The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History

by Sharon McMahon

How many more Americans who changed the course of history are waiting to be discovered?

Eliza could take her turn on the auction block and be sold to a “decent” family, one that would not punish her too harshly. A family that would give her somewhere warm to sleep, and enough food to sustain her and help her grow tall and strong.

If anyone tries to tell you the Civil War was a war for “state’s rights,” calmly look them in the eye, and ask, politely and inquisitively, what exactly the states wanted the “right” to do? You can follow up with, “Make their own rules about what?” The answer is, of course, that they wanted to make their own rules about whether they had the right to enslave people. All the “way of life” and “self-determination” and “economic conditions” roads lead right back to slavery.

Jane fully believed Benny’s horrific death was God punishing them for Franklin’s vain political pursuits.[9]

“My countrymen: it is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself…. I ought to be, and am, truly grateful for this rare manifestation of the nation’s confidence; but this, so far from lightening my obligations, only adds to their weight. You have summoned me in my weakness; you must sustain me by your strength.”[10]

Franklin Pierce had three dead sons, a wife who was in such poor mental and physical health that she couldn’t leave her room, an absent and (shortly thereafter) dead vice president, and the first bubbles of a civil war fast becoming a simmer.

So no, America is not “the worst it’s ever been” today, despite what some news anchors might be trying to convince you of, because if they can make you afraid, they can gain your attention and your money. Has anyone been beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate over the topic of whether it’s cool to enslave people this week? No? Okay.

Wherever she went, Clara became known for her kindness and her tenacity. If someone arrived in Colorado Territory, scrawny from hunger and with not a penny to their name, Clara would give him a place to sleep and food to eat until he could find employment.

By the end of the Civil War, Clara had amassed more than $10,000,[6] which is the modern equivalent of nearly $250,000.

Clara developed a reputation that stretched far beyond the confines of her town and into the entirety of the American West. As new people arrived in Colorado, they soon heard tell of a woman who was always quick with a meal or a bandage, a cot for a nap, or a place to rent for the month. They called her the Angel of the Rockies.[8]

When people were at their most vulnerable—sick, poor, about to give birth, desperately lonely—Clara Brown could be trusted. A woman with hands and feet that embodied what it meant to be just, peaceful, good, and free. A woman with a kindly face, tall and strong, who lived out the American virtues perhaps better than any president or founding father, perhaps better than anyone whose bust is preserved in the marble statuary of a namesake library. A woman, too, who saw opportunity for herself and for others and had the fortitude to forge ahead, not knowing where the path would lead.

“I couldn’t learn my alphabet,” Virginia recalled in her later years. Her teacher was so frustrated by Virginia’s inability to memorize and repeat ABCDEFG that she eventually gave up and just gave her a book to read, and found that she could. “By the end of the term, I received a medal for the highest honor.”[2]

Imagine, then, the pride that swelled in Sarah’s chest when Virginia attended Richmond Colored Normal School and became a qualified teacher at age sixteen.[3]

When the preacher called for people to sign a petition to get rid of Virginia Randolph, when the folks in that country church tried to rise up, Virginia felt betrayed. She was one of them. Her parents had been enslaved just like their parents had been enslaved. She was poor just like they were poor. She worked just like they worked. She wanted what they wanted: for their children to have everything they never did. Freedom. Justice. Opportunity. The fact that the congregants couldn’t see it yet just meant she had more work to do.

“We are here to help each other.” The room was still. “I have been appointed by the School Board as a teacher, and the church and school should be helping each other. If we are teaching right religion, we should be helping each other.”

The parents worried that her teaching methods were preparing their children for a lifetime of labor, not of learning. Harvesting wild honeysuckle vines and weaving them into baskets? Building chairs out of scrap wood she foraged from the white schools? Cooking lessons? Who was this benefiting, the parents thought. Surely only the white folks, who wanted cheap labor.

The mother moved slowly. As she approached, Virginia saw tears in her eyes. “I came for one thing,” she said quietly. “And found quite another.”[9]

With each passing month, she did what she could with what she had.

Through his eye, we see Virginia and her small charges, doing the hard work of inventing Black education for a new century.

However, I would like to think I was chosen because I was a good teacher, and needed to share my knowledge and skills with others.

She showed up at every community event she could, and when I tell you that she spent years gaining the trust of the community, I mean years. Years it took, putting the miles on her feet and on the buggy wheels. Years of visibility, years of effort.

“I have secured Miss Virginia Randolph as the teacher.”[20] That single act did more for tens of thousands of children and teachers all over the South, more for justice, more for peace, more for goodness, and more for the liberation of Americans than anyone could have imagined.

It was, in fact, what Katharine Lee Bates was born to do: to bring poetry into the world.

But Sybil Ludington didn’t have a famous poem written about her, so hers is not the name we remember.[5]

Her hatred of sewing was a recurring theme in her life.

Perhaps Katie took Longfellow’s compliment to mean that she had what he had: the courage and vision to become a great American poet, whose work wasn’t just about America, but for America.

she told the editor of the Boston Evening Transcript that her wish was that American writers would be able to portray American women as they really were: “The Yankee smartness, the quick tact and intuition, the dry humor and love of fun, the restless, eager curiosity, the spirited independence, the sparkle and gleam that play over the surface of earnestness and energy, thoughtfulness and devoutness, passion and intensity.”[19]

the American ideal of democracy was fragile.

The date was July 4, 1895.[6] Katie’s published poem was immediately beloved by Americans far and wide. It went viral before anyone knew what going viral meant.

She began receiving letters from people insisting that the lines should be set to music, urging her to consider how much better a song would be if she helped a few lines rhyme more melodically. Deluged with requests, Katie rewrote some of the lyrics to make them easier to sing.

In 1911, Katharine Lee Bates, our Katie, published the final version of her best-known masterpiece, one that struck a chord in the hearts of Americans, as conflict darkened the doorstep of Europe.

O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!

Unlike “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is difficult to sing and deeply rooted in military imagery, “America the Beautiful” is about the land of America and her people.

Katie asks us to work for justice, embrace peace, to do and be good, and for us to love liberty. And for that, she says, we will someday be rewarded in a place undimmed by human tears.

Then they saw on a hillside a battalion in formation and heard them singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ and they all came to life again, and sang it with tears on their faces.”[12]

The National Hymn Society pressed Congress to make “America the Beautiful” the national anthem. “It expresses the highest and deepest emotions of patriotism, not in any spirit of militant aggression and world-conquering imperialism, but with a profound gratitude and affection for the country, the government, and the traditions that have made us what we are.”[13]

Katie didn’t chain herself to courthouses, get arrested, and go on hunger strikes. She didn’t win elections or defeat foes in battle. But what she did was—and is—important. Her words light the way of truth: our shared history as a nation and the direction in which we should be heading.

Inez was a new kind of woman. Audacious. Sure of herself. Intelligent. Under her 1909 Vassar yearbook picture were the words: “Fascinating—but a trifle dangerous for household use.”[2]

Women didn’t need things like an education. What they needed was a man and a family. But that wasn’t enough for Inez. Inez stood on the precipice of change. When Inez looked to the future, she saw suffrage for women, prison reform, and the end of racial and sex discrimination.

Giving them the right to vote would upset the entire power dynamic that the United States was founded upon, and the rock upon which it still rested: the supremacy of white men.

Black women formed their own clubs, their own political action groups, and their own suffrage organizations. They weren’t quiet about wanting suffrage for themselves, suffrage for all, universal suffrage, even when white women were unwilling to go that far.

Even then, newspapers talked more about what women wore and how they looked more than what they had to say.

Forward, Inez believed. She said, “Suffrage is a gift no one can confer—it is a right.”[9]

She wasn’t the only woman in America to create a spectacle for the purpose of the suffrage cause. But she was the first to do it in Spanish.[1]

It was the club women of Southern California who helped establish a juvenile court system and raised awareness and funds to hire probation officers. It was the club women who helped organize kindergartens and playgrounds. It was the club women who fought for labor laws, and it was the club women who organized for women’s suffrage.[5]

“A democracy, we have been taught for many a year, is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What is a man?” she asks. “A man is a person. What is a person? A person is a human being—a person has a soul. Is woman a human being? Yes, a woman is a human being. Has woman a soul?” she asks. “Yes, woman has a soul.”[7] She goes on to lay out her case that men and women are equal, because they are both human beings. We can’t have a democracy without men, and we can’t have a democracy without half of the democracy’s citizens—women, she says.

So what did the women doctors do? Sit back and complain that the government was allowing soldiers to suffer instead of using the willing and able services of trained surgeons? No. They fundraised to go on their own. They got donations from wealthy women who sponsored them, they organized and worked, and they paid their own way.

The next morning, word spread quickly about what the women had done—how they ran not from the danger, as many men assumed they would, but toward it. How they thought not of saving their own lives but of laying them down so that others might be saved.

Women had few rights of their own—not to own property, not even legal rights to parent the children she birthed. In Illinois, if a couple divorced, the man got to dictate the terms of custody, and if he wanted to keep a woman from seeing her babies, he could. If a woman was deemed too much trouble, was too opinionated or intelligent, if she had what a man regarded as any emotional instability, he had the legal right to take her to an asylum and institutionalize her. While Rebecca Brown Mitchell wasn’t institutionalized, she was imprisoned, as she called it, in the iron cage of the law.[2]

By 1891, she set her sights on government, on the belief that America’s best days were ahead of her, on the idea that the marginalized needed to be treated fairly by society and the legal system. She would begin, she thought, by lobbying the Idaho legislature to achieve action on her three primary goals: Raise the age of consent for girls from ten to eighteen. (Yes. Ten.) Secure women’s suffrage in Idaho. Reform Idaho’s prison and parole system.[12]