American History Revised (22 page)

The President’s House had no portico (it was added twenty years later), nor was it white. It was gray. Abigail Adams was happy to move out after spending three months in this gloomy, sparsely furnished abode. Originally, the President’s House was supposed to be five times bigger, with terraces, fountains, and an enormous garden three quarters of a mile long. Such a palace might be fine for Louis XIV, but not in America, thought Washington, so he had fired the Frenchman L’Enfant and hired a new architect to start all over again, with more-modest specifications. After all, America was a small country, surrounded by powerful enemies claiming the bulk of the North American continent. Even the Atlantic Ocean offered little security, controlled as it was by the British navy.

America’s first ship to enter the Mediterranean Sea was the USS
George Washington.
After a three-week journey from Algiers to Constantinople, it sailed into the Golden Horn and asked for permission to enter the harbor. Asked to identify what flag the ship sailed, the captain answered he sailed under the colors of the United States of America. The Turkish harbor captain hurried back to the port to make inquiries, then returned to the American ship and informed him regretfully that no one had heard of such a country, “United States of America.”

Tuition at Harvard College in 1800 was sixteen dollars a year—a bargain compared with the more glamorous Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey), where tuition was one hundred dollars a year. And what was the value of one hundred dollars in those days? A pair of shoes cost two dollars. In terms of what economists call “purchasing power parity,” therefore, Harvard cost eight pairs of shoes, Princeton fifty. A skilled laborer got paid $1.25 a day, meaning he could send his son to Harvard for thirteen days of work—a bargain. (At Harvard’s current tuition of $45,000, the father, to part with only thirteen days of work, would have to be making more than $1 million per year. Skilled laborers today do not make $1 million, which means that either Harvard is terribly overpriced or skilled laborers are being woefully underpaid.)

The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury earned $5,000 a year—not much more than a local postmaster, who earned $4,500. The Chief Justice of the United States made only $4,000—but then lawsuits
were infrequent, and really there wasn’t all that much for him to do. The real action was collecting customs duties at the ports; this was the predominant source of revenue for the federal government. Accordingly, the collector of customs for Philadelphia got paid $8,500 a year. This was the second-highest-paying job in America.

Because its new form of government included a House of Representatives based on size of population, the U.S. developed the world’s first census. It recorded a population in 1800 of precisely 5,308,473 (of which 20 percent were slaves). Immigration was a major source of new labor, but not of voters: the moment immigrants landed on American shores, they had to wait fourteen years before they could get citizenship and the right to vote.

1800
Unlike today, when people live to eighty, people in 1800 rarely lived past forty. This condensed time frame made them work a lot harder when they were young. Says historian Bill Adler, “Since childhood was brief, even for those who survived, adolescents lurched into adulthood by age fifteen or sixteen. Parental expectations dictated high performance and productivity to ensure success.”

Back then, babies two years of age were speaking fluently, and toddlers of three or four were able to read and write Latin. The record for childhood precocity would have to go to Timothy Dwight, later president of Yale: it was said that by the age of one he had read the entire Bible.
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Clearly, American education has come far downhill since then. One reason for this is information overload. A recent brochure for Harvard University boasts that the school offers no fewer than three thousand courses to choose from. Is Harvard today that much better than when all it taught was the Three Rs? Observes
Time
magazine in an article on information overload, “A weekday edition of the
New York Times
contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.”

Abraham Lincoln, running for president at a time when there were no graduate schools in America, admitted that “the aggregate of all his schooling” did not amount to one year. The bulk of his childhood self-education consisted of one or two dozen books. But they were good books, not trash: the King James Bible,
Robinson Crusoe
, Aesop’s
Fables
, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, even William Scott’s
Lessons in Elocution: A Selection of Pieces in Prose and Verse for the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking.
No light reading for this young man. He also read his American history: Parson Weems’s
Life of George Washington
, William
Grimshaw’s
History of the United States
, and the
Revised Statutes of Indiana
containing “the Declaration, the Constitution, the first twelve amendments, the Virginia Act of Cession of the Northwest Territory, the Ordinance of 1787, the act of admitting Indiana, and the first state constitution.”

More important than the quality of what he read was the concentration he put into his reading. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he advised a law student seeking advice in the 1850s. What few books he read, he reread. So frequently did he reread the Bible and
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
that, even as president, he could cite lengthy passages at heart and startle onlookers with his deep knowledge.

In the early 1960s at Hyannis, JFK and his distant relative Gore Vidal were enjoying cigars over a game of backgammon, pontificating about politics. “How do you explain how a sort of backwoods country like this, with only three million people, could have produced the three great geniuses of the eighteenth century—Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton?” wondered the president.

“Time. They had more of it,” said Vidal. “They stayed home on the farm in winter. They read. Wrote letters. Apparently, thought, something no longer done—in public life.”

Replied JFK, “You know in this job … I get to meet everybody—all these great movers and shakers and the thing I’m most struck by the lot of them is how second-rate they are. Then you read all those debates over the Constitution … nothing like that now. Nothing.”

1817
A courier set out from Detroit to deliver U.S. Army documents to headquarters in Pittsburgh, 286 miles away. He rode hard, and at the end of his journey pulled up huffing and panting. How long did his ride take?

Fifty-three days—about as much time as it took to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. America in the early nineteenth century was essentially a collection of isolated settlements surrounded by forests. Much of the nation’s subsequent economic growth and political unification were due to basic improvements in transportation. Said John C. Calhoun in 1817, “We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion….Let us bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.”

Indeed, the great issue of the 1820s and all the way through the 1850s was not slavery, which became so important in the 1860s, but internal improvements. It cost
just as much to send goods thirty miles inland by wagon as it did three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean by ship. If the new fledgling country was to grow and stave off the European colonial empires like Britain and France, it had to develop its economy and its size. The “American System” headed by Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams called for internal improvements, land legislation, tariff protection, public works, and a national bank.

The interest in national “economic planning” strikes some as anathema today, but in the first century of the republic it was viewed as absolutely essential if the country was to survive. The transition from an agricultural to an industrial society required enormous amounts of capital to build a transportation infrastructure. Roads, bridges, canals, harbors, and railroads are not cheap.

Yet the benefits could be awesome: after the Erie Canal was completed, the three weeks and $120 it had cost to send a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City were reduced to only eight dollars and eight days.

And how was the Erie Canal financed? Even though it was “the biggest public works project in the Western World since the Great Pyramid,” President James Monroe vetoed the $1.5-million federal government “seed financing” necessary to get the $7-million project off the ground. Unlike today, when virtually every public works project is financed by Washington DC either with money or with a government guarantee, this massive project had to make it on its own. The State of New York issued equity shares and bonds for the venture, to be purchased by New York banks for resale to investors in America and England. The Erie Canal succeeded in being built entirely with private funding, as did most of the bridges and roads that eventually reduced distances in America to an economically homogeneous unit. The state played a key role in promoting development of early America, but most of the hard cash came from private individuals. “The primary source of U.S. finance,” says economics historian Stanley Lebergott, “proved to be neither foreign nor federal nor state. It was private.”

1860
Abraham Lincoln, “the most powerful President the United States has ever known,” ran the Civil War from the White House and kept on top of every detail of the military campaign, as well as running the national government. Surrounded by hostile congressmen and Southern sympathizers in Washington DC he had to rely almost exclusively on his White House staff to manage the affairs of war and state.

What’s remarkable is that he did it with so few people. His White House staff—in sharp contrast to today—consisted of only two people. They were John G. Nicolay, White House chief of staff, responsible for
receiving official visitors and maintaining relations with the Senate and House, and John M. Hay,
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assistant secretary responsible for the president’s daily correspondence. Because the president’s White House budget allowed for only one secretary, Hay had to be placed on the payroll of the Interior Department, and both secretaries had to pay for their own pens and paper out of their own pocket, though room and board was free (the two shared a bedroom on the first floor of the White House). In 1861 and again in 1864, another secretary was added, each salary “buried” in the Interior Department.