James Monroe (1758–1831) served two terms as president of the United States between 1817 and 1825. He followed his friend, fellow Virginian and occasional rival James Madison (1751–1836), into the White House. Monroe’s greatest presidential accomplishments came in the foreign policy arena: his administration acquired Florida from Spain and codified the Monroe Doctrine declaring the Americas closed to further European colonization.
Monroe, like Madison, began his political career in the Virginia legislature as a protégé of the great Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). After the American Revolution, in which he was seriously wounded, Monroe was elected to the United States Senate in 1790. The three Virginians—Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe—worked together to form the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose what they viewed as the dangerous policies of the ruling Federalists.
After Jefferson’s election to the White House in 1800, Monroe was rewarded with a series of diplomatic postings. He was sent to France to help negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, and then to Great Britain as Jefferson’s ambassador when tensions between the two countries were rising. Monroe was unable to negotiate an end to British impressment of American sailors, a major cause of the tension, disappointing Jefferson and Madison.
Now estranged, Madison and Monroe ran against each other for the presidency in 1808, and Monroe lost. However, Madison selected him as his secretary of state in 1811, just before the outbreak of the War of 1812 against Britain. In 1816, Monroe easily secured the Democratic-Republican nomination for the presidency and trounced his Federalist opponent, Senator Rufus King (1786–1853) of New York.
Although Monroe is best remembered for his foreign policy, his presidency also marked the first stirrings of regional conflict between the North and the South over the issue of slavery. In 1819, Missouri sought to join the nation as a slave state, but northern lawmakers objected, fearing it would tilt the balance of power in Congress in favor of slavery. Finally, the Missouri Compromise was forged in 1820, under which Missouri would enter the Union along with Maine, a new free state that was carved out of Massachusetts. The Missouri Compromise successfully defused tensions over slavery—if only temporarily.
1. Virginians held the presidency for all but four years between 1789 and the end of Monroe’s term; in total, eight presidents have been born in Virginia.
2. The capital city of the African nation of Liberia, Monrovia, was named after Monroe.
3. In 1819, Monroe became the first president to ride aboard a steamship.
During the presidential election campaign of 1860, many Southern states warned that they would secede from the Union if voters elected the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Lincoln had promised to ban slavery in all new states added to the Union, a proposal that Southern politicians believed would inevitably doom the institution by shifting the balance of power in Congress to the free states. South Carolina became the first state to follow through on the secession threat; delegates to a state convention voted to leave the Union on December 20, 1960.
The secession crisis was the culmination of thirty years of mounting tension over slavery in the United States. After South Carolina, most of the rest of the slave-holding South voted to leave the Union. Only a few of the slave states—Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware—rejected secession.
Initially, Northern politicians were unsure how to respond to the actions by the Southern states. Lincoln and many other Northerners considered secession illegal but hoped the crisis could be resolved peacefully. However, on April 12, 1861, Southerners fired on the Union fortification in the harbor of Charlestown, South Carolina, forcing the small Union force inside Fort Sumter to surrender.
The attack on Fort Sumter created an enormous uproar in the North and dashed hopes for a peaceful reconciliation. In the wake of the incident, both sides began forming armies in preparation for war.
Over the next four years of fighting, more than 600,000 men were killed and many parts of the nation reduced to rubble before the final defeat of the Southern states. Ironically, the skirmish at Fort Sumter that sparked the war was also one of the smallest battles of the conflict: Only one soldier was killed in the fateful attack.
1. About 2 percent of the population of the United States died during the Civil War, according to demographic estimates.
2. The state of Virginia bore the brunt of the fighting. According to the 1992 PBS documentary The Civil War, the town of Winchester, Virginia, changed hands seventy-two times during the war.
3. In total, about 185,000 African-Americans fought on the side of the Union, despite the initial reluctance of Northern politicians to accept black soldiers.
The Seneca Falls Convention (1848) was one of the earliest gatherings of women’s rights advocates in American history and is credited with starting the feminist movement that culminated seventy-two years later with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote.
Delegates to the convention, held in the upstate New York village of Seneca Falls, drafted an ambitious Declaration of Sentiments purposefully modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence. It read:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
By using the hallowed cadences of the Declaration of Independence, the authors of the Seneca Falls Convention hoped to highlight the hypocrisy of denying women the political rights American men claimed to hold dear. Wherever Thomas Jefferson had referred to King George III, they substituted “all men.”
In the short term, the Declaration of Sentiments was either ignored or scorned. But the convention at Seneca Falls started a movement. Signers included Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), and Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), all of whom would go on to become prominent fighters for the rights of American women.
1. About 300 women and men attended the convention, and 100 people—68 women and 32 men—signed the Declaration of Sentiments.
2. Only one of the women who signed the Declaration—Charlotte Woodward—lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. But at ninety-two years of age on Election Day 1920, Woodward was too sick to leave her home to vote.
The invention of the world’s first safe and reliable elevator by Elisha Otis (1811–1861) in 1852 made tall buildings feasible and changed the face of American cities in the nineteenth century by allowing for the construction of skyscrapers. A company founded by Otis, the Otis Elevator Company, today remains the world’s largest manufacturer of elevators.
Otis was born on a farm in rural Vermont and moved to New York City in 1845 to work at a factory, taking part in the migration from farm to city prevalent during the Industrial Revolution. In New York, Otis developed an interest in improving the brakes used on railroad trains, a specialty that eventually led him to his most wellknown invention.
Primitive elevators had existed for centuries, but were extremely unsafe and generally used only to hoist cargo, not people. Applying some of the same technology he had used for railroad brakes, Otis unveiled his safety elevator in 1853. The elevator included a novel mechanism—basically, a ratchet—to prevent the elevator from falling if the pulley snapped. In the event the rope broke, the brake devised by Otis would catch the elevator before it plunged downward.
Although it took several years for Otis to work out the kinks in the system—the doors for the elevator were particularly hard to design—architects began incorporating elevator shafts into their blueprints almost immediately. The invention eliminated one of the single biggest practical obstacles to skyscraper construction. Within twenty years of Otis’s invention, 2,000 elevators had been installed in American buildings.
Otis himself died at age fifty, but his two sons built the Otis Elevator Company into a major industrial powerhouse.
1. Otis first demonstrated his invention at New York’s Crystal Palace in 1854, when he rode an elevator halfway up a shaft and then had an assistant snip the rope. To the crowd’s astonishment, the safety mechanism worked, and Otis descended only a few inches before the brake stopped the elevator’s fall.
2. Through the 1930s, almost all elevators were operated by specially trained attendants. With technological advances, most human-staffed elevators were phased out by the 1950s.
3. The Otis Elevator Company later invented the Escalator, which was officially demoted to a generic, lowercase noun by the U.S. Patent Office in 1950.
In 1854, the United States paid Mexico $10 million for a vast tract of land in the present-day states of New Mexico and Arizona. Named the Gadsden Purchase after the American diplomat who negotiated the sale, the acquisition fixed the borders of the modern continental United States at their present location.
After the Mexican War ended in 1848, Mexico had been forced to relinquish control over most of the Southwest to the United States. However, it retained the area around present-day Tucson, Arizona.
Support for the buying the 29,000-square-mile area was driven mostly by Southerners, who hoped to use it for a transcontinental railroad they envisioned linking the West Coast to the South. President Franklin Pierce (1804–1869), a Northerner, was convinced by his secretary of war, Mississippian Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), to authorize James Gadsden (1788–1858) to negotiate a deal for the territory.
When it was announced in 1853, the sale was controversial in both countries. Mexicans were outraged at the loss of land, and many northern senators feared the purchase was a ploy to strengthen the South’s economy and extend slavery westward. The controversy over the purchase illustrated the growing sectional acrimony in Congress in the decade prior to the Civil War (1861–1865).
Eventually, Congress accepted a modified version of Gadsden’s deal that included a much smaller area. Had the Southerners been successful, the map of the United States would look much different today, including much of northern Mexico. As it was, Arizona and New Mexico were admitted in 1912, the last two states in the continental United States to join the Union.
1. A second transcontinental railroad connecting New Orleans with the West Coast, the Southern Pacific, was built through the Gadsden Purchase lands in the 1880s.
2. The Mexican dictator who negotiated the sale, Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876), was deposed the next year.
3. Davis went on to be president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
One of the leading historians of the nineteenth-century United States, Henry Adams (1838–1918) is better known today for his brilliant autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, which was not widely published until after his death.
Adams was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, into the illustrious Adams family. Both his grandfather, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), and great-grandfather, John Adams (1735–1826), were presidents of the United States, and all of his brothers would go on to distinguished business or literary careers.
Following the family tradition, Adams enrolled in Harvard in 1854, but he detested his college experience. He found Harvard suffocating and would later try out innovative teaching techniques when he returned there as a history professor in the 1870s.
After his graduation in 1858, Adams spent the Civil War (1861–1865) in London, where he was a secretary for his father, the American ambassador to Great Britain. Adams returned to the United States after the war and moved to Washington, DC. Although an ardent Republican, he became disillusioned by the corrupt administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885). In 1870, Adams accepted a professorship at Harvard but could endure it for only seven years. He returned to Washington, where he wrote his best-known historical work, the nine-volume The History of the United States of America (1889–1891), a painstaking reconstruction of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and James Madison (1751–1836).
Near the end of his life, Adams began writing his autobiography, intending to circulate it only to close friends. It was first published in a private edition in 1907. The book is both an amazing chronicle of the nineteenth century and a work of literary art. The Education of Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919. Since its publication, critics have marveled at Adams’s lapidary prose and sharp insights into his times, and in 1999 the Modern Library named The Education the greatest nonfiction work of the twentieth century.
1. His wife, Marian Hooper, committed suicide in 1885. Adams left the entire time period of his marriage out of The Education.
2. Adams wrote biographies of Albert Gallatin (1761–1849), the treasury secretary under presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and John Randolph (1773–1833), an early nineteenth-century Virginia politician.
3. Adams edited the prestigious North American Review from 1870 to 1876.
A legendary architecture firm responsible for some of the grandest public buildings in the United States, the partnership of McKim, Mead, and White designed and built significant parts of the skylines of Boston, New York, and Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Originally made up of three architects—Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909), William Rutherford Mead (1846–1928), and Stanford White (1853–1906)—the firm went into business in New York City in 1878. McKim and White were former students of the renowned architect H. H. Richardson (1838–1886). Breaking with Richardson’s famous Romanesque, however, the firm’s monumental style took its major inspiration from Italian Renaissance palaces of the sixteenth century.
The Boston Public Library, begun in 1887, is characteristic of the firm’s signature style. The giant building, which sits on Copley Square across from Richardson’s Trinity Church, resembles an Italian palazzo, with huge windows on its facade and an interior courtyard ringed by an arcade. The imposing granite edifice conveys an overwhelming sense of strength and solidity.
Over the next three decades, the firm also built the huge Farley Post Office in New York, the West Wing of the White House, and several buildings at Columbia University in New York City.
In the view of many architecture critics, however, the single greatest building designed by the partners was the soaring Pennsylvania Station in midtown New York City. The great railway station, which took five years to reach completion in 1910 and was modeled on an ancient Roman ruin, served hundreds of trains daily on the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. The building was torn down in 1964 to make way for Madison Square Garden, a shortsighted demolition lamented today as a huge loss to the architecture of the United States and the world.
1. The city of New York occasionally announces plans to turn the Farley Post Office into a new Pennsylvania Station, but the project still had gone nowhere as of 2007.
2. The annual Boston Marathon, one of the most prestigious long-distance running events in the United States, ends just beyond the steps of the Boston Public Library.
3. Although its three namesake partners were all dead by 1928, the firm remained in business until 1950.