1841

 

“In the first of many dangerous clashes with firefighters stationed at High and Library Streets, Yale students attack the firehouse and destroy equipment. A mob threatens to burn the College, and military companies are called in to keep the peace.” (See also: 1806, 1854, 1858, 1919 and 1959)

Painting by Brent Learned.

Benjamin Brown French begins keeping a diary. He had moved to Washington D.C. in 1833, and continuing writing till his death in 1870.

 

Violence between members of Congress.

Joanne B. Freeman uses his diary as a focal point for her book, The Field of Blood, reviewed by The New York Times. Freeman notes that between 1830 and 1860 there were more than 70 incidents of violence between members of Congress.

 

The reviewer notes:

 

In 1841, an exchange of insults between two representatives, Edward Stanly of North Carolina and Henry Wise of Virginia, led to a wild melee in which nearly all the members of the House pummeled one another. John B. Dawson of Louisiana “routinely wore both a bowie knife and a pistol” into the House and once threatened to cut a colleague’s throat “from ear to ear.” Angry over a speech delivered by the antislavery Ohioan Joshua Giddings, Dawson shoved Giddings and threatened him with a knife. Another time, Dawson pointed his cocked pistol at Giddings and was prevented from shooting him only when other congressmen intervened.

 

Freeman notes that Giddings, an outspoken abolitionist, was attacked “at least seven times,” by pro-slavery defenders. In fact, he often goaded Southerners to fight; and Freeman says Southerners were easily goaded. Even minor insults could lead to violent reaction. 

Freeman tells us of the fiery Mississippi senator Henry S. Foote, who fought four duels in his political career and was wounded in three. On the Senate floor, he raised a pistol toward an opponent, the Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, who bared his chest and invited Foote to shoot, yelling: “I have no pistols! Let him fire! I disdain to carry arms!” Another senator grabbed Foote’s weapon and locked it in a drawer. 

French recorded in his diary his delight as a spectator. Describing the huge brawl of 1841, he wrote, “The Speaker & I had the best chance to see all the fun, & while he stood at his desk pounding & yelling, I stood at mine ‘calm as a summer’s morning’ — enjoying the sport, and keeping the minutes of the proceedings!”

 

The absurdity of the code of honor is at times remarkable. Congressmen Jonathan Cilley of Maine and William J. Graves of Kentucky ended up facing off against each other in a fatal confrontation. As the NYT reviewer noted: 

Cilley, a Democrat, had charged a Whig editor, James Watson Webb, with having accepted a bribe. Outraged by the accusation, Webb wrote a letter in which he challenged Cilley to a duel. He sent the letter through Graves, a Whig friend. When Cilley refused to accept the letter, Graves felt insulted and made his own challenge to Cilley. The two men faced off with rifles on a dueling ground outside Washington. Both missed their targets in the first two rounds, but in the third Graves killed Cilley. 

What a bloody, idiotic code of “honor” to follow.

 

* 

“Nothing less than Heaven on Earth.” 

Brook Farm is founded on communistic principles by a group of Transcendentalists. They, 

…sought to transcend human experience, and seek a higher spiritual reality. The underlying logic of their rationale lay in Unitarianism, which swept like a scythe across New England early in the 19^th Century, cutting down the old Puritan dogmas, preaching the oneness of God, the goodness of man and the sacredness of reason, insisting that human problems were capable only of human solution, However, while the Transcendentalists accepted the Unitarian doctrine that Christ was not God (but had honored man by becoming man), they went even further. They saw the individual soul as a part of God – so man’s ultimate self-reliance was not to be questioned.

 

Charles A. Dana, one of the founding members explained their purpose. “Our ulterior aim is nothing less than Heaven on Earth.” George Ripley, another founder, hoped “to insure a more rational union between intellectual and manual labor.” (I think the above is from McLaughlin.)

 

* 

This description is from Halleck: 

BROOK FARM.—In 1841 a number of people, headed by George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, purchased a tract of land of about two hundred acres at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. This was known as Brook Farm, and it became the home of a group who wished to exemplify in real life some of the principles that The Dial and other agencies of reform were advocating.

 

In The Dial for January, 1842, we may find a statement of the aims of the Brook Farm community. The members especially wanted “leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul” and they determined to combine manual and mental labor in such a way as to achieve this result. Probably the majority of Americans are in sympathy with such an aim. Many have striven to find sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane.

 

[Nathaniel] Hawthorne, the most famous literary member of the Brook Farm group, has recorded many of his experiences during his residence there in 1841:

 

April 13. I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail….

 

April 16. I have milked a cow!!! …

 

May 3. The whole fraternity eat together, and such a delectable way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early Christians….

 

May 4…. there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul.

 

(Format altered slightly.)

 

Unfortunately, in order to earn a living, it was found necessary to work ten hours a day in the summer time, and this toil was so fatiguing that the mind could not work clearly at the end of the day. We find Hawthorne writing on June 1 of the same year:

 

“It is my opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish … in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.”

 

On August 12, he asks:

 

“Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so.”

 

On October 9, he says:

 

“Our household, being composed in great measure of children and young people, is generally a cheerful one enough, even in gloomy weather…. It would be difficult to conceive beforehand how much can be added to the enjoyment of a household by mere sunniness of temper and liveliness of disposition….”

 

Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm for only one of the six years of its existence. An important building, on which there was no insurance, burned in 1846, and the next year the association was forced for financial reasons to disband. … Almost all of those who participated in this social experiment spoke of it in after years with strong affection.

 

* 

Frederick Douglass is already making a mark in abolitionist circles. Brent Staples, writing a book review for The New York Times, describes the almost erotic effect he had on both men and women: 

[William Lloyd] Garrison himself went starry-eyed, declaring that God had authored the young man’s soul “but a little lower than the angels.” Enraptured by the young orator in 1841, a white New England newspaper editor wrote: “As this Douglass stood there in manly attitude, with erect form, and glistening eye and deep-toned voice, telling us that he had been secretly devising means to effect his release, we could not help thinking of Spartacus, the Gladiator.” The activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw him a year later at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and spoke for many white women when she wrote: “He stood there like an African prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with keen wit, satire and indignation he portrayed the bitterness of slavery.”

 

Staples admits the path Douglass chose – to speak out against the cruelties of slavery, to be a living exhibit of the wrongs – was never easy. 

Frederick Douglas.

Douglass became a marathon traveler for the abolitionist cause at a time when moving about the country by train was punishing in itself. Racist conductors worsened the ordeal by exiling him to “mean, dirty and uncomfortable” Negro cars or ejected him from the train altogether. Adoring crowds at some stops alternated with mobs like the one in Indiana that cried “kill the nigger” while beating Douglass unconscious and breaking his right hand. The itinerant orator was just seven years out of chains – and already the equivalent of a modern-day rock star – when the first of his three memoirs, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” made him the most well-known Negro on the globe.

 

Much of his story this blogger knows – from having read those memoirs himself – but Staples, reviewing Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight, fills in details of his later years and personal life I had never heard. 

Douglass could travel in large part because his wife Anna, who bore him five children, “ran the household with a sure hand, hosting fugitive slaves, far-flung relatives and others who turned up at the front door in need.” But Blight says Mrs. Douglas was “largely illiterate.” 

For help with his writing (including his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star) Douglass looked outside the home. 

For that, the charismatic orator called up the British abolitionist Julia Griffiths, who put aside her life and moved in 1849 to be with him in Rochester and to get The North Star off the ground. She enabled Douglass to survive personally and professionally, managing and raising money for the newspaper and for the food that came across the Douglass family table. She helped “to polish a raw genius into a gem and, for a time, managed his emotional health as well as his bank accounts.” Together with her sister, Eliza, Griffiths relieved the Douglasses of an enormous financial burden by purchasing the mortgage of the family home. White Rochester was scandalized when Griffiths moved into the Douglass home, an arrangement that spawned rumors of a romantic link between patron and orator. It is alleged that she moved out when Anna “ordered it.”

 

That Griffiths loved Douglass is clear on the face of things, but any claim that the two carried on a sexual relationship right under Anna’s nose seems far-fetched. The eccentric German intellectual Ottilie Assing was another matter. She wandered into the Douglasses’ lives in 1856, seeking permission to translate his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, into German. She remained in the family orbit for nearly three decades, serving as confidante and interlocutor – and lover. Douglass frequented her rooms in Hoboken, N.J., where the participants of her salon lionized him, validating his rise from slavery into the thinking classes. Assing shielded him when he was on the run from conspiracy charges in connection with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, when he came within a hairbreadth of being captured and marched to the gallows with his revolutionary friend.

 

That Assing was obsessed with the famous orator would have been readily apparent to Anna during the interloper’s frequent intrusion on the family home, where she lived for months at a time. We know nothing of Anna’s feelings on the matter – but the triangle of Frederick, Anna and the love-struck Ottilie comes through like the plot of an Edith Wharton novel. At different points, Assing referred to Anna as a “veritable beast” who kept her from her beloved Frederick, and as the “border state” that prevented her from advancing toward her heart’s true goal. As Blight writes, “Although Assing sipped tea occasionally with Mrs. Douglass, she held Anna in utter contempt, disrespecting her lack of education and even at times privately denigrating her role as homemaker.” The amorous German lingered in Douglass’s circle year after year, waiting in vain for the divorce that would allow her to “walk tall as the rightful ‘Mrs. Douglass.’”

 

By the time Anna died in 1882, Assing was bitterly aware that the aging orator intended to marry Helen Pitts, a well-educated white woman in her 40s, who worked for Douglass in the recorder of deeds office in Washington. The nearly 66-year-old Douglass held the plan secret even from his children, with whom he also worked daily, and who seem to have learned of the marriage from press inquiries. He failed to notify his faithful British friend Julia, who received the news secondhand from friends in Rochester. Gracious as usual, she wished the newlyweds well and hoped that the union would give him “true happiness” in the evening of his days. Later that year, Assing killed herself in a Paris park – drinking potassium cyanide – leaving her beloved a tidy sum in her will.

 

* 

“Shooting all night.” 

John Bidwell helps organize and lead a wagon train up the trail to Oregon; but many of the members of the party, including Bidwell, plan to turn off at some point and head for California. 

They run into the usual troubles, and after they cut across the bleak stretches of Nevada, barely make it. Bidwell and 33 others do. “I am satisfied that an immense emigration will soon swarm to this country. It is an object I much desire …to have this country inhabited by Americans.” 

Seven year later, California will still have a population of only 14,000, a mix of Anglos and Hispanics. 

In the seven years, 1841 to 1848, National Geographic estimates that only 2,735 people followed the “California Trail,” blazed by Bidwell and his party. Travel time was 16-22 weeks, with supplies costing $100 to $200. Bidwell’s party included missionaries heading for Oregon, to preach Christianity to the Flathead Indians. Fortunately for him, they had hired Thomas Fitzpatrick, the legendary mountain man, called “Broken Hand” by the natives, to guide them. In his diary, Bidwell speaks of immense herds of buffalo, almost overwhelming the travelers along the Platte. On one occasion, he wrote, “We sat up all night shooting at them to keep them from running over us.” 

Rufus B. Sage, who traveled west that year remembered one day in particular: “Raising camp at daylight we resumed our way, and soon afterwards arrived opposite the ‘Chimney’ …. how came such an immense pile so singularly situated? What causes united their aid to throw up this lone column, so majestic in its solitude, to overlook the vast and unbroken plains that surrounded it?” 

Chimney Rock to pioneers. Natives called it Elk's Penis.

Later, Sage, decided to climb Independence Rock in present-day Wyoming. “I went to the rock for the purpose of recording my name with the swollen catalog of others traced upon its sides; but, having glanced over the strange medley, I became disgusted, and, turning away, resolved, ‘If there remains no other mode of immortalizing myself, I’ll be content to descend to the grave unhonored and unsung.’” 

On August 11, the party divided at Soda Springs, most taking the right fork of the trail for Oregon. The Bidwell group cut across the barren stretches of Nevada in September, abandoning wagons and belongings as they went. 

On October 22, he wrote in his diary, “Killed the last ox – let this speak for our situation and future prospects.” 

Nevada - scene from Highway 50: "The Loneliest Highway in America."
(author's collection from a bicycle ride across the USA).

He and the others reached California in November. “Our journey at an end….after six months we had now arrived,” he wrote. Bidwell went on to fight in the Mexican War, serving under John Fremont. He eventually acquired a huge ranch at Chico, won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and ran unsuccessfully for governor of California. 

In 1892 he ran for president on the Prohibition Party ticket. (National Geographic: September 2000.)