Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (31 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
But the most historically significant and prominent new religious group to emerge in this period was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also called the Mormons. The group was founded in western New York in 1823 by Joseph Smith, a visionary who claimed that he had been given, by an angel named Moroni, an ancient text, the Book of Mormon, written in hieroglyphics on golden plates, which Smith translated and claimed was divinely inspired. Smith and a small band of followers moved to Ohio, where their communal efficiency attracted converts, but their claim to divine revelations attracted the ridicule and enmity of more traditional Protestant Americans, setting off a pattern of antagonism that would send the Mormons on an odyssey in search of a home in the wilderness.
With his church growing in numbers of converts, Smith was gaining political clout as well, but resentment exploded into persecution when another of Smith’s visions called for polygamy in 1843. In Missouri, their antislavery views brought the Mormons into conflict with local people. So did their polygamy and religious views. By 1838, the governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, had ordered that all Mormons be expelled from his state. In what is known as the “Extermination Order,” Boggs wrote, “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated, or driven from the state.” Provoked by the governor’s order, an anti-Mormon mob slaughtered at least eighteen church members, including children, in the Haun’s Mill Massacre of October 30, 1838. And in 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were murdered while jailed in Carthage, Illinois, by members of another militia mob. No one was ever convicted of the crime.
The group was held together under the autocratic hand of Brigham Young, who saw the church’s future in the Far West, away from further persecution. In 1847, Young and a small band of Mormons pushed to the basin of the Great Salt Lake, the new Promised Land. They began a community that became so entrenched as a Mormon power base that Young was able to dictate federal judgeships. As waves of Mormons pressed along the trail to Utah, it became a major route to the West, and the Mormons profited handsomely from the thousands heading for California and gold.
The Mormons were not the only religion facing persecution in an overwhelmingly Protestant America. Many Americans had despised Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, for centuries, going back to the days of the Puritans. The animosity was not only sectarian but national; Italian and Irish Catholics were especially hated, and there was a widely held belief that Roman Catholics were coming to America in large numbers to take over the United States and hand it over to the pope, with a new Vatican to be built in Cincinnati. That sectarian hatred led to numerous acts of violence, including the burning of a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1834 and the deadly “Bible Riots” fought between Catholics and Protestants in 1844. In two waves of rioting, hundreds of houses were burned, two Catholic churches were destroyed, and more than twenty people died in the street fighting between “Nativist” Protestants and Irish Catholics who had come to Philadelphia to work on the railroads and canals that became the “Main Line.”
Must Reads:
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer;
A Nation Rising
by Kenneth C. Davis.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
From “The Raven” by E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE
(1845):
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And that lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Drug addict. Alcoholic. Cradle robber. Necrophiliac. These are some of the epithets associated with Poe (1809–49). Most of them were the creations of a vindictive literary executor who spread the lies following the poet’s death. Later research proved many of those charges to be unfounded slanders. But there was still plenty about Poe that was strange, and his work certainly seemed to justify those bizarre stories.
Born in Boston, Poe was raised by an uncle after the death of his parents when he was three. He first attended the University of Virginia, but dropped out, then later went to West Point, but managed to get dismissed from that institution also. He turned to newspaper editing and writing, and published a few poems and short stories. He also married his thirteen-year-old cousin—an act considered less outrageous in those days than it seems now. In 1845,
The Raven and Other Poems
appeared, winning Poe instant recognition. He continued as a successful magazine editor, at the same time writing the short stories of mystery, horror, and the supernatural—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”—for which he is most famed. After the death of his wife, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Two years later, while on a train taking him to a planned second marriage, he died of unexplained causes.
Poe was a member of America’s first generation of noteworthy authors, including Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, who began to flourish in this period. They represented, as Poe did, the Romantic spirit in writing that flowered in the early nineteenth century, as well as a burst of American cultural maturity that reflected a nation moving out of adolescence.
Chapter Four
Apocalypse Then
To Civil War and Reconstruction
Why was there a war with Mexico?
What did America gain from the Mexican War?
How did Frederick Douglass become the most influential black man of his time?
Where did the Underground Railroad run?
What was the Compromise of 1850?
Why was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
the most important and controversial novel of its time?
What forced the Republicans to start a new political party?
What was the difference between a man named Dred Scott and a mule?
What did Lincoln and Douglas debate?
Why did John Brown attack a federal arsenal?
Why did the southern states secede from the United States?
What was the difference between the Confederate and U.S. constitutions?
What did the Civil War cost America?
Why did the Union win the war?
Who celebrates Decoration Day and Juneteenth?
Why was President Johnson impeached?
T
he space of time separating George Washington’s first inauguration in April 1789 from Lincoln’s first in March 1861 was only seventy-two years, a finger snap in the long stream of history. But that slice of history contained extraordinary events. From a third-rate republic, a sliver of sparsely populated seaboard extending inland for a few hundred miles from the Atlantic, threatened by foreign powers and dangerous Indian tribes, America had become a pulsing, burgeoning world economic power whose lands stretched across an entire continent.
It was a nation in the midst of powerful growth. Canals were spreading across the country, connecting the inland regions to the busy Atlantic ports. The first generation of steamships was beginning to make use of those canals and to carry prospectors around Cape Horn to California. The first railroads were being built, linking the great, growing cities across the widening landscape of America. A new generation of invention was alive, with Americans turning their attention, as Tocqueville noted, to practical pursuits. In 1834, Cyrus McCormick patented his horsedrawn reaper that would begin a revolution in American agriculture. Borrowing from an earlier invention, Eli Whitney improved on a machine that made cotton king in the South—the famous cotton “gin,” short for “engine”—and then set up a factory in the North using the idea of interchangeable parts to ease mass production—an idea that helped produce the guns that would help the Union defeat the Confederacy. In 1843, Congress voted funds to construct a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, and Samuel Morse (1791–1872) perfected the design of the telegraph and devised a code to use it. By 1851, America’s mass-produced innovations—clocks and locks, Colt revolvers and sewing machines, reapers and railroads—were the talk of Europe.
Writing from Paris in the throes of France’s bloody revolution, Jefferson had once almost giddily expressed the notion that “a little rebellion” was good for the republic. Had Jefferson known how devastating the ultimate rebellion would be, he might have acted more forcefully to forestall it during his years of power and influence. History is an unending stream of such speculations and backward glances.
Why was there a Civil War? Could it have been avoided? Why didn’t the North just let the South go? (A popular sentiment in 1860.) These questions have troubled and fascinated Americans ever since the war took place. No period in American history has been written about more, and with more sentiment and emotion—and even romance. Each year, dozens of new volumes appear in the vast library of books about Lincoln, slavery, the South, the war and its aftermath. It is hardly surprising that one of America’s most popular novels—and the equally adored film it inspired—is set during the Civil War era. Without arguing its historical or literary values, there is no question that Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
typifies—and is partly responsible for—the American passion about and romance with the Civil War era.
But as other historians and novelists have made much clearer, there was very little that was truly romantic about the Civil War. It was four years of vicious, devastating warfare that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, murderously divided families and friends, and left much of southern territory smoldering. Political and military bungling occurred on both sides. There were war atrocities of the worst sort. Even today the issues behind the Civil War and the wounds it left continue to underscore the political and social debate in America.
To comprehend the Civil War’s roots, it might be useful to think of America in the first half of the nineteenth century not as one large country but as two separate nations. The America of the North was rushing toward modernity as it underwent its urban and industrial revolutions. While agriculture was still important in the North’s economic structure, it was the enormous commercial enterprises—railroads, canals, and steamship lines; banks and booming factories—that were shaping the northern economy. Its population was mushrooming as massive influxes of European immigrants escaping the famines and political turmoil of Europe came to its cities, lured by the growing myth of America’s unlimited wealth and opportunity.
Starting in 1845, the first year of the potato blight and famine in Ireland, some 1.5 million Irish came to America over the course of the next several years. By 1860, one-eighth of America’s 32 million people were foreign-born, and most of them had settled in the North, drawn to the mill towns of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. It was these foreign workers who would feed the ravenous appetite of the new industrial machine and be pressed into the sprawling slums and tenements of the cities, where they were held captive by companies that were far from enlightened. They dutifully joined the political machines that claimed to represent them, and ultimately provided cannon fodder under the Civil War’s conscription laws.
The southern states, on the other hand, had largely remained the agrarian, slave-based economy they were in Jefferson’s time, when the gentlemen planters of Virginia had helped create the nation. The basis of their wealth was now cotton—produced only to be shipped to the textile factories of Great Britain and New England—and the slaves who produced that cotton, as well as the tobacco, rice, and corn that were staples in the southern states. Although importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1807, the slave population continued to grow at an astonishing rate. And though overseas slave trade was prohibited, trading slaves between states was an enormous business. This contradiction of logic—no foreign slave trade, but a lively domestic one—was one of the laws that many southerners felt were unfairly forced upon them by the North.
