APUSH Game Day 2020

This year, some 3.4 million students are registered to take AP Exams, which are designed to test high school students’ understanding of college-level material. Good luck to all the APUSH students taking the national exam this afternoon!

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Copperheads

In the 1860s, the Copperheads were a vocal faction of Democrats in the Northern United States of the Union who opposed the American Civil War, wanting an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates.

 

In a rural community upstate New York in 1862, farmer Abner Beech is a Northern antiwar Democrat. While his neighbors take up the Union cause in the ongoing American Civil War, Beech believes that coercion in resisting the secession of the southern states is unconstitutional, and gradually becomes more and more harassed for his views, derisively called a "Copperhead". His son, Thomas Jefferson Beech, enlists in the Union Army. Beech also arouses the ire of militant abolitionist Jee Hagadorn, whose daughter Esther (Lucy Boynton) loves Jeff.

Draft Riots and $300 Men, 1863

In 1863, Congress issued a Conscription Act to draft more people into the army to fight the Civil War. The draft law also included a provision that allowed wealthy men to pay $300 to a substitute (over $6,000 in today’s money) , thus avoiding military service. In response, in New York City protesters led four days of violent attacks against African Americans, draft officials, wealthy businessmen, and Protestant missionaries.

Notable $300.00 men who avoided the Civil War Draft

Notable $300.00 men who avoided the Civil War Draft

The Conscription Act of 1863

Context: Why do we need a draft ? 
 President Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers in April 1861. Lincoln gave a second call for an additional 42,000 men in May 1861.  In July 1861, the U.S. Congress sanctioned Lincoln's acts and authorized 500,000 additional volunteers. As the war dragged on and Battle casualties increased a formal draft become necessary

Conscription Act of 1863 The first instance of compulsory service in the federal military services. All male citizens, as well as aliens who had declared their intention of becoming citizens, between 20 and 45 were at risk of being drafted. No married man could be drafted until all the unmarried had been taken.  Two methods of evading the draft were available. A man could hire a substitute who would serve in his place, or he could simply pay $300 to get out of the obligation.   Of the more than 750,000 drafted in 1863 and 1864, only roughly 46,000 ever saw the battlefield.

Consequences: The New York City draft riots (July 13–16, 1863) were violent disturbances widely regarded as the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and racially-charged insurrection in American history, aside from the Civil War itself

Young Men Go to War

“Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to.This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Battle of Antietam, 1862

"No single battle decided the outcome of the Civil War. Several turning points brought reversals of an apparently inexorable momentum toward victory by one side and then the other during the war. Two such pivotal moments occurred in the year that preceded Antietam. Union naval and military victories in the early months of 1862 blunted previous Southern triumphs and brought the Confederacy almost to its knees. But Southern counteroffensives in the summer turned the war around. When the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River into Maryland in September, 1862, the Confederacy appeared to be on the brink of victory. Antietam shattered that momentum. Never again did Southern armies come so close to conquering a peace for an independent Confederacy as they did in September 1862. Even though the war continued and the Confederacy again approached success on later occasions, Antietam was arguably, as Karl Marx and Walter Taylor believed, the event of the war."

Historian James McPherson Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (2002)

Battle of First Bull Run, 1861

Contest: Gen. McDowell leads 30,000 men against Gen. Johnston's 22,000 Southern troops in an attempt to crush the rebels and go "On to Richmond." South scores victory as Union troops flee back to Washington in disarray. McDowell replaced by Gen. McClellan.

 "There They Waited" (2:53)

 First Bull Run Scene - From Gods and Generals 

 "The Great Skeedadle" (4:29) 

 Causalities and Loses:  

Union: 481 killed; 1,011 wounded;  1,216 missing TOTAL: 2,708

Confederacy:  387 killed;  1,582 wounded;  13 missing) TOTAL: 1,982

Consequence: The Union army's defeat made it painfully clear that the war would last much longer than 90 days and be harder fought than anyone had expected. It certainly would be no picnic.

 

Charles Sumner - Paris 1838

The Greater Journey – Americans in Paris
by David McCulloch

Charles Sumner [page #131]

On Saturday, January 20th 1838, as he recorded in his journal, Charles Sumner attended a lecture at the Sorbonne on Philosophical theory delivered of Heraclites by Adolphe-Marie duCaurroy, a distinguished grey haired scholar that spoke extremely slow. Sumner began looking around the hall. He had quite a large audience, “Sumner wrote, “among whom I noticed two or three blacks, or rather mulattoes – the-thirds black perhaps- dressed quite a la mode and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion…”… He watched closely. The black students were well received by the other students, he noted.

It was for Sumner a stunning revelation. Until this point he was not known to have shown any particular interest in the lives of black people, nether free blacks nor slaves. On a trip to Washington a few years earlier, traveling by rail through Maryland, he had seen slaves for the first time. They were working in the fields, and as he made clear in his journal, he felt only disdain for them. “They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with anything of intelligence above that of brutes.” He was to think that way no longer.

It would be a while before Sumner’s revelation – that attitudes about race in America were taught, not part of “the nature of things”-would take effect in his career, but when it did, the consequence would be profound.

John Tyler is my Grandfather

President John Tyler was born in 1790, but still has two living grandsons. We met with members of his family to find out how two generations managed to last through most of U.S. history. CBS News national correspondent Chip Reid explains.

Source Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiL2PgC17A

The Quick Summary of Tyler's Grandchildren Former President John Tyler (1790-1862)  fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler in 1853 at age 63; Lyon Gardiner Tyler fathers ....Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr in 1924 at age 71 and  Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928 at age 75. Both are still alive today

 Former President John Tyler, born 221 years ago, still has two living grandchildren. The one-term president isn't a well-known historical figure; he's probably best remembered for helping to push through the annexation of Texas in 1845, shortly before leaving office.

 So, how is it possible that a former president who died 150 years ago would still have direct descendants alive today? As it turns out, the Tyler men were known for fathering children late in life. And that math is pretty outstanding when added up:

 John Tyler was born in 1790. He became the 10th president of the United States in 1841 after William Henry Harrison died in office. Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler in 1853, at age 63.  Then, at the age of 71, Lyon Gardiner Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924 and four years later at age 75, Harrison Ruffin Tyler. Both men are still alive today.

 That means just three generations of the Tyler family are spread out over more than 200 years. President Tyler was also a prolific father, having 15 children (8 boys and 7 girls) with two wives. He even allegedly fathered a child, John Dunjee, with one of his slaves.

NOTABLE

He joined the South's secession efforts shortly before his death and was even elected to the Confederate House of Representatives.

Because of his Confederate ties, Tyler's is the only presidential death not officially mourned.

Tyler ascended to the presidency in 1841. Other things that happened that year: Canada became a nation; the United States Senate has its first filibuster, lasting nearly a month; the city of Dallas, Texas was founded.

Tyler was the first person to ascend to the presidency through succession as vice president.

The Dreams of El Dorado

The Mild, Mild West: On “Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West”
By Karl Jacoby

OCTOBER 13, 2019

FOR A PEOPLE OBSESSED with expansion, Americans have spent more than a century confused about how best to tell the history of their spread into the West. At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, attendees could step into one of the White City’s hastily constructed pavilions to listen to the professor Frederick Jackson Turner unveil his “frontier thesis.” Or they could cross the street to catch a performance by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his “Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” the most popular show business act of its time.

Each figure offered a synoptic history of the West, but otherwise they diverged starkly from one another. Turner managed the neat trick of making “free land” the key factor in the rise of American democracy without ever once mentioning the dispossession of the continent’s indigenous peoples that made it possible. Cody, by contrast, made warfare with American Indians the preeminent feature of his Wild West Show. This trigger for this violence, however, was not US expansion but rather Native American aggression toward peaceful settlers. Among the highlights of his troupe’s performances were scenes in which real-life Indians, many of them recent survivors of violent encounters with the US Army, reenacted attacks on stagecoaches and log cabins only to be dispatched at the last minute through the heroics of Buffalo Bill and his “Cowboys.”

Present-day historians of the American West still find themselves wrestling with the errors of Turner and Cody. Over 30 years ago, Patricia Nelson Limerick published The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, a book that sparked the “New Western History” with objections to Turner’s inattention to gender and ethnicity. Shortly afterward, Richard White released “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, a work that placed the federal government rather than rugged individuals at the center of the story.

Limerick’s and White’s books inspired a flood of new monographs about the American West, transforming a field that had degenerated into an academic backwater into one of the most dynamic areas of study in US history today. But no scholar attempted a single volume synthesis until this year when H. W. Brands, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, published Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West.

Brands is a well-regarded biographer who tells his story through character sketches. He opens and closes his book with Teddy Roosevelt (the subject of Brands’s 1998 biography, T. R.: The Last Romantic), an archetype of the effete Easterner who reinvented himself under big Western skies. As one contemporary lamented after Roosevelt’s ascension to the nation’s highest office in 1901, “That damn cowboy is president of the United States.”

The rest of Brands’s narrative marches through a series of crisply written vignettes centered on various individuals, some of them well known (Lewis and Clark, Stephen Austin), others less so (Joseph Meek, an early fur trapper and settler to Oregon), most of them white and male (among the exceptions: the missionary Narcissa Whitman; the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph; the Lakota holy man Black Elk). To the extent that Dreams of El Dorado advances a sustained argument, it is that the West’s promise of new beginnings and fresh starts often proved illusory: “More commonly […] the reality fell short — often far short — of the dreams.” In a nod to Turner’s nostalgia about the supposed close of the frontier in 1890, Brands situates the West’s significance in the past, with only a “residue” slipping through into our present day: “The gambling spirit of the Gold Rush found its echo in the venture capitalism of Silicon Valley.”

Although the book’s publication date is in October, Dreams of El Dorado has the feel of a book crafted for the Father’s Day market. Brands’s has a deft narrative touch and a talent for highlighting the human drama undergirding historical events. But Dreams of El Dorado is not challenging history. It is scholarship as entertainment, history as adventure story. The book’s purpose is not to cause the reader to rethink their conventional understanding of the American past, but rather to affirm what on some level they already know. Brands is Cody-like in his treatment of history as a vast theatrical pageant, and unfortunately Turner-esque in consigning the violence against indigenous people to the historical background.

If there is any larger insight to be gleaned from Dreams of El Dorado, it has to do with how difficult it remains for many historians to include a complete treatment of Native Americans in their narratives. Brands’s book appears on the heels of several other books by popular historians, both inside and outside the academy, that have struggled with making North America’s indigenous peoples meaningful actors in the past. Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States purports to be a comprehensive single-volume history of the United States, but as Christine DeLucia detailed for LARB readers several months ago, for the vast majority of Lepore’s narrative, Indians are “simply ghosts, spectrally off-stage in the American story.” The title of David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, betrays the book’s not-so-subtle biases. McCullough may be a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the very voice of history to many Americans thanks to his frequent narration of PBS documentaries (including Ken Burns’s The Civil War). But The Pioneers recycles tired 19th-century tropes of Indians as savage obstacles to white efforts to bring “American ideals” to the “unbroken wilderness.”

Brands is too smart a scholar to ignore Native Americans or to reduce them to cardboard stereotypes. But they exist nonetheless as foils to what in his telling emerges as the real story of the American West: white settlers exploring a new landscape and making it their own. Brands has little interest in the methodological challenges involved in Native history. He makes no use of indigenous records, such as the calendar sticks of the Tohono O’odham or the winter counts of the Lakota, to try to understand an Indian perspective of events. While he quotes at length from the well-known autobiography Black Elk Speaks, Brands confines to a brief footnote the questions over the reliability of Black Elk’s recollections: the spiritual leader’s words were filtered through both an interpreter and the imaginative pen of the Nebraska poet (and non-Native) John Neihardt. In reworking his interviews with Black Elk into a popular book, Neihardt obscured key details, such as the fact that his Lakota holy man was actually a catechist for the local Catholic Church. (Indeed, the Vatican is currently considering Black Elk for sainthood.) Dreams of El Dorado makes no attempt to explore the indigenous discourse about the genocidal practices of the United States that Jeffrey Ostler managed to unearth in his innovative, just published Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.

Although Turner and Cody remain the most famous interpreters of the American West to present at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, they were not the only ones. The Windy City’s mayor invited the Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon to speak at the fair as well. The Potawatomi people had once inhabited the Great Lakes region, including the land where Chicago now stood, a fact Pokagon was quick to point out to his listeners: “Where these great Columbian show-buildings stretch skyward, and where stands this ‘Queen City of the West’ once stood the red man’s wigwams.” Pokagon went on to decry the same US expansion that Turner and Cody had so celebrated: “The cyclone of civilization rolled westward; the forests of untold centuries were swept away; streams dried up; lakes fell back from their ancient bounds; and all our fathers once loved to gaze upon was destroyed, defaced, or marred.” Repurposing a traditional Potawatomi resource, Pokagon printed up his speech on birch bark and hawked copies, bearing the title The Red Man’s Rebuke, to nonplussed attendees at the World’s Fair.

Pokagon’s words soon sunk into obscurity. But one has to wonder what present-day histories might look like if the Potawatomi leader had served as the inspiration for future narratives about the American West rather than Turner or Cody. At a bare minimum, we might at last have an honest reckoning with the costs of US nation-building. For the West was not only won; it also was lost. The place we know today was constructed atop a preexisting indigenous world with a terrifying degree of violence and environmental destruction. Yet professional historians have often shied away from this topic, finding it unrelated to what they see as the central narrative: the growth, however imperfect and halting, of American democracy. In place of Brands’s elusive dreams, we might instead read about Pokagon’s enduring nightmare.

¤

Karl Jacoby is the Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University. His most recent book is The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire(W. W. Norton, 2016).