The election of General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) to the White House in 1828 marked an earthquake in national politics. Unlike his aristocratic predecessors, Jackson was a self-made man from Tennessee who had been born in poverty. To his many detractors, Jackson was a tyrant, a half-wit, and a barbarian unfit for the august office of the presidency, but his election as a “man of the people” signaled the beginning of a more democratic age in American politics.
Jackson joined the patriot army at age thirteen during the Revolutionary War and was taken prisoner by the British. After the Revolution, he worked as a lawyer in the frontier state of Tennessee. He returned to military service for the War of 1812 and became a national hero after defeating the British at the Battle of New Orleans, but to some he became known as the “Butcher of New Orleans” for his ruthlessness.
Jackson ran for president against the Massachusetts patrician John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) in 1824 but lost the election despite winning the popular vote. Outraged, Jackson began plotting his 1828 campaign almost immediately. His rematch with Adams was the most vicious campaign up to that point in American history, but the result was not close: Jackson won handily, sweeping the South and Midwest.
From the moment he took office, Jackson made it clear that he was a different sort of politician than previous chief executives. On the day of his inauguration, he opened the White House to the public. A drunken mob ransacked the mansion, forcing Jackson to flee to a nearby hotel.
During his two terms in office, Jackson aggressively expanded the power of the presidency. He was the first president to make frequent use of his constitutional veto power, vetoing more bills than all his predecessors combined. In particular, Jackson worked to destroy the national bank, which he and many of his supporters believed was a tool of Eastern financial elites. In the South, Jackson insisted on evicting the Cherokee from their tribal homelands to make way for white settlers.
Enormously popular, Jackson retired to his Nashville, Tennessee, estate in 1837 but continued to exert considerable influence on his party.
1. Jackson despised paper money and believed that gold and silver should be the only forms of American currency. Ironically, his face now appears on the $20 bill.
2. During the 1828 presidential campaign, Jackson’s supporters used hickory leaves and hickory poles to show their support for their candidate, who was nicknamed “Old Hickory.”
3. In 1999, scientists tested two strands of Jackson’s hair and determined that lead poisoning, likely the result of a bullet lodged in his shoulder from an 1813 gunfight, caused many of the president’s chronic health problems.
Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) commanded the Confederate army during the Civil War (1861–1865). Although ultimately defeated by the Union, Lee was considered a brilliant military tactician and inspiring leader by his troops. Gallant even in defeat, Lee became a symbol of Southern pride and a near-religious figure to may Southerners after the war’s end.
Born in Virginia to a prominent family, Lee attended the West Point military academy. He was extremely successful in school and later fought with distinction for the United States in the Mexican War (1846–1848). Lee opposed secession and considered slavery immoral, but he agreed to lead the Confederate forces out of loyalty to his home state of Virginia.
As a general, Lee faced overwhelming odds. At the beginning of the war, the Confederacy had a smaller population, fewer miles of roads and railroads, and a far smaller industrial base than the North.
Still, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia proved surprisingly able. He won several battles in Virginia in 1862 before mounting the ill-fated invasion of Maryland that ended in the defeat of his forces at Antietam. He tried invading the North again in 1863 but was again stopped, this time at Gettysburg.
In 1864, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) took command of the Union army. For the first time, a Union general effectively attacked Lee on his own turf. By the spring of 1865, the Confederate army, exhausted and starving, was in a state of collapse. Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865.
After the surrender, Lee urged his fellow Southerners to accept defeat graciously. In the years after his death, Lee’s sense of duty and honor made him a hero to Southerners and a central figure in the “lost cause” romanticism of the Confederacy. Hundreds of streets and bridges across the South still bear the name of the war’s greatest Confederate hero.
1. Military service was in Lee’s blood. He was the son of Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee (1756–1818), a famed hero of the American Revolution.
2. Lee graduated second in his class at West Point in 1829 and is the only student in the history of the institution to graduate without a single demerit on his record.
3. After the war, Lee was indicted for treason against the United States but never tried.
One of the most famous “conductors” on the Underground Railroad, escaped slave Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913) personally smuggled hundreds of fugitives into the North and later served as an important Union spy during the Civil War (1861–1865).
Born Araminta Ross in Maryland, Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849 and settled in Philadelphia. She worked as a servant and cook, and she used her meager salary to finance trips back to the South to help members of her family escape.
In the 1850s, most Underground Railroad volunteers remained in the relative safety of the North, waiting for fugitives to come to them. Tubman was one of the few abolitionists who actually ventured into the South to help slaves escape. A woman of extreme courage and ingenuity, she ran enormous personal risks by crossing the Mason-Dixon line into slave territory.
In total, Tubman is credited with helping about 300 slaves escape in her nineteen covert trips into the hostile territory of the South. For her bravery, she was nicknamed “Moses.” Said one fellow Underground Railroad conductor of Tubman: “She seemed wholly devoid of personal fear … her like … was never known before or since.”
After the outbreak of the Civil War, Tubman volunteered to serve as a spy for the Union army. Posing as a slave, she slipped past the Confederate lines on numerous occasions to scout military fortifications in South Carolina and Georgia, intelligence that contributed to a successful Union raid of Combahee River, South Carolina, in 1863.
Tubman’s heroic actions in the war came at huge peril: the penalty for espionage was death. After the war, however, the United States government never fulfilled its promises to pay Tubman for her spying.
Tubman spent the rest of her life in Auburn, New York, where she founded a home for the poor and elderly. She later slipped into poverty and was eventually forced to sell vegetables door-to-door for a living. She died in 1913 and was buried with military honors in belated recognition of her Civil War service.
1. Tubman was so hated by Southern slave owners that they reportedly offered a $60,000 reward—more than $1.3 million in 2007 dollars—for her capture.
2. Although she has been the subject of countless children’s books, no serious biography of Tubman existed until 2005, when Catherine Clinton published Harriet Tubman: Road to Freedom.
3. The Combahee River raid enabled about 750 slaves to escape from South Carolina.
Philanthropist and railroad mogul Leland Stanford (1824–1893) hammered in the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 and later used his enormous fortune to found Stanford University. In many respects, Stanford’s career reflected the unusual contradictions of the Gilded Age: although Stanford and his partners cut corners, mistreated employees, and corrupted politicians, they constructed a railroad that helped build the United States, and Stanford used the proceeds to found one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
Stanford was born into a prosperous New York family and moved to California shortly after the beginning of the 1848 gold rush. A shrewd entrepreneur, Stanford realized he could make more money selling supplies to miners than looking for gold himself; he opened a store and made a killing. Soon after, he formed a partnership with three other businessmen, creating a group that became known as the Big Four, to construct the California section of the planned transcontinental railroad. He also got involved with Republican politics and was elected governor of California in 1861.
While serving as governor, Stanford remained one of the Big Four, using his political influence and connections to grease the wheels for the Central Pacific Railroad because he believed that it would ultimately benefit the citizens of California. Immediately after leaving the governorship, Stanford resumed his position as the president of the line, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. The Central Pacific was notorious for mistreating the Chinese-American laborers who built the vast majority of the route, paying them less than whites and forcing employees of all races to work under unsafe conditions in the avalanche-prone Sierra Nevada.
By 1884, fifteen years after the opening of the transcontinental railroad line, Stanford had accumulated an enormous fortune of around $100 million. That year, however, his fifteen-year-old son died, a major blow to the tycoon. In his son’s memory, Stanford endowed Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1885. Still the president of the Central Pacific, Stanford was appointed the same year by the California legislature to the United States Senate, where he served until his death.
1. Technically the university is named after Stanford’s deceased son, Leland Jr., and not the mogul himself.
2. Stanford was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) for president.
3. Although Chinese immigrants built most of the railroad that made Stanford rich, he referred to them as “the dregs of Asia” in his 1862 inaugural address as governor of California and supported discriminatory policies against Chinese-Americans.
The Homestead Act of 1862 was a massive federal program that provided huge parcels of free land in the West to settlers. Under the act, which was designed to encourage Americans to populate the territory acquired sixty years earlier in the Louisiana Purchase, about 8 percent of the entire United States landmass was transferred from federal to private ownership. In total, about two million homesteaders claimed a tract of free land under the program, which remained in effect until 1986.
Providing land to settlers was a key goal of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. Indeed, along with containing the expansion of slavery, “free soil” was a key plank in the party’s original platform. Southern Democrats had opposed free soil, but when they left Congress during the Civil War (1861–1865), the Republicans suddenly had the votes to enact their agenda. The Homestead Act was passed in the same year as the law subsidizing the construction of the transcontinental railroad, another major impetus for migration to the West.
Under the law, any person over the age of twenty-one who was the head of a family and either a US citizen or an “alien” who intended to become a US citizen could file a claim for a 160-acre plot of federally owned land, as long as he or she built a home on the parcel and lived there for five years. As the Republicans hoped, the allure of free farmland prompted a mass migration to the West, which accelerated in the late nineteenth century and crested in 1913. The flow of settlers into the region allowed Congress to admit dozens of new western states after the Civil War.
Naturally, the biggest victims of the Homestead Act were Native Americans, whose ancestral lands the government was giving away to newcomers. The crush of white settlers, along with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, led to increasing tension with tribes on the Great Plains and in the Southwest that culminated in a series of wars in the 1870s and 1880s. By the early 1890s, most Native Americans had been forced onto reservations, and the “frontier” was officially declared closed in 1890.
With the obvious exception of the Civil War, the Homestead Act is often considered one of Lincoln’s most important accomplishments. By the time the program ended, the government had given away 270 million acres of land and successfully populated the western wilderness with white settlers.
1. The last homestead deed was awarded in 1988 to Kenneth Deardorff, a Vietnam veteran who in 1974 filed a claim for 80 acres in southern Alaska.
2. For most homesteaders, the entire cost of their 160 acres was an $18 application fee.
3. Many applications were rejected because the applicant did not fulfill the law’s building and residence requirements.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edith Wharton (1862–1937) grew up in a wealthy family in New York City and chronicled the habits of the wealthy in her elegant, urbane novels of Manhattan life. A trailblazing female author, Wharton wrote three of the best-known books of the early twentieth century: The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and her masterpiece, The Age of Innocence (1920).
Edith Newbold Jones was born when polite society in Manhattan was still ruled by “Old New York,” an aristocratic elite ensconced in stately mansions along Fifth Avenue. A product of this cloistered culture, she was a debutante at age seventeen, took her sailing vacations in Newport, traveled widely in Europe, and married a wealthy heir, Edward Wharton, in 1885.
Although she began writing in her teens, she did not publish her first poems and stories until after her marriage, when her work began to appear in Scribner’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly, the leading popular journals of the late nineteenth century. Edith Wharton’s first book, an interior decorating manual called The Decoration of Houses, was published in 1897.
Wharton’s debut novel, The House of Mirth, was published in 1905, and it was the biggest literary sensation of the year. In the novel, main character Lily Bart struggles to find a sufficiently rich husband among New York’s elite. The House of Mirth is often referred to as a “book of manners,” a literary genre distinguished by its detailed, even sociological attention to the customs and traditions of the characters.
After divorcing her husband in 1913, Wharton moved to France, where she hobnobbed with author Henry James (1843–1916) and other famous writers and artists and continued her successful writing career. Although Wharton spent the last three decades of her life in Europe, her American upbringing remained a major inspiration. In Ethan Frome, a short novel set in rural Massachusetts, Wharton explored the themes of sexual repression and the stunted intellectual life of rural New England. Her most famous book, the Pulitzer-winning novel The Age of Innocence, was set in the Manhattan of Wharton’s privileged youth, a time she wistfully remembered as an “age of innocence” before World War I (1914–1918) and the great social upheavals of the twentieth century.
1. The title of The House of Mirth comes from the King James version of a verse in the Bible, Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
2. Wharton volunteered to help war refugees during World War I and was awarded the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her efforts.
3. Wharton’s “country house”—a palatial estate she built in 1902 near Lenox, Massachusetts—is now a museum open to the public.
Considered the first modern American ballet dancer and the mother of American choreography, Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) spent most of her tumultuous career in Europe but had a huge and lasting influence on dance in her native country.
Born in San Francisco, Duncan moved to New York at age eighteen but soon tired of the roles offered to her and moved to London in 1899 seeking more challenging work. Lithe, beautiful, and temperamental, Duncan quickly became a sensation in the ballet halls of Europe, performing in Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Munich, and St. Petersburg.
In addition to her critical acclaim, Duncan became notorious for her unorthodox beliefs about politics and sexuality. A lifelong atheist, she sympathized with communism and briefly moved to the Soviet Union. She also disdained the institution of marriage and had high-profile affairs with several rich men who helped bankroll her extravagant lifestyle. She had two children by different fathers. A free spirit in every way imaginable, Duncan famously ended one of her shows by baring her left breast to the audience, defiantly rejecting the conventional standards of modesty demanded of women.
Duncan’s personal life, always turbulent, suffered a terrible blow in 1913, when her children drowned in the Seine River in Paris after their car slid over the bank. Later in life, after her return to Paris from the Soviet Union, Duncan became an alcoholic, and her dance career faltered. She published her autobiography, My Life, in 1927, and died later that year in an infamous automobile accident when her long, flowing scarf became entangled in a wheel and broke her neck.
Although Duncan did not allow her performances to be recorded, her bold, impulsive style liberated dance from its traditional styles and influenced the development of modern ballet in both Europe and the United States.
1. One of her beaus was Paris Singer, the heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune, who offered to buy her Madison Square Garden for performances.
2. Duncan’s family had an unfortunate tendency for unusual deaths; her father died at sea in a shipwreck.
3. Duncan legally adopted six female dancers, nicknamed les Isadorables, who carried on her legacy after her death.