The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  Benjamin Rush: A founding father who was sort of a cynic. Called the state constitution of Pennsylvania “our state dung cart.”

  AMENDMENTS

  The Constitution can be changed, but it’s a long process. Since the first ten amendments, out of more than eleven thousand that have been proposed, fewer than twenty more have been added, and most of those are about boring things like congressional protocol.

  The Battle of Monmouth: The battle right after the winter at Valley Forge. It was sort of a tie, but no one expected the colonists to do anything but lose after that winter.

  Molly Pitcher: A woman who heroically took her injured husband’s place firing a cannon on the battlefield, making her one of the few female heroes of the Revolution.

  Native Americans: We hardly mentioned them here, but they were around, of course. Suffice it to say that as usual, they got a raw deal.

  John Paul Jones: This guy was sort of like a professional pirate, raiding British ships at sea and cutting off supplies to the British army, helping Washington immensely.

  John Jay: A founding father who became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court.

  The Hessians: German soldiers hired by the British. The headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow was one of these guys!

  Forgotten Founding Fathers

  Here are a few founding fathers who never ended up on federal currency:

  Button Gwinnett and Lyman Hall: Georgia delegates with funny names. Button ended up murdered in a bar fight (or a duel, depending on who you believe. The line between “bar fight” and “duel” is often blurry).

  Charles Carroll: The only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the last signer to die (though he had pretty much been forgotten by then—see the next chapter).

  Josiah Bartlett: The delegate from New Hampshire, ancestor of the fictional president on The West Wing.

  John Lansing, Jr.: Refused to sign the Constitution, then mysteriously disappeared in New York several years later. He is thought to have drowned or been murdered; no one knows for sure. He’s certainly dead by now, though … . or is he?

  Gouverneur Morris: One of the authors of the Constitution, though he is better remembered for having a peg leg and sleeping with other men’s wives. Total party animal. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a whole book about him.

  Francis Lightfoot Lee: A signer of the Declaration of Independence best known for being the brother of Richard Henry Lee, who first proposed the document. Also a relative (great-uncle, to be exact) of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

  END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1. Which of the following about George Washington is true:

  That whole business about the cherry tree.

  He could breathe fire, which scared the bejeezus out of the British, many of whom had relatives who had been eaten by dragons.

  He could throw a coin across the Potomac River.

  He was known as one heckuva dancer.

  (ANSWER: D.)

  2. Patrick Henry is known for saying:

  “If this be treason, then make the most of it.”

  “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

  “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

  “Are you going to eat that pickle?”

  (ANSWER: A, THOUGH HE PROBABLY NEVER SAID IT. THE ONLY RECORD WE HAVE OF THE NIGHT HE SUPPOSEDLY SAID IT INDICATES THAT HE SAID SOMETHING SORT OF ROWDY BUT THEN IMMEDIATELY APOLOGIZED AND PLEDGED HIS UNDYING LOYALTY TO THE CROWN.)

  3. True or False: Ben Franklin was against drinking alcohol.

  (ANSWER: TRUE, BUT HE CHANGED HIS MIND. TODAY, JUST ABOUT EVERY OTHER BAR PUTS A QUOTE FROM HIM—“BEER IS PROOF THAT GOD LOVES US AND WANTS US TO BE HAPPY”—ON THE WALL.)

  4. The Boston Tea Party resulted in:

  King George granting colonists independence before they started fighting with solid food.

  A slight Earl Grey taste residents still detect in Boston drinking water.

  A request from the fish to throw in some sugar.

  The British sending in more troops.

  (ANSWER: D.)

  5. Tarring and feathering resulted in:

  Third-degree burns.

  People calling you “crazy chicken man.”

  Blistering.

  Unusable genitals.

  All of the above.

  (ANSWER: E.)

  6. Paul Revere was:

  A silversmith.

  A jockey.

  A prizefighter.

  A stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-lookin’ Nerf herder.19

  A refrigerator repairman.

  (ANSWER: A.)

  7. Founding father James Broom is best known today for:

  Signing the Constitution.

  Dying in 1810.

  Serving in the Delaware General Assembly.

  Nothing, really.

  (ANSWER: ALL ARE TRUE, BUT D IS CORRECT.)

  SECRET ANSWER KEY TO YOUR TEACHER’S TEST ON THE REVOLUTION

  A, D, C, B, A, A, B, D, C, A, D, B, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, JOHN PAUL JONES. TRY IT!

  ASSIGNMENT

  Write a rambling poem about Prescott or Dawes.

  DISCUSSION

  Lonely ol’ Charles Carroll, a forgotten founding father. What do you suppose he’s thinking here?

  Who was better-looking, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson?

  Assuming you didn’t know what Valley Forge would be like ahead of time, would you have joined the army? What if you had known about it? If you said yes, are you some kind of sicko?

  Which founding father do you think had the silliest name?

  MNEMONICS!

  Here are some rhymes to help you remember stuff from this chapter:

  LAST NIGHT I WAS WATCHING

  THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER

  INSTEAD OF READING HAMILTON’S FEDERALIST PAPERS.

  LISTEN, MY CHILDREN,

  AND YOU SHALL HEAR

  ABOUT SAMUEL ADAMS—HE SURE LIKED

  HIS BEER!

  IT ISN’T SO NICE TO

  BE PUNCHED IN THE GUT,

  BUT BENEDICT ARNOLD WAS SHOT IN THE BUTT.20

  ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE,

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN INVENTED THE STOVE.21

  9 A shilling was one-twentieth of a pound. Economists don’t really have an answer for how much a shilling in 1770 would be today, but it wasn’t much. We figure it was about five bucks.

  10 For that matter, neither did delegate Gouverneur Morris.

  11 We don’t know what happened to this original copy. Thomas Jefferson said there was a copy of the Declaration in the room that day, and that John Hancock might have signed it (or something like it) to make it legal, but that copy has disappeared and was probably destroyed in the printing process. The famous copy dated July 4, 1776, that’s on display in the National Archives was actually written later that summer.

  12 If it’s true, he was right—the first paragraph of the Declaration was approved, separating America from England, on July 2, and John Adams, at least, assumed that July 2 would be the day people celebrated. The stuff on July 4 was really just a formality.

  13 Well, you’d think so—but, in fact, vendors at public executions were said to do a pretty brisk business.

  14 For more on empires who strike back, see The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Why Star Wars Is Awesome, Volume 16.

  15 For more information, see The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Thomas Paine’s Views on Organized Religion.

  16 In fact, we just made them up—see The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Lying.

  17 Yeah, right.

  18 Despite what the Scarecrow says in The Wizard of Oz, this is way off. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Incorrect Interpretations of the Pythagorean Theorem.

  19 See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Why Star Wars Is Awesome, Volume 4.

  20 Actually, it was just below the butt. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Traitors’ Hindquarters.

  21 If you want to
get technical, it wasn’t the stove, but a stove, called the Franklin stove. Also, we know this doesn’t rhyme, but studies show that adding “roses are red, violets are blue” before a fact makes it 80 percent easier to remember. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Boy, Are You Gullible!

  “American gentleman … God forgive me for putting two such words together.”

  —Charles Dickens

  INTRODUCTION

  If Americans in the days just after the Revolution were known for one thing, it was a general lack of manners. British books describing how horribly Americans behaved were huge sellers in both England and America. Americans got a real kick out of books whose whole point was to tell them they talked funny, lived like pigs, and smelled like them, too.

  Many of these books were just the work of English writers picking on their American cousins because they were still bitter about the whole Revolution thing, but they probably weren’t far off when they pointed out just how bad your average American smelled. Bathing was considered strictly a novelty for the very rich, and most people in America were really quite poor. Even the richer people were pretty gross, especially by today’s standards. When Louis Philippe, who would eventually become king of France, visited America, he was told at one place where he crashed for a while that there were no chamber pots (pee buckets) and that if he had to go, he should just open the window.

  If there was a national pastime enjoyed by members of all classes in those days, it was spitting. Everybody was into spitting. People spit on the floors of their houses pretty openly, and though every member of Congress had his own spittoon in which to deposit his chewed tobacco, most of them just spit on the carpet instead, which required less aim. Visitors to the Capitol remarked that you could barely tell which designs on the carpet were supposed to be there and which had been “added” by the congressmen.

  The nineteenth century was the age of the log cabin. It was also the era when a presidential candidate’s drinking habits were viewed as a selling point. One of the few things anyone remembers about William Henry Harrison is that his campaign was based largely on the fact that he drank a lot of hard cider.

  When Englishwoman Frances Trollope wrote a book about how dirty Americans were, outraged Americans responded in the most mature way possible: by drawing a picture that made her look like Jabba the Hutt.

  Louis Philippe of France. Couldn’t he just have used his hat?

  Of course, this was the nineteenth century; the whole world was pretty nasty. Bathtubs and toilets weren’t terribly popular in England, either. And in America, people were starting to move west. There were no rest stops or showers on the Oregon Trail, and Wet-Naps would not be invented for years. If people were hopelessly dirty and smelly, it wasn’t like they could help it.

  Still. Asking a future king to pee out the window? Early America was no place for the squeamish. Or for people who were in the habit of walking under Louis Philippe’s window without an umbrella.

  THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

  In 1796, George Washington decided that if he served more than two terms, he’d start to look like a monarch. So he stepped down as president, leading the country into the first real presidential election, which ended with John Adams as president and Thomas Jefferson as vice president.

  Jefferson and Adams were actually members of different political parties: Adams was a Federalist, and Jefferson was a Democratic Republican. In those days, candidates didn’t pick a running mate like they do now. The vice presidency went to whoever came in second in the election. This is an okay way to elect, say, a runner-up in case Miss America can’t perform her duties, but for electing a vice president, it had its problems. Under this system, vice presidents spent all their time plotting revenge against the victorious president—after all, they didn’t have much of anything better to do. The vice president’s job pretty much consisted of waiting around to cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate. They ended up with plenty of free time for things like dueling.

  DEAD POLITICAL PARTIES

  The Federalist Party wanted a rich nation with a strong military. Their favorite saying was “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Notable Federalists included John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.

  Democratic Republicans favored a strict interpretation of the Constitution. They ran the country for about twenty-five years, then gradually split into the two parties we know and complain about today.

  The Whig Party mostly existed to disagree with Andrew Jackson, but four members (William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore) became forgettable presidents. Abraham Lincoln was also a Whig when he was in Congress.

  The Know-Nothings, originally called the American Republican Party, then the Native American Party, this anti-immigrant party was so secretive that, when asked what they stood for, members were supposed to say “I know nothing.” Most candidates today say pretty much the same thing when asked about their beliefs; they just take a lot longer to do it.

  Thomas Jefferson: style and a half!

  So the first bitter, nasty presidential campaign came in 1800, when Jefferson ran against Adams. Adams’s supporters claimed that Jefferson was an atheist who would have all the churches in the country burned down and all the rich people killed (this sounds a little less extreme when you consider that people in France, where Jefferson had been hanging out, were doing exactly that at the time). Meanwhile, Jefferson’s supporters portrayed Adams as a power-hungry maniac (in reality, he was just kind of a jerk). Today, a choice between these two founding fathers sounds like a great election, compared to the clowns people have had to pick between in most elections since, but in those days people saw it as a choice between a maniac and a heathen.

  When the ballots were counted, Adams had been beaten by two Democratic Republicans. Jefferson and Aaron Burr received seventy-three electoral votes each, a perfect tie.

  This meant that the House of Representatives had to decide which of the two would be president—and the Federalist-controlled Congress hated them both. After thirty-five rounds of voting, they still hadn’t picked a winner, and the country very nearly slipped into civil war. Some of the Democratic Republican leaders were threatening to call their state militias to action to install Jefferson, who was actually a lot more popular with the voters than Burr, as president. Jefferson liked to call this the Revolution of 1800, largely because he liked calling things revolutions. In the end, they went with Jefferson rather than risk any fighting.

  Aaron Burr ran for governor of New York in 1804 rather than running for president again, and, in the process, got ticked off at Alexander Hamilton and challenged him to a duel. Burr won, became the first sitting vice president ever to shoot a guy, and was arrested for murder. He got off the hook, but his political career was over.

  Tammany Hall was a political organization in New York that helped Jefferson win the election of 1800. These guys didn’t just practice corruption, they positively rejoiced in it.

  John Adams didn’t forgive Jefferson for years. He retired to his estate to spend the rest of his years writing letters to colleagues, grooming his son to take over the family business, and doing the horizontal polka with his wife, Abigail, who had been such a trusted advisor during his presidency that some people consider them to have been copresidents.

  THE WAR WITH THE BARBARY PIRATES

  Most history books don’t even bother to mention that from 1801 to 1805, the United States was at war with pirates—a rather glaring omission, we don’t mind saying. The Barbary States, a group of loosely connected North African countries, expected foreign governments to pay money to ensure that these pirates wouldn’t attack them. Explaining exactly how the power in North Africa was divided and what the pirates had to do with it would take a whole book by itself, so we’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that the guys in charge had pirates working for them and expected governments to pay them in exchange for safety.

  Back when the States were colonies, the British paid t
heir ransom to the pirates for them, thereby protecting them from pirate attacks. After independence, however, it was up to the States to cover their own bills. Just about everybody felt that the United States should refuse to pay the pirates off, but there was an argument about whether such a decision was practical. Jefferson wanted to just stop paying altogether, and Adams wanted to wait until the new country could form a good enough navy to fight the pirates.

  When Jefferson became president, the guy in charge of Tripoli, a North African country for which the pirates worked, demanded $225,000 from the United States—which was, at the time, a pretty sizable chunk of America’s total revenue. Jefferson refused, so Tripoli declared war. Several other states from around Tripoli joined in, and the pirates began attacking U.S. ships, taking Americans hostage and treating them as slaves.

  Lieutenant Stephen Decatur driving the pirates off the USS Philadelphia. The pirates had captured the ship, and Decatur and his men snuck back aboard and set fire to it so that the pirates couldn’t use it. Decatur was made a captain soon after.

  Congress never made a formal declaration of war, but Jefferson got permission to send what navy the United States had out to attack the pirates. The battles went on for four years before there was a peace treaty, and, even though it took a long time to come, America’s victory did a lot for its reputation overseas: people around the world now knew that Americans might smell bad and talk funny, but they could stand up to pirates.