After seeing my Dad receive his Golden Alumni regalia last Wednesday morning, Isaac and I set out for the serious driving part of the trip, a couple of hundred miles back and forth across the Ozarks. Isaac just likes roads he has never been on before, but I was on mission to take in some lead mines.

I have long been fascinated by the Lead Rush that took place in the mid-Mississippi Valley in the early 19th century. I gather there were actually several of these, and what interested me about them (besides the fact that such a thing could exist) was their total lack of Gold Rush-style romance. The early lead mines, which were worked by the French and Indians before the Usonians (U.S. Americans) came along, were known as “diggings” because they involved scraping around the surface for chunks of promising earth and then heating them to melt and extract the lead. Lead was valued for ammunition-making and various other industrial purposes, but it does not seem to have been valued all that much. Lead mines were more a case of scratching out some moderate prosperity than striking it rich.

The Lead Rushes brought out a rather eclectic set of hard-up entrepreneurs. Alexander Hamilton’s son William ended up out in Wisconsin Territory; they called him “Uncle Billy” in the squalid encampment where he and his rather dodgy crew of workers lived. Somehow I don’t think anyone who worked for William Hamilton’s father was in the habit of calling him “Cousin Al,” but I guess you never know. [See Juliette Kinzie's memoir of life as an Indian agent's wife on the Wisconsin frontier for a sad vignette of the downwardly mobile life of the upwardly mobile Founder's son.]

The Missouri lead belt attracted a Connecticut Yankee named Moses Austin whose previous bid for moderate success had been roofing the state capitol and mining the lead for it in Virginia. When the Virginia venture faltered, Moses initiated a family tradition of entrepreneurial expatriation, gaining the lead-mining concession in Spanish Louisiana and heading out for foreign territory where relatively few Anglo-Americans had yet ventured, at least with anything other than hunting or the Indian trade in mind. Austin did well enough to build himself a short-lived lead-mining empire, including a mansion called Durham Hall and the ambitiously named town of Potosi, after the silver mines that funded the Spanish Empire. Henry R. Schoolcraft’s View of the Lead Mines of Missouri will fill you in on the all the opportunities Austin was trying to seize.

While it’s not clear that Moses Austin was ever truly secure in Missouri, U.S. control of the area brought trouble for him. The Missouri lead business was ironically devastated by the coming of the War of 1812, and Austin’s control of his little empire, and his manhood, were challenged by the vicious competition and just plain bullying of heavily armed migrants from the U.S. South led by one John Smith T (for Tennessee, from which he hailed). Smith T was believed to have killed some 15 men on the field of “honor” and otherwise.  Though intimidation, legal chicanery, and some outright theft and violence, Smith T tried to take Austin’s land titles, frighten off his workers, and seize the Austin holdings for himself. Austin was not precisely defeated by Smith T, but by the end of his life he had largely given up the Missouri venture and turned his attention toward a new expatriation scheme in Mexico’s northernmost provinces, which his son Stephen would be the one to carry out. Moses Austin’s whole Missouri story reads kind of like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance if the John Wayne and Lee Marvin characters had joined forces to wipe out Jimmy Stewart and take the town for themselves, civilization be damned. To put it another way, Moses Austin needed John Wayne for a neighbor and got Lee Marvin instead.

Since Potosi was sadly devoid of overt Moses Austin shrines, we continued east to Missouri Mines State Historic Site in Park Hills, MO. The museum is located in an impressively nasty-looking old lead mill sitting on a top of a mine and amidst some hills that appeared to be giant piles of mine waste.  After a lifetime of consciousness raising on the dangers of lead paint, Isaac handled the omnipresence of the feared substance pretty well, with a lot of discussion on my part about how spending a few hours in an old lead mine as a 15-year-old (on a rainy day) was not the same thing as ingesting refined lead over a long period of time as a toddler. Nevertheless, at one point during our tour, Ike blurted out, “I think can feel the effects [of lead poisoning] already.” Ah, the safety-conscious youth of today.

Unfortunately, Missouri Mines State Historic Site did not really address my lead belt western scenario. I did learn that I did not know much about “modern” lead mining. The diggings of Moses Austin’s day stopped at the bedrock. Around the time of the Civil War, the lead industry turned to deep rock mining, punching thousands of miles of tunnels as much as 400 feet deep into the Earth. By World War II, the main method of getting men in and ore out was an electric railroad system — the main line was 300 miles along at just this one site. Before that, the ore cars were pulled by good-old fashioned Missouri mules. I must say that the only thing worse than eating lead dust all day would be mixing it with the aroma of mule crap, but apparently the work paid well by Ozark standards. The long distances that the miners had to travel underground to reach the ore seems to have led the St. Joseph Lead Co. to create a task-based wage system I had not heard of. Every miner had to dig out a quota or “score” of a certain number of tons of ore each day to earn their pay, after which they could go home or stay and earn extra.

The museum displays and our docent were quite insistent that lead poisoning or other health effects had not been a problem in the area, though they did admit that smelting plants could cause problems. You hope they are right for the sake of the Lead Belt’s population, because lead was and possibly still is literally a part of growing up there.  Check out “Chat Dumps of St. Francois County” for pictures of children playing, Boy Scouts hiking, and town Christmas trees standing on the gigantic piles of mine waste (chat) that once loomed larger over the towns of the Lead Belt than the surrounding Ozark hills.

Finally, coming home from the Lead Belt on U.S. 50, we went through one of Missouri’s many strangely named burgs. The state has a quite a line in misspelled and/or mispronounced foreign capitals, but perhaps more distinctively, there are several towns named after qualities that their founders presumably prized or thought their settlements embodied. Economy and Peculiar are two we had noticed before, but Useful, MO, was new to us. I started laughing and immediately made the comment that I hoped there was a Useful Cemetery. Lo and behold, it immediately appeared. I was driving too fast to stop without needing to use the cemetery ourselves, but I also knew that someone must have put such a sight on the Internet already. I was not wrong. (Click the picture for an even artier one.)

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Now playing: Whiskeytown – Mining Town
via FoxyTunes

In honor of the detestable former Reaganaut and current McCain campaign co-chair Phil Gramm’s too-revealing remark about the country being only in a “mental recession” invented by a “nation of whiners,” I thought I would throw in some links to a couple of other disastrous presidential campaign interventions by political luminaries who had fallen a little out of touch. These are from the early American republic, of course, and come courtesy of Google Books:

• 1796: Thomas Paine, A Letter to George Washington, in which Paine, writing from Paris and having just published The Age of Reason, managed to cement the Federalist linkage of the Democratic-Republicans with the sort of atheistic French wankery that few Americans of any politics much liked. Criticizing George Washington for his foreign policy was edgy enough without bringing Paine’s notorious religious views into the mix.
• 1800: A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, in which the Federalists’ preeminent figure unloaded the full measure of his jealousy and arrogance on the head of a Federalist president (John Adams) battling for re-election, and helped put his two other worst enemies (Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr) in power.

Not that Phil Gramm deserves to be put on the same plane as Paine or Hamilton, except for being uncontrollable, associated with a former regime, and having a little too much to say. However, John McCain did not need any more public reminders of just how far GOP leaders’ real concerns are from those of suburban and rural voters whose lives are rapidly becoming unfeasible thanks to high gas prices and job losses. The media always needs reminders, however, so tell us more, Phil, tell us more.

Postscript on Google Books: On the one hand, as a lover of physically browseable libraries, I imagine I should not approve of Google Books. On the other hand, as a back pain sufferer and a resident of mid-Missouri, Google Books is life-changingly awesome. It especially tickles me that many of Google’s scanned volumes on the Early Republic come from the Harvard Libraries and thus were quite likely once lugged home in 25-pound bags — on the #77 bus — by yours truly. Don’t knock it until you have carried a pile of tomes such as Wharton’s State Trials of the United States Under the Administrations of Washington and Adams and Scharf and Westcott’s History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (in 3 elephantine volumes) up several flights of stairs yourself.

I was amused by the  New York Times story last weekend about Alexander Hamilton’s country house, The Grange, getting moved “from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street.” Andy Robertson and I visited that lonely site (in terms of tourists) a few years ago. The house was indeed challenging to find, crammed in behind an Episcopal Church and surrounded by other buildings.  (In the picture above, you can see the portico of the Richardsonian-style church on the upper right.) We were the only people there except for one ranger, but we thought that the old site was actually rather appropriate. The Founder most devoted to economic development and high finance got his house completely overshadowed by the growth of exactly the sort of city he sought to foster, with all the sensitivity to the small, rural, and outmoded that such cities usually show. I am sure it is true that the new location will more closely replicate the house’s original setting, back when Harlem was a country village, but the old one sent a more accurate message about the what the historical figure stood for. Of course, the fact that Hamilton’s Monticello-like hilltop shrine will be created at public expense seems pretty Hamiltonian.

Is this America’s first “Golden Shield” memo? Jefferson thought so. Are the S of M and I being grossly unfair? In fairness, it was George Washington that Hamilton used as his “aegis.”

Quick. What other major New York politician was suspected by investigators of profiting from government service, but turned out to be just paying for sex? Here’s a hint. The stories ended a lot differently, in very telling ways.

One of the features I have planned for this blog is a series of items highlighting issues from the Early Republic that have come back or never gone away.

One of those issues is the drive to concentrate as much control as possible over the nation’s armed forces in the federal government and its military leadership. A perennial sticking point in this drive has been what used to be called the state militias, known in modern times (speaking broadly) as the Reserves and the National Guard. As both military officers and civilian officials, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were famously dissatisfied with their dependence on poorly trained and equipped militia troops, questioning the citizen-soldiers’ ability to stand and fight against regular troops, and, just as importantly, doubting their reliability when called upon to apply force to their fellow citizens in times of domestic unrest.

During the French war scare of the late 1790s, the Federalist Congress authorized President John Adams to call out 80,000 militiamen and create a 10,000-man Provisional Army in case of a declaration of war or foreign invasion. Nothing was ever done with this authority except the appointment of a few officers. Instead, Adams, Hamilton, and other Federalists struggled to create (with different agendas) a sizable Additional Army that, along with volunteer units who paid for themselves, would be usable “at the President’s discretion” whether there was a war or invasion or not. [The clearest explanation I have ever found of these matters is: William J. Murphy Jr., "John Adams: The Politics of the Additional Army, 1798-1800," New England Quarterly 52 (1979): 234-249.]

Admittedly I found the story several weeks ago, but I find it interesting, more than two centuries later, when Reserve and National Guard units have been deployed overseas for years at a time, and on regular basis, that the Pentagon feels that it still does not have enough control of state troops and also wants a greater role in policing what I guess we now have to call the “homeland.”

Pentagon control over Reserves, Guard proposed
By Philip Dine
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
Friday, Feb. 01 2008

WASHINGTON — More than six years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the nation’s plans for meeting the threats to the homeland are so thin they could be written “on the back of an envelope,” the chairman of a national military commission said Thursday.While the country has detailed contingency options for military action overseas, the capacity for responding to a terrorist attack or natural disaster within the United States is dangerously low, retired Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, chairman of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, said Thursday.

“You couldn’t move a Girl Scout unit” with the amount of planning federal officials are doing for domestic contingencies, he said, likening it to a disorganized “sandlot game.”

“You cannot do that in dealing with weapons of mass destruction,” Punaro said.

Among the shortfalls are a lack of equipment for the National Guard, with Missouri and Illinois particularly hard hit in some categories, according to the commission’s report released Thursday.

The panel called for a drastic overhaul of the military structure that would put the National Guard and Reserves under the direct control of the Army and Air Force and essentially integrate the nation’s “citizen-soldiers” into the military structure. The plan would include integrated training, pay, promotions, medical care and retirement — and improved resources and equipment.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon would be put in charge of homeland security, which would be carried out by the Guard and Reserves.

Those changes are necessary both to meet homeland security shortfalls and to allow the over-extended military to focus on overseas missions, commissioners said. Many can be implemented by the Pentagon while some require legislation by Congress.

The Guard’s current status made sense during the Cold War when it was “designed as a reserve force to be dusted off once in a lifetime,” but no longer when reservists are being used as a wing of the military, Punaro said. The current problems are heightened by the personnel limitations of an all-volunteer military, he said.

The commission, which was authorized by Congress, found that the only other alternative for dealing with a stretched-thin military — increasing the size of the active-duty component — is prohibitively expensive.

Adding the 600,000 active-duty soldiers that would be required for current needs would cost more than a trillion dollars, Punaro said. Beyond that, the military couldn’t recruit enough people to meet that target, he said.

Not only are there enough reserve forces to take over homeland security, they are highly skilled and are already in the states and cities, he said.

Reader William Hogeland, author of a recent popular history of the Whiskey Rebellion, wrote to alert me of his two-fisted piece on Alexander Hamilton in the Nov./Dec. Boston Review. Hogeland provides a careful account of the Hamilton revival over the past few years, including the shocking news that the Brookings Institution — the liberal think-thank that the Nixon White House wanted to bomb — now has a Hamilton Project dedicated to promoting policies that “will create new opportunities for middle class affluence, bolster economic security, and spur more enduring growth.”

This sounds more like the Hamilton of the op-ed writers than the historical figure who intentionally created a windfall for speculators in government securities and invented the American version of trickle-down economics, but never mind. A look at the Hamilton Project’s web site, with Jack Kemp sitting in on a panel and much emphasis on getting the poor to work harder, makes it seem more authentically Hamiltonian. (Brookings has been drifting right for years anyway, to the point of harboring some of the Iraq War’s key non-GOP ideologists.)

Returning to the Boston Review article, Hogeland follows his account of Hamilton’s modern reputation with a take-down that goes well beyond even what the modern Hamilton cult’s leading critic, Mike Wallace, has argued:

Neo-Hamiltonians of every kind are blotting out a defining feature of his thought, one that Hamilton himself insisted on throughout his turbulent career: the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.

I am not sure I agree with everything argued in the rest of the article, but go Bill! Objectors can post comments on the Boston Review’s site, or here.