Story of America a tale worth telling to those who want to radically change it

A book from the personal library of George Washington, signed and bearing his bookplate, sold for $101,575 at an April 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

I have never been to Mount Vernon, but if you want to pay your respects to George Washington, that’s the place to go. On the other hand, if you want to see Washington’s Tomb – and many thousands do each year – it is two stories below the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. A man named William Thornton (a British-American architect) designed the Capitol with a place for George and Martha to be interred, along with an appropriate statue for our first president.

However, Washington directed in his will that his body should be placed in a simple tomb at Mount Vernon and, as usual, he got his way. He also stipulated that his slaves were to be set free (one may have escaped earlier). Martha had brought 84 slaves into their marriage from a previous marriage and upon her death they and their dependents reverted back to her first husband’s estate.

Congress would later disagree and pass several resolutions to have him interred in the capital. Martha finally agreed. But, it took too many years to finish the Capitol Crypt and the new owners of Mount Vernon refused to let Washington’s remains be disturbed. This tug-of-war went on for several years, primarily between the Northern politicians and Southern legislators who definitely demanded the South due to his southern heritage. With George Washington, it is easy to forget that the “Father of our Country” was only 43 years old when he took over the American forces in the Revolutionary War … matching JFK’s age as the youngest man ever elected president. Teddy Roosevelt was 42 when he assumed the presidency, but that was only after President McKinley was assassinated in 1901.

From another perspective, the highly respected Ben Franklin was 26 years old when Washington was born, literally another generation. Even Washington’s death on Dec. 14, 1799, was not primarily related to old age since he was only 67. The story is he had been riding horseback for several hours at Mount Vernon in the rain and sleet, went home to join dinner guests … did not change the wet clothes … and woke up at 2 a.m. with a sore throat and trouble breathing. Three doctors were called since pneumonia was suspected.

George was a staunch believer in the therapeutic benefits of bloodletting (as were most doctors for 2,000 years) and some versions assert that some blood was drained before doctors arrived and they ended up taking about 40 percent of his blood over the next 10-12 hours until he grew weak and died. The current speculation is that the cause was epiglottitis – an infection of the cartilage covering the windpipe that swells and blocks the flow of air into the lungs. One thing is certain: Bloodletting was directly involved in the cause of death, irrespective of the specific set of circumstances that contributed to his death.

To fully appreciate Washington, it helps to go back to the period before the Constitution and the eight years of his presidency.

By 1787, it was clear that the Articles of Confederation would benefit from updating. Each state governed themselves with elected representatives and these same representatives had to elect a national government that was weak without an independent executive and a Congress without taxing power. Any amendments required all 13 states to agree and even important legislation required approval of nine states. So a weak minority could easily thwart the will of the many. George Washington wryly observed, “We are left with a shadow without substance.”

So began the push to create a stronger national government.

The story of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain – a seven-year war against the most powerful country in the world, under-manned, out-gunned farmers with pitchforks and rocks, the formation of the Articles of Confederation to bring together a disparate group of migrants, scrapping it all to form a Constitutional Congress, with the world’s first Constitution – is a tale worth telling to those who want to radically change it.

It’s an American story!

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

John Wilkes Booth’s heinous act took away more than a beloved president

A wanted poster for co-conspirators John Wilkes Booth, Mary Surratt, David Herold sold for $47,800 at a May 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

At some point when John Wilkes Booth was planning to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, he must have decided that it would be more impactful to decapitate the primary leadership of the North and expand the hit list to include Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William Seward and, perhaps, even General Ulysses S. Grant. After all, they were in Washington, D.C., and unprotected. It was a desperate move, but it might bolster the morale of the South. In the end, it failed because of a series of unrelated circumstances.

General Grant had declined the invitation of the president to attend a theater show because there was an eagerness to return home and resume normal life. However, that would still leave Secretary Seward, who was at home recuperating from a serious carriage accident that required medical attention. Vice President Johnson had already booked a room that night in the Kirkwood Hotel. Both men would be relatively easy targets for Booth’s co-conspirators.

Lewis Powell, the man assigned to kill Seward, had a clever plan to act like a delivery boy bringing medicine, enter the house and shoot the bedridden Seward. He did manage to stab Seward in the throat, but a metal splint on his jaw deflected most of the blows. Powell ran from the house, was easily captured and later hanged. The other conspirator, George Atzerodt, managed to book a room at the Kirkwood Hotel, but started drinking at the hotel bar, lost his nerve and fled. He was also captured and hanged. That only left Lincoln, and Booth shot him in the theater as he watched “Our American Cousin” with Mary by his side.

The date was April 14, 1865. The location was Ford’s Theatre.

Lincoln had won the 1860 presidential election by defeating three opponents. One was Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Kentucky who had helped Lincoln gain national prominence through a series of high-profile debates regarding slavery. (Douglas, coincidentally, died just two months after Lincoln was inaugurated). A second Democratic opponent was John C. Breckinridge – the incumbent vice president for James Buchanan. The third – John Bell – was the Tennessee Senator who ran as the candidate for the Constitutional Union Party, a group that was neutral on slavery but adamant that the Constitution be upheld. Lincoln’s 180 electoral votes were more than the other three combined.

Now it was four years later and President Lincoln was struggling to barely hang on. In June 1864, the prospects for the Union Army were equally dim. General Grant was bogged down in Virginia, General William Tecumseh Sherman was stalled before Atlanta and heavy casualties were shocking people back home. There was even talk about suspending or postponing the election due to the national crisis. But, as President Lincoln pointed out, “We cannot have free government without elections. If this rebellion forces us to forego a national election, it will appear we’re conquered and ruin us.”

We all now know that the 1864 election did go ahead as planned. It was the first time any nation held a general election during a major domestic war.

However, President Lincoln took a pounding in the press. Horace Greeley, founder-editor of the New-York Tribune, claimed “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten!” The influential James Gordon Bennett, founder-publisher of the New York Herald, was more direct: “Lincoln is a joke!” Some wanted to run Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and some were clamoring for General Grant. Even Thurlow Weed, Lincoln’s advisor, told him his re-election was hopeless.

Just when it seemed that Lincoln had reconciled himself to defeat, military actions started to slowly improve. Admiral David Farragut (who was the first rear admiral, first vice admiral and first full admiral in the U.S. Navy) won a great victory at the Battle of Mobile Bay (admonishing his men to “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”). General Sherman took Atlanta and began his famous “March to the Sea,” which culminated in the burning of Charleston, S.C., where the war had begun. Meanwhile, General Philip Sheridan was routing Southern troops in the valleys of Virginia and then devastating the surrounding areas.

Virtually all of Lincoln’s critics were muffled by these turns of events.

Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson won the 1864 election and the Civil War in 1865. But, the country’s troubles were not over. After Lincoln was assassinated, Vice President Johnson became president and was unable to work with the Republican Congress, which had devised a trap to impeach him. He was acquitted, but lost any hope for governing. He went home a chastened man.

In 1875, he did manage to get re-elected to the U.S. Senate … the only man to do so (up to 2020).

John Wilkes Booth did much more damage than just assassinating a president. By killing Lincoln, he eliminated possibly the only man who could have restored harmony, implemented reconstruction and unified us as our founding documents intended.

Nearly 160 years later, we are still waiting for another messiah.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Virginia’s soil was fertile ground for tobacco … and fresh ideas about freedom, governance

Sommer Islands coinage, or “Hogge Money,” was the first coinage produced for circulation in the English-speaking colonies of the New World. This (1615-1616) sixpence, Large Portholes Variety, sold for $99,875 at a January 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The Jamestown settlement in the Colony of Virginia is credited with being the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. The Colonists had sailed in a fleet of three ships: the Susan Constant, Discovery and Godspeed – under the command of Captain Christopher Newport (1561–1617) and arriving in 1607. They endured repeated failures and humiliations as a commercial entity.

King James (1566-1625) revoked the London Company’s charter in 1624 after a cumulative investment of 200,000 lb. sterling and over 100 additional shipments of supplies to keep them going. But it was a combination of an Indian massacre in 1622 and a seeming inability to develop a viable economy that prompted the king’s action. Their inability to protect the king’s people resulted in Virginia ceasing to be a commercial company and instead being governed as a mere Colony.

As early as the 15th century, European explorers had observed American Indians smoking tobacco, presumably for ceremonial or medicinal purposes. In the 16th century, ships returning to Spain brought back tobacco and it was soon adopted as a therapeutic cure-all throughout the entire Iberian Peninsula. Naturally, it spread to England after Sir Francis Drake (c.1540-1596) brought supplies of tobacco leaf and seeds for planting. By 1600, pipe smoking had become popular in upper-class London society.

Surprisingly, King James objected quite strenuously and published (perhaps) the very first treatise against tobacco in 1604: “A Counterblaste to Tobacco.” He questioned why honorable men would “imitate the barbarians and beastly manners of the wilde, godless and slavish Indians especially in so vile and stinking custome.” Much of the rest of the tirade/admonition, would fit very well with modern anti-smoking efforts still active in many parts of the world.

Refuting a view that tobacco was a magic cure for everything, he asked, “What greater absurdity can there be than to say that one cure shall exist for all divers and contrarious sorts of diseases?” He then went on to point to poisoning of the lungs and disruption in the function of organs. Finally, the treatise compared tobacco use with “a branch of the sin of drunkenness, which is the root of all sins!”

The Virginia Colony, by not being able to keep the king’s subjects safe from Indians and losing their charter, missed a chance to control the tobacco monopoly, which turned out to be America’s most valuable commodity in the 17th and 18th centuries.

When a young man named John Rolfe (1585-1622) planted seeds of a Spanish variety from the West Indies, “Never was a marriage of soil and seed more fruitful,” wrote Joseph Robert in his Story of Tobacco in America. Virginia soil along the James River (named for the anti-tobacco king) proved to be an enormous success. By the end of the 18th century, Virginia and Maryland were shipping 70 million tons of tobacco to England each year.

Rolfe, of course, would go on to marry Pocahontas (c.1596- 1617), the daughter of the influential Indian Chief Powhatan, in April 1614. She had been a captive of the Colonists during hostilities in 1613, converted to Christianity and baptized as Rebecca. The Rolfes soon traveled to London, where Rebecca was introduced as a “civilized savage,” all in a failed attempt to gain more investment in Jamestown. When the Rolfes set sail back to Jamestown, Rebecca became ill and died. Pocahontas had become a semi-celebrity in England and numerous places are named for her.

The Colonial focus on tobacco presented a risk to the “tillage of corn,” which was essential to basic food supplies needed to feed the people. The governor decreed that every man must plant two acres of corn before planting any tobacco. Then another consequential event occurred in 1619. A Dutch man-of-war sold the Company “20 and odd” Black slaves – the first slaves in what would become the American Colonies.

From these modest beginnings, there was a major shift in labor from White indentured servants to African slaves in the labor-intensive activities for tobacco cultivation, harvesting and curing. By 1860, 350,000 were cultivating tobacco – an exploitive crop that exhausted the soil and required constant cleaning of new land. Throughout the Colonial period, production of tobacco was centered in the Northern port cities, but the surplus slave labor, supply of raw material and manufacturing shifted to the South. By 1765, Virginia and Maryland tobacco combined to represent 80 percent of American exports.

Leading up to the American Revolution, South Carolina exported more than all the Northern Colonies combined and became a majority slave Colony. Of a population of 125,000, about 75,000 were slaves. Virginia had more Blacks than New York had Whites. On the eve of liberty, the majority of American exports were produced by slave labor.

Predictably, as the concentration of wealth grew, the men who controlled tobacco controlled Virginia politics. One generation into the 18th century, Virginia’s most esteemed citizens comprised a landed aristocracy – but much like the modern oil state that usually fails to develop other economic capability. However, a significant exception is that Virginia’s soil was fertile ground for fresh, new ideas on freedom and governance. This relatively small area supplied an abundance of intellectual foundations and some obvious contradictions to the coming American experiment.

We are still learning.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].