Ah, another one: many people know that the British burned the White House and the Capitol in 1814. This is true, but not the whole story: It was British subjects who burned the buildings, but many of the actual troops were not English but northern Irish and Canadians (who were of course British citizens) and the burning of the government buildings during the raid (they British knew they were too few to take the city- it was a surgical strike) was more personal than act of war. It was in large part revenge for the sack of York, Canada the previous year and the burning by Americans of the Upper Canada Parliament and other government buildings there.
On a related subject, I’ve read in books on libraries and short bios of Thomas Jefferson and even heard from tour guides at Monticello that Jefferson donated the bulk of his personal library to replace the library of Congress (then housed in the capitol) that was destroyed by the British. This is BS. Jefferson sold his library to Congress following an impassioned sales pitch for just under 25,000; while it's very difficult to make a comparison of 1815 to today’s $, it’s safe to say that $25,000 then would make a huge dent in $1 million today. Jefferson’s reason for doing this, aside from the “there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer” reason he gave (which, in fairness, was true and he probably did believe), was because he desperately needed the money as he was sinking fast financially.
I’ll count this as opinion rather than factual error since I still see the argument both ways: An opinion of my own that I’ve recently reversed: I always thought of John Brown as a homicidal crazed fanatic. Having read a lot of primary source biographies of him lately, I’ve reversed my opinion of him. I now think he was probably less of a religious nut/general psychotic than a sincere abolitionist who, though overly zealous, really and truly saw himself as a freedom fighter in the tradition of Washington (whose sword he stole and swung during his raid) and Spartacus and Wat Tyler. The main reason for my reversal of opinion is learning that he himself had very little delusion of his raid succeeding- he almost didn’t care- but rather hoped it would spark the fire that would lead to a massive uprising by example. He was probably more sane than, say, Timothy McVeigh or most militia freaks of today, and certainly incomparably more sane than Eric Rudolph or Charles Manson. (I still think it’s funny how so many of the Transcendentalists [a group whose poetry I often love but whose leaders strike me as the grandstanding Sean Penn Limousin Liberals of their day] hired lawyers who were actually moles whose purpose was to find out if he had the letters they’d sent him and, if so, to seize and return or destroy them.)
One of the most irksome that I’ve heard and I’ve heard it many many times including from college professors-
“Oh, during the Middle Ages/on the American Frontier/back in 1900/etc., if you lived to be 50 you were considered old. You probably had grandchildren and no teeth and were seen as near miraculous.”
and closely related
“So many women died in childbirth that the average man might have 5 or 6 wives over his life” or “childbirth was the big killer of women”.
I seriously knew the part about life expectancies and 50 being old was incorrect when I was a kid, because you can look at the dates of the famous people and know better- Eleanor of Aquitaine had 11 kids and lived to be 82, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Aaron Burr and many others lived into their 80s and John Adams broke 90. They were regarded as old during their times but not as “omg it must be voodoo!” old like a 120 year old would be today. The truth is that a 50 year old was probably a bit ‘older’ in biological age then than now due to the lack of heart medication/prostate screenings/BP meds/etc., than now, but this was at least in part offset by the fact they had far more active lifestyles and nowhere near as much processed junk and fat in their diets.
In some ways 50 was probably at least regarded as younger than now. For one thing, because if you look at censuses or the bios of famous men you’ll see that, in that age before birth control and where large families were the norm and wives tended to be younger by several years than their husbands, many if not most were still having kids at that age or else had small children at home- far more percentage-wise than have them now (when most men stop having kids in their 30s), thus far more children grew up with parents who were 60 or more before the youngest kids left home.
As for women dying in childbirth, it’s true that childbirth was the leading killer of women between the ages of 15-45, but I’m guessing that it’s probably still on the short list. The vast majority of women, however, did NOT die in childbirth even though any village could probably show you several women who had borne a dozen or more children. Death of babies in childbirth was a lot more common then than now (about 1:13 in colonial New England) and deaths in infancy/early childhood were a lot more common (about 1:8 in colonial New England), but the deaths of women in childbirth, while certainly a lot more common than now, were not as frequent as a lot of movies and novels may imply.
On average, life expectancies for both men and women once they reached adulthood were only a few years shorter than now. In New England, a 30 year old could usually expect to see 62, which is a lot younger than today’s life expectancies to be sure, but that’s average, meaning that a lot of people lived to be much older. A 90 year old was not that unusual in a village of the 17th century.
Unless they were slaves: very few slaves made it to great age and tended to die much younger than their free counterparts. Many theories are suggested- overwork of course being a large one as well as cramped quarters with communal cess pools being perfect breeding grounds for disease- but diet was probably just as important. Blacks in general are more susceptible to heart disease/diabetes/sugar problems, and when you add to this that lard was a staple of everyone’s diet in some areas but for no one more than the slaves (it was cheap, it made bland food taste better, and it is pure fat and cholesterol) plus lots of starch (rice is cheap and most southern counties produced it by the ton up until the Civil War [even counties you don’t think of as rice producing areas]).
Interesting reading on Plimoth Plantation and New England life expectancies and childbirth deaths can be found hyeah.
