Do you know your American history? – Carlisle Sentinel
American writer and humorist Mark Twain once quipped, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” In honor of Mark Twain – and in light of a recent study that revealed that only 13 percent of American high school students are ‘proficient’ in history, as judged by the Nation’s Report Card exam – here are some things we think people don’t know, or think they know but isn’t true, about American history:
1. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all the slaves.
When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, it applied only to slaves in the states in rebellion, but not to about 50,000 slaves in territories under Union control. On Sept. 22, 1862 – five days after the decisive Battle of Antietam, the first battle of the Civil War to be fought on Northern soil and the bloodiest single-day battle with more than 23,000 casualties – Lincoln said he would free the slaves in any Confederate states that had not returned to the Union by Jan. 1, 1863. None did, but slaves were freed as Union forces advanced and took control of more Southern-held areas. However, by re-framing the Civil War as being about slavery rather than states’ rights, which is what many Southerners had proclaimed at first, Lincoln weakened the willingness of European leaders – whose countries had already outlawed and abolished slavery – to intervene, thus ensuring the Confederacy would not get outside support. Without outside support, the agrarian-based South had no way to manufacture the arms and medicines it so desperately needed.
Slavery was officially abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865.
2. Neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence guarantees the “separation of Church and State.”
The text of the First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The phrase ‘separation of Church and State’ has been traced to a Jan. 1, 1802, letter from then-President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury, Conn., Baptist Association, in which he wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Jefferson was echoing the language of the first founder of a Baptist church in North American, Roger Williams, who had written something similar in 1644.
The idea of the separation came from the tangles of European politics in which national religion – Protestant or Catholic – was cause for contention, war and even death.
3. Paul Revere did not yell ‘the British are coming.’
In fact, he didn’t “yell” anything. When Revere made his famous “midnight” ride – it was actually around 10 p.m. – on April 18, 1775, all colonists still considered themselves to be British. Yelling ‘The British are coming,’ would have been like Revere saying, “We are coming.” Instead, historians believe he spread the word – quietly, so as not to call attention to his doing so – “The Regulars are coming out” as a way to warn the colonists that British troops had disembarked and were heading for Lexington to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. They thought the town of Concord, where the Patriot arms and munitions were stored, was far enough away to be safe.
Revere’s ride has been memorialized in the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who took poetic license with some of the details.
Revere was not the only rider that night – as he rode, he alerted other militiamen, who also mounted horses and “sounded the alarm, to every Middlesex village and farm, for the country folk to be up and to arm.”
After arriving in Lexington, Revere met with Hancock, among others, to plan the next course of action. The troops who had been spotted were thought to be too large for their mission to be capturing two men, and Concord was considered a likely target.
As the riders set off to warn more people, Revere was captured and questioned by British troops. Only one of the three riders – Dr. Samuel Prescott – managed to escape and reach Concord in time to warn the townsfolk.
The next day, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, when British Regulars fired upon colonists, marked the beginning of the American Revolution.
4. After the election of 1800, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did not speak for many years.
Adams was the incumbent president – and Jefferson his vice president – in 1800. At the time, the voting system had votes for president only, not for vice president. Members of the Electoral College could cast two votes. The man with the most votes became president, and the man with the next-highest count received the vice presidency.
Jefferson and Aaron Burr were running as pro-French Republicans; Adams and Charles Pinckney were running as pro-British Federalists.
Because of a glitch in the plan – one Republican Electoral College member was supposed to withhold his second vote, thus giving Jefferson a one-vote lead over Burr – Jefferson and Burr tied for votes.
The vote then went to the out-going House of Representatives, controlled by Adams’ Federalists. After much wrangling and bickering and a week-long deadlock, Alexander Hamilton (who despised both Jefferson and Burr but hated Burr worse and eventually fought a duel with him and died in 1804) eventually swayed the out-going House to support Jefferson, who became the third president and served two terms.
From March 1801, when the new president was sworn in, to Abigail Adams’ death in 1812, Jefferson and Adams’ previously warm friendship was chilly.
However, in 1804, Abigail Adams and Jefferson corresponded. Upon learning of her death, Jefferson wrote John Adams a warm letter offering condolences and the men resumed their friendship.
On July 4, 1826, both men died, Jefferson preceding Adams by only a few hours. Unaware of Jefferson’s death, it has been widely said that Adams’ last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
5. The United States obtained most of its growth through land purchases
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 added 828.800 square miles to the United States’ existing size, more than doubling the young nation’s total area. It contained all or parts of 15 states – all of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska; parts of Minnesota that were west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota, nearly all of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, and Louisiana, including the city of New Orleans.
The purchase price was $11,250,000, plus the cancellation of about $3,750,000 in debts France owed America, for a total price of about $15 million. In 2010 dollars, that price would be $219 million.
The purchase of Alaska in 1867 added another 586,412 square miles to the country’s area. Called ‘Seward’s Folly,’ after then-Secretary of State William Seward, who orchestrated the purchase from Russia, the purchase was derided as being worthless. The area was twice the size of Texas, but it was not until the Klondike gold strike in 1896 that most Americans saw the value of the purchase. Since then, the gold, oil and copper – among other resources – that have been found in Alaska have proven that the area’s value far exceeds the price – $7.2 million, or about $.02 per acre – paid for it.
6. George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree.
And he didn’t have wooden teeth, either. The famous story about Washington chopping down a cherry tree and then telling his father, ‘I cannot tell a lie, it was I who chopped down the cherry tree,’ was invented by Parson (Mason Locke) Weems as a moral tale to inspire good behavior in children in the early 19th century. His “Life of Washington” was published in 1800, the year after Washington died, and has been widely discredited by historians pretty much since it was published.
Washington did wear dentures, however, that fit him poorly — hence his stern face in paintings of him — but the dentures were made of things like gold, lead, hippopotamus teeth and human teeth.
7. William Howard Taft (Sept. 15, 1857 to March 8, 1930), is the only president to have later become chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
He was elected to the presidency as the 27th president in 1908. After he left office in 1913, he spent his time writing newspaper articles on American legal theory. He protested vigorously against the 18th Amendment, which started Prohibition on Jan. 16, 1919, and was an advocate for the League of Nations before World War I ever broke out.
In 1921, his lifelong ambition of being chief justice was fulfilled when he became the 10th chief justice.
He also really did get stuck in a bathtub at the White House. At 6 feet, 2 inches and more than 300 pounds, he was very large and had a special 7-foot-long, 41-inch-wide bathtub installed in the White House.
8. Benjamin Franklin was not born in Pennsylvania.
Although he signed the Declaration of Independence as part of the Pennsylvania delegation, and although he is one of the Commonwealth’s most celebrated sons, the famed Dr. Franklin was born in Boston, Mass. Apprenticed to his brother James, a printer, he ran away at 17 to Philadelphia to start a new life. The rest, of course, is history. Franklin is famous for, among many other things, the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, libraries, the lightning rod, Poor Richard’s Almanack, being a diplomat, statesman and ambassador and earning the title of ‘The First American.’
Lauren McLane has a bachelor’s degree in history from Dickinson College. She has spent far more of her time than is probably good for her reading and writing about American history.
*This article was updated from a previous version.