The Federalist Papers is the collective name for an extraordinary series of newspaper columns published in 1787 and 1788 aiming to convince Americans to accept the new Constitution. Published in New York under the pseudonym Publius, the columns were actually written by three eminent politicians: Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804), James Madison (1751–1836), and John Jay (1745–1829). Hamilton picked the name Publius in honor of an ancient Roman statesman, Publius Valerius Publicola, one of the founders of the Roman Republic. The collected columns later were published as a book titled The Federalist. The Federalist Papers are still cited by lawyers and scholars today for their insight into how the Founders intended the constitutional system to work.
Under the Constitution, at least nine of the thirteen states had to ratify the document before it would come into force. Several states, led by Delaware, ratified promptly, but New York hesitated. A strong anti-Federalist faction in the state, led by Governor George Clinton (1739–1812), argued that the Constitution took too much power from the individual states, that it failed to protect individual liberties, and that the office of the presidency would replicate the dictatorial monarchy Americans had just overthrown. Critics in Virginia, led by Revolutionary War firebrand Patrick Henry (1736–1799), also publicly argued against the Constitution.
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay began publishing their columns in 1787 to counter these influential critics. Without the Constitution’s ratification in New York, they feared, all their work at Philadelphia would go to waste. The Federalist Papers were measured and analytical, setting forth a practical explanation of how the new government would work and why it would benefit the thirteen states. In total, the three men published eighty-five articles over the course of several months.
In the short term, the Federalist Papers accomplished their political goal. After tumultuous debate, New York ratified the Constitution in mid-1788. Almost immediately, however, the papers were recognized as brilliant commentaries on the new Constitution. George Washington (1732–1799), in a 1788 letter to Hamilton, said he would give a printed edition of the Federalist Papers the place of honor in his library at Mount Vernon. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were unmasked as the authors within months of publication, and their practical, analytical commentaries on the Constitution are still studied today.
1. After the columns became famous, Madison and Hamilton both claimed credit for certain essays. It took historians until 1964 to determine that Madison had, in fact, authored the disputed articles.
2. Governor Clinton also published a series of anonymous newspaper essays, under the pen name Cato, after a Roman politician.
3. Anti-Federalists convinced Congress to add the Bill of Rights to protect individual liberties in 1791.
California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of four other present-day western states were ceded to the United States as a result of the American victory in the Mexican War, fought between 1846 and 1848. In the conflict, American troops occupied Mexico City and forced the Mexican government to hand over vast parcels of land, almost half its entire country, in exchange for peace.
In the fall of 1845, newly elected US President James K. Polk (1795–1849) had sent an envoy to Mexico with an offer that would relieve Mexico of its $3 million debt to the United States. He wanted to buy California for $25 million. The Mexicans rejected the offer, considering it an insult to their national honor. In the spring of 1846, Polk sent thousands of American troops to Texas, ostensibly to guard the area against Mexican attack. After a skirmish between the two nations near the border, Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war.
Even at the time, a war fought simply to expand the size of the United States caused great controversy. The famous writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) went to jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the war. Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), then a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, voted against the war declaration.
Militarily, the war was a shining success. The weak Mexican government was incapable of defending itself against invaders commanded by General Zachary Taylor (1784–1850). After American troops took Mexico City, the Mexican government had little choice but to agree to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in early 1848. Under the terms of the treaty, Mexico gave up its land in exchange for $15 million—much less than Polk had originally offered back in 1845.
The resounding success of the war made Taylor a national hero and propelled him into the White House in 1848 when Polk decided not to run for a second term.
1. Memories of the war remain raw in Mexico, where the loss of half the country’s territory to the United States is remembered as “the Mutilation.”
2. Many of the leaders who later became famous in the Civil War (1861–1865), including both Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) and Union general Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1855), fought as comrades in the Mexican War.
3. Taylor’s opponent in the 1848 election was another Mexican War hero, General Winfield Scott (1786– 1866), nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.”
Nurse and social reformer Dorothea Dix (1802–1887) led numerous campaigns seeking humane treatment for the mentally ill in the 1840s and 1850s and later served as the head Union nurse during the Civil War (1861–1865). Her passionate advocacy for society’s outcasts led to the establishment of the first major American mental hospitals.
Born in Maine, Dix became interested in the treatment of people with mental illness after touring England in 1836. In both the United States and England, mentally ill individuals in the nineteenth century were often locked away with criminals under horrific conditions in ordinary prisons. During her trip, Dix met a number of English reformers active in the asylum movement, which sought to build separate facilities for the mentally ill where they could receive treatment.
On her return to the United States, Dix presented a proposal to the Massachusetts legislature in 1843 to build a state mental hospital. She introduced the proposal with a memorably fiery speech: “I come as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane and idiotic men and women,” she said. Her proposal was successful, and the Massachusetts campaign served as a template for similar proposals across the Union.
In the 1850s, now a high-profile reformer, Dix devised a national plan to build federally supported hospitals. The proposal passed Congress but was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce (1804–1869), who thought giving such support was an inappropriate role for the federal government to play. Crushed, Dix left the United States for much of the late 1850s, continuing her reform work in England, Scotland, and continental Europe.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Dix returned home and was appointed superintendent of female nurses for the Union. Although her influence in the job proved minimal, she won plaudits in the South for the compassionate treatment her nurses provided to enemy prisoners.
After the war, Dix resumed her work on behalf of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, after Dix’s death in 1887, many of the hospitals she supported fell into decline.
1. Although steeped in the same New England liberalism as other contemporary reformers, Dix opposed abolitionism and women’s suffrage, which cost her crusades crucial support.
2. Her position during the Civil War was unpaid.
3. Dix is credited with founding a total of thirty-two mental hospitals during her long career.
One of the first American millionaires, Samuel Colt (1814–1862) invented the revolver that bears his name and built the world’s largest private armory at his sprawling headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut. Guns manufactured by Colt were standard issue on the Union side during the Civil War, and the famous Colt six-shooter, nicknamed “the Peacemaker,” was the most popular handgun for settlers in the West. Thanks to the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Civil War (1861–1865), Colt amassed an enormous fortune and was thought to be the richest man in the United States at the time of his death.
Born in Hartford, Colt was a mediocre student who loved firearms and explosives as a child. He designed his first revolver prototype at age eighteen and patented his first designs when he was twenty-one. The major advantage of Colt’s revolver was that it could be fired repeatedly without reloading, a huge time-saver. Colt received an order for 1,000 revolvers from the US military during the Mexican War (1846–1848), his first major sale.
Colt’s business took off during the 1850s, when he sold weapons to both sides during the Crimean War. Brash and pompous, Colt used his sudden wealth to build a highly unusual factory building in Hartford to house his company. The factory, a giant brick building topped with a blue, onion-shaped dome, remained home to the Colt company until 1994 and for many decades was the largest privately owned weapons factory in the world.
Although Colt himself was a Democrat who opposed President Abraham Lincoln’s war policies, he reaped a huge profit from the Civil War. However, the stress of running his company during the war took a ruinous toll on Colt’s health, and he died in January 1862. Colt’s business remained a top American corporation for most of the nineteenth century, but fell on hard times after World War II (1939–1945) and merged with a Texas armory in 1955. The M-16 automatic rifle—currently the standard-issue rifle in the United States military—is produced by one of the direct descendants of Colt’s original firm.
1. Colt was the first American manufacturer to open a foreign branch, building a factory in London in 1853 to supply the British with weapons during the Crimean War.
2. In recognition of Colt’s significance in Texas history, Houston’s first Major League Baseball team was called the Colt .45s from 1962 until 1965, when it changed its name to the Astros.
3. Colt’s design for the revolver is said to have been inspired by the wheel of a ship.
The prototypical boomtown of the American West, San Francisco went from small mission pueblo to sprawling metropolis within five years. In 1848, before the discovery of gold in the nearby Sierra Nevada, San Francisco’s population was about 1,000. By 1852, the population was 35,000 and San Francisco was the biggest, richest city in California.
Founded by the Spanish in 1776 and named after Saint Francis of Assisi, the town was initially home to little more than an elegant stone mission and a small fortress. The entire area was considered part of Mexico, which declared its independence from Spain in 1821. Mission Dolores, the oldest structure in San Francisco, is one of the few remaining buildings from the city’s colonial period.
Along with the rest of California, the city became American territory in 1848 under the terms of the treaty ending the Mexican War. In the same year, gold was discovered in the mountains east of the city, and hundreds of ships rushed to California carrying miners bound for the hills. Many of them got no farther than the foggy streets of San Francisco, where hundreds of shops and banks opened to serve the new arrivals. San Francisco was incorporated as a city in 1850.
In its early years, San Francisco grew too fast for the law to catch up, and the city developed a reputation for lawlessness and corruption. Irish and Chinese immigrants faced harassment, and even lynching, from armed vigilante bands that roamed the city. It took decades for law and order to take root in the city, with corruption remaining a major problem into the twentieth century. The city’s rough-and-tumble formative phase ended abruptly with the earthquake of 1906, which destroyed much of the city.
1. The company Levi Strauss was founded in San Francisco in 1853 to sell pants to miners headed for the Sierra Nevada.
2. Until the 1920 census, San Francisco was larger than Los Angeles. It is now only the fourth-biggest city in the state, after Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose.
3. In the early years of its history, San Francisco passed some of the harshest anti-Chinese laws in the country, including ones requiring strict racial segregation in the city’s public schools.
The novelist Stephen Crane (1871–1900) authored a dozen books in his short career. Most of his volumes have slipped into obscurity, with the exception of his crowning masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which is regarded as one of the best war novels in American literature and was a precursor to twentieth-century fiction for its gritty, realistic portrayal of battle and its unusual narrative style.
Crane, who was only twenty-four when he published the book and had never seen battle himself, based the novella on his interviews with shell-shocked Civil War veterans. Unlike standard war literature of the nineteenth century, which often depicted battle as a glorious test of manhood, Crane dealt frankly with the fears of his main character, a Union soldier named Henry Fleming, as he prepares for and then fights in his first engagement. The choice of a lowly private as his narrator was exceptional in itself; as contemporary critics pointed out, most war fiction of the day was told from a general’s point of view.
The writing technique employed by Crane was also highly unorthodox for its time. Crane did not attempt to capture every twist and turn in the battle. Indeed, the reader has little sense of the overall battlefield or of which side is winning. His subject is the soldier, not the war. The book focuses on Fleming’s personal impressions and emotions—the color of the trees, for instance, or the fleeting images that pass through his head as he marches uncertainly into battle.
Reaction to The Red Badge of Courage was mostly positive, although some northern veterans complained that Crane was unpatriotic for depicting an American soldier as fearful. The book sold well, and Crane became a minor literary celebrity. Based on his sensitive portrayal of battle, he was hired as a war correspondent by a New York newspaper and sent to cover fighting in Greece. He stayed in Europe for several years and ended up in London, where he contracted tuberculosis and then died at a spa in Germany. The Red Badge of Courage has been in print continuously since its publication and has been cited as an influence on Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and many other authors.
1. The battle in the book is believed to have been modeled on the Battle of Chancellorsville.
2. One critic, a former Union general, assumed that Crane was English after reading The Red Badge of Courage because, as he explained, “It is only too well known that English writers have had a very low opinion of American soldiers, and have always, as a rule, assumed to ridicule them.”
3. During his lifetime, according to biographer Linda Davis, Crane earned a total of $1,200 for all twelve of his books.
In 1896, an aspiring painter named George Luks (1867–1933) from Pennsylvania coal-mining country arrived in New York City seeking to establish his reputation. The art scene in New York, however, quickly disappointed the ambitious young artist. American painting, Luks complained, focused on genteel subject matter or nature scenes and rarely depicted the rough realities of American working-class life that Luks knew from his hardscrabble Appalachian upbringing.
Determined to inject more realism into American painting, Luks and seven colleagues joined a new artistic movement in 1908 called the Ashcan school. Although short-lived, the Ashcan school had an enormous influence on the history of American art. For the first time, Luks and his comrades made it fashionable to paint the gritty, raw reality of an increasingly urban and industrialized United States.
Many of the painters of the Ashcan school had begun their careers as newspaper illustrators, and their paintings often show a journalistic sensibility. Subjects included boxers, subway trains, and grimy urban alleyways. Like the photographer Jacob Riis (1849–1914), the Ashcan painters tried to use art to document and expose the often shocking conditions in American cities. George Bellows (1882–1925), one of the most famous Ashcan school painters, also helped edit a socialist publication, and the movement was avowedly leftist in its political outlook.
Although it fizzled thanks to an invasion of European-influenced modernists, the Ashcan school in its heyday produced dozens of famous paintings, especially Bellow’s raw depictions of illegal boxing matches. Twenty years later, social realism roared back into fashion, and the influence of the group can be seen in the work of Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and other Depression-era painters.
1. One female member of the Ashcan school, Theresa Bernstein, who died in 2002, was thought to have reached an age of between 111 and 115.
2. The founders of the movement referred to themselves as “the Eight.”
3. The painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) served as inspirations for the Ashcan artists.