Antoine Lavoisier – A Life (1743-1794)

Okay, so preface here – I am not a scientist.  I am neither very knowledgeable about science, nor am I terribly interested in its nuances, but 18th Century scientific discoveries are today not extremely advanced stuff, so I feel more or less qualified to talk about this, having taken high school chemistry.  If I say something incorrect or simply imprecise, feel free to correct me in the comments.

Anyway, Lavoisier.  As you can probably tell from the name, he’s French.  He’s best known for his work as a chemist, but he did a lot more than just that.  Lavoisier began to work on the actual mechanism behind respiration and was one of the first to connect it to metabolism.  He was an activist, attempting to use his own prestigious position within France to save foreign academics from the Reign of Terror, and even had a part in creating the metric system.

So, we’ll start at the beginning with Lavoisier’s education, which was as a lawyer.  He practiced relatively little law, as you might imagine, and at the age of 26, in 1794, he helped publish the first geological map of France.  After this, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences, the prestige of which is somewhat difficult to understand in today’s academic system.  Today, scholars of all sorts may talk to one another via email or video-chat without much problem, and they can easily and readily view one another’s work in academic journals.  As a result, many academics have myriad opportunities to collaborate with minds of their same caliber.  In Lavoisier’s day, such an opportunity was almost unheard of.  With the exception of perhaps the British Royal Society, there existed no other entity in 1769 that included so many learned men, almost all of whom had given valuable contributions to the sciences.  There were a few honorary members (Napoleon, for instance), but the level of academic discourse at the Academy must have been almost foreign to these men, who would have been used to having to dumb down their work for others so that they could be better understood.

Around the time of his admission into the Academy, Lavoisier bought a share in the Ferme générale – essentially a privatized form of the IRS used by the French Monarchy in the 18th Century.  This gave Lavoisier a certain standing within the government, which he attempted to use on monetary reform, which would have helped the peasants, but ultimately, he was ignored.

In 1772, Lavoisier began devoting time to working on Phlogiston Theory – which posited that all flammable substances contained a chemical called Phlogiston, which, when burned, would release part of itself into the air (smoke) and would also disintegrate into a solid (ash).

Lavoisier’s new formulation of combustion theory

Lavoisier’s experiments noted that after burning substances, somewhat counter-intuitively, weighed more than before combustion, but phlogiston theory would suggest that with the escape of the now-combusted phlogiston, the burned object would weigh less.  Lavoisier presented his findings to the Academy, where Joseph Priestly, a visiting Englishman, heard Lavoisier’s thesis.  Priestly and Lavoisier worked together for a time on the issue, and Priestly came to call what we now know as Oxygen “dephlogisticated air.”  In 1783, Lavoisier read to the Academy his new paper Reflections on Phlogiston, in which he launched his attack on Phlogiston Theory as a whole, taking things a step farther than Priestly had.

Teaming with Pierre Simon de Laplace, another famous scholar of the time, Lavoisier went a step further and attempted to see what would happen when one took this new gas, which was somehow linked with combustion, and combined it with another newly-discovered gas, which Lavoisier named “Hydrogen” (literally water-maker; nobody ever called scientists creative at naming things).  When the two reacted, they produced water, and so, Lavoisier and Laplace found that they had accidentally proven that water was not an element – a belief that had been held for 2,000 years.  Oops.

Unfortunately, nobody could agree on how this finding affected combustion theory.  Lavoisier would contribute a few other things to combustion theory, such as the fact that amplified sunlight could accelerate combustion, but there was still no consensus on the actual mechanism of combustion and how it works.

Lavoisier would move on to work on Stoichiometry, which he is often erroneously named the “inventor” of.  Number one, he didn’t invent it, he discovered it.  Number two, people had been making stoichiometric observations for well over a century at the time of Lavoisier.  What makes Lavoisier unique is that he seems to have been the first to understand the whole process mathematically.  Mikhail Lomonosov had stated half a century before that nothing is actually lost in a chemical reaction, but Lavoisier turned the whole thing into a simple algebra problem.  He also attempted to form a sort of periodic table, which he was never able to perfect as completely as he wanted.  It consisted of some 55 elements, which he could not distill any more than he already had, and in 1789, he published the first actual textbook on chemistry.

Other notable observations and inventions of Lavoisier were that diamond is simply another form of carbon, the most efficient form of saltpeter production to date (which was key in producing gunpowder), and a new method for lighting the streets of Paris.

After the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Lavoisier began to tread more carefully.  He worked with Laplace once more to begin creating the national set of weights and measures demanded by the new French Republic, but he entered suspicion when he began defending foreign scientists who were working in France at the time.  Lavoisier was already distrusted by the regime, due to his work with the Ferme, since taxes were in large part viewed as a royal tool to repress the people.  Moreover, much of Lavoisier’s work had been enabled by the government.  In the 1770s, he had been requested by the crown to oversee gunpowder production for the French army, a job which Lavoisier seems to have been very successful at.  Moreover, Lavoisier’s position gave him a lab in the National Armory, where he could conduct scientific experiments of his own on the government’s dime.  In November of 1793, the order of all former tax gatherers was ordered, and Maximilien Robespierre named Lavoisier a traitor not long afterward.  He was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794, shortly before Robespierre fell from power and was himself guillotined.

Lavoisier was but one among several scientists executed during the Reign of Terror, which greatly contributed to France’s “brain drain” in the early 19th Century.  Although the effects of this phenomenon on the French economy are hard to quantify, France would never be truly competitive with Great Britain economically throughout the 19th Century.  The historian’s job is not to answer “what if” questions, but I do not believe it is unreasonable to say that had France not killed so many of its educated people during the Reign of Terror, it might have had a better economy.  That seems like pretty simple logic.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this piece.  Lavoisier is an incredibly diverse guy, and the basis of the way we study chemistry today is largely due to his (and a little bit of Laplace’s) work.  I’m not a big scientific historian, but the occasional guy is pretty interesting, so later on, I might throw out a piece like this again.

Thanks for reading,

Paul

The New World Monarchy

So, this post will in theory be a little shorter than the two previous, but since I do some stream of consciousness-type writing on my blog, only pausing to do fact checking, I can’t say for sure right now.  We’ll start in Portugal, which held what is now Portugal and Uruguay in the new world, as well as a handful of important colonies around the world.  Portugal had never been particularly militarily powerful, but in the 16th Century they had been the wealthiest country in Europe and possessed one of the fastest-developing colonial empires in the world.  By the late 18th Century, however, Portugal had become a footnote in European politics behind the Englands, Prussias, and Frances of the world.

One of the main issues for Portugal was that the House of Braganza was producing heirs who were either possibly mentally handicapped or definitely insane.  Such was the case with Queen Maria, who became queen in 1777 (given that Maria married her uncle, I can’t imagine what practice within the House of Braganza might have been producing these issues).  Despite her handicaps, Maria seems to have worked through some sort of multiple personality disorder, even allegedly making vague allusions to her own limitations.  For fifteen years, Maria reigned mostly without help.  Her husband-uncle, Pedro, would act as unofficial regent when Maria was not well, but with his death in 1786, Maria became increasingly incapable.  In 1791, with the deaths of her confessor and her eldest son, she became bed-ridden and almost entirely incoherent.  Beginning around 1794, visitors to the palace would complain of the screams echoing through the halls.

In place of his mother, Maria’s son João became operating king of Portugal.  Despite almost never leaving her bed, Maria would live for twenty-five years after her final nervous breakdown in 1791 – more than twice as long as João would rule in his own right.  The outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars made Portugal’s position increasingly precarious, and despite João’s best efforts, Portugal was invaded, and in a matter of weeks, all resistance had failed.   Most of Portugal’s population did not, however, live in the homeland, so João was faced with a choice.  He could stay in Portugal and surrender, or he could flee to the New World and try to keep the empire together from Rio de Janerio.

João chose the latter, taking his raving mother with him.  Some French officers reported that they could hear her screams from the shore as the Portuguese fleet departed for the New World.  Maria became the first of two reigning European monarchs to visit their colonies in the New World (João VI, her son, would be the other).  She would never return to Portugal and died in Rio in 1816.

By the time Maria died, Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo, and the Portuguese throne had, in theory, been returned to the House of Braganza.  The reality was quite different, however, because the people weren’t too pleased with the royals.  To their minds, the Braganzas had simply skipped out when the going got tough, leaving the Portuguese people to be subjected to French occupation, and rising liberal sentiment threatened revolution.

Their complaints were not entirely unfounded, either.  While the Braganzas had been in Rio, they had molded the city to become a proper European imperial capital.  Factories, schools, newspapers, hospitals, and even military academies were established over the course of eight years.  Moreover, João had attempted to create a cultural and economic center in Rio, building an Opera House, the National Bank, botanical gardens, and an art galllery.  What João had actually done, however, was enable Brazil’s independence.  After all, if Brazil had everything Portugal had and more, what gave the trans-Atlantic power any right to rule over its larger and more sophisticated colony?

With the breakout of open revolution in Portugal, however, João decided to return home for the first time in thirteen years, leaving his son Pedro in charge in Brazil.   João arrived in Portugal to find that this revolution was not a revolt he could simply crush.  It was too far along by the time he had made the journey across the ocean.  As a result, he agreed to establish a constitution for Portugal, limiting his own problem.  The problem was, across the Atlantic in Rio, Pedro had no intention of accepting the constitution.  In fact, he had no intention of accepting his father’s authority.  Over the course of 1821 to 1822, Pedro used increasingly controversial language to describe his own authority and routinely ignored emissaries from his father.  On September 7, 1822, Pedro officially declared Brazil’s independence, and he and his father entered into a cold war.  Pedro’s new position was hardly secure enough for him to fend off a full-fledged Portuguese invasion, but João had just greatly limited his power and was now testing out the new boundaries.

An 1825 treaty officially recognized Brazil as independent in exchange for hefty reparations, but before the reparations could be paid, João died, and Pedro inherited the Portuguese throne.  Pedro believed, most likely correctly, that reunifying Portugal and Brazil would be abhorrent to the peoples of both nations, so Pedro rushed to abdicate the Portuguese throne in favor of his seven-year-old daughter, who became Queen Maria II (because Maria went so well the first time) on May 2, 1826.  In order to secure her position in Portugal, Pedro had Maria marry her uncle Miguel (classic Braganza move), in hopes that he would be able to help her rule.  As it turned out, Miguel was willing to do more than help – he wanted the crown for himself.

I never thought I would write this sentence, but in 1828, Miguel deposed his nine-year-old niece-wife, showing his true colors to Pedro.  Four of Pedro’s five sisters also defected to Miguel’s camp, and Pedro’s mind turned from establishing the new Brazilian state to avenging himself and his daughter upon his factionalist brother.  Miguel suspended the constitution of 1820, which caused rumors to arise regarding his role in his father’s death.  These have never been confirmed, but Pedro seems to have believed them, and in 1831, he abdicated the Brazilian throne to travel to the Azores, where his daughter was holed up with her loyalists.  With British and French support, Pedro deposed Miguel in 1834 after the so-called Liberal Wars.  The constitutional monarchy was restored, and Maria’s marriage to Miguel was annulled.  Shortly after his and Maria’s victory in the Liberal Wars, Pedro died of tuberculosis he contracted while on campaign.  He never returned to Brazil, instead leaving it in the hands of his son, also named Pedro.

The Brazilian Empire would last until 1889 under Pedro II’s authoritarian rulership, whereupon he abdicated to allow for the First Brazilian Republic.  One of the odder things about the whole story, however, are the bizarre relationships shared by the Braganza family.  Pedro and his father clearly had their issues, but they refused to fight one another.  Pedro loved his daughter – he died for her – but he was also willing to throw her into a pit of jackals at the Portuguese court to maintain his own court.  This isn’t even counting all the incest and backstabbing.  Ultimately, for most of the world, this is not deemed all that important of an episode in history, but it is difficult to imagine what Brazil would be today without this piece of its formative history.

How to Pick a King, Part 1

So our fun story for today and tomorrow comes from 14th Century Germany, which, I understand, is uncharted waters for even some avid history lovers.  To set the stage here, the Hohenstaufen Dynasty had just expired, for all intents and purposes, in 1250 – with the death of Frederick II, known in his time as Stupor Mundi.  Frederick had been able to cover up some fundamental fractures within his Empire, but after his death it became clear that the Holy Roman Empire was simply a church-endorsed method for the southern German lords in Swabia, Bavaria, and Austria to exert nominal authority on the North.

Before we go any further, I should probably explain what exactly the Holy Roman Empire is, and that will be pretty much the entirety of this blog post.  Tomorrow, we’ll get past the background and get into the actual story itself, but here, you can see my somewhat distilled explanation.

So, if you’re as avid a history fan as me, you’ve probably heard that there wasn’t such a thing as “Germany” until 1871 (or something similar), and while there’s some truth to this, there’s a reason why Hitler called his empire “Das Dritte Reich” (the Third Empire).  He viewed it as a succession from the Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, to the Prussian Empire, which became the modern state of Germany and was dissolved in 1919, to his own empire – starting in 1933.  This is not to cite Adolf Hitler as a historian of any merit but rather to demonstrate that, at least in modern times, the Holy Roman Empire has been understood as a predominantly Germany construct.

It is true that the Holy Roman Empire was not exclusively a German empire; there were Bohemians, Poles, Dutch, Danes, Italians, occasionally Occitans, briefly Arabs, and even a sizable Greek-speaking population for a time.  The first Holy Roman Emperor, was Charlemagne, who was crowned on Christmas Day 800 and was hailed as the resurrector of the Roman Empire in the West, and he spoke Old High German, so although the makeup of the Empire was large and varied, the vast majority of the emperors were German-speakers.

There is a fair argument to be made that in this moment, Charlemagne was the most powerful man not only in Europe but also in the entire world.  Unfortunately, his power was not to last.  He split his empire among his sons, creating the divide between France and Germany that survives to this day, and although most of the pieces were reunited under Karl the Fat for a few years, they split apart once more upon his death.  The line of East Frankia (which was primarily composed of non-Frankish Germans) died out with Ludwig the Child’s death in 911, leading to a succession crisis.

Here one of the odder moments in German history came about, and the records of the day say surprisingly little about the actual political machinations that led to the ascension of Konrad of Franconia.  By right of birth under the Salic Law (the four hundred year old law code written by Clovis, first King of the Franks), it should have passed to Karl the Simple, who was reigning in West Francia (which would become France), but, as his name would suggest, he was not deemed a fit ruler by the eastern Germanic lords.  Although Konrad’s reign was generally unsuccessful and fraught with conflict with the very dukes who had elected him, it marked a break from the line of Charlemagne in the East; moreover, it established the right of the German lords to elect their king, rather than simple father-to-sons succession.  It should be noted that this is hardly the first instance of this.  Some sort of election process was also employed by the Visigoths and Vandals, earlier Germanic tribes, as early as the 4th Century.  The Franks, however, used the gavellkind succession method, in which upon a monarch’s death, his kingdom would be divided among his sons, and when Charlemagne united and Christianized the Germanic peoples (except the Prussians and some other smaller groups), they imposed this system upon their new subjects.

Western Europe and the former empire of Charlemagne in 915

While in West Francia Charlemagne had become all but a saint, there was clearly some surviving resentment in the East.  This is reflected by the fact that they intentionally picked a king who was not a Caroliginian (meaning a descendant of Charlemagne, also spelled Karling).  The problem was that, embarrassingly, he was defeated by Charles the Simple in his war for Lorraine.  Repeat – Charles the Simple.  Moreover, from the East, a horde of Magyars under their king, Árpád was laying waste to the frontier, and Konrad was perceived as doing relatively little to stop them, particularly by Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria, who was most directly in their path.  Konrad died of his wounds from fighting Arnulf in 918, and the German lords convened again to select a new king.

This time, they chose Heinrich I (known commonly as “the Fowler”), the Duke of Saxony.  He seems to have been more closely vetted than Konrad, as he described his role as that of the “first among equals.”  He saw Germany as a confederacy of Stammesherzogtümer, which has no clean translation to English but “Tribal Duchies” suffices.  It is also sometimes rendered as “Stem Duchies,” but this is an incorrect translation of Stamm.  Ironically, by humbling his rhetoric from that of the imperial Caroliginians, he wielded more power than anyone since Charlemagne’s son Ludwig, then a hundred years deceased.  The Tribal Dukes simply wanted to be told that they had the power.  The reality of crown authority was relatively unimportant, as long as the veneer was of independence.  Sound familiar?

Seal of Heinrich the Fowler

Heinrich proved the perfect man for the job.  Although Arnulf of Bavaria still did not want to accept Saxon suzerainty with continued threats from the Magyars, Heinrich forced him to submit.  Oddly, Heinrich’s closest ally was Konrad’s brother and successor as Duke of Franconia, Eberhard.  Together, the pair of them made gains in Lorraine, taking advantage of civil war in France to secure much of what had been lost to the Caroliginians after the death of Ludwig the Child.  Heinrich would eventually fight the Magyars to a stalemate in 933 and defeated the Bohemians so badly that they would not cause the crown any trouble for almost a century.  Heinrich was so popular, that even after his death in 936, the Tribal Dukes agreed to elect his son, Otto, the new King of the Germans.

Building on his father’s successes, Otto did much to create an identity of the “German people;” however, unlike his father, Otto demanded respect from his vassals.  He crushed rebellions by both Bavaria and Franconia, killing Eberhard.  This was how German crown authority was to operate for the next six centuries.  The king was as powerful as he could make himself and as far as his nobles respected him, but the office itself came with little loyalty from one’s subjects.  This contrasts sharply with France, where the cult of Charlemagne continued, even after his descendants were ousted from the throne by Hughes Capet (Otto’s grandson through his daughter, fun fact).  Compared to many other medieval monarchies, France did not suffer the same internal strife, due to the reverence with which its aristocratic institutions were treated.

One of the simplest ways for a monarch to gain credibility was to establish oneself as King of Italy.  Historians debate whether the tradition of crowning oneself with the Iron Crown existed at this time, but claims of the crown’s usage date back to the 9th Century.  Thirty-four monarchs became powerful enough to claim the crown, and Otto was among the first to be able to extend his power south of the Alps.  The highest sign of a king’s power, however, was being crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope.  The office was, at times, left empty – even for decades.  This was the case in Otto’s time, when it had been left vacant for thirty-four years, since the death of Berengar, Charlemagne’s great-grandson, but what made it so difficult to become Holy Roman Emperor?

Simply put, the German Kings could not trust the men who elected them to continue their support in their absence, and to march an army down to Rome in order to be anointed Emperor by the Pope was quite an investment of both time and money.  As far as the electors were concerned, if they had put the king on the throne, they had all the right to take him right back off.  Only a king who was powerful to make the dukes fear him even in his absence could take the risk of travelling all the way to Rome to receive an almost entirely symbolic honor.  Otto did so, however, in 962, establishing the practice for generations to come, lasting into the 16th Century with Maximilian I.

Empire of Otto I (the Great)

The notion of a German nation, however, did not truly arise until the 11th Century during the Investiture Controversy (a story for another time).  Like I mentioned, Heinrich the Fowler was simply head of a confederacy, Otto styled himself after Charlemagne, who took his authority from God and the Pope.  The notion that the German-speaking peoples should be united did not come about until the days of Heinrich IV, who feuded constantly with the Papacy.  The Pope then referred to a rex Teutonicum (roughly, King of the Germans), refusing to refer to Heinrich as Holy Roman Emperor (he had already been crowned).  Heinrich responded by calling himself rex Romanorum (King of the Romans), which essentially removed any meaning from the title of Holy Roman Emperor, save the “Holy” part, which relegated the Pope’s authority to that of the religious.  It seems like petty semantics, and it is, but it is important to understand that around a century after Otto’s death, the Germanic tribes had been united for so long that it was plausible to call them a united kingdom.

By 1152, the process of electing kings had become more or less institutionalized by the “College of Electors.”  Although membership was initially somewhat fluid, it clearly included the “Four Nations of Germany” which evolved from the Stammesherzogtümer – Franconia, Swabia, Saxony, and Bavaria – among others.  By 1250, the membership had crystallized into a panel of seven rulers:

1. The Archbishop of Mainz
2. The Archbishop of Trier
3. The Archbishop of Cologne
4. The King of Bohemia (House of Přemyslid, later House of Luxembourg)
5. The Pfalzgraf of the Rhine (House of Wittelsbach)
6. The Duke of Saxony (House of Wettin)
7. The Margrave of Brandenburg (House of Ascania, then House of Wittelsbach after extinction of Ascania)

The College of Electors would maintain roughly this composition, with powerful families attempting to install their relatives in the Archbishoprics so that they would be elected to the throne.

Eventually, the College of Electors became quite a seedy business, with massive bribes being paid out almost habitually.  Families such as the House of Wettin became almost legendarily wealthy because their choice could become extremely consequential in such a small voting pool, and so if a family believed that its candidate was especially viable, they would drop a fortune on the Electors.  Even foreigners would sometimes become candidates for the throne if they could offer to pay enough, and a few were even elected, such as Karl V (probably the best-known, Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso of Castile).  The dispute between Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso of Castile is where we will pick up our story tomorrow.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned,

Paul

Top 5 US Presidents Ranked by Foreign Policy

This is probably a dangerous place to start, but why not?  Now, what we’re doing here is strictly Realpolitik; we’re not assessing them based on their moral decisions but rather how well they projected America’s power abroad

1.I think you have to go McKinley here.  He turned the United States into a legitimate empire by winning a fairly cheap war with the Spanish, and by chasing them out, he made the United States essentially the only imperial power with a major presence in the Western Hemisphere.  Meanwhile, by taking Pacific possessions from Spain, he made United States trade with an increasingly weak and malleable China more feasible than ever before.  At the same time, he understood that the US was still incapable of legitimate competition with the other Great Powers, so he instead chose to propose the “Open Door Policy” in which all countries would be free to engage in untaxed trade with China, but no one would violate the territorial integrity of the country.  McKinley contributed 5,000 soldiers to the China Relief Expedition in 1901, which put down the Boxer Rebellion, in order to stabilize the floundering imperial regime, and although it did prop up the emperor a little longer, the efforts would ultimately prove to be in vain.  Perhaps the most lasting influence of McKinley’s foreign policy is his role in passing the Newlands Resolution in August of 1898, which asserted that the United States had legally annexed Hawaii (which is still a matter of legal debate to this day).  Half a century later, the islands became a state and has become a very prosperous area, particularly considering its economic limitations as an island chain.  What should be noted here is that McKinley had one of the easiest Presidencies in terms of dealing with Congress.  For the entirety of his five years in office, he enjoyed a majority in both houses, and moreover, the budget was left in good shape after the fiscally conservative Grover Cleveland had occupied the White House for the previous four years.  McKinley’s advantaged position should be a caveat to this assessment, but there is no denying his effectiveness as a foreign policy President.

2. This is probably a surprise for some, but I have to go with Jefferson on this one.  When one considers the limited resources and political clout the man had, particularly with the French monarchy, previously the United States’ closest ally, having been recently toppled, he was a genius.  Early in his Presidency, he sought to deal with the Barbary problem.  Barbary corsairs from North Africa had been extorting money from US shipping for years, and to deal with it, Jefferson sent his fleet straight to the source – Tripoli.  The city was bombarded five times before the Bey would surrender, but eventually he did, and the United States’ legitimacy instantly increased, after having tolerated piracy for decades.  Jefferson’s masterpiece came in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.  Napoleon Bonaparte, who at the time was referring to himself as Consul of France but was the unquestioned leader of the country, had little use for what remained of the French Empire in the New World, and, preoccupied by constant war in Europe and in need of funds, offered to sell the entirety of the remaining French territory in North America for $15 million, and Jefferson accepted, roughly doubling the size of the United States.  Jefferson’s Native American policy was also unique for his time, in that he encouraged them to pursue agriculture, in order to make better trading partners for the United States.  This avoided Indian Wars that the United States could ill afford at the time, while still bolstering the economy.  The lone black mark on his record is his inability to deal with British impressment of American sailors (forcing them into British naval service).  This was left to his successor, Madison.  Jefferson attempted to deal with the issue of impressment by imposing an Embargo on Great Britain, but the reality was that his economic sanctions would have little effect on the British Empire, and in the end, he left the Presidency looking much weaker than he should have internationally.  Part of the reason Jefferson is ranked this highly is that the Presidency came with fewer powers – actual or presumed – in the early Republic.  As a result, he worked much more closely with Congress and with far more questioning of legal precedent than many of his successors had to.  Today, Presidents authorize “police actions” and drone strikes all around the world and the public says little about it, but in the early 19th Century, Presidents were still feeling out the boundaries of their power, which makes Thomas Jefferson’s accomplishments even more impressive.

3. James K. Polk.  The man history shouldn’t have forgotten.  He is the only American President to have voluntarily not run for re-election.  He accomplished every piece of his campaign platform within his first term, and so by 1848, when he was up for re-election, he saw little point in running.  At the time of his election, Polk was the youngest man ever to have been elected, at a spry 49 years old.  He claimed Andrew Jackson as a role model, which is a questionable choice morally, but considering the nature of his goals, he could not have picked anyone better.  Upon his inauguration, Polk named four main goals for his administration, three of which were foreign policy oriented – reduce tariffs, acquire some or all of the Oregon Territory from Great Britain, and acquire California and New Mexico from Mexico.  He quickly passed the Walker Tariff, which solved the first point, but the other two were far more elusive prospects.  Polk got a godsend in 1845, when Texas, which had gained her independence from Mexico in 1836, petitioned to join the Union.  Texas, which at the time had a disputed border with Mexico, proved a perfect excuse for Polk to declare war on General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, and after a little less than two years of war, Mexico was forced to cede vast swaths of land in what is now the southwestern United States.  This entire time, Polk was in a standoff with the British over the Pacific Northwest.  The popular rallying cry among democrats was “54-40 or Fight!” meaning that they insisted on getting territory that would have extended the United States up to the border of the then Russian-occupied Alaska, and the fact that the United States had already been willing to declare war on Mexico due to a shaky border dispute made the “Fight” part of the slogan far more convincing.  Polk instead proposed a compromise, along the 49th Parallel (the modern-day border), and the British, eager to rid themselves of the crisis, agreed with the 1846 Oregon Treaty.  Thus, by March of 1848, when the Mexican-American War ended, Polk had achieved all of his goals and was ready to retire.

4. Another one-term President (whose re-election effort was ruined by the ticket-splitting Ross Perot) George H.W. Bush managed the most dangerous political situation the world had faced since 1939.  Granted, many of his programs were simply a continuation of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan’s, but the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent power vacuum, but he faced over thirty different countries changing governments via non-elective means during his Presidency.  However, his background as the former Director of the CIA likely prepared him for the job more than any previous President.  If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a sign that the Soviet Union was crumbling, the First Persian Gulf War was the death knell.  A coalition of UN member states banded together against a regional power and crushed in a matter of months, and the Soviet Union did almost nothing.  It had spent every last cent of its political capital trying to prop up regimes in Poland, Romania, and East Germany, and now when a major war arose, the Soviet Union had no part to play.  When Boris Yeltsin announced the end of the Union in 1991, Bush swept in and ensured that the Cold War would not resume as soon as it had ended (unfortunately his successor was not so successful in this).  Although he might not have the dazzling accomplishments of a McKinley or a Polk, Bush should be recognized for what could have happened but did not happen during his watch.

5.This list would not be complete without Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Although Roosevelt’s critics will, not without merit, point out that he had some dictatorial tendencies, it was under him that America’s foreign policy changed permanently.  He mixed in many failures with his successes, which is why he is not number one, but his impact was so great that it would be a travesty to leave him off.  From the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, which led the US to exercise more “soft power” in the region instead of the previous policy of occupying countries at will to his famous 1937 Quarantine Speech, in which he described aggressor countries as a “disease” that needed to be quarantined, since they were a public health hazard, FDR was already doing a lot of diplomacy even before the beginning of the Second World War.  FDR also described the United States as the “Arsenal of Democracy.”  A plan that in theory has worked well but has been almost habitually improperly implemented, to the point that the policy now needs to be re-evaluated as a whole.  There is no denying that few Presidents could have accomplished during the Second World War what FDR did, and few would have had the courage to turn so far away from traditional politics to take on a new mantle of responsibility in the world, but FDR’s judgment of foreign leaders was severely lacking.  He chose to align himself with Winston Churchill, who would become highly unpopular in the UK, and, by extension, so would FDR.  He refused to recognize Charles de Gaulle as the legitimate leader of France as well, despite being, for all intents and purposes, at war with Vichy France, and finally, he seems to have greatly underestimated Josef Stalin.  Few would actually claim that FDR trusted Stalin, but allowing Stalin to “reconstruct” half of Europe was foolhardy.  One could also question the wisdom of an oil embargo with Japan, but the logic here is understandable.  Despite his shortcomings, however, FDR was the President America, and really the world, needed during the Second World War.

Honorable Mention: Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, Theodore Roosevelt

Worst of the Worst: Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Zachary Taylor, Grover Cleveland