The term “Black Robe Regiment” referred not to a literal regiment of soldiers that wore black robes into battle but rather to the influential clergymen who promoted American independence and supported the military struggle against Britain. By encouraging the Patriot cause, those ministers helped muster critical support among members of their congregation—support the British begrudgingly acknowledged as vital to maintaining the colonists' frustrating resistance to British attempts to restore Parliamentary rule. In its implicit comparison of symbolic support to a specific body of troops, the term “Black Robe Regiment” is somewhat similar to the “fifth column” identified by the Spanish general Emilio Mola. During that country’s Civil War in 1936, Mola boasted that he had four columns of soldiers marching upon Madrid and a “fifth column” of sympathizers already living in the city who would support the army once it arrived. The term “fifth column” has since come to refer generally to civilian supporters living within a populace, even though that group usually lacks formal organization. Likewise, the Black Robe Regiment was not an actual detachment in the Continental Army but rather a British epithet for the influence preachers exerted in support of the Patriot cause. Advocates of the British crown found preachers’ support of the Patriot cause particularly detrimental to their efforts to maintain loyalty among the colonists. Such clergymen provided sanction for the cause of independence as well as formal support for the military effort. In the 1770s, most colonists still considered themselves aligned with England; many parishioners questioned the fundamental legitimacy of revolution, and of separating from Britain and consequently the Church of England. From their pulpits, these members of the Black Robe Regiment reassured their audiences that their revolution was justified in the eyes of God. Winning and maintaining the support of the population was critical in the American War for Independence, which relied heavily on the support of volunteers and the general population.

Peter Muhlenberg is perhaps the most iconic figure associated with the Black Robe Regiment. A Virginia minister, Muhlenberg accepted a commission to lead a regiment of the Continental army. An anecdote—likely apocryphal—from an 18th-century biography depicted Muhlenberg preaching to his congregation in his clerical robes, only to strip them off and reveal his military uniform underneath, a dramatic appeal for men to join the Patriot struggle. Muhlenberg served as an officer in the Continental Army throughout the war and commanded a brigade at the Battle of Yorktown. But Muhlenberg’s literal participation in the war’s fighting was highly unusual for clergymen. Far more common, and the origin of the British label “Black Robe Regiment,” was the rhetorical support for independence those ministers offered regularly from their pulpits. Nor should the undeniable importance of support from this influential group of Protestant clergymen suggest that the American Revolution was mainly a religious revolution, or that its supporters were monolithic in their faith. Colonial religious life was heterogeneous and reflected a diverse set of beliefs. Some Patriot supporters, like the Black Robe Regiment and their congregations, subscribed to Protestant faiths and read in the events of the war evidence that God favored their cause. Many other members of the founding generation—products of the Enlightenment, which emphasized reason and rational explanation over revealed truth—characterized themselves as Deists, believing that a divine God had created the universe and set it in motion, but took no active role in shaping or guiding human affairs. A few influential Patriots seemingly defied any sort of religious affiliation: Thomas Paine, whose pamphlets "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" were credited with boosting support for the Patriot cause during critical junctures in the revolutionary movement, famously rejected organized religion and the creeds professed by various faiths. Asserting that “My own mind is my own church,” Paine suggested that the various religions appeared to him as “no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Success in the War of Independence drew on Americans of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and faiths, who unified effectively enough to defeat the world’s strongest military power in a bloody and protracted conflict.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) began in early 1933, under its FDR-appointed director, Robert Fechner, a union leader who had previously been the vice president of the International Association of Machinists. The CCC was a public work relief program for unemployed young men, aged 18-25, who worked on government-owned lands, mostly on natural resource conservation projects. The U.S. Army ran the program, which was therefore sometimes jocularly referred to as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army.” It ended in 1942. The CCC’s Second Corps Area included New York and New Jersey, and in these two states there were 75 camps, most of which resembled rustic World War I Army camps. Some of them were essentially tent towns and were occupied only during the warmer seasons, but others served as winter quarters as well and were constructed of timber buildings and masonry. The enlistees who served in each camp generally came from all over the country. The young men who enlisted from Onondaga County, for example, were transported by train to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where they were given some very basic training before being assigned to CCC camps around the country.

The CCC, from its winter quarters at Camp 55 on the south side of Upper Green Lake State Park near Fayetteville, worked on the construction of the Green Lakes golf course a half-mile away. The course is still open. The Fayetteville Free Library has an online exhibit about the work of the CCC at Green Lakes State Park, which includes interesting photos of the CCC at work on the park. In Pratt’s Falls County Park, in Manlius, 6 miles southeast of Syracuse, the CCC worked throughout the park on stone retaining walls, roads, trails, buildings, and bridges. In Morgan Hill State Forest the CCC planted millions of conifer trees from seedlings trucked in from the Corps’ tree nursery near Albany. On the Onondaga Reservation, the National Youth Administration and the WPA funded a community center built in 1940 by Indian youth, as well as a model program for training Indians who were then employed as youth camp counselors in the region. Except for the emergency occasioned by a forest fire in October 1935, when 150 CCC men from nearby camps were brought in to help fight the fire, the main CCC did not extend its work into the reservation. Instead, a separate organization—in keeping with the tribe’s sovereignty—called the Indian Emergency Conservation Work Program (IECW), which was renamed the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division (CCC-ID) in 1937—was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but with all projects cleared by the tribal council and employing Indian workers. These projects included the development of forest land, clearing brush, the straightening of roads, watershed protection, boundary demarcation, flood control and soil erosion measures, and the construction of drainage ditches between 1935 and 1937.

Near CCC Camp 15, known as “Cross Clearing Camp,” at Tupper Lake, in Franklin County, the WPA had undertaken a project in 1933-34 to reconstruct the dam on the Lower Racquette River to control the water level. Soon afterward, the CCC had their enlistees clearing rocks, stumps and debris out of the river course to allow navigation on the river and to make it possible to float logs downstream. The site of the Tupper Lake CCC camp is apparently still discernible and directions for finding it are in a 2006 article by Tupper Lake town historian Bill Frenette. A list of other CCC camps in the Adirondacks (and so generally northeast of Onondaga County), is on history researcher Marty Podskoch’s Civilian Conservation Corps Stories website. A CCC camp was established at Gilbert Lake State Park, in the town of New Lisbon, north of Oneonta in Otsego County. Nowadays the park features the New York State Civilian Conservation Corps Museum, one of 12 CCC museums around the country. It displays photos and memorabilia from CCC work at the park and elsewhere. The Corps built many of the park’s 221 campsites and 33 cabins that are still in use today. At Camp 31 at Chittenango Falls State Park, in Madison County, near Cazenovia, the CCC worked on the park’s trails and roads and built the stone facilities and shelters that are still there. At Camp 20 at Selkirk Shores State Park, near Pulaski in Oswego County on Lake Ontario, the CCC cleared trees and brush for public campsites (still open) and created a swimming beach (now closed), reforested conifers, straightened small streams, and cleared the bank of the Salmon River for public access. Also in Oswego County, the WPA and CCC planted conifers in land around Kasoag and built Mosher, Whitney and Long Ponds by constructing small dams. One of the lasting effects of the CCC, which is certainly still "visible" in a sense, not only in rural New York but also throughout the country, was its fostering of a basic kind of conservationist view of America's wilderness areas among its enlistees and their families. As a consequence, it played a strong part in the birth of what we know regard as the environmental movement.

Pershing undoubtedly had complex views on race and American citizenship, probably not so different from his political ally and fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt. Given his command of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” in the 1898 Spanish-American War and his participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre of Lakota Indians just eight years earlier, it would seem that he held very contradictory views. To Pershing, blacks may have seemed like worthy soldiers, while Indians deserved genocide. On the other hand, as a military officer, Pershing was carrying out orders and we cannot assume these actions reflected his personal beliefs. Roosevelt, however, was in a different position. Unlike Pershing, who followed orders, Roosevelt gave orders and thus set the tone for race relations both in the military and in society at large. For example, Roosevelt was determined to see the cultural extinction of American Indians (while holding them up as “noble savages” nonetheless), but he also hosted black educator Booker T. Washington at the White House, a very controversial move, especially to white Southern Democratic politicians.

As the first two decades of the 20th century passed, the nation saw increased immigration from both Europe and Asia, as well as increased activism by African Americans, American Indians, and others who demanded equal opportunities and the end of discriminatory laws and customs. World War I was a watershed in these movements, as both African Americans and American Indians enlisted in the army. Blacks served in segregated units, but Indians did not. Indians had a highly ambivalent attitude about their senses of belonging to the American nation; after all, they belonged to tribal nations as well, nations which had long histories of government-to-government relations with the United States. Yet by 1918, the federal government had done a good deal to not only destroy Indian lives but to destroy that government-to-government relationship as well. Many Indians were resentful of these policies, but chose to join the military anyway. Why? Veterans have offered many reasons, one of which is that they believed that when America was threatened, their homelands were threatened. Many veterans saw themselves as warriors not only for their own tribal communities but for the U.S. as well. Despite their service alongside whites, there is no doubt that Indians experienced a high degree of discrimination in the military, as sensitively shown by Joseph Boyden in the novel Three Day Road. Both Indians and blacks sacrificed for the United States and felt that the country ought to treat them more fairly. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who had to maintain political support from southern white supremacist Democrats, vacillated on this issue (especially in his refusal to support anti-lynching legislation in Congress) and questions of African American integration in the military were essentially abandoned until after World War II. Wilson, like so many other policy makers, seemed to effectively ignore Indian concerns. Indians’ service with whites in the military might be explained by the emerging notion of “whiteness.” Whiteness is an analytical category that historians have used to explain the shifts in race relations created by immigration and industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We must remember that men like Roosevelt and Pershing talked about “race” in what today we would think of as ethnic or national terms—there was an English race, an Irish race, a German race, an Italian race, and so on. Today, we tend to think of these ethnicities as “white,” though that idea was hardly solidified in the early twentieth century. Instead, a long historical process created “whiteness” and a white population out of many different nationalities once perceived as incompatible and even threatening to Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Famously, Roosevelt believed in the “melting pot,” a phrase that we have come to associate with his belief in equality and the worth of all men, but which in actuality referred to his wish to see Americans with ancestry in Western Europe mix and marry one another. It was only those Americans who could jump into the melting pot—Asians, African Americans, American Indians, and others were explicitly excluded from Roosevelt’s vision of a strong American people. Yet, Indians were not segregated in military service, despite the fact that every American president had endorsed a policy that would essentially exterminate them. These policies had not wholly succeeded, but at the turn of the 20th century the American Indian population was at its lowest in human history. In this light, we can imagine that Indians were not perceived as a threat to whiteness in the same way that Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were. By the 1920s, immigrants from places seen as undesirable to Anglo-Saxon policy makers had increased so much that Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act. This act installed quotas on immigrants from certain countries; in general, the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia could not exceed 2% of those populations currently living in the US, as of the 1890 census. In other words, if, say, 100,000 people from China lived in the United States in 1890, then the US would admit no more than 2,000 people in a given year. Pershing, who was close to President Calvin Coolidge and had even considered a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1920, was present for the signing of this bill, indicating his support for it and what it represented for policy-makers’ hopes about the future racial composition of the United States. Of course, we now know that this policy ultimately did not achieve its intended effect, however much “whiteness” is taken for granted today. Indeed, what this period shows is that the racial hierarchies we believe to have always been in place were in considerable flux even as recently as 100 years ago. Pershing, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge were at the forefront of maintaining white supremacy, but they could not ignore the consistent—and insistent—protest of non-white Americans, nor should we ignore the fact that within white and non-white communities, there are very distinct groups with different histories who possessed varied responses to their situations in the United States.

Eli Whitney patented his cotton engine, or “gin,” in 1794. A mechanical device to separate cotton fibers from cotton seed, it dramatically lowered the cost of producing cotton fiber. Formerly, workers (usually slaves) had separated the seeds from the lint by hand, painstaking work that required hours of work to produce a pound of lint. By mechanizing the process, the gin could produce more than 50 pounds of lint per day. Cotton fabric, formerly quite expensive due to the high cost of production, became dramatically cheaper, and cotton clothing became commonplace. In the early decades of the 19th century, Southern farmers shifted more and more of their acreage into highly profitable cotton production, and large-scale plantation agriculture became common in the Deep South states of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The gin’s effect on the economy and on the lives of the slaves who made up a significant part of that economy was complex. The cotton gin freed slaves from the arthritic labor of separating seeds from the lint by hand. At the same time, the dramatically lowered cost of producing cotton fiber, the corresponding increase in the amount of cotton fabric demanded by textile mills, and the increasing prevalence of large-scale plantation agriculture resulted in a dramatic increase in the demand for more slaves to work those plantations. Overall, the slave population in the South grew from 700,000 before Whitney’s patent to more than three million in 1850—striking evidence of the changing Southern economy and its growing dependence on the slave system to keep the economy running. Cotton cultivation proved especially well-suited to slave labor. A relatively delicate plant, growing and harvesting cotton was a labor-intensive process. On large Southern plantations, much of that labor was provided by slaves working in gangs. Gang labor fit the slave system particularly well: dozens of slaves collected into a work crew could be supervised by a single white overseer, which made for more efficient work. Unlike solitary jobs like shepherding, which made constant supervision of individual slave workers extremely difficult from a practical standpoint, gang labor in the cotton fields allowed one overseer to supervise (and, when necessary, to discipline and punish) large numbers of slaves simultaneously.

On large cotton plantations both the work and the punishments were unremitting and unforgiving. During the height of harvesting season, slaves worked from sunup to sundown; when the moon was full, they worked into the night as well. Slaveowners varied in their reputations for physical violence, but none eschewed punishment completely in the quest to extract more labor from their charges. Beatings and whippings were frequently used to coerce recalcitrant slaves; slaves who resisted labor or attempted to escape were punished with mutilation, sale away from their families, and occasionally death. There is no simple calculus to determine whether and how the cotton gin affected the lives of individual slaves. It is possible that the adoption of the gin made the working hours of a few individual slaves somewhat less difficult. However, given the barbarity of slavery generally—rampant physical and sexual abuse, the separation of families, lives of forced labor in acute deprivation, and the overarching dehumanization that the system enforced—it seems clear that any invention that encouraged the growth and expansion of the institution increased the misery of slaves in the aggregate acutely. Given the cotton gin’s effects on the spread of large-scale cotton agriculture and the resultant growth in the institution of slavery in the first half of the 19th century, it is difficult to portray its introduction as anything other than a disaster from the perspective of enslaved African-Americans.

Railroads and the political system have been intertwined since the first rail systems in the 1830s and 1840s when in the name of “internal improvements” the Whig Party supported government funding for start-up railroad companies. It was, however, during its rapid expansion in the post-Civil War era that the industry’s ties to the political system became controversial.

The federal government gave railroad companies thousands of acres of land on which to run their tracks. Men like Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. A. Harriman, James J. Hill, and J.P. Morgan controlled a powerful industry. They wielded political power, too, by demanding the federal government send troops in to break up railroad strikes in 1877 and 1894. Meanwhile farmers began to protest the railroad’s monopoly over transportation rates. Congress responded with the Interstate Commerce Act (1887), which sought to prevent “pools” of interests from dominating industries. But given that both Republican and Democratic leaders benefited from gifts given by the railroad companies, real reform, it seemed, was going to have to come from outside the two-party system.

The People’s Party, or the Populists, emerged in the 1890s calling for strict regulation to rein in railroad companies’ power. By the early 1900s, self-styled “progressives” in both parties had picked up on the Populists’ and organized labor’s attacks on the railroads. During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, progressive Republicans and Democrats joined forces to pass the Elkins Act (1903), the Hepburn Act (1906) and, during William Howard Taft’s term as president, the Elkins-Mann Act (1910) and the Railroad Valuation Act (1913) all of which regulated the industry. Conservative Republicans pushed back by denying Roosevelt the nomination in 1912, thus causing a rift in the party and guaranteeing Woodrow Wilson’s election.