The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

by Willie James Jennings

The seizing of land by colonial powers such as England parallels this superimposition in the conjuring of a new spatial vision of land. This is much more than simply the bringing of land into national territorial spheres. Rather, land itself would be drawn into a new dimensionality that rendered former spatial designations and coordination of ways of life meaningless or at best marginal to the entrance into a civilized sphere of existence. With the Land Survey System suggested by Thomas Jefferson in 1784 and enacted by the Congress of the United States in 1785, Jefferson and others “devised a plan whereby all the vacant unclaimed land in the young republic could be divided into an almost infinite number of squares, each of them a square mile, or 640 acres—more than enough to satisfy the average would-be settler.”46 This grid system became fundamental to the way Americans would imagine actual living space—its divisions, borders, and limits.