Patrick Henry (1736–1799), a leading Virginia lawyer and politician, is remembered today almost entirely for a single, electrifying speech he gave in March 1775, demanding an end to British rule in the thirteen American colonies. “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” he exclaimed at the close of his famous oration before the Virginia legislature, a rousing battle cry at a crucial moment that moved opinion in Virginia decisively for independence. After the Revolution, Henry led with equal vehemence the opposition to the United States Constitution, which he said reminded him too much of the hated British monarchy. Henry believed the Constitution, written and signed in 1787, gave far too much power to the federal government at the expense of the states, and he bitterly opposed its ratification in Virginia.
Born near Richmond, Henry began studying law after failing as a farmer. He proved an able attorney and was elected to the Virginia legislature, the House of Burgesses, while still in his twenties. Henry’s uncompromising defense of colonial rights impressed the young Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who would later cite Henry as a political mentor.
Henry’s reemergence as the leading Virginia anti-Federalist after the Revolution, however, pitted him against his old friend Jefferson, who backed the Constitution. For Henry, the Constitution dangerously expanded federal power and also threatened the institution of slavery. The Constitution, he warned his fellow Virginians, “squints toward monarchy” and would allow the government to “liberate every one of your slaves.”
In the end, Henry’s objections did not prevent Virginia from ratifying the Constitution in 1788, but they had lasting influence in the South. Seventy years later, Virginia and other Southern states echoed many of his objections to federal power as they seceded from the Union in the name of states’ rights and the preservation of slavery.
1. At the start of the Revolution, Henry briefly served as the commander of Virginia’s first rebel militia, but he proved to be an inept military man and soon returned to politics.
2. Henry was elected the first independent governor of Virginia in 1776 and was succeeded by Jefferson in 1779.
3. In his later years, Henry rejected invitations from President George Washington (1732–1799) to become secretary of state and, later, chief justice of the Supreme Court.
After the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the patriot army was impatient to drive British troops out of Boston once and for all. From farms and villages across New England, patriot militiamen streamed into Massachusetts, short on ammunition and training but eager to attack the redcoats. That June, unwilling to wait any longer for much-needed supplies to arrive, they struck. The Americans seized two strategic hilltops north of Boston, Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, both of which had commanding views of Boston Harbor.
About 1,200 Americans had taken over the hills on the night of June 16. By the time the sun rose the next morning, the soldiers had finished digging fortifications into the hillsides. The British commander in Boston, General William Howe (1729–1814), immediately recognized the danger of allowing the rebels to hold the hills, and he ordered his troops to attack.
In the subsequent Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, British soldiers retook the two hilltops in the first major battle of the Revolutionary War. About 400 American soldiers were killed in what would be among the bloodiest clashes of the entire war. In a narrow sense, the battle was a defeat for the undisciplined, overeager Americans. However, the British also suffered massive casualties—about half of their 2,000 soldiers were killed or wounded.
Unlike the Lexington and Concord battles—which, in reality, had been more like small skirmishes—Bunker Hill was a protracted bloodbath for both sides. Although they lacked ammunition and were poorly organized, the Americans proved surprisingly resilient. William Prescott (1726–1795), an American officer, famously instructed his soldiers not to fire at the advancing British soldiers “until you see the whites of their eyes!” This advice was sound; the patriots had so few bullets that they needed to save them for when they would be most effective. In all, it would take three charges up the hill before the British finally dislodged the patriots.
After the battle, George Washington (1732–1799) arrived in Massachusetts to take command of the patriot army. After nine more months of the siege, the British abandoned Boston in March 1776.
1. Some patriot leaders opposed sending the militia to seize Bunker Hill before more supplies arrived, since their entire arsenal consisted of eleven barrels of gunpowder.
2. One of the American casualties was Dr. Joseph Warren (1741–1775), a patriot leader and member of the Sons of Liberty.
3. The battle of Bunker Hill exposed the poor discipline of many American soldiers, who deserted in droves as the battle raged. One of George Washington’s first acts as general was to fire a number of officers for “cowardly behavior” during the battle.
A colonial-era newspaper publisher in New York City, John Peter Zenger (1697–1746), helped create the American concept of freedom of the press by successfully defending himself against a libel accusation in 1735.
Born in Germany, Zenger came to New York City with his family as a child. His parents apprenticed him to a well-known printer, where he learned to operate presses. In 1733, after finishing his apprenticeship, he started his own newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal.
Like many early American newspapers, the Journal was openly partisan. Its mission, Zenger proclaimed in the first issue, was to be a platform for invective against the British-appointed governor, William Cosby (c. 1690–1736).
Cosby, an aristocrat who was widely disliked in New York, was not amused. After Zenger printed some particularly critical articles and poems, Cosby ordered him arrested. Zenger continued to publish the newspaper from behind bars for ten months by passing instructions to his wife during prison visits.
At trial, Zenger was represented at no charge by a well-known Philadelphia lawyer, Andrew Hamilton (1676–1741). The jurors faced enormous pressure from the government—and from the Cosby-appointed judge—to return a guilty verdict. But in a much-acclaimed argument to the jury, Hamilton convinced jurors that since the law was unjust, they should acquit Zenger despite the judge’s instructions.
By the end of the trial, Zenger had won the sympathy of many New Yorkers, and the memory of his trial helped inspire the First Amendment to the Constitution protecting free speech fifty years later.
1. Zenger’s wife, Anna, and his son, John, continued printing the Journal after Zenger’s death until the paper folded in 1751.
2. The offending articles were likely not written by Zenger himself, whose grasp of English was incomplete, but by James Alexander, a political opponent of Governor Cosby who helped finance the Journal.
3. The jurors depended on the controversial concept of “jury nullification,” by which juries can choose not to enforce laws they consider unjust, to acquit Zenger. Although rarely used, American juries still have this prerogative.
Wall Street, a narrow alley in downtown Manhattan, has been the nation’s financial capital ever since a group of twenty-four stockbrokers set up the first American stock exchange there under a buttonwood tree in 1792. At its inception, only five equities were traded on Wall Street. As the exchange grew in the early nineteenth century, lower Manhattan became a magnet for dozens of banks and speculators who moved to the neighborhood and made the words Wall Street a synonym for American capitalism.
Initially, the only two types of equities traded on Wall Street were bonds, which the federal government issued beginning in the 1790s to repay its Revolutionary War debts, and stocks in bank companies. Over time, manufacturers, insurance companies, and railroads also began listing their stocks on Wall Street. As the American economy surged in the late nineteenth century, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Wall Street surpassed European financial capitals in importance and became the world’s largest stock exchange in 1918. By 2007, a total of 2,764 corporations were listed on the NYSE, where billions of dollars are now traded daily.
Even by the mid-nineteenth century, the growing power of the stock exchange concerned some Americans. Traders on Wall Street wielded enormous clout over the corporations whose stock they owned, and critics accused them of using that power to encourage rapacious corporate behavior. In addition, Wall Street’s cycles of boom and bust could put millions of Americans out of work by depriving companies of needed capital. The panic of 1873 and, most famously, the stock market crash of 1929 illustrated the devastating effects of stock downturns on the overall American economy.
As the symbol of American capitalism, the street itself became a target of violence in 1920, when anarchists attempted to blow up the exchange and surrounding buildings. The bank J. P. Morgan & Company, located across the street from the NYSE at 23 Wall Street, decided not to fix the shrapnel damage to its headquarters as a monument to the blast’s thirty-nine victims. Pockmarks are still visible in the building’s facade today.
1. A Chinese gong was originally used to signal the end of the trading day instead of the now-familiar closing bell.
2. The second major American stock exchange, NASDAQ, now trades more shares per day than the NYSE, although its companies have a smaller overall market capitalization.
3. Until 1836, members of the stock exchange actually traded in the streets outside the building.
During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress met in five different cities and even convened briefly in the small town of York, Pennsylvania, while Philadelphia was under British occupation. After the war, the nomadic governing continued, with a half dozen different cities serving as the nation’s capital.
In the late 1780s, the Founding Fathers began looking for a more permanent seat of government. Many members of Congress favored a major commercial center like New York or Philadelphia, but southerners wanted the capital built in the agricultural South. In 1790, northern politicians finally agreed to build the permanent capital between the borders of Virginia and Maryland, in exchange for southern votes on a separate bill backed by northerners.
The result of this compromise is the federal city of Washington, which was named after the first United States president and has been the official home of the US government since 1800. A French-born American architect, Pierre L’Enfant (1754–1825), was hired to design the city’s blueprint, making Washington one of the first examples of a modern planned city.
A relatively small town until the mid-twentieth century, Washington with its surrounding area is now one of the most heavily populated regions in the country and a global center of commerce and diplomacy. Many national landmarks, including the Smithsonian Museum, the White House, and the United States Capitol building, are located within the original boundaries sketched out by Congress in 1790.
Washington’s legal status remains unique in American government. Although carved out of the states of Maryland and Virginia, the District of Columbia that Washington occupies is not itself a state. Its citizens have no vote in Congress (although they must pay federal taxes and may be conscripted in wartime), and Congress—rather than elected city council members—retains ultimate say over most laws within the district’s borders.
1. In 1961, the Constitution was amended to give residents of the District of Columbia the right to vote in presidential elections.
2. George Washington himself was too modest to accept the name of the city, and he referred to the capital as the Federal City.
3. During the 1790s, while the city of Washington was under construction, Philadelphia was the nation’s capital.
In 1845, a newspaper in New York City published on its back page a poem by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) titled “The Raven.” The poem began with a stanza that is now one of the most instantly recognizable verses in American literature:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.”
The poem, one of Poe’s most well-known works, is typical of the author’s bewitching style. Poet, short story writer, and literary critic, Poe specialized in phantasmagoric tales of the supernatural.
Although “The Raven” is Poe’s single most famous work, he wrote mostly short stories, including such macabre classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe’s tales are often dark, morbid, and suspenseful, full of strange deaths in exotic lands. For instance, in one of Poe’s most notorious horror stories, “The Cask of Amontillado,” a murderer chains an Italian nobleman up in a basement and walls him in to die a slow death.
As one might guess, Poe’s disturbing tales were the product of a deeply troubled soul. During much of his lifetime, Poe struggled with alcoholism, debt, and gambling problems. He was devastated by the death of his wife, Virginia, from tuberculosis in 1847, and he died at age forty after a drinking binge in Baltimore.
In terms of influence, few nineteenth-century American writers rival Poe. Among his other distinctions, he was the first American mystery writer and one of the inventors of the science fiction genre. His work was widely read abroad and has been arguably even more influential in France than in the United States. Nearly every American horror writer, from H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) to Stephen King (1947–), owes a direct debt to Poe’s pioneering fiction.
1. Although born in Boston and raised in Virginia, Poe is most closely associated with his adopted hometown of Baltimore, where the NFL team is named the Ravens in honor of Poe’s famous poem.
2. Poe is mentioned in the famous 1967 Beatles song “I Am the Walrus,” in which an “elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna” is kicking Edgar Allan Poe for an unspecified reason.
3. In a little-known 1848 book, Eureka, Poe baffled readers by insisting that the universe began in “one instantaneous flash”—forecasting the big-bang hypothesis more than a century before astronomers made the same claim.
The leading songwriter of the nineteenth-century United States, Stephen Foster (1826–1864) penned hundreds of American standards, including “Oh, Susanna,” “Swanee River” (originally titled “Old Folks at Home”), “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” but died with thirty-eight cents in his pocket at a New York City hospital.
Foster was born in Pittsburgh, where he was taught music by Henry Kleber, a German immigrant. When he was only eighteen, Foster published his first song, “Open Thy Lattice.” In an era before recorded music, composers like Foster made most of their income from the sale of sheet music. In 1848, Foster sold “Oh, Susanna,” one of the most popular songs in American history, to a publisher for $100—his first major success.
Foster’s style was heavily influenced by so-called plantation music, and some modern detractors accuse Foster, who was white, of beginning the inglorious American tradition of stealing from African-American musicians. Many of Foster’s songs were sentimental and highly unrealistic odes to plantation life in the South, and they use racial terminology now considered offensive.
In the context of the 1850s, however, the casual racism in Foster’s songs was hardly unusual. Minstrel shows, performed by whites in blackface, were one of the era’s most popular forms of entertainment, and several of Foster’s most famous songs, including “Camptown Races” and “Swanee River,” became staples of minstrel performances.
For Foster, however, the prosperity of the 1850s was short-lived. In 1860, after the collapse of his marriage, he moved to New York City and promptly descended into alcoholism and poverty. He continued to write music, but found little success after abandoning minstrel music. He died at the age of thirty-seven in a public hospital in January 1864. Foster’s last song, the poignant ballad “Beautiful Dreamer,” was published shortly after his death and became one of his greatest, most beloved hits.
1. Two of his songs are official state anthems: “Swanee River” in Florida and “My Old Kentucky Home” in Kentucky.
2. Foster was born July 4, 1826, the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died.
3. He wrote his ballad “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” in 1854 for his wife, Jane Denny McDowell. The couple separated later that year.