Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (14 page)

Then, in 1803, slaves in Haiti revolted against the French colonists who occupied the island nation. Napoleon was forced to send in reinforcements, but his army met with more resistance than anticipated—along with yellow fever—which led to tens of thousands of French casualties.

Seeing an opportunity, President Thomas Jefferson sent an envoy to France with an offer to buy the port of New Orleans for $10 million. Jefferson got a lot more than he bargained for: The besieged Bonaparte offered to sell 828,800 square miles of French-claimed land for $15 million, or about 3¢ per acre. The envoy took the deal, now known as the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the U.S. with the stroke of a pen.

Martin Waldseemüller. A few years after Vespucci led two Portuguese voyages to Brazil between 1499 and 1503, Waldseemüller, a German cartographer, published the first full map of the New World. He named the region “America” after Amerigo Vespucci.

How many U.S. presidents were not born in the U.S.?

Who sent the corpse of a “barking squirrel” to Thomas Jefferson?

There have been seven presidents born outside the United States. Doesn’t the Constitution require that the president be a natural-born citizen? Yes, but only if he was born
after
the U.S. gained independence from England. The framers of the Constitution added a now-obsolete exception to that rule: A candidate could qualify if he were a citizen at the time the Constitution was adopted in 1787. Martin Van Buren, who served from 1837 to ’41, was the first president actually born an American citizen.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Two centuries ago, not long after the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country, President Jefferson tasked Lewis, a U.S. Army Captain, with leading an expedition to the untamed West. Lewis selected his friend and former commander, Clark, to join him. Thier mission: Survey the landscape, find places to farm, make peace with the Indians, and catalog the West’s flora and fauna. Beginning in St. Louis, Missouri, in May 1804, the expedition of 33 people set off. Along the way, Lewis and Clark discovered and, in many cases, obtained samples of 178 previously unknown plants and 122 animals, including grizzly bears, California condors, cutthroat trout, magpies, coyotes, and “barking squirrels”—the burrowing rodents we now call prairie dogs.

A woman named Alse Young was the first person to…what?

What war featured the first attempted submarine attack?

Young was the first person to be executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. It happened on May 26, 1647, at Meeting House Square in Hartford, Connecticut.

Five years earlier, witchcraft had become punishable by death in the colonies. Unlike in England, where witches were burned alive, in the New World the punishment was slightly more humane—they were merely hanged (or in one case, crushed to death by a boulder). The historical record is unclear as to what led to Young’s conviction as a witch, but it is known she left behind a husband and a baby girl who, 30 years later, was also labeled as a witch. By the time the death penalty for witchcraft was repealed in 1750, 32 people—most of them women—had been executed, including 20 in Salem, Massachusetts.

The American Revolution. A Connecticut man named David Bushnell built a hand-cranked underwater craft, which he called the
Turtle
, and on September 6, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee climbed into the world’s first submarine and piloted it through New York Harbor. His mission: attach a barrel of gunpowder to the side of a British ship, and then blow it up. Lee made it all the way to the ship but was unable to attach his payload. It floated away and exploded in the open water. Then Lee hightailed it back to shore.

Bushnell built more subs during the war, but none of them were able to sink a British ship.

Where was the Statue of Liberty originally going to live, and why didn’t she end up there?

Egypt. French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi’s lifelong dream was to create a monument that would rival the Colossus of Rhodes, a 107-foot-tall statue of the Greek god Helios that was destroyed by an earthquake in 226 B.C. Instead of a man, Bartholdi decided to create a robed woman holding a torch over her head—and he wanted her to stand at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, which he’d visited on a trip to Egypt in 1855 at age 21.

Bartholdi spent the next few years honing his craft and drawing up plans. All he had to do was convince Egypt’s government to help pay for the statue, which would also serve as a lighthouse. At first, prospects looked good: Egypt was enjoying a windfall from the revenue generated by ships passing through the canal. Plus, Egyptian cotton was suddenly in demand, since a blockade of the Southern states during the U.S. Civil War had halted America’s cotton exports. But after the war ended, U.S. cotton returned to the market and the price of cotton tanked…and with it, Egypt’s economy. Bartholdi was forced to look elsewhere for a place to put his statue. He chose the United States, a close ally of France. In 1871 he sailed to the U.S. to raise money and to look for a site. As his ship was traveling through New York Harbor, it sailed past Bedloe Island. The sculptor knew he had found his spot.

Bartholdi spent the next 15 years working on the statue, which he called
La Liberté éclairant le monde
(“Liberty Enlightening the World”). It was completed in 1886, three decades after he got his big idea.

Who wrote in a letter to Henry Ford, “While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make”?

What bit of trivia was partly responsible for “The Star-Spangled Banner” becoming the official national anthem of the United States?

That love letter to Henry Ford was penned by bank robber Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde fame. Written in early 1934, here’s the letter in full:

Bonnie and Clyde’s business was indeed far from legal—their gang robbed several banks and killed dozens of people, including nine cops. A few weeks after sending the letter, the lovebirds were gunned down by lawmen on a desolate Louisiana road…while hiding out in their stolen 1934 beige Ford V-8.