Boston merchant and banker John Hancock (1737–1793) emerged as a leading financier of opposition to British rule in Massachusetts in the decade before the American Revolution. Outraged by taxes imposed on his lucrative businesses, Hancock used his profits to fund the Sons of Liberty, the clandestine radical group responsible for the Boston Tea Party. In recognition of his contributions to the patriot cause, Hancock became the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
In the turbulent years leading up to the Revolution, Hancock and Samuel Adams (1722–1803) were the most vocal critics of the British in Boston, organizing the merchant class of the city to oppose the series of taxes imposed by the British Parliament.
The British taxes and trade restrictions hit Hancock’s shipping, whale oil, and real estate interests particularly hard. The two men were a constant thorn in the side of the Boston colonial authorities, who were eventually ordered to arrest them in 1775.
The British raid to capture Hancock and Adams led directly to the first battles of the Revolution, at Lexington and Concord, in April 1775. The two men evaded capture by hiding in the countryside near Boston. Hancock, who became a national hero for his defiance of the British, was elected president of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia the next month. His position as president entitled him to sign the Declaration of Independence first.
Once the Revolution began, however, Hancock was sidelined by his comrades. Despite his undeniable dedication to the cause and his deep pockets, Hancock was not popular with his fellow revolutionaries, who tired of his pomposity. His gigantic, curlicued signature on the Declaration of Independence is a fitting reflection of a man deeply dedicated both to American liberty and to himself.
1. The tallest building in modern Boston, the glass-paneled John Hancock Tower, is named after the John Hancock insurance company, which in turn named itself after the famous Boston patriot.
2. Slavery was still legal in Massachusetts until 1780. Although himself a slave owner, Hancock supported the state constitution that abolished the institution.
3. Hancock graduated from Harvard and before that from Boston Latin School, the first public high school founded in the British colonies.
“I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there
was something charming in the Sound.”
—George Washington
On June 15, 1775, the Continental Congress chose a wealthy Virginia planter and surveyor, George Washington (1732–1799), to command the patriot army camped near Boston. A veteran of the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Washington accepted the commission as commander in chief of the newly established Continental army and rode to Massachusetts to take charge of his army the next month.
By the time General Washington arrived, the ragtag patriot force had already fought one large battle against the British at Bunker Hill and had encircled the city of Boston. In his first campaign of the war, Washington directed a successful siege of the city, leading the British to evacuate in March 1776.
The army Washington led, however, bore little resemblance to the well-trained British enemy. Drawn from colonial militia regiments, his soldiers often had little or no training, lacked uniforms, deserted regularly, and were accustomed to electing their own officers.
As the commander of the Continental army, Washington’s most urgent task at the beginning of the war was to bring discipline to the unruly force. In the early years, he desperately sought to avoid pitched battles with the British, preferring instead to harass the enemy in small skirmishes. The arrival of several European advisors, including the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) from France and Baron von Steuben (1730–1794) from Prussia, helped transform the army into a professional fighting force.
An officer of great bravery, Washington often led the army into battle himself, miraculously avoiding any serious injury for the course of the war. Immensely popular by the end of the war, Washington was the unanimous choice as the first president of the United States in the election of 1789.
1. When he agreed to lead the Continental army in 1775, Washington declined a salary, asking only that Congress reimburse his expenses.
2. Washington was the first of twelve US presidents to hold the rank of general.
3. According to biographer Joseph Ellis, the general had a soft spot for theater and had a performance of his favorite play, Cato, staged for his soldiers.
Millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in the international slave trade that flourished in the eighteenth century. The horrible conditions aboard the slave ships during the notorious Middle Passage killed as many as a third of the enslaved Africans before they even landed.
The first African slaves in the British colonies of North America arrived in Virginia in 1619, shortly after the establishment of the Jamestown colony. However, the mass forcible importation of human beings into the British colonies would not begin in earnest for another century. Most of the slaves had been kidnapped or taken prisoner by local chiefs during military struggles in western Africa, sold to European traders, and chained together in floating dungeons for the months-long journey to the Americas.
The vast majority of African slaves were taken to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America and the Caribbean to toil on sugar plantations. A relatively smaller number ended up in British North America. Initially, all of the thirteen colonies allowed slavery, but it was much more common in the agricultural South.
Some eighteenth-century Americans were well aware of, and ashamed by, the horrors of the Middle Passage. In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who himself owned slaves, assailed King George III (1738–1820) for allowing the importation of slaves: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
The United States Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, and the British Navy began arresting slavers in the 1830s. However, the Atlantic slave trade continued until 1888, when Brazil became the last American country to outlaw slavery. Even after the end of the international slave trade, however, domestic slave auctions continued in the United States until the Civil War (1861–1865).
1. Most of the slaves taken to the United States came from the modern-day nations of Ghana, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.
2. Homelands for liberated slaves who wanted to return to Africa were established by the British in Sierra Leone in 1808 and by the Americans in Liberia in 1821.
3. The Royal Navy hastened the end of the Middle Passage by declared slave trading a form of piracy, which exposed slave traders caught by the British to the death penalty.
Prior to 1825, the year the Erie Canal opened for business, transporting cargo from the Midwest to the East Coast was a slow and arduous task. Mule-drawn carts carrying grain or whiskey from the Ohio River valley to New York might take months to cross the Appalachian Mountains on rough, muddy paths through terrain that was still mostly wilderness.
The Erie Canal, which at the time of its construction was the most significant feat of engineering in United States history, made transportation drastically cheaper and faster, giving an enormous boost to the economy of the Midwest. The canal, which connected the Great Lakes region with the Hudson River, allowed farmers in Ohio or upstate New York to ship their wares to New York City in about two weeks for about one-tenth the cost of overland shipping.
New York State, led by Governor DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828), sponsored the construction of the 363-mile canal at the cost of $7 million—one of the most profitable investments in the state’s history. The canal solidified New York City’s place as the busiest port in the United States, making it the principal departure point for American products shipped to Europe. The canal also led to more settlement in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, regions that suddenly had easy access to eastern ports and European markets.
The enormous success of the Erie Canal spawned a boom of canal construction in the United States, including several feeder canals in New York. However, the popularity of canals waned after the introduction of the railroads in the 1830s, which were even faster. Still, the Erie Canal remained a lucrative business for decades. Many remnants of the original canal remain in upstate New York, and parts are still used for commercial shipping.
1. The canal rose a total of 420 feet in elevation on its route westward and required 82 locks.
2. Originally, barges on the Erie Canal had no source of power and had to be pulled by horses or oxen that walked alongside the canal on a strip called a towpath.
3. Many New Yorkers were skeptical of Clinton’s plan, and they derisively referred to the canal as Clinton’s Folly until it proved a spectacular success.
Engineer Pierre L’Enfant (1754–1825) designed the blueprint for the nation’s capital, an influential milestone in urban planning that was largely ignored in L’Enfant’s time but later became the basis for the layout of modern Washington, DC. In L’Enfant’s plan, he sought to translate the democratic aspirations of the United States into urban form and create a city that would win international respect for the young nation.
Born in France, L’Enfant traveled to America to enlist in the patriot army at age twentytwo, following in the footsteps of his compatriot, the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834). He eventually rose to the rank of major and befriended General George Washington (1732–1799). After the Revolutionary War, L’Enfant Americanized his first name to Peter and found work designing houses and furniture in his adopted homeland. In 1790, Congress decided to build a new capital city and gave Washington control over the details. Washington, in turn, asked L’Enfant to prepare a design for the city.
L’Enfant’s elegant plan attempted to give physical form to the nation’s revolutionary ideals. He envisioned two great buildings, the Capitol and the White House, which would be physically separate to symbolize the concept of separation of powers that is enshrined in the Constitution. L’Enfant’s plan also called for a system of grand avenues, each of which would be named after a state in recognition of the importance of federalism.
Because of L’Enfant’s prickly personality and the high cost of his plan, Washington removed the Frenchman from the project less than a year later. By the nineteenth century, relatively little of his blueprint had become reality. City planners in Washington, DC, revived the L’Enfant Plan in 1901, however, and finally implemented many of his ideas—a testament to L’Enfant’s visionary accomplishment.
1. Every state has an avenue in Washington, DC, named in its honor.
2. L’Enfant was never paid for his work, and he died in Maryland in poverty.
3. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who had opposed the L’Enfant plan because of its cost, was the first US president inaugurated in Washington, DC, in 1801.
“Whosoever would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Massachusetts writer, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) is among the most influential literary figures in American history, and he played a crucial role in encouraging the development of American fiction and poetry in the mid-nineteenth century. In one of his most famous works, an 1837 lecture titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson called on his compatriots to cast off foreign influences and create a distinctively national literature, a clarion call that inspired many American writers. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” Emerson intoned in the lecture.
Emerson’s own poetic output was modest. His most famous poem is probably “Concord Hymn,” a short patriotic verse about the Battle of Concord in 1775.
As a lecturer and essayist, however, Emerson was far more prolific. In addition to “The American Scholar,” he wrote the highly influential essay “Self Reliance” (1841), which called on writers to develop their own intellect rather than rely on hidebound convention and tradition. The truly inventive mind, Emerson explained, would often contradict itself, but so what? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” he famously wrote.
Emerson’s criticism was largely rooted in the transcendentalist philosophy that he helped shape and define. Although trained as a Unitarian minister, Emerson stopped preaching in the 1830s. The transcendentalists—a movement with religious, literary, and philosophical dimensions—for the most part rejected organized religion in favor of a highly individualistic, optimistic view of the world and of human nature.
Written with elegance and occasional pungency, Emerson’s essays in the pages of The Dial, the leading Transcendentalist journal, were extremely influential and would inspire Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Herman Melville (1819–1891), and Walt Whitman (1819–1892), among others. Whitman is said to have been directly inspired by one of Emerson’s articles, “The Poet” (1844), in which the critic lamented the absence of a true American poet. Thoreau, meanwhile, owed a more literal debt to Emerson, who had allowed the writer to build a cabin on his land next to Walden Pond.
1. Emerson attended Harvard on a scholarship that required him to wait tables for other students.
2. The poem “Concord Hymn” was written for the dedication of a monument to the minutemen in the writer’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts.
3. Emerson preferred to be called Waldo, rather than Ralph, by his friends.
The first nationally famous photographer in American history, New York-born Mathew Brady (c. 1823–1896) shocked his viewers by documenting the gruesome bloodshed of the Civil War (1861–1865). Thanks to Brady and his crew of assistants, who toted primitive camera equipment from battlefield to battlefield, Americans for the first time saw accurate pictures of the death and devastation of war. Brady also snapped many iconic portraits of leading generals and political leaders of the nineteenth century, including President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1855).
Photography had been invented in France in the 1820s and 1830s and imported to the United States in the early 1840s. Brady, one of the first artists to make use of the new technology, opened his photography studio in New York City in 1844.
In its early years, taking and developing pictures was a cumbersome, time-consuming process. Cameras of the 1860s were the size of microwave ovens, and few photographers ventured outside of their studios.
Brady was among the first photographers to realize the journalistic potential of the primitive technology. Although unable to capture actual snapshots of battle, Brady and his men were often the first to arrive on the scene afterward, taking haunting photos of scorched buildings, destroyed bridges, and the bloated corpses of the dead.
In 1862, Brady mounted his first exhibit of war photos, displaying a collection of pictures from the Battle of Antietam. The photos were hailed for their raw realism, and Brady would take more than 10,000 pictures over the course of the war at huge cost.
Unfortunately for Brady, his investment never paid off. After the end of the Civil War, Americans had little interest in graphic reminders of the conflict. Brady’s business collapsed, and he died thirty years later after being hit by a streetcar in New York City.
1. Congress granted Brady $25,000 in 1875 in recognition of his Civil War service, but Brady used the entire gift to pay off some of his crushing debts.
2. During the war, Brady employed a primitive photographic process known as albumen printing, which used paper coated with dissolved egg whites to produce a print.
3. He also photographed several Confederate generals after the war, including Robert E. Lee (1807–1870).