“The
existence of parties is not necessary to free government.”
President James
Monroe
__________
February 17:
Municipal lighting is turned on in Baltimore, one hour after sunset. Lamplighters
hurried from post to post, touching off each gas jet by hand.
*
March 4: The phrase, the “Era of Good Feelings,” was coined by a
Federalist newspaper in Boston in 1817. By this time, Republicans had come to
accept the need for a national bank, and supported a protective tariff.
James Monroe’s inaugural address, according
to Ammon, was “badly read in an almost inaudible voice.” Monroe called for an
effort to construct a national system of roads and canals, with “constitutional
sanction.” He hoped to foster American manufacturing, to free us from
dependence on foreign imports; and he advocated improvement of the nation’s
defenses.
He entered office believing that the
“existence of parties is not necessary to free government,” and he made
eliminating them a primary goal. In the spring of 1817, the new president
announced that he would tour the New England states – and did so, traveling as
a private citizen, at his own expense, and without a private escort.
Monroe made himself completely accessible
to all parties and went out of his way to show respect to former Federalist
leaders. Monroe was the ideal person to undertake this reconciliation. Most men
immediately liked him, although he never aroused the same kind of enthusiasm
which Jefferson could among his associates. In spite of his rather formal
manners, Monroe had a rare ability of putting men at ease by his courtesy, his
lack of condescension, his frankness and by what his contemporaries looked upon
as his essential goodness and kindness of heart. These traits seem not only
vague, but rather unexciting, yet they were the ones most commonly stressed by
the people who knew him.
Abigail Adams who met him during the
tour, said all “were captivated by his agreeable affability…unassuming
manners…[and] his polite attentions to all orders and ranks.” (24/369, 371,
373)
Monroe particularly enjoyed seeing “Old
Ironsides,” which he hoped would be preserved as a national monument. He was
hailed, not as a hero, but as a symbol of national unity. Monroe saw himself as
head of the nation, not leader of a party.
Main gun deck of the U.S.S. Constitution.
“Historically,” Ammon explains, “the
Republican Party had been bound together as much by a shared fear of Federalism
as by a common set of principles.” Ammon notes repeatedly that Monroe was the
master of important issues, and led, in part, by his in-depth understanding of
the fundamentals.
He proposed that Congress takes steps to
facilitate the introduction of the “arts of civilized life” to the Indians,
that the Constitution be amended to authorize federally sponsored internal
improvements and to permit the establishment of “seminaries of learning,” and
that pensions be provided for veterans of the Revolution. His final suggestion
was the most welcome of all to the people and politicians alike – the repeal of
the internal taxes levied during the war. (24/387)
The new president had already been busy,
putting together his administration:
While Monroe regarded political parties
as an anomaly in a democratic state and hoped to facilitate the amalgamation of
all parties into one, he was not prepared to go quite so far as to act on
Andrew Jackson’s suggestion that Federalist William Drayton of North Carolina
be made Secretary of War. Nor was he prepared to endorse George Sullivan’s
recommendation of Daniel Webster as Attorney General. He did not think the time
was right for such an advanced step, although he agreed with Jackson that many
Federalists who had rallied to the government during the war merited
recognition. However, many others still cherished “principles unfriendly to our
system of government,” of which the Hartford convention had furnished adequate
proof. (24/357)
John Quincy Adams admired Monroe’s
ability to carefully listen to and to evaluate advice, which Adams felt was a
quality “which in so high a place is an infallible test of a great mind.”
(24/362)
All his cabinet heads remained with
him for eight years, save Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin W. Crowninshield.
Vice President Daniel Tompkins had serious financial problems and found comfort
in the bottle. “On the rare occasion when he presided over the Senate, he was
often drunk.” (24/365)
*
April 28-29: The Rush-Bagot Agreement is reached,
banning naval armaments on the Great Lakes, save for customs purposes. The
agreement was made by Richard Rush and Sir Charles Bagot. (24/345, 349)
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I always cited this quote for students, and asked
what Jefferson meant. For classroom purposes, I changed it slightly to, “by the
ears,” and would mimic holding a wolf at arms’ length. What’s the problem with
slavery, then – the wolf – in regard to the nation?
February: The questions revolving around the
admission of Missouri as a slave state quickly fester. “Who would have thought,
Senator James Barbour commented, “that the little speck we…saw [last
session] was to be swelled into the importance that it has now assumed, that
upon its decision depended the duration of the Union.” (24/450)
It seemed to President Monroe that restricting
slavery would place the control of the nation permanently in the hands of the
Northern states. Since, to his way of thinking, the real objective of these Northern
leaders was power, he believed that they were willing to accept disunion, if
their plans could not be achieved in any other fashion.
Slaves picking tobacco. Picture not in blogger's possession.
*
March 6: The Missouri Compromise is passed. The vote to delete the clause
forbidding slavery passes the Senate, 90-87. Even John Quincy Adams used his
influence to convince friends to vote in favor. A second dispute, over whether
the new state could ban the migration of free Negroes, was solved by a vaguely
worded compromise, asserting that the new state would honor the privileges and
immunities citizens enjoyed under the U.S. Constitution. (24/454)
*
March 22: Commodore Stephen Decatur dies from
wounds received in a duel.
*
May: President Monroe explains why he was reluctant to help the
Spanish colonies in their revolts: “I am satisfied that had we even joined them
in the war, we should have done them more harm than good, as we might have
drawn all Europe on them, not to speak of the injury we should have done to ourselves.”
(24/410)
*
THE RUSSIANS still have a colony in
Alaska and had establish themselves on the Farallon Islands, right off the bay
of San Francisco, where they had a small fort. Van Loon notes that “the Tsar
suddenly forbade all foreign vessels (including all American vessels) to come
within a hundred miles of his American possessions.” (124/304)
*
James Fenimore Cooper.
IN THIS YEAR, James Fenimore Cooper
first turns to writing. The following description is from Halleck’s History
of American Literature.
“One of
the outposts of civilization.”
YOUTH. …
He was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the year made memorable by the
French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family moved to the
southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at
the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet for the lake. In this
romantic place he passed the most impressionable part of his boyhood.
At the close of the
eighteenth century, Cooperstown was one of the outposts of civilization. Few
clearings had been made in the vast mysterious forests, which appealed so
deeply to the boy’s imagination, and which still sheltered deer, bear, and
Indians. The most vivid local story which his young ears heard was the account
of the Cherry Valley massacre, which had taken place a few miles from
Cooperstown only eleven years before he was born. Cooper himself felt the
fascination of the trackless forests before he communicated it to his readers.
He entered Yale in 1802
[note that he was only 13], but he did not succeed in eradicating his love of
outdoor life and of the unfettered habits of the pioneer, and did not remain to
graduate. The faculty dismissed him in his junior year. …
Cooper’s father sent him off to serve a year on
a merchant vessel. The future writer then joined the U.S. Navy as a midshipman.
He resigned from the service in 1811, when he married.
BECOMES AN AUTHOR.—Cooper
had reached the age of thirty without even attempting to write a book. In 1820
he remarked one day to his wife that he thought he could write a better novel
than the one which he was then reading to her. She immediately challenged him
to try, and he promptly wrote the novel called Precaution.
Critics of that period, often British,
“considered American subjects commonplace and uninteresting.” Cooper decided to
write about English life, knew nothing about local color, and the book was a
fizzle.
A patriotic duty to make American subjects fashionable.
This book was soon
forgotten, and Cooper might never have written another, had not some sensible
friends insisted that it was his patriotic duty to make American subjects
fashionable. A friend related to him the story of a spy of Westchester County,
New York, who during the Revolution served the American cause with rare
fidelity and sagacity. Cooper was then living in this very county, and, being
attracted by the subject, he soon completed the first volume of The Spy,
which was at once printed. As he still doubted, however, whether his countrymen
would read “a book that treated of their own familiar interests,” he delayed
writing the second volume for several months. When he did start to write it,
his publisher feared that it might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had
thought out the intervening chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it
printed and paged to satisfy the publisher. When The Spy was
published in 1821, it immediately sold well in America, although such was the
bondage to English standards of criticism that many who read the book hesitated
to express an opinion until they had heard the verdict from England. When the
English received the book, however, they fairly devoured it, and it became one
of the most widely read tales of the early nineteenth century. Harvey Birch,
the hero of the story, is one of the great characters of our early fiction.
Cooper now adopted writing
as a profession. In less than thirty years, he wrote more than thirty romances,
in most cases of two volumes each. When he went to Europe in 1826, the year of
the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, he found that his work
was as well known abroad as at home. Sir Walter Scott, who met Cooper in Paris,
mentions in his diary for November 6, 1826, a reception by a French princess,
and adds the note, “Cooper was there, so the American and Scotch lions took the
field together.”
A series of libel cases.
Halleck notes that the author’s later years were
marred by an “unfortunate incident.” He returned from Europe in 1833. Four
years later, some of his neighbors in Cooperstown aroused his anger.
Here in the summer of 1837
there occurred an unfortunate incident which embittered the rest of his life
and for a while made him the most unpopular of American authors. Some of his
townspeople cut down one of his valuable trees and otherwise misused the picnic
grounds on a part of his estate fronting the lake. When he remonstrated, the
public denounced him and ordered his books removed from the local library. He
then forbade the further use of his grounds by the public. Many of the
newspapers throughout the state misrepresented his action, and he foolishly
sued them for libel. From that time the press persecuted him. He sued the
Albany Evening Journal, edited by Thurlow Weed, and received four
hundred dollars damage. Weed thereupon wrote in the New York Tribune:—
“The value of Mr. Cooper’s character has been
judicially determined. It is worth exactly four hundred dollars.”
Cooper promptly sued The
Tribune, and was awarded two hundred dollars. In the heat of this
controversy Thurlow Weed incautiously opened Cooper’s The Pathfinder,
which had just appeared, and sat up all night to finish the book. During the
progress of these suits, Cooper unfortunately wrote a novel, Home as
Found, satirizing, from a somewhat European point of view, the faults of
his countrymen. A friend, trying to dissuade him from publishing such matter,
wrote, “You lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with
brickbats, as you do.” Cooper, however, published the book in 1838, and then
there was a general rush to attack him. A critic of his History of the
Navy of the United States of America (1839), a work which is still an
authority for the time of which it treats, abused the book and made reflections
on Cooper’s veracity. The author brought suit for libel, and won his case in a
famous trial in which he was his own lawyer.
Cooper’s reputation suffered greatly and
“diminished the circulation of Cooper’s books in America during the rest of his
life.”
Even on his deathbed he
thought of the unjust criticism from which he had suffered, and asked his
family not to aid in the preparation of any account of his life. He died in
1851 at the age of sixty-two, and was buried at Cooperstown. Lounsbury thus
concludes an excellent biography of this great writer of romance:—
“America has had among her representatives of
the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on
pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper…. But she counts on the scanty roll
of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or
loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature and no more
heroic soul.”
NOTE TO TEACHERS: My students
always found it interesting when I noted that inanimate objects, such as ships,
and here the nation itself, controlled by men, were referred to by use of the
feminine pronoun.
It was amusing to tell the
young ladies in class that some feminists had suggested a new word, “womyn,”
not based on men, to describe their sex. We started throwing our arms up in the
air to make a “Y.” I’d see female students in the hall, etc. and throw up the
“Y” and we had fun with it.
The Leatherstocking Tales.
Back to Halleck:
GREATEST ROMANCES.—Cooper’s
greatest achievement is the series known as The Leatherstocking Tales.
These all have as their hero Leatherstocking, a pioneer variously known as
Hawkeye, La Longue Carabine (The Long Rifle), and Natty Bumppo.
… Leatherstocking embodies the fearlessness, the energy, the rugged honesty, of
the worthiest of our pioneers, of those men who opened up our vast inland
country and gave it to us to enjoy. Ulysses is no more typically Grecian than
Leatherstocking is American.
The Leatherstocking Tales are five in number. The order in which they should be read
to follow the hero from youth to old age is as follows:—
The Deerslayer; or The First War Path (1841).
The Last of the Mohicans; a Narrative of 1757 (1826).
The Pathfinder; or the Inland Sea (1840).
The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna (1823).
The Prairie; a Tale (1827)
… These books are the
prose Iliad and Odyssey of the
eighteenth-century American pioneer. Instead of relating the fall of Ilium,
Cooper tells of the conquest of the wilderness. The wanderings or
Leatherstocking in the forest and the wilderness are substituted for those of
Ulysses on the sea. This story could not have been related with much of the
vividness of an eye-witness of the events, if it had been postponed beyond
Cooper’s day. Before that time had forever passed, he fixed in living romance
one remarkable phase of our country’s development. The persons of this romantic
drama were the Pioneer and the Indian; the stage was the trackless forest and
the unbroken wilderness.
The Last of the Mohicans has been the favorite of the greatest number of readers. In
this story Chingachgook, the Indian, and Uncas, his son, share with Hawkeye our
warmest admiration. The American boy longs to enter the fray to aid Uncas.
Cooper knew that the Indian had good traits, and he embodied them in these two
red men. Scott took the same liberty of presenting the finer aspects of
chivalry and neglecting its darker side. Cooper, however, does show an Indian
fiend in Magua.
Cooper’s work in this
series brings us face to face with the activities of nature and man in God's
great out of doors. Cooper makes us realize that the life of the pioneer was
not without its elemental spirit of poetry. We may feel something of this spirit
in the reply of Leatherstocking to the trembling Cora, when she asked him at
midnight what caused a certain fearful sound:—
“‘Lady,’ returned the scout, solemnly, ‘I have
listened to all the sounds of the woods for thirty years, as a man will listen,
whose life and death depend so often on the quickness of his ears. There is no
whine of the panther, no whistle of the catbird, nor any invention of the
devilish Mingos, that can cheat me. I have heard the forest moan like mortal
men in their affliction; often and again have I listened to the wind playing
its music in the branches of the girdled trees; and I have heard the lightning
cracking in the air, like the snapping of blazing brush, as it spitted forth
sparks and forked flames; but never have I thought that I heard more than the
pleasure of him, who sported with the things of his hand. But neither the
Mohicans, nor I, who am a white man without a cross, can explain the cry just
heard.’”
Mark Twain’s takedown of Cooper’s writing.
Halleck admits that some of Cooper’s other works
“are almost unreadable,” but admits the writer’s central place in American
literature. Mark Twain later provided a hysterical analysis of Cooper’s flaws as a
writer.
A sampling:
In his little box of stage properties
[Cooper] kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages
and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so
happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A
favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the
moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and
barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he
pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his
broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is
a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig
and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a
Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute,
he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step
on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find
a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather
Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.
Twain can’t help himself in lambasting Cooper.
My favorite example involves a rather large boat and a rather narrow stream:
In the Deerslayer
tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake;
it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason; and
yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself.
Fourteen pages later the width of the brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly
shrunk thirty feet, and become “the narrowest part of the stream.” This
shrinkage is not accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication
that it has alluvial banks and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and
fifty feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would
have noticed that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of
it.
Six Indians in one sapling.
Cooper made the exit of
that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place, for no particular reason; in
the second place, he narrowed it to less than twenty to accommodate some
Indians. He bends a “sapling” to the form of an arch over this narrow passage,
and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are “laying” for a settler's scow
or ark which is coming up the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled
against the stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the
lake; its rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes
the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions “it was little more
than a modern canal-boat.” Let us guess, then, that it was about one hundred
and forty feet long. It was of “greater breadth than common.” Let us guess,
then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. This leviathan had been prowling
down bends which were but a third as long as itself, and scraping between banks
where it had only two feet of space to spare on each side. We cannot too much
admire this miracle. A low-roofed log dwelling occupies “two-thirds of the
ark's length” – a dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a
kind of vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms – each forty-five feet long
and sixteen feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bedroom of the Hutter
girls, Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime, at night it is
papa's bedchamber. The ark is arriving at the stream's exit now, whose width
has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the Indians – say to
eighteen. There is a foot to spare on each side of the boat. Did the Indians
notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that
they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just
stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would have noticed
these things, but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they
are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about
his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them.
The ark is one hundred and
forty feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet long. The idea of the Indians is
to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark
creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It
will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety
foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do?
It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give
it up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief,
a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched
the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his
calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and
dropped. And missed the house! That is actually what he did. He missed the
house, and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it
knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven
feet long he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper's, not his. The
error lay in the construction of the house. Cooper was no architect.
There still remained in the
roost five Indians.
The boat has passed under
and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did – you would not
be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in
the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water
still farther astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way
astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away
astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat – for he was a Cooper Indian.
In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the
Indian that stands in front of the cigarshop is not spacious. The scow episode
is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill, because the
inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of fictitiousness and general
improbability over it. This comes of Cooper's inadequacy as an observer.
In any case, Halleck writes:
The English critic’s query,
“Who reads an American book?” could have received the answer in 1820, “The
English public is reading Irving.” In 1833, Morse, the inventor of the electric
telegraph, had another answer ready – “Europe is reading Cooper.” He said that
as soon as Cooper’s works were finished they were published in thirty-four
different places in Europe. American literature was commanding attention for
its original work.
Halleck admits Cooper’s faults. In his opinion,
however, writing in 1911, those faults did not,
seriously interfere with
the enjoyment of his works. A teacher, who was asked to edit critically The
Last of the Mohicans, said that the first time he read it, the narrative
carried him forward with such a rush, and bound him with such a spell, that he
did not notice a single blemish in plot or style. A boy reading the same book
obeyed the order to retire at eleven, but having reached the point where Uncas
was taken prisoner by the Hurons, found the suspense too great, and quietly got
the book and read the next four chapters in bed. Cooper has in a pre-eminent
degree the first absolutely necessary qualification of the writer of fiction –
the power to hold the interest. In some respects he resembles [Sir Walter]
Scott, but although the “Wizard of the North” has a far wider range of
excellence, Leatherstocking surpasses any single one of Scott’s creations and
remains a great original character added to the literature of the world. These
romances have strong ethical influence over the young. They are as pure as mountain
air, and they teach a love for manly, noble, and brave deeds. “He fought for a
principle,” says Cooper’s biographer, “as desperately as other men fight for
life.”
*
IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of 1820,
there was only one dissident vote in the Electoral College. And yet, turmoil
over the admission of Missouri as a slave state meant the era of good feelings
was soon ended.
Monroe’s reelection was foreordained. In
Virginia, only 4,321 men out of a white population of 600,000 bothered to go to
the polls.
“Mr. Monroe has just been reelected with
apparent unanimity,” Henry Clay warned, “but he has not the slightest influence
in Congress. His career was considered as closed. There was nothing further to
be expected by him or from him.” (24/472)
*
A LETTER in the Indiana Centinel, a
paper in Vincennes, offers praise for Tecumseh:
“Every
schoolboy in the union now knows that Tecumseh was a great man. He was truly
great – and his greatness was his own, unassisted by science or the aids of
education. As a statesman, a warrior and a patriot, take him all in all, we
shall not look upon his like again.”
William
Henry Harrison would say of his foe, that he was “one of those uncommon
geniuses, which sprang up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the
established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States,
he would perhaps be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of
Mexico or Peru.”
According
to his biographer, Glenn Tucker,
He was a brilliant orator and warrior
and a brave and distinguished patriot of his people. He was learned and wise,
and was noted, even among his white enemies, for his integrity and humanity.
But his unique greatness lay in the fact that, unlike all previous native
leaders, he looked beyond the mere resistance by a tribe or group of tribes to
white encroachments. He was a Shawnee, but he considered himself first an
Indian, and fought to give all Indians a national rather than a tribal
consciousness, and to unite them in defense of a common homeland where they
might all continue to dwell under their own laws and leaders. (125/131, 133)
AFTER 1822, the historian Harry Ammon
says presidential politics led to an end to any “Era of Good Feelings,” to be
replaced by an “Era of Bad Feelings,” with Monroe caught in the middle. At one
point, when he was accused of profiting from the financial misdeeds of Col.
Samuel Lane, Commissioner of Public Buildings, the Mr. Monroe erupted in a
letter:
Every kind
of malignant effort is made to annoy me, by men of violent passions, some of
whom are very ignorant, and others little restrained by principle. I have
pursued my system of policy steadily, relying on the support of the nation, and
treating every attack of a personal nature with contempt and scorn. I shall
persevere in this to the end of my term, and be happy, when I can retire,
beyond their reach in peace to my farm. (24/535)
*
The
Monroe Doctrine.
MONROE feared the European “concert of
powers,” which had organized to suppress liberal uprisings against “legitimate”
rulers: Such as, kings, queens, emperors, empresses, czars, and czarinas.
August 20: The British made the following proposal
to the Monroe administration. The two nations would announce:
1.We conceive
the recovery of the Colonies by Spain to be hopeless.
2.We conceive
the question of recognition of them, as independent States, to be one of time
and circumstances.
3.We are,
however, by no means disposed to throw any impediment in the way of an
arrangement between them and the mother country by amicable negotiation.
4.We aim not
at the possession of any portion of them ourselves.
5.We could not
see any portion of them transferred to any other power within difference.
(24/477)
According to Ammon, Adams believed Cuba
“would fall into the hands of the United States by a kind of continental law of
gravitation,” and so was reluctant to agree to Point 4.
*
AFTER YEARS of arbitration, with both the
United States and Great Britain having agreed to abide by the decision of the
czar, a matter of compensation is decided. The British will pay $1.2 million
for slaves carried away during the War of 1812.
*
September 22: Joseph Smith claims that on this date,
directed by an angel named Moroni, he goes to a spot on a hill near Palmyra,
New York, and uncovers
a stone box. Inside are golden plates, covered in strange hieroglyphics. The
angel would not allow him to take the golden plates – so Smith says he returned
annually, until 1827. On his four visit he was allowed to take the tablets
home, and translated them, he said, and from these we have The Book of
Mormon.
From the book would come the basic tenets
of what would later become the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints,
commonly called the “Mormons.”
Smith sees the angel Moroni for the first time.
*
THE RIVALRIES of various politicians begin
to percolate. Andrew Jackson is soon convinced that Monroe is trying to harm
his prospects for 1824. A rumor is spread that Monroe might seek a third term
and use the military to assure victory. The president still dreams of
eliminating parties.
*
IN THE 1823-1824 SESSION of Congress,
President Monroe ended up in a battle with the Georgia delegation – who yearned
to remove all Indians from state lands.
Ammon writes,
Monroe was
much more advanced in his thinking on Indian affairs than most of his
contemporaries. Believing, as he had stated in his annual message of 1817, that
the Indians must be given individual plots of land if they were to be induced
to abandon their nomadic habits, he instructed Governor Lewis Cass of the
Northwest Territory to make such grants to those Indians declining to be moved
West of the Mississippi. The Senate, quite unmoved by these generous
aspirations, struck out all grants in fee simple made in treaties negotiated
with the Indians in 1817.
Ammon notes that tactics used to drives
natives from their lands included “bribery, intimidation, negotiations with
tribal minorities or with groups which had no claim to the land.” Jackson, for
example, forced the Creeks to cede 23,000,000 acres, as punishment for
attacking settlers.
*
NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might
interest your students to know that this poem, which many of them have heard,
is two hundred years old. Children haven’t changed much in the last two
centuries.
December 25: Clement
Clarke Moore publishes a poem which is still popular today:
A Visit from St.
Nicholas
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,
When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer!
now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid!
on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too –
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes – how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight –
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
When not writing poems for Christmas, Moore was a Professor
of Oriental (as then called) and Greek Literature, as well as Divinity and
Biblical Learning. He later published a two-volume Hebrew and English
Lexicon.
