John Murray, also known as the fourth Earl of Dunmore (1732–1809), was the last British colonial governor of Virginia. A descendent of Scottish kings, Lord Dunmore was dispatched to the colonies in 1770, an appointment that was considered a plum assignment for a young British aristocrat at the time. During the governor’s rocky tenure in Williamsburg, however, he clashed repeatedly with the colony’s unruly legislature, the House of Burgesses. After the outbreak of war in 1775, Lord Dunmore unsuccessfully tried to suppress the rebellion by offering freedom to Virginia slaves who fought for the British, but he was defeated and forced to flee to England in 1776.
At the time of Lord Dunmore’s arrival in Virginia, members of the House of Burgesses included brilliant patriot luminaries like Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Patrick Henry (1736–1799), and George Washington (1732–1799). The governor first tangled with this group of notables in 1773 and took the unpopular step of dissolving the house in 1774 after legislators proposed a day of fasting in solidarity with Boston after the British closed that city’s port in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party.
In late 1774, Lord Dunmore led a successful expedition to the western frontier against the Shawnee Indians. However, by the time he returned to the capital, Virginia was in nearly open revolt against him. Henry, a constant thorn in the governor’s side, gave his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech on March 23, 1775. The Revolution began in Boston a few weeks later. Lord Dunmore, sensing it was unsafe for him to remain ashore, fled to a British warship off the Virginia coast that June.
From aboard the Fowey, Lord Dunmore made a famous and highly unusual proclamation. He offered to free any American slaves who joined the British army fighting the Revolution. The offer incensed Virginia slaveholders, but it was the first large-scale emancipation offered to slaves in the South. The earl, however, never made good on his promise, and was forced to leave Virginia for good in 1776.
1. In his native Scotland, Lord Dunmore may be best remembered for a bizarre building he constructed on his country estate in 1761, the so-called Dunmore Pineapple. The building features a cupola shaped like a pineapple, a fruit that was considered an extremely rare delicacy in the eighteenth century.
2. A county in northern Virginia was named in Lord Dunmore’s honor in 1772 but was quickly renamed Shenandoah County during the Revolution.
3. After the colonials drove him out of Virginia, Lord Dunmore later served a more peaceful stint as British governor of the Bahamas from 1787 to 1796.
In December 1777, the exhausted army of General George Washington (1732–1799) arrived in the small town of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. With the British occupying nearby Philadelphia, Washington picked the town, already under six inches of snow, for the army’s winter quarters. The winter at Valley Forge proved hellish, the most difficult stretch of the war for Washington and his troops. As the British stayed warm and comfortable in Philadelphia, more than 2,000 of the approximately 10,000 American soldiers died from cold, disease, and hunger in the snows of Valley Forge.
The months at Valley Forge were, in the words of Thomas Paine (1737–1809), “times that try men’s souls.” Typhoid fever and pneumonia were rampant in the camps. The men lacked blankets, clothing, even shoes. Rather than face death and disease, many soldiers simply deserted—a fairly common problem in Washington’s army.
However, the soldiers who survived Valley Forge emerged in 1778 as a hardened and battle-ready force. A Prussian officer named Friedrich von Steuben (1730–1794) joined the army at Valley Forge and helped Washington impose discipline on the troops. As the snows melted, von Steuben drilled the army, molding them into a more professional force.
The army remained at Valley Forge into June 1778, when the British commander in Philadelphia suddenly decided to transfer his troops to New York. Washington’s forces attacked the British columns at the Battle of Monmouth in central New Jersey. Although the battle was inconclusive, the results showed the value of von Steuben’s drills. In open battle against the best troops of the British army, Washington’s army held its own.
The awful months at Valley Forge represented the worst period of the war for Washington’s troops but created an army that would eventually drive the British out of America.
1. Many men who would later become famous—or infamous—suffered through the winter at Valley Forge, including both Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) and his eventual killer, Aaron Burr (1756–1836).
2. Historians believe that the hardships of American soldiers at Valley Forge were partly caused by the greedy profiteering of Pennsylvania farmers, who sold their crops to the British at Philadelphia instead of to Washington’s army.
3. Washington’s army at Valley Forge was multiracial, including freed slaves and a handful of Oneida Indians. Washington had openly disobeyed the Continental Congress by allowing black soldiers to reenlist.
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the framers struggled to reach consensus on the contentious issue of slavery. Although declining in the North and regarded as a moral evil by many of the delegates, slavery was a major part of the South’s economy, and Southern representatives at the convention insisted on protecting their “peculiar institution.”
Eventually, rather than allowing disputes over slavery to derail the whole convention, the framers made the fateful decision to set the whole issue aside for future generations. Instead of banning the slave trade, as many delegates had hoped, the delegates wrote a clause into the document allowing Congress to outlaw the practice—but not until 1808.
The delegates also faced a related question: Would slaves count as people in determining the number of seats each state received in the new House of Representatives? Southerners, not surprisingly, wanted representation based on their total population, which would have increased their influence in the House. Northern delegates objected, arguing that if slaves were not to be treated as citizens, why should they have representation in Congress?
After heated argument, the delegates agreed on the notorious three-fifths compromise. For the purposes of congressional representation, the compromise said, a slave would count as three-fifths of a person. A million slaves, in other words, would count as 600,000 people under the formula.
In the short term, the three-fifths compromise made the Constitution possible. In the long term, by dealing so inconclusively with the slavery issue, the framers planted the seeds of the Civil War (1861–1865). The compromise also had the effect of giving Southern whites hugely disproportionate power in early Congresses, which they used to fend off challenges to slavery. And in the eyes of abolitionists, the tacit acceptance of slavery by the delegates in Philadelphia made the North complicit in Southern slavery.
1. The three-fifths compromise was officially repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which based congressional representation on the total number of citizens in a state.
2. The compromise was proposed by Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson (1742–1798), who later became one of the original Supreme Court justices appointed by President George Washington (1732–1799).
3. Several ratios were considered before the delegates agreed on three-fifths.
Whale hunting was one of the most important parts of the economy before the Civil War (1861–1865), with more than 700 ships from American ports sailing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in search of right whales and sperm whales. Whaling expeditions often lasted years, and a single tall-masted ship might catch hundreds of the giant mammals. Once a whale was harpooned, its blubber was boiled down to produce oil, which was prized in nineteenth-century America as a source of fuel for lamps. The whale’s bones, meanwhile, were used as a component in buggy whips, umbrellas, and certain kinds of women’s clothing.
In the early nineteenth century, the major centers of American whaling were New Bedford, Massachusetts; the island of Nantucket; and New London, Connecticut. Later, after the Civil War, the industry migrated to San Francisco. Crews aboard American whaling ships tended to be international in nature, with Africans, Asians, and Caribbean Islanders joining American-born sailors; a high percentage of these ships’ crew members emigrated from the small African island nation of Cape Verde.
Even during its heyday, whalers enjoyed a reputation as romantic adventurers on the high seas. In Moby-Dick (1851), the most famous whaling novel, Herman Melville (1819–1891) observed that “scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men” poured into the whaling ports of Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, “all athirst for gain and glory.” The grueling routine of life at sea, however, was hardly romantic.
The tapping of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 and the start of the Civil War dealt a serious blow to the whaling industry. During the war, dozens of Union whaling ships were sunk by the Confederacy. Although the whale fishery resumed after the war, it never regained either its economic prominence or its place in the national consciousness. The last whaling ship sailed out of New Bedford in 1924. To protect endangered species, whaling is now illegal in the United States, but the rich cultural heritage of the whaling fleet remains central to American literature.
1. In recognition of its importance to the state’s economy in the nineteenth century, the sperm whale is the state animal of Connecticut.
2. Art made from whale bones is called scrimshaw, and a scrimshaw artist is referred to as a scrimshander.
3. A whale yielded an array of products, including ambergris, a substance from its intestine that was treasured as a source of perfume. In Moby-Dick, Melville noted the irony of rich Americans spritzing themselves with whale guts: “Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!”
President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States. For the bargain price of $15 million, Jefferson (1743–1826) purchased 800,000 square miles of land stretching from New Orleans to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. About one-quarter of the current United States, including all or part of fifteen states, joined the nation as a result of the deal with the French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821).
Originally, the diplomats Jefferson sent to Paris in 1803 wanted to buy only the key city of New Orleans in order to protect American shipping on the Mississippi River. Napoleon, however, had other ideas. The soon-to-be emperor insisted on including the rest of France’s territory in North America as well, famously declaring, “I renounce Louisiana.” At the time, Napoleon was planning war with Great Britain, and he needed the proceeds from the sale of Louisiana to finance his army.
For Jefferson, the treaty with France presented a personal and political dilemma. During the 1790s, Jefferson had been a scathing critic of the expansion of the government’s power under the presidency of George Washington (1732–1799), but the Louisiana Purchase would be the most brazen application of federal power yet. Many critics considered the deal illegal, since the Constitution did not give the government the authority to acquire new territory. In the end, however, Jefferson decided the opportunity was simply too good to allow principle to get in his way. Setting aside his own scruples, Jefferson sent the treaty to Congress, where it was approved in the fall of 1803.
The Louisiana Purchase was the first major territorial expansion in American history, and it set a fateful precedent. To an American at the time of the Revolution, it was neither obvious nor necessarily desirable that the country would expand at all—much less reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean. But in the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, the nation began to look increasingly westward. The dream of “manifest destiny” took hold among many Americans and helped drive the waves of territorial purchase and conquest that would build the modern United States.
1. One of Jefferson’s diplomats in Paris was James Monroe (1758–1831), later the fifth president of the United States.
2. The deal with Napoleon was opposed by the leaders of the Federalist Party, who feared it would alienate the British.
3. Louisiana was actually owned by Spain at the time Napoleon negotiated the treaty with Monroe. However, the Spanish had already agreed to relinquish control to France later in 1803.
Among the most popular American literati of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) wrote many of the classics of the American canon, including his famous poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Longfellow’s poetry expressed the nationalism and optimism of his age and helped create the selfimage of the United States as a beacon for freedom and tolerance in the world.
Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, and attended Bowdoin College, where he befriended the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Longfellow traveled widely in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s and was appointed to a Harvard professorship of modern languages in 1836. Longfellow began writing poetry after moving to Cambridge, and he published one of his bestknown epic poems, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, in 1847. The poem tells the story of the Acadians, a group of French-speaking Canadians who were expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755 by the British and found refuge in Louisiana.
Other works by Longfellow included The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). Like Evangeline, these long poems were accounts based loosely on actual episodes from American history, burnished into patriotic myth.
His most well-known historical poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” was first published in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War (1861–1865). Although the poem is based on the real events preceding the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, it severely exaggerates the role of Boston silversmith Paul Revere (1734–1818). Still, to a nation thirsty for heroes at the beginning of the Civil War, the poem was an instant hit. Its opening lines are among the most famous in all of American verse:
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Although based only very loosely on the facts, Longfellow’s poems struck a nerve with the American public and have remained popular ever since.
1. Longfellow was the first American translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
2. Longfellow’s son, Charley, ran away from home to join the Union army in 1863 against his father’s orders.
3. Longfellow was traumatized by the death of his wife, who accidentally set herself on fire at their Cambridge home in 1861. Longfellow was injured trying to put out the flames and later wrote, “how I am alive after what my eyes have seen, I know not.”
The most famous and influential cartoonist of American journalistic history, Thomas Nast (1840–1902) lampooned the rich and powerful of the nineteenthcentury United States and popularized the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant still used to symbolize the two major American political parties.
Born in Germany, Nast immigrated to the United States in 1846 with his mother, settling in New York City. Ironically, despite his own foreign background, anti-immigrant stereotypes would form a large part of Nast’s later work.
After briefly attending art school, Nast began working during the Civil War (1861–1865) at Harper’s, the same prestigious magazine that also employed the young Winslow Homer. An ardent Republican and supporter of President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), during the war Nast drew cartoons attacking slavery and the copperhead Democrats who favored negotiating a peace settlement with the Confederacy.
Nast achieved his lasting fame after the war, however, with his caricatures of Boss Tweed. Nast depicted Tweed, the head of New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall political organization and a behind-the-scenes power broker in city politics, as fat and greedy. Published in Harper’s between 1869 and 1871, Nast’s cartoons are widely credited with bringing down the Tammany organization.
The Tammany cartoons, however, also exposed Nast’s darker side. The Tweed ring derived much of its support from newly arrived immigrants, especially the Irish, and Nast blamed the Irish as a whole for the ring’s crimes. In his cartoons, Nast often portrayed Irishmen as apes, a testament to the deep ethnic prejudices of nineteenthcentury America.
In recognition of his services to the Republican Party, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 appointed Nast to a diplomatic posting in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he died shortly thereafter in a yellow fever outbreak.
1. In 1862, Nast drew the first version of the modern American depiction of Santa Claus, an image that contributed to the commercialization of the once-religious holiday in the late 1800s.
2. Nast chose the elephant to represent the Republican Party for its size, strength, and intelligence, in implicit contrast to the Democratic jackass.
3. Nast is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Brooklyn, a massive graveyard that is also home to the remains of author Herman Melville (1819–1891), jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–1991), and composer Irving Berlin (1888–1989).