Life in Tidewater Virginia

 

(Based on a map of Tidewater Virgina published in Harper's Monthly Magazine. 1896)

If you had money in early Virginia, you wanted a river out front and tobacco out back. Throw in a boat landing, and you were in business. Nobody wanted to drag a load of tobacco through ten miles of mud if a ship could come collect it.

 

That was Tidewater. Low country, stretching from the Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay inland to the falls near Richmond and Fredericksburg. The James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac ran through it, with creeks branching off all over the place.

 

You could wave at your neighbor across the water. Getting to his house by road was another matter. Better take a boat unless you had most of the day to kill.

 

Native Virginians knew those waterways long before the English arrived. They farmed, fished, and got around by canoe. The newcomers took their land and brought war, but communities like the Pamunkey and Mattaponi held on.

 

By the early 1700s, everybody wanted tobacco money. Grow it, dry it, pack it into wooden barrels called hogsheads, and send it overseas. Ships came back with tools, cloth, dishes, and a fresh batch of things to spend money on.

George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the Making of the Constitution

 

James Madison, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton at Mount Vernon
debating the constitution

As early as 1784, it was apparent to George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and other politicians that the new government wasn’t working. Under the Articles of Confederation, the government was weak. It didn’t have the power to raise taxes and police disputes among the thirteen states.

One of the first attempts to rework the Articles of Confederation was the Annapolis Convention, held in 1786. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia got together to rework the Confederation. One outcome of the meeting was the call for a broader Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia the following year.

Meanwhile, George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Henry Knox worked behind the scenes from Mount Vernon to draft a new Constitution. James Madison was the principal architect of what would become known as the Virginia Plan. It laid out a vision for the new government that included a strong central government, a bicameral legislative system (that included the House and Senate), and an executive and legislative branch.

The Constitutional Convention was held at Independence Hall in Philadelphia from May 14—September 17, 1787. George Washington was elected President of the Convention. He wore his military uniform and presided over it, sitting in a tall chair on a raised platform overlooking the other delegates.

Charles Dickens Comes to America—and America Won’t Leave Him Alone

 

Charles Dickens in 1842 (Munsey's Magazine. 1893)

Charles Dickens came to America in 1842 and again in 1867.

 

He could barely get through the crowds. People who’d never laid eyes on him acted like he owed them an evening. The papers looked his wife over, took inventory of his clothes, and gave his hair a thorough going-over.

 

Dickens was twenty-nine. Americans ate up his books.The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and The Old Curiosity Shop.

 

Now, everyone wanted to get close enough to go home and brag about it.

 

At first, Dickens loved the attention. He’d looked forward to visiting America for years. The newspapers welcomed him with open arms—and took a good, long look while they had him.

 

The Boston Transcript found him “frank, sociable, noble-hearted.” A Worcester reporter described Dickens’s dress—brown coat, red waistcoat, fancy cravat, corkscrew curls, forehead, eyeballs, nose, and mouth.

 

The verdict was that he had “more animation than grace, and more intelligence than beauty.”

 

Welcome to America, Mr. Dickens.

General Mad Anthony Wayne and the Attack On Stony Point, American Revolution

 

A musket ball grazed Anthony Wayne’s skull. Blood ran down his forehead. Around him, American soldiers pushed uphill through broken timber and musket fire.

Their muskets were empty. They couldn’t shoot back, and stopping to load would leave them under British fire. They had to shove through the sharpened branches and claw their way uphill to the men shooting at them.

It was just past midnight on July 16, 1779. About 1,300 Americans were going after Stony Point. They’d slipped through the marshes without a sound, but now the British were firing and men were falling.

Six weeks earlier, the British had seized Stony Point and the landing across the river at Verplanck’s Point. Between them lay King’s Ferry, a busy crossing that helped carry American supplies and travelers between New England and the states farther south. British troops now stood across that route.

Sir Henry Clinton, Britain’s commander-in-chief in America, wanted Washington to fight for it. If the ferry wasn’t enough of a temptation, British troops threatening the Hudson Highlands might do the trick. Clinton needed Washington somewhere he could strike him.

General Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan To End Civil War

 

General Winfield Scott (Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 1861)

Lieutenant General Winfield Scott was better known to his men as “old fuss n feathers,” and the name fit him perfectly. Scott was as close as the Americans had to a genuine hero. He had fought with distinction in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. In 1832, he completed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War that purchased six million acres from the Sac and Fox nations. Scott enforced Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy during that same decade and removed the remainder of the Five Civilized Tribes to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. No American military commander other than George Washington had accomplished so much.

 

Winfield Scott was a corpulent, seventy-three-year-old worrywart when the Civil War rolled around. Everything had to be just so for the old general. So he planned everything down to the last detail and prepared for every contingency.

 

When Abraham Lincoln asked Scott to draw up a plan for the war, he created the Anaconda Plan. Like the slithery South American serpent, it would wrap its coils around the Confederacy and slowly strangle it into submission.

 

The Anaconda Plan combined a blockade of Southern ports by the navy and a joint army and navy campaign down the Mississippi, and then to control New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Its object was to split the Confederacy in half and squeeze them like an Anaconda snake.

Philo Farnsworth Changed American Life

 

Whimsical illustration of Philo Farnsworth at work in his laboratory

“The damned thing works!”

 

That was the message Philo Farnsworth sent his backer after getting his television working in September 1927, according to an account published by the Indiana Historical Bureau. The picture was a straight line. After all the trouble it had taken to get it, a straight line was plenty.

 

Philo was 21. He’d been building equipment in a San Francisco laboratory, trying to make pictures travel electronically. His wife, Pem, helped with the work. Her brother, Cliff Gardner, learned glassblowing because the tubes Philo needed weren’t sitting on a hardware store shelf.

 

Getting somebody to pay for this took some explaining.

 

When fundraiser George Everson pitched the project to banker James Fagan, the banker answered, “Well, that is a damn fool idea, but somebody ought to put money into it.”

 

A group connected with Crocker First National Bank put up $25,000. Philo had money to work with—and people who’d eventually want it back.

 

He’d been thinking about television since he was a kid. Born in Utah in 1906, he’d read science magazines and fooled with electrical equipment. His wife said looking at rows in a field helped him picture how television could work.

Extracting the Caimanera Mines Guantanamo Bay Spanish American War

Sailors dragging water for mines

(Most of this article is based on official Naval Records and “Lifting the Caimanera Mines,” an article by Arthur H. Dutton in The Overland Monthly Magazine, July 1904. The illustrations are adopted from photos published in the Dutton article. The infographic on the mine is original.)

The Texas had already hit a mine. So had the Marblehead, and both ships were still afloat.

 

That was the good news. The bad news was that nobody knew how many more mines were waiting under the water.

 

It was June 1898. American warships were pushing into Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay. They’d secured the lower harbor, but getting farther inland toward Caimanera meant crossing water the Spanish had turned into a floating ambush.

 

A mine didn’t need a gun crew or good aim. It just had to sit there until something expensive bumped into it.

 

The Texas and Marblehead had caught mines with their propellers during a bombardment on June 15. Somehow, they hadn’t gone off.

 

You could call that luck, but you couldn’t build a naval campaign around getting lucky twice.