One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  • In 1872, Congress passed a law requiring officials of both houses to deprive members of a day’s salary for every day’s absence, except in the case of illness. The law has been enforced only twice since it was passed.

  • Congress in 1873 gave itself a salary raise of 50 percent and made it retroactive for two years.

  • The ice-cream soda was invented by accident in 1874, when Robert M. Green ran out of sweet cream and substituted vanilla ice cream in sodas he was selling at the semicentennial celebration of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

  • The life expectancy of Americans in 1876 was about forty.

  • Custer’s march on the Little Big Horn, which cost him his life as well as the lives of 224 other men, was carried out against the orders of his superiors.

  • William Cullen Bryant’s last words were: “Whose house is this? What street are we in? Why did you bring me here?”

  • “Anybody,” Jay Gould once remarked, “can make a fortune. It takes genius to hold on to one.”

  DYSAESTHESIA AETHIOPICA: WHY SLAVES ARE LAZY

  A question that puzzled slaveowners throughout history was why their slaves had poor work habits. Seemingly obvious answers, such as the absence of incentives and cruel conditions, were often ignored. One of the more interesting theories of slave misbehavior was put forth by Dr. Samuel W. Cartwright of Louisiana, who attributed slave misconduct to a disease, Dysaesthesia Aethiopica, which overseers erroneously labeled “rascality.”

  The sickness caused slaves to “do much mischief” which often appeared “as if intentional.” They became destructive and wasteful in their work. A slave suffering from DA would perform his tasks “in a headlong, careless manner, treading down with his feet or cutting with his hoe the plants” he was trying to cultivate. The symptoms, reported Dr. Cartwright, all reflected “the stupidness of mind and insensibility of the nerves induced by the disease.”

  The doctor also attributed deviate slave behavior to the Negro’s poor sleeping habits. “In bed,” he explained, “when disposing themselves for sleep, the young and old, male and female, instinctively cover their heads and faces, as if to insure the inhalation of warm, impure air, loaded with carbonic acid and acqueous vapor. The natural effect of this practice is imperfect atmospherization of the blood—one of the heaviest chains that binds the negro to slavery.”

  SOURCES: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp. 102–3; Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases of Negroes,” De Bow’s Review, O.S. XI (August 1851), 210.

  IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

  Slavery could be a brutal institution. In the middle 1800s, Mr. Stevens, a large slaveowner from Georgia, fell seriously ill and was cared for by Dr. Hamilton. As a gesture of gratitude, Stevens told the doctor that if he ever needed a favor, his former patient would do anything to help. In conjunction with his medical practice, Dr. Hamilton researched cures for sunstroke. In Stevens’s kind offer he found a monumental opportunity to further his studies. Rather than simply make hypotheses about potential cures, Dr. Hamilton borrowed one John Brown, a field slave who had belonged to Stevens for fourteen years. With John as the subject, Dr. Hamilton would now be able to compare his remedies firsthand. Of course, to keep John from missing his daily work in the fields, the experiments had to be conducted at night.

  First the doctor ordered a hole dug three and a half feet deep, by three feet in length, by two and a half feet wide. Into the pit went fired, dried red oak bark, with the embers removed. Across the bottom the doctor put a plank with a stool. Brown was then forced to strip and sit on the stool, while wet blankets were placed over the hole, locking in the heat. Hamilton allowed a slight gap in the blankets for Brown’s head. After half an hour John Brown fainted. Dr. Hamilton then carefully measured the heat in the hole.

  A slave auction as pictured in the Northern press. (Harper’s Weekly, January 12, 1867, p. 24.)

  Every three or four days Dr. Hamilton repeated the experiment, each time with John taking one of the doctor’s sunstroke remedies before descending into the hole. The time required for John to faint and the heat of the hole were meticulously recorded. Finally Dr. Hamilton concluded that cayenne pepper tea, a common household remedy at the time, afforded the best protection against heat. But every household had easy access to cayenne pepper. So Dr. Hamilton marketed pills containing ordinary flour, which, when dissolved in cayenne pepper tea—the instruction indicated—would give a person stamina and fortitude against sunstroke. Reportedly, Hamilton made a large fortune from the sale of his pills.

  But the doctor was not through experimenting with John Brown. Next he tried to discover how deep John’s black skin went, which left the slave with lifelong scars on his legs, hands, and feet. In all, Dr. Hamilton used John as a human guinea pig for approximately nine months. When the experiments made John too weak to work in the fields, he was transferred to the slave carpenter crew. John soon “got a liking for” this work and, in the end, claimed to be much happier swinging a hammer than he had been swinging his hoe in the fields.

  SOURCE: John F. Bayliss, ed., Black Slave Narratives (New York: Collier, 1973), pp. 77–80.

  FREEDOM BY MAIL

  Escapes from slavery were difficult. Henry “Box” Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, often prayed to God about escaping. Finally, according to Brown’s later narrative, instructions came from up above to “go and get a box and put yourself in it.” Brown wasted no time. He had the plantation carpenter construct a box the same size as the largest boxes commonly shipped in those days. He then poked three small gimlet holes in the three-foot-by-two-foot crate and carefully marked “this side up with care” on the outside. With only a “bladder” of water, Brown placed himself inside.

  The slave soon learned that travel in a small box could be trying even though the trip had been sanctioned by the Almighty. At the express office the box was thrown in a corner upside down. Soon Brown and the box were loaded onto the baggage car, where, with good fortune, the crate happened to fall right side up. Next in his travel northward toward freedom, Brown was transferred to a steamboat, and again placed on his head. For what Brown later estimated was about an hour and a half, he rode upside down on his head. In a short time his “eyes were almost swollen out of their sockets, and the veins on [his] temple seemed ready to burst.” His arms and hands were so numb he could not move them. The thought of calling for help, if anyone was even in a position to hear, became more and more appealing than the prospect of dying a slow, gruesome death in the box. Freedom, however, remained Brown’s goal, and he resigned himself to either achieving it or dying. Finally, Brown was taken off the boat and placed in a wagon. After a rough ride, the box was thrown down so hard that the runaway’s neck was almost broken. But Brown had reached his destination, freedom and Philadelphia.

  He was ecstatic. After the group of Northerners he had been mailed to removed the box lid, the former slave promptly stood up and fainted.

  Brown was lucky. Another slave, a girl, who attempted to mail herself to freedom contracted “brain fever” and emerged from her box gray-headed. For the rest of her life she appeared ten years older than she actually was.

  SOURCE: John F. Bayliss, ed., Black Slave Narratives (New York: Collier, 1973), pp. 191–96.

  WENDELL PHILLIPS AND THE SLAVE

  “Before Wendell Phillips, the great Abolitionist, was very well known, he had occasion to visit Charleston, South Carolina, and put up at a hotel. In the morning he ordered his breakfast served in his room, and was waited upon by a slave.

  “Mr. Phillips seized upon the opportunity to impress upon the Negro, in a sentimental way, that he regarded him as a man and brother, and more than that, he himself was for the abolition of slavery.

  “The Negro, however, seemed more anxious about his patron’s breakfast than he was about his own position in the social scale or the conditions of his soul, until finally Mr. Phillips became discouraged and told the servant to go away, saying that he could
not bear to be waited upon by a slave.

  “‘You must excuse me,’ said the Negro, ‘I am obliged to stay here ’cause I’m responsible for the silverware.’”

  SOURCE: Negro Digest, June 1946, 72.

  ON THE YAZOO RIVER

  In the middle of the nineteenth century Stephen Foster came close to using the name Yazoo in a song. He was writing the words to a “plantation song” and wanted the name of a southern river that had a melodious sound. Since he had never been farther south than Kentucky (he was a native of Pittsburgh), he consulted a map and happened upon the river Yazoo, a tributary of the Mississippi. He liked the name and decided to use it, but when the song was first sung his brother objected that the sound of “Yazoo” wasn’t quite right. So Foster dropped it and found another river. In 1851 he published his song: “Swanee River.”

  SOURCE: Frank Smith, The Yazoo River (New York: Rinehart, 1954), p. 10.

  HORACE GREELEY NEVER SAID IT

  Next to a few lines from the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the most quoted remark from American history may very well be Horace Greeley’s “Go west, young man, go west.” Historians routinely trot out the admonition, as do politicians and columnists. It is known to children almost from the time they begin to read. Remarkably, the line is almost never recalled without mentioning the name of Horace Greeley. But Horace Greeley never said it. The author of the quotation was actually John L. Soule, a little-known Indiana journalist, who published it in the Terre Haute Express in 1851. Greeley repeatedly denied that he had said it, and even reprinted the article in which Soule used the expression, but to no avail.

  SOURCE: Bergen Evans, ed., Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), p. 745.

  FRANKLIN PIERCE PREPARES FOR OFFICE

  Franklin Pierce entered the office of president with possibly the most devastating personal problems of any chief executive.

  Pierce’s wife, whom he loved deeply, had never taken pride in her husband’s political career. In 1836, while Pierce was a young congressman from New Hampshire, she confided to a close friend, “Oh, how I wish [Franklin] was out of political life! How much better it would be for him on every count!” She was disconsolate when her husband was elected to the Senate, and began not accompanying him to the disagreeable capital when he had to attend Congress. Instead, she remained home in New Hampshire while Pierce roomed alone in a boardinghouse.

  The Pierces had lost two children in infancy, but when a third, Benjamin, arrived in 1841, Franklin resigned his Senate seat, returned to New Hampshire, and permanently abandoned further political aspirations. In 1846 he declined a cabinet position in James K. Polk’s administration because of feelings for his wife and family. Never again, he told Polk, would he be voluntarily separated from his family for any considerable length of time.

  In 1852, Pierce was named as New Hampshire’s favorite-son candidate for the Democratic party. No one seriously thought he stood a chance of receiving the nomination. But as the convention became deadlocked, the delegates began looking around for a dark horse. Pierce’s name was mentioned, and on the forty-ninth ballot he received the top position on the Democratic ticket.

  Jeanie Pierce was not enthralled by the political turn of events. Benjamin was now eleven years old, and both father and mother literally lived for their only surviving child. Franklin told his wife he had not wanted the nomination, but since the party had drafted him anyway he had to run, for Bennie’s sake as well as the nation’s. Would not Bennie look fine growing up in the White House? Jeanie Pierce acquiesced, and her husband was elected in November.

  After the election, however, Mrs. Pierce discovered that her husband had actually sought the Democratic nomination and had lied to her about his “passive” activities. Then, on January 6, 1853, the Pierces personally witnessed the brutal death of their only living son, Benjamin, in a train accident. In two months Jeanie Pierce had lost her faith in her husband’s integrity and her son. The President-elect’s relationship with his beloved wife irrevocably and painfully deteriorated. Exhausted and depressed over the loss of his son and the alienation of his wife, Pierce, at that time the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, was inaugurated, on March 4, 1853.

  SOURCE: Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), pp. 535–36.

  THE MOST ANONYMOUS VICE PRESIDENT OF THEM ALL

  William King, elected vice president under Franklin Pierce in 1852, was the only man in history not given the chance to prove the harmlessness of his particular office. A mere forty-five days after he took the oath—in Cuba, the only man to be sworn in as vice president in a foreign country—he died, on April 18, 1853. His death came so quickly that he never even had the opportunity of presiding over the Senate, the only job prescribed for vice presidents by the Constitution.

  SOURCE: Joseph Kane, Facts about the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p. 94.

  THE COMMODORE KEEPS HIS PROMISE

  Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great shipping and railroad magnate, was a man of his word in an era of freewheeling finance. In 1849 the commodore founded a steamship line which ran from the east coast to California. The new line, designed to take advantage of increased traffic resulting from the gold rush of ’49, cut the usual steamship fare in half, saved the traveler six hundred miles by crossing land at Nicaragua rather than Panama, and offered dependable service, something unheard of in those days. Profits? The commodore earned over a million dollars on the business venture in the first year.

  Yet in 1853, Vanderbilt, diverting his assets to other investments, sold a large block of his stock in the line to a group of Americans known as the Nicaragua Transit Company. The commodore was soon in trouble with his new partners, however, as the Transit group refused to pay him for the stock. Legal prosecution, Vanderbilt knew, would mean a drawn-out, national affair. To avoid all of this, he sent the following note:

  “Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for law is too slow. I will ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.”

  Vanderbilt was not merely making an idle threat. Shortly thereafter he established a new shipping company to compete with the other one on the east coast–California route. In two years he put the Nicaragua Transit Company out of business. All totaled, the commodore spent nine years running ships from the east coast to California, making profits estimated at no less than ten million dollars.

  SOURCE: N. S. B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson, Casebook in American Business History (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1939), p. 363.

  HOW JAY GOULD ACCUMULATED HIS FIRST FORTUNE

  In 1853 seventeen-year-old Jay Gould set out for New York to sell an invention which he was sure would make a fortune and revolutionize the world. The invention was a better mousetrap. His grandfather had designed it but given Jay the right to exploit it commercially. The future financier leaped at the opportunity, with big dollar signs racing before his eyes, keeping him awake at night.

  That summer he set out for the financial hub of the country to try to interest a small manufacturer in his “can’t miss” invention. But when he arrived in New York, disaster struck. As he was riding on the Sixth Avenue trolley, gazing lazily from the back of the car at the impressive tall buildings, a thief took off with the mousetrap, which was sitting on a seat enclosed in an invitingly exquisite mahogany case. When Gould returned to his seat, he immediately called to a conductor, “What has become of my box?”

  “Was it yours?” the conductor innocently asked him. “Why, a man who got out and turned down the last street carried it off. If you run, you will probably catch him.”

  Gould promptly jumped off the car, ran madly back to the last stop, and there caught a glimpse of a big, strong fellow carrying away the mahogany box. Gould shot after the thief, wrestled him to the ground, and grabbed the invention.

  Just then a policeman appeared. Immediately the thief accused Gould of trying to steal the maho
gany box. Gould attempted to explain that the box was his, but to no avail. It was down to the station for both men. There Gould convinced the police that the box was his by revealing its unusual contents. The thief had no idea what he had stolen, of course, and was thunderstruck to learn that all that expensive-looking box contained was a crude-looking mousetrap.

  The next day the New York Herald devoted half a column to the incident. It was the first time Jay Gould made it into the papers, for once as a victim.

  Within three years Gould succeeded in turning a profit on his mousetrap. By the age of twenty, from the trap and other inventions, he had accumulated the vast savings of $5,000, which in the days before the Civil War was a small fortune.

  SOURCES: Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), pp. 38–39; Robert I. Warshaw, Jay Gould (New York: Greenberg, 1928), pp. 42–43; Richard O’Connor, Gould’s Millions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 30.

  CONDENSING THE WORLD

  Gail Borden, the inventor of condensed milk and founder of the company that bears his name, aspired to condense much more than milk. “I mean,” he once remarked, “to put a potato into a pill box, a pumpkin into a tablespoon, the biggest sort of watermelon into a saucer. . . . The Turks made acres of roses into attar of roses. . . . I intend to make attar of everything.”

  SOURCE: Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 313.

  HISTORY OF BLACK GOLD

  When an eastern Kentucky salt well suddenly filled up with oil in 1818, becoming the first well in America to produce crude, it was promptly abandoned as useless. Years earlier, Seneca Indians and General Benjamin Lincoln’s Revolutionary soldiers had recognized the value of oil for medicinal purposes, but businessmen had not yet discovered its commercial possibilities. When oil was found in more salt wells in the late 1830s, these too were abandoned.

  In the 1840s, after many uses for oil had been discovered, businessmen couldn’t find enough oil-producing salt wells to supply their needs. These wells were in especially great demand because the only other known way of obtaining crude was by collecting it from springs, creeks, and ditches—a slow and costly method. Incredibly, though everyone knew that salt wells had produced oil, no one thought of drilling a well solely for the purpose of getting oil. When James M. Townsend, president of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, suggested to a friend in the late 1850s that oil could perhaps be produced from a well just like water, he was told, “Nonsense! You’re crazy.”