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And we return to our American stories.

Up next, the story about a man born into a life of privilege in Maine who took to the sea and led the U.S. on a wild goose chase that became a political crisis of sorts in 1864.

You're to tell the story of Appleton Oaksmith is Jonathan W. White. Let's get into it.

Appleton Oaksmith's mother was a woman named Elizabeth Oaksmith, and she was a very

prominent first-wave feminist. She was a lecturer, an essayist, a poet, a playwright, a

journalist. She traveled in literary circles. She was friends with Edgar Allan Poe,

Henry Wasworth Longfellow, Horace Greeley.

She would speak on behalf of women's rights, but she was also in favor of ending slavery.

And to give you a sense of how progressive she was in her time, she got the state of New York to legally change her kids' last names.

She either thought the last name Smith was too boring or

she didn't want her kids to have her husband's surname. She went by Elizabeth and then her

middle name, Oakes, and then her husband's last name Smith. Her son's last name is Oakesmith as

one word without it, the E.S. It's just kind of smushed together.

I am convinced that if the story hadn't happened, that we would still know Elizabeth Oaksmith today

in the same way that we know Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was that prominent

in early feminism. When she was 16 years old, she married an older man named

Siba Smith. Now, Siba Smith is famous because he created a fictional character named Jack Downing,

a fictional advisor to Andrew Jackson, and it didn't matter if you were a Democrat or a Whig, everyone in the 1830s and 40s

loved him. So Lincoln loved him, and Lincoln's primary opponent, Stephen Douglas, loved him.

Andrew Jackson loved him, and his primary political opponent, Henry Clay, loved him. Everybody

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