Daniel Webster (1782–1852) was the most famous orator of the first half of the nineteenth century, a person capable of drawing tens of thousands of spectators to his captivating speeches. As a lawyer and politician, Webster used his gift to successfully argue several landmark cases before the United States Supreme Court and then won election to the US Senate from Massachusetts. In his long Senate career, Webster reached the pinnacle of his fame as an unceasing supporter of the Union during acrimonious debates over slavery in the 1830s and 1840s.
Webster graduated from Dartmouth College in his home state of New Hampshire. He later moved to Boston to open a law office. As a lawyer, he represented his alma mater in a precedent-setting Supreme Court case, Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). In the case, justices ruled that the state of New Hampshire couldn’t seize Dartmouth and turn it into a public university, as they had planned. Webster also argued McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), a crucial case upholding the federal government’s right to charter a national bank.
Elected to the Senate from Massachusetts in 1827, Webster emerged as one of the foremost opponents of Southern separatism and the doctrine of states’ rights. Webster believed in a strong federal government and opposed efforts by Southern states to opt out of tax laws they disliked. He ended an 1830 speech on the Senate floor with a famous refrain that would be repeated by Webster’s admirers for decades: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
On the issue of slavery, Webster’s personal views favored the abolitionists. Slavery, he felt, was “a great moral and political evil.” But Webster cared more about preserving the Union than about ending slavery, and he alienated many abolitionists with his willingness to compromise with pro-slavery southerners. Abolitionists denounced Webster for supporting the controversial Compromise of 1850, which they felt gave too much ground to pro-slavery forces; Webster, sensing that both sides would not budge, acridly declared in the middle of the debate that he wanted to “beat down the Northern and Southern follies, now raging in equal extremes.”
Like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, Webster achieved greatness as a senator but never realized his ultimate ambition, the presidency. He ran several times without success. Webster was on the ticket in 1852, but he died a few weeks before the election.
1. In an 1825 speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, 20,000 Bostonians listened to Webster’s oration, which he gave without the assistance of a microphone.
2. Webster’s last words, as he lay dying of cirrhosis, were “I still live.”
3. A fantastical 1937 short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898– 1943), was made into an opera of the same title by Douglas Stuart Moore (1893–1969) in 1939.
Although the Union attack on Battery Wagner on July 11, 1863, had little military impact on the Civil War (1861–1865), it marked a significant milestone in the history of civil rights and American warfare. The 600-man unit that led the assault on the small Confederate fortress in Charleston, South Carolina, was the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first all-black unit in the history of the United States Army.
African-Americans had fought in the American Revolution, but at the outset of the Civil War, the military strongly resisted accepting black volunteers as regular soldiers. Only in March 1863, with the war raging and manpower short, did President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) sign the Emancipation Proclamation allowing black soldiers to enlist in segregated regiments.
Not surprisingly, many African-Americans in the North, eager for a chance to help crush slavery, rushed to join the fight against the Confederacy, including two sons of the prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1817–1895). Within months of Lincoln’s order, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was ready for combat.
Even before entering the battlefield, the soldiers in the regiment endured a series of humiliations from their own leadership. Initially, the War Department in Washington, DC, offered to pay black privates only $10 a month, rather than the $13 paid whites of the same rank. Outraged, the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts fought without pay, rather than accept less than whites. Originally, the army also refused to allow blacks to become officers. The commander of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837–1863), a prominent white antislavery activist from Boston.
The heroics of the soldiers during the attack on Battery Wagner made the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts nationally famous. The assault itself, ironically, was a failure, and about a third of the regiment, including Shaw, died in battle. However, the bravery of the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts impressed the nation and put pressure on Congress to equalize pay for black and white soldiers, which it finally did in June 1864.
1. A member of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, Sergeant William H. Carney, became the first African-American to win the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, for his heroism at Battery Wagner in 1863.
2. In 1897, the city of Boston erected a monument designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) in memory of the regiment, in a place of honor across the street from the Massachusetts state capitol.
3. The 1989 movie Glory, starring Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington, was based on the exploits of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Washington’s performance in the film won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
On July 13, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, deadly riots erupted in New York City in protest of the North’s military draft. Most of the rioters were poor, white, unskilled immigrants, many of them newly arrived from Ireland. The rioters burned and looted hundreds of buildings in New York and killed dozens of African-Americans in one of the country’s deadliest outbreaks of racial violence.
Economic competition between immigrants and African-Americans formed the backdrop for the riots. The Emancipation Proclamation not only freed the slaves, overnight it created a vast new potential source of labor for American industry. Irish immigrants, who occupied the lowest rung on the nation’s economic ladder, feared they would lose their jobs to ex-slaves, and they deeply resented the draft that forced them to fight for a cause many feared would lead to their own economic ruin. Rioters also objected to the unfairness of the draft, which allowed the rich to avoid service by paying a $300 fee.
Over the course of three days, the mob took over the city’s Second Avenue Armory, ransacked the homes of prominent abolitionists, looted the headquarters of a leading Republican newspaper, burned down a black orphanage, and hanged or drowned in the East River scores of African-Americans. According to historian Eric Foner, the riots were the second-worst rebellion against federal authority in the nation’s history—after only the Civil War itself.
In response to the outbreak of violence, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) responded forcefully. Battle-hardened Union troops were diverted from Gettysburg and quickly marched to New York, where they killed more than 100 of the protesters. Estimates of the total death toll range as high as 1,000. Although suppressed within a few days, the riots exposed seething racial tensions in the North.
1. New York was a stronghold for “copperheads,” or Democrats who opposed the Civil War. The label, coined by Republicans, comes from the name of a poisonous snake.
2. At the time of the riots, the New York police force numbered 800 poorly equipped officers; the mayhem prompted the formation of the modern New York City police department.
3. The mob, perhaps making a fashion statement, also burned down the Brooks Brothers clothing store.
Inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) developed scores of new technologies at his famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, including the incandescent lightbulb, the phonograph, and many of the advances that made movies possible. An entrepreneur, Edison also founded the company that eventually became General Electric, which is today among the nation’s largest corporations. One of the keys to Edison’s huge success was his ability to combine technological genius with a practical understanding of the desires of the American consumer.
Edison was born in Ohio and first learned about electricity while working for telegraph companies in the Midwest in the 1860s. Many of his first patents were improvements to the telegraph. Edison eventually moved to New Jersey, where he would establish his national reputation after his invention of the phonograph in 1877.
The first phonograph was a primitive device that recorded sounds onto a fragile metal disk. Its invention made Edison famous; it seemed so magical that he became known as the Wizard of Menlo Park for his ingenuity. After the phonograph, Edison was able to attract investments from major financiers, including the finance mogul J. P. Morgan (1837–1913), to begin work on developing an electric lightbulb. Many other scientists had attempted to build such a device, but Edison was the first to succeed. He produced the first practical incandescent lightbulb in 1879.
During the 1880s, the electricity company Edison founded to power the bulbs was locked in a battle with its main competitor over how to transmit electricity. The competition pitted Edison’s direct current (DC) transmission system against the alternating current (AC) system devised by rival George Westinghouse (1846–1914). After decades of bitter rivalry, the AC system won out as a means of delivering power to homes, although Edison's DC is still used for other applications, including the third rail on subway lines.
Edison continued to invent during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1891, he patented the kinetoscope, a motion picture projector that was an early predecessor to modern motion picture technology. In 1892, Morgan arranged to combine Edison’s business with several others to form General Electric.
1. Edison opposed capital punishment but inadvertently invented the electric chair. Seeking to disparage AC power as too dangerous, he facetiously suggested it should be used for executions; state authorities took him seriously and began electrocuting criminals in the 1890s.
2. Edison did not invent the telephone, but he is sometimes credited as the person responsible for popularizing the practice of answering the phone with the word “hello.”
3. In 1954, the New Jersey town that included Menlo Park renamed itself Edison in honor of the inventor.
At the time of its opening on May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and a marvel of modern construction. Spanning the East River, the bridge connected Manhattan with Brooklyn, which at that time were separate cities in New York. Iconic as an engineering milestone, the Brooklyn Bridge also reflected the rapid growth of American cities in the decades after the Civil War (1861–1865).
Prior to the bridge’s construction, travelers had to take a ferry between the two cities, which were the first and third largest in the nation as of 1880 (Philadelphia occupied second place). The East River at that point widened to nearly a half mile across, far too great a distance for traditional bridges. The difficulty of crossing the river was both an everyday annoyance to New Yorkers and a drain on the city’s economy.
Engineer John Roebling (1806–1869), a German immigrant, finally devised a way to cross the river in 1870. Suspension bridges were not a new idea; they had been constructed by the ancient Roman and ancient Incan civilizations, among others. But Roebling added a new element. Instead of using rope woven from hemp, his design called for thick steel wires to hold up the bridge’s span.
The construction of the bridge took thirteen years and exacted a major toll on Roebling’s family. Roebling himself died from tetanus following an accident in the early stages of construction; his son, Washington Roebling (1837–1926), took over the project but was crippled for life after contracting decompression sickness on a visit to the underwater section of one of the bridge’s piers. Although Washington Roebling remained nominally in charge of the bridge’s construction, his wife, Emily Warren Roebling (1843–1903), handled most of rest of the project.
When it finally opened, the Brooklyn Bridge surpassed any other structure in the world. More than a mile long, it was a thousand feet longer than any other span. Additionally, its towers were believed to be the tallest in the world. Despite fears that the fantastic structure would collapse, thousands crossed the bridge on its first day, and it has continued to dazzle visitors to New York City ever since.
1. The Brooklyn Bridge once carried elevated trains in addition to cars; a pedestrian walkway is now in the space once occupied by train tracks.
2. Manhattan and Brooklyn, along with the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, were formally joined into one city, Greater New York, in 1898.
3. Two other suspension bridges built later, the Manhattan Bridge (1909) and the Williamsburg Bridge (1903), now connect Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was recognized in 1930 for his books Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), which lampooned American materialism and provincialism and earned the author his reputation as an acerbic cultural critic.
Lewis was born in Minnesota in 1885 and graduated from Yale in 1908. He spent most of his twenties as a struggling writer, working at various magazines and publishing houses, including a brief stint as an editor at a magazine for teachers of the deaf.
Main Street, published when Lewis was thirty-five, was an enormous success, aided by the enthusiastic reviews of H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). The book chronicled the life of Carol Milford, a young woman in Minneapolis who marries a doctor and moves to his small hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Expecting a bucolic country village, she instead finds an ugly, conservative backwater.
By satirizing small-town customs, Lewis challenged one of America’s favorite beliefs about itself—namely, the inherent virtue of rural life. Lewis himself described the reaction to the book’s message with his characteristic droll sarcasm. “One of the most treasured American myths,” he wrote, “had been that all American villages were peculiarly noble and happy, and here an American attacked that myth. Scandalous.”
Babbitt, a wry satire on conformity and civic boosterism, followed two years later. Set in the fictional city of Zenith, which Lewis modeled on Cincinnati, the novel’s main character is the selfish real estate salesman George Babbitt, one of the most memorable characters in American fiction.
After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis’s career quickly slid downhill, lubricated by large amounts of alcohol. He wrote one more well-received novel, a satire on fascism called It Can’t Happen Here (1935), and died in Rome of health problems related to his alcoholism at age sixty-five.
1. In 1906, Lewis worked briefly as a janitor at a utopian community founded by the author Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), with whom he is often confused because of their similar names.
2. Lewis was born in the town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the model for Gopher Prairie.
3. His oldest son, Wells Lewis, was killed in France during World War II (1939–1945).
One of the twentieth century’s most popular and prolific songwriters, Irving Berlin (1888–1989) composed “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” and dozens of other tunes that lifted spirits during World War II (1939–1945) and have become permanent parts of the nation’s songbook.
Originally named Israel Baline, Berlin was born to a large Jewish family in a tiny Siberian village called Tyumen. After a pogrom, the family fled to the United States in 1893 and wound up in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, where many newly arrived Jewish immigrants first settled.
Growing up on the rough-and-tumble streets of New York, the young Berlin worked as a newspaper vendor, street busker, and even a singing waiter in Chinatown. Forced to support his family after the death of his father in 1896, Berlin completed only about two years of school.
Despite a lack of formal musical training, Berlin began writing songs in his spare time when he was eighteen and published his first score in 1907. His first major Tin Pan Alley hit, the unforgettably catchy “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” was released in 1911.
A rising musical star, Berlin’s career was put on hold when he was drafted into the US Army during World War I (1914–1918). After his return, Berlin wrote a spate of hits in the 1920s, including “Remember” and “Always,” and embarked on a high-profile courtship of a wealthy Irish Catholic heiress, Ellin Mackay. In a drama worthy of one of his own songs, Berlin convinced Mackay to marry him and then gave her the royalty rights to the romantic song “Always” after her father disowned her for marrying a lowly Jewish immigrant.
In 1938, at the peak of his career, Berlin wrote the patriotic song “God Bless America” for the singer Kate Smith (1909–1986); it was an instant hit. “White Christmas,” Berlin’s single most successful song, was released in 1942.
After World War II, Berlin continued writing at a prodigious clip. By the time he retired in the late 1960s, he had composed 1,500 songs, 19 Broadway shows, and the sound tracks to 18 movies. In the last decades of his life, Berlin became somewhat of a recluse at his Manhattan townhouse, but he lived to see a huge Carnegie Hall party for his 100th birthday in 1988, a celebration of America’s best-loved songwriter. He died at age 101.
1. The Willie Nelson hit “Blue Skies” was originally composed by Berlin in 1927.
2. Berlin wrote a campaign song for Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) in 1952, “I Like Ike.”
3. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” is not actually written in ragtime; it is a march.