Abigail Smith Adams (1744–1818), the daughter of a Massachusetts preacher, began exchanging love letters with lawyer John Adams (1735–1826) in 1762, when she was a sickly teenager. The long letters between Abigail and John, the work of two tender and playful souls, led to their marriage in 1764, when she was twenty and he was twenty-nine. For the rest of their fifty-four-year marriage, John and Abigail continued to trade thousands of notes and letters. Abigail’s letters about politics, gardening, life in the White House, religion, and women’s rights form an extraordinary trove for historians and a moving monument to the second First Lady of the United States.
Much like her famous husband, Abigail comes across in her letters as principled, witty, and occasionally sarcastic. Her most famous letter to John Adams was written on March 31, 1776, while he was in Philadelphia working on the Declaration of Independence. After inquiring about the proceedings at Philadelphia, Abigail went on to lambaste her husband and men in general:
By the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation … That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute …
John Adams, in his sarcastic response mailed several days later, accused his wife of being “saucy,” and said he planned to ignore her suggestions because they would lead to the “Despotism of the Peticoat.”
The letters continued for the next two decades, in huge torrents of loving prose, irate political arguments, and updates on the Adams family. The letters finally cease in 1801, when they retired, together, to Massachusetts.
1. John Adams was the first president to live in the White House, which was half-finished in late 1800 when he and Abigail moved in.
2. While posted in Europe in the 1780s, John and Abigail hosted the visiting daughter of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) along with one of Jefferson’s slaves—Sally Hemings.
3. Their oldest son, John Quincy Adams (1735–1826), became president of the United States in 1825.
On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain, the most powerful country in the world. In the first decade of the 1800s, the British navy had routinely harassed American shipping in the Atlantic, seizing cargo with little or no justification. The British also frequently stopped American ships to “impress” sailors for forcible service in the Royal Navy. Fed up with the demeaning treatment on the high seas, in 1810 American voters elected a hawkish Congress bent on a confrontation with Britain.
The War of 1812, as it became known, unfolded on two fronts. British and American warships battled in the Atlantic, where the United States Navy, led by the USS Constitution, captured several enemy ships. At the same time, American armies wrestled for control of the Great Lakes region, where they faced both the British and their Native American allies under the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh (c. 1768–1813).
After several years of episodic fighting, American forces finally succeeded in controlling the Great Lakes, thanks in large part to the exploits of Oliver Hazard Perry (1785–1819), who defeated the British Navy on Lake Erie. However, at the same time, the British mounted a series of successful attacks on the East Coast of the United States. In 1814, the British army burned Washington, DC, forcing President James Madison (1751–1836) to flee from the city.
With both sides tiring of war, they signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814. The treaty restored the status quo, meaning that both sides were able to claim victory. Britain made no concessions and did not agree to stop the impressment of American sailors. Canada remained a British possession. However, in practice the British never again interfered with American shipping.
1. The War of 1812 was so unpopular in New England, where trade with the British was a major part of the economy, that the governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts took their state militias out of the fighting.
2. The famous Battle of New Orleans, which made a national hero of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), was fought on January 8, 1815—two weeks after Britain and the United States had signed the treaty ending the war but before the news had crossed the Atlantic.
3. Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891) was named after the defeated Native American leader Tecumseh, whose military acumen was greatly admired even by his US Army adversaries.
A ferocious, unrelenting enemy of slavery, journalist William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) worked tirelessly starting in 1830 to turn northern public opinion in favor of abolition. Garrison started a newspaper called The Liberator in 1831, penning a famous editorial in his first edition promising, “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice … I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
In its heyday in the 1840s, The Liberator reached hundreds of thousands of homes across the North. As a writer, Garrison was a master of invective, in the radical tradition of Thomas Paine (1737–1809). The United States Constitution, Garrison wrote in one typically harsh article, was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because it permitted slavery.
A native of Massachusetts, Garrison quickly became popular in the North, but his essays made him an instant villain to many southerners. He was burned in effigy in 1835 in Charleston, South Carolina. Southern lawmakers, led by Senator John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) of South Carolina, sought to prevent copies of The Liberator from circulating in the South, on the grounds that they could incite slaves to revolt.
In addition to its nonstop advocacy for abolition, The Liberator campaigned for women’s rights and against the death penalty. A champion of many causes, Garrison had little patience for politicians. At a time when Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was seen as a national hero, Garrison denounced him when he failed to free slaves in the border states in his Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
After the Civil War (1861–1865) and the December 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that abolished slavery, Garrison triumphantly published a final edition of The Liberator. But he remained active politically, defending the rights of newly freed African-Americans in the South as well as Native Americans and Chinese immigrants.
1. Garrison’s father, Abijah, abandoned his family a few years after William’s birth by running away to sea.
2. In 1830, Garrison was convicted of libel and imprisoned for forty-five days after accusing a Massachusetts merchant of illegally trafficking in slaves.
3. Although nominally a pacifist, Garrison endorsed John Brown’s raid on the US arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 and enthusiastically backed the Union effort in the Civil War.
On January 24, 1848, a lumber mill foreman named James Marshall (1810–1885) noticed a few shiny metallic flakes in a flume near Sacramento, California. Marshall and the mill’s owner, John Sutter (1803–1880), tested the specks and were astonished by the results: They had discovered gold.
Within a year of the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, a massive stampede of prospectors descended on northern California in a tumultuous chase for riches known as the California Gold Rush. Nearly overnight, the rush changed the face of California, which the United States had seized from Mexico only two years earlier. Swollen with profits from gold mining, Sacramento and San Francisco grew into major cities, and California was admitted into the Union as a state in 1850.
At the time of the gold rush, the metal was not only a valuable commodity but also the basis of the world’s economy. The discovery of gold turned California into a nexus of world trade and made San Francisco the major gateway of American commerce with Asia.
For the prospectors who streamed to California by land and by sea, California during the early years of the gold rush was a notoriously dangerous, anarchic environment. Many “claims” to mining territory in the Sierra Nevada were enforced violently, helping to create the popular image of the lawless West. (The cartoon character Yosemite Sam, for instance, is supposed to be a forty-niner—a common term used to describe those who traveled to California in search of gold in 1849.) The gold rush also helped inspire the notion of “the American dream,” the promise of a country in which anyone could become rich through the right combination of ambition and luck.
Within a few years of the discovery of the mother lode, the most easily accessible gold deposits in California were tapped out, and many forty-niners were ruined. Wealth from the gold rush, however, helped build the transatlantic railroad, and the cities established during the 1850s remained major centers of commerce. The gold rush itself was one of the most important events in the history of California, which is now the nation’s most populous state.
1. In an homage to its gold-mining history, California’s state motto is Eureka—a Greek term meaning I have found it!
2. San Francisco’s NFL team, the Forty-Niners, is named in honor of the 1849 gold rush.
3. To handle the immense quantity of gold mined in California, the mint opened a branch office in San Francisco to turn the metal into currency. The facility is still in operation today.
Before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the most common overland route used by travelers to the West was a long, arduous path known as the Oregon Trail. First mapped in 1810, the route stretched more than 2,000 miles from Missouri to the Pacific Northwest. Although the voyage along the Oregon Trail took months to complete and was fraught with danger, thousands of pioneers crossed the continent on the trail to reach the lush farmlands of the Willamette Valley. The path remained in use for decades, and ruts created by thousands of covered wagons are still visible along many sections of the original trail.
First mapped by fur traders, the Oregon Trail was not widely used until 1836, when a new type of covered wagon was invented that could withstand the long westward journey. At the time, much of the region encompassing present-day Oregon and Washington still belonged to Great Britain, but the availability of cheap farmland was a major lure for Americans. Indeed, the rush of American settlers contributed to Britain’s decision to cede its claim in the region to the United States in 1846.
For travelers, the trek across the Great Plains and through the Rocky Mountains was extremely dangerous, and hundreds of settlers died en route. In the mid-1840s, at the peak of the Oregon Trail’s popularity, most of the Louisiana Purchase remained a near wilderness, with few outposts along the route. As users of the educational computer game Oregon Trail may recall, diseases like dysentery were a frequent affliction for the pioneers, and oxen often died before finishing the trip.
The fact that so many settlers were willing to brave the hardships of the Oregon Trail was a testament to the great enthusiasm for expansion shared by many nineteenthcentury Americans. The Oregon Trail reflected and reinforced the widely held belief that the United States had a “Manifest Destiny” to expand its borders all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
1. New Yorkers Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who crossed the continent in 1836, were the first settlers to complete the trip with a covered wagon.
2. The trail crossed the Rocky Mountains at South Pass, a famous route across the Continental Divide in Wyoming that was also used by Mormons fleeing to Utah.
3. The first trip along the trail took ten months; later, the average time was reduced to about four months.
Author, satirist, and literary critic Mark Twain (1835–1910) was the most prominent American writer of the late nineteenth century. Born in Missouri, Twain worked as a pilot on Mississippi River steamboats before moving to New England in the 1870s, where he wrote many of his best-known works. Although most famous for his immortal novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain also authored The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and reams of short stories and essays.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain adopted his pseudonym from a common phrase he heard in his travels along the Mississippi. Boatmen measuring the depth of the river would cry, “By the mark twain,” meaning the water was two fathoms deep. Clemens joined the Confederate army in the Civil War, but deserted after his first taste of battle. He fled west, where he spent most of the war and where his first short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), was set.
The story, a comic tale of a California gold miner and his pet frog, contains many elements typical of Twain’s wry, satirical style. In one passage, Twain describes the miner’s earnest efforts to train his frog to “outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”
He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal’klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He’d give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you’d see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat.
Unlike many authors of his day, Twain wrote in the American vernacular, attempting to render the language as it was actually spoken by the people. Twain’s influence on American literature was profound, and he was cited as a role model by authors from William Faulkner (1897–1962) to Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961).
1. Twain became politically active toward the end of his life, and he served as vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League formed to oppose the American occupation of the Philippines.
2. Always leery of organized religion, Twain targeted, among others, the Christian Science church, which he lampooned in the 1907 book Christian Science: With Notes Containing Corrections to Date.
3. Twain was fascinated by the French heroine Joan of Arc (1412–1431) and published a long, fictionalized account of her life in 1896.
In 1870, a Danish carpenter named Jacob Riis (1849–1914) arrived in the United States with no friends, no money, and a spotty grasp of English. By the time he died more than forty years later, Riis had become a famed journalist, a trusted confidant of the president of the United States—and a wealthy man.
Riis achieved the American dream, ironically, by documenting the plight of those who didn’t. His black-and-white photographs, published in major American magazines and in his seminal 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, exposed the violent, dirty conditions in New York City’s teeming, dangerous slums.
Riis’s concern for the urban poor stemmed, in part, from his own immigrant experience. After his arrival in New York, Riis spent several years living on the streets, sleeping in police stations and squalid flophouses. He finally found a job as a newspaper reporter, where he wrote about the woes of New York’s poor that he so recently had experienced firsthand.
For Riis, however, photography proved a far more powerful form of journalism than writing. Technological advances after the Civil War (1861–1865) had made it possible to take candid shots with relative ease, giving Riis’s pictures far more immediacy and intimacy than pictures by earlier photographers like Mathew Brady (c. 1823–1896). (More recently, however, scholars have criticized Riis for staging some of his pictures.) Riis was one of the first artists to take advantage of flash photography, which made nighttime and indoor photography possible after its invention in 1887.
For How the Other Half Lives, his most famous work, Riis photographed the overcrowded tenements, crime-ridden alleyways, and impoverished children of the slums. At a time when photography was still a relatively new and novel medium, the pictures provoked enormous outrage and helped inspire urban reformers like Jane Addams (1860–1935) in the twentieth century.
1. After becoming famous, Riis befriended Teddy Roosevelt (1858–1919), who invented the term muckraking to describe the activities of Riis and his journalistic peers.
2. A public housing project on Avenue D on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is named after Riis.
3. The most famous picture taken by Riis, “Bandits’ Roost,” shows thugs standing in an alleyway at 59 1/2 Mulberry Street in Manhattan, in a notoriously dangerous neighborhood that was later torn down and replaced by Columbus Park.