Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  7 A glance at the map will show that upstate New York lay across the New England migrants’ westward path.

  8 ‘I am not making this up, you know’ (Miss Anna Russell, in her guide to Wagner’s Ring).

  9 Looked at in detail, the intricacies of Mormon polygamy strikingly resemble those of twentieth-century American divorce, especially as to wife-swapping.

  10Similar tensions have arisen between American society and totalitarian sects in the twentieth century. The most appalling demonstration of the clash of values occurred in 1978. Jim Jones, the mad, charismatic leader of the People’s Temple sect, which had left California to establish itself in Guyana, murdered an investigating Congressman; immediately afterwards all 900 members of the sect, on Jones’s orders, committed suicide by ritually drinking lemonade laced with cyanide. Jones died with them.

  11See next chapter.

  12Jackson County is to be the gathering place of the Saints in the Last Days. They are commanded to build a temple there, in the chief town, Independence, which happens to be also the place where the Oregon and Santa Fe trails started, and where Harry Truman was born.

  13 I am grateful to Mr Jonathan Raban for supplying this piece of information, which I had long looked for in vain.

  14 Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston, Sentry edn, 1961), p. 159.

  15 Young was not actually acclaimed by this title until 1848, but by then the ceremony was only a recognition, by God and the people, of a fait accompli.

  16 The same might be said of the entire West between the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains and the eastern edge of the High Plains, or short-grass country, which runs roughly north and south down the middle of the Dakotas and Nebraska, defining the western third of Kansas, and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. In the whole of this vast region the politics of water (a source of energy as well as food) is as important as the politics of oil, and much more so, nowadays, than the politics of silver.

  17 See Chapter 14.

  18 Not until 1978 was the first Negro elder appointed in the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

  19 The biographical details given in my text are mostly derived from Victor Weybright and Henry Sell, Buffalo Bill (London, 1956), which does as well as can be expected in sorting out fact from fiction in the records of Cody’s life; but I would take my oath for very few of them.

  1 That is, foreign minister.

  2 See The Statistical History of the United States, pp. 201 – 6.

  3 Roads which charged their users tolls.

  4 A privateer was a private vessel, crewed and commanded by men who in peacetime were fishermen or merchants, which received ‘letters of marque’ from its government permitting it to attack the shipping of the national enemy in time of war. The trick was to dodge the blockading squadron in a small, light boat and then find a fat merchantman to prey upon. It was a licensed piracy, and France’s only effective naval weapon against Britain.

  5 So called because when President John Adams sent the papers concerning the business to Congress, he suppressed the names of the French officials involved, giving instead these initials.

  6 See above, pp. 227 – 8.

  7 See above, p. 55.

  8 John Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848) was the son and heir of John Adams. When the War of 1812 broke out he was US minister in Russia.

  9 See above, p. 227.

  10 Under the original Constitutional arrangement, the runner-up for the Presidency was elected Vice-President. This resulted in repeated difficulty and intrigue, especially in 1800 when Jefferson and Burr, the Republican candidates, got exactly the same number of electoral votes, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives. So in 1804 the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted, by which a citizen may be a candidate for either the Presidency or the Vice-Presidency, but not for both at the same time.

  11 Modern scientific research has established that he begot at least one child in this way.

  12 The ‘spoils system’ is explained below (see pp. 267 – 8). The lobby, as shorthand for pressure groups, derives, like so much else, from New York politics. Under the Albany Regency in the late 1820s it was noticed that men who wished to extract favours, or otherwise to influence state legislators, waited in the lobby of the state Capitol (since they were not allowed onto the floor itself). This gave rise to all sorts of new words: lobbyists forming the lobby or a particular lobby (e.g. the railroad lobby, the labour lobby) exist to lobby elected politicians. In English political usage, by contrast, the lobby consists of highly regarded newspaper correspondents who are accepted by Parliament as a convenient means of telling the world what it wants the world to believe.

  13 It is worth quoting him in full: ‘It may be, sir, that the politicians of New York are not so fastidious as some gentlemen are, as to disclosing the principles on which they act. They boldly preach what they practise. When they are contending for victory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. If they are successful, they claim, as a matter of right, the advantages of success. They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the VICTOR belong the spoils of the ENEMY.’

  14 Robert V. Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1963), p. 181.

  15 See below, pp. 295 – 6.

  16 Jackson put the case rather more succinctly to his Secretary of State: ‘The Bank, Mr Van Buren, is trying to kill me; but I will kill it.’

  17 For a detailed analysis of the subject, see Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969).

  18 British travellers to the United States need to be aware that what Americans call ‘cider’ is mere unfermented apple-juice; only ‘hard cider’ is alcoholic.

  19 The Siamese twins were Chang and Eng (1811 – 74), who were united at their waists by a tube of cartilage. As children they were sold by their parents to a British merchant and exhibited as freaks in England and America. Before long they began to make money by exhibiting themselves. They married sisters and settled as farmers in North Carolina. They died at sea: Chang of drink, Eng, a few hours later, of fright.

  20 ‘Okay’ is thought to be a word brought to America by slaves from West Africa.

  21 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Dèmocratic en Amèrique (first published 1835), Part II, Chapter 2.

  1 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York, Vintage edn, 1956, p. 131), records that ‘a slave who had been promised freedom in his master’s will, poisoned his master to hasten the day of liberation’.

  2 It ought perhaps to be said that Mrs Stowe, Horace Greeley and the others did not preach hate and murder either.

  3 One of the many merits of the celebrated novel Gone with the Wind (by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936; Edmund Wilson, the critic, called it the South’s answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is that it shows its heroine, the spirited Scarlett O’Hara, in instinctive perpetual revolt against the insipid norms imposed on a ‘lady’ in the Old South. In Scarlett’s world a lady forfeited caste by even such a small thing as drinking alcohol, however moderately. No wonder Scarlett became a secret tippler. In this as in other ways she cannot have been unique.

  4 The total white population of the slave states in i860 was 8,098,000 (black, 4,204,000); 385,000 were slave-holders, of whom only 46,000 owned more than twenty slaves and are thereby known as planters.

  5 The question of the profitability or otherwise of slavery has been fiercely debated since the eighteenth century. An excellent digest of modern work on the subject is to be found in R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engerman (eds), The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971), Part VII.

  6 Jefferson to John Holmes, 22 April 1820. Note how Jefferson wavers between the belief that gradual emancipation might be effected and the belief that self-preservation made it impossible.

  7 See below, Chapter 17.

  8 Declaration of the Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention, 1833.

  9 Southern Illin
ois, like Indiana, was largely settled by emigrants from the South, who brought their racial attitudes with them; and Alton, where Lovejoy died, was just across the Mississippi from that violent, slave-owning Missouri which gave so much trouble to the Mormons and Buffalo Bill’s father (see above, pp. 236 and 245).

  10 Art. IV, Sec. 2: ‘The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.’

  11 ‘Manifest Destiny’ was a phrase launched by the Democratic journalist, John L. O’Sullivan, who in 1845 proclaimed that it was America’s ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. It was ‘manifest destiny’ that the United States would one day soon come to possess not only Texas but also California, Oregon and Canada.

  12 No one knows for sure why the South came to be known as Dixie. The most plausible theory, according to the Concise Dictionary of American History (New York, 1963), is that in French-speaking Louisiana, in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, ‘the word Dix [ten] was printed on the ten-dollar bank bills. Louisiana thus came to be known as Dix’s Land; and, expanded to Dixie, the name spread to the whole South.’ One of these ten-dollar bills is still displayed in a New Orleans bar.

  1 At least he had an inventive mind. As Secretary of War he had started a Camel Corps in the south-western deserts. He thought that howitzers mounted on camels’ humps would be the very things for fighting Indians. Unfortunately, like so many bright ideas, this one proved impracticable. Camels and Americans conceived a profound dislike for each other.

  2 The same process was at work on the other side. This was not another war between Roundheads and Cavaliers, but between two sorts of deadly Roundheads.

  3 One of the difficulties of the Civil War is that the two sides gave different names to the battles. The convention is that the victor’s name should be used, but this is not much help in cases like that of Antietam/Sharpsburg where both sides claimed victory. I use the most familiar names: thus, in this case, Bull Run, not Manassas.

  4 See below, pp. 352 – 3.

  5 Bruce Catton, The Penguin Book of the American Civil War (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 258.

  6 He had waited so long chiefly so that the hampering mud of winter could dry. In this respect as in many others conditions during the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond were much like those which were to prevail on the Western Front fifty years later.

  1 ‘Thus always to tyrants’: the motto of the state of Virginia. Another version is that he shouted ‘The South shall be free!’

  2 To be fair, it must be mentioned that the wilder Republicans tried to prove that Johnson had been a party to Lincoln’s murder. Both sides were base and foolish; but that hardly excuses Johnson. Folly in the President of the United States is rightly regarded as a more serious, less normal matter than folly in Congressmen.

  3 ‘Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members…’ (Art. I, sec. 4).

  4 B. F. Moore to Lewis Thompson, 3 September 1866. Quoted in Roark, Masters Without Slaves, p. 185. The writer later became a Republican, so perhaps his views should not be accepted quite unquestioningly.

  5 The phrase arose from an incident during the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, when Ben Butler, leading for the prosecution, produced a nightshirt stained with what was said to be the blood of a carpetbagger from Ohio who had been flogged by whites in Mississippi.

  6 Art. II, sec. 4.

  7 Above all, Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977).

  8 Though as it happened the Mississippi plantation that had formerly belonged to Jefferson Davis and his brother (a highly enlightened slave-holder) were to be worked by freedmen-proprietors for nearly twenty years more.

  9 Except for Tennessee, which, thanks to the exertions of its Republican-appointed Governor, was deemed fit to re-enter the Union as early as 1866. The paradoxical result was that white supremacists recaptured power in Tennessee sooner than in any other state of the Confederacy.

  10 Revels, who sat in 1870 – 71, and Bruce, who sat for a full term (1875 – 81), were the only African-Americans to sit in the Senate before the election of Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1966.

  11 The North had begun to provide free public schooling in the thirties and forties. In this respect, as in so many others, the ante-bellum South had undoubtedly been backward; but it will set things in proper proportion if we note that the system of state education was only just beginning in England at this very time. The Forster Education Act became law in 1870. However, it should also be recorded that the state of Mississippi did not introduce public education for any race until 1919.

  12 James Atkins to James Garfield, 7 December 1865. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson, p. 37.

  13 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (London, 1966), pp. 454-5.

  14 See above, p. 153.

  15 The Bureau also made sure that freedmen who signed contracts stuck to them; indeed, it had the reputation of being the only authority which could make the ex-slaves work. This aspect of the Bureau shows how limited was its vision, for the contracts it enforced were only marginally better than the ones it disallowed, and both unduly restricted the African-American’s freedom as a working man. The blacks were willing enough to work hard – for themselves, or for those, like the Bureau, that they trusted.

  16 When the people of Arkansas were asked to vote on some railway proposals, they were not vexed with tedious detail. The ballots were simply marked ‘For Railroads’ and ‘Against Railroads’. The Ayes had it.

  17 So-called because, unlike the gentry, the Southern poor farmers had to work in the open all day long, with the savage sun beating down on their fair Anglo-Saxon necks. There was very little Mediterranean immigration to the South.

  18 The poll-tax was a payment which citizens had to make before they were allowed to vote. It excluded the poorest, among them almost all the blacks, from the exercise of their Fifteenth Amendment rights, but since many poor whites were thereby disfranchised a ‘grandfather clause’ was inserted in half a dozen Southern state constitutions permitting the poor to vote if their immediate ancestors had done so in 1867. No blacks qualified under this clause. The white primary laid down that only whites could vote in the Democratic party primaries, because the party was a voluntary body and not covered by the Fifteenth; but in the post-bellum ‘Solid South’ the primaries were the real election, so the effect was to make a black citizen’s vote useless, even if he were allowed to cast it at the general election.

  1 The child Samuel Gompers (see Chapter 18) sang this song with great fervour in his cigar-factory in London; it helped turn his mind to the idea of emigration to America, as it had earlier turned the thoughts of Andrew Carnegie’s father.

  2 The definitions used in the census until the mid-twentieth century mean that even this figure is an understatement, the definition of ‘urban’ covering a great many places that were no more than villages in the countryside.

  3 Not to be confused with Abilene, Texas.

  4 Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, attached the label ‘the Gilded Age’ to the earlier part of the period; a happy thought, as it touched on the new rich’s taste in interior decoration as well as their leaf-thin respectability and the corruption of the politics of this meretricious time. To apply the label to the whole period 1865–1929 would be seriously misleading; and faith in the importance of the gold standard eventually became such a cardinal tenet of the capitalists that my variant seems preferable. An attractive, alternative would be the Age of the Railroad, except that the roads’ decline began well before 1929.

  5 Originally, stocks in companies were sold only in quantities sufficient to raise as much capital as a corporation needed to get started, or to expand its activities. This kept the load of debt to a tolerable size. Then managers began to dilute, or ‘wat
er’, these original share issues by issuing fresh ones, whose yield was not necessary for running the business, either simply to enrich themselves with the proceeds or to swamp the holdings of their rivals in a sea of shares, as Gould and Fisk swamped Vanderbilt, or both. Such operations not only burdened a corporation with unnecessary debt, they also damaged its standing on the stock exchanges and, if on a large enough scale, undermined public faith in all shares. On the other hand, Vanderbilt always maintained that there was nothing wrong in issuing stock so long as a corporation’s profits made it possible to pay dividends: it was the only way of distributing and releasing capital that would otherwise have remained locked up in the corporation’s treasury.