Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  10 James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) explains this dynamic better than anyone.

  11 Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 210.

  12 Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and Politics, 230; Jeffrey R. Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 113.

  13 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, ed. and completed by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976), 284.

  14 Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President, 211.

  15 Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and Politics, 230.

  16 “House Divided Speech,” in Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dun-lap, eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 2:461-69 (henceforth cited as Collected Works).

  17 Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 19.

  18 Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria,” October 16, 1854, in Basler, Collected Works, 2:263-64.

  19 John C. Calhoun to Percy Walker, October 23, 1847, in Robert L. Meriwether, et al., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 25 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959- ), 24:617.

  20 Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 146.

  21 Jefferson Davis, Speech in the Senate, February 13-14, 1850, in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), 1:279, 283.

  22 Lemmon v. People, 7 NY Super 681.

  23 20 New York, 562 (Court of Appeals, 1860).

  24 Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and Politics, 5.

  25 Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies About American History (New York: Sentinel, 2008), 119.

  26 Lerone Bennett, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 2007), 147.

  27 Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 36.

  28 Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Mentor, 1977), 138.

  29 Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided.

  30 Potter, Impending Crisis, 301.

  31 Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and Politics, 246.

  32 Ibid., 57.

  33 David Grimstead, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1998), in a more detailed version of the classic argument that the Civil War was a collapse of the principles of “law and order,” notes that the rise in mob violence in the antebellum period was substantially related to slavery and anti-slavery. See also Phillip S. Paludan, “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order,” American Historical Review 77 (1972), 1013-34.

  34 Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and Politics, 99.

  35 Grimstead, American Mobbing, 248.

  36 Ibid., 249.

  37 Oates, With Malice Toward None, 146.

  38 Charles W. Calomiris and Gary Gorton, “The Origins of Banking Panics: Models, Facts, and Bank Regulation,” in R. Glenn Hubbard, ed., Financial Markets and Financial Crises (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 109-74.

  39 Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

  40 Charles W. Calomiris and Larry Schweikart, “The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment,” Journal of Economic History 51 (December 1991): 807-34 (quotation on 810).

  41 Jenny Wahl, “Dred, Panic, War: How a Slave Case Triggered Financial Crisis and Civil Disunion,” Carleton College Economics Department Working Paper no. 2009-1, located at http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/econ/workingpapers/, 8.

  42 Ibid., 13.

  43 Ibid., 19.

  44 Cincinnati Enquirer, April 16, 1857.

  45 Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union: The Emergence of Lincoln, Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857-1859 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 156.

  46 Ibid.

  47 Ibid., 158.

  48 Calomiris and Schweikart, “Panic of 1857,” 813 and Table 1, 814.

  49 Paul W. Gates, “Land and Credit Problems in Undeveloped Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1965): 41-61.

  50 Gates, “Land and Credit Problems in Undeveloped Kansas,” 54.

  51 Fishlow, American Railroads, 202-3.

  52 Stephen Salisbury, The State, the Investor, and the Railroad: The Boston & Albany, 1825-1867 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 308.

  53 Huston, “Western Grains and the Panic of 1857,” passim, and his The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

  54 Potter, Impending Crisis, 145-297.

  55 Ibid., 306.

  56 Cincinnati Enquirer, August 28, 1857.

  57 Calomiris and Schweikart, “Panic of 1857,” 818.

  58 Harry Miller, “Earlier Theories of Crisis and Cycles in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 38 (February 1924): 294-329 (quotation on 328), quoting Edmund Dwight, “The Financial Revulsion and the New York Banking System,” in Hunt’s Merchant Magazine 38 (February 1858).

  59 Calomiris and Schweikart, “Panic of 1857,” 819-20.

  60 Cook, “Annual Report,” in Calomiris and Schweikart, “Panic of 1857,” 822.

  61 Melvin Ecke, “Fiscal Aspects of the Panic of 1857,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1951, 80-85, 92-94, 118-20.

  62 Huston, The Panic of 1857, 20.

  63 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 359; Providence Daily Tribune, September 18, 1857; Newark Daily Advertiser, October 6, 9, 10, 1857.

  64 Louisville Daily Courier, October 17, 1857.

  65 Huston, The Panic of 1857, 25.

  66 Ibid., 29.

  67 William W. Fowler, Inside Life in Wall Street, or, How Great Fortunes are Lost and Won . . . (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 133.

  68 Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 37 (1857); James S. Gibbons, The Banks of New York, Their Dealers, the Clearing House, and the Panic of 1857 (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 2-10.

  69 James Cook, “Annual Report of the Superintendent of the Banking Department of the State of New York,” in U.S. House of Representatives, Executive Document No. 77 and Executive Document 107, 35th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1858).

  70 Fowler, Inside Life in Wall Street, 110-13.

  71 George W. Van Vleck, The Panic of 1857: An Analytic Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); Fishlow, American Railroads.

  72 James L. Huston, “Western Grains and the Panic of 1857,” Agricultural History 57 (1983), 14-22, and his The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

  73 Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 37 (November 1857); Francis W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779-1861 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1975), 212.

  74 Huston, The Panic of 1857, passim.

  75 Larry Schweikart, Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

  76 Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, xiv.

  77 Ibid.

  78 Nevins quoted in Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 57.

  79 Douglas quoted in Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 58.

  80 Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), got carried away with these efficiencies, claiming essentially that slaves worked harder and were more productive than free labor, and only under subsequent refinement was it clarified that this was due in large part to longer hours and to the “gang system” that only applied to physical field work. See Paul David, et al., Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical St
udy in the Quantitative History of the American Negro (New York: Oxford, 1976).

  81 Douglas quoted in Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 115.

  82 Ibid.

  83 Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 24.

  84 Ibid., 27.

  85 Ibid., table 2.4, 30.

  86 Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History from Colonial Times to 1940, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), ch. 11 and 12, passim; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross; Claudia Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

  87 Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 80.

  88 Larry Schweikart and Lynne Pierson Doti, American Entrepreneur (New York: Amacom Press, 2009).

  89 See Fred Bateman, James Foust, and Thomas Weiss, “Profitability in Southern Manufacturing: Estimates for 1860,” Explorations in Economic History 12 (1975): 211-31; and their “Large-Scale Manufacturing in the South and West, 1850-1860,” Business History Review 15 (Spring 1971): 1-17; Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

  90 Oates, With Malice Toward None, 140.

  91 George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1966).

  92 George Bittlingmayer, “Antitrust and Business Activity: The First Quarter Century,” Business History Review 70 (Autumn 1996): 363-401.

  93 George Bittlingmayer and Thomas W. Hazlett, “DOS Kapital: Has Antitrust Action Against Microsoft Created Value in the Computer Industry?” Journal of Financial Economics 55 (2000): 329-59.

  94 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 255.

  95 Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States from Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror (New York: Sentinel, 2006), 90-92.

  96 The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Section 7, June 12, 1776, http://legis.state.va.us/Laws/Search/ConstitutionTOC.htm.

  97 Articles of Confederation, Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927), 27.

  98 Mark R. Levin, Men in Black (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), 25.

  99 Ibid., 27.

  100 Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820, quoted in ibid.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 Larry Schweikart, America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror (New York: Sentinel, 2006).

  2 Janet Sharp Hermann, “Disaster Relief Then and Now,” The Freeman 50 (May 2000), http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/disaster-relief-then-and-now/.

  3 Ibid.

  4 David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 188.

  5 Ibid., 188-89.

  6 Ibid., 198.

  7 Ibid., 199.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Larry Schweikart, “William R. Jones,” in Paul F. Pascoff, ed., Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography: Iron and Steel in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Facts on File, 1989); Joseph Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  10 McCullough, The Johnstown Flood , 227.

  11 Ibid., 209.

  12 Ibid., 226.

  13 Ibid., 230.

  14 Gary Kleppner, Ohio and Its People (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989). Again, much of this material is from Peter Cajka’s unpublished paper, “The National Cash Register Company and the Neighborhoods: New Perspectives on Relief in the Dayton Flood of 1913,” 2009.

  15 Judith Sealander, Grand Plans: Business Progressivism and Social Change in Ohio’s Miami Valley, 1890-1929 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 44-45.

  16 Curt Dalton, Through Flood, Through Fire: Personal Stories from Survivors of the Dayton Flood of 1913 (Dayton, OH: Mazer Corporation, 2001), 93-94.

  17 Sealander, Grand Plans, 45.

  18 Ibid., 47.

  19 Arthur E. Morgan, The Miami Conservancy District (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1951), 31.

  20 “Heroes of the Flood,” Dayton Daily News, April 12, 1913.

  21 Sealander, Grand Plans, 48.

  22 “Restoration at Dayton Begins,” Massachusetts Globe, March 31, 1913, in Wright State University (WSU), Special Collections and Archives.

  23 “The Disaster in Dayton,” Outlook 103 (April 12, 1913).

  24 St. Louis Star, April 21, 1913.

  25 The Dayton Journal, April 20, 1913.

  26 Dayton Daily News, April 15, 1913.

  27 Peter Cajka, “National Cash Register Company and the Neighborhoods: New Perspectives on Relief in the Dayton Flood of 1913,” July 1, 2009, unpublished paper in author’s possession, 32.

  28 “Disaster in Dayton.”

  29 Sealander, Grand Plans, 49.

  30 “Villages Quick to Aid Stricken Dayton,” The Dayton Journal, April 4, 1913.

  31 Henry M. Leland to John H. Patterson, March 31, 1913, National Cash Register Company, Dayton, OH (NCR).

  32 Joseph Cauffiel to John H. Patterson, March 28, 1913, NCR.

  33 Sealander, Grand Plans, 49-50.

  34 “Disaster in Dayton.”

  35 Sealander, Grand Plans, 50.

  36 Ibid., 81.

  37 Ibid., 50.

  38 Ibid., 58.

  39 Morgan, Miami Conservancy District, 31.

  40 Sealander, Grand Plans, 84.

  41 John Edward Weems, A Weekend in September: The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the Nation’s Deadliest Natural Disaster (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993); Mary G. Ramos, “After the Great Storm: Galveston’s Response to the Hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900,” The Texas Almanac, 1989, http://www.texasalmanac.com/history/highlights/storm/.

  42 Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine; Two Centuries of Innovators (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 264.

  43 Ibid., 265.

  44 Ibid.

  45 “Did Mayor Schmitz Lose His Head?” http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/architects. html.

  46 Robin Lampson, “Man at His Best,” The Freeman 38 (March 1988), http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/man-at-his-best/.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Andrew S. Mener, “ Disaster Response in the United States of America: An Analysis of the Bureaucratic and Political History of a Failing System,” College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, 2007, http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/63, 5.

  50 Ibid., 7.

  51 18 U.S.C. § 1385. “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

  52 Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 150.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Burton Folsom, Jr., New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

  55 Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 332.

  56 U.S. Code Congress and Administration Legislative History for PL 81-875 (1950), 4024; Rutherford H. Platt, Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Disasters (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).

  57 Mener, “Disaster Response,” 8.

  58 Ibid.

  59 Platt, Disasters and Democracy, 15.

  60 Mener, “Disaster Response,” 8.

  61 Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, 1979, http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/.

  62 Oran K. Henderson, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Emergency Preparedness and Response: The Three Mile Island Incident, in Thomas H. Moss and David L. Sills, Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident: Lessons and Implication (New York: National Academy of Science, 1981).

  63 See David M. Ru
bin, “What the President’s Commission Learned About the Media,” in Moss and Sills, Three Mile Island, 98-99.

  64 Ibid.

  65 Mener, “Disaster Response,” 18.

  66 James F. Miskel, Disaster Response and Homeland Security: What Works, What Doesn’t (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 78-79.

  67 Saundra K. Schneider, Flirting with Disaster: Public Management in Crisis Situations (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 93.

  68 Donald F. Kettl, The Department of Homeland Security’s First Year: A Report Card (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2004), 20-21.

  69 Ibid.

  70 Dennis Keegan and David West, Reality Check: The Unreported Good News About America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008), 146.

  71 “New Orleans Ignored Its Own Plan,” Washington Times, September 9, 2005.

  72 Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 23.

  73 Ibid., 34.

  74 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web site, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/warn_archieve?LIX/NPW/0828_155101.txt.

  75 Keegan and West, Reality Check, 153.

  76 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 39.

  77 Ibid., 56.

  78 Ibid., 92.

  79 Ibid., 64, 93.

  80 Keegan and West, Reality Check, 147.

  81 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 233.

  82 Ibid., 233.

  83 Ibid., 239.

  84 Ibid., 239.

  85 Ibid., 214.

  86 Ibid., 116.

  87 Stephen Brill, After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).

  88 Ivor Van Heerden and Mike Bryan, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina (New York: Penguin, 2007).

  89 Ibid., 129.

  90 Keegan and West, Reality Check, 156.

  91 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 192; Keegan and West, Reality Check, 156.

  92 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 77.

  93 Ibid., 49.

  94 Ibid., 199.

  95 “Government Can Take a Lesson From Wal-Mart,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 14, 2005.

  96 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 362.

  97 Ibid., 288.

  98 Alexander Hamilton, “The Hurricane Letter,” September 6, 1772, at Alexander Hamilton Patriot, http://ahpatriot.blogspot.com/2007/06/hurricane-letter-hamilton-to-his-father.html.