At Times Dull

The Demented Moses of Tennessee

2012-01-19T16:57:00.003-06:00

I finished reading Impeached about 3 weeks ago and haven't written about it yet, which should tell you exactly how I felt about it. Andrew Johnson is that rare creature - a bad president who is also a boring president. Usually the bad presidents (Buchanan, Adams) are at least fun or educational to read about, and it's the ones whose administrations never get off the ground - your Martin Van Buren and your Franklin Pierce - that seem like a waste of time.

Part of the problem could be that this is the first non-biography I've read. Impeached is mainly an account of Johnson's impeachment trial, obviously, and spends just as much time on his critics as it does on him, because they were actually more involved in the trial than he was. With a traditional biography, I've usually built up some empathy for the presidents before they enter office, so that even if they are terrible I feel for them. But Impeached isn't about a journey to, through, and from the White House, it's about 4 horrible years.

[All this, of course, is neither a flaw or the fault of the book. I'm simply pointing out the differences in my reading experience.]

So, AJ was Lincoln's VP, chosen for that role (AS USUAL) unwisely (AS USUAL) because he was from the South. Did they really check to make sure he was down with Lincoln's policies? No. Did they check to see if he was even reeeeally a Republican? Also no. Did they check to make sure he wasn't a white supremacist? Hahahahaha. When he was sworn in as VP he was hammered, and delivered a long, unintelligible speech that made everyone embarrassed. He would repeat this performance a few years later, when he went on a stump speech tour of the Midwest, talking yards of nonsense at every stop and comparing himself to Jesus.

It would have been hard to fill Lincoln's shoes no matter what, but Johnson was bizarrely ill-qualified. The patient, conciliatory Unionist was replaced by an unreasonable bullhead. The first thing he did was decide that the recently freed slaves should be given neither citizenship nor voting rights. All the abolitionists, who had seen that as the end goal of the war, were like ummmmm wtf? They could expect support from the Republican president, but oh, Johnson had decided he wasn't a Republican anymore. No! He wanted to be a states rights "Jeffersonian." He vetoed the Civil Rights Bill, and all four of the Reconstruction Acts, although these five bills were all passed by a Congressional override. He was against the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and federal rights to anyone born in American (except people born on Indian reservations, love you guys), but Congress wisely passed it by state ratification and joint resolution, so it wasn't subject to his veto.

He also disagreed with Republicans on what should be done with Confederate leaders. He didn't think that anyone who had served in the high ranks of the Confederate military or government should be punished in any way, opening the door for them to be reelected to the federal government. This put the fear of re-secession and another war into Republicans, but states rights what can you do?

The Republicans were just spitting mad, and kept writing impeachment articles. Many of them thought that Johnson was going to blindly steer the country right back into the 1850s and that they had to get rid of him in any way possible. The accusation - that he had fired Secretary of War Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act (which they had recently passed) - was vague and purely political. Johnson's defense was that the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional and he didn't have to abide by it (which seems, in my opinion, to be true).

As the impeachment vote drew near, a black pastor prayer a public prayer for the conviction of "this demented Moses of Tennessee," which was my favorite part of the book. Johnson avoided impeachment by bribing lots of Senators.

Thaddeus Stevens

2012-01-12T12:13:00.000-06:00

"Do you inquire why, holding these views and possessing some will of my own, I accept so imperfect a proposition? I answer, because I live among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined, and as
independent as myself, who not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield their opinions to mine. Mutual concession, therefore, is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”

Thaddeus Stevens, a Congressman from Pennsylvania around the time of the Civil War, was one of the greatest statesmen in American history. He was a great orator, fearless abolitionist, and determined reformer.

It may help you to know that he will be played by Tommy Lee Jones in Spielberg's Lincoln.

Lincoln's America was a perfect milieu for him, and Johnson's was not. I think it broke his heart that he had to work under Johnson during Reconstruction, and he went a little crazy. He was so determined to get Johnson impeached that he tried to do so using legal loopholes, and persuasion rather than evidence. He filed impeachment articles 3, maybe 4 times. It's what he's most known for, which is a shame. He should be known for his years of equality-minded legislative work before and during the war, and for his measured view of congressional compromise, as stated above.

About that trip to Gettysburg

2011-10-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

This August my friend Kara and I spent 3 days in Gettysburg, PA. This is the essay I wrote about the trip for The Millions.

There is a wonderful exchange in the documentary Moving Midway between the descendant of a North Carolina plantation owner, and the grandson of that same plantation owner’s mixed-race son. The documentary follows the moving of Midway Plantation, which sat across the road from a strip mall, to more secluded acreage. Godfrey Cheshire, the filmmaker (also a descendant of the plantation owners) starts looking into the history of Midway, including its slave families, which is why Abraham Lincoln Hinton, a 96-year old man from Harlem, is invited to the house’s re-opening party.

As he stands in the front hall, Godfrey tells him that the house had originally been built in 1848. “This house?” asks Hinton, “built then, and stood up like this?”

“That’s because your family built it,” says his host.

Everyone relaxes, including the viewer, with sheer relief that someone has said something candid. These two men, who are connected by a long, ugly history, but who weren’t personally involved, and both seem very gentlemanly, have such a strange, limited space in which they can relate to each other. Engaging the history of the South would be too sober a task and, quite frankly, not their responsibility, but acting as if they’re just two guys meeting on a porch is too flippant. The resulting atmosphere is cordial but constricted.

This is how I felt for the entire three days I recently spent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just being there reminds you that, had you been born in a different time or place, there were people you would be expected to hate. Not everyone chooses to travel to the physical embodiment of racial and sectional conflict, but then I am a history fan. And, as I wrote in March, I’m in the process of reading a biography of each American president. Having recently arrived at the Civil War, I decided to celebrate, if such a word can be used, by visiting Gettysburg.

Along with everything else, Gettysburg is beautiful. The three-day battle spread itself for miles around the town, and because the battlefield is now a national park, Gettysburg is surrounded by woods and fields that have remained untouched except by monuments. As Kent Gramm writes in the opening of his book, Gettysburg, “It is the most beautiful place on earth. But death is everywhere — in every meadow, along every Virginia rail fence, all over those quiet, rocky hills at sunset.” My friend Kara, who traveled with me, and I spent our time learning and relearning the story of the battle. A topographically-based battle is remarkably easy to grasp, especially when the topography is preserved, and you are walking around on it.

There are two long, parallel ridges – Cemetery Ridge and Seminary Ridge – that extend southward from the edge of town and frame the second and third day’s fighting. Then there are the contested hills – Culp’s Hill, Oak Hill, Little Round Top, and Big Round Top – that provided more brief, concentrated action. The major events of the battle – Buford’s stand on the first day, the Wheatfield and the Little Round Top bayonet charge on the second day, Pickett’s Charge on the third day – cluster around these high grounds.

We spent the first day at the Gettysburg visitors’ center and museum, plus a visit to the room-sized diorama. The next day we went on the self-guided auto tour, for which you listen to a CD in your car that tells you what points to drive to and what to know about them (usually: the next stop is a spot where many brave men died), and walked in the National Cemetery in the evening. The third day I went on a horseback ride along the Confederate encampment lines with a Robert E. Lee impersonator. As Kara said, you can’t throw a rock in Gettysburg without learning a historical fact (did you know Union Major General Daniel Sickles shot and killed Philip Key – son of Francis Scott Key – for sleeping with his wife, and was one of the first people to be acquitted of murder via a plea of temporary insanity?). By the end of the trip we knew the narrative of the battle like the backs of our hands.

The town of Gettysburg is entirely dedicated to teaching you what happened there 148 years ago, but it avoids interpreting itself. The museum’s 15-minute orienting film introduced me to the Gettysburg gaze — a particular brand of narration (in this instance supplied by Morgan Freeman, impartial as the voice of god always is) that pervades the town, describing every skirmish as good vs. good. Good wins.

Michael Shaara’s Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels, which we listened to on our drive, is the champion of the Gettysburg gaze. Its film adaptation, Gettysburg, takes it even further. Scored like NBC scores the Olympics, the film features commanders in freshly dry cleaned uniforms who philosophize more than they command. One Union commander, marveling at General Lee’s success, says “It’s amazing what one honest man can do.” “One honest man,” his superior replies, “and a cause.”

This is freakishly off point. The Southern campaign for independence was not one honest man and a cause. It was the culmination of near a century of sectional conflict which, among others, The Missouri Compromise, The Wilmot Proviso, The Compromise of 1850, the repeal of The Missouri Compromise, popular sovereignty, and The Kansas-Nebraska Act all in turn failed to assuage, and finally escalated into a fury. Sure, it all started as Jeffersonian democracy versus Federalism, but those were hardly the rallying cries of the armies as they shot at each other.

The auto tour ends on the Union side of Pickett’s Charge, the foolhardy press of 12,000 Confederate soldiers towards the better-situated Union line, which decimated Lee’s troops, ended the three-day battle, and turned the tide of the war. You stand on Cemetery Ridge, looking at Seminary Ridge on the other side of town, and you try to imagine two armies watching each other across that distance, preparing to fight each other because the Constitution didn’t explicitly prohibit slavery. Your brain tries to fill in all the steps in between and obviously falters. In Gettysburg, Kent Gramm argues that the Civil War was fought for opposing abstract ideals — union and independence. As you stand on Cemetery Ridge, picturing 7,000 dead bodies scattered in the valley before you, it’s hard to comprehend that they got there because of opposing abstract ideals. So you stand with furrowed brow for a bit longer — that bizarre requisite time you spend standing silently at complicated historical locations, usually about two minutes — and go back to the car.

All our days ended this way. The stories and statistics would build up until it was impossible to grasp, so we’d go back to the hotel and collapse on the beds to read the AV Club and update our Facebook statuses. This is when the Gettysburg gaze comes in handy. Everything turned out fine, you tell yourself, everyone involved was brave and good and civil rights were just around the corner. (That sounds ridiculous, but one narration we heard drew a direct line from Gettysburg to Jackie Robinson.)

The closest encounter I had with partisanship during my visit was talking with the Robert E. Lee impersonator on a horseback tour of the battlefield. He bemoaned the fact that I was from Indiana, preferring to socialize with his fellow natives of “God’s country.” I told him, though, that my family had lived in North Carolina before settling in Indiana in the 1850s, and that the relatives who remained behind served for the South. He praised the brave deeds of the regiments from that state, to which I assured him he was welcome. Eager to use my outsized knowledge of 19th century politics, I chatted with him about George McClellan and John C. Calhoun, the presidential elections of 1852 and 1856, and the Mexican-American war (which he fought in, although he disagreed with policies of James K. Polk, who is a long distant cousin of mine, and this caused some tension). In all this he avowed Southern partiality, but in a passive, melancholy way.

The New York Times published an editorial in 1867 that read: “The contest touches everything, and leaves nothing as it found it. Great rights, great interests, great systems of habit and of thought disappear during its progress. It leaves us a different people in everything from what we were when it came upon us.” The greatest mercy of Gettysburg is that it releases you from culpability. It’s the American Mordor. Whatever the sins of the past, they were destroyed there in fire. Surely we continue to read about and visit Gettysburg to learn what happened, but just as much to confirm that it did.

the kids

2011-10-25T10:12:00.002-05:00

My friend Kara, who is also a history buff, is a big fan of Lincoln. Last summer she and I traveled to Gettysburg together. The summer before she went on a Lincoln road trip around Illinois and Kentucky. She has this to say about the Lincoln children:

The story of Abe Lincoln’s children is probably the central tragedy of his life. Only one of his children, Robert, survived past childhood.

During the happy times, the Lincolns were notoriously permissive parents (ed. - This is so true. Tad couldn't read or write at the age of 9. 9! And when people commented on it Abe was like, it's no big deal). The boys would mess around in Lincoln’s law office while he and his partner were working, and would be asked to recite poetry at dinner functions for Abraham and Mary Todd’s Springfield cronies, which was considered gauche at the time. Mary Todd would dress up in costumes to perform in Robert’s plays, and once Lincoln had accumulated some cash, he purchased a stereoscope for the boys, the Xbox 360 of its time.

Eddie died at age three of consumption in Springfield. The Lincolns were devastated by his death, and historians believe this was the start of the unraveling of Mary Todd. Mary Todd is arguably one of the most criticized of first ladies, but this is an area where I believe historians should just give the lady a break. Three of her children died young! How could any woman stay sane?

Two of Lincoln’s boys, Willy and Tad, were White House kids, and are the source of many anecdotes that fall under my favorite category of presidential tales: Kids Clowning Around the White House Stories. Supposedly the White House roof was converted into a play area for the boys (The whole thing? Did they put up a railing?), and their pet goat would pull a cart through the hallways.

By the time the Lincolns headed to Washington, Robert was away at college. Robert was significantly older than the two little White House boys. He held some resentment toward his father for Abe’s career, which had resulted in money, power and the most famous address in the country for the younger kids, but had mainly resulted in Robert not having seen his father much during Robert’s formative years. Willie died in 1862 at age 11, and the whole nation grieved. Lincoln removed
himself from public correspondence for days, and Mary Todd basically went off the deep end. Tad was eight years old, and Robert was nineteen.

After Lincoln was killed, Mary Todd and the boys moved to Chicago. Everyone’s future had been destroyed in different ways by the assassination. Robert had been on the path toward a very promising law career, but instead had to head back to the Midwest to care for his mother and little brother. Mary Todd struggled with her mental health, and she and Robert clashed. Tad supposedly did okay in Chicago, making “many warm friends” according to Mary Todd, until his untimely death at
age 18 from congestive heart failure. Robert eventually had Mary Todd committed, and burned many of her letters.

God did his best when he created Mr. Lincoln

2011-10-20T14:26:00.000-05:00

I got so excited when I got to Lincoln. Lincoln! Lincoln after all those dopes! No more compromises, the new birth of freedom!

And then, first of all, I got sucked into George R.R. Martin, as one does. Then I went to Gettysburg, and needed a little break from the Civil War, and then I don't know, I just wasn't into it.

Part of it, I think, is that reading about Lincoln has less cache than reading about the unknowns. I'm probably the only person you know who's read a Millard Filmore biography (love him!). I'm probably the 900th person you know who's read a Lincoln biography.

There's also a sense that reading one book about Lincoln, even reading 10 books about Lincoln, will never make me understand what made him so right for America in the 1860s. Especially in the early chapters, when young Abe is reading and talking to his stepmom and deciding what he wants to do with his life, I was always looking for telltale signs that he would become the greatest American of all time. David Herbert Donald quite obviously has this lens as well, and writes about his life in Indiana and Illinois like he's writing a fable. He will never resists relating someone's impression of Lincoln that goes like this: "Lincoln showed up and he was so gangly! How embarrassing that his pants didn't cover his ankles! He dresses like a farmer! Then he started talking and now I love him more than I've ever loved anybody!"

There is at least one of these stories every 5 pages. They are, of course, enjoyable, and make heart your swell with pride every time someone else is won over by Abe's folksy charm and hidden depths. Even if he hadn't lead America through the war and freed the slaves, he'd still be one of the most likeable presidents of all time.

He was, however, an incredibly unpopular president for his first two years in office. He had so little experience in the federal government that he made stupid, embarrassing mistakes, like doing something that was actually his Secretary of State's job, and allowing a pack of dunderheads to lead the Army of the Potomac. And he had no military experience, so he was shaky in the main duty of his new job, which was leading a war. (He actually got books about military strategy out of the library! Can't you just picture him in the "military strategy" section, like that scene in Wet Hot American Summer? Again, so cute and so embarrassing.) Everybody was mad at him all the time, including his wife, who couldn't have been less helpful.

Then the summer of 1863 really magically turned his image around. First he manned up and fired General George McClellan (for the second time), truly the biggest military doofus since Alexander Hamilton, which gave the country some confidence in him. Then he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. Then he gave the Gettysburg Address. All of a sudden the country felt like it had a president. They couldn't wait to re-elect him. One guy wrote, "I think God tried his best when he created Mr. Lincoln."

So I'm not quite done with the book. We've currently got Petersburg under siege, but the hagiography has already started. What's gnawing at me is that with so many of his predecessors, when I finished a 500-page biography of them I was totally satisfied. I could close it and say, "Ok, I think I know everything I ever need to know about Franklin Pierce." But I'll never feel that way about Lincoln.

Mayor of Dreamytown

2011-07-27T14:46:00.000-05:00

I'll take a short break from Lincoln (who I AM reading, and posts are simmering) to brag about this photo:

There's me and Dave standing next to Rahm Emmanuel. I decided to be a doll and have a camera in my face. Let's zoom in.

And here is the exact picture I was taking while that picture was being taken of me.

Oh to stand so close to our darling mayor! I love him so.

how do you get to be the worst president in US history?

2011-06-24T14:29:00.000-05:00

I'm kind of tired of this guy. Let's make this quick.

After the Kansas debacle, people starting jumping the Buchanan ship. Members of his staff left, his friends in Congress stopped returning his letters, his Cabinet lost faith. Buchanan himself got more irritable. Congress disassociated itself from JB, miring all of his bills in paperwork and committee, which was especially crippling for JB because he was such a staunchly literal constitutionist, and wouldn't do anything unless Congress was in agreement.

Which is how it all went south, so to speak. South Carolina had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected. Lincoln was elected. So the federal employees of South Carolina walked out - court officials, judges, etc. However, there was no uprising or violence. And as yet, there was no secession, although it was understood that it was South Carolina's eventual intention.

So what can JB do? From a strictly constitutional perspective, which is all JB ever used, he claimed a few things:

- The federal government had no power to act aggressively towards one of the states in order to coerce submission.
- UNLESS the officials of that state asked for help.
- HOWEVER, the officials of South Carolina were not acknowledging the federal government.
- So, UNTIL the state seceded or incited violence towards the government, they were still technically a part of the country, and therefore preemptive action against them was illegal, in fact unseemly.

On top of this, Major Anderson was holed up inside Fort Sumter, hoping for new provisions. But if JB sent him more men or supplies, it could appear to be preparation for battle, which might spur South Carolina to fight.

It was a CONSTITUTIONAL STANDOFF!

JB didn't think that he had the authority to do anything, as matters stood. Many, many people pointed out - then and since - that DUH there was nothing in the Constitution about what to do if the states rebelled, because that would make it sound legal, and maybe JB should just improvise, maybe act like an executive? Of course, people were crying out for action, for the president to show some backbone, flex some muscle, but this was no Andrew Jackson we had in the White House in 1860. This was James Buchanan. He was an unpopular, lame duck president who had no intention of starting a war during his last 4 months in office. He proposed a second Constitutional convention that would add a pro-slavery amendment, in order to appease the South and keep them from seceding (this is where he lost my sympathy), but Congress wouldn't call it.

It was an incredibly murky situation, legally, politically, and morally, and JB very honestly did what he thought was right. That has not helped his legacy, it never does.

His reputation just got worse and worse after he left office. Since he was retired, and already a villain, people felt free to blame him for anything negative that had ever happened. His old friends, who knew that the reports were false, wouldn't even publicly defend him, because he was political kryptonite.

He didn't deserve all the vilification he got, and yet he was the exact wrong man to be president from 1856-1860.

Buchanan miscellany

2011-06-22T15:25:00.000-05:00

I finished the Buchanan bio last night, but before I do a final post on that ill-fated administration, there are two fun facts worth noting.

THE FIRST: James Buchanan was the only president never to marry. In his 20s he was engaged to a rich, pretty girl, but he traveled a lot and rarely saw her. She started getting mad about it, and chastised him a few times in her letters, letting him know that he was on thin ice. He didn't mend his behavior. One time, when he returned home to Lancaster from a business trip, he went immediately to see a friend who was in town to visit, and then went home to sleep, and then visited his fiancee the next day. She was furious that he had waited so long to see her, especially when he'd been to visit other people and their pretty daughters, so she dumped it. To get away from the heartbreak, she went to visit her sister. The day she arrived she took to bed, the doctor was called, but couldn't find anything wrong with her except that her heart was slowing down. It kept slowing down, until a day or two later she died. Apparently, her heart just slowed all the way down and she died, it's kind of bizarre.

After that he was rumored to be "attached" a few more times, but nothing ever came of it. When he lived in Washington, he usually shared a house with Senator King of Alabama. Andrew Jackson nicknamed Buchanan and King Aunt Nancy and Aunt Fancy, because they dressed well and were quite prim. Rumors abound, although Klein doesn't give them any quarter.

THE SECOND: During the last year of Buchanan's administration, Queen Victoria's son Albert announced a visit to Canada. JB wrote and invited him to visit the US as well, which Victoria decided he should do. This was the first time since the revolution (or before) that an English royal visited America. For 80 years relations between the two nations had been crawling from horrible to fine, and the fact that JB had been a well-liked minister to England definitely helped smooth the way.

Sub-fact: When Albert and his entourage were staying in the White House, JB threw hosted a state dinner and afterwards had to put up many of the guests. When everyone was settled, he realized there were no more beds, and had to sleep on the couch.

Albert's visit to the US is enormously significant, and might have been recognized as such if it hadn't been 1860. As it were, JB was a little annoyed at the distraction and all the duties of hosting him, with the nation crumbling all around him.

here comes some nonsense

2011-06-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

Oh, James Buchanan. He was a really good lawyer. He really wanted to be president. Did he want to be president in the 1850s? No. Was he? Yes. How did he handle that? By hoping the problems of the 1850s would sort themselves out. Considering the fact that the problems of the 1850s eventually caused an ENORMOUS WAR, you could say he spent most of his presidency deluding himself.

During JB's presidency, the divided nation projected all its issues onto Kansas. Kansas was about to be admitted as a state, and after a long long battle, it was decided that the slavery question in KS would be decided by popular sovereignty — that is, the KS residents or their elected officials would vote on whether or not to have slavery. This resulted in both the North and the South trying to get lots of people to move to Kansas to vote for their cause. In the North, the New England Emigrant Aid Company was founded to essentially pay people to move to Kansas and vote against slavery.

Chaos! Shocking no one, the abolitionist and pro-slavery factions refused to work together, and instead set up two separate Constitutional conventions, and created two separate state constitutions for the population to vote on. Each faction boycotted the other's vote. The abolitionists wrote the Topeka Constitution, which only the abolitionists voted on. The pro-slavery faction wrote the Lecompton Constitution. When they sent it out for a vote, the only choices on the ballot were "Constitution w/ slavery" or "Constitution w/o slavery," but even the w/o slavery option would not have made Kansas a free state, it would have vaguely prohibited future importation of slaves, kind of. A very small minority of Kansas settlers (mostly Southerners) voted, and passed the Lecompton Constitution with slavery.

Both the Topeka and Lecompton Constitutions were sent to D.C. for ratification. What a lot of nonsense! every said, neither of these charters have anything like popular support in Kansas, one of them didn't even present a free state option, and really, the fact that there are two state constitutions proves that there was no viable state convention. COOL THANKS LET'S PASS IT, said President Buchanan. Um, WHAT, said the nation and federal government (except for the South, who were stoked). That is NONSENSE. But JB said that the Lecompton Constitution was legally drawn up and offered for a vote. The fact that the vast majority of Kansas boycotted the vote? Their fault, said JB, and asked Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton.

The governor of Kansas RESIGNED rather than be associated with this nonsense. The Senate approved it, but the House did not. There was even a fist fight on the floor of the House, but this wasn't rare. The House decided that the constitution should be sent back to Kansas for another vote, this time with a yes/no option instead of a slavery/no slavery option, and it was voted down 6 to 1.

So now everybody is mad. The South is mad that it didn't go through, because they thought the original vote was fair. The North was mad that Buchanan had tried to force it through. The governor of Kansas was mad. Buchanan was mad that he looked like an idiot. And worst of all......Stephen Douglas was mad. Never make Stephen Douglas mad! The Douglas/Buchanan feud split the Democratic party in two. Buchanan never really had a shot at accomplishing anything after that.

And Kansas had to wait another 3 years for a constitution.

the value of an untarnished reputation

2011-06-15T11:53:00.000-05:00

The secret to JB's success, as time went on, was his avoidance of conflict. The mid-19th century was an explosive, divisive time, and Old Buck got through it without much baggage. It was great for his career, but it inspires no respect.

He served alongside what Klein calls a cache of Parliamentary giants - not only future presidents like Van Buren, Polk, Filmore, and Pierce, but lifelong statesmen like Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Benton, and Crawford. These men got their hands dirty. They loved speechifying. They defended their political interests fiercely. "Best not to say anything," said Buchanan from the sidelines. "Best to see how this all plays out." He wasn't uninterested, or unintelligent, but he was gun-shy. A few early misunderstandings with Andrew Jackson that threatened his political standing made him wary to enter the fray.

During the four gargantuan Congressional battles that led up to the Civil War - the Missouri Compromise, the nullification crisis, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska bill - Buchanan was elsewhere. Either not in office or abroad. He was, of course, Secretary of State during the Mexican-American war, but that hung solely around Polk's neck.

As the 1850s started getting real crazy - John Brown, Kansas-Nebraska, the Fugitive Slave Act's big comeback - Buchanan was in England negotiating fishing rights. He returned to America in 1856, just in time for the election, and everybody said, hey, nobody hates this guy!

So they gave the reins of the country, in its darkest hour, to a chronically passive man.

DUH DUM.

Buchanan v. Polk

2011-06-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

How trying it is, when one cannot be president, to be Secretary of State to one so undeserving.

Buchanan's mission to Russia turned out quite well for him. Because Russia had recently enslaved the Poles, and were frightfully unpopular in continental Europe, they decided to fete the American, in order to win an ally. So Buchanan went to all the balls and danced with the Empress and was all around a success. He also managed to negotiate a mutually beneficial trade agreement between the US and Russia, despite (or because of) the fact that the Russians opened all his mail.

So he had left America a b-list politician and returned a statesman. He returned to the Senate for a while, and was a frontrunner for the 1844 presidential nomination. But Van Buren was running, obviously, and he didn't want to openly oppose the party patriarch, pledging only to run if VB dropped out. By the time VB did, Polk was the nominee.

Polk named him Secretary of State, which in any other administration was an invitation to succeed him in office. But Polk was tired of seeing the last year of an administration turn into a squabble over who in the cabinet would be the next president, so he made Buchanan promise that if he planned to run for president in '48, he would immediately resign the State Department. Buchanan kind of agreed, but claimed that if his supporters started campaigning for him, he could hardly be asked to stop them.

Much to JB's chagrin, Polk really only wanted him to manage State, not run it. Polk, you may remember, was a micro-manager. A lot of previous presidents gave the State Department to their bestie so they could work closely together. Since Polk didn't have any friends, he gave it to an able statesman, but didn't let him do anything.

Let's remind ourselves, though, that Polk was an insanely efficient president, and Buchanan was known for kind of writing a lot of letters and never getting anything done. So when Polk wanted to settle the Oregon/Canada border he was like "Tell the British 49 degress" and Buchanan was like "They'll never agree" and Polk was like "I'll just do it" and Buchanan was like "Surely we should send another envoy to talk to them about it" and Polk was like "Nope!" and Buchanan was like "We need to have more meetings about this" and Polk was like "I just did it while you were fussing." So, they were not a match made in heaven.

When a Supreme Court position opened during Polk's presidency he offered it to Buchanan, probably to be like, get out of my life, but Buchanan turned it down and suggested a friend of his. Polk ignored his suggestion and nominated somebody else. Once the nomination was up for confirmation, Buchanan was like "Well if you're going to ignore my suggestion than I'll go ahead and take the post" and Polk was like, dude, they are already voting on it. The nominee was not confirmed, so Buchanan kindly informed Polk that he would take it. This time Polk just ignored him and nominated somebody else, who was confirmed, and then Buchanan was like "Yeah I don't want it" and Polk was like DUDE.

Buchanan was basically peeved that he was the most reined-in Secretary of State in American history, which is fair enough. It meant that all the prestige that usually comes from holding that post, which so frequently translates into a successive presidency, was denied him, because everyone in Washington knew he didn't do anything.

James "Backfire" Buchanan

2011-06-08T15:32:00.000-05:00

Alright! James Buchanan is happening!

ATD has been 100% dull recently while I work on other writing assignments, but this summer is going to be epic – as in, I’m going to read Buchanan and Lincoln and hopefully all of Shelby Foote before my friend and I visit Gettysburg in August.

But for now, Buchanan. JB almost always tops the list of “worst presidents in history,” because he allowed the South to secede, and war to break out. This puts an interesting lens on the early years of his life. While I’m reading about his education and career as a lawyer, I’ve got my eye out for the tragic flaws, the enormous lapses in capability that will one day throw the Union into turmoil.

So far, they’re few. Biographer Klein is being fairly coy about how poorly JB’s career will end. He’s keen on letting the early, state government phase of JB’s career stand alone, without breaking in with foreshadowing. I’m not a big fan of this tactic, because the first 100 pages of a presidential biography are reliably the least interesting. In general, any man who eventually rose to the presidency was the smartest and most admired young man in the milieu of his young life, so these sections of presidential biographies all read the same. “What a talented young lawyer/congressman/soldier! So smart! He’ll definitely go far,” say all their friends and family.

And then, God help us, they enter state politics. Know who cares about Pennsylvania state politics in the 1810s? No one. It’s not until, usually, page 200, that they get to national politics, and I’m finally like, “Oh hi John C. Calhoun! Hi Senator Adams!”, and I generally re-enter the narrative that runs through presidential history.

Those first 200 pages can be awful, as the dudes slowly climb the ranks of government, but of course they’re important for character development. Klein is being fairly objective, but lets The Buck’s flaws shine through.

And yes, while he is an obviously smart and talented lawyer and politician, he can be kind of a snot. He was a mama’s boy, and grew up fussy and conceited. He almost got expelled from college for acting like a douche all the time. His father, who clearly recognized his son’s Achilles heel, was always writing him letters reminding him to be humble about his academic prowess and to try to be agreeable. The society of Lancaster, PA, and later PA government, seemed to acknowledge that he was an important member, but not an endearing one.

He took offense easily, and wrote fussy letters about it, and his political views seem quite malleable. I first met JB when he was Polk’s Secretary of State, and Polk grew to despise his fussy, demanding ways. I will never stop describing him as fussy.

That’s not to say that sometimes he wasn’t right to throw a fit. He seemed to have chronically bad political timing. He would form an alliance of PA politicians, and then everyone they excluded would get elected to higher office. He switched political parties, and his old party swept the state elections. He went to visit presidential candidate Andrew Jackson, and Jackson later accused him of being there to strike a corrupt bargain. He was always working for his political betterment, it frequently backfired.

The tides turned when he was appointed as minister to Russia. Far-flung foreign appointments, as Klein points out, were given to politicians who you didn’t want in your government, but were too important to ignore. Jackson or Van Buren (I forget which, but they both disliked him) wanted him out of their hair without angering his supporters by an outright snub, so they packed him off to Russia. It turned out to be his big break.

Happy Presidents Day

2011-02-21T15:03:00.000-06:00

from me and John.

there are bad presidents, and then there's franklin pierce

2011-02-10T16:26:00.000-06:00

Franklin Pierce was so good looking, guys. A real charmer. Adored by everyone, a favorite at Bowdoin, and successful in business. Peter Wallner, his biographer, trots out testimony after testimony of how nice, gentlemanly, and smart he was. Probably because, to look at his presidency, you would conclude that he had his head in his pants.

A protege of Daniel Webster, he served in the House, Senate, and was a brigadier general in the Mexican American War. Then his wife, Jane, who was sickly, religious, and shy, made him leave politics and move back to New Hampshire to raise their three kids. Which he did.

Because also, he was an alcoholic. And politics made him hit the bottle. So he spent ten lovely years in New Hampshire with his wife and kids, staying sober.

Then the convention of 1852 came along, and the Democrats could not decide between Stephen Douglas, William Marcy, James Buchanan, and Lewis Cass. Thirty-four ballots went by, and no one would change their vote. Finally, someone said, "Hey, remember Franklin Pierce, he used to be a Senator?" "No," all the delegates replied. "Well, he is good looking and friends with Daniel Webster." "Ok, let's make him our candidate."

Candidate he was, and he easily beat Winfield Scott in the presidential election, because people in general were tired of Winfield Scott running for president.

What Franklin Pierce believed in was small, efficient government that neither aided nor hindered people from doing their own thing. As such, he vetoed a bill full of mental health treatment reforms, because it would have given public land for new mental institutions. (He was, however, an extremely good administrator. Never had the federal government been run so smoothly, they all said.)

But any chance he had of being remembered well was brought down by Kansas and Nebraska. It all started when they wanted to build a railroad to the Pacific. To do so, they had to formalize Nebraska as a territory. To do that, they had to decide whether or not to allow slavery in Nebraksa.

Actually, they didn't have to decide - the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the Nebraska territory, but a handful of Southern senators got together and refused to vote for a territorial bill unless slavery was explicitly allowed. Stephen Douglas, a big proponent of both territories and railroads, rewrote the bill to include popular sovereignty - the provision that allows a new territory or state to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery.

This wasn't enough for the South. They wanted an official repeal of the Missouri Compromise, not just a new bill that ignored it. Franklin Pierce was just the man for the job. He believe in states' rights almost as much as the South did, and he agreed to repeal the Missouri Compromise on those grounds. This emboldened the South, and infuriated the North. It's safe to say that, while the Civil War had been building steam for almost a century, no single act provoked it as directly as Pierce's compromise.

He became very unpopular, and wasn't renominated for a second term. During Buchanan's administration, he and Jane traveled around Europe, hanging out with Nathaniel and Sophie Hawthorne. Soon after they returned to the States, Jane and Nathaniel - essentially Pierce's two best friends - both died, and Frank started drinking again. He spent his last years getting drunk and bad-mouthing Lincoln. He was against Lincoln and reunification until the end, stubbornly demanding that personal liberty laws made the Civil War unconstitutional.

He was the wrong president at the wrong time. In a less polarizing era he could have been a good president, with his powers of persuasion and knack for detail. In the 1850s, he just made things worse.

a few fun facts about franklin (pierce)

2011-02-02T19:56:00.000-06:00

He remains the only president to come from New Hampshire. (If you don't count Jed Bartlet.)

He is the only president whose cabinet remained the same for his entire administration.

His vice president died after a few weeks in office, and was never replaced. The Senate majority leader was next in the succession line for the majority of his administration.

He was a long-time friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he appointed to a lucrative customs post.

he was only one milf

2011-01-21T16:46:00.002-06:00

If Milf was known for anything, it was patience. Possibly the happiest years of his life were his 20s and 30s, when he and his two best friends ran a law firm in Buffalo, and also ran Buffalo itself. He was widely known for being a good lawyer, and a good teacher. Many, many young lawyers, including future president Garfield, came to learn from him and then spend evenings seeking his advice.

He was also famous for the political rivalry he had with Thurlow Weed, a newspaper editor, former friend, and champion of William Seward (senator, governor, rival and eventual second fiddle to Lincoln). Weed launched a smear campaign against Milf that lasted decades, and Milf put up with it without ever striking back.

In a particularly poetic string of events, Weed was a big supporter of Milf for vice-president solely so that he would be out of New York, ensuring Seward’s bid for governor, which was thought to be a more powerful position than VP. With Milf as VP and Seward as governor, Weed started manipulating President Taylor to undercut Milf’s authority until surprise! – Taylor died, Fillmore became president, and Weed got burned.

Although he didn’t get too burned. For being the new president’s most vocal antagonist, Milf did almost nothing to shut him down when he took office. He let Weed’s friends keep their appointments, tried to work with Seward, and generally took the high road. He had bigger things to worry about, I guess is the point, than New York politics, which has always been ugly.

And at the time, even more than usual, every politician was mad all the time. Sectional conflict was starting to get pretty real, and they couldn’t even pass a bill about building canals without slavery coming up. So Milf’s main job, and main accomplishment, as a president was making most of the people happy most of the time. It’s not a legacy that forges monuments, but it’s a lot more than many of the leading politicians of the day could have done.

Of course, the flip side of being a compromise president is the argument that compromise wasn’t the noble path. Now that we all know that the compromises of the 1840s and 1850s only delayed war instead of avoiding it, these men look pretty impotent, which is why Milf gets no respect. But he seems like he was a really nice guy.

party time

2011-01-20T13:39:00.003-06:00

I’m not too interested in talking at length about the evolution of political parties, but it has to be said that things got pretty weird in the 1850s.

The Democratic-Republican party of Jefferson and Monroe started out as ultra-small government, partially due to the remaining distaste for monarchy and the big programs of John Adams. However, as the need for centralized authority in the running of a large country became more apparent, the Democratic-Republicans started putting more and more power into the federal government, to the point that John Quincy Adams, formerly a hated Federalist, became a natural member of their party.

But then Andrew Jackson was like, we need to be EVEN MORE POWERFUL, so although he claimed Jefferson and Monroe as his heroes, he is considered the first Democratic president because he broke with so much of their philosophy (like diplomacy).

So then the anti-Jackson faction kind of didn’t know what to do, because they considered themselves in opposition to him, even though he had kind of come from their party. So the only thing to do was to start a new party that was obviously not his.

The Anti-Masonic party started as a vote-getter for John Quincy Adams. A small group of supporters wanted Adams back in power, and they thought the most effective way to get rid of Jackson was to stoke people’s fear of Freemasons, of whom Jackson was a powerful member. It didn’t work, so the Anti-Masons mostly all became Whigs, which had a broader political platform.

The Whigs came to power with the presidency of William Henry Harrison, but his successor John Tyler abandoned the party while still president. Then the Whigs coalesced around opposition to the Mexican-American War and James K. Polk, its Jacksonian-protégé leader, and got Zachary Taylor elected as the anti-Polk.

The Whigs, though, had a hard time keeping it together. In order to be a powerful national party, they had to appeal to be North and South, and this was next to impossible, because everyone had a strong view on slavery. Abolitionists kept breaking away from the Whigs and starting their own parties, but they never got strong enough to win anything besides local elections.

Then there was the Native American Party, otherwise known as the Know-Nothing Party, or Nativists. This party was started by the secret society Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, a group of New England white guys who hated immigrants and Catholics. If any of them were ever asked about their secret society, they would say “I know nothing about it,” which is how they got their nickname.

The people in the Know-Nothing Party were valuable to Whigs, though, because they agreed on sectional compromise as a policy, so they eventually got folded back into the Whigs as well.

But, in general, party-hopping was rampant among non-Democrats. There were Free-Soilers, National Whigs, "Silver-Grey" Whigs, Nativists, Anti-Nebraskans, and the Liberty Party. Old Millf started out as an Anti-Mason, then a Whig, and then remained a Whig when the rest of the party became Republicans. It’s hard to keep track of, because everybody keeps switching. As Rayback says in his biography of Millf, a lot of politicians in the 1850s were “experimenting with new political loyalties,” and everything got very unpredictable.

we'll call him MilF, shall we?

2011-01-05T12:41:00.000-06:00

No better way to start the new year, really, than by reading about Millard Fillmore.

People's responses to learning about At Times Dull has been an accidental sociological study. Most people say, "What are you going to do when you get to Millard Fillmore?" I swear to this, 9 out of 10 times it's Millard Fillmore. The other time it's usually Garfield.

Ol' MillF is the poster boy for forgotten presidents with funny names. Unlucky #13. And biographies of this guy do not grow on trees. But, prosaically, the answer to "What are you going to do when you get to Millard Fillmore" is "read a biography of him and blog about it, just like all the others."

Happy new year from me and MilF!

election day

2010-12-20T15:50:00.002-06:00

The election of 1848 was the first in which the entire nation went to the polls on the same day (November 7).

Rough and Ready

2010-12-20T15:41:00.000-06:00

Zachary Taylor was an utterly competent military commander. Probably the coolest thing about him is that his biographer’s name is Jack Bauer. Here’s what Bauer had to say:

Taylor returned home a great hero. In the public mind he was the architect and leader of the victories at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista. It was an unearned reputation. Taylor was a successful battlefield commander because he faced opponents whose tactical abilities and nerves were less than his and because his army in the early battles contained well-trained, self-confident subordinates. Taylor demonstrated little tactical virtuosity or the instinct great commanders have for a final crushing blow. More than anything else, Taylor’s performance, especially when his activities were questioned by his superiors, illuminated his petulance. He easily rationalized objections as political attacks and suggestions as traps.

Two things stick out to me about Zachary Taylor. The first is that every time he was commended, it was for having well-trained, orderly men. (Before the war, that is, only before the war. The men he commanded in the war, mostly the Texans, were notorious for being jerks to the Mexican women.) The second is that he frequently wrote really really long letters of complaint to men in authority. He opposed the army’s policy of automatically promoting officers after 10 years, and he wrote a 52-page letter about it to someone in the war department. Fifty-two pages! Ugh! He was a stickler – a stickler for rules, propriety, and behavior. It did not make him a genius at war or at the presidency, but it made him predictable and reliable.

A lot of people were stressed out about James K. Polk being president. He had a habit of making sweeping decisions without consulting anybody, or taking public opinion into account (exhibit A: The Mexican War). It is a great irony that the Whig party spent 4 years opposing, complaining about, and refusing to supply the war, ran a presidential campaign based on how stupid it was the Polk started the war, and then chose a war hero as their presidential candidate.

On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense that after 4 years of the elusive, secretive Polk, an extremely bland and predictable war general was exactly what America wanted. When choosing their candidate, the Whigs essentially decided between General Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott. To give you some insight into why they chose as they did, Taylor’s nickname was Old Rough and Ready. Scott’s was Old Fuss and Feathers.

this is cute

2010-12-17T16:28:00.000-06:00

When stationed at Fort Crawford near Green Bay, Taylor's soldiers used to put on plays.

"[One] visitor reported attending a performance of The Poor Gentleman in a room of the fort. The scenery had been painted by the soldiers, who fashioned lights by placing lanterns on bayonets. The seats were arranged so that they rose like the pit of an orchestra."

quite possibly all you need to know about Zachary Taylor

2010-12-16T11:00:00.003-06:00

His second daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, was named after her grandmother and a fort.

smash and grab

2010-12-01T21:58:00.001-06:00

while my six-layer russian honey cake is cooling (my work birthday party is tomorrow), i thought we could talk a little about my cousin james.

the polk presidency was unique in so many ways. as i wrote previously, after his election polk outlined 4 goals - to reduce the tariff, to establish an independent treasury, to bring oregon into the union, and to claim california from mexico - and said he would not seek a second term. he did achieve all four, and he did refuse renomination.

the question immediately arises: why can't every president be that forcefully effective? why didn't they all take from the polk playbook? answer: by the end of his presidency, polk had next to no allies. that being only slightly less than the number he started his presidency with.

polk was a compromise presidential candidate - the democrats were deadlocked choosing between martin van buren (again? too northern!) and lewis cass (the fat guy? too southern!). the delegates were too stubborn to switch their votes, but enough of them would decamp to a new nominee. james k. polk, lately the speaker of the house and a protege of andrew jackson's, made everybody happy long enough to get a nomination vote.

you get the feeling he knew he was nobody's dream, so he just dug his heels in and decided to get tons of stuff done, not bothering to make friends. he worked incredibly hard. he only left washington 3 times during his presidency. he often went weeks without even leaving the white house. the politics of expansion had been simmering for a few decades, and he was determined to finish the job.

to back up a little, you'll remember that us presidents up to this point had fallen into the following timeline:

founding fathers
nation builders (my favorite!)
expansionists

the expansionists are not a thrilling bunch. as merry puts it, "The conquest of other nations' territories on such a scale was an alien experience for America, and it wasn't surprising that no consensus could easily emerge as to how to proceed while preserving the sacred precepts of the Constitution."so the politics of expansion involved a lot of land treaties, voting on territorial governments, and establishing trade routes.

polk was eager to have it all done with. let's just finish off manifest destiny, he said, so we can all focus on compromising over slavery for a while. and look, he did it.

we got ourselves to the mississippi pretty early on. then jefferson bought louisiana a few years later, followed in 1819 by monroe's acquisition of florida from spain. we hung out there for almost 30 years until we added texas, california, and oregon in the space of 4 years. although he shares credit for texas with john tyler, james k. polk increased the size of the US by 500,000 square miles.

but polk is much better know for the mexican-american war, an ambiguous conflict - as ill-defined as it was vaguely unconstitutional - recently making a comeback as a popular comparison to the wars of george w. bush. it was so ill-defined, in fact, that one of the reasons it dragged on was because congress was debating what its purpose was in the first place, and therefore when they could declare that purpose achieved. the war dominates polk's legacy, as it did his time in office. his cabinet - one of the best constructed of its time - splintered over it, and his senior advisers started turning other politicians against polk (james buchanan, who we'll see in a bit when he's the undisputed worst president in US history, was polk's secretary of state, and was a particular snot about it).

in a particularly sad, but very representative, anecdote from his presidency, polk had a falling out with senator thomas hart benton, who had been his closest and must trusted confidante. benton's son-in-law john fremont was being court martialled, and polk (never compromise, never make friends) refused to pull strings to get him out of trouble. the break was so severe, one washington paper reported, "that benton and polk no longer acknowledge each other in church on sundays."

history's one mercy to polk was that the war ended while he was still president, sparing him the "cleaning up polk's mess" victory of a successor. but it wasn't enough to save his reputation, the way winning 1812 had saved madison's. so he left office, having worked himself to the bone. he died 3 months after leaving office.

Henry Clay

2010-11-29T00:44:00.000-06:00

one of the great things about reading about all the presidents is getting to know all the other lifelong statesmen that crop up in everyone's biography. these men - such as patrick henry and john c. calhoun - often ran for president themselves, sometimes several times, but never won. and although decades in the senate or house arguably made them much more significant to US history than some of the slighter presidents, they're often forgotten.

john c. calhoun, for example, was vice president twice, secretary of state, and secretary of war. usually they put him in the cabinet to appease the south, because he was single-handedly drove southern politics. he was also unabashedly a white supremacist. he gave a speech in the senate opposing the annexation of mexico because then there would be non-white senators.

but henry clay is my favorite. a kentuckian born just after the revolutionary generation, he got in on the nation building. he was suave and funny and a skilled politician. he founded the whig party in the demise of federalism, and ran for president a few times, although he never won after ruining his reputation by what seemed like shady dealings to secure himself a cabinet position under JQA. every time he shows up you know he's about to say something eloquent and kind of funny.

my two favorite henry clay anecdotes occurred at the beginning and end of his political career.

the first, in the 1780s, as a young senator from kentucky he was sent to london with the treaty commission. JQA was also on this commission, as the senior member. one morning, at 4am, after JQA had risen, read his Bible, and was heading out for his morning walk and bath, he met henry clay on the stairs, who was coming back from a card party. both were disgusted (although they went on to be bosom friends, and JQA asked for Clay on his deathbed).

in the 1840s, henry clay went to the white house to pay a call on james k. polk, who had defeated him in the election 3 years earlier. despite this, and despite the fact that polk was a jackson protege, whom clay actually despised, and despite the fact that polk was wildly unpopular at the time, clay was his usual charming self and by all accounts they had a nice visit. as he was leaving, he turned to sarah polk, known for her hospitality, and said:

"Madame, I must say that in all my travels, in all companies and among all parties, I have heard but one opinion of you. All agree in commending in the highest terms your excellent administration of the domestic affairs of the White House."

pause

"But as for that young gentleman there, I cannot say as much. There is some little difference of opinion in regard to the policy of his course."

Zing! the polks were delighted by this little joke, because if you're henry clay you can say anything.

double digits, family ties

2010-06-03T22:29:00.000-05:00

technically we hit double digits with tyler, but we never celebrated it. so celebrate! we made it through the first 10 presidents! once we finish polk we'll be a quarter of the way through! and you doubted!

what you just listened to was a lovely song about james k polk by they might be giants (followed by some other songs which you didn't need to listen to but might have). although polk is not one of the more famous presidents, they touch on the two cornerstones of his legacy (can there be only 2 cornerstones? or does it have to be 4?)

regardless, those who know polk know this:

he made 4 campaign promises: assimilate texas, buy oregon, lower the tariffs, and establish an independent treasury.

he accomplished all 4 things, and did not run for re-election.

this has given him a reputation for being a combination of efficient, ruthless, genius, demanding, and uncompromising. some like to call him the most effective president in history. others think he pulled off a smash and grab job, and left future presidents to clean up the mess (then again, almost every president is accused of this in some way or the other).

but it's all so much more complicated than that! watch this space.

HOWEVER, a lesser known fact about james k polk is that his great-grandfather ezekiel came to america from scotland and settled in north carolina. many generations of polks lived in north carolina, including his great-grandson james, and his great-granddaughter mark polk petty, who is - drum roll - my great-great-great-great-grandmother. margaret and james were second cousins, making james k. polk and myself second cousins six times removed. so you'll forgive me if on this one i'm a little biased.

it's not like we ever liked you anyway

2010-05-23T17:22:00.000-05:00

despite his success annexing texas, john tyler lost reelection to james k. polk. he went home to his estate in virginia, sherwood forest, where he and his wife julia hung out, having kids and entrenching their views.

although he had never been a popular president, the south didn't have too many political luminaries to look up to, so he became a respected elder statesman of virginia. maybe this long-sought, long-coveted popularity explains his post-presidential actions. or maybe he had been waiting for the opportunity his whole life. either way, john tyler became a leading secessionist.

he was asked to be the president of a peace conference between the north and south, a last ditch attempt to avoid civil war. attended by 12 border states, 6 of each north and south, the conference went on for a while, without accomplishing much, and then at the end john tyler gave a speech stepping down as president of the conference and went home to vote for secession. there is a legend, although it is no more than that, that tyler had only attended the conference to stall the advent of war while the south built up its arsenal.

tyler was sooned elected to the confederate senate. his granddaughter letitita, who had actually been born in the white house, could be seen raising the confederate flag at confederate rallies. whatever his relationship with the american people had been, he left it behind. and the north was furious.

he was called the traitor president. when he died, in 1862 (before he ever took up that senate seat), the event was met by silence from washington, the only former president whose death was ignored.

you, sir, are no thomas jefferson

2010-05-22T11:38:00.001-05:00

john tyler was never supposed to be president. he was chosen, as were most vice-presidential candidates, to balance the ticket geographically. he was referred to commonly as "his accidency," and as soon as he got into office he went rogue.

even though he was elected on a whig ticket, one of his first actions in office was to veto a whig bill that had passed both houses. as a result he was the first president to face impeachment proceedings, led by john quincy adams on the grounds that he had no right to veto a bill that had passed with no problem.

the whigs called him a traitor, but the democrat-republicans weren't too eager to welcome the unpopular man into their party, so tyler started to call himself "a president without a party." then he spent 4 years just doing whatever he wanted.

john tyler idolized thomas jefferson and james madison. he referred to them constantly as his political role models. during his presidency, he kept taking big, bold actions reminiscent of those adept nation builders. the difference is that they were good at it.

jefferson and madison had stood up to great britain in the form of the blockade and then the war of 1812. in the 1840s, anglophobia was still rampant, not only because of popular feeling but because great britain was the most powerful state in the world. tyler stood up to great britain on two fronts - canada, hawaii, and china.

first, to settle the boundary between maine and canada, he sent a secret agent to england to gather information. completely without the knowledge of the actual american ambassador to england, this guy shows up and starts snooping around. john tyler was paying him with secret service funds, which he didn't have to disclose. it was weird.

then hawaii decided to send two emissaries on a world tour getting big nations to recognize their sovereignty. america was more than happy to do this, because it would mean britain couldn't colonize hawaii. but when the two emissaries showed up in d.c., tyler didn't see them for several weeks, giving really weird and vague excuses, which might have had something to do with the fact that one of the hawaiian dudes was black.

then there was china. tyler wanted to sign a trading treaty with china to block great britain's monopoly. so he sent caleb cushing to china to negotiate, and the letter of introduction he sent with him demonstrates his enormous belief in white supremacy.

feast your eyes, fellow americans, on this humiliating piece of diplomacy:

"I hope your health is good. China is a great empire, extending over a great part of the world. The Chinese are numerous. You have millions and millions of subjects. The twenty-six United States are as large as China, though our people are not so numerous. The rising sun looks over the great mountains and great rivers of China. When he sets, he looks upon rivers and mountains equally large in the United States."

and later,

"The Chinese love to trade with our people, and sell them tea and silk, for which our people pay silver, and sometimes other articles. But if the Chinese and Americans will trade, there should be rules, so that they shall not break your laws nor our laws. "

the chinese, for some reason, decided to ignore this blatantly insulting letter and sign a pretty good treaty, saving their revenge for the 2008 olympics.

so in the end, tyler accomplished a lot of good things. he settled a border with great britain, extended the monroe doctrine to hawaii, and set up trading policies with china. but each time it seemed like a miracle that it worked out. he would go into it brashly, without an ounce of tact, and all the other parties involved would compensate for him and get it done. basically, thank heaven for daniel webster, tyler's secretary of state, who was 8 times the politician, and is responsible for most of tyler's "accomplishments."

in a washington full of larger than life politicians such as daniel webster, henry clay, and john calhoun, tyler was widely regarded as the least qualified man in town for the job he held. i think this is why he just kept doing whatever he wanted. he was convinced that if he could annex texas, he would win the favor of the american people. he did, but he didn't. using the same disregard for the constitution that he had displayed again and again (and taking notes from jefferson's purchase of louisiana), he annexed texas by a joint resolution instead of an amendment, a move that made the old guard, JQA in particular, super mad.

his accidency was not reelected. but unlike other former presidents, he did not go back to his mansion and age quietly, instead he worked to hasten the civil war. hold on to your seats, readers, it's about to get ugly.

coming up next, 4 more years of not ending slavery

2010-05-17T18:00:00.000-05:00

from a distance, our presidential timeline so far would look something like this:

Founding Fathers

Nation Builders

Eight Guys Who Didn't Free the Slaves

Lincoln

in the eyes of history, these guys never stood a chance.

a heartbeat away

2010-05-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

in an early season episode of the west wing, the vice president is being pressured to resign because of a public scandal (alcoholism i think? dave?) in the end, president bartlett tells him he doesn't want him to resign. the reason: "because i could die."

the irony of the episode, as with so many west wing episodes, is that in the endless political maneuvering, the heart of the issue was forgotten. that being that the vice president could become the president in a blink of an eye.

and for this we have john tyler to thank. the constitution is very unclear about the process of succession in the case of the president's death. lucky for tyler, william henry harrison was gravely ill for about a month, so he had a long time to get ready to make his move. after the president's death, he went to the capital and announced that he would take office. the response of the federal government was basically, "um...are you sure?....is that what we're supposed to do? does anybody know?" and since john tyler was the only one who acted with any certainty, the office was his. it became known as the tyler precedent, and has been used 7 times since. (it was not until 1967 that an amendment to the constitution made official what had happened 8 times.)

8 times! 8 presidents have died in office! 4 by assassination and 4 by natural death. that's more than 1 in 6 presidents that die in office. that number seems high considering the apathy and mixed motives with which we continue to choose and judge vice presidential nominees. especially since the other precedent that john tyler set was that a vice president, who has no campaign promises breathing down his back, can kind of do whatever he wants.

Of 19th Century Campaign Slogans

2010-05-03T16:39:00.003-05:00

Just finished Harrison (sucked) and haven't finished Tyler yet, but I thought a good transitional post would be about the greatest gift that the two of those jokers gave to posterity---the campaign slogan. "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" is a masterpiece---at once alliterative, iambic, and stirring. It makes a man feel good about casting his ballot for politicians capable of constructing such a sturdy slogan.

James K. Polk, Janet's fave, continued Harrison's tradition of poetic slogans with his melodic "54-40 or fight." However Polk also brought upon us the age of the cumbersome campaign slogan with his "Reannexation of Texas and Reoccupation of Oregon." Any political scientist could have told Polk that presidential elections are about change, and that it is ill-advised to use the prefix "re" in your slogan three times (if you look hard enough).

Then came Zachary Taylor's "President of the People" campaign, which boldly forfeited the coveted animal vote to ensure his election. John C. Fremont's unsuccessful 1856 bid had as its rallying cry, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, and Fremont," and mostly Honest Abe Lincoln followed in the money-for-nothing theme with "Vote Yourself a Farm." Lincoln's 1864 slogan was "Don't swap horses in the middle of the stream," which sounds reasonable enough, and which George W. Bush appropriated in his 2004 run. The message: I got you into this mess, so who else is better equipped to get you out? It reminds me of my late Uncle Danny, who spent the first half of his career installing asbestos insulation, and the second half removing it.

Then, my friends, we arrive at the 1884 election between President Grover Cleveland, and his challenger, James G. Blaine of Maine. Blaine struck first with his rhyme, "Ma, Ma, Where's my Pa, Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha." It is hard to make much of this, but my feeling is that this little ditty was the 1884 version of the oft-seen 2000 bumper sticker, "A village in Texas is missing its idiot." Cleveland, not to be outdone, retorted, "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, The Continental Liar from the State of Maine." Aside from the four superfluous syllables of "Continental," the slogan is pure genius---the perfect smartass comeback to the playground taunt. Cleveland took it all the way to the White House, and history remembers Blaine as just another continental liar.

That is all for this gimmick post. This may leave you wondering if we can really be serious about breaking this post up so that we will have another slogan column at the ready when we have nothing to write about during the 20th century presidents. Yes, We Can.

what a tool

2010-04-22T22:52:00.000-05:00

in fact, the title of our biography is "mr. jefferson's hammer," which is to say that when indiana split off from ohio as a new state, and that state needed a governor, WHH got the job because he had proven himself so adept at obtaining "cessions" from native american tribes. "cessions" being when an indian chief signs away his tribe's lands for some alcohol and "munitions" that may or may not be paid.

it is easy to dislike WHH for this. but the sad fact of the matter is that if he didn't do it, somebody else would have. this biography has been really interesting because it shows what was going on in the west of the country while dave and i were reading merrily through the first 8 east coast presidents. general washington gave harrison his first commission. john adams appointed him governor of indiana. thomas jefferson was the one who wrote him letters at the turn of the 19th century that said, in effect, "do what you have to do." we've jumped way back in time to watch the birth of the nation from a whole other side. the ugly side.

the american west (which at that point obviously was like illinois) was often referred to as the back country. as someone quoted at the time very wisely said, the fact that it was called the back country makes it obvious which way they were facing (a: europe). for all the lip service paid to treating the indians fairly (and there was a mountain of it), the revolutionary generation saw them as an obstacle to their destiny as a new and better version of europe. so the government's men in the west were commissioned to either bring the indians in line or get them out of the way.

WHH was born in virginia. his father, benjamin harrison, was a signer of the declaration of independence. as owens sees it, WHH was always trying to make himself into a gentleman farmer/statesman equal to his father. this is grouseland, the original indiana governor's mansion that he had built near vincennes (still there). it looks a lot like the virginia plantation homes he had grown up with, and it was also designed as a workable fortress. this just about sums up WHH's political philosophy in territorial and then stated indiana - move the revolutionary ideal west, build up the arts and agriculture and education, and try to look leisurely doing it. if anybody gets in your way, get rid of them.

in this way harrison was a good soldier, a tool of the system. his superiors liked him because he got the job done, so he kept his job running indiana for a long time.

on the other hand, as dave pointed out, his baldly pro-slavery hijinks in a territory that was conceived to be anti-slavery were really despicable. in that way he was just a tool.

mad anthony

2010-04-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

some would say harrison's big break was "Mad Anthony" Wayne, the commander of president washington's indian fighting army who took a liking to WHH and promoted him a few times. he figures prominently in the beginning of the WHH bio, and shaped much of the future president's young life.

dave currently lives in fort wayne, the city named for this crazy general, which includes an historic fort you can visit.

why dave hasn't yet visited this fort, in service of his blog, is beyond me.

hoosier hysteria

2010-04-10T14:10:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I think of this 4 year quest as a 230 year quest- a march across a timeline that began with the inauguration of George Washington and will end with either the second inauguration of Barack Obama or the first of 45. In that context, some of these biographies are absolute bargains. Thomas Jefferson got us from 1800 to 1808 in a mere 232 pages. The month of FDR will get us from the Great Depression to the cusp of the atomic age. To that end, it is hard to get excited about William Henry Harrison, who died so shortly into his term---the 30 days of April will yield us a mere 31 days of presidency. This book is to our project as a five-dollar bill is to a student loan.

Anyhow, one part of this book to which I did look forward was the Indiana part. I knew from my fifth grade Indiana history section that William Henry Harrison was the first governor of Indiana, and the first Hoosier elected president. At least I could learn a little about the origins of my state.

Turns out that the origins of my state are pretty embarrassing. When WHH took the reins, the Indiana Territory was in the midst of internal and external debate as to whether slavery would be allowed. Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance had seemingly resolved this issue. It stated that all slavery was banned north of the Ohio river. However, WHH chose to interpret the ordinance liberally, as to merely outlaw all new slavery. In fact, "his first major public initiative as governor was to bring more slaves to the area." Then, to be sure, he suspended Article VI for 10 years. All of this in the face of popular opposition. This policy of deliberate ambiguity began a long period of Indianan indecision on the slavery issue that was not fully resolved until the state opted to take the Union side in the Civil War.

By the time I got to the Indiana chapter, though, I knew what to expect. By that time, WHH had already spent 3 years as the devil perched atop President Jefferson's shoulder. Thomas Jefferson's contradiction as a freedom-promoting slavery propagator has been well-covered, not least in this blog. And it has always been something of a mystery to me how a President could enforce laws he so fervently believed to be unjust. Owens explains it like this: "While Jefferson's distaste for slavery in the abstract prevented him from encouraging its spread, a lack of moral courage prevented him from decisively discouraging it."

WHH had no such reservations, and actively encouraged slavery's spread in the Indiana Territory. Most troubling is that his motivation appears to have been at least partly personal. WHH, you see, had always been very self-conscious about his less-than-aristocratic upbringing. And he was constantly compensating by acquiring more land, more power. "He needed to openly display not only his worth but his power as well," Owens tells us, and "[f]or the society into which he was born, to be a man of note was to have control over others . . . being a master to slaves."

With this guy as our first governor, it is miraculous that Indiana eventually produced such national treasures as Kurt Vonnegut, James Dean, and the Butler Bulldogs. I will hold out more hope for the biography of Indiana's second President, Dan Quayle.

i sure do miss the adamses

2010-03-30T22:30:00.002-06:00

as some of you know, i recently had major abdominal surgery, which is why i have been absent from the blog (and society) for the last month or so. the most expedient way to catch up on how i felt about andrew jackson is to share two different online conversations david and i had when we were reading the meacham biography.

me: this jackson is so emo
David: right?
me: i cannot imagine jon meacham and ralph ketcham talking at parties
David: you should mock up a dialogue
me: he illustrates every point with a long list of things separated by commas
David: haha
me: lover, warrior, friend, father, d-bag, husband
David: he loves the contradictions
me: so original
i'm only on page 50 or so, but i'm still waiting for him to calm down and tell the story
David: i am at same place
me: i'm glad i already know most of the context from jqa
otherwise i wouldn't even know that him seizing florida was a big deal

[and a day or two later...]

David: i gotta get moving on old hickory
me: i'm about 100 pages in
it's so different
it feels like part of a different project
David: elaborate pls
me: he's all about atmosphere
like talking more about society and the invention of the train than about jackson's policy
David: jqa loved the train
me: he did, i want to write about it
David: dickens loved it too
i wish there was more time
me: based on how well i feel i know madison or jqa
i feel like i don't know jackson at all
i know him like i know tom hanks
David: do you think its because as a person he is a son of a bitch
(jackson not hanks)
me: i think it's meacham's philosophy of characterization
like what he thinks it's important for us to know
which is nothing
David: i notice that for some of the "lesser" presidents the book titles are like [President]---His Life and Times
but you wouldnt think that would be necessary for AJ, who actually was an interesting man

and i think that just about sums up how i felt about the jackson biography. (and yes, david and i spend a lot of time discussing the presidents online.) one of the most complex figures in our history was usually summed up by a string of painstakingly chosen adjectives, without a ton of explication behind them. the fact that he drastically changed the role of a president is covered, but given much less attention than the squabbling of the white house inner circle. but that's all old news.

as david has already very ably iterated, martin van buren was like a spin-off of the andrew jackson administration. and, as with all spin-offs, didn't recapture the magic of the original and didn't last as long. martin van buren was a consummate party man. i bet it would have been a fun party trick to think up the most convoluted political scenarios and see how long it took him to form the democratic party's response. within minutes he would list all the precedents, the party's position on all the relevant issues, and whose arm to twist to get it all done. he was nicknamed "the little magician" because of his talent for working politics. and he is always described as competent, efficient, and loyal. but as a president, this made him uninspiring. he entered office during an economic recession, and all he did was stay the course. he showed no creative initiative or leadership. only the 3rd president to lose re-election, he lost not because the american people had grown to dislike him, but because they had never really grown to like him.

he's the first guy who, while i was reading the biography, i thought, maybe wasn't cut out to be president.

Popping the Question

2010-03-16T18:03:00.004-06:00

When we started reading John Quincy Adams, Janet said something like, "Folks, we are no longer on money." The Revolutionary Era was over. But our drop-off was not very severe--we took a step down but did not fall off a cliff. This is because Presidents Quincy Adams and Jackson, like their predecessors, possessed the heretofore ineffable qualities of Great Presidents. They governed boldly, they are remembered, and Jackson, yes, is on money.

Martin Van Buren is the first of our forgotten Presidents. Something of a Presidential history buff, all I knew of MVB before reading this book I had learned from a legendary book report by my friend Lisa's sister, whose overreliance on her electric dictionary and thesaurus led to exposition on Martian Van Buren's Trial of Lacerations. So our first order of business is to figure out the difference. Why are some borderline-evil Presidents like Jackson remembered, while others are forgotten? I think the answer has something to do with The Question.

As dramatized by the West Wing episode, "The Question," a threshold statement every presidential wannabe has to make is a cogent and persuasive answer to this question: "Why do you want to be President?" Ted Kennedy, for one, struggled to answer this in his nascent 1980 campaign, and never recovered. The Question separates those who seek the presidency as a means toward improving their country from those who seek it as an end in itself.

Say what you will (and we have) about the flaws of the first seven great man Presidents, but all of them could have answered that question. Washington hated the idea of occupying the office, but knew he was indispensable as a man who could govern above the partisan bickering. Jefferson was more ambitious, essentially seeking a real-world laboratory for his philosophical musings on democracy. Even poor old impotent JQA was a servant, his self always sublimated to his countrymen. Why did he want to be President? To lend America his talents.

My guess is that MVB could not have answered this question, and that this is what separates him from the earlier Presidents. From the time he was elected Governor of New York, Van Buren's every move seemed calculated only in terms of the next election, or the next step of his career. As Jackson's Secretary of State, MVB was known internally and internationally as a yes-man whose biggest diplomatic coup was befriending the ill-reputed wife of a cabinet member. As Jackson's veep, his biggest successes are unknown, at least from a reading of this book. The guy's biggest talent seemed to be not pissing anybody off.

When MVB ran for and won the Presidency, he was carried to the starting line and over the finish line by Jackson. Voters were voting for an extension of the Jackson presidency, with MVB acting as a seat-filler. Why did the voters want MVB to be president? Because they wanted more Jackson. Why did MVB want it? Because it was there.

I am not so far into his Presidency yet, and am interested to see how his political philosophy plays out now that he has attained the ultimate. I suspect that he will be kind of dull and uninspiring now that he has nothing left to run for.

presidential fact #17

2010-03-16T18:00:00.002-06:00

As well as/despite being the first President not born an American, Van Buren is the only President whose first language was not English. It was Dutch.

presidential fact #16

2010-03-11T19:43:00.002-06:00

martin van buren was the first president born after the founding of the country (1782).

behind the scenes of at times dull

2010-02-25T10:07:00.000-06:00

here is what is going on. we are mired, just mired, in andrew jackson. we had planned to finish the meacham biography by february 14, and neither of us has yet accomplished it. every once in a while we check in with each other, confirm that we haven't finished, and complain about this book.

i can't put my finger on it, but this biography just seems insubstantial. andrew jackson was a huge turning point for the american presidency, and while meacham is quick to point this out, he's more interested in which adjectives to use to describe the turning point than in parsing out its implications.

jon meacham loves adjectives.

we have also had very little serious inquiry into AJ and the indian question, which is maybe the defining question of his presidency. meacham dwells a lot more on the nullification crisis, and on the scandal of who would and would not receive visits from andrew jackson's secretary of war's wife, who was of ill repute. these issues got a lot of people hot and bothered at the time, but their historical merit doesn't jump off the page.

dave and i are now very serious presidential scholars, and we can tell a fluff biography when we've got it in our hands. we're not happy about it.

presidential fact #15: this was before the time of full body scanners

2010-02-25T10:02:00.000-06:00

back in the day, the public were allowed to come and observe congressional sessions at their will. (this is still true to a degree, but there are a lot more bag checks, i'll tell you.)

if one was going to the senate to listen to the nullification debates of the 1830s, one would pass a sign that read:

GENTLEMEN WILL BE PLEASED NOT TO PLACE

THEIR FEET ON THE BOARD IN FRONT OF THE GALLERY,

AS THE DIRT FROM THEM FALLS UPON SENATORS HEADS

happy presidents day!

2010-02-15T20:51:00.000-06:00

Belated Valentine's Day Gift

2010-02-15T20:33:00.002-06:00

http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/the-top-43-sexiest-us-presidents/index.asp?page=1

In which all of the Presidents are listed in order of sexiness.

Most underrated? Harding at 41---I like the eyebrows.

Most overrated? Honest Abe Lincoln at 10. When accused of being two-faced, he once replied, "If i had two faces, would I use this one?"

h/t Matt Rogers

Civil War Stirrings

2010-02-11T21:14:00.003-06:00

In one of Meacham's first scenes, a weary second-term Andrew Jackson admits to himself that Civil War may be inevitable, and that he had best start preparing for it. The President had a perfect candidate in mind to command the Union troops: himself. It is an arresting introduction to the seventh president, and offers a tidy summation of many of his salient traits-- patriotism, courage, stubbornness, and being ahead of his time.

My first thought upon seeing Jackson facing civil war was "What? Already?" Abraham Lincoln, whose presidency is defined by the Civil War, is still 9 presidents away. But the small-c, small-w civil war that loomed over Jackson did not have at its core the familiar issue of slavery---it concerned the Nullification Crisis, a huge deal that history largely has forgotten (at least it was never taught to me).

Basically South Carolina passed a law that declared the Tariff Act of 1828 (passed by Jackson's enemy and predecessor, JQA) unconstitutional, and inapplicable to its citizens. This was indeed a crisis. Though the Constitution created a federal government of limited and enumerated powers, its power to tax had never been questioned. If the citizens of South Carolina were exempt from paying federal taxes, all United States citizens would also be, and the union would dissolve. Similarly, if any one state were to have the power to declare federal laws unconstitutional, no federal law could ever be enforced.

Many South Carolinans and interested observers expected some support for Nullification from the new President Jackson. He was swept into office with a populist states' rights message. Surely he would support a state's ability to disencumber itself from the tax-happy feds. However, and after a good amount of dithering, Jackson stated certainly: "I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assembled by one state, incompatible with the existence of the union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed." Jackon's Vice-President, John Calhoun, disagreed and left his post to become a South Carolina senator.

Both sides began gearing up for conflict. Jackson made absolutely clear that he would not hesitate to send troops to South Carolina to enforce the tariff, and Congress passed the Force Bill, allowing him to do just that. On the brink of war, Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, reached a solution that all parties agreed with. Basically South Carolina would pay its taxes, and the tariffs would decrease each year for a period of nine years. War was averted.

Yet it would be folly to dismiss the Nullification Crisis as an isolated incident---the basic battle lines that it drew were apparent in the Civil War, and persist today. You had on one side the strong federal government people, who believed in laws that were more or less uniform- each state was an equal member of the union, and had to be taxed as such. On the other side was the state's rights contingent, who believed in a "weak, inactive, and frugal federal government."-- states should be allowed to do almost whatever they wanted including interpreting the Constitution and allowing slavery. From the Crisis forward, "states rights" became euphemistic for "allowing slavery," and every state who supported nullification ended up seceding from the union during the Civil War.

This division exists today, evidenced by Rick Perry's threat that Texas secede from America to protest the President's stimulus packages, and the Tea Partiers allying themselves historically with those who believed they should be free from unjust national taxes. The Nullification Crisis should perhaps teach us that such rhetorical protesting can have dramatic real-world consequences. In the run-up to the Civil War, only one state decided to secede without dramatic disagreement and in-fighting. That state was South Carolina, which had already been waiting 25 years for its opportunity.

Presidential Fact #14

2010-02-07T16:12:00.002-06:00

During the 1828 election, members of JQA's camp referred to Jackson as a "Jackass," punning on his last name. Jackson embraced the nickname and adopted it as his personal symbol, which is still used by the modern Democratic Party.

full steam ahead

2010-02-04T10:42:00.000-06:00

with jackson in the white house, we're crossing into the 1830s. when people ask me about this project, one of the things i mention is that i feel like i live dually in 2010 chicago and in 19th century america. i'm very at home with the pace, vernacular, customs, and geography of the 1800s, because i spend so much of my time there. which is why i almost let out a whoop of joy the other day, when john quincy adams got on a train.

back when we were reading adams and jefferson, dave texted me to say, "it's driving me nuts that these guys don't have cell phones." a lot of the early guys who were european ambassadors before they were presidents had to wait month - months! - for answers to their letters. sometimes they would get promoted or reassigned and not know it for almost a year. it was terrible.

and then there's a handful of times in each biography so far where the dude's trip to washington is delayed because of muddy roads. because they all went home when congress wasn't in session, about every 50 pages we have to go through a description of the trip back to quincy or virginia and how the carriage held up. it's dull reading, at times.

but then, thank the almighty in heaven, they built the railroad. it happens during jackson's tenure, so one of john quincy adam's trips to washington as a congressmen is the first time we read about it. i was just so happy. when one of these guys gets in a car i'll probably weep for joy.

Common Beginnings

2010-01-27T21:24:00.004-06:00

When JQA's father died, it was marked by a Presidential proclamation, a day of rest for all armed forces, and a national week of mourning. When Andrew Jackson's father died (weeks before he was born), "[his] pallbearers drank so much as they carried his corpse from Twelve Mile Creek to the church for the funeral that they briefly lost the body along the way." Without a father, Jackson grew up in the houses of relatives, for whom his mother acted as a domestic servant/pity case.

Jackson came to feel that he never belonged to any home, and it made him angry. Despite his considerable skinniness (as President, Jackson was 6'1, 140 lbs), boyhood Jackson was an accomplished schoolyard wrestler who constantly harangued his friends with empty death threats. When angry, he would "work himself into fits of rage so paralyzing that contemporaries recalled he would begin slobbering." At 14, Jackson and his brother Robert were rounded up by British troops who took them as prisoners of war during the War of Independence. When a soldier demanded that Jackson polish his boots, Jackson refused, causing the solider to attack the two boys with his sword- an attack that ultimately killed Robert. Jackson's mother nursed him back to health, then died herself---At the age of 14 Jackson had lost both of his parents and all of his siblings.

In the meantime, his contemporary JQA was learning Latin from Benjamin Franklin in a mansion in Paris.

***

A frustrating part of this project has been the extent to which the first 6 books have overlapped. These guys were all together during America's formative years, which means J.Po and I have read the same little anecdotes about the same events many times. But thematically, this book very much reads as a sequel. Having spent the last half year learning about how some elites created this democracy experiment, we now learn how the experiment was affecting the people who Sarah Palin would call "Real Americans." Thomas Jefferson voted to start a war and retired to his plantation. Andrew Jackson lost both his brothers to the wrath of British troops. His story will be the first story of "of, by, and for the people."

There also seems to be a certain symmetry shaping up between the lives of Jackson and JQA. JQA's story was of a man taking 60 years to learn how to fight. Jackson's story begins with a kid who would become paralyzed with rage. Let's see if he learns to chill out.

kind of a big deal

2010-01-27T10:08:00.000-06:00

jqa also knew stephen douglass (of the famed lincoln-douglass debates) when he was in congress. and he knew charles dickens, because on dickens' famed tour of america, the aging ex-president was one of the people he insisted on meeting.

after jqa's uninspiring and unpleasant term as president, he returned to congress as a representative from massachusetts and served under the next 5 presidents, until he literally died on the job almost 20 years later. (he collapsed during a session of congress and was taken to the speaker's chambers, where he died the next day.)

in this time, jqa became an american folk hero. he was far more popular as a congressman than he had ever been as president. because of his experience, he garnered obvious respect in the house, and because he was post-presidential, he had nothing to lose. he had always been a reserved, cantankerous guy forced to play nice in order to survive in politics. no more! this dude let loose.

at the time, regional tensions were ramping up in a major way, full steam ahead to the civil war, so congress was a place where everyone was trying to compromise to keep a tenuous peace. jqa was the guy who didn't give a hoot what would make everyone happy, he fought for what he thought was the best outcome for the nation.

when the gag rule was enacted (in which no petition to congress concerning slavery could be read aloud or debated), jqa introduced a motion to have it revoked at the beginning of every session for over a decade, and found sneaky ways to read those petitions anyway.

when the amistad sailors were imprisoned in america (africans who were being brought to america on a slave ship who overpowered the ship's crew and sailed the boat into new york harbor by themselves), jqa defended them before the supreme court, a case nobody else would touch (much like his father defended the british soldiers of the boston massacre decades earlier). his closing oration before the court is said to be one of the crowning achievements of his life.

he was an outspoken abolitionist and made enemies freely. in so doing, he became wildly popular. he was celebrated wherever he went and fought over as a public speaker. he had become something like america's grouchy old uncle, not always pleasant, but indisputably the most respected member of the family. the papers nicknamed him "old man eloquent."

he was never happier. he was finally getting the adulation he deserved for his lifetime of service, and he could finally do just about whatever he wanted. it makes you think all ex-presidents should serve in congress.

it's just an incredible chapter of american history, and one i had no idea existed. lucky for you, there's a new book - Mr. Adams' Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan - in case you had no idea either. you should really learn about this guy, you're going to like him.

presidential fact #13

2010-01-27T08:43:00.005-06:00

JQA knew Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln's turn in the House of Representatives from 1847 until Adams' death in 1848. He is probably the only person to have counted both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as acquaintances.

It was also JQA who first suggested that, in the event of a civil war, the President could use his war powers to outlaw slavery. Fifteen years after the two met, Lincoln did just that in his Emancipation Proclamation.

snap.

2010-01-21T11:54:00.001-06:00

jqa was a mega prolific diarist, often using it as an outlet to rant about his political enemies, one of whom he described as a "beef-witted blunderhead."

presidential fact #12

2010-01-19T23:07:00.002-06:00

Only two then-living Presidents have failed to attend their successor's inauguration---John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Bitter.

All the World's a Stage

2010-01-19T22:26:00.004-06:00

F. Scott. Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American lives. He was wrong, of course- American lives, and especially American politician's lives, are all about second acts, and especially third acts. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to America as a sexually confused teenaged bodybuilder, became the greatest action star of all time, and wound up the steward of the world's tenth biggest economy. George W. Bush started as a rich fuck-up, owned a professional sports franchise, then became a busy President. Richard Nixon went from a powerless Vice-President, to an embarrassing failure of a gubernatorial candidate, to the Presidency. And so on.

JQA is also a man of three acts. The first we have already talked about- the tortured prodigy, the reluctant family man, the brilliant statesman. The third act is certainly his finest- the curmudgeonly congressman who dedicated his days to promoting abolitionism. He was the original lion in winter (the latest of whom is rolling over in his grave tonight).

Act Two was relatively uneventful and uninspiring, which is surprising as this constituted JQA's presidency. Nagel devotes only ten or twenty or thirty pages to the presidency, because not much really happened during it. History has long since forgotten whatever minor policy decisions JQA made during his four years as commander in chief. From a historical perspective, it is dust in the wind- a stopgap between the last founding father presidency and the first commoner presidency.

But we have been searching for JQA the man in these posts, and Act Two serves its purpose as a useful bridge between Act One's precocious neurosis and Act Three's heroic bluster. I suggest that JQA's presidency is when he finally stopped caring so much about the public opinion of him. When he decided to run for President (which in those days meant you decided not to protest too much when others decided to nominate you for President), JQA quickly realized that his top competitor would be the war hero, Andrew Jackson, from Tennessee. Jackson had captured the public's imagination with his battlefield exploits and aw-shucks charm, and stood in sharp contrast to the stuffy JQA. JQA thus did everything right in attempting to woo his rival and the public. He hosted Jackson with a fancy banquet at his own home, at the end of which Jackson gave a lengthy toast to JQA's wife, Louisa. Even when Jackson eventually entered the race and lost to JQA, Jackson congratulated his victorious rival with a hearty handshake.

However all of JQA's sucking up got him nowhere. From the time he took office, hateful rumors were floated from the Jackson camp accusing JQA of being a sexual deviant, adulterer, and cheat. His rivals in Congress used procedural delays and dishonest rhetoric to thwart his every attempt at governing. JQA retreated into a state of depression that briefly isolated his wife and friends.

After four years and a trouncing by the new President Jackson, JQA was relieved to move out of the White House. But he was not relieved because he now was able to leave politics- rather, he was now free from the restraints imposed on him by the presidency, which required him to compromise his powerful ideas and govern the whole country rather than throw partisan bombs. JQA was ready to fight, finally. Whereas he entered the White House a deliberate man with a deep concern for how he was perceived, he left it an angry man who needed the country to know that they were wrong for disagreeing with him. As Bob Dylan said, "there's no success like failure." For JQA, failure finally rid him of his fear of failure-unchained, he followed it with his greatest years, discussed next time on attimesdull.

presidential fact #11

2010-01-19T09:54:00.001-06:00

"At 10 o'clock on an August night in 1819, Adams arrived in New York City on his way to a summer holiday in Quincy. When he learned that the helpful French ambassador was also in town, he set out to locate him, ignoring the late hour. Finding Hyde de Neuville at the French consul's residence, "I roused him from his bed and held a dialogue with him, standing at the door of his home, and he in his night cap with his head out of the chamber window."

It was like a scene from a Moliere play, Adams admitted, as he explained to the sleepy baron that the untimely intrusion was only because he had to catch a steamboat for New England at dawn.

what's the opposite of a silver lining?

2010-01-12T23:51:00.000-06:00

i don't know why the presidents keep reminding me of tv shows, but so it is.

there is an episode of everybody loves raymond where ray is nominated for a sportswriting award. he calls it a lose-lose situation. he says if he wins, there will be expectations, jealousy, competition. if he loses, he'll be upset. his wife, deborah, tries to convince him just to be excited that he was nominated.

they never show the ceremony, so the next scene is the two of them arriving home. deborah walks in the door, saying, "i promise you, ray, something good is going to come of this," at which point ray walks in, dragging his feet and whining, carrying a huge trophy.

JQA reminds me of this over and over again. throughout his life, people and institutions absolutely throw acclamation at him, and he is quick to rue it every time. when george washington appoints him as minister to russia it's oh why didn't he ask me about it first and when john adams transfers him to prussia it's people will think it's because you're my dad and when his fiancee - not girlfriend, fiancee! - asks him when he wants to get married it's maybe you should just go back to america and i'll be there in a few years and we'll get married then and MAN why do you write me so often?

paradoxically, he is aching to make something of himself, to benefit the world, as he says. he is tormented by the dual demons of wanting to live up to his father's reputation and his mother's standards, and also wanting to be seen as independent of their influence and patronage.

paul nagel has a major beef with abigail, and i therefore have a major beef with paul nagel. he goes to great lengths to portray her as a domineering nag, and has few qualms about the fact that this point of view is singular. he rarely misses an opportunity to quote her pedantic letters to JQA, brushing over the fact that the adams family were devoutly religious, so what seems pedantic to us was probably basic chatter in their house. not to mention the fact that nuclear families in those days all lived together until the kids were in the mid-20s, and sometimes after, so having a son who was across the ocean for years at a time was, oh, traumatic and worrying. when JQA, at the age of 22, basically without money, wants to marry a 15-year-old, abigail thinks it's a bad idea. so does john, JQA'S brothers, the girl's family, and eventually the girl and JQA herself. "so after abigail ruined that marriage" nagel defiantly explains, JQA was heartbroken. sure.

but sure, even so, john and abigail had high expectations, and were an intimidating set of parents to live up to. JQA was always saying that he wanted to be a scholar, and have a literary career. but equally, and more subconsciously, i think, he wanted to please his father, and people in government were always asking for his service, so he kept subverting his dreams to work in politics.

he took the road more traveled, in the adams family, and always wondered what difference it had made. what constantly nagged at him - much much more than abigail - was the impression that he hadn't chosen his life.

happy birthday, dave

2010-01-06T23:56:00.000-06:00

from all of us!

and janet.

presidential fact #10: more spooning

2010-01-05T19:25:00.000-06:00

when the marquis de lafayette, a revolutionary war hero, visited america from france in the late 1820s, it was a huge occasion. he was feted in washington, and then went on a trip (with then president quincy adams) to visit jefferson, madison, and monroe. john marshall came along as well. the picture of these guys hanging out together in retirement is just too adorable for words.

on one of the stops on their journey back east, quincy adams and monroe "were quartered in the same bedchamber."

i love it when these guys bunk up!

Revolutionary Brat

2010-01-04T20:48:00.004-06:00

It is a well-known British convention for monarchs to refer to themselves with the "royal we." The idea is that the King is both himself and the state---his person and his position. Thus when a King dies, people react with my favorite English expression, which is not self-contradictory: "The King is dead. Long live the King."

Of the first five Presidents, there was little space between the man and the potus. George Washington, for example, totally sublimated his personality to make it fit that of what he considered an ideal leader: stoic, brave, disciplined. James Madison was so consumed with political spirit that there was barely room left for a personality- imagining Madison "the man" is like imagining James Carville "the man." They are what they do. Revolutions just take so much energy. To be a revolutionary is necessarily to dedicate your life to the revolution and you don't have much time for such foolishness as a dramatic inner monologue.

Enter John Quincy Adams. As the son of America's worldliest founding father, Adams was instilled with all of the wisdom and experience of a revolutionary- JQA spoke several languages, including Greek and Latin, fluently at age 11. He was secretary to the minister of Russia at 14, the age at which his father plausibly called him the most well-travelled person in America. When JQA took his entrance exam at Harvard, he requested the exam be in French- the language in which he was most conversant. To read about JQA's culturally privileged childhood is to lazily leap from platitude to platitude, like some pond frog on so many lily pads. A schoolteacher in some country says that JQA is the most brilliant mind he has seen; A king in some other says that JQA is the most promising youth; And so on.

So what's the big deal, you say. Just another genius President. But the difference in this genius president is that he was not becoming brilliant for something. His father studied and studied because he was not born of relative privilege and needed every advantage to be a successful lawyer, and later statesman. Madison's learning was all funneled toward how he could best serve the cause. The student JQA had no particular utility for his knowledge besides vague ideals from his parents to become a "sturdy" man and "not to embarrass" them. He was the first spoiled liberal arts student in the United States of America (I was the 19,000,000th).

And what happens to spoiled liberal arts students? They think too much. They get depressed. They break up with the loves of their lives because the women don't meet their mothers' standards. JQA did all of these things. No milestone in JQA's life escaped his considerable angst. An election to Congress was accompanied with soul searching over whether he wanted to enter a life of partisan politics. A foray into the legal world brought about deep ambivalence about whether to exit public service. When a perfect woman practically dragged JQA to the alter, he set up a Rube Goldberg-esque series of hurdles to ensure the wedding was delayed.

None of this is to say that JQA was a whiny ninny- I actually quite like him. He seems thus far the most genius of the genius Presidents, and most of his wrath was of the self-loathing variety. Most who knew JQA, including his long suffering betrothed, found him a good dude. And man, he wrote great erotic poetry. In one poem, in which he looks forward "to my lonely conch return," he ends with these lines:

Louisa! thus remote from thee,/ Still something to each joy is wanting/ While thy affection can to me/ Make the most dreary scene enchanting.

Here's my point:

We sometimes conceive of the modern presidency as an office through which men can exorcise their personal demons on a public stage. Clinton needed to be liked, Nixon needed to be loved, Bush 43 needed to be taken seriously, etc. Going into this project, I was very much looking forward to learning about the men behind the early presidencies, but was stonewalled. The first five guys aren't just on monuments, they are monuments. JQA was the first to bring a personality to the office that hadn't been formed by a long journey to the office. In a limited sense he was America's modern President- its first Royal We.

the fellowship of the revolution

2010-01-03T22:31:00.000-06:00

Before I totally say goodbye to the founding fathers, which I am obviously sad to do, I thought I'd share something I've used to occupy my mind on the commute lately.

The Founding Fathers as played by The Fellowship of the Ring

or vice versa

Bilbo Baggins : Benjamin Franklin

about half a generation up from the other guys. already a legend on his own merits. given in his old age to silliness and ribaldry, which is tolerated because he's earned the right to sit on his laurels, but soulful and wise when it counts.

Gandalf : one of the Greek philosophers who the fathers are always quoting

dave has a crush on a girl who could tell us which one

Aragorn : George Washington

courageous military commander who is reserved and wise beyond his years in everyday life. a leader whom men line up to follow.

Legolas : Thomas Jefferson

understated, pithy, seems above it all. intimidatingly perceptive and detached.

Boromir : Alexander Hamilton

a soldier, and somewhat likeable, but ultimately treacherous. is killed.

The Hobbits : John Adams

chronically underestimated because of their size, appetite, and capacity for merriment. when relied upon, will go anywhere and stop at nothing to succeed. approachable and well loved.

The Dwarf : i have no idea!

this one's been puzzling me. at first i thought john adams, because of his gruffness and unlikely bond with jefferson, but he's too optimistic and helpful to be the dwarf. maybe john marshall, just because he deserves to be on the docket. i don't know, and dave's never read or seen lord of the rings, so this one may be left up in the air.

happy new year, 1825

2010-01-03T22:18:00.000-06:00

2010 brings with it a whole new phase for At Times Dull. james monroe is regularly referred to as the last founding father. he fought under washington in the revolutionary war, but came to fame for his accomplishments in the early senate. as he turned the reins over to JQA in 1825, the era of America being run by veterans of the revolution officially came to a close, and a generation of men who had been raised in an independent nation took over. revolutionary heroes stopped being presidents, senators, justices, and diplomats, and started being icons. or rather, they started being the founding fathers

the latter half of 2009 took dave and i through the bombastic early phases of america. there were the firebrand idealists, who orated our nation to freedom (these people are patrick henry, alexander hamilton, and samuel adams). then there were the nation builders, who slowly and painstakingly, with many mistakes, fashioned a federal government from the ashes of war (these people are adams, jefferson, and monroe). now, with all the freedoms won (and rewon in 1812), and infrastructures structured, the president becomes an executive.

james monroe's presidency saw no wars, insurrections, or stalemates. it saw some treaty negotations, internal improvements, a moderately serious economic downturn, and a doctrine. by this time, monroe had had enough predecessors to learn from their mistakes (don't keep the last guy's cabinet, don't suffer fools in the military, make sure your diplomats have brains), and enough of their wisdom to fall back on. in one case, when monroe wasn't sure whether something was constitutional or not, he actually went and asked madison, a convenience which surely could be envied by many of his successors. i won't embarrass him by pointing out again that he wasn't a genius (oh, oops), but i will say that being a genius started to be a lot less necessary. the job was in place, just listen carefully and be a good leader.

2010 is going to be a real touchstone year for us. leaving the founding fathers in 2009, this year will take us from JQA to at least Grant. of those 13 presidents, exactly four could be called household names (Quincy Adams, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant), leaving us with the forgettable nine of the of the 19th century (Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Filmore, Pierce, and Buchanan).

folks, we are not on money any more.

james, we hardly knew you

2010-01-02T19:08:00.000-06:00

jefferson and madison both loved monroe. in fact, everyone seemed to love monroe. apparently he inspired confidence and was well liked, ammon says it all the time.

he had been governor of virginia, twice a diplomat, and secretary of war and secretary of state at the same time. as madison's second term came to a close, monroe was the heir apparent. says ammon,

"While Monroe never enjoyed Jefferson's great popularity in the nation, he was, nonetheless, a widely respected figure. If most of his contemporaries did not judge him to have talents comparable to those of the first two Republican Presidents, all acknowledged that his sound judgment, his administrative abilities and his long service to the nation for four decades gave him a just claim to the succession."

it's not the highest praise. as we've said, monroe was the first non-genius president. his success is due to the fact that he is a fundamentally great guy to have around. he was confident and hard-working and his superiors always liked him. and one can't underestimate the impact being tall and good-looking has on one's fortune in the world.

but i really have no idea what james monroe was like. ammon's biography reads like a really, really (really, really) long encyclopedia entry. mccullough was big on personality and detail, and john adams comes across in the flesh. ketcham was big on political theory, as madison was a politics geek, and his book is the basis of most of my understanding of revolutionary politics. ammon's book is neither. it's very informative. maybe ammon is our first non-genius biographer.

this is probably why, on january 2nd, i'm scrambling to finish the last 100 pages or so of monroe that i was meant to finish in december so i can move on to JQA this week. david finished monroe a long time ago, because he lives in fort wayne.

presidential fact #9

2009-12-14T22:26:00.001-06:00

The Liberian city, Monrovia, is the only non-American capital city named after a U.S. President

Good Feelings

2009-12-14T21:23:00.003-06:00

Bipartisanship in our era is a joke. Everyone promises it and nobody can deliver. Our most recent two Presidents (and their challengers) campaigned on a platform of being political gap-bridgers---uniters, not dividers. But then it always blows up instantly. Obama tried for bipartisanship for about a week before he passed his stimulus package with a strictly partisan vote. Bush got a little more leeway before becoming "the most divisive President in history."

But the thing about that is that every President was considered the most divisive President in history. Clinton was so despised by the Right that he was impeached on sex charges, to the Right's own political detriment. Ford kept getting shot at by women. LBJ could barely go outside his house the protests were so bad. Lincoln caused a civil war. And so on. Not that this is a bad thing- Josh Lyman, among others, teaches us that partisanship is a necessary evil that leads to enhanced debate. Sharper elbows produce sharper ideas.

However, in our trip through divisive presidents, the buck stops with Monroe (to paraphrase another divisive president). Monroe went way out of his way to appoint politically opposed and geographically diverse men to his cabinet and government posts. His unprecedented effort at reconciliation led to his Presidency being dubbed the "Era of Good Feelings." He paid a price for it at first- a friend to all is a friend to none, and Henry Clay led the charge of people who were offended by Monroe's choices.

But it paid dividends later on when, despite a string of failures, Monroe preceded Ronald Reagan as America's first Teflon President. There was a terrible depression in 1819, and Monroe mishandled Missouri's application for statehood, which eventually led to Missouri being admitted as a slave state (until it wasn't---we will get to that during Buchanan). But people stuck with Monroe and he retired as one of our most popular Presidents ever.

it's about time we got some real men in here

2009-12-09T23:33:00.000-06:00

the nice thing about james monroe is that he's a dude. really tall, bulky, soldier, war hero. he and madison were jefferson's two closest friends, but while jefferson and madison corresponded about philosophy, science, and classic literature, they only wrote to monroe about politics.

monroe was our first non-genius president (that washington was a genius at leadership will do for our purposes). ketcham's biography of madison serves pretty well as a seminar in revolutionary politics, because madison shaped so much of revolutionary politics. monroe wasn't an original thinker - as ammon puts it he "had no talent for abstract thought" - but he worked hard, and he was influential because reportedly he was the nicest guy in virginia. monroe would pick sides and then "dedicate himself" to the debate.

he a talented politician, while his 4 predecessors were men of talent who got involved in politics. it's a fascinating transition to watch, because it seems to have been a permanent one. after all, when's the last time we had a president you would call a genius?

It's Not What You Know

2009-12-02T20:21:00.003-06:00

In this life, connections are everything, and it was no different in Revolutionary America. And I feel very safe saying that no person, now or then, has ever possessed references better than James Monroe's. As a 21 year old war veteran, he traversed the country looking for a regiment of troops he could command, and later sought a placement at University in France. He had with him three letters of recommendation.

Alexander Hamilton said this: "You know him to be a man of honour and a sensible man and a soldier. This makes it unnecessary to me to say anything to interest your friendship for him. You love your country too and he has the zeal and capacity to serve it."

George Washington: "[T]he esteem I have for him, and a regard for his merit, conspire to make me earnestly wish to see him provided for in some handsome way."

Thomas Jefferson called Monroe a man of "abilities, merit, and fortune" and a "particular friend."

Jefferson later became Monroe's legal mentor (after Monroe FAILED to get a job or place in school!) and pretty much invented the case method for teaching law, just for Monroe. That's what they now teach at every law school in the country, including Notre Dame, where I just left with three letters of recommendation from non-Founding Fathers.

presidential fact #8

2009-12-01T16:44:00.001-06:00

George Washington, James Madison, and James Monroe were all born within miles of each other in Westmoreland County, Virginia.

the cressman conundrum; or, freaks & geeks explains the war of 1812

2009-12-01T10:54:00.002-06:00

It was 1979 in suburban Michigan and Allen wouldn't stop bullying Sam Weir. Sam goes to Harris, their mentor geek, to ask for advice.

"I would recommend the Cressman Conundrum. Tom Cressman. My freshman tormentor. The ideas was, if you fight your bully, afterwards, whether you win or lose, they'll tend to leave you alone."

"Did it work?"

"He broke my tailbone. But the results were effective."

--

So the British have spent a few decades being grumpy about the colonies going all independent. They took it out on America by making trading really difficult. The details are at times dull. During the Adams presidency, John Jay went to England and made a treaty with them, essentially agreeing to keep letting them oppress American shipping, bullying that was swallowed because of how unprepared America was to go to war with England 10 years into nationhood.

But it just got worse and worse. A lot of people in parliament still viewed America as a rebellious colony that would eventually collapse back into the fold, and they continually refused fair trading policies with them. Madison enacted an embargo on British trade, hoping that this would so cripple the British economy that they'd come to appreciate and respect their American trading partners. It did not, they did not. England just started trading with other people, and Federalists opponents of Madison in New England continued to smuggle goods in and out regardless of the embargo.

The embargo was kind of a disaster. It had about the effect of a 7-year-old who decides to run away from home, and therefore spends a few hours in the treehouse in the backyard. When he repents and comes back inside, his rebellion is mistaken for a normal amount of time spent outside. James Madison was made for debate, not for broad strokes on the world stage.

So the time came to face the bully. America was outmatched, unprepared, and not unified in its decision to go to war, but it seemed that Britain would never stop punishing America unless it defended itself.

Madison and Congress declared war, appointed an astounding number of incompetent weenies to run the army, and got stomped on. Stomped on for years. They basically didn't win a battle for the first two years of the war, and then Madison sat on a horse on a ridge overlooking Washington while the British flooded in and burned down the White House and the Capitol. Only after they spent some time inside the White House eating Madison's dinner.

At about this time the American commissioners in London sent home the King's offer of peace, which essentially assumed that America had been reconquered. It was a bad year for Madison.

This turn of events, although disastrous, at least accomplished what Madison had not been able to accomplish thus far - it united public opinion. After some reshuffling in the chain of command the the swift promotion of Andrew Jackson, the American army successfully expelled the British forces from Baltimore (cue the Star Spangle Banner. literally.) and New Orleans.

Having fought the bully, and gotten stomped on several times, the results, as Harris promised, were effective. The next offer of peace from Britain was that of an equal, and America had finally proven her place in what Ketcham always calls "the family of nations." Madison's reputation did a 180 from that of a indecisive cerebral to a triumphant wartime president, and he retired joyfully to Virginia while Washington was rebuilt for the incoming Monroe.

Fight the power.

Adams Marathon #2

2009-11-29T16:26:00.003-06:00

A few thoughts about film as a medium for teaching history.

In the David McCullough documentary that was a special feature to the Adams boxed set, the author says what all of our history teachers say: that history is more than a collection of dates and quotes---it is about people, and their lives. This is doubtlessly true, but the reason that dates and quotes get so much play is that they are capable of accurate and ready determination. We know for sure what day the Declaration of Independence was ratified, and what was argued on either side of the surrounding debate. We don't know what Thomas Jefferson's face looked like as delegate after delegate altered its language. It seems that a historian's main challenge is to use the facts as a foundation, and to divine from them the human story.

In books, it is very easy to tell what is fact and what is guesswork. Ralph Ketcham, especially, takes liberties in trying to find the man in the collected papers and letters that are "James Madison." He frequently invites us to "imagine" Madison doing certain things: running through a swamp as a boy, despairing when his first relationship falls apart, nodding in agreement at a colleague's argument. These frolics are harmless--- there are certain gaps in the record, and it is useful to have educated guesses (when labeled as such) from an authority on the subject.

A movie, of course, is different, as the filmmaker is guessing all the time. Something as minor as the way an actor is standing when delivering a line can forever inform the way a viewer thinks of a subject. For example, Janet made the pithy comment yesterday that Thomas Jefferson was always "looking exasperated and leaning against stuff." This is not something we knew from any book, because an author couldn't get away with something like that. And it isn't like the filmmaker is trying to slip something by us, there's no choice. The guy playing Jefferson has to do something while he is talking so he might as well look exasperated and lean against something, because that seems pretty in character.

All of which is leading me to the question of whether using talented actors and paul giamatti to tell the story of John Adams is "better" history than using the facts---the dates and quotes---alone. I asked my friend Jenny about this---she is getting her Phd in history now, and she doesn't like that the book became a miniseries at all. She referred to it as "historical fiction," and drew no distinction between a work like the Adams miniseries and a Philippa Gregory novel.

I think for someone like me who doesn't have a phd in history, the film treatment does more good than harm. In the McCullough documentary to which I referred, he remembered meeting Harry Truman in 1952, and that what most surprised him was that Give 'Em Hell Harry was in color- he only knew him from newspapers and newsreels. And so it is with these historical figures who precede even photography. We forget that they were people before they were monuments, or as janet said, that they were not the founding fathers at the time. That's why it is important to see a Jefferson who is always leaning against stuff. Not because it teaches me that he is the specific type of person portrayed in the movie, but because it reminds me that he was a person at all.

All for now. Some thoughts on the war of 1812 tomorrow, then on to Monroe.

loyal opposition

2009-11-29T12:47:00.003-06:00

On July 3, 1776, the day before the D of I was signed and independence declared, John Adams wrote this in a letter to Abigail:

The fourth day of July, 1776, will be memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great Anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever.

Dont fail to notice, people, that he said "one end of the continent to the other." Did they even know about California back then?

The miniseries had many flaws (not least of which was casting the marginally talented paul giamatti against the actress, laura linney), but one thing it was great at was contextualizing and respecting Adams's opponents- those like John Dickinson who did not want the colonies to declare their independence. Since we now know that declaring independence was so clearly the right decision, it seems right to portray the loyalists as british apologists at worst, and scaredy-cats at best. Now that we know that we won the war and survived our salad years, arguing for reconciliation seems reckless.

But John Dickinson wasn't the crazy one---John Adams was. There were too many obstacles in the way of independence to list, or fit in an 8 hour miniseries. But through guile, rhetoric, religious invocation, and a bit of fear-mongering, Adams convinced 12 state delegations composed of learned men to essentially ignore the facts on the ground, and start a suicidal war (12, not 13, because Dickinson ultimately abstained) because of idealism. The movie portrays Dickinson as he probably thought of himself--- a sober, thoughtful, grounded man with his finger in the dyke, holding off for as long as he could the deluge of revolution.

What kind of man leads his countrymen into such chaos? The same kind of man/fanatic who knows specifically that 230 years later, the 4th of July will be celebrated with parades and fireworks. Only because his ideas seem reasonable now does history regard Adams as a reasonable man. But in the unfolding of his time, Adams was as daring a revolutionary as has lived. Film proved an especially good medium for reminding me of this.

a very special episode of At Times Dull

2009-11-28T23:44:00.000-06:00

today david came to chicago and we marathoned the 7-hour john adams miniseries. there is much to say.

john adams - a few weeks ago i told my friend kait of our plans to watch the miniseries. "john sadams?" she asked, "because that thing will have you crying in 20 minutes." and yeah, what the crap, hbo? the miniseries is directly based on david mccullough's book, which is a real credit to him, but having read that very book i'd have to say that john adams is NOT that depressing. in fact, mccullough frequently paints him as the most candid, amiable of the founding fathers, most of whom where stiff-lipped aristocrats. the miniseries would have you think he was a big crankypants, always whining and badgering and huffing and puffing when he didn't get things his way. the impression i had of him was that he was brilliant, ambitious, persuasive, and extremely likeable, and that his moody, vain attributes were just the common b-side of a type a personality.

of course, you say, who am i to judge the character of john adams? i am no one. but consider the fact that he was repeatedly elected to public office, he was repeatedly chosen by his peers in government for the highest offices available, and george washington, benjamin franklin, and thomas jefferson all regarded him as talented and a reliable friend. the man depicted by hbo was simply too much of a downer to have accomplished any of those things.

the making-of featurette, which i rushed to view, is drenched in the goal "not to romanticize the founding fathers." this is a noble goal. as the director said, to understand the world of 1776, you have to live in a world where you don't know who the founding fathers are. they're not icons yet, they're still just dudes in wigs who spend a lot of time debating. and they are portrayed in the miniseries as very human, with all their flaws hanging out. the great providence of the american revolution is not the actions of a single one of them, but that they were all alive at the same time. they, shall we say, complete each other. i will now presume to call myself a student of the american revolution and say that, as a student of the american revolution, the scenes that had me on the edge of my seat were the personal interactions between the founding fathers, whom in the last few months have come to play a bizarrely large role in my daily life. there's a scene when franklin, adams, and jefferson are sitting around putting red pen to the first draft of the declaration. there's a scene where the continental congress does a roll call vote for independence. there's a scene where george washington is sworn in as president on a balcony in philadelphia. there's a scene where john and abigail drive up to the white house, still under construction, still called the president's house. some of the hair and make-up on the production is pure alchemy, and as david mccullough said in an interview, the first time he walked up to david morse in costume as george washington, it was heart-stopping.

these scenes gave me the goosebumps. i would refrain from saying that history came to life, but i guess i just did.

pride & prejudice: being the bromance between john adams and thomas jefferson: i believe i've already written at some length about the relationship between adams and jefferson, but it's the part of early american history that i find most captivating. i was delighted to find that i share this in common with david mccullough.

adams and jefferson died on the same day - july 4 1826 - the 50th anniversary of american independence. mccullough said that it was this extraordinary fact that he first wanted to write about, and that in exploring how to do so without being swept up in the glamour and legacy of jefferson, he discovered that adams' was the story that needed to be told. even so, the extraordinary friendship between the two steals the show in the both the book and the miniseries.

they met in 1776. adams was a brash orator and jefferson a shy idealist. adams pulled jefferson out of his shell to write the declaration. jefferson becomes a superstar. a few years later they both end up in paris as diplomats, and form a close friendship. when the adams' are called away to london, they are most saddened by the fact that they'll be away from jefferson's company. after the constitution is ratified, both men return to america to serve in the new federal government - adams as vice president and jefferson as secretary of state. as two political parties emerge, they find themselves torn asunder by domestic politics. as adams was part of the ruling federalist majority - first as vice president and then as president - it was jefferson who turned to the destructive political machinations of the minority, hurting adams professionally and personally. the rift was almost a matter of policy until after adams retirement when he found out that jefferson had secretly been funding a newspaper with the express instructions to write damaging and frequently untruthful articles about adams. and that was when he broke both adams and my heart.

adams, it should be said, always refused to say anything bad about jefferson. even when running against each other in the presidential election of 1801, adams referred to jefferson as "a dear friend of many years."

but in their retirement, when both had wearied of national politics, adams wrote jefferson a letter, and jefferson wrote back. after not hearing or seeing each other in over a decade, they began a correspondence that lasted until their deaths. historians drool over it. and in the miniseries, it's the happy ending. in a touch that would be way too adorable were in not entirely factual, they had busts of each other in their bedrooms. busts. this stuff kills me.

abigail adams: for the love of heaven would someone give this woman a monument.

benjamin franklin: being a genius at french etiquette is maybe not something to be proud of.

paul giamatti: i remain unconvinced.

david mccullough: what a gem.

1780s

2009-11-23T22:30:00.000-06:00

so you won a revolution. now what are you going to do?

the 1780s: not great.

the 1770s were all death to king george! no taxation without representation! give me liberty or give me death! we declare these truths to be self-evident!

and by the 1790s, we had a nation. a president that virtually everyone liked, some good trade agreements, and something that was, if not already so, on its way to being a stable currency.

in between, the 1780s happened. it's like the decade that america forgot, or would like to, and has been the hardest part to get through of every biography so far. so we won the war, which put us in massive debt. the states were being governed by the articles of confederation which, in a nutshell, said, "you're free! please behave yourselves." most of the luminaries of the revolution basically graduated out of legislative duty. some of them went to europe as diplomats, some retired, and some went home and said "i'm a hero! give me a state to run!" (read: patrick henry. good at sound bytes, bad at everything else, like running virginia.)

so when the first post-war congress convened, there were almost no big-name declaration signers there. just a bunch of talented younger guys, many of who had been active in state legislatures in voting for independence, but new to the national scene. and these guys had all the unexciting work to do. there were no more declarations to write, wars to win, philosophies to shout from the rooftops. there was inflation, debt, regional conflict, and state governments running wild with their independence. the main conflict of the 1780s went something like this:

congress: we owe several european nations millions of dollars, could you please tax your citizens?
states: do we have to?
congress: we'd like you to.
states: but we're free now! we hate tyranny!
congress: if we don't get some taxes we're going to become part of britain again.
states: stop oppressing me!

soon it became clear that the articles of confederation were based on way too much goodwill among the states, and a stronger central government was needed. the 1780s were a decade in which the states and the congress tested out their new government, found its flaws, started speeding towards self-implosion, and then tried to reshape the government from within the confines of the confederation. in short, it was the decade for james madison.

because james madison was a huge nerd. almost no description of him is ever written without getting to "man of learning" in the first few sentences. madison was part of the first post-war congress, and he became extremely frustrated with the weak national government. when his term was over, and he returned to virginia, he found himself without much to do, so he decided to embark on a course of study on how all governments had worked through the history of time. he made himself an expert on every republic, empire, monarchy, parliament, and senate that had ever ruled, and studied what worked and what didn't. he was doing his homework.

after a few years in the virginia legislature, madison went to serve in the federal convention where, basically, he walked that convention like a dog. many of the delegates were there with goals of protecting the private interests of their state. madison was there to create the most perfect government on the earth, and pretty soon he was running every debate.

madison was no idealist. unlike jefferson, his most particular friend, madison did not think that americans when left to their own devices would all decide to be virtuous farmers. but he did think a republican government was the only way to go. when the constitution was being ratified, madison and hamilton published a series of essays in its defense now known as the federalist papers. madison wrote, in the opening essay, "it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force."

a lot of these decisions and choices were made in the 1780s, by men whose states were going broke and who had very little reason to concede to each other. james madison is known as the father of the constitution because, during the very long and hot and miserable summer of 1787, he got them all to agree to fund a strong central government and start working for the greater good. he did this by merit of how blatantly smarter he was than everybody else in the room (and franklin was there). he was a huge nerd, and he was also a huge political genius. we should all be very glad we weren't alive in the 1780s, and we should be very glad that james madison was.

now if only the guy would get married.

presidential fact #7

2009-11-18T10:07:00.001-06:00

The delegates of the Federal Convention of 1787 (or FedCon, as we would call it nowadays) got a 10-day break after a month or two so a committe could summarize their progress. George Washington went on a trout-fishing trip with Gouverneur Morris (his actual name) to Valley Forge. It was the first time he had been there in the summer.

One can only imagine the subtle, wise, magisterial, time-worn comment he made upon seeing the site not covered in snow and blood.

presidential fun fact #6

2009-11-14T22:10:00.002-06:00

James Madison was both our shortest and lightest President. At 5'4 and 100 pounds, he was a little bit shorter and slighter than Victoria Beckham (h/t celebheights.com).

Madison, the Early Years

2009-11-14T20:50:00.003-06:00

Ironically, James Madison had a weak constitution.

Centuries before Jimmy Carter bemoaned America's Crisis of Confidence, and Bill Clinton Felt Your Pain, Madison was the country's first emoter-in-chief. Starting in his college days Madison had a weird form of what was then called epileptoid hysteria, and what we would now call panic attacks. Madison described it like this: "a constitutional liability to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling Epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions." Madison took medicine for his disorder, but it seems to have been more in his head than body---the hysteria only appeared before sea voyages and other activities that involved intense physical or intellectual labor. When Jefferson invited him to Europe once, Madison wrote to his mentor, "I have some reason to suspect that crossing the sea would be unfriendly to a singular disease of my constitution." Throughout every step of his life, people close to Madison were always worried that whatever responsibility he was about to take would finally overwhelm his fragile health. He was too weak to become a farmer, and too stressed out to become a lawyer. Even studying for finals proved too difficult for him, and he had to stay at Princeton one summer because he was too drained to make the journey home after exams.

He was also shy. Whereas John Adams could not shut up about his love for Abigail, and Thomas Jefferson sent saucy letters to women happily married to his friends, Madison seemed almost embarrassed by his clumsy attempts at romance. For example, the world didn't know until 1948 that he had been engaged to a woman named Kitty Floyd (no relation to Kitty Boyd, happy birthday). Why? Because Madison had inked out every reference to her in every letter. After a couple hundred of years, the ink had faded sufficiently that historians could set to work deciphering the code that Madison used to write about his betrothed. The engagement ended when she cheated on him with a med student, as women will.

Even Madison's attempts at mischief seem virginal (Don't think I didn't see the opportunity for a joke about the Non-Intercourse Act of 1810. I just passed). At Princeton, he became involved in a flame war with a rival student association. About its leader, Moses Allen, Madison composed this attempt at bawdy humor: Great Allen founder of the crew/ If right I guess must keep a stew/ The lecherous rascal there will find/ A place just suited to his mind/ May whore and pimp and drink and swear/ Nor more the garb of Christians wear/ And free Nassau from such a pest/ A dunce a fool an ass at best.

Marshall Mathers he wasn't. But from this sensitive youth emerged the finest diplomatic mind America had known. In the early days of the country, America faced a choice between allying with Britain, whose economic and political interests best aligned with ours, and France, who had bailed us out during the Revolutionary War. In the midst of partisan profane discourse that would make Billy Martin sound like Judith Martin, it was Madison who forged a compromise that allowed France to save face. He was worried about their feelings. This deft maneuvering later served as a model for President Kennedy (another man who felt) in dealing with Khrushchev's bombastic ego during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Madison used the occasion of his first inaugural address to share his nuanced view of how the psyche affected politics: "Indulging no passions which trespass on the rights or the repose of other nations, it has been the true glory of the United States to cultivate peace by observing . . . the respect of the nations at war . . . . If there be candor in the world, the truth of these assertions will not be questioned."

And that's how far I am in the book. Can't wait to see how this guy reacts when the Brits burn down the White House. I will let you know.

fie!

2009-11-09T02:25:00.000-06:00

one of the more awkward situations i've ever been a part of transpired when my big brother eric and i traveled together to boston. i was a junior in high school and he was a sophomore in college and we had the same spring break, so we drove out to visit some family and be tourists in boston.

one of our stops was at the boston tea party site, where you can board an imitation boat, attend an imitation town meeting, and then throw an imitation crate of tea over the side of the imitation boat (after which, because the crate is tethered with a rope, and because we can't actually all throw crates into the harbor, you have to haul the crate back up and hand it to the next person in line).

the whole attraction is really best enjoyed when you're about 13, which is not to say it's without merit, but the enjoyment you get out of it at any other age is just pure irony.

the real low point was the town meeting. our spring break was in mid-march, well before tourist season, so the group of us present at the town meeting numbered about 7, scattered around benches that could have seated 40. eric and i, an elderly asian couple, and a young european couple with two young children were the rebels present on this particular day. a young girl, who i can only guess was a history major unhappy with the way her life was turning out, stood before us. she explained that the revolution was popularized in new england by town meeetings, during which the town officials would tell news of what the british were doing and get the crowd riled up. when the crowd was pleased, they would pump their fists and yell "aye!" when the crowd was angered, they would point and the ground and yell "fie!" she had us practice this, and from that moment it was clear that those present with us did not understand english, or were pretending not to.

she started the meeting. she reminded us of the stamp act (fie!). general washington was raising a colonial army (aye!), but there were already ships full of british soldiers crossing the atlantics (fie!). now they were imposing the tea tax (fie!) but the sons of liberty weren't going to take it (aye!). as the asians and europeans looked on blandly, eric and i gamely carried the mob mentality a deux. we yelled aye and fie as often as expected, but this only served to highlight how pathetic the whole spectacle was. at one point, eric got mixed up and shouted "fie!" while pumping his fist, instead of pointing at the ground. this gave us the giggles, and the town meeting continue to go downhill. we tried to participate as good-naturedly as possible, regarding our tour guide with the trademark combination of amusement and pity with which you regard anyone who wears a costume for a living, but our efforts were not enough to keep the desperation and humiliation out of her eyes, barely visible below her historically accurate lace bonnet.

all this is to say that i've never been carried away by the revolutionary spirit. this is one of the reasons i love james madison.

washington began his career as an officer in the british army. always the upward mover, he actually sent an embarrassingly grovelly letter to a british admiral asking for a promotion, which he was not given.

adams and jefferson both studied law, and began their careers as opposition to the british was growing popular. it was something they had to consider gravely, and incorporate into their public philosophies.

madison was about 16 when the stamp act was passed, and the decade that passed between that and the declaration he spent at school, college, and back in virginia at his family's estate. when at princeton (then called the college of new jersey), he and his classmates debated the idea of british rule in their commencement oratories. he studied Moral Philosophy (a subject that at the time included ethics, political science, economics, and philosphy) in the context of america's role vis a vis tyrannical britain. he grew up with the idea of revolution, and he loved it.

after college, he and william bradford, a princeton classmate and philadelphia printer, decided to keep up a regular correspondence for "pleasure and improvement." this correspondence soon became an exchange of revolutionary ideas, news, and gossip. as many of the men who went on to vote for independence were out fighting, debating, or writing, madison was a 23-year-old on his family farm, pumping his fist. he was a convert of the purest form, not bothering to temper his arguments against those who might disagree, never discussing his ideas with anyone except those who vehemently agreed, and rushing to swift, aggressive conclusions. where the first 3 presidents have come across as wise, reasonable men in the time of independence, madison comes across as an enthusiast. it's endearing. aye!

We See Things as We Are, or Watching C-Span in Fort Wayne

2009-11-08T19:30:00.004-06:00

As Jefferson lay ailing in the Winter of 1826, he wrote this to James Madison: "Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections."** So Dramatic. Madison did what he could, making his mentor look good with a very successful presidency (which I am now reading about in this long-ass book). But as the Bernstein epilogue points out, Jefferson's legacy has been quite variable, moving at the whim of the present worldview of an ambivalent public.

During the first phase of Jefferson's legacy, from his death until the civil war, the very word "Jefferson" acted as an inkblot test measuring the psyches of the nation's opposing factions. Northerners championed what he said, holding him as a defender of individual liberties and a strong national government--Southerners what he did, praising him as a slavery advocate and believer in states rights. What everyone agreed on was that Jefferson was the father of religious freedom- Americans at that time really started going for organized religion.

Jefferson's popularity was at its low point after the Civil War, which is surprising since Honest Abe claimed Jefferson as his intellectual hero. But he had not been nearly as enamored of TJ as were Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee, a Virginian. Like every revolutionary in the world since 1776, they saw their cause as being tied to that of the American Patriots. The industrial revolution made America feel alienated from the gentleman planter who dreamed of an agrarian America. Also, an increasingly progressive country started to see through his hypocrisy re: the slavery issue (only 100 years before I did). President Wilson even called him "not a great American."

But then everything collapsed in 1929, and Jefferson's poor man populism once again became trendy. FDR praised Jefferson's crusade against "malefactors of great wealth" (and more nefariously, admired Jefferson's pluck in trying to disregard everything the Supreme Court said) (in a history of the Supreme Court, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR would be the villains).

Finally, Jefferson gained his status as an American hero during World War II. Jefferson's bicentennial was observed in 1943, and gave the country a reason to reflect on his thoughts about freedom. We were in the depths of the war against fascism, sowing the seeds of a long war against communism, and Jefferson was our best cheerleader. He was the best political writer in our history, and in battles of ideologies, words have meaning.

So the question is this: Why is Jefferson's legacy so malleable? I think it's no more complicated than that the man is really, really quotable. The best thing about having swine flu in Fort Wayne was all the C-Span I got to watch during the health care debate. And Jefferson's prints all over that thing, superficially. Some Dem blowhard quoted Jefferson as saying this: "Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. " Obviously, Jefferson was in favor of the public option. But then Sarah Palin, via her facebook page came back with this Jeffersonian zinger: "Tyranny will take hold if good conscious men do nothing." (Yes, I am facebook friends with Sarah Palin. She's like, the hottest girl in school. Either her or Korrinne Ward). Obviously Thomas Jefferson would detest this attack on our freedoms.

The point is that the guy just took some points (Freedom, Religion, Speech) that everyone agrees on, and wrote about them elegantly and kinda generically. He was a real douchebag (Janet's word) when he was alive, and people held it against him for awhile, but not anymore. Now we strip mine his presidency for quotes, and all agree that he (we) was right all along. I could see a similar thing happening to Barack Obama years from now- it's just the downside of being a quotable populist. For example, in 100 years, when America is deciding whether to allow Canada into the country as the 51st state, people will abuse the shit out of this quote: There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.

OK I'm done with Jefferson. My next post will be about Madison. He wrote the Constitution---the supreme law of the land.

*I am reminded of Rep. Michelle Bachmann's statement in the health care debate the other day: "Our forebearers are crying out for us to preserve their freedoms." God help us if we still need health care after we die.

presidential fact #5

2009-11-07T00:01:00.002-06:00

James Madison (4th president) and Zachary Taylor (12th president) were 2nd cousins.

virginia

2009-11-06T23:55:00.001-06:00

Monticello

At first I was kind of dreading the amount of overlap we would get between all the different biographies. Especially in the early years of the presidency, when the American political scene was still very small, most of the presidents were not only contemporaries but lifelong friends. So we're reading about alot of the same stuff over and over again. A letter that Adams wrote to Jefferson is quoted in the biographies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, and I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up in Madison and Monroe as well.

But the nice thing about it is how well I'm getting to know colonial/revolutionary America. I'm currently in the early years of the Madison biography, and when Ralph Ketcham lists off some of his more prominent classmates at Princeton, I already knew who a lot of them were. When he mentioned that Philip Freneau authored many satirical pamphlets at Princeton I was like, "Of course he did! Blast that Freneau! Always making trouble."**

I also know my way around American in the 1770s. Philadelphia was the center of progress (thanks in no small part to Benjamin Franklin). It was the largest city in America, and the first one to have sidewalks, streetlamps, and organized political dissension. People used to meet at the London Coffee House (ha) to complain about England.

Boston was a town of well-educated Puritans and Rebels. There wasn't a lot of old money in Boston in those days, mostly lawyers and merchants and clergy. John Adams was a true Boston man - self-made, thrifty, devoutly religious, and vehemently revolutionary.

New York started making a play for majorness slightly later. It had good shipping, and once the Revolutionary War was in full swing the British targeted it much more than Philadelphia. Although it was on its way up, in general it was a poor man's Philadelphia. George Washington was inaugurated there but the federal government moved to Philadlephia only a few months later.

Philadelphia was dead set on being the permanent capital of the federal government. It had hosted all the Continental Congress sessions, after all, it was the biggest, the most sophisticated, and the president already lived there.

But they decided to build a brand new capital, and they decided it should be on the Potomac. Why? Well, mainly because George Washington got to pick where it was, and Thomas Jefferson was his secretary of state, and they were all about Virginia.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all hailed from Virginia planter class (although Washington kind of married into it), and they literally will not shut up about it. Getting any of them, especially the first two, to leave Virginia was like kicking Adam and Eve out of the garden. Presidencies, ambassadorships, gigs writing the Consitution - all of these were moaned about as not being as awesome as staying in Virginia. Virginia was the most important place in America for the latter half of the 18th century, and possibly longer.

Americans were still comfortable with landed gentry, even if they weren't crazy about monarchy, and the Virgininan planters came close to being the barons and earls of America. They had huge, sprawling estates, hundreds of slaves, lots of debt, and oodles of class. It's an easy place to farm, and a big productive farm was possibly the manliest thing you could possess. The children of these estates (among them those 4 early presidents) had very little to do with their youth other than learn Latin, Greek, rhetoric, oratory, and theology. They grew up to be brilliant, stately, very accustomed to luxury, and very attached to their land. Virginia produced luminaries of the Revolution at a much higher rate than any other state, and was constantly being deferred to. When three men were needed to be envoys to Britain, Congress wanted to send a Northerner, a Southerner, and a Virginian. Men from Virginia were loyal to each other (most of them were related anyway), so any time a position came open, being from Virginia was always hugely in someone's favor, because of all the clouty friends they would carry with them. If the Virginians banded together in any debate, they would win it.

It was the old boys club within the original old boys club. Even at the time it had its skeptics. Adams - who was a fan of living within his means and not a fan of owning other people - thought Virginia was kind of ridiculous.

It's been a funny thing to get used to, because Philadelphia, New York, and Boston are all still major cities, but Virginia doesn't have a trace of the cache it used to. When I think of Virginia I think swing state and ham, but when I read the biographies it's just the ultimate. Jefferson thought it would be the model for the rest of America. Washington thought it would be the gateway to the west, the eternal epicentre of America, which is why he built the federal city a stone's throw from his house.

I don't know what happend to Virginia, or when it lost its status, but when I read about Virginia in the old days, I kind of wish I could go there. As long as I was a rich white man.

**Freneau was a poet and friend of Jefferson and Madison. Years later, when they were unhappy with the way America was going but didn't want to embroil themselves in a public scandal, they gave Freneau the money to start a newspaper had him write articles about how great they were. He was (maybe) the bane of Adams' presidency.

Declaration

2009-11-01T19:27:00.002-06:00

My favorite scene in pre-America America is Thomas Jefferson seething while the Continental Congress gentrifies his Declaration of Independence. I found a copy of Jefferson's draft here: http://www.princeton.edu/~tjpapers/declaration/declaration.html

Cf. the final product: http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html

Of note---

-Changing "we hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable" to "we hold these truths to be self-evident" (a change Jefferson made)

-Congress totally neutering the list of complaints against Crazy King George (the sentences that start "he has . . .")

Jefferson was pretty pissed about Congress abrogating the list of grievances---that section got the most press at the time. But now we remember the second paragraph, which I memorized in fifth grade, and which is Jefferson's writing entirely.

Also Jefferson and Adams both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration's ratification. But you already knew that.

presidential fact #4

2009-10-31T11:10:00.003-06:00

speaking of sally hemings, of the very few contemporary accounts of her that exist, one of the most detailed was written by abigail adams.

the adamses and jeffersons were BFF in the years during and right after the war. abigail even joked about john quincy marrying martha jefferson. when jefferson was the ambassador to france, he sent for his young daughter patsy to join him. when she got to europe, she stayed for a few weeks with the adamses, who were living in london. abigail adams immediately hit it off with the 7-year-old patsy, but was shocked that she was traveling alone with only one of jefferson's slaves taking care of her - a young, immature, moody, irresponsible girl who had no business caring for a child, in abigail's opinion. sally hemings.

Historiography

2009-10-30T08:55:00.000-06:00

There's a popular myth out there that upon completing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson went back to Virginia and freed all of his slaves. That didn't happen in real life. Jefferson's relationship with slavery remains for me (and everyone else) the hardest part of his legacy to accept or make sense of. It's easy enough (right or wrong) for us evolved folk to gloss over the people-owning. We are all products of our time. But to do so would be letting TJ off the hook too easily.
First, of the thinkers and potuses of the time, none was so Cavalier about accepting the slavery. Washington was exceedingly kind to his servants and during his presidency operated his plantation as Schindler did his factory: losing money, poor productivity, everyone treated as a person. His excellency freed his slaves upon his death. The Adamses abhorred slavery. They received a slave once as a gift and immediately set her free. Abigail thought that EVERYTHING- from the revolutionary war to a child's sore throat- was God's punishing america for the evil institution. Yeah, he was from Virginia, but so was GW, and besides we expect greatness greater than this from our great men.
Also there is Sally Hemings.The Bernstein book largely ignores that elephant, but as literary convention would have it, the book has an epilogue.It points out that despite 200 years of compelling circumstantial evidence, mainstream historians.usually dismissed the claims of the Hemings-Jefferson offspring, and those who supported them. They were the original birthers. Now with widely accepted DNA testing techniques (which came way too late for generations of jefferson issue and ronald goldman), we know that the rumors are true. And as it is hard to imagine one's property consenting to a sexual relationship (or even having the capacity to do do), well, it's uncomfortable.
It's actually nonsensical. How could this guy, who as a youth proudly considered himself a "freeborn british subject," who started a war over tea taxes, who penned the clearest moral statement in the western world's history of man's responsibility to his fellows (We hold these truths to be Self-Evident...)--- how could he house one of his families in luxury in Monticello and the other in squalor in his backyard?
In her last post Janet notes that Jefferson was famed for his stoicism. Shakespeare (whose house Janet and I will never tire of telling you that Adams and Jefferson visited together) told of another Stoic, who crushed his conscience's stirrings under a belief that his compromises were in the best interest of his country. But Brutus is an honorable man.

public displays of patriotism

2009-10-29T22:54:00.004-06:00

thomas jefferson was a very, very slow fuse. he was famous for his stoicism, and never publicly responding to criticism (the original 'no comment' president.)

after he was president, he devoted a huge amount of time to the founding of the university of virginia. he designed the campus, handpicked the faculty, and personally designed the curriculum. he said that the official opening of the university was the proudest day of his life.

things went quickly down hill. the first class of students, perhaps as a backlash to jefferson's enormously high expectations, acted out. they vandalised the campus, went streaking at night, and gambled all the time. when things got out of control, jefferson decided to give a speech to the student body in order to extol them to higher principles.

when he walked into the hall where the students were waiting, flanked by madison and monroe, both former presidents and lifelong friends, he wept openly. he couldn't give the speech as planned because he was too overcome with emotion.

jefferson could be kind of a d-bag. the kind of total snob whose expectations nobody will ever meet, and both washington and adams became really exasperated with him as part of their adminstrations. but this moment won me back. jefferson never wanted to live any other life than that of the scholar, but his phenomenal intellectual capacity, given the time he lived in, continually pulled him into public service, where he was - over and over and over again - disappointed by people.

it was his own fault. he expected everybody to be the embodiment of their own ideals, or in most cases of his ideals. but his disappointment in people was utterly real.

he was a perfectionist, he was furious at every word of the Declaration that congress proposed to change. when he had to watch an entire nation - one that he had created in his mind as a utopia of liberty - go off on its own shaky legs and try to sustain itself, he couldn't write enough letters expressing his grief. but when the university of viriginia fell short of his lofty plans, he simply couldn't take another disappointment. he wept in public. i can't remember the last time i saw a family member weep, let alone the president of the united states. that poor guy.

presidential fun fact #3

2009-10-29T21:03:00.004-06:00

Thomas Jefferson's first memory in life was as a 2-year-old being carried on a pillow by a slave. His last living moment was spent telling a slave to readjust his pillows so that he could rest more comfortably.

Washington/Adams/Jefferson

2009-10-29T07:17:00.003-06:00

Janet pretty much covered everything in the way of introductions, but there are two things I should add.

1. She and I met when we overlapped for one day working at the greatest bookstore in history in Boston. It was my first day, and her last day, and she was supposed to train me. Within probably eight minutes she had set off the fire alarm.

2. I am stuck in Fort Wayne, Indiana, doing a sort of legal internship for the year. This accounts for my enthusiasm that J. referenced earlier. She thought that my life's ennui would "shine through" my posts, but I think it is better to put it out front.

Onto the books. These first three guys are serving as more of an introduction to the Presidency than as an accounting of it.

Washington, Adams, and Jefferson were very different men with one thing in common. Their greatest moments did not involve their being President. This is almost inconceivable today, where Presidents are lifelong politicians whose careers have been meticulously planned as not to interfere with the goal of attaining the presidency. The office is not a reward--becoming President is the main thing. The culmination, of this trend is our recently electing a 46-year-old junior senator, who recently (very recently) had been serving in the Illinois State Capitol.

But not our first three chief execs. In 1776, John Adams, through persuasion and guile, convinced a majority of the delegates at the Congressional Congress to vote for Independence. He passed the ball to Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence (and Adams fought for every last word of it on the floor of Congress when weak-kneed PC delegates tried to temper the fightin' words). Then Washington went and won the damn war. By 1781 these guys were has-beens, or at least would-be has-beens. GW fancied himself the American Cincinnatus, who would retire to his plantation after winning the war. Adams wanted to finally spend some time with Abigail, the 18th-century Natalie Portman.

By the time they (spoiler alert) became President, they really didn't want to do it. Washington even maintained plausible deniability that his name was on the ballot. Again, inconceivable today.

Excited to start Madison. He mostly grew up in a time where the presidency existed---it was something he wanted.

2009-10-28T23:49:00.000-06:00

John Adams
David McCullough

I remember seeing David McCullough on Charlie Rose soon after the book was published, and he was asked why he chose to write about John Adams. He said that he had been looking through some of Adams’ journals, and he found an entry that said, “I strive to rise every morning with the sun, read the Scriptures, study Latin and Greek, philosphy, and science, and walk 5-10 miles each day.” The next day’s entry said, “It is raining. I have dreamed away the day.” And that, McCullough said, is a man I can relate to. Among the tall, statuesque founding fathers, John Adams is short and chubby and talked to much and tended to get on people’s nerves. There are no monuments to him in Washington, and he’s not on any money. But he led the fight, in the 1776 continental congress, for independence, and personally persuaded a huge number of the delegates to vote with him.

Then he helped write the Declaration, went to France and Holland to secure wartime loans and political support, and ended up in England as the first citizen of the American nation to stand in front of the King of England. He also shared a bed with Benjamin Franklin on a few diplomatic missions and visited Shakespeare’s home with Thomas Jefferson. He got around.

Abigail Adams, as everybody says, is totally great. When the relationship between Jefferson and Adams turned sour (which broke my heart), Abigail still wrote to Jefferson to sympathize with him at the death of his daughter. When he replied and basically said, “I’m really sorry your husband and I aren’t friends anymore, but these things are out of our control,” she wrote back and said, “These things were completley in your control. You’re just a jerk. And now you’re lying about it.” One supposes that not many women in the 19th century would write to an ex-president in such a manner.

Everyone says Andrew Jackson was the first grassroots president, but I’d have to say John Adams should be in the running for that. Sure he went to Harvard, but everybody did back then, and for the most part he was a middle-class, self-motivated, self-made man. America!

presidential fact #2

2009-10-28T23:48:00.001-06:00

when both were diplomats in europe, john adams and thomas jefferson visited shakespeare's home together.

presidential fact #1: founding spooners

2009-10-28T23:46:00.002-06:00

during the early years of the revolutionary war, benjamin franklin and john adams were tasked with visiting a british admiral outside new york in the hopes of negotiating peace. on their trip, they shared a bed, and could not decide whether or not to keep the window open while they slept. adams was against it, franklin for it. franklin said he had theories about the health benefits of night air, and asked adams if he'd like to hear him. adams obliged, and fell asleep to the sound of franklin explaining these theories.

43 to go

2009-10-28T23:45:00.000-06:00

His Excellency: George Washington
Joseph J. Ellis

A few months ago, I have no idea why, I decided it might be fun to read a biography of each American president, in order. I floated this idea a few times, and usually people laughed at me or said I would never get past the revolution.

But the project appeals to me. First of all, I don’t think I have a particularly admirable awareness of American history or politics, and this is a way to get a thorough schooling inAmerican history in a compelling way. Second of all, there are all these presidents! I probably couldn’t name more than 25-30 off the top of my head. And the role of the American president is so beguiling – so powerful and symbolic and influential, and yet so bogged down and defensive and working uphill – and this man can be George W. Bush one minute and Barack Obama the next. Crazy.

Eventually, I mentioned the idea to my friend Dave, who was immediately and ardently on board. He just graduated from law school and is kind of a political junkie, so he’s supplying all the context and enthusiasm. We waited until the end of the summer – until he had taken the bar and I had finished Infinite Jest – and dove into Washington after Labor Day.

We figure it will take four or five books before the project has any legitimacy. When I tell people I’m reading through all the presidents, they always ask me which one I’m on, and answering “Washington” doesn’t garner me a lot of respect. But we’re going to do it! Our goal is to finish before the 2012 election, which means we need to average a little less than a month for each president. Easy.

I did realize recently that I’m going to have to read through the entire American Revolution like, I don’t know, five times.

But Washington was great. I was surprised as how much vital information I didn’t know about him. Like where he grew up, and the fact that he didn’t have kids. This part, talking about when he was chosen to lead the Continental Army, made me laugh:

“Another short answer, subsequently offered by Adams as a joke, was that Washington was always selected by deliberative bodies to lead, whatever the cause, because he was always the tallest man in the room. Even as a joke, however, Adams was making a serious point that a veritable legion of his contemporaries made, especially upon first meeting Washington; namely, that he was physically majestic.”

John McCain can blame mass media if he wants, but it appears we have always been enraptured with leaders who look the part.

I also liked this part, about his post-presidential retirement at Mount Vernon.

“A day in the life of George Washington in retirement began at five o’clock with the rising of the sun: ‘If my hirelings are not in their places at that time, I send them messages of my sorrow for their indisposition.’”

Wake up calls! From George Washington!