67 pages • 2 hours read
Sharon McMahonThe Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Angel of the Rockies”
Introduction Summary: “New York, 1804”
As Alexander Hamilton lay dying, he was surrounded by his wife, his bishop, his seven children, and his close friend Gouverneur Morris. Morris is forgotten by history, overshadowed by Hamilton’s celebrity, yet “shift[ing] focus just slightly” brings him into the scene (3).
Morris was a Founding Father and Hamilton’s “intellectual equal.” He was responsible for penning the Preamble of the United States Constitution; however, few would recognize him or be able to name his accomplishments. Morris was “jovial, disabled, and a bit of a rake” (6). He had a wooden leg and a badly scarred arm but no shortage of girlfriends. He died after a painful, “undiagnosed infirmity” prompted him to use a whalebone from his wife’s corset as a DIY catheter. Despite these “unfortunate” details, Morris contributed to the founding of the United States “as much or more than” better-known founders (6).
Before launching into the investigation of how many other key players in American history were likewise forgotten, McMahon introduces herself. One Christmas morning, as a girl finishing her paper route just before dawn, McMahon saw spectacular auroras lighting up the sky above Lake Superior. The spectacle lasted only a few moments before the sunrise chased the aurora away. However, McMahon knows that the aurora didn’t vanish; it just became invisible in the sunlight. History is similar. People who have made significant contributions are often eclipsed by “the overshadowing suns.”
When McMahon began studying history, she was fascinated by the stories of these unsung heroes. Through her years of teaching and research, she came to realize “that the best Americans are not always famous” and that “flawed and complicated” Americans like Morris also deserve to have their stories told (11). In the Preamble to the Constitution, Morris describes America as “just,” “peaceful,” “good,” and “free” (12). Over the years, the United States has both upheld and abandoned these ideals, often simultaneously. This, however, is part of “the experience of any government run by fallible human beings” (12-13). McMahon says that we must continue to be guided by the ideals outlined in the Constitution, which were “conjured” by “ordinary people.”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Clara Brown, Kentucky, 1830s”
Clara Brown was born enslaved around 1800. As a child, she was sold to a family in Kentucky, where she grew up and started a family. Clara and her husband had four children, including twin girls named Paulina and Eliza. Although enslaved, Clara and her family were happy to be together. One day, Clara heard Eliza screaming for her. She rushed to find her daughter at the creekside, pointing frantically at the water where her sister had disappeared.
After Paulina drowned, eight-year-old Eliza struggled to sleep and became prone to sobbing fits. The family’s enslaver died in 1835, and Clara, her husband, and their children were each sold to a different family. Eliza sobbed hysterically as she was taken from her mother, and Clara promised herself that she would see her daughter again one day. Clara spent 20 years with her new enslaver, who tried to help her keep track of her scattered family. Clara learned that her husband, son, and eldest daughter had died, but all she could learn of Eliza was a rumor that she had gone West.
At 56 years old, Clara’s enslaver died, and his relatives freed her. She moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she got her first paid job cooking and cleaning for a German couple. Clara continued to ask about Eliza, but there was never any news. When Clara’s employers invited her to move to Kansas with them, she accepted.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Bleeding Kansas, 1850s”
In 1857, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision ruled that African Americans were not citizens of the United States. During this time, many white Americans who were not enslavers nonetheless “benefited from and approved of the practice of enslaving other human beings” (27). Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the United States expanded and granted statehood to certain new territories. However, the debate to admit some of these territories, such as Missouri in 1820, turned violent since the North wanted to avoid admitting more enslaving states. By the middle of the 19th century, the United States had acquired southwestern territories like Texas and California from Mexico, and many European settlers and free African Americans were making their way West.
The United States needed a railroad to connect the East to the West, but Congress disagreed on the railroad’s route, as many wanted to avoid taking the tracks through enslaving states. In 1850, Stephen Douglas suggested that slavery be left up to the states’ “popular sovereignty.” There was considerable pushback, but Douglas insisted that there was no other option, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed by President Franklin Pierce in 1854. Abolitionists and enslavers flooded Kansas, each trying to create a majority to turn Kansas’s policy on slavery in their favor. This time of “murder, mayhem, destruction, and psychological warfare” was known as “Bleeding Kansas’ (32). Tensions around slavery were rising as a whole, and the country was on the brink of civil war. In Congress, the debate around slavery became so fierce that pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks assaulted abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, injuring him so badly that he could not resume his post for three years.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Clara Brown, Colorado, 1870s”
While this conflict around slavery was unfolding, Clara Brown was living in Missouri and Kansas, still dreaming of finding her missing daughter. Clara wondered if she might find her daughter out West, so she decided to start a laundry business and look for Eliza. In the spring of 1859, Clara followed rumors of the gold in Colorado and joined a wagon caravan heading West. Impressing the wagon driver with “her tenacity,” she secured transport for her laundry equipment in exchange for feeding the 25 men in the caravan. Clara was almost 60, but she walked every day for eight weeks and cooked every day for the hungry crew of pioneers. She covered 700 miles on foot and was likely the first Black woman to enter Colorado.
Clara set up shop in Central City, a collection of “barely habitable shacks.” Most of the inhabitants were miners and laborers living in “abject poverty,” and Clara began working to “bring a semblance of civilization” to town (36). She started prayer meetings and a Sunday school and offered food and shelter to anyone who needed it. Slowly, Clara earned the community’s trust. The people she helped rewarded her with patronage, and her laundry business thrived. By the time the Civil War ended, Clara had over $10,000 in savings, the equivalent of almost $250,000 in today’s money. Her reputation as a generous and caring woman spread across the West, and she became known as the “Angel of the Rockies.” The governor of Colorado even recruited Clara to travel to Kansas and convince Black people to move to Colorado.
Many of Clara’s properties were lost in floods and fires, and her savings were embezzled by an attorney she had hired to help her. By 1873, Clara was elderly and poor. Colorado offered a pension program for those deemed “official pioneers,” but Clara was initially denied this designation. With the support of her friends and community, she appealed the decision and was awarded the pension. Finally, at age 82, she received news of her daughter. Eliza was living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Clara immediately bought a train ticket.
Reunited with her daughter, Clara felt a “truly unmitigated joy.” Eliza was a widow, but she had several children, and she and one of Clara’s granddaughters accompanied the elderly woman back to Colorado. Clara died on October 26, 1885, surrounded by her long-lost family and the community she loved and supported. Both the mayor and governor attended her funeral, and she is remembered with a portrait in Denver’s old Supreme Court chambers and memorialized at the Smithsonian. She was a woman “who lived out the American virtues perhaps better than any president or founding father” (42).
Introduction-Part 1 Analysis
In the Introduction to The Small and the Mighty, McMahon uses Gouverneur Morris to introduce the theme of The Importance of Forgotten Figures in Shaping History. Morris is an example of the kind of ordinary American whose stories McMahon explores throughout the text. Next to the bright “sun” of Alexander Hamilton’s fame, Morris has been all but forgotten despite his important contributions to the founding of America. Partly, McMahon argues, he was forgotten because his story wasn’t as glamorous as that of the charismatic Hamilton, and his personal life makes it difficult to portray him as a paragon of moral virtue. Morris had many affairs, often with married women, and eventually married his children’s nanny, who had previously been accused of murdering her own child. McMahon argues that humans are, by nature, “flawed and complicated.” Historical narratives that treat figures like Hamilton as above reproach create an unrealistic picture of human nature and of how history is made.
McMahon argues that members of the dominant social class—a class that, notably, includes Morris—are most likely to be remembered by history. She writes that “men with the best military strategy, the people with the most ships, those with vast fortunes and political power” make up most of our national narrative (9-10). They outshine those individuals who might have contributed just as much but have been forgotten because they inhabit marginalized identities. To this end, the stories that McMahon recounts come from women, African Americans, Jewish people, Asian Americans, and more.
The first story that McMahon delves into in detail is that of Clara Brown, an enslaved Black woman born at the start of the 19th century. Clara’s story is one of bravery and tenacity and introduces the theme of Hope and Resilience in the Face of Adversity. McMahon’s “small and mighty” American heroes share a number of qualities, but one of the most important is their tenacity, determination, and refusal to give up hope. Clara lost contact with her daughter for nearly 40 years, yet she never gave up trying to find her. She faced numerous hardships, from being separated from her family to pioneering the American West, but she faced it all with strength and poise. She never let her situation overwhelm her but remained focused on what she could do in that moment. She “had the fortitude to forge ahead” and embodied “the American virtues perhaps better than any president or founding father” (42). This statement encapsulates McMahon’s thesis in the book: Though powerful figures like presidents and founding fathers are often held up as the exemplars of America’s virtue and the prime movers of its history, real history has often been made by people like Clara, whose marginalized identities prevented their achievements from becoming well known.
