Don’t Know Much About History

After the shooting stopped, the United States of America was recognized by the world’s major powers as independent. But this gangling new child was an ugly duckling among nations, a loose collection of states under the Articles of Confederation, not yet a completely sovereign nation. The big question was “Now what?” Following eight years of fighting, this new entity had to face the realities of governing. As might be expected, different people from different states had a lot of different ideas about how that should be done.

But during the next seventy-odd years, powered by dynamic forces, America would expand swiftly and aggressively. However, in that expansion, and in the way in which the new nation formed itself, the seeds of the next great American crisis were being sown. This chapter highlights the milestones in a developing America between the end of the Revolution and the prelude to the Civil War.

What was Shays’s Rebellion?

Rebellion, as the Founding Fathers would quickly discover, could be a catchy tune.

Besides independence, the end of the war had brought economic chaos to America. As with most wars, the Revolution had been good for business. Everybody works, soldiers spend money, factories turn out ships and guns, armies buy supplies. That’s the good news. The bad news is that after war comes inflation and depression. The years immediately following the Revolution were no different. America went through bad economic times. Established trading patterns were in disarray. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had no power to tax. In the thirteen states, where power was centered, the separate currencies had created an economic shambles.

While the situation was bad almost everywhere, in Massachusetts, the home of the Adamses and birthplace of the patriot cause, the economic dislocation boiled over into bloodshed between Americans. Like the prewar Bacon’s Rebellion, the Regulator Movement in the Carolinas, and the Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania, this “little rebellion,” as Thomas Jefferson would call it, was a sign of serious class conflict, a symptom of the economic tension that had always existed in America between, on one side, the working-class frontier farmers, inner-city laborers, the servant class, smaller merchants, and free blacks, and on the other side the “haves,” the landed, slaveholding gentry, and the international merchants of the larger cities.

Massachusetts passed a state constitution in 1780 that found few friends among the poor and middle class, many of them veterans of the Continental Army still waiting for promised bonuses. When they learned that they were now barred from voting and holding office, they must have wondered what they had been fighting for. As the economy worsened, many farms were seized to pay off debts. When the local sheriffs looked to the militia to defend the debt courts against angry crowds, the militia sided with the farmers.

In the summer of 1786, an army veteran named Daniel Shays emerged on the scene. With 700 farmers and working-class people, Shays marched on Springfield and paraded around town. Onetime radical Sam Adams, now part of the Boston establishment, drew up a Riot Act, allowing the authorities to jail anyone without a trial. Revolt against a monarch was one thing, said Adams, but against a republic it was a crime punishable by death.

Shays soon had a thousand men under arms and was marching on Boston, the seat of wealth and power. Then General Benjamin Lincoln, one of Washington’s war commanders, brought out an army paid for by Boston’s merchants. There was an exchange of artillery fire, leaving some casualties on both sides, and Shays’s army scattered. Lincoln’s army pursued the rebels, but refrained from attacking when the rout was assured. A harsh winter took its toll, and Shays’s amateur army disintegrated. Some of the rebels were caught, tried, and hanged. Others were pardoned. Shays, on the run in Vermont, was pardoned, but died in poverty in 1788.

Writing from the safe distance of Paris, Thomas Jefferson said of the uprising, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. . . . God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Lacking cohesion and stronger leadership, the Shaysites disintegrated. However, several of the reforms they had demanded were made, including the end of the state’s direct taxation, reduced court costs, and the exemption of workmen’s tools and household necessities from the debt process.

AMERICAN VOICES

GEORGE MASON, delegate from Virginia, writing on the eve of the Constitutional Convention in May 1787:

I have reason to hope there will be greater unanimity and less opposition, except for the little States, than was at first apprehended. The most prevalent idea in the principal States seems to be a total alteration of the present federal system, and substituting a great national council or parliament, consisting of two branches of the legislature, founded upon the principles of equal proportionate representation, with full legislative powers upon all subjects of the Union; and an executive: and to make the latter a power of a negative upon all such laws as they shall judge contrary to the interest of the federal Union. It is easy to foresee that there will be much difficulty in organizing a government upon this great scale, and at the same time reserving to the State legislatures a sufficient portion of power for promoting and securing the prosperity and happiness of their respective citizens; yet with the proper degree of coolness, liberality and candor (very rare commodities by the by), I doubt not but it may be effected.

A Virginia statesman who wrote the first American bill of rights—the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776—George Mason (1725–92) is not usually mentioned in the same breath with the more familiar Founding Fathers. Though he held few public offices, he was one of the most significant and influential men of the day.

Before the Revolution, his most important contribution was the Virginia Declaration of Rights, from which Jefferson borrowed to craft the Declaration of Independence. Mason played an active role in creating the Constitution, but disagreed with parts of it and refused to sign the final draft of the United States Constitution.

Chief among his complaints was the lack of a bill of rights to protect personal liberties. Another of those slaveholding delegates who were uncomfortable with slavery, Mason also found fault with some of the compromises that would be made over slavery. Dissatisfied when these concerns were not addressed, he was one of the few delegates who refused to sign the Constitution. When the Constitution was submitted to the states for ratification, he opposed it, and made the absence of a bill of rights his main objection.

What was the Constitutional Convention?

While the Massachusetts uprising was a relatively minor affair that did not spread armed insurrection throughout the states, it sufficiently shook up America’s new ruling class. Something stronger than the Articles of Confederation was needed; the states had little ability to control local rebellion, let alone a foreign attack—a genuine threat as Spain and England both maintained troops in America. Equally pressing was the substantial danger posed by Indians on the western frontier who outnumbered the state militias. Nor could the states adequately handle the other two related crises facing America: the disruption of overseas trade and the postwar financial and currency collapse.

On May 25, 1787, after a delay of ten days because too few delegates had arrived, the convention to draw up a new plan of government gathered in Philadelphia. Every state but Rhode Island sent delegates, and George Washington was unanimously selected to preside over the convention. In the course of the next four months, they would create the Constitution. (While Washington presided at the convention and is recognized as the first president, there were actually several earlier presidents. Under the Articles of Confederation, John Hanson of Maryland had been elected “President of the United States in Congress Assembled.”)

At various times during the four months, fifty-five delegates were present at what is now called Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but rarely were they all there at the same time. Forty-five of them had served in Congress; thirty had served in the war. To delegates like Patrick Henry, it consisted of “the greatest, the best, and most enlightened of our citizens.” John Adams was not there. Nor was Thomas Jefferson, who from Paris called the convention “an assembly of demigods.” In his book The Vineyard of Liberty, James McGregor Burns neatly encapsulated this group as “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed,” and it applied to most of them, America’s new aristocracy. They included the likes of Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris, one of America’s wealthiest men, who had funded the Revolution. To other modern historians, they represented not the broad masses, but the wealthy merchants of the North and the wealthy, slaveholding plantation owners of the South.

Of them, the oldest was also perhaps the most famous, eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin; Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey was youngest at twenty-seven. Their median age was forty-three. A little more than half (thirty-one) were college-educated, the same number as were lawyers. Seventeen of the delegates who were present to “establish justice . . . and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” (in the words of the preamble) owned several thousand black slaves; John Rutledge (South Carolina), George Mason (Virginia), and George Washington (Virginia) were among the largest slaveholders in the country.

After two hundred years of rule under the Constitution, we have come to think of it as a perfect ideological and idealistic document created by a gathering of legislative geniuses. It has often been said that no new nation before or since has enjoyed a more politically experienced group than the men who wrote the Constitution. It might be useful to think of them as a collection of, in a modern phrase, special interest groups and regionally minded legislators, almost all of them admittedly brilliant politicians. And in politics, then as now, the art of compromise is the secret of success.

The Constitution was no different; it was a political creation, hammered together in a series of artfully negotiated compromises, balancing political idealism with political expediency. There were conflicts everywhere: between small states and large states, North and South, slave states and abolitionist states.

While there was near unanimity that a federal government was necessary, there was less agreement about the structure of such a government. The first broad scheme for the Constitution came from the Virginians, young James Madison chief among them, and came to be known as the Virginia Plan. Its key points were a bicameral (two-chamber) legislature, an executive chosen by the legislature, and a judiciary also named by the legislature. An alternative, known as the New Jersey Plan, was favored by smaller states. Through the heat of summer, debate dragged on, the convention facing a deadlock essentially over two key questions.

The first was representation. Should representation in Congress be based on population, with larger states getting proportionately more votes, or should each state receive equal representation?

The second question was that of slavery. The southern states wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. Faced with growing abolitionist sentiments, the southern delegates would not bend on questions affecting slavery, nor would they grant freed blacks the vote. On the other hand, they wanted slaves counted for the purpose of determining representation in Congress. In other words, it was “Now you see ’em, now you don’t.”

With an impasse near, Roger Sherman proposed what is called the Connecticut Compromise, or Great Compromise. Seen in retrospect, it seems an obvious solution to the representation issue, providing for equal representation in the upper house of Congress (the Senate) and proportional representation in the lower house (the House of Representatives).

Two more compromises “solved” the issue of slavery and slaves, words that appear nowhere in the Constitution. Instead, flowery euphemisms like “no person held in service,” and “all other persons” were coined in accordance with the Constitution’s flowing legal prose. Under these bargains, Congress was prohibited from taking any action to control slavery for a period of twenty years (until 1808), although the gentlemen did agree that the slave trade could be taxed. (Apparently the antislave forces thought, “We may not like it, but at least let’s make some money out of it.”) And for the purposes of determining representation, slaves (“all other persons”) would be counted as three-fifths of their total population. In hindsight, it was a small step forward for blacks. At least they had gone from being ignored to being three-fifths human. If they could hold out for another seventy years, they would be free! In turn, the southern states agreed to allow a maximum of three new future states that would ban slavery.

One of the last of the central debates regarded the executive and the role of the president. The delegates were men who feared too much power in the hands of a single man—they had just fought a long war to do away with one monarch. The Virginia Plan called for a chief executive to be elected by Congress. Virginia’s George Mason proposed three presidents. Elbridge Gerry, a leading opponent of a strong federal government, wanted the president elected by the state governors. Alexander Hamilton, a proponent of a strong federal government, wanted the president to serve for life. Another proposal was to bar anyone from the presidency who was not worth at least $100,000 (the equivalent of a multimillionaire). The solution came from New York’s Gouverneur Morris, who at the time was living in the same house as George Washington. Morris proposed an executive elected by the people. Morris also proposed that he be commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well. As Thomas Fleming points out in Liberty, “One suspects that when Gouverneur Morris spoke, they were hearing advice from George Washington. Also, as Pierce Butler of South Carolina pointed out, there sat Washington, the man who was certain to be the first President. There was no need to fear that he would become a tyrant.”

And in the ultimate exercise of compromise, the men who put the Constitution together recognized that it might have to be changed, so they built in an acceptable form of amending their work. Change would not be easy, but it was possible.

As is true of other moments in American history, cynicism born of perfect hindsight is easy. On the other hand, credit should be given where it is due. The Framers were intelligent, even brilliant men; they knew their history and their law. The Constitution they forged was then the pinnacle of thousands of years of political development. They were familiar with, and could draw on, such sources and models as the Greek philosophers, the Roman republic, and the evolution of the English democratic tradition running from the Magna Carta through Parliament and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Above all, in the Constitution—and earlier, in the Declaration—they embodied the triumph of the Enlightenment, that glorious flowering of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that elevated the powers of human reason and strove for new forms of government, free of tyranny. The philosophies they were striving to fulfill had been expressed by such giants of the age as Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Kant. They were all familiar to the Framers, and these ideas contributed to the heady debate, a debate that centered on the ongoing struggle between liberty and democracy, two ideas that often clash.

As for debate, there was plenty. Even with the broad outlines agreed upon, major differences cropped up at every turn. It took nearly six hundred separate votes to settle them all. These were not small matters of detail, either, but large questions that might have altered the course of the nation. For instance, New York’s Alexander Hamilton, one of the staunchest advocates of powerful central government and the chief representative of northern commercial interests—he was one of the founders of the Bank of New York—wanted the president and the Senate appointed for life. He also argued for giving the “first class,” the wealthy men of America, among whom he could certainly be counted, “a distinct permanent share of the government.”

Hamilton’s suggestion was turned down, but the Constitution did not provide for direct elections, except for the House of Representatives, where it was still left to the states to determine who voted. Property ownership was the key qualification in almost every state. And of course, women, Indians, and blacks—free or slave—had no vote. It is simple to dismiss even that basic decision as the result of sexism and racism. But, again, the temper of the times must be considered. In a period in which class differences were so clearly delineated, though less so in America than in Europe, it may have been inconceivable for these men to consider allowing just anyone to vote. They took as an article of faith that to participate responsibly in a democracy required education and the measure of property that would allow one the leisure to read and think. That said, however, they also did everything they could to make sure that women, Indians, blacks, and the white poor would be excluded from obtaining such education and property.

The final form of the Constitution, prepared by New York’s Gouverneur Morris, was put to a vote on September 17, 1787. Thirty-nine of the delegates present voted in favor; three were opposed. Another thirteen of the principals were absent, but seven of these were believed to favor the Constitution. It was sent on to Congress, which decided to submit the document to the states for ratification, with the approval of nine states needed for passage.

AMERICAN VOICES

Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

For any and all of the Constitution’s flaws—as well as those of the men who wrote it—this document was, and remains, a remarkable achievement. As Leonard W. Levy argues in Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution, “The Constitution lacks the eloquence and passion of the Declaration of Independence, although the opening of the Preamble, ‘We the People,’ summons forth the still radically democratic idea that the government of the United States exists to serve the people, not the people to serve the government. That is fundamental to the Framers’ original intent, as is the related idea that government in the United States cannot tell us what to think or believe about politics, religion, art, science, literature or anything else; American citizens have the duty as well as the right to keep the government from falling into error, not the other way around.”

What are checks and balances?

This has nothing to do with monthly bank statements. Whether out of wisdom or fear, the Constitution’s architects created a fundamental principle underlying the strength and tension of the federal government. The fear was obvious; no one wanted anyone else to become too powerful. So for almost every power they granted to one branch of government, they created an equal power of control for the other two. The legislature could “check” the power of the president, the Supreme Court could “check” the power of Congress, and so on, maintaining a careful symmetry, or “balance,” among the three branches.

BASIC POWERS AND CHECKS

EXECUTIVE POWERS (PRESIDENT)

• Approves or vetoes federal bills.

• Carries out federal laws.

• Appoints judges and other high officials.

• Makes foreign treaties.

• Can grant pardons and reprieves to federal offenders.

• Acts as commander-in-chief of armed forces.

CHECKS ON EXECUTIVE POWERS

• Congress can override vetoes by two-thirds vote.

• Senate can refuse to confirm appointments or ratify treaties.

• Congress can impeach and remove the president.

• Congress can declare war.

• Supreme Court can declare executive acts unconstitutional.

LEGISLATIVE POWERS (CONGRESS)

• Passes federal laws.

• Establishes lower federal courts and the number of federal judges.

• Can override the president’s veto with two-thirds vote.

CHECKS ON LEGISLATIVE POWERS

• Presidential veto of federal bills.

• Supreme Court can rule laws unconstitutional.

• Both houses of Congress must vote to pass laws, checking power within the legislature.

JUDICIAL POWERS

• Interprets and applies the law by trying federal cases.

• Can declare laws passed by Congress and executive actions unconstitutional.

CHECKS ON JUDICIAL POWERS

• Congress can propose constitutional amendments to overturn judicial decisions. (These require two-thirds majority in both houses, and ratification by three-quarters of states.)

• Congress can impeach and remove federal judges.

• The president appoints judges (who must be confirmed by the Senate).

What three-letter word is not in the Constitution?

There is an American political drama that has been played out in recent years during the Democratic convention. Someone, usually a conservative Republican with ties to the Christian right, blasts away at the Democratic Party’s platform because it doesn’t mention God. Then, if all goes according to form, a Democratic Party spokesperson will fire back that the United States Constitution doesn’t mention God, either. In this case, the Democrats have it right.

Unlike the Declaration of Independence, which tiptoed around the question of a deity with euphemisms like “Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” and “Divine Providence,” the Constitution makes no such nods to divine intervention. Instead, the Constitution calls the nation the creation of the will of the people. In a country in which the role of religion is constantly debated and politicians routinely point to America’s “Judeo-Christian heritage” and “the faith of our fathers,” the question of the missing deity in the Constitution raises a larger point: What did the Founding Fathers believe? Few questions have generated as many myths or misconceptions.

In fact, eighteenth-century America was predominantly Christian—and overwhelmingly Protestant. But that was a big tent, covering a large crowd whose faith was far from monolithic. New England was dominated by Congregationalism, derived from the Pilgrim and Puritan tradition, and Congregational churches received government support in some states. But the Protestants of the South leaned toward the Episcopal, aligned with the very Church of England from which the Puritans had separated themselves. In Virginia, the Anglican, or Episcopal, church also received state money. In Maryland, founded as a refuge for Catholics, the Roman Catholic presence was larger than in other states, but many Americans regarded Roman Catholics, or “Papists,” with suspicion—or worse. Nonetheless, Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration and the richest man in Maryland and quite possibly the whole nation, was a devout Roman Catholic. His faith was one of the reasons that Carroll would later have such disdain for Thomas Jefferson, who, by 1800, was being denounced as an atheist. There was also a whole slew of other Protestant sects and denominations, including the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers, each group finding fertile ground in the new American landscape.

This was, after all, the Age of Enlightenment when science and reason were elevated above both church and king. The work of scientists like Newton in upsetting the status quo of belief had spilled over into politics. By proving that the universe was governed by mathematically proven laws of nature in the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton helped Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632–1704) shake political thought free from the past. Locke wrote, “A government is not free to do as it pleases. The law of nature, as revealed by Newton, stands as an eternal rule to all men.” Locke’s ideas, in turn, profoundly influenced Jefferson.

During this period of extraordinary intellectual, political, and religious ferment, many of the Founding Fathers—most of them educated, wealthy, and aristocratic—rejected the orthodoxy of religion, just as they had rejected the divinity of the English throne. What many of the Founding Fathers believed in was deism, which had replaced the highly personal God of Judeo-Christian biblical tradition with “Providence,” an amorphous force that George Washington once referred to as “it.” A survey of a handful of the most influential Founding Fathers is useful in assessing what these men did believe:

• Benjamin Franklin: During the colonial religious revival known as the Great Awakening (see Chapter 2), Franklin befriended George Whitefield, one of the most prominent leaders of the Awakening. Though Franklin supported Whitefield’s good works, he “drew the line short of his own conversion,” as Franklin biographer H. W. Brands put it in The First American.

Along with Jefferson probably the best example of the American Enlightenment Man, Franklin was skeptical of organized religion. Describing Franklin’s spiritual thought, Brands writes, “As the deists did, Franklin measured the immensity of the universe against the minisculity of the earth and the inhabitants thereof and concluded from this that it was ‘great vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect does in the least regard such an inconsiderable nothing as man.’ Moreover, this Supremely Perfect had absolutely no need to be worshipped by humans; He was infinitely above such sentiments or actions.”

Proponents of America as a “Christian nation” and those who favor public prayer often cite Franklin’s entreaty that the constitutional convention open its meetings with a prayer. What they conveniently leave out is what actually happened following that suggestion. Alexander Hamilton first argued that if the people knew that the convention was resorting to prayer at such a late date, it might be viewed as an act of desperation. Nonetheless, Franklin’s motion was seconded. But then Hugh Williamson of North Carolina pointed out that the convention lacked funds to pay a chaplain, and then the proposition died. Franklin later noted, “The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary” (emphasis added).

Late in his life, Franklin wrote what could almost pass for a modern New Age statement of faith:

“Here is my creed. I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. . . . That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth. I think the system of morals and his religion . . . the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have . . . some doubts as to his divinity.” He added, “I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments. . . . I hope to go out of the world in peace with all of them.”

• George Washington: The image of Washington on his knees at prayer in Valley Forge is an American icon. And like many Washington images, it is largely mythical. While Washington prayed regularly and fervently, he was never seen doing it in the snows of Pennsylvania.

Clearly a believer who often resorted to calls to “Providence,” the father of the country regularly attended the Episcopal church, whether at home in Virginia, at the Philadelphia conventions, or in New York as president. But as Thomas Fleming notes in Duel, “Washington usually left before the communion service, pointedly if silently stating his disbelief in this central ceremony of the Christian faith.”

But Washington was certainly a Christian and in his 1796 Farewell Address expressed his belief that religion and morality were “pillars of human happiness,” then adding, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”

Perhaps more significantly, the nominally Episcopalian Washington was also a Freemason, along with numerous other Founders, including John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Franklin. (While he was in France, Franklin met the philosopher Voltaire, also a Freemason.) When Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in 1793, the local Masonic lodge organized the ceremony, and Washington wore a Masonic apron made for him by the wife of the Marquis de Lafayette, who belonged to the Masons as well. Washington took his oath of office as president with a Masonic Bible.

One of the oldest and largest fraternal organizations in the world, Freemasonry was invented in London in 1717, a semisecret society that has inspired substantial mythology ever since. It was formed by a group of intellectuals who took over a craft guild and fostered what they called “enlightened uplift,” dedicated to the ideals of charity, equality, morality, and service to God, whom the Masons describe as the Great Architect of the Universe. The order spread quickly through Enlightenment Europe and included men as diverse as Voltaire, King Frederick II of Prussia, and the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (First performed in Vienna, Austria, in 1791, Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute deals symbolically with Masonic beliefs and rituals.)

As it developed, Freemasonry was viewed as anticlerical and was later thought to be antireligious by conservative Congregationalists in the United States. An anti-Mason movement took hold in the nineteenth century, and the Antimasonic Party became the first significant third party in American politics. (In 1831, the Antimasonic Party became the first party to hold a nominating convention to choose candidates for president and vice president. Its candidate, William Wirt, won a respectable seven electoral votes in 1832.) The controversy grew when a disgruntled ex-Mason announced he would publish the group’s secret rituals. He was abducted and disappeared. Twenty-six Masons were indicted on murder and six came to trial, with four of them convicted on lesser charges. But the fact is that Masonry was a voluntary fraternal order—a kind of eighteenth-century spiritual Rotary Club—and not a sinister cult intent on world domination as it has often been portrayed, including more recently by Reverend Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian right.

Some people believed—and many still do—that this powerful Masonic influence can be seen in symbols on the American dollar bill, and that they were put there by the “Masonic president,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to show that the country had been taken over by Masons. The objects in question on the dollar bill are actually the two sides of the Great Seal of the United States, which dates from the late 1700s (see page 126). It is Mason Benjamin Franklin who is often credited—or blamed—for them. But even that may be a myth. The symbols in question are the representation of an eye and an unfinished pyramid. The All-Seeing Eye of Deity is mentioned in Freemasonry, but the concept behind the image dates back to the Bible. An unfinished pyramid symbolizes that the work of nation building is not completed, but the pyramid is not a particularly Masonic symbol. The eye in the pyramid, still featured on America’s money, was a common symbol of an omniscient Deity that dated to Renaissance art. In other words, the Masons may have adopted the design as a symbol later on and not the other way around.

As a footnote to Masonry in America, it should be pointed out that the Enlightenment spirit went only so far. In spite of its idealism, American Masonry was neither color-blind nor sexually enlightened. Just as blacks and women were kept out of the Constitution, they were barred from Masonry’s chummy club as well. In 1765, Prince Hall, a free black Methodist minister who settled in the Boston area, founded a Masons for blacks. (They would later be called Prince Hall Masons.) In 1775, a British army lodge admitted Hall and fourteen other free blacks who formed African Lodge 1, but white American Masons refused to grant the lodge a charter. The group finally received its charter from the Grand Lodge of England in 1787, as African Lodge 459. Prince Hall and other early black Masons protested slavery and sought to improve the status of free blacks. Later Prince Hall members included W. E. B. DuBois, the historian, writer, and one of the founders of the NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Thomas Jefferson: More radical in his beliefs than either Franklin or Washington was Thomas Jefferson, who inveighed against “every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” by which he meant organized Christianity. In 1782, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom was approved by the Virginia legislature. This landmark legislation guaranteed every citizen the freedom to worship in the church of his or her choice and ended state support for the Episcopal church in Virginia. The statute passed thanks to the efforts of James Madison.

Jefferson had also once produced an edited version of the Gospels (still available in book form as The Jefferson Bible) in which he highlighted the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus while editing out any reference to his divinity or miracles. The reference to Providence at the close of the Declaration was an addition made by the Continental Congress while the document was debated.

• Aaron Burr: The libertinish Burr, usually regarded as one of the scoundrels in America’s past, is not usually discussed in the same breath with American religious tradition. But he was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the greatest name in New England church history and another leader of the Great Awakening (see Chapter 2). Burr had spent a year studying for the ministry before deciding that he lacked sufficient faith. According to historian Thomas Fleming’s Duel, Burr’s decision was “typical of a general decline in theological fervor throughout America. The French Revolution’s assault on religion as the bulwark of the ruling class accelerated this trend. In the Yale class of 1796, a poll revealed that only one graduate believed in God—a glimpse of why the Federalists’ attacks on Thomas Jefferson’s supposed atheism went nowhere.”

Ultimately, what is far more important than what any of the so-called Founding Fathers personally believed is the larger concept that most of them embraced passionately: the freedom to practice religion, as well as not to. And certainly, to a man, they emphatically opposed the idea of a government-sponsored religion. Franklin shuddered at the intrusion of religion into politics. Washington denounced spiritual tyranny and felt that religion was a private matter with which government had no business meddling. To him, government existed to protect people’s rights, not save their souls.

In a famous letter to members of the Newport Hebrew Congregation, the oldest synagogue in America, Washington wrote in 1790: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction—to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens” (emphasis added).

As for Jefferson, he famously wrote that it made no difference to him whether his neighbor affirmed one god or twenty, since “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” It was this concept—that the government should neither enforce, encourage, nor otherwise intrude on religion—that would find its way into the Constitution in the form of the First Amendment.

AMERICAN VOICES

“A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786:

We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Jefferson introduced this bill in 1779, and passage was secured while he was in Paris with the collaboration of James Madison. Along with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his establishment of the University of Virginia, Jefferson had his authorship of this bill included on his tombstone.

What does e pluribus unum mean?

E pluribus unum is the Latin motto on the face of the Great Seal of the United States and the phrase means “out of many, one.” It can be traced back to Horace’s Epistles. It refers to the creation of one nation, the United States, out of thirteen colonies. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, members of the first committee for the selection of the seal, suggested the motto in 1776. Since 1873, the law requires that this motto appear on one side of every United States coin that is minted.

The Great Seal of the United States is the symbol of the sovereignty of the United States, adopted on June 20, 1782. European countries had long used seals, and the new nation signified its equal rank by adopting its own seal. William Barton, a specialist in heraldry, advised the committee responsible for creating the seal, and designed most of the seal’s reverse side. Charles Thomson, secretary of the Congress, prepared the images used on the face, which is used on official documents. The American eagle, with an escutcheon, or shield, on its breast, symbolizes self-reliance. The shield’s thirteen vertical stripes came from the flag of 1777, but seven are white, while in the 1777 flag seven are red. The eagle holds an olive branch of thirteen leaves and thirteen olives in its right talon, and thirteen arrows in its left, symbolizing the desire for peace but the ability to wage war. In its beak is a scroll inscribed e pluribus unum. Above its head is the thirteen-star “new constellation” of the 1777 flag, enclosed in golden radiance, breaking through a cloud.

The reverse side of the seal is familiar from the back of the one-dollar bill, but it has never been used as a seal. A pyramid of thirteen courses of stone, representing the Union, is watched over by the Eye of Providence enclosed in a traditional triangle. The upper motto, Annuit coeptis, means “He [God] has favored our undertakings.” The lower motto, Novus ordo seclorum, means “the new order of the ages” that began in 1776, the date on the base of the pyramid.

Who were the Federalists, and what were the Federalist Papers?

Two hundred years of miseducation have left an image of the Constitution as a sort of American Ten Commandments, divinely inspired and carved in stone. So it is hard to imagine that its ratification was not assured. Like an unsuccessful organ transplant, it was nearly rejected by the body politic. When the Constitution left Philadelphia, the country was almost evenly split between those favoring the strong central government it promised, who came to be known as Federalists, and those for a weaker central government with stronger states’ rights, a.k.a. the anti-Federalists.

Loyal Americans and staunch patriots—many of them were Revolutionary leaders and veterans—the anti-Federalists feared a new brand of elected monarchy at the expense of individual liberties. They were led by such major contemporary figures as Virginia’s governor, Patrick Henry; Boston’s Samuel Adams of Revolution fame; and New York’s longtime governor, George Clinton. Their disdain for the Constitution might best be summed up in the words of Thomas Paine: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” The anti-Federalists believed that men like Alexander Hamilton were trying to reintroduce an American form of monarchy.

But no small part of their resistance was personal; many anti-Federalists simply didn’t like their opposites among the Federalists. No better examples of this could be found than in Virginia, where Patrick Henry kept James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, from being elected to the Senate, and New York. where the anti-Federalists were led by New York’s governor, George Clinton. Alexander Hamilton and Clinton were philosophical rivals, but their mutual disdain went far beyond policy into personality and rivalries. Clinton and his allies were more or less credited with creating the spoils system—in which patronage jobs were doled out to friends, family, and financial supporters. In 1792, Clinton had stolen the governor’s race in New York from Hamilton’s handpicked candidate, John Jay, simply by declaring the votes of three counties invalid and declaring himself the winner. (From “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same” Department comes this wisdom from William “Boss” Tweed, the notorious nineteenth-century “fixer” of all things political in New York City, who said on Election Day in 1871, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”)

Championing the Federalist cause, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay—then serving as the head of the Confederation’s state department—attempted to influence the ratification debate with a series of pseudonymous newspaper letters signed “Publius” and later collected as the Federalist Papers. Eighty-five of these essays were published, and while they are considered among the most significant political documents in American history, after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, their direct impact on the debate of the day is dubious. Probably most of the people who counted had already made up their minds.

Of far greater consequence than the papers was the proratification stance of America’s two most prominent men, Franklin and Washington, the latter of whom everyone assumed would become the first president under the new Constitution. Of Washington’s impact on Virginia’s ratification vote, James Monroe wrote to Jefferson, “Be assured his influence carried this government.” One by one, the state conventions voting on the question came to ratification—some unanimously; others, like Massachusetts, by the narrowest of margins. The oldest kind of “smoke-filled room” politicking was often required, and several states agreed only with the proviso that a bill of rights be added to the Constitution. Delaware, a small state happy with the representation it would receive, was the first to ratify and was joined in succession by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, the ninth ratifying state.

But even with the required nine states, there was uncertainty. Virginia and New York had not spoken, and rejection by either or both of these powerful, wealthy states might have rendered the Constitution meaningless. With the Bill of Rights compromise that had worked elsewhere, Virginia voted in favor. In New York, aggressive speechmaking and buttonholing by Alexander Hamilton, combined with John Jay’s gentler persuasion, carried the day for ratification.

AMERICAN VOICES

JAMES MADISON, reporting on the signing of the Constitution in September 1787:

Whilst the last members were signing, Dr. Franklin looking towards the president’s chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art, a rising from a setting sun. “I have,” said he, “often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the president, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now, at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.”

Who elected George Washington the first president?

In their wisdom and foresight, not to mention their fear of the rabble, the Framers of the Constitution had created a remarkably curious beast when it came to selecting the president. The Electoral College was the Constitution’s last-ditch defense against an overdose of democracy.

In the Framers’ scheme, each state would choose electors equal to its representation in Congress (House seats plus Senate seats). How the electors were chosen was a decision left to the separate states. The electors would then meet in their states and vote for two persons for president. The winner was the man with a majority. The Framers figured nobody—besides George Washington, that is—could win a clear majority, in which case the election would be decided in the House of Representatives, where each state got one vote.

Political parties were not only absent at this time, but were considered contemptible. Ideally in a debate, men would line up on one side or the other and then fall back into nonalignment, awaiting the next issue. The men who made the Constitution did not foresee the rise of the two-party system as we know it, although its beginnings were apparent in the debate over ratification. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, would be the first political party formed in America.

Although February 4, 1789, has come down as the traditional first presidential election date, that was actually the day on which the first electors cast their ballots. It was preceded by a crazy quilt of elections taking place in late 1788 and the first months of 1789, with each state setting its own rules as to who could vote for what. Some states allowed the electors to be chosen directly by voters; in other states, electors were chosen by the state legislature. While being a male freeholder (property owner) was generally the key to a vote, some states had very ambiguous voting rules. In New Jersey, for instance, women indeed did vote for president in the first election. In Pennsylvania, any taxpayer was eligible.

But the result was the same. On March 4, the first Congress was supposed to convene in New York, but a quorum wasn’t reached until April 1. Finally, on April 6, the Senate counted the electoral ballots and declared the inevitable. Washington was elected unanimously. John Adams had been named on enough ballots to qualify as vice president. Officially informed of his election on April 14, Washington left Mount Vernon two days later for an eight-day triumphal journey past adoring crowds along the way, and on April 30, 1789, he took the oath of office at Federal Hall in New York, which would be the seat of government for the next year and a half.

Washington earned a salary of $25,000 a year, a rather handsome sum at the time; however, he had to pay his own expenses. After moving to 39–41 Broadway, he hired fourteen white servants and brought seven slaves from Mount Vernon.

AMERICAN VOICES

GEORGE WASHINGTON, taking the oath of office (Article II of the Constitution directs the president-elect to take the following oath or affirmation to be inaugurated as president):

I do solemnly swear [affirm] that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Custom, not constitutional directive, dictates that the president-elect place his left hand on a Bible and keep his right hand slightly raised for the duration of the oath. When George Washington took the oath in 1789, he ad libbed a bit and added the words, “So help me God” at the end of the oath, according to legend. This report is disputed. Since then, every president has customarily said the same words.

AMERICAN VOICES

MARTHA WASHINGTON on life as first lady in New York City:

I live a dull life here. I never go to any public place. Indeed, I am more like a state prisoner than anything else . . . and I cannot do as I like, I am obstinate and stay home a great deal.

What was the Bill of Rights?

For the new government, no order of business was more pressing than delivering on a promised set of amendments to the Constitution. These were demanded during ratification by those who feared the states would be destroyed by the new central government. Madison took the lead in preparing the amendments, and on September 25, 1789, a list of twelve was submitted by the Congress, meeting in New York City, for ratification by the states. Ten of the twelve amendments were finally ratified and in force on December 15, 1791, and became known as the Bill of Rights. (See Appendix 1 for a complete text and discussion of the Bill of Rights, along with other constitutional amendments.)

Although England had a Bill of Rights, it was narrower and could be repealed by Parliament. The American version was broader, and repeal could be made only through the states. The intention of the amendments was to guarantee freedoms not specifically named in the original Constitution. While legal scholars argue that such guarantees may have been logically unnecessary, they have become an integral part of the American legal system and remain at the core of many of the major controversies in American history, including those confronting contemporary America.

GUARANTEES IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS

First Amendment. Guarantees separation of church and state and freedom to worship, freedom of speech and the press, the right to assemble and petition for changes.

Second Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms. (The key to gun control debate. Those who favor gun controls point to the Bill’s specification of “a well-regulated Militia.” Advocates of gun ownership cite this amendment in its most literal sense.)

Third Amendment. Soldiers cannot be housed in a private home without the consent of the owner. (A reaction to the British Quartering Act, one of the intolerable acts leading to the Revolution.)

Fourth Amendment. The right to be free from “unreasonable search and seizure.” (Another hot issue, criminal rights versus law enforcement, hinges on the interpretation of this amendment.)

Fifth Amendment. Provisions concerning prosecution and due process of law, including the requirement of a grand jury indictment, double jeopardy restriction—a person cannot be tried for the same crime twice—and the protection from testifying against oneself. (See “Who was Miranda?” in Chapter 8.)

Sixth Amendment. Guarantees the right to a speedy, public trial in the district where the crime has been committed, as well as other protections for the accused.

Seventh Amendment. Guarantees trial by jury.

Eighth Amendment. Prohibits excessive bails or fines and “cruel and unusual punishment,” the amendment at the heart of the capital punishment debate.

Ninth Amendment. Based on the idea that all human beings have certain fundamental rights, this amendment covers basic rights not specifically set forth in the Constitution.

Tenth Amendment. Guarantees that any powers not specifically delegated to the federal government or denied to the states in the Constitution rest with the states or the people.

(Two proposed amendments dealing with the apportionment of members and congressional compensation were not ratified at that time, although versions of each article have since been ratified.)

Amended by the Bill of Rights, the Constitution was still a political document, not an act of God. Like most works of men, it was flawed and imperfect in many ways—its flagrant denial of the rights of blacks, women, and Indians chief among its flaws. Many modern commentators argue that the Constitution was the perfectly realized means of assuring the control of the wealthy over the weak, with enough table scraps for the working and middle classes to assure popular support. From the beginning, critics have said the Constitution and Bill of Rights were selectively enforced and often ignored, as in the case of the Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams administration (1798), which clearly trampled the guarantees of the First Amendment.

On the other hand, what was the alternative? If the northern delegates had taken the moral high ground and not compromised on the issue of slavery, the constitutional convention would have disintegrated. Under the Articles of Confederation, the states would have remained economically weak and ripe for invasion by awaiting foreign forces.

The 1790 Census

To determine how many delegates each state would have in the House of Representatives, the Census Act was passed in 1790. The first census was completed in August 1790. Some highlights:

• Total U.S. population: 3,929,625.

• Black population: 697,624 slaves; 59,557 free blacks. (Massachusetts reported no slaves.)

• Philadelphia is the largest city, with 42,000; New York is second, with 33,000.

• Virginia is the most populous state, with more than 820,000 people.

• Nearly half of the population (48.5 percent) lives in the southern states, with the rest divided between New England and the middle states.

• America is youthful: 490 of every 1,000 whites are under the age of sixteen.

AMERICAN VOICES

Virginian ROBERT CARTER III, one of the wealthiest men and largest slaveholders in America (1791):

Whereas I Robert Carter of Nomini Hall in the county of Westmoreland & Commonwealth of Virginia [own] . . . many negroes & mulatto slaves . . . and Whereas I have for some time past been convinced that to retain them in Slavery is contrary to the true principles of Religion and justice . . . I do hereby declare that such . . . shall be emancipated.

Unlike other Founding Fathers who bemoaned slavery and kept slaves, Robert Carter III put his money where his mouth was. The grandson of Robert “King” Carter, the wealthiest of all Virginians, Robert Carter III had begun something akin to a spiritual quest. His grandfather built Christ Church on Virginia’s Northern Neck peninsula, one of the most beautiful old churches in America. And to ensure that no one missed the point, churchgoers were expected to wait until the Carter coach arrived before entering the church. Leaving the Anglican church of his youth and family, Robert Carter III became a deist, then a Baptist, but continued listening to other preachers, including Methodists. He became one of the most influential supporters of Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, which allowed Virginians to choose their religion and ended taxpayer support for the Episcopal church. Then in 1791, Carter shocked his neighbors by announcing he would emancipate his slaves. Not all of the neighbors were pleased by the news.

Why didn’t Jefferson like Hamilton?

Under Washington and the new Congress, the government moved rapidly toward organization. Drawing from a rich array of political talent, Washington selected appointees to the key posts in his administration, often turning to old friends and war veterans, such as Henry Knox, who became secretary of war. A 1,000-man army was established, principally to confront the Indians on the western frontier. The Supreme Court was created, and John Jay was chosen first chief justice. But the two giants of this administration, and the men who would personify the great debate and division within the country in the years ahead, were Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s most prominent biographer, has stated their difference simply. “No other statesman has personified national power and the rule of the favored few so well as Hamilton, and no other has glorified self-government and the freedom of the individual to such a degree as Jefferson.”

America’s envoy in Paris as the Bastille was stormed in 1789, beginning the French Revolution, Jefferson returned to New York to lead the State Department. Although a member of the aristocratic, slaveholding class, Jefferson despised the monarchy and saw Hamilton and his allies as a “British party,” trying to restore a form of elected monarchy to the new nation. He had only disdain for what he called “money men.” In theory, he wanted a weak government and envisioned America as a democracy of farmers and workers.

An illegitimate child born in the West Indies, Hamilton had risen during the Revolution to become Washington’s confidential secretary. He had become an attorney in New York, founder of the Bank of New York, and one of that state’s and the nation’s most powerful men, first helping to frame, then selling the Constitution. Hamilton was no “man of the people,” though. The masses, he said, were a “great beast.” He wanted a government controlled by the merchant and banking class, and the government under Hamilton would always put this elite class first. He would fill the critical role of Washington’s chief adviser in money matters.

Hamilton’s work was cut out for him. The nation’s finances were chaotic. America owed money to foreign nations, principally France and the Netherlands, and there was massive domestic debt. Even worse, there was no money to pay the debts off. The government needed money, and a series of excise taxes were passed, not without a little argument from congressmen, who wanted either local products free from taxes, or overseas products protected by tariffs. Many of them were the same items that had been taxed by the English a few years earlier, prompting the first rebellious actions in the colonies.

There were two key components of Hamilton’s master plan for the financial salvation of America. The first came in his Report on Public Credit, which provoked a firestorm of controversy by recommending that all creditors of the government be given securities at par with old, depreciated securities. Since most of these older securities were in the hands of speculators (mostly northern) who had bought them from original holders (mostly southern farmers and many of them veterans of the War for Independence) for a fraction of their worth, Hamilton was attacked viciously for selling out to the “eastern” speculators. When he added the suggestion that the federal government assume the debts of the states, he was also pilloried by the southern states because most of them had already paid their debts, and Hamilton’s plan would be a boon to the “eastern” states.

A real estate deal solved this problem. Opposed to Hamilton’s plan, Jefferson and James Madison, the latter a leader in the House of Representatives, swung the South to support it in exchange for an agreement establishing the site for a new federal city in the South. The nation’s future capital would be located on the banks of the Potomac. (Until the new city was ready, Philadelphia would become the nation’s capital.) But this compromise did not patch up the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson. Their political differences over almost every issue confronting the new government eventually grew to personal enmity.

The second major component of Hamilton’s master plan was the establishment of a national bank to store federal funds safely; to collect, move, and dispense tax money; and to issue notes. The bank would be partly owned by the government, but 80 percent of the stock would be sold to private investors. Again, Jefferson balked. It was unconstitutional, he argued; the government had no such power. Hamilton responded by arguing that the bank was legal under the congressional power to tax and regulate trade. This time there was no compromise, and President Washington went along with Hamilton.

It was a dazzling move in terms of the new nation’s finances. According to Thomas Fleming, “Hamilton had taken a country floundering in a morass of $80 million in state and federal war debts . . . and in a series of brilliant state papers, persuaded Congress to transform this demoralizing legacy of the Revolution into a national asset. . . . To stabilize the new system and prime the national financial pump, Hamilton persuaded Congress to create the semipublic Bank of the United States. In five years, the United States had the highest credit rating in the world and a reliable money supply was fueling prosperity from Boston to Savannah” (Duel, p. 5).

The differences between Jefferson and Hamilton extended to foreign affairs. With England and France again at war and the French Revolution under way, Hamilton openly favored the English. Jefferson admired the French and their Revolution, which America had certainly helped inspire, even if he detested the rushing rivers of blood that the guillotine was creating. The lines were similarly drawn over Jay’s Treaty, a settlement made with the British in the midst of another English-French war that threatened to involve the United States. Under its terms, British soldiers withdrew from their last outposts in the United States, but other portions of the treaty were viewed as excessively pro-British, and it was attacked by Jefferson’s supporters. (The treaty was ratified by the Senate in 1795.)

As part of their ongoing feud, both men supported rival newspapers whose editors received plums from the federal pie. Jefferson’s platform was the National Gazette, and Hamilton’s was the Gazette of the United States, both of which took potshots at the opposition. These were not mild pleasantries, either, but mudslinging that escalated into character assassination. More important, the feud gave birth to a new and unexpected development, the growth of political parties, or factions, as they were then called.

To this point, organized parties were viewed as sinister. There was no scheme for a two-party system consisting of a government party and a loyal opposition. Instead this system evolved piecemeal, and the seeds were sown in the Jefferson-Hamilton rivalry. Jefferson and James Madison, a Federalist during the ratification debate but now swung to Jefferson’s views, began to organize factions to support their growing opposition to Washington’s Federalist administration. Their supporters eventually adopted the name Democratic Republicans in 1796. (Now stay with this: The name was shortened to Republicans, but during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, they became Democrats.) These first Republicans generally favored a democratic, agrarian society in which individual freedoms were elevated over strong, centralized government. Hamilton and his supporters coalesced in 1792 as the Federalist Party, favoring a strong central government, promoting commercial and industrial interests, and supported by the elite and powerful of the nation. Under Washington, who openly disdained any “factions,” the Federalists held most of the power in Washington for several years to come, dominating Congress during the two Washington administrations and the Adams presidency.

To call these two groups the forerunners of the modern Democrats and Republicans is a bit of an oversimplification. The process leading to the present two-party system was a long, slow one, with several interruptions along the way. If he were alive today, would Jefferson be a Democrat or a Republican? His notions of less federal government would sit well with those Republicans who want to dismantle the federal bureaucracy. His preoccupation with civil liberties would seem more at home with the Democrats. And Hamilton? Certainly his commercial and banking instincts would place him in the old guard eastern establishment Republican mainstream. But his insistence on a powerful federal government pulling the economic strings would be heresy to more conservative, laissez-faire, small-government Republicans.

The personal in these politics would soon explode. Married to the daughter of one of New York’s most powerful men, General Philip Schuyler, Hamilton was at the peak of his power as both Treasury secretary and a New York state power broker. But he was about to be brought down in a scandal over, what else, money and sex.

In 1791, Hamilton had become involved with a Philadelphia woman named Maria Reynolds. (He was also rumored to have had an ongoing affair with his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church. But times were different for eighteenth-century men, whose illicit dalliances, if not expected, were at least tolerated.) James Reynolds, the husband of Maria, had begun charging Hamilton for access to his wife—call it blackmail or pimping. Reynolds then began to boast that Hamilton was giving him tips—“insider information,” in modern terms—that allowed him to speculate in government bonds. Accused of corruption, Hamilton actually turned over love letters from Maria Reynolds to his political enemies to prove that he might have cheated on his wife, but he wasn’t cheating the government. But in 1797, the letters surfaced publicly through a pamphlet by James Thomson Callender (who may have gotten the letters from Virginia’s James Monroe, a Jefferson ally). He accused Hamilton of immense speculation on Treasury policies. Hamilton confessed the affair publicly, and his career seemed over. But Hamilton had powerful, loyal friends. Most of all, he had the support of the “first friend.” With George Washington’s public show of loyalty, Hamilton survived, the eighteenth century’s version of the comeback kid.

AMERICAN VOICES

GEORGE WASHINGTON, from the Farewell Address:

I have already intimated to you the danger of Parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on Geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind. It exists under different shapes in all Governments, more or less stifled, controuled [sic], or repressed; but, in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention [sic], which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself frightful despotism. . . . [T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it in the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.

Was George Washington killed by his doctors?

With a last hurrah, Washington led troops once more in 1794 to suppress the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in the frontier of western Pennsylvania. Like Shays’s Rebellion, it was a revolt of backwoods farmers against the establishment, this time over a stiff excise tax placed on whiskey. With 13,000 troops—more men than he had led during the war—Washington rode out in uniform, with Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton by his side, to put down the uprising with ease.

In September 1796, setting aside requests that he take a third term, Washington made the last of his many retirement speeches in his Farewell Address, warning against political parties and “passionate attachments” to foreign nations. He was basically ignored on both counts.

Washington’s retirement to Mount Vernon was interrupted by the near outbreak of a war with France, which was basically kidnapping American sailors to man its ships in its wars against England. In 1798, Congress asked him to lead the army once more, and Washington agreed. He asked Alexander Hamilton to be his second-in-command, but the disagreement with France was settled, and Washington returned to Mount Vernon.

After a winter ride in December 1799, Washington fell ill with a throat infection, then called “quinsy” (most likely what is now called strep throat). With his throat badly swollen, Washington had difficulty breathing. Following standard medical practice of the day, Washington was first given a mixture of tea and vinegar. This was followed by calomel, a commonly used laxative also called “blue mass,” which was intended to flush out sickness. Finally, he was bled by his doctors, a total of four times, taking over half the blood in his body. While the bleeding did not kill him, it certainly didn’t help Washington’s cause. “I die hard,” he said on his deathbed, “but I am not afraid to go.” Washington died on December 14, 1799, two months before his sixty-eighth birthday.

Prior to his death, Washington had told a British visitor to Mount Vernon, “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can [save] our Union.” While he had done little to bring that end about in his lifetime other than fret about it, his will included specific conditions for the problem that he had publicly and privately wrestled with—his slaves. From 1775, Washington had stopped selling slaves, a profitable enterprise, and the plantation’s slave population actually doubled. All were to be freed after his wife Martha’s death. (She released her husband’s slaves before she died in 1800, and the estate supported some as pensioners until 1833.)

What was the Revolution of 1800?

With Washington’s retirement came the first true presidential campaign, which got under way in 1796. Gathering in a “caucus,” the Federalist congressmen selected John Adams, the vice president, as their standard-bearer, with Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as a second candidate. The other Federalist leader, Alexander Hamilton, was deemed too strong-willed and monarchist for even the staunchest of Federalists. Jefferson was the obvious choice of the Democratic Republicans, with their second on the ticket being Aaron Burr, an ambitious New Yorker who brought control of Tammany Hall, the first “political machine,” to the ticket.

Shrewd and ambitious, Hamilton thought he could pull a power play by getting Pinckney elected and becoming the man pulling the strings, but this stratagem backfired when New England Federalists caught on to Hamilton’s plan and voted for Jefferson instead. Adams squeaked into the presidency, and Jefferson, although of the opposing party, won the second most electoral votes and became vice president. Obviously, it would be back to the drawing board for presidential elections.

Adams’s years in office were distinguished mostly by the animosity that had been unleashed between the two competing parties. Although the Federalists had held sway through Washington’s administrations and into that of Adams, their power was beginning to decline. Neither the Jay Treaty nor Adams was broadly popular, and Adams endured much abuse from the Republican press. His greatest accomplishment was managing to avoid a wider war with France when it seemed likely; his low point came with passage of a series of repressive measures called the Alien and Sedition Acts, which expressed the fear of foreigners in the young nation while attempting to suppress all criticism of the Federalist administration.

Yet the next election, in 1800, would be a close one, in more than one way. Adams once again led the Federalist ticket, with Charles C. Pinckney (the brother of Thomas Pinckney) as his party’s number two choice. Jefferson and Burr were again the Republican nominees. The campaign produced a torrent of slurs and abuses from both sides. And newspapers loyal to either party were filled with crude rumors of sexual philandering by both Adams and Jefferson. To the Federalists, Jefferson was an atheist who would allow the excesses of the French Revolution to come to America.

When the ballots were counted, however, the Republicans held the day. But the problem was, which Republican? There was no separate election of president and vice president, and Jefferson and Burr had collected seventy-three votes each. Under the Constitution, the tie meant the House of Representatives, still under Federalist control, would decide the question.

Faced with a choice between these two, Alexander Hamilton lobbied for Jefferson. He hated Jefferson but he detested fellow New Yorker Burr, in his opinion a “most unfit and dangerous man.” Burr played his hand cautiously, not campaigning for himself, but not withdrawing, either. The votes of nine of the House’s state delegations were needed to win, and Jefferson failed to gain them through thirty-five ballots. The crisis was real, and some historians believe that civil war over this election was not only possible but likely. Some Republican leaders were threatening to call out their state militias to enforce the popular will. Finally, with Jefferson privately assuring the Federalists that he would maintain much of the status quo, the House elected him on February 17, 1801. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, in the new federal capital of Washington. (The difficulties of selecting the president in 1800 resulted in passage of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which provides for separate balloting for the vice president and president. See Appendix 1 for more on this amendment.)

This electoral crisis marked a triumph of level heads in both parties, who put the orderly succession and continuity of government first. This Revolution of 1800, as Jefferson called it, was a bloodless one, but its impact was real. The Federalist Party was all but guillotined; it lost both the presidency and Congress, but John Adams had made certain that its influence did not die with his defeat.

Must Read: John Adams by David McCullough.

What was Marbury v. Madison?

In his last weeks before leaving the presidency, John Adams did what Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and other presidents have only dreamed of accomplishing. Working with a “lame duck” Federalist Congress that would soon be out of power, Adams created dozens of new judgeships. He signed appointments until late into the night before Jefferson was inaugurated, and these “midnight judges” of staunch Federalist beliefs throughout the federal courts resulted in the most successful “court-packing” operation in American judicial history. In doing so, Adams influenced the course of events long after his rather inconsequential four years in office were over.

Most prominent among Adams’s appointments was that of John Marshall, who had served as Adams’s secretary of state, to be chief justice of the United States in 1801. Although he had studied law only briefly and had no judicial experience, Marshall held that post until his death in 1835. He placed a stamp on the Court and the young nation that is still felt today. Of his many decisions, one of the most important came in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison.

The case grew out of the ongoing political fight to the death between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans. In the last-minute rush to appoint judges who would uphold the Federalist principle of a strong central government, William Marbury, one of the “midnight judges,” was named to a lower federal court. But Marshall, as secretary of state, had failed to present Marbury with his commission, and James Madison, the secretary of state for the incoming Jefferson administration, refused to grant Marbury’s commission. Marbury sued and appealed to the Supreme Court—now with Marshall presiding—to order Madison to grant the commission.

But Marshall refused Marbury’s request, saying that although Marbury was theoretically entitled to the post, a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had established the federal court system, was unconstitutional and void. For the first time the Supreme Court had overturned an act of Congress. Although Marshall’s decision in this case affected only the right of the court to interpret its own powers, the concept of judicial review, a key principle in the constitutional system of checks and balances, got its first test.

AMERICAN VOICES

From CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL’S decision in Marbury v. Madison:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. . . . Thus the particular phraseology of the constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void. . . .

How did America purchase Louisiana?

While America enjoyed its bloodless Revolution of 1800, France was still in the throes of its more violent contortions. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte engineered the coup that overturned the Revolutionary Directory, eventually making himself ruler of France. While most of Napoleon’s grandiose plans focused on Europe, America had a place in the Little Corporal’s heart. His first step was to force a weak Spain to return the Louisiana Territory to France, which it did in 1800. The second step was to regain control of the Caribbean island of St. Domingue. In 1793, at the time of the French Revolution, the island had come under control of a self-taught genius, General Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had led a successful slave revolt. To launch any offensive in North America, Napoleon needed the island as a base, and he sent 20,000 troops to retake it.

All this French scurrying around in America’s backyard alarmed President Jefferson, who knew that French control of New Orleans and the western territories would create an overwhelming threat to America. Jefferson had an option play ready. Although he preferred neutrality between the warring European nations, Jefferson dropped hints to the British about an alliance against the French, and found them receptive. At the same time, he directed Robert Livingston and James Monroe to offer to buy New Orleans and Florida from France. Such a sale seemed unlikely until the French army sent to St. Domingue was practically wiped out by yellow fever after regaining control of the island. (The French withdrew to the eastern half of St. Domingue, and the western half was renamed Haiti, the original Arawak name for the island, with Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, proclaiming himself emperor. The island, Columbus’s Hispaniola, remains split today between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.)

Without the safe base on the island, a French adventure into Louisiana was out of the question. Preparing to open a new European campaign, Napoleon wrote off the New World. He needed troops and cash. Almost on a whim, he ordered his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to offer not only New Orleans and Florida but the whole of the Louisiana Territory to America. Livingston and Monroe dickered with the French over price, but in May 1803, a treaty turning over all of Louisiana was signed. Nobody knew exactly what Napoleon sold, but under the treaty’s terms, the United States would double in size for about $15 million, or approximately four cents an acre. Left unclear were the rights to Texas, western Florida, and the West Coast above the Spanish settlements in California. Spain had its own ideas about these territories. Ironically, the purchase was made with U.S. bonds, the result of Hamilton’s U.S. Bank initiative, which Jefferson had resisted as unconstitutional.

AMERICAN VOICES

MERIWETHER LEWIS, from The Journals of Lewis and Clark (February 11, 1805):

about five Oclock this evening one of the wives of Charbon was delivered of a fine boy. it is worthy of remark that this was the first child which this woman had boarn, and as is common in such cases, labour was tedious and the pain violent; Mr. Jessome informed me that he had frequently administered a small portion of the rattle of the rattle-snake, which he assured me had never failed to produce the desired effect, that of hastening the birth of the child; having the rattle of a snake by me I gave it to him and he administered two rings of it to the woman broken in small pieces with the fingers and added to a small quantity of water. Whether this medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not undertake to determine, but I was informed that she had not taken it more than ten minutes before she brought forth perhaps this remedy may be worthy of future experiments, but I must confess that I want faith as to its efficacy.

Who were Lewis and Clark?

Months before the purchase was made, Jefferson had the foresight to ask Congress for $2,500 to outfit an expedition into the West. Ostensibly its purpose was to “extend the external commerce” of the United States, but Jefferson had several other motives: to get America into the fur trade; to feel out the political and military uses of the West; and, reflecting his philosophy as a true Enlightenment man, to collect scientific information about this vast, uncharted land.

With the purchase complete, the little expedition now became a major adventure to find out what exactly America now owned. For this job, Jefferson selected thirty-year-old Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809), his private secretary, an army veteran, and a fellow Virginian. Lewis selected another Virginia soldier, thirty-four-year-old William Clark (1770–1838), a veteran of the Indian wars and brother of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, as his co-commander. With some forty soldiers and civilians, including Clark’s slave York, they set out from St. Louis in the winter of 1803–4 aboard three boats, a fifty-five-foot keelboat with twenty-two oars and two pirogues, or dugout canoes, each large enough to hold seven men. They carried twenty one bales of gifts to trade with Indians. Working their way upstream was arduous, and strict martial discipline was maintained with regular floggings, but the company reached what is now North Dakota in the fall of 1804, built Fort Mandan (near present-day Bismarck), and wintered there.

In the spring of 1805, they set out again for the West, now joined by Charbonneau, a French-Canadian trapper, and one of his Indian wives, a pregnant teenager named Sacagawea, who acted as guides and interpreters. Crossing the Rockies in present-day Montana, they built boats to take them down the Clearwater and Columbia rivers, reaching the Pacific coast in November, where they built Fort Clatsop (near the site of Astoria, Oregon). Hearing the Indians speak some “sailor’s” English, presumably learned from traders, the expedition believed a ship might pass and they decided to winter there. When no ship appeared, they set off for an overland return, splitting the expedition in two after crossing the Rockies to explore alternative routes. The parties reunited at the site of Fort Union, and arrived together in St. Louis on September 23, 1806.

After twenty-eight months of incredible hardships met in traveling over difficult, uncharted terrain, in skirmishes with Indians, and in encounters with dangerous animals from rattlesnakes to grizzly bears, the Lewis and Clark expedition had suffered only a single casualty: one man had succumbed to an attack of appendicitis.

The journals they kept, the specimens they brought or sent back, the detailed accounts of Indians they had encountered and with whom they had traded were of inestimable value, priming an America that was eager to press westward.

While William Clark lived long and was influential in Indian affairs, Lewis suffered from melancholy and committed suicide. Although some historians later claimed Lewis was murdered, there is scant evidence to support that notion. Suffering from what was then described as “hypochondria,” which is how later Lincoln described his own depression, the modern term would more likely have been manic depression, or bipolar syndrome. There is also some suggestion that Lewis suffered from the effects of syphilis. Contrary to common myth that she survived to her nineties, Sacagawea actually died in her twenty-eighth year. Her son, born on the trip and nicknamed Pomp, was later raised by Clark and traveled in Europe before returning to America, where he became a trapper and guide.

Must Read: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose.

Why did Aaron Burr shoot Alexander Hamilton?

Thomas Jefferson did not sit around idly while waiting for his two adventurers to return. The deal with France was the centerpiece of Jefferson’s first administration, and while the few remaining Federalists in Congress tried to undermine it on constitutional grounds, the acquisition and the president were so popular that resistance was futile.

Jefferson had earlier made the historically popular move of cutting taxes, including repeal of the Whiskey Tax that Washington had led an army to enforce. He won more admirers when he balked at the widely accepted practice of paying tribute to pirates based in North Africa—the “Barbary pirates.” A brief naval war followed, which did not end the tribute payments, but did give America some new naval heroes (Stephen Decatur chief among them), inspired the line in “The Marines’ Hymn” about “the shores of Tripoli,” and earned America a new measure of international respect. (It also provided members of the Marine Corps with their distinctive nickname. To ward off sword blows, the marines wore a protective piece of leather around their necks—hence “leathernecks.”)

By election time in 1804, Jefferson’s popularity was so great that the opposition Federalist Party was all but dead.

But a group of Federalists known as the Essex Junto did attempt a bizarre break from the Union. Their conspiracy would have been historically laughable had it not ended in tragedy. Part of their plan was to support Aaron Burr for governor of New York. No friend of Jefferson’s, Burr had been frozen out of power in the Jefferson administration, and then unceremoniously dumped by his party as candidate for vice president (and replaced by George Clinton, the aging governor of New York). The long-standing hatred between Burr and Alexander Hamilton resurfaced as Hamilton used all his influence to defeat Burr in the governor’s race. To Hamilton, Burr was a “dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” That was the polite attack; others were aimed at Burr’s notorious sexual exploits. An admitted adulterer, Hamilton was no paragon of marital fidelity, either, and Burr pulled no punches in his counterassaults.

Hamilton’s political destruction of Burr was successful, but with awful results. A few months after the election, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, and they met on the morning of Wednesday, July 11, 1804, on the cliffs above the Hudson in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton’s son had died in a duel, and he opposed the idea of dueling, but personal honor and that of the fading Federalist Party forced his hand. The widely accepted version of events is that Hamilton fired his pistol but deliberately missed, an intention he had supposedly stated before the duel. Others dispute that, and say Hamilton just missed. Burr did not. (As Gore Vidal’s fictional Aaron Burr put it in the novel Burr, “at the crucial moment his hand shook and mine never does.”) Hamilton was mortally wounded, and suffered for an excruciating thirty hours before dying. Aaron Burr, who had nearly been president a few years before, was now a fugitive.

But Burr was hardly finished as a factor in American politics, or as a thorn in Thomas Jefferson’s side. Perhaps inspired by Napoleon, an ambitious colonel who had become an emperor, Burr envisioned securing a western empire he intended to rule. With James Wilkinson, one of Washington’s wartime generals who was appointed by Jefferson to govern Louisiana, but who was secretly on the Spanish payroll, Burr organized a small force in 1806 to invade Mexico and create a new nation in the West. For some reason, Wilkinson betrayed Burr, and the conspiracy was foiled. Burr was captured and placed on trial for treason, with Chief Justice John Marshall presiding. Jefferson’s hatred for Burr was unleashed as he did everything in his power to convict his former vice president. But the crafty old Federalist Marshall saw the trial as another way to undermine Jefferson, and his charge to the jury all but acquitted Burr. Following a second treason charge, Burr jumped bail and fled to Europe, where he remained for five years, attempting to persuade Napoleon to organize an Anglo-French invasion of America. He did return to New York in 1812, where he continued a colorful and lusty life until his death in 1836.

Must Read: Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America by Thomas Fleming.

AMERICAN VOICES

From the Richmond Recorder, published by James Thomson Callender (1802):

A Song Supposed to have been written by the SAGE OF MONTICELLO

When pressed by loads of state affairs

I seek to sport and dally

The sweetest solace of my cares

Is in the lap of Sally,

She’s black you tell me—grant she be—

Must colour always tally?

Black is love’s proper hue for me

And white’s the hue for Sally

Callender, the muckraking journalist who had revealed Hamilton’s affair a few years earlier, was disappointed when he failed to get a patronage job from Jefferson in 1800. He turned the tables and began to attack Thomas Jefferson with the charges that Jefferson kept a slave as his lover.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: Did he or didn’t he?

The DNA evidence is in. Or is it?

While Jefferson won the election of 1804 in a landslide, the campaign was notable for the one juicy bit of mudslinging gossip it had produced. A popular Federalist claim of the day was that Jefferson had carried on an affair with a young slave named Sally Hemings while he was envoy in Paris, and that she had given birth to Jefferson’s illegitimate children. What makes the Hemings story all the more remarkable is that fact that “dusky Sally,” as the newspaper called her, was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Sally’s mother had become the mistress of Martha Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, after the death of Martha’s mother, and as a result Sally was Martha’s slave half-sister. Martha Jefferson died in 1782, when Sally was nine, and Jefferson, then thirty-nine years old, was grief-stricken, apparently to the point of suicide. But while Jefferson was in Paris, in 1787, his daughter Maria was brought to France during an epidemic in Virginia. She was accompanied by Sally, now almost sixteen. Some believe that at this time, Sally Hemings became Thomas Jefferson’s mistress and eventually bore him children during a thirty-eight-year relationship. (This relationship is also lovingly but fictionally depicted in the Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris.)

Jefferson remained silent on Callender’s charges, and while the public was certainly aware of them, they had little impact on the election in 1804. What the incident shows is that there is nothing new about “negative campaigns” and mudslinging during presidential races.

The controversy was mostly forgotten over the years, as Jefferson was lionized for his role in the founding of the country, placed on Mt. Rushmore, and celebrated in a Broadway musical called 1776. But the story gained new life with the publication of two books, Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), Fawn Brodie’s “psychobiography,” and Barbara Chase Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings (1979), both of which became best-sellers by claiming the relationship was real. Defenders of Jefferson countered that while Jefferson certainly had a love affair while in Paris, it was with Maria Cosway, the wife of an English painter, and whether it was consummated is a matter of conjecture. Others, including Virginius Dabney, author of The Jefferson Scandals (1981), a refutation of the Sally Hemings rumor, point to two of Jefferson’s nephews as Sally’s lovers and the possible fathers of her children.

Then came another book, a scholarly work called Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, by Annette Gordon-Reed, followed by DNA tests on descendants of Jefferson and Hemings in 1998. The national news media widely reported that these tests confirmed the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, and that Eston Hemings, who was freed in Jefferson’s will, was Jefferson’s son. In fact, they do not do so conclusively. Out of seven tests, the DNA match found one match identical to twenty-five Jefferson males then living in Virginia. Six of these Jefferson males were between fourteen and twenty-seven and could have been responsible for impregnating Sally Hemings. The controversy spilled into very public view when the descendants of Hemings sought to be admitted into the Monticello Association, an organization of descendants of Jefferson, which would entitle them to be buried in the Jefferson cemetery. The Jefferson group declined to accept the Hemings group because the scientific evidence was deemed inconclusive, but they did offer a separate burial area for descendants of Jefferson’s slaves.

In 2008, Gordon-Reed published a new book, The Hemingses of Monticello, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, in which she essentially concluded that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally’s children, an opinion that has become more widely accepted. At Jefferson’s home, Monticello, this long-rumored relationship is now acknowledged.

Does it matter whether it was really Jefferson, or one of his younger relatives? What is the real historical import of the question? What takes this story out of the context of a People magazine article or a daytime television talk show? Ultimately, the story of Jefferson and his slaves is about the great American contradiction, particularly as it is embodied by Jefferson—the contradiction between “all men are created equal” and the “peculiar institution” on which Jefferson’s life and fortune were built. It is that great contradiction that led Samuel Johnson to rise in Parliament during the Revolution and ask, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”

Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, who has written several histories of slavery, once attempted to resolve this contradiction when he wrote in the New York Times, “Jefferson was no saint, but his reflections on African-Americans must be understood in the context of his times and his relationship with an African-American woman. Nearly all Caucasians of his day, including most abolitionists, simply assumed that African-Americans were racially inferior. Jefferson was unusual in the degree to which he agonized over the subject. He was overtly inclined to what we would consider today to be racist views, but he also held out the possibility that he might be wrong. In this regard, he was ahead of his times.”

What was impressment?

Following Washington’s example, Jefferson declined an opportunity to run again. (There was no constitutional limitation on the number of presidential terms of office a single individual might serve until after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unique election to a fourth term in 1944. The Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1947, limits a president to two terms or to a single elected term for a president who has served more than two years of his predecessor’s term. When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, he stated his opposition to this limitation on principle, expressing the belief that the people should be entitled to vote for the candidate of their choice. For more on this amendment, see Appendix 1.) Although Jefferson had been reelected at the peak of his popularity, he left under less happy circumstances, primarily because of his unpopular Embargo Act.

Passed in 1807, the act was the result of America’s international weakness at a time when Napoleon had turned the world into a battleground with England and its allies. Jefferson wanted to keep America—a weak, third-rate nation with no real army and a skeleton navy—neutral in the wars that had left Napoleon in control of Europe and had made the British masters of the seas. America had actually flourished economically during the fighting, as the warring nations eagerly bought American goods and ships. But American neutrality did not protect her merchant ships from being stopped by British vessels, which could take any British subject off the ship and “impress” him into Royal Navy service. On board the ships, legal distinctions such as “naturalized citizenship” were meaningless, and Americans were being seized along with British subjects.

The Embargo Act, which prohibited all exports into America as economic retaliation for the British impressment policy and as a means to keep America out of war, was one of the most unpopular and unsuccessful acts in American history. In his last week in office, Jefferson had it abolished, replaced by the Nonintercourse Act, which prohibited trade only with England and which provoked only more impressment attacks.

Jefferson’s handpicked successor was his secretary of state, fellow Virginian and longtime ally James “Jemmy” Madison, who was elected in 1808 for the first of two terms. When Madison took office, war with England and perhaps with France seemed inevitable.

Who were Tecumseh and the Prophet?

The coming war got some provocation from one of the most remarkable Indian leaders of American history. A young Shawnee chief from the Ohio valley, Tecumseh envisioned a vast Indian confederacy strong enough to keep the Ohio River as a border between Indians and whites, preventing further westward expansion. He and his brother, Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, an Indian mystic who called for a revival of Indian ways and a rejection of white culture, traveled extensively among tribes from Wisconsin to Florida. With Tecumseh’s organizing brilliance and the Prophet’s religious fervor, younger warriors began to fall in line, and a large army of braves, a confederacy of midwestern and southern tribes, gathered at the junction of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers.

General William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory (and a future president and grandfather of a president), was given the task of confronting Tecumseh, whom he met twice. After one of those meetings, Harrison wrote, “The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him, is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.”

Harrison took 1,000 men out to camp near the Indians. Tecumseh, then on one of his organizing and recruiting trips, was absent when his brother, the Prophet, ordered a badly calculated assault on Harrison’s troops in November 1811. The Indians inflicted heavy losses, but were eventually driven back and scattered. Harrison and his troops destroyed their food stores, their village, and the Prophet’s claim of invincible magic, shattering Indian confidence and ending hopes for Tecumseh’s confederation.

To western Americans, the Indian confederation was a convenient excuse to fan anti-British sentiment in Congress. Calling Tecumseh’s confederation a British scheme, land-hungry westerners heightened the war fever, clamoring for the expulsion of the British from North America, even if it meant invading Canada to do it.

AMERICAN VOICES

TECUMSEH of the Shawnees:

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun.

Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, to give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, “Never! Never!”

Tecumseh died during the War of 1812, fighting alongside the British on the Thames River in Ontario. Tecumseh was shot and killed in October 1813. His body was reportedly skinned and mutilated by Kentucky militiamen, and he was buried in a mass grave near the battlefield, according to R. David Edmunds in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians.

What was the War of 1812 about?

With the British encouraging the Indians and the continuing controversy over English impressment of sailors taken from American ships, there was a powerful cry for war among the land-crazed “war hawks” of the West. Led by the bellicose but powerful young House speaker, Henry Clay of Kentucky, Madison was pushed to what Jefferson had tried to avoid, a war with England. The War of 1812 finally got under way in June, in the midst of the presidential campaign.

It was not a war that America was ready to fight. A regular army of 12,000 was scattered and led by political appointees rather than by experienced commanders. There was a small navy, hardly equal in numbers or experience to England’s.

Neither side apparently prosecuted this war with much enthusiasm. The results showed in a meandering war effort that went on for the next two and a half years, ending early in 1815. After its humbling experience in the Revolution, and preoccupied with Napoleon’s armies on the continent, England fought a reluctant war. English commercial interests saw America as an important market and supplier, so their support for war was halfhearted. America didn’t lose this war. Nor did it really win. And the greatest single American victory in the war, at the Battle of New Orleans, came after peace had already been signed.

MILESTONES IN THE WAR OF 1812

1812

July Aiming to conquer Canada, American troops under General William Hull launch an assault. British-Canadian troops, augmented by 1,000 of Tecumseh’s braves, send Hull’s army reeling. Hull is later court-martialed and sentenced to death for cowardice, but is pardoned by Madison.

August–December A series of surprising American sea victories by the Constitution (Old Ironsides) and the United States commanded by Stephen Decatur are morale boosters, but have no influence on the war’s outcome.

December Madison is reelected president, beginning an American political tradition: no president has been turned out of office in wartime. Madison’s new vice president is Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration, who wins a place in posterity for creating another political tradition. Gerry carved Massachusetts into election districts that favored his party. These districts, say his opponents, were shaped like wriggling salamanders, giving the American political dictionary a new word, “gerrymander.”

The British begin a naval blockade of Chesapeake and Delaware bays.

1813

March Commodore Isaac Chauncey, with the assistance of young Captain Oliver Perry, begins to build warships on Lake Erie to control the Great Lakes.

April American forces capture York (Toronto) and burn government buildings there.

May American forces under Winfield Scott take Fort George, forcing British withdrawal from Lake Erie.

June The American frigate Chesapeake is captured by the British. Before dying, the American captain, James Lawrence, orders his men, “Don’t give up the ship.” They listened, prevailed, and the words soon become the American navy’s rallying cry.

September The American fleet on Lake Erie, led by Oliver Hazard Perry, defeats a British counterpart, giving the United States control of this strategic waterway. Perry’s message to a happy President Madison: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

October The Battle of the Thames. Americans under William Henry Harrison defeat retreating British and Indian forces. Harrison’s Indian adversary, Tecumseh, is killed in the battle, depriving the Indians of the strong leader who might have united them.

November American forces under James Wilkinson are defeated at Montreal. A disgraced Wilkinson is later court-martialed for cowardice, but is acquitted.

The British navy extends its blockade north to Long Island. Only ports in New England remain open to commerce, and merchants in New York and New England continue to supply the British.

1814

March While the war against the British goes on, General Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia has been fighting the Creek Indian War. Jackson achieves a decisive victory in this war at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama, ending the Creek War.

April Napoleon Bonaparte is overthrown, freeing some 14,000 British troops to concentrate on the war in America.

The British blockade is extended to New England. The Americans retaliate by privateering, and capture 825 British vessels by the summer.

July Battle of Chippewea. Outnumbered American forces under Winfield Scott defeat British forces.

August Peace negotiations begin in Ghent.

After routing an American army at Bladensburg in a battle watched by President Madison, British troops march unopposed into Washington, D.C. In retaliation for the earlier American burning of York, the British set fire to the Capitol, the president’s mansion, and other government buildings. The British withdraw from the capital for an attack on Baltimore, and Madison returns to Washington at the end of August.

AMERICAN VOICES

FIRST LADY DOLLEY MADISON, in a letter to her sister (August 23–24, 1814):

Will you believe it, my sister? We have had a battle, or skirmish, near Bladensburg, and here I am still, within sound of the cannon! Mr. Madison comes not. May God protect us! . . . At this late hour a wagon has been procured, and I have filled it with plate and the most valuable portable articles, belonging to the house. . . . I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvas taken out. It is done!

After the war, the president’s mansion was painted white to cover the scorch marks left by the British. That is when everyone started to call it the White House.

September An American victory on Lake Champlain forces the British to abort a planned offensive south from Canada.

The siege of Baltimore. A successful defense of the city and Fort McHenry is witnessed by Francis Scott Key, an American civilian held on board a British ship, who is inspired to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Two elements of the British strategy, one assault from Canada and another into the middle states, have now been thwarted, leaving a third British army aimed at the Gulf Coast.

December Andrew Jackson arrives in New Orleans, unaware that a large British invasion fleet is sailing there from Jamaica. When he learns of the attacking force, he begins preparing a defense of New Orleans, and an elaborate system of fortifications is completed just before Christmas.

December 24 The Treaty of Ghent is signed, ending the war. The treaty leaves unresolved most of the issues that led to the fighting, including impressment, now a moot point because the end of the Napoleonic wars ends the British need for more sailors. Clear boundaries between Canada and the United States are set, and a later agreement demilitarizes the Great Lakes. The Oregon Territory in the Pacific Northwest is placed under joint British-American control for a period of ten years.

1815

January The Battle of New Orleans. Unaware that peace was made two weeks earlier, the British attack. The American defenders, under General Andrew Jackson, are aided by the French privateer Jean Lafitte, who has been courted by the British as well. Heavily outnumbered by British troops fresh from the victory over Napoleon’s armies, the Americans use artillery and sharpshooting riflemen to repulse numerous British charges against their defensive position, inflicting massive losses. The British suffer more than 20,000 dead; U.S. casualties are 8 dead and a small number wounded. Although the war’s outcome is unaffected by this rout, Jackson becomes an instant national hero. The news of the Treaty of Ghent finally reaches America in February.

What was the Monroe Doctrine?

America suffered one notable casualty in the War of 1812. The Federalist Party, which had opposed the war, was mortally wounded. Peace had delivered a large political bonus for Madison and his party. In 1816, the Federalists barely mounted opposition to Madison’s chosen successor, James Monroe, next in the “Virginian dynasty” that started with Washington, was delayed by Adams, and continued through Jefferson and Madison.

Elected at age fifty-eight, Monroe had seen much in his life. A veteran of the War of Independence, he had fought at Trenton, was twice governor of Virginia and then a senator from that state. As a diplomat he helped engineer the Louisiana Purchase. Like Jefferson and Madison before him, he had served as secretary of state, giving that post and not the vice presidency the luster of heir apparent’s office.

With the great foreign disputes settled and the nation comfortably accepting one-party rule, Monroe’s years were later dubbed the Era of Good Feelings. It was a period of rapid economic expansion, especially in the Northeast, as manufacturing began to replace shipbuilding as the leading industry. These calm years saw the beginnings of the machine age, as men like Eli Whitney, Seth Thomas of mechanical clock fame, and Francis Cabot Lowell were bringing America into the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. A series of postwar treaties with the British solidified the nation’s boundaries and eliminated the threat of another war with England.

But the most notable historical milestone in this administration came in an address given to Congress in 1823. The speech was as much the work of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, son of the second president, but some decades later it came to be called the Monroe Doctrine.

In this speech, Monroe essentially declared that the United States would not tolerate intervention in the Americas by European nations. Monroe also promised that the United States wouldn’t interfere with already established colonies or with governments in Europe. In one sense, this declaration was an act of isolationism, with America withdrawing from the political tempests of Europe. But it was also a recognition of a changing world order. Part of this new reality was the crumbling of the old Spanish Empire in the New World, and rebellions swept South America, creating republics under such leaders as Simon Bolívar, José de San Martín, and—the most unlikely name in South American history—Bernardo O’Higgins, the son of an Irish army officer and leader of the new republic of Chile. By 1822, America recognized the independent republics of Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and La Plata (comprising present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama).

On the positive side, the doctrine marked what might be called the last step in America’s march to independence, which had begun in the Revolution and moved through post-independence foreign treaties, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the postwar agreements. But from another historical perspective, the Doctrine became the basis for a good deal of high-handed interference in South American affairs as the United States embarked on a path of meddling in Central and South America. As demonstrated by the “revolution” that created Panama with Teddy Roosevelt’s help (see p. 293) and, more recently, the long war against Fidel Castro and the illegal support of the contra rebels in Nicaragua during the 1980s, that hemispheric interference has continued for centuries.

What was the Missouri Compromise?

As proof of the “good feelings,” Monroe was almost unanimously reelected in 1820, winning 231 of the 232 electoral votes cast that year. Popular legend has it that one elector withheld his vote to preserve Washington’s record as the only unanimously elected president. But the facts show that the one elector who voted for Secretary of State John Quincy Adams did not know how everyone else would vote, and simply cast his ballot for Adams because he admired him.

While it may have been the Era of Good Feelings, not everyone felt so good. Certainly the Indians who were being decimated and pushed into shrinking territories by the rapacious westward push didn’t feel so good. Nor did the slaves of the South, who now had to harvest a new crop in cotton, which had replaced tobacco as king. And it was the question of slavery that led to the other noteworthy milestone in the Monroe years—one about which Monroe had little to say—the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

From the day when Jefferson drafted the Declaration, through the debates at the Philadelphia convention, slavery was clearly an issue that America would be forced to confront. The earlier compromises of the Declaration and Constitution were beginning to show their age. Even though the slave trade had been outlawed in 1808 under a provision of the constitutional compromise, an illicit trade in slaves continued. The chief argument of the day was not about importing new slaves, however, but about the admission of new states to the Union, and whether they would be free or slave states.

It is important to realize that while strong abolitionist movements were beginning to gather force in America, the slavery debate was essentially about politics and economics rather than morality. The “three-fifths” compromise written into the Constitution, allowing slaves to be counted as part of the total population for the purpose of allocating congressional representation, gave slave states a political advantage over free states. Every new state meant two more Senate votes and a proportional number of House votes. Slave states wanted those votes to maintain their political power. Of course, there was an economic dimension to this issue. Wage-paying northerners were forced to compete against slave labor in the South. For southerners, wealth was land. With Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (the word “gin” is short for “engine”) allowing huge increases of efficiency in production, and the new factories of Lowell in New England to make cloth, the market for cotton was booming. Slaveholding southerners needed more land to grow more cotton to sell to the textile mills of the Northeast and England, and slaves were needed to work that land. If gaining new land to plant meant creating new states, slaveholders wanted them to be slave states.

By adding massive real estate to the equation under the Louisiana Purchase, the United States brought the free state/slave state issue to a head, particularly in the case of Missouri, which petitioned for statehood in 1817. With Henry Clay taking the lead, Congress agreed on another compromise. Under Clay’s bill, Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, but slavery would not be allowed anywhere else north of Missouri’s southern border. But every politician in America, including an aging Thomas Jefferson, could see the strict sectional lines that were being drawn, and few believed that this Missouri Compromise would solve the problem forever. Of course, the issue would soon explode.

The Union in 1821

This is an alphabetical list of the twenty-four states in the Union following the Missouri Compromise, divided into free and slave states. The dates given denote the date of entry into the Union or ratification of the Constitution for the original thirteen states; the number following the date denotes order of entry.

Free States	Slave States
Connecticut (1788; 5)	Alabama (1819; 22)
Illinois (1818; 21)	Delaware (1787; 1)
Indiana (1816; 19)	Georgia (1788; 4)
Maine (1820; 23)	Kentucky (1792; 15)
Massachusetts (1788; 6)	Louisiana (1812; 18)
New Hampshire (1788; 9)	Maryland (1788; 7)
New Jersey (1787; 3)	Mississippi (1817; 20)
New York (1788; 11)	Missouri (1821; 24)
Ohio (1803; 17) North	Carolina (1789; 12)
Pennsylvania (1787; 2)	South Carolina (1788; 8)
Rhode Island (1790; 13)	Tennessee (1796; 16)
Vermont (1791; 14)	Virginia (1788; 10)

The possessions of the United States at this time also included the Florida Territory, ceded by Spain in 1819; the Arkansas Territory, which extended west to the existing border with Mexico (farther north than the modern border); the Michigan and Missouri Territories, comprising the Midwest to the Rockies; and the Oregon Country, then under joint British-American rule.

According to the census of 1820, the U.S. population was 9,638,453. New York had become the most populous state with 1.3 million people, followed by Pennsylvania with a little over a million. The population in the northern free states and territories was 5,152,635; the total for the southern states was 4,485,818.

What was the “corrupt bargain”?

There is a good deal of talk today about the problem of negative advertising in presidential campaigns. We like to look back fondly to the genteel days of the past, when high-minded gentlemen debated the great issues in the politest terms. Take 1824, for example. Candidate Adams was a slovenly monarchist who had an English wife. Candidate Clay was a drunkard and a gambler. And candidate Jackson was a murderer.

If America needed any evidence that Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings was over, it came with the election of 1824. For a second time, the choice of a president would be sent to the House of Representatives after a ruthlessly bitter campaign demonstrated how clearly sectionalism, or the division of the country into geographic areas with their own agendas, had replaced party loyalties. The leading candidates for president in 1824 were all ostensibly of the same party, the Democratic Republicans of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Even John Quincy Adams, son of the last Federalist president, was now a member of this party and, as Monroe’s secretary of state, a leading contender for the presidency. The other chief candidates, all from the South or West, were General Andrew Jackson, senator from Tennessee; House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky; William H. Crawford, Monroe’s Treasury secretary, from Georgia; and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. After considerable infighting, Calhoun dropped from the race and opted for the vice presidency, with an eye on a future presidential bid.

Crawford was the choice of the congressional power brokers who nominated him in caucus. But given the growing popular resentment against the caucus system, that designation did more harm than good. When Crawford suffered a stroke during the campaign, his candidacy was left crippled. Issues became negligible in the campaign; personalities were the only subject of debate, and slanderous charges were thrown about by all. Adams and Jackson took the lead as popular favorites, but the election was inconclusive, with neither winning a majority of electoral votes, and the choice was given to the House, as it had been in 1800. Jackson, with 43.1 percent of the popular vote and ninety-nine electoral votes, had a legitimate claim to the office. But Clay, also a powerful westerner, wanted to keep his rival Jackson from the office. It is likely that Clay legitimately believed Adams was the more experienced candidate, but he also knew that an Adams election would clearly benefit Clay’s political future at the expense of Jackson’s. Clay threw his considerable influence in the House behind Adams, who won on the first ballot. Adams then named Clay to be his secretary of state. Jackson supporters screamed that “a corrupt bargain” had been made between the two. In Jackson’s words, Clay was the “Judas of the West.”

Whether a deal was made in advance or not didn’t matter. The damage was done. In the public eye, the people’s choice had been circumvented by a congressional cabal. Brilliant in many ways and well intentioned, Adams was an inept politician. His administration was crippled from the start by the political furor over the “corrupt bargain,” and Adams never recovered from the controversy. The Tennessee legislature immediately designated Jackson its choice for the next election, and the campaign of 1828 actually began in 1825.

What were Jacksonian democracy and the spoils system?

Jackson got his revenge in 1828, after a campaign that was even more vicious than the one of four years earlier. The label of murderer was reattached to Jackson, an outgrowth of the general’s numerous dueling encounters and his penchant for strict martial law, which had led to hangings of soldiers under his command. One Adamsite newspaper claimed that Jackson’s mother was a prostitute brought to America by British soldiers, and that she had married a mulatto. Jackson’s own marriage became an issue as well. He had married Rachel Robards in 1791, after she had presumably been divorced from her first husband. But the first husband had not legally divorced her until after her marriage to Jackson. Jackson remarried Rachel following the official divorce, but Adams supporters asked, “Ought an adultress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices?” One popular campaign ditty went:

Oh Andy! Oh Andy!

How many men have you hanged in your life?

How many weddings make a wife?

(The attacks on his wife particularly enraged Jackson, as Rachel was sick and died soon after the election.)

John Quincy Adams was not safe from character assault, either. For purchasing a chess set and a billiard table, he was accused of installing “gaming furniture” in the White House at public expense. In another campaign charge, Adams was charged with having procured a young American girl for the pleasure of Czar Alexander I when he had served as minister to Russia in 1809–11, under Madison.

Jackson won a substantial victory in the popular vote, and took 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 83. For the first time in America’s brief history, the country had a president who was neither a Virginian nor an Adams. (John Quincy Adams left the White House and returned to Congress as a representative from Massachusetts, the only former president ever to serve in the House of Representatives. He served there with considerable dignity and distinction, leading the antislavery forces in Congress until his death in 1848.) That a new American era was born became apparent with Jackson’s victory and inaugural. A large crowd of Old Hickory’s supporters, mostly rough-hewn western frontiersmen with little regard for niceties, crowded into Washington, flush with the excitement of defeating what they saw as the aristocratic power brokers of the Northeast. When Jackson finished his inaugural address, hundreds of well-wishers stormed into the White House, where tables had been laid with cakes, ice cream, and punch. Jackson was hustled out of the mansion for his own protection, and the muddy-booted mob overturned chairs and left a chaotic mess. All of the Adamsite fears of rule by “King Mob” seemed to be coming true.

This was the beginning of so-called Jacksonian democracy. Part of this new order came with reformed voting rules in the western states, where property ownership was no longer a qualification to vote. Unlike the earlier Jeffersonian democracy, which was a carefully articulated political agenda voiced by Jefferson himself, this new democracy was, in modern political language, a grassroots movement. Jackson was no political theorist and hardly a spokesman for the changing order, but he was its symbol. Orphan, frontiersman, horse-racing man, Indian fighter, war hero, and land speculator, Andrew Jackson embodied the new American spirit and became the idol of the ambitious, jingoistic younger men who now called themselves Democrats. At its best, Jacksonian democracy meant an opening of the political process to more people (although blacks, women, and Indians still remained political nonentities). The flip side was that it represented a new level of militant, land-frenzied, slavery-condoning, Indian-killing greed.

A large number of the unruly crowd that upset the ice cream in the White House had come to Washington looking for jobs. It was expected that Jackson would sweep out holdovers from the hated Adams administration. They had won the war and were looking for the “spoils” of that war in the form of patronage jobs in the Jackson White House. There was nothing new about this “spoils system”; it had been practiced by every administration from the beginning of the republic. But the widespread and vocal calls for patronage that followed Jackson’s election have linked the spoils system to Jackson. Ironically, only a few new patronage jobs were created during his years in office, with most posts going to previous jobholders, all established Washington insiders—proof once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

AMERICAN VOICES

MARGARET BAYARD SMITH, witness to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson (March 11, 1829):

But what a scene did we witness! The majesty of the people had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, Negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity! No arrangements had been made, no police officers placed on duty, and the whole house had been inundated by the rabble mob. We came too late. The president, after having been literally nearly pressed to death and almost suffocated and torn to pieces by the people in their eagerness to shake hands with Old Hickory, had retreated through the back way or south front and had escaped to his lodgings at Gadsby’s.

What was the Trail of Tears?

From the moment Columbus stepped onto the sands of San Salvador, the history of European relations with the natives they encountered could be written in blood. It was a story of endless betrayals, butchery, and broken promises, from Columbus and the conquistadores through John Smith, the Bay Colony, the French and Indian War, right up to the War of 1812. From the outset, superior weapons, force of numbers, and treachery had been the Euro-American strategy for dealing with the Indians in manufacturing a genocidal tragedy that surely ranks as one of the cruelest episodes in man’s history.

Hollywood has left the impression that the great Indian wars came in the Old West during the late 1800s, a period that many think of simplistically as the “cowboy and Indian” days. But in fact that was a mopping-up effort. By that time the Indians were nearly finished, their subjugation complete, their numbers decimated. The killing, enslavement, and land theft had begun with the arrival of the Europeans. But it may have reached its nadir when it became federal policy under President Jackson.

During the Creek War of 1814 that first brought him notice, Jackson earned a reputation as an Indian fighter, and a particularly ruthless one. To the Indians, Jackson became Sharp Knife. Confronted by a tenacious Creek Nation in the South as commander of the Tennessee militia, Jackson had used Cherokee, who had been promised governmental friendship, to attack the Creek from the rear. As treaty commissioner, Jackson managed to take away half the Creek lands, which he and his friends then bought on attractive terms.

In 1819 he embarked on an illegal war against the Seminole of Florida. Claiming that Florida, still in Spanish hands, was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and marauding Indians, Jackson invaded the territory, unleashing a bloody campaign that left Indian villages and Spanish forts smoldering. Jackson’s incursion set off a diplomatic crisis, eventually forcing the Spanish to sell Florida to the United States in 1819 on terms highly favorable to the Americans. Again, Jackson became governor of the newly conquered territory. As a land speculator, Jackson knew that he and his friends would profit handsomely by moving the Indians off the land.

But the harsh treatment of the Indians by Jackson as a general, as well as throughout earlier American history, was later transformed. It went from popular anti-Indian sentiment and sporadic regional battles to official federal policy initiated under Jackson and continued by his successor, Martin Van Buren. The tidy word given this policy was “removal,” suggesting a sanitary resolution of a messy problem, an early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the Third Reich’s “final solution.” The Indians called it the Trail of Tears.

Some historians ascribe humane motives to Jackson’s call for the wholesale forced migration of Indians from the southeastern states to unsettled lands across the Mississippi. Better to move them, argued Jackson, than to slaughter them, which was already happening. In 1831, for instance, Sac tribes under Black Hawk balked at leaving their ancestral lands in Illinois. But when a group of some 1,000 Indians attempted to surrender to the militia and the regular army, they were cut off by the Mississippi River and cut down by bayonets and rifle fire, with about 150 surviving the slaughter.

The removals were concentrated on the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. Contrary to popular sentiment of the day and history’s continuing misrepresentation, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes had developed societies that were not only compatible with white culture, but even emulated European styles in some respects. The problem was that their tribal lands happened to be valuable cotton-growing territory. Between 1831 and 1833 the first of the “removals” forced some 4,000 Choctaw from Mississippi into the territory west of Arkansas. During the winter migration, there was scarce food and poor shelter. Pneumonia took its toll, and with the summer came cholera, killing the Choctaw by the hundreds. The Choctaw were followed by the Chickasaw and then the Creek, or Muskogee, who did not go as peacefully. The tribe refused to leave, and the Creek war of 1836–37 followed. Winfield Scott, the American commander of the operation, eventually captured 14,500 Creek—2,500 of them in chains—and marched them to Oklahoma.

The final removal began in 1835, when the Cherokee, centered in Georgia, became the target. Like the other tribes that had been forced out, the Cherokee were among the “civilized” tribes who clearly provided proof that the “savages” could coexist with white, Euro-American culture. The Cherokee, at the time of their removal, were not nomadic savages. In fact, they had assimilated many European-style customs, including the wearing of gowns by Cherokee women. They built roads, schools, and churches, had a system of representational government, and were becoming farmers and cattle ranchers. A written Cherokee language had also been perfected by a warrior named Sequoya. The Cherokee even attempted to fight removal legally by challenging the removal laws in the Supreme Court and by establishing an independent Cherokee Nation.

But they were fighting an irresistible tide of history. In 1838, after Andrew “Sharp Knife” Jackson left office, the United States government forced out the 15,000 to 17,000 Cherokee of Georgia. About 4,000 of them died along the route, which took them through Tennessee and Kentucky, across the Ohio and Missouri rivers, and into what would later become Oklahoma (the result of another broken treaty). This route and this journey were the Trail of Tears.

The strongest resistance to removal came from the Seminole of Florida, where the Indians were able to carry out another costly war, in which 1,500 U.S. soldiers died and some $20 million was spent. The leader of the Seminoles was a young warrior named Osceola, and he was captured only when lured out of his camp by a flag of truce. He died in a prison camp three months later. With Osceola gone, the Seminole resistance withered and many Seminole were eventually removed to the Indian Territory. But several bands remained in the Everglades, continuing their struggle against the federals.

Who was Tocqueville, and why did he say all those things about America?

One of the most eloquent witnesses to the cruelties against the Indians was a young French magistrate studying America’s penal system. Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, he wrote, “In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung.” The Indians, he added, “have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.”

The author of those words was a young aristocrat named Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville (1805–59), who arrived in America in May 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As young men who had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, they came to examine American democracy with an eye to understanding how the American experience could help form the developing democratic spirit in France and the rest of Europe. The two spent nine months traveling the nation, gathering facts and opinions, interviewing Americans from President Jackson to frontiersmen and Indians. On their return to France, Tocqueville reported on the U.S. prison system, and Beaumont wrote a novel exploring the race problem in America.

But it is for an inspired work combining reportage, personal observation, and philosophical explorations, and titled Democracy in America, that Tocqueville’s name became a permanent part of the American sociopolitical vocabulary. The book appeared in two volumes, the first in 1835, the second in 1840. More than 150 years after its appearance, Democracy in America remains a basic text in American history and political theory. With his keen insight into the American character and his extraordinary prescience, Tocqueville is still regarded as a valuable commentator on American politics and democracy in general.

While he admired the republican system, Tocqueville found what he considered a great many shortcomings. Perhaps his aristocratic background left Tocqueville unprepared for the “general equality of condition among the people” he found. There were clearly class differences in America, but Tocqueville found that the lines were not as sharply or as permanently drawn as they were in Europe, with its centuries of aristocratic tradition. Admittedly, he also spent most of his time with the upper and middle classes, overlooking much of the rank poverty that existed in America among the working poor. Most of the latter were gathered in the sprawling urban centers of New York, Philadelphia, and other northern cities, where waves of poor European immigrants were drawn by the millions and consigned to the spreading inner-city slums and tenements. In this “equality of condition,” Tocqueville saw a social leveling that would result, in his opinion, in a reign of mediocrity, conformity, and what he called the “tyranny of the majority.”

Although many of his commentaries and observations were remarkably astute, and seem to apply as neatly to modern America as they did to the United States he found in 1831, Tocqueville did not always bat a thousand. Perhaps one of his greatest oversights was his assessment of the presidency as a weak office. In fact, he wrote at a time when Andrew Jackson was shaping the office as preeminent among the three branches, establishing the mold of a strong presidency that would be repeated in such chief executives as Lincoln and the Roosevelts. Critical of slavery (as well as the treatment of the Indians), the Frenchman could see civil strife ahead. However, his prediction that the Union would fall in the face of such a regional conflict was wide of the mark.

In many more matters, however, he was right on target and remains eerily correct about the American addiction to practical rather than philosophical matters and the relentless and practically single-minded pursuit of wealth. As he observed, “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.”

Perhaps his most astute forecast was the prediction of the future competition that would arise between the United States and Russia.

What made the South fear a slave named Nat Turner?

Nothing struck deeper fear into the hearts of southerners, whether they held slaves or not, than the idea of a slave revolt. Contrary to the popular image of docile slaves working in peaceful servitude, there had been numerous small rebellions and uprisings of slaves, often in union with Indians or disaffected whites, as far back as slavery in the New World under the Spanish. These were not limited to the South, as murderous uprisings took place in colonial Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. One of the bloodiest of these uprisings occurred in South Carolina in 1739, when slaves killed some twenty-five whites under the leadership of a slave named Jemmy.

But the greatest horror for young America came from the Caribbean, where Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former carriage driver and a natural military genius, led the slaves of St. Domingue (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in a successful rebellion during the 1790s. Inspired by the revolutions in America and France, Toussaint’s rebellion resulted in some 60,000 deaths and a republic of freed slaves on the island. Yet Toussaint was a remarkable administrator as well, and successfully integrated the white minority into the island’s government. In 1800, Napoleon sent troops to retake the island with little success until Toussaint was lured to the French headquarters under a truce flag, arrested, and jailed in the Alps, where he died in a jail cell.

Slaveholders tried for years to keep the news of Toussaint and his rebellion from their slaves. But as Lerone Bennet writes in Before the Mayflower, “Wherever slaves chafed under chains, this man’s name was whispered.” In 1831, a new name came to the fore as the most fearful threat to white control, that of Nat Turner (1800–31). Nat Turner’s rebellion followed two earlier unsuccessful rebellions by slaves. The first was of some thousand slaves led by Gabriel Prosser in an aborted assault on Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. The second, in Charleston in 1822, was led by another charismatic slave, Denmark Vesey, and failed because of betrayals.

Although Turner’s rebellion also ultimately failed, it changed the South. Born in 1800, Turner was a mystic and preacher who used his visions and biblical authority to build a devoted following. In August 1831, Turner and about seventy followers started their rampage. Beginning with his own masters, Turner embarked on a death march that spared no one. The whites around Southampton, Virginia, were thrown into utter panic, many of them fleeing the state. Turner’s small army, lacking discipline, halted its march, allowing a group of whites to attack. Turner counterattacked, but was soon vastly outnumbered and went into hiding. Thousands of soldiers were pressing the search for this one man who had thrown the country into hysterical terror. A massacre of any slaves even suspected of complicity followed. Turner eluded capture for some two months, during which he became a sort of bogeyman to the people of the South. To whites and slaves alike, he had acquired some mystical qualities that made him larger than life, and even after his hanging, slave owners feared his influence. Stringent new slave laws were passed, strict censorship laws aimed at abolitionist material were passed with Andrew Jackson’s blessing, and, perhaps most important, the militant defense of slavery took on a whole new meaning.

AMERICAN VOICES

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805–79), in the first issue of the abolitionist journal The Liberator (1831):

On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.

Who were the Whigs?

Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party was largely an outgrowth of Jackson’s personality and individual opinions rather than of the strict orthodoxy associated with modern party politics. And Jackson’s popularity was undeniable, resulting in his handy 1832 reelection (55 percent of the popular vote; 77 percent of the electoral vote), which also brought in New York politico Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) as the new vice president.

Jackson’s personal platform was fairly simple: suspicion of the upper classes and big business, typified by the Bank of the United States, which Jackson vetoed in 1832; freedom of economic opportunity, including elimination of Indians to open up their lands for white expansion; increased voting rights (for white men, at least); and a general opening of the political process to the middle and lower classes, which had been closed out by the earlier, gentry-based administrations. On the growing question of the Union versus states’ rights, Jackson tiptoed a cautious path, proclaiming a strong Unionist position but tending to limit the powers the federal government held over the states, the ostensible reason behind his opposition to the Bank of the United States.

Jackson’s general popularity almost completely stifled opposition, but not entirely. Out of the ashes of the old Federalists came heirs of Hamilton who believed in a national approach to economic problems, coupled with the more extremist states’ rights advocates and those who simply disliked Jackson and feared his unchecked power. From this loose coalition a new party started to take life with two congressional giants, Daniel Webster (1782–1852) and Henry Clay (1777–1852), its most prominent leaders. In 1834, they took the name Whigs, recalling the pre-Revolution days when patriots adopted that name to contrast themselves with Tories loyal to the British Crown. For this new generation of Whigs, the tyrant was not a foreign monarch but King Andrew, as Jackson was called by friend and foe alike.

The Whigs mounted their first presidential campaign in 1836, but failed to coalesce behind a single nominee, sending out three favorite sons instead. William Henry Harrison, a former general, did best, with Hugh White and Daniel Webster finishing far out of the running. Easily outdistancing them was Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president and handpicked successor, who also carried the distinction of being the first president born an American citizen. An adept tactician, Van Buren had begun to master the new politics of group voting, or “machine politics,” and was responsible for delivering New York’s electoral votes to Jackson. But he utterly lacked Jackson’s ability to win popular support. A severe economic depression during his term—the Panic of 1837—ruined Van Buren’s chances for a second term, but he was really undone by a new Whig strategy that turned the tables on Andrew Jackson’s earlier campaign against John Quincy Adams, which had cast Adams as a remote aristocrat.

In the “log cabin” campaign of 1840, the Whigs cast Van Buren, nicknamed Martin Van Ruin, as a bloated aristocrat. They presented themselves as the people’s party and General Harrison (1773–1841), their candidate, as a common man living in a log cabin. In fact, he was from a distinguished family, the son of one of the Declaration’s signers. He was also presented as a war hero in Jackson’s image for his battles against Tecumseh at Tippecanoe. With Virginia’s John Tyler (1790–1862) as his running mate, their campaign slogan was the memorable “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” The campaign of 1840 was a raucous affair, with huge rallies, an impressive voter turnout, and plenty of hard cider spilled. One linguistic legacy of the campaign: a distiller named E. C. Booz bottled whiskey in log cabin–shaped containers. Although the word “booze” was derived from the Dutch word bowse, Booz reinforced the use of the word, and soon it became a permanent part of the language.

One month after he was inaugurated, Harrison fell ill with pneumonia and died. John Tyler, his vice president, a Virginian and an ardent states’ righter, became the first “accidental president.”

AMERICAN VOICES

JOSé MARíA SáNCHEZ, a Mexican surveyor, sent on an expedition to the border of Mexico, which then included Texas and Louisiana (April 27, 1828):

This village has been settled by Mr. Stephen Austin, a native of the United States of the North. It consists, at present, of forty or fifty wooden houses on the western bank of the large river known as Rio de los Brazos de Dios. . . . Its population is nearly two hundred persons, of which only ten are Mexicans, for the balance are all Americans from the North with an occasional European. Two wretched little stores supply the inhabitants of the colony: one sells only whiskey, rum, sugar, and coffee; the other rice, flour, lard, and cheap cloth. . . . The Americans . . . eat only salted meat, bread made by themselves out of corn meal, coffee, and home-made cheese. To these the greater part of those who live in the village add strong liquor, for they are in general, in my opinion, lazy people of vicious character. Some of them cultivate their small farms by planting corn; but this task they usually entrust to their negro slaves, whom they treat with considerable harshness. . . . In my opinion the spark that will start the conflagration that will deprive us of Texas will start from this colony.

Who fought at the Alamo?

When Jackson left office, there were clearly unanswered questions about the nation’s future. Southern politicians were already setting forth the argument that because states had freely joined the Union, they could just as freely leave. And while there was much talk of tariffs and banks, the real issue was slavery. The slave question pervaded the national debate on almost every question before Congress, including the momentous one regarding the fate of Texas, then a part of Mexico.

Led by Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836), Americans settled the area at the invitation of Mexican authorities. President Jackson, and Adams before him, offered to buy Texas from Mexico, but were turned down. By 1830, more than 20,000 white Americans had been drawn to the fertile, cotton-growing plains, bringing with them some 2,000 slaves. They soon outnumbered the Mexicans in the territory, and in 1834, Austin asked the authorities in Mexico City to allow Texas to separate from Mexico as a prelude to statehood. Besides the obvious reason that these Americans wanted to remain American, an overriding cause for their request was Mexico’s prohibition of slavery. Austin was arrested and jailed. By 1836, President Santa Anna of Mexico announced a unified constitution for all Mexican territories, including Texas.

The Americans in Texas decided to secede. With an army of 6,000 men, Santa Anna marched against what he viewed as the treasonous Texans. With a force of 3,000, Santa Anna approached San Antonio, held by 187 men under the command of Colonel William B. Travis. The defenders took a defensive stand behind the walls of a mission called the Alamo. For ten days, in a now-legendary stand, the small group fended off Santa Anna’s massed troops, inflicting tremendous casualties on the Mexicans. But the numbers were insurmountably in the Mexicans’ favor. As the Mexican bands played the “Degüello,” literally “throat-cutting,” artillery breached the walls of the Alamo, and Travis’s band was overrun. The American defenders who survived the final onslaught were then apparently executed. All of the Americans’ corpses were soaked in oil and then set on fire. Among the dead was Jim Bowie, a Louisiana slave trader who became best known for the infamous long knife he carried on his belt, and Davy Crockett (1786–1836), the professional backwoodsman, congressman, and veteran of Andrew Jackson’s Creek War. Only three Americans came out of the Alamo alive: a soldier’s wife named Susanna Dickenson, her fifteen-month-old baby, and Travis’s slave Joe. They were freed by Santa Anna and went by foot to warn Sam Houston (1793–1863), commander of the Texas army, of the fate that awaited them if they continued to resist.

A second slaughter, in which hundreds of Texans were slain by Santa Anna’s troops at the town of Goliad, stoked the flames higher. Santa Anna pressed the small Texan army that remained under Houston until the forces met at San Jacinto in April 1836. With “Remember the Alamo!” as their rallying cry, the vastly outnumbered Texans swept into the lines of the Mexicans, who had been granted a siesta by the self-assured Santa Anna. The battle was over in eighteen minutes. With the loss of nine men, the Texans killed hundreds of Mexicans, captured hundreds more, including Santa Anna, and sent the bulk of the Mexican army into a confused retreat across the Rio Grande.

The Texans immediately ratified their constitution, and Houston, who nearly died from gangrene after the San Jacinto battle, was made president of the new republic. They then petitioned for annexation into the United States. Jackson did nothing until his last day in office, when he recognized Texan independence. Van Buren also hesitated. Both men feared war with Mexico, but more seriously, the admission of Texas added fuel to the burning slave debate. The southern states wanted another slave territory. The North saw the annexation of Texas as breaching the balance that had been reached in the Missouri Compromise (under which slave state Arkansas and free state Michigan had been admitted as the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth states). For the next nine years, the Texas question simmered, further dividing North and South over slavery, and pushing relations with Mexico to the brink of war.

Must Read: Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis by William C. Davis.

What was Manifest Destiny?

The annexing of Texas was a symptom of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a nineteenth-century version of Lotto fever. In 1845, this fervor was christened. In an expansionist magazine, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote of “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

O’Sullivan’s phrase, quickly adopted by other publications and politicians, neatly expressed a vision that sounded almost like a religious mission. Behind this vision was some ideological saber rattling, but the greatest motivator was greed, the obsessive desire for Americans to control the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. As each successive generation of Americans had pressed the fringes of civilization a little farther, this idea took on the passion of a sacred quest. The rapid westward movement of large groups of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri, with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first traveled in 1847, initially took the religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City. And in the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.

The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still laid claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control all of it.

Why did the Mormons move west?

While the majority of nineteenth-century Americans believed that God’s plan was to send them west, others in America were finding other religious paths. The early part of the century saw an extraordinary period of spiritual reawakening that produced such groups as the Shakers, founded in New York in 1774 by an Englishwoman called Mother Ann Lee. They flourished for some years, but eventually died out when their policy of celibacy became self-induced extinction. Other “spiritual” movements of this period included the utopian communities of Oneida, where, in contrast to the Shakers, promiscuity was encouraged, and Brook Farm, the retreat of the New England Transcendentalists.

But the most historically significant and prominent new religious group to emerge in this period was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also called the Mormons. The group was founded in western New York in 1823 by Joseph Smith, a visionary who claimed that he had been given, by an angel named Moroni, an ancient text, the Book of Mormon, written in hieroglyphics on golden plates, which Smith translated and claimed was divinely inspired. Smith and a small band of followers moved to Ohio, where their communal efficiency attracted converts, but their claim to divine revelations attracted the ridicule and enmity of more traditional Protestant Americans, setting off a pattern of antagonism that would send the Mormons on an odyssey in search of a home in the wilderness.

With his church growing in numbers of converts, Smith was gaining political clout as well, but resentment exploded into persecution when another of Smith’s visions called for polygamy in 1843. In Missouri, their antislavery views brought the Mormons into conflict with local people. So did their polygamy and religious views. By 1838, the governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, had ordered that all Mormons be expelled from his state. In what is known as the “Extermination Order,” Boggs wrote, “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated, or driven from the state.” Provoked by the governor’s order, an anti-Mormon mob slaughtered at least eighteen church members, including children, in the Haun’s Mill Massacre of October 30, 1838. And in 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were murdered while jailed in Carthage, Illinois, by members of another militia mob. No one was ever convicted of the crime.

The group was held together under the autocratic hand of Brigham Young, who saw the church’s future in the Far West, away from further persecution. In 1847, Young and a small band of Mormons pushed to the basin of the Great Salt Lake, the new Promised Land. They began a community that became so entrenched as a Mormon power base that Young was able to dictate federal judgeships. As waves of Mormons pressed along the trail to Utah, it became a major route to the West, and the Mormons profited handsomely from the thousands heading for California and gold.

The Mormons were not the only religion facing persecution in an overwhelmingly Protestant America. Many Americans had despised Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, for centuries, going back to the days of the Puritans. The animosity was not only sectarian but national; Italian and Irish Catholics were especially hated, and there was a widely held belief that Roman Catholics were coming to America in large numbers to take over the United States and hand it over to the pope, with a new Vatican to be built in Cincinnati. That sectarian hatred led to numerous acts of violence, including the burning of a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1834 and the deadly “Bible Riots” fought between Catholics and Protestants in 1844. In two waves of rioting, hundreds of houses were burned, two Catholic churches were destroyed, and more than twenty people died in the street fighting between “Nativist” Protestants and Irish Catholics who had come to Philadelphia to work on the railroads and canals that became the “Main Line.”

Must Reads: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer; A Nation Rising by Kenneth C. Davis.

AMERICAN VOICES

From “The Raven” by EDGAR ALLAN POE (1845):

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And that lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Drug addict. Alcoholic. Cradle robber. Necrophiliac. These are some of the epithets associated with Poe (1809–49). Most of them were the creations of a vindictive literary executor who spread the lies following the poet’s death. Later research proved many of those charges to be unfounded slanders. But there was still plenty about Poe that was strange, and his work certainly seemed to justify those bizarre stories.

Born in Boston, Poe was raised by an uncle after the death of his parents when he was three. He first attended the University of Virginia, but dropped out, then later went to West Point, but managed to get dismissed from that institution also. He turned to newspaper editing and writing, and published a few poems and short stories. He also married his thirteen-year-old cousin—an act considered less outrageous in those days than it seems now. In 1845, The Raven and Other Poems appeared, winning Poe instant recognition. He continued as a successful magazine editor, at the same time writing the short stories of mystery, horror, and the supernatural—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”—for which he is most famed. After the death of his wife, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Two years later, while on a train taking him to a planned second marriage, he died of unexplained causes.

Poe was a member of America’s first generation of noteworthy authors, including Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, who began to flourish in this period. They represented, as Poe did, the Romantic spirit in writing that flowered in the early nineteenth century, as well as a burst of American cultural maturity that reflected a nation moving out of adolescence.