Drinking in America by Susan Cheever

Author:Susan Cheever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Great American West

By the end of the Civil War, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the westward expansion that created today’s United States was well under way. Five days after Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth while he sat with his wife at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., watching a play. Together these two events—a surrender and a murder—jolted the country westward again with a burst of energy.166

Westward expansion wasn’t a new idea. It had already done its part to form the American character: the lust for wide-open spaces where anyone could start over, the emphasis on self-reliance, and the religion of the individual and his family. The exploration and exploitation of the American West started with Thomas Jefferson’s presidency and with one of the most intriguing characters in American history: Meriwether Lewis.

Lewis, who grew up in the woods of Albemarle County, Virginia, and went to Washington and Lee University, became Jefferson’s secretary at the age of twenty-six and soon integrated himself into the affections of the new president—Jefferson had just been elected the country’s third president after the one term served by John Adams. Generous, voluble, an accomplished woodsman and an experienced soldier, Lewis had served among the troops who put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pittsburgh and was a captain in the United States Army.

Jefferson had recently overseen the Louisiana Purchase, a negotiation that would create the American West as we know it. Jefferson’s representative, James Monroe, hoping to buy the port of New Orleans for $10 million so that trade could move freely on the Mississippi River, was offered the entire bulk of French Louisiana for an extra $5 million. The purchase doubled the size of the United States and opened up huge territories that had previously been claimed by the French or the Spanish, although they already had many residents—the Native Americans.

Jefferson had often dreamed of westward expansion, and now he had the opportunity. He also had Meriwether Lewis, a young man who was shaping up to be a diplomat and leader. He spent two years preparing Lewis, including a year of the study of natural medicines with none other than Dr. Benjamin Rush. For a companion Lewis chose another soldier who had impressed him with calm and competence: William Clark. “Dispatched by Jefferson to seal the greatest achievement of his administration, the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition ranks as one of the greatest explorations in history,” writes historian Page Smith.167

As long as there were physical hardships to endure and dangers to survive, Lewis was a magnificent leader. Although there was plenty of whiskey in the stores carried by Lewis and Clark from Saint Louis to the Pacific Ocean, there is no record of Lewis being drunk during the twenty-six months of the expedition, which set off from Saint Charles, Missouri, just north of Saint Louis by boat in May 1804. It was a trip with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.