These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  105.“The Telegraph,” New York Sun, November 6, 1847, in Morse’s scrapbook, Samuel Morse Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  106.Daly, Covering America, 77; Daniel Webster, “Opening of the Northern Railroad to Lebanon, N.H. [1847],” in Works of Daniel Webster, 11th ed., 6 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1858), 2:419.

  107.Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Martin Milligan (1961; New York: Dover Publications, 2007), 69.

  108.Ralph Waldo Emerson: Updated Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 127.

  109.Quoted in James D. Hart, “They All Were Born in Log Cabins,” American Heritage 7 (1956): 32.

  110.Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), 118, 54, 118, 57, 102, 107, 58–59.

  111.Thoreau, Walden, 175, 352; Review of Walden, The New York Churchman, September 2, 1854.

  112.Thoreau, Walden, 57.

  Seven: OF SHIPS AND SHIPWRECKS

  1.Walters, Explosion on the Potomac, 9–10.

  2.Quoted in Dan Monroe, The Republican Vision of John Tyler (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 63.

  3.Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, edited and with an introduction by Patricia Ingham (1842; New York: Penguin, 2000), 138.

  4.Daniel Webster, “Letter to the Citizens of Worcester County, Massachusetts,” January 23, 1844, in The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, ed. Edward Everett, National Edition, 18 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903), 16:423.

  5.Quoted in Walters, Explosion on the Potomac, 31, 32.

  6.Quoted in Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 62.

  7.“Speech of Mr. McDuffie, July 6, 1844,” in Niles’ National Register, ed. William Ogden Niles, 75 vols. (Baltimore, 1839–48), 66:303. On Greeley, see Daly, Covering America, 66–72. And on American expansion in this era, see Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, and John Robert Van Atta, Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic: 1785–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

  8.John Quincy Adams diary entry, April 22, 1844, in The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, 44:303.

  9.Henry Clay to Stephen F. Miller, July 1, 1844, in The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay, ed. Calvin Colton (Boston: Frederick Parker, 1856), 491.

  10.John Quincy Adams diary entry, February 19, 1845, in The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, 45:50.

  11.“Nuptials of the President of the United States,” New York Herald, June 27, 1844; Walters, Explosion on the Potomac, 105–6.

  12.Quoted in Haynes, The First American Political Conventions, 70.

  13.Haynes, First American Political Conventions, 89. And see Charles Sellers, “Election of 1844,” in Schlesinger, History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, 1:761–66.

  14.Speech by Daniel Webster, “On Mr. Foot’s Resolution,” January 26–27, 1830, Register of Debates, Senate, 21st Cong., 1st Sess. (1830).

  15.Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States . . . Abridged by the Author for the Use of Colleges and High Schools (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), 595. And see Arnold Bennett, The Constitution in School and College (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935).

  16.Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1:251–52. And, broadly, see Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself; Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Daniel Levin, Representing Popular Sovereignty: The Constitution in American Political Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

  17.William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave [1825], ed. William L. Andrews and Regina E. Mason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 103.

  18.Colley, “Empires of Writing,” 237–38.

  19.“The Sage of Montpelier Is No More!,” Charleston Courier, July 7, 1836.

  20.David W. Houpt, “Securing a Legacy: The Publication of James Madison’s Notes from the Constitutional Convention,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 118 (2010): 4–39.

  21.Quoted in Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, 97–100.

  22.Quoted in ibid., 103, 83.

  23.Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, introduction.

  24.Webster, “Letter to Citizens of Worcester County, Massachusetts,” in The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, 16:423.

  25.Quoted in Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 322.

  26.Eugene McCormac, James K. Polk: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1922), 705. In 1845, a Florida senator had asked Congress to negotiate with Spain for Cuba; while the War with Mexico continued, Congress set this request aside. But by 1848 Polk was writing in his diary, “I am decidedly in favour of purchasing Cuba & making it one of the States of the Union”: James K. Polk diary entry, May 10, 1848, in The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845–1849, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, Chicago Historical Society Collection, 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1910), 3:446. And on southern imperial ambitions, see especially Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  27.Quoted in Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 122. And see Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (Boston: Little Brown, 1943), and William Ghent, The Road to Oregon: A Chronicle of the Great Emigrant Trail (New York: Longmans and Green and Co., 1929).

  28.John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July–August 1845): 5–10.

  29.James K. Polk, “Special Message to Congress on Mexican Relations,” May 11, 1846.

  30.Daly, Covering America, 78–79.

  31.Dickens, American Notes, 134.

  32.Joanne Freeman, “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress,” paper delivered at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, November 4, 2017.

  33.Speech by John C. Calhoun, “Conquest of Mexico,” 30 Cong. Globe 51 (January 4, 1848).

  34.Charles Sumner to Salmon P. Chase, February 7, 1848, Chase Papers, Library of Congress—quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 60; Speech of B. R. Wood, “The Wilmot Proviso,” 29 Cong. Globe 345 (February 10, 1847), appendix.

  35.Quoted in Meinig, Shaping of America, 2:300–301.

  36.Theodore Parker, A Sermon of Mexican War, Preached at the Melodeon, on Sunday, June 7, 1846 (Boston: I. R. Butts, 1846), 32, 30.

  37.Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Horace Elisha Scudder et al., 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, [1863] 1893), 10:141, 149.

  38.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing,” in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, ed. David Lehman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35.

  39.Maurice S. Lee, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15.

  40.John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015).

  41.Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. David W. Blight (New York: St. Martin’s/Bedford Books in American History, 1993), 16.

  42.Daly, Covering America, 93.

  43.Frederick Douglass, “The War with Mexico,” The North Star, January 21, 1848.

  44.Frederick Douglass, Editorial, The North Star, April 28, 1848.

  45.Quoted in Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, 12.

  46.Daly, Covering America, 81.

  47.Speech by Lewis Cass, 29 Cong. Globe 369 (February 10, 1847).

  48.David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995), ch. 1.

  49.Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 21–22.

  50.James DeBow, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, 1853), xxix.

  51.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman (New York: Signet Classics, 1965), 116.

  52.Lynn Hudson Parsons, “The ‘Splendid Pageant’: Observations on the Death of John Quincy Adams,” New England Quarterly 53 (December 1980), 464–82.

  53.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 303.

  54.“Letter XII: Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” in Angelina Grimké, Letters to Catherine Beecher, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism Addressed to A. E. Grimké (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 114.

  55.Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 11, 45. And see Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1979; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

  56.Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845), 26.

  57.On Fuller, see especially Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

  58.Zachary Taylor to Capt. J. S. Allison, April 22, 1848, in The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. Melba Porter Hay, 11 vols. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 10:343. See also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  59.Quoted in Haynes, First American Political Conventions, 101.

  60.Quoted in ibid., 105.

  61.Quoted in Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 655.

  62.Lincoln, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859.

  63.Quoted in Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 14–16.

  64.Quoted in ibid., 72, 45, 41, 46.

  65.Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (Rochester, NY: 1854), 13. And see Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (New York: Viking, 2017), ch. 9.

  66.George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1854), 177, 179, 183, 158.

  67.George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857), 31, 29. See also Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

  68.Salmon P. Chase to Charles Sumner, March 24, 1850, in “The Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P. Chase,” Annual Report, American Historical Association (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903), 205.

  69.Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848 (Rochester, NY: John Dick, 1848), 7–9.

  70.“Bolting Among the Ladies,” Oneida Whig, August 1, 1848. And see DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, and Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

  71.Capper, Margaret Fuller, 505–14.

  72.Longfellow to John Greenleaf Whittier, September 6, 1844, in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19), 3:44.

  73.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, “‘Sail On, O Ship of State!’: How Longfellow Came to Write These Lines 100 Years Ago,” Colby Library Quarterly 2 (1950): 209–214. On the relationship between Sumner and Longfellow, see Frederick J. Blue, “The Poet and the Reformer: Longfellow, Sumner, and the Bonds of Male Friendship, 1837–1874,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 273–297, and Jill Lepore, “Longfellow’s Ride,” in The Story of America: Essays on Origins, ch. 15.

  74.John Marshall to Joseph Story, September 22, 1832, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Second Series, 14 (1950): 352; Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of California, vol. 3 (Sacramento: J. D. Young, 1881), 1191.

  75.Stephen Douglas, Chicago, July 9, 1858, in Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas (Columbus, OH: Follett, Foster, 1860), 6.

  76.Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston, 1861), 286.

  77.The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 4:3.

  78.Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Tubman quoted in Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden Story of the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 2015), 191.

  79.Lee, Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, 23.

  80.Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” July 5, 1852.

  81.The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, ed. Robert W. Johannsen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 399.

  82.King quoted in Michael S. Green, Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 77. Hamlin quoted in Mark Scroggins, Hannibal: The Life of Abraham Lincoln’s First Vice President (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 107.

  83.Samuel F. B. Morse, The Present Attempt to Dissolve the American Union, a British Aristocratic Plot (New York, 1862), 38.

  84.Samuel F. B. Morse to Sidney Morse, December 29, 1857, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, ed. Edward Lind Morse, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 2:331.

  85.Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on Slavery,” [April 1, 1854], in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:222–23; Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010); John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2009); Robert Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  86.Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1, 24–30.

  87.Abraham Lincoln, Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:266, 255, 275, 276.

  88.Lincoln, “Fragment on Slavery,” [July 1, 1854], in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:222–23.

  89.Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:323.

  90.Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas (Boston, 1856); Longfellow to Sumner, May 28, 1856, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3:540; Excerpts from Long-fellow’s Account Books, transcribed from the original account books at the Houghton Library, Harvard University by James M. Shea, Director/Museum Curator, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  91.Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 150.

  92.Quoted in Haynes, The First American Political Conventions, 138, 173.

  93.Quoted in Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 20.

  94.“President Polk’s Diary,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1895, 237.

  95.James Buchanan, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1857.

  96.New York Herald, March 5, 1857.

  97.Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

  98.New York Evening Journal [Albany, New York], March 7, 1857; The Liberator, March 13, 1857; The National Era [Washington, DC], March 19, 1857; The Independent [New York], March 19, 1857.

  99.Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 1857.

  100.Longfellow to Sumner, February 24, 1858, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 4:65.

  101.Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857.

  102.Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision,” Speech delivered before the American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, May 14, 1857, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner; ab
ridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 347–48, 351, 350.

  Eight: THE FACE OF BATTLE

  1.Samuel F. B. Morse to Sidney Morse, March 9, 1839, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, 2:129; and see Stauffer et al., Picturing Frederick Douglass.

  2.“New Discovery—Engraving, and Burnet’s Cartoons,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (London, 1839), 384.

  3.Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 27.

  4.Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 2 vols. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915), Wednesday, August 8, 1888, 2:107.

  5.Douglass’s essays on photography are reprinted in Stauffer et al., Picturing Frederick Douglass (quotations, xv, 127, 140–41).

  6.Quoted in Trachtenberg, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas, 26.

  7.The Liberator, September 10, 1858; Reverend Dr. Bellows, Speech, in Charles T. McClenachan, Detailed Report of the Proceedings Had in Commemoration of the Successful Laying of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable, by Order of the Common Council of the City of New York (New York: Edmund Jones & Co., Corporation Printers, 1863), 244.

  8.Samuel F. B. Morse to Norvin Green, July 1855, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, 2:345.

  9.The statistics are from J. Cutler Andrews, “The Southern Telegraph Company, 1861–65: A Chapter in the History of Wartime Communication,” Journal of Southern History 30 (1964): 319.

  10.Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 34.

  11.Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidential Debates: The Challenge of Creating an Informed Electorate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 40, 21, 78.

  12.Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (1797; Troy, NY: 1803), 240–42.

  13.Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), 89.

  14.Dan Monroe and Bruce Tap, Shapers of the Great Debate on the Civil War: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 106–7.

  15.The correspondence is reprinted in David Henry Leroy, ed., Mr. Lincoln’s Book: Publishing the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009).