Blue Gray Review | American Civil War more or less

up in the air

Posted on February 15, 2021 by SUMPTER

first in flight

A duck, a sheep, and a rooster take off in a hot air balloon. … Already heard this one? … No? Well, actually, according to the Château de Versailles, this isn’t a joke. In 1782 the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Étienne, began experimenting with using the gas created by a fire to lift a fabric-encased object off the ground. In 1783 Étienne brought the experiments to metro Paris. After a couple tethered attempts, on September 19, 1783, at Verasaille in front of King Louis XVI, the three animals, riding in a basket attached to a balloon, successfully lifted 600 metres off the surface of the earth and traveled about two miles before a rip in the balloon fabric brought the vessel back down to earth. Then, “in front of the Dauphin at Château de La Muette on 21 November, Pilâtre de Rozier became the first man ever to be borne aloft. A new page had been written in the history of mankind.” ^[1]

Approximately four score and seven years later an American editorial was uncertain whether aerial machines would ever become effective weapons of war. From Harper’s Weekly Supplement January, 21, 1871 page 67:

THE USE OF BALLOONS IN WAR.

AN ingenious Frenchman, M. Bobæuf some time since discovered a method of discharging missiles by means of the gas in the balloon, which he compressed in a special apparatus; and thus, as the weight of the car was diminished by that of the bullet thrown, so also the lifting power of the balloon was lessened by the use of the amount of gas which discharged it.

Such a plan, however, might bring the aeronauts into an unpleasant position; they might fire away all their gas in the action, and find themselves slowly sinking into the hands of their irate enemies below, without any means of taking flight again. On the other hand, the vapor or gas of gunpowder has been used to inflate balloons, apparently not with any great success. What special advantage this gas has over the ordinary coal-gas does not appear.

“Perhaps the culmination of all modern civilization”

getting the word out … from Paris

Such are the only uses to which it has been proposed to apply balloons, as at present constructed, to purposes of war. Numerous other inventions have been proposed; but they are all founded on some plan for obtaining flight, either by guiding a balloon, or by means of an aerial ship, or flying-machine. Of course one of the most obvious uses to which an aerial ship could be put would be to sail quietly into the centre of a town or camp, and attack the unconscious inhabitants. Most of our greatest inventions are now principally useful according as they can be more or less easily adapted to the purposes of war. More thought and trouble have been spent on the Martini-Henry rifle than on the spinning-jenny. Perhaps the culmination of all modern civilization, the greatest achievement of modern science, is the mitrailleuse. Consequently, if ever any attempt to navigate the air can be successful, the first application of the scheme will probably be to purposes of destruction. We shall hear of balloon monitors before we hear of balloon mail, in any other sense than that in which those irregular supplies of letters from Paris are said to come par ballon monté. It is curious – as showing, among other circumstances, how little change there has been in this respect in men’s opinions — that the Jesuit, Francis Lana, who was one of the very earliest to hit upon the idea of any scheme, like that of our balloons, for rising in the air, when he described his machine (which was something like a boat, with several copper globes, from which the air had been exhausted, fastened round her gunwale, in order to raise her into the air) should have looked upon his craft as likely to be of use chiefly in war, and lamented the fact that it would make all castles and strong-holds useless. He, of course, did not know the modern dictum, which has received so much confirmation from recent events, that the easier it is to wage war, and the more destructive war is when waged, the less we of necessity have of it. But then, of course, he only lived in the dark ages, before nineteenth-century civilization and breech-loaders were invented.

Francesco Lana de Terzi’s idea upper left

Unfortunately all these schemes break down in the flying part. Nobody as yet has managed to fly – at least more than a few yards, which has been accomplished – or to construct any machine capable of being guided in the air. A man can, by the help of a balloon, rise into the air, like a cork in the water, and then drift about at the mercy of the winds, but that is all; and it seems more than probable that he will never do any thing better. To prove the impossibility of such a thing is, indeed, not easy, as it never is to prove any impossibility; but there are a few obstacles in the way which seem almost insuperable.

In order to guide any machine through the air it is necessary that it should have some motion independent of that given it by the wind– some steerage-way, at all events. It is obvious that a boat simply drifting before a current can not be steered; the rudder in such a case is simply useless, and is only available when the boat has a definite motion in some particular direction independent of that given it by the stream. Some motion, then, independent of the wind, the balloon must have. Again, to be of any avail beyond checking its forward movement, such power must be capable of driving the balloon faster than the wind, or else it can only be of use in perfectly calm weather. Considering the amount of force required to move a body along the ground, with the leverage afforded by the solid earth, at a pace equal to that even of a light breeze, the power required to move any object in the air, with no better leverage than that given by the air itself, may easily be imagined. Suppose that an aerial ship could be made which would go twenty miles an hour in a perfect calm, that would be considered a sufficient feat; but in a breeze which moved at the rate of twenty miles an hour it could only be stationary, or, at most, move in a direction with the wind, but not exactly before it–with the wind on her quarter, to use a nautical expression. It is to be remembered that a balloon must of necessity be carried along entirely by the wind, so that, as regards the balloon, the wind has absolutely no relative motion. Aeronauts never feel any breeze whatever in a balloon, since it and the wind travel along precisely at the same pace. Hence it can not sail, as a boat does, in a direction at an acute angle to that of the wind, any more than a boat can drift in any direction but that of the current. The motion of the boat is the result of two forces acting upon it; the balloon is subjected only to one. The first thing needful, then, is to impart motion to the vessel which is to sail “with sublime dominion through the azure fields of air.” Until this can be done it is hopeless to think of directing it.

This puts balloons out of the question. It will probably never be possible to make a balloon which can lift any engine capable of moving it. The surface of a balloon is enormous; and to drive such a large mass–which is incapable, from its nature, of receiving momentum–through the air, would require an engine of immense power, and, therefore, of considerable weight. The only way of increasing the lifting power of a balloon is by increasing its size, and consequently its surface, and consequently, again, the power of its engine. This is a hopeless dilemma. Then a silk balloon is not strong enough to resist any pressure from the air; and no other material of equal lightness and sufficient strength is likely to be discovered. Any frame-work which would serve to strengthen the balloon, and enable it to keep its shape, would also be heavy. Lastly, the guiding machinery must be attached to the balloon itself, not to the car–so that the ordinary shape could not be employed; and the machine would have to be fish or boat shaped–an almost impossible form for a gas balloon.

trying to “impart [non-wind] motion to the vessel”

If, then, we are ever to rival the birds, it must be by aid of some mechanical means–some flying-machine. Numbers of these have been invented, but it hardly necessary to say that none of them have as yet been successful. No one has yet really discovered the principles on which birds fly, or on which it will be necessary to proceed before men can do the same. Any of these machines would doubtless, if successful, be very useful for purposes of fighting, but some few have been intended by their inventors chiefly for that object.

Among the most remarkable of these is one for which a patent was taken out, in 1855, by the Earl of Aldborough. This invention, if it could be brought to work, would of itself be quite sufficient to revolutionize the whole art of warfare; and balloons would by this time have taken the place of men-of-war, with the additional advantage of being equally useful over land and sea, which no ship could possibly be. Then the present war might have seen fulfilled the prediction of the poet of “Locksley Hall,” who, in fancy,

“Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the people plunging through the thunder-storm.”

The specification of the patent in question describes a perfect armament of aerial vessels of warlike nature, which probably never existed even as models. Each of them is a sort of balloon, fitted with wings to be worked by hand and by a complicated arrangements of springs. Some are of the ordinary balloon shape, and have wings fastened to the car; others are in the shape of a boat. They are all to be raised by means of gas, and the wings are to be used only to impart horizontal motion and direction. How liable these machines are to all the objections mentioned above is obvious.

The armament of these vessels is complete. Guns and muskets are to be so placed as to utilize the recoil–how, is not said–while explosive shells are to be dropped from them. Some are even to be thinly armor-plated at top, that they may be safely protected from the attack of hostile vessels above. To each ship one or more “pilot-boats” are attached, for the purpose of guiding, landing passengers, etc., so that no convenience may be wanted.

lots of balloons – no armament

no armor

To ensure the safety of these marvelous ships a fortress is to be provided, guarded by a sort of chevaux de frise, arranged like the entrance to a mouse-trap, so as to allow vessels to go out, but impede the entry of any hostile ships. In order to admit friendly balloons the stakes of the chevaux de frise are moveable.

The invention is apparently the most complete in intention of any which would apply balloons to fighting uses. How utterly impracticable it is in all its execution is obvious. One or two others of like character have been patented, but one such is enough to mention–ex uno disce omnes. Still it is easy to laugh at the attempt after aerostation. The science may, after all, but be in its infancy; and some new source of motive power may yet be discovered which may lift us through the air. Till such discovery we must be content to go on destroying one another with the means we have–means, to judge of the present war, of very sufficient power.

Balloons weren’t used as weapons during the American Civil War, but they did have a military purpose. According to the American Battlefield Trust both the Confederacy and the Union experimented with using balloons for aerial reconnaissance, but The Union effort was more organized. Its Union Army Balloon Corps operated from 1861-1863 under the direction of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe. John LaMountain also reconnoitered in the air, mostly for General Benjamin F. Butler around Fort Monroe; he didn’t get along too well with Professor Lowe and was discharged in February 1862.

Prof. La Mountain, the Aeronaut, reconnoitering the rebel positions near Ft. Monroe

Balloon Camp, Gaines’ Mill, June 1, 1862

Civil War aircraft carrier on the Potomac

You can read about Thaddeus Lowe’s June 16, 1861 test ascent from where the National Air and Space Museum now stands at the Smithsonian. With the balloon tethered at 500 feet Professor Lowe, along with “telegrapher Herbert Robinson and George Burns, supervisor of the telegraph company,” sent President Lincoln what is said to be the first telegraph from the air.

According to Wikipedia, in “Locksley Hall” (published in 1842) Alfred Tennyson predicted “the rise of both civil aviation and military aviation in the following words:

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Of course, by World War I flying machines were widely used as weapons. Airplanes were in the ascendancy, but the gas-filled zeppelins bombed Britain. The zeppelin’s creator, Ferdinand von Zeppelin was in the United States during the Civil War:

Ferdinand von Zeppelin served as an official observer with the Union Army during the American Civil War. During the Peninsular Campaign, he visited the balloon camp of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe shortly after Lowe’s services were terminated by the Army. Von Zeppelin then travelled to St. Paul, MN where the German-born former Army balloonist John Steiner offered tethered flights. His first ascent in a balloon, made at Saint Paul, Minnesota during this visit, is said to have been the inspiration of his later interest in aeronautics.

Zeppelin’s ideas for large airships were first expressed in a diary entry dated 25 March 1874. Inspired by a recent lecture given by Heinrich von Stephan on the subject of “World Postal Services and Air Travel”, he outlined the basic principle of his later craft: a large rigidly-framed outer envelope containing a number of separate gasbags.

von Zeppelin crouching, Fairfax Court House, June 1863

peaceful zeppelin

According to Wikipedia Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier took the first manned untethered balloon flight on the outskirts of Paris along with François Laurent d’Arlandes. Benjamin Franklin backs up the online encyclopedia’s statement that there were two aeronauts on the November 21st flight. He was serving as United States to France in 1783. At Project Gutenberg you can read the 1907 Benjamin Franklin and the First Balloons edited by Abbott Lawrence Rotch. This publication contains a series of letters from Mr. Franklin to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society of London describing the balloon experiments from a tethered hydrogen-filled balloon ascent on August 27th, then the hot-air journeys on September 19 and November 21, through the first manned hydrogen balloon trip on December 1st. Benjamin Franklin might have been off by a day, but he does mention he visited with one of the two first hot-air aeronauts on November 21st: “One of these courageous Philosophers, the Marquis d’Arlandes, did me the honour to call upon me in the Evening after the Experiment, with Mr. Montgolfier the very ingenious Inventor. I was happy to see him safe. He informed me that they lit gently without the least Shock, and the Balloon was very little damaged.” He mentioned the reconnaissance possibilities: “This Method of filling the Balloon with hot Air is cheap and expeditious, and it is supposed may be sufficient for certain purposes, such as elevating an Engineer to take a View of an Enemy’s Army, Works, &c. conveying Intelligence into, or out of a besieged Town, giving Signals to distant Places, or the like.” And also philosophised: “This Experience is by no means a trifling one. It may be attended with important Consequences that no one can foresee. We should not suffer Pride to prevent our progress in Science. Beings of a Rank and Nature far superior to ours have not disdained to amuse themselves with making and launching Balloons, otherwise we should never have enjoyed the Light of those glorious objects that rule our Day & Night, nor have had the Pleasure of riding round the Sun ourselves upon the Balloon we now inhabit.”

Rozier and d’Arlandes flying November 21, 1783

same flight, in color

Montgolfier brothers

While the first manned hot air balloon flight occurred on November 21, 1783, the first manned hydrogen balloon flight took place on December 1, 1783. The hydrogen balloon also took off from Paris, and Benjamin Franklin also described that feat in a letter to Joseph Banks. This balloon was built by the Robert brothers. The aeronauts were one of the brothers and Jacques Charles

lift-off December 1, 1783

it’s a (big) bird

what goes up

According to Wikipedia war helped inspire the first hot air balloons: “Of the two brothers, it was Joseph who was first interested in aeronautics; as early as 1775 he built parachutes, and once jumped from the family house. He first contemplated building machines when he observed laundry drying over a fire incidentally form pockets that billowed upwards. Joseph made his first definitive experiments in November 1782 while living in Avignon. He reported some years later that he was watching a fire one evening while contemplating one of the great military issues of the day—an assault on the fortress of Gibraltar, which had proved impregnable from both sea and land. Joseph mused on the possibility of an air assault using troops lifted by the same force that was lifting the embers from the fire. He believed that the smoke itself was the buoyant part and contained within it a special gas, which he called “Montgolfier Gas”, with a special property he called levity, which is why he preferred smoldering fuel.”

Balloons were used for military reconnaissance at least by the 1794 Battle of Fleurus: “The French use of the reconnaissance balloon l’Entreprenant was the first military use of an aircraft that influenced the result of a battle.”

French air advantage

The French used balloons during the September 1870 – January 1871 Siege of Paris as part of two-way communication with the outside world. Balloons got information out of Paris; carrier pigeons brought messages back in. From Balloons, Airships, and Flying Machines by Gertrude Bacon (1905) (at Project Gutenberg (pages 73-78)):

But the time when the balloon was most largely and most usefully used in time of war was during the Siege of Paris. In the month of September 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was closely invested by the Prussian forces, and for eighteen long weeks lay besieged and cut off from all the rest of the world. No communication with the city was possible either by road, river, rail, or telegraph, nor could the inhabitants convey tidings of their plight save by one means alone. Only the passage of the air was open to them.

Quite at the beginning of the siege it occurred to the Parisians that they might use balloons to escape from the beleaguered town, and pass over the heads of the enemy to safety beyond; and inquiry was at once made to discover what aeronautical resources were at their command.

It was soon found that with only one or two exceptions the balloons actually in existence within the walls were unserviceable or unsuitable for the work on hand, being mostly old ones which had been laid aside as worthless. One lucky discovery was, however, made. Two professional aeronauts, of well-proved experience and skill, were in Paris at the time. These were MM. Godard and Yon, both of whom had been in London only a short time before in connection with a huge captive balloon which was then being exhibited there. They at once received orders to establish two balloon factories, and begin making a large number of balloons as quickly as possible. For their workshops they were given the use of two great railway stations, then standing idle and deserted. No better places for the purpose could be imagined, for under the great glass roofs there was plenty of space, and the work went on apace.

As the balloons were intended to make only one journey each, plain white or coloured calico (of which there was plenty in the city), covered with quick-drying varnish, was considered good enough for their material. Hundreds of men and women were employed at the two factories; and altogether some sixty balloons were turned out during the siege. Their management was entrusted to sailors, who, of all men, seemed most fitted for the work. The only previous training that could be given them was to sling them up to the roof of the railway stations in a balloon car, and there make them go through the actions of throwing out ballast, dropping the anchor, and pulling the valve-line. This was, of course, very like learning to swim on dry land; nevertheless, these amateurs made, on the whole, very fair aeronauts.

But before the first of the new balloons was ready experiments were already being made with the few old balloons then in Paris. Two were moored captive at different ends of the town to act as observation stations from whence the enemy’s movements could be watched. Captive ascents were made in them every few hours. Meanwhile M. Duruof, a professional aeronaut, made his escape from the city in an old and unskyworthy balloon called “Le Neptune,” descending safely outside the enemy’s lines, while another equally successful voyage was made with two small balloons fastened together.

And then, as soon as the possibility of leaving Paris by this means was fully proved, an important new development arose. So far, as was shown, tidings of the besieged city could be conveyed to the outside world; but how was news from without to reach those imprisoned within? The problem was presently solved in a most ingenious way.

There was in Paris, when the siege commenced, a society or club of pigeon-fanciers who were specially interested in the breeding and training of “carrier” or “homing” pigeons. The leaders of this club now came forward and suggested to the authorities that, with the aid of the balloons, their birds might be turned to practical account as letter-carriers. The idea was at once taken up, and henceforward every balloon that sailed out of Paris contained not only letters and despatches, but also a number of properly trained pigeons, which, when liberated, would find their way back to their homes within the walls of the besieged city.

When the pigeons had been safely brought out of Paris, and fallen into friendly hands beyond the Prussian forces, there were attached to the tail feathers of each of them goose quills, about two inches long, fastened on by a silken thread or thin wire. Inside these were tiny scraps of photographic film, not much larger than postage stamps, upon which a large number of messages had been photographed by microscopic photography. So skilfully was this done that each scrap of film could contain 2500 messages of twenty words each. A bird might easily carry a dozen of these films, for the weight was always less than one gramme, or 15½ grains. One bird, in fact, arrived in Paris on the 3rd of February carrying eighteen films, containing altogether 40,000 messages. To avoid accidents, several copies of the same film were made, and attached to different birds. When any of the pigeons arrived in Paris their despatches were enlarged and thrown on a screen by a magic-lantern, then copied and sent to those for whom they were intended.

This system of balloon and pigeon post went on during the whole siege. Between sixty and seventy balloons left the city, carrying altogether nearly 200 people, and two and a half million letters, weighing in all about ten tons. The greater number of these arrived in safety, while the return journeys, accomplished by the birds, were scarcely less successful. The weather was very unfavourable during most of the time, and cold and fogs prevented many pigeons from making their way back to Paris. Of 360 birds brought safely out of the city by balloon only about 60 returned, but these had carried between them some 100,000 messages.

Of the balloons themselves two, each with its luckless aeronaut, were blown out to sea and never heard of more. Two sailed into Germany and were captured by the enemy, three more came down too soon and fell into the hands of the besieging army near Paris, and one did not even get as far as the Prussian lines. Others experienced accidents and rough landings in which their passengers were more or less injured. Moreover, each balloon which sailed by day from the city became at once a mark for the enemy’s fire; so much so that before long it became necessary to make all the ascents by night, under cover of darkness.

They were brave men indeed who dared face the perils of a night voyage in an untried balloon, manned by an unskilled pilot, and exposed to the fire of the enemy, into whose hands they ran the greatest risk of falling. It is small wonder there was much excitement in Paris when it became known that the first of the new balloons made during the siege was to take away no less a personage than M. Gambetta, the great statesman, who was at the time, and for long after, the leading man in France. He made his escape by balloon on the 7th of October, accompanied by his secretary and an aeronaut, and managed to reach a safe haven, though not before they had been vigorously fired at by shot and shell, and M. Gambetta himself had actually been grazed on the hand by a bullet.

M. Gambetta escapes

pigeon post

continued

Animals have helped humans explore space; Wikipedia sees the three balloon animals as precursor: “Animals had been used in aeronautic exploration since 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck, and a rooster aloft in a hot air balloon to see if ground-dwelling animals can survive (the duck serving as the experimental control).”

The material from Harper’s Weekly 1870 comes from the Internet Archive (on page 701 M. Gambetta is identified as one of the passengers escaping over the Prussian lines); you can read the editorial and all of the other 1871 Harper’s Weekly content at Hathi Trust.

From Wikimedia Commons: ChrisO’s 2004 photograph of a Reffye mitrailleuse at Les Invalides, Paris – the photo is licensed under Creative Commons; balloon air mail postcard – the manned balloon mail helped Paris communicate with the outside world during the Prussian siege of September 1870-January 1871; November 21, 1873 flight in a colorful Montgolfier balloon – it’s from one of the collecting sets at the Library of Congress; Bargès photo of the statue of the Montgolfier brothers in Annonay by Henri Louis Cordier (1853–1925) is licensed under Creative Commons; the Bataille de Fleurus 1794

From the Library of Congress: showing first balloon flight on September 19, 1783 with a sheep, a duck and a rooster as passengers; aeronautics from 1818 – the Montgolfiers’ balloon next to Father Lana’s floating boat; flying machines with some form of propulsion between 1885 and 1904; collecting card, left and right, the one on the right includes a representation of the use of a reconnaissance balloon at the 1794 Battle of Fleurus; John LaMountain reconnoitering near Fort Monroe from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper August 31,1861; balloon camp at Gaines’ Mill; Count von Zeppelin with Union officers Fairfax Court House June 1863 – a well-read group, apparently enjoying Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, ; a Capitol visit, said to be by the Graf Zeppelin (1928-37); hot air flight on November 21, 1783; the first manned hydrogen balloon lift-off December 1, 1783; a surprise in the sky December 1, 1783; the first manned hydrogen balloon landing on December 1, 1783; the mitrailleuse mounted on a French airplane from the July 15, 1917 issue of the New York Tribune;

The image of the aircraft-carrying barge comes from the Naval History and Heritage Command: “Balloon Reconnaissance after Launch from the USS GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKE CUSTIS, Civil War Naval Aircraft Carrier, a Balloon ascends over the Potomac River, making reconnaissance of blockade, November 1861, near Budd’s Ferry below Mount Vernon. Drawing in Lowe Collection at National Archives.” George Washington Parke Custis‘s father was George Washington’s step-son; his daughter married Robert E. Lee.

mitrailleuse on a flying machine

^[1]According to several sources, including Benjamin Franklin, it was a two-man crew that ascended on November 21st↩

Posted in 150 Years Ago, Technology | Tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Balloons, Battle of Fleurus (1794), Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin O'Neale Stratford (Sixth Earl of Aldborough), Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Francesco Lana de Terzi, Franco-Prussian War, François Laurent d'Arlandes, George Washington Parke Custis, Jacques Alexandre César Charles, Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, John LaMountain, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, Léon Gambetta, mitrailleuse, Nicolas-Louis Robert, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, Union Army Balloon Corps | Leave a comment

nothing to see year

Posted on January 1, 2021 by SUMPTER

At least not over here. The Chicago Tribune used its January 1, 1871 issue to review the old year. According to the paper, the recent-history-perusing side of Janus would have been kind of bored looking at events in the United States:

THE OLD YEAR.

The past year has been, in this country, singularly barren of important events. Some of our social philosophers have laid down, as a law of the social forces, that when some one great convulsion or crime, like war, is putting forth its power, all lesser strifes cease. While our great convulsion was pending, Europe looked on a sympathizing and philosophical spectator; Frenchmen and Prussians wondered at the fierceness of the struggle; the alleged inadequacy of its cause; the supposed pusillanimity which seemed to be displayed by the beligerent [sic] which was taken most unawares at the outset, yet which finally prevailed; and ere long at the bloody and unflinching persistence and slaughter with which it was sustained on both sides. The London Punch, which began by ridiculing our bloodless battles, ended by a cartoon, in which two Europeans, looking across the Atlantic, anxious to know if the war had ended. The observer with the longest glass assured the other that it would not end for some time, as he could still see a few able-bodied men left. So we look on at the Franco-Prussian conflict, around which all the world gathers, aghast and peaceful. How easily could disinterested parties settle their neighbors’ quarrels, and how evident it is that they alone should have the settlement of them. The two first of European nations — each foremost in its advances of science, industry, literature and art — have plunged into mortal strife with as little reason and the same motives as might actuate a street fight between two newsboys, and millions of wealth and hundreds of thousands of lives will be sacrificed, solely because, as Mr. Sumner states it, nations have not yet advanced beyond tho duel as tribunal.

1870 action: more war … over there

dueling nations

It is yet too early to declare that the apparent downfall of the empire has led to the establishment of a republic in France. … [the other great event in the old year was the adoption of the dogma of papal infallibility during the First Vatican Council. The paper disagreed with the doctrine and referred to Charles Dickens, who passed away in June 1870: While the six hundred priests gathered at Rome were determining whether a clever Bishop of Italy taught infallibly the law of love; the millions themselves turned aside and bowed with grateful tears over tho grave of Charles Dickens, conscious, and yet unconscious, that he had taught them more of the law of law than any Pope in Rome.]

… In our own country it is not too much to say that the most important events have been the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and of a new and model constitution by the State of Illinois. The nation is too intent on restoring the industries which were prostrated by the war, reviving our national credit, and the value of our currency, paying off our debt and diminishing our taxation, to have time or interest for sensations. We are passing through our financial “March to the Sea,” a slow, long agony of excessive taxation, straightened economies, general depression, though without actual suffering. In a word, we are realizing all the slow torture of earning and paying our way out of debt. All financial discussions come to this at last, that the only thing to be done with our debts is to earn the money by hard work and pay them off. It is not a pastime. It it a thorny, and aggravating, and excessively hard road to travel. But here again there rises out of the mist [?] of human history an overshadowing and mysterious Presence, declaring, as a sentence of retributive justice, that for every drop of blood wrung, through the years oppression, by the lash, there shall flow another by the sword, and every dollar of wealth gathered from the unpaid toil of the slave shall be offset by an equal sum in the debt incurred for his emancipation. We have paid the penalty in blood. We have still to pay the penalty in treasure. For however it may be with individuals, nations, with unerring fidelity, bear the burden of their own transgressions.

black men can vote!

Happily we have now every prospect of lightening our burden rapidly with each year, and of maintaining meanwhile a degree of national prosperity that, on the whole, has not always been exceeded when our load was far less. Every decade adds ten millions of people to our republican empire. Every test has strengthened our republic among earthly powers. Under its protecting shield a more rapid and general progress is being made in wealth, culture, religion, art, and science, than was ever before made by the same number of people. Our own section of the country is participating fully in this marvellous progress. Our own city of Chicago is striding forward –

“To her throne amid the marts,”

with a rapidity unexampled in the history of cities. Republican palaces are rising around us on every street. Edifices, modelled after the residences of the crowned heads of Europe in their order of architecture, are rising on our central streets, and will be devoted to the purposes of commerce, or the wants of travel — thus reasserting, in stone and iron, the essential truth of the sovereignty of the people. Where the people resort, there are our palaces; and none in the world are vaster or more permanent. In all these exhibitions of progress there is not merely the toil of the effort, but the enjoyment of success. Side by side with the temples of trade, and not less costly, are those of art, of song, of worship, and of amusement. These are significant proofs that our enterprise is not sordid, but that our success is human, and that, hand-in-hand with it, go all the amenities, graces, and enjoyments of a true life. Trusting that all these may fall within the experience of our readers, one and all, we tender them gratefully and cordially the wish of the hour — a Happy New Year.

Chicago – bigger and better

In Columbia, South Carolina The Daily Phoenix used its January 1st editorial to look ahead with a grim determination:

Columbia, S.C. 1865

1871 – The New Year.
This morning ushers in a new year. The year 1870 has passed away, with its numerous and diverse incidents, individual and national – with its record, religious, social and political. What is past, we cannot recall. But we are wise, if reviewing the past in the spirit of a sober inquiry, we shall resolve to analyze it truthfully, to study its great lessons and to derive benefit from the review. The year just passed away has been an eventful one for the nations. It has been an eventful one for many an individual. But it is gone – passed away – with its hopes and fears, with its births and deaths, with its disasters and victories. A new year is upon the individual, the nation, the world. It comes with its grave responsibilities. It comes with its great duties. We cannot say that here in South Carolina it comes under very fair auspices. Whilst doubtless we have had cause to be grateful for calamities withheld and blessings received, yet there is much in the political and industrial world in which we live to arouse our anxieties. The skies are not so bright, and our surroundings are not so agreeable as we might desire. But yet, after all, is our duty the same, That duty is obvious. It is to banish all traitorous doubts, and in faith and hope to work on. We have our responsibilities to meet – our responsibilities to God, our country and our families. These must be met and discharged. Let them be met earnestly, hopefully and perseveringly, to the end that they may be discharged efficiently and victoriously. We have victories to win, and God helping, we shall win them – victories over ourselves, by which we shall be made better, wiser and purer – victories over the forces of nature, by which our material progress shall be quickened – victories over the depressing political influences around and over us, by which the State shall be redeemed and re-established.

To those duties we respectfully and earnestly summon our readers. In this spirit of faith, hope and work, we ask them and ourselves to begin the duties of the New Year.

William W. Belknap during war

The rather somber theme continued in the nation’s capital. According to the December 31, 1870 edition of The New-York Times, the annual New Year’s reception at the White House was cancelled:

Special Dispatch to the New-York Times.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30.—In consequence of the death of Mrs. BELKNAP, the programme for the official reception by the President on Monday has been withdrawn. The several Cabinet Ministers have also given notice that there will be no receptions at their respective residences. This will serve to materially check the customary festivities of New-Year’s Day. The action of the President is criticised in some quarters; but as his action is bound to be criticised in any event, a majority of thoughtful people will be glad to see in this a recognition of an event which brings great grief to a member of his official family, and which could not go unrecognized without an imputation of heartlessness and indifference. The funeral of Mrs. BELKNAP will take place on Sunday at 2 o’clock P.M. The pall-bearers selected are Secretary Fish, Secretary Robeson, Gen. Sherman, Gen. Ricketts, Judge Miller, United States Supreme Court; C.P. Marsh, Esq., of New-York; Gen. Horace Porter, Commodore Alden, Gen. Michler and W. S.Huntington, Esq.^[1]

Horace Porter on far right

Mrs. Belknap would have been the second wife of Secretary of War William W. Belknap – “she died of tuberculosis shortly after childbirth in December 1870.”

According to the White House Historical Society the New Year’s Day reception was an (almost) annual tradition from 1801 to 1932. The site says that there wasn’t a reception the eight years before 1922.

waiting to shake hands with the president

January 2, 1922

In its January 2, 1871 issue the Richmond Daily Dispatch acknowledged the grimness of events during the last fifteen years (As if the war wasn’t bad enough, on April 27, 1870 a second-floor courtroom collapsed, killing at least 60 people) but believed the bad things had helped Richmond’s citizens develop fortitude and self-reliance. The paper saw a bright future given the city’s natural resources and improving railroad ties.

According to Wikipedia, there was a recession in the United States from June 1869-December 1870. The Chicago Tribune editorial above mentioned the nation’s financial “March to the Sea.” According to Burton W. Folsom at Foundation for Economic Education that march was quite successful:

The starting point here is the decision after the Civil War to reduce the $2.7 billion national debt. From 1866 to 1893, the U.S. government had budget surpluses each year and slashed the national debt to $961 million. Annual revenue during these years was about $350 million and expenses were about $270 million—most of which consisted of Civil War pensions and interest on the national debt.

One reason the federal budgets tended to be lower in the 1880s than in the 1860s and 1870s was that interest payments on the debt declined sharply as the debt disappeared. For example, the annual interest on the national debt dropped from $146 million in 1866 to only $23 million in 1893. The generation that fought the Civil War became the politicians of the Gilded Age, and they had the fortitude to wipe out almost two-thirds of the Civil War debt.

Why couldn’t the government just given everybody $2,000 and be done with it?

Harper’s Weekly provided lots of news about the Franco-Prussian War. You can see and read all of 1870 at the Internet Archive. George N. Barnard’s 1865 photograph of Columbia in ruins comes from the National Archives via Wikimedia – the destruction occurred after General William T. Sherman’s Union army took the city in February 1865.

From the Library of Congress: The Fifteenth amendment ; New Year’s Day waiting line from an unknown year; line on January 2, 1922 – like 1871, January 1st fell on Sunday; General William W. Belknap; General Grant and staff – Horace Porter: “From April 4, 1864 to July 25, 1866, Porter was aide-de-camp to General Ulysses S. Grant with the grade of lieutenant colonel in the regular army. On July 17, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominated Porter for appointment as brevet brigadier general, to rank from March 13, 1866, and the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment on July 23, 1866. From July 25, 1866 to March 4, 1869, Porter was aide-de-camp to General Ulysses S. Grant with the grade of colonel in the regular army.”; Bird’s-eye-view of Chicago from 1857; commercial calendar

Have a resolute new year!

^[1]The New York Times The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers Inc., 2008. DVD.↩

Posted in 150 Years Ago This Week, Postbellum Society, Reconstruction | Tagged Chicago, Fifteenth Amendment to the U S Constitution, Franco-Prussian War, Grant Administration, Horace Porter, James Alden Jr., New Year's, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, William Worth Belknap | Leave a comment

guns and egg-nog

Posted on December 25, 2020 by SUMPTER

And the firecrackers look like fun, too

As Reconstruction was presumably trudging on, a New York City newspaper provided its readers with a couple glimpses of Christmas celebrations from the land down under, down under the Mason-Dixon line. From Harper’s Weekly December 31, 1870:

that holiday tradition

yahoo!

The pics piqued my curiosity, so I looked through a couple southern newspapers. I didn’t notice any specific mention of egg-nog in the December 25, 1870 issue of Columbia, South Carolina’s The Daily Phoenix, but I did notice Fire Crackers in an ad for some of the good things of the season, and the ad did include some possible egg-nog ingredients. An editorial used the Christmas story to urge its relatively well-off readers, including children, to share with the poor. Sharing children might find “the richest happiness of the day.” The paper touched on Reconstruction: “The weather has become thoroughly reconstructed, if the people have not. For the past two days it has been terribly cold. The butchers, yesterday morning, were forced to cut steaks with a saw and liver with a hatchet.”

some good Christmas goods

1870 years ago still pertinent to-day

that Yankee wind blows icy cold

____________________

Egg-nogg was mentioned in the December 24, 1870 issue of The Charleston Daily News. The author imagined a Christmas Eve party after the little ones had gone to bed. The younger adults were dancing and playing blind-man’s-bluff, while the old people sat by the fire and further warmed themselves by “sipping their egg-nogg or steaming apple-jack”

From The Charleston Daily News on December 24, 1870:

Christmas.

To-morrow is Christmas: the day of days; when the sublime harmonies which nineteen centuries ago sounded on the plains of Bethlehem are echoed in the souls of Christian millions; when the memory of the great Evangel blunts the edge of bitter sorrow; when age drives cankering care away, and youth beholds a myriad hopeful gleams in the uncertain vistas of the future!

For five years the South has struggled to heal the wounds of horrid war. The people have worked with dogged energy that they might wrest fortune from the iron teeth of adversity. It is true that the prospect is not as bright as when the summer heats ripened the silvered soil. But the people know their power. Blows and buffets have strengthened their moral fibre. They have learned the sweet uses of affliction. They, feel that, in God’s good time, self-reliance, self-reverence and self-control will give them the crowning victory.

Yet the thronging memories of four years of carnage are not obliterated by the events of five years of peace. In every breast there lingers the remembrance of martyred saints, who, in the flash of manhood or with the snows of winter on their brow, fought and bled under the gleaming banner whose stars have faded from our sight – whose cross we would gladly bear forever. These knightly soldiers – our comrades, our brothers, fathers, sons – taught the South, by their death, a lesson of endurance and fortitude, of courageous perseverance and unselfish devotion, whose fruit will live whatever else may die.

no, really

Cheerfully as we may, then, let us turn to the Christmas merry-making. It is a season of kindness and love; of charity and peace. The poor have a peculiar claim; they depend upon their prosperous neighbors for their Christmas festival. And this is the time when the sinning and the sinned against may pluck the bitterness from their hearts, and forgive as they expect to be forgiven. For them who cherish animosity and nurse their anger, however just it seem, there is no happy Christmas.

Faith in Providence, hope for the future, charity towards all men – these are the Christmas gifts which will, we trust, be found on the morrow in every home in the State.

Our Christmas Carol.

“Our song we’ll troll out for Christmas stout,
The hearty, the true and the bold;
A bumper we’ll drain, and with might and main
Give three cheers for this Christmas old.
We’ll usher him in with a merry din,
That shall gladden his joyous heart,
And we’ll keep him up while there’s bite or sup,
And in fellowship good we’ll part.”

Thank God for this returning anniversary – happy, happy Christmas; the season of all others that lights not only the fire of hospitality in the hall, but the flame of charity in the heart; the season that wins us back to the delusions of childish days, recalls to the old man the pleasures or his youth, and warms the fireside with memories of the tender, and the true. Yes, it is the only anniversary in all the year not forced upon mankind by proclamation: the only one which, in the lessons of the hour, teaches more of human sympathy and Christian love than half the homilies ever written by half the divines that have ever lived.

That man must indeed be a misanthropic sinner, who, apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, can think of Christmas time as any other than a good time – a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time – when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their sealed-up hearts and think of the people around them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave.

What sweeter I thought, too, than that there is at least one day in the year when you are sure of being welcomed wherever you go, and of having, as it were, the world thrown open to you. True, the past may be hung in mourning. Vacant chairs may be around the fireside;
the footsteps of prattling little ones may no longer lightly print tho ground; father, mother, brother, sister or husband may be celebrating their eternal Christmas before “the Jasper Throne.” Perhaps the looks of friendship that shone so brightly once have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped have grown cold; the eyes we sought have hid their lustre in the grave; yet there will come to us to-morrow “glad tidings” of even those who have gone before. The old home, the room, the merry faces, circumstances the must minute and trivial, will crowd upon our mind as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday; hope will build new fires upon the altar of the heart, and love will gather there to be renewed in the fresh and genial warmth.

Let Christmas, then, be fruitful in its joys. Let the averted faces with which we have met old friends be changed to smiles. Among the red berries and holly bushes, among the turkeys, geese and game, the pigs, sausages and oysters, the puddings, pies and punches – among emblems of the blessed season hung in every sanctuary, hall and kitchen – let us hold funeral service over all petty jealousies and private wrongs, and so bury forever the animosities that deform our human nature. At best our hearts need correcting as much as ever did the first proof of a printer’s devil, and before life’s edition is worked off another year for exportation to eternity, why ought we not to resolve that the errors which now mar the sullied page shall not stand against us when the volume of our history is finally revised by the Author of the universe? Thanking God, then, for present blessings, let us use them as the best of besoms to sweep out litter from the attics and cellars of our poor human nature, and brush down the cobwebs of care that have gathered in its dark corners. Nor should we extend these favors to the body, and, as it were, put a clean shirt upon the soul, for the reason that “to-morrow we die;” but we are to do these in remembrance of the time when a sin-sick world first began to experience the cheering symptoms of convalescence.

To-morrow the civilized world – all peoples and nations, knit together by a mighty thought – will become one great family. Happy bells will send as their greetings to each Christmas fire –

“Good will and peace! peace and good will!
The burden of the Advent Song.”

And in a myriad of homes, the same festival that every year has stirred the heart of mankind, will again gather youth and age around the happy fireside.

A Christmas family party! What magic there is in the name. What man or woman, sending memory on its grateful errand, does not linger with a Hush of happiness upon the associations that are recalled. The coming home from school, tho greeting of parents, brothers, sisters, cousins and aunts; the welcome of the old-time nurse in her fresh bandana and immaculate neckerchief; the roaring fires in the parlors and bed-rooms; the wonderful hampers, and the handsome girls hooded and booted for any sort of Christmas fun. And Christmas Eve! How the great tree – very mighty in our young imagination – planted in the middle of the table, sparkles with its multitude of little tapers that find reflection in our dancing eyes, while we wait for the distribution of the toys, that peep like fairies from among the leaves. Grandpapa and grandmama are there; brothers who have just come from school and college; uncles from the cities, and maiden aunts, with pockets full of love and bon-bons. By-and-by, bed-time arrives, and we little ones are sent to dream of Santa Claus, and wonder what our stockings will be freighted with, when at daylight we hurry from our trundles to the chimney jam. The evening concludes with the time-honored Christmas dance, and a glorious game of blind-man’s-bluff, in which the pretty girls take refuge behind the window curtains, and get mad if you fail to make your eliptical salutes with a vim. The old people, all delight, sit in the cosiest corner of the fire-place, and sipping their egg-nogg or steaming apple-jack, watch with glistening eyes the lively youngsters who remind them of Merry Christmas long ago. King among the musicians is the hoary-headed old Ethiopean, who has played dance-music in the family for a quarter of a century, and tonight, all mellowness, he scrapes his fiddle until it shrieks with fifty stomach aches; while dusky house-servants, peeping in at the windows and door-ways, keep time with nimble feet to the jollity of the hour, and all goes “merry as a music bell.” And so ends Christmas Eve, but only to usher in the cheerfulness of the day to come. And that day! Ah, how crowded with memories. Memories of a home-gathering of all the accessible members of the family circle; of home ties renewed, and love warming every heart. Memories of your mother, who, with tender thoughtfulness, and grateful for her own pleasure, has sent heaping baskets of good things to the families of her poor neighbors, who, but for her largesse, would have had no Christmas. Memories of the last Christmas blessing ever asked by him who presided; of a room all aglow with ruddy light, and a board spread with such an array of feathered phenomenon in every stage of sissing excellence, gigantic puddings blazing in brandy, and choice wines, with the bouquet of whole generations in them, as make us think, in these changed times, we have been living in a dream.

But no! Christmas is just as real to us to-day as it ever was to our forefathers. Our children will recall its happy scenes, just as we gather the tangled ends of our own reminiscences. Friends are as true, and affections as tender around us, now, as when we ourselves were budding into serious men and women; and if we do our duty, changed as may be our circumstances, the season will preserve all its sacred charm for us and our little ones; and the lesson will continue to be written upon our hearts- “This do in remembrance of Me!” And so, a Merry Christmas to you all, and GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE!

Remember the Poor.

The season of gladness is upon us. In happy homes to-day begins the rosy reign of mirth and jollity and innocent rejoicing. The Christmas tree is already blossoming in some hidden recess with its wondrous, but, as yet, forbidden fruit. The blithe and expectant little ones are making ready to hang their stockings by the chimney-piece, with grave misgivings as to their capacity to hold the good things to be distributed in the night-time by the slyly-generous Santa Claus. Families are everywhere gleeful with the anticipation of merry gatherings around the plenteous board and festive libations from the foaming bowl. Bleak and wintry though the sky be out of doors, around the hearthstone joy and comfort and social happiness rule the hour.

But not to all homes will Christmas bring the appropriate merry makings and delights. Right here, in this good old City of Charleston, there is many a family whose desolate hearth glows not, even in this bitter weather, with the ruddy blaze of the yule log, or of any substitute, and to whom one plain hearty meal would be a Christmas feast indeed. To these unfortunates, too many of whom have known better days, let each man, woman and child, who reads these lines at the breakfast table this Christmas Eve, give something better than mere sympathy. There are several noble relief societies in our community, ready and anxious to relieve the charitable of the trouble and responsibility of seeking out the distressed and really deserving poor. The Fuel Society, especially, crave assistance to-day; and the biting December blasts dismally second their pleading. Any Christmas offerings, either in money or fuel, that may be sent to the office of THE NEWS will be promptly placed at the disposal of the good ladies of the society.

You can find Harper’s Weekly for all of 1870 at the Internet Archive – the two pictures below are also from December 31st. From the Library of Congress: sheet music; Currier & Ives’ graphic greeting. According to Wikipedia southerner George Washington “served an eggnog-like drink to visitors” – the drink included four different types of alcohol. Tiny Tim said, “God bless us, every one!” in A Christmas Carol – author Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870.

Christmas is for children

holidays cheer

traditional greeting

Posted in 150 Years Ago This Week, Postbellum Society, Reconstruction, Southern Society | Tagged Charleston South Carolina, Christmas, Columbia South Carolina | Leave a comment

temple tussle

Posted on December 23, 2020 by SUMPTER

American patriot (South)

American patriot (North)

The day before the 1860 U.S. presidential election the governor of South Carolina advised secession in the event of Abraham Lincoln’s probable victory. Thanks to the telegraph, that news got up North very quickly. On Election Day, November 6, 1860, The New-York Times headlined “Immediate Secession Recommended by the Governor of South Carolina,” and included letters from Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi assessing disunion sentiment. With Mr. Lincoln’s election, another New York City publication, Harper’s Weekly, seemed to anticipate disunion by providing images of Charleston, South Carolina; “memories of the Union;” Savannah, Georgia; the defenses of the City of New York; Washington, D.C. (“in view of the momentous discussions which are now going on at the Federal Capital”).

Charleston

Savannah cemetery

the rebels are coming?

_______

As southern states decided if they would secede from the Union, a dispute reportedly broke out at a public meeting in Boston about whether the anniversary of violent abolitionist John Brown’s execution should be publicly commemorated. Some people at the meeting were concerned about offending Virginia, a populous slave state that, unlike the deep South, gave its 1860 Electoral College votes to John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party, not John Breckinridge of the breakaway southern Democrats.

page 788

From the December 15, 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly:

AFFRAY IN BOSTON.

WE publish on page 788, from a sketch by a person who was present, a picture of the riot which took place on December 3, in Tremont Temple, Boston, on the occasion of the attempt of Garrison, Redpath, Sanborn, Douglass, and other abolitionists to celebrate the anniversary of the execution of John Brown. No sooner had the abolitionists appeared in the hall than a number of citizens of Boston proceeded to organize the meeting. This was resisted by the abolitionists and a scuffle ensued; but the Union men carried their point, and organized the meeting by electing Mr. Fay chairman. A calm speech was delivered by Mr. Fay, in spite of frequent interruptions by Fred Douglass, and the following resolutions were put up and carried:

“Whereas, That it is fitting upon the occasion of the anniversary of the execution of John Brown, for his piratical and bloody attempt to create an insurrection among the slaves of the State of Virginia, for the people of this Commonwealth to assemble, and express their horror of the man and of the principles which led to the foray; therefore it is

“Resolved, 1. That no virtuous and law-abiding citizen of this Commonwealth ought to countenance, sympathize, or hold communion with, any man who believes that John Brown and his aiders and abettors in that nefarious enterprise were right in any sense of that word.

“2. That the present perilous juncture in our political affairs, in which our existence as a nation is imperiled, requires of every citizen who loves his country to come forward and to express his sense of the value of the Union, alike important to the free labor of the North, the slave labor of the South, and to the interests of commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the world.

“3. That we tender to our brethern in Virginia our warmest thanks for the conservative spirit they have manifested, notwithstanding the unprovoked and lawless attack made upon them by John Brown and his associates, acting if not with the connivance, at least with the sympathy of a few fanatics of the Northern States, and that we hope they will still continue to aid in opposing the fanaticism which is even now attempting to subvert the Constitution and the Union.

“4. That the people of this city have submitted too long in allowing irresponsible individuals and political demagogues of every description to hold public meetings to disturb the public peace and misrepresent us abroad. They have become a nuisance, which in self-defense we are determined shall henceforward be summarily abated.

“4. [sic] That a copy of these resolutions be sent to each of the persons named in the coll[?] for this meeting.”

After the passage of the resolutions, speeches were made by Fred Douglass and others, and the meeting ended in the expulsion from the hall of the abolitionists and negroes by sheer force.

above the fray

the fray

a more peaceful temple, 1881

According to the December 4, 1860 issue of The New-York Times, the public was invited to the programmes to celebrate John Brown’s death. Apparently a lot of the public that showed up were against the abolitionist celebration; they tried to take over the meeting. Things got out of hand and eventually the police “cleared the hall and locked the doors.” The abolitionists changed venues:

After the Chairman had pronounced the meeting dissolved, FRED. DOUGLASS, SANBORN and a few others, manifested some resistance to the police, and were ejected from the platform and hall. During the uproar Rev. J. STELLA MARTIN announced that a meeting would be held in his church in the evening. In response to this announcement the Baptist Church (colored) in Joy-street, was filled at an early hour. The edifice was small, end a large proportion of the audience were black. Here WENDELL PHILLIPS, JOHN BROWN, Jr., FRED. DOUGLASS and other leading John Brown sympathizers ventilated their opinions freely, with little interruption. A woman named CHAPMAN appeared to preside. Several policemen were stationed in the Church. Outside there was an immense crowd, and a strong force of police. The disturbance was confined to noisy demonstrations, though the crowd seemed very anxious to get hold of REDPATH.

The meeting broke up at about 10 o’clock, and the audience dispersed quietly. Some of the leading spirits were hooted at in passing through the outside crowd, but no violence was committed.

FRANK. B. SANBORN was acting President of the meeting. In anticipation of a possible riot, the Second Battalion of Infantry was held in readiness at their Armory by order of the Mayor. The Police force however was amply sufficient, and the day and evening passed simply with a good-natured, but quite patriotic excitement.

The Richmond Daily Dispatch covered the Tremont meeting in it’s December 3, 1860 issue. On November 27th the newspaper published a letter from Pennsylvania governor William F. Packer to the meeting organizers:

ABOLITIONISM REBUKED.

–A letter having been addressed by James Redpath to Gov. Packer , of Pennsylvania, inviting him to participate in a meeting at Tremont Temple, in Boston, on the anniversary of the execution of John Brown , Governor P. promptly returned the invitation with the subjoined reply written on a blank page of Mr. Redpath’s letter:

LETTER
Executive Department, Harrisburg, Pa., Nov, 21, 1860. Sir:

–In my opinion, the young men whose names are attached to the foregoing letter would better serve God and their country by attending to their own business. John Brown was rightfully hanged. and his life should be a warning to others having similar proc [sic]

Wm. F. Packer , Governor of Pennsylvania.

death’s in the air

In his account of the tumultuous meeting, William S. McFeely writes that the unionists who took over the Tremont gathering were supporters of the Constitutional Union party. Frederick Douglass was the main antagonist to the unionists and it was only after he was first ejected from the hall by the police that the unionists passed the resolutions. He then came back by another door and continued the argument until the police again removed the abolitionists. During the night meeting at J. Sella Martin’s church, Mr. Douglass “advocated a course of action even more subversive than John Brown’s insurrection: ‘We must … reach the slaveholder’s conscience through his fear of personal danger. We must make him feel that there is death in the air around him, that there is death in the pot before him, that thee is death all around him.’ … he called for encouraging more slaves to run away, and revived the old dream that the Appalachian mountains could become a haven for them. ‘I believe in agitation,’ … with uncharacteristic bitterness, he declared, ‘The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter, is to make a few dead slave catchers.'” Mr. Douglass included war as one of the methods to end slavery.^[1]

Frederick Douglass alluded to Massachusetts and New England in a May 30, 1881 address about John Brown at Storer College in Harper’s Ferry:

… The difficulty in doing justice to the life and character of such a man is not altogether due to the quality of the zeal, or of the ability brought to the work, nor yet to any imperfections in the qualities of the man himself; the state of the moral atmosphere about us has much to do with it. The fault is not in our eyes, nor yet in the object, if under a murky sky we fail to discover the object. Wonderfully tenacious is the taint of a great wrong. The evil, as well as “the good that men do, lives after them.” Slavery is indeed gone; but its long, black shadow yet falls broad and large over the face of the whole country. It is the old truth oft repeated, and never more fitly than now, “a prophet is without honor in his own country and among his own people.” Though more than twenty years have rolled between us and the Harper’s Ferry raid, though since then the armies of the nation have found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted to do on a small one, and the great captain who fought his way through slavery has filled with honor the Presidential chair, we yet stand too near the days of slavery, and the life and times of John Brown, to see clearly the true martyr and hero that he was and rightly to estimate the value of the man and his works. Like the great and good of all ages—the men born in advance of their times, the men whose bleeding footprints attest the immense cost of reform, and show us the long and dreary spaces, between the luminous points in the progress of mankind,—this our noblest American hero must wait the polishing wheels of after-coming centuries to make his glory more manifest, and his worth more generally acknowledged. Such instances are abundant and familiar. If we go back four and twenty centuries, to the stately city of Athens, and search among her architectural splendor and her miracles of art for the Socrates of to-day, and as he stands in history, we shall find ourselves perplexed and disappointed. In Jerusalem Jesus himself was only the “carpenter’s son”—a young man wonderfully destitute of worldly prudence—a pestilent fellow, “inexcusably and perpetually interfering in the world’s business,”—”upsetting the tables of the money-changers”—preaching sedition, opposing the good old religion—”making himself greater than Abraham,” and at the same time “keeping company” with very low people; but behold the change! He was a great miracle-worker, in his day, but time has worked for him a greater miracle than all his miracles, for now his name stands for all that is desirable in government, noble in life, orderly and beautiful in society. That which time has done for other great men of his class, that will time certainly do for John Brown. The brightest gems shine at first with subdued light, and the strongest characters are subject to the same limitations. Under the influence of adverse education and hereditary bias, few things are more difficult than to render impartial justice. Men hold up their hands to Heaven, and swear they will do justice, but what are oaths against prejudice and against inclination! In the face of high-sounding professions and affirmations we know well how hard it is for a Turk to do justice to a Christian, or for a Christian to do justice to a Jew. How hard for an Englishman to do justice to an Irishman, for an Irishman to do justice to an Englishman, harder still for an American tainted by slavery to do justice to the Negro or the Negro’s friends. “John Brown,” said the late Wm. H. Seward, “was justly hanged.” “John Brown,” said the late John A. Andrew, “was right.” It is easy to perceive the sources of these two opposite judgments: the one was the verdict of slave-holding and panic-stricken Virginia, the other was the verdict of the best heart and brain of free old Massachusetts. One was the heated judgment of the passing and passionate hour, and the other was the calm, clear, unimpeachable judgment of the broad, illimitable future.

There is, however, one aspect of the present subject quite worthy of notice, for it makes the hero of Harper’s Ferry in some degree an exception to the general rules to which I have just now adverted. Despite the hold which slavery had at that time on the country, despite the popular prejudice against the Negro, despite the shock which the first alarm occasioned, almost from the first John Brown received a large measure of sympathy and appreciation. New England recognized in him the spirit which brought the pilgrims to Plymouth rock and hailed him as a martyr and saint. True he had broken the law, true he had struck for a despised people, true he had crept upon his foe stealthily, like a wolf upon the fold, and had dealt his blow in the dark whilst his enemy slept, but with all this and more to disturb the moral sense, men discerned in him the greatest and best qualities known to human nature, and pronounced him “good.” Many consented to his death, and then went home and taught their children to sing his praise as one whose “soul is marching on” through the realms of endless bliss. One element in explanation of this somewhat anomalous circumstance will probably be found in the troubled times which immediately succeeded, for “when judgments are abroad in the world, men learn righteousness.” …

You can read his entire speech at Project Gutenberg. The pamphlet’s introduction refers to the Tremont Temple disturbance in 1860:

In substance, this address, now for the first time published, was prepared several years ago, and has been delivered in many parts of the North. Its publication now in pamphlet form is due to its delivery at Harper’s Ferry, W. Va., on Decoration day, 1881, and to the fact that the proceeds from the sale of it are to be used toward the endowment of a John Brown Professorship in Storer College, Harper’s Ferry—an institution mainly devoted to the education of colored youth.

That such an address could be delivered at such a place, at such a time, is strikingly significant, and illustrates the rapid, vast and wonderful changes through which the American people have been passing since 1859. Twenty years ago Frederick Douglass and others were mobbed in the city of Boston, and driven from Tremont Temple for uttering sentiments concerning John Brown similar to those contained in this address. Yet now he goes freely to the very spot where John Brown committed the offense which caused all Virginia to clamor for his life, and without reserve or qualification, commends him as a hero and martyr in the cause of liberty. This incident is rendered all the more significant by the fact that Hon. Andrew Hunter, of Charlestown,—the District Attorney who prosecuted John Brown and secured his execution,—sat on the platform directly behind Mr. Douglass during the delivery of the entire address and at the close of it shook hands with him, and congratulated him, and invited him to Charlestown (where John Brown was hanged), adding that if Robert E. Lee were living, he would give him his hand also.

“The hanging of John Brown took place at 11:30 a.m., December 2, 1859, in a field just outside Charles Town. “

You learn about John Brown’s trial at Professor Douglas O. Linder’s Famous Trials

Abolitionist John Sella Martin was born into slavery in North Carolina. After the American Civil War he moved back South and worked in education and politics.

I didn’t know about American Revolutionary War soldier William Jasper, but that would explain the pseudonym of The New-York Times‘s antebellum correspondent from Charleston.

From Wikimedia Commons: Boston from a hot air balloon on October 13, 1860; temple organ 1881; DASonnenfeld’s 2015 photo of the statue of John Brown and the African-American boy is licensed under Creative Commons (“Larger than lifesize, bronze sculpture of John Brown and African-American youth, by Joseph P. Pollia. Installed at John Brown’s Farm, near Lake Placid, New York, 1935. Commissioned by the John Brown Memorial Association.”) – you can see a picture of the statue on its pedestal at Uncovering New York

From the Library of Congress: the page with the two drawings of Frederick Douglass from a set called “Election posters. Ward 5, Boston. 1860”; Frederick Douglass photograph from 1862; young girl looking at John Brown’s grave – it looks like the other names are Captain John Brown, who died in 1776, and Oliver, who died from wounds received during the Harpers Ferry raid – his remains were returned to the family in 1899; new steamship line

All the 1860 Harper’s Weekly comes from the Internet Archive.

The illustration of John Brown’s execution comes from The National Park Service’s John Brown’s Raid at Project Gutenberg.

still a-moldering

still standing

high hopes (BOSTON, December 3d, 1860.)

I’m not getting any faster. The Tremont Temple commemoration was only a day after the anniversary of the hanging. It’s twenty days since the 160th anniversary of the Tremont fracas. I lost some of the dramatic effect of southern states pondering secession as December began. South Carolina promulgated an ordinance of secession on December 20, 1860 … but at least other states in Dixie still had to decide! … at least from the perspective of 160 years ago

Harper’s Weekly December 1, 1860

from the same issue

^[1]McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991. Print. page 208-211.↩

Posted in 160 Years Ago, Secession and the Interregnum, Slavery, The election of 1860 | Tagged abolitionists, Boston, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Frederick Douglass, James Redpath, John Brown, John Sella Martin, Nathan Hale, Robert E. Lee, Storer College, Tremont Temple, William Fisher Packer, William Jasper, William Lloyd Garrison | Leave a comment

the three exemptions

Posted on November 26, 2020 by SUMPTER

setting the precedent

Apparently 150 years ago the United States was free from pestilence and civil strife:

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas it behooves a people sensible of their dependence on the Almighty publicly and collectively to acknowledge their gratitude for his favors and mercies and humbly to beseech for their continuance; and

count our blessed exemptions

Whereas the people of the United States during the year now about to end have special cause to be thankful for general prosperity, abundant harvests, exemption from pestilence, foreign war, and civil strife:

Now, therefore, be it known that I, Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States, concurring in any similar recommendations from chief magistrates of States, do hereby recommend to all citizens to meet in their respective places of worship on Thursday, the 24th day of November next, there to give thanks for the bounty of God during the year about to close and to supplicate for its continuance hereafter.

In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

[SEAL.]

Done at the city of Washington, this 21st day of October, A.D. 1870, and of the Independence of the United States the ninety-fifth.

U.S. GRANT.

By the President:
HAMILTON FISH,
Secretary of State.

generally accepted custom

From the November 25, 1870 issue of The New-York Times:

Of the many good customs handed down to us by our pious Puritan forefathers, there is, perhaps, none that has met with such general acceptance as that of the annual Thanksgiving which they first originated. Indeed, now its observance may be fairly said to be universal, and not all the differences of creed, race, and social customs that on other points so widely divide our cosmopolitan people, seem to offer the slightest bar to their hearty co-operation in and enjoyment of this pious festival. Here they intuitively perceive that they can all bow before a common altar and offer to their common Father praise and thanksgiving for the abundance of the good things with which during the year He has blessed them. The day was never better or more generally observed here, and though the weather was rather chilly and uncomfortable, and in the morning threatening clouds flitted across the sky, out-door pleasure-seekers were in no way deterred from enjoying themselves, and all our leading thoroughfares were crowded with gay promenaders. In the down-town portion of the City business was entirely suspended, and, except cigar stores and places where refreshments were sold, very few business houses of any kind were open. Everywhere a Sabbath-like stillness, so far as business traffic was concerned, prevailed, which was not even broken by the noisy newsboys. There being no evening papers issued, their occupation was gone, and they were allowed to devote themselves to turkey and such other good things as kind friends provided. Along the docks the ships lay lazily at their moorings, while very rarely one of their crews was to be seen about. Most of the vessels had their best flags flying, and presented a gay appearance. Target excursions were to be seen during the day in every direction, many of them composed of Juveniles rigged out in all sorts[?] of uniforms except a uniform suit. But in this motley arrangement of their military outfit, they were entirely eclipsed by processions of “fantasticals,” whose ludicrous costumes were a source of general merriment.

less hawk, more turkey

Tho most pleasant feature of the celebration, however, was the lavish public and private charity that made so many of the poor and suffering, for a brief time, at least, forget their troubles, and partake of the good things set before them. At all the public hospitals, asylums and prisons, the inmates were made to feel the humanizing influences that the day called forth, and to many of them it will no doubt be a green spot in their future recollections. In short, it is safe to say that there were few within the limits of the City, save those suffering from severe illness, that did not yesterday in some way share in the general enjoyment of the day.

In the thousands of our happy and wealthy homes it was, however, that the real spirit of the occasion was most keenly realized, and the wisdom of its observance most apparent. Here around the social home-board, family reunions were a feature; old friends renewed acquaintance; interesting reminiscences of other days were called up and discussed, and even though a vacant seat, at the table indicated that a member of the household had been called away, and threw a shade[?] of sorrow over the gathering, fervent thanks were offered up that so many others were spared to participate.

The inmates of the public institutions were provided for with a liberality that has never been exceeded in former years. … ^[1]

Memorial Day of General Lee, The Charleston Daily News November 25, 1870

I checked a couple papers below Mason-Dixon for November 25th. There was little news about the holiday. According to a telegram from Columbia published in The Charleston Daily News, “Thanksgiving day has been generally observed in this city.” (I saw no mention of it in Columbia’s The Daily Phoenix for the 25th) The Charleston paper summarized Thanksgiving church services in the city on page 3. For example:

At Grace Church the regular services were conducted by the pastor, the Rev. C.C. Pinckney, and, in addition, a collection taken up for the Lee Monument. The attendance was almost as large as usual on Sunday, and the amount collected very satisfactory and encouraging. The text of the sermon was taken from the 107th Psalm and 8th verse: “Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!” In the discourse the benefits for which should return thanks were pointedly set forth, and a touching tribute paid to the virtues of General R.E. Lee.

front page

next up – Christmas!

‘we did our part’

The New-York Times began its overview of Thanksgiving church services in the last column on the front page of its November 25th issue. Just like ten years earlier Reverend Henry Ward Beecher preached at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. His “discourse was devoted to a consideration of the aspects and social tendencies of civilization in this country.” Thanksgiving was a good day to think less about private affairs and more about the community as a whole.

The third exemption that the Grant Administration was thankful for was the absence of foreign war. The Franco-Prussian seems to have been a dominant story in the American Press during the second half of 1870. The Charleston paper front page on November 25th included reports about it, as well as war rumblings between Russia and Britain.

To say that the United States was free from civil strife, well that might have been in general or at least compared to five or six years earlier. That Charleston front page also included reports of outrages throughout the state. For example, blacks dragged a lone white man from his house; the Ku Klux Klan apparently made an appearance at the jail in Spartanburg – only the sheriff’s firmness prevented some outrage. And “Beast Butler Crazy” – Benjamin F. Butler, a Congressman from Massachusetts and former Union general saw a war with Great Britain as a way to unite North and South by fighting a common enemy. On page 2 federal troops were being distributed throughout Georgia to enforce the Congressional election law during voting in December. Also, South Carolina should be proud of its war record – it didn’t just drag the rest of the South into secession, it pulled more than its own weight in blood spilled.

According to the Charleston Grace Church Cathedral website “The history of Grace Church has embraced the tragedy of wars, the destruction of earthquake and hurricane, economic depressions and urban flight. During the shelling of Charleston in the Civil War, many parishioners fled the city, and most other Episcopal churches were forced to close. Grace remained open until January 1864 when a single shell destroyed part of the clerestory. The church reopened in March 1865.” The Rev. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was its second rector, serving from 1855-1898.

According to Virginia Places, “The Hollywood (cemetery) Memorial Association organized the Ladies’ Lee Monument Association which solicited funds for 16 years from all southern states. Their goal was a memorial statue in Hollywood Cemetery. Confederate General Jubal Early also organized a committee of men to raise funds for a memorial with Jefferson Davis as honorary chair. Former confederates throughout the south began to collect funds. By 1877 neither group had raised enough funds. The General Assembly passed an act creating a governor’s board to head the effort – led after 1885 by Fitzhugh Lee, R.E. Lee’s nephew – to which the men’s group gave their funds. In 1886 a legislative act combining the funds of the Ladies Lee Monument Association with the men’s funds for a total of $52,000”. read more about Ladies Memorial Associations in general at Essential Civil War Curriculum

You can find President Grant’s 1870 Thanksgiving Proclamation at Project Gutenberg and at Pilgrim Hall Museum (Thanksgiving – Thanksgiving Proclamations). Pilgrim Hall also includes information about Thanksgiving’s religious roots.

Harper’s Weekly for 1870 is available at the Internet Archive.

From Wikimedia Commons: newsboy by Henry Inman, 1841. From the Library of Congress: 1914’s The first American thanksgiving, artist unattributed; the November 25, 1870 issue of The Charleston Daily News; Sarony & Major’s c1846 lithograph of Pilgrim landing. From Free-Images: Henry Ulke’s painting of Ulysses S. Grant

an earlier first thanksgiving

^[1]The New York Times The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers Inc., 2008. DVD.↩

Posted in 150 Years Ago This Week, American Culture, American Society, Postbellum Society, Reconstruction | Tagged Benjamin Franklin Butler, Charleston, Grace Church (Charleston), Lee Monument (Richmond), Pilgrims, Puritans, Robert E. Lee, South Carolina, Thanksgiving, The Rev. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1855-1898), Ulysses S. Grant | Leave a comment

minority majority president

Posted on November 11, 2020 by SUMPTER

how puzzling

160 years ago four different candidates divvied up the votes in the United States presidential election. Republican party candidate Abraham Lincoln won a plurality (about 40%) of the popular vote on November 6, 1860, but under the United States Constitution’s Electoral College that wasn’t the whole story. In 1860 most states were giving all their electoral college votes to the winner of the state’s popular vote. By this math Mr. Lincoln won almost 60% of the electoral college and was well on his way to being sworn in as the nation’s sixteenth president about four months later. The election was sectionally solid. Most of the south supported Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge; the north was solidly Republican; Stephen A. Douglas won the second most popular votes but came fourth in the electoral college. One of the reasons there were four candidates is because the Democratic party split. The party couldn’t agree on a candidate at its first convention in Charleston, South Carolina. A subsequent convention in Baltimore nominated Stephen A. Douglas. Southern Democrats didn’t like the popular sovereignty (territories could decide for themselves if they wanted slavery) espoused by Douglas and nominated Breckinridge to run on a separate ticket.

before secession in Democrat party

precocious: seceders before secession

Both Douglas and Lincoln were from Illinois, but the Chicago Daily Tribune made it pretty clear that Lincoln was it’s more favorite son as it reported early results in its November 7th issue. The paper thought November 6th was a marvel. The weather broke and the day was clear and cool, perfect for those who had to wait in line hours to vote. In some wards the lines stretched out for three blocks or more. The police were present, but there was little drunken and/or disorderly conduct.

“Yesterday was a marvel”

Heralding Lincoln

1860 Electoral College results

Virginia gave its electoral college votes to John Bell of the Constitutional Union party. A Richmond newspaper didn’t like the Republican victory but hoped the Union would stay in one piece; but it also saw signs of trouble even before election day. From the Richmond Daily Dispatch on November 8, 1860 (page 2):

the “most deplorable” result

The Presidential election.

The returns received and published yesterday left little or no doubt of the election of ABRAHAM LINCOLN to the Presidency. Today we publish enough to make it certain. The event is the most deplorable one that has happened in the history of the country. The Union may be preserved in spite of it. We think it will; but we are prepared to expect trouble. We have already one sign from South Carolina, and this may be followed by others of more serious character.

I’m pretty sure this is the sign from South Carolina (page 1 the same issue):

Important from South Carolina.

The South Carolina Legislature met at Columbia, Monday. After organization, the following message was received from the Governor:
LETTER

The Act of Congress, passed in the year 1816, enacts that the Electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed on the Tuesday next after the first Monday of the month of November, of the year in which they are to be appointed. The annual meeting of the Legislature of South Carolina, by a constitutional provision, will not take place until the fourth Monday in November instant. I have considered it my duty, under the authority conferred upon me, to convene the Legislature on extraordinary occasions, to convene you that you may, on to-morrow, appoint the number of Electors of President and Vice-President to which this State is entitled.

prevent “consolidated despotism”

Under ordinary circumstances your duty could be soon discharged by the election of Electors representing the choice of the people of the State, but in view of the threatening aspect of affairs, and the strong probability of the election to the Presidency of a sectional candidate, by a party committed to the support of measures which, if carried out, will inevitably destroy our equality in the Union, and ultimately reduce the Southern States to more provinces of a consolidated despotism, to be governed by a fixed majority in Congress hostile to our institutions, and fatally bent upon our ruin, I would respectfully suggest that the Legislature remain in session, and take such action as will prepare the State for any emergency that may arise.

That an exposition of the will of the people may be obtained on a question involving such momentous consequences, I would earnestly recommend that in the event of Abraham Lincoln ‘s election to the Presidency, a Convention of the people of this State be immediately called, to consider and determine for themselves the mode and measure of redress. My own opinions of what the Convention should do, are of little moment; but believing that the time has arrived when every one, however humble he may be, should express his opinions in unmistakable language, I am constrained to say that the only alternative left, in my judgment, is the secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. The State has, with great unanimity, declared that she is right, peaceably, to secede, and no power on earth can rightfully prevent it.

Columbia, South Carolina: graves of members of Mexican War’s Palmetto regiment

If in the exercise of arbitrary power and forgetful of the lessons of history, the Government of the United States should attempt coercion, it will become our solemn duty to meet force by force; and whatever may be the decision of the Convention, representing the sovereignty of the State, and amenable to no earthly tribunal, it shall, during the remainder of my administration, be carried out to the letter, regardless of any hazards that may surround its execution. I would also respectfully recommend a thorough reorganization of the militia, so as to place the whole military force of the State in a position to be used at the shortest notice and with the greatest efficiency. Every man in the State, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, should be well armed with the most efficient weapons of modern warfare, and all the available means of the State used for that purpose.

In addition to this general preparation, I would also recommend that the services of ten thousand volunteers be immediately accepted; that they be organized and drilled by officers chosen by themselves, and hold themselves in readiness to be called on upon the shortest notice. With this preparation for defence, and with all the hallowed memories of past achievements, with our love of liberty and hatred of tyranny, and with the knowledge that we are contending for the safety of our homes and firesides, we can confidently appeal to the Disposer of all human events and safely trust our cause in His keeping.
Wm. H. Gist .
SECTION

John Calhoun’s tomb; palmetto flag and cockade

The message was made the special order for Tuesday noon, and the Legislature adjourned.

The conviction of the necessity of secession is hourly gaining ground. The federal officials of Charleston are said to have their resignations written.

At the celebration in Savannah of the completion of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, the Mayor of Savannah pledged fifty thousand Georgians to rush to the assistance of South Carolina if coerced. Collector Colcock , of Charleston, made an eloquent disunion speech. Mr. Buchanan was teased as the last of an illustrious line.

There is the greatest enthusiasm for a Southern Confederacy here. Every hat has a cockade, and all minds are resolved to fight.

COLUMBIA, Nov. 5–12 P. M.–A caucus was held to-night, at which it was ascertained that a large majority of the Legislature are for immediate secession by State action.

An immense crowd assembled this evening at the Congaree House and serenaded Senator Chesnut . He spoke long and eloquently, declaring the last hope of the Union gone and resistance unavoidable. The speech was enthusiastically received, because Mr. Chesnut was hitherto uncommitted.

It is rumored that Senator Hammond will follow suit.

Messrs. Bonham , Rhett , ex-Gov. Adams and others spoke also in the same strain.
[by Telegraph.]
Charleston, Nov. 7.

–The U. S. Judge for this district resigned his office this morning in open court.
ENTRY
Columbia, S. C.,, Nov. 7.

–In the Legislature yesterday, a joint resolution was adopted making the special order of the day for Thursday, the question of reorganizing the militia and preparing the State for defence.

Mr. Brist , urging it in the House, said action should be prompt, immediate, unqualified, effective and decisive in case of Lincoln ‘s election.

Hon. Wm. C. Boyce spoke yesterday, from the steps of the Congaree Hotel, urging secession in case of Lincoln ‘s election. He was followed by other prominent Carolinian.
ENTRY
Charleston, Nov. 7–P. M.

— James Connor , U. S. District Attorney, and W. F. Colcock , Collector of the port, have resigned.

It wasn’t just South Carolina either. According to the same issue of the Dispatch: Mississippi Governor Pettus said legislature should be prepared to convene if and when Lincoln was elected. Texas Senator Wigfall told President Buchanan that he would be leaving the U.S. Senate if Lincoln won. There was to be an encampment of cavalry at the Richmond Central Fair Grounds, although it wasn’t necessarily a step to prepare for trouble; Colonel Hardee, the “distinguished tactician of the U. S. Army,” was in Richmond and would be visiting the encampment. Several militia units were having parades and drills. Also,

The news of Lincoln ‘s election at the South.
Augusta, Ga., Nov. 7.

–The Charleston Mercury says that the news of Lincoln ‘s election was received in Charleston with long continued cheering for a Southern Confederacy.

A strong feeling is expressed in the different part of the South heard from in favor of calling State Conventions, to deliberate on the centre of policy to be pursued.

COLUMBIA, S. C. Nov. 7.–It was reported here last night that the South Carolina Legislature will soon send a commissioner to Georgia to confer about prompt action.

But, like the Chicago paper, the Richmond Dispatch reported that the election day was peaceful even in the “greatest excitement”

[November 17, 2020]: I think there were militia-type units all around the country. For example, there were even Zouave units up in my neck of the woods.

______________________

Encyclopedia Virginia provides a good overview of the 1860 election including a map with pie charts that contrast popular and electoral college votes. [keep scrolling – it’s in there]

A Drummond light is another name for limelight. You can be further illuminated here here

stealing John Bell’s thunder?

Has it really been a decade since my great excitement as the American Civil War Sesquicentennial took its first steps with Little Giants and Wide-Awakes, torchlit processions, Fire-eaters, Minutemen, and cockades? Of course! But it’s still kind of hard to believe, although I definitely feel a little less wide awake than I did back then. Oh! and transparencies, as from the Richmond Dispatch issue above: “-A large Union procession, with music, transparencies, &c., took place in Petersburg on Tuesday night.” 150, 160 years ago. Two things I learned have stayed with me. Allen Gathman from Seven Score and Ten stressed Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone speech – at least the Southern elite wanted to build a slave society; and as much as I think I dislike a “consolidated despotism” the South 160 years ago probably isn’t the place to look for inspiration and not just because of slavery. Allen also pointed out that the Confederate constitution prohibited secession.

Springfield Slugger

From Wikimedia Commons: AndyHogan14’s 1860 electoral college map; 1850s image of William Henry Gist You can find all the material from Harper’s Weekly in 1860 at the Internet Archive

From the Library of Congress: divided by four; the November 7, 1860 of the Chicago Daily Tribune; when we were one – Carol M. Highsmith’s 2017 photo of Palmetto regiment graves from the Mexican War in Columbia, South Carolina; Lincoln envelope; base ball – fusion = anybody but Lincoln; Uncle Sam’s choice

A. Lincoln: “I will endeavor to do my duty.”

Posted in 160 Years Ago, The election of 1860 | Tagged Abraham Lincoln, Electoral College, John Bell, John C. Breckinridge, South Carolina, Stephen A. Douglas, William Henry Gist | Leave a comment

a death on campus

Posted on October 12, 2020 by SUMPTER

in 1845

It was a damp, chilly afternoon in Lexington, Virginia. A heavy rain set in that eventually resulted in some severe flooding. September 28, 1870 was a long day for Robert E. Lee, the president of Washington College. According to Colonel William Preston Johnston, Mr. Lee ended his work day with a three hour church meeting:

the last picture shown

“Wednesday, September 28, 1870, found General lee at the post of duty. In the morning he was fully occupied with the correspondence and other tasks incident to his office of president of Washington College, and he declined offers of assistance from members of the faculty, of whose services he sometimes availed himself. After dinner, at four o’clock, he attended a vestry-meeting of Grace (Episcopal) church. The afternoon was chilly and wet, and a steady rain had set in, which did not cease until it resulted in a great flood, the most memorable and destructive in this region for a hundred years. The church was rather cold and damp, and General Lee, during the meeting, sat in a pew with his military cape cast loosely about him. In a conversation that occupied the brief space preceding the call to order, he took part, and told with marked cheerfulness of manner and kindliness of tone some pleasant anecdotes of Bishop Meade and Chief-Justice Marshall. The meeting was protracted until after seven o’clock by a discussion touching the rebuilding of the church edifice and the increase of the rector’s salary. General Lee acted as chairman, and, after hearing all that was said, gave his own opinion, as was his wont, briefly and without argument. He closed the meeting with a characteristic act. The amount required for the minister’s salary still lacked a sum much greater than General Lee’s proportion of the subscription, in view of his frequent and generous contributions to the church and other charities, but just before the adjournment, when the treasurer announced the amount of the deficit still remaining, General Lee said in a low tone, ‘I will give that sum.’ He seemed tired toward the close of the meeting, and, as was afterward remarked, showed an unusual flush, but at the time no apprehensions were felt. …

After the church meeting Mr. Lee went home. As his wife Anna Custis Lee wrote, the general was literally speechless:

tea delayed

“…My husband came in. We had been waiting tea for him, and I remarked: ‘You have kept us waiting a long time. Where have you been?’ He did not reply, but stood up as if to say grace. Yet no word proceeded from his lips, and he sat down in his chair perfectly upright and with a sublime air of resignation on his countenance, and did not attempt to a reply to our inquiries. That look was never forgotten, and I have no doubt he felt that his hour had come; for though he submitted to the doctors, who were immediately summoned, and who had not even reached their homes from the same vestry-meeting, yet his whole demeanour during his illness showed one who had taken leave of earth. He never smiled, and rarely attempted to speak, except in dreams, and then he wandered to those dreadful battle-fields. Once, when Agnes urged him to take some medicine, which he always did with reluctance, he looked at her and said, ‘It is no use.’ But afterward he took it. When he became so much better the doctor said, ‘You must soon get out and ride your favorite gray!’ He shook his head most emphatically and looked upward. He slept a great deal, but knew us all, greeted us with a kindly pressure of the hand, and loved to have us around him. For the last forty-eight hours he seemed quite insensible of our presence. He breathed more heavily, and at last sank to rest with one deep-drawn sigh. And oh, what a glorious rest was in store for him!”

“what a glorious rest was in store for him!”

General Lee breathed his last on October 12th. Thanks to the telegraph, the news spread quickly. From the Richmond Daily Dispatch October 13, 1870:

The News Of The Death Of General Lee

home and office

The tidings of the death of Gen. Robert E. Lee reached Richmond by telegraph at nightfall yesterday. The brief telegram containing the sad intelligence brought sorrow to the heart of every man, woman, and child, in the city, and ere an hour passed, the whole community was shrouded in gloom. All seemed to have a sense of personal bereavement, and everywhere was manifested a desire to pay a fitting tribute of respect and affection to the memory of the departed patriot.The Chamber of Commerce had just assembled in annual meeting when the news was announced. No business was done except the adoption of the following resolution:”That this Chamber of Commerce recommend to its members and the citizens generally to close their places of business and place crape upon their doors during the day tomorrow (13th instant), in token of the general grief and as a tribute to the memory of the good and great man who has fallen in the midst of his usefulness and his honors.”The Chamber then adjourned to meet on Wednesday, the 19th instant.The action of this representative body of our mercantile community was spontaneous, and just what might have been expected of an assemblage of Virginia gentlemen stricken by the saddest of news; and the sentiment which prompted it will find an echo in every breast. No words of ours are necessary to secure the strict observance of the recommendation.The Governor will to-day communicate officially to the General Assembly the news of General Lee’s death, and in all probability that body will set apart a day to be observed as one of mourning throughout the Commonwealth. Virginia’s voice will doubtless find expression in the request that the remains of her noblest and most honored son shall he brought to the capital and interred where lie so many of her heroic dead – at Hollywood.The bells on all the public buildings in the city will be tolled from sunrise to sunset to-day as a tribute of respect, and the City Council will hold a meeting at 5 o’clock P. M. to take action in reference to the public loss.

Columbia’s mourning paper

The Daily Phoenix page 2

‘a tale of sorrow for the South’

________________________

Horace Greeley really annoyed the Richmond Dispatch when he apparently opined that flags should not be flown half-mast in General Lee’s honor. In its October 24th issue the Daily Dispatch said that future historians would look kindly on General Lee – just like a contemporary editorial from London:

almost venerated

Greeley excuses himself for justifying Mr. Boutwell and his Savannah understrapper in refusing to allow the United States flag to fly at half-mast upon the occasion of the death of General Lee by pleading that that flag represents “the whole country” that General Lee won his fame in attempting to humble it; and that he (Greeley) cannot “consent that a false estimate” of General Lee’s errors “shall pass into history.” Thus spoke and wrote the great Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Washington, and the other “rebels” who fought the war of American independence. Thus spoke and wrote the British loyalists of the seventeenth century concerning John Hampden, Algernon Sidney, and Oliver Cromwell. But history to-day speaks the praises of all these men. A Carlyle champions Cromwell, a Macaulay extols Hampden and Sidney, and every historian, British and American, lauds the “Cincinatus of the West.” So shall it be, oh, mole-eyed Greeley, with the fame of Robert E. Lee. It will grow brighter and brighter as the coming centuries fall into line with the years “beyond the flood.” The voice of contemporaneous historians residing in England is some indication of what the verdict of those separated from us by time instead of distance will be. Even as we write we come across the following discriminating article, copied from the London Standard. Read it, all ye puny tricksters who set up your little parasols between the sun and the earth, and understand how much light you will be able to shut out from the future historian – how easy you will find the task of preventing the truth from “passing into history”: “The announcement that General R. E. Lee has been struck down by paralysis, and not expected to recover, will be received, even at this crisis, with universal interest, and will everywhere excite a sympathy and regret which testify to the deep impression made on the world at large by his character and achievements. Few are the generals who have earned, since history began, a greater military reputation; still fewer are the men of similar eminence, civil or military, whose personal qualities would bear comparison with his. The bitterest enemies of his country hardly dared to whisper a word against the character of her most distinguished general; while neutrals regarded him with ah admiration for his deeds and a respect for his lofty and unselfish nature which almost grew into veneration, and his own countrymen learned to look up to him with as much confidence and esteem as they ever felt for Washington, and with an affection which the cold demeanor and austere temper of Washington could never inspire. The death of such a man, even at a moment so exciting as the present, when all thoughts are absorbed by a nearer and present conflict, would be felt as a misfortune by all who still retain any recollection of the interest with which they followed the Virginian campaigns, and by thousands who save almost forgotten the names of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. Truer greatness, a loftier nature, a spirit more unselfish, a character purer, more chivalrous, the world has rarely if ever, known. Of stainless life and deep religious feeling; yet free from all taint of cant and fanaticism and as dear and congenial to the Cavalier Stuart as the Puritan Stonewall Jackson; unambitious, but ready sacrifice all at the call of duty; devoted to his cause, yet never moved by his feelings beyond the line prescribed by his judgment; never provoked by just resentment punish wanton cruelty by reprisals which would have given a character of needles savagery to the war – North and South owe a deep debt of gratitude to him, and the time will come when both will be equally proud of him. And well they may, for his character and his life afford a complete answer to the reproaches commonly cast on money-grubbing, mechanical America. A country which which has given birth to like him him, and those who follow him, may look the chivalry of Europe in the face without shame; for the fatherlands of Sidney and Bayard never produced a better solider, gentlemen, and Christian than General Robert E. Lee.”

An editorial from New York City wasn’t as complimentary. From the October 29, 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly:

amiable soldier

ROBERT E. LEE

ROBERT E.LEE was undoubtedly an amiable man and a good soldier. But his career, in that part of it which concerns the whole country, was an illustration of an apparently fatal weakness of character. He was bred to the army, and served as an engineer in Mexico with great distinction, and subsequently in a cavalry command. Upon the fall of Sumter, the first time that the flag of his country had been fired upon with doubtful result, he resigned his commission, on the 20th of April, 1861, saying that except in defense of his native State he hoped never again to draw his sword. Despite this hope, however, he went immediately to Richmond, where, two days afterward, he was appointed General of the Virginia troops, and on the 10th of May Major-General of the rebel army. From that time he was the most popular man in the Confederacy. He was passionately extolled by his Southern associates, and the Copperhead and the Copperhead papers in the North were never weary of applauding the “great captain” and “the Christian gentleman.”

Harper’s Weekly February 5, 1870

His military skill was conceded by his ablest opponents. But he kept himself carefully aloof from politics, confining himself closely to his military duties. It will not, however, be forgotten that the suffering of the Union prisoners at Belle Isle was almost visible from his headquarters in Richmond, and that the tortures of Andersonville were not stopped by him, nor, so far as we are aware, condemned by him. Personally courteous, and in the field honorably considerate of friend and foe, his indifference to the fate of the Union prisoners may have been due to incredulity, or to a feeling that he was not responsible. Indeed, notwithstanding that he passed immediately from the national army to that of the rebels, his interest in the rebellion seems to have been reluctant and ex officio. Trained in the sophistry of State sovereignty he thought it his duty to “to go with his State,” but saw no reason that his State should go. His services being required by the authority to which he thought them due, he performed the tasks allotted him as well as he could. “I recognize no necessity for this state of things,” and with a fatal inability to perceive, what he yet seems always to have vaguely felt, the consequent immorality of his position, he continued to conduct the operations of a war which seemed to him needless.

pity the self-sophisticated

If that war had been in defense of his country, if it had been a rising against intolerable oppression, if its object had been to assert and maintain threatened freedom, his obedience to such an authority would have been commendable. But it was a war to destroy a nation, and instead of a rising against oppression, it was an effort to overthrow a great government, solely because it seemed to favor lawful liberty. To such a cause he gave his sword, because he thought that Virginia had a right to command it! Was his moral judgment, was his manhood, subject to his State? A man may be amiable, courteous, and refined, a brave and skillful soldier, unselfish, and modest, but if in the crucial moment of his life he consents to fight in a war of which he sees no necessity, and the malign purpose of which is but too plain, he consents to cloud his name forever as that of an amiable man whose weakness is virtual crime. It is in vain that we say General LEE thought that he ought to go with his State, for no man whom history can respect thinks that he ought to go with his State or with his country for an ignoble purpose. If he did not see that purpose as ignoble, his confusion is even the more evident; for he was then ignorant of what was known to every man, and of what had been loudly and widely declared by the second officer of the Government which he obeyed.

From the day that he surrendered and his cause was lost General LEE lived quietly withdrawn from the public eye. Apparently regarding events as a soldier and not as a politician, he did not think it honorable to try to thwart the results of a victory which he had vainly sought to prevent. His personal generosity and kindliness, and the modesty of his retirement, had greatly softened public feeling, and he has been regarded with the pity that always attends sincere self-sophistication. But in the warmest eulogies that have been made of him, however, there is a tone of conscious apology. He was in no sense a great man, but he may be called truly unfortunate. His name will be remembered as that of a chief leader of one of the worst causes in history, yet a weak man, called to deal with events which he could neither clearly comprehend nor control.

thanks for the memories

Lee Chapel on campus

with the missus at one of the “dreadful battle-fields”

great race on the big river

Colonel Johnston’s book said that one of Robert E. Lee’s last earthly acts was to contribute some money to his church, but of course that was 150 years ago. According to the Episcopal Church website, the church in Lexington changed its name from R.E. Memorial Church to Grace Episcopal Church three years ago. Scroll to bottom of the web page if you’d like to “♥ Give to The Episcopal Church”

I enjoyed learning more about Robert E. Lee’s last years at a lecture reproduced on Youtube. Gettysburg National Military Park Ranger Matt Atkinson is a big fan of the general.

Last evening I read Allen C. Guelzo’s “The Mystery of Robert E. Lee” in the October 5, 2020 issue of National Review (pages 33-36). Robert’s father, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, behaved recklessly and abandoned of his family when Robert E. was six-years old. The trauma created three great drives in Robert’s psyche – desires for perfection, independence, and security. Those forces “governed the extraordinary skill with which he managed Confederate military affairs.” His preeminence in the CSA did not make him happy; that only came when he used the three forces at as president of Washington College, “where he would find independence to run matters as he saw fit, find security for himself and his family, and find perfection in what he could demand of his students.” I got a little nervous when I read that Mr. Lee abolished the college rule book, the only rule was to behave as a gentleman, which made President Lee the only lawgiver and judge. I’m kind of used to believing in the U.S. we live under a written constitution.

I’m guessing the “nearer and present conflict” mentioned in the London editorial is the Franco-Prussian war, which has even been dominating the pages of America’s Harper’s Weekly.

Trib take October 13, 1870

on Traveller

Traveller, Lincoln, and the UDC

________________________________

chapel exterior/interior

Lee burying-place

Valentine sculpted the recumbent statue

Lee monument in Richmond, early 20th century

Robert E. Lee Jr. included the information from Colonel William Preston Johnston and his mother in Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee (at Project Gutenberg, Chapter XXIV). I guess it’s not just The Dukes of Hazard, people have apparently been naming moving vehicles after Mr. Lee for a long time (included a Confederate blockade runner. The information about the steam race and all the Harper’s Weekly information from 1870 can be found at the Internet Archive; the paper was a little harder on Mr. Lee in February 1870. The photo of wet fallen leaves comes from Free-Images, just like the image of sculptor Valentine’s studio and Traveller’s tombstone

All the images with the brownish background come from General Robert E. Lee after Appomattox, edited by Franklin L. Riley; you can get a copy at HathiTrust. The last section of the book is a letter that Mr. Lee wrote to the famous Lord Acton on December 15, 1866 from Lexington. He believed in states’ rights, including over suffrage laws, and saw those rights as a way to prevent a dangerous consolidation of national power.

From the Library of Congress: death bed by Currier & Ives: “His deeds belong to history, while his life of devoted, unostentatious piety and firm and living trust in Jesus as his personal Redeemer, gives assurance that he has received the Christian crown of glory, and entered into that ‘rest that remaineth for the people of God.'”; the front page of and editorial in Columbia South Carolina’s Daily Phoenix – the telegrams announcing General Lee’s death appear on page 3; the front page of The Charleston Daily News for October 13, 1870; In Memoriam from 1870; Lee Chapel, according to the Library – Significance: The Lee Chapel was declared a Registered National Historic Landmark in 1961 by the U.S. Department of the Interior which stated that “This site possesses exceptional value in commemorating and illustrating the history of the United States.” A monument to the life of Robert E. Lee, it commemorates especially the final achievement of the Confederate General, his leadership in education as a way of rebuilding the South and of restoring the unity of the nation. This small brick chapel was built in 1867 under the supervision of Lee when he was president of Washington College. The burial place of Lee, it is visited by about 35,000 persons annually; Carol M. Highsmith’s July 2019 photo of Earl Weaver and Holly Roberts Morgan portraying the Lees at Gettysburg re-enactment; the editorial in the New-York Tribune on October 13, 1870 – it seems pretty balanced, no mention of flags at half-staff in that piece; the Lee monument in Richmond; the general and horse

[October 15, 2020] After poring incessantly over the fascinating stacks at the Library of Congress, yesterday I finally re-found the bottom painting of General Lee. It is here and said to be c1886 Aug. 27.

I got the image of Washington College in 1845 at Wikimedia

Mary Custis Lee picture: from Personal reminiscences, anecdotes, and letters of Gen. Robert E.
Lee. By Rev. J. William Jones. [Published by authority of the Lee
family, and of the faculty of Washington and Lee university] (1874) at Hathi Trust

[October 13, 2020]Mr. Guelzo’ article contrasted Robert E. Lee’s gentlemanly, dignified composure with the bad temper he could have at times. The most striking example of this occurred in 1859. Lee’s father-in-law put him in a bind by naming him executor of his estate with provisions in the will to divide the real estate between the Lees’ three sons and pay each of the Lees’ four daughters with $10,000. How to sell raise the $40,000 without selling the property? Robert E. Lee strove to make the plantations more efficient and productive than they had been. Three runaway slaves threatened his plans. After the slaves were captured and returned, Mr. Lee had them whipped; some said he even did the whipping. On the other hand,General Lee voluntarily emancipated the slave family he inherited from his mother in 1862.

October 14, 2020I forgot to mention an important part of the Custis will – Robert E. was expected to emancipate all his father-in-law’s slaves within five years. That probably increased the stress on him to make the plantations productive.

[October 13, 2020]From General Lee’s letter to Lord Acton: “… while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. …”

patriot

Posted in 150 Years Ago, 150 Years Ago This Week, Aftermath, Confederate States of America, Southern Society, Veterans | Tagged 1st Baron Acton, Edward Virginius Valentine, Horace Greeley, John Dalberg-Acton, Mary Anna Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee, Robert E. Lee Jr., Washington College (Lexington VA) | Leave a comment

‘demi-deity’ in bronze

Posted on September 27, 2020 by SUMPTER

already there in the Square c1870

Apparently some people politicized public monuments 150 years ago. From the October 8, 1870 issue of Punchinello (at Project Gutenberg):

“SOLEMN SILENCE.”

Perhaps very few persons—and especially very few members of the Republican party—are aware that a monument to ABRAHAM LINCOLN has at last been completed, and that it has been placed on the site allotted for it in Union Square. It is very creditable to the Republican Party that they exercised such control over their feelings when the day for unveiling the LINCOLN Monument arrived. Some parties might have made a demonstration on the occasion of post-mortuary honors being accorded to a leader whom they professed to worship while he lived, and whom they demi-deified after his death. No such extravagant folly can be laid at the door of the Republican Party. “Let bygones be bygones” is their motto. They allowed their “sham ABRAHAM,” in heroic bronze, to be hoisted on to his pedestal in Union Square in solitude and silence. That was commendable. A live ass is better than a dead lion; and so the Republican Party, who consider themselves very much alive, went to look after their daily thistles and left their dead lion in charge of a policeman.

It’s true I didn’t see anything in Harper’s Weekly about the unveiling, but about seven months earlier the publication did mention that the statue was going to be erected and provided an illustration.

Prospect Park in Brooklyn

solitary silence

improvement shown?

_________________________

From the February 26, 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly:

STATUE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

We give above [in the center] a picture of the bronze statue of ABRAHAM LINCOLN by the distinguished artist, Mr. H.K. BROWN, which is to be placed opposite the equestrian statue of Washington, by the same artist, at the lower end of Union Square, in this city. In some respects this statue is an improvement upon the one executed by the same artist for Prospect Park, Brooklyn, of which we gave an engraving in the Weekly for November 13, 1869. The attitude and expression are full of dignity and repose, and the work reflects great credit on the artist.

The statue was cast at the foundry of Messrs. ROBERT WOOD & Co., of Philadelphia, to which the public is indebted for many works of great artistic excellence, one of the principal of which is the cast of the statue of a “Citizen Soldier,” by Mr. QUINCY WARD, of this city, for the New York Central Park.

I think in 1870 The New-York Times was Republican-leaning. On the front page of its September 11, 1870 edition it explained that workmen were preparing the monument and gave details about its appearance and the materials used. For example there were 36 stars representing the number of United States during Mr. Lincoln’s presidency (after Nevada joined up in 1864). The article also mentioned that the monument was ordered by the Union League Club^[1].

According to the New York City Parks website the Lincoln statue in Union Square was dedicated on September 16, 1870. You can read much more about Henry Kirke Brown and John Quincy Adams Ward at The Met. Karen Chernick’s post at Hidden City Philadelphia tells the story of the Robert Wood foundry.

Harper’s mentioned John Quincy Adams Ward’s “Citizen Soldier” in Central Park. It must be the memorial to the Seventh Regiment, although that wasn’t dedicated until 1874.

The Departure of the 7th Regiment
To the War, April 19, 1861

presented to 7th in May 1863 at Washington DC

remember the common soldier

A citizen-soldier type monument in Louisiana has had a tumultuous time recently. According to The South’s Defender on August 13th this year the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury voted to keep The South’s Defenders Memorial Monument standing in place outside the parish courthouse, despite calls for its removal. But CBS News reported that the statue was knocked off its pedestal on August 27th, apparently by Hurricane Laura. You can read a history of the monument at The South’s Defenders Memorial Monument. The most recent time the statue was toppled was during a windstorm back in 1995. You can read a case for removing the monument at change.org

Philadelphia Foundry

finished product

South’s Defender standing at the Courthouse, 1923

I got the photograph of Washington Monument in Union Square (c1870) at Wikimedia; The photograph of Henry Kirke Brown is also from Wikimedia and also c1870. Maybe three times really is a charm, at least Wikimedia is also the place I found Jim.henderson’s photo of the 7th regiment statue, which is the 7th Regiment National Guard – you can read much more about the regiment and the statue at Daytonian in Manhattan; the 7th was designated the 107th for World War I. Thomas Nast’s The Departure of the 7th Regiment
To the War, April 19, 1861 (1869) and the 7th’s National Color come from the NY State Military Museum

From the Library of Congress: Lincoln’s statue in Prospect Park; Robert Wood’s advertisement; Lincoln in the square; South’s Defender at the Courthouse in 1923; the monumental centerfold from the August 19, 1885 issue of Puck – it looks like the Washington and Lincoln Union Square statues made the pic;

monuments a plenty

[September 28, 2020]: I added the single quotes in the title. That’s Punchinello’s concept as the publication was apparently having some fun with local Republicans. Also, last night I read a current article that gave Union Square a relative thumbs up. In “The Death of Public Beauty” Michael J. Lewis bemoaned modern public spaces that are “fragmented and disjointed.” “Perhaps the worst offender in this regard is Chicago’s Millennium Park. whose different features were funded independently by individual donors, making it less a unified design like New York’s Union Square than a series of discrete naming opportunities.” That is on page 29 of the September 21, 2020 issue of National Review.

^[1]The New York Times The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers Inc., 2008. DVD.↩

Posted in 150 Years Ago This Month, Aftermath, Monuments and Statues | Tagged 7th Regiment New York State Militia, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Kirke Brown, John Quincy Adams Ward, Lake Charles Louisiana, monuments and statues, The South's Defenders Memorial Monument, Union League Club, Union Square (New York City) | Leave a comment

define citizen

Posted on September 4, 2020 by SUMPTER

on the road again

The magic number was .75, or at least that was the magic constant and had been since the U.S. federal constitution was promulgated in 1788. According to Article 5 of the Constitution, a proposed amendment that has been approved by two-thirds in the U.S. Senate and in the House will become law after three-fourths of the state legislatures approve it. The proposed Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote in the United States passed Congress in June 1919. Over the next year 35 states approved the amendment, but the magic number was 36 out of the 48 ststes. On August 18, 1920 Tennessee ratified the amendment; on August 26th the U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the results – the 19th amendment was law.

enfranchised en masse

The front page of The New York Times on August 19, 1920 stated that both major political parties began targeting the new women voters immediately after the Tennessee vote and both major party presidential candidates said they were happy with the result. The paper got a couple sound bites. Democrat James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio, equated the passage of the amendment with the end of war: “The civilization of the world is saved. The mothers of America will stay the hand of war and repudiate those who traffic with a great principle. …” The presidential race was an all-Buckeye contest. U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding: “All along I have wished for the completion of ratification, and have said so, and I am glad to have all the citizenship of the United States take part in the Presidential elections. …”

Candidate Cox meets suffragists

war is now a goner

now all citizens can vote

_______________________________

Women had the right to vote in some states prior to the Nineteenth Amendment. The territory of Wyoming even passed woman’s suffrage way back in 1869; later Wyoming refused to accept statehood unless women could retain the right to vote; the U.S. Congress grudgingly agreed, so in 1890 Wyoming became the first state to allow women the vote. Between then and 1920 fourteen other states granted women full suffrage.

Wyoming: a revolutionary territory

early (woman) voter

the states of suffrage

_______________________

New York State granted women the right to vote in 1917, but some New York women didn’t wait that long. On November 5, 1872 Susan B. Anthony and fourteen other women voted in Rochester, New York. These women and the three election officials who allowed them to vote were eventually arrested. According to the November 30, 1872 issue of The New-York Times, a federal official in Rochester examined the women on the 29th. The women admitted that they voted but claimed they were entitled to do so by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. …

Susan B. Anthony was tried and convicted for illegal voting during June 1873 in federal court in Canandaigua New York. After she was convicted the three election inspectors who voted 2-1 to allow her to vote were also tried and convicted. You can read an account of the proceedings at Project Gutenberg. Here are a few parts of the presentation and argument by Henry R. Selden, Ms. Anthony’s attorney:

… Before the registration, and before this election, Miss Anthony called upon me for advice upon the question whether, under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, she had a right to vote. I had not examined the question. I told her I would examine it and give her my opinion upon the question of her legal right. She went away and came again after I had made the examination. I advised her that she was as lawful a voter as I am, or as any other man is, and advised her to go and offer her vote. I may have been mistaken in that, and if I was mistaken, I believe she acted in good faith. I believe she acted according to her right as the law and Constitution gave it to her. But whether she did or not, she acted in the most perfect good faith, and if she made a mistake, or if I made one, that is not a reason for committing her to a felon’s cell. …

Women have the same interest that men have in the establishment and maintenance of good government; they are to the same extent as men bound to obey the laws; they suffer to the same extent by bad laws, and profit to the same extent by good laws; and upon principles of equal justice, as it would seem, should be allowed equally with men, to express their preference in the choice of law-makers and rulers. But however that may be, no greater absurdity, to use no harsher term, could be presented, than that of rewarding men and punishing women, for the same act, without giving to women any voice in the question which should be rewarded, and which punished. …

Selden for the defense

Miss Anthony, and those united with her in demanding the right of suffrage, claim, and with a strong appearance of justice, that upon the principles upon which our government is founded, and which lie at the basis of all just government, every citizen has a right to take part, upon equal terms with every other citizen, in the formation and administration of government. This claim on the part of the female sex presents a question the magnitude of which is not well appreciated by the writers and speakers who treat it with ridicule. Those engaged in the movement are able, sincere and earnest women, and they will not be silenced by such ridicule, nor even by the villainous caricatures of Nast. On the contrary, they justly place all those things to the account of the wrongs which they think their sex has suffered. They believe, with an intensity of feeling which men who have not associated with them have not yet learned, that their sex has not had, and has not now, its just and true position in the organization of government and society. They may be wrong in their position, but they will not be content until their arguments are fairly, truthfully and candidly answered.

In the most celebrated document which has been put forth on this side of the Atlantic, our ancestors declared that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” …

By reference to the provisions of the original Constitution, here recited, it appears that prior to the thirteenth, if not until the fourteenth, amendment, the whole power over the elective franchise, even in the choice of Federal officers, rested with the States. The Constitution contains no definition of the term “citizen,” either of the United States, or of the several States, but contents itself with the provision that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States.” The States were thus left free to place such restrictions and limitations upon the “privileges and immunities” of citizens as they saw fit, so far as is consistent with a republican form of government, subject only to the condition that no State could place restrictions upon the “privileges or immunities” of the citizens of any other State, which would not be applicable to its own citizens under like circumstances.

It will be seen, therefore, that the whole subject, as to what should constitute the “privileges and immunities” of the citizen being left to the States, no question, such as we now present, could have arisen under the original constitution of the United States.

But now, by the fourteenth amendment, the United States have not only declared what constitutes citizenship, both in the United States and in the several States, securing the rights of citizens to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States;” but have absolutely prohibited the States from making or enforcing “any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.“

By virtue of this provision, I insist that the act of Miss Anthony in voting was lawful.

It has never, since the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, been questioned, and cannot be questioned, that women as well as men are included in the terms of its first section, nor that the same “privileges and immunities of citizens” are equally secured to both. …

If we go to the lexicographers and to the writers upon law, to learn what are the privileges and immunities of the “citizen” in a republican government, we shall find that the leading feature of citizenship is the enjoyment of the right of suffrage.

The definition of the term “citizen” by Bouvier is: “One who under the constitution and laws of the United States, has a right to vote for Representatives in Congress, and other public officers, and who is qualified to fill offices in the gift of the people.”

definitions galore, including “citizen”

By Worcester—”An inhabitant of a republic who enjoys the rights of a freeman, and has a right to vote for public officers.”

By Webster—”In the United States, a person, native or naturalized, who has the privilege of exercising the elective franchise, or the qualifications which enable him to vote for rulers, and to purchase and hold real estate.”

The meaning of the word “citizen” is directly and plainly recognized by the latest amendment of the constitution (the fifteenth.)

“The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This clause assumes that the right of citizens, as such, to vote, is an existing right.

Mr. Richard Grant White, in his late work on Words and their Uses, says of the word citizen: “A citizen is a person who has certain political rights, and the word is properly used only to imply or suggest the possession of these rights.”

Mr. Justice Washington, in the case of Corfield vs. Coryell (4 Wash, C.C. Rep. 380), speaking of the “privileges and immunities” of the citizen, as mentioned in Sec. 2, Art. 4, of the constitution, after enumerating the personal rights mentioned above, and some others, as embraced by those terms, says, “to which may be added the elective franchise, as regulated and established by the laws or constitution of the State in which it is to be exercised.” At that time the States had entire control of the subject, and could abridge this privilege of the citizen at its pleasure; but the judge recognizes the “elective franchise” as among the “privileges and immunities” secured, to a qualified extent, to the citizens of every State by the provisions of the constitution last referred to. When, therefore, the States were, by the fourteenth amendment, absolutely prohibited from abridging the privileges of the citizen, either by enforcing existing laws, or by the making of new laws, the right of every “citizen” to the full exercise of this privilege, as against State action, was absolutely secured.

Chancellor Kent and Judge Story both refer to the opinion of Mr. Justice Washington, above quoted, with approbation.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky, in the case of Amy, a woman of color, vs. Smith (1 Littell’s Rep. 326), discussed with great ability the questions as to what constituted citizenship, and what were the “privileges and immunities of citizens” which were secured by Sec. 2, Art. 4, of the constitution, and they showed, by an unanswerable argument, that the term “citizens,” as there used, was confined to those who were entitled to the enjoyment of the elective franchise, and that that was among the highest of the “privileges and immunities” secured to the citizen by that section. The court say that, “to be a citizen it is necessary that he should be entitled to the enjoyment of these privileges and immunities, upon the same terms upon which they are conferred upon other citizens; and unless he is so entitled, he cannot, in the proper sense of the term, be a citizen.”

In the case of Scott vs. Sanford (19 How. 404), Chief Justice Taney says: “The words ‘people of the United States,’ and ‘citizens,’ are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing; they describe the political body, who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty and hold the power, and conduct the government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the sovereign people, and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty.”

Judge Ward Hunt

As the judge was about to pronounce Ms. Anthony’s sentence the following exchange reportedly took place:

Judge Hunt—(Ordering the defendant to stand up), “Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?”

Miss Anthony—Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

Judge Hunt—The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.

HOPE unmasked

Miss Anthony—May it please your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot, in justice, be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers, as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property and—

Judge Hunt—The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on.

Miss Anthony—But your honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of protest against this high-handed outrage upon my citizen’s rights. May it please the Court to remember that since the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury—

Judge Hunt—The prisoner must sit down—the Court cannot allow it.

Miss Anthony—All of my prosecutors, from the 8th ward corner grocery politician, who entered the complaint, to the United States Marshal, Commissioner, District Attorney, District Judge, your honor on the bench, not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, even then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, awake or asleep, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men. Even my counsel, the Hon. Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before your honor, is my political sovereign. Precisely as no disfranchised person is entitled to sit upon a jury, and no woman is entitled to the franchise, so, none but a regularly admitted lawyer is allowed to practice in the courts, and no woman can gain admission to the bar—hence, jury, judge, counsel, must all be of the superior class.

Judge Hunt—The Court must insist—the prisoner has been tried according to the established forms of law.

taking her right to vote

Miss Anthony—Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women; and hence, your honor’s ordered verdict of guilty, against a United States citizen for the exercise of “that citizen’s right to vote,” simply because that citizen was a woman and not a man. But, yesterday, the same man made forms of law, declared it a crime punishable with $1,000 fine and six months’ imprisonment, for you, or me, or any of us, to give a cup of cold water, a crust of bread, or a night’s shelter to a panting fugitive as he was tracking his way to Canada. And every man or woman in whose veins coursed a drop of human sympathy violated that wicked law, reckless of consequences, and was justified in so doing. As then, the slaves who got their freedom must take it over, or under, or through the unjust forms of law, precisely so, now, must women, to get their right to a voice in this government, take it; and I have taken mine, and mean to take it at every possible opportunity.

Judge Hunt—The Court orders the prisoner to sit down. It will not allow another word.

Miss Anthony—When I was brought before your honor for trial, I hoped for a broad and liberal interpretation of the Constitution and its recent amendments, that should declare all United States citizens under its protecting ægis—that should declare equality of rights the national guarantee to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. But failing to get this justice—failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers—I ask not leniency at your hands—but rather the full rigors of the law.

Judge Hunt—The Court must insist—

(Here the prisoner sat down.)

summarizing the judgment

Judge Hunt—The prisoner will stand up.

(Here Miss Anthony arose again.)

The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.

Miss Anthony—May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper—The Revolution—four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Judge Hunt—Madam, the Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.

Apparently Post Offices were widely used 150 years ago. The same book at Project Gutenberg includes Susan B. Anthony’s address “Delivered in twenty-nine of the Post Office Districts of Monroe, and twenty-one of Ontario, in her canvass of those Counties, prior to her trial in June, 1873.” It’s a long speech and includes references to two Union generals from the Civil War:

… President Grant, in his message to Congress March 30th, 1870, on the adoption of the fifteenth amendment, said:

“A measure which makes at once four millions of people voters, is indeed a measure of greater importance than any act of the kind from the foundation of the Government to the present time.”

How could four millions negroes be made voters if two millions were not included? …

Benjamin F. Butler, in a recent letter to me, said:

“I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens.”

And again, General Butler said:

“It is not laws we want; there are plenty of laws—good enough, too. Administrative ability to enforce law is the great want of the age, in this country especially. Everybody talks of law, law. If everybody would insist on the enforcement of law, the government would stand on a firmer basis, and questions would settle themselves.”

And it is upon this just interpretation of the United States Constitution that our National Woman Suffrage Association which celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the woman’s rights movement in New York on the 6th of May next, has based all its arguments and action the past five years. …

math problem

just enforce the law

remembrance/anticipation

According to Alma Lutz’s 1959 Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (pages 198-200 at Project Gutenberg):

Susan preached militancy to women throughout the presidential campaign of 1872, urging them to claim their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by registering and voting in every state in the Union. …

With the spotlight turned on the Fourteenth Amendment by these women, lawyers here and there throughout the country were discussing the legal points involved, many admitting that women had a good case. Even the press was friendly.

Susan had looked forward to claiming her rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and was ready to act. She had spent the thirty days required of voters in Rochester with her family and as she glanced through the morning paper of November 1, 1872, she read these challenging words, “Now Register!… If you were not permitted to vote you would fight for the right, undergo all privations for it, face death for it….”

This was all the reminder she needed. She would fight for this right. She put on her bonnet and coat, telling her three sisters what she intended to do, asked them to join her, and with them walked briskly to the barber shop where the voters of her ward were registering. Boldly entering this stronghold of men, she asked to be registered. The inspector in charge, Beverly W. Jones, tried to convince her that this was impossible under the laws of New York. She told him she claimed her right to vote not under the New York constitution but under the Fourteenth Amendment, and she read him its pertinent lines. Other election inspectors now joined in the argument, but she persisted until two of them, Beverly W. Jones and Edwin F. Marsh, both Republicans, finally consented to register the four women.

This mission accomplished, Susan rounded up twelve more women willing to register. The evening papers spread the sensational news, and by the end of the registration period, fifty Rochester women had joined the ranks of the militants. …

Election day did not bring the general uprising of women for which Susan had hoped. In Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Connecticut, as in Rochester, a few women tried to vote. In New York City, Lillie Devereux Blake and in Fayetteville, New York, Matilda Joslyn Gage had courageously gone to the polls only to be turned away. Elizabeth Stanton did not vote on November 5, 1872, and her lack of enthusiasm about a test case in the courts was very disappointing to Susan.

However, the fact that Susan B. Anthony had voted won immediate response from the press in all parts of the country. Newspapers in general were friendly, the New York Times boldly declaring, “The act of Susan B. Anthony should have a place in history,” and the Chicago Tribune venturing to suggest that she ought to hold public office. The cartoonists, however, reveling in a new and tempting subject, caricatured her unmercifully, the New York Graphic setting the tone. Some Democratic papers condemned her, following the line of the Rochester Union and Advertiser which flaunted the headline, “Female Lawlessness,” and declared that Miss Anthony’s lawlessness had proved women unfit for the ballot.

As of this morning Google defined citizen as: a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized.
“a Polish citizen”

or an inhabitant of a particular town or city.
“the citizens of Los Angeles”

It was still a numbers game for Alice Paul but she was one of the suffragists in the 1910s who wanted to change course – instead of getting all the states to change their state laws, get 36 states to ratify a constitutional amendment that would impose federal law on all 48 plus.

Abigail Adams: women will “foment a rebellion”

sewing star by star

what will they think of next?

The 1918 photo of Louisa A. Swain, one of the first female voters in Wyoming Territory is from Wikimedia Commons. Lokal_Profil’s suffrage map is licensed under Creative Commons. Wikimedia Commons also provides the image of B.F. Butler

The clipping describing the trial was published in the July 5, 1873 issue of Harper’s Weekly at Hathi Trust.

One of the themes of political cartoons from 150 or so years ago seems to have been an apprehension of changing gender roles. The example here of a woman getting her two bits worth at the barbershop is from the September 10, 1870 issue of Punchinello at Project Gutenberg

From the Library of Congress: parade vehicle; headline from the August 26, 1920 issue of the Washington Evening Star; the photo of a meeting said to have taken place on Jul16, 1920 – “Alice Paul and a delegation consulting with Governor Cox on the suffrage situation in Tennessee.”; candidate James M. Cox candidate Warren G. Harding; portrait of Henry Rogers Selden – you can read more about him at Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote; Alice Paul sewing in the December 21, 1919 issue of the New York Tribune; Susan B. Anthony’s papers with the image of Abigail Adams and 1902 words from Ms. Anthony that she’s pro-divorce when women are mistreated by their husbands; Noah Webster; Judge Ward Hunt; Suffrage kewpies in Puck February 20, 1915; the cover of the June 5, 1873 issue of The Daily Graphic; U.S.Grant ca. 1868; with the Susan B. Anthony quote on a banner at the National Woman’s Party; Alice Paul with 36 star banner; don’t forget Susan B.

June 2, 1920

36 starts at last

Posted in 100 Years Ago, American History, The election of 1920 | Tagged Alice Paul, Bainbridge Colby, female suffrage, Fourteenth Amendment U.S. Constitution, Henry Rogers Selden, James Middleton Cox, Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Noah Webster, Susan B. Anthony, The election of 1920, Ward Hunt, Warren Gamaliel Harding | Leave a comment

peanut prophecy

Posted on August 8, 2020 by SUMPTER

From the July 16, 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly:

PEA-NUTS.

OUR illustration on this page represents a scene which is perfectly familiar to those who have visited our Southern cities; and we dare say some of our readers who have sauntered along the Savannah docks may recognize the features of the good-natured and almost superannuated aunty whose bent figure, sheltered by the tattered umbrella, and surrounded by heaping baskets of roasted pea-nuts, forms the principle object in our picture. It was drawn from life, greatly to the delight of the old woman, who had never before been honored by the attentions of an artist.

Come get your goobers

The pea-nut, though almost universally liked, is considered very “ungenteel.” Its cheapness, and the ease with which the soft shell is broken, make it a favorite with boys; and it is rare indeed to empty a little fellow’s pocket and not find among its wonderfully miscellaneous contents two or three pea-nuts or the debris of their crumbling shells. Outside of boydom the popularity of the pea-nut is chiefly confined to people who frequent such places of amusement as the Bowery Theatre, the atmosphere of which is always redolent of the pea-nut stand and the beer gardens. Such people, indeed, munch them every where – as they walk the street, on the cars, in the stages, and aboard the ferry boats, scattering the shells abroad with the utmost indifference, and littering the dress of every person in their neighborhood. Pea-nuts impart a pungent odor to the breath, which makes the eater almost as great a nuisance in a crowd as one who indulges in the luxury of Limburger cheese.

pungent peanut place

In this city there are hundreds of stands where pea-nuts are sold, and the trade in them must be very large, if not particularly remunerative. There must be several hundred old men and old women in New York alone who make their living at these stands – their entire sales consisting, on any day, of a few shillings worth of pea-nuts, with perhaps a dozen or two apples, whose surface shines with a polish too suggestive of the process by which it is obtained for delicate stomachs. Occasionally you may see a gentleman purchasing at these stands; but generally it is done with a furtive glance to see that nobody is near whose observation might be unpleasant. If one like pea-nuts, and is thus sensitive, it is convenient to have the protection of a little son or nephew, who may not, however, in all cases reap the benefit of the purchase.

The pea-nut is not recognized in polite society. It is not found at dessert. Yet a few years ago an American in Munich placed on the dinner-table of the Hôtel de Bavière a dish of these with other nuts peculiar to this continent, for the benefit of his German friends, and the unanimous verdict of the foreign members of the party was, that the pea-nut was most excellent eating. Thus pea-nuts, like prophets, are not without honor save in their own country; and it is not likely they will ever rise above their present position here.

When I read this piece I thought of a book I read years ago (I don’t have the reference). The author referred to hamburger (and maybe potatoes) as an inferior food or inferior good. That kind of surprised me – what about McDonald’s?

I’m not sure about peanuts. I don’t think adults try to hide their use of them. You might never be able to order peanuts as a main course in hotels in Bavaria or any other place, but 150 years later peanuts do seem to be a highly valued food. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches might not have the same cachet as other entrees, but they have a good deal of nutritional value. As scientists have analyzed food in greater and greater detail, we now know that peanut butter is kind of high in fat, but it has 0 cholesterol and 0 trans fat. And that’s a good thing, at least for now. [September 8, 2020: For example, the September 5th 2020 issue of The Economist (page 8) mentions that up to 240 million people around the world have food allergies and peanut allergy is the most common, although thanks to science, there is now an approved remedy.]

Tuskegee teacher

peanut power

Peanuts were one of the crops that George Washington Carver, an earlier scientist, urged farmers to grow to offset the ravages of King Cotton:

good steward of the soil

“While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts. Although he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none became commercially successful.” Rotating cotton with crops that returned nitrogen to the soil, for example sweet potatoes and legumes such as peanuts, would improve the soil.

In his 1917 How to grow the peanut : and 105 ways of preparing it for human consumption George Washington Carver saw a bright future for peanuts:

“By reason of its superior food value the peanut has become almost
a universal diet for man, and when we learn its real value, I think
I am perfectly safe in the assertion that it will not only become a
prime essential in every well-balanced dietary, but a real necessity.
Indeed, I do not know of any one vegetable that has such a wide range
of food possibilities.”

Gotham goobers

wash it down with a Billy Beer … or two

peanuts worth?

_________________________________

Life isn’t always as peaceful as that snapshot of the peanut vendor at the Savannah docks. On December 22, 1869 General Alfred Howe Terry began serving as “the last military governor of the Third Military District, based in Atlanta.” According to the January 1, 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly even before that he had reported that the Klu Klux Klan was still active in the state. The newspaper editorialized:

MURDER AND SENTIMENTALITY.

A FEW weeks ago, while the Boston Cadets were feasting General MAGRUDER, the rebel commander at Great Bethel, Union men in Georgia, according to General TERRY, were murdered at the pleasure of the Ku Klux hands. There is, he says, no security for life or property, and magistrates neither will nor can do justice. Do the worthy members of the Company of Cadets see no relation between the two facts? Their invitation to General MAGRUDER does not, indeed, directly occasion the slaughter of Union men; but it does indirectly. The lesson which the disaffected element in the Southern States is so painfully slow to learn is that we understand our own victory, not as one of vengeance, but of principle. And how can we ever expect them to learn it if we do not show it in every intelligible way? General MAGRUDER threw up the commission of his country to fight against his flag, at the command of a State, for the purpose of perpetuating human slavery. Is this an act which the Boston Cadets think worthy of especial honor? Or is it to show that they have no ill feeling? But nobody charged it upon them. Or is done because they think that General MAGRUDER was as honest as they were?

… we would not certainly honor conspicuous rebels while the rebel spirit slaughtered our brethren …

… There is this advantage in the councils of extreme men, as they are called – that they understand each other. Set a thief, if you choose, to stop a thief. Fight fire with fire. These are exhortations that grow out of the depths of experience. It may not be an agreeable truth, but it is a truth, that such a man as THADDEUS STEVENS understood better how to deal with rebels than any more moderate man; and for the reason that he was of a like resolution and temper with them, but patriotically and nobly directed. The policy of reconstruction which has been adopted was the result of a situation which Mr. STEVENS, and men like him instinctively divined. When he spoke of confiscation and military rule and territorial condition, there was a general shuddering even among his own party friends. He was vigorously denounced as blood-thirsty and vindictive by the opposition. But he always quietly answered in substance, why is the blood of enemies more precious than that of friends?

He did not indeed advise bloodshed. But he was of the opinion that the blood of rebels should be spilled rather that of Union men of any color. He knew, also, that it was necessary, by a thorough and radical reorganization of society in the rebel States, to show the rebel spirit that the country fully comprehended its own victory, and would certainly secure it. He knew that the contempt of “the North” was ingrained and traditional in the South,” and that the shortest and surest way of peace was to show a perfect readiness upon the part of “the North” to use its superior strength to establish its policy.

feted in Boston

fire fighter

Georgia on his mind

His view of the situation was correct. It implied nothing vindictive, nothing unjust. Gradually events showed its wisdom. … [events including massacres, Black Codes, and the Ku Klux Klan] …

That condition virtually remains. Nobody, of course, expects that any system will instantly pacify a State so long demoralized by the barbarism of slavery, and then so riven with Civil War as Georgia. But because every thing may not be done at once, it would be extremely foolish to endeavor to do nothing. The removal of the colored members of the Legislature was a deliberate defiance of the authority of the United States. Had it been instantly accepted as such by Congress, and the territorial condition been restored, there would be at this moment much more security for life and property in that State than General TERRY reports. So, likewise, when it was proposed that the Cadets in Boston should honor General MAGRUDER, magistrates and juries in Georgia would have been stronger had the Cadets decisively declined.

The remedy is, first of all, moral, then physical. Let the South perceive that we regard the war as a very sober matter – as an enormous crime, the memories and lessons of which are not to be drowned in a slop of sentimentality. Then the leaders will act accordingly; and if not now, then in the next generation. It is a very great mistake that we can not wait. Experience proves that we can. Then the immediate remedy is physical. It is a disgrace to the country that it suffers such a condition of things any where in its domain as that reported by General TERRY. If it is proved that Georgia does not protect lives and property, let the United States protect them by any necessary number of soldiers, and for any length of time whatever.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia General Terry took some action soon after he took over:

“In June 1869 in White v. Clements, the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled two-to-one that blacks did indeed have a constitutional right to hold office in Georgia. Ironically, one of the two deciding justices was Chief Justice Joseph E. Brown, appointed by Bullock in July 1868. In January 1870, Alfred H. Terry, the third and final commanding general of the District of Georgia, conducted “Terry’s Purge.” He removed the General Assembly’s ex-Confederates, replaced them with the Republican runners-up, and then reinstated the expelled black legislators, thus creating a heavy Republican majority in the legislature. In February 1870 the newly constituted legislature ratified the Fifteenth Amendment and chose new senators to send to Washington. The following July, Georgia was again readmitted to the Union.”

“Shelling peanuts, Wolf Creek, Georgia” 1935

I think I remember years ago reading a quote from George Washington Carver about peanuts. I’m not sure if this is it or not:

When I was young, I said to God, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the universe.’ But God answered, ‘That knowledge is for me alone.’ So I said, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.’ Then God said, ‘Well George, that’s more nearly your size.’ And he told me.

You can read that and many more interesting quotes from Mr. Carver at AZ Quotes

The picture isn’t big enough to show, but the Library of Congress has a cartoon by Denys Wortman from 1945 in which the value of peanut butter was debated: “Mopey Dick and the Duke. ‘I can’t decide whether to give up peanut butter on account of its calories, or to eat it on account of its vitamines’ [sic]”

Plains, Georgia

Dothan, Alabama

Savannah, Georgia

From the Internet Archive: Harper’s Weekly for 1870 and George Washington Carver’s 1917 book.

The World War II era poster is from the National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. It is dated 1943; Mr. Carver died on January 5, 1943. Also from Wikimedia Commons – the Bowery Theatre in July 1867.

From the Library of Congress: Chemistry laboratory at Tuskegee Institute about 1902 – Mr. Carver is second from right; Carol M. Highsmith’s photograph of the statue of Mr. Carver “outside the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, in the 1926-43 segregated Phoenix Union Colored High School in Phoenix, Arizona;” Peanut stand on West 42nd Street, NY City; the huge peanut float in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1977 for the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as U.S. president – Mr. Carter was a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia – his brother Billy promoted the beer named after himself; Carter peanut novelties; the portrait of John Bankhead Magruder – apparently Prince John could be kind of fluid, after the Civil War he fled to Mexico, where he worked for the Mexican government for awhile, he left Mexico in November 1866, you can read a short bio at Duke University; the image of Thaddeus Stevens; General Alfred H. Terry; three more from Carol M. Highsmith – Plains, a mural in Dothan Alabama (a Mural City which is also named the “Peanut Capital of the World), “Felix de Weldon’s Waving Girl statue on Savannah, Georgia’s, waterfront” (“it depicts Florence Martus, who took it upon herself to be the unofficial greeter of all ships that entered and left the Port of Savannah between 1887 and 1931. According to legend, not a ship was missed in her forty-four years on watch.”); peanut shelling in Georgia; Polly in the patch, said to be between 1900 and 1905.

“Polly in the peanut patch”

Posted in 150 Years Ago This Month, Aftermath, Postbellum Society, Reconstruction, Southern Society | Tagged Alfred Howe Terry, Bowery Theatre, food bias, George Washington Carver, Georgia, Hôtel de Bavière, John Bankhead Magruder, Ku Klux Klan, peanuts, Savannah Georgia, Thaddeus Stevens | Leave a comment