The Fabric of America (48 page)

149
The fullest picture of Benjamin Hawkins comes from
The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796
–
1810
, ed. Thomas Foster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

150
The voyage of
The Sally
is well told in the
Journal
, which deserves reading for that if for no other reason.

154
AE's bizarre meeting with Bowles and Lieutenant James Woolridge appears in the
Journal
. Woolridge's career in the Royal Navy reached its apogee in 1809 when, as captain of a fireship, he steered with suicidal bravery into the midst of a French fleet, throwing himself overboard just before it exploded, and destroyed four enemy frigates, a feat for which he was awarded a gold chain, one hundred guineas, and a ceremonial sword.

156
“
a mound of earth thrown up
”: Ellicott's Mound became famous when the dispute between Florida and Georgia about their border was finally resolved in 1872 with both sides agreeing that since it was the one obvious point their surveyors could identify, the border should run from the Mound rather than the center of the swamp.

159
AE's domestic life back in Philadelphia is covered by letters to his daughters and wife in
AE Life
and Papers. His correspondence with Jefferson is in Papers and Ford, ed.,
Works of Thomas Jefferson
.

160
I have been obliged”
: AE to James Wilkinson, April 13, 1800, Papers.

162
From the wide-ranging literature on the Burr conspiracy, the most useful for this study has been Jonathan Daniels's
Ordeal of Ambition: Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Co., 1970). But Daniel Clark Jr.'s
Proofs of the Corruption of General James Wilkinson
is indispensable.

163
“
[I] always shall be designated by the number 13”
: William R. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,”
American Historical Review
9 (1903–4). But even by 1808, his secret was sufficiently well-known for Clark to allude to him as “Number Thirteen” in the
Proofs.

163
The betrayal of Lewis and Clark came in the “Reflections,” offered by Wilkinson to Folch,
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
1 (July 1913).

165
“
I fear you will meet with an attack”
: Jackson to Claiborne, November 12, 1806, cited in “James Wilkinson: a defense by his grandson” by James Wilkinson,
Louisiana Historical Quarterly
vol. 1, no. 2, 1918.

167
For the response to the Louisiana Purchase, see Kukla,
Wilderness So Immense
.

168
Louisiana Purchase as a gigantic reservation: Thomas Jefferson explored the idea in various forms but most clearly in a letter of August 12, 1803, to John Breckinridge: “The best use we can make of the country for some time, will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the Missipi [
sic
], in exchange for their present country.”

169
The growth of the Public Land Survey, Putnam's failings, and Mansfield's strengths are covered in my
Measuring America
.

170
Lincoln's reasons for the family's move to Illinois were given to John L. Scripps of the
Chicago Press and Tribune
.

171
almost 80 percent of the population occupied just 4 percent: Wilma A. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” in
Appalachia in the Making:The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century,
Mary B. Pudup, et al., eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

172
The results of AE's astronomy were consistently reported in the
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
from 1804 through 1809.

173
AE's contributions to the Wilkinson trial are taken from Papers; his letters are also included in Clark's
Proofs.

176
The reception for James Monroe in 1817 is explored in “‘Look on This Picture… And on This!' Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820” by Andrew W. Robertson,
American Historical Review
106.4 (October 2001).

177
Andrew Jackson and the law: The background comes from David Hackett Fischer's
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

177
“treated property offenders much more harshly
”: Edward L. Ayers,
Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

178
The paid sheriff was introduced by Jackson's ordinance proclaimed in Pensacola on July 21, 1821.

180
John Quincy Adams's fifty-one volumes of diaries, kept at the Massachusetts Historical Society and now online, are the prime source for his life. See
http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/
.

180
The problems of the eastern portion of the Canadian frontier were well documented in an exhibition, “John Mitchell's Map: An Irony of Empire,” on April 21, 1997,
at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. See
http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/mitchell/
.

181
AE's demarcation of the Georgia–North Carolina border, and his days at West Point are covered in
AE Life
and Papers.

184
The Monroe Doctrine and Adams's subsequent congressional career are best explained in Samuel Flagg Bemis's two volumes,
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
(New York: Knopf, 1949) and
John Quincy Adams and the Union
(New York: Knopf, 1956).

186
Adams's version of manifest destiny is quoted in Walter A. McDougall's
Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

187
“
If the Union must be dissolved
”: Adams's diary, 1819.

187
AE's reaction to western preachers: May 17, 1785,
AE Life
.

188
For Dow's preaching style, see “ ‘Liquid Fire Within Me': Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and Early Evangelicalism, 1820–1860” by Ian Frederick Fin-seth (master's thesis in English, University of Virginia, August 1995).

189
The legend of the turtle-snapping Davy Crockett began with Matthew St. Clair Clarke's
Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee
(Cincinnati, 1833).

189
John Melish's comment on the Public Land System appears in my
Measuring America
. Edward Gibbon Wakefield's reaction was more influential than Melish's, because his writing spread the idea throughout the British empire that the distribution of land could radically influence the type of society that grew up subsequently.

191
Among the many authorities on the influence of slavery on U.S. history, one dominant theme came from David Brion Davis's broad view of it as a cultural rather than purely economic phenomenon in
Slavery and Human Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). It was counterbalanced by James L. Houston's overtly economic and property-based views in
Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

194
“We cultivate certain great staples
”: John C. Calhoun's “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” December 19, 1828.

197
Unequivocally if repellently, any doubts about the profitability of slavery were removed by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
(reissue edition, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995).

198
Timothy Flint's comments came in his
Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of Mississippi
(Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Company, 1826).

198
Ashbel Smith's remark, made in a letter December 28, 1843, was quoted in Harriet Smither's “English Abolitionism and the Annexation of Texas,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
32 (1929).

199
Henry Adams's remark comes in his autobiography,
The Education of Henry Adams
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918).

201
The attitude of some New Yorkers appears in Samuel J. May's
Some Recollections of Antislavery Conflict
(Boston, 1869).

201
Harriet Martineau's comment was made in her
Autobiography of Harriet Martineau
(reprint, London: Virago, 1983).

202
Grant expressed his characteristically blunt opinion that the purpose of the Mexican War was to increase the number of slave states in his autobiography,
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
(New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885–86).

202
Calhoun's reasons for opposing the Mexican War were put forward in a Senate speech on January 4, 1848.

203
The despair in Adams's reference to the “Utopian daydream,” in “Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents,” September 17, 1842, colored much of his public utterance in old age.

205
Woodrow Wilson
's remarks on the random creation of states in the nineteenth century appeared in “The Making of the Nation,”
Atlantic Monthly,
July 1897.

205
The House of Representatives set up its Committee on Territories in 1825, followed by the Senate in 1844. The latter became Stephen Douglas's power base.

206
The Beloit College archives published online at
http://www.beloit.edu/~libhome/ Archives/papers/beloitbegin.html
contain Horace White's memoir of the settlement's foundation.

209
Memories of harboring slaves and of the start of the Free Soil movement in Beloit are recorded in William Fiske Brown's “In Lincoln's Time: Our College Loyalty to Union and Freedom,”
Round Table
, February 10, 1911.

211
Douglas's speaking style:
Memoirs of John Quincy Adams,
vol 11, ed. Charles F. Adams (12 vols; Philadelphia, 1874–77).

211
The Senate Committee on Territories, founded in the year that Douglas entered the Senate, was dominated by him. Although the House committee was longer established, its acquiescence in his intricate deal-making indicates that during Douglas's chairmanship the Senate committee took the lead, although poor record-keeping fails to show how this was achieved.

212
Douglas's expansionist vision:
Stephen Douglas:A study in American Politics
by Allen Johnson (New York: Macmillan Company, 1908).

213
The dealings of the Committee on Territories are detailed in Johnson's
Stephen Douglas
.

215
Douglas's comment about the burning effigies is recorded in F. H. Hodder, “Stephen A. Douglas,”
Chautauquan
29 (August 1899).

215
The story of Sherman Booth is recorded in “Rescue of Joshua Glover, a Runaway Slave,” in
Leading Events of Wisconsin History
by Henry E. Legler (Milwaukee: Sentinel Company, 1898).

216
Thoreau's call for resistance came in a speech, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” delivered at Framingham, Massachusetts, July 4, 1854. “The less government” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Politics,
published in 1844. Walt Whitman's comment was sent to Mikhail Bakunin. Thoreau's disowning of American government was made in his 1849 essay “On Civil Disobedience.”

217
Angelina Grimke's reference to “
human
rights” comes in “Letter XII Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” addressed to Catherine E. Beecher, October 2, 1837.

217
David Walker's
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,
September 1829,
http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html
.

218
Lincoln's attack on the Know-Nothings was made in a letter to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855, in
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953).

219
AE's fight to reform West Point Military Academy is contained in the collection of Ellicott papers held at the academy's library. They include correspondence with James Monroe, General Joseph Swift, Sylvanus Thayer, and Jared Mansfield.

219
The history of the Corps of Topographical Engineers and its predecessor, the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, is told by Henry P. Beers in the “History of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, 1818–1863,”
Military Engineer
34 (June 1942).

220
Stephen Douglas as the promoter of railroads is the topic of Hodder's “Stephen A. Douglas.”

221
The outrage created in the north by the Kansas-Nebraska Act was expressed by the Ohio senators and representatives who signed the “Address to the People,” dated January 19, 1854.