by Adam Selzer
MANIFEST DESTINY
Even if President James K. Polk isn’t remembered for anything other than his mullet, one of his favorite ideas, Manifest Destiny, gets a lot of space devoted to it in most American history books today. The basic concept of Manifest Destiny was that it was God’s will that the United States expand all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific and that anyone who wasn’t white should get out of the way.
There were, however, those who believed that expanding westward was a bad idea, since it would mean incorporating Mexicans and other nonwhite people into the country. So the arguments for and against Manifest Destiny were both pretty much racist. In the end, the public was sold on the idea when they heard that California had gold in it.
Further stoking the people’s passion for expansion was the Battle of the Alamo. In 1836, Texas was still a Mexican territory. Americans who had settled in Texas had already asked authorities in Mexico to let it become a U.S. territory, so that it could eventually become a state. There were many reasons for their wanting to be American, not Mexican, not the least of which was that the new Mexican constitution outlawed slavery, and many Texans wanted to keep it legal.
STUPID HATS OF HISTORY:
THE COONSKIN
Hunters found these caps useful as camouflage, but nobody really thought they looked good. Davy Crockett only wore them as part of the image the Whig Party created for him, and Daniel Boone, the other guy known for wearing them, actually hated the things.
But Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna refused to let Texas go, so the Americans there decided that Texas should secede from Mexico using force. An army of 187 men, including famed frontiersman Jim Bowie and former congressman and b’ar-killer Davy Crockett, tried for thirteen days to hold off an army of several thousand at the Alamo, a fort in San Antonio. It was a valiant effort, but in the end, all but three of the Americans were killed. To honor these brave fighters, Americans today have named a rental car company after the place of their slaughter. We bet they’d be thrilled!
Inspired by this story and shouting “Remember the Alamo,” more armies of Texans managed to capture Santa Anna, who had left the presidency to lead the army, and send the Mexican armies into retreat. They then declared Texas to be a whole new republic and immediately applied for annexation into the United States.
James K. Polk: Business up front, party in the back, baby.
Presidents Jackson and Martin Van Buren both declined to declare Texas part of America, fearing both war with Mexico and the kind of trouble that could result from adding another slave state to the country, which would have irritated the North. Tensions between the North and the South continued to grow.
THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR
When President Polk proposed that Texas be made part of America, he claimed that he was not annexing Texas, but reannexing it, on the grounds that it had been a part of the Louisiana Purchase. The fact that it really wasn’t didn’t stop Congress from adopting his proposal. When guys with mullets, like Polk, spoke, Congress listened.
But declaring that the Republic of Texas was an American possession was essentially an act of war with Mexico (since Mexico still felt that Texas was theirs), and the Mexican-American War began right away. The U.S. government at the time didn’t make any excuses for their attacks against Mexico; they didn’t say they were fighting for Texan independence or oil or weapons of mass destruction or anything like that. They were pretty open about the fact that they were just fighting to take land away from Mexico.
The war was a short one, and was unpopular with a lot of people. Obscure figures like Abe Lincoln spoke out against it—like most Whigs (as he was then), he saw the war as nothing more than an attempt by the South to add more slave states to the Union, so that slave states would outnumber nonslave states. And Ulysses S. Grant, a soldier who would later become a Civil War hero and a forgettable president, called it “one of the most unjust (wars) ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Henry David Thoreau, a noted philosopher of the day, went to jail after refusing to pay taxes that would have gone to support the war. That showed ’em.
The war lasted only two years, and America picked up a whole bunch more land—all of the Mexican possessions north of the Rio Grande, including California, Utah, and Nevada, as well as parts of several other present-day states. The government paid Mexico for the land, making it look like they’d bought it fair and square, but everyone knew they’d taken it by force.
Oregon Trail reenactors. Yep. They reenact this, too. Can’t you just feel history coming alive?
THE OREGON TRAIL:
AMERICA’S FAVORITE PLACE TO DIE OF DYSENTERY (EXCEPT FOR VALLEY FORGE, OF COURSE)
Now that America had enough land to stretch clear to the Pacific Ocean, people began to move west.
Actually, the great taming of the West had begun a few years earlier. In the mid-1840s, Oregon Fever broke out. This was the first, and last, recorded outbreak of this particular disease.
The government began to actively encourage people to go west and begin to populate the vast stretches of available land, and thousands answered the call, as though they were setting off on a great adventure. Huge tracts of land were free for the taking on the frontier, and people who had never been able to improve their lot in life in the East were enchanted by the idea that all they had to do to become a rich landowner in the West was show up. Of course, they had to keep from dying of the trots first, but that seemed a small risk to take for all that free land.
Prospectors. There was gold in them thar hills, but, alas, not much soap.
Very few of those who traveled the trail were actually going to Oregon; some settled at various outposts along the way, and many others were going to California. The trail wasn’t really a trail at all, in that there was no real path, road, or anything like that. It was really just a two-thousand-or-so-mile route that had been blazed by trappers in the preceding decades. People were constantly at risk of getting sick, running out of food, or being attacked by Native Americans who had already started populating the area long before.
But nothing—not adventure, or land, or Manifest Destiny, or the exciting chance to poop yourself to death—excited people like gold.
In 1848, gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in California. Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of settlers went to California, all hoping to strike it rich. San Francisco went from having a population of about a thousand in 1848 to twenty-five thousand in 1850.
By 1855, at which point most of the gold that you could get without enormous machinery to dig it up had already been found, something like three hundred thousand people had gone to California. Practically none of them got rich.
Other gold rushes brought settlers all over the West—most notably to Colorado and Nevada. Between 1845 and 1860, America added seven states.
As happy as this made the Manifest Destiny crowd, it also added fuel to the fire of the nation’s most divisive issue—which, if you haven’t figured it out already, was slavery. People were forced to decide whether these new states should allow slavery, and the old arguments started up all over again.
If Preston Brooks had had any class, he would have said “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” when Charles Sumner spoke out against slavery. Instead, he decided to demonstrate exactly what sticks and stones would do. Nice guy. Always had a smile for everyone.
SLAVERY
As more and more states joined the Union, and more and more senators became part of the government as a result, tension between the slaveholding Southern states and the nonslaveholding Northern states got worse and worse. Debates about whether slavery should expand into new territories went on endlessly.
It’s only fair to note that these debates weren’t just about the morality of slavery; in fact, they were more about economics. Northern businessmen had to compete with Southern businessmen, and slavery gave the Southern businessmen an advantage by providing them with free labor.
By the 1850s, the debate was getting violent. In 1856, a senator named Charles Sumner made an antislavery speech before the Senate. Three days later, a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks considered challenging Sumner to a duel (which always solved every problem), then decided that it would be easier just to beat the crap out of Sumner with a cane. And that’s what he did. While one of his friends held up a pistol to stop anyone from interfering, Brooks surprised Sumner by beating him so badly that it took him three years to recover. Brooks became a hero in the South. Some people today say that if every congressman were outfitted with a cane, C-SPAN would get a lot more exciting in a real hurry.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (above) wrote thirty books. She claimed that she didn’t write the most famous one, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, herself but that God wrote it through her. The novel, a tale of a runaway slave, opened people’s eyes to just how bad slavery was, and deepened the division between the North and the South. When the war began, Lincoln is said to have called Stowe the “little woman who started this big war.” She became one of the most successful writers of all time and spent her later years playing pranks on Mark Twain. Her favorite trick was to sneak up behind him and yell.
Further fanning the flames, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. This repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed new states to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Slaveholding states, which were determined to keep outnumbering nonslaveholding states so they could keep outvoting them, were not above sending militias to the new states to make sure they ended up allowing slavery.
The next president, James Buchanan, in part of the endless dance presidents in those days did trying to tiptoe around the issue, said that ending slavery was the Supreme Court’s job. But in 1857, the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, which stated that a man named Dred Scott was, as a slave, entitled to no more rights than a mule, or a horse, or any other piece of property. The ruling was terribly unpopular, at least in the North. Southerners seemed to think it was swell, and the tension between the regions got even worse.
In 1859, a man named John Brown decided that since the government had failed to solve the problem of slavery, he should do something about it himself. He was widely believed to have been completely insane, and the very fact that he thought he could end slavery with only an army of twenty-one people indicates that he must have been nuts at the very least.
In October of 1859, Brown and several of his followers—both white and black—made their first attack, a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They succeeded in taking over the federal arsenal there, but no slaves came forward to join them, and they were soon captured by the local militia, led by a young man named Robert E. Lee, who would soon be a Confederate general. Brown was quickly sentenced to hang.
Crazy though he may have been, Brown became a hero to abolitionists everywhere (who overlooked the fact that he had murdered several people) and a villain to the South, to whom he represented the North intruding on their way of life. His very existence made the tension between the North and the South even worse.
One of the spectators at Brown’s execution was John Wilkes Booth, who later went on to be a famous actor, among other things. Also present was Thomas J. Jackson, later known as Stonewall Jackson, another future Confederate general, who brought a whole classroom full of military students to watch. This is the kind of field trip you probably couldn’t get past the PTA nowadays, but the symbolic significance of having Jackson, Lee, and Booth all present at the hanging of an abolitionist less than two years before the Civil War broke out is awfully tough to ignore. Of course, most of the people present thought that the conflict with Brown was the battle between the states that had been coming for years, and that his hanging would put an end to that whole business.
John Brown in 1856, before he really went off the deep end.
On the gallows, when he was about to be hanged, Brown said he was certain that slavery could “never be purged away but with blood,” and that his own biggest mistake was to think it could be done with just a little bloodshed instead of an awful lot of it.
John Brown in 1859. By this time, President Buchanan had put a price of $250 on John Brown’s head. Brown responded by offering a reward of $2.50 for Buchanan’s arrest. Where he got $2.50 to start with, Brown wouldn’t say.
He may have been crazy, but he would soon be proven right.
A BATCH OF FORGETTABLE PRESIDENTS
You may never have heard of most of the presidents mentioned earlier in this chapter, and you can hardly be blamed for that. The nineteenth century was truly an era of forgettable presidents. There was hardly a memorable one (besides Lincoln) between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt.
Martin Van Buren, who was made fun of for his sideburns back then, too.
Andrew Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, is mostly remembered today for having really goofy sideburns. After Van Buren’s first term, during which the economy nearly collapsed, the Whig Party, the Democratic Party’s main rival in those days, nominated William Henry Harrison to run against him.
This campaign was the first that really resembled modern presidential campaigns, with big public rallies, songs, meetings, and slogans, which had been pretty much absent from earlier ones. In an attempt to cash in on Harrison’s victory in a battle with an Indian confederacy at Tippecanoe, they made their slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” which, oddly, didn’t even mention Harrison’s name, only the name of Tyler, the vice presidential candidate. Many people today recognize that slogan, but few know which president it refers to.26
TOP HITS OF THE 1860S
Celebrating Brown as a martyr, abolitionists began to sing a song with the cheery title of “John Brown’s Body Lies a-Moulderin’ in the Grave,” which is still regarded as the catchiest song ever written about mouldering. Early in the war, Julia Ward Howe wrote new words to the song, and it became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Glory Glory Hallelujah),” which has grapes of wrath in it but no mouldering.
In any case, the Whigs marketed Harrison as their version of Andrew Jackson, a rough-and-tumble man of the people. They claimed that Harrison had been born in a log cabin and was poorly educated, and that he enjoyed fighting and drinking hard cider (just the kind of background you want in a president, right?). Meanwhile, they made Martin Van Buren out to be a wuss who perfumed his sideburns and rode around in fancy English carriages. We suspect that if he did perfume his enormous sideburns, people who had to stand near him probably thanked him for it. Bathing still hadn’t really caught on as a national pastime.
John Brown’s grave, where he currently spends most of his time a-mouldering away.
Van Buren was actually not the wimp the Whigs made him out to be, though, and his slogan had more staying power: one of the clubs to promote him was called the Democratic O.K. Club, with O.K. standing first for Old Kinderhook (after his boyhood home in Kinderhook, New York). Then people started joking that it stood for “oll korrect.” Van Buren got his butt kicked in the election, but the term “okay” survives.27
William Henry Harrison, looking like he did on Day Thirty-two.
President John Tyler: Party machine!
It certainly survived longer than William Henry Harrison. Harrison actually was a rich, well-educated guy—not the poor, rowdy simpleton his supporters had made him o
ut to be—and decided to show people this side of himself by making a very brainy inaugural speech that went on for two hours. But to show people that, even at the age of sixty-seven, he was as strong and tough as ever, he refused to wear a coat while making the speech. He caught pneumonia and spent most of his presidency sick in bed, dying only thirty days into his term. Given just how forgettable presidents were in those days, you might say he was the only one smart enough to quit while he was ahead.
John Tyler, the vice president, took over, and proceeded to do very little that anyone remembers nowadays. Next up was James K. Polk, who was widely unpopular, except that he worked like crazy and brought more land to the country than any other president—even Jefferson. Then came Zachary P. Taylor, who died about a year into his term, leading Millard Fillmore to take over until Franklin Pierce was elected a few years later. Few people today have ever heard of these guys unless there’s a school or street named after them somewhere nearby.
Millard Fillmore: In 1856, a few years after his short term as president, he ran and lost as the Know-Nothing Party’s candidate. His great-grandfather was once kidnapped by pirates.
Franklin Pierce is perhaps remembered for one thing today: being a lousy president. In fact, he’s one of historians’ favorite targets. Those of us who get sick of trying to find shocking things to say about Lincoln and Washington in order to make a buck sometimes start looking around for truly bad presidents to bad-mouth instead, and Franklin Pierce makes for a fine punching bag. A lifelong alcoholic who eventually sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, Pierce seems to have been elected mainly because he was handsome and charming.