1854

Arguments over slavery lead to bloodshed in Kansas.

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“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.

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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)

 

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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.)

 

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A sample of the rhetoric of the period, this from a pro-slavery newspaper, regarding 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.” (From the book: The Englishman in Kansas.)  

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July 6: A gathering of 10,000 people in Jackson, Michigan marks the organized birth of the Republican Party. 

Horace Greeley, the newspaper publisher, had officially christened the group as Republicans in an editorial before the meeting.

 

“We should not care much whether those thus united [against slavery] were designated ‘Whig,’ ‘Free Democrat’ or something else; though we think some simple name like ‘Republican’ would more fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery,” he wrote.

 

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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?)

  

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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.

 

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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.

 

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“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)

 

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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)

 

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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. 

Midterm elections: In a stunning development, the Know Nothing Party secures 51 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The party continues to protest the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Irish and German Catholics, including 400,000 in 1854, alone. 

The Republicans seat their first thirteen members of the House.