Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the second choice of many delegates to the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago. Radical antislavery delegates thought the lawyer from Illinois was too moderate; moderate Republicans worried that Lincoln, who had failed in an 1858 Senate bid, would be unelectable. Lincoln captured the nomination as the compromise candidate, the only man acceptable to all factions.
So much has been written about Lincoln—widely considered one of the greatest American presidents—that his sheer political acumen is often forgotten. Lincoln’s behind-the-scenes deal making and political gamesmanship had as much to do with his success as his famously eloquent speeches. Lincoln not only won the presidency in a four-way race in 1860, he held together his fractious party during the long Civil War (1861–1865). He won the 1864 election, the first conducted in the midst of a war, despite public unease over the conflict in some parts of the country. At the time of his assassination, he was preparing for his most difficult political feat yet: finding a way to readmit the Southern states into the Union while satisfying the thirst for revenge of many of his fellow Republicans.
Lincoln’s political career began in 1846, when the young Illinois lawyer served a single term in the US Congress as a Whig. His tenure was brief, largely due to his unpopular vote against the Mexican War (1846–1848). Lincoln would eventually join the Republican Party in the 1850s, following the collapse of the Whigs.
As president, Lincoln inherited a badly divided country. Many Democrats sympathized with the rebels. Even Lincoln’s own generals were divided over how to attack the Confederacy, leading Lincoln to frequently change commanders until he found Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885). Lincoln was even forced to delay the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), one of his most notable achievements, until after the moraleboosting Union victory at the Battle of Antietam (1862).
The cult of Lincoln—the tales of his hardscrabble upbringing in a log cabin, his religious zeal—did not emerge until well after his death. His success in office, amid a struggle for national survival, was often a matter of pure political brinksmanship.
1. The Civil War divided many American families, including Lincoln’s: four of his brothers-in-law served in the Confederate army.
2. Lincoln’s troubled widow, Mary Todd Lincoln (1818–1882), was sitting beside him at Ford’s Theater when he was shot. She was declared insane in 1875, after years of erratic behavior following her husband’s assassination.
3. Lincoln ran for the US Senate in 1858 in Illinois, losing to Democrat Stephen Douglas (1813–1861) after a series of debates that made both men nationally famous.
The most successful general of the Civil War (1861–1865), Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) destroyed the Confederacy by aggressively attacking the Southern army. Before Grant took command in 1864, Union strategy had been overly cautious, and, in frustration, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) had fired a succession of top generals before finally putting Grant in charge.
Before the Civil War, Grant had achieved some distinction in the Mexican War (1846–1848), but he resigned from the Army afterward to pursue a string of business ventures that failed. When the war began, Grant had been reduced to working at his family’s leather goods store in Illinois.
He immediately rejoined the US Army at the outbreak of war and received a prestigious leadership position in Illinois despite rumors that he was an alcoholic. Grant participated in several campaigns in Tennessee and led the successful Union siege of Vicksburg in 1863.
Impressed by his success at Vicksburg, Lincoln put Grant in charge of all Union forces in 1864. By that point, with the 1864 elections approaching, Lincoln was desperate for a general who could go on the offensive and score decisive victories over the Confederacy to reassure Union voters that the war could be won. While Grant attacked Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) in Virginia, he ordered his trusted subordinate, General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891), to pursue the same aggressive strategy in Georgia.
After Lee’s surrender in 1865, Grant emerged a national hero. He handily won the 1868 election running as a Republican. Grant’s presidency, however, was a disaster. Marked by corruption and aimless leadership, historians consistently rank Grant’s presidency as one of the worst in US history.
Near the end of his life, while dying of cancer, Grant wrote his memoirs. Published after his death, the book is considered the finest written by an American president and was a runaway bestseller in the nineteenth century. Written in concise, gripping prose, it tells the story of the Civil War from the standpoint of its greatest soldier. But the memoirs do have a considerable omission: Grant never mentions his eight years as president of the United States.
1. Grant’s real birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but the registrar at West Point listed him incorrectly as Ulysses Simpson Grant when he enrolled in 1839. Rather than correct the error, Grant decided to accept the new name.
2. In the preface to his war memoirs, Grant frankly admitted that he hadn’t wanted to write the book but “consented for the money,” which he hoped would pay off his personal debts.
3. The publisher of Grant’s memoirs was his friend, the famous author Mark Twain (1835–1910).
The term Reconstruction refers to a period of twelve years between 1865 and 1877 when the federal government attempted to rebuild the Southern states that had been devastated by the Civil War. Reconstruction, however, involved much more than just physical rebuilding. Under orders from Congress, the program also sought to foster drastic social change in the South by extending new political and economic rights to ex-slaves who had been freed during the war.
In the first phase of Reconstruction, beginning in 1865, the government created an agency called the Freedman’s Bureau that established schools and hospitals in the South, negotiated contracts, and mediated disputes between former slaveholders and slaves. As originally envisioned by President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), the program was expected to be a modest, short-lived effort.
However, voters in 1866 elected a group of radical Republicans to Congress who believed Johnson’s program was too weak. The Republicans wanted to use the resources of the federal government far more aggressively to help ex-slaves claim political rights. Over Johnson’s opposition, they expanded Reconstruction and extended the Freedman’s Bureau until 1869. The Republicans also passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which formally granted United States citizenship and voting rights to ex-slaves.
Reconstruction was an unprecedented event in American history—a federal initiative where government authority came into direct contact with the lives of millions of ordinary Americans. Federal officials successfully registered thousands of blacks to vote, and many African-American congressmen and senators were elected from the region in the decade after the war.
Many white Southerners deeply resented Reconstruction, and federal efforts often met with violent resistance. The Ku Klux Klan, founded by ex-Confederate soldiers to oppose Reconstruction, became a powerful force across the South in the late 1860s.
Reconstruction ended abruptly in 1877, as part of the deal that resolved the contested 1876 election. With federal troops gone, white Southerners moved to undo most of Reconstruction’s advances. Southern legislatures quickly imposed Jim Crow laws on blacks and erected barriers to black voting.
1. In addition to giving blacks the vote, the federal government barred tens of thousands of ex-Confederate officers and politicians from voting or holding office.
2. Despite the harsh rhetoric of Union leaders during the Civil War, most top Confederates were quietly released during Reconstruction and never tried for treason.
3. Whites labeled Southerners who cooperated with Reconstruction scalawags, and most of them lost their offices promptly after the withdrawal of federal troops.
The Carnegie Steel Company, founded by the famed industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) in the 1870s, was the largest corporation in the United States in the late nineteenth century and a model of efficient industrial organization during the Gilded Age. After Carnegie’s retirement, the company became US Steel, which was the first billion-dollar firm in the world and for decades one of the biggest companies in the nation.
Carnegie was born in Scotland and immigrated to Pennsylvania as a child. The rapidly industrializing United States of the mid-nineteenth century offered a wealth of lucrative opportunities; Carnegie dabbled in railroads, telegraphs, and oil before finally setting his sights on the steel business.
By the 1870s, Carnegie had opened the steel mills near Pittsburgh that would become the nucleus for Carnegie Steel. As a business executive, Carnegie was famous for pursuing a strategy of vertical integration. In addition to the mills themselves, Carnegie sought to control every step of the manufacturing process. He bought his own iron mines as well as the ships and railroads that transported his products. Carnegie was also famous for keeping wages low and suppressing union activity among his workers, most famously at the violent Homestead Strike in 1892. There, agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who were hired by Carnegie’s business partner Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) to quell the protest, killed a number of workers who had gone on strike. Carnegie, who was in Scotland during the episode, stayed silently uninvolved.
Carnegie retired in 1901 and sold his business to a group of New York investors who merged it with several smaller companies to form the conglomerate US Steel. Paid an enormous fortune in gold for his stake of the business, Carnegie spent the rest of his life donating money to a variety of causes, including Carnegie libraries in thousands of towns across the United States and around the world. Although it is no longer the behemoth in the American economy that it once was, US Steel remains in business as the country’s biggest steel producer.
1. After Carnegie’s retirement, the federal government labeled US Steel a monopoly and tried unsuccessfully to break up the company under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
2. Pittsburgh’s NFL franchise was named the Steelers in recognition of the city’s long association with the steel industry.
3. In its beginning years of operation, US Steel accounted for 67 percent of all steel made in the United States.
James Buchanan Eads (1820–1887) became the first civil engineer to bridge the Mississippi River when he completed a mile-long span between Illinois and Missouri at St. Louis in 1874. The bridge, which was the world’s first made from steel and remains in use 130 years later, instantly assured St. Louis a role as a gateway of transcontinental traffic to the West. Hailed as a genius for taming the mighty Mississippi, Eads is also credited with building the Union’s Mississippi River navy during the Civil War (1861–1865) and the system of jetties that made river navigation easier in the 1870s and 1880s.
Before the construction of the bridge, the Mississippi presented a formidable obstacle to transcontinental commerce. The lack of a bridge was particularly worrisome in Eads’s hometown of St. Louis, which began losing trade to its rival Chicago during the Civil War.
At the time he proposed the bridge, Eads was already a national hero for his military service during the Civil War. An ardent Union supporter and an experienced Mississippi boatman, he had built seven ironclad warships at his own expense that had helped the Union keep control of the crucial waterway.
However, he had no experience building bridges. The majestic span at St. Louis would be his first, and he faced significant opposition from more-experienced engineers who insisted his plan was impossible. Further complicating the project, anxious riverboat companies insisted that Eads not block the river during the bridge’s construction.
As the bridge in St. Louis neared completion, Eads began work on the other project for which he is best known, his system of jetties on the Mississippi near New Orleans. At the mouth of the river, the pace of the Mississippi slowed considerably. Eads proposed building jetties to narrow the river, which would speed the flow. Again in the face of significant nay-saying, the “tamer of the Mississippi” began construction in 1875. The project resulted in an enormous increase in river traffic. His next big project was to have been a canal across Panama, but he died before he could begin work on it.
1. His cousin and namesake was James Buchanan (1791–1868), the fifteenth US president.
2. The last freight train crossed the bridge in 1974, a century after its opening; the span is now used for a mass transit line.
3. During the construction of the support piers for the Eads Bridge, twelve workers died, at least three from the bends, a condition triggered by resurfacing to quickly from underwater.
Generally regarded as the nation’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) was the first American dramatist of international repute and was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 for his dark, brooding tragedies about small-time hustlers, failed marriages, drug addicts, insanity, and a gloomy range of human woes.
O’Neill was born in a hotel in New York City to James O’Neill, a successful but frugal stage actor, and Ella O’Neill, who became addicted to morphine as a result of complications during the baby’s birth. Rage he felt toward his miserly father and drug-addicted mother was an emotion that would recur in many of O’Neill’s plays, especially the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was published only after the writer’s death.
An alcoholic from an early age, O’Neill had a personal life as turbulent and tragic as his plays. He was expelled from Princeton in 1907 for poor grades and drinking, went to sea, and attempted suicide at least once before settling into a job as a newspaper reporter in New London, Connecticut. He married three times and had two sons, both of whom committed suicide later in their lives, and one daughter, Oona (1926–1991), whom O’Neill disowned after she married the actor Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977). His career eventually took off in the 1920s, but in a cruel twist of fate, he developed a debilitating tremor in his hand that prevented him from writing for the last decade of his life. O’Neill died in a hotel room in Boston; his last words, reportedly, were “Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room!”
O’Neill left thirty of the most original, moving plays in American history as a legacy. The Iceman Cometh, a play about a despondent group of barflies, published in 1939, is cited by some critics as his greatest masterpiece. In addition to his Nobel Prize, O’Neill won four Pulitzers, the most awarded to any playwright.
1. One of O’Neill plays, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), was a reworking of the classic Greek drama Oresteia (458 BC) by Aeschylus (525–426 BC), which O’Neill updated and set during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
2. As of 2007, O’Neill remained the only American playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
3. O’Neill did not want the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night published until twenty-five years after his death, but his widow, the actress Carlotta Monterey, defied his wishes and had it published in 1956, three years later.
Released in 1927 and starring the popular singer Al Jolson (1886–1950), The Jazz Singer was the first “talkie” in the history of Hollywood. The film employed a new technology that quickly revolutionized the motion picture industry. The movie, which tells the story of an aspiring jazz musician played by Jolson, was an immediate hit. Within four years, the era of silent movies was effectively over as nearly all studios rushed to embrace the talkie.
In the film, Jolson plays an Orthodox Jew who runs away from home after his conservative father disapproves of his musical career. Most of the movie is silent. But the Warner Brothers studio paid extra to record Jolson’s songs in the movie, making The Jazz Singer the first major feature film with synchronized sound. None of the actual dialogue was recorded, except for a single prescient line spoken by Jolson: “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
The movie’s runaway success owed much to the electrifying performance of Jolson, one of the era’s most well-known and versatile entertainers. Born in Lithuania, Jolson had emigrated as a child and quickly found success as a vaudeville entertainer. The Jazz Singer is controversial, however, because Jolson, who was white, performed in blackface, a common practice at the time that is now considered offensive.
Still, the success of The Jazz Singer sounded the death knell for the age of silent film. One by one, the major Hollywood studios switched from silent films to talkies, despite the huge costs then associated with the new technology. By the early 1930s, the transition was complete. Jolson remained a musical star until his death in 1950, although in films he never again matched the success of The Jazz Singer.
1. The Jazz Singer was nominated for an Oscar at the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.
2. Jolson was born Asa Yoelson but anglicized his name after leaving Lithuania.
3. Although extremely controversial, blackface minstrel shows are still performed occasionally by Jolson impersonators, according to the New York Times.