John Adams (1735–1826), a Massachusetts lawyer and politician, was elected the second president of the United States in 1796, succeeding George Washington (1732–1799). Adams served a single difficult term before Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), a lifelong friend and political adversary, defeated him in the 1800 election.
By his own description, Adams was an unattractive, dislikable man. A graduate of Harvard, he parlayed his quick intelligence and unpleasant personality into a thriving legal practice in colonial-era Boston. Along with his cousin, the radical orator Samuel Adams (1722–1803), John Adams became involved with revolutionary politics in the 1760s, penning attacks on the Stamp Act and other British colonial policies.
In 1774, in recognition of his influential writing on colonial rights, Adams was chosen as one of the representatives from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, where he collaborated with Jefferson on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Returning to Massachusetts, he wrote the state’s constitution in 1780, a document that remains in force today. He also served as the American ambassador successively to France, Holland, and Great Britain before becoming vice president of the United States under President George Washington (1732–1799) in 1789.
The 1796 presidential election was the first seriously contested presidential race in American history after the unanimous choosing of Washington in 1789 and 1792. Adams ran as a Federalist, pledging to continue Washington’s policies, against Jefferson, who led a faction concerned by the growing power of the new federal government.
Adams narrowly won the election, but his term was marked by foreign policy divisions and deepening partisanship between the two factions. Britain and France were at war during Adams’s term, and the United States was divided into the Federalists, who sided with Britain, and the Republicans, who sympathized with France.
Embittered by his defeat in the rematch with Jefferson in 1800, Adams returned to Massachusetts and retired from politics. In his old age, however, he resumed his friendship with Jefferson. The two men died on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
1. A precocious child, Adams entered Harvard at the age of fifteen.
2. The Massachusetts state constitution that Adams wrote served as an inspiration for James Madison (1751–1836), who incorporated similar language protecting individual freedoms into the Bill of Rights.
3. Adams was painfully aware of his shortcomings, and he asked Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence because, he said, “I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise.”
In 1796, as George Washington (1732–1799) prepared to depart the presidency after thirty years of overall service to his country, he began writing a farewell address to the American public. The address, published as an essay in numerous American newspapers later that year, would become an important milestone in American politics and foreign policy.
In the text, Washington advised his fellow citizens to avoid any alliances with foreign nations, or even excessive “affection” for them. “History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government,” he wrote. Better to focus on the well-being of the United States, Washington wrote, than to get involved in the endless intrigues of European countries.
Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests … Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?
Washington’s clarion call to avoid foreign entanglements reflected, and helped to shape, an enduring aversion to international affairs among the American public. Heeding Washington’s advice, the United States would not sign a formal foreign “alliance” for the next 150 years. But the American commitment to isolationism began to fray after World War I (1914–1918), and especially after the genocidal horrors of World War II (1939–1945), which forced the country to ask searching questions about its role in the world. Although isolationism still has its supporters, American foreign-policy makers of the post–World War II era have largely abandoned Washington’s recommendations.
1. The United States did not enter a permanent foreign alliance until the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pact in 1949.
2. Washington’s farewell address was so influential that it is still read aloud every year in Congress.
3. The isolationist America First Committee was founded in 1940 with the goal of keeping the United States out of World War II. It disbanded on December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Second Great Awakening, about a century after the First Great Awakening revival movement, was a period of intense religious fervor in early nineteenthcentury America that energized Protestant churches and helped fuel many important social reform movements, including abolitionism. Charismatic preachers of the era like Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) and Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) challenged American Protestants to perfect society as a way of earning their own eternal salvation.
Historians point to a camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, as the first major event of the Second Great Awakening. Leading Christian ministers from several denominations—including Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist—preached to 20,000 people over several days of services. Large-scale, outdoor revival meetings, an incredibly powerful experience for nineteenth-century Americans, quickly spread across the country.
Unlike the First Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, which emphasized a return to the religious orthodoxy of the Puritans, the Second Great Awakening was liberal in both its theology and its outlook, stressing the possibility of Christians earning God’s forgiveness. The optimistic atmosphere of the Second Great Awakening gave rise to many utopian communities that reflected a belief in the perfectibility of humankind.
Initially, the Second Great Awakening had no explicit political agenda. Soon, however, Finney and Beecher, the brother of the influential antislavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, began to inject criticisms of slavery and alcohol into their sermons. “The churches by their silence and by permitting slaveholders to belong to their communion have been consenting to it,” Finney wrote.
In theological terms, the Second Great Awakening asked American Protestants to take an active role in their own salvation. This message helped awaken the abolitionist movement, which would deepen the sectional differences in the United States in the years before the Civil War (1861–1865).
1. So many revival meetings were held in western New York during the Second Great Awakening that Finney referred to the region as the “burned-over district.”
2. One of the most popular preachers of the Second Great Awakening was William Miller (1782–1849), who attracted tens of thousands of followers with his prediction that the apocalypse would come on October 22, 1844. It didn’t. However, Miller’s supporters later formed the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
3. Several other permanent additions to the American religious landscape, including Unitarianism and Mormonism, also date to the period of the Second Great Awakening.
In the spring of 1830, a thirteen-mile railroad connecting the city of Baltimore with neighboring suburbs opened to great fanfare. Initially, the railroad used horses to pull the trains along the line. Later that year, a steam-powered locomotive made its first trip on the railroad, inaugurating the age of steam. Within a few years of the first trip on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (the B&O, for short), hundreds of miles of railroad tracks were under construction across the nation, making it practical for the first time to ship unprecedented amounts of freight and providing a key impetus for the Industrial Revolution.
At the time of the railroad’s opening, Baltimore was the second-largest city in the United States. However, its port was rapidly losing business to New York City, thanks to the success of the Erie Canal. The builders of the railroad hoped to build tracks across the Appalachian Mountains to connect Baltimore with the Ohio River valley, allowing the city to compete with New York for access to western markets.
The technology behind the steam locomotive had been invented in England in the early 1800s. However, many Americans were skeptical until an infamous race between a horse and the first American-built locomotive, Tom Thumb, on the B&O. Although the horse actually won, the locomotive performed well enough to convince Americans that steam locomotion was a practical alternative to draft animals.
In the short term, the B&O was a commercial success, eventually expanding into one of the leading East Coast railroads. More important, by demonstrating that steam railroads were feasible, the line inspired an immediate wave of imitators. Another railroad opened in South Carolina later that year; in 1835, Boston was connected with the industrial city of Lowell. By the end of the decade, total trackage had gone from 23 miles to 2,818 miles; at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, more than 30,000 miles of steel crisscrossed the United States, becoming the arteries of industrial America.
1. The first stone of the B&O was laid by Charles Carroll (1737–1832), the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1828.
2. The original B&O route is still operated by the CSX railroad company.
3. Although called the Baltimore and Ohio, the railroad did not actually reach the Ohio River until 1852, when it connected to Wheeling, Virginia, which is now part of West Virginia.
Amid the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening, thousands of Americans joined short-lived utopian communities that formed across the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Although many of these communes, which were often linked to a particular Christian religious sect, closed down after only a few years, others survived well into the twentieth century. Perhaps more important, the founding of villages in places like Oneida, New York, and Harmony, Indiana, reflected a particularly American strain of utopianism that attempted to infuse the nation’s growth with religious and political idealism.
One of the most famous utopian communities was founded in 1848 in upstate New York by preacher John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886). Like many other American utopian villages of the era, members of the Oneida community embraced an unorthodox Christian theology; in their case, they believed that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred in 70 AD, thus making it possible for his followers to achieve perfection on Earth. In practice, Noyes preached that all members of the community were married to one another and could have sex with whomever they wished without committing a sin. The community lasted for several decades, until Noyes’s death.
Other communes, like Brook Farm, established in Massachusetts in 1841, were more secular in their outlook. Inspired by the transcendentalist movement and European socialism, the founders of Brook Farm sought to create a community whose members would pool their finances, share in the labor needed to run the farm, and discuss literature around the dinner table. The experiment folded after six years.
The flourishing of utopian communities in the 1840s reflected both the religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening and the pioneer mentality of the age. Many of the communities have been preserved as monuments to the optimism and zealotry of Americans living in pre–Civil War times.
1. Noyes was arrested once for adultery and fled to Canada to avoid arrest for statutory rape.
2. The longest-lasting utopian movement of the nineteenth century may have been the Shakers, a Christian sect that still has a handful of members in New England. Their resilience is somewhat ironic, since one of the religion’s principles is total celibacy.
3. After Noyes’s death, the Oneida community evolved into a corporation that made the world-famous Oneida silverware.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an 1852 novel dramatizing the evils of slavery written by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), was the best-selling book of the nineteenth century in the United States. By portraying the human consequences of slavery in vivid fashion, Stowe outraged northern audiences and hardened opposition to slavery in the decade before the Civil War (1861–1865). The novel’s impact was so great that when President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was introduced to Stowe during the war, he remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
The novel tells the story of a group of slaves in Kentucky. Their owner, George Shelby, falls into debt and is forced to sell two of the slaves, Uncle Tom and Eliza. Rather than be separated from her baby, Eliza escapes to the North, crossing the Ohio River in one of the most well-known and suspenseful passages of the novel. Tom, however, accepts his fate and is eventually sold to a cruel new master, the evil Simon Legree.
As a work of literature, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is highly sentimental and sometimes even mawkish in tone. However, the melodramatic tale had an enormous impact on the American reading public at that time, as it powerfully described the brutality of slavery and the threat of slave families being separated by the domestic slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were sold in its first year alone. Southerners, meanwhile, were outraged.
By galvanizing antislavery sentiment, Uncle Tom’s Cabin accomplished Stowe’s political goal and assured the book’s lasting historical importance. The novel’s afterlife, however, has been complicated. Since the Civil War, and especially since the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, literary critics have pointed out the book’s many shortcomings. Even while criticizing the institution of slavery, Stowe’s writing often reinforced negative stereotypes of African-Americans. The title character of Uncle Tom has been especially controversial. Stowe intended Tom as a positive example, someone who bore his hardship with Christian grace. But the label Uncle Tom is now often used as an extremely insulting epithet for African-Americans seen as complicit in racism.
1. Stowe based parts of the novel on stories related to her by escaped slaves she encountered while living in Ohio.
2. After the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe and her husband moved into a big house in Hartford, Connecticut. Their next-door neighbor was author Mark Twain (1835–1910).
3. Most of the novel was written while Stowe lived in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband was a professor at Bowdoin College.
Composer and United States Marine Band conductor John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) wrote many of the best-loved patriotic marches in American history, including “Semper Fidelis” (1888), “Washington Post March” (1889), and his masterpiece, “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1897). Immensely popular in his own day, Sousa’s upbeat, brassy music is still routinely performed on the Fourth of July, at patriotic events, and at football games nationwide.
Born in Washington, DC, Sousa was a musical prodigy at a young age and enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of thirteen to begin his apprenticeship in its band. After learning to play all the instruments in the band, he became director when he was only twenty-six.
During Sousa’s tenure, he turned the Marine Band into the nation’s premier brass band, earning the group the nickname “The President’s Own” that is still used today. Sousa wrote many of his best-known marches during this time, including “Washington Post March.” Sousa himself became known as the March King.
Hoping to reach a wider audience, Sousa left the military in 1892 to form a touring civilian band and spent much of the rest of his life on the road, performing at bandstands in towns and cities across the nation. A national celebrity, Sousa’s arrival almost invariably created a sensation wherever he went.
Sousa’s signature style—crashing cymbals, staccato piccolos, and thumping bass lines—pulses with energy and excitement. Marches, Sousa believed, were “for the feet, not for the head,” and, indeed, audiences still find it virtually impossible to remain seated during the bombastic finale to “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
In addition to his marches, Sousa wrote operettas, an autobiography titled Marching Along (1928), and several novels. Although Sousa lived well into the twentieth century, recordings of his performances are extremely rare, since he disdained radio and phonographs and almost never allowed his shows to be recorded. Appropriately, the March King died in a hotel while on tour, after conducting “Stars and Stripes Forever” that morning.
1. Sousa invented the sousaphone, a tuba-like instrument that can be carried in a marching band.
2. A Sousa march entitled “Liberty Bell” (1893) was used for the opening credits of the classic British TV comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
3. Congress declared “Stars and Stripes Forever” the national march of the United States in 1987.