Category: History

Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.

Best line of the day

“What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

Ulysses S. Grant writing in his Memoirs about the surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Grant’s Nicknames

Hiram Ulysses Grant was born on this date in 1822.

In 1839, his Ohio congressman nominated him for the U.S. Military Academy, but mistakenly as Ulysses S. Grant. The cadet simply adopted the name. Because his new initials were U.S., the same as those of Uncle Sam, Grant was nicknamed Sam in the Army.

The name U.S. Grant took on a whole new meaning in 1862 however.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY IN THE FIELD
Camp near Fort Donelson
February 16, 1862.
 
General S. B. BUCKNER,
Confederate Army.

     SIR: Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
U.S. GRANT,
Brigadier-General, Commanding.
 

From then the U.S. in U.S. Grant stood for Unconditional Surrender.

Most historically correct line of the day

“Anyhow, the real reason for the electoral college wasn’t all that high-minded guff about voter information, or even some noble desire to protect small states. It was to enhance the power of slaveowners.”

Hendrik Hertzberg in a discussion of the National Popular Vote plan. Until today I believed we should leave the electoral college alone. Hertzberg’s little essay convinced me differently.

Constitutional scholars (and brothers) Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar have made all the arguments. You can find links to their work (via Hertzberg) at FindLaw’s Writ | Akhil Amar and Vikram Amar. Scroll about half way down.

But read Hertzberg first.

The Worst Hard Time

Two years ago today NewMexiKen posted a review of The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (quoted earlier today). Like Rabbit Proof Fence, I thought it was worth bringing to your attention again.

Egan’s book is subtitled The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Centered around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas, and particularly Boise City, Oklahoma, and Dalhart, Texas, Egan tells a half-dozen personal stories from the greatest environmental disaster in American history.

It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to another— all have come and gone through the southern plains. But nothing has matched the black blizzards. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.

And the worst of it was man made.

But it’s the stories of the people where Egan excels; of lost jobs, lost farms, lost children, and lost hope. Even in the years before the drought and dust, life was tough.

In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel’s first job. She had to be there before the bell rang — five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way — to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. … After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day’s kindling — dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that — a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike’s mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground.

Egan’s book won the National Book Award.

The Boston Massacre

On this date in 1770 —

It began when a young barber’s apprentice by the name of Edward Garrick shouted an insult at Hugh White, a soldier of the 29th Regiment on sentry duty in front of the Customs House (a symbol of royal authority). White gave the apprentice a knock on the ear with the butt of his rifle. The boy howled for help, and returned with a sizable and unruly crowd, cheifly boys and youths, and, pointing at White, said, “There’s the son of a bitch that knocked me down!” Someone rang the bells in a nearby church. This action drew more people into the street. The sentry found himself confronting an angry mob. He stood his ground and called for the main guard. Six men, led by a corporal, responded. They were soon joined by the officer on duty, Captain John Preston of the “29th,” with guns unloaded but with fixed bayonets, to White’s relief.

The crowd soon swelled to almost 400 men. They began pelting the soldiers with snowballs and chunks of ice. Led by a huge mulatto, Crispus Attucks, they surged to within inches of the fixed bayonets and dared the soldiers to fire. The soldiers loaded their guns, but the crowd, far from drawing back, came close, calling out, “Come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not,” and striking at the soldiers with clubs and a cutlass.

Whereupon the soldiers fired, killing three men outright and mortally wounding two others. The mob fled. As the gunsmoke cleared, Crispus Attucks (left) and four others lay dead or dying. Six more men were wounded but survived.

Excerpt from the Boston Massacre Historical Society, which has a wonderful web site with everything about the “Massacre.”

Attorney John Adams defended the soldiers at trial. Captain Preston and six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter and branded on the thumb.

March 4th ought to be a national holiday

The Constitution went into effect 220 years ago today.

Legendary Notre Dame football player and coach Knute Rockne was born on March 4th in 1888. He died in a plane crash at age 43 in 1931.

Rockne always said that every play, if perfectly carried out, would go for a touchdown from wherever it was started. His last two teams usually started their scoring with long runs from scrimmage.

In coaching he tried always for perfection and spent hours in teaching the art of blocking. Simple plays, well executed, were his idea of the way to win football games. He had small use for any so-called trick plays. There were only seven places in a line to send a man with a ball, he said, and there ought not to be many more than seven plays.
. . .

Perhaps his greatest teams came in 1920, 1924, 1929 and 1930. On the first was George Gipp, who was named by Rockne as the greatest player he ever had. The coach told the story of seeing Gipp, who was not trying for the team, throwing a ball and kicking on the campus and of inducing him to join the squad. Gipp died a few weeks after the close of the 1920 season of a throat infection, with Rockne at his bedside.

The 1924 team was the one of the famous Four Horsemen, Harry Stuhldreher, Jimmy Crowley, Don Miller and Elmer Layden. As a combination, they have not been excelled in modern back fields and they had a great line in front of them, led by the famous Adam Walsh at centre, who is now assisting with the coaching at Yale. That team of the Four Horsemen won all over the country, beating Princeton at Princeton with a temperature of 10 above zero, and several weeks later journeying to the Coast to defeat Stanford in a temperature of 70 degrees.

The New York Times

Patricia Heaton of ”Everybody Loves Raymond” is 51.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, is 44.

Sonny and Cher’s daughter Chastity is 40.

Famed bridge expert Charles Goren was born on March 4th in 1901.

The United States Department of the Interior

Department of the Interior… was established 160 years ago today.

The idea of setting up a separate department to handle domestic matters was put forward on numerous occasions. It wasn’t until March 3, 1849, the last day of the 30th Congress, that a bill was passed to create the Department of the Interior to take charge of the Nation’s internal affairs.

The Interior Department had a wide range of responsibilities entrusted to it: the construction of the national capital’s water system, the colonization of freed slaves in Haiti, exploration of western wilderness, oversight of the District of Columbia jail, regulation of territorial governments, management of hospitals and universities, management of public parks,and the basic responsibilities for Indians, public lands, patents, and pensions. In one way or another all of these had to do with the internal development of the Nation or the welfare of its people.

U.S. Department of the Interior

The first Interior Building, 1852 -1917, was later known as the Patent Office building, and today is home to the Smithsonian Institution’s Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art.

Interior manages 507 million acres of surface land, or about one-fifth of the land in the United States, including:

  • 262 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management
  • 95 million acres managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service
  • 84 million acres managed by the National Park Service
  • 56 million acres managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs
  • 8.6 million acres managed by the Bureau of Reclamation

The Star Spangled Banner

Star-Spangled Banner … became the official national anthem of the United States on this date in 1931. You know what that means? For 155 years is was not the official national anthem. For just 78 years it has been. We could change it. It isn’t etched in granite.

The first (of four) verses:

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Who wants a national anthem that glorifies war?

And another thing singers, it’s an anthem, not a ballad, not a salsa number, not a rap. It’s an anthem, “a solemn patriotic song officially adopted by a country as an expression of national identity.”

Good Riddance

New Mexico dumped Arizona on this date in 1863 when the Arizona Territory was established.

In 1861, after March conventions in Mesilla and Tucson, the southern portion of New Mexico Territory followed the lead of the southern states and attempted to withdraw from the Union. The Confederate congress approved in 1862. While all this had no legal meaning in the United States, it probably did influence the decision to create the real Arizona Territory by February 24th the next year.

The Confederate Arizona Territory consisted of the bottom half of both present-day states (dividing the two at 34ºN). The U.S. Arizona Territory in 1863 made the division along the north-south border we have today (dividing at 109º 2′ 59.25″W). Too bad. With the Confederate division New Mexico could have been the Grand Canyon State and Arizona could have had the Deming Duck Race.

The capital of the Confederate Arizona Territory was in Mesilla (near present-day Las Cruces).

Impeached

The House of Representatives voted 126-47 to impeach President Andrew Johnson on this date in 1868. The New York Times report on the vote begins:

The first act in the great civil drama of the nineteenth century is concluded. Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, stands impeached of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It is of no use to argue whether his acts were right or wrong, whether the law he violated is constitutional or otherwise, or whether it is good or bad policy to proceed to this extreme. The House of Representatives, with a full realization of all the possible consequences, has solemnly decided that he shall be held to account in the manner prescribed by the Constitution for his alleged misdemeanors, and, be the result what it may, the issue is made. It must be met without delay, and the first step is already complete.

As the War ended in 1865, there were essentially two different approaches to Reconstruction. The first, shared by Lincoln and Johnson, was that the southern states had not left the Union. There had simply been a rebellion by their citizens. The Union’s purpose in the war had been to end the rebellion, replace the southern leaders and restore the state governments, albeit with freedom for all, black and white. The second approach took the view that the south was a conquered nation to be governed by the federal government. This view was held by many Republicans in Congress.

Continue reading Impeached

The Father of Our Country

To describe George Washington as enigmatic may strike some as strange, for every young student knows about him (or did when students could be counted on to know anything). He was born into a minor family in Virginia’s plantation gentry, worked as a surveyor in the West as a young man, was a hero of sorts during the French and Indian War, became an extremely wealthy planter (after marrying a rich widow), served as commander in chief of the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War (including the terrible winter at Valley Forge), defeated the British at the Battle of Yorktown, suppressed a threatened mutiny by his officers at Newburgh, N.Y., then astonished the world and won its applause by laying down his sword in 1783. Called out of retirement, he presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, reluctantly accepted the presidency in 1789 and served for two terms, thus assuring the success of the American experiment in self-government.
…

Washington was, after all, a magnificent physical specimen. He towered several inches over six feet, had broad shoulders and slender hips (in a nation consisting mainly of short, fat people), was powerful and a superb athlete. He carried himself with a dignity that astonished; when she first laid eyes on him Abigail Adams, a veteran of receptions at royal courts and a difficult woman to impress, gushed like a schoolgirl. On horseback he rode with a presence that declared him the commander in chief even if he had not been in uniform.

Other characteristics smack of the supernatural. He was impervious to gunfire. Repeatedly, he was caught in cross-fires and yet no bullet ever touched him. In a 1754 letter to his brother he wrote that “I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the Sound.” During the Revolutionary War he had horses shot from under him but it seemed that no bullet dared strike him personally. Moreover, when the Continental Army was ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, Washington, having had the disease as a youngster, proved to be as immune to it as he was to bullets.

— Forrest McDonald in his review of Joseph J. Ellis’ His Excellency: George Washington.

Treaty of Amity, Settlement, and Limits Between the United States of America and His Catholic Majesty

The Adams Onis Treaty was concluded 190 years ago today (1819). It ceded Florida to the United States and settled, after nearly 16 years, the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase.

His Catholic Majesty [Spain] cedes to the United States, in full property and sovereignty, all the territories which belong to him, situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the name of East and West Florida.

The boundary-line between the two countries, west of the Mississippi, shall begin on the Gulph of Mexico, at the mouth of the river Sabine, in the sea, continuing north, along the western bank of that river, to the 32d degree of latitude; thence, by a line due north, to the degree of latitude where it strikes the Rio Roxo of Nachitoches, or Red River; then following the course of the Rio Roxo westward, to the degree of longitude 100 west from London and 23 from Washington; then, crossing the said Red River, and running thence, by a line due north, to the river Arkansas; thence, following the course of the southern bank of the Arkansas, to its source, in latitude 42 north; and thence, by that parallel of latitude, to the South Sea [Pacific].

The Avalon Project has the complete text of the Treaty. The Adams in the Treaty short name is Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

131 years ago today

Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph and ultimately music changed forever.

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape…This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, “Mary had a little lamb.” To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him. …
It didn't look much like an iPod

The invention was highly original. The only other recorded evidence of such an invention was in a paper by French scientist Charles Cros, written on April 18, 1877. There were some differences, however, between the two men’s ideas, and Cros’s work remained only a theory, since he did not produce a working model of it.

Source: Library of Congress

It didn’t look much like an iPod. Click image for larger version.

Remember the Maine

On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion destroyed the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor and helped propel the United States into a war with Spain. The USS Maine was in Cuba, officially, on a mission of friendly courtesy and, incidentally, to protect American lives and property in the event that Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain might escalate into full-blown warfare. “Yet,” writes author Tom Miller, “the visit was neither spontaneous nor altruistic; the United States had been eyeing Cuba for almost a century.”

On board the Maine that sultry Tuesday night were 350 crew and officers. Shortly after 9 p.m. the ship’s bugler, C. H. Newton, blew taps. The ship bobbed listlessly, its imposing 100-yard length visible from stem to stern. “At 9:40 p.m.,” writes Miller, “the ship’s forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water. Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption–this one deafening and massive–splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air…. In all, 266 of the 350 men aboard the Maine were killed.”

The American press was quick to point to an external explosion–a mine or torpedo–as the cause of the tragedy. An official U.S. investigation agreed. On April 25, 1898, Congress formally declared war on Spain. By summer’s end, Spain had ceded Cuba, along with the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, to the United States.

In 1976, Adm. Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted yet another investigation into the cause of the Maine disaster. His team of experts found that the ship’s demise was self- inflicted–likely the result of a coal bunker fire. There are those, however, who still maintain that an external blast was to blame. Some people, it seems, just won’t let you forget the Maine.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine, February 1998.

200

Our greatest president was born 200 years ago today. It seems a good reason to read, once again, some of his most meaningful words — read them slowly and meticulously, perhaps almost saying them aloud as he did.

The Address at Gettysburg (November 19, 1863):

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And, from his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865):

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.