In August 1788, the happily retired George Washington (1732–1799) received a letter at his sprawling estate of Mount Vernon from an old war buddy, Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804). In the letter, Hamilton politely urged Washington to accept the office of the United States presidency. For the newly formed government to succeed, Hamilton wrote, it needed a strong and respected leader, and the great war hero from Virginia was the natural choice. “I take it for granted, Sir, you have concluded to comply with what will no doubt be the general call of your country in relation to the new government,” Hamilton wrote.
Washington, however had little interest in returning to power, and in his reply to Hamilton, he expressed his ambivalence about the presidency. In the five years since resigning from the army, Washington had been content to tend his fields at Mount Vernon, playing little role in the government. Although he served as the titular president of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Washington did not play a significant part in the deliberations that created the new system of government. “My great and sole desire,” Washington wrote to Hamilton a few days after receiving the letter, was “to live and die, in peace and retirement on my own farm.”
Eventually, however, after several more pestering letters to Mount Vernon, Hamilton finally prevailed on Washington to accept the office. In 1789, Washington rode to the national capital, then located in New York, where he took the oath of office on a balcony overlooking Wall Street.
The creation of a presidency by the new Constitution had been controversial in the thirteen states. Many Americans, such as the Virginia patriot leader Patrick Henry (1736–1799), feared it would simply turn into a new kind of monarchy. To assuage their fears, Washington deliberately avoided the sort of ostentatious displays of power associated with European crowns. He insisted on the modest, democratic title of “Mr. President” instead of “His Majesty.” He wore ordinary civilian clothes rather than a military uniform. Most important, Washington left office voluntarily after two four-year terms, a precedent observed until 1940.
1. In the election of 1789—largely a formality, since the whole country backed Washington—North Carolina and Rhode Island did not participate because they had not formally joined the Union yet by ratifying the Constitution.
2. Washington’s inauguration, scheduled for March 4, 1789, was delayed by several weeks because the House and Senate lacked a quorum.
3. Washington gave the shortest inaugural address on record, a mere 133 words, at his second inauguration in 1793.
Burdened by crushing war debts from the American Revolution, the nowindependent state of Massachusetts was forced to impose heavy taxes on its citizens after the war. Farmers in the central part of the state revolted in protest, leading to a small uprising called Shays’s Rebellion (1786–1787). Under the direction of Daniel Shays (c. 1747–1825), a Revolutionary War veteran, the farmers seized the armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, before the state militia put down the rebellion and executed several of the conspirators.
Although suppressed relatively quickly, Shays’s Rebellion exposed the impotence of the American government under the old Articles of Confederation. The national government had been a mere spectator in the rebellion, which had been stopped entirely with Massachusetts state militia. From his home at Mount Vernon, George Washington (1732–1799) was appalled that a small gang of Massachusetts farmers could threaten the country he had fought to establish. Shays’s Rebellion provided added urgency for the delegates who met in Philadelphia later in 1787 to replace the Articles of Confederation with a stronger central government under a new Constitution.
When the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in western Pennsylvania in 1794, Washington was determined to show that the new federal government could now defend itself. Like the revolt in Massachusetts, the Whiskey Rebellion arose from opposition to taxes, this time a nine-cents-a-gallon levy on whiskey producers.
As president, Washington assembled a huge army of 13,000 soldiers to suppress the revolt. By the time this massive force arrived in Pennsylvania, the rebels had dispersed. The army managed to locate two conspirators and they were tried and condemned to death for treason, but Washington pardoned both.
The distinct contrast between the national government’s meek response to Shays’s Rebellion in 1786 and its zealous suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 showed that under the new Constitution, the federal government had both the power and the will to protect itself.
1. The army of 13,000 soldiers dispatched to quell the Whiskey Rebellion was derisively referred to as the “watermelon army” for the supposedly untrained New Jerseyans in the force.
2. At the time of Shays’s Rebellion, the national capital was in New York. Before permanently settling in the new city of Washington, DC, the capital had also been located in Philadelphia; Annapolis, Maryland; Trenton, New Jersey; and Princeton, New Jersey.
3. After his revolt was quashed, Shays fled to Vermont, which was an independent republic until it joined the Union in 1791.
In August 1790, President George Washington (1732–1799) wrote a letter to the Jewish congregation of about 300 members in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington had a personal connection to the congregation and had visited their synagogue during the Revolution. His letter—written in uncharacteristically eloquent language for Washington—promised Rhode Island’s small Jewish community that the newly formed government of the United States would treat Jews no differently than other Americans.
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
Washington’s famous letter, and its promise to give “bigotry no sanction,” has historical significance in both the American and global contexts. In the late eighteenth century, persecution of Jewish communities was the norm in most European countries. Virtually no other leader could have guaranteed the “enlarged and liberal policy” towards Jews promised by Washington.
The letter was also significant because it expanded the American definition of “religious toleration” to include non-Christians. For even the most open-minded colonial settlers, religious toleration meant only a respect for the differences between different versions of Christianity. Their understanding of toleration rarely extended to Native American religions, Judaism, or other non-Christian denominations.
Like Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, which was written about a decade later, Washington’s letter to Newport’s Jewish community became a key document in the evolution of modern American concepts of religious tolerance.
1. Rhode Island was the destination for the first Jewish immigrants to America in the 1650s, described in Henry Wordsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.”
2. The center of the Jewish community in Newport, Touro Synagogue, was completed in 1762 and is now the oldest synagogue in the nation.
3. Washington’s statement came in response to a letter from Moses Seixas, the warden of the congregation, who had written to the president earlier that summer congratulating Washington on his election.
The panic of 1837 was a devastating economic crisis triggered by a sudden shortage of gold and silver at American banks. The panic cast the banking system into disarray, and the resulting turmoil soon rippled across the national economy. Thousands of businesses were destroyed during the panic, which did not lift until the 1840s.
The panic had its roots in the metals-based currency system of the nineteenth century. By law, only gold and silver coins were officially recognized as money. However, the two precious metals were rare, and relatively few coins were produced at the government’s mint in Philadelphia.
Instead, many Americans used paper money issued by private banks. Unlike today, when only the United States government prints paper money, many individual banks in the 1830s issued their own notes.
In theory, private banknotes were redeemable in gold or silver at the institution that issued them. In practice, however, most banks printed much more currency than they could actually back up. Initially, the resulting flood of “soft” money provided a major economic stimulus, fueling the construction of railroads, canals, and factories in the 1830s.
However, President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) distrusted banks and paper money and regarded the whole arrangement as a scam. In 1836, his administration issued an order instructing federal agents to refuse banknotes and accept payment for federal land only in “hard” money—gold or silver. In effect, with a stroke of the pen, Jackson declared the paper money used by most Americans worthless. Predictably, many rushed to their bank to trade in paper money for gold and silver, provoking a shortage that overwhelmed the banking system early in the presidency of Martin van Buren (1782–1862). Van Buren refused to intervene in the crisis and was punished at the polls in 1840 when William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) defeated him in his bid for a second term.
1. In economic parlance, when gold and silver are used as currency, they are referred to as specie—from the Latin in kind. Thus, Jackson’s 1836 order was known as the specie circular.
2. The crisis was exacerbated by the lack of a federal bank, which might have lent money to the insolvent private banks; Jackson had taken away its charter in 1836.
3. The specie circular was rescinded in 1838, but the effects of the panic did not lift until after van Buren’s defeat.
For most of the nation’s history, the Mississippi River has been the most economically important waterway in the United States, stretching about 2,320 miles from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. If its main tributary, the Missouri River, is included, the Mississippi is the third-longest river in the world, trailing only the Nile and the Amazon. Thanks to its size and historical importance, “Old Man River” also looms large in American literature, culture, and music.
Acquiring control over the Mississippi was a key goal of President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) when he authorized American diplomats to buy the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. American farmers wanted safe access to the river to ship their goods to New Orleans and from there onward to Europe. Steamboats, which were first built in the United States in 1809, made river navigation easier and replaced hand-powered keelboats as the main form of transportation on the Mississippi in the early nineteenth century. During the Civil War, the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863 delivered control of the Mississippi to the Union, a key victory that split the Confederacy in two.
The lore of the Mississippi owes much to one of the steamboat pilots, Samuel Clemens. Writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, Clemens (1835–1910) set many of his tales along the river, including his most famous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The river also figures prominently in the blues, a musical style that developed in the Mississippi Delta region. River commerce is still a major source of traffic on the Mississippi and, measured in tons of goods, New Orleans remains one of the busiest ports in the world.
1. Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto (c. 1500–1542) was the first European to discover the Mississippi in 1541.
2. The first steamboat to travel the Mississippi was the New Orleans, which was built in Pittsburgh in 1811 and cost $40,000.
3. Although up to four miles wide in some sections, most of the Mississippi is less than ten feet deep.
When it was first published in 1851, the novel Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville (1819–1891) disappointed many of the author’s fans. Unlike his previous works, swashbuckling nautical thrillers like Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), Moby-Dick was long, complex, and dark. The novel received terrible reviews—the London Atheneum called it an “absurd book”—and it was a commercial failure that dealt a severe blow to Melville’s budding literary career.
About seventy years later, however, literary scholars rediscovered Melville’s brilliant, inventive novel, which had been gathering dust in libraries. Most modern critics now consider Moby-Dick and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) the two greatest American novels of the nineteenth century.
Moby-Dick follows the voyage of the Pequod, a whaling ship based on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. At the beginning of the novel, the main character, a crew member named Ishmael, expects that the voyage will be an ordinary whaling expedition. After the Pequod leaves port, however, Ishmael discovers that Captain Ahab has something else in mind: he wants to kill Moby-Dick, a legendary white whale that had crippled him on a previous trip.
Moby-Dick is laden with allegory and symbolism, starting with the elusive white whale itself. In one of the most famous chapters in the book, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Melville describes the combination of awe and terror the “ghastly whiteness” of the beast provokes aboard the Pequod. The whale’s pale hue, Melville writes, seems to symbolize the “nameless horror” of nihilism:
in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we should shrink?
Ahab’s obsessive quest for the whale, which grows over the course of Moby-Dick as the ship sails across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. The pursuit for the whale is often seen as an allegory for humankind’s search for truth—an object, like the great white whale, that seems to recede the harder one looks.
1. The book was dedicated to author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), a friend of Melville’s who had encouraged him to write Moby-Dick.
2. The Starbucks coffee chain was named for Starbuck, Ahab’s levelheaded first mate on the Pequod.
3. One of the inspirations for Moby-Dick was the real-life story of the American whaling ship Essex, which was attacked by a sperm whale in 1820.
Famous for his arched doorways and graceful brownstone trim buildings, architect H. H. Richardson (1838–1886) set a new standard for American design in the nineteenth century with the elegant train stations, courthouses, and churches he built in cities and towns across the United States.
Henry Hobson Richardson was born on a Louisiana plantation and attended Harvard, where he was a classmate of author Henry Adams (1838–1918). After graduation, Richardson traveled to Paris for architecture school, missing the Civil War (1861–1865). Richardson returned to the United States in 1866 and opened an office in New York City.
Although he died young, during Richardson’s brief career he built a stunning number of well-regarded buildings, including department stores, college halls, jails, libraries, and private homes. Many of his buildings feature rounded facades and mud-toned coloring, a style sometimes referred to as Romanesque Revival for its similarities to European buildings of the Middle Ages.
Boston’s Trinity Church, one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the United States, is Richardson’s most famous work. Made out of granite and brownstone and constructed in the shape of a cross, the giant church took five years for Richardson to complete in 1877. Home to the city’s Episcopalian congregation—known by wags for many decades as “the Republican Party at prayer”—the church remains in everyday use.
Designing at a frantic pace, Richardson worked himself to death at age forty-eight. Several of his students went on to become famous architects in their own right, including two of the founders of the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White, Charles F. McKim (1847–1909) and Stanford White (1853–1906). Many of Richardson’s buildings are now considered historic sites, although his famous Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago was torn down during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
1. Richardson worked mostly in Chicago or on the East Coast, but he also designed a monument in rural Wyoming to the Ames family, major financiers of the transcontinental railroad.
2. The jail Richardson designed in Pittsburgh was in operation until 1995.
3. Highlights of the first Romanesque period, around the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD, include the Cathedral and Leaning Tower in Pisa, Italy.