American History December 2020

First Modern Scandal Hits DC Camp Followers’ Amazing Journey When the Draft Resumed in 1940 Maine Splits From Massachusetts JEFFERSON v. ADAMS, 1800 SCARE TACTICS / RELIGIOUS SMEARS / FOREIGN MEDDLING

Fighting Dirty

December 2020 HISTORYNET.com

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Sacred Stone of the Southwest is on the Brink of Extinction

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enturies ago, Persians, Tibetans and Mayans considered turquoise a gemstone of the heavens, believing the striking blue stones were sacred pieces of sky. Today, the rarest and most valuable turquoise is found in the American Southwest–– but the future of the blue beauty is unclear.

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Why Are Dealers Hoarding These 100-Year-Old U.S. Silver Dollars?

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hen it comes to collecting, few coins are as coveted as the first and last of a series. And when big anniversaries for those “firsts” and “lasts” come around, these coins become even more coveted.

Take, for example, the 1921 Morgan Silver Dollars. These 90% pure silver coins were the last of their kind, a special one-year-only resurrection of the classic Wild West Silver Dollar. Three years prior, the Pittman Act authorized the melting of more than 270 million Morgan Silver Dollars so their silver could be sold to our allies in the United Kingdom. Facing our own Silver Dollar shortage, the world’s favorite vintage U.S. Silver Dollar was brought back for one year only while the U.S. Mint worked on its successor, the Peace Silver Dollar.

Dealers Begin Stockpiling Last-Year Morgans

Knowing what we’ve told you about special anniversaries, dealers around the country are preparing for a surge in demand. 2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar—the last-yearof-issue for the most popular vintage U.S. Silver Dollar ever minted. But slow-moving collectors may be disappointed in what they find when they seek out these coins.

Since the days of the Pittman Act, millions more U.S. Silver Dollars have been melted or worn down in commerce. It’s been estimated that as few as 15% of all the Morgan Dollars ever minted have survived to the present day. That number grows smaller each year, with private hoards now accounting for virtually all the surviving Morgan Silver Dollars. And that was before silver values started to rise...

Interest in Silver Is on the Rise

19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 LY G T T V C N B R R Y E LY G JU AU SEP OC NO DE JA FE MA AP MA JUN JU AU

Silver Trend Chart: Prices based on monthly averages. ©2020, AMS

As you can see from the chart on the left, in 2020, we’ve seen daily silver prices close as low as $12.01 per ounce and as high as $28.33 per ounce. That rise in value has led to a sharp increase in buyers’ interest in silver. We’re already seeing a surge of interest from collectors wanting to add vintage Morgan Silver Dollars to their collections. But at what price?

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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. MCD222-01, Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2020 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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DECEMBER 2020

FEATURES 24 Explosive Election

24

The campaign of 1800 threatened to sunder the nation

By Peter R. Henriques

32 Camp Follower

Intent on finding her husband, a German mercenary fighting for Britain, a baroness brings her children to Quebec. Drama ensues By Jonathan House

40 ‘Your Number Came Up’

With war in the wings, the United States began drafting men into service in 1940 By Paul Dickson

48 Run From the Shadows

How the first modern Washington scandal enveloped James Garfield By Robert B. Mitchell

58 Splitting States

Maine finally rode out of Massachusetts thanks to the Missouri Compromise By Stephanie Bouchard

DEPARTMENTS

32

6 Mosaic

News from out of the past

10 Contributors 12 Interview

The Gilded Age emphasized ‘I;’ progressivism pushed ‘we.’ What pronoun will Americans use next?

14 Déjà Vu

For all its flaws, the electoral college does discourage election mischief.

18 American Schemers

8

Bluestocking Anthony Comstock waged war on whatever he decreed to be smut.

20 SCOTUS 101

PHOTO CREDIT

48

How the court gave corporations the same access to federal courts as citizens.

22 Cameo

Black artists are restoring dioramas that survive from the 1940 Black World’s Fair.

John Cairnes used economics to argue against British recognition for the Confederacy.

66 Reviews 72 An American Place

LA’s Highland Park is well-named.

ON THE COVER: Pursuing the White House in 1800, rival titans Thomas Jefferson and John Adams campaigned relentlessly, even viciously.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; MONTICELLO; GRANGER, NYC; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; GRANGER, NYC; COVER: ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER

DECEMBER 2020

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

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How an ‘ill-armed peasantry’ crushed Clinton, Cornwallis, and a raft of Europe’s top soldiers. bit.ly/LondonSouthernSetback

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DECEMBER 2020 VOL. 55, NO. 5

MICHAEL DOLAN EDITOR NANCY TAPPAN SENIOR EDITOR SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY CORPORATE ROB WILKINS DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIP MARKETING TOM GRIFFITHS CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT GRAYDON SHEINBERG CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT SHAWN BYERS VP AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT JAMIE ELLIOTT PRODUCTION DIRECTOR ADVERTISING MORTON GREENBERG SVP Advertising Sales mgreenberg@mco.com TERRY JENKINS Regional Sales Manager tjenkins@historynet.com RICK GOWER Regional Sales Manager rick@rickgower.com DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING NANCY FORMAN / MEDIA PEOPLE 212-779-7172 ext. 224 nforman@mediapeople.com SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM or 800-435-0715 American History (ISSN 1076-8866) is published bimonthly by HISTORYNET, LLC, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA, 22182-4038 Periodical postage paid at Vienna, VA and additional mailing offices.

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4 AMERICAN HISTORY

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by Sarah Richardson

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made a five-year, $250 million commitment to fund monuments on the American landscape relating to social justice. According to The New York Times, the foundation previously put $5 million into Montgomery, Alabama’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, built to honor lynching victims. Another $25,000 went for a memorial to an abolitionist family from Seneca Village, a community of Blacks displaced when Central Park was being built in New York City. The latest program, the Monuments Project, is the charity’s largest ever, and reflects a change of mission; the foundation now stresses social justice in supporting research, the arts, and higher education. The first grant recipient, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Monument Lab, collaborates with artists and communities to use public space to highlight stories of social justice and equity. In part that grant will inventory existing commemorative monuments. The Mellon Fund does not underwrite the removal of monuments.

DBIMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Making New Monuments

6 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Representing “Raise Up,” by Hank Willis Thomas, is part of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

On September 17, 2020, a memorial to WWII commander and 34th President Dwight D. Eisenhower opened on the National Mall.

Eisenhower Memorialized Eisenhower hated equestrian statuary, so architect Frank Gehry posed him with GI paratroopers against a backdrop that suggests the rippling sands of Normandy. A youthful Eisenhower seated off to the side looks on.

Congress approved the memorial in 1999. Gehry’s final design was accepted in 2017.

SOPA IMAGES LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ARTEPICS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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Reframing Recollection Public high schools in selected Virginia communities will be introducing an elective Black history course. Schools in eight counties and in Charlottesville, Covington, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, and Winchester will offer the course, the result of a campaign begun in 2019 to improve the state’s history curricula. Last year, 400 years after White Jamestown settlers bought the first captive Africans sold in the American colonies, Governor Ralph Northam named a group to recommend improvements. Analysis of portrayal of the Black experience is the foundation of critical race theory, which highlights the gap between the former ubiquity of slavery and its aftermath and the ideals of equality and liberty.

President Donald Trump has assailed such explorations as “toxic propaganda” and as a counterbalance has proposed a “1776 Com-

Enslaved persons await sale in Richmond, Virginia. The state is bringing an elective Black history course to some public schools. mission” to infuse young Americans with patriotism. Calling the 1776 Commission a “narrow and celebratory” partisan ploy, the Organization of American Historians said its members oppose the Trump undertaking. “History is not and cannot be simply celebratory,” the historians’ group said. “Vibrant democratic societies are not built upon a foundation of selective depictions of the past, but rather demand critical examination of and grappling with the historical record.”

DECEMBER 2020 7

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Recreation Students of historic preservation at Tuskegee are restoring the miniature dioramas.

Diorama Revival

Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ on State Street in Chicago, Illinois, is on the annual Saving America’s Top Eleven list of endangered structures. The National Trust for Historic Preservation maintains the roster. At the temple in 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley held an open-casket funeral to show the world what racists had done to her 14-year-old son, Emmett, left. The young Chicagoan was visiting family in Money, Mississippi, when he was attacked on August 28, 1955, allegedly for having whistled at a White woman. He was beaten and shot and his body was found submerged in the Tallahatchie River. Some 100,000 mourners viewed the youth’s mutilated body, beginning an ongoing reckoning.

Another entry: Ponce, Puerto Rico, the 18th-century port devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and subsequent earthquakes. (http://bit.ly/2020preservation.)

8 AMERICAN HISTORY

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DOYLE AUCTIONS; COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG; AP PHOTO

Till Funeral Site Endangered

COURTESY OF THE TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY LEGACY MUSEUM; AP PHOTO

In summer 1940, 33 dioramas depicting the Black experience in America went on display at the American Negro Exposition, also known as the Black World’s Fair, at the Chicago Coliseum. Only 20 displays survived, conserved by the Legacy Museum at historically Black Tuskegee University. Students enrolled in Tuskegee’s historic preservation program are restoring the artworks. The exposition honored the 75th anniversary of ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the end of the Civil War, aiming to “promote racial understanding and good will; enlighten the world on the contribution of the Negro to civilization and make the Negro conscious of his dramatic progress since emancipation.” The dioramas, created

by Black artists led by dioramist pioneer Erik Lindgren, a Swede, illustrated vignettes ranging from constructing the Sphinx to slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction to the Gold Rush and World War I.

New World Real Estate Colonial Williamsburg is displaying historic maps intended as advertisements that advanced a view of the New World at sharp odds with the reality of violent conquest. “Promoting America,” with colonial maps and maps depicting the newly founded United States of America, runs through March 27, 2022.

TOP BID

An extremely rare first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with the author’s unsigned reviews of his own book laid in, sold at Doyle Auctions in New York City on September 30. Unable to persuade any established publisher to print his work, Whitman self-published. Hiring a publisher of legal documents, he chose binding materials and personally set the type, leaving his name off the title page but including an image of himself. Of that first run of 795 copies, Whitman sent a handful, including this one, to England.

DOYLE AUCTIONS; COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG; AP PHOTO

COURTESY OF THE TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY LEGACY MUSEUM; AP PHOTO

$175,000

Suffragists in Central Park Since August 26, 2020, Manhattan’s Central Park has had its first statuary commemorating women who made history. A bronze of New Yorkers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth was unveiled around the centenary of the ratification on August 18, 1920, of the 19th Amendment establishing woman suffrage in the United States. The installation is the work of Monumental Women.

DECEMBER 2020 9

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House

Bouchard

Henriques

Semper Fidelis

As a retired Marine, I enjoyed the August issue and its articles about Colonel Robert Taplett and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The colonel’s assignment in Utah was not in “Clearview” but Clearfield. After the Navy closed shop this barracks depot eventually became the Freeport Center. As for Tailgunner Joe, it’s sad that the values we stand for and are held to on active duty do not always stay with former Marines. Joe would have had a much more honorable and memorable legacy had he maintained those Marine principles, traits, and values.

John Thompson, Major, USMC (Ret.) Ogden, Utah

Reclaiming History

Dickson

Mitchell

Freelanc writer Stephanie Bouchard (“Splitting States,” p.

58) lives on the Maine coast. She tweets as @SBouchardME and posts at stephaniebouchard.net. This is her first piece for the magazine.

Paul Dickson (“Your Number Came Up,” p. 40) writes about baseball, the American language, and 20th century American history. His many books include Sputnik: The Shock of the Century and The Bonus Army: An American Epic (with Thomas B. Allen).

Peter R. Henriques (“Explosive Election,” p. 24) is Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University. His new book, First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington, is just out from University of Virginia Press.

When California native and former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Jonathan House relocated to Washington DC, he discovered a passion for American history. “Camp Follower” (p. 32) is his first article for the magazine.

Robert B. Mitchell (“Run from the Shadows,” p. 48) is the author of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age (Edinborough Press) and the award-winning Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver (Edinborough Press). He is an editor with the Washington Post News Service.

I taught in Texas public schools for 34 years, and I disagree with Walter Buenger (“Overtime at the History Works,” August 2020). Many history texts I read leaned so far left they presented incorrect information. Prentice Hall’s United States History described the Texas Revolution as an Anglo land grab; in fact, Texas was one of nine Mexican states to rebel when Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna or perhaps Miguel Barragan disbanded that nation’s Congress. The same volume traced the Great Depression to “unequal wealth distribution,” not the stock market crash, and described America as shamelessly imperialistic. Professors and teachers who criticized these biased, inaccurate texts were called White supremacists, as Buenger does.

Alvin Ronnfeldt San Antonio, Texas

In Black and White

With regard to race, editorial content in the October 2020 issue consistently capitalized “Black” but lowercased “white.” Please change this practice.

Ronald E. Wales Houston, Texas EDITOR’S REPLY: Done.

CORRECTION: A June 2020 Mosaic item (“More Maps at Mount Vernon,” p. 8) misdated a map of British battlements near New York City that French military engineers drew for General George Washington. The map dates to 1781. The editor regrets his error.

10 AMERICAN HISTORY

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A View from the Bridge Atop the Golden Gate Bridge: steel crew foreman Grover McClain, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and welder S.E. Stanley during 1935 bridge construction.

TALKING ALONE ABOUT WORKING TOGETHER Putnam sees a United States poised for a period of robust citizen activism after passing through its Second Gilded Age.

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.

He has won every major scholarly honor in his profession. In 2013 President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal for “deepening our understanding of community in America.” Putnam’s 16 books include Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. His latest, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again arrived in October from Simon & Schuster.

Progressive movement, which was rooted in protests against the late 19th century’s inequities and self-centeredness, flowered in the first decade of the 1900s. This broad, heterogeneous movement was united only by its insistence that America needed change. The young Progressive Walter Lippmann captured America’s essential choice in his masterful book, Drift and Mastery. Lippmann declared that Americans could drift with the seemingly inexorable tide of the Gilded Age but should act to master change in a new direction.

The United States of the Gilded Age was rife with economic inequality, cultural fragmentation, and social Darwinism. A 65-year shift produced a more communitarian “we” society. When and how did that shift start? The

You see in the Progressive Era a “moral awakening” that was pursuing grassroots activism. Describe what citizens took on. Frances Perkins, from a middle-class Yankee family, first encountered Progressive politics when a

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

BY RICHARD ERNSBERGER JR.

12 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Mount Holyoke professor asked her to study working conditions in factories. After more than 30 years as a reformer, Perkins culminated her career as the first American woman cabinet member, when she served as FDR’s secretary of labor. Tom Johnson rose from poverty in Virginia to succeed as a young industrialist. But in his mid-30s, inspired by the reform spirit, Johnson reversed course to become the country’s foremost urban activist and reformer. Ida B. Wells, born into slavery and outraged at being thrown off a segregated train in 1884, became a leading voice for Black rights and in the early 1900s almost single-handedly ended the abominable practice of lynching.

unavoidable is an optical illusion that is being promoted by extreme individualists.

In the late 1960s and 1970s the pendulum began to swing, and the Great Convergence became the Great Divergence, leading to a “second Gilded Age.” America entered the 1960s in a “we” posture, and in a kind of collective backflip emerged from that decade heading in an “I” direction. It happened so quickly that it’s hard to name a single cause, but the What you call the Great Convergence saw congruent improvement in pivot is apparent even in the era’s popular economic equality, political comity, social cohesion, and community. music. In the 1960s the Beatles were singing in Did the alignment of those four factors surharmony about togetherness—I want to hold prise you? I was shocked, though I should your hand; I get by with a little help from my not have been, because researchers already friends—but in their final recording as a group had documented the changes in each of in April 1970 a disillusioned George Harrison those four areas. I and my co-author Shaylyn was complaining, All I can hear, I me mine/I Romney Garrett noticed the remarkable unime mine, I me mine. Six months later, John formity of change across all four. That simulLennon replied in his solo hit, “God”: I don’t taneity altered our perspective on each of the believe in Beatles/I just believe in me. four taken separately.

And since then, you see regression across the four fronts. Has any one been particularly How did education and public high school powerful? The changes are so closely synchrofigure in this communitarian period? Few nized it’s impossible to distinguish what might people know that around 1910 Americans be causing what, just as it’s impossible when invented the public high school. For the first time anywhere, communities were providing watching birds in flight to tell which bird is free secondary education to all the kids in leading a flock whose members simultaneously town. Remarkably, this innovation came not change direction. Pushing the evidence as hard top-down, not from national experts, and not from leading metropolises, as we can, however, we think we spot two but from grassroots activists in small Midwestern towns, where the clues: First, surprisingly, economic inequality sense of community was strongest. lags slightly behind the rest, so it is unlikely to be the cause; and second, some non-quantitaCooperation marked the era, including the New Deal and on through tive evidence hints that cultural change may the civil rights era of the 1960s. FDR’s nine major New Deal reforms— come earlier than the others. the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Industrial Recovery Despite the current Gilded Age, you seem Act, the National Housing Act, the Works Progress Administration, optimistic that Americans can come together Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor again and rebalance our individual and comStandards Act—had the support of nearly half—47 percent—of congres- munitarian virtues. I am optimistic. Indeed, sional Republicans. President Lyndon Johnson’s six major Great Society since we finished the book in February events initiatives—the War on Poverty, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare/ have made me even more optimistic that we Medicaid, federal aid to education, and immigration reform—had the are nearing a major historical turning point. backing of 63 percent of congressional Republicans. Compare that to The title—The Upswing—suggests it’s time to recent years, in which comparable initiatives—Obamacare or Trump’s learn from a comparable turning point more tax reforms—have had the support of 3 percent of the opposing party. than a century ago. In the first Progressive Era, grassroots mass mobilization was key; young For much of the 20th century, America enjoyed rapid economic people concerned about new issues were key, growth and greater equality—the best of our individualistic and com- political leadership was a lagging indicator, and munitarian impulses—not an easy balance to achieve. People—and so on. Not coincidentally, those are precisely especially economists—often say we have to choose between growth and the patterns we are seeing today. Personally, equality. But for most of the “we” era we in fact had both growth and I’m more optimistic about our country’s future equality. The idea that a hard choice between growth and equality is today than I have been for much of my life. H

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

it’s time for us to learn from the first progressive era, a comparable turning point more than a century ago.

DECEMBER 2020 13

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Down to the Wire A commission had to resolve the 1876 election that gave Rutherford Hayes a one-vote victory over Samuel Tilden.

2020 is the 59th American presidential election year. Since the first, in 1789, every candidate has undertaken to win a majority in the Electoral College. This small body—membership is now 535 persons—materializes briefly every four years and, despite never actually meeting as a whole, almost always decides who becomes the most powerful person on the planet. Despite many a glitch, this odd institution marches on, because the Electoral College arguably fulfills the main purpose that the Framers had in mind when they created it: warding off stolen elections.

The brigands seen as most threatening at the Constitutional Convention were foreigners, and the most recent example of such thievery had involved Poland. Early modern Poland, a vast domain, stretched from Lithuania to Ukraine. This mega-state’s monarch was chosen by Poland’s nobility, assembled in the sejm or diet. When the throne became vacant in 1763, the leading candidate was the noble Stanislaw August Poniatowski. Handsome and fluent in half a dozen languages, Poniatowski, 32, would have made, according to one diplomat, an excellent master of ceremonies, though “moral courage he altogether lacks.” His main qualification was that in their twenties he and Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, had been lovers. Russia had long cultivated allies in Poland’s diet, and Catherine now used them to boost Poniatowski, calculating that he would be a compliant placeholder until she and Poland’s other neighbors—Prussia and Austria—could agree on divvying Poland up. Her ex became Stanislaw II Augustus in 1764. Catherine and fellow predators

BY RICHARD BROOKHISER

took their first helpings of his country in 1772.

Fifteen years later the Framers’ first stab at a constitution, the Virginia Plan, envisioned a chief executive chosen by the national legislature. On second thought, however, the Framers realized a president picked by Congress would be no less vulnerable to foreign influence than a Poniatowski picked by the Polish sejm.

“The great rival powers of Europe who have American possessions,” said James Madison, will want to see “at the head of our government a man attached to their respective politics and interests.” This was no idle worry.

Great imperial powers surrounded America.

Former masters the Brits owned Canada; Spain controlled the Mississippi River and the Gulf coast. And who could say when France, still ensconced in the Caribbean, might chance a return to the North American mainland?

“The election of a President of America,” Thomas Jefferson warned Madison in a kibitzing communique he posted from Paris, “will be much more interesting to certain nations of

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COLLEGIATE CONUNDRUM

14 AMERICAN HISTORY

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actually casts. Several presidents who racked up big Electoral College margins won only pluralities of the popular vote—Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996—thanks to third-party candidates’ vote-draining effect. And in 1888, 2000, and 2016 Electoral College winners Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump trailed rivals Grover Cleveland, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton in the popular tally.

Is the Electoral College still a shield against fraud? Foreign countries have been trying to influence American elections as far back as 1796, when France was threatening grave consequences unless a Francophile candidate, meaning Jefferson, won, and as recently as 2016, when Russia reached out to the Trump campaign with multiple tentacles. But foreigners could not tamper with the vote.

One unintended consequence of the Electoral College may be the blunting of homegrown vote-stealing in presidential contests.

Every political machine tries to thumb the scale, but perhaps only in 1844 did that tip an election. Historian Daniel Walker Howe argues that Henry Clay lost New York’s electoral votes, and thus the race, not only because the abolitionist Liberty Party diverted anti-slavery Whigs from Clay—the view taught in textbooks—but also through Tammany Hall skullduggery on behalf of victor James Polk. Richard Nixon’s 1960 campaign, believing vote stealing had thrown that contest to JFK, demanded recounts in several states. When Illinois, one of the largest, examined its returns, officials found fraud, but not enough to have changed the result. A recount in Hawaii actually moved that state from Nixon’s to Kennedy’s column.

Targeting decisive races in a continent-sized republic is difficult enough for the purposes of ordinary campaigning. For vote stealing it is a more difficult undertaking yet.

In a tight race decided by a national popular vote, however, any vote stolen anywhere would be worthwhile. The temptation to run up one’s candidate’s tally would be almost irresistible—and none would resist. National recounts would inevitably follow, like nightmares after a bad dinner. Such a system could work only with a national voter ID card.

So we bumble along with a college whose members never meet en masse, and electors who should, but sometimes don’t, do what the voters who picked them want. H

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Europe than ever the election of a king of Poland was.”

The solution, not settled until the Constitutional Convention’s final weeks, was to have each state’s voters choose electors. Those electors— the phrase “electoral college” came into vogue in the 19th century—would pick the president and vice president. This scheme’s main virtue, Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers, was that the electors would be a serial pop-up group. “The appointment of the President” does not “depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes,” Hamilton wrote, but on persons picked “for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.” As an extra safeguard, senators, representatives, and other federal officeholders could not be electors, lest they support an incumbent pursuing re-election. Since each state’s electors would meet in that state’s capital—initially 13 locations, more as the country grew—foreign influencers would be hard pressed to lobby electors even at the last minute.

The arrangement evolved by evolution and amendment. At first some states chose electors by popular vote, others via their legislatures. In time, a popular Drumroll, Please vote with the statewide winner taking all became Carrying the 1960 the norm; Maine and Nebraska choose some votes, U.S. Senate electors in separate electoral districts. pages Don Wilson In the first four presidential elections, each and Tom Chapman elector voted for two men, the one who got the precede Sergeant at most votes becoming president, the runner-up Arms Joseph Dukes. becoming veep. The 12th Amendment, ratified early in 1804, required electors to declare their first choices, institutionalizing not only the presidential ticket, with a POTUS candidate and a running mate, but the system of political parties that picked those tickets.

Although Hamilton’s comments in the Federalist Papers suggested otherwise, electors were always expected to vote as the states that chose them directed, though in recent years the elector who goes his own way has become more common. In 2016 five of Hillary Clinton’s electors and two of Donald Trump’s went rogue. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws against bolting.

The Electoral College has delivered its share of crack-ups. In 1800 and 1824, the House of Representatives decided the election, because no candidate won a majority of electoral votes. In 1876 three states each sent two conflicting slates of returns, while a fourth state’s tally was challenged because one elector was a federally employed postmaster. An Electoral Commission of senators, representatives, and justices of the Supreme Court sorted out the mess. The biggest problem, which grows bigger as America thinks of itself as more democratic, has been disparity between the Electoral College count and the votes that John Q. Citizen 16 AMERICAN HISTORY

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS

Chief Stock in Trade: Smut Professional bluestocking Comstock carefully curated his facial hair into an extravagant set of muttonchops that became a favorite target of cartoonists.

Anthony Comstock always dressed in black and white: black suit and shoes, starched white shirt, black bow tie—except at Christmas, when he replaced the black tie with a white one. Comstock saw the world in black and white, good and evil. You worked for God or you slaved for Satan. Comstock toiled for God, fighting what he saw as Beelzebub’s most insidious creation—erotica. There was, he proclaimed, “no more active agent employed by Satan in civilized communities to ruin the human family than EVIL READING.” For 42 years, Comstock served as the United States government’s official hunter of racy novels, risqué postcards, and sex manuals that dared to explain contraception.

Brawny, broad-shouldered, and zealous, he loved to kick in doors and vault through windows to arrest smut merchants—especially if, as often was the case, he’d brought along a gaggle of reporters. Comstock craved publicity

and meticulously recorded his triumphs. “In the 41 years I have been here, I have convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches—60 coaches containing 60 passengers each and the 61st almost full,” he bragged not long before his death in 1915. “I have destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.”

A Puritan born on a Connecticut farm in 1844, Comstock grew up in a teetotaling Congregational household whose members spent most waking hours working or praying. One night a teenaged Anthony got drunk with a friend. Waking with a hangover that felt like God’s punishment, he swore off booze for life.

At 18, he discovered that a store was illegally selling grog, so he broke into the place by night and opened the taps, emptying every keg—his first attack on God’s enemies.

In 1863, he joined the Union army, which shipped him to the Florida coast. He saw little combat against Confederates but fought the

CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MATTEO OMIEAD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

BY PETER CARLSON

18 AMERICAN HISTORY

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS devil every day. When his unit received its whiskey ration, he poured his share on the ground. His irked comrades would have been happy to drink it, but Comstock refused to be a party to the consumption of firewater. Sins of the flesh likewise tormented him.

“I debased myself,” Comstock wrote in his diary of his habitual masturbation. “I deplore my sinful weak nature…”

After the war, he became a clerk in a Manhattan dry goods business and married a pious woman ten years his senior. When a daughter died in infancy, the couple adopted a baby girl.

But dry goods and domestic life bored Anthony. Lusting for action but loathing lust, he launched a personal crusade. He would buy racy books, then convince city cops to deputize him to arrest the sellers. One day, eager for publicity about his exploits, he brought a New York Tribune reporter with him as he busted seven booksellers.

In 1872, Comstock went after New York’s famous stockbroker sisters— Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin—who published a weekly newspaper that advocated women’s suffrage and free love.

When the scandal-mongering siblings published an article accusing America’s most famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher, of adultery, Comstock got the sisters charged with obscenity. The indictment made him famous, but after months of legal wrangling, the charges were dismissed. Bans on obscenity did not include newspapers.

Obviously, Comstock needed a stronger law, so he traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby for one. Lugging a carpetbag of dirty books, he buttonholed congressmen, citing saucy passages, and won their votes for “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use”—soon shortened to “the Comstock Act.” Signed by President Grant in 1873, the act outlawed use of the mails to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials—as well as sale or possession of devices used “for the prevention of conception.”

Congress appointed Comstock a “special agent” of the U.S. Post Office, deputized to sniff out and snuff out porn and prophylactics. He got a badge and power to make arrests but no salary, so a like-minded organization, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, hired him as its staff vicebuster. He worked full time and loved the job. In 1873 alone, he logged 23,000 miles—his stops included Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and St. Paul—arresting 55 individuals and seizing 67 tons of one-handed books, 194,000 pictures, 5,500 decks of naughty cards, and 60,300 contraceptive devices.

A tireless scold, Comstock maintained his frantic pace for 40 years, all the while hectoring Americans that “EVIL READING” inspired lust, which “defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart and damns the soul.” By the late 1870s, he had defeated the nation’s major publishers of hot stuff, but rather than declare victory the zealot became overzealous, attacking political dissidents, birth control advocates, and, famously, playwright George Bernard Shaw.

In 1878, Comstock arrested Ezra Heywood. The charge brought

CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MATTEO OMIEAD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

comstock attacked belly dancers at the Chicago world’s fair for being an “assault on the sacred dignity of womanhood.”

against the eccentric pacifist and atheist? Publishing Cupid’s Yokes, a 23-page endorsement of free love. The pamphlet was about as erotic as a telephone directory, but Heywood had irked Comstock by denouncing him in it as “a religio-monomaniac.” Convicted under the Comstock Act, Heywood drew two years at hard labor, but President Rutherford Hayes pardoned him after six months. In 1882, Comstock arrested Heywood once again, for selling Cupid’s Yokes and publishing Walt Whitman’s poem “To a Common Prostitute.”

In 1887, Comstock raided a Fifth Avenue gallery, seizing 117 photographs of paintings by French artists depicting unclothed models.

“Let the nude be kept in its proper place,” the Savonarola of Sensuality said, “out of the reach of the rabble.” In 1893, Comstock demanded that Chicago lock up World’s Fair belly dancers on charges that they were perpetrating an “assault on the sacred dignity of womanhood.”

In 1905, Comstock warned the NYPD that a Broadway theater was rehearsing Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Though Comstock hadn’t seen the play or read the script, he’d heard the titular “profession” was prostitution.

He denounced Shaw as “an Irish smut dealer” and promised to “investigate his books.”

The playwright responded appropriately.

“Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States,” Shaw said.

“Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place.”

By then, Comstock, to his vast irritation, had become a laughingstock for many Americans. Newspaper columnists mocked him as a yammering fuddy-duddy. Cartoonists parodied his muttonchop whiskers. Increasingly irascible as he aged, he was ejected from multiple courtrooms for yelling at prosecutors who refused to prosecute those he’d arrested.

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson named Comstock to represent the United States at the International Purity Conference, taking place that year in San Francisco.

Comstock delivered several speeches at the conference, then caught a cold, which became pneumonia and killed him. Federal authorities enforced the Comstock Act until 1965. Its namesake took one secret to his grave: If erotica “corrupts the mind,” how was Anthony Comstock to spend four decades wallowing in titillation and yet remain uncorrupted? H DECEMBER 2020 19

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SCOTUS 101 Bank On It The plaintiff in Bank of the United States shown at home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1799.

ROADWAY TO REALISM Forging functional constitutional details for the government they were forming, the Founders gave one issue little discussion: virtually all agreed that when a citizen of one state had a legal dispute with a citizen of another state, the party of the first part should have the option of bringing that case in federal court rather than in a court administered by the defendant’s home state. “It may happen that a strong prejudice may arise in some states against the citizens of another,” James Madison suggested in advocating for what came to be called “diversity jurisdiction.” The concept had to do with optics. Even if a litigant from out of state got a fair hearing, Madison said, “at all events, he might think himself injured.”

Opening federal courts to cases involving citizens of different states made sense when John Doe was suing Richard Roe. However, what if one party was not an individual but a corporation, or if both parties fit that description? The idea that for legal purposes a corporation can be a “person,” which dates to Roman times, figured in the English judicial traditions that underpin American law. But it was unclear whether a “person” was also a “citizen.”

In 1809, just 21 years after the Constitution was ratified, the Supreme Court faced the question, unequivocally declaring that the diversity jurisdiction clause did not cover corporations.

The ruling came when Georgia levied a tax on a congressionally chartered bank. When the bank balked, state revenue officers forced their way into that establishment’s Savannah branch and carted off two boxes containing $2,004 in silver.

The bank, asserting it had Pennsylvania citizenship, went to federal court demanding that Georgia return the bullion. Chief Justice John Marshall explained in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux that the aggrieved bank could not use the federal courts because “that invisible, intangible, and artificial being, that mere legal entity, a corporation aggregate, is certainly not a citizen; and consequently cannot sue or be sued in the courts of the United States.”

Bank of the United States was a clear holding, but not, in 1809, a very important one. Few businesses then organized themselves as corporations, in part because to organize as a corporation an enterprise needed a special charter issued by a state legislature. For the next 30 years, plaintiffs challenging this principle were

20 AMERICAN HISTORY

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HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

LOUISVILLE, CINCINNATI & CHARLESTON RAILROAD CO. V. LETSON 43 U.S. 497 (1844) OVERTURNING ESTABLISHED LAW, THE JUSTICES RULE THAT CORPORATIONS CAN SUE AND BE SUED IN FEDERAL COURTS.

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BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ

HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

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SCOTUS 101 rebuffed by a High Court convinced a corpora- William Overton Harris wrote in the Virginia Law Review. tion was not a citizen, even as the Industrial This watershed decision was the work of a tremendously shrunken Revolution was creating a need for bigger enter- court. Justice Smith Thompson recently had died. Three members— prises and changing the way that businesses including Chief Justice Roger Taney—had recused themselves, probably organized. By 1840 states had passed general because they owned railroad stock. Justice James Moore Wayne, who was incorporation laws, allowing any business to to serve on the court a total of 32 years, in his day longer than any jusorganize as a corporation by filing the proper tices except Marshall and Joseph Story, wrote the decision. Wayne documents. Even in 1840, nonetheless, in a case acknowledged in his exegesis that by 1844 there existed a persuasive colthree Louisianans brought against a Mississippi lection of cases holding that a corporation was not a citizen. bank, the justices found that precedent forced However, Wayne said, the justices’ duty lay in “yielding to decided them to deny diversity jurisdiction, in the pro- cases everything that can be claimed for them on the score of authority cess explicitly stating their reluctance to do so. except the surrender of conscience.” Their consciences told them that in The time clearly had come for the High reality a corporation created by state charter in legal proceedings “seems Court to reexamine Bank of the United States. to be a person, though an artificial one, inhabiting and belonging to that An opportunity came four years later. The mat- state, and therefore entitled, for the purposes of suing and being sued, to ter revolved around a railroad now a footnote be deemed a citizen of that state.” Wayne insisted that in opening federal in American history but then a lofty entrepre- courts’ doors to a wide variety of business cases the justices were not neurial dream. The Louisville, Cincinnati & establishing any new reading of the law, but merely adhering to “the true Charleston Railroad had incorporated in South principles of interpretation of the Constitution.”

Carolina in 1835. The corporation was to build a 700-mile line between Charleston and Cincinnati—the first rail link connecting Southern cotton plantations and Midwestern farms to Eastern Seaboard markets. The plan fell apart when the railroad had trouble getting permits from certain states and reverberations from the Panic of 1837 torpedoed the national economy.

Contractor Thomas W. Letson sued to get the sum the rail line owed him for preparing a bed for a 48-mile segment between Orangeburg and Columbia, South Carolina. As a citizen of The ensuing decision was, as White House associate New York, Letson, invoking the divercounsel Tara Helfman wrote in a recent law journal sity provision, sued in federal court, Denying Diversity The railroad, stock article, “transformative.” Federal courts became the which awarded him $18,142.23. certificate above, said Louisville Railroad appealed to the the diversity provision arena of choice for commercial litigation involving significant sums—Congress now sets $75,000 as the miniSupreme Court, arguing in Louisville did not apply to the mum amount which must be in dispute to trigger Railroad v. Letson that under Bank of plaintiff in the case. the United States v. Deveaux Letson diversity jurisdiction—and was a major factor in federal could not claim diversity jurisdiction. The rail trial courts’ blossoming importance. line was not a citizen of South Carolina, the corPlaintiff Letson himself was one of the first to benefit: the year after poration’s lawyers asserted, but merely an the Louisville Railroad decision, the federal court in Baltimore ordered agglomeration of shareholders whose ranks the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company to pay Letson $1.5 million due included citizens of New York. Thus, the case when the company disavowed a contract awarded his firm to complete involved New Yorkers suing New Yorkers and that waterway (“Watery Waymaking,” December 2019). so lacked the disparate citizenship the ConstiAt first the primary users of the new power to put corporate disputes tution requires, the attorneys claimed. into federal courts were plaintiffs suing businesses, but within 20 years The justices weren’t buying it. They unani- corporations had begun invoking diversity jurisdiction to get disputes mously held Letson and the railroad to be citi- into federal courts. The goal was to make their arguments before judges zens of different states, meaning that the more attuned to hearing complex legal arguments and, often, at locations federal trial court had been right to take the so distant as to disadvantage defendants. That shift swelled the federal case and that the court’s award to the contrac- court workload. In 1844 only six states were home to more than one U.S. tor was valid. The High Court ruling “com- District Court; over the next two decades, thanks in good part to the volpletely changed the status of corporations for ume of business cases unleashed by Louisville Railroad, the federal judipurposes of jurisdiction of the federal courts,” cial system added trial courts in eight states. H DECEMBER 2020 21

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Coerced workers, Cairnes countered, would never be productive at skilled tasks, nixing any hope of the Southern economy diversifying beyond agricultural labor. Cairnes cited the region’s paucity of manufacturing, a condition that forced the South to rely on finished goods from the North.

In slaveholding societies, Cairnes wrote, capital is very scarce. “From this state of things result two phenomena which may be regarded as typical of industry carried on by slaves—the magnitude of the plantations and the indebtedness of the planters,” he added. Accompanying this imbalance, he said, was a “[t]endency to a very unequal distribution of wealth.”

Born in 1823 at Castlebellingham, County Louth, Cairnes, son of a successful self-made brewer, earned degrees at Dublin’s Trinity College. He also read the law but gravitated to

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In 1862, an Anglo-Irish political economist and abolitionist locked horns with Confederate lobbyists trying to formalize ties with Britain, the world’s leading industrial power. The United Kingdom was the main market for the 2-to-3 million bales of cotton that slaves in North America harvested each year. Convinced “King Cotton” had dealt the Confederacy a winning hand in what had become a civil war, the secessionist government was seeking Crown recognition. Britain had banned slavery in its colonies in 1833, but some voices there were backing the Confederate cause, not only to ensure a reliable source of cotton but to rein in the United States, now bidding to compete with the United Kingdom. Arguing against that tack, economist John Elliott Cairnes of Queens College, Galway, spelled out slave societies’ failings in devastating material detail.

Cairnes’ damning portrait of economic fragility, social stultification, and endemic aggression helped turn Britons against the Confederate project.

In the years approaching the Civil War, plantations in the American South had produced and stockpiled some of their biggest cotton crops ever. Confederates were hoping access to this bounty for British textile interests would spur support for the breakaway nation slaveholders had founded on a premise of White supremacy and a captive work force.

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Insatiable Culture Slavery, Cairnes said, required ever more land and aggressive expansion in order to make its flawed economics function.

studying political structure and economic had become a breeding center for slaves. Drawrelationships and became a professor and ing on the 1840 and 1850 U.S. censuses, Cairnes journalist. In 1859 he met and befriended asked what except trade in slaves shipped elseJohn Stuart Mill, champion of free trade and where in the South could explain Virginia’s individual liberty. As Mill did, Cairnes main- population of enslaved Blacks ages 20 to 40 tained that individual freedom and personal shrinking while the populations of enslaved choice brought beneficial social and eco- Blacks in cotton-growing Louisiana, Missisnomic development. These cultural characteristics had emerged only sippi, and Arkansas ballooned? recently, and only in societies that had cast off the feudal arrangements Cairnes also pointed to late-1850s proposals of old Europe such as still existed in Ireland under English rule, and among Southern planters to revive the African slavery such as powered the South’s plantations. slave trade. Confederate advocates claimed Instead of assuming, as many did, that slavery in the American South those overtures merely to have been explorawas bound to wither as the region’s economy developed, Cairnes laid tions of ways to preserve the South’s way of out why slaveholders, rather than surrender land and power, inevitably life. Cairnes countered that in order to survive would have to aggregate land and power. His 1862 book, The Slave a slaveholding culture had to be expansive and Power, dissected the Southern economy and its poisonous effects—and aggressive. He painted a system benefiting an struck home. Of that volume, a London paper wrote, “It will do much to oligarchy of planters wealthy but often deeply arrest the extraordinary tide of sympathy with the South which the in debt because of mortgages on enslaved clever misrepresentations of Southern advocates have managed to set workers. Scarcity of opportunity was impoverrunning in this country, and to imprint the picture of a modern ishing that society’s workers, enslaved and slave-community on the imaginations of thoughtful men.” free. This society was not moving toward more Cairnes had become an avowed abolipersonal freedom; its uppermost tionist without ever visiting the United echelon needed slavery to exist.

States. He reached his conclusions by In part thanks to Cairnes, Britain reading the works of Frederick Olmsted, withheld recognition from the South.

Alexis de Tocqueville, and other witAfter the war, details of his argument nesses who had traveled in the South, as came in for dispute and his analysis well as the U.S. census and other statistifell by the wayside. But his ideas on cal sources. His analysis emphasized not the concentration of wealth based on only the cruelty inflicted on the enslaved enslaved labor and financial links but bondage’s cost to the entire Southern between slavery and Northern bankeconomy, burdens it imposed on poor ing were prescient. Historians are Whites as well, and its stranglehold on rethinking Atlantic slavery’s role in innovation and opportunity for all. capitalism’s evolution.

In the United States, Hinton Helper’s Cairnes remained on the faculty at 1857 The Impending Crisis of the South University College, London, which had made parts of this case, stressing filled classes by sex. When his health how slavery dominated the region’s labor waned, Cairnes integrated his classmarket, limiting opportunities for poor Whites and Piercing the Veil room, the institution’s first coed class. discouraging industrialization. Cairnes drilled Cairnes saw through Arthritis and an 1872 riding accident left more deeply, describing how the plantation econ- the South’s pretenses him partially paralyzed. He died in 1875. of noble agrarian omy, mixing slavery and cotton’s chronic exhaus- grandeur to the hard Cairnes was a specialist, but The Slave tion of soil nutrients, drove a hunger for ever more truths of slavery’s Power, written for a mass readership, is land and ever more slaves to work that land. an exemplar of applied economic analybroad and inevitably “Two forces have thus been constantly urging negative impact. sis. Such work, its author felt, was neuon the Slave Power to territorial aggrandizement— tral in nature, but could identify how an the need for fresh soils, and the need for slave states…” Cairnes wrote. economy’s structure can yield good or bad “Accordingly for nearly a quarter of a century—ever since the annexation results. Cairnes’s values shone in the middle of Texas—the territory at the disposal of the South has been very much name he and his wife gave their second son. greater than its available slave force has been able to cultivate; and its John Gould Cairnes’s name honored Robert most urgent need has now become, not more virgin soils on which to Gould Shaw, the White officer who at 25 died employ its slaves, but more slaves for the cultivation of its virgin soils….” leading U.S. Colored Troops in a valiant but Among impacts Cairnes cited arising from this complex was the situa- failed effort to take Fort Wagner, South Carotion in Virginia. Its soils depleted by tobacco farming, that state in effect lina, on July 18, 1863. H DECEMBER 2020 23

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The campaign of 1800 threatened to sunder the nation

By Peter R. Henriques

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Past as Prologue 220 years ago Americans considering presidential candidates Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were in a now-familiar pickle.

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The decade preceding the Civil War aside, the last years of the 18th century may have been the most divisive in American history. Convinced the country’s fate rested on it winning and holding power, each party portrayed the opposition as dangerously, even fatally wrong. Despite that resemblance, there was no close equivalent to today’s party system. The Federalist party, which split into factions, one affiliated with John Adams and the other with Alexander Hamilton, eventually evolved into today’s Republican party. The original Republican party, represented by Jefferson and James Madison, evolved into the modern Democratic organization. Federalists tilted to

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that each state’s electors would equal in number the state’s representation in Congress—House membership plus two. Each elector was to vote mong pivotal American episodes, the 1800 for two individuals for president, at least one of election occupies a central place. That race, those from a state other than the elector’s. The labeled by Thomas Jefferson “the Revolution candidate receiving the majority of electoral of 1800,” introduced to the world the modern votes would be president; whoever received the political campaign as well as the peaceful next highest number of electoral votes would be transfer of power in a nation-state. Fittingly, that campaign’s key figures— vice president. Electors had no means of distinJefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Aaron Burr—were larger guishing which choice they preferred for presithan life. Jefferson, having served as Adams’s vice president since 1797, dent and which for vice president. was challenging the incumbent for the presidency. The contest brought An option was required should no candidate intense scrutiny to bear on the 1787 Constitutional Convention’s choice of get a majority. While the delegates all expected how to select a chief executive. The result was less than ideal.

George Washington to win by huge majorities— and in 1788 and 1792, he uniquely received every Debating extensively in 1787 about how to choose a president, virtually elector’s vote—they anticipated that normally no no delegates to the Constitutional Convention had supported the notion of candidate would amass a majority. The solution having the people vote directly. Delegates decided to trust the choice of that the Constitutional Convention embraced to leader to a group of electors, men of stature to be chosen for this role in a address the absence of a majority was another manner decided by each state’s legislature. effort to balance power between large This raised the issue of how many electors each A Near Run Thing states and small states. The founders state should field. Accustomed to the great sway that The country as it stood in expected electors to function as an was accorded all states by the Articles of Confedera- 1800 was narrowly and elite nominating committee, with the tion, smaller states feared a system that parceled out sharply divided between House of Representatives choosing power according to population would cost them influ- the Federalist and the Re- the president from among the top five vote-getters. In making this selection ence and protection. Hence the Convention’s decision publican perspectives. each state, regardless of congressional delegation size, would have one vote, to be determined by the majority of its delegation.

Proportionally speaking, this gave small states significantly more power over the outcome. For example, Virginia with 19 representatives in the House would have one vote, as would Delaware, with its single delegate.

The idea of electors as an elite body proved impracticable, and quickly—the Framers had not accounted for the power of party loyalty. Once parties came into existence during the 1790s, electors were picked to support a given party’s choice, not to use their individual best judgment (see “Collegial Conundrum,” p. 14).

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No Tribute the right; Republicans, to the left.

The most dramatic factor affecting America Americans were up in in the 1790s had been the French Revolution arms over the Barbary and its aftermath. Reading into that tumultuous pirates’ depredations sequence of events, Federalists concluded that as well as efforts by unfettered democracy imposed a leveling fac- France to exert influence on affairs across tion that would lead to anarchy, atheism, and the Atlantic. tyranny. Federalists saw the Republican party, and especially Jefferson, as head-over-heels Francophiles, little more than a French front openly hostile to the American government.

Relations between America and France descended to a nadir in 1798 following the XYZ Affair. In that international ruckus, French officialdom behaved so contemptibly toward ambassadors sent by President Adams on a peace mission that, for a time, war seemed inevitable. In the “quasi-war” which followed, Adams and the Federalists gained popularity and political power, putting Republicans on the defensive.

The Federalist-controlled Congress focused on two major domestic perils. One was an increase in the number of immigrants of questionable loyalty. The other was the growing power of the Republican press in an era in which newspapers basically functioned as party mouthpieces. Federalists regarded opposition papers’ attacks on government as scurrilous, even seditious. Consequently, in 1798 Congress passed, and President Adams signed, the very controversial Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Alien Acts lengthened from five to 14 years the period of residency required to qualify for citizenship. Under them, a president had authority to expel immigrants with roots in any country at war with the United States, as well as any immigrant he considered “dangerous.” The Sedition

Act made a crime punishable by fine and prison of publishing “false, scandalous, and malicious” criticism of the government, the president, or Congress that might stir Americans to sedition.

One supporter claimed to see abundant evidence of “the necessity of purifying the country from the sources of pollution.”

A Federalist editorial writer summarized that party’s position: “You who are for French notions of government; for the tempestuous sea of anarchy and misrule; for arming the poor against the rich; for fraternizing with the foes of God and man; go to the left and support the leaders, or dupes of the anti-federal junto. But you that are sober, industrious, thriving, and happy, give your votes for those men who mean to preserve the union of the states, the purity and vigor of our excellent constitution, the sacred majesty of the laws, and the holy ordinances of religion.” A Federalist pamphlet declared that Republicans “have made liberty and equality the pretext, whilst plunder and dominion has been their object.” One pamphleteer wrote that Republicans’ “democracy” would be little different from the French Revolution’s “Jacobin tyranny.”

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election of 1800. The Federalists championed Adams as their best chance of holding onto power and eventually selected South Carolinian Charles C. Pinckney for the vice presidential slot. The Republicans looked to their acknowledged leader, Thomas Jefferson, to head that party and eventually decided on Aaron Burr as his running mate.

Fearing no Republican figure as greatly as they feared Thomas Jefferson, Federalists spared no effort to castigate the Republican candidate as a “head in the clouds” philosopher whose impractical and naive ideas would wreck the country. Jefferson was too “theoretical and fanciful” to lead a growing confederacy, they said.

Make him president of a college, perhaps. President of the United States? Never.

Reviving the infamous Mazzei letter as a campaign cudgel, Federalists reminded Americans that Jefferson had slandered their greatest hero. In April 1796, venting spleen about George Washington to a former neighbor, Philip Mazzei, in what he thought to be a private exchange, Jefferson had raged obliquely at the sitting president. “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates [emphasis added] who have gone over to these heresies [against republicanism],” he wrote. “Men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their head shaved by the harlot England.”

Published in the United States in May 1797, the letter had embroiled Jefferson in a firestorm of criticism that the Federalists were happy to stoke again in 1800. Washington had been dead only a year, they argued; how could Americans elect a man who would malign him?

federalists impugned republicans as godless beasts. republicans savaged federalists for being the moral equivalent of tories.

To win in 1800, the magic number was 70 electoral votes. In 1796, Adams had narrowly defeated Jefferson, 71-68; thanks to the system of split voting, Jefferson became Adams’s vice president.

Planning for 1800, Republicans analyzed where Adams had gotten those 71 votes, calculating which states were ripe for flipping. Northern states were solid for Adams; the South, except perhaps Pinckney’s South Carolina, was solid for Jefferson. The middle states were key. In 1796 Adams had carried a vote each from Republican states Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Had two of those votes gone to Jefferson, he would have been president. To help ensure its native son’s victory in 1800 by getting him all 21 Virginia electoral votes, that state’s legislature changed its rules. Now a single statewide election was to choose electors. This tactic eliminated any possibility of Federalists casting electoral votes in Virginia.

The other crucial takeaway from 1796 was that the Federalists had carried all 12 New York electoral votes. If the Republicans could sweep New York or pry away at least some New York electoral votes, Jefferson likely would win. To that end, Republicans tried to have New York choose electors by district vote, instead of by the legislature. That effort failed. The Republicans’ only remaining hope was to win control of the New York legislature, a feat that rested on winning New York City, historically a Federalist enclave controlled by Alexander Hamilton.

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C.C. Pinckney

The most pervasive Federalist accusation was that Jefferson was an atheist. “Our churches may become temples of reason,” a pamphlet warned, invoking French revolutionaries’ label for deconsecrated sanctuaries. “Our Bibles cast into the fire.” “Those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin—which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence will be jettisoned,” trumpeted another broadside. “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced,” a partisan said. “And the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.” “Every American must lay his hand upon his heart and ask, whether he continues in allegiance to “GOD AND RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON AND NO GOD!!!” read a headline.

Republicans counterattacked. “Federalism was a mask for monarchy,” the newspaper Aurora declared. In Republicans’ eyes, Federalists differed little from Revolutionary-era Loyalists as foes of the new nation. Jefferson saw in the Sedition Act a first step toward ending the American experiment in republicanism and establishing a monarchy.

Alleging Sedition Act violations, the Federalists shut down newspapers and jailed journalists. One imprisoned publisher, Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon, became so prominent a symbol of Federalist oppression that in 1798 he won re-election from behind bars.

Besides creating a standing army, the Federalist crackdown illustrated President Adams’s despotic disregard for individual liberty, Republicans said. Adams and his Federalist gang, they claimed, were spurning the principles of 1776—seeking war with France, cosseting the rich and established churches, victimizing immigrants, and increasing public debt and taxes. As president, supporters said, Jefferson would tax less, spend less, and do less, leaving people freer, especially in worshipping as they chose.

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Cast of Characters Against Alexander Hamilton, at desk, in April 1800, the wily Burr aligned a slate of New York power players.

Enter New Yorker Aaron Burr, a man of great intellect, charm, and political acumen—arguably America’s first modern politician. “He possessed in a preeminent degree the art of fascinating the youthful,” a contemporary wrote. Few fellow politicians fully trusted Burr. Many actively disliked him. However, not a one doubted his influence over New York City politics. With a singleness of purpose that awed friend as well as foe, Burr, intent on becoming vice president, worked tirelessly to carry New York City for the Republicans in the April 1800 state elections.

In an age that expected demurely self-effacing candidates, Burr politicked robustly. Against Hamilton’s lackluster list, he recruited a stellar slate, including ex-governor George Clinton and Horatio Gates, a hero of the Revolution.

On election day, Burr wrangled a remarkable vote-getting push, especially in quarters thick with immigrants. The city’s poorest political district, the 6th Ward, comprising the mostly unsettled part of Manhattan Island above what is now Canal Street, made the difference. Immigrant voters tipped the scale. The legislature that would determine New York’s 12 electoral votes now was controlled by the Republicans, whose caucus had nominated Jefferson for president and Burr for vice president. Those men would oppose Adams and Pinckney.

New York was a critical but not necessarily essential state. The other keys were South Carolina and Pennsylvania. The situation in Pennsylvania was complicated. Republicans completely controlled the House; Federalists narrowly ran the Senate. A compromise, very unsatisfactory to the Republicans, eventually gave Jefferson an 8-7 victory. To take the White House, the Republicans needed to take South Carolina.

George Clinton

Horatio Gates Aaron Burr

Matters in South Carolina also were confused.

Charles Pinckney, who had fought in the Revolution, was the older brother of the well-regarded and well-connected Federalist Representative Thomas Pinckney, who had run as Adams’s No. 2 in 1796. The elder Pinckney, popular in his home state, was likely to pull some electoral votes there. If South Carolina went for Jefferson and Pinckney, Pinckney might end up president—a fervent desire of Alexander Hamilton, who believed C.C. Pinckney to be more susceptible to his arguments than the strong-willed and independent Adams. Hamilton, backed by the party’s conservative wing—sometimes called “Ultras” or “High” Federalists—viewed Adams’s overtures to France and fresh peace negotiations as a disastrous election-year mistake. Indeed, DECEMBER 2020 29

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Eagle-Eyed Cartoons in 1800 piled on a great deal more content with their punch.

Here, Jefferson faces a raptor’s revenge for his letter to Philip Mazzei.

One prominent Federalist disagreed. Alexander Hamilton’s strong loathing for Aaron Burr trumped the enmity he felt toward Jefferson, and Hamilton worked ferociously to convince fellow Federalists not to vote for Burr, whose personal ambition Hamilton saw posing a fatal risk to the new nation. “As to Burr, there is nothing in his favor,” Hamilton wrote. “His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement . . . I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition . . . Burr loves nothing but himself . . . He is sanguine enough to hope everything—daring enough to try anything—wicked enough to scruple nothing…if we have an embryo Cesar in the United States it is Burr.”

Hamilton’s protestations exerted minimal impact. Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, Federalist speaker of the House, acknowledging Burr’s flawed character—besides loving power, “he is ambitious, selfish, profligate”— nonetheless said Burr should be president, observing him to be well bred and bereft of “pernicious theories,” Sedgwick said. “His very selfishness prevents his entertaining any mischievous predilections for foreign nations,” he added. Additionally, Sedgwick argued, in order to be able to

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these Federalists, the unexpected tie vote offered a heaven-sent opportunity to fence Thomas Jefferson out of the White House.

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Hamilton so profoundly despised Adams that at one point he was heard to declare that he would rather see Jefferson win—in that case, he said, at least a man would know who his enemy was.

In October, Hamilton articulated his animosity in a scathing message that circulated among Federalist leaders. The document went viral, pre-industrial style, when the Aurora printed it.

Hamilton derided Adams as mentally unstable and unfit to serve, excoriating the incumbent for showing “extreme egotism,” “distempered jealousy,” “ungovernable temper,” and “vanity without bounds.” Though probably not a deciding factor in the election, the communique cost Hamilton dearly in party influence and status.

Among the 16 state legislatures, whose votes had to be in by December 3, South Carolina’s 151-member body voted last, convening November 24, 1800. Each party ran eight electors; of those 16, legislators were to vote for eight. Some electors seemed poised to vote for Jefferson and for Pinckney. However, Pinckney, acting out of a sense of honor and anger at Hamilton’s epistolary tirade, said he wanted only support from men who would vote both for him and for Adams. Ultimately, the legislators chose all eight electors pledged to Jefferson and Burr.

As word was spreading about the South Carolina result, Jefferson seemed certain to beat Adams—until a disturbing wrinkle intruded. In instructing their slates, the Republicans had not made clear which elector was to vote for Jefferson and which was to vote for someone other than Burr. Thanks to this grievous oversight, Jefferson and Burr tied at 73 votes. Adams got 65; Pinckney, 64. John Jay received one vote.

Each of the 73 electors had intended Jefferson to be president and Burr to be his vice president but had not been able to so specify. Under the Constitution, an electoral-vote tie clearly bounced the choices of president and vice president to the U.S. House of Representatives. In the general Theodore election, control of the House Sedgwick had gone to the Republicans— but not until after the incoming Congress was sworn in the following year. The lame-duck body that was going to be deciding the 1800 presidential election had more Federalists than Republicans.

Almost all of the Federalist congressmen interpreted the constitutional mandate to mean that they were to use their best individual judgment to pick the man they believed most suited to be president, not to do the will of the majority. To

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govern effectively, Burr would need to engineer Federalist support, obtainable only by acceding to Federalist views.

Despite laying claim to a lame-duck majority, House Federalists did not control a sufficiency of states to elect Burr. With 16 states in all, the winning number was nine.

Jefferson and the Republicans held eight states—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Adams and the Federalists had six—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and South Carolina. Two delegations— Maryland’s and Vermont’s—were divided.

When the House met in Washington, DC, the new capital, in February 1801, to choose a president, the first ballot was eight for Jefferson, six for Burr, and two divided. The same occurred on the second ballot and the third, and through a week of more than 30 ballots.

Speculation arose about what might happen if the election had not been decided by March 4, when by law a president was to be inaugurated.

Rumors swirled of assassination plots, arson schemes, military preparations, revolution, and nascent civil war. A Republican newspaper wrote, “Usurpation must be resisted by freemen whenever they have the power of resisting,” Jefferson warned Adams to expect “resistance by force and incalculable consequences.”

Aaron Burr’s role in the crisis is murky. There is no evidence that Burr offered anything specific to Federalists in exchange for their support.

But neither did Burr emulate Pinckney’s statesmanly stance in South Carolina and remove himself from contention.

Instead, once it was clear that there was to be

James Asheton Bayard

Fanning the Fires Swag printed to tout Thomas Jefferson foreshadowed 220 years of figurines, posters, buttons, t-shirts, and gimme hats.

a tie, Burr declared to a Jefferson ally that he would accept the presidency if offered. He could become president only if some Republicans decided to vote for him to avoid a crisis. Had Burr openly sought those politicians’ support, he would never have received it. He followed the best course open to him, despite the fact that none of the electors wanted him to win.

To win, Burr needed three votes; Jefferson, one. Moderate Federalist James Bayard, a champion of Hamilton’s financial program, including the establishment of a national bank, was Delaware’s sole delegate. If Bayard were to switch his vote, Jefferson would have nine states and the presidency. In a long, passionate letter, Hamilton lobbied Bayard, not only savaging Burr but backhandedly endorsing Jefferson. “I admit his politics are tinctured with fanaticism. . . that he has been a mischievous enemy to the principle measures of our past administration, that he is crafty & persevering in his objects, that he is not scrupulous about the means of success, nor very mindful of truth, and that he is a contemptible hypocrite,” Hamilton wrote, balancing that harsh portrait by observing that Jefferson was no zealot but rather inclined to temporizing. A man of character, Jefferson would not ruin the financial system, making him by far the better of two bad choices, Hamilton maintained.

Bayard, fearful of seeing the stalemate drag on, conveyed to Jefferson that his vote depended on certain guarantees, such as that Jefferson would not undermine the bank and that he would leave in place individuals Bayard had placed in government jobs.

Did Jefferson make concessions? Maybe.

At any rate, Bayard pronounced himself satisfied. He withheld his vote, as did Federalists in Maryland and Vermont, giving Jefferson 10 states— without a single Federalist who voted for Burr actually changing his vote to Jefferson. The logjam broke, and after 36 ballots the House elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States.

The American presidential election of 1800 had not been pretty at all.

The balloting almost didn’t occur, and events came close to triggering violence. However, for the first time in history a nation saw power pass peacefully from one political party to its opponents, beginning an American tradition that has persisted even in the midst of civil war. H DECEMBER 2020 31

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Camp Follower In 1777, a high-born wife takes her three youngsters to North America to find her husband, a German officer fighting under British command. What could go wrong?

By Jonathan House

Struggle at Saratoga Baroness Riedesel had no idea she and her little ones were bound for one of the Revolution’s climactic confrontations.

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atching sight of Quebec, Baroness Frederika Charlotte Riedesel felt her heart pound. Early on that Wednesday morning—June 11, 1777—the baroness spied from aboard ship a cluster of stone buildings perching on a hilltop between rivers named for Saints Lawrence and Charles, and beyond the little city ranks of forested mountains. It had been nearly a year since Baroness Riedesel, 30, and her small daughters left Brunswick, a German-speaking duchy located in central Europe. They and their servants were to join her husband, an officer whose unit of Brunswickers had been hired to fight with the British Army.

As far as Frederika knew, her Friedrich was stationed at Quebec.

In a memoir, the baroness described how, as their vessel entered the harbor, the crews of ships already at anchor fired salutes. A dozen sailors in

white wearing green sashes rowed a boat to the ship to escort her to shore—and to deliver bad news. Days before, General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel had left Quebec leading his 3,000 troops as part of a 7,000-man British force marching south to quell a rebellion in the Empire’s other North American colonies. He had left a letter saying where he had gone and explaining that he would send for her and the girls in due time. With her neat coif, pale skin, and elegant dresses, the blueeyed baroness resembled a porcelain figurine, but she was also strong-willed and determined.

Rather than wait for her husband’s summons,

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Frederika Charlotte von Massow wed Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, baron of Eisenbach, in 1762 in Neuhaus, Brunswick. Frederika was 16, daughter of a general in the army of Prussian King Frederick II, aka Frederick the Great.

Friedrich was 24 and the favorite aide-de-camp of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, one of the 18th century’s nearly 100 German-speaking states.

He pronounced his family name “Ree DAY zell.”

On young Riedesel’s behalf, Duke Ferdinand asked Frederika’s father if his subaltern could have her hand, a model of proper procedure. Yet the couple also enjoyed a love match, having grown close at her family home in Minden, where Friedrich had been Frederika’s favorite among many young officers to come calling.

The Riedesels had been married for 13 years when the duke of Brunswick appointed Friedrich to lead a brigade that England’s King George III had hired to fight in America. With his forces stretched across a global empire and the Americans in revolt, the king needed more troops. German states historically had provided multiple nations with boots on the ground—for a price.

When King George advertised for mercenaries, six states jumped at the opportunity. Hesse-Cassel sent the most, about 17,000; German troops came to be known in America as “Hessians.”

Brunswick came second with 6,000 soldiers.

Other forces hailed from Hesse-Hanau, Anspach-Bayreuth, Waldeck, and Anhalt-Zerbst.

When Friedrich announced his impending departure for the New World, Frederika, who had grown up following her father’s armies and was pregnant with their third child, said she would come too and bring along Augusta, 4, and Frederika, 2. Friends’ tales of cannibalistic Indians were no deterrent. She and Friedrich agreed he would go first, and she would follow later. He

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The couple agreed: he would go to canada and she would follow once their third child was born. It took her more than a year to get there.

she decided to set off into the North American wilds to find her man. Doing so put her in the ranks of camp followers—civilian women with ties personal and practical making them part of 18th century soldiering, even on battlefields.

In the 1700s there was no such thing as Blitzkrieg—the Hundred Years’ War was more the model. Accompanying a soldier on campaign was the only way many military families could have lives together. Commanders trying to keep desertions down grudgingly accepted women’s presence in garrison and in the field. Upperclass wives who could afford the outlay kept semblances of households, setting the table as lavishly as possible and hosting their husbands’ fellow officers and their spouses, but most women in this situation had far smaller purses.

To pay their and sometimes their offspring’s way, these camp followers—so called because on the march they generally were at the rear, with the baggage train—worked at armies’ fringes, helping with the laundry, cooking, sewing, and tending the wounded. About 300 women accompanied British General John Burgoyne’s army on its push south from Canada on the Northern Campaign of 1777. Baroness Riedesel’s memoir chronicles camp-follower life with a noncombatant’s vivid perspective on important battles and actors of the American Revolution.

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Destination Quebec A trans-Atlantic voyage carried the baroness and her children to the port of Quebec, where her search for her husband began in earnest.

left on February 22, 1776, frequently exchanging heartfelt letters with her.

“Dearest wife: Never have I suffered more than upon my departure this morning,” Friedrich wrote in his first letter home. “My heart was broken.”

Within months, in a newly built carriage, the two Frederikas, Augusta, and 10-week-old Caroline were heading west, attended by several servants. Rockel, the forester from Frederika’s father’s estate, packed his firearms and came along as her footman. In one town, residents warned of bandits, some of whom recently had been caught and strung up. Passing through woods in a carriage that twilight, the baroness felt something fuzzy come through a window and strike her in the face.

“It was the body of a hanged man with woolen stockings!” she wrote.

In England, she visited King George and Queen Charlotte. The queen told the baroness she admired her guest’s courage and would be asking about her progress. Save for the royal audience, the Riedesels’ British interlude was tedious. The baron had arranged for his wife to make the trans-Atlantic crossing with the wife of a British officer he knew; the woman, Hannah Foy, repeatedly delayed their departure until winter shut down the sea lanes. At last putting to sea the following spring, Frederika had new cause to regret her association with Madame Foy. Their ship’s captain was an “old and intimate friend of Madame Foy,” who dared not “refuse to him those liberties to which he had formerly been accustomed.”

And Madame Foy’s pretty chambermaid not only caroused at night with the ship’s sailors but pilfered the captain’s wine, then tried, unsuccessfully, to blame Rockel. “I felt deeply for this honest man,” the baroness said.

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Frederika’s decision to set out after Friedrich arose from fear that once the Northern Campaign had gotten under way, she would never see him again. Lady Mary Carleton, wife of Quebec Governor Guy Carleton, proffered invitations to dine and stay at her official residence. Frederika came for dinner but declined lodging. She instead found a boatman to take her and her party 20 miles up the Saint Lawrence to Point aux Trembles. Landing in the middle of the night, the travelers transferred into a trio of

Baroness Riedesel

two-wheeled open carriages called calashes. The baroness held her infant on her lap, tied Frederika to the seat beside her, and sat Augusta on the calash floorboards at her feet. The servants and luggage—including cases of Friedrich’s favorite wines—followed in calashes of their own.

The baroness promised their drivers a reward for speed. “I knew that if I would reach my husband, I had no time to lose,” she said. At a locale where they had to cross several rivers a storm arose. The only vessel available was an odd contrivance, narrow and made of bark—a canoe.

Terrified, the voyagers sat, mother and children at one end, servants at the other, trying to keep an even keel. A cascade of hail set little Frederika to screaming and flailing. The boatman shouted at the baroness to control her child, lest the canoe capsize. On the far bank, they learned two fishermen had drowned that way nearby. “I thanked God that I had accomplished the passage so successfully, and yet it was not pleasing to me to know of my danger,” the baroness said.

His wife and daughters caught up with Baron Riedesel at Chambly, near Montreal—but only after mistaking him for a Canadian. Friedrich looked ill and feeble and even in the heat of summer was wearing a long woolen coat with blue and red fringe at the hem. Weeping, little Frederika, who associated her father with portraits of a handsome bewigged man in a brilliant Hessian Households on the March Many of the German-speaking warriors King George hired arrived in the New World accompanied by wives and children.

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The Northern Campaign, as conceived by Burgoyne and Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the colonies, called for a large British force to push south from Quebec to Albany, New York, and meet another marching north from New York City at the order of General William Howe, senior British commander in America. The aim was to control the Lake Champlain and Hudson River waterways, separating and isolating the northern and southern colonies. The British then could focus on reducing New England, in their eyes the wellspring of revolutionary sentiment. At first

General John Burgoyne

Lord Germain

the plan went smoothly. As the superior British force was nearing American-held Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, Continental General Arthur St. Clair decided he had no choice but to evacuate that dilapidated bastion to save his 2,500-odd troops. In the following weeks, General Philip Schuyler, senior commander of the Americans’ northern forces, kept up the retreat, abandoning Fort Anne, located about ten miles south of Lake Champlain, Fort George, ten miles west at the southern end of the lake of the same name, and Fort Edward, some 20 miles south of Fort George. Burgoyne reported his triumphs in letters to Lord Germain in London.

Schuyler felt that he lacked the strength to mount a direct attack, but as he was withdrawing, he undertook a skilled campaign of obstruction, blocking roads, damming streams, and dismantling bridges. Progress across the wet, mountainous terrain grew increasingly difficult for Burgoyne’s troops. At Bennington, Vermont, thousands of militia gathered to repel an eastward British probe. American attacks on Fort George led Burgoyne to abandon that and other rearguard locations, in effect severing his force’s ties to Canada (“Desperate Hours,” August 2019).

In August, Burgoyne established a headquarters at Ford Edward. The Riedesels spent three

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blue and gold uniform, shied away from the seeming stranger.

“No, no! This is a nasty papa,” she wailed. “My papa is pretty.”

“The very moment, however, that he [Friedrich] threw off his Canadian coat, she tenderly embraced him,” Frederika wrote.

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At Freeman’s Farm Baron Riedesel and his Brunswicker troops advance to aid British troops under pressure.

Wives following common soldiers in 18th-century armies lived very differently from their aristocratic counterparts with ties to the officer corps.

They got army rations, but had to work for them, performing odd jobs.

Cooking and sewing was usually a male preserve, but wives would help out. Women commonly handled washing. Assisting in field hospitals, one of the few paid jobs open to camp followers, appears to have been among the most desirable. Women often worked as sutlers, selling commodities—primarily alcohol—to the ranks. Typically, each regiment had one sutler; others sometimes could keep shops in the vicinity of an encampment.

To a degree, the British army controlled soldiers’ marriages, expecting wives to work hard and not cause trouble. The army tried to prevent the presence of prostitutes but was not always able to keep whores from gathering nearby, especially when it set up camp near urban centers; some commanders required periodic screenings for venereal diseases. Few reports of adultery involving soldiers’ wives are on record, but many officers, rankled by the women’s presence, took a hostile attitude toward them.

The Continental Army was more relaxed; many soldiers were married before they enlisted. When troops left garrisons for the field, women’s presence usually was restricted further. The number of women accompanying British regiments during the Revolution varied but averaged roughly one woman for every eight soldiers, or about 6,000 at its peak. Muster rolls suggest about 1,600 on the American side, or about one woman per 30 men.

The Americans were fighting much closer to home, many on short-term enlistments, and the army had fewer resources for soldiers’ wives.

The numbers of accompanying women and children tended to grow when an army remained awhile at one location and soldiers fraternized with locals. During the Revolution, which had aspects of a civil war, armies moving across the countryside attracted more followers of all sorts as supporters of one side or the other sought protection from the foe.

Those 300 women accompanying Burgoyne’s army at the beginning of the 1777 campaign were joined by hundreds of others as Loyalist inhabitants, perceiving the British column as safe, joined the march.

En route, women historically clustered at the column’s rear, with the

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Pitching In

happy weeks there—though food did run short.

Baroness Riedesel, happy to have her family together again, felt “beloved by those by whom I was surrounded.” The presence of a handful of other fine ladies, including Lady Harriet Acland, wife of Colonel John Dyke Acland and author of her own memoir of the 1777 campaign, reinforced soldiers’ pride and nostalgia for home.

Anglicizing her name’s proper pronunciation.

British soldiers fondly bestowed the nickname “Red Hazel” on Baroness Riedesel, The army resumed its march south. The baroness reported morale to be high. Burgoyne proclaimed, “The English never lose ground.”

Victory appeared to be certain. The baroness remarked on the beauty of the countryside she was passing through, but also noted its bleak

baggage train. Most walked, often carrying belongings and children. During battles, women usually stayed in the rearguard, but sometimes officers directed them to bring water to troops.

American Mary Ludwig Hayes came along two years later to join her husband, who was serving with a company of the Pennsylvania Artillery.

At the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, she supplied men on the line with drinking water, leading soldiers to nickname her “Molly Pitcher.” When her husband collapsed from heat stroke, she took his place at the cannon and kept firing at the enemy. —Jonathan House

emptiness; many inhabitants had fled to join the rebel army. “In the sequel this cost us dearly, for every one of them was a soldier by nature, and could shoot very well,” she wrote. “Besides, the thought of fighting for their fatherland and their freedom, inspired them with still greater courage.”

Compounding the perils facing the British and German column, Howe had not dispatched that promised force to meet Burgoyne at Albany. Lord Germain had failed to give Howe a clear order to do so, and the general decided that that year’s priority would be an attack against the American capital at Philadelphia. By the time Burgoyne severed his army’s ties to Canada, he was on his own, and knew it, with his foe growing stronger every day. Congress had decided to relieve Schuyler, a wealthy landowner many members disliked because of his continual retreats. The politicians replaced Schuyler with General Horatio Gates and instructed neighboring states to send more militia. Buoyed by victory at Bennington and animated by reports of atrocities by Indians attached to Burgoyne’s army, thousands enlisted. When Gates arrived at Van Schaik Island, on the Hudson River, DECEMBER 2020 37

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All the Riedesels were caught in the gears of October 7 and the days after. The baroness wrote that her husband’s breakfast at the house where they were staying was interrupted by the sounds of his troops mustering for that day’s fateful events: it was time for him to leave. “Our misfortunes may be said to date from this moment,” she wrote. As the day passed, rifle shots built to a murderous crescendo. Feeling “more dead than alive,” she supervised dinner preparations; the evening’s guests were to include General Simon Fraser, commander of the British advance unit.

Within hours later, Fraser did arrive—mortally wounded and borne by troops who moved aside the dining table to lay their leader down. Groaning all night, the dying man repeatedly asked the baroness to forgive his intrusion. He sent Burgoyne a message asking that he be buried at 6 the next afternoon on a nearby hill. Fraser died that morning. Burgoyne decided to honor this request, much to the dismay of the baroness, who thought the army should begin its retreat immediately. “This occasioned an unnecessary delay, to which a part of the misfortunes of the army was owing,” she said.

The mass of healthy soldiers, wounded men, horses, and baggage train lumbered north by fits and starts. During one pause, Friedrich Riedesel climbed into his wife’s carriage and slept for three hours with his head on her shoulder. Hungry men asked the baroness for food; the commissaries had not distributed any provisions.

She reprimanded a Burgoyne aide for the to take command in late August, his army numbered Aftermath oversight, leading to an appearance 15 about 10,000. He believed his men ready to do some- Following Burgoyne’s minutes later by the commander himself, surrender, top, the fam- promising to remedy the situation. thing new: advance on the enemy.

Gates’s army occupied Bemis Heights, one of sev- ily was welcomed by “I believe that in his heart, he has eral bluffs overlooking the Hudson near the town of General Philip Schuyler never forgiven me this lashing,” the barSaratoga. On September 19, the British ordered a force and victorious rebel oness wrote later. troops. Opposite: the to flank the American position to its west. The AmeriAs the retreat was ending its second couple at home, picday, the column came under attack. Friecans went out to meet them. The result was a bloody tured near life’s end. drich Riedesel sent word for his wife to clash in a clearing amid dense forest called Freeman’s Farm. At day’s end the British held the field, though at Pyrrhic cost, having take refuge with the children and servants in a taken heavy and irreplaceable casualties without improving their tactical farmhouse that had been housing a British field position. Rations were low. The region’s foliage was starting to turn—a hospital. As they approached the one-and-a-half warning of winter. Friedrich Riedesel argued that the British should retreat story, gambrel-roofed building with a chimney to a more secure location to await reinforcements, and, should no rein- on each end, she spied riflemen across the Hudforcements appear, to Canada. Burgoyne, fearing permanent harm to his son aiming at them. She threw the children and reputation if he were to withdraw, decided to risk all on another attack. On herself to the carriage floor. “At the same instant, October 7, he sent a large number of troops in another flanking action. His the churls fired and shattered the arm of a poor men encountered more Americans than he had been expecting. Near English soldier behind us,” Frederika said. Amid Freeman’s Farm, rebels mowed down redcoats pouring into a wheat field. a sustained enemy barrage, she and her girls and Fighting as if possessed, the American General Benedict Arnold drove the servants scrambled into the ad hoc hospital’s

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British troops back to their own outer works.

Burgoyne’s gamble had ended in disaster.

Baron Riedesel

Baroness Riedesel

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The Riedesel girls and their mother spent six days in that cellar, often under fire, before Lord Burgoyne requested a ceasefire.

cellar, where they spent a grueling night with other women and children and wounded soldiers. “A horrible stench, the cries of the children, and yet more than this, my own anguish, prevented me from closing my eyes,” the baroness wrote. In the morning, the firing eased.

Frederika directed volunteers to sweep the 45’x33’ cellar clean and fumigate the space by sprinkling vinegar on embers. No sooner was the work done than the enemy barrage recommenced, cannon balls crashing through rooms overhead where army surgeons were working.

“One poor soldier, whose leg they were about to amputate, having been laid upon a table for this purpose, had the other leg taken off by another cannon ball,” Frederika said. The baroness distracted herself tending to the wounded. An officer in the cellar helped calm the children with his imitations of a cow’s bellow and a calf’s bleat. “If my little daughter Frederika cried during the night, he would mimic these animals, and she would at once become still, at which we all laughed heartily,” she said. The party had sufficient food but soon ran short of water. “In order to quench thirst, I was often obliged to drink wine, and give it also to the children,” the baroness said. The general, who was camped nearby with his troops but frequently checked in on his family, drank so much he alarmed his spouse and the faithful Rockel. “I fear that the general drinks so much wine because he dreads falling into captivity and is therefore weary of life,” Rockel said. Soldiers’ efforts to fetch water from the river drew fire from enemy riflemen, so one of the young wives volunteered to try. “This woman, however, they never molested; and they told us afterward that they spared her on account of her sex,” the baroness

said. The Riedesels’ ordeal in the cellar lasted for six days until Burgoyne requested a ceasefire to discuss surrender terms.

Saratoga redirected the Revolution, brightening American hopes of prevailing against the world’s leading military power and paving the way for an alliance with France. The British defeat ended the war for the Riedesels. After a long but relatively comfortable captivity at Boston and then Charlottesville, Virginia, during which the baroness helped her husband battle illness and despondency, Friedrich Riedesel was released on parole.

His family was allowed to rejoin British forces in New York City. Riedesel later was exchanged for an American. He returned to active duty and was stationed back in Canada. At war’s end in 1783, the family headed for Europe with an additional member: daughter America. In London, the king and queen received the family and thanked them for their service. Back home in Germany, the baroness had two more children and in 1800, with help from daughter Augusta’s husband Count Heinrich von Reuss, brought out a memoir, “The voyage of duty to America; letters of Mrs. General Riedesel, upon her journey and during her six years’ sojourn in America, at the time of war that country, in the years 1776-1783, written to Germany.” Baroness Frederika Charlotte Riedesel died in Berlin in 1808. She was 61. H DECEMBER 2020 39

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PHOTO CREDIT

With war in the wings, the United States began drafting men into service in 1940

By Paul Dickson

PHOTO CREDIT

“Your Number Came Up!”

By the Numbers President Roosevelt, left, waits as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, blindfolded, reaches for another capsule as the Selective Service system gets into gear.

PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

Excerpted from The Rise of the G.I. Army 19401945: The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army Before Pearl Harbor © 2020 by Paul Dickson (pauldicksonbooks.com). Published in 2020 by Grove Atlantic Inc., groveatlantic.com/ book/the-rise-of-the-gi-Army-1940-1941, $30.

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Making It Legal On September 16, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Burke-Wadsworth Conscription Act into law.

One great surprise arising from enactment of the Selective Service law and the events of registration day was a seeming transformation of young college students and graduates from pacifism and isolationism to intervention and a willingness to register for the draft. Smoothly and without incident, some 4,700 students and faculty members at Harvard University registered for military service on R-Day. One overarching factor may have been awareness of the devastation engulfing Europe and the British Isles.

Much coverage greeted the participation of actors and athletes. Working on location in Big Bear Lake, California, John Wayne registered. In Hollywood and Beverly Hills, a host of younger stars, including Henry Fonda, Don Ameche, Lon Chaney, and Robert Taylor lined up. In Chicago, heavyweight champion Joe Louis, 26, appeared

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instantly as the “draft card,” the slip came into immediate use in verifying the age of males purchasing alcoholic beverages.

If you were not 21—the legal drinking age in many states and lesser jurisdictions—you did not have a card and could not be served.

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or many mid-20th century Americans, October 16, 1940, was and is R-Day—the date on which all men between ages 21 and 45 were required to register for the draft. As men were forming long lines at registration facilities, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on radio. “On this day, more than 16 million young Americans are reviving the 300-year-old American custom of the muster,” FDR said. “On this day, we Americans proclaim the vitality of our history, the singleness of our will and the unity of our nation.”

The District of Columbia opened 47 registration centers to accommodate the 113,371 men who lined up there in a cold rain to register. Almost half a million registered in Chicago. The level of cooperation achieved by a nation still divided philosophically between isolation and intervention was remarkable. Newspapers set up special bureaus providing draft information to answer questions about registration, and radio stations made sure their listeners knew how and where to register.

The registration form itself was simple, with 12 boxes to be filled in by examiners who asked registrants a dozen basic questions. An examiner then eyeballed each man to determine whether his build was slender, medium, or stout. In characterizing registrants by race, examiners had five choices: White, Negro, Oriental, Indian, and Filipino.

A wallet-size card handed back to each registrant contained basic information, including date of birth. This document was proof that the signer had registered, and he was advised to keep it with him at all times. Known

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Giant Step Forward Twenty-five members of the New York Giants football team showed up as ordered on October 16, 1940, to register for conscription.

at a segregated registration station, accompanied by his brother and manager. Louis enrolled under his given name—Joseph Louis Barrow—and the following day an Associated Press photo of the champ ran in newspapers throughout the country captioned, “He’s a fighter for you, Uncle Sam.” William McChesney Martin Jr., president of the New York Stock Exchange, spent more than six hours trying to find his assigned registration station.

Three Rockefellers proudly stood in line, as did the student sons of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and two of FDR’s sons.

The actual draft began ritualistically at the Departmental Auditorium on Constitution Avenue NW in Washington, DC, on October 29, 1940. “This is a most solemn ceremony,” President Roosevelt intoned to open the proceedings. “It is accompanied by no fanfare—no blowing of bugles or beating of drums. There should be none.’”

Despite that claim, the event displayed, as one historian put it, all the “panache of a Hollywood award ceremony.”

As the commander-in-chief addressed a big All Together Now Heavyweight boxing crowd, warplanes flew over the capital. champion Joe Louis, Celluloid capsules that contained the lotnear right, and FDR’s tery numbers were escorted to the auditorium son John Roosevelt both by 500 veterans of World War I. The blue- presented themselves to tinted capsules were dumped into a 10-gallon register for the service. fishbowl and stirred with a spoon made of wood from a beam at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The fishbowl, last used for conscription in 1919, had traveled from Philadelphia with a full military escort.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, blindfolded with a strip of yellow linen that had been cut from the fabric used to upholster the chair used by the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, drew the first capsule. Stimson handed the capsule to the president, who announced the number: 158.

At this, a woman in the audience screamed loudly enough to be heard over the CBS radio network. Washingtonian Mildred Bell explained later that her son Robert held number 158. Across the country, 6,175 men assigned that number now knew they were required to report immediately for a physical. At the end of the CBS broadcast, reporter Robert Trout concluded his report by telling listeners his own lottery number.

After the initial numbers were drawn, local boards sent a questionnaire to each man affected to determine his eligibility. Recipients had five days to answer and return the eight pages of questions. Their responses would be regarded as confidential, viewed by only their draft boards.

Based on registrants’ sworn answers, the boards shunted candidates into four categories. Class 1 was men available for induction into the U.S. Armed Forces. Class 2 was men deferred from induction because their civilian jobs were important to the national good. Men in Class 3 were deferred because they had dependents relying on them. Class 4 encompassed governors, sitting judges, and others whose induction was prohibited by law. Men in sub-class 4-F were deemed unfit for service for reasons of physical or mental health or because they were in prison, a mental hospital, or otherwise removed from society. Men classified 1-A—fit for service—were in line to be called up and sent to an induction center. The system ensured that skilled workers in key industries would be called up last. Such men would do ten times as much

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good on the job as in uniform, a member of the Selective Service committee explained to the Washington Post.

all registered, as the law demanded. On November 14 in a New York City courtroom, eight theological students who had refused to register reiterated that resistance, claiming they simply were adhering to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Unwilling to recant when a judge gave them a chance to do so, the eight were sentenced to a year and a day in a federal penitentiary. Their trial signaled the government’s position that refusal to take part in the system was a felony.

Opposition to the war as a matter of conscience or faith became an issue. Over several months, authorities imprisoned 5,000 to 6,000 men on grounds that they had failed to register or agree to serve the nation in some alternate way. These resisters were mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses reprising the position members of that

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Checked Out Clockwise from left: a West Virginia recruit, 21, undergoes examination; Army doctors at Fort Slocum, New York, give physicals; handsome actor Franchot Tone’s draft card.

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Using lists compiled by governors and state adjutants general, the War Department already had selected draft boards and support personnel to staff them. Attached to each board was an appeals board, a physical examination board, and a medical appeals board. Boards had a simple set of parameters. A man had to be between 21 and 45, at least 5’ tall and no taller than 6’6”, weigh at least 105 lbs., have vision correctable with glasses, and have at least half his teeth. He had to be able to read and write, and have no criminal convictions. Foreigners who had taken out initial papers toward obtaining citizenship were eligible for the draft; those who had not were ineligible. Members of the Communist Party and the German American Bund were on the same footing as members of any political group.

Draft boards were to screen out men draft officials referred to as “young bums.” At an October 22 press conference, Selective Service and War Department officials urged draft boards to resist the temptation to use conscription to rid their communities of fellows seen as ne’er-do-wells and troublemakers. These individuals challenged the commonplace wisdom that a stint in the Army made good men of bad boys.

Instead of military discipline squaring troubled individuals’ shoulders, the word went out, such men often resisted discipline and became drunks, hypochondriacs, and mental cases. During World War I, 88,000 inductees—described as burdened by mental and nervous instability—had broken down under the strains of military life and afterwards required hospitalization, costing taxpayers $33,000 per man, officials said.

Conscientious objectors and war resisters were rare, and most but not

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sect had taken during World War I. Jehovah’s Witnesses also refused military service in Adolf Hitler’s Germany; more than 10,000 Witnesses died in Nazi concentration camps.

After R-Day, a thought occurring to many and much promoted by the government was the sunny potential offered by a year in the Army, which would be assigning and training volunteers and draftees for specialties ranging from cook to automobile mechanic. “When the average draftee leaves the service to-day he will be far better equipped to earn a living than he was when he went in,” wrote the popular Sunday newspaper supplement This Week.

Men inclined to such thinking, many of them out of work and cleared for military service, were invited to volunteer on induction day, the idea being that their entry into the ranks would lessen the need for conscription and soften the draft’s impact. In the early weeks, 71,000 “volunteer draftees,” as they were known, asked draft boards to move their names to the top of the list, reducing from 30,000 to 19,700 the number of draftees called by December 1. In some areas, so many draftees volunteered that during 1940 few actually were drafted. Forty percent of volunteer draftees were unemployed, evidence that the Depression was still a fact of life.

Once volunteers had undergone physicals, draft boards called all 6,175 holders of number 158 to be considered for service.

Men holding lottery numbers drawn later were called in sequence and received an “order to report for induction.” That letter named the branch of service a man was being called to and gave the date, time, and place to complete his paperwork and undergo a final physical.

On Monday, November 18, two months and two days after President Roosevelt signed the nation’s first peacetime conscription bill, the first group of 984 volunteer draftees reported at 9 a.m. to induction centers in the six New England states. They immediately underwent a second physical. Each affected induction board’s staff included a neuropsychiatrist, three internists, an eye specialist, an orthopedic surgeon, one general surgeon, a nose and throat specialist, a clinical pathologist, and a dentist.

Men on the Move Conscientious objectors in Lagro, Indiana, top; Southern Californians being sworn into service at the courthouse in Los Angeles on November 18, 1940; first wave of draftees and volunteers in Detroit, Michigan.

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Line Up and Sign Up A WWI recruitment poster was dragooned back into service as millions of men reported for induction into the armed forces.

The Depression’s lingering side effects quickly made themselves known. That first year, nearly half the men drafted were sent home. More than 100,000 were rejected for illiteracy. Punctured eardrums that made a man susceptible to poison

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The first man to undergo induction was from Boston. John Edward Lawton, 21, an unemployed plumber’s helper, secured that status when the three volunteer draftees in line ahead of him failed their physicals. Physicians at that induction center were startled to find that volunteers who had been given a chance to reveal disabilities on their questionnaires and been put through one physical still were failing the final physical. The next morning’s Boston Herald headlined the phenomenon: “20 P.C. OF DRAFTEES SENT HOME.” Officials had assumed that no more than two percent of men called up or volunteering in the first days of the draft would have physical deficiencies sufficient to disqualify them. They were wrong. An early report from New York City revealed that a quarter of men called to induction centers on a given day were found unfit to serve. The Dallas Morning News reported that on a given day in November, a third of men called were unfit.

The most frequent disqualifying factors were a shortage of teeth and poor vision, neither condition difficult to diagnose. Around Baltimore, Maryland, hernias caused most rejections.

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Induction was simple, but not subtle—a fast-moving assembly line arrangement that in an hour could process about 25 men. Most of the physical took place unclothed. Naked men bore numbers on placards around their necks or scrawled on the backs of their hands.

This gantlet included the psychiatric exam, which led some examiners to conclude that nakedness encouraged the shedding of defenses. Nudity made some men nervous, often rendering inductees unable to urinate into a specimen bottle on demand.

At the end of the line, men learned if they had been approved; those who failed were sent home. Those approved were fingerprinted, assigned a serial number, and sworn in, then sent to a reception center to be given uniforms, vaccinated, and receive basic military training before being sent to regular units. As time passed the system dropped the unsettling routine of waking up at home and sleeping that night at a military facility, and instead swore in inductees and gave them two weeks to get their affairs in order before being processed into the Army.

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gas even while masked got many registrants classified 4-F. Of the first million draftees, more than 30,000 were diagnosed with untreated, active cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, and other venereal diseases that disqualified them for service.

Most disturbing was the large number of men displaying the impact of poor nutrition. Of the first million men that draft boards screened in 1940, reviewers rejected at least 130,000 for severe disabilities relating to poor diet. This finding led to a government decision to spike staple food products with vitamins and minerals. Thiamin, niacin, iron, and eventually riboflavin became ingredients in enriched bread and breakfast cereals. Federal food fortification was not new—since the 1920s, salt producers had been dosing their product with iodine to prevent goiter—but the draft rejection rate for the malnourished imbued the practice with new urgency.

Race inevitably intruded. When Connecticut attempted to send two Negro volunteers into service, an order came down from the First Corps headquarters in Boston that these men could not be accepted. Connecticut Governor Raymond Baldwin then threatened to take the matter up with the War Department in Washington, and the officers in Boston backed off. Southern states in the Fourth Corps region announced the number of men going into uniform in the first call by race—Alabama planned to send 313 Whites and 134 Negroes.

Men did try to avoid induction, feigning ailments or having dentists pull perfectly good teeth. Others, as if trying to prove their manhood or patriotism, did their best to hide deficiencies. Draft board physicians learned to pinpoint inductees who were epileptic trying to conceal that condition by studying lips and tongues for scars left by seizures. Virtually every draft board had stories of fellows who, having been rejected, demanded a repeat physical and memorized the eye chart or enlisted in a different service, finding their way into uniform by any means necessary.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard in June 1940, registered at Stanford University that September, under a “permit to attend,” which allowed him to audit classes of his choice without credit. He was one of 22 Stanford students among the first wave of prospective draftees assigned deferments until the end of that academic year. In early 1941, as the European situation was deteriorating, Kennedy, 24, decided that rather than wait until his deferment expired, he would seek a commission by enlisting in the Army. Rejected as medically unfit, he applied to the Navy; again, he was turned down for medical reasons. In September 1941, with a boost from a highly placed Navy officer who was a former colleague of his father and a letter from a Boston doctor declaring him fit for service, Kennedy was accepted into the U.S. Navy.

Actor Jimmy Stewart was at the height of his fame in late 1940 when he was drafted. He was 6’3” but weighed only 138 lbs., causing Army doctors to reject him as underweight. Stewart, a licensed pilot who wanted to serve in the Army Air Corps, sought help. MGM muscleman and trainer Don Loomis put the stringbean star on a workout and diet regimen. Reexamined

You’re in the Army Now Clyde Odell Brown comes face to face with kitchen policing; actor James Stewart, rejected as too skinny, ate himself into uniform, eventually serving as a pilot. on March 21, 1941, Stewart was deemed 1-A, immediately sworn in as a private, and sent to Fort MacArthur, California.

“I’m sure tickled I got in,” Stewart told reporters, who noted that his salary had gone from $12,000 a month to $21 a month.

As 1940 was ending, many draftees now in uniform were celebrating the New Year with the understanding that their fellow Americans believed the Army and local draft boards had gotten off to a good—and equitable—start.

Results of a Gallup poll counted 92 percent of respondents as saying that the draft was being handled fairly; 91 percent said the Army was taking good care of draftees. An overwhelming 89 percent thought the draft to have been wise and a “good thing,” given circumstances in Europe. By New Year’s 1941, the Selective Service mechanism had inducted 18,933 men— compared to what was coming, a drop in the bucket, but the system was up and working. H DECEMBER 2020 47

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Satirists’ Field Day The byzantine Credit Mobilier rumpus lent itself to hilarious simplification. To see who was who, take a gander at page 51.

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Bold Caption Head Mintio quam iliberor recab invendae vellorit, nimaximos re con repta es as sam nitiist

Run from the Shadows How the first modern Washington scandal enveloped James Garfield

By Robert B. Mitchell

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Thomas C. Durant

W

racked with dread on a wintry Tuesday evening in 1873, U.S. Representative James A. Garfield retreated to the pages of his diary. “At 11 o’clock went before the Credit Mobilier Investigating Committee and made a statement of what I know concerning the Company,” Garfield, 41, wrote. “I am too proud to confess to any but my most intimate friends how deeply this whole matter has grieved me. While I did nothing in regard to it that can be construed into any act even of impropriety much less than corruption, I have still said from the start that the shadow of the cursed thing would cling to my name for many years. I believe my statement was regarded as clear and conclusive.”

Garfield had appeared earlier on January 14 before a House committee investigating sweetheart stock sales by a congressman to colleagues. In the years after the Civil War, Washington was awash in sleazy deals, but Garfield had avoided the mire—until now. In sworn testimony, the Ohioan insisted he “never owned, received, or agreed to take any stock of the Credit Mobilier or of the Union Pacific Railroad, nor any dividends or prof-

Garfield’s anxiety had its origins in the effort to construct a transcontinental railroad linking the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The visionary scheme aimed at establishing not only a passenger and freight transportation network but a grid of communities around which the nation could grow. Knowing the stakes and wanting to speed the project, Congress in 1862 passed the Pacific Railroad Act, authorizing issuance of generous land grants and government-backed bonds to the railroads. The companies building the rails, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, incurred huge expenses and took giant risks, hoping for enormous returns.

No project in America’s preceding 90 years had been of remotely similar scope or significance.

Nonetheless, the Union Pacific was having trouble drawing investors. Congress priced stocks and bonds such that it made the securities extremely tough to sell to Eastern speculators—until Union Pacific Vice President Thomas C. Durant devised a clever solution. Durant, who understood that the big money would come from building—not running—railroads, bought a dormant railroad finance company in 1864 and renamed it Credit Mobilier.

Durant used Credit Mobilier to soak the government-backed Union Pacific by overcharging the railroad for construction contracts. The company made millions of dollars in profits for its investors, a number of whom also sat on the Union Pacific board. A congressional committee that investigated the operations of Credit Mobilier concluded in 1873 that the company’s most lucrative contract with the Union Pacific produced almost $30 million in profits.

One of the most enthusiastic investors in the Union Pacific and in Credit Mobilier was U.S. Representative Oakes Ames (R-Massachusetts), whose family-owned shovel-making business had earned him the sobriquet “King of Spades.”

After Ames and Durant—both Credit Mobilier board members—patched up a bitter feud over control of the railroad in the fall of 1867, they divided control of unallocated Credit Mobilier shares between them.

But another investor, Henry S. McComb, a railroad speculator and Durant ally, insisted that he should have received some of the extra stock as well. McComb pressed Ames to accommodate him. The King of Spades refused. Ames

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its arising from either of them.”

That night, as Garfield was scribbling in his diary, he feared permanent stain from the scandal consuming the capital.

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Along Came a Spider Scandal progenitor Ames, center, relentlessly hawked felicitously priced shares in the transcontinental railroad project, eventually enlisting a large coterie of fellow lawmakers in a dubious and shadowy arrangement.

Garfield

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Kelley

Ames

Colfax

Wilson

Patterson

Brooks

Dawes

told McComb by letter that he was offering the shares in question to members of Congress as a way to win the Union Pacific support on Capitol Hill. “I have used this,” Ames said of the Credit Mobilier stock, “where it will produce most good for us, I think.” McComb was unconvinced.

In November 1868, he sued Ames and Credit Mobilier demanding more shares.

Ames’s dual role as a member of Congress and major investor in the Union Pacific troubled some. “This man, worth millions, takes the position of Representative—seeks and gets it—for

the purpose of promoting his private interest,” Navy Secretary Gideon Welles raged in his diary. But many in Congress were eager to do business with the King of Spades. As the feud with McComb was simmering during the winter of 1867-68, Ames was flogging the valuable Credit Mobilier shares to Capitol Hill colleagues wherever he caught them—on the floors of the House and the Senate, over dinner, and on the streets of the capital.

Ames buttonholed Representative William “Pig Iron” Kelley (R-Pennsylvania) at a corner a few blocks from the White House. Kelley recalled Ames offering shares on terms so generous “I did not see how I could lose anything.” Garfield hesitated, but Ames kept pressing him. “He said if I was not able to pay for it, he would hold it for me `til I could pay, or until some of the dividends were payable,” Garfield testified. Ames eventually DECEMBER 2020 51

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In passing the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, Congress intended to promote construction of the transcontinental railroad with $48,000 in governmentbacked bonds and 6,400 acres in land grants for every mile of track laid. Despite the proffered federal largesse, investors stayed away because the law barred the railroad from selling its securities at less than face value and put investors on the hook should the venture fail. In addition, the railroad was to be built across the vast expanse of the West to serve markets and communities that did not yet exist.

By 1864, the Union Pacific needed to raise capital—and fast—or construction of the transcontinental line would stall.

Swashbuckling Union Pacific Vice President Thomas C. Durant, nicknamed “the Napoleon of Railways,” improvised a solution. Durant bought a Pennsylvania-chartered construction company he rechristened “Credit Mobilier,” borrowing a prominent French bank’s glamorous name. Durant used Credit Mobilier to build his railroad. More importantly, Credit Mobilier could generate profits for itself and dividends for Union Pacific stockholders by inflating construction costs and taking payment in Union Pacific securities.

Unlike the railroad, Credit Mobilier, upon receiving Union Pacific shares in payment, could resell those shares at the market price rather than the rate Congresshad set. And customers who obtained Union Pacific stock through Credit Mobilier avoided the liability hanging over those who invested directly in the railroad.

Durant’s arrangement allowed investors to pay themselves to build the Union Pacific, an arrangement commonly used by other railroads that in this instance raised questions about whether the government was being fleeced.

Representative Oakes Ames (R-Massachusetts), an avid railroad investor, believed Credit Mobilier offered a “practical scheme” for profitably investing in the Union Pacific. He poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the venture and recruited fellow New Englanders to invest before falling out with Durant in a battle for control of the Union Pacific and its lucrative construction subsidiary. In autumn 1867, as Ames and Durant resolved their differences, they divided unallocated Credit Mobilier shares and formalized a $48 million construction contract with the railroad. A congressional committee found that Credit Mobilier billed the railroad $57.1 million for construction when the actual cost was $27.1 million, producing a profit of almost $30 million—$513 million today. The lucrative pact made Credit Mobilier shares much more valuable—one investor estimated that the stock doubled in value as a result—just as Ames began to peddle them on Capitol Hill. —Robert B. Mitchell

A Credit Mobilier Primer

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HENRY GUTTMANN COLLECTION/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; GRANGER, NYC

persuaded Garfield to accept 10 shares on those terms, investigators concluded, and recruited at least 10 other Hill colleagues willing to invest.

At least one went to bat for Ames. Representative Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts bought 10 Credit Mobilier shares for $1,000 in December 1867. Dawes then shepherded into law a bill authorizing the Union Pacific to move its headquarters away from New York—and beyond the reach of judges allied with Durant. Although the railroad failed to take advantage of the opportunity to relocate, the measure illustrates what Ames was hoping to get for his stock.

Credit Mobilier’s reach into Congress did not go unnoticed. In 1869, railroad finance expert Charles Francis Adams Jr., descended from two presidents, warned in an article in the North American Review that Credit Mobilier represented “a source of corruption in the politics of the land, and a resistless power in its legislature.” Americans paid little heed until September 4, 1872, when the muckraking New York Sun devoted most of its four broadsheet pages to an article headlined “The King of Frauds” detailing what McComb had said when testifying against Ames in his suit. Error-ridden and slanted—one subtitle read “Congressmen Who Have Robbed the People, and Who Now Support the National

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If You Build It, Will They Come?

The railroads needed investors to make the cross-country connection, above and right, whose profitability depended on Americans leaving the East for opportunities out West.

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Standing Up for the Plowman Left, a magazine illustration extolled the role played by the Grange in alerting Americans to the railroads’ rapacity in sacrificing agrarian well-being to advance the interests of investors.

Robber”—the newspaper’s exposé nonetheless spelled out the fundamental facts.

In his lawsuit, McComb named 11 congressmen Ames had identified to him as recipients of Credit Mobilier shares in 1867-68. Along with Garfield, McComb listed former House speaker Schuyler Colfax, now vice president, and Senator Henry Wilson (R-Massachusetts), picked by President Ulysses S. Grant to replace Colfax on the ticket for his 1872 re-election run. Lesser figures named by the Sun included Senator James Patterson (R-New Hampshire) and U.S. Representative James Brooks (D-New York), who had bought Credit Mobilier stock independently of Ames. The Sun also presented damning transcripts of letters that Ames had written to McComb in early 1868. In those missives, Ames confided that his decision to place the Credit Mobilier stock with congressional colleagues was an effort to amplify the Union Pacific’s DECEMBER 2020 53

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Getting to the Point A 17.5-carat gold spike was ceremonially driven to complete the rail line linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah.

nominally apolitical Patrons of Husbandry— also known as the Grange—to counter railroad influence. Newspapers nationwide ran stories inspired by the Sun scoop. The once obscure phrase “Credit Mobilier” quickly became shorthand for the assumption that railroads were corrupting American politics.

The Sun blockbuster exploded as Garfield was out in the Montana Territory, concluding a visit with the Flathead Indians. The Ohioan devoted September 8 to catching up with his mail and the news. Garfield had every reason to look forward to his return to Washington.

With Grant poised to crush the quixotic editor-turned-politician Horace Greeley in the November election, many more years of Republican dominance seemed assured. Garfield’s political ascent, which had begun with his 1859 election to the State Senate and to Congress in 1862—with time off during the Civil War to lead Ohio troops as a Union general—showed no signs of slowing. Back East, he would be resuming his duties as chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee

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The railroads dominated statehouses nationwide, so angering farmers that a movement known as the grange took form as a way to fight the power.

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sway on Capitol Hill. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames told McComb, “& if a man will look into the law, (& it is difficult to get them to do so unless they have an interest to do so,) he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.”

The sensational reporting galvanized readers.

Southern and Northern Democrats, who were eager to undo Reconstruction, cited the stories as evidence of Republican corruption.

Conservative critics believed Credit Mobilier exemplified the dangers of government involvement in business. The exposé also spoke to growing concern about the way railroads were transforming the nation’s economy.

Americans celebrated the completion of the transcontinental connection in 1869, but their enthusiasm curdled as railroads flaunted their domination of state legislatures from Albany to Sacramento. Farmers in the Mississippi Valley and the South, angry about extortionate freight rates and monopoly power, flocked to the

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and a political partnership with House Speaker James G. Blaine. A rude shock greeted him, however, in the form of newspaper stories and headlines screaming about Credit Mobilier. As he was on his way home, Garfield struggled to grasp his circumstances. “I find my own name dragged into some story which I do not understand but see only referred to in the newspapers,” he confided in his diary on September 9.

As his train was nearing Ohio, Garfield dashed off a note to Colfax inquiring “about the nature of the slander against him and me and others.”

Responding by mail, Colfax professed indifference to the revelations, but the vice president later made an emotional denial before a hometown crowd in South Bend, Indiana, that would be proven false. Back in Washington, Garfield turned for additional advice to a high-powered capital attorney. Pennsylvanian Jeremiah Sullivan Black, a Democrat, had been a state judge and attorney general and secretary of state during the Buchanan administration. If anyone could erase Garfield’s uncertainties, it was this consummate Washington insider, to whom Garfield referred as “a great and delightful friend.”

Black may have been a treasured confidant, but he was not a disinterested observer. He had represented McComb in his suit against Ames and had tipped a Washington correspondent for the Sun to McComb’s testimony. Seeking counsel on how best to respond to the Credit Mobilier revelations, Garfield was relying on the man responsible for leaking them.

Black assured Garfield that all was well. Ames was guilty of offering a bribe, Black advised, but because Garfield had not known bribery to be Ames’s purpose, Garfield was not guilty of accepting a payoff. Garfield should remain calm and profess ignorance about Ames’s intentions, Black said, adding that this stance “shows that you were not the instrument of his corruption, but the victim of his deception.”

Placated, Garfield met with Blaine in early December to plan an investigation into the Sun allegations. The next day, the House formed a committee of two regular Republicans, one Liberal Republican, and two Democrats, to look into the charges. U.S. Representative Luke Potter Poland (R-Vermont), headed the panel. At first meeting in secret, the committee took testimony from Ames and McComb. When protests by the press and the public forced the proceedings into the open, members and former members of Congress trooped into the committee room to tell their sides. Most denied buying shares or claimed to have backed out of deals

shortly after purchasing shares. Ames insisted that there was nothing wrong with a member of Congress holding stock in a corporation that could be affected by the legislation of Congress.

The Sun wryly headlined a series of stories on the hearings “Trial of the Innocents.”

Charles Francis Adams Jr.

Jeremiah Black

James G. Blaine

Horace Greeley

Ulysses S. Grant

With the press and Capitol Hill fixated on the scandal, Garfield found staying as cool as Black had advised easier said than done. As the day of his testimony was approaching, Garfield battled a nausea-inducing bout with nerves. The House floor, usually a refuge where lawmakers could immerse themselves in legislative debate or gossip, offered no relief. Garfield felt the House to be consumed by a “feeling of panic” caused by the continuing “discussion of the Credit Mobilier and the Pacific R.R,” he wrote in his diary. On January 14, Garfield testified as Black had counseled. He admitted under oath that he had discussed purchasing Credit Mobilier stock with Ames but said he never actually agreed to buy shares—and claimed not to have known at the time what exactly Credit Mobilier did. “You never examined the charter of the Credit Mobilier to see what were its objects?” committee member George McCrary (R-Iowa) asked.

“No sir,” Garfield replied. “I never saw it.” He was under the impression, Garfield maintained, that the company built housing.

“You did not know that the object was to build the Union Pacific Railroad?”

“No sir,” Garfield said. “I did not.”

Garfield’s denial echoed similar dodges by Colfax, Kelley, Patterson, Wilson, and others.

The evasions infuriated the King of Spades. As congressmen who had bought stock from Ames were trying to put as much distance between themselves and Credit Mobilier as possible, the Massachusetts Republican again addressed the investigative committee. He explained in detail his transactions with members of the House and Senate. Patterson, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, was Ames’s first target.

Having once denied to the committee that he had bought Credit Mobilier shares from Ames, former schoolteacher Patterson returned to admit under oath that he had bought the shares.

Ames looked on as Patterson squirmed “like one of the poor delinquents he used to torture” in the classroom, the Sun reported.

The next day, Ames elaborated, testifying that many lawmakers had held shares far longer than claimed and as a result had reaped substantial dividends. Ames’s revelations enraged James Garfield. The King of Spades “is evidently DECEMBER 2020 55

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As fellow lawmakers were trying without success to clear their names, Garfield swung between optimism and despair. On February 8, he wrote a friend in Ohio that “men here are recovering their balance a little and begin to think with more calmness on the merits of the case” but stopped short of forecasting an end to his troubles. It was “too early,” Garfield cautioned his correspondent, “to tell into what conclusions the public judgment” would be. Writing in his diary a day later after dining with Black, he struck a gloomier note, dismissing the other man’s sunny predictions. Garfield said he doubted Black saw “all the forces that are now at work to injure and defame.”

Weeks of tension climaxed on February 18, 1873, with release of the Poland committee report. That body’s findings and recommendations resounded through the House chamber for about an hour as the House clerk read the document aloud and implicated lawmakers grimaced and glared. “The report produced a profound sensation and was listened to with silence and painful interest,” Garfield wrote in his diary.

Garfield pursed his lips and avoided eye contact as the clerk read a committee finding that he had bought 10 shares from Ames and received $329—$8,060 today—in dividends. The committee concluded 56 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Ward Healers Schuyler Colfax, pictured in coffin, never recovered from his association with Credit Mobilier. Others, like James Garfield, left, were able to recover from their bruising brushes with scandal.

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determined to drag down as many men with him as possible,” Garfield steamed in his diary on January 22. “How far he will be successful it remains to be seen. But in the present condition of the public mind, he will probably succeed in throwing a cloud over the good name of many people. He seems to me as bad a man as can well be.”

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that virtually every individual on the roster McComb’s provided had made money on Credit Mobilier shares sold by Ames. Poland demanded that the House expel Ames and Brooks.

Despite the committee’s findings, Garfield felt vindicated. In an outcome that infuriated Democrats and the public, the committee concluded that Ames had been attempting to use Credit Mobilier stock to sway lawmakers’ votes—but also that Garfield and others who bought the stock were innocent of wrongdoing. The Poland committee could not “find that any of these members of Congress have been affected in their official action in consequence of their interest in Credit Mobilier stock.” Black, the influential capital insider who distinguished between offering and receiving a bribe, had been right.

But if Garfield thought the worst was past, he was badly mistaken. The Senate failed to vote on the expulsion of Patterson recommended by the Senate committee examining the scandal. Public fury intensified when, just before leaving town, Congress voted itself a retroactive pay increase— accomplished by attaching the bump up to an appropriations bill that Garfield had managed.

On top of everything else, the aftershocks of the Panic of 1873, an economic plunge which triggered the worst economic crisis in American history until the Great Depression of the 1930s, intensified the ensuing political crisis.

Garfield responded with dispatch. He quickly refunded his own raise, a gesture that the local press applauded. He published a paper defending himself against the Credit Mobilier allegations and he campaigned energetically across his district. These efforts helped fend off disaster, but Garfield also benefited from a divided opposition that fielded two candidates—a Democrat and an Independent who had been nominated

by Garfield’s Republican foes.

Democratic attempts to link Garfield to a paving contract scandal in Washington, DC, went nowhere. Garfield hung on to win re-election in 1874 even as Republicans lost dominance of the House for the first time since 1858.

His escape accelerated Garfield’s rise through Republican ranks. When Blaine went to the Senate in 1876, Garfield became House Republican leader. In 1880, divided Republicans turned to Garfield over Grant and Blaine as their presidential nominee (“Porch Politics,” August 2016).

Garfield’s 1880 election victory came on a 59-vote electoral college margin that camouflaged a ballot-box difference of only 8,355 votes.

the most important nation on the globe a man whose oath has been squarely contradicted as was Gen. Garfield’s oath in the Credit Mobilier report?” the Democratic Washington Post asked. The answer was yes—barely. Garfield’s 59-vote Electoral College win masked a razorthin 8,355-vote popular margin over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock. On July 2, 1881, the president was waiting to board a train in Washington when a delusional man ritually characterized as a “disgruntled officer-seeker” shot and badly wounded him. Garfield died September 19 from infections caused by doctors’ unsanitary handling of his injuries.

Historians convinced that intraparty feuding consumed Garfield’s presidency damn him with faint praise. “His stormy presidency was brief, and in some respects unfortunate, but he did leave the office stronger than when he found it,” biographer Allan Peskin wrote in 1978.

Just after his death, though, the once-jaundiced Post was more effusive.

“The events of his wonderful life, supplemented by the sad dramatic incidents of the past two and half months, will make such chapters of history as will be read with Bad Luck, Good Timing ever-increasing interest for centuries to come.” Garfield’s assassination The paper made no mention of Credit Mobilier early in his term spared or Garfield’s hand in the scandal that less than a him what could have decade earlier rocked the capital. The “shadow been painful interest in his Credit Mobilier role. of the cursed thing” had lifted, at last. H

As Garfield had feared, the specter of Credit Mobilier lingered. During the 1880 campaign Democrats made the scandalous affair a rallying cry. “Are honest men willing to put at the head of DECEMBER 2020 57

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Splitting States How Maine finally rode out of Massachusetts on the Missouri Compromise

By Stephanie Bouchard

Maine’s long march to statehood had begun in earnest in 1785, when Peleg Wadsworth, 37, owner of a store in what is now Portland, led neighbors in a campaign to end what they all saw as “enslavement” by Massachusetts, which did not even share a border with Maine—New Hampshire separates them—but nonetheless retained a firm grip. Maine separatists had a considerable list of grievances echoing those for

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had persuaded voters and the leadership of Massachusetts to endorse the move. But letters from Maine delegates on Capitol Hill were telling King another story. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Henry Clay (Democratic-Republican, Kentucky) had declared that Maine would not gain statehood if federal legislators insisted on restricting slavery in Missouri, a territory also petitioning to join the Union. Five of the seven men in Maine’s delegation were willing to pass up statehood for the district rather than see slavery expanded. King did not condone slavery, but it had taken 35 years to get Maine to the cusp of statehood and he was not going to let politics keep that from happening.

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s 1819 was becoming 1820, William King should have been celebrating. After a 35-year struggle to cleave from Massachusetts, the District of Maine, King’s home turf, was about to become a state.

One of Maine’s richest shipbuilders—he was known as “the Sultan of Bath” in that center of shipwrighting—King, 50, had played so instrumental a role in bringing about this profound change that it was widely thought he would be the new state’s first governor. King had just fathered his first son and second child, born on Christmas. The baby and his mother, Ann, were healthy. However, rather than feeling jubilant King was awash in incredulity. Inexplicably, far to the south in Washington, DC, Congress had embroiled Maine’s statehood bill in the fight to restrict slavery in states joining the Union.

Early in December 1819, members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation representing Maine had submitted the district’s petition for statehood. From the delegates’ perspective— and King’s—approval of the request was a forgone conclusion. Maine’s movers and shakers

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State Maker William “Sultan of Bath” King steered Maine toward statehood and away from subordination to Massachusetts.

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which the North American colonies had flayed England—in particular, the complaint that Massachusetts unfairly taxed Mainers, who were underrepresented in the statehouse in Boston.

This bitterness traced to the 1600s and the clouds enveloping land titles in New England.

This was especially true in the District of Maine, where competing claims to territory were common. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Maine native Alan Taylor in his book, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier 17601820, land title confusion arose, in part, from “vague and overlapping patents” drafted by lawyers in Britain with no knowledge of the region.

Another factor was the phenomenon of Native Americans who had no tradition of “exclusive, private, hereditary property in land” selling the same parcels over and over to new buyers.

By the late 1670s, the colonial government in Boston had consolidated power over Maine and its small, disorganized population, as well as over New Hampshire. In 1679, Britain made New Hampshire a royal province with its own governor. Maine got no such reprieve. In 1691, when the crown renewed New Hampshire’s provincial charter, a pact between Boston and Britain sealed Maine’s fate as part of Massachusetts.

Through the mid-1700s, Maine became a shuttlecock in the competition between France and England that culminated in the Seven Years’ War. During the American Revolution, the British attacked, burned, and destroyed Falmouth, an important Maine port.

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Henry Clay

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Aims at Odds Continental Army general Henry Knox, left, and later Kentucky congressional leader Henry Clay figured prominently in the saga of Maine’s fight for statehood.

Below, a map showing the original 13 colonies, plus what today is the state of Maine.

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The Price of Freedom After a Franco-British rivalry preceding the Seven Years’ War entangled Maine, the Revolution saw British warships attack Falmouth, wreaking havoc on that key port. the Revolution meant that the District of Maine finally enjoyed peace. Its populace began to grow as the region’s expanses of land and abundant opportunity attracted southern New Englanders.

Some newcomers—powerful, wealthy men who had strong economic, social, and political ties to Boston—were known as “great proprietors.” Others were former militia members or enlisted men trying to survive. All had fought for independence, but each demographic had a different outlook. Those differences would fire 35 years of debate over statehood for Maine.

Hardscrabble families moving to Maine held that the Revolution had nullified titles to land that had been owned by or granted to individuals by the British Crown; they figured to move onto such parcels and claim them as their own

independence brought a surge of new residents to maine, many of whom saw land as their compensation for the years that they had spent fighting the British.

as compensation for wartime service.

This outlook collided with that of the great proprietors, like Henry Knox, formerly one of George Washington’s generals. Knox’s in-laws owned vast tracts in Maine. He and his fellow proprietors believed the Revolution had been fought to keep large property holdings intact for families such as his wife’s people, and to benefit those, like himself, who had risen to the top of society, Taylor said in an interview. Through their deep connections and with their resources, these players reasserted ownership of or purchased land to which newcomers laid claim.

Conflicts over land ensued, sometimes progressing into violence. Frequently, the great proprietors, flexing their connections to Boston, maintained the upper hand, fueling resentment against Massachusetts.

“If it were left up to these people in the interior towns who were fighting with the great proprietors, Maine would have become a state pretty quickly,” Taylor said. However, power in Maine concentrated in towns along its coast—the municipalities with the highest populations, the most political clout, and a dependency on trade with Massachusetts.

But Peleg Wadsworth, who had served as a brigadier general in the Continental Army, joined fellow coastal townspeople chafing at Maine’s subDECEMBER 2020 61

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Rufus King

way to New Jersey. Savings in money and time resulting from this federal requirement discouraged Maine coastal towns from jeopardizing ties to Massachusetts. Finally, Wadsworth and company threw in the towel.

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servience to the Bay State.

Besides seeking to relieve Maine of unfair taxes and eliminate underrepresentation, Wadsworth and company wanted power of their own, seeking to be “the ‘big men’ in a new state without oversight from Boston elites,” said Liam Riordan, a history professor at the University of Maine at Orono.

Wadsworth and his allies belonged to the Federalist Party that dominated Massachusetts politics, but the Boston government had no desire to share power with Mainers.

To run its own show, the Wadsworth faction had to break away. This meant organizing coastal separatists and hinterlanders equally eager for statehood into an alliance strong enough to persuade a diffident stratum of Maine residents to embrace the cause. “Clearly a more persistent group never lived than the men who championed the cause of separation between 1785 and 1797,” wrote historian Ronald Banks in Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785-1820.

“Rebuffed time and again, they refused to concede defeat.”

Between 1785 and 1794, separatists convened five times, interrupting their agitation only during the creation and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and Shays’s Rebellion but failing to gain enough voter support.

The main impediment was the 1789 U.S. Coasting Law. That law required merchant vessels sailing the Atlantic seaboard, outbound and inbound from their home ports, to stop and pay a fee to states that did not border a voyage’s point of origination. Since Maine was part of Massachusetts, ships based there paid no Coasting Law fees until they had gotten all the

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Point of Disorder Maine’s opposition to slavery, above, deeply complicated efforts for statehood that Rufus King, William’s half-brother, was aiding in Congress.

Stuck in a Stew of Issues Maine’s long campaign for statehood, above, was caught in conflicting issues that included revenues from the Coasting Law, administered

by Treasury Secretary William Crawford, left, whose influence was key to revising that law.

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William Crawford

the federal Coasting Law brought so much money into maine ports that their voters refused repeatedly to break out from under another state’s thumb.

The growth of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party as the 18th century was ending revived debate in Maine about breaking free of Boston. As the Democratic-Republicans gained power, Maine Federalists who had supported separation about-faced. If Maine stayed in Massachusetts, Maine Federalists could ally with Federalists in Boston to hold onto power, these partisans reasoned. Democratic-Republicans in Maine, led by William King, favored separation. Boston-based Federalists saw utility in letting Maine go its own way, however, and allowed the district to vote repeatedly for separation. Boston Federalists befriended the ambitious and powerful King, who had bootstrapped himself from sawmill hand to shipping magnate. He had businesses all over the district and had served in the Massachusetts House and Senate. His older half-brother, Rufus King, represented New York in the U.S. Senate.

Between 1800 and 1810, separatists made little headway, in part because of the Embargo Act of 1807, which aimed to stop France and Britain from violating United States neutrality as they fought the Napoleonic Wars, crushed Maine’s economy. The War of 1812 initially sapped separatist energies but after Boston refused to help when British forces occupied Maine’s northeast coast, interest in separating grew. A May 1816 referendum tallied 4,000 votes more for separating than for the status quo—but not enough voters had turned out, invalidating the result. Massachusetts agreed to another vote, to be held that September. For the new vote to be valid, 55.5 percent of the votes had to be in favor of separation.

King and colleagues thought victory assured.

Four weeks after the districtwide vote, delegates from all around Maine met to review the returns.

Separatists were able to tally more votes than those opposing, but still did not achieve the stipulated 55.5 percent majority.

Shenanigans ensued. Voting returns disappeared. Partisans challenged ballots’ legality on grounds of their having been “incorrectly” or “illegally” returned or returned by unqualified voters. Officials debated the meaning of “majority.” Amid the democratic jangle, a majority that at first seemed elusive took form. Separatists cheered. Anti-separatists were apoplectic. The press caterwauled. Massachusetts politicians so detested the display that they voided the vote.

King and allies laid low but swore to carry on.

The sultan of Bath knew what had to be done.

Most “no” votes in the September 1816 election had been cast in coastal communities where the Coasting Law dominated all considerations. If Maine was to become a state, King knew, the Coasting Law had to go. Late in October 1818, he traveled to Washington, DC, to confer with brother Rufus, who offered advice and support—and aided William in convincing Treasury Secretary William Crawford, whose department enforced the Coasting Law, to get DECEMBER 2020 63

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George Thacher

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Congress to revise that statute. In spring 1819, Congress rescinded maritime state-by-state stops and fees.

Again, Mainers asked Massachusetts to allow another districtwide vote on separation. Again, Massachusetts agreed. The July 26, 1819, election saw the largest turnout ever for a separation vote in the district; the proposition passed by 10,000 votes. With stipulations, including a deadline that Congress accept Maine as a state by March 4, 1820, Massachusetts agreed to allow the District of Maine to go its own way. Now a federal bill to grant statehood had to navigate the corridors of Congress.

In February 1819, as the Coasting Law revisions were ripening, Congress was considering a bill to grant the territory of Missouri statehood. Addition to that bill of a clause effectively barring slavery in Missouri—the clause reads, “That the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall be duly convicted; and that all children of slaves, born within the said state, after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free, but may be held to service until the age of twenty-five years.”—triggered heated debate that engulfed the congressional session, loosing threats of civil war and disbanding the Union. The matter was unresolved when Congress adjourned on March 3, 1819. Members reconvened that December to find an unexpected gift for advocates of slavery: Maine’s petition for statehood. To that petition bill, pro-slavery members added a clause that would hinge Maine’s

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Intended Consequences The Missouri Compromise, whose engineers are thematically shown here, brought Maine statehood but defied hard-line abolitionists like George Thacher, below.

Most Mainers scorned slavery on moral grounds.

The district’s constitution barred slavery and enfranchised africanamerican men.

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statehood on Missouri’s admission to the Union with slavery unrestricted there. To break the ensuing logjam, Congress engineered a compromise: admit Maine as free and Missouri as slave, allow Arkansas and Oklahoma to permit slavery, and prohibit slavery permanently north of latitude 36 degrees and 30 minutes in the unorganized territory of the Louisiana Purchase.

Mainers were outraged. The District of Maine, as part of Massachusetts, had prohibited slavery since 1783, when a series of court cases in Boston deemed the practice illegal in the state.

Even while Massachusetts was accepting bondage, Mainers had owned very few slaves.

And while Maine was never a hotbed of abolition—its first anti-slavery body didn’t form until 1833—most residents scorned slavery on moral grounds. The district’s constitution barred slavery and enfranchised African-American men.

With the coupling of Maine statehood to the question of restricting or expanding slavery’s domain writ large, the seven members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation who represented Maine voters—and who did not support slavery—faced an epic quandary: vote against expansion of slavery into Missouri and kill Maine’s chance at statehood or vote for Maine statehood and allow slavery to expand.

“Maine statehood was supposed to be a foregone conclusion—the hard work was supposed to be getting the votes in Maine to break away and convincing Massachusetts’ legislature. [They] did all that,” said Matthew Mason, history professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

“Congress was supposed to be a formality. Turns out not to be, and so that creates a sense of crisis and competing priorities.”

Mainers at home and in Washington, DC, split sharply on what to do, Mason said. Newspapers in Maine and around the country vociferously staked out positions on either side of the issue, as did the seven Maine members of the Massachusetts House delegation. According to Mason, foes of compromise, willing to restrict slavery even at the cost of Maine’s statehood, framed the argument as a simple moral question: Are you in favor of slavery or against slavery?

Judge George Thacher, a member of Maine’s constitutional convention, wrote to John Holmes, one of the seven Maine men in Congress and an architect of the compromise, that the delegation should “suffer Martyrdom in the cause of liberty, rather than yield an inch in favor of slavery.” The Portland Gazette said Maine would do better to forgo statehood “than bear up so wicked a freight as the slavery of Missouri.”

But would-be compromisers rejected binary morality, Mason said. They saw compromise as a matter of politics. Constitutionally, Congress could not prohibit slavery in new states because new states entered the Union as equals of existing states, they argued; to dictate whether a state could or could not allow slavery would be to trample that state’s sovereignty. The pro-compromise contingent disdained the separatists’ moralizing, declaring the real concern to be that letting slavery expand would boost the South’s clout until it eclipsed the North’s.

Until that point, grants of statehood had been focusing on the goal of balancing power between slave states and free states. The Maine-Missouri fight became a contest between North and South to advance each region’s hegemony at the other’s expense.

Land and Sea A Maine crest illustrates the state’s deep roots in agrarianism and corresponding nautical history.

Maine delegates sought William King’s advice.

At first, King supported the view that Maine should not ride into statehood on the backs of enslaved persons. He asked half-brother Rufus, a leader among congressional abolitionists, to do whatever he could to extricate Maine from this disaster, but nothing could be done. King began making contingency plans, including discussion of Maine temporarily reorganizing itself as an independent republic, pending a future stab at admission. King lobbied Boston to extend the March 4, 1820, deadline for obtaining statehood, which brought about a two-year extension on admission to the Union.

These arrangements could have facilitated withdrawal of the statehood petition, and some argued for that. But King and other leaders of the Maine Democratic-Republican party were done waiting. King’s support for rejecting statehood to avoid expanding slavery evaporated, despite the break that this shift threatened with his brother.

Obtaining statehood by taking slavery’s side was distasteful and unfortunate, said King and the supporters of compromise, but after such a long, hard fight, there would be no pulling back. King urged Maine’s seven delegates to vote for the compromise. Five voted against.

Still, the Missouri Compromise passed, Maine achieved statehood, and the United States of America began a torturous trek toward secession by the Southern states and civil war. H DECEMBER 2020 65

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Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-New York), center, with residents, staff, and press on Liberty Street in Hazard, Kentucky, while touring Appalachia.

hungry. He trudged unpaved streets, meeting residents who lacked indoor plumbing and children who hadn’t had breakfast. He saw hollows that flooded because coal companies had scraped all cover from the surrounding hills.

Beside exerting a direct impact on policy— Kennedy pushed for improvements in the Food Stamps program that proved a long time in coming—and national politics—within weeks he entered the Democratic presidential race— RFK’s tour has come to symbolize a moment when enlightened 1960s liberalism built a fleeting consensus around poor and working class people that stretched from Harlem to Harlan.

The immediate response to Kennedy’s trip was not nearly as congratulatory as the reputation it has acquired subsequently. Many Kentuckians bristled at the portrayal of their state as an abject backwater. Others wrote vitriolic letters

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All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia

By Matthew Algeo Chicago Review; 2020; $28.99

The latest standout on local libraries’ RFK lists is All This Marvelous Potential, in which Matthew Algeo focuses on two days in 1968 that Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-New York) spent in Eastern Kentucky. This is not simply a blow-by-blow of 48 hours in Kennedy’s life nor a prequel to Thurston Clarke’s similarly excellent The Last Campaign. Algeo situates his book in the context of Appalachia at a time when the rest of America was starting to learn about the extent of that region’s poverty, waning opportunities, and scarred landscape.

Kennedy’s coal country tour convinced him the War on Poverty was not enough. Incumbent Lyndon Johnson’s social programs were as teaspoons against an ocean of pathological conditions in places like Hazard, seat of Perry County. In a one-room schoolhouse, Kennedy heard from the jobless, the disabled, and the

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Mountain Memories

to the senator, accusing his informants of squandering welfare checks on TV dinners, instant potatoes, and other “luxuries.”

Near his book’s close, Algeo cites 2014 New York Times data showing that six Eastern Kentucky counties rank among the nation’s 10 most distressed. In 2016, voters in those six counties went for Donald Trump.

Rather than attempt to explain how this region transformed itself from one that was

open to Kennedy’s message to a MAGA stronghold, Algeo offers a historically grounded precis to a half-century long national conversation regarding one of America’s poorest precincts.

—Clayton Trutor teaches American history at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont.

University of Nebraska Press will publish his book Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta and Atlanta Remade Professional Sports. He tweets as @ClaytonTrutor.

On one of the first pages of American Warsaw, Dominica A. Pacyga declares, “Polish Chicago and Polish America cannot be understood without understanding Polish history.” The author takes this idea very seriously. He has filled his incredibly detailed story of Polish influence on Chicago, hub of the Polish diaspora in the U.S.—Chicago’s metropolitan area has some 1.5 million residents of Polish descent—with interesting information about the Windy City, but also about Poland. He explains how Polish phenomena, like 19th-century tensions between nobility and peasantry, shaped Chicago’s development and, on a broader scale, American history. Using a rich palette of diverse, well-researched facts, Pacyga paints a Technicolor saga of the rise and demise of Polish neighborhoods in Chicago. Beginning with the establishment of the city’s first Polish Roman Catholic parish in 1867, he weaves through waves of migration to Polish greenhorns’ and their descendants’ progress from working to middle class and from city to suburbs. By no means a sugar-coated portrait, American Warsaw describes Polish achievements, like creating a vibrant network of social and cultural organizations, as well as compellingly treating troubles with poverty and crime. Chronicling juvenile delinquency among Polish youths in the 1930s, his story compares with David Simons’s sociologically charged HBO series The Wire. Other topics like institutions and their proceedings run to the dry side. Among American Warsaw’s ensemble cast of Polish Chicagoans, only a few—musician Walter “Li’l Wally” Jagiello stands out— emerge fully fledged. The book’s opening may seem chaotic in its account of intricate conflicts within the Polish diaspora, but this foundational material proves its worth as the narrative advances. In vividly conveying Polish Chicago’s complexity, diversity, and vastness, Pacyga illuminates many Polish-American factions, institutions, and social groups, as well as a wealth of cultural influences transmitted, received, and kept vibrant in Chicago and environs throughout what has been almost a 200-year Polish presence there. —Journalist and blues musician Marek Kępa writes in English from Warsaw, Poland, about culture, politics, history and society for website Culture.pl.

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PAUL GORDON

Windy City, Polish City

American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago

By Dominic A. Pacyga University of Chicago, 2019; $27

That Toddling Town The scene outside Polska Stacya saloon in Chicago on May 29, 1903.

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Flagging In 1860, secessionists in Columbia, South Carolina, fly the first states’ rights flag.

fascism—hostile both to the planter aristocracy and to racial minorities, often embracing nascent feminism, committed to industrialization and militaristic in foreign policy.

Though insistent upon a “states’ rights” understanding of the division between federal and state spheres of authority, the secessionist states’ activist philosophy of government was sometimes condemned as dictatorial. Slavery, however, was seen as negotiable, sometimes even undesirable—provided Whites could keep their hegemony through systems that, while theoretical, anticipated real-world Jim Crow.

The minority Southern ideology was the inverse of its counterpart—firmly pro-slavery, albeit with the caveat that enslaved persons deserved humane treatment. This school’s believers focused less on White power than on preserving the status of the planter aristocracy, White or Black. Some even recommended enslaving working-class Whites, arguing that costly slaves would receive better treatment than easily replaced factory workers. Most in this faction advocated fair dealings with

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Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 1815–1870

By Jeffrey Zvengrowski LSU, 2020; $55

No major conflict in American history can match the Civil War for generating controversy.

The common view holds that the Confederacy owed its brief existence to men bent on maintaining White supremacy and preserving slavery. Defenders of the Old South insist that the issue was states’ rights, crediting Southerners of the day with tending to favor gradual elimination of slavery, advocating humane treatment of bondsmen, and willing to treat a few free Black plantation owners as their White counterparts’ equals. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Zvengrowski’s book demonstrates that both readings are inaccurate and that proponents wrongly assume the Confederacy to have been a monolithic bloc rather than an uneasy alliance between rival factions.

Seeing Napoleonic France as a model for the combination of White supremacy with White egalitarianism, the Confederacy’s dominant ideology reflected neither old order conservativism nor liberalism.

Instead, Zvengrowski argues, adherents had faith in a bizarre political brew foreshadowing

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Conflicted States of America

American Indians. Libertarian politics, agrarianism, and other stereotypical regional beliefs were at this philosophy’s core.

Brutally honest in depicting the South, Zvengrowski portrays the North no less scrupulously, noting that many Republicans who opposed slavery also were racist. His explanation for the Confederacy’s collective decision to surrender rather than fighting on guerrilla-style is particularly damning of the North—Southerners put down their guns, he says, in part because they realized most Northerners did not pose the threat to White supremacy that secessionists had been fearing.—James Baresel is a freelance writer in Annandale, Virginia.

JACK RIDDLE/THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Brilliantly Bogus Showman P. T. Barnum did not say “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but that miscredited aphorism economically sums up Evelyn Wood and her enterprise, Reading Dynamics.

An avatar of “speed reading,” Wood achieved fortune, fame, and infamy. Her bogus method and bulldozer disregard for fact made her “the greatest huckster of them all,” Marcia Biederman writes as she engagingly explicates the life of a schoolgirl early to show characteristics—skill at debate and oratory, fascination with theatrics—that helped Wood to gull a million otherwise sensible adults.

In the 1930s, the Mormon Church assigned Evelyn and new husband Douglas Wood to spread the faith in eastern Germany. He managed more than 100 sites. She wrote lessons that soft-pedaled Hitler’s anathematizing of Jews.

As German troops were garrisoning Czechoslovakia in 1939, the couple came back to Utah via the Netherlands.

Studying under a professor who claimed to read 6,000 words per minute with “outstanding comprehension,” Evelyn created a regimen in which she ostensibly ingested and digested printed matter at very high speed by zigzagging one fingertip down the center of each page, absorbing “concepts and thoughts.”

At a 1961 National Education Association convention, a teen Wood-method adept performed before an audience of 150. Handed a book he had never seen, he read 120 pages in three minutes, then spent 15 minutes discussing the text. The youth, a DuPont executive’s son, claimed to read 7,000 books—“several thousand,”

he later clarified—per year. Moving from Utah to Washington, DC, Wood began training teachers in the era of the New Frontier. Nourished by endorsements from senators who had been comped the 10-week, $50 course—eventually five weeks at $500—Reading Dynamics sprouted franchises in 150 cities.

Then reality kicked in. Academic authorities hammered Wood’s claims; she countered that no test could gauge comprehension. Student satisfaction sufficed, she said. But she got out while the getting was good, unloading Reading Dynamics to the first in a series of corporate owners, a death spiral preceding one or many strokes that laid Wood low. By the time she died in 1995 her name and program had disappeared; Biederman suggests the time may be ripe for a reinfestation. Scan Artist thoroughly portrays Wood’s rise and fall as well as the need to beware the deal that seems too good to be true. It always is. —Richard Culyer writes in Hartsville, South Carolina.

Scan Artist; How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World that Speed-Reading Worked

By Marcia Biederman Chicago Review Press, 2019; $26.99

Speed Queen Wood in 1966 at a company event with regional manager Carl Peterson in Denver, Colorado.

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Cartographers to Cowboys In Dreams, H.W. Brands seats the reader in canoes and prairie schooners among the stalwarts who explored and settled the American West. In powerfully evocative prose, the best-selling author of Traitor to His Class and The Age of Gold tells how Americans and immigrants slowly, often violently, crossed the Mississippi in pursuit of wealth, thrills, land, sanctuary from illness and debt, and the opportunity to turn indigenous hearts to Christ.

Two presidents’ illusive dreams bookend Brands’s account. Thomas Jefferson’s hopes of finding a watery route to the Pacific ran dry when his Corps of Discovery had to portage the great falls of the Missouri River.

Dreams of El Dorado: Nonetheless, Corps-drawn maps and journal A History of the entries guided later wanderers. Would-be cattle American West baron Teddy Roosevelt lost his herds to North

By H.W. Brands Dakota’s killing winter of 1886-87; he went on Basic, 2019; $32 to champion the conservation of western public lands. Charting the century separating their presidencies, Brands introduces dozens of characters who shared those leaders’ zeal for the West, and often their heartaches.

With masterful ease, Brands weaves a chronicle of the migrations that populated Texas, Oregon, California, Utah, and the Great Plains, highlighting contrasting threads. As Sam Houston reluctantly leads a vengeful Texas militia against the Mexican army at San Jacinto in 1836, Presbyterian missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman are cutting the ruts of the Oregon Trail, intending to share the gospel with wary Nez Perce. While John Muir is celebrating the safeguarding of California’s Yosemite Valley as the first national park in 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry is on the way to subjugating the mighty Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.

Recalibrating the West’s mythopoetic individualism, Brands shows how deeply and consistently European pioneers relied on one another—and on the wider world. Near strangers allied to battle the elements and Indians.

Fur trappers’ and wheat farmers’ fates swayed according to the meandering whims of London fashions and Russian markets.

Western settlers’ lives likewise were wired into 19th century America’s complex of social and political forces. Brands argues convincingly that Abraham Lincoln fought to keep the union intact less out of attachment to the slaveholding South than to the resources of the bountiful West. Absence of a Southern veto in the U.S. Senate during the Civil War let Republicans legislate railroad and homesteading land grants that brought El Dorado within popular grasp. By century’s close, the West had no room for new dreams. —Jessica Wambach Brown writes from Kalispell, Montana.

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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. American History 2. (ISSN: 1076-8866) 3. Filing date: 10/1/20. 4. Issue frequency: Bi Monthly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 6. 6. The annual subscription price is $39.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. Contact person: Kolin Rankin. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182.

9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182, Editor, Michael Dolan, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182 , Editor in Chief, Alex Neill, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 10. Owner: HistoryNet; 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent of more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: American History. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: October 2020. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 30,828. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 27,219. B. Paid circulation.

1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 23,966. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 24,105. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 1,284. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 298. 4. Paid distribution through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 25,250. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 24,403.

D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1.

Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 589. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 687. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 589. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 687. F. Total free distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 25,839. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 25,090.

G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,989. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 2,129. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 30,828. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 27,219. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 97.7% Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 97.3% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 25,250. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 24,403. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 25,839. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 25,090. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 97.7%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 97.3%.

I certify that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes. Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the December 2020 issue of the publication.

18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Shawn G. Byers, VP, Audience Development & Circulation . I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.

10/16/20 9:48 AM

TODAY IN HISTORY JANUARY 30, 1835 ANDREW JACKSON SURVIVED AN ASSASSINATION ATEMPT WHILE ATTENDING A FUNERAL AT THE U.S. CAPITOL. UNEMPLOYED HOUSE PAINTER RICHARD LAWRENCE TWICE TOOK AIM AT JACKSON, MISFIRING BOTH TIMES. IN RESPONSE JACKSON THRASHED HIM WITH HIS CANE. THE CROWD, WHICH INCLUDED U.S. REPRESENTATIVE DAVID CROCKETT, SUBDUED LAWRENCE. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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6/18/20 2:55 PM

Highland Park...

Hallelujah the Hills The Browne estate, inset, is as it always has been but much of the rest of Highland Park is in flux as its fashionability keeps attracting new residents.

CHON KIT LEONG/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ASYLUM RECORDS

…in northeast Los Angeles, California’s San Rafael hills, once was home to the Chumash and Tongva peoples. In colonial times, the vicinity became 36,000-acre Rancho San Rafael, granted in 1784 by Spain to Corporal Jose Maria Verdugo. Auctioned in 1869 to repay a loan, the ranch was leased to sheepherders. In the 1880s a portion of the property served by two rail lines began developing residentially into Highland Park. Roller-coaster topography—a 33° grade ranks the neighborhood’s Eldred Street among LA’s steepest roadbeds—drew bohemians and artists fond of Arts & Crafts architecture. One was printer Clyde Browne, who built a faux-Mission residence and atelier alongside Arroyo Seco, a canyon not as dry as its name in Spanish suggests. For the cover of his 1973 LP For Everyman, right, singersongwriter Jackson Browne posed at his grandfather’s house, to this day still a family holding. By the 1960s, Highland Park’s demographic had shifted strongly to Latinx. Gang violence came to curdle civic life until crackdowns brought peace in the now-gentrifying neighborhood. LA’s light-rail Gold Line passes through, carrying travelers between downtown and Pasadena.

—Michael Dolan is editor of American History.

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