I was going to mention Joshua Chamberlain.
It would seem that my knowledge of American history and its heroes are confined to stuff I’ve seen of film.
I really must apologise, I’m not really as stupid as this comes across…I don’t think so anyway
He might have been better known back in the seventies. John Jakes wrote the Kent Family Chronicles back then and they were best-sellers at the time. He threw in various histoical figures and Henry Knox was one who was prominent.
Don’t worry, your knowledge of American history is probably better than that of the average American about Nineteenth Century Britain. (“Let’s see, there was Victoria . . . and some Prime Ministers whose names we forget . . . oh yeah, and that guy who fought Napoleon!”)
But seriously, it’s harder to worship generals and Indian fighters and expansionist politicians, now that nationalism is out of style. The modern tendency is to worship ordinary people who fought for what we now recognize as noble causes (in the US, anti-slavery, pro-civil rights, and women’s suffrage), or scientists and inventors who advanced knowledge . . . which activties didn’t really get going in America until late in the Nineteenth Century.
Yah, I know. That’s why I threw in the bolded phrase.
I don’t think that “worship” is the correct word in this instance.
For example, I still think of people like Churchill,FDR, Wellington etc as people who fought for what they believed to be right and I admire those people for what they did.
By the same reasoning I also admire the likes of Martin Luther King, Abe Lincoln and others who also fought for what they believed to be right
I’ve got ambivalent feelings about Churchill. We’re all products of our times, but he wrote about “hoping the natives would stir up some action” so he could go out and fight, and advocated gassing people in Iran, among other things.
“Heroes”? I don’t know, but I admire the hell out of
John Wesley Powell
John Muir
Jedidiah Smith
[QUOTE=Derleth]
[li]Frederick Douglass isn’t as well-known, but he was a slave and he was one of ][/li][/QUOTE]
There’s a mural of Frederick Douglass in West Belfast.
To my mind - John Brown
Mark Twain.
I’ll speak up, to join the chorus for Joshua Chamberlain.
I admire U.S. Grant, too, while recognizing the huge flaws in his presidency. It was not his best moment, as others have said he was too trusting of his friends. As a general he was cold-blooded in a way that is often hard to understand on a casual read - he wasn’t a brilliant tactician, like Lee. Nor flamboyant. But, he understood the strategic realities of the Civil War better than most. (I want to say anyone, but I think Sherman might have had as good a grip.) He knew that flinching from high casualty rates would work to the South’s favor, and lead to a longer campaign - and so was willing to rack up casualties that horrified most in Washington.
What cements my admiration of him though is his battle to provide for his family after he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. It was after his Presidency, and he was again dead broke. There was no pension for him, not from the Army, nor from his presidency. So, he was told he had only months to live, and his biggest worry was not to extend his life - but to find some way to provide for his wife.
So he found someone who would pay for his memoires (Samuel Clemens, IIRC) and promised that he would finish them before he died. He was in agony for much of the time he was writing his memoires, and had only a few months to do it. But he succeeded, and with an apparantly well-written book, too. I’ve not yet read it, myself, but my impression was that in spite of the generous terms Grant got for the work, it still made the publishers a good deal of money.
A little earlier, Samuel Adams is a favorite. Colorful in a way that his cousin wasn’t. And far more radical, too.
Winfield Scott, I think, should be better known. I’ve heard a lot of bad about his personality, but he was one of the few War of 1812 generals who could fight and win. And far more sympathetic a figure than Jackson.
I also have a good deal of respect for Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. IIRC they both put their prestige behind the Missiouri Compromise, knowing it wasn’t popular and could damage their future prospects - to find a way to preserve the Union. Has the Civil War been fought in the 1820s, I think that there’s little reason to expect anything other than a southern victory. For that matter, Clay’s famous quote, “I’d rather be right than be President!” has a good deal of appeal.
A lot that have been mentioned (Joshua Chamberlain, Harriet Tubman, Lewis n’ Clark n’ Sacagawea, Lincoln, John Muir etc.)
John Adams and John Quincy Adams. They both did a lot of admirable things, just not during their respective presidencies.
Has Clara Barton been mentioned yet? Civil War nurse and founded the American Red Cross.
[sub]And in the category of “people I know weren’t really ‘heroes’, but who I have a soft spot for anyways”: Doc Holliday and Calamity Jane.[/sub]
There were deeper problems in Grant’s administration than his toleration of corruption. He stood by passively and allowed at least four biracial Southern state governments to be overthrown by armed force, a shameful moment in American history that had serious adverse consequences for the next century.
If we’re going back before 1800, many of the Founding Fathers would qualify, depending on your definition of a “hero”—and George Washington would have to be on the list.
. . . showing how subjective this analysis is, because, wow, I would never consider John Brown a hero.
Could you provide a cite for that? Per the wikipedia article he seems to have been trying to run a balance between offending the population of the South, and protecting the rights of freedmen.
My impression had always been that the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments was part and parcel of the Devil’s deal that Rutherfraud Hayes made for the presidency in 1876.
A martyr for the cause of ending slavery? What’s not heroic about that?
I mean, the OP’s listed a guy who’s claim to fame was as a circus owner, for crying out loud.
The best recent book-length study of the overthrow of the Republican state governments in the South, and of the Grant administration’s dithering response, is Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann. Lemann concentrates on the Mississippi election of 1875, but also discusses Alabama in 1874 and South Carolina and Louisiana in 1876. (These are the four states to which I allude. Violence also played a role in the overthrow of Republican governments in six other states, but was most systematic and concentrated in time in the above four.) For an earlier state-by-state study, see Reconstruction and Redemption in the South, edited by Otto Olsen, 1980.
During his first term, Grant defended African American civil rights rather aggressively and successfully, mostly because he had an Attorney General, Amos Akerman, who was committed to the cause. Grant employed the army (with Congressional authorization) and the newly created Department of Justice to bust up the KKK where the Klan was terrorizing Republicans and disrupting Southern elections. During the elections of 1872 black people voted in large numbers and in an almost unmolested manner in every Southern state.
Grant’s second term was a very different story. Akerman was gone, and from the Colfax Massacre (Louisiana) to the Alabama Plan (1874) to the Yazoo City Massacre (Mississippi) to the Hamburg riots (SC, 1876) to the “bulldozing of the Negroes” (Louisiana, 1876), lawfully elected Republican state and local governments beseiged the Grant administration with requests for assistance, and got . . . no response. Grant defended his inactivity by saying that “the whole public are tired of these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South”, for which the solution apparently was not to suppress the outbreaks but to allow them to succeed.
In Yazoo County, Mississippi a Republican vote of 2,433 in the 1873 state elections was reduced to 7 in the presidential election of 1876. (That isn’t a typo.) In East Feliciana, Louisiana, a Republican vote of 1,688 in 1874 was reduced to zero in 1876. Let your imagination run wild as to the types of methods which produce such results, and think again about whether Hayes or Tilden would be better described as “His Fraudulency”.
By the time the Compromise of 1877 was fashioned, Republicans “controlled” only South Carolina and Louisiana, and in those states they could barely make their authority felt outside the statehouse due to paramilitary resistance. All the Compromise of 1877 did was allow these last two powerless regimes to collapse and ensure that the Hayes administration would continue Grant’s second term policy of non-intervention, which allowed the long night of Jim Crow to settle upon the South.