ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

LUCRETIA IS ESCORTED BY A THUG

                A meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in New York was attacked by a mob.  The abolitionists were forced to leave the hall and go through the crowd of enraged men.  Mott, who was famous for her anti-slavery work, had a group of body guards when she went out in public.  When she noticed that some of the other ladies were unescorted, she told her body guards to look after them.  When one of them asked her who would protect her, she turned to the biggest thug in the crowd and said:  “This gentleman will escort me.”  The man was so surprised, he took on the job and saw Lucretia threw the crowd safely.

–  maroon  22

CLAY AND WEBSTER AND MULES

                Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were once sitting on the porch of a hotel in Washington.  A man with a pack of mules passed by.  Webster:  “Clay, there goes a number of your Kentucky constituents.”  Clay:  “Yeah, they must be going up to Massachusetts to teach school.”

–  Little, Brown 129

HENRY “BOX” BROWN

                Henry Brown was a slave in Richmond, Virginia.  He would pray to God and one day God responded, counseling him to “go and get a box and put yourself in it.”  He had the plantation carpenter build him a box similar to a shipping crate.  He poked some air holes in it and had it labeled “This side up with care” on the top.  Then he got inside with a “bladder” of water.  He arranged for the box to be brought to the local express station with it addressed to a group of abolitionists in Philadelphia.  The box was thrown in the corner upside down, but soon it was loaded onto a baggage car right-side up.  But when the box was transferred to a steamboat, it was again put upside down.  For over an hour, he rode on his head.  It caused excruciating pain, but he was determined to be free.  Finally, the steamboat voyage ended and a wagon took Henry to the Philadelphia post office where the crate was thrown down, almost breaking his neck.  He was soon picked up by the abolitionists and became famous as Henry “Box” Brown.    

–  maroon 114

A DAY ON A SLAVE SHIP

                A voyage across the “Middle Passage” was horrific.  The male slaves were chained in pairs by the ankles and wrists.  They slept this way.  Buckets were provided, but to get to them the pair had to walk over other slaves (sometimes being bitten in the process), so most did not even try.  In the morning, the slaves were awakened and brought on deck.  The dead slaves were thrown overboard.  The survivors were fed the first of their two meals.  It was cheap horse beans that were mixed with a concoction of water, flour, palm oil, and red pepper that was called “slobber sauce”.  After this, the “dance” took place.  A crewman played a drum, bagpipes, or fiddle.  This was repeated in the late afternoon.

–  Lawrence pp. 21-22

FREDERICK BAILEY

                The greatest abolitionist was born Frederick Bailey.  His mother was a slave and his father was an unknown white man.  He was trained to be a shipwright (a person who works as a carpenter constructing and repairing ships).  In 1838, he escaped by train (with the help of his future wife who was a freed slave) and changed his name to Frederick Douglass.  He met William Lloyd Garrison who hired him to lecture for his Anti-Slavery Society.  In 1845, he wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.  He had to flee to Great Britain where he lectured.  He returned to America after friends bought his freedom from his owner.  He began to publish his newspaper “The North Star”.  When the Civil War broke out, he became an adviser to Lincoln and encouraged him to allow blacks in the Army.  Douglass helped recruit the most famous black unit – the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.  Two of his sons served in the unit.  After the war, he held several political positions including minister to Haiti.  He became a supporter of feminism after he married his second wife who was a supporter of women’s rights.  He was nominated (without his knowledge) as Vice Presidential running mate for Victoria Woodhull of the Equal Rights Party.

–  Amazing 281-283 

THE AMISTAD CASE

                In Feb., 1839, Portuguese slave hunters kidnapped hundreds of Africans and brought them to Cuba for sale.  Two Spanish plantation owners bought 53 at auction.  They were loaded on a ship called the Amistad (“friendship”) and sailed for the Caribbean island where they had their plantations.  The cargo consisted of 49 adult males and 4 kids (three girls).  After several days asea, Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinque), managed to unshackle himself.  He led a revolt using knives which took over the ship on July 30.  The captain and cook were killed.  The cook had taunted the Africans with being eaten when they reached their destination.  They forced the owners to sail to Africa, but at night they would change direction.  The ship ended up wandering up the coast of the U.S.  On August 26, it was encountered by the brig USS Washington anchored off Long Island.  The slaves were put in chains and incarcerated.  The Washington claimed the ship and its cargo under salvage rights.  The Africans were accused of murder and piracy.  Plus, the court had to determine the status of the cargo.  The officers of the Washington, the owners, and the Spanish government all claimed the “property”.  President Van Buren wanted to ease tensions with Spain by extraditing Cinque and the others.  Abolitionists took up the cause and raised money for their defense.  A key development was the location of a sailor who spoke their language.  In the case, held in New Haven, Connecticut, the judge ruled that they were slaves and should be repatriated.  The case was appealed and ended up in the Supreme Court.  John Quincy Adams was recruited because he was famously anti-slavery.  Adams was 73 and serving in the House of Representatives.  In a lengthy defense, he accused Van Buren of abusing executive power and made an impassioned plea for freedom for the slaves.  The Supreme Court voted 7-1 to return them to Africa.  In November, 1841, Cinque and the 34 survivors went home.

https://www.history.com/topics/abolitionist-movement/amistad-case

FACTS ABOUT NAT TURNER

  1. He was born a slave to a small, but prosperous plantation owner named Benjamin Turner. He was greatly influenced by his grandmother who had been brought over from Africa.  She was very religious and very anti-slavery.
  2. He was a special child. As early as age 3, he claimed to know things that happened before his birth.  He was taught to read and write and showed great intelligence.
  3. He became a preacher and was known as “The Prophet” because he claimed to get visions. One of the visions told him to “fight against the serpent”.
  4. He ran away at age 21. His father had run away at a similar age.  After a month in the woods, he returned to “his earthly master”.
  5. A solar eclipse (on Lincoln’s 22nd birthday) convinced him to lead a slave rebellion. Later, when the sun took on a bluish green tint (possibly due to an eruption by Mount St. Helens), he assumed this was the signal to launch the insurrection on August 21, 1831.
  6. He started with about six trusted followers. Their first victims were his master Joseph Travis, his wife, nine-year-old son, and a hired hand.  Two of his men were sent back into the house when they remembered there was a baby.
  7. Officially called the Southhampton Slave Insurrection, the rebels went from plantation to plantation freeing slaves and killing whites, many in their beds. Their weapons were mostly axes, hatchets, and blunt instruments. 
  8. The rebellion was not very successful as only about 75 slaves joined. The entire countryside was riled up and white militias quickly responded.  The rebellion was over by August 23.   Although up to 60 whites were killed, many more innocent blacks were killed in the retaliation. 
  9. More than 50 suspected rebels were executed after trials, plus some 40 who were lynched.
  10. Turner managed to hide for six weeks. One day a white man noticed his brushwood lair and he surrendered without a fight.  He was hanged on November 11, 1831.  Before he died, the told his story to a local lawyer named Thomas Gray.  He wrote “The Confessions of Nat Turner”, but some historians question its veracity.

https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-nat-turners-rebellion

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nat-Turner

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Nat-Turner-Quick-Facts

ELI WHITNEY

                Eli Whitney was born on Dec. 8, 1825 in Massachusetts.  As a youth he showed talent in the mechanical arts by building his own violin.  He graduated from Yale in 1789 and hope to become a teacher.  Things did not work out and he ended up stranded in Georgia.  He was befriended by Catherine Greene, widow of Revolutionary War general Nathanael.  She let him stay on her plantation called Mulberry Grove.  One day, the manager complained to him about how hard it was to get the seeds out of cotton.  The cotton fiber stuck to the seeds so much that a slave could only clean one pound per day.  Whitney was inspired to build a machine that had a revolving cylinder with hundreds of short wire hooks that ripped the seeds out of the fiber.  It was called the cotton gin with “gin” being short for engine.  Now, a slave could clean 50 pounds of cotton in one day.  In 1794, he received a patent and should have gotten rich.  Unfortunately, the machine was easy to pirate and plantation owners would be damned if they would pay Whitney a percentage of their cotton to have it ginned by Whitney.  Whitney later said “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.”  Very unfortunately, planters now had an incentive to grow a lot of cotton and they needed more slaves to pick it.  Ironically, although the invention saved slaves the frustration of removing the seeds by hand, it caused a lot more slaves to be bought to pick the cotton in the fields.  Whitney was no hero!  He returned to Massachusetts when his business failed.  In 1797, the government offered contracts to make 40,000 muskets for a possible war against France.  (Previously, the two national armories had made 1,000 in three years.)  That’s because it required a skilled craftsman to hand-make each musket.  If a part broke, an identical part had to be hand-made.  Whitney got a contract to make 10,000 muskets in two years.  He had developed a process called “interchangeable parts”.  Each part was made by a machine and then an unskilled worker could easily put the parts together.  This was the beginning of mass production.  In 1801, Whitney demonstrated the process to President Jefferson by taking parts off piles and putting together a musket.  This convinced the government to retain the contract, because it took Whitney ten years to produce the 10,000.  He blamed an epidemic and shortage of supplies, but part of the reason may have been Whitney taking time off for side ventures.  He did get rich off making guns.  Ironically, he had never owned a gun before.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eli-Whitney

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/cotton-gin-and-eli-whitney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Whitney

BROOKS CANES SUMNER

                On May 19 and 20, 1856, Sen. Charles Sumner gave a speech against slavery.  It almost got him killed.  Sumner was a leading abolitionist.  His speech was against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  In the speech, he compared slavery to prostitution.  And he threw in some jibes against Sen. Andrew Butler of S.C.  He made fun of Butler’s speech problems after his recent stroke.  (Earlier, Butler had made sexual references linking Sumner to black women.)  Stephen Douglas upon hearing Sumner’s speech said:  “That damned fool will get himself killed by some other damned fool.”  Two days later, Butler’s cousin Sen. Preston Brooks approached Sumner in the nearly deserted Senate chamber.  Sumner was seated at his desk when Brooks began pummeling him with his metal-tipped cane.  He needed the cane due to a dueling injury.  (He had planned to challenge Sumner to a duel, but a friend convinced him that Sumner was not a gentleman.)  Brooks hit Sumner numerous times, even after the cane broke. Other senators attempted to intervene, but Sen. Laurence Keitl kept them back with a pistol.  Sumner was left unconscious, battered, and bleeding.  He was unable to return to the Senate for three years.  Brooks avoided expulsion, but resigned and was reelected.  Both men became heroes to their section of the country.  Brooks received hundreds of canes.  The cane, which had shattered, had parts made into rings that pro-slavery Senators wore on neck chains. 

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/this-day-in-1856-a-near-murder-on-the-u-s-senate-floor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner

THE PEACEMAKER EXPLODES

The USS Princeton was the most powerful warship in the world.  It was designed by the great inventor John Ericsson (who later created the Monitor).  It was the first warship with a screw propeller and it had the largest naval gun in the world.  The Peacemaker was a 15-inch monster.  The steam frigate arrived in Washington in 1844 for its official launching.  On Feb. 28, it was to sail up the Potomac to Mount Vernon with a shipload of celebrities, including Pres. John Tyler and several members of his Cabinet.  Dolley Madison came along.  Among the celebrities was a rich New Yorker named David Gardiner and his two daughters, Julia and Margaret.  The recently widowed Tyler had already proposed to Julia, but her mother had nixed the idea because of the age difference.  The President was 54 and Julia was 24. 

            The highlight of the voyage was the firing of the Peacemaker.  It was fired at ice floes and the noise wowed the crowd.  John Ericsson (who was not on board), had warned Capt. Robert Stockton that the gun should not be fired without further testing, but so far so good.  After a lunch, with toasting, below deck, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer ordered the reluctant Stockton to fire a salute to Mount Vernon.  This time the gun exploded, spraying the deck with shards of metal.  Eight people were killed.  The dead included Gilmer and Sec. of State Abel Upsher.  Tyler’s slave/valet was killed.  Gardiner was among the deceased.  Tyler, who had been heading up a gangplank, consoled his daughter.  His actions convinced Julia and her mother that he was marriage-worthy.  She gave him seven more kids to go with the eight from his first marriage (setting the record for most Presidential children).  Julia left the legacy of having a band play “Hail to the Chief” when the President enters the room. 

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tyler-narrowly-escapes-death-on-the-uss-princeton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Princeton_(1843)

https://fredericksburg.com/town_and_countymiscellaneous/the-forgotten-tragedy-the-1844-explosion-on-the-uss-princeton-shook-the-presidency-of-john/article_58a55481-ebdf-56f9-b5fb-b82fd2d894b6.html

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  1. When the historian Carter Woodson inaugurated Negro History Week in 1926, he had it coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Woodson placed Douglass’ birthday on Feb. 14.
  2. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but changed his name when he got his freedom. A friend suggested he adopt the name of a character from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake”.
  3. A turning point in his life came when he was 16. He fought back against a slave-breaker and won.  It increased his self-esteem and his desire for freedom.
  4. The wife of a slave-owner taught him the alphabet, but was forced to desist by her husband. He learned to read by carrying a book on his errands to town and bribing white kids to teach him passages by offering them bread.  Later, he taught other slaves how to read the Bible.
  5. In 1838, he escaped with the help of his future wife Anna. Anna was a free laundress who gave him some money and a sailor’s suit that he used to take a train to the North.  She died in 1882.
  6. His first autobiography became one of the most famous books of the 19th Century. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” was published in 1845.  Because it made hi famous, he moved to Ireland and England for two years to escape slave-catchers who desperately wanted to get him.  He went on to write two more biographies.
  7. He was the only African-American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights. “In respect to political rights, we hold that women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.”  In 1866, he co-founded the American Equal Rights Association with Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragists.
  8. During the Civil War, he met with Lincoln and pushed for the recruitment of black soldiers. He specifically had a role in the creation of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.  Two of his sons fought with the famous unit and participated in the attack on Fort Wagner (although they do not appear in the movie “Glory”, but he does).  Then he spoke out for equal pay and merit-based promotions.
  9. In 1872, he became the first African-American to be nominated for Vice President. He was the running mate of Victoria Woodhull of the Equal Rights Party.  Douglass had not wanted the nomination and did not acknowledge it.
  10. In 1877, while he was visiting Washington, his home in Rochester, NY was burned to the ground, destroying much of his possessions. Hundreds of his letters and copies of his newspaper “The North Star” were lost.
  11. He held federal positions under five Presidents – Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison.
  12. He was probably the most photographed American of the 19th Century. There are 160 portraits of him.  He called photography the “democratic art” and valued its accuracy in portraying African-Americans as human beings.  He himself refused to ever be photographed smiling as he refused to play the stereotyped happy slave.
  13. When Anna died, he remarried a white abolitionist named Helen Pitts. She was 20 years younger.  The marriage was criticized by both whites and blacks, but it was a happy one and lasted eleven years until his death in 1895.

https://www.npca.org/articles/1736-10-facts-you-might-not-know-about-frederick-douglass-in-honor-of-his-200th

https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-frederick-douglass/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/539306/facts-about-frederick-douglass

THE GREAT EGGNOG RIOT

            The U.S. Military Academy was founded in 1802.  It was located at West Point on the Hudson River in New York.  It soon gained a reputation for hard partying.  In 1817, Sylvanus Thayer was appointed Superintendent with the understanding that he would improve the college’s reputation.   He must have done a good job because he is now known as the Father of West Point.  He instituted rules against cooking in rooms, leaving campus, and dueling.  The Academy already had a rule against alcohol consumption, but it wasn’t being enforced.  Thayer put emphasis on no alcohol, but little changed. 

It was traditional to celebrate Christmas eve with eggnog spiked with alcohol.  Eggnog was a popular beverage.  George Washington had his own recipe which called for rum, sherry, brandy, and (not or) whiskey.  On Dec. 24, 1826, several cadets went to taverns (one was Benny’s Haven where Edgar Allen Poe had spent a lot of time before being expelled).  They smuggled in two gallons of whiskey and one of rum.  Around 4 A.M. on Christmas day, faculty member Capt. Ethan Allen Hitchcock was awakened by noisy partying.  He went to a room which had seven drunken cadets and chewed them out and ordered them to their rooms.  He then heard noises in another room.  He found three cadets who attempted to conceal their identities.  Two got under blankets.  Angry words and threats were hurled at Hitchcock.  He then heard more noises from a third room.  On the way there, he encountered a drunken Jefferson Davis.  Davis rushed ahead to the room to warn that Hitchcock was coming.  The drunkards verbally abused Hitchcock, who sent them to their rooms.  Davis went and stayed, which saved his future.  Meanwhile, cadet Lt. William Thornton was on guard duty and making his rounds.  He was threatened with a sword.  He was knocked down by a piece of wood.  Hitchcock approached a room that was barricaded.  Inside, a cadet brandished a pistol.  When another cadet bumped him, it went off, hitting the door jamb near Hitchcock.  Hitchcock sent a sober cadet to get Commandant of Cadets William Worth.  Rumor spread through the unruly cadets that the “bombardiers” (artillerymen stationed on campus and hated by the cadets) were being called out.  Some called for defense of the barracks against the “attackers”.  The situation escalated into breaking windows and furniture.  ($168.83 in damages –  $4,430 in today’s money.)  When Worth arrived, cooler and sorer heads prevailed and the riot petered out. 

Around 90 of the 260 cadets participated in the mayhem.  70 were charged (not including Jefferson Davis).  Six resigned and 19 were court-martialed.  10 were expelled.  These included two future Confederate generals (Benjamin Humphreys and Hugh Mercer) and one future Supreme Court justice (John Campbell). 

   https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/eggnog-riots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggnog_riot

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/egg-nog-its-all-fun-and-games-until-someone-starts-a-holiday-riot-180949281/

THE WORST INVENTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY? 

            A while back, our high school celebrated Black History Month by putting up posters highlighting people and events that were important in the history of African-Americans.  I was struck by a poster that commemorated the invention of the cotton gin.  I assume the poster was meant to praise a labor-saving device that made the lives of slaves better.  I just had to shake my head because the cotton gin was not something to be thankful for.  It was a disaster for future African imports and present American slaves.

            Eli Whitney was born in Massachusetts to a farm family.  He did not go into the family business and instead graduated from Yale in 1792.  He headed South to find employment as a tutor.  Whitney stayed for a while at the plantation of Catherine Greene.  Catherine was the wife of the famous Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. (He had passed away by this time.) One day Catherine complained about the amount of time and effort it took to remove seeds from cotton. It took a slave ten hours to remove seeds from one pound of cotton.  Whitney, who had a mechanical bent, decided to see what he could do. 

He came up with a simple machine that had a drum with a series of hooks on it.  The cotton would be fed into the machine where the hooks would pull the cotton apart.  The cotton fiber would then be fed through a mesh that had such small holes the seeds could not go through.  They would be deposited at the bottom of the machine.  The original hand cranked model could produce 50 pounds of cotton per day.  (Later, horses were used to power the machine and then steam power was used.)  On March 14, 1794, Whitney was awarded a patent for an invention he was sure would make him wealthy.  He planned to manufacture the cotton gin (the “gin” was short for “engine”) and sell them to cotton growers for a percentage of the crop.  Not surprisingly, Southerners simply built their own gins and since patent infringement was poorly policed, Whitney made very little off his invention.

            Why was the machine a disaster?  Before Whitney came along, slavery was not very profitable.  Cotton was not a major crop because of the difficulty in producing the cotton fiber.  Now that it could be produced efficiently, more would be produced.  New England textile mills provided the demand.  And not just American factories, there was also a demand for cotton for British mills.  By the mid-19th Century, cotton was the leading American export.  Now that supply could meet that demand, Southern farmers turned to cotton as the most profitable use of their land.  More land was converted to cotton production and the plantation system expanded rather than declined.  In 1830, 750,000 bales of cotton were produced.  By 1850, the number was 2.85 million.  Bigger farms needed more workers, so slave importation greatly increased.  The number of slaves went from 700,000 to 3.2 million in 1850.  One has to wonder how American History would have been different if Eli Whitney had not made cotton, and thus slavery, profitable.

            P.S. Before you feel sad for Whitney being cheated out of a fortune for producing the machine he invented, he became wealthy from another invention that revolutionized the American economy.  He developed the idea of interchangeable parts.  This means individual parts of a product were made by machines so each part was identical.  This led to mass production.  The product he used the concept with was the manufacturing of muskets.  Before he came along, guns had to be made by hand. 

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/cotton-gin-and-eli-whitney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

HIRAM REVELS

                Hiram Revels was born to free parents in North Carolina on Sept. 27, 1827.  He became an ordained minister in 1845.  During the Civil War, he helped organized two African-American infantry regiments and served as a chaplain.  In 1870, he became the first black elected to Congress when he was elected Senator from Mississippi.  He supported amnesty and restoration of full citizenship for ex-Confederate officials.  He opposed segregation of Washington, D.C. schools and railroads.  He spoke out against carpetbaggers. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Rhodes_Revels

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hiram-Rhodes-Revels