Transcript
The Fourth
July 4, 1826
July 4, 1826. Fifty years since the Declaration of Independence. Americans called it the Jubilee.
The Declaration's author lay dying in this house. Since the night before, he'd kept asking whether it was the Fourth yet.
Thomas Jefferson died at about ten minutes to one.
Five hundred miles away, John Adams was 90. Quincy, his hometown, had asked him for a toast.
John Adams Independence forever!
Anything to add?
John Adams Not a word.
He died that evening. The people in the room heard his last words as "Thomas Jefferson survives." Jefferson had been dead about five hours.
Ten days earlier, he wrote his last letter.
Thomas Jefferson the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs
Six months after he died, his estate sold more than a hundred people he had enslaved, to pay his debts.
The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of Divine favor…
The president, John Adams's son, called it a sign of God's favor. Many Americans agreed.
John Quincy Adams visible and palpable marks of Divine favor
Fifty years in, what made Americans one people? And what was already pulling them apart?
The Long Room
1753–1826
To find out, go to Philadelphia.
The Pennsylvania State House. Congress voted for independence here, fifty years before.
In the tower hung a bell ordered for another fiftieth anniversary, that of Pennsylvania's charter. Its verse comes from the Bible's jubilee.
In 1824 the city restored the Assembly Room for Lafayette, who was touring all 24 states. Philadelphians began calling it the Hall of Independence.
Upstairs from the Declaration was a museum. Its keeper, Charles Willson Peale, painted himself there at 81, lifting the curtain for you.
He named his children Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian, after painters. Another son, Linnaeus, was named for the Swedish scientist who sorted living things into kinds.
Peale sorted his birds by kind, case after case.
The star was a mastodon, dug out of a New York farm in 1801. A famous French naturalist had written that American animals were small and weak. Americans pointed at this.
Between 1800 and 1848, the country grew from sixteen states to thirty, and from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
To what extent did politics, the economy and foreign policy make Americans one people, 1800–1848?
Here's the exam's question about this period. How far did politics, the economy and foreign policy make Americans one people?
Peale sorted the world by kind. Historians sort it by cause. So imagine one more row of cases. One object from each film in this unit.
Tie the Threads
1800–1848
Your thread comes off a Lowell bobbin. It's cotton. An object becomes evidence when you can say how it led to the next one. Tie three chains of cause and effect: one for politics, one for the economy, one for foreign policy.
Three threads, three causes, one people. That's the case for unity, and it's a strong one.
Look closer. Every thread you tied has a second end.
The Second End
1807–1845
Politics first. The years that gave the vote to nearly every white man took it from others.
New Jersey's 1807 law left out women and Black men. New York kept a $250 property test for Black men alone.
Pennsylvania wrote the word “white” into its constitution in 1838.
Freedom's Journal's editors We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.
So they built their own churches, schools and papers.
The cotton behind Lowell's cloth grew on land taken from the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw.
Enslaved people picked that cotton. Hundreds of thousands were sold south from Virginia and Maryland.
Canals and railroads pulled the West toward the North. The South sold cotton abroad and built an identity of its own.
In 1817 a young South Carolinian wanted roads and canals to bind the Union.
John C. Calhoun Let us conquer space.
Twenty years later, in the Senate, the same man called slavery
John C. Calhoun a good—a positive good.
Most white Southerners owned no one. Their leaders defended slavery anyway, because the South's cotton and power rested on it.
Even the churches split. Over slavery, the Methodists divided in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845.
Every thread that tied Americans together also pulled on something else. One thread is still loose.
Irreparably Cracked
1846–1848
Monday, February 23, 1846. Philadelphia rang the old State House bell for Washington's Birthday.
Workmen had filed the crack's edges so it wouldn't buzz. It rang clear until noon. Then it split. A newspaper called it “irreparably cracked and dumb.”
Eleven weeks later, the United States went to war with Mexico. By 1848 Mexico had lost more than half its territory, counting Texas.
Here's the thread nobody tied. Louisiana led to Missouri's line. The land from Mexico asked Missouri's question again: slave or free?
In 1846, Congressman David Wilmot moved to ban slavery from any land taken from Mexico. Northerners mostly voted yes, Southerners no, whatever their party.
The people left out kept reaching for the same words.
David Walker See your Declaration Americans!!!
Elizabeth Cady Stanton all men and women are created equal
So here's one answer. Politics, the economy and foreign policy made Americans one people as never before. Each also sharpened the regions. And new land reopened slavery, the question that could break them.
Abolitionists had already renamed it the Liberty Bell. They took the verse at its word: all the inhabitants. The bell went quiet in 1846. The question on it didn't.