Review
“With shimmering research, an observant eye, and a bright moral compass, Sharon McMahon leads us through the thickets of the past until we can see where we came from and where we are going.”
―David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon
“Sharon McMahon is a national treasure and a one-woman cavalry for truth, saving our republic one loving and clear-eyed lesson at a time. She and this book are a gift to our country.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns
“This book won’t just enlighten and entertain you—it will leave you empowered by newfound confidence that you don’t need to be rich or famous to make a difference. The Small and the Mighty is a master class in making American history fascinating and fun.”
―Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking
“These are the underdogs, the unknowns, and some of the most amazing historical heroes you’ve never heard of. The Small and the Mighty overflows with inspiration and brilliantly proves that the best Americans are not always famous.”
―Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Nazi Conspiracy
“The Small and the Mighty isn’t just history—it’s a testament to the power of courage and resilience. If you’re looking for a book that restores faith in the American dream, this is it."
―Jermaine Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of The Humanity Archive
“Sharon McMahon has assembled a thrilling cast of idealists, trailblazers, change agents, and crusaders. Together they light up the past—and the page.”
—Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
“So many history books focus on what went wrong. The Small and the Mighty teaches us about the people who got it right. In a time when democracy is on the line, we need this book as a reminder that hope—even when it's tiny—is strong enough to meet this moment.”
―Jemar Tisby, professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky and New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and The Spirit of Justice
“McMahon is a world-class educator and masterful storyteller who has crafted an essential and irresistible book. If you want to be deeply inspired by history—and have a great time along the way—read this book.”
―Candice Millard, author of River of the Gods
“In this magnificent debut, Sharon McMahon offers detailed, nuanced portraits of unexpected heroes. In the process, she reminds us that citizenship is far more than a legal status―and that the American Dream is never writ small.”
―Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First
“This is a reminder that this country's ideals were and are lived by people brave enough to go against the grain—without sugarcoating our history or letting systems of oppression off the hook. The Small and the Mighty is McMahon at her best: pointing out the light in the darkness. "
―Nora McInerny, author of It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too), No Happy Endings, The Hot Young Widows Club, and Bad Vibes Only, and host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking
“Too often, America’s history is told in black and white. In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon reminds us that our story is vastly more interesting, populated by unlikely and complicated figures. This book is a timely reminder of the promise of American citizenship: that anyone, no matter their background, can shape the course of the nation’s future.”
―Troy Senik, presidential historian, former White House speech writer, and author of Man of Iron
“The Small and the Mighty powerfully illuminates the messy, often dangerous work of democracy, performed by imperfect Americans with hope for a more just world. Sharon’s characteristic humor, thorough research, and disarming candor combine to issue a blazing call to be the change we want to see, wherever we are.”
―Julie Bogart, author of Raising Critical Thinkers and founder of Brave Writer
“In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon has crafted an accessible, beautiful, and courageous masterpiece. Her meticulous attention to detail brings to light untold histories, keeping you frantically turning the page. This book is a road map toward understanding who we have always been.”
―Dr. Bettina Love, William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of Punished for Dreaming
“The Small and the Mighty drops us into some of the most riveting and consequential times in American history, where we meet twelve of the most important people you’ve likely never heard of. McMahon’s subjects are the folks who shifted the narrative of our country. McMahon’s gifted storytelling and deep research will show you why.”
―Kate Winkler Dawson, author of American Sherlock
“With stories you thought you knew and most you’ve never even heard before, The Small and the Mighty takes us on a journey of ordinary, human hope—something America decidedly needs. This is what you wish history class had actually been.”
―Kendra Adachi, author of The Lazy Genius Way
“The Small and the Mighty brings to life a cast of Americans who deserve their place in our national Hall of Fame. It's a swift, moving, beautiful book that makes you blush with pride—after swearing with outrage at the circumstances that forced them to act.”
―Timothy Egan, author of A Fever in the Heartland
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
Clara Brown
Kentucky, 1830s
The marketplace buzzed with activity on a sizzling Kentucky day. And just up ahead, to the right, near the wooden platform in the center of town, a heartrending scene was unfolding.
Clara Brown clutched her youngest child close, Eliza Jane's tear-sodden face disappearing into the fabric of Clara's dress. Eliza was prone to "fits" of behavior she had difficulty controlling, and she was now sobbing.
"Shhhhhh," Clara whispered to her. "You have to be a brave girl now."
She tried to dry Eliza's face. To wipe her nose. To imbue her with her motherly strength so 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 Eliza stood there looking like a blubbering mess, she might fetch a bad price and go to a family that couldn't-or wouldn't-care for her.
When Clara was born around 1800, she was born enslaved to enslaved parents. As a child, she was sold to a man in another state, a fate that would soon befall her own offspring. Kentucky wasn't home to the vast plantations of Virginia, where she came from; the land here was more mountainous, the farms were more compact. It's likely that Clara had many jobs as she grew up, learning to cook, clean, garden, wash, and iron alongside the other enslaved women she lived with.
Unusually for a woman in her circumstances, Clara married for love. Because so little has been recorded about the lives of enslaved people, and what was recorded was often from the perspective of the people who owned them, diaries and letters from the time tell us that Clara's owners were very happy that she married Richard, and that they threw the new couple a wedding feast to celebrate the union.
It's difficult today not to be cynical about these accounts-if the enslavers felt genuine affection for Clara and Richard, why didn't they free them? What were they actually happy about? Was it that they had a family of strong workers living on their farm now, a family that would soon bear children they could sell or enslave as well? Was the marriage for love anything more than dollar signs in the eyes of the people who owned Clara and Richard?
Clara and Richard welcomed a son, Richard Jr., daughter Margaret, and twin baby girls, Paulina Ann and Eliza Jane. Unlike many enslaved people, the family was allowed to live together and to tend to their own garden plot. In the evenings, the children could play in the creek that ran through the property.
Clara's life changed forever one summer day. In the distance, she heard the unmistakable sound of her eight-year-old daughter screaming, "MAMAAAAAAAAA!" Clara felt a punch in her gut and a weight on her chest that made it hard to breathe. She took off in the direction of her daughter's voice, her legs moving her six-foot frame at a speed they had never carried her before. She found Eliza creekside, pointing downstream.
"What! What happened? What is it?" Clara cried, the panic rising in her throat.
"PAULINA!" Eliza cried. "PAULINA!"
Eliza had tried in vain to reach her twin, Paulina, who was tangled in the branches that swirled at the edge of the creek. Eliza had watched as her wombmate disappeared under the surface.
Paulina's body was recovered a short time later. But Eliza's mind was not. Clara worried desperately about her, worried how she would be treated the rest of her life if she couldn't snap out of her episodes of staring blankly off into the distance and the crying jags that lasted for hours unabated. Eliza barely slept, which meant Clara barely had a chance to close her eyes.
Today we would recognize the PTSD that Eliza was experiencing, the flashbacks of trying to rescue her entangled sister that seized her at night. The crippling feelings of guilt that it was her fault, the regret she felt because they shouldn't have been in the creek to begin with.
When the family's current owner, Ambrose Smith-the one who had thrown them the wedding feast-, died in 1835 the family had to be separated and sold, one by one, to settle his estate. Each member of Clara's family, her husband and four beloved children, took turns stepping up onto the auction block, hoping against hope for some kind of miracle that might allow them to stay together. But none came.
The sight of fragile little Eliza with her tearstained face, eyes swollen from crying, being wrenched from her arms and hoisted atop the platform, caused a pain unlike any Clara had known. When Paulina died, Clara grieved. But delivering her dead baby girl into the arms of the Lord-Clara was a woman of great faith-was far different than delivering her sobbing, living daughter into the arms of an unknown enslaver. She knew there was a good chance they would never meet again outside of heaven. It was a grief she shared with many thousands of mothers whose babies were taken and who never again had the chance to kiss the tops of their heads, to remark on how much they were growing, or to marvel in pride at who they were becoming.
"SOLD!" the auctioneer yelled, pointing at the man who had just purchased her flesh and blood. Eliza was carted away, nestled in the back of a wagon among sacks of feed and bolts of fabric. Clara watched her disappear, praying that Eliza would not be afraid, that she would find the strength to be a good girl, and that she would always know that she was loved.
She vowed to find her again someday, even if it took the rest of her life.
When it was Clara's turn to step on the auction block, she was sober, her eyes fixed on the horizon. She couldn't allow herself to look into the faces of the people who stared her up and down. She didn't allow herself to cry for Eliza, or for her husband, or her two older children, all sold to different enslavers. She held her head high, turning on command so the auction attendees could see her from all angles, silent in her rage and despair.
Clara was sturdy. Experienced enough to take to most jobs quickly, but young enough to still have many decades of work left in her. Her buyer was a man named George Brown. He motioned to a spot for Clara to sit in his wagon. The auction block, and Clara's life as she knew it, slowly disappeared from view as she rolled toward a new, unknown life.
George Brown was a merchant-a hatter-and instead of working outdoors, Clara now had a job inside the Brown home. Over the years, as she helped raise the Browns' three daughters, she thought endlessly of her own three girls. Her Margaret, was she happy? Did she marry? Her Eliza, did she grow out of the crying spells? How tall was she now? Her Paulina, was she watching from above? Could she hear how often Clara talked to her as she folded laundry and stirred the supper bubbling on the stove? She hoped her son and husband remembered her, as she did them.
Clara spent the next twenty years cooking, cleaning, and washing for the Browns. She couldn't read or write, but with their help, she tried to keep track of what happened to her children and husband.
Margaret, she heard, had died of a respiratory condition. Clara's husband, Richard, sold down the river to one of the deadly plantations in the Deep South, was also gone. Her son, Richard Jr., was presumed dead, because the Browns had not been able to find a trace of him for many years. Eliza had initially been sold to an enslaver in Kentucky, but by 1852, she was twenty-six years old, and the only thing Clara had been able to turn up was a rumor that Eliza had headed west.
When George Brown died and his relatives freed Clara, as stipulated in his will, Kentucky law gave her one year to leave the state. Stay any longer, and she risked re-enslavement. The Brown daughters found a job for her in St. Louis, working with a family as a housekeeper and cook.
For the first time in her life, at age fifty-six, Clara was working for pay. Her new employers, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Brunner, were German immigrants, and they taught Clara how to make the foods they enjoyed, which were quite different from what Clara had learned to cook back in Kentucky.
Out of curiosity, I became interested in what German immigrants to the Ozarks were eating in the 1850s. We know from the records that Clara learned to cook a variety of German dishes, and that her newfound skills would later come in handy. I found a historian at Deutschheim, a German heritage site in the Ozarks, who described the great lengths that German immigrants went to to have variety in their diets-it was not part of their food culture to eat the same five things in rotation, as was common in frontier communities. German immigrants at the time believed strongly in the concept of kitchen gardens and orchards, and a German seed catalog from the 1850s boasted hundreds of kinds of apples, pears, and stone fruit seeds. German produce favorites were soon adapted to the warmer Ozark climate.
Dr. Erin McCawley Renn says that German immigrants scoffed at the typically American cash crop system of planting their fields with nothing but tobacco or corn to sell, believing that it ruined the soil fertility and made it difficult to feed your family. The rule of thumb was to grow a hundred heads of cabbage per person, and that should be enough, if they were stored in your underground cellar properly, to last the year. (And before you gasp at a root cellar holding five hundred heads of cabbage, it was mostly stored as sauerkraut.) One German immigrant from the 1840s described the fifty-six types of vegetables he grew in his kitchen garden, ranging from eggplant to radishes to six different kinds of peas, all surrounded by a picket fence to keep the pigs and chickens out.
When November came and hogs across the state were butchered, Germans introduced many varieties of sausages that Anglo-Americans had never tried: mettwurst, sommerwurst, bratwurst, and more. All of these were likely new to Clara. German immigrants were also big on soup, often eating it for at least one meal a day. Soup was something you put on the stove in the morning, and when anyone was hungry, you just helped yourself, sopping up the broth with a hunk of rye bread. Clara learned not just how to keep her employers fed and happy, but how to make efficient use of her time in the kitchen and how to store food for the cold winter months, making pickles and vinegars and other fermented foods that helped keep people healthy when fresh produce wasn't available.
While living in St. Louis, Clara asked every Black person she met if they had heard of her daughter Eliza. No, came the answer, over and over.
"Sorry, auntie," children said.
"No, ma'am, I don't know her," said the men at the train station.
The Brunners wanted to move to Kansas, and Clara accepted their invitation to accompany them there. She had exhausted her search for Eliza in St. Louis, and the change of scenery would give her access to new people who might have encountered her now grown baby girl.
Clara would have no way of knowing what kind of world she was headed to as she made her way to what would come to be called Bleeding Kansas.
Two
Bleeding Kansas
1850s
Many, many bad things in America lead back to my least favorite president: Andrew Jackson. Chief among the bad things is the notorious Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, which is widely, and I do mean WIDELY, regarded as the most idiotic thing the high court has ever committed to paper.
Dred Scott was an enslaved man in Missouri, a slave state, whose enslavers brought him to Illinois and Wisconsin territory, which were considered free soil. When they returned to Missouri, Dred Scott claimed that he should be free, because crossing into free soil made him a free man.
No surprise, his enslavers disagreed. Dred Scott sued. And the final outcome of the case, decided on by the Supreme Court, was that Dred Scott didn't have any standing to bring a lawsuit. Why? Because, the court said, all African Americans, no matter if they were enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States. The court, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, said that "they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them."
Taney (which is pronounced Tawney), was a close adviser to and served in the cabinet of Andrew Jackson. And it was Jackson, an enslaver himself, who appointed Taney to the Supreme Court.
Roger Taney was slim, with noteworthy jowls. He had a wavy, chin-length bob, much like what you see young celebrity women of the twenty-first century sporting every spring. Taney was from Maryland, a Catholic who married the sister of Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Roger and Anne Taney supposedly had an agreement to raise any of their sons Catholic, like him, and any daughters Episcopalian, like Anne. As the fates would conspire, the couple had six daughters.
In recent years, a school in Maryland changed its name from Taney to Thurgood Marshall, after a champion of civil rights who was also from Maryland. Statues of Taney have been removed from various Maryland locations, and in February 2023, a Roger Taney statue was taken down inside the United States Capitol building-a movement led by several members of Congress.
The Dred Scott case was happening right around the same time that Clara was emancipated and went to St. Louis. Following the Supreme Court's decision, Clara, who for the first time in her life was free from bondage, was now formally regarded as "not a citizen" by her own government. There isn't a record of what Clara might have thought and felt about Dred Scott, but she likely didn't need the likes of Roger Taney to tell her what she had already experienced: that many people considered her less than based solely on the color of her skin.
