Liberty's grid A founding father, a mathematical dreamland, and the shaping of America

Amir Alexander

Book - 2024

"In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States: All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a titanic rectilinear grid, aligned with the points of the compass. Why did the author of the Declaration of Independence set out to transform the landscape of North America into an abstract mathematical dreamland? Historian and writer Amir Alexander compellingly argues that Jefferson saw the Cartesian grid not as a pattern of practical utility for dividing land, but as a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning. Following Newton and Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible, and where Americans, acting fr...eely, could find liberty. And if the real, actual America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history did not match his ideal of the blank slate land, then it must be made to match it. When Congress endorsed Jefferson's vision, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided since. From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty's Grid tells the story of the continuing battle between grid-makers and their opponents. On the one side are the rectilinear streets of Manhattan and the squared corn fields of Kansas, on the other the curvy paths of Central Park and the cliffs of Yosemite Valley. To grid creators, America appears a land of limitless freedom; to those beholden to the rhythms of nature and history, the naturalistic is an escape from moral collapse. Their conflict, Alexander shows, is written on our landscape"-- more