Linklater gives Ellicott the starring role in the first half of his book, and it's a wise choice, not only because Ellicott's achievements were impressive and consequential - as Linklater writes, "his lines helped define the shapes of no fewer than eleven states and the District of Columbia, as well as the southern and northern frontiers of the United States" - but also because Ellicott was an intriguing figure, and Linklater is highly skilled at character portrayal:
At the heart of Ellicott's character lay a contradiction, between his deep-seated desire for regularity and a tendency to emotional extravagance. A career devoted to mapping the unmapped expanse of the wilderness often seems to have been the only way that he could satisfactorily reconcile two conflicting impulses.
But, while Ellicott plays a crucial role in Linklater's book, The Fabric of Americais not a biography. It is, rather, an account of the extent to which clearly demarcated boundaries, of both the states and the nation, contributed to the formation of the American character. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously attributed that character to the independent spirit of those who settled the frontier:
"The frontier is productive of individualism," Turner wrote. "The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression."
Linklater, however, demonstrates pretty conclusively that Jackson got it exactly wrong:
