America: The Last Best Hope Volumes I and II

MAIN CONTENTS

AMERICA THE LAST BEST HOPE VOLUME I:

FROM THE AGE OF DISCOVERY TO A WORLD AT WAR

1492–1914

AMERICA THE LAST BEST HOPE VOLUME II:

FROM A WORLD AT WAR TO THE TRIUMPH OF FREEDOM

1914–1989

AMERICA

THE LAST BEST HOPE

VOLUME I:

FROM the AGE of DISCOVERY

TO a WORLD at WAR

1492–1914

William J. Bennett

© 2006 by William J. Bennett

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Scripture quotations at taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All interior images: Getty Images.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the Library of Congress.

Bennett,William J. (William John), 1943–

America : the last best hope / William J. Bennett.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59555-055-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-59555-111-5 (trade paper)

ISBN 978-1-59555-181-8 (student edition)

1. United States—History. I. Title.

E178.B46 2006

973—dc22

2006006611

Printed in the United States of America

09 10 11 12 QW 12 11 10 9 8

To the American soldier,

whose fidelity, patriotism, and valor

have made this land

the last best hope of earth.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Westward the Course (1492–1607)

I. Columbus: The Christ Bearer

II. The Scramble for Empire

III. The Rise of England

Chapter 2: A City Upon a Hill (1607–1765)

I. Coming to America

II. The Great Migration

III. Expanding English Rule

IV. Britain and France: Conflict for a Continent

V. Religious and Intellectual Awakenings

VI. Britain and France: The Final Conflict

Chapter 3: The Greatest Revolution (1765–1783)

I. Stamping Out Unfair Taxes

II. A Total Separation

III. The Shot Heard ’Round the World

IV. A Continental War

V. The French Alliance

VI. The World Turned Upside Down

VII. A Dangerous Peace

Chapter 4: Reflection and Choice: Framing the Constitution (1783–1789)

I. A Critical Period

II. The Great Little Madison

III. The Struggle for Ratification

Chapter 5: The New Republic (1789–1801)

I. The Sacred Fire of Liberty

II. Madison’s Bill of Rights

III. A Host in Himself : Hamilton’s New System

IV. Hurricane Genet

V. A Long and Difficult Farewell

VI. War, Peace, and Honest John Adams

VII. The Revolution of 1800

Chapter 6: The Jeffersonians (1801–1829)

I. An Empire for Liberty

II. Lewis & Clark: The Corps of Discovery

III. Plots, Trials, and Treason

IV. A Splendid Misery: Jefferson’s Last Years

V. Mr. Madison’s War

VI. The Battle of New Orleans

VII. An Era of Good Feeling

VIII. The Missouri Compromise

IX. The Monroe Doctrine

X. A Corrupt Bargain: The Election of 1824

XI. Is It the Fourth?: Adams and Jefferson Die

Chapter 7: Jackson and Democracy (1829–1849)

I. From Caucus to Raucous: The Election of 1828

II. The Peggy Eaton Affair

III. John C. Calhoun: The Cast-Iron Man

IV. "Our Federal Union: It Must Be Preserved!"

V. The Tragedy of Indian Removal

VI. Jackson’s War on the Bank

VII. Old Man Eloquent

VIII. Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!

IX. Great Harry of the West

X. Reannexing Texas and Reoccupying Oregon

XI. The Halls of Montezuma

Chapter 8: The Rising Storm (1849–1861)

I. California and The Compromise of 1850

II. Railroads and Reform

III. Bleeding Kansas

IV. Dred Scott

V. Lincoln Meets Douglas

VI. John Brown and Harpers Ferry

VII. The Election of 1860

Chapter 9: Freedom’s Fiery Trial (1860–1863)

I. Secession Winter (1860–61)

II. Fort Sumter: The Circle of Fire

III. A People’s Contest: The Civil War Begins

IV. One War at a Time: The Trent Affair

V. 1862: Year of Jubilee

VI. Emancipation: Forever Free

Chapter 10: A New Birth of Freedom (1863–1865)

I. Gettysburg: The Confederacy’s High-Water Mark

II. The Agony of Abraham Lincoln

III. Long Abraham a Little Longer

IV. The Union Victorious

Chapter 11: To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds (1865–1877)

I. Pass in Review

II. Thunder on the Borders: South and North

III. Reconstruction and Renewal

IV. Impeachment

V. Let Us Have Peace

VI. A Tragic Divorce in Freedom’s Ranks

VII. The Spirit of 1876

VIII. A Dangerous Dispute

Chapter 12: An Age More Golden Than Gilded? (1877–1897)

I. A Gilded Age?

II. Reform, Roosevelts, and Reaction

III. Grover Cleveland: Tell the Truth!

IV. The Golden Door

V. Winning the West

VI. A Social Gospel

VII. A Cross of Gold

VIII. From the New World

Chapter 13: The American Dynamo— Shadowed by War (1897–1914)

I. A Splendid Little War

II. Rough Rider Politics

III. TR in the White House

IV. TR and the Square Deal

V. Wielding the Big Stick

VI. The Taft Interlude

VII. Unsinkable, Unthinkable

VIII. A Bull Moose on the Loose: The Election of 1912

IX. Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom

X. The Lights Are Going Out . . .

Notes

Index

Back to Main Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a labor of love. My love for our country has been deepened and made more intense by this project. I could not have completed this task without the help and encouragement of friends and colleagues.

Bob Morrison, my former colleague at the Department of Education, has been with the project from the beginning. He has been of immense help. His effort has been exemplary, and his love of the project has been contagious. With William Faulkner, Bob believes the past isn’t dead—it isn’t even past.

Seth Leibsohn, my producer on Morning in America and a true friend, has graciously given his time and his thoughts to this book. Seth’s wisdom about, and enthusiasm for, this project have been indispensable.

Noreen Burns has been smart about this book as she is about many things.

Steve Ochs is a great teacher. My sons and many others have benefited from his scholarship and his devotion to his students and this nation’s past. I am grateful for his selfless contributions to the early chapters of this work.

Vin Cannato read this book and provided many helpful suggestions. A distinguished author and professor in his own right, Vin provided countless insights and helped me fact-check the thousands of facts herein.

Max Schulz and Ken Watson read key portions of this book and provided solid recommendations. I thank each for his friendship and valuable help.

John Cribb had good suggestions. I took them.

Brian Kennedy and the Claremont Institute and Lawrence and Susan Kadish encouraged and supported me and this project. They all think and encourage big. I thank them.

Bob Barnett—as usual—counseled, advised, and made the deal that made the book possible.

I thank publisher David Dunham for his warm welcome to Thomas Nelson, Inc. He is accessible and responsive. My editor Joel Miller is painstakingly careful and helpful; I am grateful.

I want to thank my listeners. The callers to my radio talk show have encouraged me mightily by their love for and dedication to this country.

They deserve our best efforts.

Finally, Elayne encouraged, read, and offered her always probing commentary and judgment. I am grateful to her and to my sons for their love and support.

INTRODUCTION

I wrote this book for many reasons. The first and most important is the need for hope. When President Lincoln wrote to Congress in December 1862, shortly after he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote, We shall nobly save or meanly lose this last best hope of earth. For nearly a century before that message—and easily for a century afterward—Americans would not have doubted that this country was indeed that last best hope. In a speech scheduled for delivery in Dallas on 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s text read, We in this country are the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. Kennedy’s view was Lincoln’s before him and Jefferson’s before Lincoln. Later it was Reagan’s. Democrat, Republican, Federalist, Antifederalist . . . it hardly mattered. An abiding sense of American greatness, of American purpose, of American exceptionalism has long characterized many of our leaders and tens of millions of the rest of us as well. We have long had hope.

I believe America is still that hope, but I also believe that our conviction about American greatness and purpose is not as strong today. Newspaper columns and television reports are full of cynicism. Many express doubts about American motives on the world stage. Some Americans seem ready to believe the worst about our leaders and our country. Thinking and believing the worst certainly is not hopeful. It is my humble wish that those who read this book will find reason to reclaim some of the hope and conviction we have lost.

The second reason I wrote this book is to give Americans an opportunity to enjoy the story of their country, to take pleasure and pride in what we have done and become. Many books about America not only fail to counter cynicism and hopelessness, they don’t encourage anything positive in their place. Some do not engage, entertain, educate, or encourage. History textbooks are often the worst in this regard. National tests repeatedly show that many high school (and college) students know little about their country’s past. Dull histories drive young people away—away from serious study, away from reading history as adults, away from a reasoned, thoughtful, and heartfelt embrace of their country. Dumbed-down history, civics, and—worst of all—social studies textbooks may be one cause of voter and citizen apathy. An encouraging countertrend is the huge popularity of a few histories and biographies. David McCullough’s 1776 and Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin come to mind. The success of these books is much deserved: they give pleasure, they educate, and they entertain. But few such books have attempted to tell the whole American story. I hope this will be one.

The third reason I wrote this book is to give thanks and to remind my fellow citizens of their obligation of gratitude to those who made it possible for us to lead free and happy lives. To Lincoln and the Founders before him, and to many historical figures afterward, much is due. Obscurity and oblivion are not what they deserve.

Americans can be grateful that time and again, our ancestors and our contemporaries have chosen wisely and have by their demeanors defined us as a people. Over and over again we have shown the almost uniquely American capacity for self-renewal. And over and over again in our story, intelligence and leadership have counted in the nick of time. Think of those Americans at Philadelphia in 1787 who devised the most miraculous political document in history just as the young nation seemed to be falling apart.

Or Americans coming together to rebuild this nation after the long and devastating Civil War.

Or Americans standing fast against totalitarianism during the Cold War.

At the same time, it is regrettable but true that any number of American choices were not wise. For example, we failed to eliminate slavery when this nation was founded. For too long we failed to uphold our stated principles in the face of Jim Crow segregation laws.

We can be grateful that leaders like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rose to prod our consciences and to force us to look into the mirror of our own souls, however belatedly. We needed them to help us right those wrongs. It is important to note that when such leaders stepped forward, they acknowledged a debt of gratitude: both Frederick Douglass and Dr. King appealed to the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers. They reminded Americans that this country, in order to be true to itself, had to attend to the business of establishing justice and respecting the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To deny some people these universal rights because of the color of their skin, these reformers pointed out, was to deny the essence of what America was to the world. Those who would deny fundamental rights were, as Lincoln said, blowing out the moral lights around us and dishonoring our Fathers. We need to remember the Fathers and the lights that showed them the way.

The fourth reason I wrote this book is to tell the truth, get the facts out, correct the record, and put forward a reasoned, balanced presentation of the American story. In this work, I will not try to cover up great wrongs. Injustices need sunlight—always, as Justice Brandeis said, the best disinfectant. I will try to paint America as Oliver Cromwell asked to be painted: warts and all. But I will not follow the fashion of some today who see America as nothing but warts.

We must remember that America is still a great success story. When we criticize—as criticize we must—we should play the part of what James Madison called a loving critic. Former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it best: Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies that are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is on balance incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do. Have we done obscene things? Yes, we have. How did our people learn about them? They learned about them on television and in the newspapers.

The fifth reason I wrote this book to encourage a new patriotism—a new reflective, reasoned form of patriotism.

Ronald Reagan was especially proud of the new patriotism he had helped to spark during his two terms. It was something even his opponent Fritz Mondale was gracious enough to praise him for. But Reagan recognized that this spirit would not last unless it was an informed patriotism. Interestingly, the Old Man who dreamed dreams—and lived to see those dreams become reality—looked backward in his Farewell Address to the American people. It was something he rarely did:

[T]here is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past 8 years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over thirty-five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.

But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom— freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection].

So we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those thirty seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.Well, let’s help her keep her word.

If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.

Finally, I write this story to kindle romance, to encourage Americans to fall in love with this country, again or for the first time. Not unreflectively, not blindly, but with eyes wide open.

The great writer, adventurer, and map enthusiast Bernard DeVoto once had good reason to write to his friend Catherine Drinker Bowen, the wonderful historian whose works Miracle at Philadelphia and Yankee from Olympus made history come to life to a wide audience. She was losing heart, getting discouraged in her history writing craft. Were her stories of America important? Was her celebration of her country and its achievements right? Where was the romance? DeVoto wrote this to her:

If the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when our Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln and the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headlines you read in a newspaper. . . . The simplest truth you can ever write about our history will be charged and surcharged with romanticism.

The dream of which DeVoto writes is, of course, the American dream, and as he reminds us, despite obstacles, setbacks, stupidities, and atrocities, there is an unparalleled and documented record of this dream’s being real. America was, is, and—we pray—will continue to be the place where more than anyplace else, dreams actually do come true.

One

WESTWARD THE COURSE

(1492–1607)

America comes into view slowly for Europeans, just beyond the western horizon. Led by Christopher Columbus, a series of brave and ruthless explorers race to make new discoveries and lay claim to vast regions. Spain seeks empire, as does Portugal. Having freed the Iberian Peninsula from seven hundred years of Muslim rule, they nonetheless retain a dread practice of the Moors—human slavery. France and England come later, settling respectively in Canada and along the Atlantic seaboard. These latecomers, the English, challenge Spain’s far-flung empire, eventually seizing control of the seas from their former Iberian masters. Despite fears of the unknown—disease, privations, wild animals, and sometimes hostile natives—the Europeans are irresistibly drawn to the possibilities of new life in the New World.

I. COLUMBUS: THE CHRIST BEARER

Bartholomeu Dias’s two sailing ships limped back into Lisbon harbor in December 1488, bringing startling news: he had succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. The sea route to the riches of India and the Spice Islands of Asia lay open to the seafaring Portuguese. Among those waiting in Lisbon for Dias to bring his report to his king, John II, was a tall, red-haired sea captain from Genoa, Italy, named Christopher Columbus. Dias’s triumph would mean more years of disappointment for the Italian mariner. If India could be reached by going east, the king would have little interest in financing Columbus’s great enterprise—a westward voyage to the Indies.¹

The Portuguese had been inching along the coast of Africa for a century. Unlike their neighbors in Spain, who spent most of the fifteenth century fighting to rid their country of the Muslim Moors, Portugal had been united, seeking. Prince Henry the Navigator had established a world famous school at Sagres to bring together all the elements of seamanship, mapmaking, piloting, and navigation.² Prince Henry sent out as many as fifteen expeditions to Africa’s Cape Bojador, just south of the Canary Islands. His captains all returned claiming that the shallow waters and fierce currents made that point impassable. Finally, Prince Henry ordered Gil Eannes to sail beyond the cape. Eannes did so in 1434 by sailing west into the Atlantic before heading back to Africa’s coast. He had at last passed the dreaded cape.³ This same Eannes ten years later would bring back the first shipload of two hundred African slaves. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, a Portuguese contemporary of Eannes, wrote that desperate African mothers would clasp their infants in their arms, and throw themselves on the ground to cover them with their bodies, disregarding any injury to their own persons so that they could prevent their children from being separated from them.⁴ Zurara tried to lessen the horror of these scenes by assuring readers that the slaves were treated with kindness and no difference was made between them and free-born servants of Portugal. He said they were taught trades, converted to Christianity, and intermarried with the Portuguese.⁵ Still, he gave us insight when he wrote: What heart could be so hard as not to be pierced by piteous feeling to see that company?⁶ And the presence of light-skinned Africans among them suggested that some, at least, had been bought in markets from the ubiquitous Muslim salesmen.⁷

Slavery was an inescapable part of African life. Mansa Musa, a devout Muslim, was the king of Mali (currently part of Niger). He sold fourteen thousand female slaves to finance his journey to Cairo in 1324.⁸ The Arabs were always seizing our people as merchandise, complained the black king of Bornu (in present-day Nigeria) to the sultan of Egypt in the 1390s.⁹ With the extension of Islam into West Africa’s Gold Coast came an increasingly vigorous trade in black slaves.¹⁰ The Christian Portuguese emulated this practice. Three hundred years before adoption of the U.S. Constitution, decisions made in Europe and Africa would have great and terrible consequences for a nation as yet unimagined and a people still unnamed.

Portugal’s efforts gained momentum when the Muslim Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople in 1453. This meant that city-states like Genoa and Venice would have to deal with the Turks for such prized goods as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. And it would drive the Atlantic kingdoms outward.

Columbus had had to plead for King John II to give him a safe passage to Lisbon because he feared arrest for his debts. Columbus was surely capable of directing such a venture as he proposed. He had traveled as far away as Iceland and Britain and throughout the Mediterranean at a time when most mariners never ventured outside the sight of land. Still, Columbus spent years unsuccessfully appealing for support for his great project.

One thing Columbus did not have to contend with was any notion that the earth was flat. Although a popular misconception, in truth all scholars at that time knew the earth was a sphere. What they did not know was the circumference of the earth. Here, Columbus radically miscalculated. He thought that Japan lay only 2,400 to 2,500 miles west of the Canary Islands.¹¹

Columbus heard Dias make his report to Portugal’s king and returned, empty-handed, to Spain. These were years of great frustration for Columbus as Spain’s monarchs—Ferdinand and Isabella—concentrated their attention on driving the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula. Finally, in 1492, the Spanish rulers succeeded in freeing their country of seven hundred years of Moorish domination. Ferdinand and Isabella saw their victory as a gift from God. They styled themselves their most Catholic majesties. Columbus’s devout religious faith clearly helped him in his appeals to them for aid. He took seriously his first name, which means bearer of Christ. He pleaded for the chance to carry Christianity to the lands beyond the sea.¹²

With three small ships, called caravels, Columbus set sail from the port of Palos on 2 August 1492. Favored by fair winds and clear skies, the Niña, the Pinta, and his flagship, the Santa Maria, made excellent time. Even under such favorable conditions, Columbus’s Spanish sailors soon began to grumble. With steady winds carrying them west, how would they return to Spain? And when the little flotilla entered a dense patch of sargassum (gulf weed), the men fretted about getting stuck in the thickening growths. Most troubling of all, perhaps, was the fact that they were Spaniards and the Capitán General was not. Columbus was Genoese, and centuries of foreign occupation had led these sons of Spain to be deeply suspicious of outsiders. Columbus had to deceive his sailors by keeping double logs of the ships’ daily distance covered. Even by his false account, however, the men could tell that they had gone farther west than anyone had ever gone before, and farther west than they had been led to believe they would have to go in order to make a landfall.

Threatened with mutiny by his crew, Columbus was forced to promise his captains on October 9 that if they failed to sight land within three days, they would all turn about and head back to Spain. The captains were Martin Alonso Pinzon, commander of the Pinta, and his brother, Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who led the Niña. They were Spaniards, from a Palos shipping family, and gave Columbus help without which he could never have succeeded. Fortunately for Columbus, stiff breezes sped his ships’ way and his crew began to see clear signs of land ahead. Flights of migrating birds covered the moon. Tree branches with still-green leaves floated by, giving assurances of land just over the horizon.¹³

Suddenly, gale winds and rough seas confronted the expectant mariners on the night of October 11. Determined, Columbus refused to shorten sail. Early in the morning of the twelfth, the cry came from Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta—"Tierra! Tierra!" Columbus gave orders to stand off the shore to avoid reefs and shoals and, finally, to shorten sail. At dawn, they began their search for a safe place to land.¹⁴

Columbus, the admiral as he was now called, put out in a longboat from the Santa Maria and headed into shore. It carried the royal flag of Castile (a great province of Spain) and the banner of the expedition, which was a cross of green surmounted by a crown, all on a white field. The brothers Pinzon joined the shore party in their own ships’ boats. The men knelt in the sand, prayed, and gave thanks to God for their safe passage. Then Columbus named the island—a part of today’s Bahamas—San Salvador, Holy Savior.¹⁵