1894

 

April 30: Coxey’s Army, called by one modern writer, a “petition in boots,” arrives in Washington D.C., to protest against high unemployment, caused by the financial panic of 1893. Led by Jacob Coxey, a hundred men from Massillon, Ohio, had begun the march on March 25.

 

Roughly 6,000 unemployed reach the capital, but the next day Coxey and other leaders are arrested for walking on the grass at the U.S. Capitol.

 

Their protest rapidly fades from the news.

U.S. Capitol Building. Author's collection

 

 

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Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye’s Comic History of the United States is published. The work can now be found online. The excerpts below, I found interesting for varying reasons. Nye, born in 1850, died in 1896.

 

A few of his observations, some funny, some revealing the almost casual prejudices of his era, follow:

 

Spain at this time [1492] regarded the new land as a vast jewelry store in charge of simple children of the forest who did not know the value of their rich agricultural lands or gold-ribbed farms. Spain, therefore, expected to exchange bone collar-buttons with the children of the forest for opals as large as lima beans, and to trade fiery liquids to them to pay a freight-bill for the Spanish confidence man. (24)

 

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…Cortez had a way of capturing the most popular man in a city, and then he would call on the taxpayers to redeem him on the instalment plan. Most everybody hated Cortez, and when he held religious services the neighbors did not attend. The religious efforts made by Cortez were not successful. He killed a great many people, but converted very few. (27)

 

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The Jesuit missionaries about the middle of the seventeenth century pushed their way to the North Mississippi and sought to convert the Indians. The Jesuits deserve great credit for their patience, endurance and industry, but they were shocked to find the Indians averse to work. They also advanced slowly in the church work, and would often avoid early mass that they might catch a mess of trout or violate the game law by killing a Dakotah [Lakota or Sioux] in May. (30)

 

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Twenty years later the Quakers shocked everyone by thinking a few religious thoughts on their own hook. The colonists executed four of them, and before that tortured them at a great rate.

 

During dull times and on rainy days, it was a question among the Puritans whether they would banish an old lady, bore holes with a red-hot iron through a Quaker’s tongue, or pitch horseshoes. (53-54)

 

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[The colonists were] compelled to fight an armed foe [the Native Americans] whose trade was war and whose music was the dying wail of a tortured enemy. Unhampered by the exhausting efforts of industry, the Indian, trained by centuries of war upon adjoining tribes, felt himself footloose and free to shoot the unprotected forefather from behind the very stump fence his victim had worked so hard to erect….

 

What an era in the history of the country! Gentlewomen whose homes had been in the peaceful hamlets of England lived and died in the face of a cruel foe, yet prepared the cloth and clothing for their families, fed them and taught them to look to God in all times of trouble, to be prayerful in their daily lives, yet vigilant and ready to deal death to the general enemy….

 

At this time there was a line of battle three hundred miles in length. On one side the white man went armed to the field or prayer-meeting, shooting an Indian on sight as he would a panther; on the other, a foe whose wife did the chores and hoed the scattering crops while he made war and extermination his joy by night and his prayer and life-long purpose by day. (55-56)

 

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The colonists defied him [the royal tax collector], and when he was speaking to them publically in a tone of reprimand, he got an ovation in the way of eggs and codfish, both of which had been set aside for that purpose when the country was new, and therefore had an air of antiquity which cannot be successfully imitated. (57)

 

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The year 1692 is noted mostly for the Salem excitement regarding witchcraft. The children of Rev. Mr. Parris were attacked with some peculiar disease which would not yield to the soothing blisters and bleedings administered by the physicians of the old school, and so, not knowing exactly what to do about it, the doctors concluded that they were bewitched. Then it was, of course the duty of the courts and selectmen to hunt up the witches. This was naturally difficult.

 

Fifty-five persons were tortured and twenty were hanged for being witches; which proves that the people of Salem were fully abreast of the Indians in intelligence, and that their gospel privileges had not given their charity and Christian love such a boom as they should have done.

 

One can hardly be found now, even in Salem, who believes in witchcraft; though the Cape Cod people, it is said, still spit on their bait. The belief in witchcraft in those days was not confined by any means to the colonists. Sir Matthew Hale of England, one of the most enlightened judges of the mother-country, condemned a number of people for the offence, and is now engaged doing road-work on the streets of New Jerusalem as a punishment for these acts done while on the woolsack.

 

Blackstone himself, one of the dullest authors ever read by the writer of these lines, yet a skilled jurist, with a  marvelous memory regarding Justinian, said that, to deny witchcraft was to deny revelation.

 

“Be you a witch?” asked one of the judges of Massachusetts, according to the records now on file at the State House in Boston.

 

“No, your honor,” was the reply.

 

“Officer,” said the court, taking a pinch of snuff, “take her out on the tennis-grounds and pull out her toenails with a pair of hot pincers, and they see what she says.”

 

It was quite common to examine lady witches in the regular court and then adjourn to the tennis-court. A great many were ducked by order of the court and hanged up by the thumbs, in obedience to the customs of these people who came to America because they were persecuted. (58-60)

 

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The idea that “God is love” was not popular in those days. (61)

 

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Roger Williams was now settled at Providence Plantation, where he was joined by Mrs. Hutchinson, who also believed that the church and state should not be united, but that the state should protect the church and that neither should undertake to boss the other. It was also held that religious qualifications should not be required of political aspirants, also that no man should be required to whittle his soul into a shape to fit the religious auger-hole of another. (68)

 

[Williams was granted a charter that]…gave to all the first official right to liberty of conscience ever granted in Europe or America. Prior to that a man’s conscience had a brass collar on it with the royal arms engraved thereon, and was kept picketed out in the king’s grounds. The owner could go and look at it on Sundays, but he never had the use of it. (69)

 

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There was an attack on Haverhill in March, 1697, and a Mr. Dustin was at work in the field. He ran to his house and got his seven children ahead of him, while with his gun he protected their rear till he got them away safely. Mrs. Dustin, however, who ran back into the house to remove a pie from the oven as she feared it was burning, was captured, and, with a boy of the neighborhood, taken to an island in the Merrimac, where the Indians camped. At night she woke the boy, told him how to hit an Indian with a tomahawk so that “the subsequent proceeding would interest him no more,” and that evening the two stole forth while the ten Indians slept, knocked in their thinks, scalped them to prove their story, and passed on to safety. Mrs. Dustin kept those scalps for many years, showing them to friends to amuse them. (110-111)

 

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The name of George Washington has always had about it a glamour that made him appear more in the light of a god than a tall man with large feet and a mouth made to fit an old-fashioned full-dress pumpkin pie. (124)

 

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Money was very scarce, and ammunition very valuable. In 1635 musket-balls passed for farthings, and to see a New England peasant making change with the red brother at thirty yards was a common and delightful scene.

 

The first press was set up in Cambridge in 1639, with the statement that it “had come to stay.” Books printed in those days were mostly sermons filled with the most comfortable assurance that the man who let loose his intellect and allowed it to disbelieve some very difficult things would be essentially—well, I hate to say right here in a book what would happen to him. (133)

 

[Shoes were calfskin for the well-to-do]…and the rest wore cowhide and were extremely glad to mend them themselves. These were greased every week with tallow, and could be worn on either foot with impunity. Rights and lefts were never thought of until after the Revolutionary War. (134-135)

 

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[The defenders of Charleston during the Revolution]…turned loose with everything they had, grape, canister, solid shot, chain-shot, ‘bar-shot, stove-lids, muffin-irons, newspaper cuts, etc., etc., so that the decks were swept of every living thing except the admiral. (166-167)

 

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[Oliver Hazard] Perry was twenty-seven years old, and was given command of a flotilla on Lake Erie, provided he would cut the timber and build it. (206)

 

Proctor and Tecumseh were at Malden, with English and Indians, preparing to plunder the frontier and kill some more women and children as soon as they felt rested up. (207)

 

The Indians in 1813 fell upon Fort Mimms and massacred the entire garrison, men, women and children, not because they felt a personal antipathy towards them, but because they—the red brothers—had sold their lands too low and their hearts were sad in their bosoms. There is really no fun in trading with an Indian, for he is devoid of business instincts, and reciprocity with the red brother has never been a success.

 

General Jackson took some troops and attacked the red brother, killing six hundred of him and capturing the rest of the herd. Jackson did not want to hear the Indians speak pieces and see them smoke the pipe of peace, but buried the dead and went home. He had very little of the romantic complaint which now and then breaks out regarding the Indian, but knew full well that all the Indians ever born on the face of the earth could not compensate for the cruel and violent death of one good, gentle, patient American mother. (209)

 

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In eighteen months one hundred thousand people went to the scene [of the gold rush]. Thousands left their skeletons with the red brother, and other thousands left theirs on the Isthmus of Panama or on the cruel desert. Many married men went who had been looking a long time for some good place to go to. Leaving their wives with ill-concealed relief, they started away through a country filled with death, to reach a country they knew not of. Some died en route, others were hanged, and still others became the heads of new families. Some came back and carried water for their wives to wash clothing for their neighbors. (230-231)

 

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The Black Hawk War…grew out of the fact that the Sacs and Foxes sold their lands to the United States and afterwards regretted that they had not asked more for them. (219)

 

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…One hundred thousand men were massed at Fort Monroe April 4, [in 1862] and marched slowly toward Yorktown, where five thousand Confederates under General Magruder stopped the great army under McClellan.

 

After a month’s siege, and just as McClellan was about to shoot at the town, the garrison took its valise and went away. (266-267)

 

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[Fredericksburg]…Twelve thousand Union troops were killed before night mercifully shut down upon the slaughter. (274)

 

(The Union army actually suffered 12,000 casualties.)

 

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In the midst of all these discouragements [in 1862], the red brother fetched loose in Minnesota, Iowa and Dakota, and massacred seven hundred men, women and children. The outbreak was under the management of Little Crow, and was confined to the Sioux Nation. Thirty-nine of these Indians were hanged on the same scaffold at Mankato, Minnesota, as a result of this wholesale murder.

 

This execution constitutes one of the green spots in the author’s memory. In all lives now and then an oasis is liable to fall. This was oasis enough to last the writer for years. (274-275)

 

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It was a warm time in Vicksburg; a curious man who stuck his hat out for twenty seconds above the ramparts found fifteen bullet-holes in it when he took it down, and when he wore it to church he attracted more attention than the collection. (275)

 

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On the 30^th of July [1864], eight thousand pounds of powder were carefully inserted under a Confederate fort [near Petersburg, Va.] and the entire thing hoisted in the air, leaving a huge hole, in which, a few hours afterwards, many a boy in blue met his death, for in the assault which followed the explosion the Union soldiers were mowed down by the concentrated fire of the Confederates. The Federals threw away four thousand lives here. (288)

 

Those who declare war hoping to have a summer’s outing thereby may live to regret it for many bitter years. (287)

 

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[Inflation in the Confederacy]: Flour was forty dollars a barrel; but you could get a barrel of currency for less than that. (292)

 

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[He writes of England; and the disastrous winters of the 1880s which ruined the cattle business] “She has put from five to eight million dollars into cattle on the plains of the Northwest, where the skeletons of same may be found bleaching in the summer sun…” (292)

 

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[Sherman’s army] “Before it was terror, behind it was ashes.” (294; he’s quoting someone]

 

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The Modoc Indians broke loose in the early part of Grant’s second term, and leaping from their lava beds early in the morning, Shacknasty Jim and other unlaundried children of the forest raised merry future punishment, and the government, always kind, always loving and sweet toward the red brother, sent a peace commission with popcorn balls and a gentle-voiced parson to tell Shacknasty James and Old Stand-up-and-Sit-down that the white father at Washington loved them and wanted them to come and spend the summer at his house, and also that by sin death came into the world, and that we should look up, not down, look out, not in, look forward, not backward, and lend a hand.

 

It was at this moment that Early-to-Bed-and-Early-to-Rise-Black Hawk and Shacknasty James, thinking that this had gone far enough, killed General Canby and wounded both Mr. Meachem and Rev. Dr. Thomas, who had never had an unkind thought toward the Modocs in their lives.

 

The troops then allowed their ill-temper to get the best of them, and asked the Modocs if they meant anything personal by their action, and, learning that they did, the soldiers did what with the proper authority they would have done at first, bombarded the children of the forest and mussed up their lava-beds so that they were glad to surrender. (312-314)

 

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The real Indian has the dead and unkempt hair of a busted buggy-cushion filled with hen feathers. He lies, he steals, he assassinates, he mutilates, he tortures. He needs Persian powder long before he needs the theology which abler men cannot agree upon. We can, in fact, only retain him as we do the buffalo, so long as he complies with the statutes. But the red brother is on his way to join the cave-bear, the three-toed horse, and the ichthyosaurus in the great fossil real of the historic past. Move on, maroon brother, move on!

 

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Worried about the quality of the nation’s “race stock,” three Harvard graduates, typical Boston Brahmins, found the Immigration Restriction League to protect it. Their announced purpose was to exclude “elements undesirable or injurious to our national character.” Or, as Erika Lee buts it more bluntly in American for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, they were “convinced that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.”