America: The Story of Us (2010) s01e04 Episode Script
Division
300 million years BC.
A meteorite the size of Central Park hurtles towards Earth.
With the force of 100, 000 atomic bombs, it smashes into the Appalachian Mountains.
The Cumberland Gap.
When America passes through this gateway and conquers what lies beyond, a colony will become a continent.
I think Americans have always been- have been pioneers.
We're a nation of adventurers and explorers.
We are always moving forward and we're always dealing with problems, not ignoring them.
America: The Story of Us 1x02 Westward and Division Land west of the Cumberland Gap belongs to a patchwork of foreign superpowers: Britain, France, Spain.
The rest occupied by hundreds of Native American tribes.
3,000 miles of fertile land.
Millions of acres for anyone who can conquer it.
Riches, too.
Thousands of tons of gold and silver.
But this land is also brutal wilderness.
Conquering it requires extraordinary people.
March 1775.
Daniel Boone: woodsman, hunter, freedom fighter, explorer dreamer.
Okay, men, keep clring.
Cut it through, we're coming through here.
Boone and his 30 men slash through the Cumberland Gap on a mission to tap the riches.
Cut it through, we're coming through here.
Before us lay the finest body of land in the world, with which little exertion we can call our own.
One day thousands will desire this land, and we will be rich.
But Boone's journey into the western wilderness is also a journey into the American soul.
The frontier is a crucible where America will define itself and forge its true character.
The King of England has outlawed any Western expansion, illegal settlers rounded up and punished.
Boone's already fought the British back East.
Now he's defying them again.
Daniel Boone was that first great action hero for America.
America wanted to see itself that way, I think.
They wanted to see themselves as fiercely independent, very capable and and willing to go places most human beings wouldn't have gone.
Come on, men, this way.
Boone and his men take no supplies.
Come on, come on ! conjured from the land.
Bear grease: insect repellent.
Wasp larvae: food.
Come on, come on ! Boone records in his journal.
We are exposed daily to peril and death amongst savages and wild beasts.
But nature satisfies all we need.
Few experience the happiness we feel here in the howling wilderness.
But for the Shawnee, this is not wilderness.
It is home.
And they will defend it at all costs.
Good work, John, good work.
These areas that seemed like wilderness to the Americans weren't wilderness to these American-Indian people.
That was just their lands.
Daniel Boone and the Shawnee have history.
Only the year before, they kidnapped his eldest son, James And tortured him to death.
On the 25th of March, 1775, Boone crosses into Shawnee territory.
In the mountains for eight days People were able to survive on this with nothing to eat.
Go, go ! Go, go, run ! Rifles, get 'em, come on ! Ambushed, Boone must flee.
His friend, Captain Twitty, and his slave, Sam, are both scalped and slaughtered.
But Boone pushes on further west.
Well, I think more than anything, the American character is perseverance.
They persevered, they fought, it wasn't easy against great odds, but they had persevered.
Boone's friend and companion Felix Walker writes: He conducted the company through the wilderness with such bravery.
Indeed he appeared void of fear, with too little caution for the enterprise.
50 of Boone's men die settling Kentucky.
But within 20 years, 200,000 Americans pour in behind him.
We were a burgeoning society.
Suddenly we realized, whoa, the owner's manual says, "This is all ours.
Keep going west.
" Land hunger becomes a fever even for the government.
27 years after independence, the single biggest real-estate deal in history.
President Thomas Jefferson buys the vast Louisiana territories from Napoleon.
Half a billion acres for 3â an acre.
Just as America will one day go to the moon, now a mission into this unknown.
Lewis and Clark wanna see what's on the other side.
Given a mountain, we wanna climb it.
We hold those venturers of the past in great admiration.
May 1804.
A presidential aide and a junior army officer set out on a mapping expedition.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's journey is about to become one of the most epic tales of survival in American history.
The Rockies: unknown, mythical.
Even woolly mammoth are fabled to roam here.
Treacherous, too.
No one expects the Rockies to be 90 separate mountain ranges, 3,000 miles long.
They're caught in a death trap.
After two weeks, starvation sets in.
They eat any plants they can find.
Next, they eat their horses.
The expedition is given up as dead.
But they survive, and they owe their survival to a 16-year-old Native American girl.
Sacagawea of the Shoshone Nation guides them, finds wild food, and saves their precious million-word journals from an overturned canoe.
In 1805, William Clark notes in his journal: Ocean in view ! O ! The joy ! They are the first New Americans to reach the Pacific Ocean over land.
Lewis and Clark's remarkable expedition discovers 300 species of wildlife, transforming science and agriculture.
But their journals record an even greater discovery, one that will forge a whole new breed of American hero.
America.
East and West.
The pioneering spirit of Americans has busted the continent wide-open.
Lewis and Clark's heroic expedition through the Rockies uncovers a route to the West's most valuable commodity beaver.
Their pelts, frontier hard currency.
Traded by Native Americans for guns, knives, salt.
And they're a high-fashion luxury for the rich.
They've been hunted nearly to extinction in Europe.
Here they're everywhere.
Millions of them.
The freezing Rocky Mountain water makes the beaver pelts thicker, warmer, more expensive than other fur.
New iron traps from New York foundries make catching them easier.
Baited with the beaver's own scent glands, they're drawn to their death.
October 1823.
300 eager trappers roam the Rockies, searching for their fortune.
One in five won't make it out alive.
Trapping's harsh, hungry work.
6,000 calories a day are needed to survive the extreme conditions-- three times what we eat today.
Jedediah Smith is the greatest hunter of all.
24 years old.
He walks up to 1, 000 miles in the Rockies each year.
Traps 600 pelts in a season-- three years' pay back East.
Smith is a devout Christian.
Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke.
Bible and gun a constant companion.
He's smart, works with the Native Americans.
The Crow show him ancient shortcuts, sell him horses, nurse his sick men back to health.
Wilderness survival.
For millennia, the tribes of North America have adapted themselves to live in any condition, from arid plains to harsh mountain pass.
Jed Smith uses their knowledge and his skill to open up the West for vast fur-trapping profits.
He'll die a rich man.
But today he's not the hunter.
He's the hunted.
Jed Smith's friend James Clyman writes: The grizzly did not hesitate, springing on the captain, breaking his ribs and cutting his head.
This gave us a lesson on the character of the grizzly, which we did not forget.
The grizzly bear is the most deadly frontier beast.
100,000 of these terrifying killers are on the prowl.
Up to ten feet tall, 1,000 pounds, they don't fear man yet.
Today there are fewer than 2, 000 grizzlies in the Rockies.
Halfway to death, Jed Smith's right-hand man, JameClyman, stitches his scalp and ear back to his head.
I put in my needle, stitching it through and through and over and over, laying the lacerated parts together as nice as I could.
There is an amazing sense of confidence as part of that American spirit that doesn't even think about failing.
Jed Smith pushes on.
This is the new character of America: frontier grit, rugged individualism, survival.
And something else survives, too.
The trails he forges become settler paths, wagon trains, roads and today Interstate 15.
And Americans follow the new tracks west in a tidal wave of hope.
May 1846.
Thousands of men, women and children.
Riding, walking, pushing.
They're heading for a new life 2, 000 miles away.
It was a land of opportunity.
You can make of yourself what you want.
You're only held back by your own desires.
Germans, Belgians, French.
Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons.
One of the world's great mass migrations begins.
The pioneer spirit has moved on.
In this colossal migration to Oregon and California, America will finally define its character.
It's the American dream, then as now, the people want an already good life to get better.
They can walk ten miles a day for up to six months straight.
Some go through ten pairs of boots each.
Half are children.
En route, one in five of the women are pregnant.
But these aren't America's poor.
Families sell farms, save for five years to join the exodus, risking it all.
I think if there is one episode that encapsulates the American spirit, I think it is probably the move West.
Whip those mules and horses and cross those rivers and cross over those mountains to the unknown and say, "I'm leaving everything behind.
"I'm leaving everything that I know behind to reinvent myself.
" A wagon and oxen cost minimum $5, 000 in today's money.
But it buys a complete life-support machine.
The wagons carry a precious cargo, 1,000 pounds of supplies and a grubstake for your journey-- your entire new life in the West.
The pioneering spirit is ingenious.
Essential drinking water captured from rain on the wagon canvas.
Even the oxen's dung is fuel for fires.
And like today, there are tolls.
Native Americans charge $10 for road and $100 for river crossings, in modern money.
But the greatest toll of all human lives.
In all, 20,000 Americans will die reaching the West.
Ten graves for every mile.
But one story of suffering and death will show just how far the pioneers will go to conquer the West.
Hiyah ! Hiyah, hiyah ! June 1846.
A wagon train heads west.
Its leader is George Donner.
Good luck.
Good, now push ! Push ! His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a schoolteacher.
Yes, okay.
But on the trail, women must turn their hands to anything.
Push, that's it ! Yeah, push, push ! The Donner Party are halfway across the blistering Wyoming Prairie, miles from the nearest doctor, with barely any water.
Good, yes.
Okay.
I think the women who came across America in the early days, must've been made up of the strongest fiber possible.
It's unimaginable.
Good.
Yes.
Ludwig.
The new American's mother and father are Philippine and Ludwig Keseberg.
They christen their son Louis.
The journey is tough but the going's good.
Tamsen Donner writes in her journal: I could never have believed we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty.
Indeed if we do not experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.
But as leader of the wagon train, Tamsen's husband, George Donner, is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey.
The Sierra Nevada.
Peaks up to 14,000 feet.
Fail to clear the mountain passes before the first snow falls and the consequences are terrifying.
But as the Donner Party approaches Utah, George Donner makes a fateful decision-- leading a splinter group off from the main party.
He's read one of the many new trail guidebooks, showing a shortcut that claims to shave two weeks off the journey time.
Hastings Cutoff is said to be a saving of 400 miles.
We are informed it is a fine, level road with plenty of water and grass.
But Donner's information is wrong.
In fact, the "shortcut" adds 100 miles to the journey.
High in the Sierra Nevada, the Donner Party enters the Truckee Pass.
They're only 30 miles from the California plains.
But supplies are dangerously low, and traveling through the mountains is taking its toll.
A broken axle.
The Donner Party stops to make repairs.
But that night 5 feet of snow falls.
Soon the drifts are 60 feet deep.
The Donner Party will be stranded for five months.
In just three weeks, they've eaten all their food.
Then they kill their pack animals.
Next, they eat charred bones, twigs, bark, leaves, dirt and worse.
Even the wind held its breath as the suggestion was made that were one to die, the rest might live.
Cannibalism.
Christmas 1846.
They eat their first human.
Bodies are cut up, flesh labeled, so people don't eat their own kin.
Four rescue parties bring out some survivors.
The very last finds Philippine's husband Ludwig, alone.
He is surrounded by bones, entrails, and a 2-gallon kettle of human blood.
George Donner's body is found, skull split open, his brain removed.
Tamsen Donner's body is never found.
The pass is renamed the "Donner Pass," testament to the hardship of the pioneers' push West.
Today it's the Lincoln Highway.
Thousands drive this road every year.
But beneath the bones of the Donner Party, the Sierra Nevada conceals a seam of gold.
Largest the world has yet seen.
Gold fever is about to change the West, and the American character yet again.
March 1836.
Texas, the Alamo.
The American nation is expanding, growing stronger, bigger.
But there's something else out there even bigger, even stronger: Mexico-- a superpower.
A colossal empire stretching from Oregon to Guatemala.
But Texas is disputed territory.
The Mexican government has invited American settlers in, but are soon overwhelmed by the flood of pioneers.
Americans, by the thousands, were coming into Texas and they were not abiding to the agreements to come in as settlers.
And once they outnumber-- by 1835-- Mexicans ten to one in that area, of course the Americans are thinking about independence.
The Alamo is where Mexico tries to stem the flood.
The shots that killed Davy Crockett and his fellow settlers echoed across America.
The women and children are spared, sent back to send the Mexican message, "Don't come.
" But America hears something else.
"Remember the Alamo.
" ( screaming A turning point.
America will now wage war to go West.
Texas is won, California fought and bought.
The same month California becomes American, it becomes the nation's greatest prize.
Volcanic magma.
Over millions of years, in a fault zone beneath the Sierra Nevada, cooling and pressure create quartz.
And within the quartz, gold.
The seam is one of the densest on the planet.
Rocks erode and the riches are released.
Carpenter James Marshall finds a 3-ounce nugget in the California river.
Two months' pay in his hand, but billions of dollars beneath his feet.
News of Marshall's discovery spreads to every corner of the world.
In California, you can taste the American dream: get rich quick.
Within a year, 100, 000 desperate amateur prospectors flood the Sierra foothills.
It was the American dream distilled to its essence.
Take yourself and go out and try and make a success of it.
A Chinese prospector's 100-ounce strike in the Yuba River.
$26,000 made by a single Irishman in just four days.
A $200,000 super seam mined by 12 Mexicans at Bear Valley.
In the port of San Francisco, a plot of land worth $16 before the gold strike now changes hands for $45,000.
In two years, the population of California explodes from 15,000 to 100,000.
Now, hand-panning is replaced by lines of sluice boxes desperately combing for anything the first prospectors missed.
And the price of living rockets.
Picks, pans, shovels go from a few cents to $10 apiece.
Breakfast costs ten times what it does back East.
But still the people come.
200 abandoned ships in San Francisco harbor, the crews deserting, rushing for the hills.
He's traveled 6,000 miles.
He's spent all his money.
Now he travels by foot.
Belgian Jean-Nicolas Perlot We crossed 200 miles of wilderness full of Indians, bears, panthers, wildcats, snakes of every kind.
The first thing he finds isn't gold.
It's graves.
200 of them.
Prospectors cut off by rains in the foothills starved to death.
Approaching, we realized animals of some kind had dug up the bodies.
I read a note attached to one of the graves.
"God has willed that civilization "should begin in this place, "with this duty which a man owes to his kind.
Bury the dead.
" Perlot does find gold, but never in the quantities that he'd dreamed.
As the gold fields are picked clean, tensions rise, times get tougher.
After just five years, the Gold Rush is over.
I think that there is that Western mentality of prospecting-- try and fail, try and fail, and the fact that you tried is worthy in and of itself.
Of 300,000 who rush to find gold, less than one out of 100 struck it rich.
But fortunes were made by the merchants and landowners who supplied the miners.
From dirt and dreams came the great cities of California.
Both the West and the American character that built it are settled.
Now this new powerhouse will face another revolution.
October 1818.
A nine-year-old boy comforts his mother as she lies on her deathbed.
Milk sickness kills thousands of pioneers every year.
The cause: White Snakeroot eaten by cattle, the deadly poison passed in milk to humans.
At 18, the boy becomes a man, but he has been working like a man for years, battling for existence in this harsh environment.
It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.
There I grew up.
I had an ax in my hand from my eighth to my 20th year.
This is the life of American settler stock.
The young man's grandfather followed Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road into Kentucky.
His father pushed further into the primeval forests of Indiana.
Settler families of ten or more live in log cabins built from scratch.
Single roomed, basic.
The trailer homes of the day.
The wilderness provides everything.
They make their own plows, rakes, forks, shovels, build their own furniture.
And they bury their dead.
In bad years, malaria kills one in eight of the settlers.
Life expectancy is half of what it is today.
But from adversity comes strength.
This settler's name is Abraham.
Abraham Lincoln.
If you work hard, you can do anything you wanna do.
The possibilities are endless.
To me, that was the American dream, as a kid.
Lincoln's family and thousands like theirs have settled the West in four generations.
President Thomas Jefferson thoughit would take 1,000.
The forests are cleared: five acres a family, a year.
In 1800, 23 million acres of Indiana is wilderness.
In 60 years, it's tamed, flat, fertile farmland.
But there is more than forest to clear.
It's always been one of the deep flaws of the American imagination, that it can't imagine a future for American-Indian people as Americans.
American-Indian people have to imagine that for themselves, and that's the hard part.
Keep walking.
Frontier president Andrew Jackson declares a new policy, a policy that America will maintain for more than 100 years.
The forced relocation of American tribal people onto reservations.
You, keep moving ! After years of Supreme Court battles, the bill passes Congress by a single vote.
Chickasaw, Chocktaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, all forced off their nations by the point of a bayonet.
An episode in the conquest of the West that even some of the soldiers taking part find shameful.
US Army Private John G.
Burnett writes: The sufferings of the Cherokee were awful.
The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.
They slept in the wagons and on the ground without fire.
I saw as many as 20 die in a single night of pneumonia, cold, exposure.
Move along.
Move along.
The march of 1,000 miles becomes a Trail of Tears.
It's a shameful act in American history and it's, in its own way, sort of an iconic act because it really symbolizes what happened to the Native Americans.
The West is open for business, but key to the transformation of the region is a river 2,000 miles in length, fed by rainfall from 31 states.
Running from Minnesota to New Orleans, the Mighty Mississippi.
It's a lifeline connecting the West to the outside world.
If roads exist, they're muddy tracks.
This is the only trade artery, the interstate, that allows the pioneers and settlers to sell the produce they've sweated over.
A huge amount of goods are shipped out, but they're shipped out in the most nickel-and-dime way.
A farmer will build a flatboat, fill it up with hogs, sassafras root, ginseng root, tobacco-- whatever it is you grow- put it on the flatboat, use the power of the Mississippi to drift you down to sell them along the riverbank.
Aged 19, Abraham Lincoln makes his first trip down the Mississippi, poling his simple raft.
The current is too strong to return upstream.
The primitive flatboats are simply sold as lumber in New Orleans.
Farmers have to walk the 800 miles home and begin again.
But on that first journey, Lincoln sees the future.
A new invention which will transform the Mississippi, the Midwest, and America.
The steamboat was the 19th century's time machine, just as surely as the airplane was the 20th century's time machine.
It shrunk distance.
By shrinking distance, it enabled commerce.
Even upstream, steamboats can travel 50 miles a day, eight times faster, eight times the cargo of a raft.
But they're deadly.
Over half the early models explode, maiming and killing hundreds.
But their number triples every decade.
They make the Midwest America's economic powerhouse.
Within 20 years, St.
Louis alone swells from a few hundred to a population of 16,000.
Over four generations, America has grown from a 100-mile-wide strip of colonies on the Eastern Seaboard to a continental powerhouse.
America is exploding across the continent.
The economy is booming.
Cotton in the South industry in the North.
But the new nation is divided.
In the land where all men are created equal 4 million black Americans live as slaves.
And it's tearing the nation apart.
All over the world, the modern era is being born.
It's the Industrial Revolution.
America is racing to catch up.
In upstate New York, a man-made river is cutting through the wilderness.
The Erie Canal is the biggest construction project in the Western world in the last 4,000 years.
Over 300 miles long, dug entirely by hand, and America lacks a single qualified engineer.
The United States of America isn't about to let nature stand in its way.
I think of the spirit of America being imagination combined with tenacity.
There's a strong work ethic, a wonderful freedom of creation combined with the mental muscle and physical labor.
So to me, it represents the best of the human spirit.
But the land doesn't always cooperate.
A wall of solid limestone 60 feet high.
Just 30 miles from the finish line, Lake Erie.
The canal will change everything, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the whole middle of America.
It changes where people live, and why, and turns the North into a global economic powerhouse.
The man behind the canal is New York's gung-ho governor, DeWitt Clinton.
Born to wealth, he won't take no for an answer.
He wants to be president.
Instead, he runs New York for 20 years.
America was blessed with many inspirational leaders, and I think DeWitt Clinton had a real sense of how important New York could be for America.
Clinton's vision: to make New York rich.
Politically, the canal is a huge gamble.
It's savaged in the press as dangerous and too expensive.
They call it "Clinton's big ditch.
" But it will change New York forever.
It is a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial than has hitherto been achieved by the human race.
Entrepreneurship is about doing things when you don't know what it's gonna look like, you don't know what it's gonna be made of, you just have this instinct that you can do it and it'll work.
Those guys had visions and did it.
50,000 men.
11 million cubic yards of rock.
Enough to fill the Rose Bowl 26,000 times.
Crews are filled with Irish immigrants.
David Gilroy makes five times what he can earn back home, but it's hazardous work.
They're literally moving mountains, and there's only one way through-- gunpowder.
A highly combustible mix of nitrate, charcoal and sulfur.
The wrong proportions can be lethal.
There's only one job that's more dangerous than lighting the fuse going back to relight it.
To cope, workers drink.
Whiskey calms the nerves- and clouds the brain.
An English tourist can't believe they're mixing alcohol and explosives.
The Irish laborers grew so reckless of life, that at the signal for blasting, they would just hold their shovels over their heads.
I think when you're brought up in America, you're brought up on the history of hard work.
There are so many immigrants that have died to build this country.
That's in our bloodstream, that's in our DNA as Americans.
We don't want their lives to go in vain.
Because of that, we usually work harder than anybody else.
Eight years of digging.
Nearly a thousand lives lost.
$7 million, more than 100 million today.
The Erie Canal opens in 1825, a miracle of engineering, connecting East and Midwest.
It's an instant economic superhighway.
$15 million of goods a year flow along the canal.
Villages along the canal boom into dynamic cities-- Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester.
Goods crash in price, up to 95%.
A frontier that had to be self-sufficient can now buy anything they want.
Prosperity is on the move.
New York City becomes a boomtown.
Wall Street takes off as a global financial center.
The city quadruples in size and surpasses New Orleans as the nation's number-one port.
There's so much money around, the word "millionaire" is invented in 1840.
The Erie Canal still shapes New York today.
80% of the upstate population still lives within 25 miles of it.
Hundreds of miles to the south, a small plant is creating another economic boom.
Cotton.
But this one will eventually tear the nation apart.
Cotton is native to tropical regions, making the Southern states of the US a perfect breeding ground.
The valued part is the soft fiber which grows tightly around the shrub's sticky seeds.
There are 30 species worldwide.
Growing it's no problem, but processing the fiber before it can be spun into cloth is labor-intensive.
Especially, separating the seeds.
For years, it could only be done by hand.
One pound took an entire day.
A simple patent filed on March 4, 1794, changes all that.
The cotton gin.
It automates the process and deeply divides the country.
The cotton gin transformed not only America, but the world.
The concept of mass production using a machine just exploded everywhere.
One man can now process 50 times more cotton.
Output skyrockets all over the South.
In 1830, America is producing half the world's cotton.
By 1850, it's nearly 3/4.
Called white gold, cotton supports a new lavish lifestyle in the South.
By 1850, there are more millionaires per capita in Natchez, Mississippi, than anywhere else on Earth.
The richest man in town owns 40,000 acres, nearly three times the size of Manhattan Island.
The South is thriving on the backs of humans owning other humans.
It's called slavery.
The North is implicated in the South's success.
The industrial North is profiting from Southern cotton, but turns a blind eye to slavery.
Many of them slave owners themselves, the Founding Fathers assumed slavery would soon disappear.
Slavery has already been abolished for 20 years in Britain and is outlawed across most of Europe.
But with the cotton explosion, slavery becomes critical to the Southern economy.
Each slave is now 50 times more profitable.
A slave who sold for $300 before the cotton gin goes for nearly 2,000 by 1860.
People don't really realize this, but slavery was actually on the decline in the South prior to the invention of the cotton gin, but then once the cotton gin made it so practical to grow cotton, all of a sudden, every farmer in the South wanted to plant as much cotton as possible.
But overproduction is destroying the land.
Cotton heads west in search of fertile soil, bringing slavery with it.
But antislavery forces in the North want to keep the frontier free.
The stage is set for the first battles in the war over slavery.
Cotton is changing the way Americans live.
In time, it will blow the nation apart.
For the South, cotton is a gold mine.
Now the North wants a piece of the action.
It's a partnership that makes everyone rich, based on a new machine, the power loom.
Raw cotton comes in, finished cloth goes out.
All under one roof.
The modern factory is born.
Lowell, Massachusetts, is called the city of spindles, a textiles boomtown.
Population explodes from 200 in 1820 to nearly 20,000 in just 15 years.
More than a third of the town works in the mills.
85% are single women between 15 and 25.
Harriet Robinson is ten.
When her father dies, she goes to work at the mill.
I can see myself now, racing down the alley, between the spinning frames, carrying in front of me a bobbin box bigger than I was.
Women earn money for the first time.
Harriet's wages help support her family.
Industrialization is changing everyone's lives.
All the mill girls make good use of their money.
The mortgage is lifted from the homestead, the farmhouse is painted.
Mill girls help maintain widowed mothers and drunken or invalid fathers.
We were paid $2 a week.
Oh, how proud I was when it came to my turn to stand upon the bobbin-box.
When women really joined the workforce in the cotton mills and the thread factories, I think it gave women an opportunity to get out, be serious about being breadwinners.
And it changed the whole fabric of America.
The mills also revolutionize how Americans dress.
Mass production of cheap cotton fabrics spawns America's clothing industry.
Previously, most families made their own clothes.
Now, people buy ready-to-wear.
Eastern fashions replace buckskin.
By 1850, men's clothing is the largest manufacturing industry in New York City.
For me, what makes me proudest to be an American is that American spirit of productivity, optimism, this idea that the world doesn't have to be doom and gloom, that we can use technology to make our lives better.
Fashion isn't the only innovation to come out of the mills.
Technology developed here will lead straight to Silicon Valley.
Looms pioneer punch cards to produce patterned fabric.
Each hole in the card tells the loom to use a different-colored thread, a yes-no decision.
It's binary code, the basis of all modern computers.
The birth of the computer and Internet began in cotton mills with these looms.
You know, in every major development, I think, in the history of America, technology has been at the center of it.
Despite 12-hour shifts, the factories offer a new world of opportunity for women.
They are reading more, talking more, educating themselves.
Yeah, reading books on factory time was against the rules, but we hid books in apron pockets and wastebaskets.
Sometimes we pasted poems on our looms to memorize.
And for the first time in America, their voices are heard.
October 1836.
Women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organize.
Their protest against wage cuts is one of the first strikes in US history.
And they will win.
The mill bosses back down.
A generation of young women go on to become teachers, writers and even college graduates.
Harriet Robinson will become a leading suffragette and testify before Congress.
They're the first wave in a movement that results in women getting the vote.
Their secret meetings at night are only possible with the light from lamps powered by an extraordinary creature.
Whale oil opened up the night, and like so many really transformative technological innovations, it expanded human freedom.
It created a way for people to get more, do more and achieve more.
Crude oil won't be discovered for another 20 years.
Until then, America runs on whale oil.
The whaling industry helped invent part of the Industrial Revolution and the classic American workaholic, work-round-the-clock kind of environment, where if you have more light to keep you going in those dark winter days, you could get more done, you could make more money, and you could kind of drive the economy forward.
Whales are among the largest creatures to ever live on Earth.
Up to 180 tons and more than 100 feet long.
A single whale can produce up to 3, 000 gallons of oil.
Even today, whale oil is used by NASA.
The Hubble space teleope runs on it.
Whaling is one of the North's biggest industries, bringing in $11 million a year.
But the human cost is also high.
Half of all ships will eventually be lost at sea.
Few men are willing to take the risk.
But it's an opportunity for African-Americans.
20,000 freemen and escaped slaves take to the seas.
John Thompson is a runaway from Maryland.
I have a family in Philadelphia.
But fearing to remain there any longer, I thought I would go on a whaling voyage where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.
The equal opportunity offered in whaling is ahead of its time.
Here, a colored man is only known and looked upon as a man and is promoted in rank according to his ability and skill to perform the same duties as a white man.
The whaling industry offered an ex-slave like John Thompson the possibility of social and economic fluidity, mobility and acceptance in a way.
Even in the North, that was not possible for black people otherwise.
The man on the lookout cried out, "There she blows !" There were four whales in sight, not more than 3/4 of a mile distant.
It takes hours to kill them.
They use state-of-the-art harpoons invented by runaway slave Lewis Temple.
The whale can only be killed by lancing him under the fin, which is a work of much skill and practice.
A monster, terrible in his fury, able to shiver the boat in atoms by one stroke of his tail.
And yet even the dangers at sea are preferable to the horror of life as a slave.
Punishment is savage for those who risk escape, but some will do anything to be free.
1841, New Orleans.
Ground zero for the slave trade.
It's auction day.
The day every slave fears the most.
In the first half of the 19th century, over half a million slaves are sold at auction.
It's a business worth $2 billion to the Southern economy.
Since the cotton boom, the value of slaves has skyrocketed.
Now men cost $1,000.
Women, 800.
Children, 500.
Solomon Northup, an educated freeman from the North, was kidnapped into slavery.
You, come over here.
He would make us hold up our heads, walk us briskly back and forth, while customers would feel our hands and arms and bodies, make us open up our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse, which he is about to barter for or purchase.
Scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale.
Take your top off.
90% of all African-Americans are slaves, 4 million men, women and children.
We had based this country on everyone having inalienable rights to freedom and equality, and yet we created a system of abject persecution.
Slaves are fattened for auction, like livestock.
Dark-skinned men are bought for the fields, light-skinned women for the house.
Traders lie about their ages, even dye a slave's gray hairs.
For the plantation owners, it was like just going to your local supermarket to get sugar or flour.
They had become so desensitized to the humanity of the slave that they did not see them as human beings.
Buyers demand the most fertile slaves for breeding.
The most expensive are light-skinned teenage virgins.
Rape is common.
Eliza's from a state plantation.
She's being sold, with her two children, Emily and Randall.
In Louisiana, it's illegal for children under 11 to be taken from their parents.
Boy, come over here.
It happens all the time.
Show me your teeth.
You know, 140 years is not a really long time in the context of history.
So it's hard for me to believe that blacks didn't have any rights here, they weren't treated as human beings, they were treated like animals, essentially.
Sir, please ! Over half the sales at auction will tear a family apart.
If you've ever been eight, to think of being separated from your mother and your father and sold and you'll never see them again.
The horror of that, the poignancy of all of that, and yet that's the kind of thing that happened across the South up until the end of slavery.
Okay, my final offer, I'll give you 1,000 for that man, 900 for that man.
That woman there, $700.
Please, buy my child ! Sir ! Sir ! I have seen mothers kissing for the last time the faces of their dead offspring, but never have I seen such an exhibition of intense grief as when Eliza was parted from her child.
Three miles outside Baltimore heading North.
A slave on the run.
The risk of capture is high.
At most, 1, 000 a year are successful.
Ears cut off; Achilles tendons slashed; branding; all are common punishments if caught.
Frederick Douglass has failed twice, but won't let that stop him.
Men like Douglass are the South's worst nightmare.
He has a better chance than most of passing as a freeman.
Unlike 80% of slaves, he can read and write.
Even in the 21st century, we're only three or four generations away from people that not only could not get paid for their labor, it was against the law for them to read and write, it was against the law for them to marry, it was against the law for them to name their children after themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen, please.
Long way to go.
Ticket.
Black Americans must carry documents proving they're free, or who they belong to.
Frederick Douglass has papers borrowed from a friend.
Ticket.
They won't hold up to careful examination.
My whole future depended on the decision of this conductor.
Someone get this chicken.
This moment of time was one of the most anxious I ever experienced.
Had he looked closely at the paper, he could not have failed to discover that it called for a very different-looking person from myself.
Frederick Douglass makes it to New York City-- and freedom, and becomes a leading figure in the antislavery movement.
He'll write a best-selling autobiography.
He'll meet and debate with Lincoln in the White House.
At a time when slaves are barely regarded as people, he will become an icon, a celebrity, the best-known African-American in America.
The best hope for escaped slaves is the legendary Underground Railroad and the tireless efforts of Harriet Tubman.
An escaped slave herself, she risks her life returning south again and again to guide others to freedom.
A masterful escape artist, Tubman will do anything to avoid capture, even keeping babies quiet with opium.
That's a good boy.
Harriet Tubman is the Moses of our people.
She was a wanted woman, she was a hated woman, reviled by the white South.
Just imagine you've gotten out of slavery, you've escaped, and yet you come back, you have the courage and the care about other people to come back into a hell.
The South puts a $40, 000 reward on her head, but nothing stops her.
Come on, y'all ! Come on ! Move or die.
Tubman is one of America's first civil-rights activists.
In the same month she dies, Rosa Parks is born.
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman threaten everything the South stands for.
Tens of thousands of slave owners had to deal with, for the first time, the fact that these people are going to rebel.
She was far more effective as the symbol that they feared than the few hundred that she saved.
Nearly 60,000 slaves will escape, up to a $50 million loss to their owners, but it symbolizes much more.
Now the South has a fight on its hands, and they're prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve their way of life.
The fight for the soul of a nation is just getting started.
Midway through the 19th century, America is entering the modern world.
In 20 years, there'll be Levi's Jeans, chewing gum and hot dogs.
But the nation is split, being torn apart at the seams dividing North and South.
Slavery became not simply a political issue, not simply an economic issue, but a moral issue as well.
It became the issue that defined North and South in the 1850s.
September 1850.
The Fugitive Slave Law brings the brutality of Southern slavery to the North.
Now, no African-American is safe, anywhere.
Gentlemen, you've made a mistake.
This is a place of business.
I'm a tailor, these are my clients.
I'm a freeman.
I'm not a slave, gentlemen.
The Fugitive Slave Law meant that if you were a slave and you managed to escape to the North, your master could come and get you, and you had no recourse.
Not only that, if you were a free Negro, they still could sell you down the river.
The search for runaway slaves had become a witch hunt.
Any African-American can be condemned simply with an accusation.
Even a freeman has no right to a trial by jury.
Federal magistrates get $10 to rule them slaves, five to set them free.
Ordinary people are outraged by the new law.
Abolitionist newspapers and literature spread like wildfire.
Published in 1852, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" becomes the best-selling book of the century, after the Bible.
A passionate antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an unknown housewife from Connecticut.
It mainly appeals to women who are becoming politicized for the first time.
Slavery is the burning issue of the day.
As America expands across the continent, North and South face off over each new territory.
Will it be slave-owning or free ? The Northerners began to see that, wait a minute, they're not gonna keep slavery just in the South, they wanna take slavery West and to turn the country into a slave country.
Americans from all over the country are flooding into the new territories on the frontier.
Each becomes a battleground.
Will it be slave-owning or free ? It comes to a head in Kansas.
A peaceful protest turns violent.
Emotions run high.
Towns are terrorized, stores robbed.
Homesteads burned.
North and South are polarized.
Neither side will back down.
One man will stop at nothing to abolish slavery.
John Brown.
A folk hero in the North a terrorist to the South.
He thinks he's fighting a holy war.
He believes himself to be God's chosen instrument.
He will murder for his cause.
John Brown is one of those controversial figures about whom almost anything you can say is true.
He's a terrorist, in our modern terms.
He's a revolutionary.
The divide between North and South is an open wound.
Kansas bleeds for two years, more than 200 dead.
America is on the road to war.
Slavery is tearing the nation apart.
America is built on a number of distinct fault lines, one, of course, was slavery and freedom, that was a fault line that had to be addressed.
In the South, slavery is a way of life, even for non-slave owners.
Antislavery forces in the North threaten their right to decide their fate.
There is still, in some areas of America, a great pride in being Southern and holding true to the original Southern attitude.
I think our clinging to the idea that slavery is a right and just a way of life, you know, it is a dark spot in our history.
Anger in the South grows more passionate every day.
The North claims the moral high ground, but they are getting rich off cotton, too.
Pretty much everybody agreed that a crisis was developing.
Not everyone knew that the crisis would include, in the end, the Civil War, but everyone understood that a showdown between the slave South and the free North was about to occur.
John Brown wants to light the fuse.
October 1859.
Passionate in his hatred of slavery, Brown prepares to take the fight into the heart of the South.
His plan, to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the biggest collection of weapons in the South.
20,000 rifles, muskets and pistols, worth almost $7 million today.
He wants to arm Southern slaves and lead a slave rebellion.
He's fighting alongside his five sons, all of them willing to die for their cause.
The arsenal is poorly defended.
Breaking in is a pushover.
But his raid is based on local slaves rising up and joining the fight.
He needs a small army to carry off so many weapons.
Without slave reinforcements, it's a suicide mission.
Word gets out and local townsfolk attack the arsenal.
Not a single slave joins Brown and his men.
They are trapped and fighting for their lives.
I wanna free all Negroes in this state.
I have possession of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.
Radical abolitionist John Brown is trying to inspire a slave revolt.
No slaves have joined him, and now he's trapped.
At dawn, the US Marines arrive.
They storm the arsenal under the command of Colonel Robert E.
Lee.
Brown won't go down without a fight.
The soldiers overwhelm them.
The fight against slavery has only just begun.
But John Brown's crusade is over.
His sons are dead.
His trial captivates the country.
Charged as a criminal, he puts the institution of slavery on trial.
America is fatally divided.
Brown is convicted of treason and sentenced to death.
A terrorist in the South, a martyr in the North.
He's executed on December 2, 1859.
As the country prepares to elect a new president in 1860, many wonder if the nation can survive.
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.
Chicago, May 18, 1860.
A backwoods congressman comes out of nowhere to grab the new Republican Party's nomination for President.
Abe Lincoln's only claim to fame-- he's lost two elections to the Senate.
Personally, Lincoln hates slavery, but he is desperate to hold the country together.
What I admire about Abraham Lincoln is that he had his beliefs and he stuck to his beliefs at a time when it wasn't popular to do so, especially when it was black, white and very cut-and-dry, he stuck to his beliefs.
November 6, 1860.
Election Day.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
Abraham Lincoln will be elected president of a country hurtling towards war.
The South rebels, convinced he'll abolish slavery.
They threaten to leave the Union.
The battle lines are drawn.
The North is behind him.
For the South, Lincoln is the enemy.
An editorial in an Atlanta paper: "Let the consequences be what they may.
"Whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore "and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms "with mangled bodies, the South will never "submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
" The South knew that Lincoln was gonna win, and it was just a matter of time, tick, tick, tick, before secession occurred.
The South wants no part of a Union with Lincoln in the White House.
But as he prepares to take office, the President-elect is still determined to avoid a civil war.
Lincoln was not happy about slavery.
He did not see that as congruent to "All men are created equal.
" And he had given a speech, before he ever became president, on why that was so important to him.
And I think that was coming to a head, and when he got elected, that was the final straw for the South.
December 20, 1860.
South Carolina secedes from the Union.
The ten other slave states soon follow.
Lincoln's victory makes war inevitable.
He's prepared to fight to preserve the Union-- and won't have to wait long.
In February 1861, a few weeks before his inauguration, the Confederate States of America are born.
Lincoln's principal objective was to save the Union and then we'll deal with slavery, but before too long, he had to both save the Union and deal with slavery.
Abraham Lincoln receives his first death threats before ever taking office.
He'll save every one, keeping a file in his desk " Assassination.
" On the journey to Washington, he'll wear a disguise, just to be safe.
He'll do anything to avoid war, except allow slavery to expand.
It is Lincoln who explains the case for freedom and says, "I'm not gonna attack slavery where it is, but I'm not gonna let it expand.
" At his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln reluctantly pledges that states with slaves will be allowed to keep them, but it's too tittle, too late.
A virtual state of war already exists.
The South mobilizes an army of 800,000 men against a Union army of 2ý million.
Five weeks after Abraham Lincoln takes office, the first shots are fired in the War Between the States.
It will spark a brutal and bloody civil war, the deadlit in American history.
In the next four years, more lives will be lost than in all America's other wars put together.
A meteorite the size of Central Park hurtles towards Earth.
With the force of 100, 000 atomic bombs, it smashes into the Appalachian Mountains.
The Cumberland Gap.
When America passes through this gateway and conquers what lies beyond, a colony will become a continent.
I think Americans have always been- have been pioneers.
We're a nation of adventurers and explorers.
We are always moving forward and we're always dealing with problems, not ignoring them.
America: The Story of Us 1x02 Westward and Division Land west of the Cumberland Gap belongs to a patchwork of foreign superpowers: Britain, France, Spain.
The rest occupied by hundreds of Native American tribes.
3,000 miles of fertile land.
Millions of acres for anyone who can conquer it.
Riches, too.
Thousands of tons of gold and silver.
But this land is also brutal wilderness.
Conquering it requires extraordinary people.
March 1775.
Daniel Boone: woodsman, hunter, freedom fighter, explorer dreamer.
Okay, men, keep clring.
Cut it through, we're coming through here.
Boone and his 30 men slash through the Cumberland Gap on a mission to tap the riches.
Cut it through, we're coming through here.
Before us lay the finest body of land in the world, with which little exertion we can call our own.
One day thousands will desire this land, and we will be rich.
But Boone's journey into the western wilderness is also a journey into the American soul.
The frontier is a crucible where America will define itself and forge its true character.
The King of England has outlawed any Western expansion, illegal settlers rounded up and punished.
Boone's already fought the British back East.
Now he's defying them again.
Daniel Boone was that first great action hero for America.
America wanted to see itself that way, I think.
They wanted to see themselves as fiercely independent, very capable and and willing to go places most human beings wouldn't have gone.
Come on, men, this way.
Boone and his men take no supplies.
Come on, come on ! conjured from the land.
Bear grease: insect repellent.
Wasp larvae: food.
Come on, come on ! Boone records in his journal.
We are exposed daily to peril and death amongst savages and wild beasts.
But nature satisfies all we need.
Few experience the happiness we feel here in the howling wilderness.
But for the Shawnee, this is not wilderness.
It is home.
And they will defend it at all costs.
Good work, John, good work.
These areas that seemed like wilderness to the Americans weren't wilderness to these American-Indian people.
That was just their lands.
Daniel Boone and the Shawnee have history.
Only the year before, they kidnapped his eldest son, James And tortured him to death.
On the 25th of March, 1775, Boone crosses into Shawnee territory.
In the mountains for eight days People were able to survive on this with nothing to eat.
Go, go ! Go, go, run ! Rifles, get 'em, come on ! Ambushed, Boone must flee.
His friend, Captain Twitty, and his slave, Sam, are both scalped and slaughtered.
But Boone pushes on further west.
Well, I think more than anything, the American character is perseverance.
They persevered, they fought, it wasn't easy against great odds, but they had persevered.
Boone's friend and companion Felix Walker writes: He conducted the company through the wilderness with such bravery.
Indeed he appeared void of fear, with too little caution for the enterprise.
50 of Boone's men die settling Kentucky.
But within 20 years, 200,000 Americans pour in behind him.
We were a burgeoning society.
Suddenly we realized, whoa, the owner's manual says, "This is all ours.
Keep going west.
" Land hunger becomes a fever even for the government.
27 years after independence, the single biggest real-estate deal in history.
President Thomas Jefferson buys the vast Louisiana territories from Napoleon.
Half a billion acres for 3â an acre.
Just as America will one day go to the moon, now a mission into this unknown.
Lewis and Clark wanna see what's on the other side.
Given a mountain, we wanna climb it.
We hold those venturers of the past in great admiration.
May 1804.
A presidential aide and a junior army officer set out on a mapping expedition.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's journey is about to become one of the most epic tales of survival in American history.
The Rockies: unknown, mythical.
Even woolly mammoth are fabled to roam here.
Treacherous, too.
No one expects the Rockies to be 90 separate mountain ranges, 3,000 miles long.
They're caught in a death trap.
After two weeks, starvation sets in.
They eat any plants they can find.
Next, they eat their horses.
The expedition is given up as dead.
But they survive, and they owe their survival to a 16-year-old Native American girl.
Sacagawea of the Shoshone Nation guides them, finds wild food, and saves their precious million-word journals from an overturned canoe.
In 1805, William Clark notes in his journal: Ocean in view ! O ! The joy ! They are the first New Americans to reach the Pacific Ocean over land.
Lewis and Clark's remarkable expedition discovers 300 species of wildlife, transforming science and agriculture.
But their journals record an even greater discovery, one that will forge a whole new breed of American hero.
America.
East and West.
The pioneering spirit of Americans has busted the continent wide-open.
Lewis and Clark's heroic expedition through the Rockies uncovers a route to the West's most valuable commodity beaver.
Their pelts, frontier hard currency.
Traded by Native Americans for guns, knives, salt.
And they're a high-fashion luxury for the rich.
They've been hunted nearly to extinction in Europe.
Here they're everywhere.
Millions of them.
The freezing Rocky Mountain water makes the beaver pelts thicker, warmer, more expensive than other fur.
New iron traps from New York foundries make catching them easier.
Baited with the beaver's own scent glands, they're drawn to their death.
October 1823.
300 eager trappers roam the Rockies, searching for their fortune.
One in five won't make it out alive.
Trapping's harsh, hungry work.
6,000 calories a day are needed to survive the extreme conditions-- three times what we eat today.
Jedediah Smith is the greatest hunter of all.
24 years old.
He walks up to 1, 000 miles in the Rockies each year.
Traps 600 pelts in a season-- three years' pay back East.
Smith is a devout Christian.
Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke.
Bible and gun a constant companion.
He's smart, works with the Native Americans.
The Crow show him ancient shortcuts, sell him horses, nurse his sick men back to health.
Wilderness survival.
For millennia, the tribes of North America have adapted themselves to live in any condition, from arid plains to harsh mountain pass.
Jed Smith uses their knowledge and his skill to open up the West for vast fur-trapping profits.
He'll die a rich man.
But today he's not the hunter.
He's the hunted.
Jed Smith's friend James Clyman writes: The grizzly did not hesitate, springing on the captain, breaking his ribs and cutting his head.
This gave us a lesson on the character of the grizzly, which we did not forget.
The grizzly bear is the most deadly frontier beast.
100,000 of these terrifying killers are on the prowl.
Up to ten feet tall, 1,000 pounds, they don't fear man yet.
Today there are fewer than 2, 000 grizzlies in the Rockies.
Halfway to death, Jed Smith's right-hand man, JameClyman, stitches his scalp and ear back to his head.
I put in my needle, stitching it through and through and over and over, laying the lacerated parts together as nice as I could.
There is an amazing sense of confidence as part of that American spirit that doesn't even think about failing.
Jed Smith pushes on.
This is the new character of America: frontier grit, rugged individualism, survival.
And something else survives, too.
The trails he forges become settler paths, wagon trains, roads and today Interstate 15.
And Americans follow the new tracks west in a tidal wave of hope.
May 1846.
Thousands of men, women and children.
Riding, walking, pushing.
They're heading for a new life 2, 000 miles away.
It was a land of opportunity.
You can make of yourself what you want.
You're only held back by your own desires.
Germans, Belgians, French.
Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons.
One of the world's great mass migrations begins.
The pioneer spirit has moved on.
In this colossal migration to Oregon and California, America will finally define its character.
It's the American dream, then as now, the people want an already good life to get better.
They can walk ten miles a day for up to six months straight.
Some go through ten pairs of boots each.
Half are children.
En route, one in five of the women are pregnant.
But these aren't America's poor.
Families sell farms, save for five years to join the exodus, risking it all.
I think if there is one episode that encapsulates the American spirit, I think it is probably the move West.
Whip those mules and horses and cross those rivers and cross over those mountains to the unknown and say, "I'm leaving everything behind.
"I'm leaving everything that I know behind to reinvent myself.
" A wagon and oxen cost minimum $5, 000 in today's money.
But it buys a complete life-support machine.
The wagons carry a precious cargo, 1,000 pounds of supplies and a grubstake for your journey-- your entire new life in the West.
The pioneering spirit is ingenious.
Essential drinking water captured from rain on the wagon canvas.
Even the oxen's dung is fuel for fires.
And like today, there are tolls.
Native Americans charge $10 for road and $100 for river crossings, in modern money.
But the greatest toll of all human lives.
In all, 20,000 Americans will die reaching the West.
Ten graves for every mile.
But one story of suffering and death will show just how far the pioneers will go to conquer the West.
Hiyah ! Hiyah, hiyah ! June 1846.
A wagon train heads west.
Its leader is George Donner.
Good luck.
Good, now push ! Push ! His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a schoolteacher.
Yes, okay.
But on the trail, women must turn their hands to anything.
Push, that's it ! Yeah, push, push ! The Donner Party are halfway across the blistering Wyoming Prairie, miles from the nearest doctor, with barely any water.
Good, yes.
Okay.
I think the women who came across America in the early days, must've been made up of the strongest fiber possible.
It's unimaginable.
Good.
Yes.
Ludwig.
The new American's mother and father are Philippine and Ludwig Keseberg.
They christen their son Louis.
The journey is tough but the going's good.
Tamsen Donner writes in her journal: I could never have believed we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty.
Indeed if we do not experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.
But as leader of the wagon train, Tamsen's husband, George Donner, is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey.
The Sierra Nevada.
Peaks up to 14,000 feet.
Fail to clear the mountain passes before the first snow falls and the consequences are terrifying.
But as the Donner Party approaches Utah, George Donner makes a fateful decision-- leading a splinter group off from the main party.
He's read one of the many new trail guidebooks, showing a shortcut that claims to shave two weeks off the journey time.
Hastings Cutoff is said to be a saving of 400 miles.
We are informed it is a fine, level road with plenty of water and grass.
But Donner's information is wrong.
In fact, the "shortcut" adds 100 miles to the journey.
High in the Sierra Nevada, the Donner Party enters the Truckee Pass.
They're only 30 miles from the California plains.
But supplies are dangerously low, and traveling through the mountains is taking its toll.
A broken axle.
The Donner Party stops to make repairs.
But that night 5 feet of snow falls.
Soon the drifts are 60 feet deep.
The Donner Party will be stranded for five months.
In just three weeks, they've eaten all their food.
Then they kill their pack animals.
Next, they eat charred bones, twigs, bark, leaves, dirt and worse.
Even the wind held its breath as the suggestion was made that were one to die, the rest might live.
Cannibalism.
Christmas 1846.
They eat their first human.
Bodies are cut up, flesh labeled, so people don't eat their own kin.
Four rescue parties bring out some survivors.
The very last finds Philippine's husband Ludwig, alone.
He is surrounded by bones, entrails, and a 2-gallon kettle of human blood.
George Donner's body is found, skull split open, his brain removed.
Tamsen Donner's body is never found.
The pass is renamed the "Donner Pass," testament to the hardship of the pioneers' push West.
Today it's the Lincoln Highway.
Thousands drive this road every year.
But beneath the bones of the Donner Party, the Sierra Nevada conceals a seam of gold.
Largest the world has yet seen.
Gold fever is about to change the West, and the American character yet again.
March 1836.
Texas, the Alamo.
The American nation is expanding, growing stronger, bigger.
But there's something else out there even bigger, even stronger: Mexico-- a superpower.
A colossal empire stretching from Oregon to Guatemala.
But Texas is disputed territory.
The Mexican government has invited American settlers in, but are soon overwhelmed by the flood of pioneers.
Americans, by the thousands, were coming into Texas and they were not abiding to the agreements to come in as settlers.
And once they outnumber-- by 1835-- Mexicans ten to one in that area, of course the Americans are thinking about independence.
The Alamo is where Mexico tries to stem the flood.
The shots that killed Davy Crockett and his fellow settlers echoed across America.
The women and children are spared, sent back to send the Mexican message, "Don't come.
" But America hears something else.
"Remember the Alamo.
" ( screaming A turning point.
America will now wage war to go West.
Texas is won, California fought and bought.
The same month California becomes American, it becomes the nation's greatest prize.
Volcanic magma.
Over millions of years, in a fault zone beneath the Sierra Nevada, cooling and pressure create quartz.
And within the quartz, gold.
The seam is one of the densest on the planet.
Rocks erode and the riches are released.
Carpenter James Marshall finds a 3-ounce nugget in the California river.
Two months' pay in his hand, but billions of dollars beneath his feet.
News of Marshall's discovery spreads to every corner of the world.
In California, you can taste the American dream: get rich quick.
Within a year, 100, 000 desperate amateur prospectors flood the Sierra foothills.
It was the American dream distilled to its essence.
Take yourself and go out and try and make a success of it.
A Chinese prospector's 100-ounce strike in the Yuba River.
$26,000 made by a single Irishman in just four days.
A $200,000 super seam mined by 12 Mexicans at Bear Valley.
In the port of San Francisco, a plot of land worth $16 before the gold strike now changes hands for $45,000.
In two years, the population of California explodes from 15,000 to 100,000.
Now, hand-panning is replaced by lines of sluice boxes desperately combing for anything the first prospectors missed.
And the price of living rockets.
Picks, pans, shovels go from a few cents to $10 apiece.
Breakfast costs ten times what it does back East.
But still the people come.
200 abandoned ships in San Francisco harbor, the crews deserting, rushing for the hills.
He's traveled 6,000 miles.
He's spent all his money.
Now he travels by foot.
Belgian Jean-Nicolas Perlot We crossed 200 miles of wilderness full of Indians, bears, panthers, wildcats, snakes of every kind.
The first thing he finds isn't gold.
It's graves.
200 of them.
Prospectors cut off by rains in the foothills starved to death.
Approaching, we realized animals of some kind had dug up the bodies.
I read a note attached to one of the graves.
"God has willed that civilization "should begin in this place, "with this duty which a man owes to his kind.
Bury the dead.
" Perlot does find gold, but never in the quantities that he'd dreamed.
As the gold fields are picked clean, tensions rise, times get tougher.
After just five years, the Gold Rush is over.
I think that there is that Western mentality of prospecting-- try and fail, try and fail, and the fact that you tried is worthy in and of itself.
Of 300,000 who rush to find gold, less than one out of 100 struck it rich.
But fortunes were made by the merchants and landowners who supplied the miners.
From dirt and dreams came the great cities of California.
Both the West and the American character that built it are settled.
Now this new powerhouse will face another revolution.
October 1818.
A nine-year-old boy comforts his mother as she lies on her deathbed.
Milk sickness kills thousands of pioneers every year.
The cause: White Snakeroot eaten by cattle, the deadly poison passed in milk to humans.
At 18, the boy becomes a man, but he has been working like a man for years, battling for existence in this harsh environment.
It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.
There I grew up.
I had an ax in my hand from my eighth to my 20th year.
This is the life of American settler stock.
The young man's grandfather followed Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road into Kentucky.
His father pushed further into the primeval forests of Indiana.
Settler families of ten or more live in log cabins built from scratch.
Single roomed, basic.
The trailer homes of the day.
The wilderness provides everything.
They make their own plows, rakes, forks, shovels, build their own furniture.
And they bury their dead.
In bad years, malaria kills one in eight of the settlers.
Life expectancy is half of what it is today.
But from adversity comes strength.
This settler's name is Abraham.
Abraham Lincoln.
If you work hard, you can do anything you wanna do.
The possibilities are endless.
To me, that was the American dream, as a kid.
Lincoln's family and thousands like theirs have settled the West in four generations.
President Thomas Jefferson thoughit would take 1,000.
The forests are cleared: five acres a family, a year.
In 1800, 23 million acres of Indiana is wilderness.
In 60 years, it's tamed, flat, fertile farmland.
But there is more than forest to clear.
It's always been one of the deep flaws of the American imagination, that it can't imagine a future for American-Indian people as Americans.
American-Indian people have to imagine that for themselves, and that's the hard part.
Keep walking.
Frontier president Andrew Jackson declares a new policy, a policy that America will maintain for more than 100 years.
The forced relocation of American tribal people onto reservations.
You, keep moving ! After years of Supreme Court battles, the bill passes Congress by a single vote.
Chickasaw, Chocktaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, all forced off their nations by the point of a bayonet.
An episode in the conquest of the West that even some of the soldiers taking part find shameful.
US Army Private John G.
Burnett writes: The sufferings of the Cherokee were awful.
The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.
They slept in the wagons and on the ground without fire.
I saw as many as 20 die in a single night of pneumonia, cold, exposure.
Move along.
Move along.
The march of 1,000 miles becomes a Trail of Tears.
It's a shameful act in American history and it's, in its own way, sort of an iconic act because it really symbolizes what happened to the Native Americans.
The West is open for business, but key to the transformation of the region is a river 2,000 miles in length, fed by rainfall from 31 states.
Running from Minnesota to New Orleans, the Mighty Mississippi.
It's a lifeline connecting the West to the outside world.
If roads exist, they're muddy tracks.
This is the only trade artery, the interstate, that allows the pioneers and settlers to sell the produce they've sweated over.
A huge amount of goods are shipped out, but they're shipped out in the most nickel-and-dime way.
A farmer will build a flatboat, fill it up with hogs, sassafras root, ginseng root, tobacco-- whatever it is you grow- put it on the flatboat, use the power of the Mississippi to drift you down to sell them along the riverbank.
Aged 19, Abraham Lincoln makes his first trip down the Mississippi, poling his simple raft.
The current is too strong to return upstream.
The primitive flatboats are simply sold as lumber in New Orleans.
Farmers have to walk the 800 miles home and begin again.
But on that first journey, Lincoln sees the future.
A new invention which will transform the Mississippi, the Midwest, and America.
The steamboat was the 19th century's time machine, just as surely as the airplane was the 20th century's time machine.
It shrunk distance.
By shrinking distance, it enabled commerce.
Even upstream, steamboats can travel 50 miles a day, eight times faster, eight times the cargo of a raft.
But they're deadly.
Over half the early models explode, maiming and killing hundreds.
But their number triples every decade.
They make the Midwest America's economic powerhouse.
Within 20 years, St.
Louis alone swells from a few hundred to a population of 16,000.
Over four generations, America has grown from a 100-mile-wide strip of colonies on the Eastern Seaboard to a continental powerhouse.
America is exploding across the continent.
The economy is booming.
Cotton in the South industry in the North.
But the new nation is divided.
In the land where all men are created equal 4 million black Americans live as slaves.
And it's tearing the nation apart.
All over the world, the modern era is being born.
It's the Industrial Revolution.
America is racing to catch up.
In upstate New York, a man-made river is cutting through the wilderness.
The Erie Canal is the biggest construction project in the Western world in the last 4,000 years.
Over 300 miles long, dug entirely by hand, and America lacks a single qualified engineer.
The United States of America isn't about to let nature stand in its way.
I think of the spirit of America being imagination combined with tenacity.
There's a strong work ethic, a wonderful freedom of creation combined with the mental muscle and physical labor.
So to me, it represents the best of the human spirit.
But the land doesn't always cooperate.
A wall of solid limestone 60 feet high.
Just 30 miles from the finish line, Lake Erie.
The canal will change everything, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the whole middle of America.
It changes where people live, and why, and turns the North into a global economic powerhouse.
The man behind the canal is New York's gung-ho governor, DeWitt Clinton.
Born to wealth, he won't take no for an answer.
He wants to be president.
Instead, he runs New York for 20 years.
America was blessed with many inspirational leaders, and I think DeWitt Clinton had a real sense of how important New York could be for America.
Clinton's vision: to make New York rich.
Politically, the canal is a huge gamble.
It's savaged in the press as dangerous and too expensive.
They call it "Clinton's big ditch.
" But it will change New York forever.
It is a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial than has hitherto been achieved by the human race.
Entrepreneurship is about doing things when you don't know what it's gonna look like, you don't know what it's gonna be made of, you just have this instinct that you can do it and it'll work.
Those guys had visions and did it.
50,000 men.
11 million cubic yards of rock.
Enough to fill the Rose Bowl 26,000 times.
Crews are filled with Irish immigrants.
David Gilroy makes five times what he can earn back home, but it's hazardous work.
They're literally moving mountains, and there's only one way through-- gunpowder.
A highly combustible mix of nitrate, charcoal and sulfur.
The wrong proportions can be lethal.
There's only one job that's more dangerous than lighting the fuse going back to relight it.
To cope, workers drink.
Whiskey calms the nerves- and clouds the brain.
An English tourist can't believe they're mixing alcohol and explosives.
The Irish laborers grew so reckless of life, that at the signal for blasting, they would just hold their shovels over their heads.
I think when you're brought up in America, you're brought up on the history of hard work.
There are so many immigrants that have died to build this country.
That's in our bloodstream, that's in our DNA as Americans.
We don't want their lives to go in vain.
Because of that, we usually work harder than anybody else.
Eight years of digging.
Nearly a thousand lives lost.
$7 million, more than 100 million today.
The Erie Canal opens in 1825, a miracle of engineering, connecting East and Midwest.
It's an instant economic superhighway.
$15 million of goods a year flow along the canal.
Villages along the canal boom into dynamic cities-- Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester.
Goods crash in price, up to 95%.
A frontier that had to be self-sufficient can now buy anything they want.
Prosperity is on the move.
New York City becomes a boomtown.
Wall Street takes off as a global financial center.
The city quadruples in size and surpasses New Orleans as the nation's number-one port.
There's so much money around, the word "millionaire" is invented in 1840.
The Erie Canal still shapes New York today.
80% of the upstate population still lives within 25 miles of it.
Hundreds of miles to the south, a small plant is creating another economic boom.
Cotton.
But this one will eventually tear the nation apart.
Cotton is native to tropical regions, making the Southern states of the US a perfect breeding ground.
The valued part is the soft fiber which grows tightly around the shrub's sticky seeds.
There are 30 species worldwide.
Growing it's no problem, but processing the fiber before it can be spun into cloth is labor-intensive.
Especially, separating the seeds.
For years, it could only be done by hand.
One pound took an entire day.
A simple patent filed on March 4, 1794, changes all that.
The cotton gin.
It automates the process and deeply divides the country.
The cotton gin transformed not only America, but the world.
The concept of mass production using a machine just exploded everywhere.
One man can now process 50 times more cotton.
Output skyrockets all over the South.
In 1830, America is producing half the world's cotton.
By 1850, it's nearly 3/4.
Called white gold, cotton supports a new lavish lifestyle in the South.
By 1850, there are more millionaires per capita in Natchez, Mississippi, than anywhere else on Earth.
The richest man in town owns 40,000 acres, nearly three times the size of Manhattan Island.
The South is thriving on the backs of humans owning other humans.
It's called slavery.
The North is implicated in the South's success.
The industrial North is profiting from Southern cotton, but turns a blind eye to slavery.
Many of them slave owners themselves, the Founding Fathers assumed slavery would soon disappear.
Slavery has already been abolished for 20 years in Britain and is outlawed across most of Europe.
But with the cotton explosion, slavery becomes critical to the Southern economy.
Each slave is now 50 times more profitable.
A slave who sold for $300 before the cotton gin goes for nearly 2,000 by 1860.
People don't really realize this, but slavery was actually on the decline in the South prior to the invention of the cotton gin, but then once the cotton gin made it so practical to grow cotton, all of a sudden, every farmer in the South wanted to plant as much cotton as possible.
But overproduction is destroying the land.
Cotton heads west in search of fertile soil, bringing slavery with it.
But antislavery forces in the North want to keep the frontier free.
The stage is set for the first battles in the war over slavery.
Cotton is changing the way Americans live.
In time, it will blow the nation apart.
For the South, cotton is a gold mine.
Now the North wants a piece of the action.
It's a partnership that makes everyone rich, based on a new machine, the power loom.
Raw cotton comes in, finished cloth goes out.
All under one roof.
The modern factory is born.
Lowell, Massachusetts, is called the city of spindles, a textiles boomtown.
Population explodes from 200 in 1820 to nearly 20,000 in just 15 years.
More than a third of the town works in the mills.
85% are single women between 15 and 25.
Harriet Robinson is ten.
When her father dies, she goes to work at the mill.
I can see myself now, racing down the alley, between the spinning frames, carrying in front of me a bobbin box bigger than I was.
Women earn money for the first time.
Harriet's wages help support her family.
Industrialization is changing everyone's lives.
All the mill girls make good use of their money.
The mortgage is lifted from the homestead, the farmhouse is painted.
Mill girls help maintain widowed mothers and drunken or invalid fathers.
We were paid $2 a week.
Oh, how proud I was when it came to my turn to stand upon the bobbin-box.
When women really joined the workforce in the cotton mills and the thread factories, I think it gave women an opportunity to get out, be serious about being breadwinners.
And it changed the whole fabric of America.
The mills also revolutionize how Americans dress.
Mass production of cheap cotton fabrics spawns America's clothing industry.
Previously, most families made their own clothes.
Now, people buy ready-to-wear.
Eastern fashions replace buckskin.
By 1850, men's clothing is the largest manufacturing industry in New York City.
For me, what makes me proudest to be an American is that American spirit of productivity, optimism, this idea that the world doesn't have to be doom and gloom, that we can use technology to make our lives better.
Fashion isn't the only innovation to come out of the mills.
Technology developed here will lead straight to Silicon Valley.
Looms pioneer punch cards to produce patterned fabric.
Each hole in the card tells the loom to use a different-colored thread, a yes-no decision.
It's binary code, the basis of all modern computers.
The birth of the computer and Internet began in cotton mills with these looms.
You know, in every major development, I think, in the history of America, technology has been at the center of it.
Despite 12-hour shifts, the factories offer a new world of opportunity for women.
They are reading more, talking more, educating themselves.
Yeah, reading books on factory time was against the rules, but we hid books in apron pockets and wastebaskets.
Sometimes we pasted poems on our looms to memorize.
And for the first time in America, their voices are heard.
October 1836.
Women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organize.
Their protest against wage cuts is one of the first strikes in US history.
And they will win.
The mill bosses back down.
A generation of young women go on to become teachers, writers and even college graduates.
Harriet Robinson will become a leading suffragette and testify before Congress.
They're the first wave in a movement that results in women getting the vote.
Their secret meetings at night are only possible with the light from lamps powered by an extraordinary creature.
Whale oil opened up the night, and like so many really transformative technological innovations, it expanded human freedom.
It created a way for people to get more, do more and achieve more.
Crude oil won't be discovered for another 20 years.
Until then, America runs on whale oil.
The whaling industry helped invent part of the Industrial Revolution and the classic American workaholic, work-round-the-clock kind of environment, where if you have more light to keep you going in those dark winter days, you could get more done, you could make more money, and you could kind of drive the economy forward.
Whales are among the largest creatures to ever live on Earth.
Up to 180 tons and more than 100 feet long.
A single whale can produce up to 3, 000 gallons of oil.
Even today, whale oil is used by NASA.
The Hubble space teleope runs on it.
Whaling is one of the North's biggest industries, bringing in $11 million a year.
But the human cost is also high.
Half of all ships will eventually be lost at sea.
Few men are willing to take the risk.
But it's an opportunity for African-Americans.
20,000 freemen and escaped slaves take to the seas.
John Thompson is a runaway from Maryland.
I have a family in Philadelphia.
But fearing to remain there any longer, I thought I would go on a whaling voyage where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.
The equal opportunity offered in whaling is ahead of its time.
Here, a colored man is only known and looked upon as a man and is promoted in rank according to his ability and skill to perform the same duties as a white man.
The whaling industry offered an ex-slave like John Thompson the possibility of social and economic fluidity, mobility and acceptance in a way.
Even in the North, that was not possible for black people otherwise.
The man on the lookout cried out, "There she blows !" There were four whales in sight, not more than 3/4 of a mile distant.
It takes hours to kill them.
They use state-of-the-art harpoons invented by runaway slave Lewis Temple.
The whale can only be killed by lancing him under the fin, which is a work of much skill and practice.
A monster, terrible in his fury, able to shiver the boat in atoms by one stroke of his tail.
And yet even the dangers at sea are preferable to the horror of life as a slave.
Punishment is savage for those who risk escape, but some will do anything to be free.
1841, New Orleans.
Ground zero for the slave trade.
It's auction day.
The day every slave fears the most.
In the first half of the 19th century, over half a million slaves are sold at auction.
It's a business worth $2 billion to the Southern economy.
Since the cotton boom, the value of slaves has skyrocketed.
Now men cost $1,000.
Women, 800.
Children, 500.
Solomon Northup, an educated freeman from the North, was kidnapped into slavery.
You, come over here.
He would make us hold up our heads, walk us briskly back and forth, while customers would feel our hands and arms and bodies, make us open up our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse, which he is about to barter for or purchase.
Scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale.
Take your top off.
90% of all African-Americans are slaves, 4 million men, women and children.
We had based this country on everyone having inalienable rights to freedom and equality, and yet we created a system of abject persecution.
Slaves are fattened for auction, like livestock.
Dark-skinned men are bought for the fields, light-skinned women for the house.
Traders lie about their ages, even dye a slave's gray hairs.
For the plantation owners, it was like just going to your local supermarket to get sugar or flour.
They had become so desensitized to the humanity of the slave that they did not see them as human beings.
Buyers demand the most fertile slaves for breeding.
The most expensive are light-skinned teenage virgins.
Rape is common.
Eliza's from a state plantation.
She's being sold, with her two children, Emily and Randall.
In Louisiana, it's illegal for children under 11 to be taken from their parents.
Boy, come over here.
It happens all the time.
Show me your teeth.
You know, 140 years is not a really long time in the context of history.
So it's hard for me to believe that blacks didn't have any rights here, they weren't treated as human beings, they were treated like animals, essentially.
Sir, please ! Over half the sales at auction will tear a family apart.
If you've ever been eight, to think of being separated from your mother and your father and sold and you'll never see them again.
The horror of that, the poignancy of all of that, and yet that's the kind of thing that happened across the South up until the end of slavery.
Okay, my final offer, I'll give you 1,000 for that man, 900 for that man.
That woman there, $700.
Please, buy my child ! Sir ! Sir ! I have seen mothers kissing for the last time the faces of their dead offspring, but never have I seen such an exhibition of intense grief as when Eliza was parted from her child.
Three miles outside Baltimore heading North.
A slave on the run.
The risk of capture is high.
At most, 1, 000 a year are successful.
Ears cut off; Achilles tendons slashed; branding; all are common punishments if caught.
Frederick Douglass has failed twice, but won't let that stop him.
Men like Douglass are the South's worst nightmare.
He has a better chance than most of passing as a freeman.
Unlike 80% of slaves, he can read and write.
Even in the 21st century, we're only three or four generations away from people that not only could not get paid for their labor, it was against the law for them to read and write, it was against the law for them to marry, it was against the law for them to name their children after themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen, please.
Long way to go.
Ticket.
Black Americans must carry documents proving they're free, or who they belong to.
Frederick Douglass has papers borrowed from a friend.
Ticket.
They won't hold up to careful examination.
My whole future depended on the decision of this conductor.
Someone get this chicken.
This moment of time was one of the most anxious I ever experienced.
Had he looked closely at the paper, he could not have failed to discover that it called for a very different-looking person from myself.
Frederick Douglass makes it to New York City-- and freedom, and becomes a leading figure in the antislavery movement.
He'll write a best-selling autobiography.
He'll meet and debate with Lincoln in the White House.
At a time when slaves are barely regarded as people, he will become an icon, a celebrity, the best-known African-American in America.
The best hope for escaped slaves is the legendary Underground Railroad and the tireless efforts of Harriet Tubman.
An escaped slave herself, she risks her life returning south again and again to guide others to freedom.
A masterful escape artist, Tubman will do anything to avoid capture, even keeping babies quiet with opium.
That's a good boy.
Harriet Tubman is the Moses of our people.
She was a wanted woman, she was a hated woman, reviled by the white South.
Just imagine you've gotten out of slavery, you've escaped, and yet you come back, you have the courage and the care about other people to come back into a hell.
The South puts a $40, 000 reward on her head, but nothing stops her.
Come on, y'all ! Come on ! Move or die.
Tubman is one of America's first civil-rights activists.
In the same month she dies, Rosa Parks is born.
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman threaten everything the South stands for.
Tens of thousands of slave owners had to deal with, for the first time, the fact that these people are going to rebel.
She was far more effective as the symbol that they feared than the few hundred that she saved.
Nearly 60,000 slaves will escape, up to a $50 million loss to their owners, but it symbolizes much more.
Now the South has a fight on its hands, and they're prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve their way of life.
The fight for the soul of a nation is just getting started.
Midway through the 19th century, America is entering the modern world.
In 20 years, there'll be Levi's Jeans, chewing gum and hot dogs.
But the nation is split, being torn apart at the seams dividing North and South.
Slavery became not simply a political issue, not simply an economic issue, but a moral issue as well.
It became the issue that defined North and South in the 1850s.
September 1850.
The Fugitive Slave Law brings the brutality of Southern slavery to the North.
Now, no African-American is safe, anywhere.
Gentlemen, you've made a mistake.
This is a place of business.
I'm a tailor, these are my clients.
I'm a freeman.
I'm not a slave, gentlemen.
The Fugitive Slave Law meant that if you were a slave and you managed to escape to the North, your master could come and get you, and you had no recourse.
Not only that, if you were a free Negro, they still could sell you down the river.
The search for runaway slaves had become a witch hunt.
Any African-American can be condemned simply with an accusation.
Even a freeman has no right to a trial by jury.
Federal magistrates get $10 to rule them slaves, five to set them free.
Ordinary people are outraged by the new law.
Abolitionist newspapers and literature spread like wildfire.
Published in 1852, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" becomes the best-selling book of the century, after the Bible.
A passionate antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an unknown housewife from Connecticut.
It mainly appeals to women who are becoming politicized for the first time.
Slavery is the burning issue of the day.
As America expands across the continent, North and South face off over each new territory.
Will it be slave-owning or free ? The Northerners began to see that, wait a minute, they're not gonna keep slavery just in the South, they wanna take slavery West and to turn the country into a slave country.
Americans from all over the country are flooding into the new territories on the frontier.
Each becomes a battleground.
Will it be slave-owning or free ? It comes to a head in Kansas.
A peaceful protest turns violent.
Emotions run high.
Towns are terrorized, stores robbed.
Homesteads burned.
North and South are polarized.
Neither side will back down.
One man will stop at nothing to abolish slavery.
John Brown.
A folk hero in the North a terrorist to the South.
He thinks he's fighting a holy war.
He believes himself to be God's chosen instrument.
He will murder for his cause.
John Brown is one of those controversial figures about whom almost anything you can say is true.
He's a terrorist, in our modern terms.
He's a revolutionary.
The divide between North and South is an open wound.
Kansas bleeds for two years, more than 200 dead.
America is on the road to war.
Slavery is tearing the nation apart.
America is built on a number of distinct fault lines, one, of course, was slavery and freedom, that was a fault line that had to be addressed.
In the South, slavery is a way of life, even for non-slave owners.
Antislavery forces in the North threaten their right to decide their fate.
There is still, in some areas of America, a great pride in being Southern and holding true to the original Southern attitude.
I think our clinging to the idea that slavery is a right and just a way of life, you know, it is a dark spot in our history.
Anger in the South grows more passionate every day.
The North claims the moral high ground, but they are getting rich off cotton, too.
Pretty much everybody agreed that a crisis was developing.
Not everyone knew that the crisis would include, in the end, the Civil War, but everyone understood that a showdown between the slave South and the free North was about to occur.
John Brown wants to light the fuse.
October 1859.
Passionate in his hatred of slavery, Brown prepares to take the fight into the heart of the South.
His plan, to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the biggest collection of weapons in the South.
20,000 rifles, muskets and pistols, worth almost $7 million today.
He wants to arm Southern slaves and lead a slave rebellion.
He's fighting alongside his five sons, all of them willing to die for their cause.
The arsenal is poorly defended.
Breaking in is a pushover.
But his raid is based on local slaves rising up and joining the fight.
He needs a small army to carry off so many weapons.
Without slave reinforcements, it's a suicide mission.
Word gets out and local townsfolk attack the arsenal.
Not a single slave joins Brown and his men.
They are trapped and fighting for their lives.
I wanna free all Negroes in this state.
I have possession of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.
Radical abolitionist John Brown is trying to inspire a slave revolt.
No slaves have joined him, and now he's trapped.
At dawn, the US Marines arrive.
They storm the arsenal under the command of Colonel Robert E.
Lee.
Brown won't go down without a fight.
The soldiers overwhelm them.
The fight against slavery has only just begun.
But John Brown's crusade is over.
His sons are dead.
His trial captivates the country.
Charged as a criminal, he puts the institution of slavery on trial.
America is fatally divided.
Brown is convicted of treason and sentenced to death.
A terrorist in the South, a martyr in the North.
He's executed on December 2, 1859.
As the country prepares to elect a new president in 1860, many wonder if the nation can survive.
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.
Chicago, May 18, 1860.
A backwoods congressman comes out of nowhere to grab the new Republican Party's nomination for President.
Abe Lincoln's only claim to fame-- he's lost two elections to the Senate.
Personally, Lincoln hates slavery, but he is desperate to hold the country together.
What I admire about Abraham Lincoln is that he had his beliefs and he stuck to his beliefs at a time when it wasn't popular to do so, especially when it was black, white and very cut-and-dry, he stuck to his beliefs.
November 6, 1860.
Election Day.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
Abraham Lincoln will be elected president of a country hurtling towards war.
The South rebels, convinced he'll abolish slavery.
They threaten to leave the Union.
The battle lines are drawn.
The North is behind him.
For the South, Lincoln is the enemy.
An editorial in an Atlanta paper: "Let the consequences be what they may.
"Whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore "and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms "with mangled bodies, the South will never "submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
" The South knew that Lincoln was gonna win, and it was just a matter of time, tick, tick, tick, before secession occurred.
The South wants no part of a Union with Lincoln in the White House.
But as he prepares to take office, the President-elect is still determined to avoid a civil war.
Lincoln was not happy about slavery.
He did not see that as congruent to "All men are created equal.
" And he had given a speech, before he ever became president, on why that was so important to him.
And I think that was coming to a head, and when he got elected, that was the final straw for the South.
December 20, 1860.
South Carolina secedes from the Union.
The ten other slave states soon follow.
Lincoln's victory makes war inevitable.
He's prepared to fight to preserve the Union-- and won't have to wait long.
In February 1861, a few weeks before his inauguration, the Confederate States of America are born.
Lincoln's principal objective was to save the Union and then we'll deal with slavery, but before too long, he had to both save the Union and deal with slavery.
Abraham Lincoln receives his first death threats before ever taking office.
He'll save every one, keeping a file in his desk " Assassination.
" On the journey to Washington, he'll wear a disguise, just to be safe.
He'll do anything to avoid war, except allow slavery to expand.
It is Lincoln who explains the case for freedom and says, "I'm not gonna attack slavery where it is, but I'm not gonna let it expand.
" At his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln reluctantly pledges that states with slaves will be allowed to keep them, but it's too tittle, too late.
A virtual state of war already exists.
The South mobilizes an army of 800,000 men against a Union army of 2ý million.
Five weeks after Abraham Lincoln takes office, the first shots are fired in the War Between the States.
It will spark a brutal and bloody civil war, the deadlit in American history.
In the next four years, more lives will be lost than in all America's other wars put together.