1842

 

__________ 

“It can manufacture governors, senators, judges to suit its purpose is as easily as it can manufacture cotton cloth.” 

Theodore Parker.

__________

CHARLES DICKENS, still writing under the name “Boz,” tours the United States and helps popularize the beard, then sometimes called “Boz locks.” 

    Godey’s Lady’s Book is not a fan of the style. A man with hair under his nose was said to have “caught the moustache rabies.” 

    Sarah Hale went on to add, “Persons who carry their faces behind a mask of this sort cannot be supposed to possess clear consciences, for honesty and fair dealing have no motives for any such concealment.” (113/147)

Boz with the moustache rabies.

NOTE TO TEACHERS: In 1973, I had a job interview for a teaching position. I had long hair then; and during the interview, the principal noted, matter-of-factly, “Of course, we don’t allow any facial hair.” 

I replied, “Do you realize you wouldn’t hire Abraham Lincoln to teach government?” 

Yeah. 

I didn’t get the job. 

I assume your students would have comments to make on the topic: What current trends popular with teens, do parents, teachers, and other adults dislike?

The guy who wants to teach - in the Marines, 1970.

The same guy in 1973.

* 

“This class is the controlling one in politics.” 

THEODORE PARKER, a crusading minister of this era, describes the power of the Lowells  and other Massachusetts families: “This class is the controlling one in politics. It mainly enacts the laws of this state and the nation; makes them serve its turn … It can manufacture governors, senators, judges to suit its purpose is as easily as it can manufacture cotton cloth. This class owns the machinery of society … ships, factories, shops, water privileges.”  (Halberstam, Book 491)

* 

“Walking property walked off.” 

THE NEW YORK TIMES has an interesting article on Thomas Smallwood, “The Man Who Named the Underground Railroad.” 

    Thomas Smallwood was a busy man in the summer of 1842. Born into slavery outside Washington, D.C., in 1801, he had largely educated himself and bought his own freedom 11 years before. By day, he ran a shoemaking business from the little house he shared with his wife and four children a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. By night, he was organizing daring, dangerous escapes from slavery — not by ones and twos but by the wagonload — from Washington, Baltimore and the surrounding counties.

 

    He also wrote for anti-slavery publications, and in August 1842, one day, he took up his pen and gave us a name. 

    Addressing in his usual antic style a Washington slaveholder whose “walking property walked off,” as he once put it, Mr. Smallwood told the man, “It was your cruelty to him, that made him disappear by that same ‘under ground rail-road’ or ‘steam balloon,’ about which one of your city constables was swearing so bitterly a few weeks ago, when complaining that the ‘d----d rascals’ got off so, and that no trace of them could be found!”

 

    In a later dispatch, Mr. Smallwood elaborated: The outburst had come from a notorious Baltimore police constable named John Zell, who often collected the rewards paid by slaveholders for returning runaways. There were, of course, no actual underground railroads at the time; Mr. Zell was referring sarcastically to a nonexistent, futuristic means of travel, just as we might quip that a person who suddenly vanished must have been teleported to another city or kidnapped by aliens.

 

    The policeman’s bitter jest would soon have been forgotten – except that Mr. Smallwood seized on it as a backhanded compliment to him and those he was helping to flee north. He began riffing in his columns on this mythical transport system supposedly speeding people out of the clutches of the slaveholders, wielding the phrase with savage mockery. He advised slaveholders bewildered by the disappearance of their enslaved workers to apply at the “office of the underground railroad” in Washington for information on their lost property. He appointed himself “general agent of all the branches of the National Underground Railroad.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: See also: lesson plans and ideas from the Cincinnati Art Museum, based on this famous painting by Charles T. Webber.