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Index
Colonization
 European Colonization North of Mexico
 Spanish Colonization
 English Colonization Begins
 Life in Early Virginia
 Slavery Takes Root in Colonial Virginia
 Founding New England
 The Puritans
 The Puritan Idea of the Covenant
 Regional Contrasts
 Dimensions of Change in Colonial New England
 The Salem Witch Scare
 Slavery in the Colonial North
 Struggles for Power in Colonial America
 Diversity in Colonial America
 The Middle Colonies: New York
 Fear of Slave Revolts
 The Middle Colonies: William Penn’s Holy Commonwealth
 The Southernmost Colonies: The Carolinas and Georgia
American Independence
 John Adams (1735-1826)
 Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
 Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 Alexander Hamilton (1755?-1804)
 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
 James Madison (1751-1836)
 Robert Morris (1734-1806)
 Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
 George Washington
Civil War
 The Election of 1860
 South Carolina Leaves the Union
 Secession
 Establishing the Confederacy
 Last-Ditch Efforts at Compromise
 Fort Sumter
 Lincoln Responds to Secession
 War Begins
 Prospects for Victory
 Why the Civil War Was So Lethal
 Bull Run
 A War for Union
 The Anaconda Plan
 Pressure for Emancipation
 War in the West
 A Will to Destroy
 The Eastern Theater
 Native Americans and the Civil War
 War Within a War
 Antietam
 The Significance of Names
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The Emancipation Proclamation
The Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation
The Home Front
The Death Toll
The Second American Revolution
The Confederacy Begins to Collapse
The New York City Draft Riots
Blacks in Blue
Fort Wagner
The Battle Against Discrimination
Towards Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg
Vicksburg
The Thirteenth Amendment
Total War
Slaves' Role in Their Own Liberation
The 1864 Presidential Election
Grant Takes Command
A Stillness at Appomattox
'The President is murdered'
The War's Costs
Industrial Revolution
 Labor in the Age of Industrialization
 American Labor in Comparative Perspective
 Sources of Worker Unrest
 The Drive for Unionization
 The Great Railroad Strike
 The Molly Maguires
 The Origins of American Trade Unionism
 Haymarket Square
 Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor
 Homestead
 Pullman
 Labor Day
 The Murder of Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg
 Socialist and Radical Alternatives
 Biographies
World War 1
 Sgt. York
 World War I
 The Road to War
 The Guns of August
 The Lusitania
 The United States Enters the War:
 Over There: American Doughboys Go to War
 Over Here: World War I on the Home Front
 The Espionage and Sabotage Act
European Colonization North of Mexico
Period: 1600-1860
Prior to the seventeenth century, all European attempts to plant permanent colonies north of Mexico--with the
exception of a Spanish fortress at St. Augustine in Florida and a small Spanish settlement in New Mexico-failed. Unprepared for the harsh and demanding environment, facing staunch resistance from the indigenous
population, and lacking adequate financing and supplies, sixteenth-century French and English efforts to
establish permanent North American settlements in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the St. Lawrence Valley,
Florida, and Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina were short-lived failures.
During the early seventeenth century, however, national and religious rivalries and the growth of a merchant
class eager to invest in overseas expansion and commerce encouraged renewed efforts at colonization.
England established its first enduring settlement in Jamestown in 1607; France in Quebec in 1608; the Dutch
in what would become Albany in 1614; and the Swedes a fur-trading colony in the lower Delaware Valley in
1638. As early as 1625, nearly 10,000 Europeans had migrated to the North American coast. But only about
eighteen hundred were actually living on the continent in that year, due mainly to the staggering number of
deaths from disease during the initial stages of settlement.
Seventeenth-century European settlement took sharply contrasting forms. Perhaps the most obvious
difference was demographic. The English migration was far larger and more gender-balanced than that of the
Dutch, the French, or the Spanish. The explanation for the rapid growth of England's North American colonies
lies in the existence of a large "surplus" population. Early seventeenth-century England contained a large
number of migrant farmhands and unemployed and under-employed workers. Most English migrants to North
America were recruited from the lower working population--farm workers, urban laborers, and artisans--who
were suffering from economic distress, including sharply falling wages (which declined by half between 1550
and 1650) and a series of failed harvests. Outside of New England, most English immigrants--perhaps as
many as 70 percent or more--were indentured servants, who agreed to serve a term of service in exchange
for transportation across the Atlantic.
Religious persecution was a particularly powerful force motivating English colonization. England allowed
religious dissidents to migrate to the New World. Some 30,000 English Puritans migrated to New England,
while Maryland became a refuge for Roman Catholics and Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Rhode
Island, havens for Quakers. The refugees from religious persecution included Baptists, Congregationalists,
Presbyterians, and a small number of Catholics, to say nothing of religious minorities from continental Europe,
including Huguenots and members of the Dutch and German Reformed churches.
Europe's North American settlements differed markedly in their economies. While the Dutch, French, and
Swedish settlements relied mainly on trade in fish and furs, English settlement took a variety of forms. In New
England, the economy was organized largely around small family farms and urban communities engaged in
fishing, handicrafts, and Atlantic commerce, with most of the population living in small compact towns. In the
Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, the economy was structured largely around larger and much
more isolated farms and plantations raising tobacco, with an average of only about two dozen families living in
a twenty-five square mile area. In the Carolinas and the British West Indies, economic life was organized
around larger but less isolated plantations growing rice, indigo, coffee, cotton, and sugar.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the population in Britain's North American colonies was growing at
an unprecedented rate. At a time when Europe's population was increasing just 1 percent a year, New
England's growth rate was 2.6 or 2.7 percent annually. By the early eighteenth century, the population was
also growing extremely rapidly in the middle Atlantic and southern colonies, largely as a result of a low death
rate and a sex ratio that was more balanced than in Europe itself.
By 1700, Britain's North American colonies offered an unprecedented degree of social equality and political
liberty for white men. The colonies differed from England itself in the proportion of white men who owned
property and were able to vote, as well as in the population's ethnic and religious diversity. Yet by the
beginning of the eighteenth century, it was also clear that colonial expansion involved the displacement of the
indigenous population and that the colonial economy depended heavily on various forms of unfree labor, of
which the most rapidly growing form consisted of black and sometimes Indian slaves, who could be found in
every one of Britain's North American colonies.
Spanish Colonization
Period: 1600-1860
Conflict with Indians and the failure to find major silver or gold deposits made it difficult to persuade settlers to
colonize the region. Spanish settlement was largely confined to religious missions, a few small civilian towns,
and military posts intended to prevent encroachment by Russia, France, and England. It was not until 1749
that Spain established the first civilian town in Texas, a town that eventually became Laredo; and not before
1769 did Spain establish permanent settlements in California.
Fixated on religious conversion and military control, Spain inhibited economic development. Following the
dictates of an economic philosophy known as mercantilism, aimed at protecting its own manufacturers, Spain
restricted trade, prohibited manufacturing, stifled local industry and handicrafts, impeded the growth of towns,
and prevented civilians from selling to soldiers. The government required all trade to be conducted through
Veracruz and levied high excise taxes that greatly increased the cost of transportation. It exercised a
monopoly over tobacco and gunpowder and prohibited the capture of wild horses. Still, Spain left a lasting
imprint on the Southwest.
Such institutions as the rodeo and the cowboy (the vaquero) had their roots in Spanish culture. Place names,
too, bear witness to the region's Spanish heritage. Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and Tucson were all
founded by the Spanish. To this day, the Spanish pattern of organizing towns around a central plaza bordered
by churches and official buildings is found throughout the region. Spanish architectural styles--adobe walls,
tile roofs, wooden beams, and intricate mosaics--continue to characterize the Southwest.
By introducing European livestock and vegetation, Spanish colonists transformed the Southwest's economy,
environment, and physical appearance. The Spanish introduced horses, cows, sheep, and goats, as well
tomatoes, chilies, Kentucky bluegrass, and a variety of weeds. As livestock devoured the region's tall native
grasses, a new and distinctly southwestern environment arose, one of cactus, sagebrush, and mesquite. The
Spanish also introduced temperate and tropical diseases, which reduced the Indian population by fifty to
ninety percent.
It is equally important that in attitudes toward class and race Spanish possessions differed from the English
colonies. Most colonists were of mixed racial backgrounds and racial mixture continued throughout the
Spanish colonial period. In general, mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry) and Indians
were concentrated in the lower levels of the social structure.
Even in the colonial period, the New Spain's northern frontier served as a beacon of opportunity for poorer
Mexicans. The earliest Hispanic settlers forged pathways that would draw Mexican immigrants in the future.
English Colonization Begins
Period: 1600-1860
During the early and mid-sixteenth century, the English tended to conceive of North America as a base for
piracy and harassment of the Spanish. But by the end of the century, the English began to think more
seriously about North America as a place to colonize: as a market for English goods and a source of raw
materials and commodities such as furs. English promoters claimed that New World colonization offered
England many advantages. Not only would it serve as a bulwark against Catholic Spain, it would supply
England with raw materials and provide a market for finished products. America would also provide a place to
send the English poor and ensure that they would contribute to the nation's wealth.
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English poor increased rapidly in number. As a
result of the enclosure of traditional common lands (which were increasingly used to raise sheep), many
common people were forced to become wage laborers or else to support themselves hand-to-mouth or simply
as beggars.
After unsuccessful attempts to establish settlements in Newfoundland and at Roanoke, the famous "Lost
Colony," off the coast of present-day North Carolina, England established its first permanent North American
settlement, Jamestown, in 1607. Located in swampy marshlands along Virginia's James River, Jamestown's
residents suffered horrendous mortality rates during its first years. Immigrants had just a fifty-fifty chance of
surviving five years.
The Jamestown expedition was financed by the Virginia Company of London, which believed that precious
metals were to be found in the area. From the outset, however, Jamestown suffered from disease and conflict
with Indians. Approximately 30,000 Algonquian Indians lived in the region, divided into about 40 tribes. About
30 tribes belonged to a confederacy led by Powhatan.
Food was an initial source of conflict. More interested in finding gold and silver than in farming, Jamestown's
residents (many of whom were either aristocrats or their servants) were unable or unwilling to work. When the
English began to seize Indian food stocks, Powhatan cut off supplies, forcing the colonists to subsist on frogs,
snakes, and even decaying corpses.
Captain John Smith (1580?-1631) was twenty-six years old when the first expedition landed. A farmer's son,
Smith had already led an adventurous life before arriving in Virginia. He had fought with the Dutch army
against the Spanish and in eastern Europe against the Ottoman Turks, when he was taken captive and
enslaved. He later escaped to Russia before returning to England.
Smith, serving as president of the Jamestown colony from 1608 to 1609, required the colonists to work and
traded with the Indians for food. In 1609, after being wounded in a gunpowder accident, Smith returned to
England. After his departure, conflict between the English and the Powhatan confederacy intensified,
especially after the colonists began to clear land in order to plant tobacco.
In a volume recounting the history of the English colony in Virginia, Smith describes a famous incident in
which Powhatan's 12-year-old daughter, Pocahontas (1595?-1617), saved him from execution. Although
some have questioned whether this incident took place (since Smith failed to mention it in his Historie's first
edition), it may well have been a "staged event," an elaborate adoption ceremony by which Powhatan
symbolically made Smith his vassal or servant. Through similar ceremonies, the Powhatan people
incorporated outsiders into their society. Pocahontas reappears in the colonial records in 1613, when she was
lured aboard an English ship and held captive. Negotiations for her release failed, and in 1614, she married
John Rolfe, the colonist who introduced tobacco to Virginia. Whether this marriage represented an attempt to
forge an alliance between the English and the Powhatan remains uncertain.
Life in Early Virginia
Period: 1600-1860
Early Virginia was a death trap. Of the first 3,000 immigrants, all but 600 were dead within a few years of
arrival. Virginia was a society in which life was short, diseases ran rampant, and parentless children and
multiple marriages were the norm.
In sharp contrast to New England, which was settled mainly by families, most of the settlers of Virginia and
neighboring Maryland were single men bound in servitude. Before the colonies turned decisively to slavery in
the late seventeenth century, planters relied on white indentured servants from England, Ireland, and
Scotland. They wanted men, not women. During the early and mid-seventeenth century, as many as four men
arrived for every woman.
Why did large numbers of people come to such an unhealthful region? To raise tobacco, which had been
introduced into England in the late sixteenth century. Like a number of other consumer products introduced
during the early modern era--like tea, coffee, and chocolate--tobacco was related to the development of new
work patterns and new forms of sociability. Tobacco appeared to relieve boredom and stress and to enhance
peoples' ability to concentrate over prolonged periods of time. Tobacco production required a large labor
force, which initially consisted primarily of white indentured servants, who received transportation to Virginia in
exchange for a four to seven-year term of service.
Lacking valuable minerals or other products in high demand, it appeared that Jamestown was an economic
failure. After ten years, however, the colonists discovered that Virginia was an ideal place to cultivate tobacco,
which had been recently introduced into Europe. Since tobacco production rapidly exhausted the soil of
nutrients, the English began to acquire new lands along the James River, encroaching on Indian hunting
grounds.
In 1622, Powhatan's successor, Opechcanough, tried to wipe out the English in a surprise attack. Two Indian
converts to Christianity warned the English; still, 347 settlers, or about a third of the English colonists, died in
the attack. Warfare persisted for ten years, followed by an uneasy peace. In 1644, Opechcanough launched a
last, desperate attack. After about two years of warfare, in which some 500 colonists were killed,
Opechcanough was captured and shot and the survivors of Powhatan's confederacy, now reduced to just
2,000, agreed to submit to English rule.
Raising tobacco required a large labor force. At first, it was not clear that this labor force would consist of
enslaved Africans. Virginians experimented with a variety of labor sources, including Indian slaves, penal
slaves, and white indentured servants. Convinced that England was overpopulated with vagabonds and
paupers, the colonists imported surplus Englishmen to raise tobacco and to produce dyestuffs, potash, furs,
and other goods that England had imported from other countries. Typically, young men or women in their late
teens or twenties would sign a contract of indenture. In exchange for transportation to the New World, a
servant would work for several years (usually four to seven) without wages.
The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was not wholly dissimilar from slavery.
Servants could be bought, sold, or leased. They could also be physically beaten for disobedience or running
away. Unlike slaves, however, they were freed after their term of service expired, their children did not inherit
their status, and they received a small cash payment of "freedom dues."
The English writer Daniel Defoe (1661?-1731) set part of his novel Moll Flanders (1683) in early Virginia.
Defoe described the people who settled in Virginia in distinctly unflattering terms: There were convicts, who
had been found guilty of felonies punishable by death, and there were those "brought over by masters of
ships to be sold as servants. Such as we call them, my dear, but they are more properly called slaves."
George Alsop, an indentured servant in Maryland, echoed these sentiments in 1666. Servants "by hundreds
of thousands" spent their lives "here and in Virginia, and elsewhere in planting that vile tobacco, which all
vanishes into smoke, and is for the most part miserably abused." And, he went on, this "insatiable avarice
must be fed and sustained by the bloody sweat of these poor slaves."
Founding New England
Period: 1600-1860
In sixteenth-century England, a religious movement known as Puritanism arose which wanted to purge the
Church of England of all vestiges of Roman Catholicism. The Puritans objected to elaborate church
hierarchies and to church ceremonies and practices which lacked Biblical sanction and elevated priests above
their congregation.
Late in the sixteenth century, some Puritans, known as separatists, became convinced that the Church of
England was so corrupt that they withdrew from it and set up their own congregations. In 1609, a group of
separatists (later known as Pilgrims) fled from England to Holland, eager to escape the corrupting wickedness
around them. In his classic History of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford (1588-1657), the Pilgrim leader,
explains why the Pilgrims decided to leave the Netherlands in 1619 and establish a new community in the
New World. In this selection, he also describes how the Pilgrims were assisted by an Indian named Squanto.
Squanto's story illustrates the way that the entire Atlantic world became integrated in wholly new ways during
the seventeenth century and the impact this transformation had upon real-life individuals and communities. A
Patuxet Indian born around 1585, Squanto had grown up in a village of 2,000 located near where the Pilgrims
settled in 1620. In 1614, Captain John Smith had passed through the region, and one of his lieutenants
kidnapped Squanto and some twenty other Patuxets, planning to sell the Indians in the slave market of
Malaga, Spain. After escaping to England, where he learned to speak English, Squanto returned to New
England in 1619, only to discover that his village had been wiped out by a chicken pox epidemic--one of many
epidemics that killed about 90 percent of New England's coastal Indian people between 1616 and 1618.
Squanto then joined the Wampanoag tribe.
After the Pilgrims arrived, Squanto served as an interpreter between the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, and
the colonists and taught the English settlers how to plant Indian corn. He also tried to use his position to
challenge Massasoit's leadership, informing neighboring tribes that the Pilgrims would infect them with
disease and make war on them unless they gave him gifts. Squanto's scheme to use his connections with the
Pilgrims to wrest power from Massaoit failed. In 1622, two years after the English settlers arrived, Squanto fell
ill and died of an unknown
The Puritans
Period: 1600-1860
No group has played a more pivotal role in shaping American values than the New England Puritans. The
seventeenth-century Puritans contributed to our country's sense of mission, its work ethic, and its moral
sensibility. Today, eight million Americans can trace their ancestry to the fifteen to twenty thousand Puritans
who migrated to New England between 1629 and 1640.
Few people, however, have been as frequently subjected to caricature and ridicule. The journalist H.L.
Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy." And
particularly during the 1920s, the Puritans came to symbolize every cultural characteristic that "modern"
Americans despised. The Puritans were often dismissed as drably-clothed religious zealots who were hostile
to the arts and were eager to impose their rigid "Puritanical" morality on the world around them.
This stereotypical view is almost wholly incorrect. Contrary to much popular thinking, the Puritans were not
sexual prudes. Although they strongly condemned sexual relations outside of marriage--levying fines or even
whipping those who fornicated, committed adultery or sodomy, or bore children outside of wedlock--they
attached a high value to the marital tie. Nor did Puritans abstain from alcohol; even though they objected to
drunkenness, they did not believe alcohol was sinful in itself. They were not opposed to artistic beauty;
although they were suspicious of the theater and the visual arts, the Puritans valued poetry. Indeed, John
Milton (1603-1674), one of England's greatest poets, was a Puritan. Even the association of the Puritans with
drab colors is wrong. They especially liked the colors red and blue.
Although the Puritans wanted to reform the world to conform to God's law, they did not set up a church-run
state. Even though they believed that the primary purpose of government was to punish breaches of God's
laws, few people were as committed as the Puritans to the separation of church and state. Not only did they
reject the idea of establishing a system of church courts, they also forbade ministers from holding public
office.
Perhaps most strikingly, the Puritans in Massachusetts held annual elections and extended the right to vote
and hold office to all "freemen." Although this term was originally restricted to church members, it meant that a
much larger proportion of the adult male population could vote in Massachusetts than in England itself
(roughly 55 percent, compared to about 33 percent in England).
John Winthrop (1606-1676) was a well-off landowner who served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony for much of its early history. Unlike the Pilgrims, Winthrop and the other Puritans who traveled to
Massachusetts were not separatists. Rather than trying to flee the corruptions of a wicked world, they hoped
to establish in New England a pure church that would offer a model for the churches in England.
The Puritan Idea of the Covenant
Period: 1600-1860
A central element in Puritan social and theological life was the notion of the covenant. All social relationships-between God and man, ministers and congregations, magistrates and members of their community, and men
and their families--were envisioned in terms of a covenant or contract which rested on consent and mutual
responsibilities.
For example, seventeenth-century New England churches were formed by a voluntary agreement among the
members, who elected their own ministers. Similarly, the governments in Plymouth Colony (before it merged
with Massachusetts) and in New Haven Colony (before it merged with Connecticut) were based on
covenants. In each seventeenth-century New England colony, government itself rested on consent.
Governors and legislative assemblies were elected, usually annually, by the freemen of the colony. In
contrast, England appointed Virginia's governor, while in Maryland, the governor was appointed by the
Calvert family, which owned the colony. Even marriage itself was regarded as a covenant. Connecticut
granted nearly a thousand divorces between 1670 and 1799.
In this famous essay written aboard the Arabella during his passage to New England in 1630, John Winthrop
(1606-1676) proclaims that the Puritan had made a covenant with God to establish a truly Christian
community, in which the wealthy were to show charity and avoid exploiting their neighbors while the poor
were to work diligently. If they abided by this covenant, God would make them an example with the world--a
"city upon a hill." But if they broke the covenant, the entire community would feel God's wrath.
In his stress on the importance of a stable community and reciprocal obligations between rich and poor,
Winthrop was implicitly criticizing disruptive social and economic changes that were rapidly transforming
English society. As a result of the enclosure of traditional common lands, which were increasingly used to
raise sheep, many rural laborers were thrown off the land, producing a vast floating population. As many as
half of all village residents left their community each decade. In his call for tightly-knit communities and
families, Winthrop was striving to recreate a social ideal that was breaking down in England itself.
Regional Contrasts
Period: 1600-1860
There were significant demographic and economic contrasts between the Chesapeake region and New
England. Because of its cold winters and low population density, seventeenth-century New England was
perhaps the most healthful region in the world. After an initial period of high mortality, life expectancy quickly
rose to levels comparable to our own. Men and women, on average, lived about 65 to 70 years, 15 to 20
years longer than in England. One result was that seventeenth-century New England was the first society in
history in which grandparents were common.
Descended largely from families that arrived during the 1630s, New England was a relatively stable society
settled in compact towns and villages. It never developed any staple crop for export of any consequence, and
about 90 to 95 percent of the population was engaged in subsistence farming.
The further south one looks, however, the higher the death rate and the more unbalanced the sex ratio. In
New England, men outnumbered women about 3 to 2 in the first generation. But in New Netherlands there
were two men for every woman and the ratio was six to one in the Chesapeake. Where New England's
population became self-sustaining as early as the 1630s, New Jersey and Pennsylvania did not achieve this
until the 1660s to the 1680s, and Virginia until after 1700. Compared to New England, Virginia was a much
more mobile and unruly society.
Compared to the Southeast, it was much more difficult for native peoples of New England to resist the
encroaching English colonists. For one thing, the Northeast was much less densely populated. Epidemic
diseases introduced by European fishermen and fur traders reduced the population of New England's coastal
Indians about 90 percent by the early 1620s. Further, this area was fragmented politically into autonomous
villages with a long history of bitter tribal rivalries. Such factors allowed the Puritans to expand rapidly across
New England.
Some groups, notably the Massachusetts, whose number had fallen from about 20,000 to just 750 in 1631,
allied with the Puritans and agreed to convert to Christianity in exchange for military protection. But the
migration of Puritan colonists into western Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 1630s provoked bitter
warfare, especially with the Pequots, the area's most powerful people. In 1636, English settlers accused a
Pequot of attacking ships and murdering several sailors; in revenge, they burned a Pequot settlement on what
is now Block Island, Rhode Island. Pequot raids left about 30 colonists dead. A combined force of Puritans
and Narragansett and Mohegan Indians retaliated by surrounding and setting fire to the main Pequot village
on the Mystic River.
In his History of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford described the destruction by fire of the Pequot's major
village, in which at least 300 Indians were burned to death: "Those that escaped from the fire were slain with
the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run threw with their rapiers [swords]....It was a fearful sight to see
them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same." The survivors were enslaved and
shipped to the Caribbean. Altogether about 800 of 3,500 Pequot were killed during the Pequot War. In his
epic novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville names his doomed whaling ship "The Pequod," a clear reference to
earlier events in New England.
Dimensions of Change in Colonial New England
Period: 1600-1860
Although most of New England's settlers were Puritans, these people did not agree about religious doctrine.
Some, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth, believed that the Church of England should be renounced, while others,
like Massachusetts Bay's leaders, felt that the English church could be reformed. Other issues that divided
Puritans involved who could be admitted to church membership, who could be baptized, and who could take
communion.
Disagreements over religious beliefs led to the formation of a number of new colonies. In 1636, Thomas
Hooker (1586-1647), a Cambridge, Massachusetts minister, established the first English settlement in
Connecticut. Convinced that government should rest on free consent, he extended voting rights beyond
church members. Two years later, another Massachusetts group founded New Haven colony in order to
combat moral laxness by setting strict standards for church membership and basing its laws on the Old
Testament. This colony was incorporated by Connecticut in 1662.
In 1635, Massachusetts Bay colony banished Roger Williams (1604-1683), a Salem minister, for claiming that
the civil government had no right to force people to worship in a particular way. Williams had even rejected
the ideal that civil authorities could compel observance of the Sabbath. Equally troubling, he argued that
Massachusetts's royal charter did not justify taking Indian land. Instead, Williams argued, the colonists had to
negotiate fair treaties and pay for the land. Instead of returning to England, Williams headed toward the
Narragansett Bay, where he founded Providence, which later became the capital of Rhode Island. From 1654
to 1657, Williams was president of Rhode Island colony. The New England Puritans, like many Americans
before the nineteenth century, rejected the idea that prices should fluctuate freely according to the laws of
supply and demand. Instead, they believed that there was a just wage for every trade and a just price for
every good. Charging more than this just amount was "oppression," and authorities sought by law to prevent
prices or wages from rising above a customary level.
Yet within a few decades of settlement, the Puritan blueprint of an organic, close-knit community, a stable,
self-sufficient economy, and a carefully calibrated social hierarchy began to fray as New England became
increasingly integrated into the Atlantic economy. To try to maintain traditional social distinctions,
Massachusetts Bay colony in 1651 adopted a sumptuary law, which spelled out which persons could wear
certain articles of clothing and jewelry.
But as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, a growing number of New Englanders were
engaged in an intricate system of Atlantic commerce, selling fish, furs, and timber not only in England but
throughout Catholic Europe, investing in shipbuilding, and transporting tobacco, wine, sugar, and slaves.
Particularly important was trade with the West Indies and the Atlantic islands off of northwestern Africa. Such
trade was highly competitive and risky, but over time it gradually created distinct classes of merchants,
tradesmen, and commercially-oriented farmers.
For nearly half a century following the Pequot War, New England was free of major Indian wars. During this
period, the region's indigenous people declined rapidly in numbers and suffered severe losses of land and
cultural independence. During the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, New England's indigenous
population fell from 140,000 to 10,000, while the English population grew to 50,000. Meanwhile, the New
England Puritans launched a concerted campaign to convert the Indians to Protestantism. John Eliot, New
England's leading missionary, convinced about 2,000 to live in "praying towns," where they were expected to
adopt white customs. New England Indians were also forced to accept the legal authority of colonial courts.
Faced with death, disease, and cultural disintegration, many of New England's native peoples decided to
strike back. In 1675, the chief of the Pokanokets, Metacomet (whom the English called King Philip), forged a
military alliance including about two-thirds of the region's Indians. In 1675, he led an attack on Swansea,
Massachusetts. Over the next year, both sides raided villages and killed hundreds of victims. Twelve out of
ninety New England towns were destroyed.
The last major Indian war in New England, King Philip's War, was the most destructive conflict, relative to the
size of the population in American history. Five percent of New England's population was killed--a higher
proportion than Germany, Britain, or the United States lost during World War II. Indian casualties were far
higher; perhaps 40 percent of New England's Indian population was killed or fled the region. When the war
was over, the power of New England's Indians was broken. The region's remaining Indians would live in
small, scattered communities, serving as the colonists' servants, slaves, and tenants.
The Salem Witch Scare
Period: 1600-1860
In 1691, a group of girls in Salem, Massachusetts, accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft.
Tituba's confession ignited a witchcraft scare which left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to
death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting trial.
For two decades, New England had been in the grip of severe social stresses. A 1675 conflict with the Indians
known as King Philip's War had resulted in more deaths relative to the size of the population than any other
war in American history. A decade later, in 1685, King James II's government revoked the Massachusetts
charter. A new governor, Sir Edmund Andros, sought to unite New England, New York, and New Jersey into a
single Dominion of New England. He also tried to abolish elected colonial assemblies, restrict town meetings,
and impose direct control over militia appointments, and permitted the first public celebration of Christmas in
Massachusetts. After William III replaced James II as King of England in 1689, Andros's government was
overthrown, but Massachusetts was required to eliminate religious qualifications for voting and to extend
religious toleration to sects such as the Quakers. The late seventeenth century also marked a sudden
increase in the number of black slaves in New England.
The 1637 Pequot War produced New England's first known slaves. While many Indian men were transported
into slavery in the West Indies, many Indian women and children were used as household slaves in New
England. The 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties recognized perpetual and hereditary servitude (although
in 1643, a Massachusetts court sent back to Africa some slaves who had been kidnapped by New England
sailors and brought to America). Tituba was one of the growing number of slaves imported from the West
Indies.
Probably an Arawak born in northeastern South America, Tituba had been enslaved in Barbados before being
brought to Massachusetts in 1680. Her master, Samuel Parris, had been a credit agent for sugar planters in
Barbados before becoming a minister in Salem, Massachusetts. In late 1691, two girls in Parris's household
and two girls from nearby households began to exhibit strange physical symptoms including convulsions and
choking. To counteract these symptoms, Tituba made a "witchcake" out of rye meal and urine. This attempt at
counter-magic led to Tituba's arrest for witchcraft. She and two other women--Sarah Good and Sarah
Osborne--were accused of bewitching the girls. Tituba confessed, but the other two women protested their
innocence. Good was executed; Osborne died in prison.
As Elaine G. Breslaw has shown, Tituba's confession that she had consorted with Satan and attended a
witches' coven fueled fears of a diabolical plot to infiltrate and destroy Salem's godly community. In her
testimony, Tituba drew upon Indian and African, as well as English, notions of the occult.
Tituba later recanted her confession, saying that she had given false testimony in order to save her life. She
claimed "that her Master did beat her and otherways abused her, to make her confess and accuse...her
Sister-Witches."
Slavery in the Colonial North
Period: 1600-1860
In colonial America, there was no sharp division between a slave South and a free-labor North. New England
was involved in the Atlantic slave trade from the mid-1600s to the 1780s. In the years preceding the American
Revolution, slavery could be found in all the American colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves made
up almost 8 percent of the population in Pennsylvania, 40 percent in Virginia, and 70 percent in South
Carolina. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a fifth of Boston's families owned slaves; and
in New York City in 1746, slaves performed about a third of the city's manual labor.
In the North, slaves were used in both agricultural and non-agricultural employment, especially in highly
productive farming and stock-raising for the West Indian market in southern Rhode Island, Long Island, and
New Jersey. Slaves not only served as household servants for an urban elite--cooking, doing laundry, and
cleaning stables--they also worked in rural industry, in salt works, iron works, and tanneries. In general,
slaves were not segregated into distinct racial ghettoes; instead, they lived in back rooms, lofts, attics, and
alley shacks. Many slaves fraternized with lower-class whites. But in the mid-eighteenth century, racial
separation increased, as a growing proportion of the white working-class began to express bitter resentment
over competition from slave labor. The African American response in the North to increased racial antagonism
and discrimination was apparent in a growing consciousness and awareness of Africa and the establishment
of separate African churches and benevolent societies.
Struggles for Power in Colonial America
Period: 1600-1860
Two parallel struggles for power took place in eastern North America during the late seventeenth and early
and mid-eighteenth centuries. One was an imperial struggle between France and England. Four times
between 1689 and 1763, France, England, and their Indian allies engaged in struggles for dominance. The
other was a power struggle among Indian groups, pitting the Iroquois and various Algonquian-speaking
peoples against one another.
These two struggles were closely interconnected. Both France and England were dependent upon Indian
peoples for furs and military support. The English outnumbered the French by about 20 to 1 during this
period, and therefore the survival of French Canada depended on the support of Algonquian-speaking
nations. For Native Americans, alliances with England and France were a source of wealth, providing
presents, supplies, ammunition, and captives whom the Indians either adopted or sold. Such alliances also
kept white settlers from encroaching on Indian lands.
During times of peace, however, Indians found it much more difficult to play England and France off against
each other. It was during the period of peace in Europe that followed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that
England and France destroyed the Natchez, the Fox, and the Yamasee nations.
Diversity in Colonial America
Period: 1600-1860
Even in the colonial era, the distinguishing characteristic of American society was the diversity of its
population. By European standards, America was extraordinarily diverse ethnically, religiously, and regionally.
The first federal census, conducted in 1790, found that a fifth of the entire population was African American.
Among whites, three-fifths were English in ancestry and another fifth was Scottish or Irish. The remainder was
of Dutch, French, German, Swedish, or some other background.
This astonishing diversity was in large part a product of the way that colonial America was originally settled.
During the early seventeenth century, the most dynamic countries in Europe scrambled to establish overseas
colonies and trading posts. The Dutch set up outposts in Brazil, Curacao, New Netherlands, the Pennsylvania
region, and West Africa; the English in the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia, as well as along
the mainland Atlantic coast; the French in the Caribbean, Canada, Guadaloupe, St. Domingue, Louisiana,
and Martinique. The first phase of colonization was highly decentralized. The earliest settlements were
established not under the direction of government, but by commercial companies, religious organizations, and
individual entrepreneurs.
By the mid-seventeenth century, however, it became apparent that the colonies could be an important source
of national wealth for the parent nation. Mercantilist thinkers saw colonies as a source of revenue and raw
materials, a market for manufactured goods, and a way to strengthen a nation's economic self-sufficiency.
The English government adopted a more systematic approach to colonization; it moved aggressively to annex
Jamaica, New Netherlands, and New Sweden and began to grant territory to a specific person or persons
called proprietors.
Although major goals of the new colonial system were to expand trade and assert greater control over the
colonies, many of the proprietors projected utopian fantasies onto the lands they were granted. George
Calvert, Lord Baltimore, established the first proprietary colony. He envisioned Maryland as a haven for
Roman Catholics and as a place where he could recreate a feudal order. A group of eight nobles who
received a gift of land in the Carolinas envisioned a hierarchical manorial society with a proprietary governor
and a hereditary nobility. William Penn sought a refuge for himself and other Quakers. A group of proprietors
led by James Oglethorpe envisioned Georgia as a haven for debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida.
In practice, it proved impossible to confine colonial development to a predetermined design. To attract
settlers, it proved necessary to guarantee religious freedom, offer generous land grants, and self-government
through a representative assembly. But it was not merely schemes to set up feudal manors or to maintain
proprietary rule that failed. The proprietors of Georgia banned the importation of hard liquor and outlawed
slavery (not out of a moral concern about slavery, but an anxiety that slavery would promote economic
inequality and discourage industrious habits among white settlers). Yet within a few years, mounting
opposition from Georgians and migration out of the colony led the trustees to revoke the restrictions on liquor
and slaves.
The Middle Colonies: New York
Period: 1600-1860
In 1648, after an eighty-year struggle, the Dutch Republic won its independence from Spanish rule. The
seventeenth century was the Netherlands's golden age, during which the Dutch produced some of the world's
greatest painters, like Rembrandt, great philosophers, like Spinoza, and great mathematicians and
astronomers, like Christian Huygens. During the golden age, the Netherlands also developed a colonial
empire with bases stretching from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Brazil to Aruba, the Antilles, and the southern tip
of Africa. It was also the only western country permitted to trade with Japan. A major sea power, the Dutch in
1650 owned 16,000 of the 20,000 ships engaged in European commerce.
In an effort to find a sea route around the Americas to Asia, the Dutch East India Company sent Henry
Hudson and a crew of 20 to search for a westward passage. On his third voyage, in 1611, Hudson sailed into
the harbor of present-day New York City and journeyed up the river named after him as far as Albany, thereby
establishing Dutch claims to the region. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company (which had been founded to
trade in West Africa and the Americas) began to colonize New Netherlands, which encompassed parts of
present-day New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
From the outset, New Netherlands was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Only about half the
population was Dutch; the remainder included French, Germans, and Scandinavians, as well as a small
number of Jews from Brazil. The Dutch considered New Netherlands a minor part of their colonial empire,
valuable primarily as a source of furs. But many merchants were attracted by the colony's promise of freedom
of worship, local self-government, and free land that would remain tax exempt for ten years. But even before
an English fleet captured New Amsterdam in 1664, many of the colony's residents had been alienated by
corruption, trade monopolies, and arbitrary taxation and on-going conflict with neighbor Indian nations.
Between 1652 and 1674, the Dutch fought three naval wars with England. The English had hoped to wrest
control of shipping and trading from the Dutch but failed. As a result of these conflicts, the Dutch won what is
now Surinam from England, while the English received New Netherlands from the Dutch. In 1664, the English
sent a fleet to seize New Netherlands, which surrendered without a fight. The English renamed the colony
New York, after James, the Duke of York, who had received a charter to the territory from his brother King
Charles II. The Dutch briefly recaptured New Netherlands in 1673, but the colony was returned to the English
the next year.
Under Dutch rule, New Netherlands had suffered from ethnic tension, political instability, and protracted
Indian warfare, which retarded immigration. Similar problems persisted under English administration. One
source of tension was the Duke of York's refusal to permit a representative assembly, which was not
established until 1683.
Another source of tension was the "patroon" system, which the Dutch West India Company set up in 1629 to
promote settlement. Patroons were given huge estates, which they rented to tenant farmers. Patroons had
the power to control such aspects of settlers' lives as their right to move, establish businesses, and marry.
The Duke of York allowed Dutch landowners to retain these estates, and gave equally large tracts of land to
his supporters. By 1703, five families held approximately 1.75 million acres of New York. By 1750, these
families had become among colonial America's wealthiest landed elite. Although these landowners lost their
feudal privileges as a result of the Revolution, they still owned about 1.8 million acres of land in the early
nineteenth century. Between 1839 and 1846, tenant farmers on these properties staged "Anti-Rent Wars,"
demanding title to lands that they felt rightfully belonged to them. In 1846, New York granted the tenants their
farms.
Fear of Slave Revolts
Period: 1600-1860
In 1741, New York City executed 34 people for conspiring to burn down the city. Thirteen African American
men were burned at the stake and another 17 black men, two white men, and two white women were hanged.
An additional 70 blacks and seven whites were banished from the city.
In 1741, New York's economy was depressed, and, as a result of a punishing winter, the population suffered
severe food shortages. The British Empire was at war with France and Spain, and there were reports that the
Spanish were threatening to invade New York or organize acts of arson. There were also troubling news
about the Stono slave uprising in South Carolina. With one-fifth of Manhattan's population consisting of black
slaves, it was apparently easy to believe that they, perhaps assisted by Irish Catholic immigrants, were
conspiring to set the city ablaze. It seems unlikely that there was an organized plan to set fire to the city and
murder its inhabitants, as the authorities alleged. There is, however, evidence of incidents of arson and it
appears that some slaves talked about retaliating against their enslavers and winning their freedom.
While slave masters described their slave populations as faithful, docile, and contented, slave owners always
feared slave revolt. Probably the first slave revolt in the New World erupted in Hispaniola in 1522. During the
early eighteenth century there were slave uprisings on Long Island in 1708 and in New York City in 1712.
Slaves in South Carolina staged several insurrections, culminating in the Stono Rebellion of 1739, when they
seized firearms, killed whites, and burned houses. In 1740, a slave conspiracy was uncovered in Charleston.
During the late eighteenth century, slave revolts took place in Guadeloupe, Grenada, Jamaica, Surinam, St.
Domingue (Haiti), Venezuela, and the Windward Islands. Many fugitive slaves, known as maroons, fled to
remote regions like Spanish Florida or Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp.
The main result of slave insurrections, throughout the Americas, was the mass execution of blacks. In 1712,
when a group of enslaved Africans in New York set fire to a building and ambushed and murdered about nine
whites who arrived to put out the fire, fourteen slaves were hanged, three were burnt at the stake, one was
starved to death, and another was broken on the wheel.
The Middle Colonies: William Penn’s Holy Commonwealth
Period: 1600-1860
The social upheaval ignited by the seventeenth-century English Civil War spawned many radical, millennarian
religious groups, including the Diggers, who rejected private property; and the Ranters, who claimed to
worship God through drinking, smoking, and fornicating. Only one of the radical religious groups that emerged
during the tumultuous years of the 1640s and 1650s has survived until now: the Society of Friends or the
Quakers.
Today, the Quakers are often associated with austerity and self-discipline, but in the sect's early days,
members behaved in very rebellious ways. Some marched into churches, where they denounced ministers as
dumb dogs and hirelings. They also refused to doff their hats before magistrates or to swear oaths. They
opposed war and gave women the right to speak at public meetings, holding that both sexes were equal in
their ability to expound God's teachings.
The Quakers rejected the orthodox Calvinist belief in predestination. Instead, the Quakers insisted that
salvation was available to all. It came, however, not through an institutional church, but from within, by
following the "inner light" of God's spirit. It was because Friends seemed to shake when they felt religious
enthusiasm that they became known as Quakers.
In England as well as in a number of American colonies the Quakers faced violent persecution. Some 15,000
Quakers were jailed in England between 1660 and 1685. In 1660, Edward Burrough catalogued the
maltreatment of Quakers in New England: 64 Quakers had been imprisoned; two Quakers lashed 139 times,
leaving one "beat like into a jelly"; another branded with the letter H, for heretic, after being whipped with 39
stripes; and three Quakers had been executed.
Even in New York, which tolerated a wide variety of religious persuasions, the Quakers faced hostility. After
arriving in Long Island in 1657, some Quakers were fined, jailed, and banished by the Dutch, who (like Puritan
New Englanders) were outraged by Quaker women proselytizing. In this selection, New York's Quakers
inform the province's royal governor about ways they are mistreated.
Over time, the Quakers found successful ways to channel their moral idealism and religious enthusiasm. The
sect established weekly and monthly meetings which imposed structure and discipline on members, and
beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, directed their energies against a wide variety of social evils, including
slavery. By the early nineteenth century, Quakers were engaged in moral reform movements in numbers
wildly disproportionate to the sect's size. As many as a third of all early nineteenth century feminists and
antislavery activists were Quakers.
The Quakers had remarkable success in attracting a number of socially prominent individuals to their cause.
Among these, none was more important than William Penn (1644-1718). The son of an English naval officer
and a friend of James II, Penn became a Quaker at the age of 22. He was imprisoned several times for
writing and preaching about Quakerism, including an eight-month confinement in the Tower of London.
In 1680, Penn asked Charles II of England to repay an $80,000 debt owed to Penn's father with wilderness
land in America. The next year, he was granted a charter. Penn viewed his new colony as a "Holy
Experiment," which would provide colonists religious liberty and cheap land. He made a treaty of friendship
with Indians shortly after he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682, paying them for most of the land that King
Charles had given him.
Compared to many other colonies, Pennsylvania, from the outset, was a remarkable success. It experienced
no major Indian wars. Strong West Indian demand for grain generated prosperity and made Philadelphia a
major port. Nevertheless, the colony did not live up to Penn's dream of a "peaceable kingdom." In 1685 he
pleaded with the colonial legislature: "For the love of God, me, and the poor country, be not so
governmentish; so noisy and open in your disaffection."
The Southernmost Colonies: The Carolinas and Georgia
Period: 1600-1860
South Carolina's proprietors envisioned establishing a feudal society in their land grant. They kept huge
landed estates for themselves, and, with the assistance of the English philosopher John Locke, drew up a
plan, known as the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which would have given them the power of feudal
lords. The scheme called for a three-tiered hereditary nobility--consisting of "proprietors," "landgraves," and
"caciques"--who would own forty percent of the colony's land and serve as a Council of Lords and
recommend all laws to a parliament elected by small landowners. But like other feudal visions, this one failed.
South Carolina's settlers rejected virtually all of this plan and immigrants refused to move to the region until it
was replaced by a more democratic system of government.
Emigrants from Barbados played a decisive role in South Carolina's early settlement in 1679 and 1680, and
brought black slaves with them. Within a decade, they had found a staple crop--rice--which they could raise
with slave labor. The grain itself had probably come from West Africa and African slaves were already familiar
with rice cultivation. The result was to transform South Carolina into the mainland society that bore the closest
resemblance to the Caribbean. As early as 1708, slaves actually outnumbered whites and by 1730 there were
twice as many slaves as whites in the colony. About a third of South Carolina's slaves during the early
eighteenth century were Indians.
The rapid growth in the slave population raised the specter of slave revolt. In 1739, the Stono Rebellion, the
largest slave uprising in colonial America, took place about twenty miles from Charleston. Led by a slave
named Jemmy, the rebels burned seven plantations and killed approximately 20 whites as they headed for
refuge in Spanish Florida. Within a day, however, the Stono rebels were captured and killed by the white
militia.
North Carolina was also the scene of some of the most bitter Indian-white warfare. In 1711, after incidents in
which whites had encroached on their land and kidnapped Indians as slaves, the Tuscaroras destroyed New
Bern. Over the next two years, the colonial militia, assisted by the Yamassees, killed or enslaved a fifth of the
Tuscaroras. Many survivors subsequently migrated to New York, where they became the Sixth Nation of the
Iroquois Confederacy. Then, in 1715, the Yamassees, finding themselves increasingly in debt to white traders
and merchants, allied themselves with the Creeks and attempted to destroy the colony. With help from the
Cherokees, the colonial militia successfully repelled the offensive, largely ending Indian resistance to white
expansion in the Carolinas.
Prior to the American Revolution, only one colony, Georgia, temporarily sought to prohibit slavery, because
the founders did not want a workforce that would compete with the debtors they planned to transport from
England. Settlers, however, illegally imported slaves into the colony, forcing the proprietors to abandon the
idea of a slave-free colony.
A Biographical Guide
Period: 1760-1780
Our founders guide offers succinct information about the women and men who led the colonies to
independence, who drafted the Declaration of Independence, and later wrote the U.S. Constitution.
John Adams (1735-1826)
His father was a Braintree, Mass., farmer and shoemaker. Although Adams was able to attend college, his
two younger brothers did not, and became farmers.
In 1770, Adams defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre in a belief that they had a right
to effective legal counsel. Adams obtained deathbed testimony from one of the five men mortally wounded by
the British soldiers, who swore that the crowd, not the troops were to blame for the massacre.
Adams was the first Vice President (1789-1797) and second President (1797-1801) of the United States.
Read his inaugural address: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/inaugural/
Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
As one of the chief organizers of protests against British imperial policies, Adams was, in Thomas Jefferson's
words, "truly the man of the Revolution." A founder of the Sons of Liberty, the Boston-born Harvard-educated
Adams was also a key instigator of protests against the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts.
Adams's hatred of arbitrary royal authority had deep personal roots. His father had established a land bank in
Massachusetts, which lent paper money backed by real estate. In 1741, wealthy merchants led by Thomas
Hutchinson, fearful that the bills would be used to pay debts, called on Massachusetts' royal governor to
declare the land bank illegal. When he did, Adams's father lost tremendous sums of money and never
recovered financially.
He was a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses, signed the Declaration of Independence,
and served as governor of Massachusetts (1794-1797).
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
His is one of the most remarkable success stories in American history. The 18th child of a Boston candle
maker and soap maker, his schooling ended at ten. At 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James, a
printer who published the New England Courant.
When he was 17, he ran away to Philadelphia, seeking a new start. He went to London and worked there as a
compositor in a printer's shop until he returned to Philadelphia with the help of a merchant named Thomas
Denham, who gave him a position in his business. On Denham's death Franklin set up a printing house of his
own from which he published The Pennsylvania Gazette, He was so successful that he was able to retire at
age 42 and devote the rest of his life to science and politics.
As a printer, he had owned slaves. But in later life, he became president of the world's first anti-slavery
society. Up until the early 1770s, Franklin was loyal to Britain. Yet by 1776, when he was 70 years old, he
had become an ardent patriot. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, he was 81 years old and had to
be carried on a sedan chair. His speeches had to be read by other delegates.
Alexander Hamilton (1755?-1804)
Born in the West Indies, Hamilton never developed the intense loyalty to a state that was common among
Americans of the time. He understood banking and finance as none of the other founders did.Although
Thomas Jefferson and his followers successfully painted Hamilton as an elitist defender of a deferential social
order and an admirer of monarchical Britain, in fact Hamilton offered a remarkably modern economic vision
based on investment, industry, and expanded commerce. Most strikingly, it was an economic vision with no
place for slavery. Before the 1790s, the American economy, North and South, was tied to a transatlantic
system of slavery. A member of New York's first antislavery society, Hamilton wanted to reorient the American
economy away from slavery and trade with the slave colonies of the Caribbean.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy hosted a White House dinner for America's Nobel Laureates. He told the
assemblage that this was "probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for
those times when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Jefferson was a man of many talents. He began his career as a lawyer, served in the Virginia House of
Delegates, and subsequently became governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, secretary of state, vice
president, and president. But when he wrote the epitaph that appears over his grave, he mentioned none of
these public offices. He simply stated that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the
Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and the father of the University of Virginia.
An architect, inventor, philosopher, planter, and scientist, he was convinced that the yeoman farmer, who
labors in the earth, provides the backbone of republican society. A stalwart defender of political, intellectual,
and religious freedom, he took as his inspiration, the motto on his family crest: "Resistance to tyrants is
obedience to God." A child of the Enlightenment, he popularized the idea that the success of republican
society depended on an informed citizenry and that government should create a system of state-supported
education to nurture a meritocracy based on talent and ability.
Jefferson was an extremely complex man, and his life is filled with many inconsistencies. An idealist who
repeatedly denounced slavery as a curse and expressed his willingness to support any feasible plan to
eradicate the institution, he owned 200 slaves when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and freed only
five slaves at the time of his death.
Yet Jefferson remains this country's most eloquent exponent of democratic principles. Abraham Lincoln said
that his words will always "be a rebuke and stumbling block to… tyranny and oppression."
James Madison (1751-1836)
Although one of the Library of Congress' building was recently named after him, there is no memorial to
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," in our nation's capital. Yet no delegate to the Constitutional
Convention had a greater impact on our system of government. As a member of the first Congress, he
introduced the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
He was short in stature ("no bigger than a snowflake," observed a contemporary), and had weak speaking
voice. Secretly, he suffered from epilepsy. Nevertheless, he dominated the Constitutional Convention. As the
principal author of the Virginia Plan, he set the terms of debate. The plan's essential feature, including the
separation of powers among branches of government, enumerated powers, and federal supremacy over
foreign affairs and interstate commerce, were eventually adopted. His notes, published after his death in
1836, give us the only daily account of what happened at the Constitutional Convention.
Before the convention, he had studied the history of the Greek city-states, the Roman empire, and the nations
of Europe. Convinced that the American Revolution was degenerating into chaos, he persuaded Washington
to leave his retirement at Mount Vernon to go to Philadelphia.
Unlike Jefferson, he had little faith in the essential goodness of humanity. The separation of powers among
different branches of government was necessary because politicians could not be trusted. "If men were
angels," he wrote, "no government would be necessary." In the Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper
essays in defense of the Constitution that remain guides to the framers' intentions, he argued that liberty
could best be assured in an extended republic. A large nation made up of many interest groups does not
permit a single faction to dominate the rest. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," he said.
William Pierce, a Georgia delegate, said of Madison: "He blends together the profound politician with the
scholar. In the management of every great question, he evidently took the lead in the convention, and tho' he
cannot be called an orator, he is a most agreeable, eloquent and convincing speaker."
His life mirrored the history of the new nation. At 29 he was the youngest member of the Continental
Congress. At 36, he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Later he served two terms in the
House of Representatives, formed the Democratic-Republican party that nominated Thomas Jefferson to the
presidency, served eight years as secretary, and was elected the fourth president in 1809.
Robert Morris (1734-1806)
A wealthy Philadelphia merchant, he was superintendent of finance in the Confederation Congress. He
persuaded the Confederation Congress to charter a Bank of the North America, to provide a secure source of
credit, but failed to persuade Congress to impose a 5 percent duty on imports, which would have allowed the
Confederation to repay its war debts.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
"I know not," John Adams wrote in 1806, "whether any man in the world has had more influence on its
inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Thomas Paine." After enduring many failures in his native
England, Paine, whose father was a Quaker, arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, bearing invaluable letters of
introduction from Benjamin Franklin.
By far the Revolution's most powerful pamphleteer, Paine was the author of Common Sense, which sold
150,000 copies after it was published in January 1776. A powerful attack on monarchy and hereditary
privilege, it also demanded a complete break with Britain and the establishment of a strong federal union.
George Washington
Our nation's capital, a state, and a soaring obelisk represent monuments to George Washington. He gained
an international reputation when he surrendered his sword to Congress after he resigned as commander-inchief in 1783 at age 52 to tend Mount Vernon, his 6700 acre plantation along the Potomac.
Even during his lifetime, Washington was considered as much a monument as a man. To Americans of the
revolutionary and early national period, he personified republican virtue. A superb horseman, dignified in
appearance, standing well over six feet tall, he looked like a military hero. But it was his character that elicited
particular admiration.
Compared to many of the nation's founders, his background was far more limited. He never attended college
nor did he ever visit Europe. Until he took command of the revolutionary army besieging British troops in
Boston, he had never traveled north to New England, and until he became President, he had never gone
south to the Carolinas or Georgia. A frontiersman and a surveyor, he made his reputation in the wilderness
that lay across the Appalachian Mountains. As a general, he possessed great political skills, and was able to
hold the Continental Army together in the face of severe challenges.
Acutely aware of his reputation for republic virtue, Washington was extremely careful about how he behaved
in public. The Constitution posed a genuine quandary for Washington. He very much hoped for a stronger
national government than the Articles of Confederation could provide, but he also feared that he public might
question his motives for participating in the convention. The following quotation reveals his thoughts on this
subject:
A thought...has lately run through my mind.... It is, whether my non-attendance in this Convention will not be
considered as dereliction to Republicanism, nay more, whether other motives may not (however injuriously)
be ascribed to me for not exerting myself on this occasion?
In the end, Washington agreed to serve as president of the Constitutional Convention, and his popularity and
prestige helped to secure the Constitution's ratification.
Jefferson wrote in 1814: "His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order.... He was
incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his
character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, ever consideration, was maturely weighed...."
Vice President Adams proposed that Washington be given a title to fit the dignity of his office: "His Highness,
the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties." But Washington preferred a simple title:
"Mr. President."
The Election of 1860
Period: 1860s
In April 1860, the Democratic Party assembled in Charleston, South Carolina to select a presidential nominee.
Southern delegates insisted that the party endorse a federal code to guarantee the rights of slaveholders in
the territories. When the convention rejected the proposal, delegates from the deep South walked out. The
remaining delegates reassembled six weeks later in Baltimore and selected Stephen Douglas as their
candidate. Southern Democrats proceeded to choose John C. Breckinridge as their presidential nominee.
In May, the Constitutional Union Party, which consisted of conservative former Whigs, Know Nothings, and
pro-Union Democrats nominated John Bell of Tennessee for President. This short-lived party denounced
sectionalism and tried to rally support around a platform that supported the Constitution and the Union.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln on the third ballot.
The 1860 election revealed how divided the country had become. There were actually two separate sectional
campaigns: one in the North, pitting Lincoln against Douglas, and one in the South between Breckinridge and
Bell. Only Stephen Douglas mounted a truly national campaign. The Republicans did not campaign in the
South and Lincoln's name did not appear on the ballot in 10 states.
In the final balloting, Lincoln won only 39.9 percent of the popular vote, but received 180 Electoral College
votes, 57 more than the combined total of his
South Carolina Leaves the Union
Period: 1860s
Convinced that a Republican administration would attempt to undermine slavery by appointing antislavery
judges, postmasters, military officers, and other officials, a secession convention in South Carolina voted
unanimously to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860. The convention issued a declaration in which
it attempted to justify its decision. Drawing on arguments developed by John C. Calhoun, the convention held
that the states were sovereign entities that could leave the Union as freely as they joined. Among the many
indictments of the northern states and people, nothing seems more central than the issue of trust with respect
to the capture and return of fugitive slaves.
James L. Petigru (1789-1863), a staunch South Carolina unionist, reportedly responded to the Palmetto
State's actions by saying that his state was too small for a country and too large for an insane asylum.
Secession
Period: 1860s
In just three weeks, between January 9, 1861 and February 1, six states of the Deep South joined South
Carolina in leaving the Union: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Unlike South
Carolina, where secessionist sentiment was almost universal, there was significant opposition in the other
states. Although an average of 80 percent of the delegates at secession conventions favored immediate
secession, the elections at which these delegates were chosen were very close, particularly in Georgia,
Alabama, and Louisiana. To be sure, many voters who opposed immediate secession were not unconditional
Unionists. But the resistance to immediate secession did suggest that some kind of compromise was still
possible.
In the Upper South, opposition to secession was even greater. In Virginia, on February 4, opponents of
immediate secession received twice as many votes as proponents, while Tennessee voters rejected a call for
a secession convention.
On February 1, a secession convention in Texas voted to leave the Union. Three weeks later, a popular vote
ratified the decision by a three-to-one margin. Texas Governor Sam Houston (1793-1863), who owned a
dozen slaves, repudiated secession and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. As a result,
he was forced from office. Houston predicted: "Our people are going to war to perpetuate slavery, and the first
gun fired in the war will be the [death] knell of slavery."
Establishing the Confederacy
Period: 1860s
In early February 1861, the states of the lower South established a new government, the Confederate States
of America, in Montgomery, Alabama, and drafted a constitution. Although modeled on the U.S. Constitution,
this document specifically referred to slavery, state sovereignty, and God. It explicitly guaranteed slavery in
the states and territories, but prohibited the international slave trade. It also limited the President to a single
six-year term, gave the President a line-item veto, required a two-thirds vote of Congress to admit new states,
and prohibited protective tariffs and government funding of internal improvements.
As President, the Confederates selected former U.S. Senator and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (18081889). The Alabama secessionist William L. Yancey (1814-1863) introduced Davis as Confederate President
by declaring: "The man and the hour have met. Prosperity, honor, and victory await his administration."
At first glance, Davis seemed much more qualified to be President than Lincoln. Unlike the new Republican
President, who had no formal education, Davis was a West Point graduate. And while Lincoln had only two
weeks of military experience, as a militia captain, without combat experience in the Black Hawk War, Davis
had served as a regimental commander during the Mexican War. In office, however, Davis's rigid, humorless
personality; his poor health; his inability to delegate authority; and, above all, his failure to inspire confidence
in his people would make him a far less effective chief executive than Lincoln. During the war, a southern
critic described Davis as "false and hypocritical...miserable, stupid, one-eyed, dyspeptic, arrogant...cold,
haughty, peevish, narrow-minded, pig-headed, [and] malignant."
Following secession, the Confederate states attempted to seize federal property within their boundaries,
including forts, customs houses, and arsenals. Several forts, however, remained within Union hands,
including Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, and Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina's harbor.
Last-Ditch
Efforts
at
Compromise
Period: 1860s
Threats of secession were nothing new. Some Southerners had threatened to leave the Union during a
Congressional debate over slavery in 1790, the Missouri Crisis of 1819 and 1820, the Nullification Crisis of
1831 and 1832, and the crisis over California statehood in 1850. In each case, the crisis was resolved by
compromise. Many expected the same pattern to prevail in 1861.
Four months separated Lincoln's election to the presidency and his inauguration. During this period, there
were two major compromise efforts. John J. Crittenden (1787-1863) of Kentucky, who held Henry Clay's old
Senate seat, proposed a series of Constitutional amendments, including one to extend the Missouri
Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, in defiance of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision.
The amendment would prohibit slavery north of the line but explicitly protect it south of the line. On January
16, 1861, however, the Senate, which was controlled by Democrats, refused to consider the Crittenden
compromise. Every Republican Senator opposed the measure and six Democrats abstained. On March 4, the
Senate reconsidered Crittenden's compromise proposal and defeated it by a single vote.
Meanwhile, Virginia had proposed a peace convention to be held in Washington, D.C., February 4, 1861, the
very day that the new Confederate government was to be set up in Alabama. Delegates, who represented 21
of the 34 states, voted narrowly to recommend extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. The
delegates also would have required a four-fifths vote of the Senate to acquire new territory. The Senate
rejected the convention's proposals 28 to 7.
Compromise failed in early 1861 because it would have required the Republican Party to repudiate its guiding
principle: no extension of slavery into the western territories. President-elect Lincoln made the point bluntly in
a message to a Republican in Congress:" Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the
extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later
must be done over....The tug has to come and better now than later."
With compromise unattainable, attention shifted to the federal installations located within the Confederate
states, especially to a fort located in the channel leading to Charleston Harbor. In November 1860, the U.S.
government sent Colonel Robert A. Anderson (1805-1871), a pro-slavery Kentuckian and an 1825 West Point
graduate, to Charleston to command federal installations there. On December 26, under cover of darkness,
he moved his forces (10 officers, 76 enlisted men, 45 women and children, and a number of laborers) from
the barely defensible Fort Moultrie to the unfinished Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861, President James
Buchanan made an effort to reinforce the garrison, but the supply ship was fired on and driven off.
Fort Sumter
Period: 1860s
By late February, Fort Sumter had become a key symbol of whether the Confederate states exercised
sovereignty over their territory. South Carolina demanded that President Buchanan surrender Fort Sumter in
exchange for monetary compensation. To the rebels' surprise, he refused. As the following letter from
Jefferson Davis makes clear, any decision about forcing the surrender of the fort by force carried profound
consequences. Eight slave states in the Upper South remained in the Union. But their stance would clearly
depend on the steps that South Carolina and the federal government took toward Fort Sumter.
Lincoln Responds to Secession
Period: 1860s
In his inaugural address, Lincoln attempted to be both firm and conciliatory. He declared secession to be
wrong; but he also promised that he would "not interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists." He
announced that he would use "the power confided to me...to hold, occupy, and possess the property and
places belonging to the Government." But he assured Southerners that "there would be no invasion, no using
of force against or among the people anywhere."
When he delivered his inaugural address, the new President assumed that there was time for southern prounion sentiment, which he greatly overestimated, to reassert itself, making a peaceful resolution to the crisis
possible. The next morning, however, he received a letter from Robert Anderson informing him that Fort
Sumter's supplies would be exhausted in four to six weeks and that it would take a 20,000-man force to
reinforce the fort.
Lincoln received conflicting advice about what to do. Winfield Scott, his commanding general, saw "no
alternative to surrender," convinced that it would take eight months to prepare naval and ground forces to
relieve Fort Sumter. Secretary of State William H. Seward also favored abandoning the fort to avoid provoking
a civil war, but also considered the possibility of inciting a foreign war (probably with France or Spain) as a
way to reunite the country. Lincoln's Postmaster General Montgomery Blair and Treasury Secretary Salmon
P. Chase favored dispatching a force of warships and transports to relieve the fort and assert federal
authority, since "every hour of acquiescence ... strengthens [the rebels'] hands at home and their claims to
recognition as an independent people abroad."
In the end, Lincoln decided to try to peacefully re-supply the fort with provisions and to inform the Confederate
government of his decision beforehand. Unarmed ships with supplies would try to relieve the fort. Only if the
South Carolinians used force to stop the mission would warships, positioned outside Charleston Harbor, go
into action. In this way, Lincoln hoped to make the Confederacy responsible for starting a war.
Upon learning of Lincoln's plan, Jefferson Davis ordered General Pierre G.T. Beauregard (1818-1893) to
force Fort Sumter's surrender before the supply mission could arrive. At 4:30 a.m. April 12, Confederate guns
began firing on Fort Sumter. Thirty-three hours later, the installation surrendered. Incredibly, there were no
fatalities on their side.
Ironically, the only fatalities at Fort Sumter occurred just after the battle ended. During the surrender
ceremony, a pile of cartridges ignited, killing one soldier, fatally wounding another, and injuring four.
War Begins
Period: 1860s
Lincoln was convinced that the Confederate states had seceded from the Union for the sole purpose of
maintaining slavery. Like President Jackson before him, he considered the Union to be permanent, an
agreement by the people and not just of the states. Further, he strongly agreed with the sentiments voiced by
Daniel Webster (1782-1852), when that Whig Senator declared in 1830, "Liberty and Union, now and forever,
one and inseparable." Lincoln, too, believed that a strong Union provided the only firm safeguard for
American liberties and republican institutions. By attacking Fort Sumter, the Confederacy had directly
challenged federal authority. And so the war came.
Lincoln responded to the attack on Fort Sumter by calling on the states to provide 75,000 militiamen for 90
days service. Twice that number volunteered. But the eight slave states still in the Union refused to furnish
troops, and four--Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia--seceded.
One individual who felt especially torn by the decision to support the Union or join the Confederacy was
Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) of Virginia. Lee was Winfield Scott's choice to serve as field commander of the
Union army, but when a state convention voted to secede, he resigned from the U.S. army, announcing to his
sister that he could not "raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children. Save in defense of my
native state, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword." After joining the Confederate army, he
predicted "that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation perhaps for
national sins."
Prospects for Victory
Period: 1860s
Many Northerners felt confident of a quick victory. In 1861, the Union states had 22.5 million people,
compared to just 9 million in the Confederate states (including 3.7 million slaves). Not only did the Union have
more manpower, it also had a larger navy, a more developed railroad system, and a stronger manufacturing
base. The North had 1.3 million industrial workers, compared to the South's 110,000. Northern factories
manufactured nine times as many industrial goods as the South; seventeen times as many cotton and woolen
goods; thirty times as many boots and shoes; twenty times as much pig iron; twenty-four times as many
railroad locomotives; and 33 times as many firearms.
But Confederates also felt confident. For one thing, the Confederacy had only to wage a defensive war and
wait for northern morale to erode. In contrast, the Union had to conquer and control the Confederacy's
750,000 square miles of territory. Further, the Confederate army seemed superior to that of the Union. More
Southerners had attended West Point or other military academies, had served as army officers, and had
experience using firearms and horses. At the beginning of 1861, the U.S. army consisted of only 16,000 men,
most of whom served on the frontier fighting Indians. History, too, seemed to be on the South's side. Before
the Civil War, most nations that had fought for independence, including, of course, the United States, had won
their struggle. A school textbook epitomized southern confidence: "If one Confederate soldier can whip seven
Yankees," it asked, "how many soldiers can whip 49 Yanks?"
Why the Civil War Was So Lethal
Period: 1860s
The Civil War was the deadliest war in American history. Altogether, over 600,000 died in the conflict, more
than World War I and World War II combined. A soldier was 13 times more likely to die in the Civil War than in
the Vietnam War.
One reason why the Civil War was so lethal was the introduction of improved weaponry. Cone-shaped bullets
replaced musket balls, and beginning in 1862, smooth-bore muskets were replaced with rifles with grooved
barrels, which imparted spin on a bullet and allowed a soldier to hit a target a quarter of a mile away. The new
weapons had appeared so suddenly that commanders did not immediately realize that they needed to
compensate for the increased range and accuracy of rifles.
The Civil War was the first war in which soldiers used repeating rifles (which could fire several shots without
reloading), breechloading arms (which were loaded from behind the barrel instead of through the muzzle),
and automated weapons like the Gatling gun. The Civil War also marked the first use by Americans of
shrapnel, booby traps, and land mines.
Outdated strategy also contributed to the high number of casualties. Massive frontal assaults and massed
formations resulted in large numbers of deaths. In addition, far larger numbers of soldiers were involved in
battles than in the past. In the Mexican War, no more than 15,000 soldiers opposed each other in a single
battle, but some Civil War battles involved as many as 100,000 soldiers.
Bull Run
Period: 1860s
Any hopes for a swift northern victory in the Civil War were dashed at the First Battle of Bull Run (called
Manassas by the Confederates). After the surrender of Fort Sumter, two Union armies moved into northern
Virginia. One, led by General Irvin McDowell (1818-1885), had about 35,000 men; the other, with about
18,000 men was led by General Robert Patterson (1792-1881). They were opposed by two Confederate
armies, with about 31,000 troops, one led by General Joseph E. Johnston (1807-1891), another led by
General Pierre G.T. Beauregard (1818-1893). Both Union and Confederate armies consisted of poorly trained
volunteers.
McDowell hoped to destroy Beauregard's forces while Patterson tied up Johnston's men; in fact, Johnston's
troops eluded McDowall and joined Beauregard. At Bull Run in northern Virginia 25 miles southwest of
Washington, the armies clashed. While residents of Washington ate picnic lunches and looked on, Union
troops launched several assaults. When Beauregard counterattacked, Union forces retreated in panic, but
Confederate forces failed to take up pursuit.
War for Union
Period: 1860s
In July 1861, Congress adopted a resolution by a vote of 117 to 2 in the House and 30 to 5 in the Senate that
read: "This war is not waged...for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the established institutions of
those States, but to maintain the States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the
war should cease." Fearful of alienating the slave states that remained in the Union--Delaware, Kentucky,
Maryland, and Missouri--or of antagonizing Northerners who would support anti-war Democrats if the conflict
were transformed into a war to abolish slavery, Lincoln felt that he had to proceed cautiously. Nevertheless,
opponents of slavery regarded the war as a providential opportunity to destroy slavery and the slave power.
In its analysis of the Civil War's causes, the London Times rejected the notion that this was a war about
slavery. It argued that the conflict had the same roots as most wars: territorial aggrandizement, political
power, and economic supremacy. But few Northerners or Southerners saw the war in such simple terms. To
many white southern soldiers, it was a war to preserve their liberty and their way of life, to prevent abolition
and its consequences--race war, racial amalgamation, and, according to one militant Southerner's words, "the
Africanization of the South." To many northern soldiers, it was a war to preserve the Union, uphold the
Constitution, and defeat a ruthless slave power, which had threatened to subvert republican ideals of liberty
and equality.
The Anaconda Plan
Period: 1860s
The initial Union strategy involved blockading Confederate ports to cut off cotton exports and prevent the
import of manufactured goods; and using ground and naval forces to divide the Confederacy into three
distinct theaters. These were the far western theater, west of the Mississippi River; the western theater,
between the Mississippi and the Appalachians; and the eastern theater, in Virginia. Ridiculed in the press as
the "Anaconda Plan," after the South American snake that crushes its prey to death, this strategy ultimately
proved successful. Although about 90 percent of Confederate ships were able to break through the blockade
in 1861, this figure was cut to less than 15 percent a year later. Although the Union army suffered repeated
defeats and stalemates in the East, victories in the western theater undermined the hopes for Confederate
independence.
Pressure for Emancipation
Period: 1860s
In August 1862, Lincoln stated: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others
alone I would also do that." In fact, by that time, immense pressure was building to end slavery and Lincoln
had privately concluded that he could save the Union only by issuing an emancipation proclamation, which he
had already drafted.
The pressure came from a handful of field commanders, Republicans in Congress, abolitionists, and slaves
themselves. In May 1861, General Benjamin Butler (1818-1893), who had been a lawyer and a politician
before the war, had declared slaves who escaped to Union lines "contraband of war," not returnable to their
masters. In August, Major General John C. Freemont, commander of Union forces in Missouri, had issued an
order freeing the slaves of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri. Lincoln, incensed by Freemont assumption
of authority and fearful that the measure would "alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us,"
revoked the order, but allowed Union generals discretion in providing refuge to fugitive slaves.
Congress, too, adopted a series of antislavery measures. In August 1861, it passed a Confiscation Act,
authorizing the seizure of all property, including slaves, used for Confederate military purposes. Then in the
spring and summer of 1862, Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories;
prohibited Union officers from returning fugitive slaves; allowed the President to enlist African Americans in
the army; and called for the seizure of Confederate property.
The border states' intransigence on the issue of slave emancipation also pushed the President in a more
active direction. In the spring of 1862, Lincoln persuaded Congress to pass a resolution offering financial
compensation to states that abolished slavery voluntarily. Three times, Lincoln met with border state
members of Congress to discuss the offer, and even discussed the possibility of emancipation over a 30-year
period. In July, however, the Congressmen rejected Lincoln's offer.
War in the West
Period: 1860s
Under the Anaconda Plan, Union forces in the West were to seize control of the Mississippi River while Union
forces in the East tried to capture the new Confederate capital in Richmond. In the western theater, the
Confederates had built two forts, Fort Donelson along the Cumberland River and Fort Henry on the
Tennessee River, which controlled the Kentucky and western Tennessee region and blocked the Union's path
to the Mississippi.
The Union officer responsible for capturing these forts was Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), a West Point
graduate who had resigned from the army because of a drinking problem and who was working in his father's
tanning shop when the war began. In February 1862, gunboats under Grant's command took Fort Henry and
ten days later, Grant's men took Fort Donelson, forcing 13,000 Confederates to surrender.
Grant and some 42,000 men then proceeded south along the Tennessee River. A Confederate force of
40,000 men, under the command of Beauregard and Johnston tried to surprise Grant before other Union
forces could join him at the Battle of Shiloh. In two days of heavy fighting during which there were 13,000
Union casualties and over 10,000 Confederate casualties, Grant successfully pushed back the southern
forces. By early June, Union forces controlled the Mississippi River as far south as Memphis, Tennessee.
A Will to Destroy
Period: 1860s
The Civil War witnessed a will to destroy and a spirit of intolerance that conflicted with Americans' self-image
as a tolerant people committed to compromise. Not only did the conflict see the use of shrapnel and booby
traps, it reportedly saw a few southern women wear necklaces made of Union soldiers' teeth. In a notorious
1862 order, Union General Ulysses S. Grant expelled all Jews from his military department on the grounds
that they were speculating in cotton.
While Grant was driving toward the Mississippi from the north, northern naval forces under Captain David G.
Farragut (1801-1870) attacked from the south. In April 1862, Farragut steamed past weak Confederate
defenses and captured New Orleans. In New Orleans, Union forces met repeated insults from the city's
women. Major General Benjamin F. Butler ordered that any woman who behaved disrespectfully should be
treated as a prostitute. Reaction in the North was mixed. Southern reaction to "Beast" Butler was predictably
harsh.
The Eastern Theater
Period: 1860s
In the eastern theater, Union General George McClellan's plan was to land northern forces on a peninsula
between the York and James Rivers southeast of Richmond and then march on the southern capital. In
March 1862, McClelland landed over 100,000 men on the peninsula, only to find his path along the James
River blocked by an iron-clad Confederate warship, the Virginia. Nevertheless by May, McClellan's forces
were within six miles of Richmond.
The Confederacy was in desperate straits. The Confederate government had packed up its official records
and was prepared to evacuate its capital. It had already lost most of Tennessee, much of the Mississippi
Valley, and New Orleans, its largest city and most important port. Between March and June, Confederate
forces suffered serious military defeats in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
In June, however, Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. As a
diversionary move to prevent Union forces from concentrating on Richmond, Lee relied on General Thomas J.
("Stonewall") Jackson to launch lightning-like raids from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Then in a series of
encounters between June 26 and July 2, 1862, known as the Seven Days' Battles, Lee and Jackson forced
McClellan, who mistakenly believed he was hopelessly outnumbered, to withdraw back to the James River.
Union forces still hoped to capture Richmond and bring the war to a quick end. But 10 days after President
Davis offered the following assessment of the conflict, Lee again repulsed a northern advance. At the Second
Battle of Bull Run, Union General John Pope found his army almost surrounded and retreated, giving the
Confederacy almost total control of Virginia.
Native Americans and the Civil War
Period: 1860s
In 1861, many Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles decided to join the Confederacy,
in part because some of the tribes' members owned slaves. In return, the Confederate states agreed to pay
all annuities that the U.S. government had provided and let the tribes send delegates to the Confederate
Congress. A Cherokee Chief, Stand Watie (1806-1871), served as a brigadier general for the Confederacy
and did not surrender until a month after the war was over.
After the war, these nations were severely punished for supporting the Confederacy. The Seminoles were
required to sell their reservation at 15 cents an acre and buy new land from the Creeks at 50 cents an acre.
The other tribes were required to give up half their territory in Oklahoma. This land would become
reservations for the Arapahos, Caddos, Cheyennes, Commanches, Iowas, Kaws, Kickapoos, Pawnees,
Potawatomis, Sauk and Foxes, and Shawnees. In addition, all these nations had to allow railroads to cut
across their land.
War Within a War
Period: 1860s
In the midst of the Civil War, a thirty-year conflict began as the federal government sought to concentrate the
Plains Indians on reservations. Violence erupted first in Minnesota, where, by 1862, the Santee Sioux were
confined to a territory 150 miles long and just 10 miles wide. Denied a yearly payment and agricultural aid
promised by treaty, these people rose up in August 1862 and killed more than 350 white settlers at New Ulm.
Lincoln appointed John Pope (1822-1892), commander of Union forces at the Second Battle of Bull Run, to
crush the uprising. Pope promised to deal with the Sioux "as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as
people with whom treaties or compromises can be made."
When the Sioux surrendered in September 1862, 1,808 were taken prisoner and 303 were condemned to
death. Defying threats from Minnesota's governor and a senator who warned of the indiscriminate massacre
of Indians if all 303 convicted Indians were not executed, Lincoln commuted the sentences of most, but did
finally authorize the hanging of 37. This was the largest mass execution in American history, but Lincoln lost
many votes in Minnesota as a result of his clemency.
In 1864, fighting spread to Colorado, after the discovery of gold led to an influx of whites. In November, 1864,
a group of Colorado volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington (1821-1894), fell on a
group of Cheyennes at Sand Creek, where they had gathered under the governor's protection. "We must kill
them big and little," he told his men. "Nits make lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). The militia slaughtered about
150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children.
Antietam
Period: 1860s
The United States achieved independence in part because foreign countries such as France and Spain,
entered the war against Britain on the American side. The Confederacy, too, hoped for foreign aid. In a bold
bid to win European support, the Confederacy sought to win a major victory on northern soil.
In September 1862, Lee launched a daring offensive into Maryland. No one could be sure exactly what Lee
planned to do. But in an incredible stroke of luck, a copy of Lee's battle plan (which had been wrapped around
three cigars) fell into the hands of Union General George B. McClellan. After only a brief delay, on September
17, 1862, McClellan forces attacked Lee at Antietam Creek in Maryland.
The Battle of Antietam (which is sometimes referred to as the Battle of Sharpsburg) produced the bloodiest
single day of the Civil War. Lee suffered 11,000 casualties; McClellan, 13,000. Lee was forced to retreat,
allowing the North to declare the battle a Union victory. But Union forces failed to follow up on their surprise
success and decisively defeat Lee's army.
Lincoln deeply mistrusted McClellan, an obsessively cautious general and a Democrat who bitterly opposed
the Emancipation Proclamation and who called Lincoln the "Gorilla." Lincoln was outraged by the statement of
one Union officer, Major John J. Key, whose brother was a key McClellan adviser, that it was not the objective
of the war to crush the Confederate army. Instead, Key implied, the goal was simply to drag the war out until
both sides gave up and the Union could be restored with slavery intact. Key was the only officer to be
dismissed from service for uttering disloyal sentiments.
The Significance of Names
Period: 1860s
During the Civil War, the Union and Confederate armies tended to give battles different names. Thus the
battle known to the Union as Bull Run was called Manassas by the Confederacy. Similarly, the Battle of
Antietam was known by the Confederacy as the Battle of Sharpsburg. In general, the North tended to name
battles and armies after bodies of water (such as the Army of the Potomac or the Army of the Mississippi),
while the Confederacy tended to name battles after towns and armies after land areas (such as the Army of
North Virginia or the Army of Kentucky). It seems plausible that the Confederacy used such names to convey
a sense that its soldiers were defending something of pivotal importance: their homeland.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Period: 1860s
In July 1862, about two months before President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,
Congress adopted a second Confiscation Act calling for the seizure of the property of slaveholders who were
actively engaged in the rebellion. It seems unlikely that this act would have freed any slaves, since the federal
government would have to prove that individual slaveholders were traitors. (In fact, one of the largest
slaveholders in South Carolina was a Baltimore Unionist). Lincoln felt that Congress lacked the legal authority
to emancipate slaves; he believed that only the President acting as commander-in-chief had the authority to
abolish slavery.
On September 22, 1862, less than a week after the Battle of Antietam, President Lincoln met with his cabinet.
As one cabinet member, Samuel P. Chase, recorded in his diary, the President told them that he had "thought
a great deal about the relation of this war to Slavery":
You all remember that, several weeks ago, I read to you an Order I had prepared on this subject, which, since
then, my mind has been much occupied with this subject, and I have thought all along that the time for acting
on it might very probably come. I think the time has come now. I wish it were a better time. I wish that we
were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have
best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion.
When the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue
a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to any one; but I
made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a little)--to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am
going to fulfill that promise.
The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that President Lincoln issued on September 22 stated that all
slaves in designated parts of the South on January 1, 1863, would be freed. The President hoped that slave
emancipation would undermine the Confederacy from within. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles reported
that the President told him that freeing the slaves was "a military necessity, absolutely essential to the
preservation of the Union....The slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who [have] their
service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us."
Fear of foreign intervention in the war also influenced Lincoln to consider emancipation. The Confederacy had
assumed, mistakenly, that demand for cotton from textile mills would lead Britain to break the Union naval
blockade. Nevertheless, there was a real danger of European involvement in the war. By redefining the war
as a war against slavery, Lincoln hoped to generate support from European liberals.
Even before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair (18131883), a former Democrat from Maryland, had warned the President that this decision might stimulate antiwar
protests among northern Democrats and cost the administration the fall 1862 elections. In fact, Peace
Democrats did protest against the proclamation and Lincoln's assumption of powers not specifically granted
by the Constitution. Among the "abuses" they denounced were his unilateral decision to call out the militia to
suppress the "insurrection," impose a blockade of southern ports, expand the army beyond the limits set by
law, spend federal funds without prior congressional authorization, and suspend the writ of habeas corpus
(the right of persons under arrest to have their case heard in court). The Lincoln administration imprisoned
about 13,000 people without trial during the war, and shut Democratic newspapers in New York, Philadelphia,
and Chicago for varying amounts of time.
The Democrats failed to gain control of the House of Representatives in the Fall 1862 election, in part
because the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation gave a higher moral purpose to the northern cause.
The Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation
Period: 1860s
In October 1862, the London Times dismissed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation as an empty
gesture. "Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the Negroes free," the newspaper commented; "where
he retains power he will consider them as slaves. This is more like a Chinaman beating his two swords
together to frighten his enemy than like an earnest man pressing forward his cause."
In recent years, it has sometimes been charged that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves,
since it applied only to areas that were in a state of rebellion, and explicitly exempted the border states,
Tennessee, and portions of Louisiana and Virginia. This view is incorrect. The proclamation did officially and
immediately free slaves in South Carolina's sea islands, Florida, and some other locations occupied by Union
troops. Certainly, the Emancipation Proclamation was only a crucial first step toward complete emancipation,
but in effect it transformed the Union forces into an army of liberation.
At the time he issued the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln defended it as a war measure necessary to defeat
the Confederacy and preserve the Union. But it seems clear that Lincoln regarded this argument as
necessary on tactical grounds. When he issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, he described it not
only as "a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion," but an "act of justice."
In July 1863, Hannah Johnson, the daughter of a fugitive slave, heard an erroneous report that Lincoln was
going to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation. She wrote the President: "Don't do it. When you are dead
and in Heaven, in a thousand years that action of yours will make the Angels sing your praises...."
The Home Front
Period: 1860s
The Civil War separated families in unprecedented numbers and freed women to assume many new roles.
With the departure of many men into the military, women entered many occupations previously reserved for
men only: in factories, shops, and especially, the expanding civil service, where women took jobs as clerks,
bookkeepers, and secretaries. A number of women also served as spies (like Rose O'Neal Greenhow (18141864), a Confederate spy in Washington) and even as soldiers (like Albert Cashier, whose real name was
Jennie Hodgers).
But it was as nurses that women achieved particular prominence. Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton were
among thousands of women, North and South, who carried supplies to soldiers and nursed wounded men on
the battlefield and in hospitals. Through organizations like the Christian Commission (formed by the North's
YMCAs) and the U.S. Sanitary Commission (one of whose founders was Elizabeth Blackwell, the first
American woman to earn a medical degree), women agents distributed medical supplies, organized hospitals,
passed out Bibles and religious tracts, and offered comfort to wounded or dying soldiers
The Death Toll
Period: 1860s
Almost as many soldiers died during the Civil War as in all other American wars combined. Union combat
deaths totaled 111,904; another 197,388 died of disease, 30,192 in prison, and 24,881 as a result of
accidents. Another 277,401 Union solders were wounded. Confederate casualties were nearly as high, with
approximately 94,000 combat deaths, 140,000 deaths by disease; and 195,000 men wounded.
Over half of all deaths were caused by disease. As a result of poor sanitation, primitive medical practices, and
contaminated water supplies, the average regiment lost half its fighting strength from disease during the first
year.
The Second American Revolution
Period: 1860s
During the war, the Republican-controlled Congress enacted a series of measures that carried long-term
consequences for the future. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided public land free to pioneers who agreed to
farm the land for five years. The Morrill Act of 1862 helped states establish agricultural and technical colleges.
Congress also authorized construction of the nation's first transcontinental railroad.
The Civil War also brought vast changes to the nation's financial system. Before the Civil War, the federal
government did not issue paper money. Instead, paper notes were issued by more than 1,500 state banks in
1860, which issued more than 10,000 different kinds of currency.
To end this chaotic system and to impose federal regulation on the financial system, Congress enacted two
important pieces of legislation. The Legal Tender Act of 1862 authorized the federal government to issue
paper money. Because these notes were printed on green paper, they became known as greenbacks. The
National Bank Act of 1863 created the nation's first truly national banking system.
As finally adopted by Congress, the National Banking Act of 1863 chartered national banks which met certain
requirements, made the notes of national banks legal tender for all public and private debts, and levied a tax
of 2 percent on state bank notes, which gradually increased over time. By imposing a tax on state bank notes,
the federal government forced state banks to join the federal system. By 1865, national banks had 83 percent
of all bank assets in the United States. After 1870, interestingly, state banks made a comeback; they avoided
the tax on their bank notes by issuing checks.
The Confederacy Begins to Collapse
Period: 1860s
By early 1863, the Civil War had begun to cause severe hardship on the southern home front. Not only was
most of the fighting taking place in the South, but as the Union blockade grew more effective and the South's
railroad system deteriorated, shortages grew increasingly common. In Richmond, food riots erupted in April
1863. A war department clerk wrote: "I have lost twenty pounds, and my wife and children are emaciated."
The Confederacy also suffered rampant inflation. Fearful of undermining support for the war effort,
Confederate leaders refused to raise taxes to support the war. Instead, the Confederacy raised funds by
selling bonds and simply printing money without gold or silver to back it. The predictable result was
skyrocketing prices. In 1863, a pair of shoes cost $125 and a coat, $350. A chicken cost $15 and a barrel of
flour $275.
Defeatism and a loss of will began to spread across the Confederacy. Military defeats suggested divine
disfavor. Hardships on the home front generated discontent within the ranks.
In the South, the imposition of a military draft in April 1862 produced protests that this was "a rich man's war
and a poor man's fight." Although the law made all able-bodied men ages 18 through 35 liable for three years'
service, the draft law allowed draftees to pay a substitute to serve for him (the North adopted a similar draft
law in March 1863). Further aggravating tension was enactment of the "Twenty Negro Law" in October 1862
which exempted one white man from the draft on every plantation with 20 or more slaves.
The New York City Draft Riots
Period: 1860s
As the war dragged on, enthusiasm faded and class tensions flared. In the North, the worst mob violence in
American history took place in New York City in July 1863, two weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg. About
120 people were killed, mainly by police and soldiers. Irish Catholic immigrants and their children had been
egged on by Democratic leaders who told them that Republicans wanted to free the slaves in order bring
them north to replace Irish workers. During four days of rioting, mobs lynched at least a dozen African
American men, destroyed draft offices, burned and looted black neighborhoods and the homes of leading
Republicans and abolitionists.
Blacks in Blue
Period: 1860s
By early 1863, voluntary enlistments in the Union army had fallen so sharply that the federal government
instituted an unpopular military draft and decided to enroll black, as well as white, troops. Indeed, it seems
likely that it was the availability of large numbers of African American soldiers that allowed President Lincoln
to resist demands for a negotiated peace that might have including the retention of slavery in the United
States. Altogether, 186,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and another 29,000 served in the Navy,
accounting for nearly 10 percent of all Union forces and 68,178 of the Union dead or missing. Twenty-four
African Americans received the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in battle.
Three-fifths of all black troops were former slaves. The active participation of black troops in the fighting made
it far less likely that African Americans would remain in slavery after the Civil War.
While some white officers, like Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863), who commanded the 54th Massachusetts
Regiment, were proud to lead black troops in battle, others exhibited a deep resistance.
Fort Wagner
Period: 1860s
Black soldiers participated in the war at great threat to their lives. The Confederate government threatened to
summarily execute or sell into slavery any captured black Union soldiers--and did sometimes carry out those
threats. Lincoln responded by threatening to retaliate against Confederate prisoners whenever black soldiers
were killed or enslaved.
In July 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black regiment raised in the North, led an assault
against Fort Wagner, which guarded Charleston, South Carolina's harbor. Two of Frederick Douglass's sons
were members of the regiment. Over forty percent of the regiment's members were killed or wounded in the
unsuccessful attack, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a member of a prominent antislavery family, who
was shot dead in the charge.
The Battle Against Discrimination
Period: 1860s
During the war, African American troops also faced a different kind of battle: a battle against discrimination in
pay, promotions, and medical care. Despite promises of equal treatment, blacks were relegated to separate
regiments commanded by white officers. Black soldiers received less pay than white soldiers, inferior benefits,
and poorer food and equipment. While a white private was paid $13 a month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance,
blacks received just $10 a month, out of which $3 was deducted for clothing. Furthermore, black soldiers were
not provided with the enlistment bonuses commonly given to white soldiers, and, until the end of the war, the
federal government refused to commission black officers.
Within the ranks, black troops faced repeated humiliations; most were employed in menial assignments and
kept in rear-echelon, fatigue jobs. They were punished by whipping or by being tied by their thumbs; if
captured by the Confederates, they faced execution. But despite these trials, African American soldiers won
their fight for equal pay (in 1864) and in 1865 they were allowed to serve as line officers. Drawing upon the
education and training they received in the military, many former troops became community leaders during
Reconstruction.
One Union captain explained the significance of black military participation on the attitudes of many white
soldiers. "A great many [white people]," he wrote, "have the idea that the entire Negro race are vastly their
inferiors. A few weeks of calm unprejudiced life here would disabuse them, I think. I have a more elevated
opinion of their abilities than I ever had before. I know that many of them are vastly the superiors of
those...who would condemn them to a life of brutal degradation."
Towards Gettysburg
Period: 1860s
After the Battle of Antietam, Lee's forces retreated into Virginia's Shenandoah Valley with almost no
interference. Frustrated by McClellan's lack of aggressiveness, Lincoln replaced him with General Ambrose
E. Burnside (1824-1881). In December 1862, Burnside attacked 73,000 Confederate troops at
Fredericksburg, Virginia. Six times Burnside launched frontal assaults on Confederate positions. The Union
army suffered nearly 13,000 casualties, twice the number suffered by Lee's men, severely damaging northern
morale.
After the defeat at Fredericksburg, Lincoln removed Burnside and replaced him with Joseph Hooker (18141879). In May 1863, Hooker tried to attack Lee's forces from a side or flanking position. In just ten minutes,
Confederate forces routed the Union army at the Battle of Chancellorsville. But the Confederate victory came
at a high cost. Lee's ablest lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, was accidentally shot by a Confederate sentry and
died of a blood clot.
Despite Confederate victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the Union showed no signs of giving
up. In a bid to shatter northern morale and win European recognition, Lee's army launched a daring invasion
of Pennsylvania.
When his forces drove northward into Pennsylvania, Lee assumed, mistakenly, that Union forces were still in
Virginia. When he suddenly realized that Union forces were in close pursuit, he ordered his forces, which
were strung out from Maryland to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to converge at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a
central location where a number of roads met. Lee, who did not want to risk a battle until he had gathered all
his troops together, ordered his men not to engage the enemy. But on July 1, 1863, a Confederate brigade
ran into Union cavalry near Gettysburg and the largest battle ever fought in the West Hemisphere broke out
before anyone realized what was happening.
The Battle of Gettysburg
Period: 1860s
On the evening of July 1, most of Lee's army of 75,000 reached Gettysburg. Meanwhile, most of the 90,000man Union army of General George Meade (1815-1872) arrived at Gettysburg that same evening.
On July 2, Lee tried to attack Union positions from the left and right flanks, but northern troops repelled the
attack. The next day, the Union army, which expected Lee to attack again on the flanks, reinforced its flanks.
But Lee launched a frontal attack on the center of the Union lines, which came as a shock and a surprise.
However, a frontal assault against a well-fortified defensive position on a hill was very unlikely to succeed.
Some 15,000 Confederate troops, led by General George E. Pickett (1825-1875), marched three-quarters of
a mile into withering Union rifle and artillery fire. Although about a hundred Confederate soldiers succeeded in
temporarily breaking through the Union defenses, the northern lines held firm. When Lee finally ordered a
retreat back into Virginia, it became clear that the Confederacy had suffered a disastrous defeat.
Nearly 25,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in action at the Battle of Gettysburg.
After Gettysburg, Lee was never able to mount another major offensive.
Vicksburg
Period: 1860s
The four days between July 1 and July 4, 1863 marked a major turning point of the Civil War. Beginning in
mid-May, Ulysses S. Grant's troops had begun a siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Located on a bluff
overlooking the Mississippi, Vicksburg allowed the Confederacy to control river traffic between Memphis and
New Orleans. The day after the defeat of Lee's army at Gettysburg, Vicksburg surrendered. Five days later,
Union forces captured Port Hudson, Louisiana. These victories gave the North complete control of the
Mississippi River and isolated confederate territory west of the Mississippi from areas east of the river.
After the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, southern morale began to sag. Yet despite military defeats,
inflation, shortages, desertions, the flight of thousands of slaves, and flagging resolve, the Confederacy
continued to fight for another 22 months.
The Thirteenth Amendment
Period: 1860s
The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves in states still at war. As a wartime order, it could
subsequently be reversed by presidential degree or congressional legislation. The permanent emancipation of
all slaves therefore required a constitutional amendment.
In April 1864, the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in the United States.
Opposition from Democratic Representatives prevented the amendment from receiving the required twothirds majority. If McClellan and the Democrats had won the election of 1864, as Lincoln and most
Northerners expected in the summer, the amendment would almost certainly have been defeated and slave
emancipation repudiated as a war aim. Only after Lincoln was reelected did Congress approve the
amendment. Ratification by the states was completed in December 1865.
Total War
Period: 1860s
Initially, Lincoln and his generals anticipated a conventional war in which Union soldiers would respect
civilians' property. Convinced that there was residual unionist support in the South, they expected to preserve
the South's economic base, including its factories and rail lines. But as the war dragged on, the Civil War
became history's first total war, a war in which the Union sought the Confederacy's total defeat and
unconditional surrender. To achieve success, Union officers such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh
Sherman believed that it was necessary to break the South's will to fight. Sherman summed up the idea of
total war in blunt terms: "We are not only fighting hostile armies," he declared in 1864, "but a hostile people,
and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."
A year earlier, a general order was issued that declared that military necessity "allows of all destruction of
property" and "appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety
of the Army." This order allowed soldiers to destroy anything that might be of use to the Confederacy.
Slaves' Role in Their Own Liberation
Period: 1860s
Slaves played a critical role in their own liberation. Southern slaves deserted plantations and fled to Union
lines. Slaves also staged a few small insurrections during the war as the slave system itself began to unravel.
Planters were stunned to see trusted house slaves and field drivers lead field hands in deserting to the Union
army. Eventually, 150,000 former slaves fought as soldiers in the Union army.
The plantation system of labor and discipline was beginning to break down in the face of protracted war.
The 1864 Presidential Election
Period: 1860s
The 1864 presidential election was one of the most critical in American history. At stake was whether the war
would end in unconditional surrender or a negotiated settlement, which might result in the preservation of
slavery as a legal institution. Even though hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted to Union lines during the
war, it is not at all inconceivable that slavery could have survived if the President had not been committed to
emancipation. During the American Revolution a third of Georgia's slaves had been freed by the British, and
tens of thousands of Virginia's slaves had escaped bondage. Nevertheless, slavery survived the revolutionary
upheavals in the South, and soon began to flourish and expand. Similarly, slavery was temporarily reinstituted
by the French in St. Domingue and greatly expanded in Guadeloupe, Martinique and other colonies despite
the Haitian Revolution and the French emancipation decree of 1794.
In August 1864, Lincoln expressed his view in moving words. Observing that over 130,000 blacks were
fighting to preserve the Union, he said that they were motivated by the "strongest motive...the promise of
freedom. There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors. I would be
damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and
enemies, come what will."
Deeply anxious about the election's outcome, Republicans and pro-war Democrats formed the National Union
Party, which re-nominated Lincoln and selected Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), a former Democratic Senator
from Tennessee, for Vice President. Johnson replaced Lincoln's first Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin (18091891), a former U.S. Senator from Maine.
As their presidential nominee, the Democrats chose General George B. McClellan, who opposed the
Emancipation Proclamation and who ran on a platform which condemned Lincoln for "four years of failure"
and called for a negotiated end to the war.
Some Radical Republicans also opposed Lincoln's reelection. Lincoln had asked Congress to seat
representatives from three recently conquered Confederate states--Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee-and also announced that when 10 percent of the voters in the rebel states (excluding high Confederate
officials) pledged loyalty to the Union (including government actions concerning slavery) they would be
readmitted to the Union. Radicals denounced the "10 Percent Plan" as too lenient. Congress in July 1864
adopted a much more radical measure, the Wade-Davis Bill, which required rebel states to abolish slavery,
repudiate the Confederate war debt, disfranchise Confederate leaders, and require fifty percent of the citizens
to pledge loyalty to the Union. The radicals nominated General John C. Freemont for President, but he
withdrew a month before the election.
Lincoln feared that northern battlefield victories might be lost at the polls. During the summer of 1864, he
confessed, "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected." There seems little
doubt that a McClellan victory would have resulted in an agreement to maintain slavery in the United States.
The capture of Atlanta, a major southern railroad and manufacturing center, in September, electrified northern
voters, who gave Lincoln a resounding victory. He received 55 percent of the popular vote to just 21 percent
for McClellan.
Grant Takes Command
Period: 1860s
In March 1864, Lincoln gave Ulysses S. Grant command of all Union armies. Vowing to end the war within a
year, Grant launched three major offenses. General Philip H. Sheridan's task was to lay waste to farm land in
Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, a mission he completed by October. Meanwhile, General William Tecumseh
Sherman advanced southeastward from Chattanooga and seized Atlanta, a major southern rail center, while
Grant himself pursued Lee's army and sought to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital.
Grant started his offensive with 118,000 men; by early June, half of his men were casualties. But Lee's army
had been reduced by a third to 40,000 men. In a month of fighting in northern and eastern Virginia, Grant lost
almost 40,000 men, leading Peace Democrats to call him a "butcher." But Confederate losses were also
heavy--and southern troops could not be replaced. At the Battle of the Wilderness, in northern Virginia, Lee's
army suffered 11,000 casualties; at Spotsylvania Court House, Lee lost another 10,000 men. After suffering
terrible casualties at Cold Harbor--12,000 men killed or wounded--Grant advanced to Petersburg, a rail center
south of Richmond, and began a nine-month siege of the city.
At the same time that Grant was pursuing Lee's army, Sherman, with a force of 100,000 men, marched
toward Atlanta from Chattanooga, and captured the rail center on September 2, 1864. After leaving Atlanta in
flames, Sherman's men marched across Georgia toward Savannah. In order to break the South's will to fight,
Sherman had his men destroy railroad tracks, loot houses, and burn factories. Sherman seized Savannah
December 21, and then drove northward, capturing Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, then heading
through North Carolina to Virginia. Sherman summed up the goal of his military maneuvers in grim terms: "We
cannot change the hearts of those people, but we can make war so terrible...[and] make them so sick of war
that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."
A Stillness at Appomattox
Period: 1860s
By April 1865, Grant's army had cut off Lee's supply lines, forcing Confederate forces to evacuate Petersburg
and Richmond. Lee and his men retreated westward, but Grant's troops overtook him about a hundred miles
west of Richmond. Recognizing that further resistance would be futile, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court
House, Virginia. The aristocratic Lee wore a full-dress uniform, with a ceremonial sash and sword, while Grant
wore a private's coat.
The next day, in a final message to his troops, Robert E. Lee acknowledged that he was "compelled to yield
to overwhelming numbers and resources." Three-quarters of the Confederate white male population of
military age had fought in the war, but by 1865, the North had four times as many troops as the Confederacy.
At the time he surrendered, Lee's entire army had shrunk to just 35,000 men, compared to Grant's total of
113,000. Lee's decision to surrender, however, probably helped to prevent large-scale guerrilla warfare.
'The President is murdered'
Period: 1860s
At noon on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Major General Robert Anderson raised the U.S. flag over Fort
Sumter. It was the same flag that he had surrendered four years before.
That evening, a few minutes after 10 o'clock, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), a young actor and Confederate
sympathizer (who had spied for Richmond and been part of a plot to kidnap Lincoln), entered the presidential
box at Ford's Theater in Washington and shot the President in the back of the head. Booth then leaped to the
stage, but he caught a spur in a flag draped in front of the box. He fell and broke his leg. As he fled the
theater he is said to have cried out: "Sic semper tyrannis"—thus always to tyrants, the motto of the State of
Virginia.
Simultaneously, a Booth accomplice, Lewis Paine, brutally attacked Secretary of State William Seward (18011872) at his home with a knife. Seward survived because Paine's knife was deflected by a metal collar he
wore from a severe accident. Seward slowly recovered from his wounds and continued to serve as Secretary
of State under Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson.
Lincoln was carried unconscious to a neighboring house. He was pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m., April 15. A
few minutes later, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (1814-1869) stepped outside and announced to the
assembled crowd, "he belongs to the ages."
Following the shooting, Booth fled to Maryland on horseback. A friend then helped him escape to Virginia. On
April 26, two weeks after he had shot Lincoln, the army and Secret Service tracked Booth down and trapped
him in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia. When Booth refused to surrender, his pursuers set the barn on fire.
Booth was found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Lincoln's assassination was part of a larger plot to murder other government officials, including Vice President
Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and General Ulysses S. Grant. Only Lincoln was
killed. Following the assassination, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered War Department agents to
apprehend the conspirators. Despite wild rumors of involvement by top Confederate officials, the actual
conspirators included, apart from Booth, an ex-Confederate soldier, a carriage maker, and a druggist's clerk.
Eight individuals were arrested; a military commission found all of them guilty. Four were hanged. Of the
remaining four, one died in prison in 1867 and three others received presidential pardons in 1869.
Many Northerners blamed the Confederate leadership for the President's death. Anger and a thirst for
vengeance against "traitors" were surely widespread. This makes it all the more remarkable that the North's
victory was not followed by a massive and bloody extermination of Confederate leaders and their northern
sympathizers.
The War's Costs
Period: 1860s
As a result of the Civil War, the South lost a fourth of its white male population of military age, a third of its
livestock, half of its farm machinery, and $2.5 billion worth of human property. Factories and railroads had
been destroyed, and such cities as Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond had been largely burned to
the ground. In South Carolina, the value of property plunged from $400 million in 1860, ranking it third in the
nation, to just $50 million in 1865.
Labor in the Age of Industrialization
Period: 1880-1920
Labor conflict was never more contentious or violent in the United States than during the late 19th and early
20th centuries, when bloody confrontations wracked the railroad, steel, and mining industries. During the early
1880s, there were about 500 strikes a year involving about 150,000 workers. By the 1890, the number had
climbed to a thousand a year involving 700,000 workers a year, and by the early 1900s, the number of strikes
had climbed to 4,000 annually. Some 500 times government sent in militias or federal troops to put down
labor strikes. While most labor clashes took place in the mines and mills of the east and Midwest, bloody
incidents involving private police forces, state militias, and federal troops also took place on the New Orleans
and San Francisco waterfronts and in the mining districts of Colorado and Idaho.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, labor struggles were more acute in the United States than in
many European countries. Today, in contrast, labor relations in the United States are more cooperative and
less conflict-ridden than elsewhere. The story of how the United States forged an enduring and workable
system of collective bargaining after more than half a century of bitter struggles is one of the most important
themes in modern American history.
American
Labor
in
Comparative
Perspective
Period: 1880-1920
In 1905, Werner Sombart, a German social democrat who became a Nazi party supporter in the 1930s, asked
why the American working class--unlike the workers in every other industrialized country--never produced a
genuinely mass-based political party of its own. In Europe, the working class created Labor, Social
Democratic, and Socialist parties with massive popular support; in sharp contrast, American workers threw
their support to the Democratic and Republican Parties, which were broad-based coalitions that included
business, middle-class, and labor interests.
Sombart's explanation was that the political and economic position of the American working class made it
much more conservative than its European counterpart. In contrast to Europe, where the working class had to
struggle to win the vote, universal manhood suffrage was the practice in the United States. Further, American
workers, Sombart insisted, enjoyed a much higher standard of living than their European counterpart and had
a much greater chance to rise into the middle class.
Sombart overestimated the economic well being of the American working class. While the average income of
industrial workers in the United States were indeed higher than in Europe, between 1860 and 1913, workingclass wages, adjusted for inflation, rose more slowly than in Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden. In addition,
the American economy between the Civil War and World War I was even more subject to boom and bust
cycles than the economies of other industrial countries.
During the late 19th century, the average American worker was jobless for three or four months a year due to
illness, inclement weather, or seasonal unemployment.
In the late 19th century, the average income of an urban worker was only about $400 or $500 a year, a sum
insufficient to support a family. The remainder was made up by wives and especially by older children.
Children under the age of 16 contributed about 20 percent of the income. These children worked not because
their parents were heartless, but because their earnings were absolutely essential for their family's well-being.
Sources
of
Worker
Unrest
Period: 1880-1920
Many American workers experienced the economic transformations of the late 19th century in terms of a
wrenching loss of status. For free white men, pre-Civil War America, more than any previous society, was a
society of independent producers and property holders. Farmers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen generally
owned the property they worked. About four-fifths of free adult men owned property on the eve of the Civil
War. High rates of physical mobility combined with the availability of western lands to foster a sense that the
opportunity to acquire property was available to anyone who had sufficient industry and initiative.
After the Civil War, however, many American workers feared that their status was rapidly eroding. The
expanding size of factories made relations between labor and management increasingly impersonal.
Mechanization allowed many industries to substitute semi-skilled and unskilled laborers for skilled craft
workers. A massive influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe saturated labor markets, slowing
the growth of working-class incomes.
Echoing earlier debates over slavery, many working men and women feared that the great industrialists were
imposing a new form of feudalism in America, which was reducing "freemen" to "wage slaves." They
demanded "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" and an eight-hour work day. Native-born workers, fearing
competition from low-wage immigrant workers, sometimes agitated for immigration restriction. Many
observers feared that the United States was on the brink of a ruinous class war.
At the end of the 19th century, American workers intensely debated how they could best defend their interests
in the face of powerful national corporations. One of the most contentious questions that late 19th century
workers debated was whether labor should agitate for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working
conditions, or for more fundamental transformations in the nation's economy. Some of the earliest labor
organizations called for a "cooperative" rather than a corporate economy, built around worker-controlled
producer cooperatives.
Another source of controversy was whether unions should try to organize whole industries (what are called
industrial unions) or organize particular skilled crafts (craft unions). Unlike unskilled or semi-skilled craft
workers who could be easily replaced by immigrant labor, skilled craft workers, the "aristocracy of labor," had
greater power to bargain with employers.
What was at stake in these debates was the very meaning of American democracy in a modern, industrial
society. Among the crucial questions was government's role in labor disputes: Would government, at the
local, state, and federal levels, align itself with labor or management?
The
Drive
for
Unionization
Period: 1880-1920
For the last half-century, Americans have experienced a remarkable degree of labor-management peace and
enormous rates of productivity. But this development did not come easily. It took decades of industrial strife,
economic upheaval, and political battles to establish the right of workers to unionize and have some say in
work rules. It would not be until the 1930s that the United States adopted laws that guaranteed the right of
workers to bargain collectively.
During the late 19th century, union members seeking higher wages and better working conditions were
described as anarchists or Communists. The term "Communist" referred not to advocates of Marxism, but,
rather, to a violent upheaval that had taken place in France in 1871 known as Paris Commune.
The struggle for the right to unionize was a remarkable achievement. It not only involved overcoming
employers' resistance, but also ethnic divisions within the working class itself. During the late 19th and early
20th centuries, the American working class was deeply split not just into the native and foreign born, but also
into the "old" and "new" immigrants. The old immigrants not only included English-speaking immigrants from
Ireland and Britain, but also northern European immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. The new
immigrants, who came primarily from southern and eastern Europe, included many Hungarians, Italians,
Jews, and Slavs. Employers often hired workers from different ethnic groups to work in the same plant in
order to make unionization more difficult.
The depth of labor conflict in post-Civil War America is illustrated by bitter disputes that erupted in the nation's
rail yards and coalfields in 1877, the first year of the country's second century.
The
Great
Railroad
Strike
Period: 1880-1920
The total miles of railroad track in the United States increased from just 23 in 1830 to 35,000 by the end of the
Civil War to a peak of 254,000 in 1916. By the eve of World War I, railroads employed one out of every 25
American workers. The industry's growth was accompanied by bitter labor disputes. Many of the nation's most
famous strikes involved the railroads.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country's first major rail strike and witnessed the first general
strikes in the nation's history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed the country's
commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic. The strike
would be broken within a few weeks, but it also helped set the stage for later violence in the 1880s and
1890s, including the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike near
Pittsburgh in 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894 ushered in the world's first Labor Day parade in 1882.
In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the Financial Panic of 1873, began cutting salaries and wages,
prompting strikes and labor violence with lasting consequences. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation's
largest, cut wages by 10 percent and then, in June, by another 10 percent. Other railroads followed suit. On
July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the wages of all employees making more than a dollar a day by 10
percent. It also slashed the workweek to just two or three days. Forty disgruntled locomotive firemen walked
off the job. By the end of the day, workers blockaded freight trains near Baltimore and in West Virginia,
allowing only passenger traffic to get through.
Also in July, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that it would double the length of all eastbound trains from
Pittsburgh with no increase in the size of their crews. Railroad employees responded by seizing control of the
rail yard switches, blocking the movement of trains.
Soon, violent strikes broke out in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco.
Governors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia called out their state militias. In Baltimore, a 20-yearold volunteer described the scene: "We met a mob, which blocked the streets, wrote Charles A. Malloy. "They
came armed with stones and as soon as we came within reach they began to throw at us." Fully armed and
with bayonets fixed, the militia fired, killing 10, including a newsboy and a 16-year-old student. The shootings
sparked a rampage. Protesters burned a switch town, a passenger car, and sent a locomotive crashing into a
side full of freight cars. They also cut fire hoses. At the height of the melee, 14,000 rioters took to the streets.
Maryland's governor telegraphed President Rutherford Hayes and asked for troops to protect Baltimore.
"The strike," an anonymous Baltimore merchant wrote, "is not a revolution of fanatics willing to fight for an
idea. It is a revolt of working men against low prices of labor, which have not been accomplished with
corresponding low prices of food, clothing and house rent."
In Pittsburgh, where the local militia sympathized with the rail workers, the governor called in National Guard
troops from Philadelphia. The troops fired into a crowd, killing more than 20 civilians, including women and at
least three children. A newspaper headline read:
Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia. The Lexington of the Labor Conflict at Hand. The Slaughter
of Innocents.
An angry crowd forced the Philadelphia troops to retreat to a roundhouse in the railroad complex, and set
engines, buildings, and equipment ablaze. Fires raced through parts of the city, destroying 39 buildings, 104
engines, 46 passenger cars, and over 1,200 freight cars. The Pennsylvania Railroad claimed losses of more
than $4 million in Pittsburgh.
When the National Guard was at last able to evacuate the roundhouse, it was harassed by strikers and
rioters. A legislative report said that the National Guard forces "were fired at from second floor windows, from
the corners of the streets...they were also fired at from a police station, where eight or ten policemen were in
uniform." Militia and federal troops opened the railroad in Pittsburgh and Reading, Pa. was occupied by U.S.
Army troops.
It appears that some 40 people were killed in the violence in Pittsburgh. Across the country more than a
hundred died, including eleven in Baltimore and a dozen in Reading, Pa. By the end of July, most strike
activity was over. But labor strikes in the rail yards recurred from 1884 to 1886 and from 1888 to 1889 and
again in 1894.
Native-born Americans tended to blame the labor violence on foreign agitators. "It was evident," said the
Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States, published in 1877, "that there were agencies at work outside
the workingmen's strike. The people engaged in these riots were not railroad strikers. The Internationalists
had something to do with creating scenes of bloodshed.... The scenes...in the city of Baltimore were not
unlike those which characterized the events in the city of Paris during the reign of the Commune in 1870."
The
Molly
Maguires
Period: 1880-1920
On June 21, 1877, in Schuylkill County, Pa., 10 Irish immigrants were hanged for terrorism and murder in the
region's coalfields. According to the prosecution, the men were members of a secret organization, the Molly
Maguires. Before they were hanged, the condemned men swore their loyalty to the Catholic Church.
Soon, another 10 men would be executed. The Chicago Tribune editorialized, history "affords no more
striking illustration of the terrible power for evil of a secret, oath-bound organization controlled by murderers
and assassins than the awful record of crime committed by the Molly Maguires in the anthracite-coal region of
Pennsylvania." A Philadelphia newspaper expressed thanks at the "deliverance from as awful a despotism of
banded murderers as the world has ever seen in any age."
Violence in the coalfields began during the Civil War and grew in intensity during the 1870s. Altogether, about
24 mine foremen and superintendents had been murdered in Pennsylvania's mining district. In 1873,
Pinkerton's, a private detective agency, reported rumors about the existence of "the 'Molly Maguires," a band
of roughs joined together for the purpose of instituting revenge against anyone whom they may have taken a
dislike." The Reading Railroad, which controlled mining in the region, hired Pinkerton's to investigate. For twoand-a-half years, a Pinkerton detective, an Irish Catholic immigrant named James McParlan, worked
undercover in the coalfields and later testified against the 20 accused men. The trial itself was a mockery of
judicial process, with coal company attorneys prosecuted the case in court.
Apparently, a scattering of Irish immigrant coal miners did engage in violence in the coal fields, though a
majority of the men executed as assassins were probably innocent of the murder charges. The Mollies were
apparently modeled after impoverished Catholic farmers in West Donegal County Ireland who disguised
themselves wearing women's clothes who staged nocturnal raids against Protestant landowners. According to
one tale, Molly Maguire was a woman who wore pistols strapped to her thighs and led bands of men through
the countryside.
Alarm over the Molly Maguires helped mine operators crush the miners' union, the Workingmen's Benevolent
Association, eliminating unions from the coal field for many years. Fear of the Mollies also led Catholic
bishops to excommunicate any Catholic who remained a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a
fraternal order to which some violent Irish miners belonged.
In 1979, Pennsylvania's governor issued a posthumous pardon to John Kehoe, the last of the accused Mollies
to be hanged
The
Origins
of
American
Trade
Unionism
Period: 1880-1920
It took American labor longer than industrialists to successfully organize on a national basis. By the 1820s,
craft workers in the Northeast had organized the first unions to protest the increased use of unskilled and
semi-skilled workers in the production process. But these were local organizations. It was not until 1834 that
the first national organization of wage earners, the National Trades' Union, was formed. By 1836, the
organization claimed 300,000 members, but it rapidly lost membership during the financial panic of 1837.
In 1852, printers' locals in 12 cities organized the National Typographic Union, which fought for a common
wage scale and restrictions on the use of apprentices. It was one of five national unions formed in the 1850s.
Another 21 national unions were organized in the 1860s. By the early 1870s, about 300,000 workers were
organization, making up about nine percent of the industrial labor force. But during the financial depression
from 1873 to 1878, membership in labor organizations fell to just 50,000.
The Knights of Labor
During the 1870s and 1880s, American workers began to form national labor unions in order to effectively
negotiate with big corporations. The Knights of Labor was one of the most important early labor organizations
in the United States. It wanted to organize workers into "one big brotherhood" rather than into separate unions
made up of workers who had a common skill or who worked in a particular industry.
The Knights were founded in 1869 as a secret organization of tailors in Philadelphia. At first, the union had a
strong Protestant religious orientation. But a decade later, when a Catholic, Terence V. Powderly was elected
its head, the Knights became a national organization open to workers of every kind, regardless of their skills,
sex, nationality, or race. The only occupations excluded from membership were bankers, gamblers, lawyers,
and saloonkeepers.
At its height in 1885, the Knights claimed to have 700,000 members. Despite the Knight's rejection of strikes
as a tactic in labor disputes, the union won big victories against the Union Pacific railroad in 1884 and the
Wabash railroad in 1885. The Knights had a wide-ranging platform for social and economic change. The
organization campaigned for an eight-hour work day, the abolition of child labor, improved safety in factories,
equal pay for men and women, and compensation for on-the-job injury. As an alternative to wage labor, the
Knights favored cooperatively run workshops and cooperative stores. The organization held the first Labor
Day celebration in 1882.
The Knights declined rapidly after the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, in which 11 people were killed
by a bomb. The American Federation of Labor, a union of skilled workers, gradually replaced the Knights as
the nation's largest labor organization. Unlike the Knights, which sought to organize workers regardless of
craft, rejected the strike as a negotiating tool, and had a broad-based reform agenda, the American
Federation of Labor was made up of craft unions and committed to "bread-and-butter" unionism. Its goals
were narrower but also more realistic than those of the Knights. It sought to increase workers' wages, reduce
their hours, and improve their working conditions.´
Haymarket
Period: 1880-1920
Square
An explosion in Chicago in 1886 helped to shift the labor movement toward "bread-and-butter" unionism.
On May 1, 1886, thousands of people in Chicago began demonstrations in behalf of an eight-hour workday.
The marchers' slogan was, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will."
On May 4, 1886, a deadly confrontation between police and protesters erupted at Chicago's Haymarket
Square. A labor strike was in progress at the McCormick farm equipment works, and police and Pinkerton
security guards had shot several workers.
A public demonstration had been called to protest police violence. Eyewitnesses later described a "peaceful
gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs when authorities began to
move in and disperse the crowd." Suddenly a bomb exploded, followed by pandemonium and an exchange of
gunfire. Eleven people were killed including seven police officers. More than a hundred were injured.
The Chicago Tribune railed against "the McCormick insurrectionists." Authorities hurriedly rounded up 31
suspects. Eventually, eight men, "all with foreign sounding names" as one newspaper put it, were indicted on
charges of conspiracy and murder.
No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb. Several of the suspects had not attended the
rally. But all were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged and a fifth committed suicide
in his cell. Then, the Illinois Governor, Richard Ogelsby, who had privately expressed doubts "that any of the
men were guilty of the crime," commuted the remaining men's death sentences to life in prison.
Illinois's new governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men. A German born immigrant who
had enlisted in the Union army at the age of 15, Altgeld declared, "The deed to sentencing the Haymarket
men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice. And the truth is that the great multitudes annually arrested are poor,
the unfortunate, the young and the neglected. In short, our penal machinery seems to recruit its victims from
among those who are fighting an unequal fight in the struggle for existence."
After granting the pardon, he said to the famous attorney Clarence Darrow: "Let me tell you that from this day,
I am a dead man, politically." There was an immediate outcry. The Washington Post asked rhetorically: "What
would one expect from a man like Altgeld, who is, of course, an alien himself?" The Chicago Tribune stated
that the governor "does not reason like an American, does not feel like one, and consequently does not
behave like one."
In 1889, the American Federation of Labor delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed
May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy, the right of
workers to organize, and to memorialize the eight "Martyrs of Chicago."
Samuel
Gompers
and
the
American
Federation
of
Labor
Period: 1880-1920
The labor movement gained strength in the 1850s in such crafts as typographers, molders, and carpenters.
Fixed standards of apprenticeship and of wages, hours, and working conditions were drafted. Although such
agreements often broke down in periods of depression, a strong nucleus of craft unions had developed by the
1880s so that a central federation emerged. This was the American Federation of Labor.
Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) was the first president of the American Federation of Labor, the first enduring
national labor union. He served as president from 1886 until his death in 1924, except for a single year, 1895.
Born in London, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 13, and worked as a cigar-maker. He
became the leader of the cigar-makers' union, and transformed it into one of the country's strongest unions.
Gompers believed that labor had the most to gain by organizing skilled craft workers, rather than attempting
to organize all workers in an industry. He refused to form an alliance with the Knights of Labor. "Talk of
harmony with the Knights of Labor," he said, "is bosh. They are just as great enemies of trade unions as any
employer can be."
Gompers repudiated socialism and advocated a pragmatic "pure and simple" unionism that emphasized
agreements with employees--which would spell out for a stipulated period the wages, hours of work, and the
procedures for handling grievances. Gompers proposed that agreements contain clauses stipulating that
employers hire only union members (the closed shop) and that any employee should be required to pay union
dues. Employers advocated the open shop, which could employ non-union members.
During the 1880s and 1890s, unions sought to secure and retain a foothold in such major industries as
railways, steel, mining, and construction. It was in the building trades where the craft principle was most
dominant that the American Federation of Labor developed its largest membership. Miners merged their
crafts into the United Mine Workers of America, an industrial union that admitted to membership of those
working in and about a mine, whether skilled or unskilled.
In 1892, the AFL's affiliate in the steel industry, struck in protest against wage cuts. Following the bitter
Homestead strike, the steel industry adopted an open shop policy. Craft unions were able to secure collective
bargains on railroads, but when some workers a union of all rail workers, their effort collapsed in the Pullman
boycott of 1894.
But some efforts at unionization proved more successful, including efforts in organizing workers in immigrant
sweatshops. The International Ladies' Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers
demonstrated that the new immigrants could be effectively organized.
As trade unionism gained ground before World War I, employers in mines and factories established "company
unions," to handle grievances and provide certain welfare benefits. The most notable company union was in
the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.
Homestead
Period: 1880-1920
In 1986, United States Steel, once been the world's largest steel producer, closed down its steel mills in
Homestead, Pa., six miles from Pittsburgh. During the summer of 1892, the Homestead steel works had been
the scene of an epic clash between labor and management that helped eliminate unions from the steel
industry for more than four decades.
Originally built in 1880 and 1881 by local merchants, the Homestead Works was purchased by industrialist
Andrew Carnegie, who installed open-hearth furnaces and electricity in order to boost the plant's efficiency
and reduce the need for skilled labor. Carnegie's steel mills produced armor for battleships, rails for western
railroads, and beams, girders, and steel plates for bridges and skyscrapers.
But Carnegie's drive for efficiency also led to an armed confrontation at Homestead. In contract talks in 1892,
Henry Clay Frick, the superintendent of the Carnegie Steel Company, proposed to cut workers' wages,
arguing that increased efficiency had inflated salaries. At the time, unskilled mill workers, who were mainly
eastern European immigrants, made less than $1.70 for a 12-hour day. Skilled workers earned between $4
and $7.60 a day. Frick also wanted to eliminate the union from the plant.
When the negotiations broke down, Frick shut down the mill, installed three-miles of wooden fence topped
with barbed wire around the mill, and hired 300 guards supplied by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The
guards were placed aboard two company barges in Pittsburgh for the trip up the Monongahela River to
nearby Homestead.
On July 6, the guards were confronted by hundreds of workers and townsfolk. In the gun battle that ensued,
seven workers and three Pinkerton guards were killed. Twelve hours after the battle for Homestead began,
the guards surrendered.
The union's apparent victory was short-lived. Within days, 8,500 members of the National Guard took control
of the plant. When Frick was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in his Pittsburgh office, public
opinion turned against the steel workers' union. By November, the union had been broken and the mill had
reopened as a non-union plant using African American and eastern European workers. Union leaders were
blacklisted from the steel industry for life.
One of the strike's consequences was that the steel mills shifted from an eight hour to a 12-hour a day, sixday work week, with a 24-hour shift (followed by a day off), every two weeks. It would be some 44 years
before the steel industry would again be unionized.
Pullman
Period: 1880-1920
1894 was the second of four years of depression. The pinch was felt even by the Pullman Palace Car
Company, which manufactured the sleeping cars used by most of the nation's railroads. George Pullman
responded by laying off several thousand of his 5,800 employees and cutting pay 25 to 50 percent, while
refusing to reduce rents charged employees, who lived in the company town of Pullman, near Chicago. Then
he fired three members of a workers' grievance committee.
On May 11, 1894, 90 percent of his workers went on strike. The strike spread nationwide when the American
Railway Union refused to move trains with Pullman cars. Within a month, more than a quarter million other
railroad employees had joined the strike.
The government, under President Grover Cleveland, swiftly won a court injunction ordering strikers back to
work. When they refused to comply, he dispatched more than 14,000 federal troops and marshals. In
Chicago, when soldiers fired into a crowd of 10,000, 25 persons were killed, 60 badly injured. Hundreds were
jailed, including union leader Eugene Debs, who subsequently founded the Socialist party. Railroad attorney
Clarence Darrow switched sides and defended Debs, launching his career as a defender of underdogs. Social
Worker Jane Addams led an investigation of the strike.
Samuel Gompers and his fellow craft unionists at the helm of the American Federation of Labor spurned
Debs' plea for a general strike to protest enlistment of the White House and the courts on the side of
management.
Labor
Day
Period: 1880-1920
Labor Day, the holiday honoring America's workingmen and women, is today regarded as a day of rest and
recreations signaling the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. Calls for a Labor Day had
begun as early as 1869. But it was not until 1882 that the first Labor Day parade was held in New York City,
under the sponsorship of the Knights of Labor, when 10,000 men and women marched down Manhattan's
Fifth Avenue. The holiday was intended to fill the gap between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and
demonstrate labor's strength.
The first Labor Day parade was organized by Peter J. McGuire, a New York City carpenter, who founded not
only the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, but also the English-speaking branch of the Socialist Labor Party,
and by Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Patterson, N.J., who later became the first Socialist Labor Party
member elected to public office (as an alderman in Patterson, N.J).
The parade drew the following negative reaction in a New York newspaper:
A large force of working men of this city and neighborhood indulged in a parade and picnic yesterday,
apparently for the purpose of enjoying a holiday, and at the same time making an exhibition of numerical
strength.
At the time, there was debate about when a holiday should be held. In 1888, labor leaders from several
countries picked May 1 as International Labor Day, to commemorate a peaceful gathering of 10,000 people in
Chicago in 1883 campaigning for an eight-hour workday.
In 1894, in the midst of the Pullman strike, Congress established a national labor day by unanimous vote. Six
days after signing the act into law, Cleveland sent several thousand deputies to Chicago to enforce a court
injunction barring workers from interrupting delivery of the mail.
The
Murder
of
Former
Idaho
Governor
Frank
Steunenberg
Period: 1880-1920
The popular image of the post-Civil War American West stresses independence and self-reliance. The
dominant images in popular mythology are of rugged individuals: cowboys, pioneers, and prospectors. But in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mining regions from Colorado to Idaho were the scenes of violent labor
confrontations; the most violent labor clashes in American history.
On New York's Eve 1905, former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg was killed by a bomb, rigged to go off
when he opened his gate. The explosion could be heard 16 miles away. Suspicion focused on a drifter named
Harry Orchard, who had killed 13 men in 1904 when he dynamited a railroad depot during labor conflict in
Colorado.
Orchard confessed to the ex-governor's murder, but said he had undertaken it at the behest of officials of the
Western Federation of Miners, the most militant labor organization in the country. The federation, he said,
saw Steunenberg as a traitor who had betrayed the union movement by declaring martial law and calling in
federal troops to quell violence in the Coeur d'Alenes region of Idaho, an area rich in gold, lead, and silver
deposits, in 1899. The soldiers--African Americans who had distinguished themselves during the Spanish
American War--corralled more than a thousand people, not only miners but also teachers and doctors, in
barns and boxcars. Racist resentment against the soldiers exacerbated the miners' anger at Governor
Steunenberg.
Three Federation leaders, who Orchard said had commissioned the assassination, were kidnapped from
Colorado by the Pinkerton Detective Agency and spirited to Idaho on a special train paid for by the mining
companies. Given the weakness of law enforcement in many parts of the West, private detective agencies
like Pinkerton openly assisted government prosecutors.
"Big Bill" Haywood, the Federation's secretary-treasury, was put on trial in May 1907. Haywood, who along
with Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, had founded the International Workers of the World, a
revolutionary labor organization known as the "Wobblies," was reviled by many leading politicians including
President Theodore Roosevelt.
Haywood was defended by Clarence Darrow, "the attorney for the damned," who had already become a
legendary figure for defending Debs in the 1894 Pullman strike. In his closing statement, which dragged on for
more than 11 hours, Darrow said:
Out on our broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide oceans where men are tossed and
buffeted on the waves, through our mills and factories, and down deep under the earth...the poor, the weak
and the suffering of the world are stretching out their helpless hands to this jury in mute appeal for Will
Haywood's life.
Prosecuting attorney William S. Borah, who had just been elected to the U.S. Senate, closed his case by
recalling the day when the former governor had been murdered and he saw:
...the stain of his life's blood upon the whitened earth. I saw Idaho dishonored and disgraced. I saw murder-no, not murder, a thousand times worse than murder--I saw anarchy wave its first bloody triumph in Idaho.
At the end of the trial, Haywood was acquitted. A second union leader was acquitted in 1908 and charges
against a third union official were dropped. Theodore Roosevelt privately called the verdict "a gross
miscarriage of justice, concluding, "I suppose the jury was terrorized."
The 1907 trial received national newspaper coverage. The arrival of millions of foreign immigrants, the rise of
Socialist parties, the growth of unions, including radical unions like the Western Federation of Miners, had
made the public jittery. Eugene Debs had threatened to send armed workers to Idaho if Haywood was
executed.
Labor and management in Idaho seemed to be engaged in open warfare, fighting with dynamite, arson, and
rifles. The mine owners, ranchers, and mainstream press regarded the Western Federation of Miners as a
source of anarchy and disorder. The labor and Socialist press was convinced that Idaho's government had
trumped up charges against Haywood in order to destroy organized labor in the state. A rally for Haywood in
Boston attracted an estimated crowd of 100,000.
The miners' federation, which had been organized during the bitter labor violence of the 1890s, was
convinced that it was engaged in class warfare. Its first president had said: "There can be no harmony
between organized capitalists and organized labor. Our present wage system is slavery in its worst form."
In 1892, the mine owners in Idaho's' Coeur d'Alene region had cut the wages of unskilled workers from $3.50
for a 10-hour day to $3. When the miners had struck, the owners locked them out and reopened the mines
with scab labor. In 1896, the miners had helped elect the Democratic and Populist candidate for governor,
Frank Steunenberg. Most mining companies responded by raising the daily wage back to $3.50, but one
company refused, and in 1899 heavily armed federation members dynamited that company's mines.
Altogether, the union may have killed dozens of non-union laborers. It was this bombing that led Gov.
Steunenberg to ask for federal troops.
The miners were convinced that the mine operators would stoop to virtually anything--including the use of
spies and kidnapping--to suppress unions. Indeed, the Pinkerton agent who investigated the Steunenberg
murder, James McParland, had early infiltrated the Molly Maguires and testified in the trials in which 20 men
were executed for terrorism in the Pennsylvania coalfields. "It is war," one reporter said, "and the methods of
war have been adopted."
Socialist
and
Radical
Alternatives
Period: 1880-1920
The rise of the American Federation of Labor did not spell the disappearance of more radical groups. Two
organizations offered a more radical vision. The Industrial Workers of the World, formed in 1905, clamored for
"one big union" to oust "the ruling class" and abolish the wage system.
The Socialist Party, founded in 1901, had, by 1912, grown to 118,000 members. By that year, it had elected
1,200 public officials, including the mayors of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Flint, Michigan.; and Schenectady, New
York. More than 300 Socialist periodicals appeared. A weekly socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason,
reached a circulation of over 700,000 copies in 1913.
Socialist support was concentrated between two immigrant groups: Germans, who had left Europe in the
1840s, and East European Jews, who were refugees from Czarist repression. The largest daily socialist
newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward, which had a circulation of 142,000 in 1913, was
published in Yiddish, not in English. The Socialist Party's first major electoral victories occurred in Milwaukee,
which had a large German community. In 1910, the city elected a Socialist mayor and member of Congress.
The Socialist Party declined in influence during Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's first term, as many
reforms enacted by Congress diminished the party's appeal. Support for the party briefly surged during World
War I, but had dissipated by 1919 as a result of federal, state, and local campaigns to suppress the party and
internal disputes involving how the party should respond to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Biographies
Period: 1880-1920
Eugene Debs
He led the drive for one big union embracing all rail workers. In his early twenties, he had become an official
of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, a bastion of crafts separatism. He started out as a champion of
compromise and arbitration as avenues to harmonious and equitable labor-management relations. But
experience convinced him that the robber barons in command of major railroads were less interested in
peace than in pitting one brotherhood against another. The collapse of a strike by rail switchmen in Buffalo in
1892 after the other crafts refused to come to their aid prompted Debs to resign his post with the firemen and
become prime mover in setting up the American Railway Union, which cut across all craft lines and even took
in longshoremen, car builders, and coal miners. The infant union had phenomenal growth, quickly eclipsing in
size the combined membership of all the old-line brotherhoods. But its demise was equally swift.
Emma Goldman
She was synonymous with radicalism. Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was born in Russia and moved to the
United States in 1886. She was soon caught up in a swirl of radical movements--feminism, birth control,
pacifism, and anarchism. She defended free speech, free love, and the rights of striking workers and
homosexuals.
At the height of the Red Scare in 1919, Emma Goldman was imprisoned on Ellis Island, put on a ship with
246 men and two other women who were branded radicals, and deported to the Soviet Union. The roundup
was engineered by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the Justice Department's Radical Division and later director
of the FBI. She and 248 other suspected radicals were placed on a military transport with a detachment of
armed marines and deported to revolutionary Russia.
Greeted by the wife of the famous writer Maxim Gorky, Emma Goldman said: "This is the greatest day in my
life. I once found political freedom in America. Now the doors are closed to free thinkers, and the enemies of
capitalism find once more sanctuary in Russia." But her enthusiasm for the new Soviet Union quickly faded.
She lived there for less than two years. In a book describing her time in Russia, she argued that repression
and terror were the inevitable result of Bolshevik ideology. In exile, she lived in France. During the Spanish
Civil War, she worked with anarchists in defense of the Spanish Republic.
Mother Jones
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was a legendary union organizer and strike leader. Born in Ireland in 1830, she
migrated to the United States at the age of eight, and died in 1930. During her long life, she taught school,
worked as a seamstress, survived a yellow fever epidemic that killed her husband and their four children, and
watched her house and business burn in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She was present at many of the
most famous American strikes, exhorting workers in coal strikes in Colorado, Illinois, and West Virginia, steel
strikes in Indiana and Pennsylvania, and cotton mill strikes in Alabama. She was present at the convention
that founded the radical Industrial Workers of the World. She said, "If I pray I will have to wait until I am dead
to get anything; but when I swear I get things here."
America at War: World War I
Sgt.
York
Period: 1910s
In the French village of Chatel-Chehery stands a memorial that describes the exploits of one of America's
World War I soldiers. "Armed with a rifle and pistol," the monument reads, "...he silenced a German battalion
of 35 machine guns, killed 25 enemy soldiers, and captured 132."
The soldier’s name was Alvin Cullum York. He was born in a one-room log cabin in rural Fentress County, in
the Cumberland Mountains of northern Tennessee. Even today, his hometown of Pall Mall has only a single
paved road. The third of 11 children, his father died when he was a boy.
When he was 27, York abandoned his hard-drinking, brawling ways and joined a fundamentalist church. A
pacifist and a church elder, he registered for the military draft as a conscientious objector. During basic
training, he went home to struggle with his conscience and, ultimately, decided that it was God's will that he
fight. On October 8, 1918, York, then a corporal, single-handedly killed 25 German soldiers and forced a
German commander to order the rest of the battalion to surrender. Hollywood made his exploits into a 1941
movie, Sgt. York, starring Gary Cooper.
The real-life man lived a simple life. After the war, he turned down offers to promote products that would have
earned him $500,000. He returned to Pall Mall and worked as a blacksmith. He used the royalties he earned
from the film to found a high school in Jamestown, Tenn.
World
War
I
Period: 1910s
A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the 20th century ranked the onset of World War I
as 8th. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was, in one
way or another, a result of World War I, including the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War II, the
Holocaust, and the development of the atomic bomb. The Great Depression, the Cold War, and the collapse
of European colonialism can also be traced, at least indirectly, to the First World War.
World War I killed more people (more than 9 million soldiers, sailors, and flyers and another 5 million
civilians), involved more countries (28 nations), and cost more money ($186 billion in direct costs and another
$151 billion in indirect costs), than any previous war in history. It was the first war to use airplanes, tanks,
long-range artillery, submarines, and poison gas. It left at least 7 million men permanently disabled.
World War I probably had more far-reaching consequences than any other preceding war. Politically, it
resulted in the downfall of four monarchies--in Russia in 1917, in Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918, and
in Turkey in 1922. It contributed to the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917 and the triumph of fascism in
Italy in 1922. It ignited colonial revolts in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia.
Economically, the war severely disrupted the European economies and allowed the United States to become
the world's leading creditor and industrial power. The war also brought vast social consequences, including
the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey and an influenza epidemic that killed over 25 million people
worldwide.
Few events better reveal the utter unpredictability of the future. At the dawn of the 20th century, most
Europeans anticipated a future of peace and prosperity. Europe had not fought a major war for 100 years. But
a belief in human progress was shattered by World War I, a war few wanted or expected. At any point during
the five weeks leading up to the outbreak of fighting, the conflict might have been averted. World War I was a
product of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication.
No one expected a war of such magnitude or duration as World War I. At first, the armies relied on outdated
methods of communication, such as carrier pigeons. The great powers mobilized more than a million horses.
However, by the time the conflict was over, tanks, submarines, airplane-dropped bombs, machine guns, and
poison gas had transformed the nature of modern warfare. In 1918, the Germans fired shells containing both
tear gas and lethal chlorine. The tear gas forced the British to remove their gas masks; the chlorine then
scarred their faces and killed them.
In a single day at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, some 100,000 British troops plodded across no-man's
land into steady machine gunfire from German trenches a few yards away. Some 60,000 soldiers were killed
or wounded. At the end of the battle, 419,654 British men were killed, missing, or wounded.
Four years of war killed a million troops from the British Empire; 1.5 million troops from the Hapsburg Empire;
1.7 million French troops; 1.7 million Russians; and 2 million German troops. The war left a legacy of
bitterness that contributed to World War II some 21 years later
The
Road
to
War
Period: 1910s
On June 28, 1914, a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial Hapsburg throne, made a
wrong turn. As the car came to a halt and tried to turn around, a nervous teenager approached from a coffee
house, pulled out a revolver, and shot twice. Within an hour, the Archduke and his wife were dead.
Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old assassin, was a Bosnian nationalist who opposed the domination of the
Balkans by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had received his weapon from a secret society known as the
"Black Hand," which was clandestinely controlled by the government of Serbia. Princip died of mistreatment in
an Austrian prison in 1918.
The assassination provoked outrage in Austria-Hungary. The dual monarchy wanted to punish Serbia for the
assassination and to intimidate other minority groups whose struggles for independence threatened the
empire's stability. The assassination of the archduke triggered a series of events that would lead, five weeks
later, to the outbreak of World War I. When the conflict was over, 11 million people had been killed, four
powerful European empires had been overthrown, and the seeds of World War II and the Cold War had been
planted.
A complicated system of military alliances transformed the Balkan crisis into a full-scale European war.
Recognizing that any action it took against Serbia would create an international incident, Austria asked for
Germany's diplomatic and military support. Meanwhile, Russia, fearful of Austrian and German expansion into
the Balkans, strongly supported the Serbs and began to mobilize its army.
This move made Germany's leadership fear encirclement by Russia and France. Germany sent an ultimatum
to France asking it to declare its neutrality in the event of a conflict between Russia and Germany. The
French refused. They were obligated by treaty to support Russia and were still bitter over their defeat by
Prussia in 1871. When Russia failed to demobilize its forces, the German Kaiser agreed to war.
World War I caught most people by surprise. Lulled by a century of peace--Europeans had not seen a largescale war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815--many observers had come to regard armed conflict as a relic
of the past, rendered unthinkable by human progress. World War I shattered these dreams. The war
demonstrated that death and destruction had not yet been banished from human affairs.
The
Guns
of
August
Period: 1910s
Faced by Russia to its east and France to its west, Germany believed that its only hope for victory was to
strike first. The German military had formulated a blueprint (known as the Schlieffen Plan) for victory in
Western Europe in 42 days. The attack would occur before the Russians would have time to advance from
the east. The plan called for a preemptive strike at France through Belgium.
Germany's plan involved a violation of international law. Belgium was a neutral country and Britain was
committed to its defense. Thus, a German invasion was certain to bring Britain into the war. Germany asked
for permission to move its troops through Belgium. But King Albert, the country's monarch, refused by saying,
"Belgium is a nation, not a road." Germany decided to press ahead anyway; its forces invaded Belgium on
August 3.
The German military strategy worked better on paper than it did in practice. While fierce resistance by
200,000 Belgian soldiers did not stop the German advance, it did give Britain and France time to mobilize
their forces. Meanwhile, Russia mobilized faster than expected, forcing Germany to divert 100,000 troops to
the eastern front. German hopes for a quick victory were dashed at the first battle of the Marne in September
1914, when a retreating French army launched a powerful counter-attack, assisted by 6,000 troops
transported to the front by 1,200 Parisian taxicabs.
After the Allies halted Germany's massive offensive through France and Belgium at the Marne River, the
Great War bogged down into trench warfare and a ghastly stalemate ensued. Lines of men, stretching from
the English Channel to the Swiss border, formed an unmovable battle front across northern France. Four
million troops burrowed into trenches that were 6-to-8 feet deep and wide enough for two men to pass each
other. The trenches stretched for 450 miles. The soldiers were ravaged by tuberculosis and plagued with lice
and rats. They stared at each other across barren expanses called "no-man's land" and fought pitched battles
over narrow strips of blood-soaked earth.
To end the stalemate, Germany introduced several military innovations in 1915. But none proved decisive.
Germany dispatched submarines to prevent merchant ships from reaching Britain; it added poison chlorine
gas to its military arsenal at the second battle of Ypres in northern France; and it dropped incendiary bombs
over London from a zeppelin. Airplanes, tanks, and hand grenades were other innovations that distinguished
World War I from previous conflicts. But the machine gun did most of the killing, firing eight bullets per
second.
In a fateful attempt to break the deadlock, German forces adopted a new objective in 1916: to kill so many
French soldiers that France would be forced to sue for peace. The German plan was to attack the French city
of Verdun, a psychologically important town in northeastern France, and to bleed the French dry. The battle-the war's longest--lasted from February 21, 1916 through July. The battle also engaged two million soldiers.
When it ended, Verdun had become a symbol of wartime futility. France had suffered 315,000 casualties,
Germany 280,000. The town was destroyed; however, the front had not moved.
At the Somme River, a hundred miles northwest of Verdun, the British launched an assault in July 1916.
When it was over in October, one million men on both sides had died.
With fighting on the western front deadlocked, action spread to other arenas. A British soldier and writer
named T.H. Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), organized revolts against the Ottoman
territories in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. With Germany preoccupied in Europe,
Japanese and British Commonwealth forces seized German islands in the Pacific, while British forces
conquered German colonies in Africa.
The military stalemate produced political turmoil across Europe. On Easter Monday 1916, some 1,500 Irish
Catholics seized buildings in Dublin and declared Ireland an independent republic. Fighting raged for a week
before British forces suppressed the rebellion. British reprisals created great sympathy for the rebels. A twoyear guerrilla war followed. The war reached a climax when British troops in November 1920 fired at a soccer
crowd, killing a dozen people--an event that became known as "Bloody Sunday." In 1921, Britain was forced
to agree to the creation of a self-governing Irish Free State.
In Czarist Russia, wartime casualties, popular discontent, and shortages of food, fuel, and housing touched
off revolution and civil war. In March 1917, strikes and food riots erupted in the Russian capital of Petrograd.
Soldiers called in to quell the strikes joined the uprising. On March 15, Czar Nicholas II abdicated. The czarist
regime was replaced by a succession of weak provisional governments which tried to keep Russia in World
War I. On November 7, communist Bolsheviks led by V.I. Lenin overthrew the provisional government. Lenin
promised "Peace to the army, land to the peasants, ownership of the factories to the workers."
In 1917, after two-and-a-half years of fighting, 5 million troops were dead and the western front remained
deadlocked. This was the grim situation that awaited the United States.
Germany was desperate to break the stalemate and to end the war of attrition. In January 1917, they
launched unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping to cripple the British economy. German subs sank a half
million tons of Allied shipping each month, leaving Britain with only a six week supply of grain. But these
German U-boats risked bringing the United States into the war.
The
Lusitania
Period: 1910s
On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania, the "fastest vessel afloat," was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine.
The ship sank off the Irish coast in under 20 minutes. A total of 1,198 passengers and crew members lost
their lives; only 861 people survived.
The German Embassy had issued a warning that appeared in New York newspapers:
Travelers intended to embark for an Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany
and her allies and Great Britain and her allies.... Vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or any of her allies are
liable to destruction.
The Lusitania had previously made a half dozen Atlantic round trips without incident. Few believed that a
civilian passenger ship would be deliberately targeted.
Following the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Germany would institute a moratorium on unrestricted
submarine warfare. However, pressure on the German high command to resume unrestricted submarine
warfare was great. It was viewed as the only way to starve Britain and France into submission. This
resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare would ultimately bring the United States into the war.
The
United
States
Enters
the
War:
Period: 1910s
President Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. When the War began, Wilson declared U.S. neutrality
and demanded that the belligerents respect American rights as a neutral party. He hesitated to embroil the
United States in the conflict with good reason. Americans were deeply divided about the European war;
involvement in the conflict would certainly disrupt Progressive reforms. In 1914, he had warned that entry into
the conflict would bring an end to Progressive reform. "Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this
war," he said. A popular song in 1915 was "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier."
In 1916, President Wilson narrowly won reelection after campaigning on the slogan, "He kept us out of war."
He won the election with a 4,000 vote margin in California.
Toward Intervention
Shortly after war erupted in Europe, President Wilson called on Americans to be "neutral in thought as well as
deed." The United States, however, quickly began to lean toward Britain and France.
Convinced that wartime trade was necessary to fuel the growth of American trade, President Wilson refused
to impose an embargo on trade with the belligerents. During the early years of the war, trade with the allies
tripled.
This volume of trade quickly exhausted the allies' cash reserves, forcing them to ask the United States for
credit. In October 1915, President Wilson permitted loans to belligerents, a decision that greatly favored
Britain and France. By 1917, American loans to the allies had soared to $2.25 billion; loans to Germany stood
at a paltry $27 million.
In January 1917, Germany announced that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare. This
announcement helped precipitate American entry into the conflict. Germany hoped to win the war within five
months. Additionally, they were willing to risk antagonizing Wilson on the assumption that, even if the United
States declared war, it could not mobilize quickly enough to change the course of the conflict.
Then a fresh insult led Wilson to demand a declaration of war. In March 1917, newspapers published the
Zimmerman Note, an intercepted telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the
German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram said that if Germany went to war with the United States,
Germany promised to help Mexico recover the territory it had lost during the 1840s, including Texas, New
Mexico, California, and Arizona. The Zimmerman telegram and German attacks on three U.S. ships in midMarch led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
Wilson decided to enter the war so that he could help design the peace settlement. Wilson viewed the war as
an opportunity to destroy German militarism. "The world must be made safe for democracy," he told a joint
session of Congress. Only six Senators and 50 Representatives voted against the war declaration.
Over
There:
American
Doughboys
Go
to
War
Period: 1910s
In 1917, a High German official scoffed at American might: "America from a military point-of-view means
nothing, and again nothing, and for a third time nothing." The U.S. Army at the time had only 107,641 men.
Within a year, however, the United States raised a five million-man army. By the war's end, the American
armed forces were a decisive factor in blunting a German offensive and ending the bloody stalemate.
Initially, President Wilson hoped to limit America's contribution to supplies, financial credits, and moral
support. But by early 1917, the allied forces were on the brink of collapse. Ten divisions of the French army
had begun to mutiny. In March 1917, the Bolsheviks, who had seized power in Russia in November, accepted
Germany's peace terms and withdrew from the war. Then, German and Austrian forces routed the Italian
armies.
The United States was forced to quickly assume an active role in the conflict. As a preliminary step, American
ships relieved the British of responsibility for patrolling the Western Hemisphere, while another portion of the
U.S. fleet steamed to the north Atlantic to combat German submarines.
To raise troops, President Wilson insisted on a military draft. More than 23 million men registered during
World War I, and 2,810,296 draftees served in the armed forces. To select officers, the army launched an
ambitious program of psychological testing.
In March 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive on the western front in France's Somme River
valley. With German troops barely 50 miles from Paris, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the leader of the French
army, assumed command of the allied forces. Foch's troops, aided by 85,000 American soldiers, launched a
furious counteroffensive. By the end of October, the counterattack pushed the German army back to the
Belgian border.
American entry into the war quickly overcame the German military's numerical advantage. In June 1918,
some 279,000 American soldiers crossed the Atlantic; in July over 300,000; in August, 286,000 more. All told,
1.5 million American troops arrived in Europe during the last six months of the war. By the end of the conflict,
the allies could field 600,000 more men than the Germans. The influx of American forces led the AustroHungarian Empire to ask for peace, Turkey and Bulgaria to stop fighting, and Germany to request an
armistice.
President Wilson announced that he would negotiate only with a democratic regime in Germany. When the
military leaders and the Kaiser wavered, a brief revolution forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and a civilian regime
assumed control of the government. At 11:00 a.m., November 11, 1918, the guns stopped.
Over
Here:
World
War
I
on
the
Home
Front
Period: 1910s
Approximately one-third of the nation (32 million people) were either foreign-born or the children of
immigrants, and more than 10 million Americans were derived from the nations of the Central Powers.
Furthermore, millions of Irish Americans sided with the Central Powers because they hated the English.
The Wilson administration was convinced that it had to mobilize public opinion in support of the war. To
influence public opinion, the federal government embarked on its first ever domestic propaganda campaign.
Wilson chose muckraking journalist George Creel to head the government agency, the Committee on Public
Information (CPI). The CPI placed pro-war advertisements in magazines and distributed 75 million copies of
pamphlets defending America's role in the war. Creel also launched a massive advertising campaign for war
bonds and sent some 75,000 "Four-Minute Men" to whip up enthusiasm for the war by rallying audiences in
theaters. The CPI also encouraged filmmakers to produce movies, like The Kaiser: the Beast of Berlin, that
played up alleged German atrocities. For the first time, the federal government had demonstrated the power
of propaganda.
Anti-German Sentiment
German American and Irish American communities came out strongly in favor of neutrality. The groups
condemned massive loans and arms sales to the allies as they saw the acts as violations of neutrality.
Theodore Roosevelt raised the issue of whether these communities were loyal to their mother country or to
the United States:
Those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in
treason to the American Republic.
Once the United States entered the war, a search for spies and saboteurs escalated into efforts to suppress
German culture. Many German-language newspapers were closed down. Public schools stopped teaching
German. Lutheran churches dropped services that were spoken in German.
Germans were called "Huns." In the name of patriotism, musicians no longer played Bach and Beethoven,
and schools stopped teaching the German language. Americans renamed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage";
dachshunds "liberty hounds"; and German measles "liberty measles." Cincinnati, with its large German
American population, even removed pretzels from the free lunch counters in saloons. More alarming, vigilante
groups attacked anyone suspected of being unpatriotic. Workers who refused to buy war bonds often suffered
harsh retribution, and attacks on labor protesters were nothing short of brutal. The legal system backed the
suppression. Juries routinely released defendants accused of violence against individuals or groups critical of
the war.
A St. Louis newspaper campaigned to "wipe out everything German in this city," even though St. Louis had a
large German American population. Luxembourg, Missouri became Lemay; Berlin Avenue was renamed
Pershing; Bismark Street became Fourth Street; Kaiser Street was changed to Gresham.
Perhaps the most horrendous anti-German act was the lynching in April 1918 of 29-year-old Robert Paul
Prager, a German-born bakery employee, who was accused of making "disloyal utterances." A mob took him
from the basement of the Collinsville, Illinois jail, dragged him outside of town, and hanged him from a tree.
Before the lynching, he was allowed to write a last note to his parents in Dresden, Germany:
Dear Parents: I must on this, the 4th day of April, 1918, die. Please pray for me, my dear parents.
In the trial that followed, the defendants wore red, white, and blue ribbons, while a band in the court house
played patriotic songs. It took the jury 25 minutes to return a not-guilty verdict. The German government
lodged a protest and offered to pay Prager's funeral expenses.
The
Espionage
and
Sabotage
Act
Period: 1910s
In his war message to Congress, President Wilson had warned that the war would require a redefinition of
national loyalty. There were "millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live
amongst us," he said. "If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression."
In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The piece of legislation gave postal officials the authority
to ban newspapers and magazines from the mails and threatened individuals convicted of obstructing the
draft with $10,000 fines and 20 years in jail. Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a
federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the Constitution, the
government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these
acts.
Political dissenters bore the brunt of the repression. Eugene V. Debs, who urged socialists to resist militarism,
went to prison for nearly three years. Another Socialist, Kate Richards O'Hare, served a year in prison for
stating that the women of the United States were "nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to
get into the army and be made into fertilizer."
In July 1917, labor radicals offered another ready target for attack. In Cochise County, Arizona, armed men,
under the direction of a local sheriff, rounded up 1,186 strikers at the Phelps Dodge copper mine. They placed
these workers--many of Mexican descent--on railroad cattle cars without food or water and left them in the
New Mexico desert 180 miles away. The Los Angeles Times editorialized: "The citizens of Cochise County
have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy."
The radical labor organization, the International Workers of the World (IWW), never recovered from
government attacks during World War I. In September 1917, the Justice Department staged massive raids on
IWW officers, arresting 169 of its veteran leaders. The administration's purpose was, as one attorney put it,
"very largely to put the IWW out of business." Many observers thought the judicial system would protect
dissenters, but the courts handed down stiff prison sentences to the radical labor organization's leaders.
Radicals were not the only one to suffer harassment. Robert Goldstein, a motion picture producer, had made
a movie about the American Revolution called The Spirit of '76, before the United States entered the war.
When he released the picture after the declaration of war, he was accused of undermining American morale.
A judge told him that his depiction of heartless British redcoats caused Americans to question their British
allies. He was sentenced to a 10 year prison term and fined $5,000.
TIMELINE
15th Century
1492
August 3: Columbus and a crew of 90 depart from Palos in Spain in the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
October 12: Columbus's expedition lands in the Caribbean. Between October and December, the expedition
explores the Bahamas, Cuba, and the northern coast of Hispaniola. Columbus made three later voyages to
the New World: from 1493-1496, 1498-1500, and 1502-1504.
1494
June 7: The Treaty of Tordesillas grants lands west of the line of demarcation (370 leagues west of the cape
Verde Islands) to Spain and those east of the line to Portugal.
During his four voyages, Columbus explored Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Honduras,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
1497
June 24: John Cabot, who was probably born in Genoa, Italy, claims Newfoundland in behalf of England.
16th Century
1507Martin Waldseemuller's Cosmographiae Introductio is the first to call the New World America.
1513
April 2: Juan Ponce de Leon claims Florida for Spain.
1519
March: Hernando Cortes leads an expedition to Mexico.
September. 20: Fernando Magellan sets sail on the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe.
1526
Summer: Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon establishes the first European settlement in the present-day United States
at San Migel de Guadalupe on the South Carolina coast.
1556
September 8: The Spanish establish the first permanent European colony in what is now the United States at
St. Augustine, Florida.
1565
John Hawkins introduces smoking of tobacco into England.
1584
Richard Hakluyt's Discourse Concerning Western Planting argues that New World settlement would benefit
England's economy by providing raw materials and markets and putting idle workers to work.
1587
The "Lost Colony." For the second time, English settlers establish a colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast
of North Carolina. When a group of colonists returns from England with supplies in 1590, it finds no trace of
the settlers; it only finds the word "Croatoan" carved on a tree.
1598
Juan de Onate begins Spanish settlement of what is now New Mexico.
17th Century
1607
May 13: The first permanent English colony is founded in Jamestown, Virginia.
1619
July 30: Virginia's House of Burgesses convenes; it is the first legislative assembly in English North America.
August: A Dutch ship carries 20 blacks to Virginia. We now know that these were not the first blacks to arrive
in Virginia.
1620
May 21: The Mayflower Compact, signed by 41 adult males in Provincetown Harbor, Mass., represents the
first agreement on self-government in English North America.
December 26: The Pilgrim Separatists land at Plymouth, Mass.
1621
December 25: Massachusetts Governor William Bradford forbids game-playing on Christmas day.
1622
March 22: Indian attacks kill one-third of the English settlers in Virginia.
1624
John Smith publishes his General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, which describes
his rescue by Pocahontas.
May: The Dutch establish the colony of New Netherland.
May 1: The Maypole at Mare Mount. In what is now Quincy, Mass., Thomas Morton and others set up a May
Pole, engaged in drinking and dancing with Indian women, and celebrated "the feasts of the Roman Goddes
Glora, or the beastly practises of the Madd Bacchinalians," according to Massachusetts Governor William
Bradford. Morton was deported to England.
1632
Charles I grants Lord Baltimore territory north of the Potomac River, which will become Maryland. Because
the royal charter did not restrict settlement to Protestants, Catholics could settle in the colony.
1634
Massachusetts' sumptuary law forebodes the purchase of woolen, linen or silk clothes with silver, gold, silk, or
lace on them.
1636
June: After being expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams founds Rhode Island, which
becomes the first English colony to grant complete religious tolerance.
1637
November 7: Massachusetts banishes Anne Hutchinson for preaching that faith alone was sufficient for
salvation.
1638
March: The first Swedish colonists settle in Delaware.
1654
The first Jews arrive in New Amsterdam, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in Brazil.
1660
May: Massachusetts forbids the celebration of Christmas.
December 1: Parliament adopts the First Navigation Act, which requires all goods carried to and from England
to be transported on English ships and that the colonies could export cotton, ginger, sugar, tobacco, and wool
exclusively to England. Other Navigation Acts were enacted in 1662, 1663, 1670, and 1673.
1661
September: Governor John Endicott orders an end to persecution of Quakers in Massachusetts, where three
Quakers had been executed.
1662
A synod of Massachusetts churches adopts the Halfway Covenant, which permits baptism of children whose
parents had not become full church members.
1664
Maryland adopts a statute denying freedom to slaves who converted to Christianity. A similar act was adopted
by Virginia in 1667.
September 7: The Dutch surrender New Netherland to the English, who rename the colony New York. The
Dutch temporarily regained possession in 1673 and 1674.
1669
John Locke drafts the Fundamental Constitutions for the Carolinas, which combines a feudal social order with
a stress on religious toleration.
1675
June 24: King Philip's War begins. Relative to the size of the population, this conflict between the New
England colonists and the Mohegans, Naragansetts, Nipmucks, Podunks, and Wampanoags was the
deadliest in American history.
1676
September 19: Jamestown, Virginia., is burned during Bacon's Rebellion. Declining tobacco prices, a cattle
epidemic, and a belief that the colony's governor had failed to take adequate measures to protect Virginia
against Indian attacks contributed to the rebellion, which petered out after its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, died in
October 1676.
1681
March 4: Charles II grants William Penn a charter to what is now Pennsylvania.
1682
Mary Rowlandson publishes an account of her captivity among Indians.
1684
June 21: Charles II revokes Massachusetts' charter on the grounds that it had imposed religious qualifications
for voting, discriminated against the Church of England, and set up an illegal mint.
1685
James II consolidates the New England colonies into the Dominion of New England and names Sir Edmund
Andros governor, who dissolved the New England colonies' assemblies.
1689
Leisler's Insurrection. Following the overthrow of James II, Jacob Leisler, a German merchant, force New
York's governor to flee. He was subsequently executed for treason.
The first French and Indian war, King William's War begins. Colonists launch attacks on Port Royal, Nova
Scotia, and Quebec, and the French and their Indian allies burn Schenectady. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick
restored the pre-war status quo.
April 18: The New England colonies out Royal Governor Edmund Andros.
1692
March: The Salem Witch Scare begin when a group of young girls claims that they have been bewitched.
When Massachusetts Governor William Phips halted the trials in October, 19 people had been hanged, one
man had been crushed to death, and two people had died in prison. In 1697, one of the Salem witch judges,
Samuel Sewall, publicly repented his role in the affair.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/hyper_titles.cfm
This site was updated on 21-Jun-12.