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Arguments over slavery lead to bloodshed in Kansas. |
__________
“When the white man governs himself, that is
self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that
is more than self-government – that is despotism.”
Abraham Lincoln, October
16, 1854.
__________
March
20: The historian John Bach McMaster
explains how the Kansas-Nebraska Act “completed the ruin” of the Whig Party.
The breaking up of old parties over the
slavery issues naturally brought up the question of forming a new party, and at
a meeting at Ripon in Wisconsin in 1854, it was proposed to call the new party
Republican. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, a thousand citizens
of Michigan signed a call for a state convention, at which a Republican state
party was formed and a ticket nominated on which were Whigs, Free-soilers, and
Anti-Nebraska Democrats. Similar “fusion tickets,” as they were called, were
adopted in eight other states. The success of the new party in the elections of
1854, and its still greater success in 1855, led to a call for a convention at
Pittsburgh on Washington’s Birthday, 1856. There and then the national
Republican Party was founded. (97-335)
*
We
forget our ancestors could be pretty nuts:
Bricks
and bullets fly after a confrontation between townspeople and Yale students at
a New Haven theater. After the leader of the town group is stabbed, students
retreat to the College. The locals bring in two militia cannons and aim them at
the College, but are stopped by constables before they can open fire. (See also
1806, 1841, 1858, 1919 and 1959.)
*
A sample of the rhetoric of the day, this from a pro-slavery man
in Kansas:
“Strike
your piercing rifle-balls and your glittering steel to their black and
poisonous hearts! Let the war-cry never cease in Kansas again, until our territory
is wrested of the last vestige of abolitionism.”
“Lead’s
the best argument for these infernal white-livered Yankees.” (The blogger
failed to note a source.)
*
George Fitzhugh publishes Cannibals All,
or Slaves Without Masters. In one passage he argues:
The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some
sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the infirm work not at
all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them.
They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The
women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their
husbands by their masters. The Negro men and stout boys work, on the average,
in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is
spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White
men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but Negroes
luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun,
they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human
enjoyments…
Fitzhugh
argued that most Northern workers would be better off as slaves, themselves. “I
am quite as intent on abolishing Free Society, as you are on abolishing
slavery,” he once told an audience. Lecturing at Yale, he told his listeners,
“Free society in Western Europe is a failure … it betrays premonitory symptoms
of failure even in America.” In Cannibals
All he warned that abolition meant revolution. Northern private property,
churches, laws, and marriages would be swept away in flames. (56-378 or 391?)
*
August 19: Somewhat like the Israelis and
Palestinians today, or the Bloods and the Crips in Southside Chicago, there
seemed no way to stop the cycle of violence involving settlers and natives.
For example, Lt. John Gratten, a recent
West Point graduate, led a party of thirty men, backed by artillery, to a
conference in Nebraska Territory with Sioux leaders. Some kind of trouble,
including at least one drunken interpreter, led to bullets and arrows flying.
Only one Sioux, Chief Conquering Bear,
was killed; but Gratten and his entire party were wiped out, their bodies
mutilated.
That same year trouble developed in the
Rogue River Valley in Oregon. Settlers murdered twenty-seven Indians. So
warriors rampaged down the valley, killing any settlers in their path.
There were “terrorists” on the loose in
the years before the Civil War; it just wasn’t always clear on which side the
terrorists were lining up.
*
The
Homestead Bill, favored by Northern and Western Republicans was defeated in
Congress in 1854, passed in 1860 and vetoed by President Buchanan.
“Vote
Yourself a Free Farm,” was one Republican slogan of the era.
First
called for by a newspaper editor named George Henry Evans, the cause was
championed by Rep. Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania. Hard feelings between Northern
and Southern lawmakers led to all kinds of mayhem. Ohio Senator Ben Wade was
challenged to a duel after he called one Southern legislator a liar; but the
Southern gentleman later backed down. Grow had what has been called a
“rough-and-tumble” fight with Laurence M. Keitt, another Southern
representative – and when the coming of the Civil War cleared Congress of all
Southern influence, Grow took over as Speaker of the House. He had the pleasure
of watching the Homestead Act passed into law.
*
“No education without leisure.”
Students today will have no
comprehension of what “Washing Day” was like for women of earlier times.
Sarah Hale would write,
…our spirits fall with the first rising of steam in the kitchen,
and only return to natural temperature when the clothes are folded in the
ironing basket. We rejoice that a better day is at hand and consider the
invention described below as full of deepest interest to our sex as
housekeepers.
Finley describes the machine, shown
in a crude wood-cut illustration in Godey’s.
It was a queer looking contraption,
this first practical washing machine; The Book ran a crude woodcut of
it. But its mechanism, operated by hand of course, employed the strength-saving
principle of the lever, developed in a series of cog-wheels; the churning
barrel turned with a crank, slowly enough, goodness knows, but easily.
Furthermore a woman could sit down the while. The machine sold for $40.
Other “important” developments for
women included a “particularly useful rotary egg-beater” and a “double skillet
for boiling milk,” which saved the cook from constantly stirring. (113/158)
Finley is clear. Hale’s greatest
cause was education for females, but if an egg-beater could save a woman an
ounce of energy, it had its value. “There can be no education without leisure,
and without leisure education is worthless,” she said. (113/159)
*
September 20: The first “orphan train” leaves New York City, bound by
steamship for Detroit, and points west. Aboard are 47 boys and girls, ages 7 to
15. Most have lost their parents, although two brothers, Dick and Jack, had a
father who was still alive, but a raging alcoholic.
Once they arrive at their
destination, the town of Dowagiac, in southwestern Michigan, they are put out
to farm families or find employment within a few days. “On the whole,”
announces their escort, “the first experiment of sending children West is a
very happy one, and I am sure there are places enough with good families in
Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, to give every poor boy and girl in New
York a permanent home.”
In the next 75 years, nearly a
hundred thousand orphaned, destitute, and unwanted children from the New York
slums are sent to the West. This movement is the brainchild of young Charles
Loring Brace (b. 1826), a Yale grad and a minister, later to become famous and
controversial as a leader of the “child savers.” (American History
Illustrated, “The Orphan Trains” by Leslie Wheeler, 10)
Brace sometimes visited the city
prison and preached to inmates; and later he worked at a mission in the
notorious Five Points district. There he was struck by “the immense number of
boys and girls floating and drifting about our streets with hardly any
assignable home or occupation, who continually swelled the multitude of
criminals, prostitutes and vagrants.”
The chief of police estimated that
there were at least 10,000 homeless children at large in the city; and in one
fairly typical year, four-fifths of felony complaints were filed against
minors.
At that time, New York did have a
free public school system; but attendance was not compulsory. Truancy was
rampant.
Brace and a few other ministers tried
to organize Sunday school classes for boys in several poor neighborhoods.
Wheeler notes: “The results were disappointing, however, for the boys usually
disrupted the meetings by fighting among themselves, hurling missiles at the
minister in charge, and in one instance, interrupting what to them seemed a
particularly long, windy sermon with cries of “Gas, gas.” [That is, the
minister was full of hot air.] (14)
In 1853, the Children’s Aid Society
was organized, with much better success. Brace explained what came next:
The most touching of all was the crowd of wandering little ones
who immediately found their way to the office. Ragged young girls who had
nowhere to lay their heads; children driven from drunkards’ homes; orphans who
slept where they could find a box or stairway; boys cast out by stepmothers or
stepfathers; newsboys, whose incessant answer to our question “Where do you
live?” rung in our ears, “Don’t live nowhere!” little bootblacks, young
peddlers, “canal-boys,” who seemed to drift into the city every winter, and
live a vagabond life; pickpockets and petty thieves trying to get honest work;
child beggars and flower sellers growing up to enter courses of crime – all
this motley throng of infantile misery and childish guilt passed through our
doors, telling their simple stories of suffering, and loneliness, and
temptation, until our hearts became sick; and the present writer, certainly, if
he had not been able to stir up the fortunate classes to aid in assuaging these
fearful miseries, would have abandoned the post in discouragement and disgust.
(14)
The idea, then, was to get these unfortunates out of the city,
into homes in the country, where they might thrive. As stated in its annual
report, the society’s goal was “to help the children help themselves.” Wheeler
notes that Brace believed that “an honest, hardworking youth could not fail to
rise in the world.” The goal, then, was to find “every kind of religious
family” that wanted to take responsibility for one child – or more – and by
“individual influence by throwing about the wild, neglected little outcast of
the streets, the love and gentleness of home, and by bringing him up to honest,
healthy labor.”
Placing out these children, as it was called, Wheeler explains,
reflected Brace’s view of the city as an evil and unwholesome
place from which dependent children were best removed. Instead of the “gases
and exhalations of the filthy lodging houses,” these children would be able to
breathe the “pure country air”; instead of “the narrow alleys, the
drink-sellers, and the thieves haunts of a poor quarter,” they would look upon
“trees, and fields, and harvests”; and, finally, rather than being confronted
at every turn by the city’s many temptations to vice, they would have before
them the noble example of farm life, where virtue and industry were the rule.
(17)
Eventually, the Children’s Aid Society hired a permanent western
agent, whose job was to scout out communities desiring children. In some
instances, Wheeler writes, children later brought their parents west with their
savings. Sometimes parents changed their minds, and went west, to try to
persuade children, often unsuccessfully, to return home. In the early parties
sent west, children just a few months old were included. Boys always
outnumbered girls. In many cases older teens proved to be the “terror” and
“dread” of the communities where they were placed. Often, admits Wheeler, “it
was too late to do much for them.”
Farmers who accepted children sometimes asked the agent, “Won’t
the boy run away?” To that, the agent replied, “Did ye ever see a cow run away
from a haystack? Treat him well, and he’ll be sure to stay.” (18) At least one
farmer drove fifty miles to pick up an orphan, and an agent once reported that
a crowd of 2,000 had gathered in Frankfort, Indiana, to see the children
arrive. The child had to give consent to being placed, and if a placement
didn’t work, they might be moved. Many of the older boys, Wheeler says, turned
out to be “rolling stones.”
As is always true, where humanity is involved, there was a
mixture of success and failure.
Some families could not thank the society enough for having
brought them the child, whom they described as their treasure, the “bright and
shining star” of their family; others told a different story. A foster parent
from Ohio complained of the child placed with him: “He is the worst-tempered
boy I have ever had anything to do with… but I will try do my duty by him.”
[One] foster mother wrote, “I am often asked by my friends, who think the child
is little more than half-witted, why I do not ‘send her back and get a brighter
one.’ My answer is, that she is just the one who needs the care and kindness
which Providence has put it in my power to bestow.”
Letters from the children, sent back to New York, often
mentioned crops and livestock, and even the pet pony or calf they had been given.
“I am five foot high and fat as a bear,” one boy wrote. “I have a good home. A
farmer I should like to be when I grow up to be a man.”
Others were naturally homesick, as one young man placed with a
family in Osage, Iowa remembered years later. “The town and the county was wild
prairie, with nothing on it which was at all attractive to a boy from New York
City. I was so homesick it seemed to me that I should die.”
One girl wrote back to friends, “Now, my dear girls, I would
advise you to come West, if you would like to be treated as one of the family.
You are not treated as hired girls in the city – oh, no, if they go to town,
you go – if they go off visiting, you go along.”
Some of the older boys found farm work hard, and chances at an
education lacking. One remembered studying at home at night, or during the day,
“by tearing leaves from books and studying them concealed in my hand while following
the plow and its work on the farm.”
Many of the orphans came to see the West as a land of greater
opportunity. At least one former newsboy returned home to visit old companions.
“Do you want to be newsboys always and shoe-blacks, and timber-merchants in a
small way by selling matches? If ye do you’ll stay in New York, but if you
don’t you’ll go West, and begin to be farmers, for the beginning of a farmer,
my boys, is the making of a Congressman, and a President.” (20)
Years later, the Society listed some of its success stories:
A Governor of a State, a Governor of a Territory, two members of
Congress, two District Attorneys, two Sheriffs, two Mayors, a Justice of the
Supreme Court, four Judges, two college professors, a cashier of an insurance company,
twenty-four clergyman, seven high school Principals, two School
Superintendents, an Auditor-General of a State, nine members of State
Legislatures, two artists, a Senate Clerk, six railroad officials, eighteen
journalists, thirty-four bankers, nineteen physicians, thirty-five lawyers,
twelve postmasters, three contractors, ninety-seven teachers, and any number of
business and professional men, clerks, mechanics, farmers, and their wives, and
others who have acquired property and filled positions of honor and trust.
The two who became governors were both sent West in 1859. Four
years later, by then 10-and-a-half years old, Andrew H. Burke, who went on to
become governor of North Dakota, ran away to become a drummer boy in the Union
Army. John Green Brady’s mother had died before he left for the West, having
previously run away from home because his father beat him. He later moved to
Alaska, then a territory, where he was elected lieutenant governor.
In actuality, many of the orphans were placed in homes in New
England, or in rural communities in New York State. The peak year for
settlements in the West was 1875, when a little more than 4,000 orphans and
others were sent. Other cities copied the idea; but even in New York, there
were critics. Catholics complained that children of their faith were placed
with Protestant families. Some complained that children were “sold as slaves”
and agents of the Society “enriched themselves from the transactions.” An
observer from Wisconsin complained that “thieves, liars and vagabonds” were
sent West and turned loose on the community. Sometimes, families that were not
screened sufficiently proved abusive to the children placed in their care.
In the words of one boy, who grew up to be an Indiana newspaper
editor, the virtues of the effort are clear.
Since 1873, the year your people brought me West, I have had
considerable experience. ... Have had “ups” and “downs”, just like everyone
else, but when I contrast what might have been had not the Children’s Aid
Society sent me to this new home, with what it is, I am very grateful. (23)
*
October: George W. Hall, having been convicted of murder, on testimony
of Chinese witnesses, appeals his case to the California Supreme Court (People v. Hall). Under California
law, at that time, Native Americans, African Americans, and even “mulatto” individuals
were forbidden to testify either for or against whites. Hall’s lawyers insisted
that these racial categories were drawn – clearly – to ban testimony by
non-whites against whites.
Chief Justice Charles J. Murray delivered the decision, going back as far as the landing of Christopher Columbus in
America in 1492, for guidance. Columbus believed the “Indians” were really Asians,
he noted. Until very recently, Justice Murray added, “the American Indians and
the Mongolian, or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type of the human species.”
Since California law was based on laws of states formed earlier, when it was
still argued that Indians and Asiatics were the same race, Murray ruled that
Chinese testimony was inadmissible in state courts.
To be more precise, in his ruling, he explained:
Can, then, the use of the word
“Indian,” because at the present day it may be sometimes regarded as a
specific, and not as a generic term, alter this conclusion? We think not;
because at the origin of the legislation we are considering, it was used and
admitted in its common and ordinary acceptation, as a generic term,
distinguishing the great Mongolian race, and as such, its meaning then became
fixed by law, and in construing statutes the legal meaning of words must be
preserved.
Again: the words of the Act must
be construed in pari materia. It will not be disputed that
“White” and “Negro” are generic terms, and refer to two of the great types of
mankind. If these, as well as the word “Indian,” are not to be regarded as
generic terms, including the two great races which they were intended to
designate, but only specific, and applying to those whites and Negroes who were
inhabitants of this continent at the time of the passage of the Act, the most
anomalous consequences would ensue. The European white man who comes here would
not be shielded from the testimony of the degraded and demoralized caste,
while the Negro, fresh from the coast of Africa, or the Indian of Patagonia,
the Kanaka, South Sea Islander, or New Hollander, would be admitted, upon their
arrival, to testify against white citizens in our courts of law.
To argue such a proposition
would be an insult to the good sense of the Legislature.
The evident intention of
the Act was to throw around the citizen a protection for life and property,
which could only be secured by removing him above the corrupting influences of
degraded castes.
Murray went on to conclude that the use of various terms, all
meant to denote differences in “every shade of color” of skin, “must, by every sound rule
of construction, exclude every one who is not of white blood.”
“The word ‘white’ has a distinct
signification,” he added, “which ex vi
termini, excludes black, yellow, and all other colors.”
In fact, the judge saw an
even greater danger, if the Chinese and others were allowed to testify against
whites:
The same
rule which would admit them to testify, would admit them to all the equal
rights of citizenship, and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury
box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.
This is
not a speculation which exists in the excited and over-heated imagination of
the patriot and statesman, but it is an actual and present danger.