Category: History

“They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

— Christopher Columbus writing in his log upon meeting the Arawaks.

With 2,000 U.S. soldiers in pursuit, Chief Joseph led fewer than 300 Nez Percé Indians towards freedom at the Canadian border. For over three months, the Nez Percé outmaneuvered and battled their pursuers traveling over 1,000 miles across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. On October 5, 1877, Chief Joseph, exhausted and disheartened, surrendered in the Bear Paw mountains of Montana, 40 miles south of Canada.

Library of Congress

Surrendering to Gen. Nelson Miles 132 years ago today, Joseph spoke:

I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say “Yes” or “No.” He who led the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Today is the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Cal Berkeley. The protest was not about civil rights or the war in Vietnam. It was simply about the right for political action on campus (fundraising and membership drives, for example).

An excerpt from a good, brief history at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

At 10 a.m. on this day, they set up tables on the steps of Sproul Plaza. Fifteen minutes before noon, police went up to a guy manning one of the CORE tables. A former math grad student, he refused to identify himself or leave, and so the police arrested him [for] trespassing. He went limp. They brought in a police car to remove him (Jack Weinberg), but by now there was a huge crowd, which had gathered for the publicized noon rally. Nearly 200 students surrounded the car that the police had stuck Weinberg into, and they chanted, “Release him! Release him!” Dozens lay down in front of the squadron car and dozens more sat behind the car so that it could not move. For 32 hours, Jack Weinberg stayed inside that police car, surrounded by demonstrators. People fed him sandwiches and handed him milk through a rolled-down window of the police car.

The crowd grew to 7,000 and the number of police 500, but it was all over — peacefully ended — by the next evening.

We tend to think in terms of decades, but “The Sixties” began in 1964.

Photo from F S M.

The much disputed Warren Commission Report was issued on this date in 1964. According to the report, the bullets that killed President Kennedy and injured Texas Governor John Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald in three shots from a rifle pointed out of a sixth floor window in the Texas School Book Depository.

The Warren Commission was chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, former Governor of California. It included Senators Richard B. Russell and John Sherman Cooper, House Members Hale Boggs and Gerald R. Ford, and two private citizens with extensive government service, Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy.

On this date in 1862 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation, in effect threatening the rebellious states:

“That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

Reknowned Civil War historian James M. McPherson provides us this background in the Reader’s Companion to American History:

Most Republicans had become convinced by 1862 that the war against a slaveholders’ rebellion must become a war against slavery itself, and they put increasing pressure on Lincoln to proclaim an emancipation policy. This would have comported with Lincoln’s personal convictions, but as president he felt compelled to balance these convictions against the danger of alienating half of the Union constituency. By the summer of 1862, however, it was clear that he risked alienating the Republican half of his constituency if he did not act against slavery.

Moreover, the war was going badly for the Union. After a string of military victories in the early months of 1862, Northern armies suffered demoralizing reverses in July and August. The argument that emancipation was a military necessity became increasingly persuasive. It would weaken the Confederacy and correspondingly strengthen the Union by siphoning off part of the Southern labor force and adding this manpower to the Northern side. In July 1862 Congress enacted two laws based on this premise: a second confiscation act that freed slaves of persons who had engaged in rebellion against the United States, and a militia act that empowered the president to use freed slaves in the army in any capacity he saw fit—even as soldiers.

By this time Lincoln had decided on an even more dramatic measure: a proclamation issued as commander in chief freeing all slaves in states waging war against the Union. As he told a member of his cabinet, emancipation had become “a military necessity…. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued…. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.” The cabinet agreed, but Secretary of State William H. Seward persuaded Lincoln to withhold the proclamation until a major Union military victory could give it added force. Lincoln used the delay to help prepare conservative opinion for what was coming.

The battle at Antietam on September 17, which while not a decisive Union victory, had forced the Confederate army to retreat into Virginia. It gave Lincoln the emphasis he needed.

The Emancipation Proclamation itself was issued on January 1, 1863. Like this Preliminary Proclamation, it abolished slavery only in those places outside Union control (that is, the Confederacy).

It was the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery in the United States. It was ratified in December 1865.

The Congress of the United States abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia on this date in 1850 as part of the so-called Compromise of 1850.

Slavery itself continued in the capital of the United States until April 1862.

222 years ago today the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document and send it to the 13 states for ratification. In Gouverneur Morris’s immortal preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Click image for larger version of Mike Wilkins’s Preamble, 1987, painted metal on vinyl and wood, 96 x 96 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A. Wilkins ordered the plates from each of the states.

… was formed 101 years ago today.

A nice run while it lasted.

Poynter.org has a gallery of front pages from September 11 and 12, 2001.

California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state 159 years ago today (1850).

Admission of California as a free state (that is, no slavery) was the first in the series of five measures known as the Compromise of 1850.

The second measure organized the New Mexico Territory (which included present-day Arizona), settled the Texas-New Mexico boundary, and paid Texas $10 million to abandon its claims in New Mexico (everything east of the Rio Grande). The act also stated: “That, when admitted as a State, the said territory, or any portion of the same, shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission.” In other words, slavery in New Mexico would be decided by the people of New Mexico. This became known as “popular sovereignty.”

The third measure was the organization of the Utah Territory (which included Nevada and western Colorado) with an identical provision about slavery.

The fourth was a revised Fugitive Slave Act, amending the law passed in 1793. This act set up commissioners authorized to issue warrants for fugitives and order their return. The commissioners were to receive $10 when the person apprehended was a fugitive slave. They were to receive $5 when they decided he/she was a free person. Fugitives claiming to be freedmen were denied a trial by jury and their testimony was not to be evidence in any of the proceedings under the law. Citizens aiding fugitives could be fined or imprisoned.

The fifth measure was the abolition of the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia.

Like most political compromises, there was more for each side to dislike than to like. Slave states disliked California’s admission as a free state. And they disliked the end of the slave trade in D.C., not because it was important but because it demonstrated federal power over any aspect of slavery. Many northerners objected to the Fugitive Slave Act; and many violated it.

And, of course, slavery in the territories became the prime issue of the 1850s, the election of 1860, and coming of the Civil War.

Before August 17, 1896, Americans had little interest in Alaska, a far off “district”—not even a territory—full of wolves and ice and forests. That attitude started to change [113] years ago today, when a Tagish Indian known as Skookum Jim spotted something shimmering among the stones in a creek near the Yukon River. The Klondike Gold Rush began as soon as news of the discovery reached the states, and between 1897 and 1899 1 in every 700 Americans abandoned home and set out for the “Golden River.”

There’s more at American Heritage, including this nugget: “At a time when workers were lucky to make 10 cents an hour, gold was worth $17 an ounce.”

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary accepted its first prisoners 75 years ago today.

Alcatraz is a 22-acre rock island in San Francisco Bay, 1½ miles from shore. For 29 years the federal prison system kept its highest security prisoners there, including Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and the famous Birdman, Robert Stroud (played by Burt Lancaster in the film Birdman of Alcatraz). Reportedly, no one was ever known to have successfully escaped from Alcatraz, though Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers were never found after their attempt (as dramatized in the Clint Eastwood movie).

From 1868 to 1934, Alcatraz was a military prison. In 1969, American Indian activists occupied and claimed the island. Their occupation lasted 19 months.

Alcatraz Island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area of the National Park Service in 1972.

Alcatraz, from the original Spanish Alcatraces, is usually defined as meaning “pelican” or “strange bird.”

Click photo to enlarge.

— and last? — nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on this date in 1945.

The BBC provides some facts (the first two are as reported at the time of the bombing):

The bomb was dropped by parachute from an American B29 Bomber at 1102 local time.

It exploded about 1,625 ft (500m) above the ground and is believed to have completely destroyed the city, which is situated on the western side of the Japanese island of Kyushu.

About 30% of Nagasaki, including almost all the industrial district was destroyed by the bomb and nearly 150,000 people were killed or injured.

The bomb, nick-named “Fat Man” in a reference to Winston Churchill, measured just under 3.5m (11ft 4in) in length, had the power of 22 kilotons of TNT and weighed 4,050kg (9,000lbs).

Residents of both cities are still suffering the physical and mental consequences of radiation to this day.

On 14 August Japan surrendered to the Allies.

… won the fourth of his four Olympic gold medals on this date in 1936. In Berlin, Owens won gold for the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump and — on August 9th — the leadoff leg of the 400 meter relay (a world record that lasted for 20 years).

Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States and Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumed the office as the 38th President.

Click to enlarge.

Click to hear a sound bite from this date in history, August 8th. [33k WAV file]

Intelligent Life took a poll of readers. The top years:

1439
5 BCE
1953
1945
1776

See the article for the next five and the discussion.

The first federal income tax was imposed on this date in 1861. It was 3% on all income above $800. The following July a $600 deduction was established and a second bracket was added, taxing income above $10,000 at 5%. The first withholding also began in 1862.

This Civil War income tax was abolished in 1872 — and direct taxes were ruled unconstitutional when attempted again in 1894. The 16th amendment (ratified in 1913) made direct taxes on individuals constitutional.