The Story of Our Country Part 13

While Fulton was working some of the smart New Yorkers were laughing.

They called his boat "Fulton's Folly," and said it would not move faster than the tide would carry it. But he let them laugh and worked on, and at last, one day in 1807, the new boat, which he named the "Clermont,"

was afloat in the Hudson ready for trial. Hundreds of curious people came to see it start. Some were ready to laugh again when they saw the boat, with its clumsy paddle-wheels hanging down in the water on both sides. They were not covered with wooden frames as were such wheels afterwards.

"That boat move? So will a log move if set adrift," said the people who thought themselves very wise. "It will move when the tide moves it, and not before." But none of them felt like laughing when they saw the wheels begin to turn and the boat to glide out into the stream, moving against the tide.

"She moves! she moves!" cried the crowd, and n.o.body said a word about "Fulton's Folly."

Move she did. Up the Hudson she went against wind and current, and reached Albany, one hundred and forty-two miles away, in thirty-two hours. This was at the rate of four and a half miles an hour. It was not many years before steamboats were running on all our rivers.

That is all I shall say here about the steamboat, for there is another story of invention I wish to tell you before I close. This is about the cotton fibre, which you know is the great product of the Southern States.

The cotton plant when ripe has a white, fluffy head, and a great bunch of snow-white fibres, within which are the seeds. In old times these had to be taken out by hand, and it was a whole day's work for a negro to get the seeds out of a pound of the cotton. This made cotton so dear that not much of it could be sold. In 1784 eight bags of it were sent to Liverpool, and the custom-house people there seized it for duties. They said it must have been smuggled from some other country, for the United States could not have produced such a "prodigious quant.i.ty."

A few years afterwards a young man named Eli Whitney went South to teach in a private family, but before he got there some one else had his situation, and he was left with nothing to do. Mrs. Greene, the widow of General Greene, who fought so well in the Revolution, took pity on him and gave him a home in her house. He paid her by fixing up things about her house. She found him so handy that she asked him if he could not invent a machine to take the seeds out of the cotton. Whitney said he would try, and he set himself to work. It was not long before he had a machine made which did the work wonderfully well. This machine is known as the "cotton-gin," or cotton engine, for gin is short for engine. On one side of it are wires so close together that the seeds cannot get through. Between them are circular saws which catch the cotton and draw it through, while the seeds pa.s.s on.

The machine was a simple one, but it acted like magic. A hundred negroes could not clean as much cotton in a day as one machine. The price of cotton soon went down and a demand for it sprang up. In 1795, when the cotton gin was made, only about 500,000 pounds of cotton were produced in this country. By 1801 this had grown to 20,000,000 pounds. Now it has grown to more than 12,000,000 bales, of nearly 500 pounds each. This is sold to foreign countries and is worked in our own mills at home, being made into millions of yards of cloth of many kinds to clothe the people of the earth. All this comes from the work of Eli Whitney's machine. And the seed taken from the cotton is pressed for the oil it contains, so that from a year's crop we get nearly 150,000,000 gallons of useful oil.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ENGLISH AND AMERICANS FIGHT AGAIN

FOR years before and after the year 1800 all Europe was filled with war and bloodshed. Most of my readers must have heard of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest generals that ever lived, and one of the most cruel men. He was at the head of the armies of France, and was fighting all Europe. England was his greatest enemy and fought him on land and sea, and this fighting on the sea made trouble between England and the United States.

The English wanted men for their war-vessels and said they had a right to take Englishmen wherever they could find them. So they began to take sailors off of American merchant vessels. They said that these men were deserters from the British navy, but the fact is that many of them were true-born Americans; and our people grew very angry as this went on year after year.

What made it worse was the insolence of some of the British captains.

One of them went so far as to stop an American war-vessel, the "Chesapeake," and demand part of her crew, who, he said, were British deserters. When Captain Barron refused to give them up the British captain fired all his guns and killed and wounded numbers of the American crew. The "Chesapeake" had no guns fit to fire back, so her flag had to be pulled down and the men to be given up.

You may well imagine that this insult made the American blood boil.

There would have been war at that time if the British government had not owned that it was wrong and offered to pay for the injury. A few years afterwards the insult was paid for in a different way. Another proud British captain thought he could treat Americans in the same saucy fashion. The frigate "President" met the British sloop-of-war "Little Belt," and hailed it, the captain calling through his trumpet, "What ship is that?"

Instead of giving a civil reply the British captain answered with a cannon shot. Then the "President" fired a broadside which killed eleven and wounded twenty-one men on the "Little Belt." When the captain of the "President" hailed again the insolent Briton was glad to reply in a more civil fashion. He had been taught a useful lesson.

The United States was then a poor country, and not in condition to go to war. But no nation could submit to such insults as these. It is said that more than six thousand sailors had been taken from our merchant ships, and among these were two nephews of General Washington, who were seized while they were on their way home from Europe, and put to work as common seamen on a British war-vessel.

At length, on June 18, 1812, the United States declared war against Great Britain. It had put up with insults and injuries as long as it could bear them. It did not take long to teach the haughty British captains that American sea-dogs were not to be played with. The little American fleet put to sea, and before the end of the year it had captured no less than five of the best ships in the British navy and had not lost a single ship in return. I fancy the people of England quit singing their proud song, "Britannia rules the waves."

Shall I tell you the whole story of this war? I do not think it worth while, for there is much of it you would not care to hear. The war went on for two years and a half, on sea and land, but there were not many important battles, and the United States did not win much honor on land.

But on the sea the sailors of our country covered themselves with glory.

Most of the land battles were along the borders of Canada. Here there was a good deal of fighting, but most of it was of no great account. At first the British had the best of it, and then the Americans began to win battles, but it all came to an end about where it began. Neither side gained anything for the men that were killed.

There was one naval battle in the north that I must tell you about. On Lake Erie the British had a fleet of six war-vessels, and for a time they had everything their own way. Then Captain Oliver Perry, a young officer, was sent to the lake to build a fleet and fight the British.

When he got there the stuff for his ships was growing in the woods. He had to cut down trees and build ships from their timber. But he worked like a young giant, and very soon had some vessels built and afloat. He found some also on the lake, and in a wonderfully short time he had a fleet on the lake and was sailing out to find the British war-ships.

The fleets met on September 10, 1813. The Americans had the most vessels, but the British had the most guns, and soon they were fighting like sea-dragons. The "Lawrence," Captain Perry's flagship, fought two of the largest British ships till it was nearly ready to sink, and so many of its crew were killed and wounded that it had only eight men left fit for fighting. What do you think the brave Perry did then? He leaped into a small boat and was rowed away, with the American flag floating in his hand, though the British ships were firing hotly at him.

When he reached the "Niagara," another of his ships, he sprang on board and sailed right through the enemy's fleet, firing right and left into their shattered vessels. The British soon had enough of this, and in fifteen minutes more they gave up the fight.

"We have met the enemy and they are ours," wrote Perry to General Harrison. He was a born hero of the waves.

Now I think we had better take a look out to sea and learn what was going on there. We did not have many ships, but they were like so many bulldogs in a flock of sheep. The whole world looked on with surprise to see our little fleet of war-vessels making such havoc in the proud British navy which no country in Europe had ever been able to defeat.

In less than two months after war was declared the frigate "Ess.e.x" met the British sloop-of-war "Alert" and took it in eight minutes, without losing a man. The "Ess.e.x" was too strong for the "Alert," but six days afterwards the "Const.i.tution" met the "Guerriere," and these vessels were nearly the same in size. But in half an hour the "Guerriere" was nearly shot to pieces and ready to sink, and had lost a hundred of her men. The others were hastily taken off, and then down went the proud British frigate to the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

All the island of Great Britain went into mourning when it learned how the Americans had served this good ship. There was soon more to mourn for. The American sloop "Wasp" captured the British sloop "Frolic." The frigate "United States" captured the frigate "Macedonian." The "Const.i.tution" met the "Java" and served it the same way as it had done the "Guerriere." In two hours the "Java" was a wreck. Soon after the sloop "Hornet" met the ship "Peac.o.c.k" and handled her so severely that she sank while her crew was being taken off.

Later on the British won two battles at sea, and that was all they gained during the whole war. On the water the honors stayed with the Americans.

There was one affair in which the British won great dishonor instead of honor. In July, 1814, a strong British fleet sailed up Chesapeake Bay, with an army of nearly five thousand men on board. These were landed and marched on the city of Washington, the capital of the young republic.

Their coming was a surprise. There were few trained soldiers to meet this army, and those were not the days of railroads, so that no troops could be brought in haste from afar. Those that gathered were nearly all raw militia, and they did not stand long before the British veterans who had fought in the wars with Napoleon. They were soon put to flight, and the British army marched into our capital city.

There they behaved in a way that their country has ever since been ashamed of. They set fire to the public buildings and burned most of them to the ground. The Capitol, the President's house, and other buildings were burned, and the records of the government were destroyed.

Then, having acted like so many savages, the British hurried away before the Americans could get at them for revenge. That was a victory, I fancy, which the British do not like to read about.

They had been so successful at Washington that they thought they would try the same thing with another city. This time they picked out New Orleans, which was so far away from the thickly settled part of the country that they fancied it would be an easy matter to capture it. In this they made a great mistake, as you will soon see.

There was a general in the South who was not used to being defeated.

This was Andrew Jackson, one of our bravest soldiers, who had just won fame in a war with the Indians of Georgia. He was a man who was always ready to fight and this the English found when they marched on New Orleans. There were twelve thousand of them, and Jackson, who had been sent there to meet them, only had half that many. And the British were trained soldiers, while the Americans were militia. But most of them were men of the backwoods, who knew how to shoot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS.]

Some of you may have heard that Jackson's men fought behind cotton bales. That is not quite true, but he was in such a hurry in building his breastworks that he did put in them some bales of cotton taken from the warehouses. The British, who were in as great a hurry, built a breastwork of sugar hogsheads which they found on the plantations. But the cannon b.a.l.l.s soon set the cotton on fire and filled the air with flying sugar, so the bales and the hogsheads had to be pulled out. It was found that cotton and sugar, while good enough in their place, were not good things to stop cannon b.a.l.l.s.

Soon the British marched against the American works, and there was a terrible fight.

"Stand to your guns, my men," said Jackson to his soldiers. "Make every shot tell. Give it to them."

Many of the men were old hunters from Tennessee, some of whom could hit a squirrel in the eye, and when they fired the British fell in rows. Not a man could cross that terrible wall of fire, and they fought on until twenty-six hundred of them lay bleeding on the field, while only eight Americans were killed.

That ended the battle. The men were not born who could face a fire like that. It ended the war also, and it was the last time Americans and Englishmen ever fought each other. Jackson became the hero of the country, and he was finally elected President of the United States. I cannot say that he was well fitted to be President. He was a very obstinate man, who always wanted to have his own way, and that is better in a soldier than in a President. But he was one who loved his country, and when one of the states of the South sought to secede from the Union, Jackson, though he was a son of the South himself, quickly gave the seceders to understand that he was a general as well as a President, and that no state should leave the ranks of the Union while he marched at its head.

CHAPTER XIX

HOW THE VICTIMS OF THE ALAMO WERE REVENGED

I HAVE told you the story of more than one war. I shall have to tell you now about still another in which the Americans fought the Mexicans in Texas.