The Fabric of America by Andro Linklater

Author:Andro Linklater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2007-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

During his absence, the past had almost disappeared from Ellicott’s neat brick house on Market Street. The three eldest children were ready to leave home and begin new lives as married adults. The youngest, born after his departure, had died before his return, to Ellicott’s “inexpressible concern”; the two infants had grown to childhood, and the middle three were now adolescents. In his absence, Sally Ellicott had held the household together, paying bills, wheedling allowances from the State Department, and, when her father died, spending her inheritance as she wanted. A miniature painted of her at this time shows someone solid and unaffected, with a determined chin and steady gaze, but missing from it is the quick, teasing humor that her daughters learned from her. In law, wives might be dependent upon their husbands, but by character and necessity Sally Ellicott demonstrated that she possessed a wholly independent spirit.

The demands of modern life were soon brought home to her husband. With a gentlemanly disdain for practicalities, Ellicott had refused to draw his salary while away and expected to receive $8,000 in back pay and expenses on his return. In the dying days of the Adams administration that proved impossible. Pickering had been fired, and his successor would not authorize payment of so large a sum. Twice Ellicott wrote to President Adams, asking for an interview to discuss his work, but was ignored. Then, a few weeks after he had presented his report with its accompanying charts, the Treasury where it was housed caught fire, destroying the only official record of his work. It was as though he had no real existence.

His one political contact was Thomas Jefferson. The first of Ellicott’s letters to him was written within weeks of his arriving back in Philadelphia and was concerned almost exclusively with his discovery that lunar observations could give longitude as accurately as Jupiter’s moons. On every count, as a scientist, a republican, and a friend, Ellicott regarded himself as a Jeffersonian Republican, and in subsequent letters he expressed increasingly desperate hopes that once his hero was elected, he would be paid. But after the hung election of 1800, three months passed before Congress broke the deadlock by electing Jefferson president over Aaron Burr.

By then Ellicott had his back to the wall. “I have been obliged to sell my valuable library and dispose of my Theodolite to procure money for market to morrow,” he burst out, “and for nothing but faithful services, [I] never used a farthing of public money, never lost a single observation by absence or inattention, and never when out on public business was caught in bed by the sun.”

Responding to this urgent appeal, Jefferson took up his case, and one of his earliest messages as president promised that Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury, would “receive any application from Mr Ellicott and do justice on it.” Not all his expenses were covered by this belated back payment, however. To earn more money Ellicott responded to an offer

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