A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  James Buchanan elected president; John C. Fremont, Republican, comes within three states of carrying election with only northern votes.

  1857:

  Panic of 1857; Dred Scott decision

  1858:

  Senatorial election in Illinois pits Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln; Lincoln-Douglas debates; Douglas issues Freeport Doctrine

  1859:

  John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia

  1860:

  Abraham Lincoln, Republican, elected president without a single Southern electoral vote; South Carolina secedes

  An Arsenic Empire?

  Having added Texas, California, and the Southwest to the national map, and finalized the boundaries with England over Oregon, the nation in 1850 looked much the way it does in 2004. Within twenty years, Alaska and the Gadsden Purchase would complete all continental territorial expansion, with other additions to the Union (Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico) coming from the Caribbean or the Pacific. “Polk’s war” interrupted—only temporarily—the rapid growth of American industry and business after the Panic of 1837 had receded.

  The United States stood behind only Russia, China, and Australia as the largest nation in the world, whereas its economic power dwarfed those states. By European concepts of space and distance, America’s size was truly astonishing: it was as far from San Francisco to Boston as it was from Madrid to Moscow; Texas alone was bigger than France, and the Arizona Territory was larger than all of Great Britain. The population, too, was growing; science, invention, and the arts were thriving; and a competitive balance had again reappeared in politics.

  Throughout her entire history, however, the United States had repeatedly put off dealing with the issue of slavery—first through constitutional compromise, then through appeals to bipartisan good will, then through a political party system that sought to squelch discussion through spoils, then finally through compromises, all combined with threats and warnings about disunion. By the 1850s, however, the structure built by the Founders revealed dangerous cracks in the framework. Emerson warned that acquisition of the Mexican cession territories, with its potential for sectional conflict, would be akin to taking arsenic. How much longer could the nation ignore slavery? And how much longer would the perpetual-motion machine of growing government power, spawned by Van Buren, spin before abolitionist voices were thrust to the fore? The answer to both questions was, not long.

  The Dark, Nether Side

  Opponents of capitalism—especially those who disparaged northern factories and big cities—began their attacks in earnest for the first time in American history. Certainly there was much to lament about the cities. Crime was rampant: New York City had as high a homicide rate in 1860 per one hundred thousand people as it did in the year 2000 (based on the FBI’s uniform crime reports). After falling in the 1830s, homicides in New York nearly tripled, to fifteen per one hundred thousand by 1860.

  By far the worst sections of New York’s dark, nether side, as reformers of the day called it, included Hell’s Kitchen, which by the late 1850s had started to replace the Bowery as the most dangerous and notorious section of the city.8 Hell’s Kitchen received its name from policemen, one of whom complained that the place was worse than hell itself, to which the other replied, “Hell’s a mild climate. This is Hell’s Kitchen, no less.” According to one writer, the Bowery, Hell’s Kitchen, and other rough sections of town, such as Rag Picker’s Row, Mulligan Alley, Satan’s Circus, and Cockroach Row consisted of

  …streets…ill paved, broken by carts and omnibuses into ruts and perilous gullies, obstructed by boxes and sign boards, impassable by reason of thronging vehicles, and filled with filth and garbage, which was left where it had been thrown to rot and send out its pestiferous fumes, breeding fever and cholera. [The writer] found hacks, carts, and omnibuses choking the thoroughfares, their Jehu drivers dashing through the crowd furiously, reckless of life; women and children were knocked down and trampled on…hackmen overcharged and were insolent to their passengers; baggage-smashers haunted the docks…rowdyism seemed to rule the city; it was at risk of your life that you walked the streets late at night; the club, the knife, the slung-shot, the revolver were in constant activity….9

  Like other cities, New York had seen rapid population increases, leaping from 123,000 in 1820 to 515,000 in 1850, mostly because of immigrants, people Charles Loring Brace called “the Dangerous Classes.”10 Immigrants provided political clout, leapfrogging New York past Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in size, but they also presented a growing problem, especially when it came to housing. The tenement population, which had reached half a million, included 18,000 who lived in cellars in addition to 15,000 beggars and 30,000 unsupervised children (apparently orphans). When the state legislature investigated the tenements, it concluded that cattle lived better than some New Yorkers.

  Prostitution and begging were omnipresent, even in the presence of policemen, who “lounged about, gaped, gossiped, drank, and smoked, inactively useless upon street corners.”11 Some women used babies as props, renting them and then entering saloons, inducing them to cry by pinching them in order to solicit alms.12

  Gangs were also seen everywhere in the slums, sporting names such as the Dead Rabbits, the Gorillas, the East Side Dramatic and Pleasure Club, and the Limburger Roarers. Politicians like Boss Tweed employed the gangs on election day—paid in cash and alcohol—to disrupt the polling places of the opponent, intimidating and, if necessary, beating up anyone with an intention of voting there. No wonder the English writer Rudyard Kipling, who visited New York, thought its streets were “first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal,” a “shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance.”13

  Cast into this fetid urban setting were masses of immigrants. The United States moved past the 50,000-per-year immigrant level in 1832, but by 1840 nearly fifteen times that many people would arrive from Ireland alone. Overall immigration soared from 20,000 in 1820 to 2.2 million in 1850, with Wisconsin, New York, California, and the Minnesota Territory receiving the most newcomers. In those states and Minnesota, immigrants made up 20 percent or more of the total population. But Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were not far behind, since immigrants made up between 10 to 20 percent of their populations.14

  Steam-powered sailing vessels made the transatlantic crossing faster and easier, and the United States had generally open borders. Still, immigrants had to want to come to America. After all, both Canada and Mexico were approximately the same distance from Europe, yet they attracted only a handful of immigrants by comparison.

  Lured by jobs, land, and low taxes, a small standing army (with no conscription), a relatively tiny government, complete absence of mandatory state church tithes, no state press censorship, and no czarist or emperor’s secret police, Europeans thronged to American shores. As early as 1818, John Doyle, an Irish immigrant to Philadelphia who had found work as a printer and a map seller, wrote home, “I am doing astonishingly well, thanks be to God, and was able on the 16th of this month to make a deposit of 100 dollars in the Bank of the United States…. [Here] a man is allowed to thrive and flourish without having a penny taken out of his pocket by government; no visits from tax gatherers, constables, or soldiers.”15

  Following the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s, when one third of the total population of Ireland disappeared, new waves of poor Irish arrived in Boston and New York City, with an estimated 20 percent of those who set sail dying en route.16 From 1841 to 1850, 780,000 Irish arrived on American shores, and unlike other immigrants, they arrived as families, not as single males. Then, from 1851 to 1860, another 914,000 immigrated. Eventually, there were more Irish in America than in Ireland, and more Irish in New York than in Dublin.17 Fresh from decades of political repression by the British, the Irish congregated in big coastal cities and, seeing the opportunity to belong to part of the power structure, they, more than any
other immigrant group, moved into the police and fire departments. An 1869 list of New York City’s Irish and German officeholders (the only two immigrant groups even mentioned!) revealed the stunning dominance of the Irish:

  GERMANS

  IRISH

  Mayor’s office

  2

  11

  Aldermen

  2

  34

  Street department

  0

  87

  Comptroller

  2

  126

  Sheriff

  1

  23

  Police captains

  0

  3218

  Hibernian primacy in New York City administration was so overwhelming that even in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City a century and a half later, the names of the slain firefighters and police were overwhelmingly Irish.

  With the exception of some who moved south—especially the Presbyterian Scots-Irish—new immigrants from the Emerald Isle remained urban and northern. Some already saw this as a problem. An editorial in 1855 from The Citizen, an Irish American newspaper, noted: “Westward Ho! The great mistake that emigrants, particularly Irish emigrants, make, on arriving in this country, is, that they remain in New York, and other Atlantic cities, till they are ruined, instead of proceeding at once to the Western country, where a virgin soil, teeming with plenty, invites them to its bosom.”19

  It was true that land was virtually free on the frontier, even if basic tools were not. Steven Thernstrom found that if immigrants simply left New England, their chances for economic success dramatically improved, especially as they moved into the ranks of skilled laborers.20 More than the Dutch or Germans, the Irish suffered tremendous discrimination. The work of a deranged Protestant girl, Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu in Montreal (1836), circulated in the United States and fomented anti-Catholic bias that touched off the “nopopery” crusade that afflicted the predominantly Catholic Irish.21 Monk’s surreal work related incredibly fantastic tales of her “life” in a convent in Montreal, where she claimed to have observed tunnels leading to the burial grounds for the babies produced by the illicit relations between priests and nuns, as well as allegations of seductions in confessionals. The Church launched a number of convent inspections that completely disproved these nonsensical claims, but the book had its effect. Protestant mobs in Philadelphia, reacting to the bishop’s request for tax money to fund parochial schools, stormed the Irish sector of town and set off dynamite in Catholic churches.

  More than other older immigrant groups, the Irish gravitated to the Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers, partly because of the antielite appeal of the Democrats (which was largely imaginary). Politically, the Irish advanced steadily by using the Democratic Party machinery to elect Irishmen as the mayors of Boston in the 1880s. But there was an underside to this American dream because the Irish “brought to America a settled tradition of regarding the formal government as illegitimate, and the informal one as bearing the true impress of popular sovereignty.”22 Political corruption was ignored: “Stealing an election was rascally, not to be approved, but neither quite to be abhorred.”23 That translated into widespread graft, bribery, and vote fraud, which was made all the easier by party politics that simply required that the parties “get out the vote,” not “get out the legal vote.” These traits, and Irish willingness to vote as a block for the Democrats, made them targets for the Know-Nothing Party and other nativist groups.24

  The experiences of Germans, the other main immigrant group, differed sharply from the Irish. First recruited to come to Pennsylvania by William Penn, Germans came to the United States in a wave (951,000) in the 1850s following the failure of the 1848 democratic revolutions in Germany. Early Germans in Philadelphia were Mennonites, but other religious Germans followed, including Amish and Calvinists, originating the popular (but wrong) name, Pennsylvania Dutch, which was a mispronunciation of Deutsch. Germans often brought more skills than the Irish, especially in the steel, mechanical, musical instrument trades (including Rudolf Wurlitzer and, later, Henry Steinway), and brewing (with brewers such as Schlitz, Pabst, and Budweiser).25 But they also had more experience in land ownership, and had no shortage of good ideas, including the Kentucky long rifle and the Conestoga wagon. John Augustus Roebling invented the wire cable for the suspension bridge to Brooklyn; John Bausch and Henry Lomb pioneered eyeglass lens manufacturing; and Henry Heinz built a powerful food company from the ground up.

  Above all, the Germans were farmers, with their farming communities spreading throughout the Appalachian valley. Berlins and Frankforts frequently appear on the map of mid-American towns. For many of them, America did not offer escape so much as opportunity to improve. Unlike the Irish, Germans immediately moved to open land, heading for the German-like northern tier of the Midwest and populating some of the rapidly growing cities there, such as Cincinnati (which in 1860 had 161,000 people—nearly half of them foreign born), Milwaukee, St. Louis, and even as far southwest as Texas.26

  One should take care not to emphasize the urban ethnic component of discord in American life too much. For every bar fight in Boston, there was at least one (if not ten) in saloons on the frontier. In Alabama, for example, the local editor of the Cahaba paper editorialized in 1856 that “guns and pistols…[were] fired in and from the alley ways and streets of the town” so frequently that it was “hardly safe to go from house to house.”27 A knife fight on the floor of the Arkansas House led to the gutting of one state representative over the relatively innocuous issue of putting out a bounty on wolf pelts, and a few years later, in 1847, one set of bank directors at the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Nashville engaged in a gun battle with other directors outside the courtroom.28 Many of these clashes were family feuds. Most lacked an ethnic component.

  One ethnic group that has suffered great persecution in modern times came to America virtually unnoticed. The first Jews had come to New Amsterdam in 1654, establishing the first North American synagogue a half century later. Over time, a thriving community emerged in what became New York (which, by 1914, had become home to half of all European Jews living in the United States). By 1850 there were perhaps thirty thousand Jews in the United States, but within the next thirty years the number would grow to more than half a million.29 After the boom in textiles in the early 1800s, the Jews emerged as the dominant force in New York’s needle trade, owning all but 17 of the 241 clothing firms in New York City in 1885.30

  The largest influx of Jews took place long after the Civil War when Russian Jews sought sanctuary from czarist persecutions. Nevertheless, Jews achieved distinctions during the Civil War on both the Union and Confederate sides. Best known, probably, was Judah P. Benjamin, a Louisiana Whig who was the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate and who served as the Confederacy’s secretary of war. But five Jews won the Medal of Honor for the Union; Edward Rosewater, Lincoln’s telegrapher, was Jewish; and the Cardozo family of New York produced important legal minds both before and after the conflict, including a state supreme court justice (Jacob) and a United States Supreme Court justice (Benjamin), who followed Louis Brandeis, yet another Jew, onto the Supreme Court.

  All the immigrant groups found niches, and all succeeded—admittedly at different rates. All except one, that is. African Americans, most of whom came to the colonies as slaves, could point to small communities of “free men of color” in the north, and list numerous achievements. Yet their accomplishments only served to contrast their freedom with the bondage of millions of blacks in the same nation, in some cases only miles away.

  Slavery, Still

  Thirty years after the Missouri Compromise threatened to unravel the Union, the issue of slavery persevered as strongly as ever. Historians have remained puzzled by several anomalies regarding slavery. For example, even though by the 1850s there were higher profits in manufacturing in the South than in plantation farming, few planters gave up their gang-based labor systems t
o open factories.

  Several facts about slavery must thus be acknowledged at the outset: (1) although slavery was profitable, profits and property rights alone did not explain its perpetuation; (2) the same free market that allowed Africans to be bought and sold at the same time exerted powerful pressures to liberate them; and (3) Southerners needed the force of government to maintain and expand slavery, and without it, a combination of the market and slave revolts would have ultimately ended the institution. In sum, slavery embodied the worst aspects of unfettered capitalism wedded to uninhibited government power, all turning on the egregiously flawed definition of a human as “property.”

  Although the vast majority of Southern blacks were slaves prior to 1860, there were, nonetheless, a significant number of free African Americans living in what would become the Confederacy. As many as 262,000 free blacks lived in the South, with the ratio higher in the upper South than in the lower. In Virginia, for example, census returns counted more than 58,000 free blacks out of a total black population of 548,000, and the number of free blacks had actually increased by about 3,700 in the decade prior to the Civil War.31 A large majority of those free African Americans lived in Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Norfolk, Lynchburg, and Petersburg. Virginia debated expelling all free blacks in 1832, but the measure, which was tied to a bill for gradual, compensated emancipation, failed. Free blacks could stay, but for how long?

  It goes without saying that most blacks in the American South were slaves. Before the international slave trade was banned in 1808, approximately 661,000 slaves were brought into the United States, or about 7 percent of all Africans transported across the Atlantic.32 America did not receive, by any stretch of the imagination, even a small portion of slaves shipped from Africa: Cuba topped the list with 787,000. By 1860 the South had a slave population of 3.84 million, a figure that represented 60 percent of all the “agricultural wealth” in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.