• Until the 1830s, Americans did not eat tomatoes. Up to that time tomatoes were believed to be poisonous and were used only as decorations. They were known as “love apples.”
• During his time as a congressman Davy Crockett made repeated attempts to abolish West Point, which he believed was a haven for the sons of aristocrats.
• In 1832, Henry Clay presented to the Senate a petition requesting land for two Kentuckians who claimed to have discovered “the secret of living forever.” The petition was denied.
• Women were not allowed on the floor of the Senate until the 1830s.
• Although he was a fine orator and brilliant senator, Daniel Webster was, to say the least, a careless spender. Often he had to take money from businessmen to keep his books balanced. Occasionally this led to a conflict of interests, as when Webster defended the Bank of the United States on the floor of the Senate at the same time that he was receiving money from the head of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle.
• The first person to steal a million dollars from the federal government was Samuel Swartwout, collector of the Port of New York, who, after embezzling the money, fled to Europe and safety.
• In January 1835 the United States became the only major nation in modern history to pay off completely its national debt. This was accomplished through the sale of public lands in the West. Eighteen thirty-five was the only year America has had no debt.
• While Martin Van Buren was vice president, he presided over the Senate wearing a pair of pistols, as a precaution against the frequent outbursts of violence.
• Washington Irving coined the phrase “The Almighty Dollar” in 1837 in his book The Creole Village.
• William Henry Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address of any president and served the shortest time: one month, to the day. In his address he made the prophetic remark that he would not be a candidate for a second term.
• John Tyler was on his knees playing marbles when informed that he had become president on the death of Harrison.
• Tyler was the first president against whom a resolution of impeachment was drawn. The resolution, which was defeated by a vote of 127 to 83, came about after a congressional committee chaired by ex-president John Quincy Adams accused Tyler of abusing the power of the veto.
• The word “millionaire” was coined in 1843 by a newspaper reporter in an obituary of Pierre Lorillard, banker, landlord, and tobacconist.
• Baseball was invented in 1845 by a genteel group of New York businessmen, who once snobbishly refused to play the game with a team of “greasy mechanics” from Brooklyn.
• When Sarah Childress Polk became first lady, she immediately banned dancing from the White House. For four years no one danced one step there.
• The Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846 and named in honor of an Englishman, James Smithson.
• A week before he died, James Polk fulfilled a lifelong promise to his wife and was baptized.
• Beginning in the 1840s, Americans built thousands of miles of roads out of wood planks. The planks were laid side by side to provide a mud-free surface for carriages and wagons. Over a fifteen-year period more than 7,000 miles of plank roads were constructed.
• John Jacob Astor once remarked, “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.”
• U. S. Grant, remarking in 1846 on the short-range muskets used during the Mexican War: “A man might fire at you all day without your finding it out.”
BIRTH CONTROL IN EARLY AMERICA
In 1823 new methods of birth control began to be popularized. Although mentioning the traditional coitus interruptus as a useful procedure, handbills first printed in London in that year urged couples to “do as other people do” and subscribe to a new method in which “a piece of soft sponge is tied by a bobbin or penny ribbon, and inserted just before the sexual intercourse takes place, and is with drawn again as soon as it has taken place.” The instructions went on to say that “many tie a piece of sponge to each end of the ribbon, and they take care not to use the same sponge again until it has been washed.” The uncirculated draft of the handbill mentioned as an alternative to the sponge a tampon of “lint, fine wool, cotton, flax, or what may be at hand.” The sponge method gained some acceptance in the United States.
Much more popular in America, however, were the ideas of Dr. Charles Knowlton, one of the initiators of the birth-control movement in this country. In his popular publications, which first appeared in 1832 and ran through many editions, he recommended douching as the chief method of control. Solutions of either alum or “astringent vegetables [such] as white oak bark, hemlock bark, red rose leaves, green tea, and raspberry leaves or roots” were suggested. Under special circumstances Knowlton prescribed special douches. When the membranes of the vagina were inflamed, a solution of sulfate of zinc was advised. When “relaxation was present,” Knowlton thought a combination of zinc and alum was most suitable. Or, if there was “tenderness of the parts,” Knowlton recommended a “solution of sugar of lead.”
Of course, homes in 1832 were not well heated. But this was not a problem for Knowlton’s birth-control formula. In mixing the solutions, the doctor advised that a little “spirits” be added to prevent freezing.
SOURCE: Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York: Gamut, 1963), pp. 216–17, 227–28.
FAMOUS AMERICAN DUELS
Following is a partial list of leading Americans who at one time or another made or accepted the challenge to a duel:
Benedict Arnold (1792)
Thomas Hart Benton (1813, 1817)
John C. Breckinridge (1854)
Aaron Burr (1804)
Henry Clay (1808, 1826)
De Witt Clinton (1802, 1803)
William H. Crawford (1802)
Stephen Decatur (1801, 1803, 1820)
Nathanael Greene (1785)
Alexander Hamilton (1797, 1804)
Samuel Houston (1845)
Andrew Jackson (involved in more than 100 duels)
John Jay (1785)
Charles Lee (1778)
Abraham Lincoln (1842)
James Madison (1797)
John Randolph (1807, 1826)
Winfield Scott (1817)
James Wilkinson (1807)
SOURCE: Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1856), passim.
ANDREW JACKSON ARMS HIS SLAVES TO KEEP THEM IN SLAVERY
Andrew Jackson was a slaveowner. He was also one of the brashest men ever to become president.
In 1811, four years before his victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson was returning to Nashville from Natchez, Mississippi, with twenty-six slaves. The road, the famous Natchez Trace highway, crossed directly through Choctaw territory. An agent of the acting governor of the territory, in response to a great number of complaints about whites helping runaways escape, had begun requiring certificates of ownership for every slave taken through the Indian area. Jackson believed the agent was harassing whites by this policy. The future president even asserted that the agent’s motive was to take possession of uncertified slaves so that he could put them to work on his own plantation. Old Hickory, of course, had no intention of being a victim of such “despotism.”
On entering the Choctaw land, Jackson was stopped and asked for proof that the slaves he was traveling with were not runaways. Jackson knew who owned his slaves and saw no need to prove his ownership to anyone. He immediately recognized the request as a pretext for illegally taking possession of his slaves.
As a citizen of the United States, he coarsely replied, the only proof he needed was an honest face and a good reputation!
This response did not sit well with the agent, who armed his twenty men to stop Jackson from crossing the Indian territory. But the ever-resourceful Jackson was not easily defeated.
Traveling with only one other white man, Jackson returned to his twenty-six slaves, removed their cha
ins, passed out axes and clubs, and then marched his newly formed “platoon” past the bemused agent. No one dared interfere with the two half-mad whites and the army of twenty-six unshackled, club-wielding slaves. Once safely into Tennessee, Jackson collected the weapons, rechained his slaves, and continued his journey home. No incident occurred with the blacks. Later, Jackson sold the majority of the twenty-six slaves.
Back in Nashville, Jackson fumed over his treatment at the hands of the agent. Immediately, he fired off letters to Tennessee congressmen and senators and other officials, vociferously denouncing the situation where “citizens are to be threatened with chains and confinement for peaceably travelling a road.” Jackson demanded that action be taken against the agent to make sure that never again would a white man’s “right” to his slaves be questioned. Needless to say, Old Hickory’s letters reflect no sense of irony over the fact that the very men who made possible the future president’s heroics were themselves condemned to a life of “chains and confinement.”
SOURCES: Andrew Jackson, letter to Willie Blount, January 25, 1812, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Mason, 1859), I, 349–60.
OLD-FASHIONED AMERICAN MANNERS
When Andrew Jackson in late 1832 was on his way to his inauguration as president, he stopped in Cincinnati. There he was mobbed by well-wishers, each eager to press the hand of the great general. The outpouring warmed Jackson’s heart and helped him forget that his beloved wife, Rachel, had died just a few weeks before. But as he was leaving, someone in the crowd painfully reminded him of her death.
“General Jackson, I guess?” a greasy fellow asked him. “Why, they told me you was dead.”
“No,” Jackson replied, “Providence has hitherto preserved my life.”
“And is your wife alive too?” the man asked. Jackson sadly responded that she wasn’t.
“Aye,” said the man, with a look of complete self-satisfaction, “I thought it was the one or the t’other of ye.”
SOURCE: Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (1832; rpt. New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 145.
HIS CHANCE OF LIVING WAS SMALL
The first attempt to assassinate a president occurred on January 30, 1835, when Andrew Jackson was shot at by Richard Lawrence, a deranged Englishman. Jackson was at the House of Representatives attending the funeral of Congressman Warren Davis of South Carolina when Lawrence quietly walked up to him and from six feet away fired two pistols. Remarkably, Jackson wasn’t hurt. Only the caps of the guns exploded, though both had been correctly loaded. When one of the guns was recapped later, it discharged perfectly. An expert on guns estimated that the chance of the pistols not firing was one in a hundred and twenty-five thousand. Lawrence, who claimed he was an heir to the British throne, was immediately apprehended, convicted, and committed to an insane asylum.
SOURCE: Marquis James, The Life of Andrew Jackson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938), II, 390–91.
BENTON WRITES A BIG BOOK
“The animosity between [Senator Henry S. ] Foote, of Mississippi, and [Senator Thomas Hart] Benton, of Missouri, was well known. It is a matter of record. . . . Mr. Foote said that he would write a little book in which Mr. Benton would figure very largely. Mr. Benton heard of this and replied in his characteristic way to his informant: ‘Tell Foote that I will write a very large book in which he shall not figure at all.’”
SOURCE: Harper’s Magazine, September 1859, p. 569.
LET THE ASSASSIN SHOOT
“One morning shortly after Benton had forbidden Foote ever to mention his name again [on the floor of Congress] the latter arose in his place and began a severe attack on Benton. As soon as his name was mentioned Benton started for him in a menacing manner, whereupon Foote hopped out into the big aisle, drew a revolver, cocked it, and leveled it at Benton. A couple of Senators, seeing what was about to happen, grabbed Benton and tried to stop him, which they could not do on account of his great strength. They could only retard his progress. He kept on. As he approached close to Foote, the latter, with his cocked revolver still in hand, began to retreat down the big aisle till he reached the Vice President’s stand, Benton tugging along after him as fast as he could, with two Senators holding on to him. When they came to a standstill Benton tore his shirt open and exclaimed: ‘Let the assassin shoot! He knows that I am not armed!’”
Foote did not fire and the crisis passed. But the event was important; it was the only time in American history that one Senator ever drew a pistol on another on the floor of the Senate.
SOURCE: Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), II, pp. 255–56. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
BENTON BOWS BEFORE GOD
“It is said that one day [Thomas Hart Benton] intended to answer a speech of Calhoun’s, but hearing that Calhoun was prostrated by illness and could not be present, he announced, ‘Benton will not speak to-day, for when God Almighty lays his hands on a man Benton takes his off.’”
SOURCE: William M. Meigs, The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1904), p. 452.
THE BURNING OF BENTON’S HOUSE
A story about Thomas Hart Benton by his daughter:
“When my father’s Washington house was burned it gave so much pain to every one that both houses adjourned and the silent, helpless crowd bared their heads to my father as he came to the ruin of his home. ‘It makes dying easier,’ he said to me; ‘there is so much less to leave.’”
SOURCE: Charles Shriner, ed., Wit, Wisdom, and Foibles of the Great (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1918), p. 35.
WHEN PEOPLE BELIEVED IN THE MAN IN THE MOON
In 1835 the New York Sun perpetrated the greatest hoax in American history. One hundred and thirty-four years before man stepped on the moon, the Sun had Americans believing that there was life on the moon. The newspaper reported that an English astronomer, Sir John Herschel, had published articles in the Edinburgh Journal of Science confirming the age-old suspicion that creatures inhabited the moon. The creatures were described in terrifying detail, from their furry bodies to their bat wings.
Other newspapers picked up the story, and for weeks people everywhere in the country believed it was completely true. A group of scientists from Yale University even traveled to New York to inspect the original accounts written by Herschel. Finally, the Sun revealed that John Herschel didn’t exist and that the Journal of Science was fictitious. By that time circulation of the paper had soared to 19,360, largest in the world.
SOURCE: Curtis MacDougall, Hoaxes (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 229–30.
CHANGING PRICE OF LAND IN CHICAGO
The phrase “boom town” must have been invented for Chicago. Between 1830 and 1840 the population of the city grew eightfold, while the price of land skyrocketed. In 1820 an acre cost a mere $1.25. By 1832, $100 lots were common. And in 1834 prime property went for $3,500. Land by the lake cost even more: over $20,000 an acre.
Source: Alex Groner, The American Heritage History of American Business and Industry (New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1972), p. 93.
DAVY CROCKETT AND THE MONKEY
“Davy Crockett was once attending a menagerie exhibition in Washington, and dilating to some friends on the similarity of countenance between one of the monkeys and a brother Member of Congress. He looked up, and behold! the Member in question was a quiet listener to his discourse!—‘I suppose, Mr. W———,’ said Davy, ‘that I ought to apologize; but I can’t tell whether to you or the monkey!’”
Source: Horace Greeley, ed., The Tribune Almanac for the Years 1838 to 1868 (New York: New York Tribune, 1868), I, 42.
REMEMBERING THE ALAMO
The Alamo, the old Spanish mission founded at San Antonio, Texas, in 1718, was the site of one of the most famous sieges in all of American history. But the 1836 stand has been surrounded by legends that obscure the truth of what happened.
The historic old church that stands at the Alamo today looked quite different in 1836. Construction of the Catholic mission was basically completed by 1750. Eighty-six years later the mission was an abandoned, dilapidated building. The ceiling of the main room of the church was almost entirely caved in, and the center of the building was filled with rubble and debris. The heroic defenders of the Alamo used some of the debris to construct a cannon emplacement on the back wall of the church. In 1849 a Major E. J. Babbit purchased the building in the name of the United States. While cleaning out the rubble, he found two decomposed bodies, reportedly victims of the battle thirteen years earlier.
The famous church formed only a small part of the entire Catholic mission. Actually, the Alamo today is only one-ninth the size of the fortifications defended in 1836. Colonel Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the other men defended the entire mission. If standing today, the old mission would include not only the church but the Alamo Plaza city park, several busy streets, and a good number of the area’s souvenir shops and tourist-catering taco stands.
The reputations of some of the Texas defenders were not of the highest caliber. Colonel Travis, contemporary evidence indicates, personally killed a man for making advances on his wife. A short time after the murder, he left his pregnant wife and two-year-old son in Alabama and emigrated to Texas. In the oath he took as a colonist, Travis lied, claiming in one case to be a widower and in another instance to be a bachelor. Travis expected reinforcements throughout the Alamo siege. Otherwise, according to some unfriendly accounts, he and his men would have fled the old mission at the first sight of the advancing Mexicans.
Man for man, there was no comparison between the Texas volunteers and the Mexican army. As one historian put it, all a private in the Mexican army had to look forward to was “bad leadership, poor pay, and no glory.” The Mexican draft system was so corrupt only the poorest, most forlorn “citizens” could not bribe their way out of service. A great number of General Santa Anna’s troops were Mayan Indians who could not even understand Spanish. Away from the tropics for the first time, many ill-supplied Mayans died of exposure in the cold Texas weather. Santa Anna, the self-proclaimed “Napoleon of the West,” issued his troops English guns left over from the days of the Battle of Waterloo! Their range was barely seventy yards, while the Texas long rifles were accurate at two hundred yards. Modern-day military historians rank Santa Anna as one of the “top five worst military commanders of all time.” Still, with over 6,000 troops surrounding the 182 Texans, the odds favored Santa Anna.
One-Night Stands with American History Page 6