American History Revised (12 page)

Who designed Washington, D.C.? Everyone will say it was L’Enfant, the French architect who laid out the master plans for the city. In actual fact, the truth is more complicated. L’Enfant, a hot-tempered individual, got fired and went back to Paris, never to be heard from again. Out of spite, he also took all the architectural drawings and maps with him. The situation got so desperate that Thomas Jefferson gathered together the American architects and told them to start all over again from scratch. Fortunately there was a mathematician on the team who had a prodigious memory: a black named Benjamin Banneker. Banneker told Jefferson he remembered everything and could reproduce the drawings. Sure enough, two days later Banneker returned with exact drawings as if L’Enfant had never left. It was a stunning achievement, and so today we have the beautiful city
of Washington DC “a monument to Banneker’s genius.” Who was Benjamin Banneker, and why wasn’t he a slave?

Banneker was the man who broadened Jefferson’s horizons and helped make Jefferson great. When millions of Americans and foreigners visit the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC and enthrall themselves with the powerful words “All Men Are Created Equal” and “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” they should remember that Jefferson was a slave owner who once wrote, “Blacks are inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Jefferson changed his views upon meeting Benjamin Banneker, inventor of the first clock in America, renowned scientist, and author of widely read almanacs. Jefferson entered into a long correspondence with Banneker concerning the mental capacities of the Negro and the whole question of slavery, recommended Banneker’s almanacs to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and got Banneker hired by President George Washington as L’Enfant’s surveyor. Upon Banneker’s death in 1806, in England William Pitt placed his name in the records of Parliament, and in France—the very country of L’Enfant—the Marquis de Condorcet lauded him before the Academy of Sciences. In his home country, America, alas, Banneker is totally forgotten.

Banneker was not a slave because of an act passed by the Maryland legislature in 1681, whereby children born of white servant women and Negro men were free. Benjamin Banneker’s mother was a free mulatto who purchased a slave and then married him. Born of a free mother, he also was free.

1799
Not many presidents would undertake a policy that virtually killed their prospects of reelection. But when that policy was the only policy that would prevent other, more hot-headed politicians from plunging the nation into war, perhaps courage is called for. After the deed was done, and he lost reelection, he would look back many years later and say it was his proudest achievement. He wrote, “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.’”

John Adams does not appear on anybody’s list of America’s great presidents. He served only four years, squeezed in between the two great luminaries Washington and Jefferson. But John Adams did more than just keep good company; he kept his integrity in an impossible situation—a situation far worse than what his predecessor or his successor had to face, a situation almost as dire as what Abraham Lincoln was to confront sixty years later.

America after the Revolution was a weak nation, surrounded by enormous territories controlled by Britain, France, Spain, Russia,
and various Indian tribes frequently aligned with foreign powers. Managing those tricky relationships was so important that the second-most-powerful position in the U.S. government was the secretary of state. Recognizing America’s weakness, President George Washington developed a policy of strict neutrality that did not always make him friends. He renounced the French-American treaty of alliance, which made the French angry, and sought better relations with the queen of the seas, Great Britain. In 1795, with great reluctance because it was not a favorable treaty but was the best he could get under the circumstances, he signed the Jay Treaty, providing for limited maritime freedom. The treaty was so humiliating that Washington found his house besieged by hundreds of angry citizens, his mail tampered with, and incriminating letters bearing his forged signature being circulated by his enemies. Washington left office almost as angry as Nixon. He gave a “Farewell Address” urging “entangling alliances with none,” and quickly retired to the peaceful world of Mount Vernon.

The French, sensing America’s weakness, upped the ante and became even more aggressive than the British. In short order, France seized some three hundred American ships, sent a general on a reconnaissance mission down the Ohio and the Mississippi, hired the head of the Creek Indians to become a general in the French army, encouraged Quebec to become a French colony, and began discussions with Spain to take over Louisiana and Florida. When the U.S. sent a new minister to France, the French made their contempt known: they refused to receive him. President Adams then sent a delegation to Paris to seek rapprochement. For several months the delegation members cooled their heels, unable to get a meeting. Finally the French minister, Talleyrand, condescended to receive the delegation, subject to payment of £50,000 and a loan of $10 million for American “insults.”

People in America howled with rage. Anti-French war hysteria swept the nation. Congress, acting on its own and sometimes without even consulting the president, voided all treaties with France, raised taxes for a massive naval buildup, and even voted on a resolution to declare war (it fell short by only a few votes). The U.S. Navy—authorized by Congress over the president’s strong objections—began an unofficial war with France that lasted more than two years and resulted in the capture of more than eighty French ships.

Trying times. During all this, President Adams refused to yield to “the mob.” He trusted his own judgment: “I know more of diplomatic forms than all of you,” he told his fellow Federalists—a bluntness that obviously did not enhance his popularity. Adams further angered his party colleagues by continuing to support his secretary of state (and chief political rival), the pro-French Thomas Jefferson. Unable to unify his party, he lost the 1800 election to Jefferson, who continued his
policy, which has lasted now for more than two hundred years.

As for the bellicose Federalist Party, it quickly vanished. America, thanks to Adams and Jefferson, survived. Adams’s gravestone had the last word.

1822
He was so highly regarded he was compared to George Washington. In an age of legislative giants—Clay, Webster, Calhoun—he was ranked the best. “The wisest man in Congress,” said Henry Clay. “The most influential member of the House of Representatives,” said John Quincy Adams. Offered the position of secretary of war by two presidents, Madison and Monroe, he turned it down for a life in the legislature, where he dominated debates on banking and internal improvements. Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee at age thirty-two, he was destined to become the youngest-ever president at age forty-two.

Admitted his chief antagonist in Congress: “The highest and best hopes of the country look to William Lowndes for their fulfillment.” But William Lowndes never became president. Today he is totally unknown.

How easy it is to forget: to become president of the United States you’ve got to be alive (!!).
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William Lowndes died at age forty, two years before the 1824 election. On top of that, all his memoirs and biographical data were destroyed in a fire. A modest man, he declined to have his features immortalized in marble. When Samuel F. B. Morse was preparing his famous painting of the Sixteenth Congress, Lowndes declined to participate. There is no portrait of him anywhere; the only memory of what he looked like is a caricature done after he refused to sit for a painting. En route to England, he died and was buried at sea, leaving “neither headstone nor common grave to mark his passing.”

William Lowndes

Observed one historian of presidents, federal judge Leslie Southwick, “It is as if there existed a conspiracy of obscurity against this statesman. William Lowndes has almost completely faded away, proving that early promise, even the presence of genius, is not enough to preserve a politician in history if he dies too young.”

1825
Shelley’s famous poem is a paean to Osymandias, the Greek name for the Egyptian king Rameses II, whose statue across the Nile River from Luxor bears this inscription: “King of King am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great am I and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”

You don’t expect a great idea to come out of a debtors’ prison, but that’s precisely what happened. Jesse Hawley, a merchant from upper New York State, was sentenced to twenty-four-months’ confinement in debtors’ prison. During his stay, he dreamed about a mighty canal that would transform New York’s landscape and commerce. Writing under the rather grand name of “Hercules,” he produced fourteen essays detailing his vision, even recommending a specific route. Several years later, in 1817, the State of New York executed Hawley’s dream and began an ambitious eight-year project to build the world’s longest canal, 363 miles. At the time there were only three canals in the United States longer than two miles. A recent twenty-seven-mile canal project had ended in failure. The federal government—thinking the whole enterprise impossible—refused to have anything to do with it, so the New York State legislature plunged ahead and authorized a bond issue with the grandiloquent sobriquet that the canal would “promote agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, mitigate the calamities of war, enhance the blessings of peace, consolidate the Union, advance the prosperity and elevate the character of the United States.”