The government of the Confederate States of America, created by the Southern states in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War and headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, functioned for four years as a through-the-looking-glass version of the United States. It preserved many elements of the American Constitution but explicitly protected the institution of slavery.
In early 1861, delegates from the seceding states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to write the Confederate constitution. Eventually, the Confederacy would include South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Although the Confederacy was vast in size—about a third of the US landmass—it was more sparsely populated and had far less industry than the North.
Confederate leaders based their constitution on the 1787 US Constitution and borrowed some passages verbatim, but with several major differences. In the Confederate system, the president was limited to a single six-year term. Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), a Mississippi politician, was elected the first and only Confederate president in 1861.
Leaders of the Confederacy, including Davis, believed that the South’s best bet for success was winning foreign recognition, which might in turn force the North to accept a negotiated settlement recognizing Southern independence. The South was a major source of the world’s cotton, and Confederate leaders hoped that the European powers would recognize the Confederacy rather than lose access to the crucial commodity. However, despite the best efforts of Confederate diplomats, no foreign countries would recognize the Confederacy.
The Confederate government, increasingly at the mercy of uncooperative state governors, proved incapable of organizing a major effort against its foe. When the Union army captured the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, in April 1865, the Confederate government fled to Danville, Virginia, and had ceased to exist by the end of the month.
1. The Confederate government planned to mint its own coins but was so cash-strapped that it was able to produce only 504 silver half-dollars, most of which were Union coins with one side smoothed off and replaced with a Confederate logo.
2. The Confederate House of Representatives included a former US president, John Tyler (1790–1862), who represented Virginia.
3. On March 13, 1865, with the war almost lost, the desperate Confederate Congress authorized the enlistment of blacks in the Confederate army, an offer that many blacks unsurprisingly spurned.
“War … is all hell.”
—William Tecumseh Sherman
A deeply controversial figure, William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891) was one of the most successful Union generals of the Civil War (1861–1865), but he was reviled in the South for his scorched-earth tactics. Sherman’s 1864 “march to the sea” destroyed much of the heartland of the Confederacy, hastening the end of the war but leaving much of Georgia in ruins.
Born in Ohio, Sherman graduated from West Point in 1840 and fought in several wars against Native American tribes early in his career. After leaving the military, he moved to Louisiana, where he took command of a small military academy and developed a personal appreciation for the South.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Confederate officials in Louisiana offered Sherman a commission in the rebel force. He refused, returning north instead to rejoin the Union army. Sherman fought bravely at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861, was promoted to general, and was eventually assigned to the staff of the Union army commander Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885).
In Grant, Sherman found a superior who was able to make good use of his meticulous attention to detail. As Grant’s star rose in the Union army, so did Sherman’s. Eventually, in 1864, Grant gave Sherman overall command of Union forces in the West, with orders to break the back of Confederate military power.
After fierce fighting, Sherman’s troops took Atlanta on September 1, 1864, and then began their infamous “march to the sea.” The army made its way from Atlanta to Savannah, about 250 miles, sabotaging railroads and factories and pillaging the countryside. Sherman’s goal was to destroy the South’s ability to make war, but many Southerners saw his campaign as nothing short of barbarity.
Sherman himself saw the march as a necessary evil to force an end to the war, and he took little pleasure in the brutality of combat. A national hero after the war, Sherman declined an invitation to run for president in 1884 and died of pneumonia at age seventy-one.
1. The Sherman tank, the main tank used by the US Army during World War II (1939–1945), was named in honor of Sherman.
2. Sherman’s younger brother, John, was elected to the US Senate from Ohio and authored the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
3. During their march across the South, Sherman’s troops wrecked miles of railroad tracks to prevent the South from using them, bending the rails into twisted heaps nicknamed “Sherman’s hairpins.”
In the wake of the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States Congress approved three amendments to the US Constitution—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—that extended basic civil rights to African-Americans for the first time.
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, permanently abolished slavery. The amendment liberated slaves in the border states, who had not been covered by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, officially defined American citizenship for the first time and in so doing granted freed slaves citizen status. The amendment also established that all people in the United States are entitled to “due process of law.”
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, established that the right of US citizens to vote shall not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Northern states approved the three amendments quickly. In the South, however, opposition was strong, spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan. In order to attain the three-quarters threshold of state ratifications required for an amendment’s inclusion in the Constitution, Congress forced the states of the former Confederacy to ratify the amendments as a condition for readmission to the Union.
Of the three amendments, the Fourteenth has emerged as the most far-reaching and influential. The “due process” clause in this amendment empowered federal courts to intervene whenever judges believed civil rights were being violated by state governments. Many of the key US Supreme Court decisions expanding individual freedoms—including the decisions relating to contraception, abortion, and sodomy, among many other rights—have cited the protections contained in the Fourteenth Amendment.
1. Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995, when the state legislature symbolically approved it.
2. The Fourteenth Amendment also proclaimed that the United States would not pay any of the Confederacy’s massive war debts, resulting in big losses for lenders in Europe who had financed the rebellion.
3. None of these amendments prohibited the restriction of voting rights based on sex. Women of all races had to wait until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 to secure their constitutional right to vote.
J. P. Morgan (1837–1913)—Pierpont to his friends, but Mr. Morgan to you—was the leading banker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a titan of Wall Street who helped bankroll the massive economic growth of the Gilded Age in the late 1800s. In multimillion-dollar boardroom deals, Morgan created several of the most successful companies in American history, including General Electric and US Steel.
John Pierpont Morgan was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and began working at his father’s bank after studying languages in Europe. He moved to New York and eventually founded his own bank, J. P. Morgan & Company, in 1861.
The House of Morgan, as his bank was often informally called, specialized in merging struggling or inefficient businesses to increase profits. Morgan’s most famous deal was probably the creation of US Steel in 1901, which involved the merger of the Carnegie Steel Company with several other firms. The banker also funded the construction and mergers of railroads and was even called on to bail out the United States government during a gold shortage.
Due to his enormous wealth and ubiquity on Wall Street, Morgan acquired a somewhat sinister reputation. In the 1880s and 1890s, populist writers and politicians portrayed Morgan as a shady character—a dark capitalist force who controlled the government behind the scenes. After his death, control of the bank passed to his son, John Pierpont Morgan Jr. (1867–1943). J. P. Morgan & Company eventually went public and remains a major force on Wall Street.
1. Morgan’s uncle, James Pierpont Morgan, wrote the Christmas carol “Jingle Bells.”
2. Morgan amassed a huge art collection—including 600 medieval manuscripts—that he left in his will to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
3. One of the first Americans to have lightbulbs installed in his house, Morgan was fascinated by the possibilities of electricity and funded many scientific experiments.
At the encouragement of the Spanish governor of California, Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by a government-subsidized group of several dozen Spanish, Indian, black, and mixed-race settlers who trekked to the preselected site from northern Mexico. Incorporated as a US city in 1850, after Spain’s loss of California to the United States in the Mexican War (1846–1848), Los Angeles remained relatively small until the late nineteenth century. The city then underwent explosive growth thanks to the arrival of the railroad, motion picture, and defense industries and the discovery of oil in the region. Today, the city nicknamed by its initials, LA, is second only to New York in population among American cities, with about 13 million residents living in its sprawling metropolitan region.
In the early years of its history, Los Angeles was known mostly by its reputation for violence. According to legend, “a murder a day” occurred in the city in the chaotic years after the California Gold Rush of 1848. From its founding, the multiethnic nature of the city has been a source of tension. In one of the most notorious incidents in the city’s history, a rampaging white mob ran amuck in the city’s Chinatown, killing nineteen Chinese residents in retaliation for the accidental death of a white person in 1871.
With the arrival of the railroad linking the city to San Francisco in 1876, new immigrants poured into Los Angeles and the city’s Wild West atmosphere began to abate. The discovery of oil in 1892 brought an additional level of prosperity and thousands of new inhabitants to the city. By 1900, the population was more than 100,000. The film industry, attracted to the area’s scenery and perfect weather, began migrating to LA in the 1910s. Thousands of tourists followed, many of whom decided to stay permanently.
World War II (1939–1945) created another growth boom for Los Angeles, when many aerospace firms built their factories in Southern California. Los Angeles also became one of the nation’s most racially mixed cities, with large black, Asian, and Latino populations. Ethnic tension erupted into deadly riots in 1965 and again in 1992 following the acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating a black man. Los Angeles surpassed Chicago as the nation’s second-most-populous city between the 1980 and 1990 censuses, a position it maintains today.
1. In the middle of what used to be cattle country, Los Angeles was once nicknamed “Queen of the Cow Counties.”
2. The city’s original full name was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, meaning the city of our lady the queen of the angels.
3. Although oil is no longer a major part of the Los Angeles economy, some of the original wildcat wells are still in operation, surrounded on all sides by residential neighborhoods.
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), one of the leading American poets of the twentieth century, was known for his spare, detailed poems about everyday objects and events. Williams’s style—direct, uninhibited, and worldly—was a major influence on Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and successive generations of poets. Like his contemporary Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), Williams was not able to support himself solely as a poet. To make ends meet, Williams also worked for nearly fifty years as a family physician in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Williams first began writing poetry while a student at the University of Pennsylvania medical school between 1902 and 1906. He received his MD degree in 1906 and then opened a private medical practice in New Jersey in 1910. According to the New York Times, few of Williams’s patients were aware that their doctor was also one of the nation’s leading modernist poets.
In style, Williams rejected the know-it-all complexity of contemporaries like T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). The subjects of his poems were wheelbarrows, fire trucks, poor women on park benches, and the history of his home state of New Jersey. Especially in comparison to other writers of his era, Williams wrote poems that were surprisingly accessible. Unlike Eliot, for instance, whom Williams disdained, the doctor managed to complete his entire oeuvre without recourse to Sanskrit.
Williams intended his poems to leave a strong, simple image in the reader’s mind. For instance, in one of his most famous poems, “This Is Just to Say,” Williams apologizes for eating plums out of the refrigerator using the clipped, minimal style for which he was known:
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
Williams regarded his medical practice as inseparable from his poetry. “One feeds the other in a manner of speaking; both seem necessary to me,” he reportedly said. He retired from private practice in 1952 and lived long enough to see a new generation of poets, the Beats, claim him as a major inspiration and influence.
1. During his lifetime, Williams delivered more than 2,000 babies.
2. Although the two parted over literary issues, Williams was a friend of Pound while both were students at the University of Pennsylvania.
3. Williams received the National Book Award for poetry in 1950.
Walt Disney (1901–1966), one of the twentieth century’s most successful entertainers and entrepreneurs, released his first animated cartoon, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. The eight-minute, black-and-white short, featuring an effeminate mouse named Mickey, was an instant success in the nation’s theaters, in part thanks to one revolutionary feature: Unlike other cartoons in the 1920s, Steamboat Willie had a sound track.
Disney and Mickey’s cocreator, Ub Iwerks (1901–1971), quickly produced more cartoons to fill the sudden national demand for Mickey’s antics. Originally, Mickey was a somewhat mischievous character, a sort of animated Charlie Chaplin who was always getting himself into trouble. Capitalizing on the mouse’s great popularity, Disney also created a comic strip version of Mickey in 1930.
Over the next decade, Disney created several other iconic cartoon characters, including Donald Duck, a cranky waterfowl, and Goofy, a talking dog. Disney’s main rival, Warner Brothers studios, unveiled Looney Tunes with Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny in the 1930s and 1940s, a period now regarded as the golden age of animation.
With the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Disney moved into full-length feature films, overcoming the skepticism of many Hollywood moguls who doubted audiences would pay to see a ninety-minute cartoon. Snow White was an unimaginable success and remains one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Disney went on to make a string of classic hit features, including Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), and Lady and the Tramp (1955).
After World War II (1939–1945), Disney expanded into live-action films and built his famous California theme park, Disneyland, which opened in 1955. His company, now a global media giant, continued his legacy of whimsical family entertainment after the founder’s death in 1966.
1. Walt Disney World, the Florida theme park planned by Disney, was opened five years after Walt’s death by his brother, Roy Disney.
2. Walt Disney was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom in a White House ceremony in 1964.
3. Donald Duck appears as the school mascot of the University of Oregon in Eugene.