Penguin History of the United States of America (154 page)
Read Penguin History of the United States of America Online
Authors: Hugh Brogan
15
It is worth underlining the point that this important decision, which proved to have dealt a mortal wound to the American slave-trade, was justified as an emergency measure, just as Lincoln’s Emancipation proclamation, which gave the death-blow to slavery itself, was justified eighty-seven years later.
16
And he by them: he proposed marriage to one of them, the widow of the great Helvetius.
17
The Spaniards were reluctant belligerents: their King, anxious about his own transatlantic possessions, was most unwilling to help George Ill’s rebels. The King of France, Louis XVI, also had an accurate royal intuition: he showed what he privately thought of the Americans by presenting one of Franklin’s noble lady friends with the Doctor’s portrait painted on the inside bottom of a chamber-pot.
18
He was quite right: the old order in France was wrecked by the war. In this sense we can say that Saratoga caused the French Revolution.
19
Philadelphia, for example, taken in 1777, was evacuated the following year.
20
Most of them (80,000 or so) eventually settled north of Lake Erie and there founded English-speaking Canada. A few went to England, where they suffered innumerable slights from English snobbery and jingoism.
21
Marquis James,
Life of Andrew Jackson
(New York, 1938), pp. 25-6.
1
Because of their proximity to the West Indies and the Spanish Empire the only coinage which the Americans had used at all commonly in colonial times was Spanish, though reckonings were usually given in pounds, shillings and pence. Metal currency was driven out of circulation by Continental paper money during the Revolutionary War; thereafter Spanish coins (pesos, pieces of eight, dollars) slowly returned. In 1792 Congress made a silver dollar the basic unit of American currency; it was divisible into the now-familiar quarters, dimes, nickels and cents. However, it took years to get used to the change, and many of the leading Revolutionaries continued to think in terms of the old English money.
2
James Swan,
National Arithmetick
, 1786. Quoted by Merrill Jensen,
The New Nation
(New York, 1967), p. 240, from which book most of this paragraph is derived.
3
This revolt against the courts is strikingly similar to other episodes in American history, such as the tumults in Iowa at the depth of the Great Depression a hundred and fifty years later. See below, p. 536.
4
See above, p. 67.
5
The observation was made by one of Washington’s former French officers, just then visiting Philadelphia.
6
A contemporary described Gerry as ‘a man of sense but a Grumbletonian… of service by objecting to every thing he did not propose’.
7
At this period, before the line of settlement had spread deep inland, what were later known as the Northern states, and still later as the North-Eastern, were generally called Eastern. The custom survives of referring to Maine as ‘down East’.
10
That is to say, every state recorded its vote
for
the Constitution; but there were individual dissidents, for the way a state would vote was settled by majority voting among its delegates.
11
Their absence meant that Hamilton’s signature on the Constitution could only be that of an individual, since the New York delegation did not have a quorum.
12
In the end, North Carolina ratified on 21 November 1789, Rhode Island on 29 May 1790.
13
See Madison to Jefferson, 24 October 1787.
14
Richard Hofstadter,
The American Political Tradition
(New York, 1948, Vintage edn), p. 9.
15
See below, p. 306.
16
This is a provision of the Fourth Amendment. It well illustrates the extent to which experience shaped the political thought of the Revolution, and, consequently, the Constitution. The authors of the Fourth Amendment wanted to avert any recurrence of the threat posed by writs of assistance.
17
The last President to reaffirm the right of revolution, so far as I know, was Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural (1861). But although he affirmed the right, his whole argument was against the proposed exercise of it by the South.
3
Unfortunately John Mack Faragher, Boone’s latest and best biographer, does not accept this story.
4
We have met him before: see above, pp. 178 and 184.
5
Invariably called Scotch-Irish by American historians.
6
The word
section
has three connotations in American history, which must not be confused: (i) the strictest: a
section
under the land survey regulations – see above, p. 192; (ii) the geographical: when writers use terms such as the
South Atlantic section
or the
South Central area
they have the physical configuration of the United States in mind; (iii) the loosest: historical-political (with which this book is mostly concerned); ‘the South’, ‘the Middle West’, ‘the West’, ‘New England’ are
sections
in this sense.
7
A glance at the map will show that upstate New York lay across the New England migrants’ westward path.
8
‘I am not making this up, you know’ (Miss Anna Russell, in her guide to Wagner’s
Ring
).
9
Looked at in detail, the intricacies of Mormon polygamy strikingly resemble those of twentieth-century American divorce, especially as to wife-swapping.
10
Similar tensions have arisen between American society and totalitarian sects in the twentieth century. The most appalling demonstration of the clash of values occurred in 1978. Jim Jones, the mad, charismatic leader of the People’s Temple sect, which had left California to establish itself in Guyana, murdered an investigating Congressman; immediately afterwards all 900 members of the sect, on Jones’s orders, committed suicide by ritually drinking lemonade laced with cyanide. Jones died with them.
11
See next chapter.
12
Jackson County is to be the gathering place of the Saints in the Last Days. They are commanded to build a temple there, in the chief town, Independence, which happens to be also the place where the Oregon and Santa Fe trails started, and where Harry Truman was born.
13
I am grateful to Mr Jonathan Raban for supplying this piece of information, which I had long looked for in vain.
14
Bernard De Voto,
The Year of Decision: 1846
(Boston, Sentry edn, 1961), p. 159.
15
Young was not actually acclaimed by this title until 1848, but by then the ceremony was only a recognition, by God and the people, of a
fait accompli
.
16
The same might be said of the entire West between the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains and the eastern edge of the High Plains, or short-grass country, which runs roughly north and south down the middle of the Dakotas and Nebraska, defining the western third of Kansas, and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. In the whole of this vast region the politics of water (a source of energy as well as food) is as important as the politics of oil, and much more so, nowadays, than the politics of silver.
17
See
Chapter 14
.
18
Not until 1978 was the first Negro elder appointed in the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
19
The biographical details given in my text are mostly derived from Victor Weybright and Henry Sell,
Buffalo Bill
(London, 1956), which does as well as can be expected in sorting out fact from fiction in the records of Cody’s life; but I would take my oath for very few of them.
1
That is, foreign minister.
2
See
The Statistical History of the United States
, pp. 201 – 6.
3
Roads which charged their users tolls.
4
A privateer was a private vessel, crewed and commanded by men who in peacetime were fishermen or merchants, which received ‘letters of marque’ from its government permitting it to attack the shipping of the national enemy in time of war. The trick was to dodge the blockading squadron in a small, light boat and then find a fat merchantman to prey upon. It was a licensed piracy, and France’s only effective naval weapon against Britain.
5
So called because when President John Adams sent the papers concerning the business to Congress, he suppressed the names of the French officials involved, giving instead these initials.
6
See above, pp. 227 – 8.
7
See above, p. 55.
8
John Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848) was the son and heir of John Adams. When the War of 1812 broke out he was US minister in Russia.
9
See above, p. 227.
10
Under the original Constitutional arrangement, the runner-up for the Presidency was elected Vice-President. This resulted in repeated difficulty and intrigue, especially in 1800 when Jefferson and Burr, the Republican candidates, got exactly the same number of electoral votes, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives. So in 1804 the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted, by which a citizen may be a candidate for either the Presidency or the Vice-Presidency, but not for both at the same time.
11
Modern scientific research has established that he begot at least one child in this way.
12
The ‘spoils system’ is explained below (see pp. 267 – 8). The lobby, as shorthand for pressure groups, derives, like so much else, from New York politics. Under the Albany Regency in the late 1820s it was noticed that men who wished to extract favours, or otherwise to influence state legislators, waited in the lobby of the state Capitol (since they were not allowed onto the floor itself). This gave rise to all sorts of new words:
lobbyists
forming
the lobby
or a particular lobby (e.g. the
railroad lobby
, the
labour lobby)
exist
to lobby
elected politicians. In English political usage, by contrast, the lobby consists of highly regarded newspaper correspondents who are accepted by Parliament as a convenient means of telling the world what it wants the world to believe.
13
It is worth quoting him in full: ‘It may be, sir, that the politicians of New York are not so fastidious as some gentlemen are, as to disclosing the principles on which they act. They boldly
preach
what they
practise
. When they are contending for
victory
, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. If they are successful, they claim, as a matter of right, the advantages of success. They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the
VICTOR
belong the spoils of the
ENEMY
.’
14
Robert V. Remini,
The Election of Andrew Jackson
(New York, 1963), p. 181.
15
See below, pp. 295 – 6.
16
Jackson put the case rather more succinctly to his Secretary of State: ‘The Bank, Mr Van Buren, is trying to kill me;
but I will kill it.’
17
For a detailed analysis of the subject, see Peter Temin,
The Jacksonian Economy
(New York, 1969).
18
British travellers to the United States need to be aware that what Americans call ‘cider’ is mere unfermented apple-juice; only ‘hard cider’ is alcoholic.
19
The Siamese twins were Chang and Eng (1811 – 74), who were united at their waists by a tube of cartilage. As children they were sold by their parents to a British merchant and exhibited as freaks in England and America. Before long they began to make money by exhibiting themselves. They married sisters and settled as farmers in North Carolina. They died at sea: Chang of drink, Eng, a few hours later, of fright.
20
‘Okay’ is thought to be a word brought to America by slaves from West Africa.
1
Kenneth M. Stampp,
The Peculiar Institution
(New York, Vintage edn, 1956, p. 131), records that ‘a slave who had been promised freedom in his master’s will, poisoned his master to hasten the day of liberation’.
2
It ought perhaps to be said that Mrs Stowe, Horace Greeley and the others did not preach hate and murder either.
3
One of the many merits of the celebrated novel
Gone with the Wind
(by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936; Edmund Wilson, the critic, called it the South’s answer to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
is that it shows its heroine, the spirited Scarlett O’Hara, in instinctive perpetual revolt against the insipid norms imposed on a ‘lady’ in the Old South. In Scarlett’s world a lady forfeited caste by even such a small thing as drinking alcohol, however moderately. No wonder Scarlett became a secret tippler. In this as in other ways she cannot have been unique.
4
The total white population of the slave states in i860 was 8,098,000 (black, 4,204,000); 385,000 were slave-holders, of whom only 46,000 owned more than twenty slaves and are thereby known as planters.