1835

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“There are but two parties, … founded in the radical question, whether People or Property shall govern? Democracy implies a government by the people … aristocracy implies a government of the rich.”    

Thomas Hart Benton

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Earlier explorers had been reporting grim conditions beyond the Mississippi. Zebulon Pike suggested that the banks of the Kansas, Platte and Arkansas rivers would “admit of a limited population.” West of Council Bluffs, he warned, the land “is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by people depending on agriculture,” and the region beyond the Rockies was “destined to be the abode of perfect desolation.” 

On maps, the “Great American Desert” appears. It covers most of what is now Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and parts of Texas, Colorado, and South Dakota. 

One geographer declared, “a large part may be likened to the Great Sahara or African Desert. (97/275-276)

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In 1835, “the Governor of Alabama went so far as to demand that New York should turn over to his State for punishment the publisher of the Emancipator, an antislavery paper, on the ground that he had disseminated seditious articles.” (56-343)

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African Americans who are free have voted in North Carolina since 1776. That right is now taken away. The original North Carolina Constitution, written in 1776, did not include race as a qualification for voting. It did, however, restrict the right to hold office to “Protestants” only. A constitutional convention was called for and narrowly adopted in 1835. Changes included relaxing the limitation on office-holding, with all “Christians” henceforth eligible. At least if they owned property. 

The new Constitution still continued a requirement to own property in order to vote or hold office. 

As for people of color, their right to vote was taken away. 

 

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Virginia Eliza Clemm, age 13, marries her cousin, Edgar Allan Poe, age 27.

 

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Whittier publishes the poem,

 

The Hunters of Men 

HAVE ye heard of our hunting, o’er mountain and glen,

      Through cane-brake and forest,—the hunting of men?

      The lords of our land to this hunting have gone,

      As the fox-hunter follows the sound of the horn;

      Hark! the cheer and the hallo! the crack of the whip,

      And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip!

      All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match,

      Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.

      So speed to their hunting, o’er mountain and glen,

      Through cane-brake and forest,—the hunting of men!

 

      Gay luck to our hunters! how nobly they ride

      In the glow of their zeal, and the strength of their pride!

      The priest with his cassock flung back on the wind,

      Just screening the politic statesman behind;

      The saint and the sinner, with cursing and prayer,

      The drunk and the sober, ride merrily there.

      And woman, kind woman, wife, widow, and maid,

      For the good of the hunted, is lending her aid

      Her foot’s in the stirrup, her hand on the rein,

      How blithely she rides to the hunting of men!

 

      Oh, goodly and grand is our hunting to see,

      In this “land of the brave and this home of the free.”

      Priest, warrior, and statesman, from Georgia to Maine,

      All mounting the saddle, all grasping the rein;

      Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin

      Is the curl of his hair and the hue of his skin!

      Woe, now, to the hunted who turns him at bay

      Will our hunters be turned from their purpose and prey?

      Will their hearts fail within them? their nerves tremble, when

      All roughly they ride to the hunting of men?

 

      Ho! alms for our hunters! all weary and faint,

      Wax the curse of the sinner and prayer of the saint.

      The horn is wound faintly, the echoes are still,

      Over cane-brake and river, and forest and hill.

      Haste, alms for our hunters! the hunted once more

      Have turned from their flight with their backs to the shore

      What right have they here in the home of the white,

      Shadowed o’er by our banner of Freedom and Right?

      Ho! alms for the hunters! or never again

      Will they ride in their pomp to the hunting of men!

 

      Alms, alms for our hunters! why will ye delay,

      When their pride and their glory are melting away?

      The parson has turned; for, on charge of his own,

      Who goeth a warfare, or hunting, alone?

      The politic statesman looks back with a sigh,

      There is doubt in his heart, there is fear in his eye.

      Oh, haste, lest that doubting and fear shall prevail,

      And the head of his steed take the place of the tail.

      Oh, haste, ere he leave us! for who will ride then,

      For pleasure or gain, to the hunting of men?

 

As the Gutenberg Project explains, “These lines were written when the orators of the American Colonization Society were demanding that the free blacks should be sent to Africa, and opposing Emancipation unless expatriation followed.” 

So, “woman” in the poem can ride for the “good of the hunted,” on the grounds that in reality they want to kick the freed African Americans out. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I doubt most students have ever seen the Liberian flag, or realize that the capital of the country is Monrovia.

 

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Sen. Thomas Hart Benton sums up the problem he believes lawmakers in Congress must address:  “There are but two parties, … founded in the radical question, whether People or Property shall govern? Democracy implies a government by the people … aristocracy implies a government of the rich.”

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November 29: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife, Mary, dies. The New Yorker had a good review of a book about the poet. In that article, we learn about his background. At fifteen, he had gone off to college, at Bowdoin. 

Even at a young age, he had aspirations: 

“I hardly think Nature designed me for the bar, or the pulpit, or the dissecting-room,” he informed his father. In a subsequent letter, he added, “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature.” This got a predictably lukewarm reception from the elder Longfellow, who had himself trained as a lawyer and doubted whether his son could make a living as a writer. “There is not wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men,” he replied.

 

So a compromise was fashioned, presumably with familial help. Longfellow, who had just graduated from Bowdoin at eighteen, was offered a chair at the college in modern European languages.

 

The fruits of nepotism did not end with the gig itself. To prepare his son for the job, Stephen Longfellow stepped up to finance a lengthy trip to Europe. Henry crossed the Atlantic in 1826 and made his way straight to Paris, where he procured a claret-colored waistcoat and various other dandyish accessories. From there he travelled to Spain, Italy, and Germany. He spent more than three years abroad, assuring his increasingly skeptical parents that he was learning loads. … he returned home in 1829 with a remarkable command of French, Italian, and Spanish. …

 

Longfellow was bored at Bowdoin, where he taught for the next six years. He cranked out textbooks on French and Italian grammar and despised his life in the sticks. “I suppose you think I am dead,” he wrote to a friend. “But it is not so; I am only buried – in Brunswick.”

 

In 1835, he was offered a job teaching modern languages at Harvard, a far more exciting prospect. By that point, he had married Mary Potter; but he would need to return to Europe to polish his German. The young couple made the journey. Mary was pregnant, miscarried, and died of infection. 

Her final plea to her husband: “Henry, do not forget me.” 

As James Marcus writes, the grieving widower “numbly went about his appointed task, vacuuming up more languages (he came to know fifteen).” 

“There are wounds which are never entirely healed,” Longfellow himself wrote his sister-in-law.

 

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December 28-31: Ridpath offers up this less-than-sympathetic telling of the Seminole War:

The difficulty in this case was much more serious and resulted in a bloody war. The question involved was the right of the government to remove the Seminole nation to a new domain beyond the Mississippi. This measure the Indians resisted. In 1835 hostilities broke out and continued with little interruption about four years. The chief of the Seminoles was the famous Osceola, a half-breed of great talents, warlike ambitions and audacity. He, together with Micanopy, another chieftain of the nation, declared that the treaty by which the Seminole lands had been ceded to the government was invalid; that the fathers could only quit-claim their own rights and could not alienate the rights of their descendants.

 

At first these protests were made openly and peaceably to the agents of the government; but General Thompson, who represented the United States, offended at the haughty bearing of Osceola, ordered his arrest and put him in irons. While thus confined the chief dissembled his purpose, gave his assent to the old treaty and was set free. As might have been foreseen, however, he immediately in revenge formed a conspiracy against the whites.

 

In anticipation of difficulties, the government had sent General Clinch to Fort Drane, in the interior of Florida. The Indians gathered in the same vicinity in such numbers as to threaten the post. Major Dade, commandant of a station at the head of Tampa Bay, set out with a hundred and seventeen men to the support of Clinch. For this force the Indians lay in ambush, fell upon them [on December 28], and slaughtered them all except one man. On the same day Osceola made a sudden attack upon the quarters of General Thompson, only fifty yards distant from the garrison, and killed and scalped the General and his nine companions. General Clinch issued from Fort Drane, and on the 31st of December fought a hard battle with the Indians and repulsed them on the Withlacoochee. The whites, however, were obliged to fall back again to Fort Drane. (1219/324)

 

Oddly enough, the picture that accompanies the text, showing the death of General Thompson, is in error.

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Death of Sally Hemings. 

The following details on the life of Sally Hemings come from The New York Times Book Review (10/5/08)

 

The Hemingses of Monticello – begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735, daughter of an African woman and white sea captain; she had at least 12 children, six by an unknown black man, six by John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. Sally Hemings was half-sister of Martha Wayles, Jefferson’s wife (d. 1782).

 

Elizabeth died in 1807, age 72, leaving eight children, more than 30 grandchildren and at least 4 great-grandchildren. “Initially because they were related to Jefferson’s wife and later because of his own connection with Sally Hemings, the family was treated quite differently from other slaves at Monticello. The women worked as house servants, never in the fields, the men as valets, cooks, and skilled craftsmen.  Jefferson paid some of them wages and allowed a few to live in Charlottesville or Richmond and keep their earnings.”

 

“In 1792, at her own request, Jefferson sold Sally’s older sister Mary to Thomas Bell, a local merchant, who lived openly with her and treated their children as his legal family. Three years later, Jefferson allowed their brother Robert to work out an arrangement with a white resident of Richmond to purchase and free him.”  James Hemings followed Jefferson to Paris and studied cuisine. He was to have his freedom – after he trained his replacement; but he later committed suicide.

 

Sally was 14 when she went to Europe and pregnant and only 16 on her return.  Her son Madison later said his mother and father agreed to a “treaty” and that she was the president’s “concubine.”  The sons were Thomas Eston Hemings, after Jefferson’s cousin, James Madison, and William Beverley.  Harriet, 21, and Beverley, 24, were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822.  They passed thereafter as white people.  On his death Jefferson freed Eston and Madison, and three of their relatives – only the four children had survived.  Sally, herself, was allowed to move to Charlottesville, where she lived as a free person until her death in 1835. 

 

Madison Hemings’ sons fought for the North during the Civil War. One died in the hellhole of Andersonville.