The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  3 Lutefisk is a gelatinous fish dish. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Weird Things Minnesotans Sometimes Eat.

  4 These are the jokes, folks. Try the buffet.

  5 Like this one!

  6 It isn’t really. As we understand it, the main mascots of the Roanoke-area teams are the Patriots and the Colonels. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Coastal Virginian High School Mascots and Other Wastes of Papier–Mâché.

  7 Note: In apartment listings, “free heat” usually means “there’s no central heat, just a radiator.” While we’re on the subject, if you’re in Chicago, “garden level” means “basement.” In New York, if the listing says “2-bedroom in Park Slope, $1200/month,” the apartment will not be anywhere near Park Slope—there’s nothing that cheap there. And if you’re in Los Angeles, “Sherman Oaks–adjacent” probably means the apartment is in Mexico. These are valuable lessons, kids. You’re welcome.

  8 Too soon?

  “[My troops] are an exceedingly dirty and nasty people.”

  —George Washington

  INTRODUCTION

  In the 1770s, British subjects living in the American colonies decided that they didn’t care much for being ruled by a guy who was born into his job, got to keep it for life, and was widely believed to be insane (which he was). Any time he felt like it, King George III could march into their houses and act like he owned them, and he was only about a six-week boat ride away when the weather was good. The colonists also weren’t terribly thrilled that King George III’s army was going around burning buildings that they’d worked really hard on. “Well, shucks,” they said. “We should at least be allowed to elect a guy before he takes advantage of us like that.”

  So they had a revolution and turned the colonies into their own darned country. A country in which all men (not to be confused with slaves, women, Native Americans, etc.) were created equal. A country in which nobody had to worry about midnight visits from a crazy monarch (except for maybe the staff at the White House after it was built). A country in which they wouldn’t have to worry about having to sit through the Teapot Dome Scandal for nearly a century and a half.

  Before the Revolution, the colonies were pretty much allowed to govern themselves. They could elect their own local representatives and only paid about a shilling9 a year in taxes. People who lived in England paid about twenty times that, and if King George wanted to shove them around, he could be at their door by morning. The colonists didn’t have any representatives in Parliament, but neither did most people in England, and they didn’t complain much.

  In fact, it didn’t occur to anybody to declare independence at first, even when the regulars (British soldiers) started burning things. The colonies were actually more or less free to start with, and some polls indicated that only 13 percent of colonists supported independence in 1775 (though poll data back then was probably even less accurate than it is now, and the best researcher on staff can’t figure out who took those polls).

  So the war didn’t start because the colonies declared independence—it actually started well before the idea to do so had even occurred to anybody, when the Crown decided to start messing around with (cue ominous theme music) …

  … THE INTOLERABLE ACTS

  The Stamp Act, instituted in 1765, meant that things like legal documents, newspapers, and playing cards had to be printed on specially stamped paper that proved a tax had been paid. The act came about because the British needed more money to pay for providing military defense to the colonies, which wasn’t cheap. The British didn’t think making the colonies chip in to help keep them from being invaded by France was unreasonable, but they were just starting to learn about how whiny Americans could be.

  In 1770, a rowdy crowd of colonists got fired on by confused soldiers. The event became known as the Boston Massacre. It looked nothing like the engraving above, done by Paul Revere. For one thing, the people didn’t really look like they’d been drawn by a caveman. The redcoats (British) thought they were being attacked, and were acting well within their rights (by 1770 standards). John Adams even defended them in court and saved them from being hanged. But the colonists were still a bit miffed.

  The colonists didn’t like this act one bit, and decided that the best way to respond was mob violence: they broke into the houses of people in charge and burned them down. Once they’d been threatened with having all of their stuff burned, in addition to being tarred and feathered, most tax collectors weren’t willing to collect the money anyway. The act was repealed in less than six months, and only a few suckers had paid even a penny.

  Two years later came the Townshend Acts. First, the British, who hadn’t yet learned their lesson, put taxes on common household items that were imported into the colonies. The colonists, naturally, responded with mob violence, having learned by then that burning stuff would probably solve the problem pretty quickly.

  In 1773, John Hancock, now famous mostly for his big signature, organized a nonviolent boycott of imported tea. The East India Company, which was British, went from selling hundreds of thousands of pounds of tea per year to selling practically nothing.

  The British responded with the Tea Act, which gave the East India Company—the Walmart of the eighteenth century—tax breaks, so that they could offer tea at prices so low the colonists couldn’t say no. As the enormous company pushed smaller organizations out of business, Sam Adams—now famous mainly for his beer—rounded up a group of guys called the Sons of Liberty for the famous Boston Tea Party.

  IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMIN

  Benjamin Franklin had only two years of formal education, yet he managed to become a noted inventor, scientist, publisher, philosopher, and statesman. He signed both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and convinced the French to join the Revolutionary War on the colonies’ side.

  He’s probably the most quotable of the founding fathers; some of his quotes, like “God helps those who help themselves,” are often mistakenly thought to be right out of the Bible.

  He probably did not, however, actually ever give himself an electrical shock by flying a kite with a key attached to it during a storm—that would be an excellent way to get killed. Presumably, the kite was attached to the ground. The details, like many things in history, are a bit muddy. Franklin didn’t tell anybody except his son about the experiment at first; he was afraid other people would make fun of him, which they most certainly would have.

  At the time, his reputation was much greater in Europe than it was in America. A few of the founding fathers, such as John Adams, thought he was a kook, and others thought he was “too English,” because he’d spent so much time hanging out there, working for the government. Many people at the signing of the Declaration of Independence were afraid he might be a spy.

  But as busy as all of this must have kept him, he still found time to sleep with an awful lot of women. Some estimate that he had as many as fifty children. This despite the fact that he was no great looker! Perhaps he was helped by having invented a musical instrument, the glass armonica, which was a sensation in Europe until rumors went around that the sound it made was so pretty that it caused mental disorders some decades later. This slight exaggeration may have set the stage for the days when even the ugliest rock star never hurt for late-night company. One can only imagine how Franklin would have fared on the social scene in an age when he could say, “See that face on the hundred-dollar bill? That’s me, baby.”

  Franklin was also known as a world-class joker and prankster; some say that the reason he was not asked to write the Declaration of Independence himself is that the others were afraid he’d sneak a joke in. Check out www.smartalecksguide.com to see his writings about the possibilities of using science to make farts smell better!

  Tarring and feathering was the practice of stripping someone down, covering them with tar, and then tossing on some feathers. If feathers weren’t handy, dung would do. It was designed to humiliate a person so much that they left town, but in many
cases, it did a lot more than that. It wasn’t usually fatal, but when the tar finally came off, which took several days, the skin could be covered with burns, and various organs, such as the genitals, could be useless for life.

  Residents of Washington, D.C., are still suffering from taxation without representation—they pay taxes, but since the District of Columbia is not a state, they have no representative in Congress. Some people there are pushing to make it a state.

  THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

  Outraged that the government would help a company offer tea at lower prices than their competitors, Adams and his pals dressed up like Native Americans, boarded one of the East India Company’s ships, and threw the modern equivalent of millions of dollars worth of tea into the water. This effectively showed the British what the colonists thought of the Tea Act, and was probably a lot of fun. After all, since Sam Adams was running things, it’s a safe bet that they had a few drinks first. However, this escapade did not exactly make the British think that the colonies were mature enough to be left alone, and they were awfully upset to see that much tea go to waste.

  None of the founding fathers was without flaws. They did manage to create a new country against all odds, which is more than you did—but if you really want to make fun of them, here’s some ammo:

  George Washington was well known for crying like a little girl in public.

  Ben Franklin used to take “air baths,” which some say were just an excuse to wander around the house naked. John Adams wrote that Franklin spent most meetings of congress asleep in his chair.

  Thomas Jefferson spent thousands of dollars on wine while he was president. That’s millions in today’s money. For most of his life he was in debt up to his eyeballs, which may be why he was never able to free his slaves (one of whom he was almost certainly sleeping with).

  Sam Adams did in fact have a brewery, but it was a colossal failure, costing him most of his inheritance.

  The British responded with some of the least tolerable acts yet. One stripped the colonies of the right to govern themselves. Another made it mandatory for people in Boston to let British soldiers stay at their houses, no matter how smelly the soldiers were. Apparently, the Crown still hadn’t figured out that the colonies tended to respond to “intolerable acts” with mob violence.

  The Continental Congress declared that these acts were illegal and suggested that people start up militias to fight back. Pretty soon, there were little local armies all over the place, ready to fight anyone from England who tried to push them around. Gradually, resistance to England turned from drunken mobs to organized military movements. These first soldiers were called the Minutemen, since they could be ready for battle in a minute (though it could just as well have been because a minute was about how long they were expected to last against the British army).

  Hot-tempered though they were, the Boston Tea Partiers were still fairly polite, as mobs go. After throwing the tea overboard, they thoughtfully swept the decks. Ben Franklin, who wasn’t present, insisted that the tea should be paid for, and offered to do so out of his own pocket.

  King George III: a man who just didn’t know when to quit. Plenty of people think the ruler of their country is insane, but in the case of King George III, they were right. Researchers today believe his insanity stemmed from a blood disorder called porphyria.

  Paul Revere, apparently contemplating the important question of whether to knock the artist over the head with a teapot or brain him with a chisel.

  Rather than conceding, the British ordered their troops to stamp out the militias, arrest revolutionaries, and engage in…

  … A WHOLE BUNCH OF BATTLES

  The first real battle of the Revolution was the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775. This fight wasn’t for control of Lexington—nobody liked Lexington that much—the British merely planned to sneak in and confiscate the weapons the militias had stored there. The first shot to be fired in the battle becames known as “the shot heard round the world”; your teacher will probably want you to underline that, because it’s pretty important. No one knows who—or even which side—fired that first shot, but it was fired in Lexington, officially beginning a war that would drag on for years.

  The colonists were ready for the British to show up, thanks to guys like Paul Revere, who had warned them. Revere was a silversmith, and is known today as the guy who had his friend hang one lantern in the Old North Church if the British came by land, and two lanterns if they came by sea. Either way, he’d see them from his window and ride around to tell everybody to get ready to fight. This, of course, left the colonies woefully unprepared if the British launched themselves across the sea by catapult or tunneled in from underground, but fortunately enough, neither of those methods would have worked, anyway. Catapults were considered useless as modes of transportation in those days.

  One night, two lanterns were hung, and Revere jumped out of bed and got on his horse. He did not, however, shout “The British are coming.” In 1775, most colonists still considered themselves British. Shouting “The British are coming” in the colonies would have been about the same thing as riding through Paris and shouting “Here come ze French!” People would have thought he was crazy.

  EXPERIMENTS TO TRY AT HOME!

  Find a big merchant company that uses tax breaks to lower its prices and squeeze smaller companies out of business (there’s probably one in your town!). Dress up in war paint and a Mohawk and start throwing their crap out of the store and into the street—see if the manager (and the police) understand that you’re doing your patriotic duty!

  What he shouted was “The regulars are out,” which people knew meant they were about to be attacked by British soldiers—or possibly by guys who ate a lot of fiber. Either way, they knew to get ready for something messy. You’ll notice that Revere wasn’t saying a word about whether they were coming by land or sea, which seems odd, given all the trouble he’d gone to, to find out.

  Revere didn’t do all the warning by himself—there were actually three riders in his group, the other two being guys named William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. Nobody really thought of Paul Revere as a war hero—or thought of him at all, for that matter—until 1860, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the poem that students were ever afterward forced to memorize. The poem is largely fictitious, and it can be argued that the reason Revere became famous while the other riders did not is that his name rhymed with “shall hear.”

  The riders gave the militias enough of a warning that they were able to hold the British back. Without this warning, the British would have confiscated the weapons stored in Lexington, and it might have ended up being a very, very short war. But the British regulars didn’t get a single musket.

  The first real American attack on the British was the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga, where the British were storing one of their best cannons. The Green Mountain Boys, a group of soldiers who were not exactly a drunken mob, though they came pretty close, stormed the fort with help from Benedict Arnold, who had been sent to lead them in the charge. It turned out to be an easy battle; the British had left the front door unlocked, and only managed to fire one shot (some say not even that) before giving up and giving the Green Mountain Boys the cannon.

  A short time later came the Battle of Bunker Hill, in which General Israel Putnam (or possibly Colonel William Prescott, no one really knows) said, “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.” This was a reasonable order: muskets were terrible guns. If you saw the army advancing, it would take just about until you could see the whites of their eyes to get your gun loaded in the first place.

  Putnam’s (or Prescott’s) advice didn’t actually work out that well—the battle was a decisive victory for the British. But by waiting until the regulars were in range, the colonists managed to shoot over a thousand redcoats, and an awful lot of them were officers. The British knew that if they won three more battles like that, they wouldn’t have much of an army left for
the fourth battle.

  Around this time came the Siege of Boston, the first great staring contest in American military history. The Continental army surrounded Boston, which was then occupied by the British soldiers, to keep them from moving out of the city. British attacks on these soldiers were unsuccessful. For months, the armies stayed put, waiting for the other army to make a move.

  In July of 1775, General George Washington arrived to take control of the army and quickly sent some of them back to Bunker Hill, which they took back without any fight at all. Those who remained spent several months waiting around outside of Boston. The staring contest ended in March of 1776, when the British blinked first. They sailed away, letting the colonists have Boston back.

  SMALLPOX

  The British didn’t leave Boston just because of the military. They were also afraid of—and probably grossed out by—the smallpox epidemic in Boston. Vaccination was still a fairly new idea then, and, since syringes hadn’t been invented, people used quills. To most, the idea of being injected with the disease seemed remarkably stupid. But having troops vaccinated may have been Washington’s most brilliant move.

  HIT SONGS OF 1775

  Both armies sang “Yankee Doodle” incessantly, but the song was originally meant to make fun of the Americans. It’s full of insulting slang, and was sung in an exaggerated “American” accent. “Doodle” was a word for an idiot, riding into town on a pony was thought to be a very sissy thing to do, and a “macaroni” was a slang term for a fop (i.e., “fancy boy”). So in the first verse of the song, the Yankee Doodle prances into town on his pony, sticks a feather in his hat, and says, “Look at me! I’m fab-u-lous!” Even the word “Yankee” was slang for a hick, but the colonists started to use the word proudly, similar to the way people now call themselves rednecks as though it’s something to be proud of.