One of the most influential judges in American history, John Marshall (1755–1835) served as chief justice of the United States for thirty-four years and wrote many of the most important rulings in the US Supreme Court’s history. A Virginia politician, Revolutionary War veteran, and cousin of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Marshall established the Court as an important and powerful force within the federal government. Marshall was one of the last remaining men of the revolutionary generation to remain active in national politics. Fittingly, when Marshall died in 1835, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia tolled for the last time before cracking irreparably.
As a young officer during the Revolution, Marshall served under George Washington (1732–1799) during the awful winter at Valley Forge. After the war, Marshall entered Virginia politics and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Marshall remained active in the Virginia legislature after the convention, but eventually broke with Jefferson, his famous cousin, over national politics. Unlike most other prominent Virginians, Marshall sympathized with the Federalists, the political party of George Washington. Federalist President John Adams (1735–1826) named Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1801, just before the end of his term.
At the time Marshall took office, the Supreme Court was regarded as a backwater in the American government. In the early years of the Republic, it remained an open question whether the president would obey an unfavorable Supreme Court order or simply ignore the justices.
Marshall’s first major case, Marbury v. Madison (1803), established the right of the Supreme Court to assess the constitutionality of legislation passed by Congress. Although taken for granted now, the principle of judicial review was highly controversial at the time. Thomas Jefferson, for one, thought it gave the Court too much power. Over the next three decades, Marshall consistently enraged Jefferson by expanding the powers of the federal government.
1. Thomas Jefferson loathed Marshall, believing that his cousin gave too much power to the federal government. During Jefferson’s presidency, Jefferson appointed new justices he hoped would oppose Marshall on the Court, but he was frustrated when the persuasive Marshall talked them into backing his decisions.
2. Marshall, who lived in Virginia, was a slave owner and sought to avoid the issue of slavery in the Court.
3. In 1807, Marshall presided over the treason trial of Aaron Burr (1756–1836), who had been accused of plotting against the United States government. Marshall found Burr innocent, again enraging Jefferson, an enemy of Burr.
One of the most feared military leaders in American history, Tecumseh (c. 1768–1813) united dozens of Native American tribes in the Great Lakes region and led a series of wars against the United States before his death in battle during the War of 1812.
Born in Ohio into the powerful Shawnee tribe, Tecumseh grew up during a period of rapid white encroachment on traditional Native American territory. Prior to the American Revolution, British policy had discouraged settlement west of the thirteen original colonies. After American independence, a wave of settlers pushed into the region. Native Americans were defeated in a frontier war in the 1790s, and Ohio officially became a state in 1803.
Like many other Native Americans in the Great Lakes region, Tecumseh regarded the sudden arrival of so many settlers as a mortal threat to his tribe and their way of life. Once-powerful tribes in the East like the Pequot, Tecumseh noticed, had “vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun.”
In an effort to save his people from a similar fate, Tecumseh and his brother, the religious leader Tenskwatawa (c. 1775–c. 1837), also known as the Shawnee Prophet, assembled a military coalition to battle white expansion. “Let the white race perish,” Tecumseh exhorted. “They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead.”
Emphasizing the need for Native Americans to act together, Tecumseh’s following cut across tribal lines. The Sauk, Ojibway, and Miami tribes, among many others, contributed to the army assembled by Tecumseh.
Tecumseh’s coalition was an impressive feat of diplomacy. Still, the force was defeated by the army of General William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) in its first major clash with the Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Tecumseh was forced to flee north to Canada, where he began rebuilding his forces. After the start of the War of 1812, Tecumseh allied himself with the British and participated in the siege of Detroit. A year later, however, Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames.
1. Tecumseh and his followers referred to Americans as the “Long Knives.”
2. Harrison later capitalized on his fame for defeating Tecumseh during the 1840 presidential race, when he and running mate John Tyler (1790–1862) ran successfully under the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”
3. Among many other tributes, a starship in the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is named after Tecumseh.
The founder of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith (1805–1844), was born in a tiny Vermont village and moved to upstate New York as a child. In New York, at age twenty-four, Smith claimed at the direction of an angel to have found, buried in a hillside, gold plates engraved in a form of ancient Egyptian that contained additional books of the Bible. Smith’s translation of the plates, first published as the Book of Mormon by Smith in 1830, said that Jesus had come to North America after his resurrection, among other claims. In the fervent atmosphere of the Second Great Awakening, Smith attracted a handful of believers.
For the next several decades, Smith and his growing band of Mormon converts encountered enormous hostility and occasionally violent persecution. Smith himself would be killed by an angry mob in Illinois. Mainstream Christians considered Mormonism either blasphemous or a cult, and they eventually chased Smith’s followers out of their settlements in Missouri and Illinois. Under the leadership of Brigham Young (1801–1877), Smith’s successor as head of the church, the Mormons eventually fled to Utah.
The persecution of the Mormons exposed, often tragically, the limits of religious tolerance in nineteenth-century American society. Mormon leaders, including Smith, were occasionally tarred and feathered. The governor of Missouri issued an “extermination order” expelling Mormons from the state in 1838, which resulted in the deaths of several adherents. The Mormon belief in “plural marriage,” or bigamy, was considered bizarre and repulsive by many Americans.
For decades after moving to Utah—and, arguably, into the present day—Mormons continued to encounter suspicion and hostility. In 1890, Congress refused to admit Utah as a state unless it banned bigamy. The president of the Mormon Church, officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, had a revelation from God at roughly the same time that the practice should be discontinued. Although Mormons describe themselves as Christians, many other Christian groups continue to regard them as heretical.
1. Before their exodus to Utah, the Mormons tried to establish a city in Illinois called Nauvoo, after a Hebrew word for beautiful.
2. Utah was a Mexican territory when the Mormons first arrived, but it became a part of the United States after the Mexican War (1846–1848).
3. The state governments of Missouri and Illinois officially apologized for their earlier harassment of Mormons in 1976 and 2004, respectively.
“You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you,
for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.”
—Letter from Cornelius Vanderbilt to business associates
Ruthless railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) was one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious and successful businessmen. Driven and ambitious, Vanderbilt was said to have had few friends but countless enemies thanks to his bare-knuckle business tactics. Vanderbilt significantly expanded the American railroad network and created one of the nation’s largest and most profitable railways, the New York Central. He died one of the nation’s wealthiest but most despised men.
Born on Staten Island, New York, to a middle-class family of Dutch origin, Vanderbilt attended school only briefly. He was running his own ferry business by age sixteen and eventually made a fortune as a steamship operator. Vanderbilt’s famous nickname, “Commodore,” dated back to his steamship days.
In the 1840s, Vanderbilt was one of the first businessmen to realize the enormous commercial potential of the railways. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he had assembled a stable of East Coast railroads, which he eventually merged into the New York Central.
Relentlessly competitive, Vanderbilt’s fight with Jay Gould (1836–1892) and Daniel Drew (1797–1879) over ownership of the Erie Railroad, a line between New York City and Buffalo, was one of the most famous business rivalries of the nineteenth century. Although Gould eventually won control of the Erie, the clash strengthened Vanderbilt’s reputation as a cutthroat tycoon.
After Vanderbilt’s death, the New York Central remained one of the biggest companies in the United States until it went bankrupt in the 1960s and was merged with its major competitor, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Despite his occasional forays into philanthropy, Vanderbilt is known today mostly as a prime example of the nineteenthcentury robber baron.
1. The Erie Railroad was nicknamed ¨the scarlet woman of Wall Street¨ because of the huge financial battles over its ownership in the 1860s and 1870s.
2. A Vanderbilt steamship that sank off Connecticut in 1840, the Lexington, was rediscovered in 1983 by divers who found about $100,000 worth of silver amid the wreckage.
3. When Vanderbilt died, his estate, worth more than $100 million, exceeded the holdings of the United States Treasury.
Between 1846 and 1869, 70,000 Mormons migrated to the barren deserts of Utah seeking religious freedom. The huge exodus, led by church president Brigham Young (1801–1877), had been triggered by the lynching of the church’s founder in 1844 and the violent persecution endured by Mormons in Illinois and Missouri. Overcoming significant hardships, the first wagon train of Mormons arrived at the Great Salt Lake in the summer of 1847, where they would establish one of the largest settlements in the West.
The first group of Mormons had departed Nauvoo, Illinois, in February 1846. Headed by Young, the group made slow progress, covering only 300 miles before the next winter. The migrants camped near Council Bluffs, Iowa, where they endured a famously harsh winter. By some estimates, about 15 percent of the pilgrims died of cholera, scurvy, or starvation during the long stay at their winter quarters.
The next spring, Young and 147 other Mormons resumed the westward trek through the wilderness. Much of the Mormon Trail paralleled the Oregon Trail, but it veered south after crossing the Continental Divide. After 111 days, Young and his exhausted followers finally reached the Great Salt Lake.
Back in Nauvoo, meanwhile, the persecution of the Mormons continued unabated, which in turn fueled more migration west. When word spread of Young’s successful trek, more wagon trains followed him to Utah. By 1852, about 20,000 Mormons lived in the vicinity of Salt Lake, making it one of the largest cities in the West.
For the initial wave of Mormon settlers, life in Utah was not easy. The region around Salt Lake had been bypassed by Spanish and Mexican settlers because of its inhospitable conditions; the Mormons’ first crops nearly failed as the result of an infestation of crickets. Then, in 1857, President James Buchanan (1791–1868) sent federal troops to Utah in the “Mormon War” to rein in Young’s control over the territory. Not until 1896, after the Mormons outlawed polygamy, would Utah join the Union.
1. Anti-Mormon violence in Illinois had grown so bad that in a single month in 1845, 200 Mormon homes and farms were burned.
2. The Mormons wanted to name the area Deseret, after a word in the Book of Mormon; the United States called it Utah instead, after the Ute tribe of Native Americans.
3. Knowing it would cause controversy, the Mormons attempted to keep the doctrine of “plural marriage” a secret following Smith’s 1843 revelation sanctioning the practice, but word quickly spread, inflaming anti-Mormon sentiment in the Midwest.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel published by Mark Twain in 1884, is considered one of the single most beloved and influential works of fiction in the American canon. A picaresque, the novel follows the adventures of a young boy, Huckleberry Finn, and an escaped slave, Jim, as they float down the Mississippi River on a raft. Part adventure story and part social satire, Twain’s novel is also extremely controversial for its frequent use of racial epithets, its problematic depiction of Jim, and its somewhat bizarre ending.
At the beginning of the novel, the young Huckleberry Finn fakes his own death in order to run away from his abusive father and his caretaker, an old widow. On the run, he eventually meets Jim, a runaway slave owned by the sister of Huck’s caretaker, and the two resolve to escape to the North together. Unfortunately for them, the Mississippi River flows south, and unwittingly the two drift farther and farther into the slave states in the course of their wild adventures.
During the trip down the Mississippi, Huck and Jim meet a fantastic array of swindlers, grifters, crooks, impostors, and drunks. Twain’s zany, improbable characters—especially two con men, the Duke and the Dauphin, who join the escapees on the raft for several chapters—are among the most memorable in American fiction. Through the course of the novel, Twain uses the adventures of Huck and Jim to lampoon American capitalism, family life, and racial attitudes.
The novel was Twain’s most commercially successful book during his lifetime. Today, Twain’s admirers interpret his frequent use of racial epithets as an ironic commentary on American racism, rather than an endorsement of those views. However, due to the racial aspects of the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most frequently banned books in the history of American literature. At any given time, a parent somewhere in the United States is complaining about Twain, a situation that surely would have gratified the great satirist.
Twain himself, as if anticipating the controversy his book would cause a century later, warned against taking anything in the novel too seriously. In the beginning of the book, he offered a famous, tongue-in-cheek disclaimer to his readers: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
1. Disney released a film version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1993 starring future hobbit Elijah Wood as Huck.
2. Although based on Twain’s recollections of his Missouri childhood, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written after he moved to Hartford, Connecticut.
3. In the old French monarchy, dauphin was the title used for heir to the throne.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a popular new musical style called ragtime emerged from the saloons and nightclubs of the United States. Ragtime, a precursor to jazz, was characterized by complex, syncopated beats and joyous, lilting piano melodies. Pianist Scott Joplin (c. 1867–1917), the son of a former slave, was the most famous ragtime composer and wrote two of the most wellknown rags of the era, “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag.”
Born in Texas, Joplin later moved to Sedalia, Missouri, where he would spend much of his life. In high school, he took piano lessons from a German classical music teacher who had recognized his exceptional talent. Joplin also learned to play cornet and violin and began performing in brass bands around Sedalia.
Joplin’s big breakthrough as a composer came in 1899, with the publication of “Maple Leaf Rag,” which went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Over the next three years, as ragtime’s popularity peaked, Joplin published many of his most well-known rags in quick succession, including “The Entertainer,” “Elite Syncopations,” and “The Easy Winners.”
Despite his commercial success, Joplin still yearned to be taken seriously as a classical musician, and he began crafting more ambitious compositions. He wrote an opera, A Guest of Honor, in 1903, but it flopped commercially, and the score has been lost. Joplin moved to New York in 1907 to find a producer for his second opera, Treemonishia. Self-published in 1911, it would never be staged in his lifetime; at the time of his death from syphilis in 1917, Joplin was still seeking a producer for Treemonishia.
With the growing popularity of jazz, Joplin’s rags fell into obscurity after his death. Treemonishia was finally staged in 1972, and the hit movie The Sting (1973), which used Joplin’s rags in its sound track, revived popular interest in ragtime and Joplin.
1. Under the terms of his contract, Joplin got a royalty payment for each copy of “Maple Leaf Rag” sold: one cent.
2. Joplin wrote a tribute to President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) in 1902 titled “The Strenuous Life” after Roosevelt became the first president to invite an African-American to dinner at the White House the previous year.
3. After his move to New York, Joplin briefly had the same music publisher as the young Irving Berlin (1888–1989); Joplin believed that Berlin stole part of the tune of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” from him.