1718

In this year, two settlements were founded that would later become important U.S. cities. The year also saw the death of Blackbeard, a notorious pirate who had terrorized ships off the Atlantic Coast and the Caribbean.

In the early 1700s, England, France, and Spain competed for control of North American. England’s colonies grew up along the Atlantic, while France claimed Canada and a vast central area called Louisisana. The Mississippi River provided access to the territory. So the French leader Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded a settlement at the mouth of the river in 1718. He named it La Nouvelle Orleans (New Orleans), after the Duke of Orleans, a French nobleman.

Farther west, in today’s Texas, Spain also founded a settlement, San Antonio. One of its first buildings was the Mission of San Antonio de Valero, later known as the Alamo.

In November, 1718, the pirate Blackbeard—an Englishman named Edward Teach—was cornered by two British ships near Ocracoke Island off North Carolina. Blackbeard wore his long, black beard in braids. To look fierce in battle, he stuck lighted matches on his hat, so that his face appeared to be ringed by fire. He was killed in a furious battle, and his head was displayed on a ship’s mast as a warning to other pirates.

Abigail Adams

In America’s early days, women had no voice in government and were not expected to know much about politics. But Abigail Adams, the wife of the second U.S. Prwsident, was ahead of her time. She was well-informed and held strong opinions about politics and government.

John Adams was a country lawyer when he married Abigail Smith in 1764. He played a key role in the struggles for independence and was often away from home. Abigail Adams raised their four children and managed the family farm, and she kept up a steady stream of letters to her husband.

When a neighbor complained because Abigail had sent a young servant to school, she wrote to John, “Merely because his face is black, is he to be denied instruction?”
And when John Adams was helping to plan the new country’s government, she wrote, “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

Abigail Adams was the first First Lady to live in the White House. But only a few rooms of the mansion were ready in 1800 when the Adamses moved in. In a letter to her daughter, Abigail revealed that she hung her family’s laundry in the unfinished East Room, later the scene of elegant receptions.

Abigail Adams is also remembered as the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President.

Johnny Appleseed

When Americans bite into crisp, fresh-picked apples or slices of apple pie, they should thank John Chapman. No one did more to encourage the cultivation of apple orchards during America’s frontier days. Chapman’s efforts made him a legendary folk hero and earned him the nickname “Johnny Appleseed.”

Each fall during cider-making time, Chapman collected seeds from the sweet-smelling cider presses. He carefully washed them, and dried them in the sun. Then he planted the seeds in forests and fields. For more than 40 years, beginning in the late 1700s, Chapman crisscrossed Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, tending his budding apple trees and showing people how to start their own orchards.

Dressed in tattered clothes, he cheerfully endured the hardships of pioneer life. People thought him odd, but praised his friendliness and sincereity. However, during the War of 1812, John Chapman saved the hamlet of Mansfield, Ohio, by summoning troops to defend it against a Native American attack.

Not much is known about John Chapman’s life. But as Johnny Appleseed, the sower of tiny seeds that grew into stately orchards, he holds a unique place in American frontier history.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott wrote almost 300 books, stories, and poems, but she is best known for the novel Little Women. This children’s classic is about four teenage sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—and their family life in a New England village during the time of the American Civil War. Alcott herself was one of four sisters, and the story is largely based on her own life.

The Alcott family moved to Concord, Massachusetts, when Louisa May Alcott was eight years old. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a teacher, but he had problems supporting his family. Among his friends were two great writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They helped Alcott develop her writing ability. She started writing when she was 19, to earn money for the family.

Alcott’s first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1854. But her first success came in 1863 with Hospital Sketches, which was based on her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. Little Women, published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, was an immediate success. Her publisher originally decided not to publish Little Women, but his children read the manuscript, loved it, and talked him into it. She later wrote several sequels about the March family, including Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

1735

By 1735, Britain had established 13 thriving colonies on the eastern coast of North America. But the colonists were chafing under British rule—they wanted more freedom.

In August, that desire for freedom led to a famous trial. John Peter Zenger, a New York printer, was under arrest for publishing a newspaper that condemned the colony’s British governor as a tyrant. There was no freedom of the press in colonial America, and the judges at Zenger’s trial were friends of the governor. The printer’s case seemed hopeless. Yet Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, refused to give up.

Hamilton believed that a person should not be convicted for writing the truth. But the judges didn’t care whether Zenger’s comments about the government nor were true or not. Under colonial law, that made no difference. So Hamilton turned directly to the jury. He told them that the question they had to decide was “not the cause of the poor printer,” but “the best cause…the cause of Liberty.” The jury acquitted Zenger, agreeing with Hamilton that Americans had “the liberty of exposing and opposing arbitrary power…by speaking and writing the truth.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about the evils of slavery that stirred the conscience of Americans and helped to bring about the Civil War.

Stowe’s father and six of her brothers were ministers. All of them were strongly opposed to slavery. After the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, she met many other abolitionists. Visiting plantations in nearby Kentucky, she saw slavery in operation, and her hatred of the institution deepened.

Harriet Beecher had married Professor Calvin Stowe in 1832. They moved to Maine in 1850, the same year that the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. The law made it easier for runaway slaves to be returned to the South. Stowe was so angry about this, she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

Published in 1852, it is the story of a slave named Uncle Tom who dies after he is beaten by a plantation owner named Simon Legree. The book’s powerful portrayal of the evils of slavery shocked its readers. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year and about two million copies before the start of the Civl War. When President Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he said to her, “So this is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.”

Civil War, Literature, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1832, 1850, Slavery, 1852, Important People

Benedict Arnold

Today, the name Benedict Arnold is a synonym for traitor. But in the early years of the American Revolution, Arnold was a hero. He led a daring attack on Quebec in 1775, and in 1777 his boldness and bravery helped win the Battle of Saratoga.

Why did Arnold turn traitor? First, he was deeply in debt and desperate for money. Second, he believed he had not been treated fairly. He felt he deserved more recognition and higher rank. The British promised to pay him handsomely for his treachery and give him high ranking in the British army.

Arnold began passing military information to the British in 1779. After he was named commander of the fort at West Point, a strategic post on New York’s Hudson River, he plotted to turn West Point over to the British.

Major John Andre, a British officer, met secretly with Arnold on September 21, 1780, but was captured by American soldiers, who found incriminating papers in his boot. Andre was hanged as a spy, and Arnold fled to safety aboard a British ship. After his treachery was exposed, Benedict Arnold led small British forces in destructive raids on Richmond, Virginia, and New London, Connecticut.

Although Arnold fought for the British against his own countrymen in the final years of the war, the British didn’t give him the high position or all the money they had promised him.

He died in England a bitter man.