A Nation Rising (2 page)

That pair of linked struggles over land and freedom—in essence, the true “dream of our founders”—resonates through the stories recounted here. Take the nearly fifty-year war in Florida between the American government and the Seminoles, allied with runaway slaves and free blacks. A piece of that conflict's history is detailed
in “Dade's Promise,” a reference to the ill-fated army commander Francis Dade, for whom Dade County is named. This attack by Seminole Indians on American troops—another nineteenth-century counterpart of 9/11—led to the longest war in American history until Vietnam. Of course, most Americans today are familiar with the “Seminoles” only as the nickname of the Florida State University sports teams.

The very human face of the struggle for freedom is also on display in the tale of Madison Washington. An escaped slave who returned to the South in a vain attempt to free his wife from bondage, Madison Washington was recaptured and resold before leading a mutiny aboard a slave ship. This little-noted episode provides a glimpse into the centuries of insurrections and rebellions that occurred throughout America's slaveholding history—an account much at odds with the traditional mythic view of complacent slaves accepting their bondage. And that too is an essential piece of America's “hidden history.”

Another example of the mythic past continuing to haunt the present is on display in the account of the “Bible Riots,” a paroxysm of deadly sectarian fighting in the 1840s that shattered the peace of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. This tableau of American intolerance and religious violence should completely shatter the comfortable notion of a so-called Christian nation. Many Americans shake their heads at the scenes of pitched street fighting in such places as Baghdad or Rwanda, wondering how countrymen from rival sects or tribes can brutalize one another. But it happened here too. The virulent anti-immigrant fever that swept through America during much of the nation's early history stands in sharp contrast
to the “melting pot”—a myth that has been such a large part of the American dream. It is a stark reminder that the nation's immigration policies have always been and remain one of the hottest of hot-button issues.

Each of these “untold tales” reflects on the basic idea of how America truly came to be the nation it was by the mid-nineteenth century—and in many ways continues to be. The issues raised by these stories—ambition, power, territorial expansion, slavery, intolerance, the rights of the accused, the use of the press, disdain for the immigrant—all continue to reverberate in our headlines. So do the uses of fear and propaganda, which have been components of the American story from the country's earliest days.

In uncovering these hidden stories, I have found some uncanny parallels to contemporary American politics. For instance, there is nothing new about “birthers,” those people convinced that President Obama was born in Kenya. In 1856, the presidential candidate John Frémont had to face the widespread rumor that he was French-Canadian by birth. And the “tea party” movement spawned in 2009 in homage to the Boston Tea Party is nothing new. In the 1840s, “tea baggers” burned down a Catholic convent.

These stories present a different truth, one that is often hidden from our view. Nearly fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy said, “For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold to the clichés of our forebears…. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
¹

 

G
ETTING THE WHOLE
“truth” and separating it from “myth” raises a question I often hear. Whether in a school, at a teachers' conference, or at a lecture in a public library, people ask why this history is “hidden.” Why don't we teach our children, and ourselves, the truth?

While doing the research for this book, I stumbled across a perfect example of those well-meaning but misguided attempts to mask reality and varnish the truth. Traveling through Florida to investigate the region's Spanish past, I visited one of the state's historic sites: a re-created Spanish colonial settlement, complete with an Apalachee native village. It was staffed by articulate, enthusiastic museum workers, many in period costume, who were clearly passionate about bringing history to life. In its otherwise excellent educational center, I came across a wall-size timeline of Florida's history. In large, clear letters it noted that the Spanish had “banished” the French from Florida in 1565. Reading that, I could only ask myself in astonishment, “Since when is
banished
the same thing as
massacred
?”

The French Huguenots referred to in that timeline were all mercilessly put to death in a religious bloodbath. The destruction of Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville, in September 1565 and the slaughter of French soldiers a few weeks later was a mass sectarian killing by the Spanish admiral who founded Saint Augustine. The museum's “banished” was the rough equivalent of a German display contending that Europe's Jews had been “deported.”

But we can't tell
that
to the children, can we? Such things don't happen in America! So we allow them to pass through history class and let them walk through a museum “learning center,” safe in the
knowledge that they are spared the ugliness in our past. Of course, the problem is that they never learn the truth. Or if they do, they have a perfectly good reason for cynicism.

One simple answer is that we have been understandably ashamed of this picture, which is at odds with the airbrushed version of the past. “We gauge our prospects as a people by locating a past from which we can draw hope and pride,” the historian Andrew Burstein once noted. “Heroes become necessary in such an enterprise.…There is another way to say this. Biography is never a faithful record. It is a construction, a clandestine effort to refashion memory, to create a new tradition, or sanction yet another myth about what is past.”
²

Or we are worried about our children, and we assume that they need to be protected from the violent nature of the truth. And so our schoolbooks omit the unpleasantness, wishfully thinking that we can craft a vision of the past filled with pride and patriotism. But truth is a harsh mistress.

For years, I have contended that our attempts to “clean up” the past was somewhat akin to removing the picture of the mad aunt or disgraced uncle from the family album. But sooner or later, the kids stumble across an old snapshot and then you have to explain the whole, awkward thing.

Admittedly, I have learned that telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the American past is an irritant to some people. I have been accused of “tearing down” our heroes. But it seems to me that getting at the heart of where we have come from as a nation is the only proper way in which the country can ever hope, as Barack Obama once put it, “to narrow
that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality” of what this country has been through.

Of course, in the best and worst of times, it is comfortable to think that America has held fast to the “dream of our founders,” a dream that has inspired millions of Americans to work and sacrifice and countless millions more to come to America. And it has breathed life into freedom movements around the world, all of them hoping to be part of that dream of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

This was the “dream of our founders.” But is the dream alive? Or worse, is it simply a pipe dream, destined to disappoint? That is a fair question to ask, as America's faith in the dream has been severely tested in the first decade of the twenty-first century by the toll of terrorism, a series of shocks to the financial system, and a collection of cataclysmic government failures.

From my own optimistic perspective, however, I will join one of the dreaming heroes of my youth, Robert F. Kennedy, in quoting George Bernard Shaw:

“You see things; and you say ‘Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?'”

—Kenneth C. Davis
Dorset, Vermont
September 2009

1789
The first Congress convenes in New York City in March.

1790
Secretary of War Henry Knox signs a peace treaty with Creek Indians. With Spanish support, however, the Creeks resume attacks on American frontier settlements.

 

1792
George Washington is reelected president, with John Adams as vice president.

 

1793
Eli Whitney's cotton gin revolutionizes cotton production.

 

1796
Tennessee, a slave territory, is admitted to the Union as the sixteenth state.

1799
George Washington dies at age sixty-seven on December 14.

 

1800
The federal government moves from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in June.

1801
After thirty-six ballots, the House chooses Thomas Jefferson as third president of the United States on February 17; Aaron Burr becomes vice president.

 

1803
Marbury v. Madison
: the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall rules an act of Congress null and void when it conflicts with the provisions of the Constitution, establishing the principal of “judicial review.”

 

1803
The Louisiana Purchase. The United States roughly doubles in size. Under the terms of the purchase, the status of West Florida and Texas is left unclear.

 

1804
Burr and Hamilton duel on July 11. Alexander Hamilton dies the next day.

 

1805
Thomas Jefferson is inaugurated for a second term.

 

1807
Aaron Burr is indicted for treason on June 27.

February 18, 1807

T
WO RIDERS WERE
approaching.

It was nearly midnight. Nicholas Perkins, an attorney and militia officer, was playing backgammon with a friend in the small town of Wakefield—to the north of Mobile—when he heard a horse and rider pass at a brisk trot. One set of hooves seemed to pass. But when a second rider followed and stopped, Perkins went to his door. The second rider asked him for directions to the home of a Major Hinson. The other rider reined in his horse and waited a short distance away.

Perkins briefly studied the silent rider, the smaller of the two horsemen. A beaver hat, pulled low, partly concealed his face. Perkins observed that the man's expensive riding boots did not match the rest of his outfit, which was rough-hewn. Knowing the difficulty of following the roads in a backwoods wilderness where the threat
from Indians was very real, Perkins advised the two riders not to press on. Instead, he suggested that they spend the night at a nearby tavern.

Rejecting the advice, the two men galloped off. But the pair of riders and the circumstances struck Perkins as too unusual to dismiss, and their unwillingness to stop raised his suspicions. “Could they be robbers with ‘a bad design' on Hinson and his property? he wondered. Then another thought crossed his mind. Might the mysterious rider be Aaron Burr, making his escape through this remote country?”
¹

This was not a random notion. The former vice president, Aaron Burr, was thought to be traveling in the territory. And Nicholas Perkins knew that a reward of $2,000 had been posted for his arrest, amid swirling rumors and newspapers' speculation that Burr was up to no good. For months, the air had been filled with whispers and reports that the former vice president was gathering an army to foment an uprising or a war. Then, in January, in a letter to Congress, President Jefferson had openly accused Burr of a treasonous conspiracy. Suspecting that the mysterious rider might indeed be Burr, Perkins set off to find the local sheriff. They rode to Major Hinson's house, and it was there that Perkins got a better look at the man who had raised alarm bells.

“He was shocked by his bizarre getup. He wore a slouching white hat with a broad brim, sported a long beard and checkered handkerchief around his neck, and a great, baggy coat tied with a belt. Hanging from the belt was a tin cup and a butcher's knife. The outfit did not fit the profile of the dapper Burr, known for his stylish dress and genteel manners. But something gave him away:
‘His eyes,' attested Perkins…. He later testified in court that he had heard ‘Mr. Burr's eyes mentioned as being remarkably keen, and this glance from him strengthened his suspicions.'”
²

Perkins waited outside Hinson's house while the sheriff spoke with the men. He then watched as Burr and the other rider, whose name was Robert Ashley, emerged from the house and rode with the sheriff, who was helping the wanted Burr get away.

If the picture of a lawman aiding and abetting a known fugitive seems incongruous, there were good reasons that the people in this part of America—what was then deemed the American “frontier” in the future state of Alabama—were sympathetic to Aaron Burr and his rumored plans. According to one openly discussed rumor, Burr was planning an audacious plot to outfit an army, begin a war with Spain, and capture Florida. Another rumor had Burr plotting to march on Mexico and claim that territory. The wildest of these rumors had Burr taking over a large swath of American western territory, seceding from the Union, and setting up his own empire. The ambitious and unscrupulous former vice president, forced from power in Washington, planned to install himself as emperor, another Napoléon, with his beloved daughter Theodosia, as his heir, an empress in waiting.

There was no love for the Spanish in America, especially in these southern territories that bordered Florida. Many Americans already expressed long-simmering, apparently inborn hostility toward the Spanish. Born of the Reformation-era religious wars between England and Spain, and fueled by centuries of anti-Spanish, antipapist propaganda, this hot streak ran especially deep among the Protestant Scots-Irish who had moved into America's southern
wilderness. Many of these Americans wanted to press farther south into the Florida territory held by Spain since the founding of Saint Augustine in 1565.

Spain still controlled neighboring Florida and its coastline, as well as vast stretches of the American South and West and Mexico. Complicating matters, the transfer of extensive portions of North America from France to America in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase had left the boundaries of Spain's territory in the area very murky. At the direction of President Jefferson, troops were sent to the borders to pressure Spain to surrender or sell the territory, and a swelling tide of American settlers continued to flood into the area, soon overwhelming the relatively few Spanish residents.

Hoping to slow the flow of American frontiersmen encroaching on their borders, the Spanish began to form alliances with Indian tribes in the territory, still numerous and eager to protect their ancestral hunting lands.

Last, the Spanish, and especially their Jesuit priests, had a reputation among American southerners for encouraging slaves to run away.

Apart from these “geopolitical” concerns, there was also little love lost for Alexander Hamilton, whom Burr had killed in a duel nearly three years earlier. As George Washington's secretary of the treasury, Hamilton had created a plan for a new American economy and a banking and credit system that seemed—in the eyes of many Americans—to favor well-heeled easterners at the expense of the less genteel westerners and southerners. Hamilton's plan called for assumption of the states' debts by the federal government in order to create a stable credit market in which the nation could put its fi
nancial house in order and more efficiently regulate commerce. The settlers and farmers who were pressing the country's boundaries with an almost insatiable desire for territory saw Hamilton's “Report on Public Credit,” issued in January 1790, as a threatening plan for a federally dominated economy. Southerners in particular viewed this plan, with its powerful central national bank under the control of the president, as a threat to their notions of an unfettered economy, with each state controlling is own destiny.

More controversially, Hamilton's plan would reward financial speculators who had purchased Revolutionary War–era bonds and promissory notes, given to soldiers when the nascent United States literally could not pay its troops, at pennies on the dollar. Desperate for cash, many farmers, often veterans of the Revolution who thought the bonds worthless, sold most of these notes at depressed prices. Under Hamilton's plan, the speculators—who had admittedly taken a risk—would reap a windfall, and the “ordinary people” who had held the original bonds would lose out. This was the opening of a split between the investor class and the working class that was a harbinger of a dichotomy that still remains a powerful force in American politics and finance: Main Street versus Wall Street.

In his biography of Hamilton, Ron Chernow encapsulated the anti-Hamilton view:

Hamilton's “assumption bill” passed Congress, but only after a deal was struck with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In exchange for their support, Hamilton agreed that the new national capital would be built in the South. It is also worth noting that, as John Steele Gordon writes in
An Empire of Wealth
, Hamilton's program was an immediate success and the new United States bonds sold out in weeks. “In 1789, the United States had been a financial basket case, its obligations unsalable, its ability to borrow nil,” says Gordon. “By 1794, it had the highest credit rating in Europe.…The ability of the federal government to borrow huge sums of money at affordable rates in times of emergency—such as during the Civil War and the Great Depression—has been an immense national asset. In large measure we owe that ability to Alexander Hamilton's policies that were put in place at the dawn of the Republic. It is no small legacy.”
⁴

But many Americans of the day, especially southerners, lacked that historical long view. The Hamilton plan contributed to a growing antagonism and sectional mistrust that would fester dangerously between the regions over the next few decades.

And that's why, to many in the South and West, Burr's role in that “famous affair of honor” on July 11, 1804, would have been
cause for admiration. Dueling was no disgrace but a badge of honor, and plenty of men carried the scars to prove it. Some, like the future president, Andrew Jackson, had killed men in duels. And for these reasons, along with the fact that Aaron Burr had a reputation as a bona fide hero of the Revolution, the former vice president still possessed a great many friends and admirers.

Mrs. Hinson told Perkins that the men were headed for Pensacola, Florida, then in Spanish territory. Paddling a canoe down the Mobile River, the determined Perkins reached Fort Stoddert, an army garrison near the border between the American-controlled Mississippi territory and Spanish Florida. Perkins then rode toward Pensacola after the Burr party with an officer, Lieutenant Edmund P. Gaines, accompanied by a detachment of mounted soldiers. Eventually overtaking the three riders, Gaines asked the mystery man if he was “Colonel Burr.” With a brief protest that the soldier had no right to arrest him, but otherwise without incident, the former vice president, at that moment the most wanted man in America, was placed under arrest. The president of the United States had publicly accused Burr of treason and declared him guilty—without evidence or a trial, jury, or judge. To Jefferson, the presumption of innocence did not apply to Burr. If convicted, Aaron Burr could hang.

Edmund Gaines would go on to a distinguished army career during the War of 1812 and then continue the long fight against the Seminoles in Florida. (Gainesville, Florida, is named in his honor.) He now took his prisoner back to Fort Stoddert, where the fifty-one-year-old New Yorker soon charmed members of the Gaines family, including Lieutenant Gaines's brother, George S. Gaines, a successful Indian trader. Fearing that Burr would attempt to escape
with the help of sympathetic locals, Gaines decided to send him back to Washington.

Nearly legendary in his day for his wit and charm, Aaron Burr had already worked his magic in this wilderness outpost that would eventually be part of the state of Alabama. Refined, educated, debonair—a man of the world who had rubbed shoulders with Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—Burr must have seemed a legend come to life, a man from another world, to these people living on the mostly unsettled edge of America. When he departed from the fort under an armed guard of eight men, to begin the journey back to Washington, Burr had clearly left an indelible mark on some of his acquaintances. “Some women wept, and a mother-to-be later named her child Aaron Burr; neither age nor misfortune had diminished Burr's gift for making friends.”
⁵

 

O
N
M
ARCH
5, 1807, the captive Burr set out on the long trip back to Washington, escorted by Perkins, his friend and fellow attorney Thomas Malone, and six soldiers from the garrison; these eight escorts had already agreed to divide the $2,000 reward for his capture. Working their way through the rough backwoods of Alabama and Georgia, they would have to cover some 1,100 miles of swamp and forest, still home to thousands of Native Americans, who then existed in a very uneasy peace with the growing numbers of white settlers moving into the territory.

At night, Burr was given the single tent the group carried. Perkins was constantly on the alert, not only for hostile Indians but also for an attempt at escape. Burr was known to have many influential
friends and allies who might try to free the famous politician. His son-in-law, Joseph Alston, lived in South Carolina, and the Alstons were a powerful force in that state. A wealthy planter, who had served in South Carolina's House of Representatives, Alston had married Theodosia, Burr's daughter, in 1801.
*

When Burr and his escort finally reached Chester, South Carolina, Burr made a small and somewhat desperate stab at escape. Jumping from his horse, he shouted to some locals, imploring them to summon a judge. He reportedly declared, sounding more like a lawyer than a dangerous man plotting a coup, “I am Aaron Burr, under military arrest. I claim the protection of the civil authorities.”

Perkins, surely thinking that his share of the reward money was about to disappear, grabbed Burr and wrestled the smaller man back into his saddle. His friend Malone slapped the horse's flanks, and the entire party galloped away. Throughout the journey, Burr had maintained a stoic demeanor. But now, with a last chance at freedom lost, he broke. According to the accounts of his guards, Burr wept. Some of his captors joined him.
⁶

A little later, Perkins hired a small coach to carry Burr the rest of the way to his date with justice. It would be far more difficult for Burr to bolt from a closed carriage, Perkins reasoned, than from horseback. Initially heading for the nation's capital, the party learned that Burr would be tried instead in Richmond, Virginia's state capital. They arrived in Richmond on March 26, the closed carriage accompanied by “eight dusty riders.”
⁷