At the time of the American Revolution, scientist, inventor, and journalist Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was by far the most internationally famous American. Simply by endorsing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin lent instant credibility on the world stage to the cause of American independence.
Born in Boston, Franklin started his writing career at the age of fifteen, lampooning Puritan ministers in a newspaper owned by his older brother, James. Hoping to start his own newspaper, Ben Franklin ran away to Philadelphia in 1723, where he eventually became a successful printer. His famous annual pamphlet, Poor Richard’s Almanac, a collection of witticisms and advice, established him as a best-selling author in the colonies.
His international reputation, however, stemmed from the amateur scientific experiments Franklin began conducting after reaching middle age. At the time, electricity was a new and poorly understood concept. Franklin famously proved that lightning was a form of electricity, and he invented the lightning rod. He toured Europe and was a sensation in France, where he was introduced to King Louis XV (1710–1774).
Franklin spent much of the 1760s in London as a lobbyist for the American colonies. He returned to Philadelphia in 1775 and, despite some misgivings, endorsed the Revolution. Ever the wit, when he signed the Declaration of Independence, tantamount to treason against King George III (1738–1820), he advised his colleagues, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Franklin was already seventy years old at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence—the oldest delegate at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia—but his service to the new nation was not done. He returned to Europe to serve as the American ambassador to France, the most important American ally in the Revolution, and later helped negotiate with Britain the treaty that ended the war.
Returning home for the last time, Franklin participated in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and penned several antislavery essays before his death in 1790.
1. Franklin had an illegitimate son, William, who split with his father during the Revolution by remaining loyal to the British Crown.
2. Franklin is the only American who signed all three of the key founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution, and the Constitution.
3. In 1751, Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.
The first shots of the American Revolution were fired on April 19, 1775, in the small Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord, just outside of Boston. After years of growing tension between the thirteen colonies and the British Crown, the opening of hostilities on the little village green at Lexington was later dubbed “the shot heard round the world.”
In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament had imposed martial law on the city of Boston. In early 1775, the British commander in the city, General Thomas Gage (1721–1787), received orders from London to crack down on dissenters and arrest the city’s two leading anti-British agitators, Samuel Adams (1722–1803) and John Hancock (1737–1793).
Adams and Hancock, however, were tipped off to their arrest warrants and hastily fled to the small town of Lexington, located a few miles northwest of Boston. Determined to catch the two men, Gage prepared a force of about 700 British soldiers to hunt them down and also to seize ammunition the patriots had stockpiled in Concord.
On April 18, under cover of darkness, the British marched on Lexington. Two Boston patriots, Paul Revere (1734–1818) and William Dawes (1745–1799), quickly rode out of the city on separate routes to warn Adams and Hancock. A third patriot, Samuel Prescott (c. 1751–1777) joined the ride outside Lexington and made it all the way to Concord after Revere was captured and Dawes turned back. Tipped off, the local Massachusetts militia known as the minutemen were ready and waiting when the redcoats arrived at the Lexington green at dawn on April 19.
A tense standoff ensued, but at first, no shots were fired. The British officer, John Pitcairn (1722–1775), angrily ordered the rebels to disperse. Then, unexpectedly, a single shot rang out. Unsure who had fired, Pitcairn ordered his troops to attack. Eight minutemen died in the battle at Lexington, but no British soldiers did.
The British pressed on to Concord and destroyed military supplies stored in the town. But Adams and Hancock had vanished. The British then encountered another minuteman contingent at the Old North Bridge in Concord, where patriots scored a victory and forced the British troops back toward Boston in disarray. During their retreat, the British were attacked mercilessly by minuteman sharpshooters and lost 73 men.
1. The anniversary of the battles, April 19, is marked in Massachusetts as Patriots’ Day and celebrated with the running of the Boston Marathon and a Red Sox home game starting at 11:00 a.m.
2. As a prosperous businessman after the war, Revere owned a mill that produced the copper plating for the hull of the famous warship USS Constitution.
3. The 1861 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), exaggerated Revere’s importance in the battles but established him overnight as a national hero.
Starting in the 1720s, a major religious revival called the First Great Awakening swept through the isolated farming communities of rural New England. The movement, which soon spread across North America and lasted until the 1740s, rejuvenated the Puritan religion, which had slipped into serious decline. More important, by challenging established religious authority figures, the Great Awakening helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution.
The Great Awakening had its roots in a crisis in New England Puritanism. By the early eighteenth century, less than 100 years after the founding of Boston, the Puritans were beset by theological divisions and a widespread fear that the community was in the midst of “declension,” or spiritual decay. Squabbles over theology had led to the founding of Yale in 1701 as a more conservative alternative to Harvard.
One of Yale’s graduates, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), emerged as the key figure in the Great Awakening. As a young preacher in the Connecticut River valley town of Northampton, Massachusetts, Edwards delivered a series of sermons that urged a return to the strict tenets of the first Puritans.
To arouse his congregation, Edwards used vivid, intimate language in his sermons, a sharp contrast with the staid and impersonal lectures delivered by “Old Light” ministers of the mainstream church. Edwards’s most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was a masterpiece of fire-and-brimstone oratory that reportedly left some of its listeners in 1741 in tears:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince …
The First Great Awakening, although urging a return to orthodoxy, was rebellious in its mind-set. According to historians, the atmosphere of opposition to clerical authorities helped embolden the colonists for the ultimate break with their political masters.
1. One of Edwards’s grandsons was Aaron Burr (1756–1836), who killed Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) in a famous duel.
2. George Whitefield (1714–1770), another prominent Great Awakening preacher, toured the colonies extensively and received a donation from Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), who attended a sermon in Philadelphia.
3. A Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s featured large-scale, outdoor revival meetings with charismatic Christian preachers who urged Americans to improve their society and thereby earn salvation.
Alexander Hamilton’s famous Report on Manufactures, published in 1791, was one of the earliest blueprints for the American economy after the Revolutionary War. As George Washington’s treasury secretary, Hamilton (1755–1804) was responsible for establishing the new government’s fundamental economic policies. Hoping to build a firm economic foundation for the Republic, Hamilton favored an aggressive federal effort to build canals and roads, as well as protective tariffs to help fledgling American industries compete in the international marketplace. Although rejected during his lifetime, Hamilton’s far-reaching vision would be highly influential in the nineteenth century for politicians like Henry Clay (1777–1852) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).
After the Revolution, the new country had encountered many difficulties in establishing an economic system independent of Britain. Many of the states were deeply in debt after the war. The United States had little domestic industry, and most manufactured goods had to be imported. American ships, no longer sailing under the British flag, were suddenly prone to attack by pirates in the Mediterranean.
Under Hamilton’s leadership as treasury secretary, the United States assumed the debt of the individual states, established the Coast Guard to prevent smuggling, and opened a mint to issue American currency. The program outlined in the 1791 report, however, was far more ambitious. By instituting a high tariff and government-subsidized infrastructure improvements, Hamilton wanted to turn his rural, relatively backward country into a major industrial power.
The Report on Manufactures was a major source of controversy in the early federal period, and disagreements over the proper governmental role in the economy became one of the defining issues in American politics. Federalists generally backed Hamilton’s vision, while the Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) opposed it. Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, leaders like Henry Clay (1777–1852) would revive Hamilton’s plan, renaming it the American System.
1. One of Hamilton’s policies, a tax on whiskey used to pay down debts from the Revolution, was so unpopular it sparked the Whiskey Rebellion.
2. Hamilton opened the first United States mint in 1792 in Philadelphia.
3. For his role in creating the modern American economy, Hamilton’s face is on the $10 bill.
The city of New Orleans, located in the marshes near the mouth of the Mississippi River, was founded by a French trading company in 1718. As the importance of river commerce grew in the eighteenth century, the outpost grew into one of the major trading centers of North America, a role the city still plays today. In a measure of the port’s growing strategic value, it changed hands three times in the hundred years after its founding, first to Spain in 1763, then back to France in 1800, and finally to the United States in 1803 as the crown jewel of the Louisiana Purchase.
The mixture of foreign influences produced a famously cosmopolitan culture that has made New Orleans unlike any other city in the United States. Creole and Cajun cuisine, music, and language are unique to Louisiana. The city is famous for its raucous Mardi Gras celebration and historic French Quarter neighborhood, both legacies of the city’s French roots.
Because of its distinctive culture and economic importance, New Orleans has always occupied a prominent role in American society. In the nineteenth century, the city nicknamed the Big Easy was famous (or infamous) as a den of gambling, prostitution, and loose morals; later, the city’s bohemian atmosphere nurtured many writers, including William Faulkner (1897–1962) and Tennessee Williams (1911–1983). The first jazz artists emerged from the sweaty, swinging nightclubs and Mississippi riverboats of New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in American history, dealt a devastating blow to New Orleans when it hit the city on August 29, 2005. As of 2007, New Orleans was still rebuilding amid an uncertain future.
1. The city’s namesake, “old” Orleans, is located in central France about an hour outside of Paris.
2. Before the Civil War (1861–1865), New Orleans was the nation’s third-biggest city, after New York and Baltimore.
3. One of Faulkner’s first novels, Mosquitoes (1927), takes place on a New Orleans riverboat and parodies the city’s art aficionados.
One of the first commercially successful female authors in the United States, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) emerged as a leading antislavery voice in pre–Civil War America and was the author of dozens of widely read novels, short stories, and magazine articles. Child’s deeply held belief in racial equality was a recurring theme in her work, beginning with her first book, Hobomok, published in 1824, a sympathetic novel about discrimination against American Indians.
Born Lydia Marie Francis in Medford, Massachusetts, the author became a literary star at the age of twenty-two upon the publication of Hobomok, which was an instant success. Over the next ten years, she wrote a stream of historical novels, children’s books, and nonfiction about the mistreatment of Native Americans. In 1826, she founded the first children’s magazine in the United States, Juvenile Miscellany. While still in her twenties, she became one of the first women inducted into Boston’s Athenaeum, an exclusive writers’ club. In 1828, at the age of twenty-six, she married David Child (1794–1874), a Boston lawyer and abolitionist.
Beginning in the 1830s, Lydia Marie Child increasingly focused her energy on the incipient abolition movement. Inspired by the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), an acquaintance of her husband’s, Child wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans in 1833. For her then-radical stance in favor of immediate abolition of slavery, Child was forced to resign as editor of Juvenile Miscellany after some pro-slavery readers canceled their subscriptions and the magazine faced a loss of readership in the South.
In 1841, with her career in Boston stymied by the controversy, Child moved to New York City, where she edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard for several years. An extremely prolific writer, she also continued to write novels, nonfiction, biographies, and poetry on other subjects as well. Her most famous poem, “A Boy’s Thanksgiving,” written in the mid-1840s, is known for its opening lines: “Over the river, and through the wood, / to Grandfather’s house we go.”
During the Civil War (1861–1865), Child led an effort to teach reading to escaped slaves who had been denied an education in the South. She continued writing after the war, championing equality for women, freed slaves, and American Indians, before retiring with her husband to Medford.
1. Child’s father was a baker.
2. In addition to all her other books, Child wrote a best-selling cookbook, The Frugal Housewife, in 1829.
3. Child helped Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave, write her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a widely read book about the hardships of slavery for women.
One of the earliest forms of indigenous American music, sea chanteys (pronounced “shan-tees”) developed in the nineteenth century as work songs for sailors aboard whaling ships. Derived from the French word chantez, meaning sing, chanteys grew out of European, African-American, and West Indian musical traditions—an early example of the eclectic mix of styles that produced American music.
In the age of sail, life at sea was full of backbreaking manual labor. The purpose of a sea chantey, first and foremost, was to set the tempo for the grueling tasks that sailors were required to perform every day, such as weighing anchor, hoisting sails, or lading cargo. The beat and structure of a chantey varied depending on the task for which it was needed. For instance, the famous song “Blow the Man Down” was a “hauling” chantey used for lengthy chores like raising a sail. A separate kind of chantey was reserved for gutting whales and boiling down their blubber.
One of the most famous sea chanteys, “Drunken Sailor,” was intended specifically for “hand over hand” tasks, such as raising small sails. One sailor, a chanteyman, sang the first line, while the others answered in the chorus:
SOLO: What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
CHORUS: What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Early in the morning.
Chanteys were meant to serve specific work purposes and were not intended to be sung for fun. Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882), in his famous book Two Years Before the Mast (1840), called them “as necessary to sailors as the drum and fife to a soldier.” However, the songs eventually spread to land in the 1870s and became popular, since they were associated with the alleged romance of the seas. The invention of steamships gradually made heavy manual labor unnecessary, and chanteys disappeared by the early twentieth century.
1. A “chanteying” festival is held every June in Mystic, Connecticut.
2. The famous folksinger Woody Guthrie recorded a collection of chanteys, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads, in 1941.