250 and Counting

Tag: 1857 deaths

  • Langdon Cheves–September 17, 1776

    Cover art for September 17, 1776: portrait of Langdon Cheves by Hal Morrison, ca. 1912, based on an earlier portrait by Charles Fraser. via US House of Representatives.

    Langdon Cheves had a bit of a rough start in life, but he managed to pull himself up and become quite the influential man in the early 1800s.

    Despite the fact that few people have heard of him, Cheves was an active member of the House of Representatives, and managed to make the best of bad situations. When the 1810 embargo on European goods had the effect of collapsing rice and cotton prices, Cheves was able to channel the voters’ dissatisfaction into returning him to Congress. He was considered a War Hawk as 1812 rolled around and still managed to get re-elected.

    Cheves was in the House of Representatives when Henry Clay was appointed Speaker, but while they generally followed similar attitudes, Clay and Cheves had a falling out over the seizure of merchants’ bonds during the War of 1812 and he found himself stripped of all committee assignments, Unfortunately for Clay, when he was asked to negotiate peace with Britain in 1824 he had to resign his position, and Cheves found himself elected Speaker. Cheves essentially went from Worst To First in the space of a year.

    After leaving Congress, Cheves returned to his law practice but found himself appointed the presidency of the Bank of the United States, a position he held for longer than he’d planned because the Board of Directors had a hard time finding his replacement when he wanted to retire. After leaving the bank, he returned to South Carolina to become a rice planter and continued to engage in public debate, at one point arguing against South Carolina seceding from the Union unilaterally, believing in Southern unity.

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  • Mary Pickersgill–February 12, 1776

    Cover art for February 12, 1776: Mary Pickersgill and the Star-Spangled Banner flag, now on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

    The thing that’s hard to understand when considering the flag that Mary Pickersgill put together, and that inspired our National Anthem, is that it’s huge. Mike says specifically that this flag is 17 feet by 42 feet, but that’s hard to picture.

    When the flag was first displayed at the Smithsonian, it hung out in the open, against the atrium wall. But a flag that big, and that old, eventually begins to give in to gravity. So the Smithsonian folks took it down and spent a couple of years restoring it. Part of the work involved undoing the restoration job from 1914:

    Now, a lot of it had been cut away for souvenirs (you can see the frayed bottom partially disguised by the painted stripes in the cover art today), and that red “V” shape is really meant to be an “A” for General Armistead. But the flag is back on display, lying flat at an angle making it easier to see, in a temperature- and humidity-controlled setting.

    The parts that have been cut away are still missing, and the “A” has been removed. but even with nearly half of it gone, this thing is still enormous. And an original-size replica often flies over Fort McHenry, weather permitting.

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  • Jean-Guillaume Hyde–January 24, 1776

    Cover art for January 24, 1776: Detail of an 1830 lithograph by Ducarme after a portrait by Legrand.
    Detail of an 1830 lithograph by Ducarme after a portrait by Legrand.

    While the United States has had its share of international mishaps, not all of them have been created by Americans. Jean-Guillaume Hyde, more properly known as “Jean-Guillaume, baron Hyde de Neuville”, would be an early example of this.

    Hyde was probably a textbook case of failing upward, as he appears to have suffered multiple setbacks and still managed to come out ahead later on. As early as 1793, when he was 17, Hyde liked to work behind the scenes, trying to nudge people into saying and doing things that would benefit France, and oftentimes failing. This eventually led to his being made to move to the United States in 1800. In 1814 when the Bourbons returned to power in France, he was allowed to return.

    That’s where his diplomatic career began, and he spent six years as the ambassador to the US, where he was rather universally despised. From there he went to Portugal, where he was again a disaster as a diplomat. This time it only took about three years to kick him out.

    In 1828 Hyde became Minister of the Navy and the Colonies where he did appear to have some luck improving the way the French Colonial Empire was organized and run, but he eventually resigned from the position as a symbol of protest.

    Hyde was involved with the internal discussions to decide whether a new commercial treaty with the US was a worthy idea, though we don’t think he did any of the actual negotiating with America.

    Hyde died in Paris in 1857 and the book of his “memoirs” is actually a collection of letters and notes compiled by his nieces.

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