Category Archives: American History

Frederick Douglass

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The title of Renaissance man would not be inaccurate in describing Frederick Douglass.  Born a slave in about February 1818, Douglass, originally called Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, was raised by his grandmother. Denied even the most basic education, Douglass rose beyond life in bondage to a man of intelligence, principles, and influence.

Douglass’ mother was a slave named Harriet Bailey.  The identity of his father is uncertain, but is believed to be his mother’s owner, Anthony Bailey. Like most slave children, Douglass was taken from his mother at birth and fostered by an older slave woman.  He later said that he saw his mother no more than five times in his life.

At the age of 12, he went to live with a relative of his owner whose wife began teaching Douglass to read.  When her husband learned of it, he demanded his wife desist.  Not only was it illegal to educate a slave, but it was believed that if a slave learned to read, he might become dissatisfied with his lot in life and attempt to rise above it.

But Douglass had already obtained the rudimentary skills of reading and continued to teach himself using the Bible and newspapers.

Slave breaker

In 1833, Douglass was hired out to a poor farmer named Edward Covey.  Covey was known as a slave breaker and 16-year-old Douglass was whipped on a regular basis.  On the verge of breaking, Douglass opted to rebel and fought back.  Covey lost the fight and could have sent Douglass to jail, where he would have been executed without trial.  But Covey wanted no one to know that he had been bested in a fight with a slave.

After three attempts, Douglass escaped in 1838 and married a free African American woman named Anna Murray.  Before long, he became acquainted with abolitionists and earned a reputation as an orator, telling his story of slavery and escape to audiences all over New England, and later in the United Kingdom.  It was while in Britain in 1845 that funds were collected to purchase Douglass’ freedom.

Douglass and the President

With encouragement from fellow abolitionists, such as newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass wrote several narratives about his life as a slave. He also owned and edited five newspapers, including The North Star.  He was known as an orator, a social reformer and a statesman. Living in Washington, DC during the American Civil War, he came to know President Abraham Lincoln and advocated emancipation for slaves and equal pay for black soldiers who had joined the Union army.

After the Civil War, Douglass held several government positions, including US representative to Haiti.  In 1872, he became the first African American to be nominated for the post of US Vice President.

Douglass lost his wife, Anna, in 1882.  He remarried in 1884 to Helen Pitts, a white feminist.  The marriage was met with controversy not only because of their difference in race, but also because Helen was twenty years younger than Douglass.

Douglass died on 20 February 1895 at Cedar Hill, a home that he had purchased in 1877.  He and wife Anna expanded the house from 14 rooms to 21, and purchased surrounding lots to expand the property to 15 acres.  Overlooking the Anacostia River as well as the city of Washington, DC, the house is maintained by the National Park Service.

Kat Smutz
For more, read American Slavery In An Hour
See also Nat Turner – the Slave Who Killed for God

Abraham Lincoln – the Legend and Legacy

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In the United States, Abraham Lincoln has become an iconic and idealized figure, held up to every American school child as an example of honesty, intelligence, and morality.  His life is often used as an example of American liberty and freedom, where anyone can climb to the highest achievements, no matter how humble their beginnings.

But how much of Lincoln’s life is fact and how much is legend?  The realities of the life of a hero are often exaggerated in an effort to emphasis the moral of the story.  Often, they are simply misinterpreted with each telling until the subject becomes a bigger-than-life hero.

A defective education

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Woodrow Wilson

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Born in Virginia to a slave owning Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson became the first Southern US president since Andrew Johnson in 1869.

A world safer for democracy

Elected the twenty-eighth US president in 1911, Wilson, a Democrat, was determined to maintain American neutrality during the First World War. He was re-elected in 1916 on the slogan ‘He kept us out of the war’. But Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, which cost American lives, together with the exposure of the Zimmermann Telegram, forced the president’s hand. Wilson received Congress’ mandate and on 6 April 1917, the US declared war on Germany, a course necessary to make the ‘world safer for democracy’.

On 8 January 1918, in a speech to Congress, Wilson delivered his Fourteen Points, a programme for peace based on the principles of democracy and justice and not on punishment and reparations. Wilson hoped it would encourage the Germany to seek peace. Georges Clemenceau, the new French prime minister, was scathing of Wilson’s Points – ‘Fourteen? The good Lord only had ten’. The establishment of a body to act as an international arbitrator, the League of Nations, was also core to Wilson’s philosophy.

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Robert Edward Lee

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Kat Smutz summarises the life of the Confederate general, Robert E Lee, born 19 January 1807.

Robert E Lee was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Soldiering ran in the family.  His father, known as “Light Horse Harry” Lee, had been a hero of the Revolutionary War.  Lee’s career as a combat engineer included service in the Mexican-American War, superintendent of West Point and leading the US Marines who arrested John Brown and his band of abolitionists at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

In 1831, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the step-great-granddaughter of America’s first president, George Washington.  Of their seven children, all three sons served in the Confederate Army while his four daughters all died unmarried.

Lee’s inheritance

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Paul Cuffee

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The story of how Paul Cuffee made his way from farmer’s son to wealthy ship owner might not sound unique unless you consider that he was African American.  In his lifetime, free African Americans were not entitled to vote in most states and slavery was still a common practice.

Cuffee’s father, Kofi, was born in Africa, a member of the Ashanti tribe, and was transported to the colonies as a slave.  His owner, a Quaker, felt that slave ownership and his religion were in conflict, and so, freed Kofi who, having gained his freedom, worked to support his family, eventually acquiring a 116-acre Massachusetts farm which Cuffee and his siblings inherited. Cuffee’s mother, Ruth Moses, was a Native America of the Wampanoag tribe.

Cuffee the shipbulider

Born 17 January 1759, Paul Cuffee was one of ten children. As a youngster, Cuffee worked on whaling ships and learnt the art of navigation sailing out from the ports of Massachusetts. Spurred on, he built his own ship which he used to trade locally before venturing out to Nantucket. Soon he made enough of a profit to purchase another ship, eventually owning a whole fleet and, in the process, becoming one of the richest African Americans in the US.

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Mathew Brady

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Kat Smutz presents a brief summary on the life of the American Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady

Mathew (with one ‘t’) Brady might well be considered the first photojournalist and has been called “The Father of Photojournalism” for his work in documenting the American Civil War.  Because of the extensive work by Brady and his associates, we know much about the American Civil War and the latter half of the 19th century than would have been otherwise.

Brady studied under daguerreotypist Samuel FB Morse, inventor of the Morse code.  By 1844, Brady was already working from his own studio in New York.  A year later, he began exhibiting portraits of famous Americans.  In 1849, he opened a studio in Washington, DC, where he met and married Juliet Handy in 1851.

Brady’s work began with daguerreotypes, which were printed on tin, but in the 1850s he began working with ambrotypes, and later, albumen prints that could be reproduced on paper.  It was the albumen prints that were most common among his Civil War work.

Photographing the American Civil War

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Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross

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The founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton, was born on Christmas Day 190 years ago in 1821. A pioneer teacher, nurse and humanitarian, Barton began nursing at the age of eleven when her brother, David, was injured in a fall. She tended to him for three years, learning to administer his medications and the art of leeching.

Barton began caring for civil war patients from the outset of the American Civil War. The US Senate chamber in Washington DC had become a makeshift hospital where she tended soldiers from Massachusetts. It was after the First Battle of Bull Run that she established an agency for acquiring and distributing medical supplies to the wounded. In 1862, she finally received permission to travel in ambulances to the battlefields where she was to witness some of the bloodiest scenes of the war.

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Refugees In The Wilderness

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In the spring of 1776 events were moving rapidly in America. Lexington and Concord had occurred one year before. The Continental Congress was in Philadelphia deciding the future course of the colonies. People were divided over their loyalties throughout the country including the colony of New York.

At the center of this in New York was Sir John Johnson, the leading loyalist in the Mohawk Valley.

Growing rift

Sir John seemed unable to hold back the movement towards independence in the valley. In late August 1774 the first meeting of the Palatine district Committee of Safety met in Stone Arabia. Members discussed the growing rift from England and how to assert their rights in what they felt was increasing oppression. Meetings like this one would continue throughout the colony in months to come. Patriot leaders would begin to fill leadership roles in civil affairs and the militia.  As author Candice Millard states in her book Liberty’s Exiles, these committees administered loyalty oaths that were a marker of differentiating patriot and loyalist. People who refused to swear to them faced jail, banishment, or having their property confiscated.

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The Day of Infamy

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How Japan’s hollow victory spelt the end for Hitler

Seventy years ago today, 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US. In just two hours it destroyed a large part of the US fleet docked in Pearl Harbor and, in one stroke, forever destroyed US isolationism, united the country for war and made the conflict global.

The US may have been expecting war but the attack on Pearl Harbor took it totally by surprise. Yet 11 months before, a lone voice had predicted such a possibility. On the 27 January 1941, the US ambassador in Japan, Joseph Grew, cabled the White House warning that the Japanese might ‘attempt a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor using all their military facilities’.

As 1941 wore on, the likelihood of war became more apparent but the US ignored Grew’s prediction, believing that conflict, if it came, would either start in the US-controlled Philippines or the Dutch or British possessions in Southeast Asia.

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Louisa May Alcott and the American Civil War

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Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, had the briefest of nursing careers: about six weeks, from start to finish.  Alcott being Alcott, she effectively morphed the experience into grist for her literary mill.

Alcott was not a Big Gun in nursing history. Her musings are not technically significant, like Florence Nightingale’s contemporaneous Notes on Nursing.  Her service does not resonate through Civil War history like that of her influential contemporaries, Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton. The product of Alcott’s nursing experience was Hospital Sketches (1863), the story of a bedside army nurse at a time when the bedside army nurse was also, typically, a Victorian spinster.  Alcott’s tale of grit and grace is as compelling now as it was in the nineteenth century.

Louisa May Alcott, daughter of philosopher Bronson Alcott, grew up in New England with prominent Transcendentalists such as Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson as family friends. Unfortunately, Bronson Alcott’s philosophical proclivities often got in the way of his better judgment, and his family suffered real poverty and instability as a result. Louisa evolved from the chaos as her mother’s mainstay in keeping the family going. Thus, she learned service and selflessness early and perhaps a little too well.

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