__________
“Slavery is not a matter of little importance. It overshadows every other question in which we are interested.”
Abraham Lincoln
__________
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In 1858, drinking milk could kill you. Photo found online. |
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
June 16: In a speech in Springfield, Illinois,
Abraham Lincoln offers stark warning. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act
had not ended the bitter debates over slavery. That act and others had made the
situation worse.
We are now far into the fifth year,
since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise,
of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy,
that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly
augmented.
In my opinion,
it will not cease, until a crisis shall have
been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot
stand.”
I believe this government cannot
endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved –
I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect
it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one
thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of
slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public
mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will
push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the
States, old as well as new – North as
well as South.
 |
Carving of Stephen Douglas. |
*
July 10: Lincoln gives a speech
in Chicago, putting distance between himself and
Stephen A. Douglas, between his party and the Democrats. His opponents believe
the Declaration of Independence is meant only for men of Anglo-Saxon descent.
Lincoln believed that the Declaration
represented a set of principles that transcended time, space, and ethnicity.
His expansive reading of the Declaration held that the Founding Fathers
intended for the proposition that “all men are created equal” to apply to all men, including those of African
descent. As Lincoln stated in his July 10 speech at Chicago, this assertion of
equality was “the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of
patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic
hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the
world.” The Declaration had established a moral standard for the republic that
should be color-blind, as Lincoln urged his audience in Chicago to “discard all
this quibbling about this man and the other man – this race and that race and
the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior
position – discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all
these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once
more stand up declaring all men are created equal.”
*
Illinois to Become an “African
Colony.”
July 16: Douglas speaks at
Bloomington, Illinois, taking his cue from Lincoln’s comments regarding the
Declaration of Independence.
Given Lincoln’s beliefs,
Douglas claimed that the new senator’s first order of business would be to
repeal the measure that prohibited African Americans from settling in Illinois.
The state would thus be transformed into an “African colony,” and the “charming
prairies” would “look black as night” during the middle of the day. Douglas
speculated that once Lincoln had gathered “all his colored brethren around him,”
he would proceed to remove all legal restrictions that had been placed upon
them and it would only be a matter of time before they were voting, holding
office, sitting on juries, and perhaps most troubling of all, “marry[ing] whom
they please, provided they marry their equals.”
He went on to assure his audience that the Founding Fathers had never meant to include “Chinese or Coolies, the Indians, the Japanese, or any other inferior races,” under the umbrella of the Declaration.
Instead, they “were speaking only of the white race, and
never dreamed that their language would be construed to include the negro.”
*
“Swallow
every greasy nigger.”
Lincoln-Douglas Debates: As imperfect as Lincoln’s positions regarding race might sound to modern ears – he thought colonizing freed blacks in Africa might be a good idea – he was boxed in by Douglas’ attacks.
He tried to clarify accordingly.
Throughout
the campaign Lincoln denied that he was in favor of elevating African Americans
to a position of social and political equality. Instead, he drew a distinction
between natural rights and civil rights. Though African Americans were entitled
to natural rights, such as the rights to life and liberty enumerated in the
Declaration, Lincoln reasoned that it did not necessarily follow that they
should be allowed to vote, hold office, or intermarry with white persons. As he
claimed on numerous occasions, “I protest, now and forever, against the
counterfeit logic which presumes that because I do not want a negro woman for a
slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.”
The
attacks on Lincoln only increased after Frederick Douglass praised the
candidate in an address. Racism in that era was never hidden, but rather accepted
and expected. The State Register ran one article under the title,
“Another Ally of Lincoln – The Nigger Chief Out for Him.”
Really,
much of what came out of Stephen Douglas’ mouth and out of newspapers that
supported him during the debates is gag-worthy. The Register warned that Lincoln and the Republicans were willing to “swallow every
greasy nigger that comes along.” Lincoln had taken “a nigger to his bosom.” The
Republicans had “a perfect right to employ darkey lecturers,” editors agreed, adding
mockingly, that they were “all right on
the great question of wool.”
Senator Douglas reminded the crowd at the
second debate in Freeport that when he last spoke there, Frederick Douglass had
been in the audience, sitting in a carriage with a white woman.
He warned that Lincoln, if elected, would be “the
champion of black men.”
A member of the audience then shouted: “What
have you got to say against it?” Douglas replied: “All I have to say on that
subject is that those of you who believe that the nigger is your equal and
ought to be on an equality with you socially, politically, and legally, have a
right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.”
To be honest, I couldn’t stand much more of the language and logic on display in that otherwise excellent article.
Let’s just say that for his time and place, Abraham Lincoln was far ahead of most Americans in regard to matters of race. (See: March 4, 1861.)
Lincoln once said that his “ancient faith” taught him “that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”
He also explained his
thinking this way: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This
expresses my idea of democracy.” (Both quotes cited by John Meacham, Time,
pp. 43-46, 10/31/22.)
*
History.com
summarizes the views of Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, regarding race,
like so:
Douglas repeatedly attacked
Lincoln’s supposed radical views on race, claiming his opponent would not only
grant citizenship rights to freed slaves but allow Black men to marry white
women (an idea that horrified many white Americans) and that his views would
put the nation on an inevitable path to war. Lincoln responded that he had “no
purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the
Black races” and that “a physical difference between the two” would likely
prevent them from ever living in “perfect equality.” Though he believed slavery
was morally wrong, Lincoln made it clear that he shared the belief in white
supremacy held by Douglas and nearly all white Americans at the time.
But while Douglas held that the
nation’s founding document had been written by white men, who intended it to
apply only to white men, Lincoln argued that “there is no reason in the world
why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration
of Independence.” Though he assured Southerners he did not plan
to interfere with slavery where it already existed, he argued that the Founding
Fathers – many of whom enslaved people – had regarded the
institution of slavery as a moral evil that must eventually disappear.
WorldAtlas
points out that for Lincoln, the question of slavery was a moral one,
and he looked to the Declaration for guidance.
*
ILLINOIS itself denied the right of people of color to testify in
court against whites. The state taxed everyone for support of
the public schools – but then refused to allow African American children to
attend. Some of the worst state laws had been passed only five years before,
but among other limitations,
African Americans were also legally prevented
from voting, holding office, serving in the militia, and intermarrying with
whites. An 1845 statute required residents of color to file a certificate of
freedom with the county court and post a bond for as much as $1,000 as a surety
of good behavior. Persons who did not have a certificate of freedom were to be
considered fugitives from slavery and treated as such. If the sheriff
apprehended someone who did not possess the requisite papers, he was required
to advertise the person in the newspaper and could hire him/her out for one
year. If the alleged fugitive remained unclaimed at end of the year, he/she was
issued a provisional certificate of freedom.
Frederick
Douglass, the great abolitionist, had been so appalled by the passage of
several of the newer laws that he asked,
What kind of people are the people of Illinois?
Were they born and nursed of women as other people are? Or are they the
offspring of wolves and tigers, and only taught to prey upon all flesh pleasing
to their bloody taste? If they are members of the human family, by what spirit
are they animated? Is it from heaven or is it from hell?
The
Chicago Times endorsed Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, and found pride in
knowing
that Illinois was “known all over the Union as
a State where white people are absolute and supreme” and had enacted measures
to insure “that the State shall for all time to come remain exclusively the
home of the white race.” The Times fully
endorsed Illinois’ policy of reserving “her broad prairies for her white
citizens, her white farmers, laborers and mechanics.” By discouraging blacks
from settling in the state, white residents would not be “crowded and
inconvenienced by an inferior and deteriorated race.” All of this was in
jeopardy, however, because Douglas’s Republican challenger was, in the opinion
of the Times, an “advocate
of negro equality and negro citizenship.” If Lincoln prevailed in the election,
the Times warned
that blacks would overrun the state, “crowd all our cities” and “stifl[e] free
white labor.” A vote for the Republicans would therefore be an act of “self-destruction,”
and Illinois would become known as “the negro State” of the Northwest.
*
September 11: In another one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the future president poses a question: “What constitutes the bulwark of our liberty and independence?”
It wasn’t guns or ships, he argued.
Our
defence is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the
heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have
planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors … Accustomed to trample on
the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own
independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises
among you.
Statewide,
the Republican Party outpolls the Democrats in the Illinois elections. But
Douglas is appointed to the U.S. Senate because the legislature is dominated by the Democratic
Party.
*
MORE PROOF that our ancestors were as violent as we can be:
The Yale man’s habit of carrying
a weapon contributes to a fatal clash. When a group of undergraduates passes
the High Street firehouse, harsh words are exchanged with a firefighter and a
student shoots him. The incident moves Yale to ban weapons – and to contribute
$100 toward relocating the firehouse away from the campus. (See also 1806, 1841,
1854, 1919 and 1959.)
*
__________
“These
philanthropists would be willing to see our nation exterminated, and our
throats cut, because we are pursuing a system of mild domestic slavery.”
A.J. Pickett
__________
A. J. Pickett was a planter in Alabama. In
1851 he wrote a book called History of Alabama: and Incidentally of
Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period. The South’s steamy
culture he wrote was “so destructive of the constitutions of the whites” the
land “could [n]ever have been successfully brought into cultivation without
African labor.” In his view, abolitionists were enemies of progress. “These
philanthropists would be willing to see our nation exterminated, and our
throats cut, because we are pursuing a system of mild domestic slavery,” he
wrote.
He died in October at age 48, two
weeks after purchasing the Figh-Pickett mansion. His wife Sarah lived in the
house for 36 years (story in Smithsonian; September 2020). Two women, Ana
Banks, a descendant of Pickett, the other the descendant of a slave, began a
search together in family records.
Karen Orozco Gutierrez of Davenport,
Iowa, is the great granddaughter of an enslaved man named Milton Howard. He
told his children, and the story was passed down, that he and his family were born
free in Muscatine, Iowa, but kidnapped by slavers and taken South. His first
enslaver was a planter in Alabama named Pickett.
Their search led to records that
showed in 1853, Milton, 2, three adults, five teenagers and seven other
children were transferred from Pickett’s ownership into a trust for the benefit
of his wife. Technically, the slaves no longer belonged to anyone named Pickett
but rather to a trust overseen by a judge. When Milton died in 1928, he was a
celebrity of sorts in Davenport. A front page obituary paid tribute to him as a
Union Army veteran who’d escaped an Alabama plantation and later worked at Rock
Island Arsenal, in Illinois.
The two women eventually located Pickett’s
grave. Karen asked Ana if she would mind her saying a prayer. “Hail Mary, full
of grace,” she began.
It is said that Pickett left the
Baptist church because he liked dancing too much, and became an Episcopalian.
*
AS LATE as mid-century, 60 percent of
deaths reported in New York City were children under age 5.
One culprit was increasingly
clear. In May 1858, a progressive journalist in New York named Frank Leslie
published a 5,000-word exposé denouncing a brutal killer in the metropolis.
Malevolent figures, Leslie wrote, were responsible for what he called “the
wholesale slaughter of the innocents.” He went on, “For the midnight assassin,
we have the rope and the gallows; for the robber the penitentiary; but for
those who murder our children by the thousands we have neither reprobation nor
punishment.” Leslie was railing not against mobsters or drug peddlers but
rather a more surprising nemesis: milk.
Drinking animal milk — a
practice as old as animal domestication itself — has always presented health
risks, from spoilage or by way of infections passed down from the animal. But
the density of industrial cities like New York had made cow’s milk far deadlier
than it was in earlier times. In an age without refrigeration, milk would spoil
in summer months if it was brought in from far-flung pastures in New Jersey or
upstate New York. Increased participation from women in the industrial labor
force meant that more infants and young children were drinking cow’s milk, even
though a significant portion of dairy cows suffered from bovine tuberculosis,
and unprocessed milk from these cows could transmit the bacterium that causes
the disease to human beings. Other potentially fatal illnesses were also linked
to milk, including diphtheria, typhoid and scarlet fever.
How did milk go from being a “liquid
poison” — as Frank Leslie called it — to the icon of health and vitality that
it became in the 20th century? The obvious answer begins in 1854, when a young
Louis Pasteur took a job at the University of Lille in the northern corner of
France, just west of the French-Belgian border. Sparked by conversations with
winemakers and distillery managers in the region, Pasteur became interested in
the question of why certain foods and liquids spoiled. Examining samples of a spoiled
beetroot alcohol under a microscope, Pasteur was able to detect not only the
yeast organisms responsible for fermentation but also a rod-shaped entity — a
bacterium now called Acetobacter aceti — that converts ethanol into acetic
acid, the ingredient that gives vinegar its sour taste. These initial
observations convinced Pasteur that the mysterious changes of both fermentation
and spoilage were not a result of spontaneous generation but rather were a
byproduct of living microbes, and that insight, which would eventually help
provide the foundation of the germ theory of disease, led Pasteur to experiment
with different techniques for killing those microbes before they could cause
any harm. By 1865, Pasteur, now a professor at the École Normal Supérieure in
Paris, had hit upon the technique that would ultimately bear his name: By
heating wine to around 130 degrees Fahrenheit and then quickly cooling it, he
could kill many of the bacteria within, and in doing so prevent the wine from
spoiling without substantially affecting its flavor. And it is that technique,
applied to milk all around the world, that now saves countless people from
dying of disease every single day. (See: 1892.)
*
EARLY SETTLERS in California were dedicated to what one government agent, in 1858, called the “great cause of civilization, which, in the natural course of things, must exterminate Indians.” 500/27
