The Fabric of America (49 page)

221
The bloodthirsty threats by pro- and antislavers in the rush for Kansas are quoted in William G. Cutler's
History of the State of Kansas
(Chicago: Andreas, 1883).

222
The birth of Lawrence, Kansas, is detailed in the Reverend Richard Cordley's
A History of Lawrence, Kansas
(Lawrence: Lawrence Journal Press, 1895).

223
The Lincoln-Douglas debates: See
In the Name of the People: Speeches and Writings of Lincoln and Douglas in the Ohio Campaign of 1859,
ed. Harry V. Jaffa and Robert Johannsen (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959).

227
Henry Adams's description of Washington, D.C., appears in
The Education of Henry Adams
.

230
Chase's ruling was delivered in the case of
State of Texas v. White
, 74 U.S. 700, December 1868.

232
In his speech of December 18, 1865, when Stevens put this argument that the secessionist states were outside the Union, he also referred to them as “dead carcasses.”

233
The title of Ralph Korngold's biography
Thaddeus Stevens:A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955) says much about his character. What set Stevens apart was not his shrewd legal brain or his relentless political maneuvering, but his capacity for what Allan Nevins in
The War for the Union:War Becomes Revolution, 1862
–
1863
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960) called “a frenzy of anger.” His furious passion for equality, honed by a background of poverty, found its cause in the fight for the abolition of slavery and its target in the hierarchical south.

234
“
Admit the right of the seceding states
”:
What They Fought For, 1861
–
1865
by James M. McPherson (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

234
“
everywhere a rigid spirit of caste
”: “Three Months among the Reconstructionists,”
Atlantic Monthly,
February 1866.

235
Edward Thomas's comments were made in his autobiography,
Memoirs of a Southerner
(Savannah, 1912),
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/thomas/thomas.html
.

236
The material achievements of Reconstruction are contained in Eric Foner's admirable
Reconstruction:America's Unfinished Revolution
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

237
Hiram C. Whitley's dubious adventures are recounted in
A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans
by William E. Connelley (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1918).

238
Senator William Fulbright's remarks were expressed in
The Arrogance of Power
(New York: Random House, 1966).

238
The spread of Jim Crow laws is described in Foner's
Reconstruction
.

238
John Marshall Harlan's dissenting opinion was expressed in
Plessy v. Ferguson,
163 U.S. 537 (1896).

239
Henry Adams's portrait of William H. Seward appeared in
The Education of Henry Adams
.

239
“
I look off on Prince Rupert's Land and Canada
”:
The Life of William H. Seward
by Frederic Bancroft (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900).

239
Seward's speech at Sitka, made on August 12, 1869, is online at the Library of Congress's page “Meeting of Frontiers.”

241
The most vivid account of Sumner's attempt to lever Canada inside the U.S. frontier is Henry Adams's in his
Education of Henry Adams
.

242
Prime Minister Macdonald's desire to leave the west a wilderness was expressed in a letter dated March 27, 1865, to Sir Edward W. Watkin, now held in the National Archives of Canada.

243
“
every drop of the blood
”: Congressman Wise's comments are recorded in
Niles' National Register
, February 5, 1842.

243
“
One held one's breath
”: See
Education of Henry Adams.

244
Mahan's question “What harm can we do Canada?” expresses eloquently the depth of the strategic rivalry with the British empire.

244
“
I went down on my knees
”:
First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power
by Warren Zimmermann (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

245
Theodore Roosevelt's Berkeley speech is quoted in David McCullough's
Mornings on Horseback:The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

246
Mahan's remark comparing the Philippines with Britain's Boer War appeared in his essay “The Transvaal and the Philippine Islands,”
Independent
52 (February 1900).

247
The evidence of atrocities in the Philippines was quoted in a petition addressed to Secretary of War Elihu Root, dated February 4, 1902, and signed by, among others, Mark Twain.

248
The judgment of Justice Edward White and the dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan were given in the case of
Dorr v. United States
, 195 U.S. 138 (1904).

250
Frederick Jackson
Turner's thesis continues to tower like a battle-scarred colossus over the history of the west, however much its shortcomings are exposed. It seems useful, therefore, to be reminded of the context in which it was originally made, and how confrontational it must have sounded.

252
Woodrow Wilson responded in his essay “The Making of the Nation,”
Atlantic Monthly
.

253
The artistic response to the frontier can be found in
American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820
–
1880
by Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

253
The literary response emerges generally in
Main Currents in American Thought:An interpretation of American Literature from the beginning to 1920
by Vernon Louis Parrington (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1930); a more focused source is another classic,
Virgin Land:The American West as Symbol and Myth
by Henry Nash Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950, 1978). The mythic reality of Kit Carson is well covered in
Virgin Land.

255
Edwin Godkin is quoted in Parrington's
Main Currents
.

256
The values of the new western school of history were brought together in
Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past,
ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

258
Dawes's 1887 speech
: Angie Debo,
And Still the Waters Run
(New York: Gordian, 1966).

259
Mayor T. C. Henry's opinion of Wild Bill Hickok: “Myths and Realities of Frontier
Violence: A Look at the Gunfighter Saga” by Rainer Eisfeld,
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
3, no. 5 (1995): 106–22.

259
The realities of the Chisholm Trail and other cattle drives are revealed in numerous interviews with cowboys, held in the Library of Congress. Entitled “The Chisholm Trail,” they are also available online at
http://www.thechisholmtrail.com/boy1.htm
.

261
The intolerance of the Puritans toward Catholics was the major reason why French Canadians failed to join in the revolution against British rule despite a personal plea by Benjamin Franklin.

261
Franklin's own protests against German immigration came in his pamphlet “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.”

262
Ellis Island records reveal unequivocally that among the crowd of Irish immigrants who disembarked from the
Nevada
, Ellie King was first, and the more newsworthy Annie Moore came next with her brothers.

262
The role of the railroads in encouraging settlement in the west is covered in my
Measuring America
.

263
The articles in
New York Independent
were clearly rewritten, but the details have a firsthand authenticity. They have been republished in
The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, as Told by Themselves
by Hamilton Holt (New York: Routledge, 2000).

265
The appendix to Israel Zangwill's
Melting Pot
is worth quoting if only because it is almost invariably ignored.

265
James Michael Curley
's 1914 comments about the Irish making Massachusetts were delivered against the background whir of thousands of Puritans turning in their graves; he is quoted in William V. Shannon's “Boston's Irish Mayors: An Ethnic Perspective,” in
Boston, 1700
–
1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics
, ed. Ronald P. Formisano and Constance K. Burns (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

267
The Du Bois–Washington split is significant in demonstrating that African-Americans had to accept the same dynamics as that of other outside groups intent on sharing power. The statistics of lynching compiled by the Tuskegee Institute are evidence of how the civil rights movement differed in the ferocity with which it was resisted.

267
President Roosevelt's meeting with Walter White of the NAACP had been arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt. The result of FDR's conservative approach to civil rights was the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1941 and the decision to go to war with a segregated army.

268
The postwar civil rights movement is covered in
Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945
–
1982
by Manning Marable (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984).

271
The growth of barriers on either side of the San Ysidro crossing, and awareness of the intensity of the immigration debate, make the banality of the actual frontier even more striking.

272
Curzon's observation that “frontiers are indeed the razor's edge” was made in the 1907 Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford University.

272
Francis Fukuyama
's 1989 essay “The End of History?” was published in the
National Interest
.

272
Kenichi Ohmae
's
The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy
(New York: Harper Business, 1990).

273
Thomas L. Friedman
's
The World Is Flat:A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).

275
Elena Poniatowski
's remarks were made in an interview in Venezuela, August 15, 2001.

275
Professor Samuel P. Huntington's warnings came first in his article “The Hispanic Challenge,”
Foreign Policy,
March/April 2004, and were later amplified in his book
Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

275
Professor Rubén Rumbaut
, codirector of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine; his conclusions appear in the recently updated and expanded
Immigrant America: A Portrait,
written with Alejandro Portes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

278
The account of AE's final years is derived from the West Point archive and letters in Papers.

Andrew Ellicott's own writing is to be found in the following forms:

Papers of Andrew Ellicott—the Library of Congress's archive collection of correspondence, maps, charts, and reports of astronomical observations, chiefly concerning Ellicott's work in surveying the boundary between the United States and Florida under the San Lorenzo Treaty (1795) and also his surveys of the city of Washington, the boundary between Georgia and North Carolina, the town of Presque Isle (later Erie), Pennsylvania, and the boundary between the United States and Canada under the Treaty of Ghent (1814). LC Control Number: mm 75019679. Original papers in the Manuscript Division, 1975: MSS19679. Microfilm edition available: no. 16,232.

The Journal of Andrew Ellicott, late Commissioner on behalf of the United States… for determining the boundary between the United States and the possessions of his Catholic Majesty in America… With six maps… To which is added an appendix containing all the astronomical observations made, etc.
Philadelphia, 1803.

Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
(
TAPS
) from 1793 through 1818:

—“Accurate Determination of the Right Ascension and Declination of b Bootes, and the Pole Star: In a Letter from Mr. Andrew Ellicott to Mr. R. Patterson.”
TAPS
3 (1793): 116–18.

—“A Letter from Mr. Andrew Ellicott, to Robert Patterson; In Two Parts. Part First Contains a Number of Astronomical Observations. Part Second Contains the Theory and Method of Calculating the Aberration of the Stars, the Nutation of the Earth's Axis, and the Semiannual Equation.”
TAPS
4 (1799): 32–66.