Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) was the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, the short-lived nation created by the Southern states that seceded from the United States at the beginning of the Civil War (1861–1865). As head of the Confederacy, Davis led the doomed effort to provide enough resources to his generals for a war against the more numerous and better-armed Union forces.
Davis fought in the Mexican War (1846–1848) for the United States and soon after won election as a US senator from his home state of Mississippi. When Mississippi voted to leave the Union, Davis resigned from the Senate and pledged his support for secession.
Delegates from the Southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama, in early 1861 to draft a constitution. Davis was elected to lead the new nation for a six-year term in 1861. Shortly after, the Confederate capital moved to Richmond, where it remained until the closing days of the war.
While in office, Davis tried unsuccessfully to win European recognition for the Confederacy and struggled to raise funds for the army. As the Southern war effort faltered, Davis desperately lobbied the Confederate Congress to allow blacks to enlist in the army, pleas that were ignored until it was far too late to make a difference.
After the war, Davis was arrested, indicted for treason, and held in prison for two years. Many vengeful Northerners considered Davis the personification of the rebel cause and hoped for his execution. However, he was never brought to trial, and he returned to Mississippi unrepentant for his wartime activities. To his death, Davis refused to take the oath of allegiance to the United States, an action for which he has been hailed a hero by atavistic Southerners ever since.
1. Davis was born in a log cabin in Kentucky only a few months before his nemesis, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), was born to similar circumstances.
2. As secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) in 1854, Davis accepted the resignation of a US army captain from Ohio—Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885).
3. Davis’s vice president was Alexander Stephens (1812–1883), a former representative to the US House from Georgia.
In the twenty years after the Civil War (1861–1865), American settlers moved west in great numbers, seeking farmland and economic opportunity. This huge migration, facilitated by the construction of transcontinental railroads, set up an inevitable clash with the Native American tribes in the Great Plains and Southwest. Between approximately 1865 and 1890, the last pockets of armed resistance were defeated by the US Army in a series of short, bloody wars. In late 1890, the last battle between US troops and Native Americans took place in South Dakota in the Sioux village of Wounded Knee, bringing the military phase of the encounter between whites and Native Americans to a tragic close.
For decades after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, relatively few Americans ventured into the vast new territory west of the Mississippi River. Starting in the 1860s, however, the government began offering settlers free land in the West under the Homestead Act of 1862 and encouraging railroad construction across the daunting terrain of the Rocky Mountains.
These developments posed an existential threat to the western tribes. Increasingly, railroads, telegraph lines, and barbed wire fences hemmed in the open prairie. White hunters virtually exterminated the bison, which had been a staple source of food for thousands of years. Treaties protecting tribal territory from encroachment by land-hungry white settlers were often simply ignored. Instead, Native Americans were systematically confined to reservations across the West.
Several tribes fought to prevent the seizure of their lands. In one of the most famous battles of the period, the Lakota chief Crazy Horse (c. 1844–1877) defeated General George Custer (1839–1876) at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, wiping out the entire American force. In the Southwest, the Apache chief Geronimo (1829–1909) led a long fight against the US Army before surrendering in 1886.
In the end, however, the American firepower was simply too great for the tribes to overcome. The rout of Sioux warriors at Wounded Knee—some contemporaries called it a massacre rather than a battle—ended the native resistance to American expansion in the West.
1. Custer was a descendant of a Hessian mercenary; Hessians were the German troops sent by King George III (1738–1820) to fight against American colonists.
2. Custer graduated last in his class at West Point in 1861, but the army was so desperate for officers that he was given a plum job as an aide to General George McClellan (1826–1885).
3. After his surrender, Geronimo died in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The Ku Klux Klan, one of the most notorious hate groups in American history, was founded in Tennessee in 1865 by veterans of the Confederate army. Over the next century, the Klan carried out thousands of attacks against blacks, immigrants, and Jews. In decline since the 1960s, the Klan still exists today as a fringe extremist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Immediately after the Civil War (1861–1865), the Klan’s main goal was to intimidate blacks who sought to assert their civil rights. The Klan also harassed whites who cooperated with Reconstruction. Some of the Klan’s earliest killings targeted white politicians, known as scalawags, who collaborated with the Northern authorities.
Violence aimed at blacks, however, was far more common. Specifically, the Klan used intimidation to prevent ex-slaves from voting and exercising their political rights. Wearing white hoods, Klan “night riders” terrorized blacks with random killings and whippings meant to keep African-Americans “in their place.”
Klan violence grew so pervasive that President Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) signed emergency legislation known as the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871 that empowered the army to pursue Klansmen and bring them to trial in federal courts. The act was successful, and Klan activity fell sharply in the 1870s.
However, the organization never completely disappeared and has experienced several revivals since Reconstruction. The largest revival came after the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation, a silent movie directed by D. W. Griffith that portrayed Klansmen as heroes for resisting Reconstruction. The movie served as a potent recruiting tool for the reinvigorated Klan. In the 1910s and 1920s, the group organized and carried out hundreds of lynchings.
The Klan reappeared during the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s, and its members were implicated in some of the era’s worst atrocities, including the brutal murder of black teenager Emmett Till (1941–1955) and the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four black girls were killed. Most recently, according to the ADL, the Klan has reemerged as an anti-immigrant and antigay organization in both the north and south.
1. The Klan was so strong in parts of rural South Carolina that Grant declared martial law in nine counties and declared members of the group to be “insurgents … in rebellion against the authority of the United States.”
2. Future president Harry Truman (1884–1972) once applied for Klan membership but withdrew his application after the group asked him to fire his Catholic employees.
3. In 1991, Klan leader David Duke finished second in the Louisiana governor’s race.
Industrialist and robber baron John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) founded Standard Oil, one of the greatest business juggernauts of the late nineteenth century, and became the world’s first billionaire thanks to the growing demand for oil and gasoline in the early twentieth century. After his retirement, Rockefeller transferred his energies to philanthropy and became famous for giving away his fortune one dime at a time to passersby on the street.
Rockefeller was born in New York and moved to Cleveland after the discovery of oil in the region. He formed Standard Oil with several partners in 1870. In the era before the automobile created a demand for gasoline, kerosene was the company’s biggest product. Thanks to Rockefeller’s bare-knuckle business practices—exploiting every available legal loophole to put competitors out of business—the company became the dominant force in the oil industry by the mid-1880s. The growing power of Standard Oil was a key factor leading to the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.
Still, it would take another two decades for the law to catch up with Standard Oil. Thanks in part to the muckraking journalism of Ida Tarbell (1857–1944), who exposed the company’s shady business practices in her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company, public hostility to the company mounted in the early twentieth century, and the government successfully broke up the company in 1911. Several major American oil companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips—were created by the breakup. Indeed, as of 2007, three of the top five corporations in the United States are descendents of Standard Oil.
By the time of the breakup, Rockefeller had retired and devoted himself to philanthropy. In addition to his infamous dimes, Rockefeller endowed numerous foundations and universities, including the Rockefeller Foundation. His descendents form one of the richest and most powerful families in the nation; Rockefellers have served as governors, as senators, and briefly, in the case of Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979), as vice president of the United States.
1. One of the first casualties after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania and the Midwest was the New England whaling industry, which quickly collapsed when kerosene replaced whale oil as a source of fuel for lamps.
2. The dish Oysters Rockefeller is named after the tycoon.
3. One of Rockefeller’s philanthropic causes was the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, which later changed its name to Rockefeller University.
The invention and mass production of barbed wire fencing beginning in 1873 changed the landscape of the American West, hastening the demise of the open range. Within several decades of its introduction, farmers had strung thousands of miles of the painful metal fencing around their homesteads, and the old cattle drives across the open prairies of the West vanished into history.
Primitive varieties of barbed wire fencing had existed since the Roman Empire but were ineffective and difficult to produce. Instead, cattlemen in the American West had to drive their herds for hundreds of miles across the prairie to prevent them from grazing crops during the planting season, an arduous trek managed by cowboys. Cowboys were also responsible for the great cattle drives of thousands of animals to depots in Kansas, where the herd would be transported by rail to slaughterhouses in distant Chicago.
Effective fencing made it possible for farmers to keep their livestock in the same location year-round, rendering cowboys obsolete. Although barbed wire was opposed by some because of the harm it caused animals—it was nicknamed “the devil’s rope”—by the 1890s the West was increasingly fenced in. Barbed wire also dealt a crippling blow to the Native Americans of the Great Plains by restricting the movements of the wild bison herds, which many tribes depended on for food.
In part thanks to the invention and widespread use of barbed wire to enclose the plains, the Wild West era gradually came to an end. Years later, the cowboy would be romanticized by Hollywood as a symbol of rugged American manhood overcome by the advances of modern technology.
1. Barbed wire was used by the military in World War I (1914–1918), adding to the misery of soldiers in the trenches.
2. A 700-pound monument to barbed wire in McLean, Texas, is composed of two balls of barbed wire.
3. Disputes over fencing occasionally led to violence, most famously in the “Johnson County war,” which erupted in Wyoming in 1892 between small ranchers and big cattle companies and led to the deaths of several of the ranchers.
Originally published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is widely considered one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), the book is set in a wealthy area of Long Island, New York, and centers around a mysterious millionaire named Jay Gatsby who throws wild, lavish parties at his seaside mansion during Prohibition.
Fitzgerald had published two other novels, This Side of Paradise (1920), and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), prior to completing Gatsby. A product of exclusive prep schools and Princeton University, Fitzgerald frequently used the theme of money and its place in American society in his novels and short stories.
The narrator of The Great Gatsby is Nick Carraway, an Ivy League–educated bond dealer originally from the Midwest who moves into a house near Gatsby and befriends his mysterious neighbor. Nick attends several of Gatsby’s raucous parties, where New York’s young elites come to enjoy the host’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of illegal liquor.
As the novel unfolds, questions grow about the source of Gatsby’s great wealth, and Fitzgerald drops hints that Gatsby made his fortune in bootlegging. Nick begins to like Gatsby but realizes that his friend will never win the true acceptance by the wealthy American elite that he so desperately craves. Gatsby’s failed quest for social acceptance is reflected in his doomed pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the beautiful wife of one of Nick’s rich friends from Yale.
Fitzgerald’s writing style is direct and fluid, punctuated with dry wit and poignant observations. Although not an instant hit when it was published, The Great Gatsby was reprinted after the author’s death and is now considered a classic of American literature.
1. The seaside mansion on Long Island believed to have been Fitzgerald’s model for Gatsby’s house went on sale for $28 million in 2005, according to Forbes magazine.
2. Fitzgerald spent time in France with Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) during the 1920s; a memorable encounter between the two in a men’s room is described in Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast (1964).
3. Although his fiction was admired by critics, Fitzgerald was unable to support himself with his novels and moved to Hollywood in the 1930s to work on movie scripts.
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) painted one of the most famous works of art in American history, the gloomy 1942 canvas Night Hawks. The painting, which shows three men and a woman at an all-night diner in an unidentified city, was the most successful work of Hopper’s long and distinguished career.
Born in New York, Hopper enrolled in art school at age eighteen. His style, influenced by the Ashcan school, emphasized plain, realistic portraits of scenes from everyday life. Hopper’s prosaic subjects included fire hydrants, bridges, gas stations, and people reading newspapers.
In the early twentieth century, however, Hopper’s stark realist paintings were unfashionable on the art scene, and he spent the first twenty years of his career toiling in relative obscurity. To make ends meet, he painted propaganda posters during World War I (1914–1918) and even won a $300 prize for his 1918 poster Smash the Hun. By 1931, at age forty-nine, Hopper had sold only two of his paintings.
The Great Depression, however, caused a seismic shift in the art world and a major reappraisal of Hopper’s work. Suddenly, interest among art connoisseurs in European modernism waned, while paintings that addressed the country’s social problems became popular.
Night Hawks perfectly illustrates the sense of urban despair and loneliness that recurs throughout Hopper’s work. The four figures in the painting each appear lost in their own thoughts and are not looking at one another. The diner is brightly lit, but the light seems harsh and artificial, in implicit contrast to the cozy glow of a fireplace.
Hopper’s paintings of forlorn cityscapes have held an enduring appeal. In recognition of his lifetime achievement, shortly before his death, Hopper was one of eleven artists whose work was selected for display at the White House by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy (1929–1994).
1. Night Hawks has been imitated and parodied countless times, including in the 1981 Steven Martin film Pennies from Heaven.
2. The painting is now on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago.
3. Following the path of most other American artists, Hopper spent four years studying in Paris and Spain in the early 1900s, but he mostly rejected European styles in his own art.