Widely regarded as the most intellectual American president, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote the Declaration of Independence and acquired the vast Louisiana Territory for the United States. He was also an expert in a stunning range of human endeavor, with interests ranging from politics to botany to architecture.
After receiving a classical education at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson entered Virginia politics at age twentyfive. Jefferson was an awkward speaker but a brilliant writer. Recognizing his abilities, Virginia leaders sent Jefferson to represent them at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774. At the convention, the thirty-three-year-old Jefferson was given the job of composing the text of its famous declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness …
Politically, Jefferson believed that individual farmers such as the tobacco planters in his native Virginia were the backbone of the nation, and he distrusted big government and grand economic schemes embraced by Federalists like Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804). Worried by the Federalist Party’s policies and sympathy for the British, Jefferson ran for president in 1796 against John Adams (1735–1826), George Washington’s vice president and favored successor. The election was surprisingly close, but Jefferson lost. He bided his time in the vice presidency, returning four years later to defeat Adams.
Jefferson himself did not consider his years in the White House a major accomplishment, and he left the presidency off of his epitaph. The importance of Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from France, which contradicted his ideas of limited federal power, would not be fully appreciated until decades after his death in 1826.
1. Among his many other pursuits, Jefferson was also an oenophile who tried, unsuccessfully, to grow wine grapes at his Monticello estate.
2. In 1998, DNA evidence suggested that Jefferson had fathered a child with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, a finding that confirmed rumors prevalent during Jefferson’s lifetime.
3. Of his many accomplishments, Jefferson was proudest of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his role as a founder of the University of Virginia in 1819.
President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) waged the first foreign war of the United States in 1804 against gangs of pirates known as corsairs who preyed on American ships in the Mediterranean Sea. By attacking the home base of the so-called Barbary pirates in northern Africa, the United States was able to stop their harassment of American merchant ships. The war substantially boosted the international prestige of the young nation and its military. In particular, the performance of the US Navy demonstrated to the rest of the world that the United States, just twenty years after achieving its independence, was now a legitimate military power.
The Barbary pirates, based in the African port cities of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, had for hundreds of years plundered European ships that failed to make tribute payments. When the United States became independent, its ships lost the protection of the British Royal Navy and were suddenly vulnerable to the pirate attacks. The first two American presidents, George Washington (1732–1799) and John Adams (1735–1826), grudgingly agreed to pay ransoms and tribute to the pirates in exchange for peace. By the time Jefferson took office, the United States had spent an astonishing sum on pirate tribute.
Jefferson detested tribute, and shortly after taking office, he sent the navy to Africa to teach the pirates a lesson. The American fleet, led by the USS Constitution, arrived off the shores of Tripoli in 1804. Thanks to the exploits of naval hero Stephen Decatur (1779–1820), who captured several enemy vessels and led a daring nighttime raid on Tripoli, the city’s corsairs were forced to stop attacking American shipping.
The United States would fight several other battles with other gangs of Barbary pirates, and the tribute payments did not cease completely until after the War of 1812. However, the expedition to Africa proved to the Europeans—and Americans—that the United States was capable of fighting and winning a war.
1. The expedition against the Barbary pirates was the first overseas deployment of the US Marines, inspiring the phrase in the famous opening stanza of the “Marine’s Hymn,” “to the shores of Tripoli.”
2. The Barbary pirates, contrary to myth, did not make their prisoners walk the plank, a practice that is thought to have originated in the 1820s in the Caribbean.
3. By the time of the war, the Barbary pirates had been raiding ships in the Mediterranean for centuries. In the seventeenth century, one of their hostages was Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), the author of Don Quixote.
In 1801, members of the small Baptist church in Danbury, Connecticut, wrote a letter to President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) congratulating him on his recent election. At the time, the Baptists were a minority religion in overwhelmingly Congregationalist New England. In their letter, the Baptists expressed concern that the state of Connecticut would trample the rights of religious minorities and force them to support the Congregationalists.
A few months later, Jefferson mailed a response to the Danbury Baptists. In his now famous letter, Jefferson said, in effect, that they had nothing to worry about. The First Amendment to the Constitution, Jefferson argued, had erected a “wall of separation” between church and state that meant Connecticut could not interfere with the Baptists’ religious freedom.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
Jefferson’s metaphor of the wall between church and state became enormously influential and has been cited by many American political and religious leaders in the two centuries since. Although not part of the Constitution, Jefferson’s metaphorical wall has been recognized by the Supreme Court as a guiding concept in the relationship between church and state.
Jefferson’s letter, however, has also led to controversy. Courts have relied on Jefferson’s concept of the wall to ban prayer and religious instruction in public schools, which some religious leaders believe goes too far in separating religion from government. Still, more than 200 years after its writing, Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists remains an influential interpretation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause and a cornerstone of religious liberty in the United States.
1. At the time, Jefferson had already alienated New Englanders by inviting Thomas Paine (1737–1809) to return to the United States from France despite his anti-Christian writings.
2. On the same day he mailed the letter, Jefferson accepted a 1,235-pound cheese produced by parishioners at a Baptist Church in Cheshire, Massachusetts.
3. Anticipating a negative public reaction to his letter, Jefferson began attending church services in Washington, DC, two days after sending it, preempting the inevitable charges that he was an atheist.
The construction of the first telegraph line in the United States by Samuel Morse (1791–1872) in 1844 sparked a technological revolution that changed the way Americans communicated and, for the first time, allowed nearly instantaneous transmissions across vast distances. Morse’s line, a forty-mile wire next to the railroad tracks between Baltimore and Washington, was the prototype for a network of telegraph lines that quickly sprawled across the pre–Civil War United States.
A painter by training, Morse was born in Massachusetts and traveled widely in Europe in pursuing of his artistic career. However, he became fascinated by electricity, a concept that was still poorly understood in the early nineteenth century, and gradually gave up on art to concentrate on his new interest.
Whether Morse truly deserves credit for “inventing” the telegraph is subject to great historical debate. He did not invent the concept. Many scientists in Europe had envisioned using electric pulses transmitted through a metal wire as a form of communication. But Morse, through a combination of technological innovation and salesmanship, was able to turn the theoretical idea into reality. After returning to the United States, he began lobbying Congress to fund an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore in the 1830s, and he finally received a $30,000 grant in 1843. Morse also developed Morse code, the system of dots and dashes used to transmit numbers and letters along telegraph wires. Anticipating the huge impact the telegraph would have on the world, the first message tapped along the line in 1844 was a famous quote from the Bible: “What hath God wrought!”
Morse’s patent on the telegraph made him a wealthy man. By 1872, the year of his death, wires had been strung from coast to coast and across the Atlantic Ocean, huge feats of engineering that suddenly closed the gap between cities, nations, and continents.
1. Europeans had built versions of the telegraph as early as 1774, but many of the designs were highly impractical; one used twenty-six wires, one for each letter of the alphabet.
2. By 1854, ten years after the first forty-mile section was built by Morse, about 23,000 miles of telegraph wire were in operation in the United States.
3. The first words transmitted on the transcontinental telegraph line, which was completed in 1861, were anticlimactic: “Line just completed.”
Even the English novelist Charles Dickens (1812–1870)—no stranger to urban decay—was stunned by what he saw at the Five Points, New York City’s worst slum of the early nineteenth century. Visiting in 1842, Dickens was disgusted by the neighborhood’s filthy alleys and seedy buildings. “Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old,” he wrote. “See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.”
To Americans of the nineteenth century, the Five Points area was synonymous with urban poverty, violence, and disease. Thousands of poor New Yorkers—many of them recently arrived immigrants—were crammed into decrepit buildings near the convergence of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets in Manhattan. At a time of massive immigration, the notorious Five Points represented the dark, threatening side of American urbanization.
Indeed, only forty years before Dickens’s visit, the Five Points did not exist. In 1800, the area was covered by a pond that was a popular destination for fishermen. As New York’s population multiplied in the early nineteenth century, however, all vestiges of the area’s rural past were quickly obliterated to make way for development. By the 1830s, the neighborhood had acquired its seedy reputation and resident population of prostitutes and hooligans.
The slum grew with immigration in the 1840s and became notorious for gang violence and ethnic tension. Although many of the residents were Irish immigrants, the neighborhood was also home to freed blacks and poor Protestant whites. Under pressure from reformers, the city of New York tore down the neighborhood later in the nineteenth century, which merely displaced the poor to other parts of the teeming city.
1. According to historians, tap dancing was invented in the Five Points in the 1840s.
2. The center of the Five Points was the “old brewery,” a large abandoned brewery that had been converted into tenement housing and is depicted in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 movie Gangs of New York.
3. Most of the area once known as the Five Points was torn down in a slum clearance program throughout the late nineteenth century and replaced with a courthouse and the notorious Tombs prison.
Leaves of Grass, an enormously influential book of risqué, exuberant poems celebrating American life by Walt Whitman (1819–1892), provided the foundation for much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American verse. The book, which Whitman expanded and revised throughout his lifetime, featured an unorthodox poetic style different than that of any of Whitman’s contemporaries and inspired American poets from Langston Hughes (1902–1967) to Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997).
When Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was one of the few critics to grasp the volume’s importance. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he wrote in a letter to Whitman encouraging the young poet.
During the Civil War (1861–1865), Whitman left New York to volunteer as a nurse in army hospitals in Washington, DC. After the Union victory, he published a book of war poems, Drum Taps (1865).
In general, Whitman’s poems celebrate individualism, democracy, nature, and the beauty of the human body. His poems dealt frankly and positively with homosexuality and masturbation, highly unusual topics in the United States during the Victorian era. One of Whitman’s most famous free verse poems, “I Hear America Singing,” exemplifies Whitman’s characteristic style and subject matter:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
1. Original editions of Leaves of Grass are among the most sought-after books for American collectors.
2. In a telltale indication of its high literary quality, Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston in 1882.
3. Whitman considered Abraham Lincoln a personal hero and wrote one of his few rhyming poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” after the president’s assassination in 1865.
In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) decided that American money was too boring. A great nation, he thought, should have beautiful coins, like the ancient Greeks and Romans did. So Roosevelt asked the most famous sculptor of the day, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), to design new ones.
Although dying of cancer at his home in New Hampshire, Saint-Gaudens gladly accepted the president’s commission, and two years later, the mint issued $10 and $20 gold coins based on his designs. The coins, which circulated for the next twenty-five years, are widely considered the most beautiful in American history.
For Saint-Gaudens, an Irish-born sculptor whose parents immigrated to the United States when he was an infant, the coins were a fitting end to his long career in the public spotlight. Trained in classical sculpture, Saint-Gaudens first achieved commercial success in the United States after the Civil War (1861–1865), when the demand for monuments to the war dead created a thriving market for sculptors.
In his moving statues of war heroes, Saint-Gaudens managed the difficult feat of pleasing both art critics and the public at large. Several of his monuments, including a statue of President Abraham Lincoln in Chicago and his memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in Boston, are considered among the finest works of public art in American history.
In addition to the plaudits from critics, his Civil War monuments also made Saint-Gaudens rich. In 1885, he purchased his hilltop mansion in New Hampshire, which he nicknamed Aspet after the village where his father was born. Saint-Gaudens soon inspired other artists to move to New Hampshire, and his hometown of Cornish became a popular artists’ colony around the turn of the twentieth century.
Stylistically, Saint-Gaudens managed to combine classical sculpture with cutting-edge European trends. His $20 coin, for instance, recalls Greek antiquity but at the same time is distinctively modern in its bold and expressive design. In a fitting tribute, the government resurrected the design in 1986 and continues to mint high-value gold coins designed by one of the greatest American sculptors.
1. The design for the $20 coin did not originally include the motto “In God We Trust,” but Congress forced the mint to add the four words in 1908 after an outcry.
2. Saint-Gaudens was a friend of Winslow Homer (1836–1910), and both belonged to the Tile Club, a New York-based art salon.
3. Saint-Gaudens labored for fourteen years on the Gould memorial, which was finally dedicated on Boston Common in 1897.