Summary of Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States

By IRB Media

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#1 Jefferson had a lifelong fascination with trees. He thought of them as his favorite type of plants, and he went to great effort and expense to place those he liked best around Monticello.

#2 Monticello faced west, and if you looked straight across the estate, you could see all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But today, this is no longer the case. The trees have grown high, and someone sitting where the president liked to take his evening ease would not be able to see in the summer his blue remembered hills.

#3 Thomas Jefferson was a man with many contradictions, but his fascination with the American West was not one of them. He was obsessively interested in how the vast majority of America’s land could be apportioned among its growing population.

#4 The American settlers who lived beyond the Appalachians were initially cut off from the American mainstream, and there was talk of secession. But they were the first beneficiaries of one of Jefferson’s great ideas: the right to own land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669398059

IRB Media

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Insights on Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Jefferson had a lifelong fascination with trees. He thought of them as his favorite type of plants, and he went to great effort and expense to place those he liked best around Monticello.

#2

Monticello faced west, and if you looked straight across the estate, you could see all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But today, this is no longer the case. The trees have grown high, and someone sitting where the president liked to take his evening ease would not be able to see in the summer his blue remembered hills.

#3

Thomas Jefferson was a man with many contradictions, but his fascination with the American West was not one of them. He was obsessively interested in how the vast majority of America’s land could be apportioned among its growing population.

#4

The American settlers who lived beyond the Appalachians were initially cut off from the American mainstream, and there was talk of secession. But they were the first beneficiaries of one of Jefferson’s great ideas: the right to own land.

#5

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was a piece of legislation that laid down the rules for how the American west was to be distributed. It established a place where the surveys of western America would be formally begun, and it raised money for a new government that was financially exhausted and depleted by the war with the British.

#6

The Geographer’s Line, which was the starting point for Thomas Jefferson’s survey of America, was 40 degrees 38 minutes North, 80 degrees 31 minutes West. It extended westward through the entire territory, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

#7

The survey system that Hutchins created was based on ranges, townships, sections, and subsections. It was intended that the distribution of the territory begin at a great speed. But the Indians felt that the white men’s treaties were unfair, and they feared being dispossessed.

#8

The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, was bought from France in 1803. It needed to be surveyed and sold, and it needed to be crossed by settlers.

#9

The decision to send the Lewis and Clark expedition was made in 1802 at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, as he was familiar with his assistant’s practical abilities as a trapper and hunter.

#10

Lewis had a very sympathetic understanding of America’s aboriginal people. He had lived with the Cherokee in Georgia, the Chickasaw and the Shawnee in Mississippi, the Miami in Ohio, and the Potawatomi in Detroit.

#11

The expedition began in May 1804. The team assembled in Saint Charles, a village on the Missouri River’s north bank with a population of about four hundred. The river’s course was directed by the local geology: low Devonian sandstone hills on the river’s northern bank.

#12

Lewis and Clark spent the first six weeks traveling through what is now the state of Missouri. They found that they were making only minimal forward progress, even though their daily distances turned out to be quite long. It was more prudent and economical to follow the river than to fight it.

#13

The Lewis and