Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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Congress: in an appendix to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomson more or less wonders why South Florida should be considered the edge of North America.34 The thought occurs to him while reading Jefferson’s famous description of a landscape-altering phenomenon that ostensibly occurred in the distant past at the point where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet and run through the Blue Ridge Mountains: “at this spot,” Jefferson muses, the two rivers, which had risen and “formed an ocean which filled the whole valley,” broke over and “[tore] the mountain down from its summit to its base.”35 This “disrupture and avulsion,” as Jefferson describes it, directs Thomson’s mind farther south than Jefferson’s Virginia. “While ruminating on these subjects,” Thomson writes, “I have often been hurried away by fancy, and led to imagine that” the Gulf of Mexico was once a vast plain bordered on the east by “a range of mountains” running “from the point or cape of Florida … through Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto rico, Martinique, Guadaloupe, Barbadoes, and Trinidad, till it reached the coast of [South] America, and formed the shores which bounded the ocean, and guarded the country behind.” Yet “by some convulsion or shock of nature,” he continues, the Atlantic Ocean broke through this mountain range; the sea then “deluged that vast plain,” turning it into the Gulf of Mexico, before receding “through the gulph between Florida and Cuba, carrying with it the loom and sand it may have scooped from the country it had occupied…. But these are only the visions of fancy.”36 Essentially, then, Thomson imagines that Florida’s tip is part of a mountain range that joins the continents.
Figure 14. Thomas Wright, A Map of Georgia and Florida (1763). Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries.
Figure 15. Isaak Tirion, Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769), detail, in Thomas Salmon, Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van Amerika …, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1766–69). HM 222554, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Scholars have speculated that North American geographic fantasies of Florida’s connection to the Caribbean and points south either voice imperial ambitions to annex Cuba and other parts of the West Indies, or express anxieties that the Caribbean was already too close and could “contaminate” U.S. bodies, culture, and politics.37 Yet if we read such fantasies more literally, they express first and foremost uncertainties about where the boundaries of the nation actually are and even what constitutes a boundary and a continent—uncertainties that Florida inspires across a broad range of texts. When Thomson and other writers fancy an American archipelago consisting of North America, the Caribbean, and points south, then, they describe a spatial possibility in play on many maps that show Florida as islands. Tirion’s General Map of the West Indian Islands (1769; Figure 16), for example, centers on a chain of islands stretching from the tip of Florida, southeast through Cuba and Hispaniola, and nearly to the coast of South America. The map’s geographic schema resonates with Morse’s claim that Florida “was once united” to Cuba, and with Thomson’s observation that a submerged, “continuous range of mountains” joins Florida, the West Indies, and South America. Ultimately, then, the maps underscore an existing sense of the artificiality of setting North America’s southern edge at Florida, to which nature joins so many other places.
Reflections on Florida as islands strikingly remind us that a geographic understanding of North America as a sharply bounded, contiguous, self-contained landmass was not as universally embraced as we might imagine were we to focus exclusively on well-known political documents of the post-Revolutionary period that emphasize the importance of continental integrity and contiguity. For example, the Federalist project depended on solid, contiguous, self-contained ground, which would permit a “serialized” society: the goal was to organize communities all over the continent according to the same set of principles, so that people in all places, and with different and competing interests, could be managed and directed from afar.38 Early federal land ordinances announce Federalism’s dependence on a specific set of geographic assumptions about the North American continent. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for example, assumes that continental ground is universally fixed and integrated when requiring that the Northwest Territory be divided into five states, each composed of townships of six square miles that contain thirty-six one-mile-square sections to be auctioned to prospective settlers.39 This requirement depends on the capacity of the entire continent to bear the sharp outlines of a permanent grid, without which the nation could not simultaneously cohere and expand. Indeed, proponents of the land system asserted that it would sustain federal authority over all prospective parts of the United States and thereby prevent the expanding country’s social and economic “disunion” and “disintegration.”40
Figure 16. Isaak Tirion, Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769), in Thomas Salmon, Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van Amerika …, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1766–69). HM 222554, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Federalism required not only a solid and integrated continent, but one that was insulated as well. In fact, many early Americans expressed their fervor for the continent by praising another landform: the island. Several political figures contended that the North American continent was actually a single island, a form that philosophers and artists had long considered ideally suited to the nation-state.41 Montesquieu, for example, had held that “the inhabitants of islands have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continent,” for “the sea separates them from great empires … and the islanders, being without the reach of [their enemies’] arms, more easily preserve their own laws.”42 Echoing this sentiment after the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton expresses his affinity for the island in Federalist No. 8 when praising the perfect form of Great Britain because of its “insular situation,” which has “contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys.”43 Hamilton continues: “if we are wise enough to preserve the Union we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation … but if we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated or … be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe.”44 John Jay observes of England that “it seems obvious to common sense that the people of such an island should be but one nation,” and James Madison urges Americans to imagine the continent as a single island, and accordingly to embrace the opportunity of “deriving from our [geographic] situation the precious advantage which Great Britain has derived from hers.”45 Compact, integrated, and self-contained, the continent-as-island is the ideal federal geographic form.
However, while the rhetoric of many of the period’s iconic political documents emphasizes the U.S. nation-state’s dependence on a solid, contiguous, and enclosed landmass, we know that some continental ground could not be geographically systematized. Certain peoples or polities demanded (or negotiated) spaces of autonomy, and certain environments such as desert regions and riverine zones thwarted expansionist design by preventing familiar versions of settlement, agriculture, and surveillance.46 In reality, then, the evenly shaded map of the republic served as an abstraction that belied a “politically fragmented,” “legally differentiated” world “encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders.”47 Florida brought this reality into sharp relief by prompting many early Americans to observe and reflect on multiple—and sometimes competing—understandings of the nature and boundaries of continental ground.
But how might we document narratives of U.S. identity that emerged from recognition of the continent’s resistance to geographic systematizing? For, while maps and other descriptions of Florida as islands confirm early American awareness of the continent’s capacity to fragment