By 1803 Napoleon wanted to raise money for war with Britain, and Jefferson was prepared to pay for control of France's territory around the mouth of the Mississippi in order to guarantee free use of the river.

The American minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, had already approached the French about such a limited purchase. (Livingston, who owned some 130,000 acres in upstate New York, was himself very familiar with the American real estate market.) But a critical shift occurred on April 11, 1803, when he went to meet Talleyrand in his offices in the Rue du Bac.

Writing James Madison that evening, Livingston reported that Talleyrand had suddenly asked whether "we wished to have the whole of Louisiana." Surprised and playing for time, Livingston at first denied any interest, but Talleyrand persisted, "What would you give for the whole?" Livingston came back with an opening bid of about $3.75 million, which Talleyrand dismissed as too low. But both men knew the game being played.

Talleyrand told Livingston to consider the proposition and return with a better price, and as the maneuvering continued over the days ahead, Livingston recorded Talleyrand's promise to "give me a certificate that I was the most importunate [negotiator] he had yet met with."

With the participation of James Monroe, who arrived in Paris the next day as the American "envoy extraordinary," and the French treasury minister, Francois Barbi-Marbois, agreement was reached just 18 days later for the sale of France's possessions in North America--some 565 million acres--for about $15 million, or less than 3 cents an acre. [...]

Looking at the Louisiana Purchase as a property transaction rather than a work of diplomacy helps to explain another anomaly. Many Americans feared the new land would make the nation too big to govern and, given the prevailing view that government was authority exercised from above over an unruly populace, they had good reason for their fears. But Louisiana was to witness the development of a new kind of society.

Under Spain and France, the province had been a near-feudal domain, ruled by appointees from Europe, with the land sold only to those approved by the governor. In the United States, however, land could be owned by whoever could afford it. Since 1785, all federal land west of the Appalachians had, at Jefferson's urging, been measured out in one-mile-square sections for sale as real estate, and this grid of squares now extended into the Louisiana Purchase.

For the first time in history, land, the primary source of wealth production, could be owned by anyone: speculators, settlers, even squatters. "Power," said John Adams, with ice-cold accuracy, "always follows property." In the Old World property was distributed in a hierarchical manner with the powerful few owning most; but as America spread westward, more than one billion acres of public land, including most of the Louisiana Purchase, would pass into private hands. Power still followed property, but now it was spread democratically, and the nation it created possessed innate stability, because each property-owning citizen had a vested interest in a law-abiding society.

Glancing down supermarket shelves, we examine the prices but have to make an effort to register the weight of a cereal box or the capacity of a carton of juice. Weights and measures are a given. A pound or a gallon, like a mile or an acre, will be the same from Florida to Alaska. And so will a bushel of wheat and a cord of wood and a hundred other units of measurement. It is a language that is picked up automatically and spoken without conscious thought.

Only when it changes, when half a gallon of cola became 2 liters in the 1990s, for instance, or a fifth of whiskey reappeared as 750 milliliters, is there a reminder that there is nothing certain about these units after all. They are not a given but an extraordinary construct, and one of the identifying marks of social life. Without the conscious decision to agree on a way of measuring, cooperative activity could hardly take place. With it, marketplaces and increasingly sophisticated economies can develop, matching barter, cash, or credit to whatever is owned by one person and desired by another.

Thus, by measuring out the wilderness, Hutchins would make it possible for someone to buy and own it. This was a revolutionary concept. For centuries the land had been lived in by the Delaware and passed through by the Miami and occupied by the Iroquois, but no one had ever owned it. No one had ever thought of owning it. The idea of one person owning land did not yet exist on the west bank of the Ohio.

Indeed, throughout most of the world and most of history, such a possibility was inconceivable. Individuals could certainly own the use of land, whole dynasties might grow up around a particular estate and the right of each generation to occupy and exploit that parcel of land would be unquestioned, but it could not be owned as a house or a bed or a pig was owned. The span of one life was too brief to possess the earth that continued forever. Territory defined the community, or society, or even the nation that lived there. A monarch or a ruler who embodied the nation might own it, but no one else. The idea that land might be treated as property belonging to an individual, to be traded, borrowed against, and speculated on like any other commodity, required a fundamental shift in thinking. The concept had been incubated in Tudor England, and taken shape in colonial America, but only with American independence, achieved just two years before Hutchinsês arrival on the Ohio, had it been fully realized. This was the magic that Hutchins would introduce into the western lands, the transformation of the wilderness into property.

The complete collection of Gunterês writing, issued in 1624, was titled The description and use of the sector, the cross-staffe, and other instruments for such as are studious of mathematical practise. By then he must have known that the last bit of the title was nonsense. The reason the book had to be in English was that his instruments were being used not by math students but by surveyors for measuring and by sailors for navigating„and unlike mathematicians, neither group could read Latin. Nevertheless, it contained so much new information on logarithms, trigonometry, and geometry that one of his contemporaries paid him this tribute: –He did open menês understandings and made young men in love with that studie [math]. Before, the mathematical sciences were lockêt up in the Greeke and Latin tongues and so lay untoucht. After Mr Gunter, these sciences sprang up amain, more and more.”



In this book Gunter first described the chain that was to bear his name. –For plotting of ground, I hold it fit to use a chaine of foure perches in length, divided into an hundred links.” The practical appeal of a chain was that, unlike a rod, it was flexible enough to be looped over a personês shoulder, and that, being made of metal, it neither stretched nor shrank as cords always did. Other kinds of chain had been devised, but the supremacy of Gunterês came from his fascination with ratios and the relationship of one set of numbers to another. As a passionate believer in the usefulness of math, he built into his chain the most advanced numerical learning of the time until it could almost be compared to a primitive calculating machine.

Four perches measured 22 yards, a strange distance that makes sense only in the context of the traditional units used for measuring land. Like all units of land measurement, a perch, also known as a rod or a pole, originally varied according to the quality of ground perch of poor soil was longer than one of fertile soil„but in the course of the sixteenth century it became standardized at 16 1/2 feet. This inconvenient length was derived from the area of agricultural land that could be worked by one person in a day„hence the variability. The area was reckoned to be 2 perches by 2 perches (33 feet by 33 feet). Thus a daywork amounted to 4 square perches. Conveniently, there were 40 dayworks in an acre, the area that could be worked by a team of oxen in a day, and 640 acres in a square mile. It was significant that all of them were multiples of 4, a number that made it simpler to calculate the area of a four-sided field.

Gunter divided the chain into 100 links, marked off into groups of 10 by brass rings. On the face of it, the dimensions make no sense: Each link is a fraction under 8 inches long; 10 links make slightly less than 6 feet, 8 inches; and the full length is 66 feet. In fact, he had made a brilliant synthesis of two otherwise incompatible systems, the traditional English land measurements, based on the number 4, and the newly introduced system of decimals based on the number 10.

The Dutch engineer Simon Stevin was the first European to publish an account of decimals in 1585, and Gunter quickly grasped the concept, using them in his logarithmic tables. Decimals make arithmetical calculation simpler because ordinary numbering is based on 10: There are single digits up to 10, and an extra column is added with each multiple of it, at 100, 1,000, and so on. In effect, the decimal point is simply moved over one place. However, for a practical activity like surveying, it is far easier to halve and quarter a distance or double and redouble it. The process can be done by eye in an instant, and the result is easily checked by measurement, or if needed by calculation.

Gunterês chain allowed either method to be used. An acre measured 4,840 square yards in traditional units and 10 square chains in Gunterês system. Thus, if need be, the entire process of land measurement could be computed in decimalized chains and links, then converted to acres by dividing the result by 10. With an understandable hint of satisfaction Gunter concluded his description of its use, –then will the work be more easie in Arithmetick.” It was that ease in calculating acreages, as much as its accuracy and straightforward practicality, that earned Gunterês chain its popularity among surveyors using the old 4-based system of measurements. Even the least competent could come close to the standards of exactness that were now expected of them.

The foreignness of the metric system went deeper than names. It took uniformity to a degree that no layperson could immediately comprehend. The traditional measures had variety because they related to different activities. Cloth was measured by the ell or the aune because it was natural to hold it and stretch out the arm to full length. A journey was measured by the yard or the toise because the road was walked. Land was measured by the acre or the arpent because that represented work. The metric system forced people to separate the measure from the activity altogether and deal with an abstract unit that as [Polish historian of science Witold] Kula observed, "would be equally applicable to textiles, wooden planks, field strips and even to the road to Paris." What underlay the popular dislike of the metric system was a very modern anxiety, the sense of alienation from the natural world.

He might have claimed to be an absolute monarch, but he ruled through a vast, centralized government machine that had grown out of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Code. It was the machine that wanted the metric system. As Napoleon himself had been forced to admit, the simplicity of calculating in decimals suited bookkeepers--and prefects, and bureaucrats, and government officials of every kind. Swallowing his reservations, Louis agreed to keep the metric system alongside the customary measures. "The important lesson France has taught the world," remarked a cynical friend of Kula, "is the effectiveness of centralized administration."

It was not wholly a coincidence that the unpopular metric system spread across Europe in concert with the growth of government bureaucracy.

"The American style has never been to impose radical changes after state commissions decide on their superiority," observed Edward Tenner, a visiting researcher in the history of science and technology at Princeton University. "Americans even hate seeing dual mile and kilometer road signs. The metric system has been a casualty of its identification with political authority."

The Gift Outright (1942) (Robert Frost)

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.