The eldest son of a Founding Father, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) grew up in a world of privilege and power. As a ten-year-old boy, he accompanied his famous father, John Adams (1735–1826), on diplomatic missions to Europe. In 1797, when the elder Adams was elected president, he appointed his thirty-year-old son the American ambassador to Prussia. Like his father, John Quincy Adams attended Harvard and briefly practiced law before devoting himself to politics.
Following in his father’s footsteps, John Quincy Adams ran for president in 1824. In a close four-way race, he defeated Henry Clay (1777–1852), Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), and William Crawford (1772–1834). His presidency, however, lasted only a single rocky term. Jackson had won the popular vote, and many of his supporters considered him the rightful president. While in the White House, Adams was unable to muster congressional support for his agenda of internal improvements such as roads and canals.
In the 1828 election, even many of Adams’s own cabinet officers supported Jackson, who won their rematch in a landslide. Again following in his father’s path, an embittered Adams returned to Massachusetts.
However, instead of simply fading from the political scene, Adams then embarked on one of the most successful political careers of any ex-president. In 1830, he returned to Washington, DC, as a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, and he continued to represent the state until his death. In Congress, Adams emerged as a leading critic of slavery. He also resumed his law practice, and he represented the prisoners who had overthrown their captors on the Amistad before the Supreme Court, winning their release in 1841. After his death, Adams was buried alongside his father at the family’s home in Quincy, Massachusetts.
1. The patrician Adams hated his opponent Jackson and wrote a letter of protest to Harvard University when it awarded Old Hickory an honorary degree, calling the seventh president “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”
2. Since Adams, only one other son of a president, George W. Bush, has been elected to the White House.
3. John Adams and John Quincy Adams are the only two presidents not to attend the inauguration of their successor.
The Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, was the first major clash of the American Civil War. Nearly a thousand men lost their lives at Bull Run, a victory of the South that was a grim beginning to the most savage of American conflicts.
Before Bull Run, many leading politicians in the North confidently predicted the Union would crush the Southern rebels within a few months. But the unexpected Confederate victory at Bull Run signaled to the world that the Southern army was a fighting force to be taken seriously.
After the secession of the Southern states and the subsequent attack against Union troops at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, it was only a matter of time before the North went on the offensive. In Washington, DC, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and enraged Union politicians prodded the US Army to attack the Confederacy immediately. The Union general in charge, Irvin McDowell (1818–1885), hesitated, arguing that his men were unprepared to confront the rebels. Eventually, he gave in to pressure to move against the South. Union forces crossed into northern Virginia on July 16, 1861, meeting the Southerners near a creek called Bull Run in the crossroads town of Manassas, Virginia.
The battle that ensued was a debacle for both sides, but especially for the North. The two armies had similar-looking uniforms and flags, and confused soldiers often fired at their own comrades. Discipline among the Union ranks was poor, and many Northern soldiers fled back to Washington in a disorganized retreat after the battle.
The Confederate victory was a major shock to the Union leadership and the country at large. Lincoln immediately replaced McDowell, the first of the many generals the president would fire. Talk of a quick victory faded, and Union politicians realized they had a real fight on their hands. Pictures taken by Mathew Brady (c. 1823–1896), the famous war photographer, made the public aware of the awful realities of the new war.
In the South, meanwhile, Bull Run was a huge psychological lift for the rebels, who had proved they could hold their own against the Union army.
1. The term skedaddle was coined after the Battle of Bull Run by Union soldiers who fled back to Washington, DC, after the carnage.
2. A second battle of Bull Run, also resulting in a Confederate victory, took place at almost exactly the same spot in 1862.
3. Bull Run took its name from a small creek that ran near the battlefield.
As opposition to slavery grew in the North starting in the 1830s, abolitionists organized a clandestine network that helped smuggle escaped slaves to freedom. Between 30,000 and 100,000 slaves are estimated to have escaped from the South thanks to the efforts of the Underground Railroad, an informal term that referred to the web of secret escape routes organized by abolitionists rather than to an actual railroad.
For most escapees, the ultimate destination was Canada, where slavery was illegal and fugitives could not be extradited back to the United States. Fugitives relied on local abolitionists, code-named “conductors,” to aid them on their way north. William Still (1801–1892), the free son of an escaped slave, was one of the most successful conductors. His home in Philadelphia served as a safe resting place for escaped slaves en route to Canada. Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913), herself an escaped slave, famously ventured back into the South to help arrange escapes for hundreds of slaves. The white abolitionist Levi Coffin (1798–1877) helped more than 3,000 slaves reach freedom, providing his home in Indiana as a way station along three escape routes.
By the early 1850s, many northern churches and individuals were quietly participating in the Underground Railroad. In many parts of the North it operated more or less in the open, as sympathetic authorities looked the other way.
Still, by helping slaves escape to freedom, abolitionists took a significant legal risk. Congress had outlawed assisting fugitive slaves in 1793, and it greatly strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. The law, however, was widely ignored, in what historian Fergus M. Bordewich called “first great movement of mass civil disobedience after the American Revolution.”
After the war, Still published his copious notes as a book called The Underground Rail Road (1872), one of the most important records of resistance to slavery. Many stations along the railroad have been preserved as monuments to the popular resistance to slavery in the North.
1. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was widely despised in most of the North. When Anthony Burns (1834–1862), a fugitive slave, was arrested in Massachusetts under the act in 1854, protests were so large that 1,000 soldiers had to be sent to Boston to escort the slave back to Virginia.
2. Recently, some historians have questioned the true extent of the Underground Railroad, suggesting that some Northerners may have exaggerated or invented their roles in the network after the war.
3. In the 1850s, Southern slave owners often hired bounty hunters to chase down their escaped slaves in the North, which provided the historical inspiration for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Toni Morrison novel Beloved (1987).
The first transcontinental railroad across the Rocky Mountains, completed in 1869, drastically reduced the cost of moving goods and people between the coasts and opened the West for a massive wave of white settlement. Crossing the Rockies was one of the greatest engineering challenges in the nation’s history, requiring hundreds of bridges and tunnels and thousands of miles of track. Countless workers died in avalanches, explosions, and train collisions while building the railroad, which is considered one of most significant industrial milestones in the nation’s history.
Since the invention of the railroad in the early nineteenth century, Americans had dreamed of forging a route to the Pacific. The first serious plan was submitted to Congress in 1845. With the nation paralyzed by sectional strife, the proposal went nowhere. During the Civil War (1861–1865), however, the administration of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) made construction of the transcontinental railroad a national priority. In 1862, Congress chartered two railroads to build the route, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, and offered them enormous cash incentives: $48,000 and 12,800 acres of land for every mile of track they built.
From its inception, the transcontinental railroad represented an uneasy collaboration between the federal government, which wanted the railroad built, and railroad corporations more concerned with turning a profit. The Central Pacific and Union Pacific employed dubious and unsafe labor practices to build the railroad cheaply and financial chicanery to inflate their already vast profits. The Crédit Mobilier scandal, which broke in the 1870s after the railroad’s completion, exposed how the Union Pacific had bilked the federal government and provided kickbacks to influential politicians.
Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of crossing the continent was achieved, an accomplishment as far-reaching as the completion of the Erie Canal a generation before. On May 10, 1869, the two railroads met at Promontory Point, Utah, setting off a national celebration. Trade between the coasts exploded, as the travel time between New York and San Francisco plummeted from six months to less than a week. By 1880, the railroads were carrying millions of dollars worth of cargo and thousands of white settlers migrating to the newly accessible towns of the West.
1. Chinese laborers dominated the Central Pacific workforce.
2. Although much of the original transcontinental railroad has been abandoned, travelers can still ride along some of the line on the Amtrak route California Zephyr.
3. The Central Pacific was one of the first American companies to make use of nitroglycerin, a dangerous explosive that had been invented in Europe in 1864.
New York City’s Central Park was one of the first public parks in the United States when it opened in 1859. Designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead (1822–1903), the 843-acre preserve amid New York’s urban bustle would be a model for hundreds of public spaces built in cities across the United States in the late nineteenth century.
The city of New York had grown dramatically in the 1840s, thanks to a wave of immigration from overseas. With this growth came many urban problems, including overcrowding, noise, and crime. City elders struggling to cope with New York’s explosive growth envisioned Central Park as an oasis of calm in the city, and they spent $5 million in the 1850s buying mostly uninhabited land north of Fifty-Ninth Street.
At the time, the idea of such a big public space was itself unusual. While Paris and London had large public parks, no American city had ever constructed anything like Central Park. The city sponsored a design competition in 1857, which was won by Olmstead and a collaborator, Calvert Vaux (1824–1895). Their design, full of ponds and hills and stately granite bridges, was heavily influenced by parks Olmstead had toured in Europe in the early 1850s.
The construction of Central Park stimulated a wave of park building in cities across the United States. Olmstead designed parks in Buffalo, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere. Like Central Park, many nineteenth-century parks were built on the fringes of cities but have since been surrounded on all sides by urban growth.
1. Although Central Park is probably the most famous park in the United States, it was not the first; that distinction belongs to Boston Common, which opened in roughly 1634.
2. The park was built on swampy terrain, and most of its soil had to be imported from New Jersey.
3. More than 1,400 plant species live in Central Park.
Muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) published his most wellknown book, The Jungle, in 1906 to draw attention to the dangerous working conditions for and poor wages of slaughterhouse workers in Chicago. As Sinclair intended, the book created an uproar—but not for the reasons he expected. To many readers, Sinclair’s graphic descriptions of the unsanitary slaughterhouses were horrifying, and they led to major new food safety regulations. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair complained, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and wrote a successful novel about the Civil War at age twenty-four. A lifelong devotee of left-wing politics, he used the considerable proceeds from The Jungle to indulge in various socialist causes, including a short-lived commune in New Jersey. During this time, Sinclair also made the first of what would be dozens of unsuccessful runs for public office, losing a New Jersey congressional race by an overwhelming margin.
As a writer, Sinclair’s style was often dramatic, sincere, and emotional, unlike the arch cynicism of his contemporary H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). The Jungle was written to create sympathy for the poor and oppressed, and modern readers expecting a tirade against injustice are sometimes surprised by the book’s sentimentalism.
Nevertheless, the book was a runaway success and perhaps the most well-known example of muckraking journalism in the early twentieth century. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) read it, summoned Sinclair to a meeting in the White House, and dispatched aides to investigate his allegations. The result, later that year, was the Food and Drug Administration, established to assure the purity of American food.
Sinclair continued to write for the next six decades, championing dozens of progressive causes from workers’ rights to vegetarianism in the ninety books he published. He also ran for office several more times, coming closest to victory in the 1934 California governor’s race, in which he ran as a left-wing Democrat in the midst of the Depression and came within 200,000 votes of victory.
1. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize, his only major award, for Dragon’s Teeth, a novelization of the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s.
2. Sinclair resigned from the Socialist Party in 1917 over his support of American involvement in World War I (1914–1918) but later rejoined the party when President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) supported intervention in the Soviet Union.
3. A lifelong civil libertarian, Sinclair was a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and founded the organization’s Southern California branch.
Even by the standards of 1915, the year of its initial release, the silent film The Birth of a Nation, produced and directed by D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), was considered racist. The three-hour epic tells the story of the creation of the Ku Klux Klan in the post–Civil War South—and portrays the white-hooded Klansmen as the heroes. In one of its first-ever publicity campaigns, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called for a national boycott of the controversial film immediately after its release.
Despite its overt bigotry, however, The Birth of a Nation was a huge sensation among both the public and critics because of Griffith’s innovative use of new film techniques. In the opinion of many film historians, The Birth of a Nation virtually created modern cinematography by inventing such film basics as establishing shots, close-ups, flashbacks, and quick cuts between different scenes.
When it hit theaters, The Birth of a Nation, which starred the actress Lillian Gish (1893–1993), was far more exciting than anything audiences had ever seen before. For Hollywood’s first two decades, most silent movies were slow and plodding—basically stage plays performed in front of an unmoving camera. In his fast-paced and dramatic epic, Griffith was the first to explore the true possibilities of the new technology.
In the history of film, The Birth of a Nation is considered an important milestone, despite its offensive subject matter. In the broader history of the United States, however, the movie played a far darker role. By portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic, The Birth of a Nation helped inspire the Klan’s resurgence in the early twentieth century. Nearly extinct by 1915, the Klan enjoyed a huge revival in both the South and the North, with the movie acting as an invaluable recruiting tool. Griffith tried to atone for the movie the next year with another historical epic called Intolerance, which criticized bigotry and racism, but The Birth of a Nation has forever marred the pioneering director’s legacy.
1. The movie, based on a book by Thomas F. Dixon, was originally titled The Clansman.
2. Many of the African-American characters in the movie were actually whites wearing blackface makeup, a common practice in Hollywood in the early twentieth century.
3. Born in Kentucky, Griffith’s father was a Confederate officer during the Civil War (1861–1865).