Born to a poor family in England, journalist Thomas Paine (1737–1809) moved to Philadelphia in 1774 and almost immediately became a supporter of the revolutionary cause. He wrote several enormously influential pamphlets urging colonists to join the Revolution. Paine’s direct, incendiary writing style was so effective that George Washington (1732–1799) ordered some of Paine’s articles read to his troops before battle.
Paine’s most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, published anonymously in early 1776, called on Americans to recognize the absurdity that a hereditary king of a faraway island would govern the thirteen colonies. “There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy,” Paine wrote.
Paine’s inflammatory prose contrasts with the measured, legalistic rhetoric of his comrade Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). While Jefferson aimed at the minds of the colonists, Paine’s propaganda appealed to their hearts in simple, clear language that everyone could understand.
Paine’s popularity after the Revolution, however, was short-lived. Paine was an ardent idealist and a believer in worldwide revolution against monarchs. He traveled to France to support the French Revolution in 1789, putting him at odds with a significant number of his former allies in the United States. Paine also published attacks on organized Christian religion, another unpopular stance.
In France, Paine became a member of one of the revolutionary assemblies that ruled the country after deposing King Louis XVI (1754–1793). After Louis was captured, Paine argued against beheading him. His quixotic opposition to the death penalty again alienated him from his erstwhile allies. Shortly afterward, Paine was himself condemned to the guillotine. While in prison, he began one of his most famous works, The Age of Reason, which summed up his philosophy of universal human rights. Paine was finally released after the American ambassador, future US president James Monroe (1758–1831), pressed the French authorities for his release.
Returning to New York in 1802, Paine lived the remainder of his life in poverty, reviled by his compatriots for his anti-Christian views.
1. Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense cost two shillings and sold about 120,000 copies within three months, at a time when the entire population of the thirteen colonies was just over 2 million.
2. After the war, the grateful New York legislature awarded Paine a farm in New Rochelle that had been confiscated from a Loyalist.
3. Paine was one of the few Revolutionary War participants officially convicted of treason in Britain, a verdict passed in December 1792 after he wrote a pamphlet urging the English to overthrow King George III (1738–1820).
In the aftermath of the Boston Massacre in 1770, the city of Boston teetered on the brink of outright rebellion. The city’s wharves and cobblestone streets seethed with anti-British resentment. Opponents of British rule, including many of the city’s richest and most prominent citizens, organized a shadowy patriot group called the Sons of Liberty that met regularly in the city’s taverns and established contacts with other disgruntled Americans across the thirteen colonies.
After the Boston Massacre, Parliament cut some of the controversial taxes on the colonies—but not the duty on tea. Outraged, the patriots launched a successful boycott that resulted in huge losses for the British East India Company, the major exporter of tea to the colonies.
In 1773, in response to the boycott, the British passed the Tea Act. The Tea Act gave the East India Company, which had long-standing ties to the British government, special permission to bring tea directly to the colonies without paying taxes, thus undercutting local merchants. The Tea Act provoked instant outrage across the thirteen colonies. So great was the opposition that when ships carrying the tea arrived at the port of Boston, no buyer was willing to unload them.
For several weeks, the tea sat unsold on three ships in Boston Harbor until the chilly night of December 16, 1773, when members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the ships and dumped 342 crates of tea into the Atlantic Ocean, one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience in American history.
When news of the Boston Tea Party reached London, King George III (1738–1820) was furious. Parliament retaliated by closing Boston’s port until the cost of the tea was repaid and dispatching more redcoats to the unruly city. For the next year, until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the city was a virtual armed camp—a tinderbox waiting for the spark that would soon come in the spring of 1775 at Lexington and Concord.
1. Ships carrying East India tea also arrived in Philadelphia and New York in 1773, but both captains returned their cargo to England rather than risking the wrath of local patriot mobs.
2. The British East India Company, one of the largest corporations in England, traded dozens of goods in addition to tea, including opium.
3. The American tea boycott was so successful that in 1773, the East India Company recorded 17 million pounds of unpurchased tea piling up in its warehouses in England.
William Penn (1644–1718), a convert to Quakerism whose father was a prominent English admiral, established the colony of Pennsylvania in 1681 as a sanctuary for persecuted Quakers. As governor of the colony, Penn guaranteed religious freedom and adopted a far more enlightened stance toward Native Americans than other English colonists, forbidding Pennsylvanians from taking native lands.
Born in London and raised as an Anglican, Penn attended Oxford, where he was first exposed to Quaker preachers. He converted in 1667, at age twenty-three. At the time, Quakers were routinely imprisoned in England for their beliefs and had also been subject to harassment and even execution in other North American colonies.
However, Penn had one advantage that other Quakers didn’t: the king, Charles II (1630–1685), owed Penn’s prominent father £16,000. After his father’s death, Penn convinced the king to trade him a huge tract of land in North America in partial repayment of the debt. About 1,300 Quakers were released from prison in England at Penn’s request and immigrated to the new colony.
Despite Penn’s idealistic impulses, the colony he founded was no democracy. Not only did Penn name the land after his own father, but as the royally appointed proprietor of the colony he wielded enormous power over his fellow settlers, even designing the street grid for the city of Philadelphia.
Penn eventually suffered financial problems and spent the last years of his life in England fending off his creditors. Still, his ideals of individual liberty and toleration would serve as an inspiration to the authors of the American Revolution.
1. Penn’s family remained a powerful force in Pennsylvania for decades after his death, appointing top officials in the colony. One of Penn’s grandsons, John Penn (1725–1795), was lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania at the outbreak of the Revolution.
2. Penn also controlled Delaware, which had originally been settled by Dutch and Swedish explorers before the English seized the area in 1664.
3. Before his death, Penn was briefly imprisoned for failure to pay his debts.
In 1793, the same year that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Samuel Slater (1768–1835) opened his first mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The mill, perched next to the raging Blackstone River, was a milestone in the history of American industry. Inside its brick walls, the mill was capable of turning large amounts of cotton into spools of cloth by harnessing the power of the nearby river. Slater’s mill—which would remain operational until the twentieth century—was the prototype for thousands of factories constructed over the next century during a period of American history known as the Industrial Revolution.
Slater was born in England and was apprenticed to a mill owner at age fourteen. He moved to the United States in 1789 after memorizing the blueprint of the mill, hoping to get rich in the fledgling American textile industry. Slater selected a rural spot along the rocky Blackstone River, with its numerous falls and gushing rapids, as the ideal setting for his factory.
In addition to the factory, Slater built a village called Slatersville, which included a town green, a church, housing for workers, and a company store. His so-called Rhode Island System would become a model for industrialists across New England, where much of the early Industrial Revolution unfolded.
The combination of the cotton gin and Slater’s mill provided an enormous boost to the textile industry. For the first time, Americans had the capability of turning cotton into finished cloth on a large-scale basis. The textile industry grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century and became a pillar of the economy in the northern United States. Although many of the stately redbrick New England mills closed in the twentieth century, many remain standing across the region as monuments to the first wave of American industrialization.
1. Slater has often been referred to as the Father of the American Industrial Revolution.
2. Slater employed children as young as seven years old at his mill, for wages of less than $1 a week, an exploitative labor practice that was not outlawed until the twentieth century.
3. The Blackstone River, site of the earliest American industries, drops 430 feet over 50 miles in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, a feature that made it attractive to nineteenth-century factories that depended on hydropower.
New York, the largest city in the United States and the nation’s economic and financial capital, was founded in 1625 by Dutch settlers on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Originally called New Amsterdam, the city was renamed in honor of the Duke of York when England seized the Dutch colony in 1664. By the time of the American Revolution, New York had surpassed Boston as the nation’s largest city, a distinction it has retained ever since.
A combination of geographic and historical factors accounted for New York’s rapid growth in the colonial era. The Dutch built the city at the mouth of the Hudson River, which became one of the most important waterways in colonial America. After the British took control of New York, its central location between the British colonies in New England and Virginia made the city a natural trading center. In addition, the lingering Dutch influence gave New York a cosmopolitan atmosphere that would prove attractive to generations of new immigrants.
Boston, however, remained the financial center of the colonies until the Revolution. During the war, New York was occupied by the British despite a strong patriot faction in the city. General George Washington (1732–1799), wary of Manhattan’s defenses, made a strategic decision not to try to retake the city, and New York was one of the last parts of the United States liberated from the British in 1783.
As the most populous city in the new nation, New York briefly served as the first national capital. Washington, the first president, took his oath of office in 1789 on a balcony overlooking Wall Street. The selection of Washington, DC, as the new capital in 1790 did little to stop New York’s growth. By the early nineteenth century, the opening of the New York Stock Exchange and the construction of the Erie Canal had transformed the Dutch trading post into the nation’s unchallenged economic powerhouse.
1. The Hudson River was named for Henry Hudson, an English sailor who explored the region on behalf of the Netherlands in 1609.
2. The Dutch briefly retook New York in 1673 and renamed it New Orange in honor of the Dutch royal family’s color.
3. New York City included only the borough of Manhattan until the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island were unified in an 1898 reorganization.
Virtually no literary tradition existed in the United States before the 1820s, when Washington Irving (1783–1859) and James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) first began publishing fiction with American settings and characters. During the course of his career, Cooper wrote dozens of adventure novels set on the American frontier and at sea, including his most famous work, The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826.
Cooper, born to a prosperous New Jersey family, had started writing fiction at age thirty to raise money when his farm fell on hard times. His first novel, Precaution, was published in 1820, the year after Irving’s seminal first collection of American stories. Precaution was a failure, but Cooper’s next book, The Spy (1821), an espionage novel set during the American Revolution, was a success.
Through the course of the 1820s, Cooper authored a series of popular frontier novels called the Leatherstocking Tales, starring the buckskin-clad trapper Natty Bumppo and his American Indian sidekick, Chingachgook. The most famous of these tales, The Last of the Mohicans, followed Bumppo’s adventures fighting the Huron Indians in the area around Lake Champlain.
In the 1830s, Cooper began to alienate critics and some of his readers by injecting more pointed social commentary into his writing. He wrote a book defending himself, A Letter to His Countrymen, in 1834. His critical reputation, however, never recovered, and Mark Twain (1835–1910) memorably skewered Cooper’s overwrought writing style in an 1895 essay titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” To modern readers, Cooper’s novels seem extremely slow-paced and turgid for adventure stories. Apart from The Last of the Mohicans, they are rarely read.
Still, Cooper’s influence on the development of American literature has been lasting and pervasive. Many American literary traditions—the Western, the sea romance, the author who moves to Europe to get a better perspective on his own country—can be traced back to Cooper’s pioneering career.
1. Although born in New Jersey, Cooper lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, a town named after his family.
2. Cooper went to Yale but was expelled. He then served briefly in the US Navy before moving to New York to farm.
3. Uncas, one of the characters in The Last of the Mohicans, was based on an actual historical figure. The real Uncas, however, was a member of the Mohegans, not the Mohicans.
In the early nineteenth century, a handful of painters began drawing big, dramatic landscape portraits of the rugged American outdoors, an artistic movement that became known as the Hudson River school. The daring, unusual paintings were extremely popular, drawing packed audiences at major galleries, and reflected a major shift in the way Americans thought about both art and nature.
Prior to 1825, when painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848) founded the movement with his first paintings of the splendid Hudson River valley, most American artists depicted nature as cold, dangerous, and foreboding. Dating back to the first Puritans, many Americans instinctively associated the wilderness with evil and believed that nature should be tamed, not admired.
But Cole, an English-born painter and newspaper illustrator, was enraptured by the natural beauty of the lakes, mountains, and foliage of the Hudson valley. His paintings, awash in sunlight and brilliant colors, celebrated the mountains, cliffs, and animals of the region. Cole was influenced by the English romanticists, who tended to see nature as inherently good.
Cole died in 1848, at age forty-seven, but several of his students continued to paint landscapes in his epic style. Two of them, Frederick Edwin Church (1826–1900) and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), became hugely popular and sold their paintings for then unprecedented sums.
At first, the artists mostly concentrated on the Hudson River, the Adirondack Mountains, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In the 1850s, however, as the nation expanded westward, so did the artistic horizons of the Hudson River painters. Bierstadt, in particular, made landscape paintings of the West that fired the imagination of Americans with their grand, sweeping depiction of the then unspoiled wilderness.
The lasting legacy of the Hudson River school was twofold. First, Cole and his followers helped shift American attitudes toward greater appreciation for the environment, arguably leading to the conservation movement that developed later in the nineteenth century. Second, in artistic terms, they helped establish a distinctively American art that did not rely on imported European styles.
1. The largest collection of Hudson River school paintings can be found at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
2. One of Cole’s more famous paintings, The Last of the Mohicans, was inspired by the best-selling James Fenimore Cooper novel published in 1826.
3. Church’s 1859 painting Heart of the Andes was such a sensation that more than 10,000 New Yorkers lined up at a gallery on Broadway and paid twenty-five cents each to see it.