notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
These started as lectures, or as answers to questions students asked after class, which is where the better lectures come from. Written versions ramble because talks ramble. May 2021.
The confession first, so you know what you are getting into. When I put a lecture on paper I discover that half of what worked in the room was timing, and the other half was the look on my face, and neither survives the transplant. What survives is the argument. So these are longer and stranger than the rest of the site, and if one of them goes on too long about, say, clocks, I can only say that the room was with me that night and you were not there.
(On the 1850s, and why I keep teaching them)
Here is my argument, and I have been making it for thirty years: the Civil War was not caused by the 1860s. The 1850s did the work. By the time Lincoln was elected, the war's causes had finished their argument; all the sixties supplied was the date and the body count.
Start in 1850 with the Compromise, which everyone treats as a cooling-off and I treat as an accelerant with good manners. The parts everyone memorized in school: California comes in free, the Southwest gets organized with popular sovereignty, the slave trade (not slavery itself, a distinction the students always caught and the senators did not) ends in the District of Columbia. The part nobody memorized is the Fugitive Slave Act, and it is the hinge of the whole decade. It federalized the return of escaped slaves. It put a legal duty on Northern officials and private citizens to participate in captures, denied the accused person a jury trial, and set a bounty for the return of enslaved people. In practice, free Black Northerners got grabbed on affidavits. Boston, of all cities, watched a man marched through its streets in 1854 under federal guard, Anthony Burns, shipped back to Virginia while fifty thousand people stood on the rooftops and watched the flag on the courthouse fly at half mast. The half of the country that had been ignoring slavery could no longer ignore it; the law had made the ignorable unavoidable. Ask me why compromise gets harder after 1850 and I will answer: because the compromise itself sent the marshals.
From there the decade runs downhill with the brakes off. 1854: the Kansas-Nebraska Act repeals the Missouri Compromise line (which had held peace for a third of a century) and leaves slavery in the territories to a local vote, producing two rival governments in Kansas and a genuine small war. 1855–56: a congressman canes a senator senseless on the Senate floor and gets celebrated for it. 1857: the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, rules that Congress cannot bar slavery from a territory at all. Read that again. The Court took the compromise power, the one tool the country had used every thirty years to paper over the question, and ruled it unconstitutional. It is the most consequential judicial misstep in our history, decided by a 7–2 vote by men who thought they were ending the argument. 1859: John Brown raids Harpers Ferry, fails, goes to the gallows calm as Sunday, and writes on the morning of his death a note predicting that the crimes of this guilty land would not be purged "but with blood." The governor of Virginia said Brown was a fanatic, which was true, and Virginia hanged him for being right about what would come next.
You can know the ending here and still miss the shape of it, which is why I teach the decade as a decade. The people in it kept trying every door marked "peaceful settlement": the ballot box, the Court, the Senate's famous committees, even a last-ditch compromise in the winter of 1860–61, which failed by one vote in the Senate in December 1860. Every door had been tried and every one had warped shut. By November 1860 the country was not a powder keg waiting for a spark. It was a structure that had already failed; the election only measured the crack. When my students tell me the war "just happened" because Lincoln won, I tell them to run the tape of the 1850s back one more time with the sound on. It did not just happen. It was decided, clause by clause, one June and one December at a time, by people who thought they were ending the argument.
One more thing. In the fall of 1862, after Antietam, when he was ready to issue the proclamation, Lincoln said the country had come to "the last ditch." Thirty years of lectures have not improved on that.
(The Wilmot Proviso section still isn't here. Every year I mean to add it; every year May arrives. It stays on the list.)
(On November 18, 1883, when the railroads reset the country's clocks)
Before 1883 the United States did not have time zones. I mean this literally and it takes a minute to absorb: when it was noon in Washington it was twelve minutes past noon in Boston and eleven minutes to noon in Savannah, because every town set its clock to its own sun, noon being the moment the shadow pointed north or thereabouts. The railroads ran through hundreds of these local times; a large railroad company in 1883 might operate on fifty or more different clock settings, and the standard time tables published in station houses were books, thick ones, listing the local corrections for each town on the line.
Punctual people have always existed, but the country did not run on a schedule before the trains, and the trains would not run on the sun, or rather they would not run on a hundred suns. The corrections were a slow bleed of missed connections and collisions. In August 1853 a head-on collision outside Providence, two trains, dozens dead, was blamed on a conductor's watch (two clocks disagreeing in a station led to a fatal assumption).[1] Something had to give, and what gave, on Sunday, November 18, 1883, was the sun.
At noon that day the country was quietly reset. The railroads had agreed, on their own authority, no act of Congress, to four time zones: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, defined by the 75th, 90th, 105th, and 120th meridians. As the standard noon reached each zone the station clocks were stopped, some for minutes, some for half an hour, and then started again on the new time, and because the new standard noon arrived in each town at a slightly different moment than the local one, in many places the clock struck twelve twice. The papers called it the day of two noons. There were, of course, holdouts: towns that kept local time out of pride, a mayor or two who refused to be told the hour by a railroad, Detroit famously kept local time until 1900. But the country mostly just, in the space of one quiet Sunday, agreed on what time it was. The engineer of the whole scheme, a railroad official named William F. Allen, deserves to be as famous as half the men on our stamps, and would be embarrassed if he were.
Congress did not get around to ratifying standard time until 1913, and did not write it fully into law until 1918, which is my favorite statistic in all of this: the United States adopted standard time the way it adopts most things, by the facts on the ground going first and the law following thirty-five years later at its leisure.
Now the part I make a whole lecture of, so consider this the short form. Standard time is a story about railroads, yes. But look at what happened: a private agreement, reached for commercial reasons, reset the daily experience of time for an entire continent. Workers now needed watches; the pocket-watch industry boomed; the school bell and the factory whistle and the train schedule converged. Time became something administered from outside the town, from outside the state, from, eventually, an atomic clock in Colorado that the country consults without knowing it. When people ask me when the modern United States started, I resist the temptation to answer "the usual year" (they mean a war) and I say: pick a quiet Sunday in 1883 when everybody's clock moved at once and nobody fought about it. The country agreed on the clock before it agreed on almost anything else that decade. There is a sermon in that and I have preached it for years.
(On the photographs from Antietam, October 1862)
After the battle of Antietam in September 1862, the bloodiest single day in American history, a photographer named Alexander Gardner, working for Mathew Brady's studio in Washington, walked the ground with a wet-plate camera and a portable darkroom wagon and made about a hundred exposures of what was still there when the shooting stopped. A month later, Brady's gallery on Broadway in New York hung a selection of them under the title The Dead of Antiquity, no, I am wrong, The Dead of Antietam, and I leave the typo in because that is exactly the kind of thing my students caught me doing at the board and it proves I am consistent across media.[2]
The show was a sensation in the quiet way that matters. People came, paid their admission (or didn't; it was a gallery), and stood. The photographs were not pictures of a battle; a battle is movement and smoke and nobody's hands steady. They were of the aftermath: rows of bodies along the Hagerstown turnpike, shoes missing, bloated and black, photographed straight on, no arrangement. The camera could not lie in this one respect and everyone who walked in knew it: these men had been alive.
The New York Times wrote, in October 1862, that Mr. Brady "has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it." Read that sentence twice; it is one of the great sentences in American journalism, and the paper knew it was reaching for something, because the usual vocabulary had stopped working.
Here is the argument I used to close the lecture. Before Gardner's plates, war in the popular mind was a painting: a general on a hill, a flag, smoke rendered in oils at a comfortable distance. After them, war was a body by a fence rail. The change was not that photographs were more true than paintings; it is that they were less optional. A painting is an account; you can argue with an account. A photograph of a dead nineteen-year-old with his boots gone is not an account. It is an exhibit. The country had been running the war on accounts for a year and a half, and in October 1862 the exhibit arrived on Broadway, in stereo, for ten cents a view, and the war got harder to keep at a comfortable distance. Everything since, every photograph that has done that work, Gardner's plates are the ancestors of it: not the first war photographs ever made, but the first ones anybody had to look at.
One postscript that always got the room quiet. Gardner and his assistant moved at least one group of bodies to make a better composition; there is a famous pair of frames where a Confederate sharpshooter lies behind a stone wall, and later research found the body was dragged some forty yards to the wall because the picture was better there. So the first "the camera cannot lie" moment in our history already contained a small, forgivable, very human lie. When my students found out, half of them were furious and the other half said "well, that's photography," and both halves were right, and that is the end of the lecture.
(On rankings, and why I gave my own up)
Every few years somebody publishes a ranking of the presidents, historians voting, scores averaged, Lincoln and Washington at the top, the usual suspects at the bottom, and the cable news has itself a week. I used to assign these rankings as a debate exercise, and then one year I wrote my own on the board, and a student looked at it for a while and asked the question that ended the exercise for good: "Who's the audience?"
Exactly. Who is the audience for a ranking? The standard criteria are leadership, crisis management, character, vision. But a president is not a golfer; he is a variable in an equation that also contains a Congress he did not choose, a war he did not start, an economy that was already doing whatever it was doing when he took the oath. Rankings pretend that the president is the whole sentence. He is the verb. The noun was there before him.
So I gave mine up, mostly, and replaced it with two questions I could actually defend at a faculty dinner. First: did the country leave the term angrier than it found it? (You can rank on that; watch a term and see who goes home madder, and follow the anger to its source. It is clarifying. It is not flattering to anybody's favorites.) Second: did he leave the office more honest than he found it? Those two questions, applied across forty-six administrations, will produce a list that argues with the official ones, and I have decided that is a feature. Grant's stock rises (the country left less angry than the textbooks claim, and the honesty was of a kind that embarrassed lesser men). Wilson's falls (a genius, and a man who screened Birth of a Nation in the White House, both facts on the same page because that is where the facts live). My colleague Denny ranks every president purely on whether he'd want to sit next to him on a long bus ride, and I have come around to the position that Denny's system is at least as defensible as the historians', and considerably harder to game.
The full presidents table, one honest line apiece with no grades anywhere, is over here. That's the version I trust. It's also the version students actually printed, which tells you something about what a table is for.