Lesaun Harvey

America’s founding generation claimed a frontier. Fertile land seemed to offer a material answer to the problem of independence: a place where free households might labor, hold property, form a life, and stand less exposed to the demands of others.

But a claimed frontier is not a common world. The claim has to be made durable, defended, connected to exchange, and turned toward reliable provision. That work exceeds the household. What cannot be secured by persons, families, or local communities passes outward into larger systems of production and public order.

Land becomes a common world only through mediation. The powers that make it reliable can enlarge household independence, but they can also harden into powers before which persons must arrange themselves. The question is whether the systems that make provision possible remain answerable to the life they organize.

From this comes an American anxiety. In Query XIX of Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Jefferson gave it republican shape by treating dependence and the manners it might form as the danger. He resisted the transfer of Europe’s manufacturing principle to America without first calculating the difference of circumstance. Europe manufactured, as he understood it, because land there was already cultivated or locked away from the cultivator; surplus people had to find support elsewhere. America seemed differently situated, with an immensity of land “courting the industry of the husbandman.” “While we have land to labour,” Jefferson wrote, Americans should not wish to see citizens called from the earth into general manufactures. To call them away was to risk exchanging a life grounded in one’s own soil and industry for one exposed to the casualties and caprice of customers.

Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, delivered to Congress in 1791, showed what that frontier hope could not supply. Hamilton granted cultivation a strong claim to pre-eminence as a source of subsistence and a condition favorable to the freedom and independence of the human mind, but denied that it could govern the Union exclusively. Independence also had material requirements. A republic that could not command its essential supplies, defend itself, enlarge domestic commerce, or steady the market for its own produce would remain free only by sufferance. Manufacture was not merely a rival pursuit to husbandry. It was how a country rich in land could secure a domestic market and the instruments of its own safety.

Writing to Benjamin Austin in 1816, Jefferson had occasion to revisit the passage in Notes on Virginia. His earlier view had become part of a new debate over domestic manufacture, and Jefferson insisted that it belonged to the circumstances in which it was formed. In 1785, as Jefferson presented the earlier world, the ocean had seemed open, exchange among nations regular, and the trade of raw materials for finished goods compatible with independence. Agriculture had seemed to possess its own advantage because the husbandman’s labor was multiplied by the “spontaneous energies of the earth.” One grain could return twenty, thirty, even fifty fold; manufacture, by contrast, appeared to add no comparable living surplus.

The intervening years, Jefferson argued, had transformed the question. Foreign powers had shown that America could be excluded from the field of exchange. It was no longer the question of whether agriculture or manufacture would add more to national wealth. It was whether Americans would make their own comforts or have them only at the will of a foreign nation. The manufacturer had to stand beside the agriculturist. Yet even then Jefferson did not turn the new necessity into a permanent maxim. Its force held while domestic supply was at stake; if production passed beyond that, whether surplus labor belonged in “the culture of the earth” or “the fabrications of art” would again depend on the circumstances then existing.

In practice, American development moved increasingly through the artifice Hamilton had set before Congress. The Report on Manufactures belonged to a wider Hamiltonian program for making national power economically real. The country remained rich in land, but its value increasingly passed through institutions able to draw local resources into a wider productive order. Manufacture was not merely a transfer of labor from field to workshop. Machinery, in Hamilton’s phrase, was “an artificial force” brought to the aid of man, “an increase of hands”; the wider system deepened skill and enlarged what the country could make from what it possessed. The free household remained an American ideal, but the practical route to independence increasingly passed through institutions able to recognize and organize useful competence.

The productive systems built within that institutional order did more than employ such competence. They embedded it. The machine first supplied force; the factory supplied sequence; the control system supplied regularity; computation supplied calculation; sensors supplied feedback. Step by step, more of what had once lived only in the trained hand or practiced judgment of a worker became part of the artifice itself.

A recent economic model carries this movement into computable work. Suppose economically valuable work can be supplied either by people or by compute, while compute remains finite but grows. The distinction is between work whose scarcity can be tolerated and work whose scarcity constrains the expansion of everything else. The latter is bottleneck work. When such work remains tied to limited human skill while the rest of the system expands, its value is bid upward. Compute is drawn toward the constraint, and bottleneck work is pulled into compute by the pressure of expansion.

If that model is carried from abstract work into the physical conditions of life, the largest bottleneck may be the capacity to make places where life can be well provisioned. An economy expands when it can support more households and richer worlds around them. A growing wall of compute becomes a growing pressure to make well-provisioned places easier to create.

Yet such places are not made by compute alone. For Hamilton, machinery supplied “an accession of strength, unincumbered too by the expence of maintaining the laborer.” Joined to computation, that strength becomes responsive to the site. The site becomes part of the intelligence that directs the work; actuators bring force to bear according to the conditions encountered there.

Life so provisioned is not comfort delivered from afar, but an environment responsive to expressed intent. A person may direct the systems around a house to build a deck; an association may direct the raising of a space habitat for settlement. Across these scales, ambient intelligent actuators answer intent, translating local circumstance into physical action throughout the places of human life and outward into the frontier.

Once actuators can answer expressed intent at such scales, the issue becomes authority. A rebuilt deck and a space habitat raised for settlement require different kinds of direction: who may authorize the act, what it may touch, and whose world it changes. A system that makes places fit for life cannot be judged by successful provision alone. It must be judged by the terms under which its powers may be directed.

That same year Jefferson wrote to Austin, he also wrote to Samuel Kercheval about constitutional self-government. Looking back on the first efforts at constitution-making, he wrote that the abuses of monarchy had so filled American political thought that “we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.” The deeper test was whether power embodied and executed the will of the people.
Jefferson gave that republican test an architecture of scale. In his scheme of ward republics, the federal republic governed foreign and federal concerns, the state governed concerns of its own citizens, counties governed county affairs, and wards governed the small but numerous public concerns nearest neighborhood life. The scheme is less useful as a blueprint than as an ideal of republican placement: public power should be lodged where the concern properly lives, and citizens should remain acting members where that power touches the affairs nearest them.

That ideal matters because intelligent actuation will suffuse places already held and governed. A house, a road, a workshop, a town, and a settlement beyond Earth belong to different orders of authority. As computation dissolves bottlenecks in provision, command over the machinery acting within those places becomes more valuable. The question is whether property and public law let that command gather where the concern lives, or whether it settles into the hands that control the technical layer.

In the present order, provision usually reaches the material world through institutions that coordinate the labor and competence of others. As actuators become able to answer command, that route can change. Less of provision may need to pass through systems that require human labor at every step; more may pass from command, through machine capacity, into matter.

Here Jefferson’s warning changes form. “While we have land to labour” need not name only soil. It names a condition in which persons can reach fertile opportunity without being called unnecessarily into dependence on the demand of others. If the frontier before us becomes increasingly provisionable by such machinery, then systems built to coordinate scarce human labor should not harden into access rules after that labor has ceased to be the necessary price of provision.

The American frontier is not mere territory, nor mere output, nor comfort delivered by distant powers. It is a lawful field for origination: places where persons may form households and associations, hold property, direct the making of their surroundings, and live in the world without arbitrary dependence. The work before us is to hold our artifice under equal law, so that the power to make fertile land for life, rather than hardening into permission for some and dispossession or exclusion for others, opens outward to the people.