A staunch defender of slavery, John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) represented South Carolina in the US Senate for decades and also served as vice president of the United States under two presidents. Calhoun, along with Henry Clay (1777–1852) and Daniel Webster (1782–1852), belonged to the so-called Great Triumvirate of prominent senators who dominated Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War (1861–1865).
Of the three, Calhoun remains the most controversial for his unabashed support of slavery. Unlike many other Southerners, who claimed that slavery was a “necessary evil,” Calhoun insisted that it was, in fact, a “positive good.” In an infamous 1837 speech on the Senate floor, Calhoun claimed that the institution of slavery had actually helped blacks. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,” he said.
Although his justifications for slavery sound appalling to modern ears, Calhoun was by far the most eloquent and powerful voice for the South in Congress at a time when Northern opinion, prodded by the abolitionist movement, was beginning to turn decisively against slavery. Calhoun tenaciously opposed efforts to limit slavery. Indeed, the main purpose of Calhoun’s 1837 speech was to attack the Northern abolitionists, whom Calhoun dismissed as “fanatics” blind to slavery’s alleged benefits.
Calhoun was born in South Carolina and graduated from Yale in 1804. In his early political career, which began with his election to Congress in 1810, he did not show any particular interest in slavery. Not until the 1830s, with sectional differences over slavery deepening, did Calhoun mount the zealous defense of the institution for which he is now remembered.
1. John Caldwall Calhoun was named after an uncle who was murdered by British Loyalists during the American Revolution.
2. In 1840, Calhoun successfully passed a law prohibiting abolitionists from mailing their pamphlets to the South.
3. Calhoun resigned as President Andrew Jackson’s vice president in 1832, one of only two vice presidents to resign from office. (Spiro Agnew became the second in 1973.)
The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the single bloodiest day of the American Civil War and remains the deadliest day in the history of American warfare. Total Union and Confederate casualties at Antietam, a small creek in Maryland about fifty miles northwest of Washington, DC, exceeded 23,000 men. The battle, a Union victory, halted a planned Confederate invasion of Maryland.
On September 3, 1862, Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) decided to invade Maryland, a border state where slavery was still legal. Lee and Confederate president Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) hoped that a Southern victory on Northern soil would deal a crippling blow to Union morale before the 1862 midterm elections.
However, the warm welcome from Marylanders that Lee expected never materialized, and US President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) immediately sent Union general George McClellan (1826–1885) with troops to repel the invasion. The Union troops caught up with Lee near the town of Sharpsburg on the evening of September 16.
The battle the next day lasted twelve ferocious hours. Nearly 100,000 soldiers participated in the battle—a force of greater size than the entire army that had fought the American Revolution seventy years earlier.
Although both armies suffered awful casualties, it was Lee who decided to withdraw from the fight, retreating back to Virginia. Lincoln, sensing an opportunity to finish off Lee’s army once and for all, ordered McClellan to pursue Lee into Virginia, but McClellan enraged Lincoln by dragging his feet. For the Union, McClellan’s failure to follow Lee into Virginia was one of the great lost opportunities of the war.
1. In the South, the clash was known by a different name, the Battle of Sharpsburg.
2. Six generals were killed—three on each side—during the battle.
3. The dead were buried hastily after the battle in shallow graves, many of which soon became exposed; not until 1867 did the army finally establish a cemetery on the site and give its fallen proper burials.
Starting in 1845, hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants immigrated to the United States to escape a deadly famine devastating their homeland. The Irish, most of them Roman Catholics who settled in the big cities of the Northeast, formed the first mass influx of immigrants in US history. But the sudden arrival of so many poor, uneducated immigrants provoked a wave of hysteria among the area’s Protestant population and led to a vicious backlash against Catholics and foreigners in the 1850s.
Prior to the Irish famine, the population of the United States was almost exclusively Protestant. Anti-Catholic prejudice, moreover, was strong. Beginning with the Puritans, many Americans regarded the Roman Catholic Church and the pope with deep suspicion and perceived Catholicism as a threat to democratic government.
The sudden arrival of so many Catholics, combined with centuries-old hatred, made friction inevitable. Anti-Irish riots erupted in Philadelphia. In Massachusetts, several Catholic churches and convents were looted by Protestant mobs. In 1854, at the height of the backlash, opponents of immigration formed a political party, the Know-Nothing Party, that swept the Massachusetts elections that fall and polled well across the Northeast and Midwest. The Know-Nothing platform promised to limit future immigration from Catholic countries, make it more difficult for immigrants to acquire American citizenship, and teach Protestantism in public schools.
Religious tensions subsided after the Civil War (1861–1865), and subsequent waves of Catholic immigrants arrived from Italy, Poland, and Germany. However, prejudice against the Irish would linger for decades.
1. Despite a rather auspicious start in politics, the Know-Nothings had dissolved by the election of 1860, with the new Republican Party absorbing their antislavery contingent.
2. The 2002 movie Gangs of New York, directed by Martin Scorsese, is loosely based on religious strife between Catholics and Protestants in New York City during the 1840s.
3. The Know-Nothings began as a clandestine organization. They acquired their name from the reply members were supposed to give—“I know nothing”—when asked about their secret meetings.
One of the first global economic downturns, the Panic of 1873 started in Vienna, Austria, and spread to the United States several months later, where it sparked a five-year depression that ruined thousands of businesses, depressed wages, and sent the unemployment rate skyrocketing. The Panic of 1873 temporarily slowed the massive growth in manufacturing that had followed the end of the Civil War (1861–1865) and greatly crippled the progress of Reconstruction in the South.
In early 1873, the national economy showed few outward signs of vulnerability. Indeed, in the eight years after the Civil War, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track had been constructed, thousands of factories opened, and the stock market surged upward. Even in the South, which bore the brunt of the devastation from the war, agriculture was on the rebound.
Many of the railroads, however, were built with borrowed money. In June 1873, the Vienna Stock Exchange crashed. Turmoil in the European markets spread to the United States on September 18, 1873, when one of the biggest bankers for the American railroad industry, Jay Cooke and Company, declared bankruptcy. Cooke’s bankruptcy was a major blow to the railroads, which lost their biggest source of cash; 89 of 364 American railroads would go bankrupt during the panic, and railroad stocks lost a third of their overall value.
For American workers, the Panic of 1873 was a crippling blow. Unemployment shot up to 14 percent of the labor force, and average wages declined sharply. While railroad stocks recovered by the end of the 1870s, it would be decades before wages would return to their pre-1873 levels.
The Panic of 1873 also exposed the hapless incompetence of the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885). Although a war hero and military genius, Grant proved incapable of responding to the nation’s sudden onset of economic woe. Indeed, in the view of some historians, the Grant administration may have exacerbated the panic by deflating the money supply, a policy that made credit relatively scarce and hastened bankruptcy for some firms.
1. At the time of the panic, Cooke was hoping to finance a second transcontinental railroad to compete with the line opened in 1869; the Northern Pacific would not be completed until 1883.
2. The stock market crash on September 19, 1873, the day after Cooke declared bankruptcy, became known as Black Friday.
3. The average daily wage dropped from $1.46 in 1872 to $1.12 in 1879 before beginning to inch back up.
The flag of Atlanta shows a phoenix rising from the ashes, a fitting symbol for a city that recovered from greater devastation than perhaps any other major American metropolis. Burned to the ground in 1864 by Union troops, the city was quickly rebuilt into one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the South.
Founded in 1837 at the end of a railroad line, the city was originally named Terminus. It became Marthasville in 1843—in honor of the then-governor’s daughter—and finally Atlanta in 1845. By the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Atlanta had grown into one of the leading rail hubs in the South, with four lines converging on the city and a population of about 10,000 residents.
During the war, the city was a major supply center for the Confederacy, dispatching trainloads of ammunition and food from its foundries, mills, and carriage shops to Southern troops at the front. In an effort to destroy the Confederacy’s war-making ability, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891) attacked Atlanta during his famous “March to the Sea” on September 2, 1864, and set the city ablaze two weeks later—a fire famously portrayed in the movie Gone with the Wind (1939).
Sherman’s attack reduced Atlanta to blackened ruins, but the city vowed to rebuild. In the decades after the Civil War, Atlanta became the capital for proponents of the so-called New South, a generation of Southerners who wanted to rebuild their region and forget about the tainted past. Within two decades, Atlanta had far surpassed its prewar population number. Many major businesses, including the famous soft drink maker Coca-Cola, moved to the newly resurgent city, which has become one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the United States.
1. The word Atlanta has no historical meaning; it was derived from Atlantic.
2. The city was built on land vacated by the Cherokees who were forced to move to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears in 1837.
3. Only 400 buildings were left standing in Atlanta at the end of 1864.
The leading man of letters in the early twentieth century, sharp-witted Baltimore journalist and critic H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) held American society up for ridicule in his powerful essays and helped popularize a generation of iconoclastic novelists like Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) and Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951).
Henry Louis Mencken, the son of a successful Baltimore cigar maker, got his first newspaper job at the Baltimore Morning Herald when he was eighteen. He rose quickly through the ranks at the newspaper and in 1906 moved to the rival Baltimore Sun, which would remain his journalistic home on and off for the remainder of his life.
Even as a young reporter, Mencken took an active interest in the American literary scene, and he authored his first book in 1905, George Bernard Shaw—His Plays. Mencken was an extremely prolific writer, sometimes penning dozens of letters a day in addition to his journalistic endeavors.
In 1908, Mencken began his association with The Smart Set, an irreverent magazine that gave the young writer a national audience and space to hone his trademark, snarling style. In his writing about culture and politics, Mencken lampooned American society with his caustic, savage wit, often referring contemptuously to ordinary Americans as the “Boobus Americanus.” Hypocrisy and religious fundamentalism particularly annoyed Mencken, who reserved some of his harshest invective for President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924).
Smart Set went out of business after World War I (1914–1918), but in 1924 it was resurrected as a new publication called American Mercury. In American Mercury, one of the most popular magazines of the decade, Mencken continued his attacks on American “boobs,” and he achieved notoriety for his coverage of the Scopes trial in 1925, in which he relentlessly ridiculed William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) and the fundamentalist Christian opponents of evolution. Mencken also used the magazine to praise up-and-coming writers like Lewis, whose famous Babbitt character Mencken cited as an archetypal American boob.
A proud, lifelong Baltimore resident, Mencken died in his sleep at age seventy-five in the same house he had lived in with his parents since age two.
1. Mencken was married once, at age fifty, to Baltimore writer Sara Haardt in 1930, but she died five years later.
2. A conservative, Mencken was a committed opponent of the New Deal and ridiculed the economic recovery programs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) in his column.
3. Over a lifetime in print, Mencken produced thousands of articles, memorabilia, and ephemera affectionately known to collectors and admirers as “Menckeniana.”
In 1936, Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) released his most famous motion picture, Modern Times. The movie’s title was a deliberate misnomer. Chaplin, a star of silent films who hated the newfangled “talkies,” never spoke in the movie, which was the last hurrah of the silent film era. The movie also marked the last appearance of Chaplin’s beloved Little Tramp character, the biggest star of Hollywood’s formative years.
The British-born Charles Spencer Chaplin had moved to California in 1913 and was soon acting in dozens of silent films every year. His famous, unnamed Little Tramp dressed in comically oversize pants, a tiny jacket, and a black bowler hat. Within a few years, Chaplin had become a major star and was directing most of his own films. Along with fellow movie stars Mary Pickford (1893–1979) and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (1883–1939) and the famous director D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), he founded the United Artists studio in 1919.
For the most part, Chaplin’s films were whimsical and comical. The Little Tramp was an endearing naïf, always in the wrong place at the wrong time. For instance, in The Kid, released in 1921, the Tramp finds a baby who has been abandoned by his mother and ends up trying to raise the child himself. Chaplin, who had been trained on the vaudeville stage, was able to master the art of the silent film, communicating the emotions of his character through gestures alone.
The invention of the talkie made the Little Tramp obsolete. Chaplin, however, saved his best effort for last. Modern Times, appropriately enough, tells the story of the Little Tramp struggling to survive in an increasingly impersonal, technological society. In one famous scene, the Tramp is ground between the gears at a factory, a metaphor for the dehumanizing effect of modern industry on the human spirit.
Chaplin finally spoke in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, a pointed satire of Nazi Germany. In that film, Chaplin played Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of the fictional country of Tomania, who bore a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). Chaplin continued to act in occasional films and also wrote the music for many movies, but he went into self-imposed exile in Switzerland in 1952 and died there in 1977.
1. Chaplin never acquired United States citizenship, and he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (1926–) in 1975, shortly before his death.
2. Chaplin’s fourth wife, eighteen-year-old Oona O’Neill (1926–1991), whom he married when he was fifty-four, was the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953).
3. Chaplin won two honorary Oscars—one at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and the other in 1972—but only one ordinary award: the 1973 Best Original Score Oscar for his music for Limelight.