A fake but accurate account

PART 2: GROWING PAINS, which hurt some more than others

The United States Begins

The country was first run under the Articles of Confederation, which some of the founders found wanting. What they wanted was a stronger central government, even though they just fought a war to do away with strong central government. One can only guess they were really against strong central government run by someone other than themselves.

So they threw a constitutional convention and wrote the Constitution. To sell the country on this idea the Federalist Papers were circulated proving it would work, on paper at any rate. Eventually it was ratified and the government as we know it today began, though on a much, much smaller scale. They set up three main branches, the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary. This was the checks and balances system, though the government rarely manages to ever balance their checkbook. They also attached ten amendments called the Bill of Rights which guaranteed freedoms of all sorts. The bill was higher than expected, the price being eternal vigilance, and as it turns out, a lot of taxes.

George Washington was elected the first President and thus became the Father of his Country. How all the other founding fathers felt about this is unknown. The new country was pregnant with possibilities, not surprising considering the number of founding fathers, and especially Ben Franklin who seemed to father more than his share if rumors are to be believed. Washington took office and everyone went back to their own business, which mostly involved ignoring the federal government. Until they taxed something popular like whiskey which sparked a rebellion. This rebellion was put down, the distillers moved to Kentucky where the Revenuers didn't have much control, if any.

President Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon who was short on funds to "liberate" Europe. At the time Louisiana was much bigger than it is today, and much more full of Indians which is reflected in many of the French and Indian names for things, Mississippi, Tennessee, New Orleans, St. Louis, and De Troit. Meanwhile, Daniel Boone was taking settlers over the Appalachian Mountains to the Ohio valley for settling, which was very unsettling to the Indians. One of them, Tecumseh fought to stem the tide of white advance. But time and tide wait for no man, Indian or otherwise, and Tecumseh's forces were defeated at Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.

Eventually America got swept up in the Napoleonic wars when the British shanghaied sailors off American ships. This was called impressment, but didn't impress the Warhawks who called for war in 1812. Now Britain was too far away so the Americans attacked Canada instead. This didn't work very well, in fact the Canadians captured Detroit. The British captured Washington DC and burnt the White House. The Americans got a bit of their own back when Andrew Jackson defeated an English army at the battle of New Orleans. This last battle actually happened after an armistice was signed, but a victory is a victory. In the end both sides decided to return to the status quo antum and the Era of Good Feeling began. The good feeling was achieved by letting America, Canada, and Britain all claim victory in their history books.

The Erie canal was built connecting the eastern seaboard with Ohio turning New York into the most important city in the country, something New Yorkers never let you forget. Railroads and factories were also springing up all over as the industrial revolution began turning cottage industries into large workshops or sweatshops. Which is not to say folks working in cottages or anywhere else didn't sweat as there was no air conditioning then.

Midwest, Far West, and More

Industry and profits, the country, and the national ego were expanding as Americans got it in their heads that this was all the very obvious work of providence. They called it Manifest Destiny which manifested itself into more of the same, a sort-of self fulfilling prophecy. New states kept being added to the map, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, and more. It was another good time to be a mapmaker as there was built-in obsolescence in the business. This expansion was helped by the Northwest Ordinance which was mainly used in the Midwest. Eventually the expansion spilled over into Mexico, in the province of Texas. This was both a long way from the national capitals of Washington, DC and Mexico City so the people there pretty much ignored both and started the earliest version of the wild west.

Figuring the Mexicans would be as easy to defy as the British had been a generation earlier, the Texans decided on a war of independence of their own. They established a stronghold at the Alamo in San Antonio, which wasn't very strong and didn't hold despite the bungling of Mexican Generalissimo Santa Anna. Later the Mexicans were defeated by an army under Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto and Santa Anna was sent packing back to Mexico City to lick his wounds and plot another losing effort in the next war. The Texans declared a republic, which they quickly forgot about and joined the United States instead.

In 1849 gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill near San Francisco starting a gold rush. Now, rush is a relative term because in those days it took months to get to California. As the saying goes, the early bird gets the worm and the early arrivals got the gold out of the mines, later prospectors got the shaft. Fortunes were made and lost, some folks got rich, others arrived dirt poor and stayed that way despite digging through tons of dirt searching for gold veins in vain. The real money was in selling important mining supplies, like tools and liquor. Levi Strauss made his fortune selling dungarees because in any kind of rush you don't want to be caught with your pants down.

All this money eventually trickled back east just in time to finance a war with Mexico. US forces invaded Vera Cruz and fought their way to Mexico City and beat Santa Anna's army decisively. The Marines came all the way from the shores of Tripoli to capture the Halls of Montezuma providing them with a fight song, though in the reverse order. This effectively kept the Mexicans out of California, at least for the time being.

The Un-United States

While all the above was going on, there were unstable undercurrents in the land. Not plate tectonics, but the issue of North versus South, manufacturing versus argriclture, protectionist versus exporters, central government versus States Rights, free versus slave. The North was protectionist, meaning they wanted to tax imports to protect their manufacturing from having to sell people things at low prices. To make up for everything costing too much they also taxed exports, though the country didn't export much except cotton which came from the South.

The South thought the North were a bunch of busy-bodies and told them to "mind your own cotton-picking business" forgetting cotton didn't grow up north so they didn't have any cotton picking businesses to begin with. Basically, the North wanted the South to change their ways, shut up and pay up. The South wanted a divorce. The North said they had no right to leave the country, even though they had just fought a revolution less than 100 years previously to establish that right. What can you say, they fought against big central government and the right to secede and then founded big central government without a right to secede. I told you history doesn't make sense.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the presidency against three other hopeless hopefuls. At this southern firebrands decided nothing succeeds like secession and tried to split from the country and started a Confederacy to unite in disunity. Some hot-heads in Charleston bombarded Fort Sumter and the northerners bombarded Washington with appeals for retaliation. Both sides raised armies which raised the stakes as well as hackles all over. The cry went up "On to Richmond" while down south the cry was "Over our dead bodiies". Both eventually proved out.

Despite all the crying the two side's forces met at Bull Run instead. The two green armies, dressed in blue and gray and not green, fought tooth and nail but with muskets and canon. All very confusing especially when you add the fog of war which was more gunsmoke than actual fog. At a critical juncture one Confederate general stood stubbornly refusing to yield to pressure or bullets or self preservation. Thus was born the legend of "Stonewall" Jackson, which is more flattering than "Stubborn as a Jackass" Jackson. The Union army eventually lost their nerve, and maybe their lunches, and fled the field crying "Back to Washington."

Since attacking from north to south didn't quite work as expected, the Union tried attacking from south to north, which seems counter-intuitive but made sense at the time. They shipped an army to a peninsula below Richmond and marched north. The rebel army under Robert E. Lee counter-marched south driving back the Federal forces in a series of battles lasting a week, called the Seven Days Battles rather than the Battle of the Week.

The northerners returned north, returned to their original plan and even returned to Bull Run for a return engagement, the Battle of Bull Rerun. Not surprisingly the results were the same, they lost again. Some folks never learn. They fought some other indecisive battles which didn't accomplish much other than getting a lot of soldiers killed. One battle did this better than most, Antietam, where both sides lost a lot of men but the Unionists won the field.

Afterwards President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all the slaves in the Confederacy. The South were pretty much ignoring any laws of the U.S. anyway so the proclamation held as much currency in the Confederacy as Confederate currency, which wasn't much. This meant the slaves were free on paper, unfortunately for them they lived on plantations. Still it was a start and earned Lincoln the nickname "The Great Emancipator" to add to his list, "The Railsplitter", "Honest Abe", and "Lincoln Continental."

Meanwhile out west, an army lead by U.S. Grant was going down the Mississippi capturing forts. Eventually he reached Vicksburg and tried to invest the stronghold. This investment wasn't paying dividends and became a quagmire, especially since some of the areas around town really were quagmires. So he floated a flotilla down river and landed below the city and attacked north avoiding the quagmire and got a stalemate instead. At the same time the Union Navy blockaded southern ports to turn the entire Confederate economy into a quagmire.

The war dragged on this way until Lee took the opportunity after yet another Union loss to invade the north. The two armies got together at Gettysburg to slug it out on July 1st, 1863. After two days of fighting and neither side giving an inch, Lee told General Picket to charge up Cemetary Ridge, a bad omen if ever there was one. This last-ditch effort was the last straw for the Rebels who were broken and fled south just in time for the Union to celebrate the Fourth of July Confederate free. This victory, plus the fall of Vicksburg saved the Lincoln presidency, doomed the Confederacy, and sold a lot of northern newspapers that finally had good news to report.

The war wasn't over, but it all went south for the South after that. Grant took over in the east and attacked south. Sherman took over in the west and also went south, marching through Georgia to the sea burning Atlanta and inspiring books and movies about the same. In Virginia, Grant was fighting a war of attrition with Lee. Attrition is a nice way of saying "you'll run out of live bodies before we do." Eventually the Union army captured Richmond and chased the Rebel army, or what was left of it, to Appomattox Courthouse where Lee sued for peace.

The Confederacy was dead, though some die-hards tried to avenge the lost cause. An actor, John Wilkes Booth, snuck up behind Lincoln in Ford's Theater and assassinated him. He made his escape and after a manhunt was captured in a barn which was set afire, but they shot him anyway. This should be a lesson to actors going off script, but again, some people never learn.

The Re-United States

The war was over and the South was beaten, so the Radical Republicans decided to beat on them a bit more. What can I tell you, that's the way radicals are, enough is never enough. The South was reinvaded by administrators and social workers carrying carpetbags full of copperhead snakes to sell snake oil projects, or so the political cartoonists indicated. They called this Reconstruction. Out of this came the '40 acres and a mule' reparations program for the newly freed former slaves. This may not seem like much today, but education wasn't emphasized much on the plantation so farming was about the only option available.

We now turn our attention away from the trials and tribulations of the South and head west, which is pretty much what happened then, too. Settlers headed out in wagon trains as railroad trains only went as far as the tracks existed. To solve this the intercontinental railroad was built by gangs of Chinese heading east from San Francisco and gangs of Irishmen heading west from St. Louis. This gang activity met up at Promontory Point, Utah where they drove a golden spike linking sea to shining sea. This officially turned the western wilderness into the wild west where men were men and women were scarce.

The U.S. Cavalry chased Indians until some Indians lead by Sitting Bull took a stand, to which the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer took a stand of their own at the oxymoronically named Little Bighorn. They fought it out until the last ones standing were the Indians which made it Custer's last stand. Though they won the battle, the Indians continued to lose the wars and their lands eventually being driven onto reservations despite their reservations. Meantimes, cowboys on horses drove cattle to railheads, settlers in wagons drove into the open plains, and hunters drove the passenger pigeon to extinction. As you can see, Americans were a driven people.

All the while railroads were given great tracts of free land from the federal government called rights-of-way. Only railroads were given these rights this way. The farmers got their land by homesteading, an early type of mortgage before the FHA was invented, or by squatting, another form of "finders keepers." The railroads laid tracks and built train stations in the middle of nowhere under the "Build it and they will come" business plan. So they did and people did come, believe it or not. Towns and farms sprung up where they had no business being, but because they did, business began and then they had a business being there after all. Which sounds like circular reasoning, but it worked out somehow.

The Guiltless Age

While the west was busy being wild, the east had its own lawlessness. Not that people were widely disobeying the law, but more because there wasn't much law around as it was the era of laissez faire, French for the less government the fairer. This meant businesses did whatever they wanted, and what they wanted was to make money. Industrialization made things cheaper and faster and the rich got richer and the poor got richer and became middle class. The poor of Europe wanted to ride this gravy train, but got on boats and sailed to America instead. These masses where huddled onto Ellis Island and took Horace Greeley's advice to go west, which was smart because going east was back to Europe.

The trains of the time, whether carrying gravy or people, were dangerous. In fact, life was dangerous back in Victorian times, riding the train, your job, the food and water. Even sitting at home not watching TV which didn't even exist yet was hazardous because lighting was done by candles or gas flames which had a nasty propensity to burn down the house, or tenement as the case may be. Still, enough people were having a good time of it at the end of the 18th century came an entire decade called the Gay Nineties. Don't let the name fool you, homosexuals were strictly in the closet despite Victorian homes often not even having closets.

You'd have thought the Pacific Ocean might have ended the western expansion in California, but not so. Step one was to buy Alaska from the Russian Tsar who figured it was expendable as there was more than enough room and salt mines in Siberia to accommodate all his enemies. Having run out of Indians to fight, the Americans looked for new patsies to pick on and found a likely candidate close by in Cuba, the Spanish. The USS Maine battleship blew up in Havana harbor and the papers blew up the incident and war sentiment exploded. The hapless Spanish lost their navy, the war, and places like Cuba and the Phillipines. Step two was complete and now American possessions went so far west they were in the East. Somewhere in here the US also took over the Sandwich Islands which were renamed after they found out the natives weren't sandwiches but Hawaiians.

Part 1: The Early Days
Part 3: Modern Times

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