Free The Fabric of America by Andro Linklater Page A

the political structure would be built up from the community based on the local “hundred” or county with its own court and administration. And its values would be derived from the independent-minded yeomen farmers who owed no allegiance or obligation for the soil they worked and owned outright.
    When he was elected governor of Virginia in 1779, Jefferson immediately took advantage of the opportunity to try out his ideas. In a general reform of its system of government, he presented to the legislature a bill based on the Saxon system that, he explained, “ proposed to lay off every county into hundreds of townships of 5. or 6. miles square,” each of which would be a center of government with a school, a court, constables, and elected officials. The bill failed, but he never deviated from this basic model. Thirty years later he still insisted, “These little republics would be the main strength of the great one … Could I once see this I should consider it as the dawn of the salvation of the republic, and say with old Simeon, ‘
nunc dimittas Domine.
’”
    Most delegates thought of the western lands simply as a source of funds. They could be offered as collateral, Thomas McKean suggested in a letter to Samuel Adams in 1782, arguing that Dutch bankers would be prepared to lend more money “ if we can obtain an indisputed title to the Western lands that belonged to the Crown of Great Britain .” Jefferson, by contrast, was determined that they should also provide the structure for his republic of yeomen farmers. “It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour,” he wrote. “… While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.”
    Constitutional thinkers from the Roman poet Virgil to Vattel had suggested similar ideas, and the social thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose books bulked large on Jefferson’s shelves, made the same argument. In the words of Francis Hutcheson, doyen of the group and Adam Smith’s teacher, “Lands must be dispersed among great multitudes, and preserved (thus dispersed) by agrarian laws, to make a stable democracy.”
    What made Jefferson’s ideas different from those of every theoretician before him was not their originality but the staggering opportunity that independence presented for putting them into practice. Once the British had ceded their land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, he and other delegates to the Continental Congress faced the challenge of dealing with four hundred thousand square miles of territory. No scientist could have asked for a better chance to experiment.
    In the winter of 1783–84, Congress met in the elegant, azure-painted surroundings of the Senate chamber in Maryland’s State House in Annapolis, a space not much bigger than a schoolroom, but easily large enough for the twenty or fewer delegates who usually attended. There, seated in four rows at plain wooden desks, they settled the business of the Union. In any company, Jefferson’s vision and intellect would have stood out; in that small circle he was exceptional. And in those months, perhaps more than at any other time in his life, he was driven to bury in public business the private agony of Martha’s death. “I can accept all of the economy of life,” he once confessed to John Adams, “and all of human activities and human nature except one thing: what is the use of grief?”
    Amidst a mass of other work ranging from the ceremonial to be observed when General Washington came to resign his commission as commander inchief through reports on the Treaty of Paris and the organization of central government— by his estimate it could be run by just forty-eight employees at an annual cost of $68,525.33—Jefferson found the time and energy to formulate the pattern for the territorial