In 1857, Edwin L. Drake, an agent for the Rock Oil Company, became convinced that oil wells could be drilled. Forming his own company in 1859, he commissioned a salt borer to drill him a hole. The man thought Drake was insane, however, and never appeared. Finally Drake hired William A. “Uncle Billy” Smith, an experienced salt borer and blacksmith.
Drilling began in June. Progress was slow, and only about three feet a day were dug. By August 27 the hole was just sixty-nine and one-half feet deep. The next day was Sunday, a rest day. On Monday, Uncle Billy went to the well to begin work and discovered it full of oil. “What’s that?” Drake asked him. “That,” Uncle Billy responded, “is your fortune!”
It was not to be, however. Drake went to Wall Street, speculated in oil stocks, and went bankrupt. Eventually the state of Pennsylvania granted him an annual pension of $1,500 for his pioneer work in oil.
SOURCE: Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 41–46.
PRESIDENTS START AS INDENTURED SERVANTS
As boys both Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson were indentured servants. In this early form of contract labor, the master, for all intents and purposes, owned the servant for the length of his contract (usually five to seven years). The rights of an individual servant were in many respects comparable to the rights of a slave, which were few, of course.
Fillmore and Johnson did not enjoy this type of servitude. Andrew Johnson ran away. The tailor he was indentured to placed an advertisement in the Raleigh, North Carolina, Gazette, offering a ten-dollar reward for the capture and return of the future president. Unfortunately for the tailor, Johnson was never caught.
Fillmore was indentured to a clothmaker. After serving his master for several years, he purchased his freedom for thirty dollars.
SOURCE: Sid Frank, The Presidents (Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, 1975), p. 33.
FILLMORE REFUSES AN HONORARY DEGREE
Fillmore, on refusing to accept an honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University: “I had not the advantage of a classical education and no man should in my judgment accept a degree he cannot read.” In 1846, though he never attended college, the modest Fillmore accepted the chancellorship of the University of Buffalo.
SOURCE: Joseph Kane, Facts About the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p. 88.
ANDREW JOHNSON’S CHALLENGE TO AN ASSASSIN
Like his mentor and fellow Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson did not scare easily. Brought up in the Carolinas, he wore the rough-hewn characteristics of the frontier conspicuously. Election to political office did not soften his manner. When threats were made against his life in 1855 during his campaign for a second term as governor of Tennessee, Johnson challenged his would-be assassins to meet him face to face. “Fellow citizens,” he began a speech at one campaign stop, after laying a pistol on the table in front of him, “I have been informed that part of the business to be transacted on the present occasion is the assassination of the individual who now has the honor of addressing you. I beg respectfully to propose that this be the first business in order. Therefore if any man has come here tonight for the purpose indicated, I do not say to him let him speak, but let him shoot.”
SOURCE: Joseph Kane, Facts about the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p. 118.
STUDENTS TRY TO MURDER STONEWALL JACKSON
Stonewall Jackson was a great general, but a horrible teacher. Between his heroic service in the Mexican War and the Civil War, Jackson taught mathematics at Virginia Military Institute. VMI students hated Jackson because he was stubborn, narrow-minded, and made excessive demands on them. Complaints about the war hero were not always verbal. Once, as Jackson walked near the campus barracks, a couple of particularly vengeful VMI students dropped a brick on him from a third-story window. The brick brushed Jackson’s hat, but had it landed on him he very likely would have been killed. Jackson walked straight ahead and did not stop to look up or around.
As fate would have it, when the Civil War began, many VMI students who had formerly hated Professor Jackson served gallantly for the Confederacy under General Jackson.
SOURCE: Frank F. Vandiver, Mighty Stonewall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), p. 79.
HEAVEN CAN WAIT
In the nineteenth century the danger of being buried alive was very great. The mother of Robert E. Lee reportedly was buried alive during one of her catatonic trances. Luckily, a sexton heard noises and scratching from inside the coffin as it was being covered with dirt, and she escaped. Mrs. Lee went on to live several more years. Throughout the century horrible incidents like this came to the attention of the public, prompting the invention of devices to prevent premature burial. One man patented a coffin which allowed a person inside the box to ring a bell aboveground. Another man was actually buried in a coffin with ventilators and a hose that connected him to the outside world.
SOURCE: Mary Cable, American Manners and Morals (New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1969), p. 175.
JOHN BROWN GETS AWAY WITH MURDER
In 1858, John Brown was a wanted man. The abolitionist leader, who had killed five proslavery settlers at Potawatomie, Kansas, in 1856, had once again violated the law: at Fort Scott, Kansas, where he was involved in the murder of a storekeeper and the theft of $7,000 worth of goods; and at two plantations in Missouri, where he freed eleven slaves, kidnapped two whites, and made off with a large amount of valuable property.
But Brown was not arrested and was not sent to jail. Astonishingly, he was allowed to remain free, though his crimes were widely condemned—by Southerners, Free Soilers, and an overwhelming majority of Kansans. President Buchanan put a bounty on Brown’s head, Missouri’s governor made some threats about apprehending him, and the governor of Kansas asked the state legislature to take immediate action against the agitator.
But neither federal nor state authorities dared to arrest Brown. Despite his crimes, he was popular in the North and could not be taken without risking a riot. Abolitionists would not allow him to be captured.
Beyond the arm of the law, “Old Ossawatomie” traveled in the open, repeatedly made speeches in public, and even brazenly appealed for funds to support future attacks on the “peculiar institution.” At Grinnell, Iowa, he made two speeches and was cheered by throngs of appreciative townspeople, who provided him with money and supplies. In Chicago he roamed the city at liberty and received $500 that had been raised for him by world-famous detective Allan Pinkerton. In Cleveland he gave several lectures and in Rochester and Boston was treated as a hero.
Trial of John Brown in Charlestown, Virginia. (Harper’s Weekly, November 21, 1859, p. 728.)
Brown remained at large throughout 1859 while he collected money and volunteers for fresh attacks on slavery. Finally, after the failure of his notorious raid on Harpers Ferry, in October, he was captured and convicted. On December 2 he was hanged—almost a year after he had engaged in murder, kidnapping, and larceny.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), II, 23–27.
ALEXANDER STEPHENS’S BIG BRAIN AND SMALL BODY
“Alexander H. Stephens never weighed a hundred pounds. Once a burly Georgian got angry at him and said, ‘I have half a mind to swallow you alive.’ Stephens retorted, in his high voice, ‘If you do, you’ll have more brains in your belly than you ever had in your head.’”
SOURCE: Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), II, 183.
ADVICE ON BECOMING PRESIDENT
Before he was nominated for president by the Democratic party in 1860, Stephen A. Douglas delivered an emotion-charged speech on the floor of the Senate denouncing “nigger-worshippers.” That evening William Seward, who would later serve as Lincoln’s secretary of state, walked home with Douglas from the Capitol. Knowing Douglas’s burning desire to receive his party’s nomination and to be elected president, Seward offered his friend s
ome advice.
“Douglas,” he explained, “no man will ever be president of the United States who spells negro with two g’s.”
SOURCE: Charles Shriner, ed., Wit, Wisdom, and Foibles of the Great (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1918), p. 616.
LINCOLN SELLS A DRINK TO DOUGLAS
“On one occasion [Stephen] Douglas sneeringly referred to the fact that he once saw Lincoln retailing whisky.
“‘Yes,’ replied Lincoln, ‘it is true that the first time I saw Judge Douglas I was selling whisky by the drink. I was on the inside of the bar, and the judge was on outside; I busy selling, he busy buying.’”
SOURCE: Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), II, 192.
LINCOLN FORGETS A COMMAND
“I remember [Lincoln] narrating his first experience in drilling his company [in the Blackhawk War]. He was marching with a front of over twenty men across a field, when he desired to pass through a gateway into the next inclosure.
“‘I could not for the life of me,’ said he, ‘remember the proper word of command for getting my company endwise so that I could get through the gate, so as we came near the gate I shouted, “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again at the other side of the gate!”’”
SOURCE: Ben Perley Poore, “Lincoln,” Reminiscences of Lincoln, ed. Allen Thorndike Rice (New York: North American Publishing Company, 1886), pp. 218–19.
LINCOLN’S MESS
A story by Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon:
“Lincoln had always on the top of our desk a bundle of papers into which he slipped anything he wished to keep and afterwards refer to. It was a receptacle of general information. Some years ago, on removing the furniture from the office, I took down the bundle and blew from the top the liberal coat of dust that had accumulated thereon. Immediately underneath the string was a slip bearing this endorsement, in his hand: ‘When you can’t find it anywhere else, look in this.’”
SOURCE: William Herndon, Life of Lincoln, ed. Paul M. Angle (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1961), p. 263.
A FRESHMAN CONGRESSMAN ELECTED SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE
On December 5, 1859, the House of Representatives convened and tried to choose a Speaker. Sixteen men competed, however, and no one was elected. The House adjourned. The next day one of the members, a Missourian, attempted to limit the number of candidates by making taste in books a test of their eligibility. He offered a resolution forbidding anyone who liked Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis, an antislavery work, to become Speaker. But the resolution was not agreed to. The following day a North Carolinian put forth a resolution requiring every candidate to be against raising the slavery question. But it was not approved either.
Two ballots, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty . . . and still no Speaker. December passed, then January. The House was immobilized, caught between proslavery and antislavery rivers.
Finally, on February 1, the House elected a Speaker, William Pennington of New Jersey, whose sole qualification seemed to be his lack of enemies. No one knew anything about Pennington—before December 5, 1859, he had not been a member of Congress. The House of Representatives had elected as its Speaker a freshman congressman.
SOURCE: George B. Galloway, History of the House of Representatives (New York: Crowell, 1961), pp. 46–47.
THE GREATEST SPOILSMAN OF THEM ALL
The image of Andrew Jackson throwing out Republicans and replacing them with Democrats when he acceded to the presidency is a strong one. The slogan, “To the victors belong the spoils,” is firmly associated with Jackson in the mind of nearly all Americans. But the plain fact is that Jackson did not turn out of office that many people. In all, Old Hickory replaced only 252 out of a total of 612 officers (not including postmasters). Thomas Jefferson, who never earned a reputation as a spoilsman, turned out more incumbents, over half of those in office. But it was Abraham Lincoln who was the preeminent spoilsman. He threw out of office more appointees than any other president in history. His first year in office he replaced 1,457 men, leaving fewer than 200 appointees from previous administrations.
SOURCE: Nathan Miller, The Founding Finaglers (New York: David McKay, 1976), pp. 140, 155, 180.
JOHN TYLER RETURNS TO CONGRESS
When John Tyler retired from the presidency in 1845, his political career did not end. In 1861 he was elected to represent his native state, Virginia, in the House of Representatives—of the Confederacy. He was the only United States president to serve in the rebel government.
SOURCE: Sid Frank, The Presidents (Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, 1975), p. 6.
VOLUNTEER AGING WITH A STROKE OF THE PEN
In 1861 many sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys wanted desperately to volunteer for the Union Army and fight for their country. Yet, with what one historian describes as “youthful innocence,” these would-be soldiers would not tell an outright lie to their government. The minimum age for a Union soldier was eighteen. Rather than walk into the recruiting office and swear they were eighteen years old, as young volunteers did in other American wars, these young boys would scribble the number “18” on a scrap of paper and place it in the sole of their shoe. Then, when questioned about their age, they could truthfully reply to their government, “I am over 18.”
SOURCE: Bruce Catton, America Goes to War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1958), p. 49.
THE FIRST JEWISH CABINET OFFICER
The first Jew to hold an American cabinet office was Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana. Judged by today’s political standards, this observant Jew is one of the most interesting and paradoxical figures in American history.
Benjamin was born in the West Indies in 1811 and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. He graduated from Yale Law School and began practicing law in New Orleans, where he was a state legislator, a founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, and a plantation owner with 140 slaves. Two years after selling his plantation in 1850, he entered the U.S. Senate. He was the second Jew to serve in the Senate.
When Louisiana seceded from the Union in 1861, President Jefferson Davis, who had served in the Senate with Benjamin, appointed him attorney general of the Confederacy. Benjamin later became the Confederacy’s secretary of war and then secretary of state. In Varina Davis’s autobiography, she reports that Benjamin was her husband’s most trusted adviser and that he usually spent twelve hours a day with Davis, shaping every important Confederate tactic and strategy. Benjamin was widely known as “the brains of the Confederacy,” although some Southerners blamed him as the war went badly.
In 1864, Benjamin privately persuaded Robert E. Lee and other Confederate military leaders that the South’s best chance of victory was to emancipate any slave who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. Only with this massive influx of new fighting men, Benjamin argued, could independence be won. When the idea became public, it caused a firestorm. “If slaves will make good soldiers,” argued Howell Cobb of Georgia against the proposal, “our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” After strenuous debate, the idea was rejected as politically untenable. The following year the South was defeated.
When John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Davis and Benjamin were suspected of plotting the assassination. In anti-Semitic Northern newspapers, Benjamin was pilloried as Judas while the martyred Lincoln was compared to Christ. When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Benjamin escaped to England, fearing he would never receive a fair trial if charged with Lincoln’s murder.
Benjamin lived out the rest of his life as a barrister in England, where he published a classic legal text on the sale of personal property. Before his death in 1884, he burned his personal papers, leaving historians with little hard evidence of his thoughts and actions. When Benjamin is remembered in American history, it is usually unsympathetically. He is buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, along with Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Marcel Proust, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, and others.
The first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate was also from the antebellum South, David Levy Yulee of Florida. Levy County, Florida, is named in his honor. He was first elected in 1845 and, like Benjamin, withdrew from the Senate in 1861 when Florida seceded from the Union. Yulee was a member of the Confederate Congress until 1865. It was not until 1898 that a non-Confederate state elected a Jew to the U.S. Senate, when Joseph Simon of Oregon took office.
SOURCES: Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1988); Kurt F. Stone, The Congressional Minyan: The Jews of Capitol Hill (Hoboken, N.J.: KTAV Publishing, 2000).
NEGROES IN THE CIVIL WAR
In April 1861 the first Negroes were appointed commissioned officers in the Civil War—by the Confederacy, in Louisiana. By war’s end 93,000 blacks served in the Confederate Army. About 100,000 blacks fought in the Union Army, and more than 65,000 were killed. There were 30,000 blacks in the Union Navy, about a quarter of the total number of sailors.
SOURCES: Harry Fleischman, Let’s Be Human (New York: Oceana Publications, 1960), p. 55; Robert Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars (New York: Monad Press, 1973), pp. 22–23, 31.
First Louisiana black troops disembarking at Fort Macombe, Louisiana. (Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1863, p. 133.)
THE PROPER WAY TO SURRENDER
On the night of September 17, 1862, the most unusual surrender in all of American military history occurred. Braxton Bragg, the Confederate major general, was steadily advancing northward into Kentucky. At Munfordville, where the railroad to Louisville crossed the Green River, Bragg’s forces encountered a federal strongpoint of 4,000 men under the command of Colonel John T. Wilder. Bragg’s advance guard attacked the Union fortifications twice and were repulsed both times, with moderate losses. Bragg then brought up the rest of his army, completely surrounding the Union position. He sent in a demand for surrender, pointing out that the Yankee case was hopeless.
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