Best and Worst Americans

American History 1600-1877 In the period from 1600 to 1877, it could be argued that the United States was only basically establishing itself as an independent nation in its own right -- the period in question builds up to the climax of the Civil War, in which the contradictions inherent in the national identity would finally reach armed conflict. Who, then, could be nominated as the best of the American enterprise in that time period? For different reasons, I would nominate Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass.

Franklin is an easy choice: he established America's credibility in the eyes of Europe. Regardless of the military issues involved in the American Revolution, it was Franklin alone who showed Europe that there was a viable independent nation across the Atlantic. This is in recognition of his various accomplishments, which were scientific, technical, literary, and philanthropical (in his endowment of universities and libraries). If there had been no Benjamin Franklin, America would have been understood as merely a vast colonial territory full of raw materials to be exploited.

Franklin demonstrated that there was something distinctive about the American character. It also must be noted that the role he played in the Revolution itself was probably crucial in terms of its success, as it was Franklin's diplomatic missions to Paris which ensured French support for the colonies.

The fact that Franklin's own view of the Revolution was somewhat ambiguous -- he supported Royalist causes before the Revolution, and was employed by the British government -- but his ultimate attendance at the Continental Congress lent it an intellectual eminence that did much to establish America as a viable nation. To include Walt Whitman on the list of best possible influences on America before 1877 may seem an odd choice: poetry and literature do not make things happen.

But Whitman served much the same function as Franklin, and Leaves of Grass demonstrated that there was a viable national philosophy.

Whitman's poetic tributes to Abraham Lincoln, in "O Captain My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," managed to give voice to the public response to Lincoln's assassination and to the Civil War generally: the fact that Whitman's quasi-religious faith in the American democratic experiment managed to persist throughout the Civil War (in which he served honorably as a nurse for the wounded) was vital to defining the nation afterward. Like Franklin, Whitman was recognized in Europe as a sign of America's maturation as an actual culture.

The most recognizable choice on this list is perhaps Frederick Douglass. The escaped Maryland slave turned abolitionist orator is perhaps the best indication of the health of American moral life even before the Civil War. Douglass managed to indict the evils of slavery simply by maintaining his own dignity and insisting on his own humanity, and his Autobiography still stands as a profound analysis of this shameful episode in the historical past.

Douglass stands above other abolitionists because there was no element of hysterical posturing to what he did: unlike William Lloyd Garrison, who simply lost interest in the fates of African-Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation, or Harriet Beecher Stowe, with her self-aggrandizing claims that God had written Uncle Tom's Cabin through her, Douglass stuck to his principles. It is difficult to select any three persons who exemplify what is best about America in this time period.

However these candidates are noteworthy for representing America at its best in the eyes of the world. Franklin made America seem credible as a home for science, and Whitman made America seem credible as a home for the arts. Meanwhile Frederick Douglass maintained an honest and patient devotion to the actual egalitarian ideals upon which the country was founded. These three deserve consideration not only for their accomplishments but for the way in which they made America credible in the eyes of the world.

In assessing the period of American history between 1600 and 1877, we must take account that the single most important event in the period is the one that summarized all of the internal conflicts of the nation as a whole -- the U.S. Civil War. As a result, trying to select those persons who represented the worst influence on the course of American events must take the Civil War into account.

I would like to discuss three figures who might not be the most obvious choices, but who I would nominate as the worst influences upon American history in this time period. They are Eli Whitney, John Brown, and Judah P. Benjamin. Eli Whitney is usually regarded as a great industrial innovator, although during his lifetime he was mostly a failure financially. He is known for two great innovations, and it is worth considering both of them.

The first was Whitney's claim to have introduced the idea of interchangeable parts into American manufacturing: in reality, this idea had been around for a while, and Whitney's claim was a triumph of self-promotion rather than engineering. However the actual patent that secured Whitney's fame -- and merits him for inclusion as one of the worst influences in American history -- was the cotton gin.

At the time Whitney introduced the cotton gin, the institution of slavery had been growing steadily more unprofitable and was considered likely to collapse on its own as an unsustainable system. The cotton gin, however, changed the institution of slavery: it made it profitable. Although we routinely celebrate engineers and inventors, there has always been a consistent critique of the human costs of industrialization.

Essentially Whitney's invention was able to turn plantation slavery into an efficient and profitable factory system, and there is every reason to believe that the explosion of "King Cotton" in the antebellum South was responsible for worsening slavery and was a result of the cotton gin itself. The bad influence of John Brown is easily understood from the standpoint of 2014 -- in contemporary terms, Brown was basically a religiously-motivated terrorist.

Both of Brown's significant contributions to American history -- Bleeding Kansas and Harper's Ferry -- are regrettable stains on the national memory. It does not matter that Brown's moral claims about the evils of slavery were prescient: Frederick Douglass could advance the same moral claims without killing people. In reality Brown was a deranged individual who was hoping to start a war, and when he failed to do so in Kansas he essentially accomplished his goal in West Virginia.

But Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was never likely to have any real world effect, except to persuade the South that their most paranoid suspicions about Northerners were correct. It is possible that the secession crisis could have been settled without the firing of shots at Fort Sumter if Brown had not already effectively militarized the country by his terrorist acts. Finally, in assessing the actual conduct of the U.S.

Civil War, it would be possible to single out many in the Confederacy as having had a particularly bad moral influence on the nation. However Judah P. Benjamin is an interesting and under-known example, and served as both Confederate Secretary of War and Confederate Secretary of State, before fleeing to.