The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  THE NAME OF THE COUNTRY

  Among his other accomplishments, Thomas Paine was the first to call our country the United States of America. But most people thought it was a lousy name. “What do we call ourselves, then?” they asked. “United Statesians?” Congress didn’t much care for it either, and considered calling the new country Freedonia, Columbia, Alleghenia, or Appalachia. But no one could agree on one of these, so rather than have one more thing to fight about, they just stuck with the United States of America.

  Was the Revolution a good idea? Canada took a different route: in 1867, it became a self-governing nation largely by asking nicely, dodging the two major wars it took America to become an independent, slave-free country. The Queen of England is still a figure in Canadian government, but try finding a Canadian who knows what the heck her job is.

  By the time the war ended, Congress was so strapped for cash that most of the soldiers hadn’t been paid in years. Many were in terrible debt. The states had forced many farmers to borrow money and buy more land to grow food for the soldiers during the war; when the war ended and they couldn’t pay off the debts, the states threw them into debtor’s prison. People were starting to think that they’d fought to create a new country but had created one big mess (along with several smaller ones back at Valley Forge).

  Cornwallis surrenders as the British army band, according to legend, plays “The World Turned Upside Down.” After this, to show that there were no hard feelings, American and French officers threw lavish dinner parties for the British officers, except for Tarleton, who wasn’t invited because no one could stand him. This sort of postwar party was standard army protocol in those days, but plenty of Americans were upset, wondering who the heck they’d have to surrender to in order to get food tastier than firecake.

  Recent surveys show that most people think Benjamin Franklin was president at one point. By the time the country had a president, he was too old and feeble even for makin’ time with the ladies, let alone running the country—plus, a lot of people thought he was crazy. He died about a year after Washington took office.

  People knew that using the military to start a republic had never really worked before (and it hasn’t worked since, for that matter). Only a handful of republics had ever been formed, and in a couple of the best-known cases, the military leaders (Julius Caesar in Rome, for instance) had marched into town and declared themselves kings. Washington could very well have marched into Philadelphia, ordered Congress to disperse, and told people he was the king of America.

  He wouldn’t have met much resistance. Imagine the scene:

  GEORGE: I’m here to tell you guys to go home. I’m running this joint now.

  CONGRESS: Well, gee, George, nice to see you and all, but the thing is, well … .

  GEORGE: The thing is that I just kicked the crap out of the whole British army, and I can certainly beat a room full of old men. Nice Independence Hall you have here. Shame if anything happened to it. That Liberty Bell looks especially breakable.

  THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND RELIGION

  One can debate for hours whether most of the founding fathers were religious. Some were. Others weren’t. Few, if any, actively spoke of setting up America as a Christian nation. Today, many people assume that in “the old days,” everyone was either a devout Christian or the town atheist, but by some estimates, only about 7 percent of colonists belonged to a church at all in 1776! It’s true that the Constitution never explicitly says that church and state are separate, but the document also never mentions God.

  Many of the founding fathers may have been Deists, meaning they believed in God but also believed that he didn’t interfere with the world, a popular theory at the time. Many were fairly religious, but probably not enough that they could carry the red states in an election today. Here are some quotes from the founding fathers:

  “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”—James Madison

  “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”—John Adams (or a document he approved, anyway)

  “Christian philosophy … . [has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”—Thomas Jefferson

  “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”—Benjamin Franklin

  Additionally, Thomas Paine had enough quotes against established religion that they could about fill a book by themselves.15

  CONGRESS: All hail King Washington!

  Washington’s case would have been further strengthened by the fact that he would have been backed up by an army of angry men who enjoyed mob violence and blamed Congress for the fact that they were broke. Congress probably would have dispersed if Washington had told them to.

  Believe it or not, a lot of people wanted Washington to break up Congress and be the new king—including most of his officers. Under the Articles of Confederation, the country was already falling apart, and installing Washington as king might well have put things on a more stable track.

  The officers met in an auditorium to plan the details of taking over Congress, but Washington showed up to settle them down. To get their attention, he put on his glasses, which he’d never done in public before, to show that he’d lost a good deal of his eyesight in service to his country. Several officers sobbed at the sight of the general looking like a nerd; the glasses alone were enough to get them to listen to his orders to calm down. He barely even needed to make a speech. Historians generally ignore the theories that these were special eyeglasses with hypnotic powers, and stories that he then used them to make all of the officers do the hokey-pokey are considered apocryphal,16 but it would have been pretty cool.

  Meanwhile, back in merry old England, King George III said that if Washington didn’t become king when the country was his for the taking, then he would be “the greatest man in the world.” Normally, we make a big deal out of the fact that George III was out of his mind, but we choose to ignore that when he says nice things about Washington.

  Washington then bade his officers farewell over drinks and obscene songs in a New York tavern, and attended a grand ball in his honor that Congress threw as a thank-you for not marching into town and shooting them. At the end of the ball, Washington formally resigned his job as general and walked out the door, where his horses were waiting for him, while the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Some said that it was the greatest exit in American history. Others pointed out that American history had really only started up a few weeks earlier, so there wasn’t a lot of competition.

  The Freemasons are a semisecret group who are, depending on who you ask, either a fraternity for adults or an ancient, mystic organization that secretly controls the whole world—like the Stonecutters on that episode of The Simpsons. Some people will tell you that everything in modern history has been a big conspiracy cooked up by the Masons. It’s true that Washington and several other founding fathers were members—in the eighteenth century, pretty much everybody who was anybody joined the group sooner or later. But this doesn’t mean the whole Revolution was a conspiracy … or does it?

  Whether Washington wanted to be king or not, everyone soon agreed that running the country as a confederacy wasn’t working—though certain states never quite got the lesson through their heads. In 1787, Congress met in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation, but it soon became clear that just revising them wasn’t going to be enough. A whole new constitution had to be written up, which is why they still call this convention … .

  … THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

  A lot of the old revolutionary heavyweights from the early days were present at the writing of the Constitution. Ben Franklin was well into his eighties by then, and in terrible shape. He was known as the convention’s “sage,” which meant that he was just there so they’d have a famous old smart guy there. He rarely did any debating, and most of his suggestions were shot down quickly. For example, he suggested that the meetings op
en with a prayer in the hopes that this would get the delegates to stop bickering. This was quickly shot down, and modern Congresses have proven that no amount of prayer will stop partisan fighting anyway.

  He then suggested that government officials, including the delegates, not be paid a salary. The other delegates refrained from beating Franklin over the head with their canes (he was pretty frail, after all), but many started to wonder if Franklin had completely lost his mind.

  Another of Franklin’s ideas was that the president and other government types should only serve single-year terms, which would have meant that we’d have to sit through presidential campaigns every year, not just every four years. On the other end of the political spectrum, Alexander Hamilton suggested that elected officials serve for life, as long as they behaved. Imagine: Gerald Ford could have been in office for over thirty years!

  One thing that Franklin did manage to push through was the nomination of George Washington as president of the convention. People loved George Washington. He had narrowly escaped capture and smallpox so many times that rumors were spreading that he could not be killed and was immune to all disease. After the Constitution was finally ratified, he would be elected the nation’s first president without really even bothering to run.

  During the writing of the Constitution, slavery was one of the most heated issues, if not the most heated. Many delegates insisted that it be outlawed in the new country immediately, but one problem of having a democracy, not a monarchy, is that they couldn’t just do away with it without enough people approving. Many of the delegates thought slavery was an abomination, but they also realized that the Southern states would never sign a constitution that outlawed it.

  Delegates crowd over to one side of the room so they can be in the painting of the signing of the Constitution—which wouldn’t actually be painted for more than 150 years.

  LIES TEACHERS TELL

  Sooner or later, someone will surely tell you that to further separate America from Britain, Congress suggested that the official language of the United States be German, and that only a single vote kept it from happening. This is complete crap. No such bill ever existed (though it does sound like the kind of thing Franklin might have suggested), and, in fact, there is no “official language” of the United States.

  In the end, they reached a compromise: they refused to specifically allow slavery in the Constitution but put in a clause saying that Congress couldn’t even talk about ending the slave trade for at least twenty years. Many assumed that it would be outlawed in all of the states by then anyway.

  This didn’t stop Franklin from pushing for an end to slavery only months later, though. He forced Congress to consider it again in 1790. After Southern delegates made long speeches saying they supported slavery because the Bible did, Franklin published a letter saying that their reasons were remarkably similar to the ones Algerian pirates used to justify enslaving Christians. It was his last published letter; he died a few weeks later.

  It’s ironic, considering that our country has always prided itself on being free, that America ended up being one of the last of the big, rich countries to abolish slavery; the practice was abolished in Britain (and its colonies) in 1833, a good thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in America. Slavery remained a huge problem in America for the next seventy years after the Constitutional Convention, largely because even abolitionists knew there were not a lot of practical ways to end slavery in the South, where the economy depended on it. In hindsight, it’s easy to say they should have just ignored the trouble and abolished slavery anyway. But before you say that, think about how your sneakers were probably made.

  In the end, none of the delegates were convinced that the constitution they eventually agreed on was a particularly good plan of government. Everyone had to compromise, and nobody got exactly the setup they wanted. Under the circumstances, though, most of them figured they’d done about as good a job as they could, setting the standard for how effective Congress is to this day.

  BICAMERALISM

  The delegates disagreed about almost everything, but one of the biggest arguments was over how many votes each state should have in Congress. Some said the number should be based on population; others thought each state should only have one vote. They compromised by giving two votes to each state in the Senate and basing the number of votes per state in the House of Representatives by population. Proposing this compromise was Ben Franklin’s most notable contribution to the proceedings.

  One thing, however, was still missing:

  THE BILL OF RIGHTS

  When the Constitution was first written, it didn’t say a word about freedom of speech, religion, or any of that business. There wasn’t even anything in it that said you didn’t have to let soldiers stay in your house if they knocked on the door.

  So Congress got together again and added ten amendments, which guaranteed such things as freedom of speech, freedom to join whatever crazy religion you like, freedom to keep your mouth shut, freedom from being tortured, freedom from being put on trial or arrested for no particular reason, and other useful things. The First Amendment alone grants the freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly, and the right to petition the government to change the laws—though the government can still throw the petition right into Mr. Trash Can if they feel like it.

  YOUR LIFE, 1776

  So, what would you have been doing in 1776? Well, if you had been born in the 1760s, odds are pretty good that by 1776, you would have been decomposing. Up to a third of all babies didn’t live to their first birthday, and only about half of all people lived to age twenty in the colonies. Sanitation was pretty poor, healthy food was hard to come by, and disease was everywhere. In the mid-1770s, a smallpox epidemic killed well over a hundred thousand people. Life expectancy was only in the forties.

  Even if you survived, life would have been rough. The good news is that you probably wouldn’t have had to go to school, but the bad news is that if you were a boy, you would have been sent out to work at about the age of seven or eight to make money for your family. Boys were usually sent off to become apprentices, spending a few years being taught a trade by a “master.” Girls were raised to be dependent on others—first their parents, then their husbands—for their entire lives. Their days were often spent on candle-making, quilting, and other chores that some modern weirdos think are fun.

  There was really no such thing as a teenager in America at the time. People reached their teen years, of course, but they were expected to act like adults by the time they were about seven. Young children were commonly dressed in robes that opened in the front, but as soon as they were old enough, they were dressed as miniature adults.

  Contrary to what your teacher might have told you, you would probably not have been married with kids by the time you were sixteen. The average marrying age was twenty-two for women and twenty-seven for men—which is fairly surprising, considering that men that age could only expect to live for another fifteen to twenty years!

  FACES ON MONEY

  The best way to get your face on money is still to be president, but a few people got on by other means, such as:

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON, $10 BILL: Hamilton wrote some of the Federalist Papers, served as the first secretary of the treasury, then was shot by Aaron Burr, the only sitting vice president ever to shoot anybody until Dick Cheney accidentally shot Harry M. Whittington in the face with bird shot in 2006. Whittington survived, but Hamilton didn’t.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, $100 BILL: If the question is “How many people do you have to sleep with to get yourself on the hundred?” the answer is “lots and lots.”

  SALMON P. CHASE, $10,000 BILL: Chase was secretary of the treasury when Lincoln was president. We have no idea how he ended up on money; maybe his heirs bribed someone. This bill stopped being printed in the 1960s.

  SACAJAWEA, $1 COIN: With this coin, Congress made up for the raw deal women and Native Americans have been getting in America for
centuries!17

  We here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide are in favor of getting politicians off money and putting on some other American icons. How about putting Miles Davis, Joe DiMaggio, or Frederick Douglass on some money? And we mean major currency, not those limited-edition coins that the mint prints up now and then to sell to coin collectors.

  Two other amendments didn’t make the cut. One regulated the number of representatives in the House and the number of constituents each respresentative could have (rejected, presumably, because it was boring), and one regulated how often Congress could give itself a pay raise. The latter was eventually ratified as the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992.

  Having formed a new nation, Americans looked to the West, beyond the mountains, and softly said, “I’ll bet some strip malls would look mighty good over there.”

  SOME OF THE STUFF WE MISSED

  Here’s a little bit about some of the things we left out. For more information, get off your lazy butt and research them yourself!

  The Marquis de Lafayette: Commander of the French army; became a friend to George Washington and helped save America’s butt.

  The Federalist Papers: Essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Very important, but kinda boring. The ideas expressed in them influenced the formation of the American government.

  Francis Lightfoot Lee, thinking, “The sum of the squares of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side!”18

  Don’t Tread on Me: The motto on a really cool flag with a snake on it that colonists used to wave to frighten the British (who apparently hated snakes). Officially known as the Gadsden flag.