American History Revised (21 page)

1777
Slow news shaped history. In the American Revolution, General Burgoyne suffered a dramatic defeat at the hands of the Colonial forces at Saratoga on October 17, 1777. During the month of November several members of the British Parliament pushed a plan to offer significant concessions to the independence movement in the colonies. They got nowhere. Reason? The British had no idea they had just lost a pivotal battle. The news of Saratoga didn’t reach London until December 2, by which time it was too late to appease the colonists.

The same thing happened in the Civil War, when the British and the French were relishing the prospect of the South winning. Not only were the two European nations conducting a major smuggling and trading operation with the South, but a divided United States meant less of a threat to them and opened up the possibility of their getting involved in Mexico. Every day with bad news for the North moved them closer and closer to the point where they could formally intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. Fortunately for the United States, news took several weeks to cross the Atlantic. In August 1862, when Prime Minister William Gladstone was writing to the British cabinet on the hopelessness of the Union cause, and Foreign Secretary John Russell was sarcastically writing “how the Great Republic of Washington degenerated into the Democracy of Jefferson; they are now reaping the fruit,” the Union had just suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Bull Run. Had Great Britain known about the Bull Run rout when it occurred, it almost surely would have intervened, thus ending once and for all the noble experiment called the United States.

Today we criticize Congress for not being able to make tough choices, hammer out compromises, and get bills passed. We look back with envy on the Constitutional Convention, when fifty-five delegates who barely knew each other met and managed to produce an entire Constitution. What is the major reason they were able to do this, whereas we cannot seem to do it today? “I wonder,” says historian Don Gifford, “if a constitution for the United States could have been achieved at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia if each of the delegates from twelve of the thirteen ex-colonies had, at the least sign of disadvantage to the interests of his state, been able to pop out into the hall and telephone his
home state for instructions? As it was, requests for instructions were infrequent and took days to arrive by courier or packet boat. Meanwhile, the discussions at the convention proceeded both in heat and at leisure. One could argue that the Constitution was achieved precisely because the delegates were and remained discussants, partially incommunicado, not the pawns of immediate instructions from the home office, not pulled up short if a bright compromise occurred to them during a walk in the woods.”

People measured time not in hours or minutes, but in months. Said Thomas Jefferson, speaking of the American minister to Spain: “I haven’t heard from him in two years. If I don’t hear from him next year, I will write him a letter.”

Just prior to the War of 1812, the British government announced it would repeal a major irritant to the Americans, namely its policy of searching neutral vessels on the high seas. Many British expected that amicable relations would resume. They were wrong. It took fifty days for the news to reach the United States, by which time it was too late: America, unaware of the British repeal on June 16, had declared war on June 18. The fighting continued. At the end of the war, Andrew Jackson won the hard-fought Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. What he did not know was that the British, two weeks earlier on Christmas Eve, had already surrendered and signed the Treaty of Ghent in Paris.

Oh, for want of a telegram! Lamented the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke: “Seas roll and months pass between order and execution.”

When news did arrive, it came by messenger—only one copy. This lack of immediate confirmation or follow-up call could allow the recipient to pretend he never got the news—and carry on business as usual. In 1804 the brilliant commodore of the American naval forces attacking the Barbary pirates at Tripoli got word from President Jefferson that he was being replaced as squadron commander. Commodore Edward Preble kept the news secret. In the few weeks he had remaining before his successor arrived, he went on a rampage and quickly won three major sea battles that had the enemy reeling. Despite these victories, no word of his successes reached America quickly, and so he was forced to relinquish command “like a boxer who has his opponent on the ropes, his right hand raised for the knockout blow, only to hear his manager throw in the towel!” He returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome, a congressional citation of appreciation, and an invitation for dinner at the White House. But because of the slow news, there was nothing the president could do. Preble and Jefferson must have had a gloomy dinner.

Fast-forward to 1859. For two years Edwin Drake, a former railroad conductor with no experience in geology or engineering, had pursued a wild dream that
there was oil deep down beneath the hills of western Pennsylvania. His new technique, deep drilling through rock, had nothing to show for itself but a lot of broken drill bits. “Crazy Drake,” everyone now called him. Finally his backers in New York pulled the plug and sent him a letter telling him to quit. The letter was sent by stagecoach, which ran only twice a week and took a week to arrive.

On the tenth day after the date of the letter (which was still in the stagecoach mail pouch, bouncing along muddy roads), Drake finally hit the jackpot: four hundred gallons of oil a day. The Great Oil Rush was on. Oil derricks sprouted up overnight, and America emerged as the king of “the golden flood of petroleum.”

Had it not been for Drake’s last-minute find, America might not have found oil for another decade, and the Model T and all other automobiles would have been powered by batteries.

1782
“How much freedom should children have?” is a question that has faced all parents throughout the centuries. “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” said the English maxim. Children in early America were brought up under very strict and even harsh discipline, with hazing and sitting alone in the corner wearing a dunce cap being common.

Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, in his book of 1782,
Letters from an American Farmer
, was fascinated to observe that many white children captured by Indians refused to be reunited with their parents when rescued years—or even months—after separation. He noted about Indians: “There must be in their social bond, something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted among us.” Benjamin Franklin noted likewise: when white children were captured and raised by Indians, and later returned to white society, “in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.” He went on to observe, “Happiness is more generally and equally diffus’d among Savages than in civilized societies. No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”
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In fact, so many European settlers after Columbus landed in 1492 had defected to join various Indian tribes that Sir Francis Bacon had written in the early 1600s:

The modern historian Francis Jennings did a comparative analysis of child-rearing habits of Native Americans versus the English and the Aztecs (who were even stricter than the English). He, too, noted that children from English colonies who were captured by Indians would refuse repatriation when the opportunity came. These children appreciated the fact that they “were rarely beaten, a fact disapproved sternly by Englishmen who did not believe in sparing the rod.”

Concludes Jennings, “There is much irony in this matter of child rearing. The ‘civilized’ peoples—Aztecs and Europeans—prepared their children for the cruel side of adult life by making life miserable in childhood. Only among the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ peoples, which had fierce cruelty enough for outsiders, were children able to grow peacefully.”

1800
It took six weeks to cross the Atlantic. Traveling from Boston to Washington by stagecoach took ten days, at fifteen to sixteen hours a day. Shipping a ton of goods thirty miles inland cost as much as shipping it all the way to England. America consisted of a lot of small towns. Political argument and brawling was a major source of entertainment; language could become quite extreme. In the election campaign, Federalist newspapers predicted the election of Thomas Jefferson would cause the “teaching of murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Recent presidents have it easy.

The federal government was tiny: 293 people, including members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The president had a salary of $25,000, but “no house, nor carriage, nor servants, nor, indeed, a single secretary.” All expenses for protocol, office, travel, and other “business-related” expenses had to come out of the president’s personal pocket. When George Washington was president in the early 1790s, this was no problem for him, since he was a wealthy man. But for John Adams in the late 1790s, it was a major problem, so Congress reluctantly allocated a one-time expense budget of $14,000. Vice President Thomas Jefferson chaired the Senate, collected his salary of $5,000 a year, and pretty much stayed home. The capital city was Philadelphia; in November 1800 it was moved to Washington DC—too late for Washington to enjoy the place (he lived just sixteen miles down the river).

The original name for the city was Federal City, D.C. During the construction
from 1790 to 1800, the name was changed to honor America’s first president. Living quarters for congressmen were sparse, forcing many of them to sleep two in a bed in wooden shacks. Those few who could afford it, mostly wealthy plantation owners from Virginia and the Carolinas, rented mansions in nearby Georgetown and commuted by carriage to the unfinished Capitol building. Next to the Capitol were “a few row houses, a tavern, an oyster market, a grocery store, a washerwoman’s establishment, a shoemaker, a tailor and a print shop.” The only industry in town was a brewery.