The United States Constitution was written over the summer of 1787 at a convention in Philadelphia. Fifty-five delegates from twelve states eventually signed the document that created the modern American government, but its main author was Virginia delegate James Madison (1751–1836), who later became the nation’s fourth president. Madison’s plan created the basic institutions of American government—the Supreme Court, the US Congress, and the presidency—that have remained essentially unchanged ever since.
By the time the delegates gathered in Philadelphia, it had become painfully clear to many Americans that the national government created during the Revolution was utterly dysfunctional. Under the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1777, the government lacked the authority to collect taxes. It also granted each of the thirteen states an equal say in national policy, which bigger states like Virginia and New York considered grossly unfair.
Small states, while aware of the iniquities in the Articles of Confederation, were wary of ceding too much power to their neighbors. Indeed, the smallest of the thirteen, Rhode Island, refused to even participate in the convention. Eventually, a delegate from medium-size Connecticut, Roger Sherman (1721–1793), proposed his famous compromise: the new Constitution would create a House of Representatives, where seats would be allotted by population, and a Senate, where each state would have equal representation.
The so-called Connecticut compromise removed the greatest obstacle to the success of the convention. Still, many contentious questions remained for the delegates, including the thorny issue of slavery. The debates over slavery eventually resulted in the three-fifths compromise, which stated that a nonfree person would be considered three-fifths of a person for tax reasons and in determining representation in Congress. Barricading themselves in Independence Hall, the delegates sweated through the hot Philadelphia summer until finally agreeing to the final draft in September. After a public relations blitz orchestrated by Madison and Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), the required number of states ratified the document and it went into effect in 1789.
1. The state of Rhode Island boycotted the Philadelphia convention and was the last of the thirteen states to ratify the new Constitution.
2. After the ratification of the Constitution, Sherman was elected to the First Congress but also continued to serve as mayor of New Haven at the same time.
3. Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution on December 7, 1787; Pennsylvania and New Jersey followed suit later that month.
The American general Benedict Arnold (1741–1801) acquired eternal infamy by betraying his compatriots during the Revolution and joining the British.
Arnold, a Connecticut native, believed that he should have earned a promotion and more of the glory for his role in the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Disgruntled by his treatment in the patriot army and deeply in debt, Arnold negotiated a secret deal with the British in 1781 to switch sides in exchange for the enormous sum of £20,000. Arnold’s betrayal shocked his former comrades. When the Revolution broke out, Arnold had joined the fight with gusto, leading the first Connecticut regiment to enter the war. He fought bravely with the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont and New York, participating in the seizure of Fort Ticonderoga, a British outpost on Lake Champlain, in 1775. His heroism at the Battle of Saratoga, although it did not win him the promotion he thought he deserved, was widely praised.
The secret plot that Arnold hatched with the British could have turned the tide of the war. In exchange for the cash, Arnold promised to hand over the key Hudson River fort of West Point to British forces. However, Arnold’s plot was discovered, and as a result he never got the full £20,000 he had been promised.
After switching sides, Arnold received a command in the British army. In 1781, now in the red uniform of a British officer, he led raids on the Connecticut coastline, pillaging his own home turf.
After the Revolution, Arnold became a kind of founding national villain, and his name continues to be used as a synonym for traitor. The legacy of his treason against the United States at a time of war, in the eyes of most historians, far outweighs his earlier military contributions to the patriot cause.
1. Arnold’s heroism at the Battle of Saratoga happened despite orders from his annoyed superiors that he not leave his quarters.
2. The British agent who arranged Arnold’s betrayal, Major John André, was captured by the Americans and hanged in 1780. His remains were eventually returned to Britain, where he was reburied as a hero in Westminster Abbey.
3. Having backed the losing side in the war, Arnold ended up in London, where he died debt-ridden and disgraced in 1801 at the age of sixty.
Shortly after the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1789, Congress added ten amendments to the document guaranteeing American citizens a long list of basic rights and liberties. The Bill of Rights, as it became known, was written largely by James Madison (1751–1836) to address the concerns of many Americans that the original Constitution, as written at the 1787 Philadelphia convention, did not explicitly protect individual liberties.
The Bill of Rights defined the basic legal protections for American citizens, including:
The right to free speech
Freedom of religion
The right to bear arms
Protection from unreasonable search and seizure by the government
Trial by jury
Freedom from cruel or unusual punishment
Ratification of the ten amendments was swift, although some Americans, including Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), argued that they were unnecessary. With ratification by three-fourths of the states, the Bill of Rights became official in 1791.
Initially, the amendments applied only to the federal government, and individual states could still restrict individual liberties if they wished. For instance, in Massachusetts, Congregationalist churches were supported by taxpayers until the nineteenth century, even though the Bill of Rights forbade “an establishment of religion.”
Over time, however, and especially after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, the Supreme Court has ruled that individual states also must abide by most provisions of the Bill of Rights. Madison’s ten short amendments now form the bedrock of American civil rights.
1. The absence of a bill of rights in the original Constitution was a major reason anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry (1736–1799) opposed its ratification.
2. Vermont and Kentucky became the fourteenth and fifteenth states to join the Union in the midst of the ratification process. Both approved the Bill of Rights.
3. In 1987, historians uncovered a handwritten draft of the Bill of Rights by Roger Sherman (1721–1793), the father of the Connecticut Compromise. It was Sherman who proposed adding the Bill of Rights as amendments to the Constitution rather than trying to rewrite the text of the original document at the last minute.
For most of the nineteenth century, the single biggest source of revenue for the United States government was the tariff, a tax on foreign products imported from abroad. All cloth, iron, and agricultural goods unloaded at American ports were subject to the tariff, which sometimes exceeded 50 percent of the underlying value of the import. How high to raise the tax was the single most divisive economic issue of the early nineteenth century, and disagreements over the tariff triggered one of the country’s gravest political crises in the era before the Civil War (1861–1865).
The Constitution approved in 1789 gave Congress the power to impose a tariff, but political leaders immediately disagreed over how high the rate should be pegged. Many Southerners wanted the tariff set as low as possible—just enough to fund the government. Their objection was partly ideological and partly out of self-interest: the Southern economy was dependent on selling raw cotton to British textile mills, and the powerful cotton producers did not want a tax in place that would discourage trade with Britain.
In the North, however, the tariff was regarded not just as a source of revenue for the government but also as an economic tool to protect fledgling northern industries from European competition. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, politicians in the North were concerned that without the protection of the tariff, their markets would be swamped with cheap European goods. A high tariff was a key part of the American System envisioned by senator and Whig Party member Henry Clay (1777–1852) to encourage the growth of domestic industry.
The controversy reached a peak in 1828, after Whigs in Congress imposed a particularly high rate known as the Tariff of Abominations. Southerners were outraged. Led by John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), the state of South Carolina refused to obey the law, prompting the “nullification crisis” that ended only when Congress gave President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) the power, in 1833, to enforce the tariff by military force.
In the early twentieth century, the income tax replaced the tariff as the biggest source of federal revenue. However, the dispute between advocates of free trade and protectionism remains a perennial political issue in national elections.
1. In the nineteenth century, as today, politicians frequently switched sides on the tariff issue. During the War of 1812, Daniel Webster (1782–1852) opposed a high tariff while Calhoun supported it; in the 1830s, they had reversed positions and argued strongly against their old views.
2. Most of the tariff disputes involved trade with Great Britain, which was the biggest trading partner of the United States in the early nineteenth century.
3. The nullification crisis is seen as a precursor to the Civil War, and it caused the first open discussions of secession in states of the future Confederacy.
After acquiring the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) dispatched army officers Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838) to chart the vast new territory. The three-year Lewis and Clark expedition, one of the most famous exploits in the history of American exploration, traversed thousands of miles of rugged wilderness and marked one of the first steps in the nation’s westward expansion.
Lewis, the main organizer of the expedition, was the son of a Continental army officer who had died during the Revolution. The young Lewis joined the army at age twenty, served on the frontier, and was eventually appointed Jefferson’s secretary. Impressed by the young officer’s courage and knowledge of Native Americans, Jefferson selected Lewis to lead the Louisiana expedition. Lewis, in turn, picked Clark as his cocaptain.
The purpose of the Lewis and Clark expedition was partly geographical and partly political. Jefferson wanted the two men to search for a (nonexistent, as it turned out) all-water route to the Pacific Ocean that would be suitable for commerce, and also to establish contact with Native American tribes in the interior. On the expedition, Clark took charge of mapping their progress while Lewis handled the diplomatic tasks and catalogued the strange plants and animals encountered by the men.
Along with their thirty-three-man crew, dubbed the Corps of Discovery by historians, Lewis and Clark followed a route that began in St. Louis, Missouri, and followed the Missouri River north to its headwaters in Montana. From there, they crossed the Rocky Mountains into present-day Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. The group finally reached the Pacific Ocean. Clark’s journal entry for November 7, 1805, captures the exhilaration of the moment: “Great joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See. and the roreing or noise made by the waves breakeing on the rockey Shores (as I Suppose) may be heard distictly. Ocian in View! O! the joy.”
1. Lewis committed suicide in 1809.
2. Clark’s older brother, George Rogers Clark (1752–1818), was a Revolutionary war hero and frontiersman who helped pry the Northwest Territory away from the British.
3. Although he had been promised a promotion in exchange for participating in the expedition, Clark was not promoted to captain until 2001—posthumously, of course.
The most well-known book by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is Walden, published in 1854, a chronicle of the writer’s experiment living a simple life in the woods next to Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Thoreau moved to his hut at Walden on Independence Day of 1845 and lived there intermittently for the next two years. Separated from mainstream society, Thoreau wrote a searing cultural critique, decrying the monotony and soul-crushing routine that he believed characterized American life in the nineteenth century. “The mass of men,” he famously wrote from his perch in the forest, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Nature, politics, and the individual’s relationship to society were recurring themes in Thoreau’s writing. In addition to Walden, Thoreau is well known for his fiery essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849), which argued that an individual has both the right and the responsibility to defy unjust laws. Thoreau wrote the essay after he was thrown in prison for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican War (1846–1848), a conflict that he considered unjust.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
In the twentieth century, Thoreau’s meditation on the rights and power of the individual would be a source of inspiration for the Indian nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), who wrote that he was “fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system” that he found in Thoreau’s writings.
At the time, however, the publication of “Civil Disobedience” and Walden brought Thoreau little income, and he struggled to support himself with his nature writing. A lifelong opponent of slavery, Thoreau became one of the few public supporters of the controversial antislavery militant John Brown (1800–1859) and gave a speech titled “A Plea for Captain John Brown” before Brown’s execution in 1859. Thoreau’s health collapsed after a bout of tuberculosis, and he died at age forty-four after several years of sickness.
1. Thoreau is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, in a section of the graveyard referred to as Authors’ Ridge because so many other great writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), are also interred there.
2. To make ends meet, Thoreau worked at his family’s pencil factory on and off for much of his life.
3. Thoreau’s Walden hideaway was built on land owned by Emerson, his friend and mentor.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty
The most famous monument in American history, the Statue of Liberty was built by France and dedicated in 1886 as a gift of friendship to the United States. Erected on an island in New York Harbor at enormous cost, the 305-foot copper colossus has greeted generations of immigrants arriving in the United States seeking a better life and the promise of freedom.
Designed by the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904), the Statue of Liberty took ten years to build. Bartholdi based his idea on the Colossus of Rhodes, a giant statue in Greece that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World before its destruction in an earthquake in 226 BC. Bartholdi raised private donations from French citizens to build the statue, which was originally intended to commemorate French assistance during the American Revolution.
To make the statue structurally sound, Bartholdi enlisted the help of French engineer Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923), the same architect who later built the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris. Eiffel designed Lady Liberty’s “skeleton,” a system of steel girders that keeps the thin copper shell in place. Bartholdi and Eiffel also built a smaller replica that stands in Paris.
Immediately hailed as a national landmark after its opening, the Statue of Liberty suffered gradual damage as its fragile copper shell deteriorated throughout the twentieth century. A major renovation in the 1980s restored the colossus. The statue reopened in 1986 to national fanfare. Sadly, the inside of the statue has been closed to visitors since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City.
1. The statue’s official name is La liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty Enlightening the World.
2. Liberty Island was named Bedloe’s Island until 1956, when the name was officially changed.
3. The gold-plated torch held aloft in the statue’s hand has an open-air platform that was originally open to visitors, but it was closed in 1916.