James Madison (1751–1836), the fourth president of the United States, was elected in 1808 and served two rocky terms before leaving office in 1817. During his presidency, the United States fought the War of 1812 against Great Britain. During the war, the first major foreign conflict fought by the young United States, Madison earned the distinction of becoming the last American president to command the US Army in the field, directing the retreat from Washington, DC, after British forces ransacked the capital.
Like his mentor and fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Madison found the presidency an unsatisfying coda to his political career. Madison hadn’t wanted war with Britain, but the “war hawks” in Congress cajoled him into the confrontation, which they hoped would end the British navy’s harassment of American shipping. In an era when Congress was the strongest branch of the federal government, Madison ended up having little choice but to go along with the hawks.
Twenty-five years earlier, by contrast, Madison’s political debut at the Constitutional Convention had made him a national hero. Madison wrote much of the document and was dubbed “Father of the Constitution” for his patient work reconciling the various factions at Philadelphia. In particular, Madison stressed the need for the system of checks and balances that was incorporated into the Constitution. He also drafted the Bill of Rights that was later added to the document.
The son of a wealthy Virginia slaveholder, Madison studied law and philosophy at Princeton before entering politics during the Revolution. In the Virginia legislature he was an ally of Jefferson and later became his secretary of state.
Like Jefferson, Madison left the presidency after two terms. Madison retired to his estate in Virginia, an elegant mansion named Montpelier. He died in 1836, as the sectional tensions that would eventually lead to the Civil War (1861–1865) were intensifying. In one of his last letters, he pleaded with his compatriots to revive the national unity he had helped create at Philadelphia. “The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated,” he wrote.
1. Madison’s draft version of the Bill of Rights initially comprised seventeen amendments but was whittled down to twelve by Congress and then to ten by the states.
2. Madison’s face is on the rarely seen $5,000 bill, which is no longer in circulation.
3. Madison’s charismatic wife, Dolley Payne Madison (1768–1849), created the hostess role of the First Lady and became famous for carrying the portrait of George Washington out of the White House when the British torched the building in 1814.
The most famous vessel in the history of the United States Navy, the USS Constitution won numerous battles in the War of 1812 and remains on duty today as the navy’s oldest warship.
Launched in Boston in 1797, the Constitution first saw action chasing pirates in the Caribbean. When President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) ordered the navy to North Africa to attack the Barbary pirates, the Constitution served as flagship of the American fleet, bombarding the fortress of Tripoli. In battle during the War of 1812, the Constitution captured several British ships and earned its famous nickname, “Old Ironsides,” for the way enemy cannonballs seemed to bounce harmlessly off its sides.
In 1830, after more than thirty years of service, the ship was slated for demolition when the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) wrote a famous poem expressing indignation that such a heroic ship would be decommissioned:
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
Oh, better that her shattered bulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!
The poem inspired a wave of protest, forcing the navy to preserve the warship. The Constitution went back into active service and served as a training vessel until after the Civil War (1861–1865). The navy continues to maintain the Constitution as a floating monument to the nation’s maritime tradition, and all crew members are active-duty members of the military. Following long-needed repairs in the 1990s, the ship is again seaworthy.
1. The Constitution circumnavigated the globe between 1844 and 1846.
2. The original figurehead of the Constitution was of Hercules, the Greek demigod of strength, but it was lost during the Barbary wars.
3. Congress was so thrilled by the Constitution’s victory over the HMS Guerriere in 1812 that its captain was given a gold medal and the crew a prize of $50,000.
In 1838, President Martin van Buren (1782–1862) forced 16,000 members of the Cherokee tribe to leave their ancestral homelands in Georgia and relocate to Oklahoma. The Cherokees’ unwilling journey westward—more than 1,200 miles on foot—is often referred to as the Trail of Tears. During the trip, thousands of Cherokees died of dysentery, road accidents, and exhaustion.
Before the arrival of European settlers, the Cherokees were one of the most powerful tribes in the Southeast. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than 20,000 Cherokees lived in present-day Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama.
In the early 1800s, however, the federal government and the state of Georgia decided that the Cherokees should be “relocated” to make room for more white settlers. Cherokee chiefs refused to leave and declared themselves an independent nation. The Supreme Court sided with the Cherokees, but President Andrew Jackson famously dismissed the court’s opinion, declaring, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can.”
The final order to evacuate was issued by Van Buren, Jackson’s successor, in May 1838. About 7,000 soldiers were dispatched to Cherokee territory that spring to round up the tribe at gunpoint, despite vociferous protests from many Americans who sympathized with the tribe’s plight. The brutal march west would kill between 2,000 and 8,000 Cherokees.
The tribe had no connections to Oklahoma, which the federal government had designated as Indian Territory, but those who survived were eventually able to adapt to their new surroundings. According to the 2000 census, the Cherokees are now the largest tribe in the United States, with about 730,000 members.
1. Many other Native American tribes were forcibly “evacuated” to Oklahoma in the 1830s, including the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.
2. During the roundup of the Cherokees, about 1,000 tribal members managed to evade capture. Their descendents form the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina.
3. One reason for the sudden federal interest in the Cherokees was the discovery of gold near tribal lands in Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1829, which set off the nation’s first gold rush.
Cyrus McCormick (1809–1884) invented the mechanical reaper, a farming device that simplified the grain harvest and greatly improved the efficiency of American agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century. The company McCormick founded to sell his reaper, headquartered in Chicago, became one of the biggest businesses of the century and one of the catalysts for the city’s growth into a major metropolis. The McCormick Company is also historically notable as one of the first American companies to sell its products on credit, which made its reapers available to the average farmer and greatly increased its sales.
McCormick was born in the Shenandoah Valley of rural Virginia. In the early nineteenth century of his childhood, farmers still harvested grain with sickles, scythes, and other handheld tools. McCormick’s father, Robert, a farmer and blacksmith, had tried for years to invent a mechanized version of the reaper that could be towed by horses, thus saving labor. After his father’s death, McCormick finally perfected a working design, which he unveiled in 1831 and patented three years later.
It took almost two decades, however, for farmers to accept the new invention. The first reapers were made of heavy cast iron, and they exhausted the horses. In 1847, McCormick relocated to Chicago, where he redesigned his reaper to make it more lightweight and efficient. The improved models more than doubled farm efficiency. McCormick’s invention helped spark settlement in the West by making farming the vast prairies more practical; by the mid-1850s, he was a millionaire. After his death, his company eventually became International Harvester, which is now part of Navistar, a Fortune 500 manufacturer.
1. McCormick’s daughter-in-law, Katharine McCormick (1875–1967), was the major backer of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) and helped fund the research that eventually led to the invention of the birth control pill.
2. A portion of Walnut Grove, the 532-acre farm that belonged to McCormick’s father, is now preserved as part of Virginia Tech.
3. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed McCormick’s factory; he soon rebuilt.
HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
—“Chicago,” by Carl Sandburg
Before it became a reality, Chicago already existed in the nation’s imagination. As early as the seventeenth century, French explorers had identified the area of present-day Chicago as a potential site for a canal linking the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. At the time, however, the site was surrounded by wilderness; the modern city of Chicago would not be founded until 1833, when it had a modest population of 200 residents.
The year 1848 represented a crucial turning point in the city’s history. Two events—the arrival of the railroad and the completion of a canal that finally linked the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan—turned the city into the nation’s transportation hub. Railroad lines soon converged on the city, bringing livestock from the west, steel from the east, and a steady flow of immigrants from around the world. The closure of the Mississippi to commerce during the Civil War (1861–1865) was a major boost to the city, since it forced many shippers to route their goods by rail through Chicago.
The “City of the Big Shoulders,” as Chicago poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) dubbed it in 1916, was the engine that would drive American growth in the late nineteenth century. In particular, Chicago’s location in the middle of the nation’s heartland made it the nexus of grain and livestock. For instance, the majority of the beef eaten in the United States in 1900 was processed in Chicago’s sprawling stockyards.
In its early years, the growing city endured considerable hardship, including legendarily filthy streets and sewers, a cholera epidemic that killed 6 percent of its residents in 1854, and the Great Fire of 1871. By the 1890 census, however, it had passed Philadelphia to become the nation’s second-largest city, a place it would hold for a century.
1. When they were first opened in 1864, Chicago’s Union Stock Yards covered 320 acres.
2. In a feat of environmental hubris, engineers reversed the direction of the Chicago River in 1871 so that the city’s sewage would flow into the Mississippi rather than Lake Michigan.
3. Illinois was originally claimed by the state of Virginia, based on its colonial borders, but was given up in 1784.
Virtually unknown during her lifetime, Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is now considered one of the leading lights of American literature for the thousands of complex, enigmatic poems that were published after her death.
Dickinson was born to a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she remained her entire life. Considered an eccentric by her neighbors, she never married and led an isolated life in the family’s home.
Still, through her family connections Dickinson was able to establish contact with many major nineteenth-century literary figures, including Boston minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), to whom she mailed some of her poems in 1862. Higginson was impressed by her “wholly new” style but discouraged Dickinson from seeking a publisher. In total, only ten of Dickinson’s 1,700 poems are known to have been printed during her lifetime.
Dickinson’s poetic voice was unusual and alien to the poetry styles of the midnineteenth century. Many of her poems are short, mordant, and full of ambiguity; Higginson called them “spasmodic” for their uneven meter and unpredictable punctuation.
One of Dickinson’s poems, written in about 1861, provides an example of her morbid, enigmatic style:
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true—
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe —
The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.
During her lifetime, Dickinson scribbled her poems whenever the inspiration seized her, and some of her verse was written on discarded wrapping paper or the backs of instruction manuals for kerosene lamps. After her death at age fifty-five, Dickinson’s family was astonished to find thousands of poems among her belongings, bundled together with twine. They were published in 1890 to enthusiastic reviews, establishing her reputation as one of her country’s most innovative, unusual literary stars.
1. Her father, Edward Dickinson, served one term in the House of Representatives as a Whig.
2. Many of her poems are written in ballad meter, the same as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and many other famous songs and poems.
3. Dickinson wrote the bulk of her poems during a sustained spurt of creativity in the midst of the Civil War; between 1862 and 1864, she averaged a poem every two days.
A distinctively American contribution to world architecture, the first skyscrapers were built in Chicago and St. Louis in the 1880s and 1890s. Although initially the term skyscraper was used for buildings as short as ten stories, within a few decades American builders regularly surpassed forty floors. The nation’s tallest skyscraper is currently the Sears Tower, which looms a staggering 110 stories—one-quarter of a mile—above downtown Chicago.
Several nineteenth-century technological innovations made the skyscraper feasible. The invention of the elevator made tall buildings practical. Better techniques for refining steel, which were developed in the 1860s, made them possible. By using lightweight steel girders, engineers were no longer limited by heavy stone masonry.
Chicago’s Home Insurance Company building, erected in 1885, is often considered history’s first skyscraper. At ten stories, the landmark building proved that taller buildings could be constructed safely. Downtown Chicago, with many empty lots after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, became the home of the first wave of skyscraper construction. The original Home Insurance Company building, however, was demolished during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Chicago-based designer Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) is widely considered the first master of the skyscraper. Sullivan built many of Chicago’s first tall buildings, and he also designed the influential Wainwright Building in downtown St. Louis, which still stands today.
The most famous skyscrapers of the early twentieth century, however, were built in New York City, the nation’s economic capital. The art deco Chrysler Building was constructed in 1930, while the nation’s second-tallest building, the Empire State Building, opened in Midtown in 1931. Several very tall buildings are currently being designed in American cities, including the Freedom Tower in New York that will be the city’s tallest structure at 1,776 feet if finished as planned.
1. A building under construction in the United Arab Emirates is expected to become the tallest structure in the world when it is completed in 2009.
2. The Boston-born Sullivan entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at age sixteen but dropped out after one year, before receiving a degree.
3. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), once a protégé of Sullivan’s, always referred to him as Liebermeister, or beloved master in German, even after the two had a falling out.