Kenneth C. Davis - A Nation Rising: Untold Tales of Flawed Founders, Fallen Heroes, and Forgotten Fighters from Americas Hidden History

A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industryadvancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.

T HOMAS J EFFERSON ,
F IRST I NAUGURAL A DDRESS (M ARCH 1801)

These were our founders: imperfect men in a less than perfect nation, grasping at opportunities. That they did good for their country is understood, and worth our celebration; that they were also jealous, resentful, self-protective, and covetous politicians should be no less a part of their collective biography. What separates history from myth is that history takes in the whole picture, whereas myth averts our eyes from the truth when it turns men into heroes and gods.

N ANCY I SENBERG ,
F ALLEN F OUNDER

The Dream of Our Founders

I T WOULD BE difficultno, it would be impossibleto have witnessed the events surrounding Election Day 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009, either as a historian, as an interested observer, or simply as an American, and not to have been profoundly struck by their place in our history. The stunning election of Barack Obama has rightfully been judged a transforming moment which historians may someday rank alongside the elections of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reaganfulcrum moments in which the course of American history took a sharp, sudden, and decisive turn. And it would be equally difficult, if not impossible, to continue to write about the shaping of a nation without taking into account this extraordinary milestone in American history.

Obamas election to the nations highest office marked a profound reversal of many long-held assumptions about geography, gender, parties, politics, and race relationsindeed, the American character itselfthat have been entwined in this nations fabric since the arrival of Europeans in North America more than 400 years ago.

On the night of his election in 2008, Obama offered a victory speech touching on this upheaval of the American political landscape and its place in the drama of American history. Speaking in Chicagos Grant Park to a throng of deliriously joyful and tearful celebrants, the forty-seven-year-old president-elect opened by saying:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

T HE D REAM OF O UR F OUNDERS

G RANTING THE FUNDAMENTAL notion that America is a place of great opportunity, it is still nearly impossible to contemplate Obamas phrase, the dream of our founders, without pondering its extraordinary and obvious corollary: many of those dreaming founders would have been perfectly at home owning Barack Obama, his wife Michelle, and their two little girls and perhaps selling all or some of themeither for profit or to pay off debts. That august group would include, of course, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, along with many of the Founders who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Framers who wrote the United States Constitution. At the time of its creation in Philadelphia, the Constitution stated that had Barack Obama then been a person held in service, he would have been counted as three-fifths of a man for the purposes of allotting seats in Congress.

So the Founders dream of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is real and possible. But it has always existed uneasily alongside the insidious influence that the legacy of slavery and race has exerted on Americas pastthe stunning gap between Americas ideals and its realities. These two competing visions of e pluribus unum lie at the heart of this countrys great contradiction, and they frame the moment of Obamas election.

The momentous upheaval brought about by Obamas victory did not wipe the slate clean. For all the distance that America has traveled as a nation since 1776, the country still needs to reconcile the glorious dream with the dark nightmare that haunts Americas past. And the sharp contradiction that pits the history of slavery and race against the dream of our founders is nowhere more clearly and devastatingly laid bare than in the period covered in this book, the crucial first fifty years of the nineteenth century.

It was a dynamic and dramatic half century during which the United States changed with stunning speed from a tiny, newborn nation, desperately struggling for survival on the Atlantic seaboard, to a near-empire spanning the continent, from sea to shining sea. In 1800, according to the census, the United States population stood at 5,308,483, of which 893,602 were slaves. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the nation doubled in size geographically. By 1826 and the Jubilee celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the population, swollen by waves of immigrants, had reached more than 12 million. And by 1850, with an even greater influx of immigrants, it had nearly doubled again, to 23,191,876, with 3,204,313 of them slaves.

It was also a half century of tremendous technological innovation: canals, steamships, railroads, and the telegraph had made for revolutions in travel and communications. The sewing machine and photography changed everyday life. When the nineteenth century began, written messages and armies moved as they had for thousands of years. By the middle of that century, information was sent over telegraph lines in minutes. Steam revolutionized the movement of people, armies, and goods.

America began to be transformed in other less material, less utilitarian ways as well. This was the era that saw an emergence of homegrown American arts and letters. Breaking free from the strictures of British and European convention, a new generation of American writers created a distinctive American voice: Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Whittier, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Poe, and that most original of voices, Walt Whitmanwho even said it outright: I hear America singing. All injected vitality into American letters. And many would cross the line between art and politicsactively writing, often in harshly critical terms, about the American scene they observed.

It was a time, in other words, when the dream of our founders was realized in ways that few men of the Revolutionary generation could have possibly imagined. And it was an era in which an inexorable succession of events ultimately led to the great, tragic conflagration that followedthe American Civil War.

But for all too many Americans, the events of those fifty-odd yearscounting roughly from Thomas Jeffersons controversial election in 1800 to Californias statehood in 1850have fallen into a black hole called American history. Even though some of us probably have dim recollections of such household names and phrases as the Non-Intercourse Act (a perennial high school favorite), the War of 1812 (What was that about?), Manifest Destiny, the Missouri Compromise, Tippecanoe and Tyler too, the Mexican War (What was that about?), and the California gold rush, the details are frequently fuzzy. Far too many people skip from 1776 to the Civil War without a clear sense of what happened during a good part of Lincolns famous four score and seven years.

And thats too bad, because this era stands as one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous periods in Americas relatively brief history. When we move beyond the nineteenth-century household names and textbook buzzwords such as nullification, states rights, or manumission, the far-reaching human impact of these crucial decades becomes even more compelling. So I return to Americas hidden historythe obscure, forgotten or deliberately erased events and people that had a profound impact on the shaping of a nation.