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1 TWO PRESIDENTS, EMBODIMENTS OF AMERICAN RACISM

“Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition of racism.” — Lerone Bennett, Jr., FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM (Johnson Publishing, 1999)

1. “Crosseyed people look funny.” — This is the 1st known image of Lincoln, a plate that was exposed in about 1846. Lincoln had a “lazy eye,” and at that early point the Daguerreotypists had not yet learned how to pose their subjects in order to evade the problem of one eye staring off at an angle. This wasn’t just Susan B. Anthony, and Francis Ellingwood Abbot, and Abraham Lincoln, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Galileo Galilei, and Ben Turpin and Marty Feldman. Actually, this is a very general problem, with approximately one person out of every 25 to 50 suffering from some degree of strabismus (termed crossed eyes, lazy eye, turned eye, squint, double vision, floating, wandering, wayward, drifting, truant eyes, wall eyes described as having “one eye in York and the other in Cork”). Strabismus that is congenital, or develops in infancy, can create a brain condition known as amblyopia, in which to some degree the input from an eye are ignored although it is still capable of sight — or at least privileges inputs from the other eye. An article entitled “Was Rembrandt stereoblind?,” outlining research by Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University and colleagues, was published in the September 14, 2004, issue of the _New England Journal of Medicine_. Rembrandt, a prolific painter of self-portraits, producing almost 100 if we include some 20 etchings. Researchers who computer-mapped the direction of his gaze in 36 of these self-depictions discovered that in 35 of the 36 he was depicting himself as having a unilateral strabismus (when one eye looks straight ahead while the other deviates sideways). He would have been, in the popular terminology, considered “crosseyed.” This would have impacted depth perception and may very well offer important information in regard to his painting style. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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According to the black scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr.’s FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM (Johnson Publishing Company, 1999), Abraham Lincoln was fond of the word “nigger” and was constantly telling “darky jokes.” This president’s dream was of a “lily-white America without Native Americans, and Martin Luther Kings.” White scholars, Bennett insists, have “consistently softpedaled” Lincoln’s racism, praising frauds such as his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln is portrayed as not wanting his proclamation to succeed, but instead merely buying time until he could help the slaves out — out of America. His agenda was to use them, then throw them away. His son Robert Todd Lincoln’s pronounced “Negrophobia,” then (he could not bear to be touched by any black servant, or to allow any black servant to ever touch any of his possessions), may be taken to be not an aberration but one of those situations in which a son had taken after his father. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The War between the Presidents

President Lincoln 1809-1865 President Davis 1808-1889

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1637

Samuel Lincoln of Hingham in England settled in Hingham MA.2

2. A book of genealogy I have consulted which traces the lineal descendants of Thomas (sic) Lincoln of Hingham in 1636 makes no mention of any descendant named Abraham, despite the fact that this book traces this man’s line of descendants down to 1895. ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1778

Thomas Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln’s father, not known to be any descendant of Samuel Lincoln of Hingham MA) was born in . HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1782

In this year Thomas Lincoln relocated with his family from Virginia to . ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1786

Thomas Lincoln’s father was killed by native Americans. ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1806

Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks were wed. A daughter, Sarah, would be born 8 months later. ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1808

Thomas Lincoln bought a farm called Sinking Spring near Hodgenville, Kentucky. ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1809

February 12, Sunday: Abraham Lincoln was born in a rustic cabin on Nolan Creek near Hogdenville, Kentucky and Charles Darwin was born on a country estate near Shrewsbury in Shropshire.

The child named Abraham would go on to become revered first as the bravest of frontier Indian-slayers and then as the author of an “emancipation” order in which he purported to have set free all persons whom he had no power to set free while keeping in all persons whom he had the power to keep in slavery — surely one of the most cynical political documents ever produced by the powers of the human mind. The child named Charles would go on to author one of the most inspiring scientific treatises ever produced by the powers of the human mind, on the origin of species, and to be condemned as the creator of a new pseudo-scientific legitimation for the black slavery that as a young man he had seen in brutal practice along the coast of South America — a slavery which, for the remainder of his life in his comfortable home in Down, England, would be giving him recurrent nightmares and attacks of panic.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1 day 12 of 2 M / Rather small meetings & no preachings - Sister E dined with us - In the Afternoon I went to Saml Thurstons & took tea & spent the eveng & my H at brother Davids RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Political Parties Then and Now

ROUND 1 DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICANS FEDERALISTS

Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, 1792 et al. representing the North and commercial interests

Thomas Jefferson, , et al. representing 1796 the South and landowning interests

1817- ’s “factionless” era of good feelings, ho ho ho 1824

ROUND 2A DEMOCRATS NATIONAL REPUBLICANS

John Quincy Adams, , representing the North and the commercial interests, 1828 and in addition the residents of border states

ROUND 2B DEMOCRATS WHIGS

Andrew Jackson, representing the South John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and landowning interests, plus wannabees such as representing the North and the commercial interests, 1832 our small farmers, backwoods go-getters, the “little and residents of border states, and in addition the anti- guy on the make” in general Jackson Democrats

ROUND 3 DEMOCRATS REPUBLICANS

Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward, representing 1856 Northerners, urbanites, business types, factory workers, and (more or less) the abolitionist movement

ROUND 4 DEMOCRATS REPUBLICANS

1932- F.D.R., representing Northeasterners, urbanites, Representing businesspeople, farmers, white-collar 1960 blue-collar workers, Catholics, liberals, and types, Protestants, the “Establishment,” right-to-lifers, assorted ethnics moral majoritarians, and in general, conservatism of the “I’ve got mine, let’s see you try to get yours” stripe.

Our Fearless Leaders

NAME BORN INAUGURATED EX OFFICIO DIED

GEORGE WASHINGTON 1789

1792

JOHN ADAMS 1796 JULY 4, 1826 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NAME BORN INAUGURATED EX OFFICIO DIED

THOMAS JEFFERSON APRIL 13, 1743 1800 DITTO

1804

JAMES MADISON 1808

1812

JAMES MONROE 1816

1820

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 1824

ANDREW JACKSON 1828

1832

MARTIN VAN BUREN 1836

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON 1840

JOHN TYLER 1841

JAMES K. POLK 1844

ZACHARY TAYLOR 1848

FRANKLIN PEIRCE 1852

JAMES BUCHANAN 1856

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1860

1864 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1811

Spring: The Lincolns relocated to a 230-acre farm on Knob Creek in Kentucky ten miles from Sinking Spring. ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1812

A brother of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas, was born but would die in infancy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1815

During this year young Abraham Lincoln attended a log schoolhouse.

James Riley and other sailors were shipwrecked on the African coast at what is now Mauritania, and were made prisoners by a band of Bedouin. A Moroccan trader, Sidi Hamet (Ahmed), would ransom them.3 TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

3. Later on, when Abraham Lincoln would be asked in 1860 what books had influenced him, he would mention the narrative to be written by James Riley, and Riley’s appreciation of this generous unexpected gesture by Sidi Hamet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1816

During this year Abraham Lincoln was able to attend school but briefly.

December: The family of Abraham Lincoln crossed the Ohio River and resettled in the backwoods of Indiana. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1817

February: Abraham Lincoln, age 7, shot a wild turkey but suffered such great remorse that he would never hunt again (except the hunt of human beings known as war, which was just fine). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1818

Young Abraham Lincoln was kicked in the head by a horse and for a brief time was thought to be dead. This may have been the point at which he acquired his extreme facial dimorphism (one side of the face extremely larger than the other side) and a left eye which drifted upward — something which you can see in the early Daguerreotypes before these technological artists became skilled enough to develop poses in which such a problem was accommodated.

October 5, Monday: Nancy Hanks Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln’s mother) died of a “milk sickness.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 5th of 10 M / This Afternoon about One OClock set out for Providence to carry sister Ruth to attend the Meeting of the Yearly Meeting school committee, & by riding in the evening a little while we reached Moses Brown’s in time to spend a good peace with him before bed time. — HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1819

December 2, Thursday: Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas Lincoln, married a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, and became stepfather to her three children. Abraham would develop much more affection for his stepmother than he would ever display for either his birth father or his birth mother. Indeed, while his father lay dying, the son would refuse to visit the father, nor would he make himself available for his father’s funeral. There is no published work of Lincoln in which he ever had anything favorable to say about his father or, for that matter, anything favorable to say about his birth mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Such remarks as he would be willing to put on the record would be quite critical, such as that this couple had done “absolutely nothing” to incite in their offspring any “ambition for education.” —But toward his stepmother Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln at least, he would feel affectionate.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 2nd of 12th M 1819 / Our Meeting was rather larger than common, several came in to sit with us in conformity & recommendation of the General Assembly of this as a day of Thanksgiving. Father Rodman had a few words very appropriate on the occasion, which I thought seasonable & Hannah Dennis was engaged in a very lively gospel testimony & I have no doubt truth was in good measure exalted. — to me it was a season of favor RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1820

From this year into 1824 Alexis de Tocqueville would be living in Metz with his father while attending secondary school and the College Royal (at which he would study rhetoric and philosophy).

Abraham Lincoln also was able to attend school, but only briefly.

Along the lines of James Adair’s 1775 HISTORY OF THE INDIANS ... and Elias Boudinot’s 1816 STAR IN THE WEST, that had featured 10-lost-tribes-of-Israel theories that fueled the doctrines of American Exceptionalism, at about this point Ethan Smith put out his VIEWS OF THE HEBREWS. Many have presumed that this effort, the most exclusively religious of such texts, must have influenced Joseph Smith’s BOOK OF MORMON — but this is problematic. James Fenimore Cooper would rely upon this crap and would feature a 10-tribes theorist in his 1848 novel OAK OPENINGS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1822

Abraham Lincoln was able to attend school for a few months. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1824

Abraham Lincoln did plowing and planting and work for hire for neighbors. He attended school in the fall and winter, borrowing books and reading whenever possible. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1827

Solomon Lincoln, Jr. wrote a History of the Town of Hingham, Plymouth County, that was published in Hingham. An Abraham Lincoln is mentioned in this book who resided in Hingham, but the man of this name is reported to have lived during the 18th Century and is reported to have been a Counsellor of the Massachusetts Commonwealth. He was the son of Enoch and Rachel Fearing Lincoln, not of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1828

January 20, Sunday: Abraham Lincoln’s married sister Sarah died while giving birth.

The Fantasy in C D.934 for violin and piano by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time, in the County Hall, Vienna. The response was mixed and, programmed at the end of a long noon concert, many in the audience had already departed.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 20th of 1st M / Our Morning Meeting was well attended & a solemn impressive one - Our frd D Buffum was engaged in lively good testimony “Boast not thyself of tomorrow for you know not what a day may bring fourth” his communication was remarkably impressive & I dont know when have seen more impression made on the countenances in audience. — Abigail Sherman followed him in short & well approved testimony. — In the Afternoon Father Rodman was engaged in a good testimony & both were favourd Meetings to me Our young frd Francis Lawton took tea & spent the evening with us, his company was pleasant & intersting & I do strongly desire he may make a good useful man in society & the community at large RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

April: Abraham Lincoln and Allen Gentry took a flatboat loaded with farm produce to New Orleans NEW ORLEANS . During the trip they would need to fight off a robbery attack by 7 black men. At New Orleans the 19-year-old would observe a slave auction (racism is not easily dissuaded; southern exposure would do nothing to alter his conviction that black people were naturally inferior to white people).

Martin Harris, remaining convinced despite expert advice that Joseph Smith, Jr. had not lied about his heavy wooden box containing the golden plates he had received from an angel to translate (a box Joseph would allow others to heft but not to look inside), became his scribe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1830

By this point, since the Indiana Supreme Court had decided in 1820 that the 1816 state convention had banned slavery, only three slaves were known still to be present within that State. Because the Illinois constitution of 1818 had, however, allowed for evasive “apprenticeships,” there were still at this point (where, in Macon County, Abraham Lincoln was currently constructing a log cabin) quite a few slaves there — and that would continue to be the situation until 1845.4

March 1, Monday: The Argyll Rooms having been destroyed by fire, the Philharmonic Society gave their initial concert in their new temporary home, the King’s Theater (they would perform at the King’s Theater for the following 38 years).

In Indiana, Thomas Lincoln’s family, including Abraham Lincoln, just turned 21, begin a 200-mile journey to re-settle on uncleared land along the Sangamon River, near Decatur in central Illinois (Abe would make his 1st political speech in order to further the project of general improving of navigation on this river).

December 16, Thursday: Abraham Lincoln, age 21, helped set the value of a stray mare.

4. Shortly after his assassination in April 1865, his admirer Phineas Taylor Barnum would order constructed a replica of this in his American Museum in New-York, for display along with “a playbill of Ford’s Theater picked up in President Lincoln’s box on April 14th.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1831

Abraham Lincoln made a second flatboat trip to New Orleans. His father moved again but Abe didn’t go along with the family this time. Instead he settled in New Salem, Illinois, where he would work as a clerk in the village store and sleep in the back. He was learning basic math, reading William Shakespeare and Robert Burns, and participating in a local debating society. In this year he wrestled a man named Jack Armstrong to a draw.

August 1, Monday: The entire capitalization of New York’s Mohawk and Hudson Rail-Road was paid.

Lewis Cass resigned as governor of the Michigan Territory in order to serve as Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson. He would be a central figure of the Jackson administration’s Indian removal policy.

Approximate date of Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in New Salem, Illinois, where he would work as a clerk in Denton Offut’s village store, sleeping in the back.

John Amy Bird Bell, 14 years of age, was hanged at half-past eleven o’clock for having offed Richard F. Taylor, 13 years of age, the son of a poor tallow-chandler, in a wood by the road, for the sake of nine shillings he was carrying (the equivalent of an unskilled laborer’s weekly wage). At his sentencing, when the judge with the black cloth atop his judicial wig directed that his corpse was to be given over to the surgeons of Rochester for practice in dissection, this young culprit had exhibited some dismay. On March 4th, the victim lad had been sent to Aylesford to collect his father’s weekly parish allowance. On May 11th, his body was found in a ditch and a white horn-handled knife led the authorities to a nearby poorhouse and the Bell family, a father with two sons. The younger of the two brothers, James Bell, required HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE by the constable to search through the pockets of the clothes upon the decayed corpse, confessed that his older brother, John Bell, had waylaid the victim in the wood, and that meanwhile he had kept watch. He said he had received a shilling sixpence as his share of the nine shillings. The older brother then pointed out to the constable the pond at which he had washed the blood off his hands on his way home. He also pointed and said: “That’s where I killed the poor boy,” and added “He is better off than I am now: do not you think he is, sir?” (Thoreau would write, in “Civil Disobedience,” “... If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and....” That would not have been a reference to this Newgate case since it is in a context of honest earning rather than in a context of dishonest theft, although it may have been a reference to the “Tolpuddle Martyrs” who had held out in 1834- 1836 for a week’s wage of ten shillings.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1832

April: Headman Black Hawk was leading his Sac warriors back into Illinois, precipitating a 4-month “Black Hawk War.” At this point, Abraham Lincoln, who had in March become a candidate for the Illinois General Assembly, enlisted in the militia to help fight Sauk and Fox tribesmen and was elected to serve as the Captain of his rifle company. When his company was disbanded, he would re-enlist as a private. His total service would be three months, and he would not participate in a battle. After heavy losses in Wisconsin, the Sac and Fox would agree to remain west of the Mississippi.

August 6, Monday: In the election for the General Assembly in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln failed to win a seat. Soon, the village store in which he was working would go out of business, and he and a partner, William Berry, would purchase another village store in New Salem.

In Providence, Rhode Island, the “Tockwotten house” was offered as a cholera hospital by is owner Moses B. Ives, and conversion of the facility was begun and physicians began to congregate there — but as yet there was no identified local patient who could be there isolated, since those who had been displaying symptoms had already all died.

The last gibbets in England were erected near South Shields for a that took place on this day and at Leicester for a hanging that would take place on the 11th (although the gibbet near South Shields would be removed promptly, the one at Leicester would continue to stand until 1856).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 6th of 8 M / Enoch Breed our Superintendent left the Institution this Morng - on a visit to his relations & friends at Weare, Lydia his wife having gone Several days previous, & Pliny Earl & Saml Gumere on a Tour to the White Mountains which make the house very lonesom & gives it an additional appearance of disertion. — We are however, who remain preserved in the quiet & do not give way to distrust, or a repining disposition RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1833

The failure of the village store in New Salem, Illinois which had been ventured by Abraham Lincoln and a business partner left the partners badly in debt. Lincoln was appointed as Postmaster of New Salem.

Fall:The failed storekeeper Abraham Lincoln, deeply in debt, was appointed as a Deputy County Surveyor for New Salem, Illinois. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

August 4, Monday: Abraham Lincoln, age 24, was elected to the Illinois General Assembly as a member of the Whig party. He would begin to study law.

Barthelemy Theodore, chevalier de Theux de Meylandt replaced Jean Louis Joseph Lebeau as head of government for Belgium. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE John Venn was born at Hull in Yorkshire.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 4 of 8th M 1834 / Joseph Bowne returned from his religious visit to the eastern Quarterly Meeting & attended the Afternoon Meeting in Town yesterday — today he called here at the Institution & sat less than an hour & then returned homeward taking the SteamBoat for NewYork. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE This Afternoon took a pleasant & interesting walk to Moses Browns Bridge with the little girls — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

December: In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, age 24, for the first time encountered a very short (and very white) man named Stephen A. Douglass, age 21, a Democrat. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1835

January: In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s former store partner William Berry died, effectively increasing his debt obligation to $1,000 (that sort of money would have been adequate to purchase outright a couple of nice homes in nice neighborhoods).

August 25, Tuesday: Benjamin Day’s New-York Sun announced that Sir John Herschel, using a remarkable new English telescope seven times more powerful than anything previously devised, had been able to look at the surface of the moon as if he were viewing with the unaided eye from a distance of only one hundred yards. Over the following three days the Sun would be presenting a series of articles, allegedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science (a reputable journal which had some time before suspended publication), detailing Sir John’s alleged sightings, up to and including moon creatures who appeared to be shaped like terrestrial beavers, who were walking upright, carrying their young in their arms, heating their dwellings by fire, etc., etc. In fact Sir John Herschel, eminent British astronomer, indeed had in January 1834 gone to Cape Town on the Cape of Good Hope to try out a new type of powerful telescope. On this day the newspaper was able to print and vend an unprecedented 15,000 copies.

In Illinois, Ann Rutledge, Abraham Lincoln’s love interest, died from fever at the age of 22. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

August 1, Monday: Abraham Lincoln was re-elected to the Illinois General Assembly (by this point he had made himself a leader in the Whig party).

The vote to free the slaves of the British West Indies in five years had been two years before, leaving three years to go.

The case of the two allegedly enslaved women seized in the port of on the previous Saturday morning had been delayed by the fact that Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who had signed the writ of habeas corpus, was absent from his upstairs courtroom over the weekend. At this point, however, the legal proceedings could not be further deferred. When the attorney A.H. Fiske asked for a further postponement while evidence was being brought from Baltimore to the effect that the two women were still enslaved, the opposition attorney Samuel Eliot Sewall argued that since all human beings were born free, the presumption of the court must be that the women were free and, unless and until demonstrated otherwise, must be allowed to exit the courthouse upon their own responsibility. The Chief Justice, however, saw a narrower issue: “Has the captain of the brig Chickasaw a right [under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793] to convert his vessel into a prison?” Since he had done nothing to bring himself within the provisions of that act, “the prisoners must therefore be discharged from all further detention.” At that point Mr. Turner, the alleged agent for Mr. Morris, arose and implied to the court that he would make a fresh arrest under the provisions of said act, and inquired whether a warrant would be necessary for such purpose. A constable was dispatched to lock the only door leading downstairs. Someone cried out “Take them!” The spectators in the courtroom began a chant of “Go! Go!” and stormed forward while Justice Shaw stood at the bench shouting “Stop! Stop!” The Justice made a dash for the courtroom door and attempted to himself hold the door against the excited crowd. The only officer in the room, a man named Huggerford, was seized and choked. The crowd bore the two women away through the private passageway normally used by the judiciary, shoved them into a carriage, and drove them out of the city. As the carriage passed over the Mill Dam, the horses were held at a full gallop while the toll money was thrown at the attendant. According to one Boston merchant paper, this was action threatening “the very existence of the state.” According to another paper, however, the Daily Evening Transcript, “The Judge stated that they (the women) must be brought back to be regularly discharged in open court.”

In the South Atlantic, the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin returned to Bahia, Brazil. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE September 9, Friday: Abraham Lincoln received his Illinois law license.

Waldo Emerson’s NATURE was self-published in Boston, 1,000 copies that cost him a little over $100.00, or 10¢ the copy. The first advertisements for this small volume appeared.

This 1st edition contained not the pseudoevolutionionistic epigraph on the worm aspiring to be man with which we are now so familiar, but in its place a quote from Plotinus: Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.

Jones Very, having completed his undergraduate education at Harvard College, preparing for his entry into the Harvard Divinity School (where he was planning to make quite a splash on account of his principled repudiation of all deliberation and “taking thought” in favor of what he was terming “conversing with Heaven,” in a state of artlessness and immediacy and spontaneity), would purchase this little volume on nature and naturalness and heavily mark it up. Courtesy of Parkman D. Howe of Needham, we know how he marked it up. We can note that almost half his markings, including all but two of his marginal comments, were confined to the chapter on “Idealism.” We can also know that he responded quite idiosyncratically to Emerson’s trope on infancy, “Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which come into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise,” in a manner which prefigured his later mental collapse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The most comprehensive explanation, however is to be found in his personal copy of a small blue book with covers decorated by tree-like vines. Mr. Tutor Very purchased it in September 1836, only a few days after it was published. The timing of its acquisition at once suggests that he was already familiar with the latest modes of nonconformity, and perhaps was even anticipating the book’s publication. At the end of August, in his Commencement Address, had he not expressed his confidence in the power of “new principles of action” to resist the “mechanical spirit” of the times, which he felt was suppressing the more heroic and precious forms of individuality? Now the opportunity arose for him to study the detailed grounds of another man’s affirmations and dissents, a man somewhat older than he, and more knowing in the ways of spiritual heroism, about which the Divinity School evidently could teach him nothing. He may have first learned of Ralph Waldo Emerson during the winter of 1835-1836, when the latter delivered a series of ten lectures on English literature, from Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare, to Byron and Coleridge, at Boston’s Masonic Temple. Or, as was perhaps more likely, when Very visited Boston that winter to listen to sermons (as he must have done, following his change of heart and recent choice of a ministerial career), he may have heard Emerson in one of his church appearances, since he preached usually twice a week during the run of his lecture course. Or, between January and May 1836, after walking the seventeen miles of turnpike linking Cambridge with his home, he may have attended one of the approximately fifteen lectures on biography and English literature Emerson delivered at the Salem Lyceum in two series. (In view of the attitudes Very was cultivating at the time, the Martin Luther, John Milton, and George Fox lectures might well have tempted him.) But whatever the way he discovered Emerson –and there were sufficient opportunities for him to have at least heard about him as early as 1835– it is certain he read NATURE eagerly in 1836, with pencil in hand, scoring margins, underlining sentences, and making written comments. [CONTINUED ON NEXT SCREEN] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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[CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS SCREEN] Most striking about Very’s markings and marginalia is that they indicate he was not at all surprised by Emerson’s aerial prose poem; instead, he apparently found what he expected — and this neither confounded nor offended him, as it did most readers. Several times he questioned what he read, but never did he challenge Emerson: his mood seemed respectful throughout. It was as if his reading confirmed suspicions that the author was a thoughtful man whose reflections repaid close scrutiny. (Though a minor aspect of Very’s use of NATURE it is indicative of his attitude toward it that he treated it incidentally as a source book for the compatible ideas of others, of Coleridge for example, and of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, George Herbert, and even of the unnamed “orphic poet.”) He read NATURE then as a literal rather than figurative testament about the nature of God, and about the relationship between God and man. He read it as if it were a conduct-book filled with supernal imperatives. While certainly not a usual approach to the book, it still was a valid one, given the disposition of the reader in September 1836. He was looking for certain information, and believed it might be found here rather than in the Divinity School. Very was particularly curious about the effects of nature upon Emerson, about his emotional and artistic responses to the natural world. Moreover, Very seemed interested in external nature as the basis for communion with God, and this accorded well with the viewpoint Emerson developed. (The professors would have shouted Very down had he suggested such an idea in the classroom.) He was concerned too with the relationship between personal morals and the morality of art, and specifically of literary art. But he seemed not so interested as Emerson in attempting to explore the philosophical middle ground between idealism and materialism. Several of the statements recalled to him verses from the Book of Revelation, and several others reminded him of the corrosive powers of sin. Emerson’s book therefore generally served to stimulate his own distinctive thoughts in an original way, one which at times was inconsistent with Emerson’s intentions; that is, from the marginalia in his copy, Very’s NATURE seems not quite the book that Emerson wrote. But this does not mean that his comments and markings conformed to any viewpoint even remotely acceptable to the provincial orthodoxy maintained by Andrews Norton and his colleagues. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Since many scholars have assumed that this manifesto NATURE must have influenced Henry Thoreau in one way or another, and since such an assumption has always seemed to me to be presumptuous, I will insert here the short synopsis Catherine Albanese used to introduce the work in her THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS:

When Emerson published his slim volume NATURE in 1836, he had produced a manifesto for the emerging transcendental movement. Seen in juxtaposition to his farewell sermon at the Second Church, NATURE offers Emerson’s spiritual alternative to the inherited forms of the church. Throughout the work he stands in the Platonic lineage and, especially, that lineage as read through a revived metaphysical tradition in the West. Hence, in NATURE the world of the “not-me” that Emerson celebrates is seen ultimately as a reflection of the one Mind or Spirit present in the human soul and in the realm of the Ideas. Refracted through the Neoplatonic teaching of the One (the Soul) and the Many (Nature), Emerson articulates a Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondence, expresses enthusiasm for magic and miracle, and speaks prophetically of human powers that seem, indeed, god-like. The while he employs the Kantian-Coleridgean distinction between the Reason and the Understanding (as he understands it) to contrast true and deceptive visions of the world. He sees in a hieroglyphic of symbols the means for the Reason to discern the secret message of Spirit encoded in matter. The metaphysical tradition that Emerson embraces in NATURE would enjoy a considerable following in the nineteenth century. Even as Emerson owed a debt to Emmanuel Swedenborg and the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem, others —like the followers of Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) in Christian Science and followers of forms of mind cure in New Thought— would owe a debt to Emerson. In the twentieth century the “positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale (b. 1898) and others also had its roots in Emerson’s teaching. Beyond that, in NATURE Emerson gives voice to a characteristic American millennialism, a sense that a new age with new powers and energies has dawned or is about to dawn. Despite his idealism, he exalts a landscape that will form the earthly paradise for a later wilderness preservation movement. He speaks with a largeness of vision and a confidence in human capacity that, in a host of different ways, finds expression in the culture of the era. Situated in a new space, Emerson and other Americans concluded that they were also living in a new time and that, as Gods, they should stretch their spirits to the demands of the age. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE (This, it seems to me, is a reductio ad absurdum, for no-one but a fool would attempt to send Henry Thoreau sailing away in the same tub with a threesome such as Emmanuel Swedenborg, Mary Baker Eddy, and Norman Vincent Peale.)

At the Krontal spa north of Frankfurt, Felix Mendelssohn proposed to Cecile Jeanrenaud. She accepted.

In Dresden, Frédéric François Chopin may have proposed to Maria Wodzinska, sister of his boyhood friends, and he may have been offered some grounds for hope (on the other hand it is possible that nothing like this actually happened).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 9th of 9th M 1836 / Rose early this Morning & got in readiness for the boat which arrived at the Long Wharf at 6 OC & I was there in season to get on board - we arrived in season for me to get to the House of my late dear friend Moses Brown nearly an hour & an half before the time appointed for his funeral to Meet at the House which was 10 OClock, & 11 O C at the Meeting House - I had a good opportunity for reflection & feel that it was the last time I should ever see his remains in his own house & in the parlour where I have spent so many & so pleasant & interesting hours with him — His corpse was singularly natural, he lay in his coffin with the same solid reverent & retired countenance as I have often seen upon him, when sitting in religious opportunities & his Mind gathering up to say something — very Many came into the room to view his remains for the last time, & after a few moments quiet Rowland Greene called the attention of the Audience to the solemnity of the occasion & the very great loss we had sustained in the removal of this our Ancient Father in the Church who had walked so long & so pleasantly affectionately & usefully among us. — The funeral then proceeded to the Meeting House - The Governor of the State [John Brown Francis] - ex- Gov Fenner Some of the Senators & Representatives of the Assembly, the Secretary of our State — Judges of our State Courts & the Judge of the Court - The President of Brown University & the Officers of it - President of the R I Historical Society & many of the Officers of it, together with many people of the first Standing in Providence were present - but none of these were as intersting to me as to see the teachers & Schollars of the YMB School walk in, in a solid manner, & go into the galery - as I saw them come in the Muscles of my face were affected, my eyes filled with tears & my whole frame so affected that it was with great difficulty that I could refrain from loud weeping — when it rushed on my mind that they had been the objects of his peculiar care & regard for many years, & that this was the last office to be performed - my mind has seldom been so much affected. — Rowland Greene was first engaged in testimony to the valuable life of the deceased & the accordancy of it with the christian principles which he professed - Then Thos Anthony to the same effect - then Mary B Allen in supplication - then John Wilbur - then Anna A Jenkins in Supplication - the Meeting closed & we HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE proceeded to the place of internment which was in the burying ground which he gave to friends The pause at the grave after the remains was laid over it was unusually long, not far from 15 minutes in which Rowland Greene was engaged in supplication, the remains was lowered down & covered up to be Seen of Men no more. — I went to the School House & dined & after dinner rode into Town & attended to a little buisness I had there & returned to the School House & Lodged. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

September 28, Wednesday: In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln began his courtship of Mary Owens.

The French metric system became official in Greece.

We do not know the date of birth but do know that it was on this day that the infant named Thomas Crapper was baptized. Although this person would serve as sanitary engineer for some of England’s royalty he was not himself of the nobility and did not ever get knighted; thus the “Sir” often tacked onto his name is a piece of fakelore. Also (see the following screen), where the word “crap,” meaning excrement, is derived from his family name “Crapper,” this is by the linguistic process know as back formation.

December: In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had an episode of severe depression.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abraham Lincoln HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

Abraham Lincoln helped to get the Illinois state capital moved from Vandalia to Springfield, and then moved in with another bachelor, Joshua Fry Speed. These two dudes would sleep together until Joshua would relocate to Kentucky in 1841.5

April 15, Saturday: Abraham Lincoln left New Salem and settled in Springfield, Illinois, becoming a law partner of John T. Stuart.

5. Am I suggesting that our favorite martyred President should be counted as a “homosexual” or “bisexual”? –Yes indeed. Is such an accusation of any significance? –Well, no, not actually, but it does depend upon who you are — if, for instance, you happen to be both a member of the Republican Party and homophobic, then this probability should be taken to be an indication that you should change your attitude, or your affiliation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Dr. Ruth Westheimer 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Edith Piaf 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Linda Hunt 4 ' 9 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Mother Teresa 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Tammy Faye Bakker 4 ' 11'' Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut 4 ' 11'' jockey Willie Shoemaker 4 ' 11'' Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 4 ' 11'' Joan of Arc 4 ' 11'' Bonnie Parker of “Bonnie & Clyde” 4 ' 11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' Gloria Swanson 4 ' 11''1/2 Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

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William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Dollie Parton 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Pia Zadora 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) John Keats 5 ' 3/4 '' Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher’s mother) 5 ' 1 '' Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) 5 ' 1 '' Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Dudley Moore 5 ' 2 '' Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel) 5 ' 2 '' Honoré de Balzac 5 ' 2 '' Sally Field 5 ' 2 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Volt ai re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

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President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

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President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 5 ' 11'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Stephen 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard Milhous Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' 6 ' 2 '' 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) William Buckley 6 ' 4-7” Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' William “Dwarf Billy” Burley 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1'' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

Summer: Abraham Lincoln proposed marriage to Mary Owens and was turned down. The courtship ended and he moved in with the bachelor Joshua Fry Speed of Springfield, Illinois. The two men would sleep together until Speed would relocate to Kentucky in 1841.6

6. Am I suggesting that our beloved President Lincoln should be counted as a “homosexual” or “bisexual”? –Yes indeed. Is such an accusation of any significance? –Well, no, not actually, but it does depend upon who you are — if, for instance, you happen to be both a Republican and a homophobe, then this probability should help you re-examine your politics, or your homophobia, or both. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1838

During this year in a celebrated case Abraham Lincoln was helping to defend Henry Truett, charged with murder. The client would be found not guilty.

August 6, Monday: Abraham Lincoln was re-elected to the Illinois General Assembly, and became the floor leader for the Whigs.

At a mass meeting of workingmen’s groups in Birmingham “The Charter” was adopted as the centerpiece of a united, national labor movement. The document advocated household suffrage, payment of parliament members, and abolition of property qualifications among a list of other insufferable demands — within the following couple of years 500 chartist leaders would find themselves in prison. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Edward Sherman Hoar matriculated at Harvard College.

Francis Lemuel Capen, Edward Everett Hale, and William Francis Channing graduated from Harvard. Channing would go on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (although his practice as a physician would never extend beyond the administration of quack applications of electricity to the heads and feet of sufferers). NEW “HARVARD MEN”

After leaving Harvard, Ellery Channing had spent almost five years living in the home of his father Dr. Walter Channing, withdrawing books from the Boston Athenæum and presumably educating himself in this manner — but otherwise not doing much of anything. In this year he determined that he was going to make something of himself, as a farmer on the frontier! (Meanwhile, in this year, Abraham Lincoln was beginning to travel through nine counties in central and eastern Illinois, as a lawyer on the 8th Judicial Circuit.)

December 3, Tuesday: Abraham Lincoln was admitted to practice before the United States Circuit Court for central and eastern Illinois. (It was in about this timeframe that, at a dance, the tall, young, upwardly mobile attorney was first meeting a handsome 21-year-old, Mary Todd, most definitely eligible and socially of a higher class than himself.)

King Frederik VI of Denmark died and was succeeded by his nephew Christian VIII. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

June: Abraham Lincoln argued his first case before the Illinois Supreme Court.

August 3, Monday: Abraham Lincoln was re-elected to the Illinois General Assembly.

Fall: In Illinois, rising attorney and politician Abraham Lincoln proposed marriage to Mary Todd, and was accepted.

November 2, Monday: The presidential election. We have no record that Henry Thoreau voted in Concord, Massachusetts (but then, we have no record that Abraham Lincoln voted in Lawrenceville, Illinois).

Monday Nov 2nd 1840. It is well said that the “attitude of inspection is prone.” The soul does not inspect but behold. Like the lily or the crystal in the rock, it looks in the face of the sky.

Francis Howell says that in garrulous persons “The supply of thought seems never to rise much above the level of its exit.”7 Consequently their thoughts issue in no jets, but incessantly dribble. In those who speak rarely, but to the purpose, the reservoir of thought is many feet higher than its issue. It takes the pressure of a hundred atmospheres to make one jet of eloquence. For the most part the thoughts subside like a sediment, while the words break like a surf on the shore. They are being silently deposited in level strata, or held in suspension for ages, in that deep ocean within — Therein is the ocean’s floor whither all things sink, and it is strewed with wrecks.

7. THE CHARACTERS OF THEOPHRASTUS; TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK, AND ILLUSTRATED BY PHYSIOGNOMICAL SKETCHES. TO WHICH ARE SUBJOINED THE GREEK TEXT, WITH NOTES, AND HINTS ON THE INDIVIDUAL VAR I ET I ES OF HUMAN NATURE. By Francis Howell. Theophrastus translated by Isaac Taylor (London: Architectural Library, Josiah Taylor 1824). THEOPHRASTUS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE {One-fourth page blank} HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

January: In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s bosom buddy Joshua Speed found him thrashing around in their habitation: “Lincoln went Crazy. I had to remove razors from his room — take away all Knives and other such dangerous things — it was terrible.” Lincoln was terribly depressed. At the time he was ingesting three mercury tablets a day (a dose typical for a man who had contracted, or feared he had contracted, syphilis), so we can’t really be sure whether this behavior was a psychotic break, or merely the result of heavy-metal poisoning.

January 1, Friday: In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln broke off his engagement with Mary Todd.

It would probably been on this day that Waldo Emerson lectured in Billerica, MassachusettsBILLERICA . THE LIST OF LECTURES

March 1, Monday: The United States, Appellants, v. Cinque, and Others, Africans, Captured in the schooner Amistad, by Lieut. Gedney resumed. The Supreme Court’s celebrity guest John Quincy Adams chewed his cud for another three full hours. READ THE FULL TEXT LA AMISTAD

In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln formed a new law partnership, with Stephen T. Logan.

August: On a trip by steamboat from Illinois into Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln glimpsed a coffle of a dozen slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

Abraham Lincoln decided not to seek re-election to the Illinois legislature.

Summer: Margaret Fuller’s brother Richard F. Fuller moved to Concord. –It seems that Margaret had put him up to it, with the idea that Henry David Thoreau would prove to be an excellent and utterly cheap (unreimbursed) tutor in preparation for Richard’s matriculation exams at Harvard College that fall. (This scheme having worked so well, Thoreau was given a music box with placid Lucerne on the lid. It would be interesting to know what tune it played.)

Abraham Lincoln resumed his courtship of Mary Todd.

September 22, Friday: A sword duel was to take place on this day between Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Illinois state auditor James Shields, because Lincoln had published letters making fun of Shields. What occurred, instead, was an exchange of explanatory letters. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE November 4, Friday: Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd staged their society wedding in Springfield, Illinois (this upwardly mobile groom was so utterly ashamed of his own family of origin that not a single one of his relatives had been invited).

Frederick Douglass spoke at a Latimer meeting in the Universalist Society meetinghouse of Lynn, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

Abraham Lincoln tried for the Whig nomination for US Congress, but was unsuccessful.

August 1, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to John L. O’Sullivan from Staten Island as the August issue of his magazine was making its rounds: US MAG & DEM. REV.

Staten Island Aug. 1st Dear Sir, I have not got Mr. Etzlers book nor can I tell where it is to be found — the copy which I used in the spring was sent from England to Mr R W Emerson by Mr Alcott But you must not think too seriously of it– — I believe my extracts are rather too favorable, beside being improved by the liberties I have taken. I dont wonder that you find much to object to in the remarks I sent you If I remember them they content me perhaps as little as they do yourself yet for the general tenor of them I suppose I should not alter it. If I should find any notes on nature in my Journal which I think will suit you I will send them.– I am at present Reading Greek Poetry— Would a translation–(in the manner of Prometheus Bound in the Dial which you may have seen of some old drama– be suited to your Review–? Please send the Mss. to Wall st as soon as convenient. I expect to remain in this vicinity for some time and shall be glad to meet you in New York– BRONSON ALCOTT JOHN ADOLPHUS ETZLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE A large assembly in Northampton welcomed the 10th anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves of the British West Indies. Would it have been this occasion that spurred a correspondent of Lewis Tappan’s Journal of Commerce to write criticizing the sort of “Wild, insane, brutal” white men who could see their way clear to escort white “refined ladies” to “meet and associate with the vulgar unionists of all colors that make up these Associations.” This correspondent noted that he himself had observed, at a community dining hall, “one of the accomplished and lovely daughters” of a member of the Association of Industry and Education, seated directly across the table from “a large male negro!!”

In New Bedford, Massachusetts, the first large-scale gala featuring a picnic and a parade seems to have taken place in this year, under the auspices of the Friends of Liberty.

Frederick Douglass completed his lecturing in Syracuse, New York and moved on toward Rochester. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Abraham Lincoln’s and Mary Todd Lincoln’s 1st child, Robert Todd Lincoln, was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

May: The Lincoln family moves into a house in Springfield, Illinois, which had cost them $1,500, almost double the usual cost of a family home of the period. Abraham Lincoln campaigned for Henry Clay in the presidential election. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Mid-October: The anonymous publication VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, which eventually would turn out to have been by Robert Chambers, took what Henry Thoreau would accept as one of the

“wider views of the universe,” in allowing that since God’s law extended across the entire starry cosmos, we might legitimately hypothesize that elsewhere, circling any number of strange distant stars, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE there might well be other earths filled with other lives than ours here beside the star known as Sol:

WALDEN: We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

NICOLAS COPERNICUS TYCHO BRAHE TYCHONIAN/COPERNICAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Finding himself unable to overlook the manifest evidences of waste and cruelty in nature, Chambers was hypothesizing anonymously that God must have established two entirely separate sets of laws, one physical and the other moral, codes quite independent of one another, so that “Obedience to each gives only its own proper advantage, not the advantage proper to the other.”

This was of course being attacked as godlessness and so the publication would sell out four editions in seven months. In this year Charles Darwin was drafting an essay on his development theory, a theory very different in every particular, but he would not publish about this for some time either under his name or anonymously. All Thoreau was able to know of Darwin’s work therefore, at this point, was what he was able to read in the published journal of H.M.S. Beagle:

[Bear in mind that these BEAGLE volumes carry not only the name of Darwin on their spine, but also Phillip Parker King and Robert FitzRoy.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE As you remember, Thoreau would later make a passing remark in CAPE COD about this reading of Darwin:

Charles Darwin was assured that the roar of the surf on the coast of Chile, after a heavy gale, could be heard at night a distance of “21 sea miles across a hilly and wooded country.”

One thing the readers of this anonymous volume could tell for sure about its author, was that he or she was a believer in phrenology. Phrenological studies were revealing that on average, the brain of a female would weigh four ounces less than the brain of a male. How then could a woman, on average, possibly be of as strong a mind as her male counterpart? No wonder men are dominant! A woman’s rationality, since it was not as robust as a man’s, would more readily yield to her body and to her emotionality — something which anyway we can observe happening every day. (Had the gender politics of the era been reversed, we may notice, the opposite conclusions could have been derived from such period scientific “observations.” Notice that in our present-day computer CPUs, speed of computation is inversely proportional to size — the more closely the transistors are packed, the shorter the wires between them, the greater the number of megaflops that can be achieved, which is the reason why supercomputers made up of computational boards have been quite replaced with supercomputers made up of computational chipsets. No wonder women are dominant! Obviously, since women’s brains aren’t inflated with water to the same degree as men’s, their brain cells are closer together, resulting in shorter dendrons, resulting in a greater quickness and acuity of mind —something which anyway HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE we can observe happening every day.)

Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter was being suspected, incorrectly, of the authorship. His son Joseph Estlin Carpenter was born (eventually this son would help out in the republication of some of his father’s works).

When this VESTIGES first became available for purchase, its price of 7s. 6d. put it entirely out of the reach of the general public. This was not a pamphlet to unsettle the masses. If available at all for the general reader, it would be found in the lending library of a mechanics’ institute, for a person who had purchased an annual subscription which entitled him to check out books. –But then a “peoples’ edition” would be put out in 1846 at 2s. 6d. A lawyer of Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, would read straight through the anonymous VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION and would proclaim himself “a warm advocate of the doctrine.”

December: In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln dissolved his law partnership with Stephen T. Logan and set up his own practice.

December 9, Sunday: William Henry Herndon was admitted to the bar at Springfield, Illinois, and immediately became Abraham Lincoln’s junior law partner.

Back home from his visit to Europe and points east in Hartford, Connecticut, the Reverend Joel Hawes, D.D. –learning of the sad event that had transpired since his departure from his daughter at her missionary station in Smyrna, Turkey– delivered a memorial sermon at the First Church. The father had departed from Smyrna on May 11th with the daughter in excellent health. The daughter had succumbed on September 27th in Constantinople after a brief and apparently mild illness. MRS. MARY E. VAN LENNEP

(Even subsequent to this memorial evening sermon, a few delayed letters would be arriving in the post.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1846

March 10, Tuesday: Osahito replaced Ayahito as Emperor of Japan.

Abraham Lincoln’s and Mary Todd Lincoln’s 2d son Edward Baker Lincoln was born.

At Sebah, in the Oasis of Fezzan, per Richardson’s JOURNAL IN AFRICA: This evening the female slaves were unusually excited in singing, and I had the curiosity to ask my negro servant, Said, what they were singing about. As many of them were natives of his own country, he had no difficulty in translating the Mandara or Bornou language. I had often asked the Moors to translate their songs for me, but got no satisfactory account from them. Said at first said, “Oh, they sing of Rubee” (God), “What do you mean?” I replied, impatiently. “Oh, don’t you know?” he continued, “they asked God to give them their Atka?” (certificate of freedom). I inquired, “Is that all?” Said: “No; they say, ‘Where are we going? The world is large. O God! Where are we going? O God!’” I inquired, “What else?” Said: “They remember their country, Bornou, and say, ‘Bornou was a pleasant country, full of all good things; but this is a bad country, and we are miserable!’” “Do they say anything else?” Said: “No; they repeat these words over and over again, and add, ‘O God! give us our Atka, and let us return again to our dear home.’” I am not surprised I got little satisfaction when I asked the Moors about the songs of their slaves. Who will say that the above words are not a very appropriate song? What could have been more congenially adapted to their then woful condition? It is not to be wondered at that these poor bondwomen cheer up their hearts, in their long, lonely, and painful wanderings over the desert, with words and sentiments like these; but I have often observed that their fatigue and sufferings were too great for them to strike up this melancholy dirge, and many days their plaintive strains never broke over the silence of the desert. In 1847 this would be transformed by John Greenleaf Whittier into a poem:

SONG OF SLAVES IN THE DESERT. WHERE are we going? where are we going, Where are we going, Rubee? Lord of peoples, lord of lands, Look across these shining sands, Through the furnace of the noon, Through the white light of the moon. Strong the Ghiblee wind is blowing, Strange and large the world is growing! Speak and tell us where we are going, Where are we going, Rubee? Bornou land was rich and good, Wells of water, fields of food, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Dourra fields, and bloom of bean, And the palm-tree cool and green: Bornou land we see no longer, Here we thirst and here we hunger, Here the Moor-man smites in anger: Where are we going, Rubee? When we went from Bornou land, We were like the leaves and sand, We were many, we are few; Life has one, and death has two: Whitened bones our path are showing, Thou All-seeing, thou All-knowing! Hear us, tell us, where are we going, Where are we going, Rubee? Moons of marches from our eyes Bornou land behind us lies; Stranger round us day by day Bends the desert circle gray; Wild the waves of sand are flowing, Hot the winds above them blowing, — Lord of all things! where are we going? Where are we going, Rubee? We are weak, but Thou art strong.; Short our lives, but Thine is long; We are blind, but Thou hast eyes; We are fools, but Thou art wise! Thou, our morrow’s pathway knowing Through the strange world round us growing, Hear us, tell us where are we going, Where are we going, Rubee?

May 1, Friday: Abraham Lincoln was nominated to be a Whig candidate from Illinois for the US House of Representatives.

May 13, Wednesday: The US Congress having been informed a couple of days before by President James Knox Polk, that a state of war existed between the United States of American and its southern neighbor, Mexico, it recognized the existence of a state of war with Mexico and voted to authorize the President to solicit 50,000 volunteers for the purpose of prosecution of that de facto war. What had happened was that the US had staged a provocation, inducing army soldiers to don stolen Mexican uniforms and stage a mock attack upon their own garrison post near the border. Word of this “Gulf of Tonkin” fraud would soon leak out of government circles and the war upon Mexico would become the 1st, but not the last, widely protested war in our history.8 WAR ON MEXICO

Medical standards were so nonexistent that a fraud like Dr. Thomas J. Hodges would have no trouble performing the duties of a US Army surgeon during this foreign campaign. “Which leg?” MUMPERY

8. A Representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, would 1st rise to the nation’s attention when he would begin to make public demands of the President, that we be informed of the “exact location” at which Mexico had allegedly invaded the United States. That Representative would learn that such anti-war antics did nothing to help the personal career and agenda of an American politician and, the next time the occasion offered, he would not attempt this stunt but instead would stay safely on the “loyal” pro-war side of the fence. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 3, Monday: Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected to the US House of Representatives. Here is his 1st Daguerreotype sitting of which we have any knowledge, and you will notice that the photographer did not know how to deal with the eye that stared at the nose — it’s like the man had never before been challenged to photograph a cross-eyed politician:

September 6, Sunday: This is probably the day on which Abraham Lincoln composed his poem “The Bear Hunt”: A wild-bear chace, didst never see? Then hast thou lived in vain. Thy richest bump of glorious glee, Lies desert in thy brain. When first my father settled here, 'Twas then the frontier line: The panther's scream, filled night with fear And bears preyed on the swine. But wo for Bruin's short lived fun, When rose the squealing cry; Now man and horse, with dog and gun, For vengeance, at him fly. A sound of danger strikes his ear; He gives the breeze a snuff: Away he bounds, with little fear, And seeks the tangled rough. On press his foes, and reach the ground, Where's left his half munched meal; The dogs, in circles, scent around, And find his fresh made trail. With instant cry, away they dash, And men as fast pursue; O'er logs they leap, through water splash, And shout the brisk halloo. Now to elude the eager pack, Bear shuns the open ground; Th[r]ough matted vines, he shapes his track And runs it, round and round. The tall fleet cur, with deep-mouthed voice, Now speeds him, as the wind; While half-grown pup, and short-legged fice, Are yelping far behind. And fresh recruits are dropping in To join the merry corps: With yelp and yell,---a mingled din--- The woods are in a roar. And round, and round the chace now goes, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The world's alive with fun; Nick Carter's horse, his rider throws, And more, Hill drops his gun. Now sorely pressed, bear glances back, And lolls his tired tongue; When as, to force him from his track, An ambush on him sprung. Across the glade he sweeps for flight, And fully is in view. The dogs, new-fired, by the sight, Their cry, and speed, renew. The foremost ones, now reach his rear, He turns, they dash away; And circling now, the wrathful bear, They have him full at bay. At top of speed, the horse-men come, All screaming in a row. ``Whoop! Take him Tiger. Seize him Drum.'' Bang,---bang---the rifles go. And furious now, the dogs he tears, And crushes in his ire. Wheels right and left, and upward rears, With eyes of burning fire. But leaden death is at his heart, Vain all the strength he plies. And, spouting blood from every part, He reels, and sinks, and dies. And now a dinsome clamor rose, 'Bout who should have his skin; Who first draws blood, each hunter knows, This prize must always win. But who did this, and how to trace What's true from what's a lie, Like lawyers, in a murder case They stoutly argufy. Aforesaid fice, of blustering mood, Behind, and quite forgot, Just now emerging from the wood, Arrives upon the spot. With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair--- Brim full of spunk and wrath, He growls, and seizes on dead bear, And shakes for life and death. And swells as if his skin would tear, And growls and shakes again; And swears, as plain as dog can swear, That he has won the skin. Conceited whelp! we laugh at thee--- Nor mind, that not a few Of pompous, two-legged dogs there be, Conceited quite as you.

Sept 6th Sunday morning 1/2 of river and thorough fare amid rocks & poling to foot of Pamadumcook –across this 1 mile lake makes N W 10 miles to hills & mountains Joe Merry bears S W. then thoroughfare & across Deep cove 2 part of same lake two miles N E –men lost on lakes –could not find river –1 1/2 across Umbedegis lake beautiful lake Joe Merry & double top –to Rock & breakfast –rill –old camp and Blacksmith’s shop & brick –pond lilies tea –black –pork hard bread salmon –birch bark plates forks Booms & fencing stuff in water & laid up at entrance & outlet of lake 1/4 mile of thorough fare & rapids to carry of 90 rods around Umbedegis falls stream we were set over –Pork barrel –carrying baggage & boat up hill through mossy places drag –& keep from rocking. bream. 500 weight– Then 1 1/2 miles of river & Passamagummuck lake a large cove or lake comes in on left through meadow to falls river like –Umbedegis stream coming in on right –. poled up these falls –then 1/2 mile to Thatcher’s Rips HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE –then 2 miles of Depskaneig lake –Passamagummuck stream coming in on left –first more northerly then more easterly –shallow & weedy & not very large.– no trout dinner choak and break tooth – –cliffy shore tea kettle –carry of 90 rods –oak hall to Pockwockomus lake river like 2 miles to Consultation isle –rush & cut grass & moose track –Depskaneig comes in from left 1/2 mile from head.– Poke Logans 1 mile from Con. isle to carry of 40 rods round Pockwockomus falls small Concord stream –willows gravel –marks of pikes on stones – barrel of pork –rocky –hard work warping up. then poling & rowing through Aboljacarmegus lake 3/4 mile river like to carry around Aboljacarmegus falls at flat rock then poling 1/2 mile by jam of logs like cannon to Sowdehunk dead water to Murch Brook & Aboljacknagesic 1 mile below Gibson’s clearing & sowdehunk and camp –13 3/4 from Head N. Twin. trout & chivin camp moose bone cedar bed and tea Mt. visible not 4 but 14 miles HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE I will include at this point some comments on Henry Thoreau’s scratch notes, by Ross and Adams:

Thoreau took a vacation from his life at Walden (itself a serious kind of vacation) with a trip to Maine in early September, 1846. The first record of that trip (in the Berg Journal) consists of brief field notes or transcriptions of field notes. Thoreau simply outlines his journey, jotting down names and places under the appropriate dates; for example: “to base of high peak. burnt land poplars moo blueberries thick woods moose dung bear dung rabbits dung — moose tracks browsing” (Berg 85 for Sept. 7). The outline ends with a brief list of dates for other expeditions to Ktaadn. Next come six pages of draft passages that would later appear in various sections of the completed essay. The drafting at first is fairly smooth, fluid, and confident, with few insertions and cancellations. But then the manuscript gives way to many interlinings and false starts. The special care Thoreau gave to this particular section suggests its importance to him and to “Ktaadn.” The new section begins:

It is difficult to conceive region of an country uninhabited by man habitually presume his exaggerate his influence we naturally suppose them on presence-& the horizon everywhere — And yet

pure we have not see^ nature unless ^ we have once seen her thus vast

whether in the wilderness or and grim and drear — for to be ^ vast though in the midst of cities — for to be Vast is how near

to being waste.

Coming down the Mt perhaps HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

I first most fully realized that that this was unhanselled and ancient or whater else men call it Demonic Nature, natura, or while coming down the Mt. whatever man has named it. The nature primitive — powerful gigantic aweful and beautiful, ^ Untamed forever. We were passing burnt by lightning perchance over burnt land^ with occasional ^ strips of timber crossing it…. (Berg 89-90)

The reader who is familiar with the “Ktaadn” essay will recognize this outburst, in a slightly tamer version, as the passage on the “Burnt Lands” which follows Thoreau’s solitary climb to the peak of the mountain (MW 69-71). In its final place, the segment picks up a major theme of the essay — the disjunction of man from nature. For the first two thirds of the narrative we see Thoreau’s typical posture of regretting that nature is gradually being taken over by human institutions. After his traumatic climb to the summit, Thoreau’s narrative persona realizes with a shock that nature may well have the ultimate control, but that such control is not comforting and benign — it is frightening. The Berg Journal passage ends, “The main astonishment at last is that man has brought so little change — And yet man so overtops nature in his estimation” (T91). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1847

Abraham Lincoln moved into a boarding house in Washington DC with his wife and sons. He would be ready to take his seat when the 30th Congress convened. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 6, Monday: Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln took their seats in the 30th federal Congress. The War between the Presidents

President Lincoln 1809-1865 President Davis 1808-1889

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

December 22, Wednesday: Congressman Abraham Lincoln from Illinois presented resolutions questioning President James Knox Polk about US hostilities with Mexico.9

WAR ON MEXICO

9. The Representative from Illinois would learn that opposing a rush to war can do nothing to help a politician’s Washington career and, the next time the occasion would offer, he would remain safely on the “loyal” or pro-war side of the fence. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1848

Lewis Cass resigned from the Senate in order to run as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. His running mate would be the Kentucky slavemaster William Orlando Butler (a “balanced” ticket, in those years, for the Democratic Party, was constituted of one southern slavemaster and one northern slavery- sympathizer). As a self-described “northern man with southern principles,” he would become a leading proponent of a Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty which left it up to the voters of a territory to determine whether or not human enslavement would be there permitted. He would support the annexation of Texas. This Democratic ticket would cause the desertion of many antislavery Democrats, and the election would be lost to the popular slaveholding general Zachary Taylor.

Disgusted by the Whig nomination of a slaveholding Mexican-War general for President of the United States, Squire Samuel Hoar and his oldest son Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar bolted the party and joined the new movement termed the “Free Soil” party. Rockwood coined the phrase “Conscience Whig.” This , which had come to be composed of radical Whigs, Liberty Party men, and Van Buren Democrats, decided to support Martin Van Buren of New York for President. The outcome of the election would be that Van Buren would come in second to the Whig candidate, with the Democrat candidate a distant third. This was HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the year, according to Arnold Toynbee, in which “history failed to turn.” Obviously this megahistorian (macromegalomaniac?) wasn’t looking in the right place for, in Concord, Henry Thoreau took his initial surveying job, to help his family recover from a financial crisis caused by an industrial fire.

Brevetted Lieutenant-Colonel James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was assigned to renew some maps of the Boundary Survey that had been destroyed by fire (this would occupy him into 1850, and then between 1852 and 1853).

Waldo Emerson wrote, in his Journal,

Henry Thoreau is like the woodgod who solicits the wandering poet & draws him into antres vast & desarts idle, & bereaves him of his memory, & leaves him naked, plaiting vines & with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want & madness.

A New Hampshire man, John Parker Hale, got elected to the US Senate because he was an abolitionist — definitely a first in American politics.

A southern actor named John Wilkes Booth would later take a fancy to his daughter Bessie Lambert Hale, probably while studying out ways to get close enough to the family to kidnap or execute this New Hampshire

abolitionist senator and Free Soil Party presidential candidate. When Booth would be trapped in a burning tobacco barn outside Washington DC and killed after having assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, he would be found to have been still carrying in his pocket this daughter’s picture. –But we are getting ahead of our story, for at this point, in 1848, this “Wilkes,” as he liked to be called, was still but a lad of ten years of age. In this year he is reported to have been musing as follows: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Of the Seven Wonders of the World, can you imagine how famous a man might be who could pull down the Colossus of Rhodes?10

January 22, Sunday: With the fighting finally at an end, Representative Abraham Lincoln of Illinois gave a speech on floor of the House of Representatives in opposition to President James Knox Polk’s war policy regarding Mexico.

Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Rome: January 22, 2 o’clock, P.M. Pour, pour, pour again, dark as night, — many people coming in to see me because they don’t know what to do with themselves. I am very glad to see them for the same reason; this atmosphere is so heavy, I seem to carry the weight of the world on my head and feel unfitted for every exertion. As to eating, that is a bygone thing; wine, coffee, meat, I have resigned; vegetables are few and hard to have, except horrible cabbage, in which the Romans delight. A little rice still remains, which I take with pleasure, remembering it growing in the rich fields of Lombardy, so green and full of glorious light. That light fell still more beautiful on the tall plantations of hemp, but it is dangerous just at present to think of what is made from hemp. This week all the animals are being blessed,11 and they get a gratuitous baptism, too, the while. The lambs one morning were taken out to the church of St. Agnes for this purpose. The little companion of my travels, if he sees this letter, will remember how often we saw her with her lamb in pictures. The horses are being blessed by St. Antonio, and under his harmonizing influence are afterward driven through the city, twelve and even twenty in hand. They are harnessed into light wagons, and men run beside them to guard against accident, in case the good influence of the Saint should fail. This morning came the details of infamous attempts by the Austrian police to exasperate the students of Pavia. The way is to send persons to smoke cigars in forbidden places, who insult those who are obliged to tell them to desist. These traps seem particularly shocking when laid for fiery and sensitive young men. They succeeded: the students were lured, into combat, and a number left dead and wounded on both sides. The University is shut up; the inhabitants of Pavia and Milan have put on mourning; even at the theatre they wear it. The Milanese will not walk in that quarter where the blood of their fellow-citizens has been so wantonly shed. They have demanded a legal investigation of the conduct of the officials. At Piacenza similar attempts have been made to excite the Italians, by smoking in their faces, and crying, “Long live the Emperor!” It is a worthy homage to pay to the Austrian crown, — this offering of cigars and blood. 10. In real life, the Colossus statue erected in 275 BCE at the entrance to the harbor of Rhodes had been toppled by a mundane earthquake in 224 BCE. 11. One of Rome’s singular customs. — ED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “O this offence is rank; it smells to Heaven.” This morning authentic news is received from Naples. The king, when assured by his own brother that Sicily was in a state of irresistible revolt, and that even the women quelled the troops, — showering on them stones, furniture, boiling oil, such means of warfare as the household may easily furnish to a thoughtful matron, — had, first, a stroke of apoplexy, from, which the loss of a good deal of bad blood relieved him. His mind apparently having become clearer thereby, he has offered his subjects an amnesty and terms of reform, which, it is hoped, will arrive before his troops have begun to bombard the cities in obedience to earlier orders. Comes also to-day the news that the French Chamber of Peers propose an Address to the King, echoing back all the falsehoods of his speech, including those upon reform, and the enormous one that “the peace of Europe is now assured”; but that some members have worthily opposed this address, and spoken truth in an honorable manner. Also, that the infamous sacrifice of the poor little queen of Spain puts on more tragic colors; that it is pretended she has epilepsy, and she is to be made to renounce the throne, which, indeed, has been a terrific curse to her. And Heaven and Earth have looked calmly on, while the king of France has managed all this with the most unnatural of mothers.

June: Abraham Lincoln attended the national Whig convention in support of General Zachary Taylor as their nominee for President. He would campaign for this candidate in Maryland and in Boston, and then in Illinois. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1849

March 7, Wednesday: On this day and the following one Abraham Lincoln would be making an appeal before the US Supreme Court in regard to the Illinois statute of limitations (his appeal would be unsuccessful).

The 1st Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray, arrived (St. Helena had been included in the See of Cape Town when it had been established two years previously). This was the 1st visit by a Bishop and thus the 1st confirmations on the island — a total of 366. Bishop Gray would make two further visits, in 1852 and in 1857.

March 31, Saturday: It is probably on this day that Nathan Johnson left New Bedford, bound for the California gold fields. (Between December 1848 and April 1850, at least a dozen other New Bedford men of color were reaching this same decision — evidently they were all trusting that a gold strike would enable them to pay off debts.)

Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois and abandoned politics for the private practice of law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 22, Tuesday: Abraham Lincoln was granted US Patent No. 6,469 (he remains the only President ever to be granted a patent).

Maria Edgeworth died.

Christine Wilhelmine “Minna” Planer Wagner joined Richard Wagner at Magdala where he was hiding.

Margaret Fuller wrote to her brother Richard Frederick Fuller: Rome, May 22, 1849. I do not write to Eugene yet, because around me is such excitement I cannot settle my mind enough to write a letter good for anything. The Neapolitans have been driven back; but the French, seem to be amusing us with a pretence of treaties, while waiting for the Austrians to come up. The Austrians cannot, I suppose, be more than three days’ march from us. I feel but little about myself. Such thoughts are merged in indignation, and in the fears I have that Rome may be bombarded. It seems incredible that any nation should be willing to incur the infamy of such an act, — an act that may rob posterity of a most precious part of its inheritance; — only so many incredible things have happened of late. I am with William Story, his wife and uncle. Very kind friends they have been in this strait. They are going away, so soon as they can find horses, — going into Germany. I remain alone in the house, under our flag, almost the only American except the Consul and Ambassador. But Mr. Cass, the Envoy, has offered to do anything for me, and I feel at liberty to call on him if I please. But enough of this. Let us implore of fate another good meeting, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE full and free, whether long or short. Love to dearest mother, Arthur, Ellen, Lloyd. Say to all, that, should any accident possible to these troubled times transfer me to another scene of existence, they need not regret it. There must be better worlds than this, where innocent blood is not ruthlessly shed, where treason does not so easily triumph, where the greatest and best are not crucified. I do not say this in apprehension, but in case of accident, you might be glad to keep this last word from your sister MARGARET. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1850

In an antislavery address, the Reverend Theodore Parker characterized democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”12

During this decade Abraham Lincoln would begin to exploit the conflicting uses of the Declaration of Independence and, by the time of his debates with Stephen Douglas, would have come to see the document’s statements on equality and rights, according to Pauline Maier, “as setting a standard for the future, one that demanded the gradual extinction of conflicting practices” (AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: MAKING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, page 205).

February 1, Friday: Edward, a son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, died after a 2-month illness. The lawyer would resume his travels in the 8th Judicial Circuit, covering over 400 miles in 14 counties in Illinois.

Richard Wagner moved back to Paris from Zürich.

12. It is not clear that Abraham Lincoln ever learned of this. The alliteration is of course an obvious one. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 21, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF DECEMBER 21

Abraham Lincoln’s and Mary Todd Lincoln’s 3d son William “Willie” Wallace Lincoln was born.

The Reverend Adin Ballou’s editorial, “Pro-War Anti-Slavery,” concluded that having a civil war to end slavery would make the situation far worse rather than any better, for both American whites and American HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE blacks:

The work of anti-slavery would be done if the nation repented and declared “the colored people placed on a level with the white population.” But nonresistance would still have to calm the continuing hostility between whites and blacks. Furthermore, if nonresistance could reach the slaveholder before antislavery, the blacks would be spared any hostile aftermath. In this eventuality, Ballou expected that freedmen would be loyal to the interests of their former masters and would seek their guidance. “Such slavery would be quite unexceptionable to Anti-Slavery itself.” But the reforms were distinct, and it already seemed probable that “Non- Resistance exerts at least a deadening influence on Anti- Slavery zeal, and so is incongruent with it.” In making this distinction, he admitted what Garrison, Wright, and the others were never willing to admit: “Anti-Slavery is essentially nothing more than consistent democracy, and ... democracy contends for political justice and natural rights merely — not for the duty of patiently enduring wrongs, submitting to outrage, and forgiving injuries.” He likewise admitted that it was very hard to agitate for the end of slavery without sometimes feeling an impulse to fight. Here was the most extraordinary concession of all: “Anti-Slavery has a strong natural affinity for political and legal action.” What, then, was the “proper sphere” for nonresistants in the antislavery struggle?

They can think, feel, speak, write, publish, and in a thousand ways enlighten, purify, and renovate public sentiment. And this, after all, is the great thing to be done. When this has been accomplished, political, legislative and legal action will follow, as the vane conforms to the changing wind.... In this respect [non- resistance] sustains the same position to the Anti-Slavery Society, as to all other noble voluntary associations, which are right in their end, but liable to err in their means.

It is uncertain what provoked this editorial. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At the end of the same year, Ballou wrote another, “Pro-War Anti- Slavery,” in which he listed affronts to nonresistance. It was bad enough that Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker, who had been understood to favor the doctrine, were calling for the death of kidnappers. It was much more distressing that “devoted and indomitable reformers,” like Stephen S. Foster and Henry C. Wright, “though affirming that they themselves are Non- Resistants, declare it to be the duty of such as hold it right to fight to the death for the poor slave.” It resembled the old argument over defensive war. Could they not see that to justify any fighting was to open the door to all fighting? Furthermore, was it not obvious that, if slavery were ended by violence, “both black and white would be subjected to a long series of calamities, moral and physical, which could never be done away, but by the moral means we can now employ with fifty times more advantage?” These were the stakes. In view of the subsequent history of racial violence and frustrated efforts at reform in the South, they are not trivial. Ballou’s contributions to the debate of the 1850s were the ideas that by demanding any kind of force abolitionists would forfeit their ability to criticize the violence which would actually occur and that slavery, if ended by force, would leave a legacy of hatred and poverty which even Christian love would have difficulty in overcoming. Ballou reiterated similar warnings throughout the decade. Nonresistance might be compelled to separate from antislavery. It was understandable, if not excusable, that foes of slavery should get mad enough to fight. But if abolitionists successfully exhorted slave uprisings, they would simply aggravate the racist fear of “black monsters” in the North. In any case, the effective abolition of slavery required a change in the culture and religion of Southerners, white and black. This testimony came to a head in 1859. A long, troubled editorial on “Practical Christian Anti-Slavery” suggested the secession from the Garrisonian society was probably appropriate for three principal reasons. First, of course, was the predominance of the war spirit among abolitionists. Second was “a growing disposition among our Anti-Slavery Associates to magnify their movement for the abolition of chattel slavery as including the main substance of Christianity, or of a natural religion much purer than Christianity.” Third was an increase in the “egotism, extremeism [sic], exaggerationism, antagonism and contemptuous personality,” of which there always had been too much; it followed from the “absurd doctrine[,] the better a man is the worse he is, or at least the most dangerous, so long as he is not a full saint.” In order to come out from antislavery, it was necessary to minimize its importance and reject its utility as a test of sinlessness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

There had been objections to the intrusion on personal privacy occasioned by the activities of the agents of Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency and other such credit-verification firms (agents such as for instance the attorney Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, who during the 1840s and 1850s was earning spot money by forwarding local gossip as to creditworthiness to the headquarters in New-York). Hunt’s Merchants’s Magazine charged in this year that, not to put too fine a point on it, any businessman who objected to such an invasion of privacy must be disingenuously attempting to get away with something unethical and unbusinesslike: “The man who objects to such investigation gives, in doing so, prima facie evidence that the result would be unfavorable to himself.”

January 10, Friday-12, Sunday: Waldo Emerson was in Springfield, Illinois, lecturing during these three succeeding evenings on “The Anglo-Saxon,” on “Power,” and on “Culture.” Years later, Abraham Lincoln would remember that he had attended one of these 3 lectures — but would be quite unable to recall which particular topic was being covered on that evening.

January 12, Sunday: Abraham Lincoln’s father Thomas Lincoln lay dying but the son was refusing to visit (nor would he make himself available for his father’s funeral).

January 17, Friday: Abraham Lincoln’s father Thomas Lincoln died. The rising son would decline to attend this funeral. (There is no published work of Lincoln in which he had anything favorable to say about his father or, for that matter, anything favorable to say about his birth mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Such remarks as he would be willing to put on the record would be quite critical, such as that this couple had done “absolutely nothing” to incite in their offspring any “ambition for education.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

April 15, Thursday: Attorney Abraham Lincoln had a busy day in the Woodford County Circuit Court of Metamora, Illinois. First the State’s Attorney David B. Campbell entered a motion of nolle prosequi in the case of People v. Snyder et al. Campbell’s motion, ending the state’s prosecution of attorney Lincoln’s clients Isaac Snyder, John Johnson, Aaron Burt, and Dempsey Hawkins, who had been indicted on a charge of “gaming.” Then, in the chancery case of Dressler v. Dressler et al., attorney Lincoln filed an answer for the minor heirs of Abraham Dressler, to wit, Levi Dressler, Jane Dressler, and Hannah Dressler (Lincoln being the guardian ad litem for the children in that land partition case). Then, in the case of Rogers v. Rogers et al. (another chancery case involving the partition of land), attorney Lincoln filed a guardian ad litem’s answer for minor heirs Susan F. Morton, John W. Morton, Tabitha Ann Morton, Elizabeth Morton, Jeremiah R. Morton, and John A. Halderman.

April 15, Thursday: My face still burns with yesterday’s sunning. It rains this morning, as if the vapor from the melting snow was again. There is so much sun & light reflected from the snow at this season that it is not only remarkably white & dazzling but tans in a few moments. It is fortunate then that the sun on the approach of the snows – the season of snow – takes his course so many degrees lower in the heavens – else he might burn us off even at that season. The face comes from the house of winter tender & white to the house of summer – and these late snows convey the sun to it with sudden & scorching power. It was not the march winds or others. It was a still warm beautiful day. I was out but 3 hours It was the sun suddenly and copiously applied to a face from winter quarters The broad flat brown buds on Mr Cheney’s elm containing 20 or 30 yellowish green threads surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups which contain the stamens & the two styles – these are just expanding or blossoming now. The flat imbricated buds which open their scales both ways – have had a rich look for some weeks past. Why so few elms so advanced – so rich now–? Are the stamenifereous & pistilliferous flowers ever on dif. trees. It is according to Emerson the Dwarf Cassandra C. Calyculata of D. Don that is so common on the river meadows & in swamps & bogs – formerly called an Andromeda – of the Ericaceae or Heath family with the Uva Ursi (Arctostaphylos.) Now well flower-budded. I had forgotten the aspen in my latest enumerations of flowers – v if its flowers have not decidedly appeared. I think that the largest early catkined willow in large bushes in sand by water now blossoming – the fertile catkins with paler blossoms the sterile covered with polen a pleasant lively bright yellow – the brightest flower I have seen thus far– Gilpin says of the stags in the New Forest (a hart is a stag in his 5th or 6th yr & upward – if one “be hunted by the king, and escape; or have his life given him for the sport he has afforded, he becomes from thence forward a hart-royal. – If he be hunted out of the forest, and there escape; the king hath sometimes honored him with a royal proclamation; the purport of which is, to forbid any one to molest him, that he may have free liberty of returning to his forest. From that time he becomes a hart-royal proclaimed.” As is said of Richard the 1st that having pursued a hart a great distance– –“The king in gratitude for the diversion he had received, ordered him immediately to be proclaimed at Tickill, and at all the neighboring towns”. Think of having such a fellow as that for a king causing his proclamation to be blown about your country towns at the end of his day’s sport – at Tickill or elsewhere – that your hinds may not molest the hart that has afforded him such an ever memorable day’s sport– Is it not time that his subjects whom he has so sorely troubled and so long, be harts royal proclaimed – who have afforded him such famous sport? It will be a finer days sport when the hinds shall turn and hunt the royal hart beyond the bounds of his forest – & his kingdom – & in perpetual banishment alone he become a royal-hart proclaimed. Such is the magnanimity of royal hearts – that through a whimsical prick of generosity spares the game it could not kill – & fetters its equals with its arbitrary will. Kings love to say shall & will. Rain rain, rain, all day – carrying off the snow. It appears then that if you go out at this season and walk in the sun in a clear warm day like yesterday – while the earth is covered with snow – you may have your face burnt in a few moments. The rays glance off from the snowy crystals & scorch the skin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Thinking of the value of the gull to the scenery of our river in the spring when for a few weeks they are seen circling about so deliberately & heavily yet gracefully – without apparent object beating like a vessel in the air. Gilpin says something to the purpose – that water-fowl “discover in their flight some determined aim. They eagerly coast the river or return to the sea; bent on some purpose, of which they never lose sight. But the evolutions of the gull appear capricious, and undirected, both when she flies alone, and, as she often does, in large companies. – The more however her character suffers as a loiterer, the more it is raised in picturesque value, by her continuing longer before the eye; and displaying in her elegant sweeps through the air, her sharp- pointed wings, and her bright silvery hue. – She is beautiful also, not only on the wing, but when she floats, in numerous assemblies on the water; or when she rests on the shore, dotting either one, or the other with white spots; which, minute as they are, are very picturesque: – – giving life & spirit to a view.” He seems to be describing our very bird. I do not remember to have seen them over or in our river meadows when there was not ice there. They come annually a-fishing here like royal hunters. to remind us of the sea – & that our town after all lies but further up a creek of the universal sea – above the head of the tide. So ready is a deluge to overwhelm our lands as the gulls to circle hither in the spring freshets. To see a gull beating high over our meadowy flood in chill & windy march – is akin to seeing a mackerel schooner on the coast. It is the nearest approach to sailing vessels in our scenery. I never saw one at Walden. O how it salts our fresh our Sweet watered Fair Haven all at once to see this sharp beaked greedy sea bird beating over it! For awhile the water is brackish to my eyes. It is merely some herring pond – and if I climb the eastern bank I expect to see the atlantic there covered with countless sails. whoever thought that walden’s blue & emerald water was ever prophaned by wing of gull or cormorant– At most it tolerates one annual loon. We are so far maritime – do not dwell beyond the range of the sea going gull – the littoral birds. Does not the gull come up after those suckers which I see? He is never to me perfectly in harmony with the scenery – but like the high water something unusual. –What a novel life to be introduced to a dead sucker floating on the water in the spring!– Where was it spawned pray? The sucker is so recent – so unexpected – so unrememberable so unanticipatable a creation– While so many institutions are gone by the board and we are despairing of men & of ourselves there seems to be life even in a dead sucker – whose fellows at least are alive. The world never looks more recent or promising – religion philosophy poetry – than when viewed from this point. To see a sucker tossing on the spring flood – its swelling imbricated breast heaving up a bait to not despairing gulls– It is a strong & a strengthening sight. Is the world coming to an end?– Ask the chubs. As long as fishes spawn – glory & honor to the cold blooded who despair – as long as ideas are expressed – as long as friction makes bright – as long as vibrating wires make music of harps – we do not want redeemers. What a volume you might on the separate virtues of the various animals – the black duck & the rest. How indispensable our one or two flocks of geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] in spring & autumn– What would be a spring in which that sound was not heard.– Coming to unlock the fetters of northern rivers. Those annual steamers of the air Would it not be a fine office to preserve the vert of this forest in which I ramble? Channing calls our walks along the banks of the river – taking a boat for convenience at some distant point – ELLERY CHANNING riparial excursions It is a pleasing epithet – but I mistrust such – even as good as this, in which the mere name is so agreeable, as if it would ring hollow erelong – and rather the thing should make the true name poetic at last. Alcott wished me to name my book Sylvania! But he & C. are 2 men in these respects. We make a good many prairial excursions We take a boat 4 or 5 miles out then paddle up the stream as much further, meanwhile land & making excursions inland or further along the banks. Walden is but little more melted than yesterday. I see that the grass, which unless in the most favored spots, did not show any evidence of spring to the casual glance, before the snow, will look unexpectedly green as soon as it has gone. It has actually grown beneath it. The lengthened spires about our pump – remind me of flame – as if it were a kind of green flame – allied to fire, as it is the product of the sun. The Aspen on the RR is beginning to blossom showing the purple or mulberry – in the terminal catkins – though it droops like dead-cat’s tails in the rain. It appears about the same date with the elm. Is it the chickweed so forward by our back door-step? DOG V that sentence in Gilpin about – A gentleman might keep a greyhound within ten miles of the forest if he was lawed– “Lawing, or expeditation, was a forest-term for disqualifying a dog to exert such speed, as was necessary to take a deer. It was performed either by cutting out the sole of his foot, or by taking off two of his claws by a chisel, and mallet.” It reminds me of the majority of human hounds that tread the forests paths of this world – they go slightly limping in their gait as if disqualified by a cruel fate to overtake the nobler game of the forest – their natural quarry– Most men are such dogs. Ever & anon starting a quarry – with perfect scent which from this cruel HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE maiming & disqualification of the fates he is incapable of coming up with. Does not the noble dog shed tears? Gilpin on the subject of docking horse’s tails – thinks that leaving the tail may even help the racer to fly toward the goal I notice that the sterile blossoms of that large catkin’d early willow begin to open on the side of the catkin – like a tinge of golden light – gradually spreading & expanding over the whole surface & lifting their anthers far & wide. The stem of these sterile catkins is more reddish smoother & slenderer than that of the female ones (pale flowered) which is darker & downy HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

April 4, Monday: Oldenburg and Hanover joined the German Zollverein.

Marietta Alboni appeared as Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Abraham Lincoln’s and Mary Todd Lincoln’s 4th son Thomas “Tad” Lincoln was born.

William M. White’s version of a portion of Henry Thoreau’s journal entry is:

I hear the hollow sound of drops Falling into the water under Hubbard’s Bridge, And each one makes a conspicuous bubble Which is floated down-stream. Instead of ripples There are a myriad dimples on the stream.

The lichens remember the sea to-day.

The usually dry cladonias, Which are so crisp under the feet, Are full of moist vigor.

The rocks speak and tell the tales inscribed on them. Their inscriptions are brought out. I pause to study their geography. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE White’s version of another portion of the journal entry is:

The other day, When I had been standing perfectly still Some ten minutes, Looking at a willow which had just blossomed, MARTIAL MILES Some rods in the rear of Martial Miles’s house, felt eyes on my back and, Turning round suddenly, Saw the heads of two men Who had stolen out of the house And were watching me over a rising ground As fixedly as I the willow.

They were studying man, Which is said to be the proper study of mankind, I nature, And yet, when detected, They felt the cheapest of the two.

April 4. Last night, a sugaring of snow, which goes off in an hour or two in the rain. Rains all day. The steam-cloud from the engine rises but slowly in such an atmosphere, and makes a small angle with the earth. It is low, perhaps, for the same reason that the clouds are. The robins [American Robin Turdus migratorius] sang this morning, nevertheless, and now more than ever hop about boldly in the garden in the rain, with full, broad, light cow-colored breasts. P. M. — Rain, rain. To Clematis Brook via Lee’s Bridge. Again I notice that early reddish or purplish grass that lies flat on the pools, like a warm blush suffusing the youthful face of the year. A warm, dripping rain, heard on one’s umbrella as on a snug roof, and on the leaves without, suggests comfort. We go abroad with a slow but sure contentment, like turtles under their shells. We never feel so comfortable as when we are abroad in a storm with satisfaction. Our comfort is positive then. We are all compact, and our thoughts collected. We walk under the clouds and mists as under a roof. Now we seem to hear the ground a-soaking up the rain, and not falling [sic] ineffectually on a frozen surface. We, too, are penetrated and revived by it. Robins still sing, and song sparrows more or less, and blackbirds, and the unfailing jay screams. How the thirsty grass rejoices! It has pushed up so visibly since morning, and fields that were completely russet yesterday are already tinged with green. We rejoice with the grass. I hear the hollow sound of drops falling water under Hubbard’s Bridge, and each one makes a conspicuous bubble which is floated down-stream. Instead of ripples there are a myriad dimples on the stream. The lichens remember the sea to-day. The usually dry cladonias, which are so crisp under the feet, are full of moist vigor. The rocks speak and tell the tales inscribed on them. Their inscriptions are brought out. I pause to study their geography. At Conantum End I saw a red-tailed hawk [Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis] launch himself away from an oak by the pond at my approach, — a heavy flier, flapping even like the great bittern at first, — heavy forward. After turning Lee’s Cliff I heard, methinks, more birds singing even than in fair weather, — tree sparrows, whose song has the character of the canary’s, F. hyemalis’s [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis], chill-lill, the sweet strain of the fox-colored sparrow, song sparrows, a nuthatch, jays, crows, bluebirds, robins, and a large congregation of blackbirds. They suddenly alight with great din in a stubble-field just over the wall, not perceiving me and my umbrella behind the pitch pines, and there feed silently; then, getting uneasy or anxious, they fly up on to an apple tree, where being reassured, commences a rich but deafening concert, o- gurgle-ee-e, o-gurgle-ee-e, some of the most liquid notes ever heard, as if produced by some of the water of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Pierian spring, flowing through some kind of musical water-pipe and at the same time setting in motion a multitude of fine vibrating metallic springs. Like a shepherd merely meditating most enrapturing glees on such a water-pipe. A more liquid bagpipe or clarionet, immersed like bubbles in a thousand sprayey notes, the bubbles half lost in the spray. When I show myself, away they go with a loud harsh charr-r, charr-r. At first I had heard an inundation of blackbirds approaching, some beating time with a loud chuck, chuck, while the rest placed a hurried, gurgling fugue. Saw a sucker washed to the shore at Lee’s Bridge, its tail gone, large fins standing out, purplish on top of head and snout. Reminds me of spring, spearing, and gulls. A rainy day is to the walker in solitude and retirement like the night. Few travellers are about, and they half hidden under umbrellas and confined to the highways. One’s thoughts run in a different channel from usual. It is somewhat like the dark day; it is a light night. How cheerful the roar of a brook swollen by the rain, especially if there is no sound of a mill in it! A woodcock went off from the shore of Clematis or Nightshade Pond with a few slight rapid sounds like a watchman’s rattle half revolved. A clustering of small narrow leaves cone-like on the shrub oak. Some late, low, remarkably upright alders (serrulata), short thick catkins, at Clematis Brook. The hazel bloom is about one tenth of an inch long (the stigmas) now. A little willow (Salix Muhlenbergiana?) nearly ready to bloom, not larger than a sage willow. All our early willows with catkins appearing before the leaves must belong to the group of “The Sallows. Cinereæ. Borrer,” and that of the “Two-colored Willows. Discolores. Borrer,” as adopted by Barratt; or, in other words, to the first § of Carey in Gray.13 The other day, when I had been standing perfectly still some ten minutes, looking at a willow which had just blossomed, some rods in the rear of Martial Miles’s house, I felt eyes on my back and, turning round suddenly, saw the heads of two men who had stolen out of the house and were watching me over a rising ground as fixedly as I the willow. They were studying man, which is said to be the proper study of mankind, I nature, and yet, when detected, they felt the cheapest of the two. I hear the twitter of tree sparrows from fences and shrubs in the yard and from alders by meadows and the riverside every day.

13. Professor Asa Gray. A MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, FROM NEW ENGLAND TO WISCONSIN AND SOUTH TO OHIO AND PENNSYLVANIA INCLUSIVE (THE MOSSES AND LIVERWORTS BY WM. S. SULLIVANT), ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL SYSTEM (Boston: J. Munroe and company). MANUAL OF THE BOTANY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

The Republican Party was formed, taking its name from the “Democratic-Republican” party founded by Thomas Jefferson (that party had dropped “Republican” from its name in 1828). Prominent in the Republican platform was the opposition to the extension of slavery. The issue of slavery, and this year’s Kansas-Nebraska Act proposed by Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglass as a way of repealing the Missouri Compromise and extending slavery, contributed to the defection of many Whigs to the new party.

Waldo Emerson’s attitude toward the Kansas/Nebraska Act was: “the question is properly, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished.”14

14. Slater, Joseph, ed. THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964, page 499. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Frederick Douglass made a modest proposal about “Bleeding Kansas”:15 It has been alleged by Michael

Goldfield in “The Color of Politics in the United States: White Supremacy as the Main Explanation for the Peculiarities of American Politics from Colonial Times to the Present” (in LaCapra, Dominick, ed. THE BOUNDS OF RACE: PERSPECTIVES ON HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1991, page 124) that: Until the early 1850s when Joseph Wedemeyer and other radical followers of Karl Marx who understood the importance of abolition for the white workers, gained some small influence in the white workers’ movement, labor leaders as a whole were more interested in freedom from Afro-Americans than in freedom for them. The rallying cry of Free Soilism in 1845 was the Wilmot Proviso, which barred slavery from the new territories, but suggested that land rights should be reserved for whites only. Such an approach was counterposed to the more radical and more realistic approach offered by Douglass for Kansas in 1854. Douglass argued that 1,000 free black homesteading families settling in Kansas would put up a “wall of living fire” through which slavery could not pass. Frederick Douglass delivered an address “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” before the literary societies of Western Reserve College in Rochester NY, in which he attacked the use of the scientism of his day as a legitimator for racism. Weighing craniological and physiological similarities against differences, he proposed that from a purely scientific standpoint humans constituted one grouping, which should not have been a difficult conclusion for his audience to accept, since, as we now know, were the same 15. You will notice an amazing thing here. We’ve got “Douglas” and “Douglass” in the very same data element! HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE standards for speciation to be applied to the pongid branch of mammals as are routinely applied to, say, beetles, we would be forced to recognize that there is only one existing species of pongids, of which chimpanzees, humans, and the recently discovered gorillas would constitute at most differing local races. Nevertheless, at the end of all this rationalization Douglass proclaimed it all to be quite literally of no significance. For even if none of this turned out to be the case, he indicated, even if anatomical differences were someday by someone demonstrated to far outweigh similarities, it would never follow that one human group ought to hold another human group in contempt as inferior beings. The title to freedom, liberty, and knowledge he held to depend not at all upon any “natural” realities, but instead upon the law of “the Courts of Heaven.” What difference does difference make, when it comes to human rights? None whatsoever. One is reminded of our contemporary “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon in which Hobbes the Tiger destroys Calvin the boy terror’s incipient Social Darwinism by informing him that living things were obviously put upon the face of this planet in order to chase and tear one another, and to eat one another alive. (Chastened of his naturalism, Calvin goes home, and at the end of the strip he is locking all the doors and turning on all the lights.)

Abraham Lincoln re-entered politics in opposition to the Kansas/Nebraska Act and was elected to the Illinois legislature, but declined this seat in order to try to become a US Senator. The Act succeeded in sweeping aside the Missouri Compromise, which had been restricting the expansion of slavery. With a nod to Southern power, the federal government was placing the volatile issue of slavery into the hands of those settling the new territories. “The people” will decide, by “popular vote,” whether to be “free” or “slave.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

Abraham Lincoln was not chosen by the Illinois legislature to be a US Senator. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

A railway bridge spanning the Mississippi River opened between Rockville, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa. Abraham Lincoln, a railroad lawyer, would be defending the legality of that bridge before the Supreme Court, in response to a “right of way” lawsuit that would be brought by a steamship company.

Salmon Portland Chase was elected Governor of Ohio and would serve two terms (1856-1860). Governor Chase would promote education, attempt to reform the prison system, establish an insane asylum, and promote women’s rights. Chase was smitten by a lust which would characterize him the rest of his life, “presidential fever.” He tried to secure the presidential nomination of the 1st Republican convention in 1856 but failed. Having the support of Rhode Island money, he would try again in 1860, but would fail even to muster the support of the Ohio delegation and the nomination would go to one of the senators from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The “Republican” party was nationally organized, replacing, in northern sections, the Whigs. joined this new party and made his New-York Herald Tribune into the party organ. The party was fielding, as its 1st presidential candidate, John Charles Frémont. The famous controversial author Harriet Beecher Stowe

announced her support for his candidacy, as did the famous controversial author Frederick Douglass.16 The wild, dreary belt of swamp-land which girds in those states scathed by the fires of despotism is an apt emblem, in its rampant and we might say delirious exuberance of vegetation, of that darkly struggling, wildly vegetating swamp of human souls, cut off, like it, from the usages and improvements of cultivated life. There is no principle so awful through all nature as the principle of growth. It is a mysterious and dread condition of existence, which, place it under what impediments or disadvantages you will, is constantly forcing on; and when unnatural pressure hinders it, develops in forms portentous and astonishing. In support of the new political candidate, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier wrote:

A SONG FOR THE TIME. UP, laggards of Freedom! — our free flag is cast To the blaze of the sun and the wings of the blast; Will ye turn from a struggle so bravely begun, From a foe that is breaking, a field that’s half won? Whoso loves not his kind, and who fears not the Lord, Let him join that foe’s service, accursed and abhorred! Let him do his base will, as the slave only can, — Let him put on the bloodhound, and put off the Man! Let him go where the cold blood that creeps in his veins Shall stiffen the slave-whip, and rust on his chains; Where the black slave shall laugh in his bonds, to behold The White Slave beside him, self-lettered and sold! But ye, who still boast of hearts beating and warm, Rise, from lake shore and ocean’s, like waves in a storm, Come, throng round our banner in Liberty’s name, Like winds from your mountains, like prairies aflame!

Our foe, hidden long in his ambush of night, Now, forced from his covert, stands black in the light. Oh, the cruel to Man, and the hateful to God, Smite him down to the earth, that is cursed where he trod! 16. James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, would be elected president, the Republicans carrying but 11 states. In the Transvaal of South Africa, the Boers established a “South African Republic” with Pretoria as its capital, Marthinus Wessels Pretorius becoming its 1st president. Our Republican Party’s next presidential choice, Abraham Lincoln, would win with the electoral votes of the 18 northern states, beginning a tradition in which, of the 18 national elections between 1860 and 1932, only 4 would be won by non-Republican candidates. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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For deeper than thunder of summer’s loud shower, On the dome of the sky God is striking the hour! Shall we falter before what we’re prayed for so long, When the Wrong is so weak, and the Right is so strong? Come forth all together! come old and come young, Freedom’s vote in each hand, and her song on each tongue; Truth naked is stronger than Falsehood in mail; The Wrong cannot prosper, the Right cannot fail! Like leaves of the summer once numbered the foe, But the hoar-frost is falling, the northern winds blow; Like leaves of November erelong shall they fall, For earth wearies of them, and God’s over all!

What of the Day? by John Greenleaf Whittier (1856) Written during the stirring weeks when the great political battle for Freedom under Frémont’s leadership was permitting strong hope of success, — a hope overshadowed and solemnized by a sense of the magnitude of the barbaric evil, and a forecast of the unscrupulous and desperate use of all its powers in the last and decisive struggle.

A SOUND of tumult troubles all the air, Like the low thunders of a sultry sky Far-rolling ere the downright lightnings glare; The hills blaze red with warnings; foes draw nigh, Treading the dark with challenge and reply. Behold the burden of the prophet’s vision; The gathering hosts, — the Valley of Decision, Dusk with the wings of eagles wheeling o’er. Day of the Lord, of darkness and not light! It breaks in thunder and the whirlwind’s roar! Even so, Father! Let Thy will be done; Turn and o’erturn, end what Thou hast begun In judgment or in mercy: as for me, If but the least and frailest, let me be Evermore numbered with the truly free Who find Thy service perfect liberty! I fain would thank Thee that my mortal life Has reached the hour (albeit through care and pain) When Good and Evil, as for final strife, Close dim and vast on Armageddon’s plain; And Michael and his angels once again Drive howling back the Spirits of the Night. Oh for the faith to read the signs aright And, from the angle of Thy perfect sight, See Truth’s white banner floating on before; And the Good Cause, despite of venal friends, And base expedients, move to noble ends; See Peace with Freedom make to Time amends, And, through its cloud of dust, the threshing-floor, Flailed by the thunder, heaped with chaffless grain! HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 29, Thursday: Abraham Lincoln helped organize the new Republican Party of Illinois. At its 1st national convention he would get 110 votes for the vice-presidential nomination, bringing him national attention. He would campaign in Illinois for the Republican presidential candidate, John Charles Frémont.

From George Templeton Strong’s New-York diary:

No new vagaries from the wild men of the South since yesterday. The South is to the North nearly what the savage Gaelic race of the Highlands was to London tempore William and Mary, vide Macaulay’s third volume; except that they’ve assumed to rule their civilized neighbors instead of being oppressed by them, and that the simple, barbaric virtues of their low social development have been thereby deteriorated. A few fine specimens have given them a prestige the class don’t deserve. We at the North are a busy money— making democracy, comparatively law—abiding and peace— loving, with the faults (among others) appropriate to traders and workers. A rich Southern aristocrat who happens to be of fine nature, with the self—reliance and high tone that life among an aristocracy favors, and culture and polish from books and travel, strikes us (not as Brooks struck Sumner but) as something different from ourselves, more ornamental and in some respects better. He has the polish of a highly civilized society, with the qualities that belong to a ruler of serfs. Thus a notion has got footing here that “Southern gentlemen” are a high—bred chivalric aristocracy, something like Louis XIV’s noblesse, with grave faults, to be sure, but on the whole, very gallant and generous, regulating themselves by “codes of honor” (that are wrong, of course, but very grand); not rich, but surrounded by all the elements of real refinement. Whereas I believe they are, in fact, a race of lazy, ignorant, coarse, sensual, swaggering, sordid, beggarly barbarians, bullying white men and breeding little niggers for sale. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE June 12, Thursday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, from Worcester.

Abraham Lincoln’s speech of June 10th was characterized on this day by his political opponents, in the pages of the Illinois State Register, as “niggerism” of “as dark a hue” as that of Frederick Douglass: Mr. Lincoln opened his speech, and for more than an hour he bored his audience with one of the weakest speeches that he ever perpetrated. He was evidently laboring under much restraint, conscious that he was doling out new doctrine to the old whigs about him, and fearful that in keeping within moderate bounds, he would so filter his discourse that it would not in any degree reach the end he desired. He would occasionally launch out and lead his hearers to think that the most ultra would follow, when, under the old whig eyes we have mentioned, he would soften his remarks to a supposed palatable texture. In this way, backing and filling, he frittered away anything of argument that he might have presented, convincing his audience, however, that his niggerism has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Douglass but that his timidity before the peculiar audience he addressed prevented its earnest advocacy with the power and ability he is known to possess. The gist of his remarks were intended to show that the democratic party favors the extension of slavery, that black republicanism aims to prevent it; by what process we did not learn from him, nor did he furnish any evidence of the truth of his allegation against the democracy. He was opposed to the extension of slavery. So are we. But we desire to see it done in a constitutional manner — by the act of the people interested. For leaving the decision of the question there, by the adjustment of ’50, and by the Nebraska act, black republicanism has raised another furor in the country, and until very lately, they have claimed for congress the power to refuse the admission of any new state recognizing slavery by its constitution. Latterly, this plank of their platform has been suppressed. We heard nothing of it on Tuesday evening from Mr. Lincoln. The same caving in as to the restoration of the Missouri restriction, marks the latter day policy of the sectional party, and he as cautiously avoided it. They seek power, Mr. Lincoln naively told us, by the agglomeration of all the discordant elements of faction, and if obtained, the now suppressed platform of ultra abolitionism will be avowed and acted upon. He boldly avowed, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE in one of his many escapings, that there could be no Union with slavery. That agitation would be ceaseless until it shall be swept away, but the mode of its eradication he left to inference from his own antecedents and those of the ruling spirits of black-republicanism — Garrison, Greeley, Seward, Sumner, and others of that genus. To attain power, by whatever means, was the burden of his song, and he pointed to the complexion of the Bloomington ticket as evidence of the desire of the factions to attain it by any process. Bissell [William H. Bissell, Republican running for governor], a renegade democrat, headed it. Hoffman, a German nondescript [Francis A. Hoffman, Republican running for lieutenant governor, who would as a native of Germany lacking the requisite 14 years of citizenship later be replaced by John Wood of Adams County], followed; Miller, ex-whig and probable know-nothing [James Miller, Republican for treasurer], followed next, while Hatch [Ozias M. Hatch, Republican for secretary of state], Dubois [Jesse K. Dubois, Republican for auditor] and Powell [William H. Powell, Republican for superintendent of public instruction], avowed know-nothings, brought up the rear. With such a medley — such a fusion of opposites, none can doubt that the end and aim of the Bloomington organization is “power” — and place, and that its managers would sink any principle, trample upon right, law and constitution to attain their object. Mr. Lincoln’s allusion to Bissell’s services as a warrior was singularly malapropos, in him, at least; Bissell’s laurels having been won in a war, the “identical spot” on which it commenced never could be learned by Mr. L., and consequently had his inveterate opposition during its entire progress, by his congressional action in hampering the democratic administration in its prosecution. In this connection, Bissell may well exclaim — “Save me from such backing!” Except from the squad of claquers we have mentioned, Mr. Lincoln’s remarks were received with coldness. He convinced nobody of his own sincerity, of the justness of his cause, nor did he elicit any applause except from the drilled few who occupied the front benches. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1857

June 26, Friday: The 2d day of the Spiritualist testing in Apartment Number 12 in the Albion building on Tremont Street in beautiful downtown Boston — and there were no better results than on the previous day.

In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln spoke against the Dred Scott decision.

This man had no rights that any white American was bound to respect. None at all. Nope.

The 1st edition of Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT was published in Baltimore, expanding upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and proclaiming also the pleasant conceit that Waldo Emerson, who had originally espoused this idea in the 1844 “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”, was America’s “most practical and profound metaphysician.” Hoo boy! What Helper was proposing amounted to a comprehensive racial boycott by all whites against all persons of color. These coloreds couldn’t help but be unfair low-price low-quality competition for decent, honest, clean white HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE workingmen such as him. He proposed a total ostracization of any white man so unaware of the needs of white people as to utilize the labor of a nonwhite. No union with slaveholders! It would become a crime to so much as possess a copy of this racist book in the American South.

There was a blurb by Horace Greeley in the New-York Tribune and Weekly Tribune. When Senator James Mason of Virginia read Helper’s statistical study, he considered that its intent was “to array man against man in our own States.” Helper’s attitude was plain. He minced no words. He recommended to all white Americans that for fundamental economic reasons an abolitionist is your “best and only true” friend. I will quote passim in the manner in which it is customary to quote from such a treatise on attitude as MEIN KAMPF, in illustration of the plainness of Helper’s message:17 You must either be for us or against us.... [The white masses are going to] have justice peaceably or by violence.... Do you aspire to become the victims of white nonslaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night?...

17. Anyone who desires to evaluate the accuracy and representativeness of the constructed paragraph of quotation is urged to consult the original, which is a quick and entertaining read if one pays attention to the textual paragraphs while ignoring the enormous quantities of utterly irrelevant and tendentious and pretentious statistical tabulation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE [Slavery is] a perpetual license to murder.... In nine cases out of ten [slaves are] happy to cut their masters’ throats.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. —Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that of the victim. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, He hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our brave New World in the first place.18

The Democrats immediately attempted to neutralize Helper’s dangerous racist abolitionism by issuing Gilbert J. Beebe’s A REVIEW AND REFUTATION OF Hinton Rowan Helper’S “IMPENDING CRISIS”. They charged that their political opponents, the Republicans, were using this treatise as their “text-book.”

18. This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Hugh C. Bailey’s HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University of Alabama, 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

A crisis would break out in the discussions of this attitude about how to achieve progress, in December 1859 during the uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry by abolitionists.

Speaking of progress, in this year in England, Herbert Spencer’s article “Progress: its Law and Cause” began to apply his one big idea, a principle that he had derived from K.E. von Baer, that the biological development of an organism proceeds from a homogeneous state to a heterogeneous state, to the solar system, to animal species, to human society, to industry, to art, to language, to science, and to the kitchen sink. This ideology- driven infatuation eventually led to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley commenting about him that Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact.”

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Abraham Lincoln “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July: Illinois railroad attorney Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln visited New-York, Niagara Falls, and Canada (no, that’s not them in the photo). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1858

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was named the Republican Party’s candidate for the US Senate and delivered a plea for unity under his leadership in which he commented “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In this year this candidate would express the personal opinion that although the language of our Declaration of Independence, that “all men ... happiness” yada yada yada, was not compatible with holding American blacks in a condition of enslavement, nevertheless it was compatible with denying to them full political and social parity with white Americans. They might well be granted something more than slavery just as soon as it became convenient to white Americans to grant that to them, but, since they were of course inherently inferior to real human beings, which is to say, white human beings like Abraham Lincoln, they would always warrant something less than full consideration.

The Democratic candidate from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, would win the election. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

May: Abraham Lincoln won an acquittal in a murder trial by using an almanac entry regarding the height of the moon in order to discredit the testimony of a witness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne again visited William Wetmore Story at his studio. The clay model “Cleopatra” was finished (it would not be carved in marble until 1862).

This statue, being done in marble, would become famous even before it would go on public exhibit at the 19 London Exhibition of 1862, due to Hawthorne’s having publicized it in THE MARBLE FAUN.

Beginning in this month and continuing into October, the Hawthornes would be snuggled in a villa in Florence.

19. Looking at this plump and sullen statue today, or, at least, looking at the 1869 replica of it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Manhattan Island, what we receive is the thought “It’s either the asp or go on a diet.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE June 16, Wednesday: Abraham Lincoln was nominated to be the Republican senator from Illinois, opposing Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas. He would deliver his “House Divided” speech at the state convention in Springfield. Also, he would be engaging Douglas in a series of seven debates with big audiences.

The remains of Elisha Mitchell were transferred from his grave in Ashville, North Carolina to the top of the peak that would be named after him, Mt. Mitchell.

Henry Thoreau noted in his journal that Edward Waldo Emerson (about 14 years of age), Edward Jarvis “Ned” Bartlett (about 16 years of age), and Samuel Storrow Higginson (presumably at this point about 15, since he would graduate from Harvard College in 1863) “came to ask me the names of some eggs to-night.” The boys provided information as to the various nests that they had seen.

June 16: To Staple’s Meadow Wood. It is pleasant to paddle over the meadows now, at this time of flood, and look down on the various meadow plants, for you can see more distinctly quite to the bottom than ever.... No doubt thousands of birds’ nests have been destroyed by the flood, –blackbirds’ bobolinks’, song sparrows’, etc. I see a robin’s nest high above the water with the young just dead and the old bird in the water, apparently killed by the abundance of rain and afterward I see a fresh song sparrow’s nest which has been flooded and destroyed.

August 21, Saturday: The negrero Echo, taken with a cargo of 306 slaves, was brought to the port of Charleston, South Carolina (HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 35th Congress, 2d session II, part 4, Number 2, part 4, pages 5, 14). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

Life must have seemed quite a bit different on this day, for Abraham Lincoln and for Henry Thoreau:

August 21: P.M.–A-berrying to Conantum. I notice hardhacks clothing their stems now with their erected leaves, showing the whitish under sides. A pleasing evidence of the advancing season. JAMES BAKER How yellow that kind of hedgehog (?) sedge, [l] in the toad pool by Cyrus Hubbard’s corner. I still see the patch of epilobium on Bee Tree Hill as plainly as ever, though only the pink seed-vessels and stems are left. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Per the COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, here is the 1st debate with Stephen A. Douglas, that was taking place on this day at Ottawa, Illinois:

August 21, 1858 Mr. Douglas’ Speech. Ladies and gentlemen: I appear before you to-day for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind. By an arrangement between Mr. Lincoln and myself, we are present here to-day for the purpose of having a joint discussion as the representatives of the two great political parties of the State and Union, upon the principles in issue between these parties and this vast concourse of people, shows the deep feeling which pervades the public mind in regard to the questions dividing us. Prior to 1854 this country was divided into two great political parties, known as the Whig and Democratic parties. Both were national and patriotic, advocating principles that were universal in their application. An old line Whig could proclaim his principles in and Massachusetts alike. Whig principles had no boundary sectional line, they were not limited by the Ohio river, nor by the Potomac, nor by the line of the free and slave States, but applied and were proclaimed wherever the Constitution ruled or the American flag waved over the American soil. (Hear him, and three cheers.) So it was, and so it is with the great Democratic party, which, from the days of Jefferson until this period, has proven itself to be the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE historic party of this nation. While the Whig and Democratic parties differed in regard to a bank, the tariff, distribution, the specie circular and the sub-treasury, they agreed on the great slavery question which now agitates the Union. I say that the Whig party and the Democratic party agreed on this slavery question while they differed on those matters of expediency to which I have referred. The Whig party and the Democratic party jointly adopted the Compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of a proper and just solution of this slavery question in all its forms. Clay was the great leader, with Webster on his right and Cass on his left, and sustained by the patriots in the Whig and Democratic ranks, who had devised and enacted the Compromise measures of 1850. In 1851, the Whig party and the Democratic party united in Illinois in adopting resolutions endorsing and approving the principles of the compromise measures of 1850, as the proper adjustment of that question. In 1852, when the Whig party assembled in Convention at Baltimore for the purpose of nominating a candidate for the Presidency, the first thing it did was to declare the compromise measures of 1850, in substance and in principle, a suitable adjustment of that question. (Here the speaker was interrupted by loud and long continued applause.) My friends, silence will be more acceptable to me in the discussion of these questions than applause. I desire to address myself to your judgment, your understanding, and your consciences, and not to your passions or your enthusiasm. When the Democratic convention assembled in Baltimore in the same year, for the purpose of nominating a Democratic candidate for the Presidency, it also adopted the compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of Democratic action. Thus you see that up to 1853- ’54, the Whig party and the Democratic party both stood on the same platform with regard to the slavery question. That platform was the right of the people of each State and each Territory to decide their local and domestic institutions for themselves, subject only to the federal constitution. During the session of Congress of 1853-’54, I introduced into the Senate of the United States a bill to organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on that principle which had been adopted in the compromise measures of 1850, approved by the Whig party and the Democratic party in Illinois in 1851, and endorsed by the Whig party and the Democratic party in national convention in 1852. In order that there might be no misunderstanding in relation to the principle involved in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, I put forth the true intent and meaning of the act in these words: “It is the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any State or Territory, or to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the federal constitution.” Thus, you see, that up to 1854, when the Kansas and Nebraska bill was brought into Congress for the purpose of carrying out the principles which both parties had up to that time endorsed and approved, there had been no division in this country in HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE regard to that principle except the opposition of the abolitionists. In the House of Representatives of the Illinois Legislature, upon a resolution asserting that principle, every Whig and every Democrat in the House voted in the affirmative, and only four men voted against it, and those four were old line Abolitionists. (Cheers.) In 1854, Mr. Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Trumbull entered into an arrangement, one with the other, and each with his respective friends, to dissolve the old Whig party on the one hand, and to dissolve the old Democratic party on the other, and to connect the members of both into an Abolition party under the name and disguise of a Republican party. (Laughter and cheers, hurrah for Douglas.) The terms of that arrangement between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Trumbull have been published to the world by Mr. Lincoln’s special friend, James H. Matheny, Esq., and they were that Lincoln should have Shields’ place in the U.S. Senate, which was then about to become vacant, and that Trumbull should have my seat when my term expired. (Great laughter.) Lincoln went to work to abolitionize the Old Whig party all over the State, pretending that he was then as good a Whig as ever; (laughter) and Trumbull went to work in his part of the State preaching Abolitionism in its milder and lighter form, and trying to abolitionize the Democratic party, and bring old Democrats handcuffed and bound hand and foot into the Abolition camp. (“Good,” “hurrah for Douglas,” and cheers.) In pursuance of the arrangement, the parties met at Springfield in October, 1854, and proclaimed their new platform. Lincoln was to bring into the Abolition camp the old line Whigs, and transfer them over to , Chase, Ford, Frederick Douglass and Parson Lovejoy,20 who were ready to receive them and christen them in their new faith. (Laughter and cheers.) They laid down on that occasion a platform for their new Republican party, which was to be thus constructed. I have the resolutions of their State convention then held, which was the first mass State Convention ever held in Illinois by the Black Republican party, and I now hold them in my hands and will read a part of them, and cause the others to be printed. Here is the most important and material resolution of this Abolition platform. 1. Resolved, That we believe this truth to be self-evident, that when parties become subversive of the ends for which they are established, or incapable of restoring the government to the true principles of the constitution, it is the right and duty of the people to dissolve the political bands by which they may have been connected therewith, and to organize new parties upon such principles and with such views as the circumstances and exigencies of the nation may demand. 2. Resolved, That the times imperatively demand the reorganization of parties, and repudiating all previous party attachments, names and predilections, we unite ourselves together in defence of the liberty and constitution of the country, and will hereafter co-operate as the Republican party, pledged to the accomplishment of the following purposes: to

20. Joshua Reed Giddings, U.S. representative from Ohio, and Thomas H. Ford, Ohio Know-Nothing and abolitionist. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE bring the administration of the government back to the control of first principles; to restore Nebraska and Kansas to the position of free territories; that, as the constitution of the United States, vests in the States, and not in Congress, the power to legislate for the extradition of fugitives from labor, to repeal and entirely abrogate the fugitive slave law; to restrict slavery to those States in which it exists; to prohibit the admission of any more slave States into the Union; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to exclude slavery from all the territories over which the general government has exclusive jurisdiction; and to resist the acquirements of any more territories unless the practice of slavery therein forever shall have been prohibited. 3. Resolved, That in furtherance of these principles we will use such constitutional and lawful means as shall seem best adapted to their accomplishment, and that we will support no man for office, under the general or State government, who is not positively and fully committed to the support of these principles, and whose personal character and conduct is not a guaranty that he is reliable, and who shall not have abjured old party allegiance and ties. (The resolutions, as they were read, were cheered throughout.) Now, gentlemen, your Black Republicans have cheered every one of those propositions, (“good and cheers,”) and yet I venture to say that you cannot get Mr. Lincoln to come out and say that he is now in favor of each one of them. (Laughter and applause. “Hit him again.”) That these propositions, one and all, constitute the platform of the Black Republican party of this day, I have no doubt, (“good”) and when you were not aware for what purpose I was reading them, your Black Republicans cheered them as good Black Republican doctrines. (“That’s it,” etc.) My object in reading these resolutions, was to put the question to Abraham Lincoln this day, whether he now stands and will stand by each article in that creed and carry it out. (“Good.” “Hit him again.”) I desire to know whether Mr. Lincoln to-day stands as he did in 1854, in favor of the unconditional repeal of the fugitive slave law. I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to-day, as he did in 1854, against the admission of any more slave States into the Union, even if the people want them. I want to know whether he stands pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make. (“That’s it;” “put it at him.”) I want to know whether he stands to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to the prohibition of the slave trade between the different States. (“He does.”) I desire to know whether he stands pledged to prohibit slavery in all the territories of the United States, North as well as South of the Missouri Compromise line, (“Kansas too.”) I desire him to answer whether he is opposed to the acquisition of any more territory unless slavery is first prohibited therein. I want his answer to these questions. Your affirmative cheers in favor of this HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Abolition platform is not satisfactory. I ask Abraham Lincoln to answer these questions, in order that when I trot him down to lower Egypt I may put the same questions to him. (Enthusiastic applause.) My principles are the same everywhere. (Cheers, and “hark.”) I can proclaim them alike in the North, the South, the East, and the West. My principles will apply wherever the Constitution prevails and the American flag waves. (“Good,” and applause.) I desire to know whether Mr. Lincoln’s principles will bear transplanting from Ottawa to Jonesboro? I put these questions to him to-day distinctly, and ask an answer. I have a right to an answer (“that’s so,” “he can’t dodge you,” etc.), for I quote from the platform of the Republican party, made by himself and others at the time that party was formed, and the bargain made by Lincoln to dissolve and kill the old Whig party, and transfer its members, bound hand and foot, to the Abolition party, under the direction of Joshua Reed Giddings and Frederick Douglass. (Cheers.) In the remarks I have made on this platform, and the position of Mr. Lincoln upon it, I mean nothing personally disrespectful or unkind to that gentleman. I have known him for nearly twenty-five years. There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted. We were both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school-teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery-keeper in the town of Salem. (Applause and laughter.) He was more successful in his occupation than I was in mine, and hence more fortunate in this world’s goods. Abraham Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who perform with admirable skill everything which they undertake. I made as good a school-teacher as I could and when a cabinet maker I made a good bedstead and tables, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus and secretaries than anything else; (cheers,) but I believe that Lincoln was always more successful in business than I, for his business enabled him to get into the Legislature. I met him there, however, and had a sympathy with him, because of the up hill struggle we both had in life. He was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. (“No doubt.”) He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, (uproarious laughter,) and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or fist fight, excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody that was present and participated. (Renewed laughter.) I sympathised with him, because he was struggling with difficulties and so was I. Mr. Lincoln served with me in the Legislature in 1836, when we both retired, and he subsided, or became submerged, and he was lost sight of as a public man for some years. In 1846, when Wilmot introduced his celebrated proviso, and the Abolition tornado swept over the country, Lincoln again turned up as a member of Congress from the Sangamon district. I was then in the Senate of the United States, and was glad to welcome my old friend and companion. Whilst in Congress, he distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE enemy against his own country; (“that’s true,”) and when he returned home he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends. (“And will be again.”) He came up again in 1854, just in time to make this Abolition or Black Republican platform, in company with Joshua Reed Giddings, Lovejoy, Chase, and Frederick Douglass for the Republican party to stand upon. (Laughter, “Hit him again,” &c.) Trumbull, too, was one of our own contemporaries. He was born and raised in old Connecticut, was bred a federalist, but removing to Georgia, turned nullifier when nullification was popular, and as soon as he disposed of his clocks and wound up his business, migrated to Illinois, (laughter,) turned politician and lawyer here, and made his appearance in 1841, as a member of the Legislature. He became noted as the author of the scheme to repudiate a large portion of the State debt of Illinois, which, if successful, would have brought infamy and disgrace upon the fair escutcheon of our glorious State. The odium attached to that measure consigned him to oblivion for a time. I helped to do it. I walked into a public meeting in the hall of the House of Representatives and replied to his repudiating speeches, and resolutions were carried over his head denouncing repudiation, and asserting the moral and legal obligation of Illinois to pay every dollar of the debt she owed and every bond that bore her seal. (“Good,” and cheers.) Trumbull’s malignity has followed me since I thus defeated his infamous scheme. These two men having formed this combination to abolitionize the old Whig party and the old Democratic party, and put themselves into the Senate of the United States, in pursuance of their bargain, are now carrying out that arrangement. Matheny states that Trumbull broke faith; that the bargain was that Abraham Lincoln should be the Senator in Shields’ place, and Trumbull was to wait for mine; (laughter and cheers,) and the story goes, that Trumbull cheated Lincoln, having control of four or five abolitionized Democrats who were holding over in the Senate; he would not let them vote for Lincoln, and which obliged the rest of the Abolitionists to support him in order to secure an Abolition Senator. There are a number of authorities for the truth of this besides Matheny, and I suppose that even Mr. Lincoln will not deny it. (Applause and laughter.) Mr. Lincoln demands that he shall have the place intended for Trumbull, as Trumbull cheated him and got his, and Trumbull is stumping the State traducing me for the purpose of securing that position for Lincoln, in order to quiet him. (“Lincoln can never get it, &c.”) It was in consequence of this arrangement that the Republican Convention was empanelled to instruct for Lincoln and nobody else, and it was on this account that they passed resolutions that he was their first, their last, and their only choice. Archy Williams was nowhere, Browning was nobody, Wentworth was not to be considered, they had no man in the Republican party for the place except Lincoln, for the reason that he demanded that they should carry out the arrangement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE (“Hit him again.”) Having formed this new party for the benefit of deserters from Whiggery, and deserters from Democracy, and having laid down the Abolition platform which I have read, Lincoln now takes his stand and proclaims his Abolition doctrines. Let me read a part of them. In his speech at Springfield to the convention which nominated him for the Senate, he said: 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. (“Good,” “good.” and cheers.) I am delighted to hear you Black Republicans say “good.” (Laughter and cheers.) I have no doubt that doctrine expresses your sentiments (“hit them again,” “that’s it,”) and I will prove to you now, if you will listen to me, that it is revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this Government. (“Hurrah for Douglas,” “good,” and cheers.) Mr. Lincoln, in the extract from which I have read, says that this Government cannot endure permanently in the same condition in which it was made by its framers — divided into free and slave States. He says that it has existed for about seventy years thus divided, and yet he tells you that it cannot endure permanently on the same principles and in the same relative condition in which our fathers made it. (“Neither can it.”) Why can it not exist divided into free and slave States? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the great men of that day, made this Government divided into free States and slave States, and left each State perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery. (“Right, right.”) Why can it not exist on the same principles on which our fathers made it? (“It can.”) They knew when they framed the Constitution that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities. They knew that the laws and regulations which would suit the granite hills of New Hampshire would be unsuited to the rice plantations of South Carolina, (“right, right,”) and they, therefore, provided that each State should retain its own Legislature, and its own sovereignty with the full and complete power to do as it pleased within its own limits, in all that was local and not national. (Applause.) One of the reserved rights of the States, was the right to regulate the relations between Master and Servant, on the slavery question. At the time the Constitution HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE was formed, there were thirteen States in the Union, twelve of which were slaveholding States and one a free State. Suppose this doctrine of uniformity preached by Mr. Lincoln, that the States should all be free or all be slave had prevailed and what would have been the result? Of course, the twelve slaveholding States would have overruled the one free State, and slavery would have been fastened by a Constitutional provision on every inch of the American Republic, instead of being left as our fathers wisely left it, to each State to decide for itself. (“Good, good,” and three cheers for Douglas.) Here I assert that uniformity in the local laws and institutions of the different States is neither possible or desirable. If uniformity had been adopted when the government was established, it must inevitably have been the uniformity of slavery everywhere, or else the uniformity of negro citizenship and negro equality everywhere. We are told by Abraham Lincoln that he is utterly opposed to the Dred Scott decision, and will not submit to it, for the reason that he says it deprives the negro of the rights and privileges of citizenship. (Laughter and applause.) That is the first and main reason which he assigns for his warfare on the Supreme Court of the United States and its decision. I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship? (“No, no.”) Do you desire to strike out of our State Constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the State, and allow the free negroes to flow in, (“never,”) and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, (“no, no,”) in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves? (“Never,” “no.”) If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. (“Never, never.”) For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) I believe this government was made on the white basis. (“Good.”) I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favour of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other inferior races. (“Good for you.” “Douglas forever.”) Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks how can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him. He and they maintain that negro equality is guarantied by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence. If they think HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE so, of course they have a right to say so, and so vote. I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, (laughter,) but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever. (“Never.” “Hit him again,” and cheers.) Abraham Lincoln has evidently learned by heart Parson Lovejoy’s catechism. (Laughter and applause.) He can repeat it as well as Farnsworth,21 and he is worthy of a medal from father Joshua Reed Giddings and Frederick Douglass for his Abolitionism. (Laughter.) He holds that the negro was born his equal and yours, and that he was endowed with equality by the Almighty, and that no human law can deprive him of these rights which were guarantied to him by the Supreme ruler of the Universe. Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man. (“Never, never.”) If he did, he has been a long time demonstrating the fact. (Cheers.) For thousands of years the negro has been a race upon the earth, and during all that time, in all latitudes and climates, wherever he has wandered or been taken, he has been inferior to the race which he has there met. He belongs to an inferior race, and must always occupy an inferior position. (“Good,” “that’s so,” &c.) I do not hold that because the negro is our inferior that therefore he ought to be a slave. By no means can such a conclusion be drawn from what I have said. On the contrary, I hold that humanity and christianity both require that the negro shall have and enjoy every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety of the society in which he lives. (That’s so.) On that point, I presume, there can be no diversity of opinion. You and I are bound to extend to our inferior and dependent being every right, every privilege, every facility and immunity consistent with the public good. The question then arises what rights and privileges are consistent with the public good. This is a question which each State and each Territory must decide for itself---Illinois has decided it for herself. We have provided that the negro shall not be a slave, and we have also provided that he shall not be a citizen, but protect him in his civil rights, in his life, his person and his property, only depriving him of all political rights whatsoever, and refusing to put him on an equality with the white man. (“Good.”) That policy of Illinois is satisfactory to the Democratic party and to me, and if it were to the Republicans, there would then be no question upon the subject; but the Republicans say that he ought to be made a citizen, and when he becomes a citizen he becomes your equal, with all your rights and privileges. (“He never shall.”) They assert the Dred Scott decision to be monstrous because it denies that the negro is or can be a citizen under the Constitution. Now, I hold that Illinois had a right to abolish and prohibit slavery as she did, and I hold that Kentucky has the same right to continue and protect slavery that Illinois had to abolish it. I hold that New York had as much right to abolish slavery as Virginia has to continue it, and

21. US Representative John F. Farnsworth of Chicago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE that each and every State of this Union is a sovereign power, with the right to do as it pleases upon this question of slavery, and upon all its domestic institutions. Slavery is not the only question which comes up in this controversy. There is a far more important one to you, and that is, what shall be done with the free negro? We have settled the slavery question as far as we are concerned; we have prohibited it in Illinois forever, and in doing so, I think we have done wisely, and there is no man in the State who would be more strenuous in his opposition to the introduction of slavery than I would; (cheers) but when we settled it for ourselves, we exhausted all our power over that subject. We have done our whole duty, and can do no more. We must leave each and every other State to decide for itself the same question. In relation to the policy to be pursued towards the free negroes, we have said that they shall not vote; whilst Maine, on the other hand, has said that they shall vote. Maine is a sovereign State, and has the power to regulate the qualifications of voters within her limits. I would never consent to confer the right of voting and of citizenship upon a negro, but still I am not going to quarrel with Maine for differing from me in opinion. Let Maine take care of her own negroes and fix the qualifications of her own voters to suit herself, without interfering with Illinois, and Illinois will not interfere with Maine. So with the State of New York. She allows the negro to vote provided he owns two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of property, but not otherwise. While I would not make any distinction whatever between a negro who held property and one who did not; yet if the sovereign State of New York chooses to make that distinction it is her business and not mine, and I will not quarrel with her for it. She can do as she pleases on this question if she minds her own business, and we will do the same thing. Now, my friends, if we will only act conscientiously and rigidly upon this great principle of popular sovereignty which guarantees to each State and Territory the right to do as it pleases on all things local and domestic instead of Congress interfering, we will continue at peace one with another. Why should Illinois be at war with Missouri, or Kentucky with Ohio, or Virginia with New York, merely because their institutions differ? Our fathers intended that our institutions should differ. They knew that the North and the South having different climates, productions and interests, required different institutions. This doctrine of Mr. Lincoln’s of uniformity among the institutions of the different States is a new doctrine, never dreamed of by Washington, Madison, or the framers of this Government. Mr. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party set themselves up as wiser than these men who made this government, which has flourished for seventy years under the principle of popular sovereignty, recognizing the right of each State to do as it pleased. 18 Under that principle we have grown from a nation of three or four millions to a nation of about thirty millions of people; we have crossed the Alleghany Mountains and filled up the whole Northwest, turning the prairies into a garden, and building up HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE churches and schools, thus spreading civilization and Christianity where before there was nothing but savage barbarism. Under that principle we have become, from a feeble nation, the most powerful on the face of the earth, and if we only adhere to that principle, we can go forward increasing in territory, in power, in strength, and in glory until the Republic of America shall be the north star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world. And why can we not adhere to the great principle of self-government upon which our institutions were originally based? I believe that this new doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln and his party will dissolve the Union if it succeeds. * This extract from Mr. Lincoln’s Peoria Speech of 1854, was read by him in the Ottawa debate, but was not reported fully or accurately, in either the Times or Press & Tribune. It is inserted now as necessary to a complete report of the debate. [Footnote written by Lincoln in the margin of the debates scrapbook.] [5] “Materially” corrected by Lincoln to “materials.” [6] “Whas" corrected by Lincoln to “What.” [7] U.S. Senator Charles E. Stuart (“my friend from Michigan”). [8] This episode is not reported in the Press and Tribune, and was deleted by Lincoln in the debates scrapbook. [9] The five preceding paragraphs composing this digression were deleted by Lincoln in the debates scrapbook. The bias of the Times reporter is obvious, but it may be well to note that the episode appears in the Press and Tribune as follows: “MR. LINCOLN---Let the Judge add that Lincoln went along with them. “JUDGE DOUGLAS.---Mr. Lincoln says let him add that he went along with them to the Senate Chamber. I will not add that for I do not know it. “MR. LINCOLN.---I do know it. “JUDGE DOUGLAS.---But whether he knows or not my point is this, and I will yet bring him to his milk on this point.” [10] This paragraph is not in the Press and Tribune.

August 27, Friday: For the 2d debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, at Freeport, Illinois, here is how Douglas was reported in the Chicago Times: MR. DOUGLAS’ SPEECH. ... I trust now that Mr. Lincoln will deem himself answered on his four points. He racked his brain so much in devising these four questions that he exhausted himself, and had not strength enough to invent the others. (Laughter.) As soon as he is able to hold a council with his advisers, Lovejoy, Farnsworth, and Frederick Douglass, he will frame and propound others. (Good, good, &c. Renewed laughter, in which Mr. Lincoln feebly joined, saying that he hoped with their aid to get seven questions, the number asked him by Judge Douglas, and so make conclusions even.) You Black Republicans who say good, I have no doubt think that they are all good men. (White, white.) I have reason to recollect that some people in this country think that Fred. Douglass is a very good man. The last time I came here to make a speech, while talking from the stand to you, people of Freeport, as I am doing to-day, I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglass and her mother reclined inside, and the owner of the carriage acted as driver. (Laughter, cheers, cries of right, what have you to say against it, &c.) I saw this in your own town. (“What of it.”) All I have to say of it is this, that if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE you have a perfect right to do so. (Good, good, and cheers, mingled with hooting and cries of white, white.) I am told that one of Fred. Douglass’ kinsmen, another rich black negro, is now traveling in this part of the State making speeches for his friend Lincoln as the champion of black men. (“White men, white men,” and “what have you got to say against it.” That’s right, &c.) All I have to say on that subject is that those of you who believe that the negro 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. (“Down with the negro,” no, no, &c.) MR. DOUGLAS’ RESPONSE TO A QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: ... Lincoln on the one hand and Trumbull on the other, being disappointed politicians, (laughter,) and having retired or been driven to obscurity by an outraged constituency because of their political sins, formed a scheme to abolitionize the two parties and lead the Old Line Whigs and Old Line Democrats captive, bound hand and foot into the Abolition camp. Joshua Reed Giddings, Chase, Frederick Douglass and Lovejoy were here to christen them whenever they were brought in. (Great laughter.) Lincoln went to work to dissolve the Old Line Whig party. Clay was dead, and although the sod was not yet green on his grave, this man undertook to bring into disrepute those great compromise measures of 1850, with which Clay and Webster were identified. Up to 1854 the old Whig party and the Democratic party had stood on a common platform so far as this slavery question was concerned. You Whigs and we Democrats differed about the bank, the tariff, distribution, the specie circular and the sub- treasury, but we agreed on this slavery question and the true mode of preserving the peace and harmony of the Union. The compromise measures of 1850 were introduced by Clay, were defended by Webster, and supported by Cass, and were approved by Millard Fillmore, and sanctioned by the National men of both parties. They constituted a common plank upon which both Whigs and Democrats stood. In 1852 the Whig party in its last national convention at Baltimore endorsed and approved these measures of Clay, and so did the national convention of the Democratic party held that same year. Thus the old line Whigs and the old line Democrats stood pledged to the great principle of self- government, which guarantees to the people of each Territory the right to decide the slavery question for themselves. In 1854 after the death of Clay and Webster, Mr. Lincoln on the part of the Whigs undertook to abolitionize the Whig party, by dissolving it, transferring the members into the Abolition camp and making them train under Joshua Reed Giddings, Fred. Douglass, Lovejoy, Chase, Farnsworth, and other abolition leaders.

August 27. P. M.–To Walden. Dog-day weather again to-day, of which we had had none since the 18th,–i. e. clouds without rain. Wild carrot on railroad, apparently in prime. Hieracium C(madense, apparently in prime, and perhaps H. scabru7n. Lactuca, apparently much past prime, or nearly done. The Nabalus albus has been out some ten days, but N. Fraseri at HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Walden road will not open, apparently, for some days yet. I see round-leaved cornel fruit on Heywood Peak, now half China-blue and half white, each berry. Rhus Toxicodendron there is half of it turned scarlet and yellow, as if we had had a severe drought, when it has been remarkably wet. It seems, then, that in such situations some plants will always assume this prematurely withered autumnal aspect. Orchis lacera, probably done some time. Robins fly in flocks. Apparently Juncus fenuis, some time out of bloom, by depot wood-piles, i.e. between south wood-shed and good apple tree; some fifteen inches high. More at my boat’s shore.

November 2, Tuesday: Although the Republican Party candidate, Abraham Lincoln, obtained a majority in the popular vote by opposing the extension of slavery to the new western states (125,000 over 121,000),22 the voters were merely selecting candidates for the Illinois statehouse who would then select the politician who would represent Illinois in the federal Senate — and in the Illinois statehouse the Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas would by a margin of 8 votes be able to retain his seat in the US Senate.

November 2: P.M.– To Cliff. A cool gray November afternoon; sky overcast. Looking back from the causeway, the large willow by Mrs. Bigelow’s and a silvery abele are the only leafy trees to be seen in and over the village, the first a yellowish mass, also some Lombardy poplars on the outskirts. It is remarkable that these (and the weeping willow, yet green) and a few of our Populus tremuloides (lately the grandidentata also [Still one.]), all closely allied, are the only trees now (except the larch and perhaps a very few small white birches) which are conspicuously yellow, almost the only deciduous ones whose leaves are not withered, i.e. except scarlet oaks, red oaks, and some of the others, etc. I see here and there yet some middle-sized coniferous willows, between humilis and discolor, whose upper leaves, left on, are quite bright lemon-yellow in dry places. These single leaves brighter than their predecessors which have fallen. The pitch pine is apparently a little past the midst of its fall. In sprout-lands some young birches are still rather leafy and bright-colored. Going over the newly cleared pasture on the northeast of Fair Haven Hill, I see that the scarlet oaks are more generally bright than on the 22d ult. Even the little sprouts in the russet pasture and the high tree-tops in the yew wood burn now, when the middle-sized bushes in the sprout- lands have mostly gone out. The large scarlet oak trees and tree-tops in woods, perhaps especially on hills, apparently are late because raised above the influence of the early frosts. Methinks they are as bright, even this dark day, as I ever saw them. The blossoming of the I Still one scarlet oak! the forest flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)! I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a nobler tree on the whole, lasting into November; our chief November flower, abiding the approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to November prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of colors, the ripest fruit of the year, like the cheek of a glossy red ripe apple from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these great oak roses, distributed on every side as far as the horizon! This my unfailing prospect for a fortnight past as surely as I rose to a hilltop! This late forest flower surpasses all that spring or summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks, which made no impression on a distant eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain- side that bursts into bloom, through or along which we may journey from day to day. I admire these roses three or four miles off in the horizon. Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale, the gardener still nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and roses which, as it were, overshadow him and ask for none of his care. Comparatively, it is like a little red paint ground on a teacup and held up against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views, walk in the greater garden, not skulk in a little “debauched” nook of it? Consider the beauty of the earth, and not merely of a few impounded herbs? However, you will not see these splendors, whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, unless you are prepared to see them. The gardener can see only the gardener’s garden, wherever he goes. The beauty of the earth answers exactly to your demand and appreciation. Apples in the village and lower ground are now generally killed brown and crisp, without having turned yellow, especially the upper parts, while those on hills and [in] warm places turned yellowish or russet, and so ripened to their fall. Of quince bushes the same, only they are a little later and are greener yet. The sap is now frequently flowing fast in the scarlet oaks (as I have not observed it in the others), and has a pleasant acorn-like taste. Their bright tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this phenomenon. They are full of sap and life. They flow like a sugar maple in the spring. It has a pleasantly 22. Neither candidate was pro-black. Both made repeated use of the word “nigger” in their stump speeches. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE astringent taste, this strong oak wine. That small poplar seen from Cliffs on the 29th is a P. tremuloides [quaking aspen]. It makes the impression of a bright and clear yellow at a distance, though it is rather dingy and spotted. It is later, then (this and the Baker Farm one), than any P. grandidentata [bigtooth aspen] that I know. Looking down on the oak wood southeast of Yew Wood, I see some large black oak tops a brown yellow still; so generally it shows life a little longer than the white and swamp white apparently. One just beyond the smallpox burying-ground is generally greenish inclining to scarlet, looking very much like a scarlet oak not yet completely changed, for the leaf would not be distinguished. However, the nuts, with yellow meat, and the strong bitter yellow bark betrayed it. Yet it did not amount to scarlet. I see a few shrub oak leaves still fresh where sheltered. The little chinquapin has fallen. I go past the Well Meadow Field. There is a sympathy between this cold, gray, overcast November afternoon and the grayish-brown oak leaves and russet fields. The Scotch larch is changed at least as bright as ours. VAR IO L A JAMES BAKER HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1859

During this year the Illinois legislature chose Stephen A. Douglas for the US Senate over Abraham Lincoln, by a vote of 54 to 46 — but this was not because the Illinois legislature was distressed at Lincoln’s racism.

There was a report from Arkansas that three white men there had been hanged when they had been found to have in their possession literature by the troublesome antislavery racist Hinton Rowan Helper. In London, in this year, the US Minister was approached by a representative of Her Majesty’s government, on behalf of a visiting white Englishman who had been caught distributing Helperite materials in Virginia. The US Minister refused to intercede on behalf of Her Majesty’s government in the internal criminal affairs of the State of Virginia.

(Get this, just as it wasn’t enough to be a white man in the southern states of the United States of America, it also wasn’t enough to be a racist — being the wrong kind of white racist could get one into really big trouble in the fastest way.)

William Still started a press campaign to end racial discrimination on Philadelphia’s railroad cars. After John Brown and his insurrection at Harpers Ferry failed, Still would shelter some of his men and help them escape capture.

Fall: Abraham Lincoln made his final trip through the 8th Judicial Circuit of Illinois.

November 30, Wednesday: Abraham Lincoln spoke at Elwood in “Bleeding Kansas”.

According to the Elwood Free Press for December 3rd, the senatorial candidate’s remarks were received there with great enthusiasm: He stated the reasons why he was unable to make a speech this evening. He could only say a few words to us who had come out to meet him the first time he had placed his foot upon the soil of Kansas. Mr. Lincoln said that it was possible that we had local questions in regard to Railroads, Land Grants and internal improvements which were matters of deeper interest to us than HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the questions arising out of national politics, but of these local interests he knew nothing and should say nothing. We had, however, just adopted a State Constitution, and it was probable, that, under that Constitution, we should soon cease our Territorial existence, and come forward to take our place in the brotherhood of States, and act our parts as a member of the confederation. Kansas would be Free, but the same questions we had had here in regard to Freedom or Slavery would arise in regard to other Territories and we should have to take our part in deciding them. People often ask, “why make such a fuss about a few niggers?” I answer the question by asking what will you do to dispose of this question? The Slaves constitute one seventh of our entire population. Wherever there is an element of this magnitude in a government it will be talked about. The general feeling in regard to Slavery had changed entirely since the early days of the Republic. You may examine the debates under the Confederation, in the Convention that framed the Constitution and in the first session of Congress and you will not find a single man saying that Slavery is a good thing. They all believed it was an evil. They made the Northwest Territory –the only Territory then belonging to the government– forever free. They prohibited the African Slave trade. Having thus prevented its extension and cut off the supply, the Fathers of the Republic believed Slavery must soon disappear. There are only three clauses in the Constitution which refer to Slavery, and in neither of them is the word Slave or Slavery mentioned. The word is not used in the clause prohibiting the African Slave trade; it is not used in the clause which makes Slaves a basis of representation; it is not used in the clause requiring the return of fugitive Slaves. And yet in all the debates in the Convention the question was discussed and Slaves and Slavery talked about. Now why was this word kept out of that instrument and so carefully kept out that a European, be he ever so intelligent, if not familiar with our institutions, might read the Constitution over and over again and never learn that Slavery existed in the United States. The reason is this. The Framers of the Organic Law believed that the Constitution would outlast Slavery and they did not want a word there to tell future generations that Slavery had ever been legalized in America. Your Territory has had a marked history — no other Territory has ever had such a history. There had been strife and bloodshed here, both parties had been guilty of outrages; he had his opinions as to the relative guilt of the parties, but he would not say who had been most to blame. One fact was certain — there had been loss of life, destruction of property; our material interests had been retarded. Was this desirable? There is a peaceful way of settling these questions — the way adopted by government until a recent period. The bloody code has grown out of the new policy in regard to the government of Territories. Mr. Lincoln in conclusion adverted briefly to the Harper’s Ferry Affair. He believed the attack of Brown wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of a great evil. We have a means provided for the expression of our belief in regard to Slavery –it is through the ballot box –the peaceful method provided by the Constitution. John Brown has shown great courage, rare unselfishness, as even Gov. Wise [Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia] testifies. But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime. Mr. Lincoln closed his brief speech by wishing all to go out to the election on Tuesday and to vote as became the Freemen of Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Maria Black of Rock Island, Illinois wrote to Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia: Rock Island Illinois Novr 30th ‘59 Gov’r Wise Dear Sir My two daughters have left with a party of young women who purpose to effect the rescue of John Brown. They number about sixteen & wear large petticoats filled with powder, having slow matches attached. If caught they intend to set themselves off & (so effective is the inflammable material about them) the consequence will be awful. In fact, Virginia will be blown sky high. My anxiety about my two children aforesaid & my affectionate concern for your welfare induce me to forewarn you of the imminent peril that awaits you. If you find the girls, send them back before the blow up & send some chivalry along. There is none of your kind up north. Truly yrs Maria Black

William L. Taylor, James J. Rankin, and Cambridge Ritter also were writing this governor: Newyork Nov 30/59 to Dishonorable Gov Wise [image of skull and crossbones] death to you if John Brown not pardoned Look for our Band it is dress in Black in name of Black Band of NewYork Pres William L. Taylor Sec James J. Rankin Tres Cambridge Ritter

Bronson Alcott recorded in his journal that he had seen Henry Thoreau again, and Waldo Emerson, in regard to the “Brown Services” that they were planning for that Friday: “We do not intend to have any speeches made on the occasion, but have selected appropriate passages from Brown’s words, from the poets, and from the Scriptures, to be read by Thoreau, Emerson, and myself, chiefly; and the selection and arrangement is ours.” The reason for this is obvious. In case there is an infiltrator at this meeting in the Concord Town Hall, and they are charged with treason, they will be able to defend themselves by pointing out that no treasonous remark of any sort was uttered, and that they had merely been a literary group meeting to read to one another from the classics, and from records of current events!

November 30: I am one of a committee of four, viz. Simon Brown (Ex-Lieutenant-Governor), R.W. Emerson, myself, and John Keyes (late High Sheriff), instructed by a meeting of citizens to ask liberty of the selectmen to have the bell of the first parish tolled at the time Captain Brown is being hung, and while we shall be assembled in the town house to express our sympathy with him. I applied to the selectmen yesterday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Their names are George M. Brooks, Barzillai Hudson, and Julius Smith. After various delays they at length answer me to-night that they “are uncertain whether they have any control over the bell, but that, in any case, they will not give their consent to have the bell tolled.” Beside their private objections, they are influenced by the remarks of a few individuals. Dr. Bartlett tells me that Rockwood Hoar said he “hoped no such foolish thing would be done,” and he also named Stedman Buttrick, John Moore, Cheney (and others added Nathan Brooks, senior, and Francis Wheeler) as strongly opposed to it; said that he had heard “five hundred” (!) damn me for it, and that he had no doubt that if it were done some counter-demonstration would be made, such as firing minute-guns. The doctor himself is more excited than anybody, for he has the minister under his wing. Indeed, a considerable part of Concord are in the condition of Virginia to-day,–afraid of their own shadows. I see in E. Hubbard’s gray oak wood, four rods from the old wall line and two or three rods over the brow of the hill, an apparent downy woodpecker’s nest in a dead white oak stub some six feet high. It is made as far as I can see, like that which I have, but looks quite fresh, and I see, by the very numerous fresh white chips of dead wood scattered over the recently fallen leaves beneath, that it must have been made since the leaves fell. Could it be a nuthatch or chickadee’s work? [EDITORIAL COMMENT: PROBABLY A DOWNY WOODPECKER’S WINTER QUARTERS.] This has been a very pleasant month, with quite a number of Indian-summer days,–a pleasanter month than October was. It is quite warm to-day, and as I go home at dusk on the railroad causeway, I hear a hylodes peeping. DR. JOSIAH BARTLETT

December 3, Saturday: Harpers Ferry residents George Mauzy and Mary Mauzy wrote again to their daughter Eugenia Mauzy Burton and son-in-law James H. Burton, who were then living in England (Burton had been a machinist, foreman, and Acting Master Armorer at the Harpers Ferry Armory between 1844-1854): To Mr. & Mrs. James H. Burton December 3, 1859 My dear Children: Well the great agony is over. “Old Osawatomie Brown” was executed yesterday at noon – his wife came here the day before, & paid him a short visit, after which she returned here under an escort, where she and her company remained until the body came down from Charlestown, in the evening, after which she took charge of it and went home. This has been one of the most remarkable circumstances that ever occurred in this country, this old fanatic made no confession whatever, nor concession that he was wrong, but contended that he was right in everything he done, that he done great service to God, would not let a minister of any denomination come near or say anything to him, but what else could be expected from him, or anyone else who are imbued with “Freeloveism, Socialism, Spiritualism,” and all the other isms that were ever devised by man or devil. There is an immense concourse of military at Charlestown, not less than 2000 men are quartered there, the Courthouse, all the churches & all the Lawyers offices are occupied. We have upwards of 300 regulars & 75 or 80 Montgomery Guards. These men were all sent here by the Sec. of War & Gov. Wise to prevent a rescue of Brown & his party by northern infidels and fanatics: of which they boasted loudly, but their courage must have oozed out of their finger ends, as none made their appearance. We are keeping nightly watch, all are vigilant, partys of 10 men out every night, quite a number of incendiary fires have taken place in this vicinity & County, such as grain stacks, barns & other out- HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE buildings. —George Mauzy HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Upon learning that John Brown had indeed been executed, Friend Daniel Ricketson continued his musing in his journal:

Learned that John Brown was hanged in Charlestown, HANGING Virginia, yesterday, between 11 and 12 A.M., — a martyr to the cause of the oppressed slave, — meeting death with the dignity and composure of a Christian martyr, as he undoubtedly was, although I do not think he took the wisest or best way to effect his noble object, — that of liberating the slaves of this professed republic. Peace to his memory. Good men will bless his name, and his memory will be venerated by the wise and good. His death must prove the destruction of the blood- cemented union of this nation. Mark this record, whosoever may at some future day read this page. I would make this record with due humility, and with a tender solicitude for the best interests of my countrymen. I wish not the blood of the tyrant, but that he may become abashed and conscience-stricken before God. My soul truly yearneth for peace and prosperity to all mankind, but cruelty and slavery must cease. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Mary Ann Day Brown would be granted the corpse of her hanged husband, but not those of her two sons.

The widow Brown would continue to bear the year of Jubilee as best she could.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson would visit her and then write A VISIT TO JOHN BROWN’S HOUSEHOLD IN 1859, and Edmund Wilson has commented, in regard to this (page 247), that Higginson interviewed the “widow in her bleak little Adirondack farm with a piety that could not have been more reverent if Mrs. Brown had been the widow of Emerson.”

Francis Jackson Meriam had come out from Boston to Concord on the train, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and others had insisted that he must escape to Canada. Waldo Emerson hired a horse and covered wagon and Henry Thoreau took the distraught man to the train station in South Acton and put him on the train. He would not, however, wind up in Canada. Thoreau referred to Meriam in his journal as “X”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

December 3: Suddenly quite cold, and freezes in the house. Rode with a man this forenoon who said that if he did not clean his teeth when he got up, it made him sick all the rest of the day, but he had found by late experience that when he had not cleaned his teeth for several days they cleaned themselves. I assured him that such was the general rule,–that when from any cause we were prevented from doing what we had commonly thought indispensable for us to do, things cleaned or took care of themselves. X was betrayed by his eyes, which had a glaring film over them and no serene depth into which you could look. Inquired particularly the way to Emerson’s and the distance, and when I told him, said he knew it as well as if he saw it. Wished to turn and proceed to his house. Told me one or two things which he asked me not to tell S. [SANBORN]. Said, “I know I am insane,”–and I knew it too. Also called it “nervous excitement.” At length, when I made a certain remark, he said, “I don’t know but you are Emerson; are you? You look somewhat like him.” He said as much two or three times, and added once, “But then Emerson wouldn’t lie.” Finally put his questions to me, of Fate, etc., etc., as if I were Emerson. Getting to the woods, I remarked upon them, and he mentioned my name, but never to the end suspected who his companion was. Then “proceeded to business,” – “since the time was short,”– and put to me the questions he was going to put to Emerson. His insanity exhibited itself chiefly by his incessant excited talk, scarcely allowing me to interrupt him, but once or twice apologizing for his behavior. What he said was for the most part connected and sensible enough. When I hear of John Brown and his wife weeping at length, it is as if the rocks sweated.

According to the Elwood Free Press for this date, this had been candidate Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Elwood in “Bleeding Kansas”, a speech that must have been delivered on or about November 30th: Mr. Lincoln was received with great enthusiasm. He stated the reasons why he was unable to make a speech this evening. He could only say a few words to us who had come out to meet him the first time he had placed his foot upon the soil of Kansas. Mr. Lincoln said that it was possible that we had local questions in regard to Railroads, Land Grants and internal improvements which were matters of deeper interest to us than the questions arising out of national politics, but of these local interests he knew nothing and should say nothing. We had, however, just adopted a State Constitution, and it was probable, that, under that Constitution, we should soon cease our Territorial existence, and come forward to take our place in the brotherhood of States, and act our parts as a member of the confederation. Kansas would be Free, but the same questions we had had here in regard to Freedom or Slavery would arise in regard to other Territories and we should have to take our part in deciding them. People often ask, “why make such a fuss about a few niggers?” I answer the question by asking what will you do to dispose of this question? The Slaves constitute one seventh of our entire population. Wherever there is an element of this magnitude in a government it will be talked about. The general feeling in regard to Slavery had changed entirely since the early days of the Republic. You may examine the debates under the Confederation, in the Convention that framed the Constitution and in the first session of Congress and you will not find a single man saying that Slavery is a good thing. They all believed it was an evil. They made the Northwest Territory —the only Territory then belonging to the government— forever free. They prohibited the African Slave trade. Having thus prevented its HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE extension and cut off the supply, the Fathers of the Republic believed Slavery must soon disappear. There are only three clauses in the Constitution which refer to Slavery, and in neither of them is the word Slave or Slavery mentioned. The word is not used in the clause prohibiting the African Slave trade; it is not used in the clause which makes Slaves a basis of representation; it is not used in the clause requiring the return of fugitive Slaves. And yet in all the debates in the Convention the question was discussed and Slaves and Slavery talked about. Now why was this word kept out of that instrument and so carefully kept out that a European, be he ever so intelligent, if not familiar with our institutions, might read the Constitution over and over again and never learn that Slavery existed in the United States. The reason is this. The Framers of the Organic Law believed that the Constitution would outlast Slavery and they did not want a word there to tell future generations that Slavery had ever been legalized in America. Your Territory has had a marked history — no other Territory has ever had such a history. There had been strife and bloodshed here, both parties had been guilty of outrages; he had his opinions as to the relative guilt of the parties, but he would not say who had been most to blame. One fact was certain — there had been loss of life, destruction of property; our material interests had been retarded. Was this desirable? There is a peaceful way of settling these questions — the way adopted by government until a recent period. The bloody code has grown out of the new policy in regard to the government of Territories. Mr. Lincoln in conclusion adverted briefly to the Harpers Ferry Affair.23 He believed the attack of Brown wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil. We have a means provided for the expression of our belief in regard to Slavery — it is through the ballot box — the peaceful method provided by the Constitution. John Brown has shown great courage, rare unselfishness, as even Gov. [Henry A. Wise of Virginia] testifies. But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime. Mr. Lincoln closed his brief speech by wishing all to go out to the election on Tuesday and to vote as became the Freemen of Kansas. On this evening candidate Abraham Lincoln was speaking in Stockton Hall at Leavenworth, Kansas. This is how his speech would be reported in the newspaper: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: You are, as yet, the people of a Territory; but you probably soon will be the people of a State of the Union. Then you will be in possession of new privileges, and new duties will be upon you. You will have to bear a part in all that pertains to the administration of the National Government. That government, from the beginning, has had, has now, and must continue to have a policy in relation to domestic 23. October 16-18, 1859. This is apparently Abraham Lincoln’s first reference to John Brown, whose execution scheduled for December 2, 1859, undoubtedly placed him in the forefront of conversational topics among his former friends and enemies in Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE slavery. It cannot, if it would, be without a policy upon that subject. And that policy must, of necessity, take one of two directions. It must deal with the institution as being wrong or as not being wrong. Mr. Lincoln then stated, somewhat in detail, the early action of the General Government upon the question — in relation to the foreign slave trade, the basis of Federal representation, and the prohibition of slavery in the Federal territories; the Fugitive Slave clause in the Constitution, and insisted that, plainly that early policy, was based on the idea of slavery being wrong; and tolerating it so far, and only so far, as the necessity of its actual presence required. He then took up the policy of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which he argued was based on opposite ideas — that is, the idea that slavery is not wrong. He said: You, the people of Kansas, furnish the example of the first application of this new policy. At the end of about five years, after having almost continual struggles, fire and bloodshed, over this very question, and after having framed several State Constitutions, you have, at last, secured a Free State Constitution, under which you will probably be admitted into the Union. You have, at last, at the end of all this difficulty, attained what we, in the old North-western Territory, attained without any difficulty at all. Compare, or rather contrast, the actual working of this new policy with that of the old, and say whether, after all, the old way — the way adopted by Washington and his compeers — was not the better way. Mr. Lincoln argued that the new policy had proven false to all its promises — that its promise to the Nation was to speedily end the slavery agitation, which it had not done, but directly the contrary — that its promises to the people of the Territories was to give them greater control of their own affairs than the people of former Territories had had; while, by the actual experiment, they had had less control of their own affairs, and had been more bedeviled by outside interference than the people of any other Territory ever had. He insisted that it was deceitful in its expressed wish to confer additional privileges upon the people; else it would have conferred upon them the privilege of choosing their own officers. That if there be any just reason why all the privileges of a State should not be conferred on the people of a Territory at once, it only could be the smallness of numbers; and that if while their number was small, they were fit to do some things, and unfit to do others, it could only be because those they were unfit to do, were the larger and more important things — that, in this case, the allowing the people of Kansas to plant their soil with slavery, and not allowing them to choose their own Governor, could only be justified on the idea that the planting a new State with slavery was a very small matter, and the election of Governor a very much greater matter. “Now,” said he, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “compare these two matters and decide which is really the greater. You have already had, I think, five Governors, and yet, although their doings, in their respective days, were of some little interest to you, it is doubtful whether you now, even remember the names of half of them. They are gone (all but the last) without leaving a trace upon your soil, or having done a single act which can, in the least degree, help or hurt you, in all the indefinite future before you. This is the size of the Governor question. Now, how is it with the slavery question? If your first settlers had so far decided in favor of slavery, as to have got five thousand slaves planted on your soil, you could, by no moral possibility, have adopted a Free State Constitution. Their owners would be influential voters among you as good men as the rest of you, and, by their greater wealth, and consequent, greater capacity, to assist the more needy, perhaps the most influential among you. You could not wish to destroy, or injuriously interfere with their property. You would not know what to do with the slaves after you had made them free. You would not wish to keep them as underlings; nor yet to elevate them to social and political equality. You could not send them away. The slave States would not let you send them there; and the free States would not let you send them there. All the rest of your property would not pay for sending them to . In one word, you could not have made a free State, if the first half of your own numbers had got five thousand slaves fixed upon the soil. You could have disposed of, not merely five, but five hundred Governors easier. There they would have stuck, in spite of you, to plague you and your children, and your children’s children, indefinitely. Which is the greater, this, or the Governor question? Which could the more safely be intrusted to the first few people who settle a Territory? Is it that which, at most, can be but temporary and brief in its effects? or that which being done by the first few, can scarcely ever be undone by the succeeding many?” He insisted that, little as was Popular Sovereignty at first, the Dred Scott decision, which is indorsed by the author of Popular Sovereignty, has reduced it to still smaller proportions, if it has not entirely crushed it out. That, in fact, all it lacks of being crushed out entirely by that decision, is the lawyer’s technical distinction between decision and dictum. That the Court has already said a Territorial government cannot exclude slavery; but because they did not say it in a case where a Territorial government had tried to exclude slavery, the lawyers hold that saying of the Court to be dictum and not decision. “But,” said Mr. Lincoln, “is it not certain that the Court will make a decision of it, the first time a Territorial government tries to exclude slavery?” Mr. Lincoln argued that the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, carried out, renews the African Slave Trade. Said he: “Who can show that one people have a better right to carry slaves to where they have never been, than another people have to buy slaves wherever they please, even in Africa?” He also argued that the advocates of Popular Sovereignty, by HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE their efforts to brutalize the negro in the public mind — denying him any share in the Declaration of Independence, and comparing him to the crocodile — were beyond what avowed pro-slavery men ever do, and really did as much, or more than they, toward making the institution national and perpetual. He said many of the Popular Sovereignty advocates were “as much opposed to slavery as any one;” but that they could never find any proper time or place to oppose it. In their view, it must not be opposed in politics, because that is agitation; nor in the pulpit, because it is not religion; nor in the Free States, because it is not there; nor in the Slave States, because it is there. These gentlemen, however, are never offended by hearing Slavery supported in any of these places. Still, they are “as much opposed to Slavery as anybody.” One would suppose that it would exactly suit them if the people of the Slave States would themselves adopt emancipation; but when Frank Blair tried this last year, in Missouri, and was beaten, every one of them threw up his hat and shouted “Hurrah for the Democracy!” Mr. Lincoln argued that those who thought Slavery right ought to unite on a policy which should deal with it as being right; that they should go for a revival of the Slave Trade; for carrying the institution everywhere, into Free States as well as Territories; and for a surrender of fugitive slaves in Canada, or war with Great Britain. Said he, “all shades of Democracy, popular sovereign as well as the rest, are fully agreed that slaves are property, and only property. If Canada now had as many horses as she has slaves belonging to Americans, I should think it just cause of war if she did not surrender them on demand. “On the other hand, all those who believe slavery is wrong should unite on a policy, dealing with it as a wrong. They should be deluded into no deceitful contrivances, pretending indifference, but really working for that to which they are opposed.” He urged this at considerable length. He then took up some of the objections to Republicans. They were accused of being sectional. He denied it. What was the proof? “Why, that they have no existence, get no votes in the South. But that depends on the South, and not on us. It is their volition, not ours; and if there be fault in it, it is primarily theirs, and remains so, unless they show that we repeal them by some wrong principle. If they attempt this, they will find us holding no principle, other than those held and acted upon by the men who gave us the government under which we live. They will find that the charge of sectionalism will not stop at us, but will extend to the very men who gave us the liberty we enjoy. But if the mere fact that we get no votes in the slave states makes us sectional, whenever we shall get votes in those states, we shall cease to be sectional; and we are sure to get votes, and a good many of them too, in these states next year. You claim that you are conservative; and we are not. We deny it. What is conservatism? Preserving the old against the new. And yet you are conservative in struggling for the new, and we are destructive in trying HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE to maintain the old. Possibly you mean you are conservative in trying to maintain the existing institution of slavery. Very well; we are not trying to destroy it. The peace of society, and the structure of our government both require that we should let it alone, and we insist on letting it alone. If I might advise my Republican friends here, I would say to them, leave your Missouri neighbors alone. Have nothing whatever to do with their slaves. Have nothing whatever to do with the white people, save in a friendly way. Drop past differences, and so conduct yourselves that if you cannot be at peace with them, the fault shall be wholly theirs. You say we have made the question more prominent than heretofore. We deny it. It is more prominent; but we did not make it so. Despite of us, you would have a change of policy; we resist the change, and in the struggle, the greater prominence is given to the question. Who is responsible for that, you or we? If you would have the question reduced to its old proportions go back to the old policy. That will effect it. But you are for the Union; and you greatly fear the success of the Republicans would destroy the Union. Why? Do the Republicans declare against the Union? Nothing like it. Your own statement of it is, that if the Black Republicans elect a President, you won’t stand it. You will break up the Union. That will be your act, not ours. To justify it, you must show that our policy gives you just cause for such desperate action. Can you do that? When you attempt it, you will find that our policy is exactly the policy of the men who made the Union. Nothing more and nothing less. Do you really think you are justified to break up the government rather than have it administered by Washington, and other good and great men who made it, and first administered it? If you do you are very unreasonable; and more reasonable men cannot and will not submit to you. While you elect [the] President, we submit, neither breaking nor attempting to break up the Union. If we shall constitutionally elect a President, it will be our duty to see that you submit. Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right. So, if constitutionally we elect a President, and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with. We shall try to do our duty. We hope and believe that in no section will a majority so act as to render such extreme measures necessary. Mr. Lincoln closed by an appeal to all —opponents as well as friends— to think soberly and maturely, and never fail to cast HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE their vote, insisting that it was not a privilege only, but a duty to do so.

December 20, Tuesday: Abraham Lincoln wrote a short autobiography.

The negrero Delicia was intercepted by a United States ship. It would be found to be sailing empty and without papers. The courts of the United States would declare that since this vessel was presumably a Spanish one, its activities were entirely beyond their jurisdiction (HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 36th Congress, 2d session IV, Number 7, page 434). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

December 20: A. M.–To T. Wheeler wood-lot. Snows very fast, large flakes, a very lodging snow, quite moist; turns to rain in afternoon. If we leave the sleigh for a moment, it whitens the seat, which must be turned over. We are soon thickly covered, and it lodges on the twigs of the trees and bushes,–there being but little wind,–giving them a very white and soft, spiritual look. Gives them a still, soft, and light look. When the flakes fall thus large and fast and are so moist and melting, we think it will not last long, and this turned to rain in a few hours, after three or four inches had fallen. To omit the first mere whitening,– There was the snow of the 4th December. 11th was a lodging snow, it being mild and still, like to-day (only it was not so moist). Was succeeded next day noon by a strong and cold northwest wind. 14th, a fine, dry, cold, driving and drifting storm. 20th (to-day’s), a very lodging, moist, and large-flaked snow, turning to rain. To be classed with the 11th in the main. This wets the woodchopper about as much as rain. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1860

When Abraham Lincoln was asked what books had influenced him, he mentioned a narrative by James Riley, who in 1815 had been shipwrecked on the African coast at what is now Mauritania. Riley and other American sailors had been made prisoners by a band of Bedouin, and then, generously and unexpectedly, a Moroccan trader, Sidi Hamet (Ahmed), had ransomed them. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The pro-Lincoln faction of the Republicans was at this point being referred to as “the Wide-Awakes.” Thomas Hicks painted a portrait of their candidate on the basis of a photograph made in a studio in Springfield during this year:

William Dean Howells’s POEMS OF TWO FRIENDS. His LIVES AND SPEECHES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND HANNIBAL HAMLIN (campaign biography, for which he would get appointed consul in Venice). During this year he met Elinor Mead, his future wife. He traveled to Boston and Concord (see LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE) where he met J.T. Fields, Lowell, Holmes, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE John Albion Andrew became a delegate to their National Convention, from Massachusetts.

Chicago hosted its 1st political convention, the one in which the newly formed Republican Party, having previously lost with its initial candidate John Charles Frémont, nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois to be its 2d presidential candidate. (Frémont had carried 11 states and Lincoln would be elected President with only 40 percent of the popular vote because he would be able to carry all 18 northern states — beginning a tradition in which, during the 18 national elections between 1860 and 1932, non-Republican candidates would succeed in only 4.)

South Carolina seceded from the Union and the Confederation of Southern States was formed. US CIVIL WAR

American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a

Presidential Political Electoral Popular Candidate Party Votes Votes

1789 GEORGE WASHINGTON No formally organized party 692

JOHN ADAMS No formally organized party 34

JOHN JAY No formally organized party 9

R. H. HARRISON No formally organized party 6

JOHN RUTLEDGE No formally organized party 6

JOHN HANCOCK No formally organized party 4

GEORGE CLINTON No formally organized party 3

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON No formally organized party 2

JOHN MILTON No formally organized party 2

JAMES ARMSTRONG No formally organized party 1

BENJAMIN LINCOLN No formally organized party 1 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a

Presidential Political Electoral Popular Candidate Party Votes Votes

EDWARD TELFAIR No formally organized party 1

(NOT VOTED) No formally organized party 44

1792 GEORGE WASHINGTON Federalist 132

JOHN ADAMS Federalist 77

GEORGE CLINTON Democratic-Republican 50

THOMAS JEFFERSON 4

AARON BURR 1

1796 JOHN ADAMS Federalist 71

THOMAS JEFFERSON Democratic-Republican 68

THOMAS PINCKNEY Federalist 59

AARON BURR Antifederalist 30

SAMUEL ADAMS Democratic-Republican 5

OLIVER ELLSWORTH Federalist 11

GEORGE CLINTON Democratic-Republican 7

JOHN JAY Independent-Federalist 5

JAMES IREDELL Federalist 3

GEORGE WASHINGTON Federalist 2

JOHN HENRY Independent 2

S. JOHNSTON Independent-Federalist 2

C. C. PINCKNEY Independent-Federalist 1

1800 THOMAS JEFFERSON Democratic-Republican 733

AARON BURR Democratic-Republican 73

JOHN ADAMS Federalist 65

C. C. PINCKNEY Federalist 64

JOHN JAY Federalist 1

1804 THOMAS JEFFERSON Democratic-Republican 162 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a

Presidential Political Electoral Popular Candidate Party Votes Votes

C. C. PINCKNEY Federalist 14

1808 JAMES MADISON Democratic-Republican 122

C. C. PINCKNEY Federalist 47

GEORGE CLINTON Independent-Republican 6

(NOT VOTED) 1

1812 JAMES MADISON Democratic-Republican 128

DE WITT CLINTON Fusion 89

(NOT VOTED) 1

1816 JAMES MONROE Republican 183

RUFUS KING Federalist 34

(NOT VOTED) 4

1820 JAMES MONROE Republican 231

JOHN Q. ADAMS Independent-Republican 1

(NOT VOTED) 3

1824 JOHN Q. ADAMS No distinct party designations 844 113,122

ANDREW JACKSON 99 151,271

HENRY CLAY 37 47,531

W. H. CRAWFORD 41 40,856

1828 ANDREW JACKSON Democratic 178 642,553

JOHN Q. ADAMS National Republican 83 500,897

1832 ANDREW JACKSON Democratic 219 701,780

HENRY CLAY National Republican 49 484,205

WILLIAM WIRT Anti-Masonic 7 100,715

JOHN FLOYD Nullifiers 11

(NOT VOTED) 2

1836 MARTIN VAN BUREN Democratic 170 764,176 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a

Presidential Political Electoral Popular Candidate Party Votes Votes

WILLIAM H. HARRISON Whig 73 550,816

HUGH L. WHITE Whig 26 146,107

DANIEL WEBSTER Whig 14 41,201

W. P. MANGUM Anti-Jackson 11

1840 WILLIAM H. HARRISON Whig 234 1,275,390

MARTIN VAN BUREN Democratic 60 1,128,854

1844 JAMES K. POLK Democratic 170 1,339,494

HENRY CLAY Whig 105 1,300,004

JAMES G. BIRNEY Liberty 62,103

1848 ZACHARY TAYLOR Whig 163 1,361,393

LEWIS CASS Democratic 127 1,223,460

MARTIN VAN BUREN Free Soil 291,501

1852 FRANKLIN PIERCE Democratic 254 1,607,510

Winfield Scott Whig 42 1,386,942

JOHN P. HALE Free Soil 155,210

1856 JAMES BUCHANAN Democratic 174 1,836,072

JOHN C. FRÉMONT Republican 114 1,342,345

MILLARD FILLMORE American 8 873,053

1860 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Republican 180 1,865,908

JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE Southern Democratic 72 848,019

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS Democratic 12 1,380,202

JOHN BELL Constitutional Union 39 590,901 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE a.Minor candidates polling less than 10,000 popular votes and receiving no electoral votes are excluded. In early elections, electors were chosen by legislatures in many states, rather than by popular vote. Until 1804, each elector voted for two men without indicating which was to be president and which vice president. Because the two houses of the New York legislature could not agree on electors, the state did not cast its electoral vote. It was some time before North Carolina and Rhode Island ratified the Constitution. When Jefferson and Aaron Burr received equal numbers of electoral votes, the decision was referred to the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment (1804) provided that electors cast separate ballots for president and vice president. In cases in which no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, the decision was made by the House of Representatives. This is all based upon data from the HISTORICAL STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES, COLONIAL TIMES TO 1957 (1960), STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969, 90th ed. (1969), and CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY’S GUIDE TO U.S. ELECTIONS, 3rd ed. (1994).

Ohio sent Salmon Portland Chase back to the US Senate, as a Republican. Two days after being sworn as senator for the 2d time, Chase resigned to accept the offer of Secretary of the Treasury from president-elect Abraham Lincoln. Chase brought to the office his fear of monopolies, distrust of bankers, a preference for revenue tariffs and a belief in hard money. His principles would be tested by an empty treasury coffer and a long civil war that would cost our nation more than $20,000,000,000. Professing a total ignorance of financial matters, Lincoln saddled Chase with the entire problem of financing the civil war. The Treasury Secretary would create the Internal Revenue Division and adopt a national banking system in attempts to keep the nation from going bankrupt. Against his beliefs, and believing that issuing greenbacks to be unconstitutional, but with the debts from the war mounting and not being paid, Chase lobbied the congress to pass the Legal Tender Acts of 1862 and 1863. This enabled the printing of paper money as a legal substitute for gold and silver for pre- existing debts including taxes, internal duties, personal debts, and excise tax debts. After the civil war, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Chase would disown his own offspring and declare his wartime Legal Tender Acts to have been unconstitutional.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 23, Thursday: The special train conveying President-elect Abraham Lincoln and his party, including his son Robert Lincoln, had departed from Springfield, Illinois on the morning of February 11th and experienced a lengthy and leisurely transit by way of Lafayette and Indianapolis in Indiana, Columbus and Cleveland in Ohio, Pittsburg and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. Buffalo and Albany and New-York in New York State, and Baltimore in Maryland. On this day the entourage arrived at the national capital, Washington, District of Columbia.

Feb. 23. 2 P. M.—Thermometer 56°. Wind south. 3 P. M.—Thermometer 58° and snow almost gone. River rising. We have not had such a warm day since the beginning of December (which was remarkably warm). I walk over the moist Nawshawtuct hillside and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup, shepherd’s-purse (circular), sorrel, chickweed, cerastium, etc., revealed. About 4 P. M. a smart shower, ushered in by thunder and succeeded by a brilliant rainbow and yellow light from under the dark cloud in the west. Thus the first remarkable heat brings a thunder-shower. The words “pardall” and “libbard,” applied by Gesner to the same animal, express as much of the wild beast as CONRAD GESNER any. read in Brand’s “Popular Antiquities” that “Bishop Stillingfleet observes, that among the Saxons of the REV. JOHN BRAND northern nations, the Feast of the New Year was observed with more than ordinary jollity: thence, as Olaus Wormius and Scheffer observe, they reckoned their age by so many Iolas.” (Iola, to make merry.—Gothic.) So may we measure our lives by our joys. We have lived, not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth, but in proportion as we have enjoyed. February is pronounced the coldest month in the year. In B.’s “Popular Antiquities” is quoted this from the Harleian Manuscripts:— REV. JOHN BRAND “Fevrier de tous les mois, Le plus court et moins courtois.” In the same work it is said that this saying is still current in the north of England:— “On the first of March, The crows begin to search.” Would it not apply to the crows searching for their food in our meadows, along the water’s edge, a little later? A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. It is like giving a man a stone when he asks you for bread. Ultimately the moral is all in all, and we do not mind it if inferior truth is sacrificed to superior, as when the moralist fables and makes animals speak and act like men. It must be warm, moist, incarnated, — have been breathed on at least. A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it. POPULAR ANTIQUITIES HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 26, Sunday evening: Abraham Lincoln was visiting New-York in order to speak importantly at the Cooper Institute, and publicly disassociate himself from the idea of trying to help the negro slave improve his lot:

John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.

On the evening before this important address, the candidate took the ferry across the East River to see and be seen at the Plymouth Church, and to hear the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher sermonize. There is a small plaque on the pew in which he sat, #89. (There is no plaque where Lajos Kossuth had sat, nor is there a plaque where Walt Whitman had sat, or where Bronson Alcott and Henry Thoreau had sat, evidently because we don’t know specifically which pews these folks sat in or for some other reason.)

Feb. 26. Sunday. 2 P. M.—Thermometer 30; cold northwest wind. The water is about six inches above Hoar’s steps. That well covers the meadows generally. Cold and strong northwest wind this and yesterday.

February 27, Monday: Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was visiting New-York in order to deliver an address at the Cooper Institute that would publicly disassociate himself from the idea of trying to help the negro slave improve his lot. This would be printed with his approval, as follows:24 MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-CITIZENS OF NEW-YORK:—The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that 24. THE ADDRESS OF THE HON. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, IN [V]INDICATION OF THE POLICY OF THE FRAMERS OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, DELIVERED AT COOPER INSTITUTE, FEBRUARY 27TH, 1860, ISSUED BY THE YOUNG MEN’S REPUBLICAN UNION, (659 BROADWAY, NEW-YORK,) WITH NOTES BY CHARLES C. NOTT & CEPHAS BRAINERD, MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF CONTROL. New-York: George F. Nesbitt & Co., Printers and Stationers, 1860. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE presentation. In his speech last autumn, at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in “The New-York Times,” Senator Douglas said: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” I fully indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse. I so adopt it because it furnishes a precise and an agreed starting point for a discussion between Republicans and that wing of the Democracy headed by Senator Douglas. It simply leaves the inquiry: “What was the understanding those fathers had of the question mentioned?” What is the frame of Government under which we live? The answer must be: “The Constitution of the United States.” That Constitution consists of the original, framed in 1787, (and under which the present government first went into operation,) and twelve subsequently framed amendments, the first ten of which were framed in 1789. Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? I suppose the “thirty-nine” who signed the original instrument may be fairly called our fathers who framed that part of the present Government. It is almost exactly true to say they framed it, and it is altogether true to say they fairly represented the opinion and sentiment of the whole nation at that time. Their names, being familiar to nearly all, and accessible to quite all, need not now be repeated. I take these “thirty-nine” for the present, as being “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.” What is the question which, according to the text, those fathers understood “just as well, and even better than we do now?” It is this: Does the proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our Federal Government to control as to slavery in our Federal Territories? Upon this, Senator Douglas holds the affirmative, and Republicans the negative. This affirmation and denial form an issue; and this issue –this question– is precisely what the text declares our fathers understood “better than we.” Let us now inquire whether the “thirty-nine,” or any of them, ever acted upon this question; and if they did, how they acted upon it — how they expressed that better understanding? In 1784, three years before the Constitution — the United States then owning the Northwestern Territory, and no other,25 the Congress of the Confederation had before them the question of prohibiting slavery in that Territory; and four of the “thirty-nine,” who afterward framed the Constitution, were in that Congress, and voted on that question. Of these, Roger Sherman [Connecticut], Thomas Mifflin [Pennsylvania], and Hugh Williamson [North Carolina] voted for the prohibition, thus 25. The cession of territory was authorized by New-York, February 19, 1780; by Virginia, January 2, 1781, and again (without certain conditions at first imposed) “at their sessions, begun on the 20th day of October, 1783”; by Massachusetts, November 13, 1784; by Connecticut, May — , 1786; by South Carolina, March 8, 1787; by North Carolina, December — , 1789; and by Georgia at some time prior to April 1802. The deeds of cession were executed by New-York, March 1, 1781; by Virginia, March 1, 1784; by Massachusetts, April 19, 1785; by Connecticut, September 13, 1786; by South Carolina, August 9, 1787; by North Carolina, February 25, 1790; and by Georgia, April 24, 1802. Five of these grants were therefore made before the adoption of the Constitution, and one afterward; while the sixth (North Carolina) was authorized before, and consummated afterward. The cession of this State contains the express proviso “that no regulations made, or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves.” The cession of Georgia conveys the Territory subject to the Ordinance of ’87, except the provision prohibiting slavery. These dates are also interesting in connection with the extraordinary assertions of Chief Justice Taney, (19 How, page 434) that “the example of Virginia was soon afterwards followed by other States,” and that (page 436) the power in the Constitution “to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the Territory or other property belonging to the United States,” was intended only “to transfer to the new Government the property then held in common,” “and has no reference whatever to any Territory or other property, which the new sovereignty might afterwards itself acquire.” On this subject, vide Federalist, No. 43, sub. 4 and 5. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE showing that, in their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything else, properly forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in federal territory. The other of the four –James M’Henry [Maryland]– voted against the prohibition, showing that, for some cause, he thought it improper to vote for it.26 In 1787, still before the Constitution, but while the Convention was in session framing it, and while the Northwestern Territory still was the only territory owned by the United States, the same question of prohibiting slavery in the territory again came before the Congress of the Confederation; and two more of the “thirty-nine” who afterward signed the Constitution, were in that Congress, and voted on the question. They were William Blount and William Few;27 and they both voted for the prohibition — thus showing that, in their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything else, properly forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in federal territory. This time the prohibition became a law, being part of what is now well known as the Ordinance of ‘87.28 The question of federal control of slavery in the territories, seems not to have been directly before the Convention which framed the original Constitution; and hence it is not recorded that the “thirty-nine,” or any of them, while engaged on that instrument, expressed any opinion of that precise question.29 In 1789, by the first Congress which sat under the Constitution, an act was passed to enforce the Ordinance of ’87, including the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory. The bill for this act was reported by one of the “thirty-nine,” Thomas Fitzsimmons, then a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. It went through all its stages without a word of opposition, and finally passed both branches without yeas and nays, which is equivalent to an unanimous passage.30 In this Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution. They were John Langdon [New Hampshire], Nicholas Gilman [New Hampshire], Wm. S. Johnson [Connecticut], Roger Sherman [Connecticut], [Pennsylvania], Thos. Fitzsimmons [Pennsylvania], William Few [Georgia], Abraham Baldwin [Georgia], [Massachusetts], William Paterson [New Jersey], George Clymer [Pennsylvania], Richard Bassett [Delaware], George Read [Delaware], Pierce Butler31 [South Carolina], Daniel Carroll [Maryland], James Madison [Virginia]. This shows that, in their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything in the Constitution, properly forbade Congress to prohibit slavery in the federal territory; else both their fidelity to correct principle, and their oath to support the Constitution, would have constrained them to oppose the prohibition. Again, George Washington, another of the “thirty-nine,” was then President of the United States, and, as such, approved and signed the bill; thus completing its validity as a law, and thus showing that, in his understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything in the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government, to control as to slavery in federal territory. 26. What Mr. M’Henry’s views were, it seems impossible to ascertain. When the Ordinance of ’87 was passed he was sitting in the Convention. He was afterward appointed Secretary of War; yet no record has thus far been discovered of his opinion. Mr. M’Henry also wrote a biography of La Fayette, which, however, cannot be found in any of the public libraries, among which may be mentioned the State Library at Albany, and the Astor, Society, and Historical Society Libraries, at New-York. Alexander Hamilton says of him, in a letter to Washington, (Works, vol. 6, p. 65): “M’Henry you know. He would give no strength to the Administration, but he would not disgrace the office; his views are good.” 27. William Blount was from North Carolina, and William Few, from Georgia — the two States which afterward ceded their territory to the United States. In addition to these facts the following extract from the speech of Rufus King in the Senate, on the Missouri Bill, shows the entire unanimity with which the Southern States approved the prohibition: — “The State of Virginia, which ceded to the United States her claims to this Territory, consented, by her delegates in the old Congress, to this Ordinance. Not only Virginia, but North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, by the unanimous votes of their delegates in the Old Congress, approved of the Ordinance of 1787, by which Slavery is forever abolished in the Territory northwest of the river Ohio. Without the votes of these States the Ordinance could not have been passed; and there is no recollection of an opposition from any of these States to the act of confirmation passed under the actual Constitution.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE No great while after the adoption of the original Constitution, North Carolina ceded to the Federal Government the country now constituting the State of Tennessee; and a few years later Georgia ceded that which now constitutes the States of Mississippi and Alabama. In both deeds of cession it was made a condition by the ceding States that the Federal Government should not prohibit slavery in the ceded country. Besides this, slavery was then actually in the ceded country. Under these circumstances, Congress, on taking charge of these countries, did not absolutely prohibit slavery within them. But they did interfere with it –take control of it– even there, to a certain extent. In 1798, Congress organized the Territory of Mississippi. In the act of organization, they prohibited the bringing of slaves into the Territory, from any place without the United States, by fine, and giving freedom to slaves so brought.32 This act passed both branches of Congress without yeas and nays. In that Congress were three of the “thirty-nine” who framed the original Constitution. They were John Langdon [New Hampshire], George Read [Delaware] and Abraham Baldwin [Georgia]. They all, probably, voted for it. Certainly they would have placed their opposition to it upon record, if, in their understanding, any line dividing local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, properly forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in federal territory. In 1803, the Federal Government purchased the Louisiana country. Our former territorial acquisitions came from certain of our own States; but this Louisiana country was acquired from a foreign nation. In 1804, Congress gave a territorial organization to that part of it which now constitutes the State of Louisiana. New Orleans, lying within that part, was an old and comparatively large city. There were other considerable towns and settlements, and slavery was extensively and thoroughly intermingled with the people. Congress did not, in the Territorial Act, prohibit slavery; but they did interfere with it –take control of it– in a more marked and extensive way

28. “The famous ordinance of Congress of the 13th July, 1787, which has ever since constituted, in most respects, the model of all our territorial governments, and is equally remarkable for the brevity and exactness of its text, and for its masterly display of the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty.” — Justice Story, 1 Commentaries, section1312. “It is well known that the Ordinance of 1787 was drawn by the Hon. Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, and adopted with scarcely a verbal alteration by Congress. It is a noble and imperishable monument to his fame.” — Id. note. The ordinance was reported by a committee, of which Wm. S. Johnson and Charles Pinckney were members. It recites that, “for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws and constitutions, are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions and governments which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said Territory; to provide also for the establishment of States and permanent government, and for their admission to a share in the federal councils, on an equal footing with the original States, at as early periods as may be consistent with the general interest — “It is hereby ordained and declared, by the authority aforesaid, that the following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original States and the people and States in the said Territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent, to wit:” * * * * “Art. 6. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; provided always that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service.” On passing the ordinance, the ayes and nays were required by Judge Yates, of New-York, when it appeared that his was the only vote in the negative. The ordinance of April 23, 1784, was a brief outline of that of ‘87. It was reported by a Committee, of which Mr. Jefferson was chairman, and the report contained a slavery prohibition intended to take effect in 1800. This was stricken out of the report, six States voting to retain it — three voting to strike out — one being divided (N.C.,) and the others not being represented. (The assent of nine States was necessary to retain any provision.) And this is the vote alluded to by Mr. Lincoln. But subsequently, March 16, 1785, a motion was made by Rufus King to commit a proposition “that there be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in any of the Territories; which was carried by the vote of eight States, including Maryland. — Journal Am. Congress, vol. 4, pp. 373, 380, 481, 752. When, therefore, the ordinance of ‘87 came before Congress, on its final passage, the subject of slavery prohibition had been “agitated” for nearly three years; and the deliberate and almost unanimous vote of that body upon that question leaves no room to doubt what the fathers believed, and how, in that belief, they acted. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE than they did in the case of Mississippi. The substance of the provision therein made, in relation to slaves, was: First. That no slave should be imported into the territory from foreign parts. Second. That no slave should be carried into it who had been imported into the United States since the first day of May, 1798. Third. That no slave should be carried into it, except by the owner, and for his own use as a settler; the penalty in all the cases being a fine upon the violator of the law, and freedom to the slave.33 This act also was passed without yeas and nays. In the Congress which passed it, there were two of the “thirty-nine.” They were Abraham Baldwin [Georgia] and Jonathan Dayton [New Jersey]. As stated in the case of Mississippi, it is probable they both voted for it. They would not have allowed it to pass without recording their opposition to it, if, in their understanding, it violated either the line properly dividing local from federal authority, or any provision of the Constitution. In 1819-20, came and passed the Missouri question. Many votes were taken, by yeas and nays, in both branches of Congress, upon the various phases of the general question. Two of the “thirty-nine” –Rufus King and Charles Pinckney– were members of that Congress.34 Mr. King steadily voted for slavery prohibition and against all 29. It singularly and fortunately happens that one of the “thirty-nine,” “while engaged on that instrument,” viz., while advocating its ratification before the Pennsylvania Convention, did express an opinion upon this “precise question,” which opinion was never disputed or doubted, in that or any other Convention, and was accepted by the opponents of the Constitution, as an indisputable fact. This was the celebrated James Wilson, of Pennsylvania. The opinion is as follows: — MONDAY, Dec. 3, 1787. “With respect to the clause restricting Congress from prohibiting the migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, prior to the year 1808: The Hon. gentleman says that this clause is not only dark, but intended to grant to Congress, for that time, the power to admit the importation of slaves. No such thing was intended; but I will tell you what was done, and it gives me high pleasure that so much was done. Under the present Confederation, the States may admit the importation of slaves as long as they please; but by this article, after the year 1808, the Congress will have power to prohibit such importation, notwithstanding the disposition of any State to the contrary. I consider this as laying the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country; and though the period is more distant than I could wish, yet it will produce the same kind, gradual change which was pursued in Pennsylvania. It is with much satisfaction that I view this power in the general government, whereby they may lay an interdiction on this reproachful trade. But an immediate advantage is also obtained; for a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding $10 for each person; and this, sir, operates as a partial prohibition; it was all that could be obtained. I am sorry it was no more; but from this I think there is reason to hope that yet a few years, and it will be prohibited altogether. And in the meantime, the new States which are to be formed will be under the control of Congress in this particular, and slaves will never be introduced amongst them.” — 2 Elliott’s Debates, 423. It was argued by in the Convention in Virginia, as follows: “May not Congress enact that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this in the last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general. But acts of Assembly passed, that every slave who would go to the army should be free. Another thing will contribute to bring this event about. Slavery is detested. We feel its fatal effects. We deplore it with all the pity of humanity. Let all these considerations press with full force on the minds of Congress. Let that urbanity which, I trust, will distinguish America, and the necessity of national defence — let all these things operate on their minds, they will search that paper, and see if they have power of . And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? There is no ambiguous implication, no logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point; they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it.” — 3 Elliott’s Debates, 534. Edmund Randolph, one of the framers of the Constitution, replied to Mr. Henry, admitting the general force of the argument, but claiming that, because of other provisions, it had no application to the States where slavery then existed; thus conceding that power to exist in Congress as to all territory belonging to the United States. Dr. Ramsay, a member of the Convention of South Carolina, in his history of the United States, vol. 3, pages 36, 37, says: “Under these liberal principles, Congress, in organizing colonies, bound themselves to impart to their inhabitants all the privileges of coequal States, as soon as they were capable of enjoying them. In their infancy, government was administered for them without any expense. As soon as they should have 60,000 inhabitants, they were authorized to call a convention, and, by common consent, to form their own constitution. This being done, they were entitled to representation in Congress, and every right attached to the original States. These privileges are not confined to any particular country or complexion. They are communicable to the emancipated slave, (for in the new State of Ohio, slavery is altogether prohibited), to the copper-colored native, and all other human beings who, after a competent residence and degree of civilization, are capable of enjoying the blessings of regular government.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE compromises, while Mr. Pinckney as steadily voted against slavery prohibition and against all compromises. By this, Mr. King showed that, in his understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything in the Constitution, was violated by Congress prohibiting slavery in federal territory; while Mr. Pinckney, by his votes, showed that, in his understanding, there was some sufficient reason for opposing such prohibition in that case.35 The cases I have mentioned are the only acts of the “thirty-nine,” or of any of them, upon the direct issue, which I have been able to discover. To enumerate the persons who thus acted, as being four in 1784, two in 1787, seventeen in 1789, three in 1798, two in 1804, and two in 1819-20 — there would be thirty of them. But this would be counting John Langdon, Roger Sherman, William Few, Rufus King, and George Read, each twice, and Abraham Baldwin, three times. The true number of those of the “thirty-nine” whom I have shown to have acted upon the question, which, by the text, they understood better than we, is twenty-three, leaving sixteen not shown to have acted upon it in any way.36 Here, then, we have twenty-three out of our thirty-nine fathers “who framed the Government under which we live,” who have, upon their official responsibility and their corporal oaths, acted upon the very question which the text affirms they “understood just as well, and even better than we do now;” and twenty-one of them –a clear majority of the whole “thirty-nine”– so acting upon it as to make them guilty of gross political impropriety and wilful perjury, if, in their understanding, any proper division between local and federal authority, or anything in the Constitution they had made themselves, and sworn to support, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories. Thus the twenty-one acted; and, as actions speak louder than words, so actions, under such responsibility, speak still louder. Two of the twenty-three voted against Congressional prohibition of slavery in the federal territories, in the instances in which they acted upon the question. But for what reasons they so voted is not known. They may have done so because they thought a proper division of local from federal authority, or some provision or principle of the Constitution, stood in the way; or they may, without any such question, have voted against the prohibition, on what appeared to them to be sufficient grounds of expediency. No one who has sworn to support the Constitution, can conscientiously vote for what he understands to be an unconstitutional measure, however expedient he may think it; but one may and ought to vote against a measure which he deems constitutional, if, at the same time, he deems it inexpedient. It, therefore, would be unsafe to set down even the two who voted against the prohibition, as having done so

30. The Act of 1789, as reported by the Committee, was received and read Thursday, July 16th. The second reading was on Friday, the 17th, when it was committed to the Committee of the whole house, “on Monday next.” On Monday, July 20th, it was considered in Committee of the whole, and ordered to a third reading on the following day; on the 21st, it passed the House, and was sent to the Senate. In the Senate it had its first reading on the same day, and was ordered to a second reading on the following day, (July 22d,) and on the 4th August it passed, and on the 7th was approved by the President. 31. This is not the Pierce Butler who fucked up Fanny Kemble, but one of his illustrious ancestors.

32. Chapter 28, section 7, U.S. Statutes, 5th Congress, 2d Session. 33. Chapter 38, section 10, U.S. Statutes, 8th Congress, 1st Session. 34. Rufus King, who sat in the old Congress, and also in the Convention as the representative of Massachusetts, removed to New- York and was sent by that State to the U.S. Senate of the first Congress. Charles Pinckney was in the House, as a representative of South Carolina. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE because, in their understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in federal territory. The remaining sixteen of the “thirty-nine,” so far as I have discovered, have left no record of their understanding upon the direct question of federal control of slavery in the federal territories [Nathaniel Gorham, Massachusetts; Alexander Hamilton, New-York; William Livingston and David Brearly, New Jersey; Benjamin Franklin, , James Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris, Pennsylvania; Gunning Bedford, John Dickinson, and Jacob Broom, Delaware; Daniel, of St. Thomas, Jenifer, Maryland; John Blair, Virginia; Richard Dobbs Spaight, North Carolina; John Rutledge and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, South Carolina]. But there is much reason to believe that their understanding upon that question would not have appeared different from that of their twenty-three compeers, had it been manifested at all. For the purpose of adhering rigidly to the text, I have purposely omitted whatever understanding may have been manifested by any person, however distinguished, other than the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution; and, for the same reason, I have also omitted whatever understanding may have been manifested by any of the “thirty-nine” even, on any other phase of the general question of slavery. If we should look into their acts and declarations on those other phases, as the foreign slave trade, and the morality and policy of slavery generally, it would appear to us that on the direct question of federal control of slavery in federal territories, the sixteen, if they had acted at all, would probably have acted just as the twenty-three did. Among that sixteen were several of the most noted anti-slavery men of those times –as Dr. Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris– while there was not one now known to have been otherwise, unless it may be John Rutledge, of South Carolina.37 The sum of the whole is, that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one –a clear majority of the whole– certainly understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories; while all 35. Although Mr. Pinckney opposed “slavery prohibition” in 1820, yet his views, with regard to the powers of the general government, may be better judged by his actions in the Convention: FRIDAY, June 8th, 1787. — “Mr. Pinckney moved ‘that the National Legislature shall have the power of negativing all laws to be passed by the State Legislatures, which they may judge improper,’ in the room of the clause as it stood reported. “He grounds his motion on the necessity of one supreme controlling power, and he considers this as the corner-stone of the present system; and hence, the necessity of retrenching the State authorities, in order to preserve the good government of the national council.” — P. 400, Elliott’s Debates. And again, THURSDAY, August 23d, 1787, Mr. Pinckney renewed the motion with some modifications. — P. 1409, James Madison Papers. And although Mr. Pinckney, as correctly stated by Mr. Lincoln, “steadily voted against slavery prohibition, and against all compromises,” he still regarded the passage of the Missouri Compromise as a great triumph of the South, which is apparent from the following letter. CONGRESS HALL, March 2d, 1820, 3 o’clock at night. DEAR SIR: — I hasten to inform you, that this moment WE have carried the question to admit Missouri, and all Louisiana to the southward of 36(deg)30’, free from the restriction of slavery, and give the South, in a short time, an addition of six, perhaps eight, members to the Senate of the United States. It is considered here by the slaveholding States, as a great triumph. The votes were close — ninety to eighty-six — produced by the seceding and absence of a few moderate men from the North. To the north of 36(deg) 30’, there is to be, by the present law, restriction; which you will see by the votes, I voted against. But it is at present of no moment; it is a vast tract, uninhabited, only by savages and wild beasts, in which not a foot of the Indian claims to soil is extinguished, and in which, according to the ideas prevalent, no land office will be opened for a great length of time. With respect, your obedient servant, CHARLES PINCKNEY. But conclusive evidence of Mr. Pinckney’s views is furnished in the fact, that he was himself a member of the Committee which reported the Ordinance of ‘87, and that on every occasion, when it was under the consideration of Congress, he voted against all amendments. — Jour. Am. Congress, Sept. 29th, 1786. Oct. 4th. When the ordinance came up for its final passage, Mr. Pinckney was sitting in the Convention, and did not take part in the proceedings of Congress. 36. Of the 23 who acted upon the question of prohibition, 12 were from the present slaveholding States. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the rest probably had the same understanding. Such, unquestionably, was the understanding of our fathers who framed the original Constitution; and the text affirms that they understood the question “better than we.” But, so far, I have been considering the understanding of the question manifested by the framers of the original Constitution. In and by the original instrument, a mode was provided for amending it; and, as I have already stated, the present frame of “the Government under which we live” consists of that original, and twelve amendatory articles framed and adopted since. Those who now insist that federal control of slavery in federal territories violates the Constitution, point us to the provisions which they suppose it thus violates; and, as I understand, they all fix upon provisions in these amendatory articles, and not in the original instrument. The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, plant themselves upon the fifth amendment, which provides that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law;” while Senator Douglas and his peculiar adherents plant themselves upon the tenth amendment, providing that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,” “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”38 Now, it so happens that these amendments were framed by the first Congress which sat under the Constitution — the identical Congress which passed the act already mentioned, enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory. Not only was it the same Congress, but they were the identical, same individual men who, at the same session, and at the same time within the session, had under consideration, and in progress toward maturity, these Constitutional amendments, and this act prohibiting slavery in all the territory the nation then owned. The Constitutional amendments were introduced before, and passed after the act enforcing the Ordinance of ‘87; so that, during the whole pendency of the act to enforce the Ordinance, the Constitutional amendments were also pending. The seventy-six members of that Congress, including sixteen of the framers of the original Constitution, as before stated, were preeminently our fathers who framed that part of “the Government under which we live,” which is now claimed as forbidding the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories. Is it not a little presumptuous in any one at this day to affirm that the two things which that Congress deliberately framed, and carried to maturity at the same time, are absolutely inconsistent with each other? And does not such affirmation become

37. “The only distinction between freedom and slavery consists in this: in the former state, a man is governed by the laws to which he has given his consent, either in person or by his representative; in the latter, he is governed by the will of another. In the one case, his life and property are his own; in the other, they depend upon the pleasure of a master. It is easy to discern which of the two states is preferable. No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free rather than slave. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Were not the disadvantages of slavery too obvious to stand in need of it, I might enumerate and describe the tedious train of calamities inseparable from it. I might show that it is fatal to religion and morality; that it tends to debase the mind, and corrupt its noblest springs of action. I might show that it relaxes the sinews of industry and clips the wings of commerce, and works misery and indigence in every shape.” — Alexander Hamilton, Works, vol. 2, pp. 3, 9. “That you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom, are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice toward this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men.” — Philadelphia, Feb. 3d, 1790. Benjamin Franklin’s Petition to Congress for the Abolition of Slavery. Mr. Gouverneur Morris said: — “He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed. * * * The admission of slavery into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this — that the inhabitant of South Carolina or Georgia, who goes to the coast of Africa, and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow-creatures from their dearest connections, and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes, in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, who views, with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice. * * * * * * * He would sooner submit himself to a tax for paying for all the negroes in the United States than saddle posterity with such a constitution.” — Debate on Slave Representation in the Convention. — James Madison Papers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE impudently absurd when coupled with the other affirmation from the same mouth, that those who did the two things, alleged to be inconsistent, understood whether they really were inconsistent better than we — better than he who affirms that they are inconsistent? It is surely safe to assume that the thirty-nine framers of the original Constitution, and the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken together, do certainly include those who may be fairly called “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.”39 And so assuming, I defy any man to show that any one of them ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories. I go a step further. I defy any one to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior to the beginning of the present century, (and I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century,) declare that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories. To those who now so declare, I give, not only “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live,” but with them all other living men within the century in which it was framed, among whom to search, and they shall not be able to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them. Now, and here, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience –to reject all progress– all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we. If any man at this day sincerely believes that a proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can. But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,” were of the same opinion — thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument. If any man at this day sincerely believes “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live,” used and applied principles, in other cases, which ought to have led them to understand that a proper division of local from federal authority or some part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so. But he should, at the same time, brave the responsibility of declaring that, in his opinion, he understands their 38. An eminent jurist (Chancellor Walworth) has said that “The preamble which was prefixed to these amendments, as adopted by Congress, is important to show in what light that body considered them.” (8 Wend. R., p. 100.) It declares that a number of the State Conventions “having at the time of their adopting the Constitution expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added,” resolved, &c. This preamble is in substance the preamble affixed to the “Conciliatory Resolutions” of Massachusetts, which were drawn by Chief Justice Parsons, and offered in the Convention as a compromise by John Hancock. (Life Ch. J. Parsons, p. 67.) They were afterward copied and adopted with some additions by New Hampshire. The fifth amendment, on which the Supreme Court relies, is taken almost literally from the declaration of rights put forth by the convention of New-York, and the clause referred to forms the ninth paragraph of the declaration. The tenth amendment, on which Senator Douglas relies, is taken from the Conciliatory Resolutions, and is the first of those resolutions somewhat modified. Thus, these two amendments sought to be used for slavery, originated in the two great anti-slavery States, New-York and Massachusetts. 39. It is singular that while two of the “thirty-nine” were in that Congress of 1819, there was but one (besides Mr. Rufus King) of the “seventy-six.” The one was William Smith, of South Carolina. He was then a Senator, and, like Mr. Pinckney, occupied extreme Southern ground. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE principles better than they did themselves; and especially should he not shirk that responsibility by asserting that they “understood the question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” But enough! Let all who believe that “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now,” speak as they spoke, and act as they acted upon it. This is all Republicans ask –all Republicans desire– in relation to slavery. As those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity. Let all the guaranties those fathers gave it, be, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly maintained. For this Republicans contend, and with this, so far as I know or believe, they will be content. And now, if they would listen –as I suppose they will not– I would address a few words to the Southern people. I would say to them: — You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than . You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to “Black Republicans.” In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of “Black Republicanism” as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite –license, so to speak– among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify. You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your section — gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very year. You will then begin to discover, as the truth plainly is, that your proof does not touch the issue. The fact that we get no votes in your section, is a fact of your making, and not of ours. And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started — to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet us as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that the principle which “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live” thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment’s consideration. Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by George Washington in his Farewell Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress, enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the North- western Territory, which act embodied the policy of the Government upon that HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE subject up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he wrote La Fayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy of free States.40 Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it. But you say you are conservative –eminently conservative– while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;” while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the “gur-reat pur-rinciple” that “if one man would enslave another, no third man should object,” fantastically called “Popular Sovereignty;” but never a man among you in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.” Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations. Again, you say we have made the slavery question more prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your innovation; and thence comes the greater prominence of the question. Would you have that question reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that old policy. What has been will be again, under the same conditions. If you would have the peace of the old times, readopt the precepts and policy of the old times. You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry . If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.41 40. The following is an extract from the letter referred to: — “I agree with you cordially in your views in regard to negro slavery. I have long considered it a most serious evil, both socially and politically, and I should rejoice in any feasible scheme to rid our States of such a burden. The Congress of 1787 adopted an ordinance which prohibits the existence of involuntary servitude in our Northwestern Territory forever. I consider it a wise measure. It meets with the approval and assent of nearly every member from the States more immediately interested in Slave labor. The prevailing opinion in Virginia is against the spread of slavery in our new territories, and I trust we shall have a confederation of free States.” The following extract from a letter of George Washington to Robert Morris, April 12th, 1786, shows how strong were his views, and how clearly he deemed emancipation a subject for legislative enactment: — “I can only say that there is no man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it; but there is but one proper and effective mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is, BY LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY, and that, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper’s Ferry affair; but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held to and made by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.” You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair. When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections. The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves. Surely, this does not encourage them to revolt. True, we do, in common with “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,” declare our belief that slavery is wrong; but the slaves do not hear us declare even this. For anything we say or do, the slaves would scarcely know there is a Republican party. I believe they would not, in fact, generally know it but for your misrepresentations of us, in their hearing. In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves. Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the Republican party was organized. What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which, at least, three times as many lives were lost as at Harper’s Ferry?42 You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was “got up by Black Republicanism.” In the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive slave insurrection, is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained. The slaves have no means of rapid 41. A Committee of five, consisting of Messrs. Mason, Davis and Fitch, (Democrats,) and Collamer and Doolittle, (Republicans,) was appointed Dec. 14, 1859, by the U.S. Senate, to investigate the Harper’s Ferry affair. That Committee was directed, among other things, to inquire: (1.) “Whether such invasion and seizure was made under color of any organization intended to subvert the government of any of the States of the Union.” (2.) “What was the character and extent of such organization.” (3.) “And whether any citizen of the United States, not present, were implicated therein, or accessory thereto, by contributions of money, arms, munitions, or otherwise.” The majority of the Committee, Messrs. Mason, Davis, and Fitch, reply to the inquiries as follows: [1] “There will be found in the Appendix, a copy of the proceedings of a Convention held at Chatham, Canada, of the Provisional Form of Government there pretended to have been instituted, the object of which clearly was to subvert the government of one or more States, and of course, to that extent, the government of the United States.” By reference to the copy of Proceedings it appears that nineteen persons were present at that Convention, eight of whom were either killed or executed at Charlestown, and one examined before the Committee. [2] “The character of the military organization appears, by the commissions issued to certain of the armed party as captains, lieutenants, &c., a specimen of which will be found in the Appendix.” (These Commissions are signed by John Brown as Commander-in-Chief, under the Provisional Government, and by J. H. Kagi as Secretary.) “It clearly appeared that the scheme of Brown was to take with him comparatively but few men; but those had been carefully trained by military instruction previously, and were to act as officers. For his military force he relied, very clearly, on inciting insurrection amongst the Slaves.” [3] “It does not appear that the contributions were made with actual knowledge of the use for which they were designed by Brown, although it does appear that money was freely contributed by those styling themselves the friends of this man Brown, and friends alike of what they styled the cause of freedom, (of which they claimed him to be an especial apostle,) without inquiring as to the way in which the money would be used by him to advance such pretended cause.” In concluding the report the majority of the Committee thus characterize the “invasion:” “It was simply the act of lawless ruffians, under the sanction of no public or political authority — distinguishable only from ordinary felonies by the ulterior ends in contemplation by them,” &c. 42. The Southampton insurrection, August, 1831, was induced by the remarkable ability of a slave calling himself General Nat Turner. He led his fellow bondmen to believe that he was acting under the order of Heaven. In proof of this he alleged that the singular appearance of the sun at that time was a divine signal for the commencement of the struggle which would result in the recovery of their freedom. This insurrection resulted in the death of sixty-four white persons, and more than one hundred slaves. The Southampton was the eleventh large insurrection in the Southern States, besides numerous attempts and revolts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the indispensable connecting trains. Much is said by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true. A plot for an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favorite master or mistress, would divulge it. This is the rule; and the slave revolution in Hayti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances.43 The gunpowder plot of British history, though not connected with slaves, was more in point. In that case, only about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by consequence, averted the calamity. Occasional poisonings from the kitchen, and open or stealthy assassinations in the field, and local revolts extending to a score or so, will continue to occur as the natural results of slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I think, can happen in this country for a long time. Whoever much fears, or much hopes for such an event, will be alike disappointed. In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many years ago, “It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up.”44 Mr. Jefferson did not mean to say, nor do I, that the power of emancipation is in the Federal Government. He spoke of Virginia; and, as to the power of emancipation, I speak of the slaveholding States only. The Federal Government, however, as we insist, has the power of restraining the extension of the institution — the power to insure that a slave insurrection shall never occur on any American soil which is now free from slavery. John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things. And how much would it avail you, if you could, by the use of John Brown, Hinton Rowan Helper’s book, and the like, break up the Republican organization? Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of 43. In March, 1790, the General Assembly of France, on the petition of the free people of color in St. Domingo, many of whom were intelligent and wealthy, passed a decree intended to be in their favor, but so ambiguous as to be construed in favor of both the whites and the blacks. The differences growing out of the decree created two parties — the whites and the people of color; and some blood was shed. In 1791, the blacks again petitioned, and a decree was passed declaring the colored people citizens, who were born of free parents on both sides. This produced great excitement among the whites, and the two parties armed against each other, and horrible massacres and conflagrations followed. Then the Assembly rescinded this last decree, and like results followed, the blacks being the exasperated parties and the aggressors. Then the decree giving citizenship to the blacks was restored, and commissioners were sent out to keep the peace. The commissioners, unable to sustain themselves, between the two parties, with the troops they had, issued a proclamation that all blacks who were willing to range themselves under the banner of the Republic should be free. As a result a very large proportion of the blacks became in fact free. In 1794, the Conventional Assembly abolished slavery throughout the French Colonies. Some years afterward the French Government sought, with an army of 60,000 men to reinstate slavery, but were unsuccessful, and then the white planters were driven from the Island. 44. Vide Jefferson’s Autobiography, commenced January 6th, 1821. Jefferson’s Works, vol. 1, page 49. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling –that sentiment– by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation? But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.45 That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing. When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication. Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events. This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has 45. “I am not ashamed or afraid publicly to avow, that the election of William H. Seward or Salmon P. Chase, or any such representative of the Republican party, upon a sectional platform, ought to be resisted to the disruption of every tie that binds this Confederacy together. (Applause on the Democratic side of the House.)” — Mr. Curry, of Alabama, in the House of Representatives. “Just so sure as the Republican Party succeed in electing a sectional man, upon their sectional, anti-slavery platform, breathing destruction and death to the rights of my people, just so sure, in my judgment, the time will have come when the South must and will take an unmistakable and decided action, and then he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned! I need not tell what I, as a Southern man, will do. I think I may safely speak for the masses of the people of Georgia — that when that event happens, they, in my judgment, will consider it an overt act, a declaration of war, and meet immediately in convention, to take into consideration the mode and measure of redress. That is my position; and if that be treason to the Government, make the most of it.” — Mr. Gartell, of Georgia, in the House of Representatives. “I said to my constituents, and to the people of the capital of my State, on my way here, if such an event did occur,” — [i.e., the election of a Republican President, upon a Republican platform,] “while it would be their duty to determine the course which the State would pursue, it would be my privilege to counsel with them as to what I believed to be the proper course; and I said to them, what I say now, and what I will always say in such an event, that my counsel would be to take independence out of the Union in preference to the loss of constitutional rights, and consequent degradation and dishonor, in it. That is my position, and it is the position which I know the Democratic party of the State of Mississippi will maintain.” — Gov. McRae, of Mississippi. “It is useless to attempt to conceal the fact that, in the present temper of the southern people, it” [i.e., the election of a Republican President] “cannot be, and will not be submitted to. The ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine, announced and advocated by the ablest and most distinguished leader of the Republican party, is an open declaration of war against the institution of slavery; wherever it exists; and I would be disloyal to Virginia and the South, if I did not declare that the election of such a man, entertaining such sentiment, and advocating such doctrines, ought to be resisted by the slaveholding States. The idea of permitting such a man to have the control and direction of the army and navy of the United States, and the appointment of high judicial and executive officers, POSTMASTERS INCLUDED, cannot be entertained by the South for a moment.” — Gen. Letcher, of Virginia. “Slavery must be maintained — in the Union, if possible; out of it, if necessary: peaceably if we may; forcibly if we must.” — Senator Iverson, of Georgia. “Lincoln and Hamlin, the Black Republican nominees, will be elected in November next, and the South will then decide the great question whether they will submit to the domination of Black Republican rule — the fundamental principle of their organization being an open, undisguised, and declared war upon our social institutions. I believe that the honor and safety of the South, in that contingency, will require the prompt secession of the slaveholding States from the Union; and failing then to obtain from the free States additional and higher guaranties for the protection of our rights and property, that the seceding States should proceed to establish a new government. But while I think such would be the imperative duty of the South, I should emphatically reprobate and repudiate any scheme having for its object the separate secession of South Carolina. If Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi alone — giving us a portion of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts — would unite with this State in a common secession upon the election of a Black Republican, I would give my assent to the policy.” — Letter of Hon. James L. Orr, of S.C., to John Martin and others, July 23, 1860. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer’s distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it;46 that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact — the statement in the opinion that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”47 An inspection of the Constitution will show that the right of property in a slave is not “distinctly and expressly affirmed” in it. Bear in mind, the Judges do not pledge their judicial opinion that such right is impliedly affirmed in the Constitution; but they pledge their veracity that it is “distinctly and expressly” affirmed there –“distinctly,” that is, not mingled with anything else– “expressly,” that is, in words meaning just that, without the aid of any inference, and susceptible of no other meaning. If they had only pledged their judicial opinion that such right is affirmed in the instrument by implication, it would be open to others to show that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is to be found in the Constitution, nor the word “property” even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or slavery, and that wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a “person;” –and wherever his master’s legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it is spoken of as “service or labor which may be due,” –as a debt payable in service or labor.48 Also, it would be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.

46. The Hon. John A. Andrew, of the Boston Bar, made the following analysis of the Dred Scott case in the Massachusetts legislature. Hon. Caleb Cushing was then a member of that body, but did not question its correctness. “On the question of possibility of citizenship to one of the Dred Scott color, extraction, and origin, three justices, viz., Taney, Wayne and Daniels, held the negative. Nelson and Campbell passed over the plea by which the question was raised. Grier agreed with Nelson. Catron said the question was not open. McLean agreed with Catron, but thought the plea bad. Curtis agreed that the question was open, but attacked the plea, met its averments, and decided that a free born colored person, native to any State, is a citizen thereof, by birth, and is therefore a citizen of the Union, and entitled to sue in the Federal Courts. “Had a majority of the court directly sustained the plea in abatement, and denied the jurisdiction of the Circuit Court appealed from, then all else they could have said and done would have been done and said in a cause not theirs to try and not theirs to discuss. In the absence of such majority, one step more was to be taken. And the next step reveals an agreement of six of the Justices, on a point decisive of the cause, and putting an end to all the functions of the court. “It is this. Scott was first carried to Rock Island, in the State of Illinois, where he remained about two years, before going with his master to Fort Snelling, in the Territory of Wisconsin. His claim to freedom was rested on the alleged effect of his translation from a slave State, and again into a free territory. If, by his removal to Illinois, he became emancipated from his master, the subsequent continuance of his pilgrimage into the Louisiana purchase could not add to his freedom, nor alter the fact. If, by reason of any want or infirmity in the laws of Illinois, or of conformity on his part to their behests, Dred Scott remained a slave while he remained in that State, then — for the sake of learning the effect on him of his territorial residence beyond the Mississippi, and of his marriage and other proceedings there, and the effect of the sojournment and marriage of Harriet, in the same territory, upon herself and her children — it might become needful to advance one other step into the investigation of the law; to inspect the Missouri Compromise, banishing slavery to the south of the line of 36(deg)30’ in the Louisiana purchase. “But no exigency of the cause ever demanded or justified that advance; for six of the Justices, including the Chief Justice himself, decided that the status of the plaintiff, as free or slave, was dependent, not upon the laws of the State into which he had been, but of the State of Missouri, in which he was at the commencement of the suit. The Chief Justice asserted that ‘it is now firmly settled by the decisions of the highest court in the State, that Scott and his family, on their return were not free, but were, by the laws of Missouri, the property of the defendant.’ This was the burden of the opinion of Nelson, who declares ‘the question is one solely depending upon the law of Missouri, and that the federal Court, sitting in the State, and trying the case before us, was bound to follow it.’ It received the emphatic endorsement of Wayne, whose general concurrence was with the Chief Justice. Grier concurred in set terms with Nelson on all ‘the questions discussed by him.’ Campbell says, ‘The claim of the plaintiff to freedom depends upon the effect to be given to his absence from Missouri, in company with his master in Illinois and Minnesota, and this effect is to be ascertained by reference to the laws of Missouri.’ Five of the Justices, then, (if no more of them,) regard the law of Missouri as decisive of the plaintiff’s rights.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE To show all this, is easy and certain.49 When this obvious mistake of the Judges shall be brought to their notice, is it not reasonable to expect that they will withdraw the mistaken statement, and reconsider the conclusion based upon it? And then it is to be remembered that “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live” –the men who made the Constitution– decided this same Constitutional question in our favor, long ago — decided it without division among themselves, when making the decision; without division among themselves about the meaning of it after it was made, and, so far as any evidence is left, without basing it upon any mistaken statement of facts. Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government, unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican President! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!” To be sure, what the robber demanded of me –my money– was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle. A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.50 Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them. Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation. The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be 47. “Now, as we have already said in an earlier part of this opinion upon a different point, the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, was guaranteed to the citizens of the United States in every State that might desire it for twenty years.” — Ch. J. Taney, 19 How. U.S.R., p. 451. Vide language of Mr. James Madison, note 35, as to “merchandise.” 48. Not only was the right of property not intended to be “distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution;” but the following extract from Mr. James Madison demonstrates that the utmost care was taken to avoid so doing: — “The clause as originally offered [respecting fugitive slaves] read ‘If any person LEGALLY bound to service or labor in any of the United States shall escape into another State,” etc., etc. (Vol. 3, p. 1456.) In regard to this, Mr. Madison says, “The term ‘legally’ was struck out, and the words ‘under the laws thereof,’ inserted after the word State, in compliance with the wish of some who thought the term ‘legally’ equivocal and favoring the idea that slavery was legal in a moral point of view.” — Ib., p. 1589. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery.” But we do let them alone –have never disturbed them– so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying. I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free- State Constitutions.51 Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis, than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full 49. We subjoin a portion of the history alluded to by Mr. Lincoln. The following extract relates to the provision of the Constitution relative to the slave trade. (Article I, Sec. 9.) 25th August, 1787. — The report of the Committee of eleven being taken up, Gen. [Charles Cotesworth] Pinckney moved to strike out the words “the year 1800,” and insert the words “the year 1808.” Mr. Nathaniel Gorham seconded the motion. Mr. James Madison — Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the American character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution. *** Mr. Gouverneur Morris was for making the clause read at once — “The importation of slaves into North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, shall not be prohibited,” &c. This, he said, would be most fair, and would avoid the ambiguity by which, under the power with regard to naturalization the liberty reserved to the States might be defeated. He wished it to be known, also, that this part of the Constitution was a compliance with those States. If the change of language, however, should be objected to by the members from those States, he should not urge it. Col. Mason, (of Va.,) was not against using the term “slaves,” but against naming North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, lest it should give offence to the people of those States. Mr. Sherman liked a description better than the terms proposed, which had been declined by the old Congress, and were not pleasing to some people. Mr. Clymer concurred with Mr. Sherman. Mr. Williamson, of North Carolina, said that both in opinion and practice he was against slavery; but thought it more in favor of humanity, from a view of all circumstances, to let in South Carolina and Georgia, on those terms, than to exclude them from the Union. Mr. Morris withdrew his motion. Mr. Dickinson wished the clause to be confined to the States which had not themselves prohibited the importation of slaves, and for that purpose moved to amend the clause so as to read — “The importation of slaves into such of the States as shall permit the same, shall not be prohibited by the Legislature of the United States, until the year 1808,” which was disagreed to, nem. con. The first part of the report was then agreed to as follows: “The migration or importation of such persons as the several States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Legislature prior to the year 1808.” *** Mr. Sherman was against the second part, [“but a tax or duty may be imposed on such migration or importation at a rate not exceeding the average of the duties laid on imports,”] as acknowledging men to be property by taxing them as such under the character of slaves. *** Mr. James Madison thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men. The reason of duties did not hold, as slaves are not, like merchandise, consumed. *** It was finally agreed, nem., con. to make the clause read — “But a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each PERSON.” — James Madison Papers, Aug. 25, 1787. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.52 Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality –its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension– its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.53 Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored – contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man– such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care –such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance– such as invocations to George Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

50. Compare this noble passage and that at page 18 [i.e., p. 535, supra], with the twaddle of Mr. Orr, (note 31,) and the slang of Mr. Douglas, (note 38.) 51. That demand has since been made. Says MR. O’CONOR, counsel for the State of Virginia in the Lemon Case, page 44: “We claim that under these various provisions of the Federal Constitution, a citizen of Virginia has an immunity against the operation of any law which the State of New-York can enact, whilst he is a stranger and wayfarer, or whilst passing through our territory; and that he has absolute protection for all his domestic rights, and for all his rights of property, which under the laws of the United States, and the laws of his own State, he was entitled to, whilst in his own State. We claim this, and neither more NOR LESS.” Throughout the whole of that case, in which the right to pass through New York with slaves at the pleasure of the slave owners is maintained, it is nowhere contended that the statute is contrary to the Constitution of New-York; but that the statute and the Constitution of the State are both contrary to the Constitution of the United States. The State of Virginia, not content with the decision of our own courts upon the right claimed by them, is now engaged in carrying this, the Lemon case, to the Supreme Court of the United States, hoping by a decision there, in accordance with the intimations in the Dred Scott case, to overthrow the Constitution of New-York. Senator Toombs, of Georgia, has claimed in the Senate, that laws of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, for the exclusion of slavery, conceded to be warranted by the State Constitutions, are contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and has asked for the enactment of laws by the General Government which shall override the laws of those States and the Constitutions which authorize them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 2, Friday: In Manchester, New Hampshire, Abraham Lincoln spoke to more than a thousand at Smyth Hall in the Smyth Block on Elm Street. When introduced as the next President of the United States, he expressed surprise, saying that he supposed that not even three states would vote for him in the Republican convention, and that William H. Seward “should and will receive the nomination.” When asked “What will satisfy the demands of the South upon the subject of Slavery?” he responded “Simply this, we must not only let them alone, but we must convince them that we do let them alone. This is no easy task. In all our speeches, resolutions and platforms, we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but it has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. These natural, and apparently adequate means, all failing, what will convince them? This and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join with them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure; we must pull down our Free State Constitutions, inasmuch as they declare the wrong of slavery with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it. If we throw open the Free Territories to them, they will not be satisfied; we know this from past experience, as well as from present controversy.” He opinioned that the way to deal with slavery in the US was like the way to deal with a snake in bed with the children — it might not be a good idea to kill the snake for fear of killing the children, and likewise it might not be wise and safe just now, to directly assail slavery in the states, for the reason that we might destroy ourselves in so doing. In the course of the speech he was occasionally interrupted by an abolitionist, the Reverend Andrew T. Foss, and after a bit of this members of the audience began to cry “Throw him out.” Lincoln responded “No, no, let him stay, he is just the man I want to see and to answer. Now, my friend, what is your question? Let’s talk together. I want you to jaw back.” He said “Now, my friend, you are in favor of dis-union. You think the only way is for the North and South to separate, but I tell you to stay with us and in the end the whole country will be free.” After several questions and responses, the Reverend Foss was applauding with the rest of the audience, and after the meeting

52. “Policy, humanity, and Christianity, alike forbid the extension of the evils of free society to new people and coming generations.” — Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 22, 1856. “I am satisfied that the mind of the South has undergone a change to this great extent, that it is now the almost universal belief in the South, not only that the condition of African slavery in their midst, is the best condition to which the African race has ever been subjected, but that it has the effect of ennobling both races, the white and the black.” — Senator Mason, of Virginia. “I declare again, as I did in reply to the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Doolittle,) that, in my opinion, slavery is a great moral, social and political blessing — a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master.” — Mr. Brown, in the Senate, March 6, 1860. “I am a Southern States’ Rights man; I am an African slave-trader. I am one of those Southern men who believe that slavery is right — morally, religiously, socially, and politically.” (Applause.) *** “I represent the African Slave-trade interests of that section. (Applause.) I am proud of the position I occupy in that respect. I believe the African Slave-trader is a true missionary and a true Christian.” (Applause.) — Mr. Gaulden, a delegate from First Congressional District of Georgia, in the Charleston Convention, now a supporter of Mr. Douglas. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would gladly speak again, but you see from the tones of my voice, that I am unable to. This has been a happy, a glorious day. I shall never forget it. There is a charm about this beautiful day, about this sea air, and especially about that peculiar institution of yours — a clam bake. I think you have the advantage, in that respect, of Southerners. For my own part, I have much more fondness for your clams than I have for their niggers. But every man to his taste.” — Hon. Stephen A. Douglass Address at Rocky Point, Rhode Island, August 2, 1860. 53. It is interesting to observe how two profoundly logical minds, though holding extreme, opposite views, have deduced this common conclusion. Says Mr. O’Conor, the eminent leader of the New-York Bar, and the counsel for the State of Virginia in the Lemon case, in his speech at Cooper Institute, December 19th, 1859: — “That is the point to which this great argument must come — Is negro slavery unjust? If it is unjust, it violates that first rule of human conduct — ‘Render to every man his due.’ If it is unjust, it violates the law of God which says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ for that requires that we should perpetrate no injustice. Gentlemen, if it could be maintained that negro slavery was unjust, perhaps I might be prepared — perhaps we all ought to be prepared — to go with that distinguished man to whom allusion is frequently made, and say, ‘There is a higher law which compels us to trample beneath our feet the Constitution established by our fathers, with all the blessings it secures to their children.’ But I insist — and that is the argument which we must meet, and on which we must come to a conclusion that shall govern our actions in the future selection of representatives in the Congress of the United States — I insist that negro slavery is not unjust.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE he took Lincoln by the hand and thanked him and said, “You are the only man that has ever talked to me in this way and I am not sure but you are right.” The Reverend would recall that Mr. Lincoln “seemed quaint and almost strange in manner and expression, but he seemed a man of intense earnestness and sincerity, gifted with all the arts of the best stump speaker, but also, like some old prophet, solemnly delivering his message of warning and exhortation to the people. I doubt if there was a person in the audience who didn’t applaud his speech, although many of them did not agree with him.” In the 1860 and 1864 campaigns, the Reverend would make himself a fervent advocate for the Republican candidate.

An article “A Toad Story” appeared in the Boston Journal that Henry Thoreau would attach to the back cover of one of his late commonplace books: A gentleman who witnessed the sight informs us that, about ten days ago, along one of the main roads near Forge village, in Westford, he observed the most marvelous collection of toads he ever witnessed or heard of. In the road for as many as a hundred rods the ground was so covered with them that one could not put his hand down without putting it upon a toad. An estimate was made, and it was determined that there were at least as many as twelve toads to the square foot! The sides of the road and fields were not examined, but for the distance we have named there were toads innumerable. Another fact not a little singular is that they were all apparently the same size — being about half an inch high, or in length, and in color and appearance seemed to be precisely alike, and all were sprightly and seemed as if very much at home. The question is where did they come from? There was a smart shower the night before they were discovered, but is it possible that they rained down? And if so, where did the clouds come in possession of such a multitude of juvenile toads? The fields around may have been as thickly populated, for aught we know to the contrary, as the road; and if so, who can explain their presence?

Thoreau wrote in his journal:

March 2: Noticed the brightness of a row of osiers this morning. This phenomenon, whether referable to a change in the condition of the twig or to the spring air and light, or even to our imaginations, is not the less a real phenomenon, affecting us annually at this season. This is one compensation for having them lopped so often along the causeways, that it is only these new and vigorous growths which shine thus. Frequently within ten days it has been uncomfortable walking in a greatcoat.

2P.M. — Thermometer 50°. To Witherell Glade via Clamshell; thence to Hubbard’s Close. Thinking to look at the cabbage as I pass under Clamshell, I find it very inconspicuous. Most would have said that there was none there. The few tallest and slenderest but tender ones were frost-bitten and far from blooming, but I found three or four more, broad and stout, — a hardy mahogany-colored one, but very low, half covered with the withered sedge, which it lifted up with it, and not apparently open. Putting my finger into one, the broadest and lowest, which opened about half an inch and stood with its back to the west (while they are all sheltered by the hill on the north), I was surprised when I drew it forth to see it covered with pollen. It was fairly in bloom, and probably yesterday too. Evidently some buds are further advanced than others even when the winter comes, and then these are further expanded and matured in advance of the others in the very warm days in the winter. No doubt it may have bloomed in some places in this neighborhood in the last day or two of February this year. Unusually warm weather in February, with bare ground where they grow, may cause them to bloom before February is over. Most would not have detected any change in it since the fall. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The grass has evidently sprung and grown a little, a very little, of late, say the very last of February, in warm wet places at the south base of hills, like this. It has a healthy but dark-green look. The (apparently) Epilobium coloratum has conspicuous green radical leaves there. I see several minute glaucous sort of grasshoppers skipping over the grass and water.

Men shooting musquash these days. All the grass-stubble in fields not mown is conspicuous pointed eastward, and reflects the light from a thousand parallel lances. Probably blown thus by the prevailing winds through the winter. Now and for some days look for arrowheads where it is not too soft. There is a strong westerly wind to-day, though warm, and we sit under Dennis’s Lupine Promontory, to observe the water. The great phenomenon these days is the sparkling blue water, — a richer blue than the sky ever is. The flooded meadows are ripple lakes on a large scale. The landscape, though no growth is visible in it, is bright and springlike. There is the tawny earth (almost completely bare) of different shades, lighter or darker, the light very light in this air, more so than the surface of the earth ever is (i. e. without snow), bleached as it were; and, in the hollows of it, set round by the tawny hills and banks, is this copious living and sparkling blue water of various shades. It is more dashing, rippling, sparkling, living, this windy but clear day; never smooth, but ever varying in its degree of motion and depth of blue as the wind is more or less strong, rising and falling. All along the shore next us is a strip a few feet wide of very light and smooth sky-blue, for so much is sheltered even by the lowest shore, but the rest is all more or less agitated and dark-blue. In it are, floating or stationary, here and there, cakes of white ice, the least looking like ducks, and large patches of water have a dirty-white or even tawny look, where the ice still lies on the bottom of the meadow. Thus even the meadow flood is parded, and of various patches of color. Ever and anon the wind seems to drop down from over the hill in strong puffs, and then spread and diffuse itself in dark fan-shaped figures over the surface of the water. It is glorious to see how it sports on the watery surface. You see a hundred such nimble-footed puffs drop and spread on all sides at once, and dash off, sweeping the surface of the water for forty rods in [A] few seconds, as if so many invisible spirits were playing tag there. It even suggests some fine dust swept along just above the surface, and reminds me of snow blowing over ice and vapor curling along a roof, — meandering like that, often. Like hair, like the crown of the head, curling various ways. The before dark blue is now diversified with much darker or blackish patches with a suggestion of red, — purplish even. Then the wind blows with stronger gust down the Nut Meadow valley on our right, and I am surprised to see that the billows which it makes are concentric curves apparently reaching round from shore to shore of this HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE broad bay, forty rods wide or more:—

This is conspicuously the form of them. For which two things may account, — the greater force of the wind in the middle and the friction of the shores. And when it blows hardest, each successive billow (four or five feet apart or more) is crowned with yellowish or dirty-white foam. The wind blows around each side of the hill, the opposite currents meeting perchance, or it falls over the hill. So you have a field of ever-varying color, — dark blue, blackish, yellowish, light blue, and smooth sky-blue, and purplish, and yellowish foam, all at once. Sometimes the wind visibly catches up the surface and blows it along and about in spray four or five feet high. Now and then, when the gust increases, there comes a top of fly-away grass from over the hill, goes dancing over the waves, and soon is lost. The requisites are high water mostly clear of ice, ground bare and sufficiently dry, weather warm enough, and wind strong and gusty; then you may sit or stand on a hill and watch this play of the wind with the water. I know of no checker-board more interesting to watch. The wind, the gusts, comb the hair of the water-nymphs. You never tire of seeing it drop, spread, and sweep over the yielding and sensitive surface. The water is so full of life, now rising into higher billows which would make your mast crack if you had any, now subsiding into lesser, dashing against and wearing away the still anchored ice, setting many small cakes adrift. How they entertain us with ever-changing scenes, in the sky above or on the earth below! If the plowman lean on his plow-handle and look up or down, there is danger that he will forget his labor on that day. These are ripple days begun, — not yet in woodland pools, where is ice yet. I see a row of white pines, too, waving and reflecting their silvery light. The red maple sap flows freely, and probably has for several days. I begin to notice the reddish stems of moss on low ground, not bright yet. C. has seen good baeomyces (?) lately. There is none however at Baeomyces Bank. In Hosmer’s ditches in the moraine meadow, the grass just peeps above the surface, apparently begun to grow a little. I see on [sic] a small round last year’s turtle with a yellowish spot on each scale and a yellow-pink breast centred with black. Also see a yellow-spot turtle there. Some of those tufts of andropogon radical leaves make excellent seats now when the earth is moist. We see one or two gnats in the air. See thirty or more crows come flying in the usual irregular zigzag manner in the strong wind, from over M. Miles’s, going northeast, — the first migration of them, — without cawing. See a little conferva in ditches. Looking up a narrow ditch in a meadow, I see a modest brown bird flit along it furtively, — the first song sparrow, — and then alight far off on a rock. Ed. Hoar says he heard one February 27th. Hayden thinks he has seen bluebirds for a fortnight!! Say that he has possibly for a week (?), and that will agree HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE with Wheeler. Ed. Hoar says he heard one February 27th. [I hear one March 3d.] At Brister Spring, and especially below, at the cowslip, the dense bedded green moss is very fresh and handsome, and the cowslip leaves, though unfolded, rise to the surface. See a little frog in one of the spring-holes. See a hen-hawk. Two or three tufts of carex have shot up in Hosmer’s cold spring ditch and been frost-bitten. Ed. Hoar says he heard a phoebe February 27th.

According to the Dover Inquirer for March 8th, this had been Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Dover NH: Mr. Lincoln spoke nearly two hours and we believe he would have held his audience had he spoken all night. He gave a brief sketch of the course of the democracy, in reference to the slavery question, showing how they had made it the prominent and almost the only question in National politics — how their leading statesmen had all been compelled to bow to the and become its obedient vassals. In reply to the charge of sectionalism, raised against the republicans, he said, we deny it. That makes an issue, the burden of proof is upon you, the democracy. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that the Republican Party has no existence in the South. The fact is substantially true, but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes there, we should thereby cease to be sectional. There was no escape from this conclusion, and if the democracy would abide by it, they would find that the republicans would get votes at the South this very year. Northern democrats were fond of saying to the opponents of slavery, why don’t you go South and preach your doctrines where slavery exists, not oppose it here, where it does not exist. Frank Blair of Missouri, a democrat, did raise the standard of opposition in the very heart of slavery — and when he was defeated, did his brother democrats of the North sympathize with him? “Not one of them,” said Mr. Lincoln. Their only greeting to him was “H-u-r-r-a-h for the D-i-m-o-c- r-a-c-y!” The republicans were charged with being responsible for the John Brown raid, yet a Committee of Congress, with unlimited powers, had failed to implicate a single republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. If any republican is guilty in that matter, you, the democracy, know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable not to designate the man and prove the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable to assert it, and especially to persist in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. The republicans who remained steadfast to the principles of the fathers on the subject of slavery, were the conservative party, while the democracy, who insisted upon substituting something new, were the destructives. But the South were threatening to destroy the Union in the event of the election of a republican President, and were telling us that the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us. This is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, with “stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer.” To be sure the money which he demands is my own, and I have a clear right to keep it, but HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE it is no more so than my vote, and the threat of death to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle. To satisfy them, said Mr. Lincoln, is no easy task. We must not only cease to call slavery wrong, but we must join with them in calling it right. Silence will not be tolerated. Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from the taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. Wrong as we believe slavery to be, we should let [it] alone in the States where it exists, because its extirpation would occasion greater wrongs, but we should not, while our votes can prevent it, allow it to spread over the National Territories and over-run us in the Free States. Neither should we be diverted by trick or stratagem, by a senseless clamor about “popular sovereignty,” by any contrivances for groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong —the “don’t care” policy of Douglas —or Union appeals to true Union men to yield to the threats of Disunionists, which was reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners but the righteous to repentance — none of these things should move or intimidate us; but having faith that right HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE makes might, let us to the end, dare to do our duty. The War between the Presidents

President Lincoln 1809-1865 President Davis 1808-1889

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

March 6, Tuesday: Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke on slavery in New Haven, Connecticut. In the course of this speech, always eager to display his humble roots to the American voters, the tall candidate posed a rhetorical question “What is the true condition of the laborer?” which enabled him to indulge in this penchant: “When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.” Maybe he was merely someone else’s hired laborer “this year” but he could look forward to being his own boss “the next” and, eventually, due to our remarkable system of initiative, obtain persons of lesser initiative “to work for him.” This pyramid scheme the goal of which is alienating oneself from labor he presented as “the true system” for the generation of wealth. For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us - and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere - all of us wish this question settled - wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object.... If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought Slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

March 6. 3 P. M. 44°. Fair and springlike, i. e. rather still for March, with some raw wind. Pleasant in sun. Going by Messer’s, I hear the well-known note and see a flock of F. hyemalis flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground, by the roadside, showing their two white tail-feathers. They are more fearless than the song sparrow. These attract notice by their numbers and incessant twittering in a social manner. The linarias have been the most numerous birds the past winter. Mr. Stacy tells me that the flies buzzed about him as he was splitting wood in his yard to-day. I can scarcely see a heel of a snow-drift from my window. Jonas Melvin says he saw hundreds of "speckled" turtles out on the banks to-day in a voyage to Billerica for musquash. Also saw gulls. Sheldrakes and black ducks are the only ones he has seen this year. They are fishing on Flint’s Pond to-day, but find it hard to get on and off. C. hears the nuthatch. Jonas Melvin says that he shot a sheldrake in the river late last December. A still and mild moonlight night and people walking about the streets. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 8, Thursday: Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln delivered, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, the standard

stump speech about American slavery being contrary to the spirit of our Declaration of Independence that he had already delivered on March 6th in New Haven and on March 7th in Meriden, Connecticut and would go on to deliver without significant changes on March 9th in Norwich and on March 10th in Bridgeport CT. According to the New Haven Daily Palladium for March 7th, this was the gist of it: MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-CITIZENS OF [INSERT TOWN HERE]: If the Republican party of this nation shall ever have the national house entrusted to its keeping, it will be the duty of that party to attend to all the affairs of national house-keeping. Whatever matters of importance may come up, whatever difficulties may arise in the way of its administration of the government, that party will then have to attend to. It will then be compelled to attend to other questions, besides this question which now assumes an overwhelming importance — the question of Slavery. It is true that in the organization of the Republican party this question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present. The old question of tariff — a matter that will remain one of the chief affairs of national housekeeping to all time — the question of the management of financial affairs; the question of the disposition of the public domain — how shall it be managed for the purpose of getting it well settled, and of making there the homes of a free and happy people — these will remain open and require attention for a great while yet, and these questions will have to be attended to by whatever party has the control of the government. Yet, just now, they cannot even obtain a hearing, and I do not purpose to detain you upon these topics, or what sort of hearing they should have when opportunity shall come. For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us — and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere — all of us wish this question settled — wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE In the beginning of the year 1854 a new policy was inaugurated with the avowed object and confident promise that it would entirely and forever put an end to the Slavery agitation. It was again and again declared that under this policy, when once successfully established, the country would be forever rid of this whole question. Yet under the operation of that policy this agitation has not only not ceased, but it has been constantly augmented. And this too, although, from the day of its introduction, its friends, who promised that it would wholly end all agitation, constantly insisted, down to the time that the Lecompton bill was introduced, that it was working admirably, and that its inevitable tendency was to remove the question forever from the politics of the country. Can you call to mind any Democratic speech, made after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, down to the time of the Lecompton bill, in which it was not predicted that the Slavery agitation was just at an end; that “the abolition excitement was played out,” “the Kansas question was dead,” “they have made the most they can out of this question and it is now forever settled.” But since the Lecompton bill no Democrat, within my experience, has ever pretended that he could see the end. That cry has been dropped. They themselves do not pretend, now, that the agitation of this subject has come to an end yet. [Applause.] The truth is, that this question is one of national importance, and we cannot help dealing with it: we must do something about it, whether we will or not. We cannot avoid it; the subject is one we cannot avoid considering; we can no more avoid it than a man can live without eating. It is upon us; it attaches to the body politic as much and as closely as the natural wants attach to our natural bodies. Now I think it important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled. And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude. There have been many efforts to settle it. Again and again it has been fondly hoped that it was settled, but every time it breaks out afresh, and more violently than ever. It was settled, our fathers hoped, by the Missouri Compromise, but it did not stay settled. Then the compromises of 1850 were declared to be a full and final settlement of the question. The two great parties, each in National Convention, adopted resolutions declaring that the settlement made by the Compromise of 1850 was a finality — that it would last forever. Yet how long before it was unsettled again! It broke out again in 1854, and blazed higher and raged more furiously than ever before, and the agitation has not rested since. These repeated settlements must have some fault about them. There must be some inadequacy in their very nature to the purpose for which they were designed. We can only speculate as to where that fault — that inadequacy, is, but we may perhaps profit by past experience. I think that one of the causes of these repeated failures is that our best and greatest men have greatly underestimated the size of this question. They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores — plasters too small to cover the wound. That is one reason that all settlements have proved so temporary — so evanescent. [Applause.] Look at the magnitude of this subject! One sixth of our population, in round numbers — not quite one sixth, and yet more than a seventh, — about one sixth of the whole population of the United States are slaves! The owners of these slaves consider them property. The effect upon the minds of the owners is that of property, and nothing else — it induces them to insist upon all that will favorably affect its value as property, to demand laws and institutions and a public policy that shall increase and secure its value, and make it durable, lasting and universal. The effect on the minds of the owners is to persuade them that there is no wrong in it. The slaveholder does not like to be considered a mean fellow, for holding that species of property, and hence he has to struggle within himself and sets about arguing himself into the belief that Slavery is right. The property influences his mind. The dissenting minister, who argued some HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE theological point with one of the established church, was always met by the reply, “I can’t see it so.” He opened the Bible, and pointed him to a passage, but the orthodox minister replied, “I can’t see it so.” Then he showed him a single word — “Can you see that?” “Yes, I see it,” was the reply. The dissenter laid a guinea over the word and asked, “Do you see it now?” [Great laughter.] So here. Whether the owners of this species of property do really see it as it is, it is not for me to say, but if they do, they see it as it is through 2,000,000,000 of dollars, and that is a pretty thick coating. [Laughter.] Certain it is, that they do not see it as we see it. Certain it is, that this two thousand million of dollars, invested in this species of property, all so concentrated that the mind can grasp it at once — this immense pecuniary interest, has its influence upon their minds. But here in Connecticut and at the North Slavery does not exist, and we see it through no such medium. To us it appears natural to think that slaves are human beings; men, not property; that some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us. [Applause.] I say, we think, most of us, that this Charter of Freedom applies to the slave as well as to ourselves, that the class of arguments put forward to batter down that idea, are also calculated to break down the very idea of a free government, even for white men, and to undermine the very foundations of free society. [Continued applause.] We think Slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the Territories, where our votes will reach it. We think that a respect for ourselves, a regard for future generations and for the God that made us, require that we put down this wrong where our votes will properly reach it. We think that species of labor an injury to free white men — in short, we think Slavery a great moral, social and political evil, tolerable only because, and so far as its actual existence makes it necessary to tolerate it, and that beyond that, it ought to be treated as a wrong. Now these two ideas, the property idea that Slavery is right, and the idea that it is wrong, come into collision, and do actually produce that irrepressible conflict which Mr. Seward has been so roundly abused for mentioning. The two ideas conflict, and must conflict. Again, in its political aspect, does anything in any way endanger the perpetuity of this Union but that single thing, Slavery? Many of our adversaries are anxious to claim that they are specially devoted to the Union, and take pains to charge upon us hostility to the Union. Now we claim that we are the only true Union men, and we put to them this one proposition: What ever endangered this Union, save and except Slavery? Did any other thing ever cause a moment’s fear? All men must agree that this thing alone has ever endangered the perpetuity of the Union. But if it was threatened by any other influence, would not all men say that the best thing that could be done, if we could not or ought not to destroy it, would be at least to keep it from growing any larger? Can any man believe that the way to save the Union is to extend and increase the only thing that threatens the Union, and to suffer it to grow bigger and bigger? [Great applause.] Whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained. And hence, there are but two policies in regard to Slavery that can be at all maintained. The first, based on the property view that Slavery is right, conforms to that idea throughout, and demands that we shall do everything for it that we ought to do if it were right. We must sweep away all opposition, for opposition to the right is wrong; we must agree that Slavery is right, and we must adopt the idea that property has persuaded the owner to believe — that Slavery is morally right and socially elevating. This gives a philosophical basis for a permanent policy of encouragement. The other policy is one that squares with the idea that Slavery is wrong, and it consists in doing everything that we ought to do if it is wrong. Now, I don’t wish to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE misunderstood, nor to leave a gap down to be misrepresented, even. I don’t mean that we ought to attack it where it exists. To me it seems that if we were to form a government anew, in view of the actual presence of Slavery we should find it necessary to frame just such a government as our fathers did; giving to the slaveholder the entire control where the system was established, while we possessed the power to restrain it from going outside those limits. [Applause.] From the necessities of the case we should be compelled to form just such a government as our blessed fathers gave us; and, surely, if they have so made it, that adds another reason why we should let Slavery alone where it exists. If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. [Laughter.] I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. [Applause.] Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. [Great laughter.] But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide! [Prolonged applause and cheers.] That is just the case! The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be! [Applause.] Now I have spoken of a policy based on the idea that Slavery is wrong, and a policy based upon the idea that it is right. But an effort has been made for a policy that shall treat it as neither right or wrong. It is based upon utter indifference. Its leading advocate has said “I don’t care whether it be voted up or down.” [Laughter.] “It is merely a matter of dollars and cents.” “The Almighty has drawn a line across this continent, on one side of which all soil must forever be cultivated by slave labor, and on the other by free;” “when the struggle is between the white man and the negro, I am for the white man; when it is between the negro and the crocodile, I am for the negro.” Its central idea is indifference. It holds that it makes no more difference to us whether the Territories become free or slave States, than whether my neighbor stocks his farm with horned cattle or puts it into tobacco. All recognize this policy, the plausible sugar-coated name of which is “popular sovereignty.” [Laughter.] This policy chiefly stands in the way of a permanent settlement of the question. I believe there is no danger of its becoming the permanent policy of the country, for it is based on a public indifference. There is nobody that “don’t care.” ALL THE PEOPLE DO CARE! one way or the other. [Great applause.] I do not charge that its author, when he says he “don’t care,” states his individual opinion; he only expresses his policy for the government. I understand that he has never said, as an individual, whether he thought Slavery right or wrong — and he is the only man in the nation that has not! Now such a policy may have a temporary run; it may spring up as necessary to the political prospects of some gentleman; but it is utterly baseless; the people are not indifferent; and it can therefore have no durability or permanence. But suppose it could! Then it could be maintained only by a public opinion that shall say “we don’t care.” There must be a change in public opinion, the public mind must be so far debauched as to square with this policy of caring not at all. The people must come to consider this as “merely a question of dollars and cents,” and to believe that in some places the Almighty has made Slavery necessarily eternal. This policy can be brought to prevail if the people can be brought round to say honestly “we don’t care;” if not, it can never be maintained. It is for you to say whether that can be done. [Applause.] You are ready to say it cannot, but be not too fast! Remember what a long stride has HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE been taken since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise! Do you know of any Democrat, of either branch of the party — do you know one who declares that he believes that the Declaration of Independence has any application to the negro? Judge Taney declares that it has not, and Judge Douglas even vilifies me personally and scolds me roundly for saying that the Declaration applies to all men, and that negroes are men. [Cheers.] Is there a Democrat here who does not deny that the Declaration applies to a negro? Do any of you know of one? Well, I have tried before perhaps fifty audiences, some larger and some smaller than this, to find one such Democrat, and never yet have I found one who said I did not place him right in that. I must assume that Democrats hold that, and now, not one of these Democrats can show that he said that five years ago! [Applause.] I venture to defy the whole party to produce one man that ever uttered the belief that the Declaration did not apply to negroes, before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise! Four or five years ago we all thought negroes were men, and that when “all men” were named, negroes were included. But the whole Democratic party has deliberately taken negroes from the class of men and put them in the class of brutes. [Applause.] Turn it as you will, it is simply the truth! Don’t be too hasty then in saying that the people cannot be brought to this new doctrine, but note that long stride. One more as long completes the journey, from where negroes are estimated as men to where they are estimated as mere brutes — as rightful property! That saying, “in the struggle between the white man and the negro,” &c., which I know came from the same source as this policy — that saying marks another step. There is a falsehood wrapped up in that statement. “In the struggle between the white man and the negro” assumes that there is a struggle, in which either the white man must enslave the negro or the negro must enslave the white. There is no such struggle! It is merely an ingenious falsehood, to degrade and brutalize the negro. Let each let the other alone, and there is no struggle about it. If it was like two wrecked seamen on a narrow plank, when each must push the other off or drown himself, I would push the negro off or a white man either, but it is not; the plank is large enough for both. [Applause.] This good earth is plenty broad enough for white man and negro both, and there is no need of either pushing the other off. [Continued applause.] So that saying, “in the struggle between the negro and the crocodile,” &c., is made up from the idea that down where the crocodile inhabits a white man can’t labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile inhabits a white man can’t labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile or negro; if the negro does not the crocodile must possess the earth; [laughter;] in that case he declares for the negro. The meaning of the whole is just this: As a white man is to a negro, so is a negro to a crocodile; and as the negro may rightfully treat the crocodile, so may the white man rightfully treat the negro. This very dear phrase coined by its author, and so dear that he deliberately repeats it in many speeches, has a tendency to still further brutalize the negro, and to bring public opinion to the point of utter indifference whether men so brutalized are enslaved or not. When that time shall come, if ever, I think that policy to which I refer may prevail. But I hope the good freemen of this country will never allow it to come, and until then the policy can never be maintained. Now consider the effect of this policy. We in the States are not to care whether Freedom or Slavery gets the better, but the people in the Territories may care. They are to decide, and they may think what they please; it is a matter of dollars and cents! But are not the people of the Territories detailed from the States? If this feeling of indifference — this absence of moral sense about the question — prevails in the States, will it not be carried into the Territories? Will not every man say, “I don’t care, it is nothing to me?” If any one comes that wants Slavery, must they not say, “I don’t care whether Freedom or Slavery be voted up or voted down?” It results at last in naturalizing [the word Lincoln spoke was more likely to have been “nationalizing”] the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE institution of Slavery. Even if fairly carried out, that policy is just as certain to naturalize [again, “nationalize”] Slavery as the doctrine of Jeff Davis himself. These are only two roads to the same goal, and “popular sovereignty” is just as sure and almost as short as the other. [Applause.] What we want, and all we want, is to have with us the men who think slavery wrong. But those who say they hate slavery, and are opposed to it, but yet act with the Democratic party — where are they? Let us apply a few tests. You say that you think slavery is wrong, but you denounce all attempts to restrain it. Is there anything else that you think wrong, that you are not willing to deal with as a wrong? Why are you so careful, so tender of this one wrong and no other? [Laughter.] You will not let us do a single thing as if it was wrong; where is no place where you will allow it to be even called wrong! We must not call it wrong in the Free States, because it is not there, and we must not call it wrong in the Slave States because it is there; we must not call it wrong in politics because that is bringing morality into politics, and we must not call it wrong in the pulpit because that is bringing politics into religion; we must not bring it into the Tract Society or the other societies, because those are such unsuitable places, and there is no single place, according to you, where this wrong thing can properly be called wrong! [Continued laughter and applause.] Perhaps you will plead that if the people of Slave States should themselves set on foot an effort for emancipation, you would wish them success, and bid them God-speed. Let us test that! In 1858, the emancipation party of Missouri, with Frank Blair at their head, tried to get up a movement for that purpose, and having started a party contested the State. Blair was beaten, apparently if not truly, and when the news came to Connecticut, you, who knew that Frank Blair was taking hold of this thing by the right end, and doing the only thing that you say can properly be done to remove this wrong — did you bow your heads in sorrow because of that defeat? Do you, any of you, know one single Democrat that showed sorrow over that result? Not one! On the contrary every man threw up his hat, and hallooed at the top of his lungs, “hooray for Democracy!” [Great laughter and applause.] Now, gentlemen, the Republicans desire to place this great question of slavery on the very basis on which our fathers placed it, and no other. [Applause.] It is easy to demonstrate that “our Fathers, who framed this government under which we live,” looked on Slavery as wrong, and so framed it and everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far as the necessities arising from its existence permitted. In forming the Constitution they found the slave trade existing; capital invested in it; fields depending upon it for labor, and the whole system resting upon the importation of slave-labor. They therefore did not prohibit the slave trade at once, but they gave the power to prohibit it after twenty years. Why was this? What other foreign trade did they treat in that way? Would they have done this if they had not thought slavery wrong? Another thing was done by some of the same men who framed the Constitution, and afterwards adopted as their own act by the first Congress held under that Constitution, of which many of the framers were members; they prohibited the spread of Slavery into Territories. Thus the same men, the framers of the Constitution, cut off the supply and prohibited the spread of Slavery, and both acts show conclusively that they considered that the thing was wrong. If additional proof is wanting it can be found in the phraseology of the Constitution. When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning. In all matters but this of Slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language. But the Constitution alludes to Slavery three times without mentioning it once! The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical. They speak of HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the “immigration of persons,” and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so. In establishing a basis of representation they say “all other persons,” when they mean to say slaves — why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say “persons held to service or labor.” If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction. Why didn’t they do it? We cannot doubt that it was done on purpose. Only one reason is possible, and that is supplied us by one of the framers of the Constitution — and it is not possible for man to conceive of any other — they expected and desired that the system would come to an end, and meant that when it did, the Constitution should not show that there ever had been a slave in this good free country of ours! [Great applause.] I will dwell on that no longer. I see the signs of the approaching triumph of the Republicans in the bearing of their political adversaries. A great deal of their war with us now-a-days is mere bushwhacking. [Laughter.] At the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon’s cavalry had charged again and again upon the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid squares. The Democrats are in that sort of extreme desperation; it is nothing else. [Laughter.] I will take up a few of these arguments. There is “THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT.” [Applause.] How they rail at Seward for that saying! They repeat it constantly; and although the proof has been thrust under their noses again and again, that almost every good man since the formation of our government has uttered that same sentiment, from Gen. Washington, who “trusted that we should yet have a confederacy of Free States,” with Jefferson, Jay, Monroe, down to the latest days, yet they refuse to notice that at all, and persist in railing at Seward for saying it. Even Roger A. Pryor, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, uttered the same sentiment in almost the same language, and yet so little offence did it give the Democrats that he was sent for to Washington to edit the States — the Douglas organ there, while Douglas goes into hydrophobia and spasms of rage because Seward dared to repeat it. [Great applause.] This is what I call bushwhacking, a sort of argument that they must know any child can see through. Another is JOHN BROWN! [Great laughter.] You stir up insurrections, you invade the South! John Brown! Harper’s Ferry! Why, John Brown was not a Republican! You have never implicated a single Republican in that Harper’s Ferry enterprise. We tell you that if any member of the Republican party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable not to designate man and prove the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable to assert it, and especially to persist in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true is simply malicious slander. Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper’s Ferry affair; but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrines, and make no declarations, which were not held to and made by our fathers who framed the Government under which we live, and we cannot see how declarations that were patriotic when they made them are villainous when we make them. You never dealt fairly by us in relation to that affair — and I will say frankly that I know of nothing in your character that should lead us to suppose that you would. You had just been soundly thrashed in elections in several States, and others were soon to come. You rejoiced at the occasion, and only were troubled that there were not three times as many killed in the affair. You were in evident glee — there was no sorrow for the killed nor for the peace of Virginia disturbed — you were rejoicing that by charging Republicans with this thing you might get an advantage of us in New York, and the other States. You pulled that string as tightly as you could, but your very generous and worthy expectations were not quite fulfilled. [Laughter.] Each Republican HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE knew that the charge was a slander as to himself at least, and was not inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. It was mere bushwhacking, because you had nothing else to do. You are still on that track, and I say, go on! If you think you can slander a woman into loving you or a man into voting for you, try it till you are satisfied! [Tremendous applause.] Another specimen of this bushwhacking, that “shoe strike.” [Laughter.] Now be it understood that I do not pretend to know all about the matter. I am merely going to speculate a little about some of its phases. And at the outset, I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to [Cheers,] where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! [Cheers.] I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. [Tremendous applause.] One of the reasons why I am opposed to Slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. [Applause.] When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat — just what might happen to any poor man’s son! [Applause.] I want every man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition — when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system. Up here in New England, you have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-eyed beans, and yet where will you find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity? There is not another such place on earth! [Cheers.] I desire that if you get too thick here, and find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have a chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded, nor have your family corrupted by forced rivalry with negro slaves. I want you to have a clean bed, and no snakes in it! [Cheers.] Then you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth! [Prolonged applause.] Now, to come back to this shoe strike, — if, as the Senator from Illinois asserts, this is caused by withdrawal of Southern votes, consider briefly how you will meet the difficulty. You have done nothing, and have protested that you have done nothing, to injure the South. And yet, to get back the shoe trade, you must leave off doing something that you are now doing. What is it? You must stop thinking slavery wrong! Let your institutions be wholly changed; let your State Constitutions be subverted, glorify slavery, and so you will get back the shoe trade — for what? You have brought owned labor with it to compete with your own labor, to under work you, and to degrade you! Are you ready to get back the trade on those terms? But the statement is not correct. You have not lost that trade; orders were never better than now! Senator Mason, a Democrat, comes into the Senate in homespun, a proof that the dissolution of the Union has actually begun! but orders are the same. Your factories have not struck work, neither those where they make anything for coats, nor for pants, nor for shirts, nor for ladies’ dresses. Mr. Mason has not reached the manufacturers who ought to have made him a coat and pants! To make his proof good for anything he should have come into the Senate barefoot! (Great laughter.) Another bushwhacking contrivance; simply that, nothing else! I find a good many people who are very much concerned about the loss of Southern trade. Now either these people are sincere or they are not. (Laughter.) I will speculate a little about HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE that. If they are sincere, and are moved by any real danger of the loss of Southern trade, they will simply get their names on the white list,54 and then, instead of persuading Republicans to do likewise, they will be glad to keep you away! Don’t you see they thus shut off competition? They would not be whispering around to Republicans to come in and share the profits with them. But if they are not sincere, and are merely trying to fool Republicans out of their votes, they will grow very anxious about your pecuniary prospects; they are afraid you are going to get broken up and ruined; they did not care about Democratic votes — Oh no, no, no! You must judge which class those belong to whom you meet; I leave it to you to determine from the facts. Let us notice some more of the stale charges against Republicans. You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your section — gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very year. [Applause.] The fact that we get no votes in your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours. And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started — to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet it as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No? Then you really believe that the principle which our fathers who framed the Government under which we live thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is, in fact, so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment’s consideration. Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress, enforcing the prohibition of Slavery in the northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy of Government upon that subject, up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it he wrote LaFayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should some time have a confederacy of Free States. Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it. [Applause.] But you say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the Government under which we live; while you with one accord reject, and 54. Lincoln was referring to a movement on the part of certain business interests to help along the Southern boycott of antislavery New England manufactures by preparing a list of “white” (which is to say, proslavery Democrats, whom it would be politically correct to patronize) rather than “black” (which is to say, opposed to human slavery, firms which would be politically incorrect to patronize) New England manufacturing concerns. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You have considerable variety of new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the Judiciary; some for the “gur-reat pur-rin-ciple” that “if one man would enslave another, no third man should object,” fantastically called “Popular Sovereignty;” [great laughter,] but never a man among you in favor of Federal prohibition of Slavery in Federal Territories, according to the practice of our fathers who framed the Government under which we live. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. And yet you draw yourselves up and say “We are eminently conservative!” [Great laughter.] It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them? Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation. The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [Applause.] This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them, from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches, we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that Slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected of all taint of opposition to Slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. So long as we call Slavery wrong, whenever a slave runs away they will overlook the obvious fact that he ran because he was oppressed, and declare he was stolen off. Whenever a master cuts his slaves with the lash, and they cry out under it, he will overlook the obvious fact that the negroes cry out because they are hurt, and insist that they were put up to it by some rascally abolitionist. [Great laughter.] I am quite aware that they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about Slavery.” But we do let them alone — have never disturbed them — so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE until we cease saying. I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of Slavery, with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding as they do, that Slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality — its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension — its enlargement. All they ask, we could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? Wrong as we think Slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored — contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man — such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care — such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance — such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it. SLAVERY

March 8. 2.30 P. M.—50°. To Cliffs and Walden. See a small flock of grackles on the willow-row above railroad bridge. How they sit and make a business of chattering! for it cannot be called singing, and no improvement from age to age perhaps. Yet, as nature is a becoming, their notes may become melodious at last. At length, on my very near approach, they flit suspiciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. This is the first flock of blackbirds I have chanced to see, though Channing saw one the 6th. I suspect that I have seen only grackles as yet. I saw, in Monroe’s well by the edge of the river, the other day, a dozen frogs, chiefly shad frogs, which had been dead a good while. It may be that they get into that sort of spring-hole in the fall to hibernate, but for some reason die; or perhaps they are always jumping into it in the summer, but at that season are devoured by some animal before they infest the water. Now and for some days I see farmers walking about their fields, knocking to pieces and distributing the cow- dung left there in the fall, that so, with the aid of the spring rains, they fertilize a larger surface and more equally. To say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and other cryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude; for there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places, always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little further every warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk-cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing [IN] the maples in midwinter in some days, perhaps some cress growing a little (?), certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing if not blooming, and apple buds sometimes expanding. Thus much of vegetable life or motion or growth is to be detected every winter. There is something of spring in all seasons. There is a large class which is evergreen in its radical leaves, which make such a show as soon as the snow goes off that many take them to be new growth of the spring. At the pool on the south side of Hubbard’s Grove, I notice that the crowfoot, i. e. buttercup, leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced than those two feet off in the air, for there they receive warmth from the sun, while they are sheltered from cold winds. Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere. In some respects our spring, in its beginning, fluctuates a whole month, so far as it respects ice and snow, walking, sleighing, etc., etc.; for some years winter may be said to end about the first of March, and other years it may extend into April. That willow-clump by railroad at Walden looks really silvery. I see there that moles have worked for several days. There are several piles on the grass, some quite fresh and some made before the last rain. One is as wide as a bushel-basket and six inches high; contains a peck at least. When I carefully remove this dirt, I cannot see, and can scarcely detect by feeling, any looseness in the sod beneath where the mole came to the surface and discharged all this dirt. I do feel it, to be sure, but it is scarcely perceptible to my fingers. The mole must have filled up this doorway very densely with earth, perhaps for its protection. Those small green balls in the Pout’s-Nest—and in the river, etc.—are evidently the buds by which the Utricularia vulgaris are propagated. I find them attached to the root as well as adrift. I noticed a very curious phenomenon in this pond. It is melted for two or three rods around the open side, and in many places partly filled with a very slender thread-like spike-rush (apparently Eleocharis tenuis?) which is matted more or less horizontally and floating, and is much bleached, being killed. In this fine matting I noticed perfectly straight or even cuts a rod or more in length, just as if one had severed this mass of fine rush as it lay [?] with some exceeding sharp instrument. However, you could not do it with a scythe, though you might with scissors, if it were ruled. It is as if you were to cover a floor with very fine flaccid grass and tread it to one inch in thickness, and then cut this web straight across. The fact is, this floating matting (it also rests partly on soft mud) was not cut at all, but pulled apart on a straight line, producing the exact appearance of a cut, as if you were to pull a piece of felt apart by a force on each side and yet leave the edge as straight as if it had been cut. It had been frozen in, and when the ice cracked it was in an instant thus pulled apart, without further disturbing the relative position of the fibres. I first conjectured this, and then saw the evidence of it, for, glancing my eye along such a cut, which ran at right angles with the shore, I saw that it exactly corresponded at its termination to an old crack in the ice which was still unmelted and which continued its course exactly. This in the ice had been filled and cemented so as to look like a white seam. Would this account for such a crack being continued into the meadow itself, as I have noticed? I meet some Indians just camped on Brister’s Hill. As usual, they are chiefly concerned to find where black ash grows, for their baskets. This is what they set about to ascertain as soon as they arrive in any strange neighborhood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 10, Tuesday: Martin Robison Delany set sail from Lagos to England.

Senator Jefferson Davis returned to the federal Senate upon recovering from eye surgery.

That evening, Abraham Lincoln spoke in the Phoenix Hall at Bloomington, Illinois. A local newspaper would report: After a few apologetic remarks, the speaker proceeded to comment upon polygamy in Utah, and the recent action in the United States house of representatives on that subject. [Vermont Representative Justin S. Morrill’s HR7 to punish the practice of polygamy, etc., although it had passed the House on April 5th, would die in the Senate.] He said his main object in doing so was to call attention to the views and action of gentlemen who held to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as related to the suppression of polygamy. These gentlemen, he said, were less than half the democratic members of the house — voting for the anti-polygamy bill, because it favored the doctrine that congress could control the subject of slavery in the territories. But the Illinois democrats, although as much opposed to polygamy as any body else, dare not vote for the bill, because it was opposed to Mr. Douglas. Mr. McClernand, of Illinois, had proposed to suppress the evil of polygamy by dividing up the territory, and attaching the different portions to other territories. He admitted that he had not seen Col. McClernand’s speech on the subject; but proceeded to comment upon his action, nevertheless. McClernand’s proposition was in harmony with the views formerly suggested by Mr. Douglas in a speech at Springfield; and he gave him credit for consistency, at least. But, inquired the speaker, how much better was it to divide up the territory and attach its parts to others? It was effecting indirectly that which Mr. McClernand denied could be done directly. This inconsistency, Mr. Lincoln illustrated by a classic example of a similar inconsistency: “If I cannot rightfully murder a man, I may tie him to the tail of a kicking horse, and let him kick the man to death!” But why divide up the territory at all? continued he. Something must be wrong there, or it would not be necessary to act at all. And if one mode of interference is wrong, why not the other? Why is not an act dividing the territory as much against popular sovereignty as one for prohibiting polygamy? If you can put down polygamy in that way, why may you not thus put down slavery? Mr. Lincoln said he supposed that the friends of popular sovereignty would say –if they dared speak out– that polygamy was wrong and slavery right; and therefore one might thus be put HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE down and the other not; and after supposing several other things of northern democrats, he proceeded to notice, what he called, Mr. Douglas’s sedition law. [On January 16th Douglas had introduced a resolution in the Senate for its Committee on the Judiciary to introduce a bill to protect a state or territory against invasion, etc., but on February 1st this had been tabled.] On the subject of the proposed law, he began by reading Mr. Douglas’s resolution as offered to the senate. Everything prohibited in the resolution, said he, is wrong, and ought to be prohibited and punished. There was now no such law against them, simply, as he supposed, because nobody had thought the crimes enumerated in the resolution would ever be committed. And, moreover, he declared, not one of them ever had been committed! He defied any one to point to a single instance where the authorities or the people of one state had invaded another: or where there had been a conspiracy or combination to interfere with the institutions or property of the people in one state by citizens of another! John Brown, to be sure, had made a raid into Virginia; but Virginia had been competent to deal with him and his confederates without a congressional law; and hence no such law was necessary. Insurrections had always been put down; hence no law was necessary against them. What, then, inquired the speaker, was the real object of Mr. Douglas’s proposition? He then quoted from that gentleman’s speech on the subject, in which he says that Brown’s raid into Virginia, and similar outrages, were the legitimate and logical result of the abolition teachings of the day. Then, said Mr. Lincoln, I conceive the real object of the proposed bill was to put down republicanism; to prevent republican meetings, and to shut men’s mouths! If, however, he added, the only object is to punish negro-dealers, he had no objection. But he denied that any body had ever conspired to steal negroes. The speaker then went on to comment on the proposed law, as if it was only meant to suppress free speech; addressed his remarks chiefly to Mr. Douglas, and throughout the speech seemed to consider him as the only man in the democratic party who was worthy of attention. A few words on the question why, if states and territories may introduce slavery, McLean county, or any individual may not, according to popular sovereignty, do the same, concluded the speech.

April 10. Cheney elm, many anthers shed pollen, probably 7th. Some are killed. Salix purpurea apparently will not open for four or five days. 2 P.M. 44 and east wind (followed by some rain still the next day, as usual).

May 18, Friday: John Shepard Keyes was among the delegates to the national convention of the Republican party when it nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois (soon Keyes would be made a United States marshal and would serve as a bodyguard during the Inauguration ceremony — and be present also for the delivery of the Gettysburg Address). But we are getting ahead of ourselves here, for before that could come about, this party’s nominee would need to campaign against and triumph over the Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglass and the Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 18. P. M.—To Walden. The creak of the cricket has been common on all warm, dry hills, banks, etc., for a week,—inaugurating the summer. Gold-thread out,—how long?—by Trillium Woodside. Trientalis. The green of the birches is fast losing its prominence amid the thickening cloud of reddish-brown and yellowish oak leafets. The last and others [?] are now like a mist enveloping the dark pines. Apple trees, now, for two or three days, generally bursting into bloom (not in full bloom), look like whitish rocks on the hillsides,— somewhat even as the shad-bush did. The sand cherry flower is about in prime. It grows on all sides of short stems, which are either upright or spreading, forming often regular solid cylinders twelve to eighteen inches long and only one and a half inches in diameter, the flowers facing out every way, of uniform diameter, determined by the length of the peduncles. Pretty wands of white flowers, with leafets intermingled. The remarkably dry weather has been both very favorable and agreeable weather to walkers. We have had almost constant east winds, yet generally accompanied with warmth,—none of the rawness of the east wind commonly. We have, as it were, the bracing air of the seashore with the warmth and dryness of June in the country. The night-warbler is a powerful singer for so small a bird. It launches into the air above the forest, or over some hollow or open space in the woods, and challenges the attention of the woods by its rapid and impetuous warble, and then drops down swiftly into the tree-tops like a performer withdrawing behind the scenes, and he is very lucky who detects where it alights. That large fern (is it Aspidium spinulosum?) of Brister Spring Swamp is a foot or more high. It is partly evergreen. A hairy woodpecker [Hairy Woodpecker Picoides villosus] betrays its hole in an apple tree by its anxiety. The ground is strewn with the chips it has made, over a large space. The hole, so far as I can see, is exactly like that of the downy woodpecker, —the entrance (though not so round) and the conical form within above,—only larger. The bird scolds at me from a dozen rods off. Now for very young and tender oak leaves and their colors.

June: Abraham Lincoln writes a longer autobiography.

During a violent storm, a large number of small black stones fell on the town of Wolverhampton, England. ASTRONOMY

October 24, Wednesday: Abraham Lincoln replied to an inquiry he had received from John C. Lee, president of the Young Men’s Republican Association of Jacksonville, Illinois. Presumably Lee had inquired whether the Democrats were correct in alleging that the candidate had contributed money to John Brown’s cause: Confidential J.C. Lee, Esq Springfield, Ills. Dear Sir Oct. 24, 1860 Yours of the 14th. was received some days ago, and should have been answered sooner. I never gave fifty dollars, nor one dollar, nor one cent, for the object you mention, or any such object. I once subscribed twentyfive dollars, to be paid whenever Judge Logan would decide it was necessary to enable the people of Kansas to defend themselves against any force coming against them from without the Territory, and not by authority of the United States. Logan never made the decision, and I never paid a dollar on the subscription. The whole of this can be seen in the files of the Illinois Journal, since the first of June last. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Yours truly A. LINCOLN

October 24. P.M.–To Walden Woods. See three little checkered adders lying in the sun by a stump on the sandy slope of the Deep Cut; yet sluggish. They are seven or eight inches long. The dark blotches or checkers are not so brown as in large ones. There is a transverse dark mark on the snout

and a forked light space on the back part [OF] the head.

Examine again Emerson’s pond lot, to learn its age by the stumps cut last spring. I judge from them that they were some five (?) years cutting over the part next the water, for I count the rings of many stumps and they vary in number from twenty-four or five to thirty, though twenty-six, seven, and eight are commonest, as near as I can count. It is hard to distinguish the very first ring, and often one or more beside before you reach the circumference. But, these being almost all sprouts, I know that they were pretty large the first year. I repeatedly see beside the new tree (cut last spring) the now well-rotted stump from which it sprang. But I do not see the stump from which the last sprang. I should like to know how long they may continue to spring from the stump. Here are shoots of this year which have sprung vigorously from stumps cut in the spring, which had sprung in like manner some twenty-eight or thirty years ago from a stump which is still very plain by their sides. I see that some of these thirty-year trees are sprouts from a white oak stump twenty inches in diameter,–four from one in one case. Sometimes, when a white pine stump is-all crumbling beside, there is a broad shingle-like flake left from the centre to the circumference, the old ridge of the stump, only a quarter of an inch thick, and this betrays the axe in a straight inclined surface.

The southeast part of Emerson’s lot, next the pond, is yet more exclusively oak sprouts, or oak from oak, with fewer pine stumps. I examine an oak seedling in this. There are two very slender shoots rising ten or more inches above the ground, which, traced downward, conduct to a little stub, which I mistook for a very old root or part of a larger tree, but, digging it up, I found it to be a true seedling. This seedling had died down to the ground six years ago, and then these two slender shoots, such as you commonly see in oak woods, had started. The root was a regular seedling root (fusiform if straightened), at least seven eighths of an inch thick, while the largest shoot was only one eighth of an inch thick, though six years old and ten inches high. The root was probably ten years old when the seedling first died down, and is now some sixteen years old. Yet, as I say, the oak is only ten inches high. This shows how it endures and gradually pines and dies. As you look down on it, it has two turns, and three as you look from the side, so firmly is it rooted. Any one will be surprised on digging up some of these lusty oaken carrots.

Look at stumps in Heywood’s lot, southeast side pond, from Emerson’s to the swimming-place. They are white pine, oak, pitch pine, etc. I count rings of three white pine (from sixty to seventy). There are a few quite large white pine stumps; on one, ninety rings. One oak gives one hundred and sixteen rings. A pitch pine some fifteen or sixteen inches over gives about one hundred and thirty-five. All these are very easy, if not easier than ever, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE to count. The pores of the pines are distinct ridges, and the pitch is worn off.

(Many white and pitch pines elsewhere cut this year cannot be counted, they are so covered with pitch.) I remember this as a particularly dense and good-sized wood, mixed pine and oak. Mrs. Heywood’s pitch pines by the shore, judging from some cut two or three years ago, are about eighty-five years old. As far as I have noticed, the pitch pine is the slowest-growing tree (of pines and oaks) and gives the most rings in the smallest diameter. Then there are the countless downy seeds (thistle-like) of the goldenrods,

so fine that we do not notice them in the air. They cover our clothes like dust. No wonder they spread over all fields and far into the woods. I see those narrow pointed yellow buds now laid bare so thickly along the slender twigs of the Salix discolor, which is almost bare of leaves.

November 6, Wednesday: Abraham Lincoln received 180 of 303 possible electoral votes but merely 40 percent of the popular vote (his name hadn’t even been printed on the ballots of the southern states), and would be duly chosen by the Electoral College as the 16th US president and the 1st Republican.

The Republican candidate had spent the bulk of the day in his office at the state house in Springfield, Illinois. At about 3PM he had walked to the polling place in the courthouse and cast a ballot. He had then hung around the telegraph office until midnight, as the polling reports were being telegraphed around the nation. Shortly after midnight he and Mrs. Lincoln went to a supper, and then soon home.

November 6. Sawed off half of an old pitch pine stump at Tommy Wheeler’s hollow. I found that, though the surface was entire and apparently sound except one or two small worm-holes, and the sap was HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE evidently decaying, yet within, or just under the surface, it was extensively honeycombed by worms, which did not eat out to the surface. Those rings included in the outmost four or five inches were the most decayed,– including the sapwood.

November 7, Thursday: In a ceremony at Naples, Giuseppe Garibaldi officially handed Southern Italy and Sicily over to King Vittorio Emanuele of Sardinia.

News arrived that the Republican candidate had won the national election. The officials of Charleston, South Carolina resigned because of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States of America.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Nov. 7. To Cambridge55 and Boston.

December 8, Friday: United States Secretary of the Treasury of Georgia resigned, stating that the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States of America justified secession. US CIVIL WAR

December 22, Saturday: At the Court of Queen’s Bench in Toronto, the actual application was submitted by John Anderson’s counsel, Mr. Freeman, for leave to appeal the court’s adverse decision to Canada’s higher Court of Error and Appeal. The court advised the attorney that there could be no appeal to the court above from its judgment upon a writ of Habeas Corpus. Counsel for Anderson then declared that he was going to sue for a writ of Habeas Corpus from the Court of Common Pleas, and he was going to sue for a writ of Habeas Corpus from the Court of Chancery, and, if necessary, he was going to apply directly to the Canadian legislature, and in the last resort, he was going to take his case directly to the Privy Council and to the Parliament in England.

President Abraham Lincoln was engaged in correspondence with Alexander H. Stephens of Springfield, Illinois, attempting to persuade this voter that although he was confessedly an opponent of race slavery, he did nevertheless realize that the needs of white Americans always did come, and always would come, before the rights of black Americans. Trust me, sir, I know what race I am: For your own eye only. Hon. A.H. Stephens — Springfield, Ills. My dear Sir Dec. 22, 1860 Your obliging answer to my short note is just received, and for which please accept my thanks. I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of responsibility on me. Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect, than it was in the days of Washington. I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us. Yours very truly A. LINCOLN

Dec. 22. This evening and night, the second important snow, there having been sleighing since the 4th, and now,–

55. Was it on November 7, 1859 or November 7, 1860 that Henry Thoreau checked out Thomas Jefferson’s NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA. WITH AN APPENDIX (8th American edition; Boston: Printed by David Carlisle, for Thomas & Andrews, J. West, West & Greenleaf, J. White & Co., E. & S. Larkin, J. Nancrede, Manning & Loring, Boston, Thomas & Thomas, Walpole, N.H., and B.B. Macanulty, Salem. 1801) from the Harvard Library? His notes on this reading are in Indian Notebook #12. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S NOTES HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1861

From this year into 1866, John Albion Andrew would be the Governor of Massachusetts. Soon after taking office, he would secure not only special legislation placing the Massachusetts Militia in readiness but also an appropriation for transporting it to Washington DC in case of need. Thus, when Abraham Lincoln’s call would come, the 6th Massachusetts regiment would be the first to reach the capital. The same spirit would characterize Governor Andrew’s actions throughout the Civil War, and the people of Massachusetts would share in his zeal to humble the proud white slavemasters. (With the return of peace, however, he would become an advocate of a policy of friendship and leniency in regard to the secessionist states.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE As General John Charles Frémont brought western territories under the control of Union armies, what he was supposed to be doing was exterminating the Indians as potential “allies of Jeff Davis,” exterminating them as effectively as Abraham Lincoln had assisting in exterminating them east of the Mississippi, as a young man:

But General Frémont didn’t understand this, the dummy! Instead he thought he was supposed to be freeing the slaves within these western territories, raising the fallen, succoring the downtrodden. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE So the President was forced to relieve him of his command. Who did this guy think he was, Tsar Alexander II?

General Mistook Cover Story for Agenda, Paid Penalty

By the way, in this year the Tsar was in fact freeing the serfs of Russia. And in this year and the next was being published Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski’s THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, based upon his experience of HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Siberian .

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski and his wife began publication of the journal Time, which presented his THE INSULTED AND THE INJURED and his A SILLY STORY.

Although this American war of attrition was not as yet bringing freedom to any of America’s serfs (locally known by the gentry under a name beginning with “n”), the North’s need to finance technologies of mass destruction was enabling Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase to regularize the currency of the United

States, replacing the private banknotes previously in circulation as a paper currency, perhaps as much as half HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of it actually worthless due to counterfeiting, due to having been issued by banks now defunct, or even being in its origins in one manner fraudulent or unsupported. Chase’s federal currency included some “fractional” bills worth less than one dollar. None of these new bills would bear the notional “In God We Trust” until 1929. Since a green ink was used as part of the new note, to make it harder to counterfeit, the new federal currency soon would acquire the moniker “greenback.” A 10% surcharge would be placed on the issuance of further private banknotes, in order to encourage the conversion to a standardized currency. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 11, Monday: Abraham Lincoln gave a brief farewell to friends and supporters at Springfield, Illinois and boarded a train for Washington DC. He would receive a warning during this trip of a possible attempt at assassination.56 US CIVIL WAR

Jefferson Davis spoke at Vicksburg and Jackson.

Am Grabe for unaccompanied male chorus by Anton Bruckner to words of Marinelli and von der Mattig, was performed for the initial time, by Liedertafel “Frohsinn” in Linz, directed by the composer.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 11th] The War between the Presidents

President Lincoln 1809-1865 President Davis 1808-1889

56. According to Harold S. Schultz’s NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 1852-1860 (Durham: Duke UP, 1950, page 226), for instance, a group of South Carolinians had organized themselves as the “Minutemen” with an agenda including but not limited to a march upon Washington DC to prevent installation of the Republican president. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau

February 19, Tuesday: President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived with his family at the Astor House in New-York on their journey to Washington DC for his inauguration. An estimated 250,000 people turned out to watch the 11- car procession. At the Astor House he met with the editor of the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant.

To supply deficiencies in the fund hitherto appropriated to carry out the Act of March 3, 1819, and subsequent acts, the federal legislature of the United States of America voted the sum of $900,000 (STATUTES AT LARGE, XII. 132). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 19th]

February 20, Wednesday: During the morning Mrs. Lincoln took the Lincoln children to Phineas Taylor Barnum's “American Museum.” In the evening President-elect Abraham Lincoln attended a new Giuseppe Verdi opera at the Academy of Music. At the end of the 1st act the cast and audience sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” Lincoln was introduced to a 94-year-old, Joshua Dewey, who had cast a ballot in ever presidential election since that of George Washington. Then, at New-York’s City Hall, Lincoln informed Mayor Fernando Wood and the city council that “There is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union.”

Playwright and Librettist Eugène Scribe died.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 20th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

March 3, Sunday, evening On the night before his inauguration in Washington DC, president-elect Abraham Lincoln slept at Willard’s Hotel, guarded by Allan Pinkerton.

In Russia, the serfs were emancipated.Edward Payson Weston had hoofed it for 10 days to get from Boston EMANCIPATION

MA to Washington DC to attend the inauguration, and in so doing had won a take-a-hike campaign bet. The new chief executive would appoint the author of his campaign biography, William Dean Howells, as United States Consul to Venice — Howells had also, you see, –despite his not having taken a hike– won something of a campaign bet.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Reverend William Henry Brisbane preached an incendiary message, “Duty of the Northern States in Relation to the Future of Slavery.” He might have gotten by with it if he had only preached the sermon, but many in the state legislature were in attendance (the church being on Capitol Square) and petitioned him to publish his sermon for wider circulation. As a result, he lost yet another church. He would enlist in the 2d Wisconsin Cavalry as its chaplain (two of his sons also enlisted in this unit). US CIVIL WAR

Henry Thoreau commented in his journal on the events of the day:

March 3. Sunday. Hear that there was a flock of geese in the river last night. See and hear song sparrows to-day; probably here for several days. It is an exceedingly warm and pleasant day. The snow is suddenly all gone except heels, and –what is more remarkable– the frost is generally out of the ground, e.g. in our garden, for the reason that it has not been in it. The snow came December 4th, before the ground was frozen to any depth, has been unusually deep, and the ground has not been again exposed till now. Hence, though we have had a little very cold weather and a good HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE deal of steady cold, the ground generally has not been frozen.

March 4, Monday: In the face of all the talk about preventing the President-elect from taking the oath of office, Lieutenant-General had taken on the task of protecting his person in “the most critical and hazardous event with which I have ever been connected” (Scott himself was receiving death threats). As Lincoln’s open carriage moved toward the Capitol, it “was closely surrounded on all sides by marshals and cavalry, so as almost to hide it from view,” one of these protective bodies being that of John Shepard Keyes (in addition, green-coated sharpshooters were stationed on the roofs above Pennsylvania Avenue). The grim reality was that two weeks earlier Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as the President of a newly constituted Confederate States of America. On the East Portico of the Capitol building, Chief Justice Roger Taney administered the executive oath for the 7th time (the Capitol building was sheathed in scaffolding because its copper and wood “Bulfinch” dome was in process of being replaced with a cast iron dome designed by Thomas U. Walter).

The sovereign state of Texas seceded from the federal Union as Abraham Lincoln replaced James Buchanan as President of the United States of America. He and his family would move into a mansion in Washington DC, the White House, that would soon sport the convenience of piped cold running water at the washstands in its 2d-floor bedrooms. I looked about for a day or two, found Major French in charge as chief marshal of the inaugural ceremonies, who at once secured me to take charge of the President with such aids as I should choose. It was the most dangerous duty of the day. Fears of an attack, assassination were rife, and rumors of real war were in the air. I accepted without hesitation, secured a dozen Massachusetts men on whom I could rely. Col. NA Thompson Gen Devens, Col Rogers, I.P. Hanscom &c I cant recall all of them, engaged our horses, and badges, conferred with my namesake Col Keyes of Scotts staff and Capt Stone of Mass in command of the local troops as to the details of the march &c. &c. &c. As the magnitude and danger of the occasion grew on me I couldnt sleep, and after tossing all night I came down at Willards very early and was sitting in the hall when who should arrive but Lincoln in a cap and cloak, looking worn and haggard with a night ride, and with only Lamon with him. No one was about but the night clerk to whom it was whispered who the guest was and he retired to his room. I recognized him from seeing him in N.Y. and he & his friend Lamon eyed me suspiciously as the only guest of the house visible at that strange hour of day down. With Lamon I soon became well acquainted, and was introduced by him to Mrs Lincoln in the evening at a sort of reception she gave after her arrival to the ladies &c at Willards. Though she tried to be agreeable she was very distasteful to me, reminding me strongly of Aunt Hannah Leland whom she resembled exactly except in not being lame, but with a thoroughly southern manner I detest. On Sunday I had my first interview with Lincoln, in his parlor where Lamon took me to confer about his wishes as to the next day. I shook hands with the long, lank, lean rough looking ill dressed president elect, and telling him my purpose in calling, was struck with his reply, as throwing his long leg over the top of the centre table he answered My only wish is to go to the Capitol take the oath and return to the White House as directly as HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE possible to begin the duties of the office.’ Then we talked of details, and he left all to me to arrange, with the committee of the Senate Baker and Collamer, while Lamon with Phillip the Dist U.S. Marshal were to see to Buchanan the out going President. After half an hours talk in which Lincoln told several good stories, and made me feel very comfortable I retired to try my saddle horse. Riding very leisurely over the route seeing the positions Scott had assigned for the troops, I met Col Butler Bens brother an old frontier Indian campaigner whom I had seen before and who asked me what I was trying that horse for. I told him to escort Lincoln tomorrow. The devil said he Ive been in lots of fights but I dont envy you. Why said I. Because Id rather take my chances in any Indian scrimmage than be in your place. Then we talked and he gave me some points for which I thanked him and rode off. It was a lovely quiet afternoon but the quiet was ominous, and foreboding There was a hushed expectancy in the city that betokened anything but a festival for the morrow and yet I had a pleasant ride and liked my horse. It was the last night of Congress which had nominally been in session all that day and in the evening I went to the Capitol to see the sights usually attending the close. Here too was the same foreboding, knots of members anxiously conferring, every one sober, and serious, nothing of interest doing only waiting in gloom and distrust for what the morrow might bring. There were but few visitors in the corridors or galleries, only some haggard claimants for legislation hoping against hope. It was dispiriting enough and I went back to Willards wrote a long letter of goodbye to Martha and slept an hour or two. Rising early the bright sun, the busy throng of sightseers occupying every favorable point, the moving troops, and the general bustle of the great day in Washington, drove away the clouds and fears of the night before. Mounting our horses at Willards we waited the arrival of President Buchanan from the Capitol, where he had been signing the last bills, and we waited long. The escort & procession were drawn up on Pennsylvania Avenue Major French and his aids in the advance and at last Buchanan arrived. He went in shook hands with Lincoln and they came out together, Lincoln and he taking the back seat of the carriage L. on the left with the Senate Committee on the front seat. Lamon and the U.S. Marshal on Buchanans side of the carriage I and my aids on Lincolns side, I so near I could have touched him by extending my arm. Col Thompson in front of me with Col Rogers, Gen Devens at my left and the others in the rear. Thus we slowly moved down the avenue, between files of troops and troopers keeping the wide street clear from curb to curb, with detachments of artillery posted on all the side streets with their horses mounted canons loaded & post fires lit. The sidewalks windows and house tops crowded with a dense mass of humanity chiefly men. In comparatively silence we passed along occasionally a faint cheer from a knot of Republicans on the walk, or a waving of handkerchiefs from a bevy of ladies at a window, no enthusiasm no warmth of greeting In the carriage Buchanan nervous faint almost collapsed, rode silent and trembling as if to his HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE execution. Lincoln calm cool quiet bowing to every greeting from the crowd and occasionally speaking to the committee men on the front seat. Baker on my side vigilant but anxiously watching every motion or pause scrutinizing every group, while I keeping my horse exactly between the wheels of the carriage, shielded Lincoln all I could the entire way. All went without incident till we got to the foot of Capitol Hill, where the crowd was densest, and there was some delay while the troops were taking their places in front of the eastern portico. Baker got very nervous & excited called on me to push on and clear the way while Buchanan shrank into his corner as haggard and frightened as if his doom had come. Old Collamer and Lincoln cool and collected talked on unconcernedly, while I sent Col T. ahead to see what caused the obstruction. As he returned a sudden sway of the crowd caused the carriage horses to start, and the pole as it lifted catching the Cols saddle unhorsed him instantly This added to the confusion, but was soon righted and before Baker’s order to ‘Drive on’ Drive on was repeated we advanced and alighted at door of the Senate wing. Here the Major Chief Marshal met us, and escorted the presidential party to the Presidents room. After a brief tarry here we entered the Senate Chamber, where we found places, and after some proceedings there formed a procession and marched to the east portico where Lincoln took the oath and delivered his famous inaugural to a vast crowd filling the steps and front square, and amid profound silence. As a part of my duty I stood within 10 feet of him hearing every word, and greatly impressed by the good sense and homely strength of his phrases. It was not very well received, his awkward appearance was not favorable and it hardly elicited a cheer, though he had a rather warm greeting from the ladies and the friends close to him as he first appeared on the platform. This over we returned to the Senate Chamber & the Presidents room, the procession reformed and Lincoln escorted by us as before resumed his place in the carriage, and we returned over the route. Lincoln was relieved and so were all others, I forget whether Buchanan came back to Willards with Lincoln or left him at the Capitol. At any rate the chat of the party was lively the crowd was relieved that all had gone well the greetings were more enthusiastic, and the return much pleasanter than the advance. As we turned up the Treasury building there was a great cheering and much heartiness shown, and in front of the White House we reviewed the society’s & delegations which composed the escort who being all Republicans were very enthusiastic. I recall with pleasure the praise Lincoln and Baker bestowed on me for keeping so exactly in my place the whole route, and it well paid for all my trouble work and anxiety. The White House reached we dismounted were invited by the President inside, warmly thanked by him for our attentions, introduced severally by Col Lamon, and then forming a body guard staid for an hour or two while he received all that desired to be introduced of the waiting crowd outside. This over the President again made his acknowledgments to the Marshals and we took our leave of him, ready to begin his duties. I was entirely delighted with HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the success of the day, satisfied with my horse my aids my position and myself, and felt as relieved, as assured that I had helped inaugurate a Republican President who would appoint me his marshal for Mass. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In his inaugural address, the new president offered that although he wasn’t planning to end slavery in those states where it already existed, he wasn’t going to hold still for any secessions. The question would be, can this be resolved without warfare?

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[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR MARCH 4th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution — which amendment, however, I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable. The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people, and they have conferred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States. The people themselves can do this also if they choose; but the executive, as such, has nothing to do with it. His duty is to administer the present government, as it came to his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by him, to his successor. Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better, or equal hope, in the world? In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth, and that justice, will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people. By the frame of the government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue, and vigilence, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years. My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in host haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied, still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied, hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend” it. I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle- field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

Fellow citizens of the United States: In compliance with a custom as old as the government itself, I appear before you to address you briefly, and to take, in your presence, the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States, to be taken by the President “before he enters on the execution of his office.” I do not consider it necessary, at present, for me to discuss those matters of administration about which there is no special anxiety, or excitement. Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed, and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this, and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them. And more than this, they placed in the platform, for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves, and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read: “Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”

I now reiterate these sentiments: and in doing so, I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that the property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause — as cheerfully to one section, as to another. There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it, for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the law-giver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution — to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause, “shall be delivered up,” their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not, with nearly equal unanimity, frame and pass a law, by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath? There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by state authority; but surely that difference is not a very material one. if the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him, or to others, by which authority it is done. And should any one, in any case, be content that his oath shall go unkept, on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept? Again, in any law upon this subject, ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and human jurisprudence to be introduced, so that a free man be not, in any case, surrendered as a slave? And might it not be well, at the same time, to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitution which guarranties that “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all previleges and immunities of citizens in the several States?”

I take the official oath to-day, with no mental reservations, and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or laws, by any hypercritical rules. And while I do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest, that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to, and abide by, all those acts which stand unrepealed, than to violate any of them, trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional. It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President under our national Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens, have, in succession, administered the executive branch of the government. They have conducted it through many perils; and, generally, with great success. Yet, with all this scope for precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional term of four years, under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted. I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever — it being impossible to destroy it, except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade, by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it — break it, so to speak; but does HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was “to form a more perfect union.” But if destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity. It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union, — that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances. I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and, to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or, in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend, and maintain itself. In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided in me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion — no using of force against, or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States, in any interior locality, shall be so great and so universal, as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly impracticable with all, that I deem it better to forego, for the time, the uses of such offices. The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible, the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed, unless current events, and experience, shall show a modification, or change, to be proper; and in every case and exigency, my best discretion will be exercised, according to circumstances actually existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections. That there are persons in one section, or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and are glad of any pretext to do it I will HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April: Ezra Heywood spoke at Hopedale on “Moral Agitation.” He was one nonresistant who would never be seduced by the war fever.

When President Abraham Lincoln planned to send supplies to Fort Sumter, in an attempt to avoid hostilities he alerted the state in advance. South Carolina, however, feared a trick. On April 10, 1861, Brigadier General Beauregard, in command of the provisional Confederate forces at Charleston, demanded the surrender of the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The Garrison commander Anderson refused. On April 12, Confederate batteries opened fire on the fort, which was unable to reply effectively. At 2:30PM, April 13, Major Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter, evacuating the garrison on the following day. The bombardment of Fort Sumter was the opening engagement of the . Although there were no casualties during the bombardment, a Union artillerist was killed and 3 wounded (one mortally) when a cannon exploded prematurely, upon firing a salute during the evacuation.

The attack on Fort Sumter prompted 4 more states to join the Confederacy, and Richmond was named as its capitol.

There was a war starting and there were defense contracts starting. There were people to kill and there was money to be made. In Boston yards, work began in the April-June period on four new screw steamers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step, while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from, have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to, are greater than all the real ones you fly from? Will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake? All profess to be content in the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right, plainly written in the Constitution, has been denied? I think not. Happily the human mind is so constituted, that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If, by the mere force of numbers, a majority should ever deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly would, if such a right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities, and of individuals, are so plainly assured to them, by affirmations and negations, guarranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution, that controversies never arise concerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. No foresight can anticipate, nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the territories. The Constitution does not expressly say. From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government, is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union claim to secede from it. All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed secession? Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissable; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left. I do not forget the position assumed by some, that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case, upon the parties to a suit, as to the object of that suit while they are also entitled to very high respect HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be over-ruled, and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there, in this view, any assault upon the court, or the judges. It is a duty, from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before them; and it is no fault of theirs, if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes. One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade, are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured; and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections, than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction, in one section; while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all, by the other. Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible then to make that intercourse more advantageous, or more satisfactory, after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens, than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you. This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember, or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy, and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the national constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor, rather than oppose, a fair oppertunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that, to me, the convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take, or reject, propositions, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Volunteer formations of troops needed to have uniforms and were uniformed, and the Boston city government was allocating the sum of $100,000.00 simply for ceremonies in which various troop formations would be formally meeting one another, on their way marching off to the war. When President Lincoln called for troops, units of the 6th Massachusetts Regiment had secretly already been armed and alerted by the Massachusetts governor, and left immediately for Ft. Monroe, Virginia. As the apparent threat to the District of Columbia would increase, the Massachusetts unit and subsequently mobilized Massachusetts militia-now-Federal Army units would prove to be the only forces available for the immediate defense of the Union capital.

The Madison, Wisconsin Weekly Patriot managed the difficult trick (well, OK, it’s not so difficult :-) of combining xenophobia with racism: Satisfactory — The appointment of L. Park Coon, of Milwaukee, as Col. of the 2d Regiment is well received. The Col. is a gentlemen who has had a military training and possesses the qualities of heart and mind necessary to make a popular and effective commanding officer.

Greatest natural phenomenon

A sharp young gentleman in a drug store near the Capitol House sends us the following good one.

Why is the 2d Regiment of Wisconsin Active Militia the greatest phenomenon of the age?

Because it is composed of Badgers led by a Coon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April: The popular weekly literary magazine of London, Once A Week. An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science, and Popular Information:

APR 1861 ONCE A WEEK With the civil war well underway, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Richard Henry Dana, Jr. as United States District Attorney for Massachusetts (until September 1866). All hands on deck! Conspirator, go thou and sin no more!

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, with an invitation to dinner to meet a Mrs. Josiah Quincy who evidently was the wife of the former Boston mayor Josiah Quincy, Jr. and a daughter-in- HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE law of the former president of Harvard College Josiah Quincy, Sr.

Daniel Foster returned from Boston to Centralia, Kansas and would remain there until May 1862.

April 15, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln issued a Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress, asking for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. US CIVIL WAR

Elizabeth Burrill Curtis was born, 1st child of George William Curtis and Anna Shaw Curtis.

Richard Wagner met the Grand Duke of Baden in Karlsruhe. The two made plans to mount Tristan und Isolde in September (this would come to naught).

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR APRIL 15th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 27, Saturday: President Abraham Lincoln instructed Army commanders in Maryland that public resistance there was to be overcome by “the most prompt and efficient means ... even, if necessary ... the bombardment of their cities and, in the extremest necessity, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.” What this meant in practice was that for the duration of this civil warfare the military could take citizens, and hold them indefinitely, and treat them in any manner considered convenient, without ever needing to lodge formal charges against them and thus without ever coming under outside scrutiny. The leading opponent of the president’s action would be the 85-year-old Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Brooke Taney, since he was at the time sitting as circuit judge for Maryland and thus would be the one called upon to rule in the case of John Merryman, an advocate of the Southern cause who raised a company of soldiers to serve in its army and was implicated in the burning of bridges in Maryland to keep Union soldiers from getting to the defense of Washington DC. Merryman’s lawyers would seek to have him released on grounds that he was being illegally held without formal presentation of charges. Taney would order Merryman released and denounce the president for voiding a basic right of the American people. The President would ignored the order and the case never reached the Supreme Court.57 Merryman would eventually be released and afterward not again heard of.

According to the New-York Sun, “There is a Providence which shapes our ends”: “The New York Sun, of a late date introduces an article on the present condition of the country in the following appropriate language: There is a God who governs the world and the passions of bad men are among the leading instruments by which He ‘coerces’ states and empires to fulfill His inscrutable decrees. Human passion is the ‘rod of iron’ with which He is said to rule the nations. It moves at His touch or rather –like certain pieces of machinery, which a cold spring is permitted at the proper moment to actuate of itself– whenever it suits the All wise Ruler to modify or remove the pressure which He keeps upon human depravity it springs fourth like the wild fury of a demon, to execute whatever work of destruction and change had been decreed. The following is the concluding paragraph: While we stand in awe at the visible ‘finger of God’ in the great events of the hours, the Christian, at least should watch the paternal providence with strengthening hope and solemn cheer. Mercy and judgment are mingled in the storm. We shall not come out of this conflict where we went in. The love of liberty, of country, of the rights of man, of truth and honor, of law and Justice, had sunk too low in the corruption and venality of our times for any resuscitation less violent and convulsive that this. When the heavens are rolled together as a scroll, and the earth on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat then look we according to His promise for a new heaven and a new earth in which dwelt righteousness. So in the minor convulsions that prefigure and prepare for the last great change, we may find the same cause and a like result — a new and better country.”

According to the Chilton, Wisconsin Times: “VOLUNTEER’S OUTFIT. — Adjutant Gen. Utly addressed the following communication to Quartermaster Gen. Tredway... ‘It is the direction of the Commander-in-Chief, after some consideration, that the following outfit be allowed to each soldier in the Wisconsin active Militia: 1 cap, 1 eagle and ring, 2 flannel shirts, 2 pair of stockings, 1 tin or rubber canteen, 1 pompon, 1 coat, 2 pair of flannel drawers, 1 leather stock, 1 haversack, 1 cap cover, 1 pair trousers, 1 pair boot’s or shoes, 1 great coat, 1 knapsack. It is not deemed advisable to purchase at this time any further articles of outfitting such as rubber blankets, ponchos, &c. not until such time as the troops are called into actual service. Other articles, axes, saws, spades, and camp equipage, generally, will be hereafter considered.’” 57. What might the exact obiter dicta be? — Perhaps something like the following: “In this land of the free and home of the brave in which no person of color has any rights which any white man is bound to respect, and in which he or she may justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit, unless it is quite convenient citizens are to have no rights which their government is bound to respect.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

According to the Wisconsin Weekly Patriot: “Progress of the Rebellion!!!!!!! We need not be surprised if we hear of sundry preliminary advances taken by the Southern rebels over the Government troops; for we must all know that so far as preparation and organization go, they have had some year or more to prepare with many traitors high in federal offices, including two Cabinet ministers, to assist them, while the Federal government was obliged to wait till they struck the first blow, before our organization could be attempted, so as to throw the onus of the fight ostensibly, where it in fact belongs — on the Southern traitors. Had it not been for the determination of the Government not to commence the fight the rebels would not have been permitted to work at Fort Moultry, in Charleston harbor for months throwing up redoubts, building floating batteries, and strengthening their positions on every hand, without hearing from Fort Sumter. But as it was, the Government muzzled its guns, and looked on in silence, day by day, for months seeing the elements of destruction erected around Fort Sumter, without so much as interposing an obstacle. When the rebels got ready they commenced the attack on Fort Sumter, and then the President’s Proclamation was issued, and in less than two weeks time some ten thousand good and loyal troops had reached the Federal Capitol, having to cut their way through some 40 miles of hostile territory, by the light of burning railroad bridges, while no less than 200,000 more troops were enlisted, of which about one-third have already been mustered into service and are either at rendezvous, on the tented field, or on their way thither. All this aside from the bringing the Navy out of chaos — providing vast quantities of military stores, &c. — has been accomplished in the incredible space of 2 weeks — a feat that eclipses the halcyon days of the great Napoleon, when his troops were raised by , instead of voluntary enlistment. And besides during this time, no less than five hundred millions of dollars have been either tendered to the Government and the loyal States, or actually paid over, by various Corporations and millions of individuals. The rebels have deep laid and desperate schemes. Their object has been to force all the border states into secession and we don’t know but they will succeed. They have got Virginia, and they now want Maryland, so as to hem in Washington by hostile territory. It is a part of their programme to cut off all communication with the North by rail, silence the telegraph and then to post war’s destruction on the flanks of the Potomac, so as to cut off Washington from succor, either by land or water. If they could once get possession of the Capitol then half their game would be played out for they would destroy the public records and other valuables, and drive the officers of Government into the loyal states or take them prisoners of war. We hardly think this can be done so long as old General Scott has a live head on his shoulders. The next move of the traitors is to block up the Mississippi, with a view of forcing terms with the Western states, but they count without their hosts for the Great West is united as one man. Traitors here are few and far between, and as fast as discovered, they will be boxed up and sent to their sympathizing friends. We believe, at least we hope, that the citizens of Maryland and especially Baltimore, will have good sense enough to offer no more obstructions to the passage of volunteers for if they do the Monumental City may soon become a monument of ruin’s. The North has been one great sleeping volcano. The Traitors have applied the torch, and they need not be surprised if they are consumed in the dreadful eruption. The North has waited for the first blow, and when that was struck, without a cause, from that moment party lines were obliterated, and Democrats, and Republicans, all parties, creeds and denominations instantly forgot their creeds and their platforms and are to-day enrolled under but one flag — the Star Spangled Banner. The North was slow to anger — slow to start — patient, enduring and even forgiving of the most wanton insults, all for the sake of peace; but since, her very toleration has been treated as an evidence of weakness and cowardice. She has now arisen in the majesty of her might and woe to the provokes of her wrath. Since all mild measures have failed — and since Mars is to be the umpire, we say war to the knife, and knife to the hilt — carry the conflict into the very heart of Africa and since the malcontent rebels would not let us fight for constitutional rights to their slave property, let us all turn abolitionists — if that word will express the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE meaning — and aim a blow at slavery that shall make the proud master’s hearts quake. Always strike the enemy in his most vulnerable part and as we know of no subject more tender to Southern consciences than their slaves, let such a blow be struck as will make every rebel howl with midnight affright for fear of a servile insurrection. Yes that’s it. In war we have no compliments and if Maryland acts the traitor too, let us begin by a coup de etat with her 80,000 slaves and when we have put them in a condition of offence and defense let us turn our attention to the half million slaves in Virginia, and make the chivalry see specters in every bush. We might extend this chapter ad infinitum but this will do for the present. Now our hands are in let us make no child’s play of it, but draw the claret at every blow.”

According to the Milwaukee Sentinel: “A SOLDIER’S KIT - At this time, when so many are preparing for the wars, a memorandum of the things necessary to take along as baggage will not be unacceptable. An old soldier contributes the desired catalogue as follows: ‘Two flannel shirts, red preferable; 2 stout hickory shirts; 2 fine shirts, if you can take them along; 4 pairs of woolen socks; 2 pair of drawers, white cotton or wool, indispensable; 2 pair stout and easy boots, if you can take a second pair; 2 towels, indispensable; 1 piece soap; 1 fine and one coarse comb; 1 tooth-brush; 1 butcher knife, (a good place for this is in the boot); 1 quart tin cup; 1 button stick; 1 vial of sweet oil; 1 piece rotten stone; 1 piece chalk; 1 button-brush, (nail brush will do); 1 flannel housewife for and full of needles — throw in a few pins while you’re about it; 1 pair small scissors; strong black and white threads in tidy skeins; 1 blacking brush, if you can take it; 1 box blacking. Learn to pack your knapsack tidily, closely and conveniently for use. To the above you can add all the grub you can stow away, inside and out, and replenish when you can, without waiting for the stock on hand to be exhausted.’”

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR APRIL 27th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May: J.P. Morgan fronted the money, and one Arthur Eastman procured, from the US Army arsenal at Governor’s Island, New York, a lot of 5,000 carbines that had been condemned as dangerously liable to explode and blow off the rifleman’s right thumb. They paid our government $3.50 each; in August these rifles would be sold out west, to General John Frémont, as “new” guns for $22.00 each. When the government would discover the fraud, the sale would be stopped — but Morgan would sue and the courts would award him the money. US CIVIL WAR

The backers of Abraham Lincoln had found out that guess what, they were not only actually the Northern party, but they were also ideally the party of Freedom. They held the moral high ground — how convenient, to be the defenders of Freedom rather than a mere pack of sectionalists, should they decide they needed to off someone! Back in Concord, Waldo Emerson was recording in his journal, in his usual sanctimonious manner, memories about the high spirits and economic blessings that had come out of the war of American Northerners upon despicable American Southerners, known as Mexicans, won of course by us righteous American Northerners, and recording also his sanguine hopes for a new administration of such high spirits and economic blessings from a war to come against this new despicable American Southern grouping, which would of course again accrue to the benefit of us righteous American Northerners. War is good not only for business, but also for the spirits of the victors, he alleges:

The country is cheerful & jocund in the belief that it has a government at last. The men in search of a party, parties in search of a principle, interests & dispositions that could not fuse for want of some base — all joyfully unite in this great Northern party, on the basis of Freedom. What a healthy tone exists! I suppose when we come to fighting, & many of our people are killed, it will yet be found that the bills of mortality in the country will show a better result of this year than the last, on account of the general health; no dyspepsia, no consumption, no fevers, where there is so much electricity, & conquering heart & mind. So, in finance, the rise of wheat paid the cost of the Mexican War; & the check on fraud & jobbing & the new prosperity of the West will pay the new debt.

How wrong this bloodthirsty Emerson was! In actuality, the disillusion caused by the carnage of the Civil War would taint even the lives and the souls of its biggest beneficiaries, and quite typically we find in their biographies that these Northern warriors went to the end of their years on earth in utter irremediable cynicism and disgust.

“No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” — Lily Tomlin HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Possibly in this month, possibly in June, Emerson made the following entry:

Our horizon is not far —say, one generation, or 30 years— we all see so much. The older see two generations, or 60 years; but what has been running on through three horizons, or 90 years, looks to all the world like a law of nature, & ’tis an impiety to doubt. Thus, ’tis incredible to us if we look into the sermons & religious books of our grand-fathers, how they held themselves in such a pinfold. But why not? as far as they could see, through two or three horizons, nothing but ministers, ministers, ministers. In other countries or districts, ’tis all soldiering, or sheep farms, or shoe-making, or Vermont cattle-driving.

May 7, Tuesday: On this day the legislature of the sovereign state of Tennessee, unable to sustain the thought that all men had been created equal, voted 66-25 in favor of secession from the federal union centered in Washington DC.

The Catholic Archbishop of New-York, John Hughes, pledged to a Southern co-religionist his neutrality: he IRISH would neither encourage his “Catholics to take part in” the suppression of the insurrection of the South, nor advise them “not to do so.”

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway wrote to President Abraham Lincoln offering to the federal government precisely what Conway didn’t have: military intelligence about the territory surrounding his home plantation in Virginia. (If the President forwarded this goofball offer to the War Department, someone had enough military intelligence to ignore it.)58 US CIVIL WAR [THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR MAY 7th]

58. In a curiously similar gesture, Elvis Presley would offer his services as a drug informant for the federal administration. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 26, Sunday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis departed from Montgomery for Richmond, Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

The attorney representing Maryland legislator and Southern sympathizer John Merryman, his client being held in Fort McHenry in Baltimore, obtained a writ of habeas corpus for General George Cadwallader to produce this prisoner before a federal judge. Surprise, the General instead produced an officer who attempted to inform the court that due to current unrest in the civilian population, this citizens’ right of long standing, of habeas corpus, had just been suspended in Maryland by the President of the United States of America. Had Abraham Lincoln in fact done such a thing? What Lincoln had instructed on April 27th was that this resistance in Maryland was to be overcome by “the most prompt and efficient means ... even, if necessary ... the bombardment of their cities and, in the extremest necessity, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus,” and, it goes without saying, the military, being an authoritarian structure, interpreted this as a blanket permission to do what it does most naturally. The response of Judge Roger Brooke Taney was to order that General George Cadwallader be brought before him, if necessary by force. However, when a US marshal attempted to serve this writ of attachment at Fort McHenry, the general simply refused to receive him, and the judge of course decided against forming a judicial posse to storm the fortification. Instead, the judge issued an opinion that the President of the United States of America, who to assume this office had been required to swear an oath “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” thereby lacked the authority to suspend a fundamental legal right such as habeas corpus, and he forwarded a copy of his judicial opinion to the White House. Of course, Lincoln would make no response and Merryman would remain in federal custody.59

59. What might the exact obiter dicta be? — Perhaps something like the following: “In this land of the free and home of the brave in which no person of color has any rights which any white man is bound to respect, and in which he or she may justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit, unless it is quite convenient citizens are to have no rights which their government is bound to respect.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE June 1, Saturday: Great Britain forbade either side in the US Civil War to bring prize ships into its ports.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis met Mrs. Varina Davis and his family at the station, visited the city defenses, conferred with Letcher, and delivered an address. US CIVIL WAR

Several centuries beyond Hannah Emerson Duston’s bloody act of 17th-Century race vengeance, the 1st monument in the United States commemorating the fame of a woman, a 25-foot obelisk, was erected, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Guess who!60

At some point during this month J.D. Mills would demonstrate to President Abraham Lincoln a Union Repeating Gun that someone, perhaps Edward Nugent or William Palmer, had developed. This device was mounted on wheels and had a tray of cartridges that, as the operator turned a crank, dropped into the rotating cylinder. Lincoln would in a few months on his own authority place an order for 10 such “coffee-mills” at $1,300 each. Horace Mann, Jr. responded to a long list of inquiries from his mother.

Q. XIII. Do you get the war news? A. We get a little of it, though not enough to make us very excited. Q. XIV. Do you think Mr. T. is prudent A. Yes.

60. At some point during this decade the 25-foot granite monolith which the town of Haverhill had erected upon its common in honor of its fave local ax murderer, Hannah Emerson Duston, would be repossessed by the stonecarvers and cut up into individual tombstones for resale, when subscribers got behind in their payments. New England literati wrestled over Duston’s grisly tale for centuries. Cotton Mather lauded her courageous stand against Catholic (French) inspired “idolators” and saw her deliverance as evidence of God’s mercy. Henry Thoreau, floating down the same Merrimack by which Duston had fled, thought her exploits worthier of the Dark Ages than an enlightened modern era. Haverhill native John Greenleaf Whittier cast her as an avenging angel acting in a fury of passion. And intent as always on revealing a stain in the Puritan soul, Nathaniel Hawthorne dourly offered in THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE OF USEFUL AND ENTERTAINING KNOWLEDGE, “Would that the bloody old hag had been drowned in crossing Contocook river.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE At this point I interrupt the narrative for a special mention. Henry Thoreau was interested enough to insert a drawing in his notes, of the way the cables of the ferry were slung from cliff to cliff across the Mississippi River below Fort Snelling, and how the people running the ferry hauled on tackle attached to these cables to move the ferry back and forth across the river. And Walter Harding couldn’t figure out Thoreau’s drawing so he omitted it from his published account. But I have come across a drawing made from a daguerreotype of that ferry in midstream at an unknown date, and a stereograph at the Minnesota Historical Society made of that ferry at the river side by Whitney’s Gallery in 1860, and you can just about make out from these illustrations the way they HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE had the cables of the ferry rigged to the cliffs on the river banks: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

June 3, Monday: There was fighting at Philippi / Philippi Races. US CIVIL WAR

Henry Thoreau and Horace Mann, Jr. went “To Minneapolis. Lead plant. To Lake Calhoun & Harriet.”

President Abraham Lincoln’s political rival Stephen Arnold Douglass died unexpectedly of typhoid fever or acute rheumatism in Chicago at the age of 48.

July 1, Monday: Theodore Sedgwick Fay had since 1853 been Minister Resident for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, at Berne. Upon the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, however, for political reasons, he felt he needed to resign. He would reside during his retirement at Berlin.

On this night and the following night, a maximum tail length of 118 degrees were being reported for the great comet II Tebbutt. The tail was reaching south, from the head directly below Polaris near the northern horizon, to well past the zenith of the southern skies, and was all night rotating about the pole. SKY EVENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37 Cong. 1 sess. No. 1, pp. 92, 97.

A return letter informed Giuseppe Garibaldi, in Italy, that the emancipation of the American negroes was “not the intention of the Federal Government” because “to throw at once upon that country in looseness, four millions of slaves” would create “a dreadful calamity.”61 What a singularly inappropriate letter for the US government to initiate upon the anniversary of its birth as a land of freedom! Further negotiations were entrusted to Henry Shelton Sanford and George Perkins Marsh, experienced senior diplomats — exactly as if we supposed there to remain some basis for further negotiations with a gentleman of honor such as Garibaldi.

61. In fact President Abraham Lincoln’s own attitude toward an Emancipation Proclamation was that it was, if it was anything, a mere military tactic of last resort. He would become famous in American history as “The Great Emancipator” not because of any affection for the American negro but only after the course of events had caused him to begin to muse in desperation that “Things have gone from bad to worse ... until I felt that we had played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game!” Never was a man more reluctant to do the right. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Galusha A. Grow became the only Speaker of the House of Representatives ever to be elected and take office on the 4th of July.

An artillery salute of 15 guns was fired at Camp Jackson near Pigs Point, Virginia, in honor of the 15 states that had declared or were declaring their independence from the US federal government in Washington DC.

Maria Mason Tabb Hubard wrote in her diary:

On yesterday July the 3rd heard of another shocking accident from the manufacturing of fulminating powder for percussion caps, the second death that has occurred in [from it — this is crossed out] this city from the same cause, poor young Laidley was the last victim, having an arm & his head blown off causing instant death! oh how shocking! and what a warning to all who handle any explosive, or igniting powder, and I am in constant dread of my precious Husband being injured during some of his chemical experiments.

US CIVIL WAR In Charleston, South Carolina, blockading Federal ships fired a salute at sunrise, which was answered by Confederate artillery salutes from Forts Moultrie and Sumter.

In Washington DC, 29 New York regiments passed in review before the President at the White House.

In a speech sent over from the White House to the two houses of the US Congress, President Abraham Lincoln defended himself against the accusation that by suspending the basic right of habeas corpus he had violated his oath of office “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” by inquiring whether “all the laws, but one, [are] to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He sought to justify the newly begun Civil War by the same argument that slavemasters used in the controversy over manumission without fair compensation to the slave’s “present owner,” who had “bought the slave fair and square,” for the loss of his “pecuniary investment”: “The nation purchased, with money, the countries out of which several of these [confederate] states were formed. Is it just that they shall go off without leave, and without refunding? The nation paid very large sums (in the aggregate, I believe, nearly a hundred millions) to relieve Florida of the aboriginal tribes. Is it just that she shall now be off without consent, or without making any return?”

In Baltimore citizens presented a “splendid silk national flag, regimental size,” to the 6th Massachusetts Regiment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts was celebrating this national holiday with the 1st Massachusetts Regiment at Camp Banks near Georgetown.

At the annual abolitionist picnic at Harmony Grove in Framingham, Massachusetts, , Wendell Phillips, and Stephen Symonds Foster spoke. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 57th birthday.

Manning their line outside Alexandria VA, the white boys of the 1st Minnesota ate a local delicacy, crab, and were able to witness the skyrockets and other fireworks over the national capitol, and they had a peculiar celebration of their own:

We had a grand burlesque Indian War Dance, executed in a style which would do justice to any set of savages wherever congregated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 21, Sunday: The day of the slaughter at 1st Manassas / 1st Bull Run in northern Virginia had arrived. At 2AM the First Minnesota Volunteer Regiment was ready to march into combat if such be their destiny.

The march was very tiresome, as it was a warm day and very dusty. I could form no idea of the number of soldiers, as I could not see either end of the line. The road seemed like a living river of soldiers.

By 11AM they had forded deep Bull Run creek and taken up a position on the “secesh” side of it. By noon they had passed their first corpses, killed by artillery. In the dust, lack of uniforms on both sides caused considerable confusion, and enemy units came within talking distance of one another without identifying each other as enemy. Then their world fell apart. Immediately in this engagement, Henry Taylor took a musket ball and also a bomb fragment in his left hand and wrist. There being no cover and nor order to fire, the Minnesotans all dropped down. They were so packed together that some were lying on top of others. The regimental colors were saved by a soldier who ripped them off their damaged staff and wrapped them around his body, and by count after the engagement, that piece of significant cloth had received “one cannon ball, two grape shots and sixteen bullets,” in addition to the shot that had shattered the flagstaff. When they received their battle order, it was to “retreat firing.”

Then there was a lull, and the men of the First Minnesota assumed that the battle was over and that they had won. They went shopping among the corpses, with Confederate revolvers being very highly prized as souvenirs. The rebel yells took them completely by surprise.

[I]t was then “Skiddoo,” every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. There was nothing else to do but to get up and git out of the way; we could do nothing; it was an utter impossibility to restore order.

There would be in all about 5,000 casualties among the men who gathered on that day near that creek: 847 were killed, 2,706 injured, 1,325 missing. This would make President Abraham Lincoln aware that the civil war might be a long one. Jefferson Davis took a train to Manassas, arriving after the battle. He toured the grounds, addressed troops, and telegraphed news to Richmond. Joseph E. Davis and family arrived in Richmond, Virginia for a visit. US CIVIL WAR

Kady Southwell Brownell was marching with the troops from Rhode Island and carrying a flag. Her company was deployed along the edge of a pine woods near a schoolhouse that quickly became a hospital after, at about 1:00PM, they came under fire. She became separated from her Robert, but stood on the line of battle in pants and knee-length skirt, holding the flag. About 4:00 PM, when the Confederates began to advance and what had been appearing to be a Union victory was somehow transforming itself into a confused and panic-stricken rout, her company, rather than rallying to the flag, along with the rest began a retreat toward Centreville. Seeing her standing there unarmed on the battlefield clutching her flag standard, a Pennsylvania soldier took her hand to lead her down the slope but he was then struck in the head by a cannonball. Kady herself was struck in the leg by a bullet or piece of shrapnel. Upon this Kady limped toward the woods and tried to hide inside an ambulance. Bullets came whizzing through the canvas of the sides, so Private Napoleon Wilson of the 2nd HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Rhode Island Infantry offered her a ride on a horse that he had found wandering loose. He would report that they both rode this horse some 60 miles, into Centreville, and from there into Arlington Heights, where after about 30 hours she came upon Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside, who helped her become reunited with her Robert.

For centuries past, noble minds have regarded the power of oppressors as constituting a usurpation pure and simple, which one had to try to oppose either by simply expressing a radical disapproval of it, or else by armed force placed at the service of justice. In either case, failure has always been complete.

As the bloodied Union troops retreated in disorder from Centreville toward the District of Columbia, the Confederate troops did not follow.

It was the hardest days work I ever expect to do. We marched 12 miles from Centreville to the Battle ground, fought over 2 hours hard fighting & then retreated to Alexandria 42 miles doing all inside 31 hours and only 2 hours sleep during the time & going without food for 24 hours having thrown off our rations before going onto the field of action.

Who should greet the remnants of the First Minnesota, minus 49 killed, 107 wounded, and 34 missing (most of them the abandoned wounded) for total losses of some 1 in 5, as it trudged back into Washington, but their congressman Cyrus Aldrich, again with his welcome troop of colored servants bearing hot coffee and sandwiches. One “Minnesotian” soldier opinioned that the whole episode could have been handled much better than it had been handled:

If we had been properly supported we would have gained the victory.

Another “Minnesotian” opinioned that their defeat was all due to the “unfair way of fighting” employed by sesesh forces: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It is reported or rumored rather that the enemy burnt the Hospital & killed the wounded in the field. I believe it. They are a set of barbarians at the Best.

Another “Minnesotian” opinioned that the whole thing was the fault of their CO, who had caused them to lose confidence:

I have heard as many as one hundred swear they will never go into another battle under him, they say they will desert first.

Colonel Willis Arnold Gorman was having a very bad press, or a bad hair day or something:

There is men in the Reg that hate him to shoot him as quick as looked at him he is an old tyrant … if there is any little thing goes rong he will throw down his cap and curse and sware like a trooper & it is a shame the way such an old man should sware so and when our Reg was coming down the river he got as drunk as a fool and hardly could stand up.

But about the final word was offered by a man who wrote to his newspaper back home:

I felt very different in battle than I expected. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

“Specimen Days” BATTLE OF BULL RUN, JULY, 1861 All this sort of feeling was destin’d to be arrested and revers’d by a terrible shock — the battle of first Bull Run — certainly, as we now know it, one of the most singular fights on record. (All battles, and their results, are far more matters of accident than is generally thought; but this was throughout a casualty, a chance. Each side supposed it had won, till the last moment. One had, in point of fact, just the same right to be routed as the other. By a fiction, or series of fictions, the national forces at the last moment exploded in a panic and fled from the field.) The defeated troops commenced pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge at daylight on Monday, 22d — day drizzling all through with rain. The Saturday and Sunday of the battle (20th, 21st,) had been parch’d and hot to an extreme — the dust, the grime and smoke, in layers, sweated in, follow’d by other layers again sweated in, absorb’d by those excited souls — their clothes all saturated with the clay-powder filling the air — stirr’d up everywhere on the dry roads and trodden fields by the regiments, swarming wagons, artillery, &c. — all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge — a horrible march of twenty miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck. Where are the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you went forth? Where are your banners, and your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing — and there isn’t a flag but clings ashamed and lank to its staff. The sun rises, but shines not. The men appear, at first sparsely and shame-faced enough, then thicker, in the streets of Washington — appear in Pennsylvania avenue, and on the steps and basement entrances. They come along in disorderly mobs, some in squads, stragglers, companies. Occasionally, a [Page 709] rare regiment, in perfect order, with its officers (some gaps, dead, the true braves,) marching in silence, with lowering faces, stern, weary to sinking, all black and dirty, but every man with his musket, and stepping alive; but these are the exceptions. Sidewalks of Pennsylvania avenue, Fourteenth street, &c., crowded, jamm’d with citizens, darkies, clerks, everybody, lookers-on; women in the windows, curious expressions from faces, as those swarms of dirt-cover’d return’d soldiers there (will they never end?) move by; but nothing said, no comments; (half our lookers- on secesh of the most venomous kind — they say nothing; but the devil snickers in their faces.) During the forenoon Washington gets all over motley with these defeated soldiers — queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench’d (the steady rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully worn, hungry, haggard, blister’d in the feet. Good people (but not over-many of them either,) hurry up something for their grub. They put wash-kettles on the fire, for soup, for coffee. They set tables on the side-walks — wag-on-loads of bread are purchas’d, swiftly cut in stout chunks. Here are two aged ladies, beautiful, the first in the city for culture and charm, they stand with store of eating and drink at an improvis’d table of rough plank, and give food, and have the store replenish’d from their house every half- hour all that day; and there in the rain they stand, active, silent, white-hair’d, and give food, though the tears stream down their cheeks, almost without intermission, the whole time. Amid the deep excitement, crowds and motion, and desperate eagerness, it seems strange to see many, very many, of the soldiers sleeping — in the midst of all, sleeping sound. They drop down anywhere, on the steps of houses, up close by the basements or fences, on the sidewalk, aside on some vacant lot, and deeply sleep. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

“Specimen Days”

BATTLE OF BULL RUN, JULY, 1861 [CONCLUDED] A poor seventeen or eighteen year old boy lies there, on the stoop of a grand house; he sleeps so calmly, so profoundly. Some clutch their muskets firmly even in sleep. Some in squads; comrades, brothers, close together — and on them, as they lay, sulkily drips the rain. As afternoon pass’d, and evening came, the streets, the bar-rooms, knots everywhere, listeners, questioners, terrible yarns, bugaboo, mask’d batteries, our regiment all cut up, &c. — stories and story-tellers, windy, bragging, vain centres of street-crowds. [Page 710] Resolution, manliness, seem to have abandon’d Washington. The principal hotel, Willard’s, is full of shoulder-straps — thick, crush’d, creeping with shoulder-straps. (I see them, and must have a word with them. There you are, shoulder-straps! — but where are your companies? where are your men? Incompetents! never tell me of chances of battle, of getting stray’d, and the like. I think this is your work, this retreat, after all. Sneak, blow, put on airs there in Willard’s sumptuous parlors and bar-rooms, or anywhere — no explanation shall save you. Bull Run is your work; had you been half or one-tenth worthy your men, this would never have happen’d.) Meantime, in Washington, among the great persons and their entourage, a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying disappointment. The worst is not only imminent, but already here. In a few hours — perhaps before the next meal — the secesh generals, with their victorious hordes, will be upon us. The dream of humanity, the vaunted Union we thought so strong, so impregnable — lo! it seems already smash’d like a china plate. One bitter, bitter hour — perhaps proud America will never again know such an hour. She must pack and fly — no time to spare. Those white palaces — the dome-crown’d capitol there on the hill, so stately over the trees — shall they be left — or destroy’d first? For it is certain that the talk among certain of the magnates and officers and clerks and officials everywhere, for twenty-four hours in and around Washington after Bull Run, was loud and undisguised for yielding out and out, and substituting the southern rule, and Lincoln promptly abdicating and departing. If the secesh officers and forces had immediately follow’d, and by a bold Napoleonic movement had enter’d Washington the first day, (or even the second,) they could have had things their own way, and a powerful faction north to back them. One of our returning colonels express’d in public that night, amid a swarm of officers and gentlemen in a crowded room, the opinion that it was useless to fight, that the southerners had made their title clear, and that the best course for the national government to pursue was to desist from any further attempt at stopping them, and admit them again to the lead, on the best terms they were willing to [Page 711] grant. Not a voice was rais’d against this judgment, amid that large crowd of officers and gentlemen. (The fact is, the hour was one of the three or four of those crises we had then and afterward, during the fluctuations of four years, when human eyes appear’d at least just as likely to see the last breath of the Union as to see it continue.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Maria Mason Tabb Hubard wrote in her diary:

God grant them strength to utterly rout and drive the vile hordes of the tyrants Lincoln & Scott from our soil forever.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July 27, Saturday: Secretary of State W.H. Seward formally offered a commission to Giuseppe Garibaldi as a two-star

major general, a post which could only be confirmed by President Abraham Lincoln himself. A thousand pounds sterling had been set aside for the hero’s initial “expenses.” Hey, manly Italian guy, we know you’re just in this killing-people stuff for the bucks! HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE President Abraham Lincoln appointed George B. McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac. “Specimen Days”

THE STUPOR PASSES — SOMETHING ELSE BEGINS But the hour, the day, the night pass’d, and whatever returns, an hour, a day, a night like that can never again return. The President, recovering himself, begins that very night — sternly, rapidly sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in positions for future and surer work. If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall — indeed a day — that it did not conquer him — that he unflinchingly stemm’d it, and resolv’d to lift himself and the Union out of it. Then the great New York papers at once appear’d, (commencing that evening, and following it up the next morning, and incessantly through many days afterwards,) with leaders that rang out over the land with the loudest, most reverberating ring of clearest bugles, full of encouragement, hope, inspiration, unfaltering defiance. Those magnificent editorials! they never flagg’d for a fortnight. The “Herald” commenced them — I remember the articles well. The “Tribune” was equally cogent and inspiriting — and the “Times,” “Evening Post,” and other principal papers, were not a whit behind. They came in good time, for they were needed. For in the humiliation of Bull Run, the popular feeling north, from its extreme of superciliousness, recoil’d to the depth of gloom and apprehension. (Of all the days of the war, there are two especially I can never forget. Those were the day following the news, in New York and Brooklyn, of that first Bull Run defeat, and the day of Abraham Lincoln’s death. I was home in Brooklyn on both occasions. The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfast — and other [Page 712] meals afterward — as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass’d them silently to each other.)

Maria Mason Tabb Hubard wrote in her diary:

William cast his third Brass Cannon! Ella, Emmy Crump & myself were present and witnessed the process, though very interesting, it did not compare with the Statue casting in the afternoon.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 6, Tuesday: Finally, Brevetted Lieutenant-Colonel James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was made a full Lieutenant-Colonel of the Topographical Engineers.

President Abraham Lincoln signed a law freeing slaves being used by the Confederates in their war effort. US CIVIL WAR

August 12, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln issued a Proclamation of a National Day of Fasting. US CIVIL WAR

August 30, Friday: Barclay Coppoc, who had escaped from Harpers Ferry to become a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment of the 3d Kansas Infantry, died when a train out of Leavenworth plunged from a 40- foot trestle over the Platte River, the supports of which had been burned by Confederate guerrillas.

General John Charles Frémont declared martial law throughout Missouri without authorization from Washington DC and ordered the expropriation of property belonging to secessionists, including their slaves, prematurely freeing the slaves of Missouri, mistaking the political objectives of the civil war and quite exceeding his authority and, incidentally, setting himself up as very feasible alternative wartime presidential material for the next national election. This, one might suspect, would transform a sitting president who intended to run for re-election, such as Abraham Lincoln, into something of a political enemy (or, wouldn’t it? — it would nowadays, and maybe things were pretty much the same back then). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Lieutenant-Colonel James Duncan Graham was appointed as Superintendent of the United States Lake Survey and Lighthouse Engineer of the 10th and 11th Districts (covering the Great Lakes except for Lake Champ1ain).

September 11, Wednesday: President Abraham Lincoln revoked General John Charles Frémont’s unauthorized military proclamation of emancipation in Missouri. US CIVIL WAR

September 12, Thursday: Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency toward self- abandonment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one’s self, toward laying down one’s own personality, and losing — dissolving — one’s self in love and contemplation. What I lack above all things is character, will, individuality. But, as always happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of the reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and deepest aspiration. I whose whole being — heart and intellect — thirsts to absorb itself in reality, in its neighbor man, in nature and in God, I, whom solitude devours and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for myself. Pride and delicacy of soul, timidity of heart, have made me thus do violence to all my instincts and invert the natural order of my life. It is not astonishing that I should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired to be. ”Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et déraison; J’ai l’effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.” It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret instinct and power of death in us, which labors continually for the destruction of all that seeks to be, to take form, to exist; it is the passion for destruction, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE tendency toward suicide, identifying itself with the instinct of self-preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere variation of the antipathy to moral light and regenerative truth? Does not sin also create a thirst for death, a growing passion for what does harm? Discouragement has been my sin. Discouragement is an act of unbelief. Growing weakness has been the consequence of it; the principle of death in me and the influence of the Prince of Darkness have waxed stronger together. My will in abdicating has yielded up the scepter to instinct; and as the corruption of the best results in what is worst, love of the ideal, tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to a state in which I shrink from hope and crave for annihilation. Action is my cross.”

There would be fighting at Cheat Mountain Summit from this day into the 15th. US CIVIL WAR

October: As the very 1st machine-gun procurement ever, without consulting anyone President Abraham Lincoln authorized $1,300 each for a lot of 10 “coffee-mills” (Union Repeating Guns). –He was hoping, of course, to make the world safe for democracy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE October: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s THE REJECTED STONE: OR, INSURRECTION VS. RESURRECTION IN AMERICA. BY A NATIVE OF VIRGINIA.62 THE REJECTED STONE

The book praised President Abraham Lincoln as an abolitionist, prematurely it would turn out. (When the President would remove General John Charles Frémont for insolently setting free some slaves in Missouri, the author would feel betrayed and become enraged — but this book had already been through the presses.)

62. Moncure Daniel Conway. THE REJECTED STONE: OR, INSURRECTION & RESURRECTION IN AMERICA. BY A NATIVE OF VIRGINIA. 8vo, pp. 181. Boston: Walker, Wise & Company, 1861. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE October 21, Monday: At 6PM Franz Liszt and Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein took communion at the church of San Carlo in Rome where they intended to get married on the following day, Liszt’s 50th birthday. They dined together in her apartment. At 11PM a messenger from Cardinal Antonelli, papal secretary of state, brought news that Carolyne’s family have declared her marriage to Liszt illegal, charging that she had lied in obtaining her original annulment from Prince Nicholas Wittgenstein. She had said that she was forced to marry, which the family claimed was untrue. Pope Pius IX had agreed to review the case. The wedding would never take place.

There was fighting at Camp Wildcat / Wildcat Mountain, and also at Fredericktown. Confederate troops defeated Federals at Ball’s Bluff near Leesburg, Virginia, where Colonel Edward Dickinson Baker was shot repeatedly with a revolver, including one ball directly to the head.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE October 24, Thursday: President Abraham Lincoln relieved General John Charles Frémont of his command, replacing him with General David Hunter. US CIVIL WAR

October 25, Friday: There was fighting at Springfield / Zagonyi’s Charge. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson was granted authority to recruit and command a regiment of Massachusetts white men.

Julia Ward Howe had gone to Washington DC with a group including the Reverend James Freeman Clarke to HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE bring supplies to Massachusetts volunteers, and was staying in Willard’s Hotel.

One morning she drowsed awake with a poem in her head, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” that could be set to the tune of the currently popular “John Brown’s Body,” and scribbled it with an “old stump of a pen” onto the back of a piece of Sanitary Commission stationery “without looking at the paper.” US CIVIL WAR

As I lay waiting for dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;63 They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps. I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel; 63. The “hundred circling camps” were just that — the ring of forts around Washington DC. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “As ye deal with my condemners, so with you my grace shall deal.” Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel, Since god is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgement seat. O be swift, my soul, to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our god is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free While god is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave; He is wisdom to the mighty, he is courage to the brave. So the world shall be his foot stool and the soul of wrong his slave, As god is marching on!64 Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

Samuel Langhorn Clemens, steamboat pilot, had been stranded in New Orleans because the Civil War had interdicted traffic on the Mississippi River, and had enlisted in the Confederacy. However, his brother Orion Clemens had been active in the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln and in reward had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. –So he accompanied his brother on a 21-day stagecoach journey to the west, arriving finally in Nevada.

There is one thing which I can’t stand and won’t stand, from many people. That is sham sentimentality..., the rot that deals in the “happy days of yore,” the “sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams.”

Frederick Douglass renewed his linkages with the Garrisonians.

64. This rarely-published sixth verse is presented as it appears in BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 1, Friday: President Abraham Lincoln appointed General George B. McClellan as general in chief of all the Union armies after the resignation of General Winfield Scott. US CIVIL WAR

November 7, Thursday: There was fighting at Belmont.

Friend John Greenleaf Whittier of Amesbury MA wrote to James M. Stone to inform him that he would be unable to attend a meeting. He criticized the present administration.

The British mail steamer Trent exited Havana harbor bound for Southampton, England, with Confederate emissaries James Mason and Slidell aboard. Unfortunately, during their dilatory 3-week layover in this Cuban port, US federal agents had learned of their plans and had dispatched the USS San Jacinto to intercept them on the high seas.

The crippled Senator Charles Sumner stopped by Concord and visited the Emerson home.

December 2, Monday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37 Cong. 2 sess. Vol. III. pt. 1, No. 1, pt. 3, pp. 11, 21.

As indicated on the following screens, subject to President Abraham Lincoln’s approval, which he would give on December 12th, the US Congress purchased, for an agreed price, from their owners, and manumitted, all slaves present in the District of Columbia: [see following screens]

December 3, Tuesday: President Abraham Lincoln’s message to the : The execution of the laws for the suppression of the African slave trade has been confided to the Department of the Interior. It is a subject of gratulation that the efforts which have been made for the suppression of this inhuman traffic have been recently attended with unusual success. Five vessels being fitted out for the slave trade have been seized and condemned. Two mates of vessels engaged in the trade, and one person in equipping a vessel as a slaver, have been convicted and subjected to the penalty of fine and imprisonment, and one captain, taken with a cargo of Africans on board his vessel, has been convicted of the highest grade of offence under our laws, the punishment of which is death (SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37th Congress, 2d session, I, No. 1, page 13). NATHANIEL GORDON HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 12, Thursday: President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill pardoning and compensating the slaveholders of the District of Columbia for their crimes (of course, the bill was not so described):

MANUMISSION EMANCIPATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1862

Ephraim George Squier had been politically helpful, and as his reward President Abraham Lincoln sent him to Peru as United States Commissioner, a diplomatic assignment that would enable him to study the native ruins of Central America (things were so different then than now).

Frederick Douglass commented that Martin Robison Delany “has gone about the same length in favor of black, as the whites have in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.” Underlying this may have been an attempt by Delany to privilege himself in the identity politics of the era as an all-black man capable of speaking on behalf of the race, in contradistinction to that Douglass fellow who was only part black and was therefore not entirely to be trusted, not entirely to be considered representative, matched by an attempt by Douglass to privilege himself in those identity politics by instancing that he had had experience of slavery, of which Delany had had none. Who then would be the more representative leader for American blacks, the man who had had experience of slavery or the man who was entirely black? The sovereignty of Liberia, which had become an independent nation as of 1847 with the cutting of the American purse-strings, was belatedly recognized by the US government. But President Abraham Lincoln was considering closer ports, such as some in South America, to which American free blacks might be exiled at a somewhat lower transport expense. At this point Delany’s African colonization plans collapsed and he switched over to recruiting black men for service with the Union Army. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The last class was graduated from Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Emily Grimké Weld’s Eagleswood School of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. This school had since 1854 been open to the children of white townspeople as well as to the children of members of the Union. Whether one could at any time have termed it a “Quaker” school is problematic. What is not problematic is that it had taken physical education for girls seriously, something of an innovation for the time. (Although Marcus Spring, the founder of the Raritan Bay Union, had married Friend Rebecca Buffum, daughter of the very prominent Rhode Island Quaker Arnold Buffum, the extent to which he ever embraced the culture of the Friends is not clear. Almost immediately Spring would re-purpose the physical plant of this school as an all-male as well as all-white “Eagleswood Military Academy, with both a literary and military faculty.” Spring’s academy would close after the civil war was over, around 1867, after which the facilities in question would no longer function as a school of any sort.)

Many white Americans were ambivalent about this recruitment of black Americans to fight. Such racist ambivalence is well reflected in a work by W.E. Woodward entitled MEET GENERAL GRANT, published in a much later timeframe (NY: H. Liveright, 1928), which would attempt to deny that such events ever in fact had occurred: The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own.... [The civil war] was not their business.... They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule.65

January 17, Friday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

Old Age As we live longer, it looks as if our company were picked out to die first, & we live on in a lessening minority.... I am threatened by the decays of Henry T.

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway delivered “The Golden Hour” at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and then he and the Reverend William Henry Channing walked over to the White House and met with President Abraham Lincoln. Channing was talking up the practicalities of reimbursement for emancipation, and other such real-world accommodations, and the President was responding to that, which perplexed a Conway who had only one arrow in his quiver, could only orate about absolutist principles.

Concerto for piano and orchestra no.1 op.17 by Camille Saint-Saëns was performed for the initial time, in Salle Pleyel, Paris, with the composer himself at the keyboard.

At the American Embassy in Havana, Louis Moreau Gottschalk formally renounced allegiance to his home state of Louisiana and declared fidelity to the United States of America, after which he boarded ship for New- York. 65. In point of fact, a promise would be made by our federal government, that each former slave, in partial compensation for his or her unreimbursed labors while in the condition of enslavement, would receive starting-out help in the form of 40 acres and a mule. –In point of fact, however, our federal government does not ever honor such commitments to minority populations as from time to time it sees fit to dissemble that it is making. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 27, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln issued General War Order No. 1 calling for the Union to launch a unified aggressive action against the Confederacy on February 22d (General McClellan would ignore this order). US CIVIL WAR

In the federal Senate: “Agreeably to notice Mr. Wilson, of Massachusetts, asked and obtained leave to bring in a bill (Senate, No. 173), for the more effectual suppression of the slave trade.” Read twice, and referred to Committee on the Judiciary; February 11, 1863, reported adversely, and postponed indefinitely. SENATE JOURNAL, 37th Congress, 2d session, page 143; 37th Congress, 3d session, pages 231-2. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE January 31, Friday: At his lecture in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Waldo Emerson chastised the Lincoln administration for its half-hearted prosecution of civil war. He asserted that emancipation was the demand of civilization and that objections to this principle were nothing but intrigue. As Lincoln groped for principles to unite the nation, Emerson noted, the Union war effort limped along. He stated that emancipation with compensation to loyal citizens would revitalize American patriotism. Emerson reasoned that the relentless logic of civil war would compel emancipation despite the efforts of generals and politicians to prevent it. If fought on high moral principles, he believed that civil war would heal a deeper wound than it made. He would be paid $84.00 for this:

At Washington, 31 January, 1 Feb, 2d, & 3d, saw Charles Sumner, who on the 2d, carried me to Mr Chase, Mr Bates, Mr Stanton, Mr Welles, Mr William Henry Seward, Lord Lyons, and President Abraham Lincoln. The President impressed me more favorably than I had hoped. A frank, sincere, well-meaning man, with a lawyer’s habit of mind, good clear statement of his fact, correct enough, not vulgar, as described; but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness, or that kind of sincerity & jolly good meaning that our class meetings on Commencement Days show, in telling our old stories over. When he has made his remark, he looks up at you with great satisfaction, & shows all his white teeth, & laughs. He argued to Sumner the whole case of gordon, the slave- trader, point by point, and added that he was not quite satisfied yet, & meant to refresh his memory by looking again at the evidence. All this showed a fidelity & conscientiousness very honorable to him. When I was introduced to him, he said, “O Mr Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture, that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air & manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’" Mr Seward received us in his dingy State Department.... He began, “Yes I know Mr Emerson. The President said yesterday, when I was going to tell him a story, ‘Well, Seward, don’t let it be smutty.’ And I remember when a witness was asked in court, ‘Do you know this man?’ ‘Yes, I know him.’ — ‘How do you know him?’ ‘Why I know him. I can’t say I have carnal knowledge of him, &c.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Our Perennial Quest to Do Harm So Good Will Come

Extermination of the Pequot Tribe 1634-1637 “King Phillip’s” Race War 1675-1676 The 1812-1815 The Revolution of the Texians 1835-1836 War on Mejico 1846-1848 Race War in the Wild West 1862-1863 The War for the Union 1862-1865 War to End War 1916-1919 Stopping Hitler 1940-1945 The Korean Police Action 1950-1953 Helping South Vietnam be Free 1959-1975 Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 yada xxxx yada yada xxxx yada yada yada xxxx HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

We should notice that this high moral ground of emancipation of the American slaves would become operative toward the middle of our bloody Civil War not because it would be an improvement in the lives of the black Americans but because the ostensive, apparent seizing of such a high moral ground would provide legitimacy for the sectional bloodshed that had already been taking place. There is an exact parallel for this, and this exact parallel to be found in the “W” administration’s belated repurposing of the 2d Iraq War in 2003, after the unfortunate fact that no Weapons of Mass Destruction at all had been found. In proof of that exact parallel, I will include here an OpEd article “Presidents Remade by War” by Thomas L. Friedman, that appeared in the New York Times for December 7, 2003: Anyone who has listened to President Bush’s recent speeches about the need to promote democracy in the Arab-Muslim world can’t but walk away both impressed and dubious — impressed because promoting democracy in the Arab world is something no president before has advocated with Mr. Bush’s vigor, and dubious because this sort of nation-building is precisely what Mr. Bush spurned throughout his campaign. Where did Mr. Bush’s passion for making the Arab world safe for democracy come from? Though the president mentioned this theme before the war, it was not something he stressed with the public, Congress or the U.N. in justifying an Iraq invasion. Rather, he relied primarily on the urgent need to pre-emptively strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. A cynic might say that Mr. Bush was always interested only in stripping Iraq of its W.M.D. But with no W.M.D. having been unearthed thus far in Iraq, and with the costs of the war in lives and dollars soaring, the president felt he needed a new rationale. And so he focused on the democratization argument. But there is another explanation, one that is not incompatible with the first but is less overtly cynical. It is a story about war and events and how they can transform a president. “It often happens,” argues Michael Sandel, the Harvard political theorist, “that presidents, under the pressure of events, especially during war, find themselves needing to articulate new and more persuasive rationales for their policies — especially when great sacrifices are involved. This happened to Lincoln during the Civil War. At the outset, the purpose of the Civil War for Lincoln was to oppose secession and preserve the Union. It was really only after the battle at Gettysburg that Lincoln articulated a larger purpose for the Civil War — namely freedom and the elimination of slavery. Henceforth, the Civil War was not only to preserve the Union, but to bring about the promise of the Declaration of Independence — written four score and seven years earlier.” As Lincoln insisted in his Gettysburg Address (while dedicating the cemetery at Gettysburg), “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” In Lincoln’s case the rationale for the war shifted, not because he couldn’t find any W.M.D. in Dixie, but rather, argues Mr. Sandel, “because of the enormity of the sacrifice that the war was requiring. It no longer made moral sense that this great sacrifice could just be about keeping these states together, could just be about a HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE political structure. It had to be about a bigger purpose and that was freedom and equality.” Woodrow Wilson went through a similar transformation, notes Mr. Sandel. He campaigned for re-election in 1916 boasting of having kept the country out of Europe’s messy war. But by April 2, 1917, Mr. Wilson was standing before a joint session of Congress, seeking a declaration of war against Germany and insisting that the world “must be made safe for democracy.” The irony, notes Mr. Sandel, is that Mr. Bush’s decision to emphasize the democracy rationale puts him in the company of Wilson, the president who made liberal internationalism the core of his foreign policy. “Indeed,” he adds, “President Bush, who campaigned for the presidency as an ardent realist, scorning nation-building and idealism in foreign policy, is now quoting President Wilson and speaking about the need to make the Middle East safe for democracy. It shows how the burden of the office and the power of events can transform presidents.” Personally, I’m partial to Mr. Bush’s new emphasis on the freedom and democracy argument, which for me was the only compelling rationale for the Iraq war. The question is how deeply Mr. Bush has internalized this democracy agenda, which is going to be a long, costly enterprise, and to what extent he can persuade Americans to stick with it. If you listen to him speak about it, it seems heartfelt, almost a religious conviction. But the fact is, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address himself. Mr. Bush’s democracy speeches were written for him. Only the future will tell us whether his attachment to this issue is the product of epiphany or expediency — or both.

Bush postures with a prop HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 1, Saturday: Johann Rudolf Thorbecke replaced Julius Philipp Jacob Adriaan, Count van Zuylen van Nijevelt as chief minister of the Netherlands.

Sicily was formally integrated into Italy.

On this day and the following one Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts would be escorting Waldo Emerson into important offices in the federal capitol Washington DC, such as the President and various members of his cabinet. Emerson was impressed with President Lincoln. Secretary of State William Henry HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Seward invited Emerson to attend his Episcopalian church and then dine with him that Sunday.

1 The next morning, at 10 /4, I visited Mr William Henry Seward, in his library, who was writing, surrounded by his secretary & some stock brokers…. We went to Church. I told him “I hoped he would not demoralize me; I was not much accustomed to churches, but trusted he would carry me to a safe place.” He said, he attended rev. Dr Pyne’s Church. On the way, we mat Gov. Fish, who was also to go with him. Miss Seward, to whom I had been presented, accompanied us. I was a little aukward [sic] in finding my place in the Common Prayer Book, & Mr Seward was obliged in guiding me, from time to time. But I had the old wonder come over me at the Egyptian stationariness of the English church. The hopeless blind antiquity of life & thought — indicated alike by prayers & creed & sermon — was wonderful to see, & amid worshippers [sic] & in times like these. There was something exceptional too in the Doctor’s sermon. His church was all made up of secessioners; he had remained loyal, they had all left him, & abused him in the papers: And in the sermon he represented his griefs, & preached Jacobitish passive obedience to powers that be, as his defence. In going out, Mr S. praised the sermon. I said that the Doctor did not seem to have read the Gospel according to San Francisco, or the Epistle to the Californians; he had not got quite down into these noisy times. Mr S said, “Will you go & call on the President? I usually call on him at this hour.” Of course, I was glad to go. We found in the President’s chamber his two little sons — boys of 7 & 8 years perhaps — whom the barber was dressing & “whiskeying their hair,” as he said, not much to the apparent contentment of the boys, when the cologne got into their eyes. The eldest boy immediately told Mr Seward, “he could not guess what they had got.” Mr Seward “bet a quarter of a dollar that he could. — Was it a rabbit? was it a bird? was it a pig?” he guessed always wrong, & paid his quarter to the youngest, before the eldest declared it was a rabbit. But he sent away the mulatto to find the President, & the boys disappeared. The President came, and Mr Seward said, “You have not been to Church today.” “No,” he said, “and, if he must make a frank confession, he had been reading for the first time Mr Sumner’s speech (on the Trent affair).”… Mr Seward told the President somewhat of Dr Pyne’s sermon, & the President said, he intended to show his respect for him some time by going to hear him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 3, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln wrote a message to McClellan on a difference of opinion regarding military plans.

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “Self-criticism is the corrosive of all oratorical or literary spontaneity. The thirst to know turned upon the self is punished, like the curiosity of Psyche, by the flight of the thing desired. Force should remain a mystery to itself; as soon as it tries to penetrate its own secret it vanishes away. The hen with the golden eggs becomes unfruitful as soon as she tries to find out why her eggs are golden. The consciousness of consciousness is the term and end of analysis. True, but analysis pushed to extremity devours itself, like the Egyptian serpent. We must give it some external matter to crush and dissolve if we wish to prevent its destruction by its action upon itself. “We are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves,” said Goethe, “turned outward, and working upon the world which surrounds us.” Outward radiation constitutes health; a too continuous concentration upon what is within brings us back to vacuity and blank. It is better that life should dilate and extend itself in ever-widening circles, than that it should be perpetually diminished and compressed by solitary contraction. Warmth tends to make a globe out of an atom; cold, to reduce a globe to the dimensions of an atom. Analysis has been to me self-annulling, self-destroying.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 4, Tuesday: Colonnen op.262, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal of Vienna.

President Abraham Lincoln denied the request of Captain Nathaniel Gordon that he be spared the penalty of death for his participation in the international slave trade: “It becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that, relinquishing all expectation of pardon by Human Authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the Common God and Father of all men.”

The president did, however, extend the date of the hanging from February 7th to February 21st to give the condemned man more of an opportunity to prepare himself.66

66. Presumably Lincoln turned down the appeal for a presidential pardon (something that had in each and every prior case for many decades been almost automatically granted) for two reasons. First, since the southerner politicians had all abandoned Washington DC, there were no longer any federal officials with whom he needed to bargain. Second, this president wanted a White America and no affection for any person of color. He wanted for “us” to be rid of “our” Negro Problem once and for all, hopefully by finding a way to afford to deport all black Americans to Haiti or Madagascar or Panama or Guyana or Belize — anyplace that was so far from here that there would be no coming back. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 7, Friday: The date set by the court for the hanging of Captain Nathaniel Gordon came and went because President Abraham Lincoln, in the unprecedented act of denying the appeal for a presidential pardon of an American convicted of engaging in the international slave trade, had granted this Maine businessman an additional couple of weeks to prepare himself to meet his Maker.67

On this day and the following day there was fighting at Roanoke Island / Fort Huger. US CIVIL WAR

67. Presumably Lincoln turned down the appeal for a presidential pardon (something that had in each and every prior case for many decades been almost automatically granted) for two reasons. First, since the southerner politicians had all abandoned Washington DC, there were no longer any federal officials with whom he needed to bargain. Second, this president wanted a White America and no affection for any person of color. He wanted for “us” to be rid of “our” Negro Problem once and for all, hopefully by finding a way to afford to deport all black Americans to Haiti or Madagascar or Panama or Guyana or Belize — anyplace that was so far from here that there would be no coming back. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February 20, Thursday: President Abraham Lincoln’s 12-year-old Willie died. The president’s wife was devastated and would not fully recover.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis met with J.E. Johnston. US CIVIL WAR

In the Tombs prison in New-York the condemned Nathaniel Gordon was taken to a new cell, stripped and carefully searched, and his clothing changed entirely. He was, however, allowed to retain some cigars, and was smoking copiously.68

Cover letter to Ticknor & Fields from Henry Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau, over “AUTUMNAL TINTS”, mentioning

68. And this businessman had many friends outside the prison, and one of them had found a way to slip him a cigar contaminated with strychnine, that he might use to cheat the hangman. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE leaf still to be sent:

Concord Feb 20.th 1862 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I send you herewith, the paper called Autumnal Tints. I see that it will have to be divided, & I would prefer that the first portion terminate with page 42, in order that it may make the more impression. The rest I think will take care of itself. I may as well say now that on pages 55-6-7-8 I have described the Scarlet Oak leaf very minutely. In my lecturing I have always carried a very large & handsome one displayed on a white ground, which did me great service with the audience. Now if you will read those pages, I think that you will see the advantage of having a simple outline engraving of this leaf & also of the White Oak leaf on the opposite page, that the readers may the better appreciate my words— I will supply the leaves to be copied when the time comes. When you answer the questions in my last note, please let me know about how soon this article will be published. Yours respectfully, Henry D. Thoreau. by S.E. Thoreau.

February 21, Friday: Captain Nathaniel Gordon had asked President Abraham Lincoln to commute his death sentence for having been caught slavetrading off the coast of Africa, but the president, although he had allowed the convicted slaver about two weeks to put his affairs in order, had refused on February 4th to commute the sentence. On this date, at about 3AM, the keepers of the prisoner noticed that their charge had suddenly been seized by convulsions. At first they imagined that he was trying to strangle himself, but when the prison physician Dr. Simmons was summoned, and stimulants administered, it became clear that he had taken some sort of poison. His body was becoming rigid and his pulse could barely be felt. Drs. James R. Wood and Hodgman appeared, and by means of brandy and the use of a stomach-pump, they were able to resuscitate the captain to the point at which he was able to speak. He asked that a lock of his hair and a ring from his hand be sent to his beloved wife, and the guards promised that they would comply with this request. The doctors surmised that the poison he had taken had probably been strychnine, administered by means of one of the cigars that he had been allowed to smoke so copiously the night before.

Although the hanging had been scheduled for 2:30PM, due to prisoner’s condition it was rescheduled for noon. When informed of this, the prisoner protested that he was supposing he had two more hours to live. By this point, however, he had been plied with so much clear whiskey by the attending physicians, that he could barely stand. Placed in a chair to be carried to the gallows with the black sack on the top of his head like a cap, he finally was able to ambulate toward the courtyard of the Tombs prison69 with the assistance of the marshals. They escorted the seacaptain to a very special gallows known as the “upright jerker,” set up in the courtyard at ground level. There was to be no platform and no drop. Instead, an experimental arrangement of counterweights and pulleys had been arranged, which in the illustration below you can see in the wooden box at the end of the horizontal beam. The idea was to spare any pain to this very special American businessman 69. This prison was a curious location for such an event, as slavetrading was legally defined as a type of piracy and pirates had always been hanged in the locale where the Maritime Code had jurisdiction, that is to say, on mud flats between the low-water and the high-water mark. However, bear in mind that it was not by chance that the city of New-York was selected as the city of execution for such a crime, for that port had been for some years the principal port of the world for the fitting out of negrero vessels, doing even more such business than the ports of Portland and Boston, so that, during eighteen months in the 1859-1860 timeframe, a total of 85 such slavers had been fitted out in New York harbor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE being executed, by ensuring that he would not dangle and strangle in the manner in which so many common criminals met their fates. The sudden jerk upward was intended to guarantee the instant snapping of the neck.70 Marines surrounded the courtyard as depicted, ready for any rescue attempt. The condemned man commented “Well, a man can’t die but once; I’m not afraid.” After US Marshal Robert Murray, representing the federal government, had read the sentence, the condemned man was asked if he had any final statements, and he proclaimed “I have done nothing wrong” before the black hood was drawn down over his head and the noose adjusted around his neck. When he was jerked upward by the apparatus, Gordon became the one and only American to be executed for engaging in the international slave trade — which had since 1820 ostensibly been a capital crime:

The body would be retrieved by a friend and buried in an unmarked grave in Brooklyn. THE EXECUTION OF GORDON, THE SLAVE-TRADER Not the least important among the changes which are taking place in the current of national policy and public opinion is evidenced by the fact that on Friday, 21st February, in this city, Nathaniel Gordon was hung for being engaged in the slave- trade. For forty years the slave-trade has been pronounced piracy by law, and to engage in it has been a capital offense. But the sympathy of the Government and its officials has been so often on the side of the criminal, and it seemed so absurd 70. This attempt at humane execution was one of America’s first. The “upright jerker” was used in a total of five executions and, although it did succeed in the case of Gordon, it would not prove to be more effective in the snapping of necks than the ordinary “drop” technique. On June 18, 1895 the warden of the Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield would obtain US Patent #541409 for the device, but the only place in which this technique of execution continues to be used is the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran is of course not paying royalties). When the would come along in a considerably later timeframe, the intent would not be humanity, but a demonstration of the power of electricity, and potentially a demonstration that the alternating-current system sponsored by Edison was far more deadly and dangerous than the direct-current system sponsored by Westinghouse. –And humane execution by painless would not begin until the following century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE to hang a man for doing at sea that which, in half the Union, is done daily without censure on land, that no one has ever been punished under the Act. The Administration of Mr. Lincoln has turned over a new leaf in this respect. Henceforth the slave- trade will be abandoned to the British and their friends. The hanging of Gordon is an event in the history of our country. He was probably the most successful and one of the worst of the individuals engaged in the trade. A native of Maine, he had engaged in the business many years since, and had always eluded justice. The particular voyage which proved fatal to him was undertaken in 1860. The following summary of the case we take from the Times: It was in evidence (given by Lieutenant Henry D. Todd, U.S.N.) that the ship Erie was first discovered by the United States steamer Mohican, on the morning of the 8th day of August, 1860; that she was then about fifty miles outside of the River Congo, on the West Coast of Africa, standing to the northward, with all sail set; that she was flying the American flag, and that a gun from the Mohican brought her to. It was shown by Lieutenant Todd that he went on board himself about noon, and took command of the prize. He found on board of the Erie, which our readers will remember was but 500 tons burden, eight hundred and ninety-seven (897) negroes, men, women, and children, ranging from the age of six months to forty years. They were half children, one-fourth men, and one-fourth women, and so crowded when on the main deck that one could scarcely put his foot down without stepping on them. The stench from the hold was fearful, and the filth and dirt upon their persons indescribably offensive. At first he of course knew nothing about them, and until Gordon showed him, he was unable to stow them or feed them -- finally he learned how, but they were stowed so closely that during the entire voyage they appeared to be in great agony. The details are sickening, but as fair exponents of the result of this close stowing, we will but mention that running sores and cutaneous diseases of the most painful as well as contagious character infected the entire load. Decency was unthought of; privacy was simply impossible — nastiness and wretchedness reigned supreme. From such a state of affairs we are not surprised to learn that, during the passage of fifteen days, twenty-nine of the sufferers died, and were thrown overboard. It was proved by one of the seamen that he, with others, shipped on the Erie, believing her to be bound upon a legitimate voyage, and that, when at sea they suspected, from the nature of the cargo, that all was not right, which suspicion they mentioned to the Captain (Gordon), who satisfied them by saying that he was on a lawful voyage, that they had shipped as sailors, and would do better to return to their duties than to talk to him. Subsequently they were told that they had shipped on a slaver, and that for every negro safely landed they should receive a dollar. The negroes were taken on board the ship on the 7th day of August, 1860, and the entire operation of launching and HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE unloading nearly nine hundred negroes, occupied but three quarters of an hour, or less time than a sensible man would require for his dinner. As the poor creatures came over the side Gordon would take them by the arm, and shove them here or there, as the case might be, and if by chance their persons were covered from entire exposure by a strip of rag, he would, with his knife, cut it off, fling it overboard, and send the wretch naked with his fellows. Several of the crew testified, all agreeing that Gordon acted as Captain; that he engaged them; that he ordered them; that he promised them the $1 per capita; that he superintended the bringing on board the negroes; and that he was, in fact, the master-spirit of the entire enterprise. For this crime Gordon was arrested, tried, and, mainly through the energy of District-Attorney Smith, convicted, and sentenced to death. Immense exertions were made by his friends and the slave-trading interest to procure a pardon, or at least a commutation of his sentence, from President Lincoln, but without avail. He was sentenced to die on 21st. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The long and open agitation for the reopening of the slave-trade, together with the fact that the South had been more or less familiar with violations of the laws since 1808, led to such a remarkable increase of illicit traffic and actual importations in the decade 1850-1860, that the movement may almost be termed a reopening of the slave-trade. In the foreign slave-trade our own officers continue to report “how shamefully our flag has been used;”71 and British officers write “that at least one half of the successful part of the slave trade is carried on under the American flag,” and this because “the number of American cruisers on the station is so small, in proportion to the immense extent of the slave-dealing coast.”72 The fitting out of slavers became a flourishing business in the United States, and centred at New York City. “Few of our readers,” writes a periodical of the day, “are aware of the extent to which this infernal traffic is carried on, by vessels clearing from New York, and in close alliance with our legitimate trade; and that down-town merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes, and have been, with comparatively little interruption, for an indefinite number of years.”73 Another periodical says: “The number of persons engaged in the slave- trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and

71. Gregory to the Secretary of the Navy, June 8, 1850: SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31 Congress, 1st session, XIV. No. 66, page 2. Cf. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31 Congress, 2d session, II. No. 6. 72. Cumming to Commodore Fanshawe, Feb. 22, 1850: SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31 Congress, 1st session, XIV. No. 66, page 8. 73. New York Journal of Commerce, 1857; quoted in 24TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 56. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.”74 During eighteen months of the years 1859-1860 eighty-five slavers are reported to have been fitted out in New York harbor,75 and these alone transported from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves annually.76 The United States deputy marshal of that district declared in 1856 that the business of fitting out slavers “was never prosecuted with greater energy than at present. The occasional interposition of the legal authorities exercises no apparent influence for its suppression. It is seldom that one or more vessels cannot be designated at the wharves, respecting which there is evidence that she is either in or has been concerned in the Traffic.”77 On the coast of Africa “it is a well-known fact that most of the Slave ships which visit the river are sent from New York and New Orleans.”78 The absence of United States war-ships at the Brazilian station enabled American smugglers to run in cargoes, in spite of the prohibitory law. One cargo of five hundred slaves was landed in 1852, and the Correio Mercantil regrets “that it was the flag of the United States which covered this act of piracy, sustained by citizens of that great nation.”79 When the Brazil trade declined, the illicit Cuban trade greatly increased, and the British consul reported: “Almost all the slave expeditions for some time past have been fitted out in the United States, chiefly at New York.”80

74. “The Slave-Trade in New York,” in the Continental Monthly, January 1862, page 87. 75. New York Evening Post; quoted in Lalor, CYCLOPÆDIA, III. 733. 76. Lalor, CYCLOPÆDIA, III. 733; quoted from a New York paper. 77. FRIENDS’ APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE COLOURED RACES (1858), Appendix, page 41; quoted from the Journal of Commerce. 78. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, pages 53-4; quoted from the African correspondent of the Boston Journal. From April, 1857, to May, 1858, twenty-one of twenty-two slavers which were seized by British cruisers proved to be American, from New York, Boston, and New Orleans. Cf. 25TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 122. De Bow estimated in 1856 that forty slavers cleared annually from Eastern harbors, clearing yearly $17,000,000: De Bow’s Review, XXII. 430-1. 79. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 33d Congress, 1st session, VIII. No. 47, page 13. 80. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 34th Congress, 1st session, XII. No. 105, page 38. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 8, Saturday: To avoid a one-on-one duel between the CSS Merrimac and the USS Monitor, the CSS Merrimac withdrew.

As the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia steamed out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, it sank 2 Federal warships and ran 3 others aground.

Federal troops occupied Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee as well as Leesburg, Virginia.

At Pea Ridge (Elkhorn Tavern), Arkansas, Federal troops defeated Confederate forces and Indians in the largest battle of the war west of the Mississippi River. 2,200 total casualties resulted, and the rebels would be forced to evacuate Arkansas. US CIVIL WAR

Un ballo in maschera op.272, a quadrille by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in Pavlovsk.

President Abraham Lincoln –impatient with General McClellan’s inactivity– issued an order reorganizing the Army of Virginia and relieving McClellan of supreme command. McClellan was given command of the Army of the Potomac and ordered to attack Richmond. This marked the beginning of the Peninsular Campaign.

Harper’s Weekly reported on the execution of Captain Nathaniel Gordon: NOT the least important among the changes which are taking place in the current of national policy and public opinion is evidenced by the fact that on Friday, 21st February, in this city, NATHANIEL GORDON was hung for being engaged in the slave- HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE trade. For forty years the slave-trade has been pronounced piracy by law, and to engage in it has been a capital offense. But the sympathy of the Government and its officials has been so often on the side of the criminal, and it seemed so absurd to hang a man for doing at sea that which, in half the Union, is done daily without censure on land, that no one has ever been punished under the Act. The Administration of Mr. Lincoln has turned over a new leaf in this respect. Henceforth the slave- trade will be abandoned to the British and their friends. The hanging of Gordon is an event in the history of our country. He was probably the most successful and one of the worst of the individuals engaged in the trade. A native of Maine, he had engaged in the business many years since, and had always eluded justice. The particular voyage which proved fatal to him was undertaken in 1860. The following summary of the case we take from the Times: It was in evidence (given by Lieutenant Henry D. Todd, U.S.N.) that the ship Erie was first discovered by the United States steamer Mohican, on the morning of the 8th day of August, 1860; that she was then about fifty miles outside of the River Congo, on the West Coast of Africa, standing to the northward, with all sail set; that she was flying the American flag, and that a gun from the Mohican brought her to. It was shown by Lieutenant Todd that he went on board himself about noon, and took command of the prize. He found on board of the Erie, which our readers will remember was but 500 tons burden, eight hundred and ninety-seven (897) negroes, men, women, and children, ranging from the age of six months to forty years. They were half children, one-fourth men, and one-fourth women, and so crowded when on the main deck that one could scarcely put his foot down without stepping on them. The stench from the hold was fearful, and the filth and dirt upon their persons indescribably offensive. EXECUTION OF GORDON THE SLAVE-TRADER, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 21, 1862. At first he of course knew nothing about them, and until Gordon showed him, he was unable to stow them or feed them — finally he learned how, but they were stowed so closely that during the entire voyage they appeared to be in great agony. The details are sickening, but as fair exponents of the result of this close stowing, we will but mention that running sores and cutaneous diseases of the most painful as well as contagious character infected the entire load. Decency was unthought of; privacy was simply impossible — nastiness and wretchedness reigned supreme. From such a state of affairs we are not surprised to learn that, during the passage of fifteen days, twenty-nine of the sufferers died, and were thrown overboard. It was proved by one of the seamen that he, with others, shipped on the Erie, believing her to be bound upon a legitimate voyage, and that, when at sea they suspected, from the nature of the cargo, that all was not right, which suspicion they mentioned HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE to the Captain (Gordon), who satisfied them by saying that he was on a lawful voyage, that they had shipped as sailors, and would do better to return to their duties than to talk to him. Subsequently they were told that they had shipped on a slaver, and that for every negro safely landed they should receive a dollar. The negroes were taken on board the ship on the 7th day of August, 1860, and the entire operation of launching and unloading nearly nine hundred negroes, occupied but three quarters of an hour, or less time than a sensible man would require for his dinner. As the poor creatures came over the side Gordon would take them by the arm, and shove them here or there, as the case might be, and if by chance their persons were covered from entire exposure by a strip of rag, he would, with his knife, cut it off, fling it overboard, and send the wretch naked with his fellows. Several of the crew testified, all agreeing that Gordon acted as Captain; that he engaged them; that he ordered them; that he promised them the $l per capita; that he superintended the bringing on board the negroes; and that he was, in fact, the master-spirit of the entire enterprise. For this crime Gordon was arrested, tried, and, mainly through the energy of District-Attorney Smith, convicted, and sentenced to death. Immense exertions were made by his friends and the slave-trading interest to procure a pardon, or at least a commutation of his sentence, from President Lincoln, but without avail. He was sentenced to die on 21st. We abridge the following account of his last hours and execution [which we illustrate above] from the Herald and Times: THE ATTEMPT TO COMMIT SUICIDE. Nothing worthy of note occurred until about three o’clock A.M. on Friday morning, when the keepers were alarmed by the prisoner being suddenly seized with convulsions. At first it was supposed that he was trying to strangle himself; but on a close examination it was evident that he was suffering from the effects of poison. Dr. Simmons, the prison physician, was immediately sent for, and stimulants were freely administered for the purpose of producing a reaction. For the first half hour or so the efforts of the physician appeared to have but little effect. The patient became quite rigid under the influence of the poison, his pulse could scarcely be felt, and it was thought that after all the gallows would be cheated of its victim. Drs. James R. Wood and Hodgman, who were also in attendance upon the prisoner, labored hard to resuscitate the dying man, and finally, by means of the stomach-pump and the use of brandy, the patient was sufficiently recovered to be able to articulate. It was not until eight o’clock, however, that the physicians had any hope of saving Gordon’s life. From that hour, however, the prisoner gradually recovered, although he was subject to fainting fits for hours afterward. When sensible he begged of the doctors to let him alone, preferring, he said, to die by his own hand rather than suffer the ignominy of a public execution. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE It has not been satisfactorily ascertained how or in what manner the unfortunate man procured the poison with which he contemplated self-destruction. The symptoms were evidently those of strychnine, and the only way in which the keepers can account for the presence of the poison is its introduction in the cigars which Gordon had smoked so freely the night before. On Thursday the prisoner was compelled to undergo a rigid search, his clothing was changed entirely, and he was placed in a new cell, so that it would seem impossible almost for him to have procured the poison in any other way than that suggested by his keepers. A few minutes after eleven o’clock, when it was apparent to Gordon that the execution would certainly take place, notwithstanding his attempt at suicide, he sent for Marshal Murray, and said he had something of a private nature to communicate. The Marshal repaired to the bedside of the culprit and asked if any thing could be done to alleviate his sufferings. Gordon raised himself slowly from his cot, and with much difficulty, said: “Cut a lock of hair from my head and give it to my wife.” Then taking a ring from his finger, he requested that that also should be sent to his wife in remembrance of her husband. The request was cheerfully complied with, and the official, quite overcome with emotion, left the unhappy man to his fate. THE EXECUTION. At 12 o’clock, Marshal Murray notified Gordon, through Mr. Draper, that the hour had arrived. At this he expressed great surprise, and said he thought he had two hours more in which to live. The clergyman entered the cell and prayed with him, or rather for him. Deputy Marshal Borst aided him in dressing and gave him a large drink of clear whisky, when his arms were tied, the black cap was put carelessly on one side of his head, and he was carried on the deputy’s shoulders to a chair in the corridor. The sight was simply shocking. The man was not sober — that is, so powerful had been the effect of the poison that, in order to keep him alive till the necessary moment, they had been obliged to give him whisky enough to make an ordinary man drunk three times over. He sat lollingly in the chair, gazing listlessly around, while the Marshal, with unaffected emotion, read the former reprieve to him. That done, he was helped to his feet, and held there while the Marshal read to him the death-warrant. After this he looked around with a senseless smile, asked for some more whisky, which was kindly given him. The procession was then formed, Gordon stalking with a bravadoish air, upheld by the Marshals, toward the scaffold. To a casual spectator it would appear that, exhausted by mental or physical suffering, Gordon was making a great effort to walk manfully to his fate. As it was, however, he had just sense enough left to endeavor to follow out the suggestion of the well- meaning deputy, who told him to die like a man, and to walk to the rope, so that no one could accuse him of fear. When he HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE reached the scaffold, he said, “Well, a man can’t die but once; I’m not afraid.” The cap was drawn over the whitened, meaningless features, the noose-knot was carefully adjusted under his ear, and he stood, an unthinking, careless, besotted wretch waiting for he knew not what, when with a jerk he went high in air, and fell to the length of the rope, still senseless, still unfeeling, still regardless of pain or pleasure. The body swayed hither and thither for a few moments, and all was quiet. No twitchings, no convulsions, no throes, no agonies. His legs opened once, but closed again, and he hung a lump of dishonored clay. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 11, Tuesday: France acquired the port of Obock, or “Djibouti” (but would not occupy it until 1883).

The USS Constellation left Portsmouth, New Hampshire under the command of Commodore Henry K. Thatcher, heading for the Mediterranean with an agenda to harass Confederate shipping and targets of opportunity there.

The Governor of Massachusetts, John Albion Andrew, proclaimed “Thursday, the third day of April next, to be observed throughout this Commonwealth, as a day of public HUMILIATION, FASTING, AND PRAYER.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “Henry D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau” sent in to Ticknor & Fields in Boston both “WALKING”

“WALKING”: Where on the Globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our states, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe: in the United States there are more than 140 species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther — farther than I am ready to follow him, yet not when he says, “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.” “The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station, towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown Ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his foot prints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe and reinvigorated himself — “Then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” — So far Guyot.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT ARNOLD HENRI GUYOT HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

and the corrected proofs for “AUTUMNAL TINTS”, under a cover note in Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s handwriting.

Sophia Thoreau Concord Mar. 11th 1862 Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I send with this the paper on Walking & also the proofs of Autumnal Tints. The former paper will bear dividing into two portions very well, the natural joint being, I think at the end of page 44. At any rate the two parcels being separately tied up, will indicate it— I do not quite like to have the Autumnal Tints described as in two parts, for it appears as if the author had made a permanent distinction between them; Would it not be better to say at the end of the first portion “To be continued in the next number”? As for the leaf, I had not thought how it should be engraved, but left it to you. Your note suggests that perhaps it is to be done at my expense. What is the custom? and what would be the cost of a steel engraving? I think that an ordinary wood engraving would be much better than nothing. Yours truly Henry D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE President Abraham Lincoln relieved General McClellan and took direct command of the Union armies.

A later letter from Theophilus Brown to Friend Daniel Ricketson, on January 19, 1868, described a conversation of this period: H.G.O. Blake had asked Henry how the future seemed, and

“Just as uninteresting as ever, was his characteristic answer.... He said it was just as good to be sick as to be well, — just as good to have a poor time as a good time.”

Also, sometime during this period, occurred the conversation in which Henry was asked a question about the next world, and replied “One world at a time.” Thoreau’s nonchalant response has reminded me of a play by Paul Claudel, Tidings Brought to Mary, in which the question of paying attention to another world besides this one is dismissed with the remark “There are two, but I say there is only one and that is enough.”81

April: Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Davis Ticknor traveled by train via New-York and Philadelphia to Washington DC and there met with General George B. McClellan, Horatio Bridge, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and President Abraham Lincoln (Hawthorne would describe this trip in an anonymous, expurgated essay published by Ticknor & Fields opposing the Civil War “by a Peaceable Man,” entitled “Chiefly about War Matters”). US CIVIL WAR

Abolitionist lecturers had begun to dominate the annual lecture course of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored by the Washington Lecture Association, which was the leading lectern in Washington, since December 1861, paving the way for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and pushing the US President toward issuance of an Emancipation Proclamation. The lectures offered by Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890), and other abolitionists from this point offer a case study of radical antislavery Christian political activity and its clash with American science. The lectures had aroused among these establishment scientists great fears of mob violence and had roiled their Institution in popular disputes. Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, believing that black people could live with white people only in a state of servitude, at this point closed the course by forbidding further lectures on partisan topics. In the following seasons he would invite only such safe scientific lecturers as Arnold Henri Guyot.

81. Act 4, Scene 2, in THEATRE (Paris: Gallimard, 1965, Volume II, page 214). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 6, Sunday-7, Monday: A Confederate surprise attack would result in a 2-day bitter struggle with 13,000 Union killed and wounded and 10,000 Confederates. President Abraham Lincoln would be pressured to relieve General Ulysses S. Grant but would resist this pressure. Americans would kill one another in the woods around Shiloh Baptist Church near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. On the initial day of this confrontation Confederate forces attacking Federal troops made modest gains but their commander, Albert S. Johnston, was killed. By nightfall the federal troops were almost defeated yet, during the night, reinforcements would arrive, and by the following morning the Union forces would be able to dominate the field. When the Confederate forces retreated, the exhausted federal forces would not follow.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s close friend General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed.

The corpse of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott’s and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott’s son Henry Nott was left among those littering this field. Total casualties 23,746.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“It is a consolation to those who mourn their loss and erect this monument to know that they died in defence [sic] of Liberty and left behind untarnished names.”

The following requiem poem would be prepared long afterward by Herman Melville. Skimming lightly, wheeling still, The swallows fly low Over the field in clouded days, The forest-field of Shiloh— Over the field where April rain Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain Through the pause of night That followed the Sunday fight Around the church of Shiloh— The church so lone, the log built one, That echoed to many a parting groan And natural prayer Of dying foemen mingled there— Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least they care: (What like a bullet can undeceive!) But now they lie low, While over them the swallows skim, And all is hushed at Shiloh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

John Wesley Powell lost his right arm as a Union officer at the Battle of Shiloh. Our history texts now record that General Grant’s Union armies were victorious in a battle near Shiloh Baptist Church.

Later on during this year, not having heard of their father and husband Willard Woolson for more than a year, the Woolson family of New York would trace him to Minnesota, where he was being treated after receiving a leg wound, allegedly at the battle of Shiloh. The leg would be amputated and Mr. Woolson would soon die.82

April 9, Wednesday: The final conference of the occupying powers at Orizaba came to an end. Spain and Great Britain decided to end their intervention in Mexico (only France would remain).

President Abraham Lincoln sent a message to General McClellan urging him to go on the attack.

82. If this soldier actually had been wounded in the leg in Tennessee in April, what on earth was he doing in Minnesota later on in the same year — and how in hell had he made it all that distance on his wounded leg? Something in this family legend simply doesn’t add up. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 16, Wednesday: President Jefferson Davis signed a preliminary conscription law. US CIVIL WAR

President Abraham Lincoln signed a law that provided compensation to the slaveholders of the District of Columbia (the City of Washington, Washington County, and Georgetown). They would receive, rather than the stick of imprisonment for the harm they had caused, the carrot of compensation for the personal loss they were incurring: $1,000,000 was appropriated to compensate owners of manumitted slaves — and $100,000 was set aside to fund the transportation of those who wished to emigrate to Haiti, Liberia, or any other country outside the United States of America who would have them. The Emancipation Claims Commission would retain the services of a Baltimore slavetrader to provide a professional assessment of the value of each freed slave, women and children being worth less than men etc., and suitable compensation would be awarded for a total of 2,989 manumitted persons. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Curiously, the District had been operating off of longhand copies of the DC slave code for lo these many years, and the very first printed version of this code would come off the presses on March 17, 1862 — just one month before slavery in the District was to come to an end. The final printed version of this legal code would be of interest only as a historical curiosity. —Well, the slaveowning representatives voting to pay themselves for their slaves out of the government coffers was a boondoggle, so I suppose we can regard this superfluous printing of an obsolete code to have been just another boondoggle!

There was fighting at Fort Jackson / Fort St. Philip, that would continue until the 28th. US CIVIL WAR

May 19, Tuesday: President Abraham Lincoln nullified the proclamation issued by David Hunter, the commander of the federal government’s Department of the South, of May 9th, freeing the slaves of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. US CIVIL WAR

A correspondent allegedly named “Long Grabs” who was allegedly stationed in “Camp Mangum” sent an account of “Blind Tom” the piano player to the Fayetteville, North Carolina Observer. (This account was surprisingly similar to an account that would be penned by Mark Twain in 1869.) The blind negro Tom has been performing here to a crowded house. He is certainly a wonder.... He resembles any ordinary negro boy 13 years old and is perfectly blind and an idiot in everything but music, language, imitation, and perhaps memory. He has never been instructed in music or educated in any way. He learned to play the piano from hearing others, learns airs and tunes from hearing them sung, and can play any piece on first trial as well HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE as the most accomplished performer.... One of his most remarkable feats was the performance of three pieces of music at once. He played Fisher’s Hornpipe with one hand and Yankee Doodle with the other and sang Dixie all at once. He also played a piece with his back to the piano and his hands inverted. He performs many pieces of his own conception — one, his “Battle of Manassas,” may be called picturesque and sublime, a true conception of unaided, blind musical genius.... This poor blind boy is cursed with but little of human nature; he seems to be an unconscious agent acting as he is acted on, and his mind a vacant receptacle where Nature stores her jewels to recall them at her pleasure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 20, Wednesday: President Abraham Lincoln signed the Federal Homestead Act granting 160 acres of free public land to “anyone” who would claim and then work the property for 5 years. This effectively limited the privilege of becoming homesteaders to citizens and to those immigrants whose intention it was to become citizens. READ THE FULL TEXT

(That, of course, intentionally left free black Americans out in the cold, completely unable to participate in the all-white development of North and South Dakota, and Oklahoma. In the commemorative stamp below, for instance, you can be very certain that the husband and wife depicted as standing outside their sod hut are white people. Thousands of white citizens would cross the Mississippi to tame the “Wild West.” Blacks attempting to do this would in general be turned back by volunteer white patrols on the eastern bank guarding the river crossing.)

“In those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery ... and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” — Alexis de Tocqueville HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE One for me and one for you and one for me, one for me and one for you and one for me. From a demographic standpoint, and from an ecological standpoint, the Homestead Act would be a disaster, as many of the quarter- sections of prairie handed out “for free” would be simply inadequate to support the life of one human being. A number approaching half of the US citizens who would avail themselves of the opportunity would fail to carry the process through to completion and would not ever obtain title to “their land,” while the direct result of this denuding of the countryside would be the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s. –On the bright side, a whole lot of the land would be disposed of in block grants to corporations, primarily railroads, and the railroads would in general do very well indeed. “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau wrote about her brother Henry to Friend Daniel Ricketson: You ask for some particulars relating to Henry’s illness. I feel like saying that Henry was never affected, never reached by it. I never before saw such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. Very often I have heard him tell his visitors that he enjoyed existence as well as ever. He remarked to me that there was as much comfort in perfect disease as in perfect health, the mind always conforming to the condition of the body. The thought of death, he said, could not begin to trouble him. His thoughts had entertained him all his life, and did still. When he had wakeful nights, he would ask me to arrange the furniture so as to make fantastic shadows on the wall, and he wished his bed was in the form of a shell, that he might curl up in it. He considered occupation as necessary for the sick as for those in health, and has accomplished a vast amount of labor during the past few months in preparing some papers for the press. He did not cease to call for his manuscripts till the last day of his life. During his long illness I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us; his perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend, as if by way of consolation, said to him, “Well, Mr. Thoreau, we must all go.” Henry replied, “When I was a very little boy I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so of course I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me.” There is very much that I should like to write you about my precious brother, had I time and strength. I wish you to know how very gentle, lovely, and submissive he was in all his ways. His little study bed was brought down into our front parlor, when he could no longer walk with our assistance, and every arrangement pleased him. The devotion of his friends was most rare and touching; his room was made fragrant by the gift of flowers from young and old; fruit of every kind which the season afforded, and game of all sorts was sent him. It was really HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE pathetic, the way in which the town was moved to minister to his comfort. Total strangers sent grateful messages, remembering the good he had done them. All this attention was fully appreciated and very gratifying to Henry; he would sometimes say, “I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much had been done for me, I could never repay my friends.” And they so remembered him to the last. Only about two hours before he left us, Judge Hoar [Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar] called with a bouquet of hyacinths fresh from his garden, which Henry smelled and said he liked, and a few minutes after he was gone, another friend came with a dish of his favorite jelly. I can never be grateful enough for the gentle, easy exit which was granted him. At seven o’clock Tuesday morning he became restless and desired to be moved; dear mother, Aunt Louisa, and myself were with him; his self-possession did not forsake him. A little after eight he asked to be raised quite up, his breathing grew fainter and fainter, and without the slightest struggle, he left us at nine o’clock.

June 19, Thursday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis wrote to his wife Varina Davis about his trip back from Raleigh, North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia, and about his concerns for their family.

President Abraham Lincoln signed a law prohibiting slavery in American territories. US CIVIL WAR

June 20, Friday: According to a report that would appear in the New-York Tribune on the following day, a delegation of Progressive Friends called upon President Abraham Lincoln to present a memorial praying him to decree the emancipation (general manumission) of the slaves, which had been adopted at their annual meeting in the Religious Society of Friends. Members of the delegation were: Friend Thomas Garrett, Friend Alice Eliza Hambleton, Friend Oliver Johnson, Friend Dinah Mendenhall, Friend William Barnard, and Friend Eliza Agnew: The President was reported to have said that, as he had not been furnished with a copy of the memorial in advance, he could not be expected to make any extended remarks. It was a relief to be assured that the deputation were not applicants for office, for his chief trouble was from that class of persons. The next most troublesome subject was Slavery. He agreed with the memorialists, that Slavery was wrong, but in regard to the ways and means of its removal, his views probably differed from theirs.83 The quotation in the memorial, from his Springfield speech, was incomplete. It should have embraced another sentence, in which he indicated his views as to the effect upon Slavery itself of the resistance to its extension. The sentiments contained in that passage were deliberately uttered, and he held them now. If a decree of emancipation could abolish Slavery, John Brown would have done the work effectually. Such a decree surely could not be more binding upon the South than the Constitution, and that cannot be enforced in that part of the country now. Would a proclamation of freedom be any more effective? Friend Oliver Johnson was reported to have replied as follows: “True, Mr. President, the Constitution cannot now be enforced at the South, but you do not on that account intermit the effort to enforce it, and the memorialists are solemnly convinced that the abolition of Slavery is indispensable to your success.” 83. In fact President Abraham Lincoln’s own attitude toward the prospect of an Emancipation Proclamation was that this would be, if it would be anything, a mere military tactic of last resort. He would become famous in American history as “The Great Emancipator” not because of any affection for the American negro but only after the course of events had caused him to begin to muse in desperation that “Things have gone from bad to worse ... until I felt that we had played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game!” Never would a man be more reluctant to come to the aid of his fellow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The President was reported to have further said that he felt the magnitude of the task before him, and hoped to be rightly directed in the very trying circumstances by which he was surrounded. Wm. Barnard was reported to have addressed the President in a few words, expressing sympathy for him in all his embarrassments, and an earnest desire that he might, under divine guidance, be led to free the slaves and thus save the nation from destruction. In that case, nations yet unborn would rise up to call him blessed and, better still, he would secure the blessing of God. The President was reported to have responded very impressively, saying that he was deeply sensible of his need of Divine assistance. He had sometime thought that perhaps he might be an instrument in God’s hands of accomplishing a great work and he certainly was not unwilling to be. Perhaps, however, God’s way of accomplishing the end which the memorialists have in view may be different from theirs. It would be his earnest endeavor, with a firm reliance upon the Divine arm, and seeking light from above, to do his duty in the place to which he had been called. US CIVIL WAR

Frederick Palmer wrote from New Orleans to his sister in Connecticut: Good Morning Sister, ... A little boy about Franks age came in last night with a pair of handcuffs around his leg where his [owner] fastened him to keep from running away. They suffer very much. Do you pity them poor creatures? Do you ever think of them? How beautiful Montville must look ... I will imagine you preparing to sit down to write me a letter which I do not believe you are doing. Do not be afraid to write me all the news. Do you miss me at home? Do the neighbors ever inquire for me? HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July: This is what New Orleans looked like in roughly this early war period:

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s new book THE GOLDEN HOUR, an elaboration on his “The Golden Hour” sermon, amounted to a 178-pages missive to President Abraham Lincoln proposing that he utilize his war powers to decree an end to enslavement in these United States of America.84 THE GOLDEN HOUR

Albeit Conway was becoming somewhat less sanguine about Lincoln becoming the Graceful Emancipator at this point, than he had before, nevertheless the Reverend still was gracelessly holding out to people locked in mortal combat the utterly preposterous and counterfactual illusion that if the southern slaves were set free by proclamation at long range, then the Southern resistance would of necessity collapse — and all this killing

84. Among the many books offered by Ticknor and Fields at the back of this volume, Henry D. Thoreau’s WALDEN appeared as 1 volume, 16 mo. for $1.00 and A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS as 1 volume, 12 mo. for $1.25. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE would of necessity be suddenly over.

Conway was going around declaring stupid stuff like that if the announcement were made, those darkies would beat their African tom-toms and the good news would get all the way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans before it even could arrive by telegraph wire. Along the way Conway attempted to deploy the memory of Henry Thoreau in a most intriguing manner: The naturalist Thoreau used to amuse us much by thrusting his hand into the Concord River, and drawing out at will a fine fish, which would lie quietly in his hand: when we thrust in ours, the fish would scamper out of reach. It seemed like a miracle, until he explained to us that his power to take up the fish depended upon his knowledge of the color and location of the fish’s eggs. The fish will protect its spawn; and when Thoreau placed his hand underneath that, the fish, in order to protect it, would swim immediately over it, and the fingers had only to close for it to be caught. Slavery is the spawn out of which the armed forces of treason and rebellion in the South have been hatched; and by an inviolable instinct they will rush, at any cost, to protect Slavery. You have only, Sir, to take Slavery in your grasp, then close your fingers around the rebellion. This is enough to remind one of what certain of our irritated and frustrated professional warmongers would be saying during the Vietnam War: that once we had firmly grabbed them by their gonads their hearts and minds would of necessity follow. Waldo Emerson was really buying into this sort of Fantasy Island stuff about the efficacy of warfare. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The Atlantic Monthly, however, reported sad news, that the authenticity of the story of Winkelried and his “sheaf of Austrian spears,” a necessary part of the story of William Tell, had been cast into the shadow of doubt, owing to the fact 1.) that somebody had noticed that said events had gone unmentioned in contemporary documents and chronicles, and owing to the fact 2.) that somebody had noticed that the Halbsuter poem recounting said events actually had plagiarized a previous poem which had made no mention of such events, and owing to the fact that 3.) somebody had notice that actually this Halbsuter poet had not been a citizen of the fair commune of Lucerne.

Nothing is safe from the debunkers!

This stuff about Tell was presumably of great interest to the American audience, because during Thoreau’s lifetime some 40,000 Swiss had emigrated to America, out of a population of about 2,500,000. (People still play around with this legend. For instance, on January 16, 2001, at a circus performance in Paris, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Mme Cathy Jamet has been shot in the face by a crossbow arrow fired by her husband M Alain Jamet.)

During this month Sgt. Brown, the real or original subject of the song “John Brown’s Body,” a shortie, drowned while attempting to ford the Rappahannock with his unit. JULIA WARD HOWE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August: Stephen Elliott led a successful expedition against a Federal force on Pinckney island. He was also involved in the devising of floating torpedoes, with which they blew up a tender in St. Helena bay. He would be promoted to chief of artillery of the Third military district, including Beaufort.85

US CIVIL WAR

During this month and the following one, in his deliberations leading up to his decision to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, a resistant Abraham Lincoln was bringing himself to “suppose” that if his staff of White House lawyers could compose such a proclamation bringing about a general manumission so that it could be considered merely a “a practical war measure,” that then, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America in the midst of this sectional conflict, he would possess adequate authority to issue such a piece of paper — but only, bear in mind, as “a practical war measure,” an interim solution, which after the cessation of hostilities inevitably would need to be superseded by one or another colonization scheme, as a final solution, that would create the necessary all-white America, freeing our nation

85. This is not the Professor Stephen Elliott of South Carolina whose botany textbook Henry Thoreau consulted, but his grandson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE forever from all these troublesome people of color.86

(Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. :-)

There was a race riot in South Brooklyn that is significant in that it provided a “dress rehearsal” of sorts, for the enormous and sustained race riot/draft riot in New-York that would be occurring during the summer of 1863. In many Northern cities, the idea of turning this sectional war into a war to free the enslaved Negroes down South was being regarded as a definite step in the wrong direction — what the white workingmen desperately needed to do was to enslave the ones who were already free in the North! IRISH

86. In fact President Abraham Lincoln’s own attitude toward an Emancipation Proclamation was that it was, if it was anything, a mere military tactic of last resort. He would become famous in American history as “The Great Emancipator” not because of any affection for the American negro but only after the course of events had caused him to begin to muse in desperation that “Things have gone from bad to worse ... until I felt that we had played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game!” Never was a man more reluctant to do the right. Lerone Bennett, in FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM, has simply dismissed the traditional story that with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, done out of the goodness of his heart, President Lincoln had freed America’s black slaves. “No other American story is so enduring. No other American story is so comforting. No other American story is so false.” The real Lincoln, he pointed out, was a white supremacist very much on the order of this century’s David Duke. Lincoln’s dream for America, “like Thomas Jefferson’s dream, was a dream of a lily-white America without Native Americans, African Americans or Martin Luther Kings.” Let us take the man at his word, Bennett suggested, and consider this to have been an act of desperation: “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.” (Of course, Bennett, a black historian, has been dismissed by white historians as a revisionist.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 22, Friday:At 4:30AM Achille-Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, 1st of 5 children born to Manuel-Achille Debussy, proprietor of a china shop and Victorine Joséphine Sophie Manoury, daughter of a wheelwright.

A 2d day of attacks by braves upon “the soldiers’ house,” Fort Ridgely. WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE

The refugee population at the Ridgely settlement in Minnesota swelled to 300. General Sibley arrived at St. Peter from Fort Snelling but ignored New Ulm’s need for aid. The Riggs party arrived at Fort Ridgely and continued downriver. RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA

Killing would be going on at Rappahannock Station / Waterloo Bridge, not letting up until the 25th. US CIVIL WAR

President Abraham Lincoln wrote his former political opponent, the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, whose perpetual public carping was getting on his nerves, and laid it on the line. Look here, it’s not about those negroes, he said, who care about them? — it’s about us white people and the strength of our united government. It might as well have been the white-man’s-white-man Hinton Rowan Helper himself who was delivering these lines! If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. (It’s often supposed nowadays that this Honest Abe from Illinois was the friend of the black man, but what I say is, if this is what it is to be a friend then Americans of color really don’t need any enemies.)

August 29, Friday: After the Italian government secretly urged Giuseppe Garibaldi to raise an army and march on Rome, the Royal Italian Army discovered the Garibaldists on Aspromonte in Calabria and fired on them. Twelve people were killed and Garibaldi was wounded twice.

Confederates destroyed Federal supply lines at Manassas, on the same battlefield as in 1861. That is to say, people began to kill each other rather than waving good-bye, at Bull Run Creek near Sudley Springs and Manassas Junction, Virginia. They wouldn’t have enough of this there on this day — but would continue on the following day to kill each other there rather than waving good-bye. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 30, Saturday: The whaler Alert sailed from the port of New London, Connecticut under the command of Captain Edwin Church, in search of sperm oil off Hurd’s Island, the newly discovered land south of Kerguelen’s.

Confederate troops invaded Kentucky, capturing Lexington.

Union troops again attacked at Manassas and again were repulsed. They retreated towards Washington DC. The last 2 days have seen some 25,000 total casualties, in round numbers, produced near the Bull Run. Union troops from Centreville, frightened out of their wits, were fortifying the District of Columbia. Any port in a storm. President Abraham Lincoln would relieve the Union commander, General John Pope.

Louisa May Alcott volunteered as an Army nurse and was sent to Union Hospital in Georgetown. Among the 40 soldiers for whom she would care in her ward in the hospital in Washington DC, one had been a 12-year- old drummer. Here is the iniquitous manner in which she cleaned up her encounter with this wounded soldier/ boy for her story LITTLE WOMEN, OR, MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY:

“I think it was so splendid in Father to go as chaplain when he was too old to be drafted, and not strong enough for a soldier,” said Meg warmly. “Don’t I wish I could go as a drummer, a vivan — what’s its name? Or a nurse, so I could be near him and help him,” exclaimed Jo, with a groan.

(To my way of thinking, this is in a no-class class with offering unsuspecting children Halloween treats, with razor blades buried inside them.)87 US CIVIL WAR

While all this was going down on the surface of the planet, up in the heavens the comet Swift-Tuttle had been brightening and brightening, and at this point its tail was spanning 25 to 30 degrees of the sky — possibly spelling out the advice “Now you all behave yourselves.” A few Americans were watching it, sighting along the black barrels of telescopes up into the starry skies rather than sighting at each other’s chests along the black barrels of rifles. These people are to be congratulated. They were behaving themselves. ASTRONOMY

Comet Swift-Tuttle, not a small body at all, and with a potential impact speed of 60 kilometers per second, and with a generally intersecting trajectory, repeatedly whipping by us, has been described as the single most dangerous object known to humankind — somewhat more deadly even that your proverbial speeding bullet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE September 16-18: There was fighting in the vicinity of Antietam (Sharpsburg), Maryland. Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee were caught by General McClellan. This battle proved to be the bloodiest day of the war; 2,108 Union soldiers were killed and 9,549 wounded — 2,700 Confederates were killed and 9,029 wounded. The battle had no clear winner, but because General Lee withdrew to Virginia, McClellan would be

87. During the US civil war, the conscription law of the North made no provision for religious objectors except by providing a way for people of means to buy their way out of the draft. Those who refused such an option or could not afford it would be treated harshly. There would be 4,000 who would serve as unarmed legal conscientious objectors (COs). Of the first 292,441 American citizens drafted to serve in the Union armies, a total of 52,288 would be financially (and morally) able to hire a substitute soldier, to go do their killing and/or dying for them. Although the official cost of such a release from the draft was $300 payable directly to our government, for some reason a significant number of wealthy men would be directly paying others as much as $2,000 each to take their places. (Only in a nation whose legal principles and practice are based firmly upon a bedrock of human slavery law can such events have transpired.)

! OHNE MICH HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE considered the victor.

The battle convinced the British and French –who were contemplating official recognition of the Confederacy– to reserve action, and gave Lincoln the opportunity to announce his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September 22), which would in pretense free all slaves in areas rebelling against the United States, effective January 1, 1863. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE September 17, Wednesday: Numerically superior Federal forces under General McClellan attacked Confederate positions along the Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland northwest of Washington. “It was sheer concentrated violence, unleavened by generalship.” General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate armies were defeated but had a chance to retreat. By nightfall many thousands would be dead, wounded, or missing — the single bloodiest day of fighting in American history: 26, 134

If you need to see the most ridiculous example of the “martyred president” syndrome which would set up Abraham Lincoln to be worshiped as a deity, visit the Antietam Battlefield Park in Sharpsburg. In a small dell near the Burnside Bridge you will find the most imposing monument on that extensive battlefield. Look for an approximately 50-foot obelisk with a bas-relief at its base of a lunchwagon with several Union soldiers lolling about, with a caption indicating that at approximately this location Commissary Sergeant William McKinley had come under enemy fire while delivering hot coffee to the Union troops. The monument was erected some thirty years after the fact, soon after President McKinley got shot while in office, and is possibly the best- humored memorial to a drink deliverer since Kipling’s “Gunga Din.” US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE September 22, Monday: Having advanced 36 miles, the military column encamped for night near Wood Lake in Minnesota, 4 miles from Yellow Medicine. RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA

As part of fighting the war, as part of demoralizing and dividing and inconveniencing the enemy, the President pre-announced a martial law matter amounting to a threat against those states still in rebellion, that he would declare a Presidential Proclamation effective January 1, 1863, retaining in enslavement all the slaves whom he might be able to free, in areas under his control in states not in rebellion, but declaring to be free all slaves that he did not have the power to liberate, in areas not under his control in states still rebellious. All these Southern slaves would need to do would be to somehow free themselves, and, he pledged, if they would somehow free themselves — why, he would free them! While such a propaganda tool could be expected to free almost no-one black and inconvenience almost no-one white, it would be sufficient to throw ideologues everywhere into a tizzy of anticipation. Although Wendell Phillips immediately detected this to be a mere “sham,” on this suspect basis the Commonwealth would proclaim 1863 to be “the year of Jubilee.” US CIVIL WAR

People are so easily impressed when it is convenient for them to be impressed! (This is known as seizing the moral high ground.)

Here is a preliminary draft of this con, in Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting:

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October 1/2: Following the Battle of Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the federal troops and fortifications at Harpers Ferry. He spent the night at the “Commanding Officer’s Quarters” on Camp Hill – the former residence of the Armory superintendent – and the next morning traveled over to Maryland Heights.

Brigadier General John Finegan established a battery on St. John’ s Bluff near Jacksonville, Florida to stop the movement of Federal ships up the St. Johns River. Brigadier General John M. had Brannan embarked on September 30th with about 1,500 infantry aboard the transports Boston, Ben DeFord, Cosmopolitan, and Neptune at Hilton Head SC. The flotilla arrived at the mouth of the St. John’s River on October 1st, where Commander Charles Steedman’ s gunboats –Paul Jones, Cimarron, Uncas, Patroon, Hale, and Water Witch– joined them. By midday, the gunboats approached the bluff, while Brannan began landing troops at Mayport Mills. Another infantry force landed at Mount Pleasant Creek, about five miles in the rear of the Confederate battery, and on the 2nd began marching overland. Outmaneuvered, Lieutenant Colonel Charles F. Hopkins abandoned the position after dark. When the gunboats would approach the bluff the next day, the 3rd of October, its guns would be silent.

November 5, Wednesday: President Abraham Lincoln named Ambrose E. Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac, replacing McClellan.

At the end of the Military Commission “trial” in Minnesota 303 of the 392 surrendered Dakota warriors had been condemned to be hanged. RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 26, Wednesday: President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe for the initial time and remarked, “So this was the little lady who made the big war.” US CIVIL WAR

November 28, Friday: There was fighting at Cane Hill / Boston Mountains. US CIVIL WAR

December 8, Monday: [Waldo Emerson, in regard to the race question] “our President Lincoln will not even emancipate slaves, until on the heels of a victory, or the semblance of such.” “One lesson they [soldiers] all learn –to hate slavery, –tererrima causa. But the issues does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. ’Tis of no account what England or France may do. But even the war is better than the degrading & descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, & our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes to please at the cost of replacing the South in the status ante bellum, we can... leave the problem to another score of years.”88 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

88. Slater, Joseph, ed. THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. NY: Columbia UP, 1964, page 536. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 11, Thursday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis spoke at Knoxville, Tennessee and then arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

As a volunteer in the Union Army, the Reverend Arthur Buckminster Fuller had been made chaplain of the 16th Regiment. He was also functioning as a newspaper correspondent. On this day, in order to urge on some reluctant troops, the eager chaplain/correspondent volunteered to himself cross the Rappahannock River.

Later on that day the Reverend picked up a rifle just as Jesus would have done under the circumstances, and before a Confederate sharpshooter picked him off he had fired the rifle at least once in the direction of the enemy. US CIVIL WAR

President Abraham Lincoln sent a message to the US Congress in regard to the 303 Dakota warriors who had been condemned to death on the plains of Minnesota by the military war-crimes commission, a direct predecessor of the Nürnberg war-crimes tribunal of WWII: RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA

[the situation as described on two following screens] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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While President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the trial transcripts and instructed members of his staff to go through them, men like Bishop Henry B. Whipple and eastern reformers urged protection for the Dakotas. At the same time Minnesota congressmen and the press demanded mass execution. The president evaluated the transcripts and on December 11 sent a message to the US Senate explaining that the nature of the case had “caused a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made.” As to those “proved guilty of violating females,” he concluded, “Contrary to my expectations, only two of this class were found.” His order changed the number to be executed from 303 to 39. Minnesota politicians were outraged. They charged the president with traitorous behavior. Capitalizing on a hysteria focused around the issue of the alleged rape of white women captives, several congressmen charged the majority of the Dakotas with gang rape. In an open letter to Lincoln, which was entered into the Senate records, and published both nationally and in newspapers around the state, Minnesota Congressmen Morton S. Wilkinson, Cyrus Aldrich, and William Windom wrote of what they called “the Indian barbarities in Minnesota.” The letter was printed in the same Senate documents that listed the men accused after Lincoln’s investigation. It elaborated on the alleged mass rape of Minnesota’s white women. It demanded execution of all those accused of “wholesale robbery, rape, murder” and claimed, “They seized and carried into captivity nearly one hundred women and young girls, and in nearly every instance treated them with the most fiendish brutality.” Describing the women of Minnesota who were captured, the congressmen went on: They were the wives and daughters of our neighbors and friends. They were intelligent and virtuous women; some of them were wives and mothers, others were young and interesting girls. These savages to whom you purpose to extend your executive clemency when the whole country was quiet, and the farmers were busily engaged in gathering their crops arose with fearful violence, and, traveling from one farmhouse to another, indiscriminately murdered all the men, boys and little children they came to; and although they sometimes spared the lives of the mothers and daughters they did so only to take them into a captivity which was infinitely worse than death. Mr. President, let us relate to you some facts with which we fear you have not heretofore been made acquainted. These Indians, whom (as we understand) you propose to pardon and set free, have murdered in cold blood nearly or quite one thousand of our people, ravaged our frontier for a distance of more than a hundred and fifty miles north and south, burned houses of the settlers, and driven from their homes more than ten thousand of our people. The letter then described “the house of a worthy farmer” whose farm was descended upon by twelve Indians. While the man and his two sons were stacking wheat, all three were shot. The house was entered and two small children were killed and “the sick mother and a beautiful HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE guarded the sick mother and took the girl “outside of the lodge, removed all her clothes, and fastened her upon her back on the ground.... One by one they violated her person” until “they left her dead on the ground ... within a few feet of a sick and dying mother.” The letter goes on to claim that “a girl of eighteen years of age,” known to the congressmen “before and at the time of her capture” as a girl “as refined and beautiful ... as we had in the State,” was taken, bound and tied, and “ravished by some eight or ten of these convicts before the cords were loosed from her limbs.... Without being more specific we will state that all or nearly all the women who were captured were violated in this way.” The letter closed by claiming that “there was no justification or pretext, even, for these brutalities,” that Agent Thomas J. Galbraith “has labored faithfully and efficiently for the welfare of these Indians; farms have been given out; missionaries have labored zealously among them for their spiritual welfare; money has been paid; farm land distributed.” Nor were the Indians “at war with their murdered victims.” Finally, reminding the president that they had “stood firm by you and by your administration,” the writers “recorded their protest against pardon” and warned of the onset of “mob law” in Minnesota unless a full execution occurred without any pardons. The Wilkinson, Aldrich, Windom letter was reproduced in newspapers around the state and fueled a growing execution fever. In late December the more than three hundred prisoners were all fastened to the brick floor by chains in their Mankato jail. The week of the scheduled hanging the popular journal Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization reported the story of a boy who “escaped after seeing the murder and outrage of his mother and sisters” The child was portrayed on the cover of the magazine pointing his finger accusingly at a grotesquely drawn Indian. Thus the reports and the rhetoric of rape helped to create the climate for a mass hanging. The hanging itself became a regional attraction for Mankato, drawing spectators from around Minnesota and from surrounding states. When, on December 26, thirty-eight Dakotas were executed, Sarah F. Wakefield’s “protector” was among those hanged. The war’s devastation, the claims of rape, and the calls for extermination created a climate in which the mass hanging was followed by the banishing of all Dakotas from Minnesota. The Dakota exile was a northern variant of the Trail of Tears — the banishment of the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeast to Oklahoma in the early 1830s. Most of the remaining Dakota prisoners were sent to an army barracks near Davenport, Iowa. In May 1863, the families of these men, mostly women and children and numbering over thirteen hundred people, were shipped on two steamboats from Fort Snelling to a reservation near Crow Creek in Dakota Territory. Another group went by freight ear from Hannibal to St. Joseph, Missouri, and then by boat to Crow Creek, a barren land where, between 1863 and 1866, many Indians died of starvation. Dakota and Winnebago [Ho-Chunk] lands were then freely expropriated for the benefit of white settlers. It was after the executions and the exile that Sarah Wakefield, safely reunited in Shakopee with her husband and their two small children, wrote her narrative. In an atmosphere of vengeance she attacked government policy and defended those Dakotas who had protected her. In a state in which the immigrant and native-born white population had HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 21, Sunday: Visiting James Thomas Fields, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway met Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, Sr. Meanwhile, on the bank of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, in the rooms of the Conway plantation home, Walt Whitman was searching fruitlessly for his wounded brother:

Begin my visits among the camp hospitals in the army of the Potomac. Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle — seems to have received only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel- staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported north to their friends.) The large mansion is quite crowded upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississippian, a captain, hit badly in leg, I talk’d with some time; he ask’d me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward in Washington, with his leg amputated, doing well.) I went through the rooms, downstairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk’d to three or four, who seem’d most susceptible to it, and needing it.

You can still see the hammering marks on the lock of this house, made when Union troops broke in:

US CIVIL WAR December 22, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln sent a brief message to the considerable number of Union soldiers who had survived, out of his Army of the Potomac. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Executive Mansion, Washington December 22, 1862 To the Army of the Potomac: I have just read your Commanding General's preliminary report of the battle of Fredericksburg. Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, nor the failure other than an accident. The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe, and the consummate skill and success with which you crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy, show that you possess all the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the country and of popular government. Condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded, I congratulate you that the number of both is comparatively so small. I tender to you, officers and soldiers, the thanks of the nation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 26, Friday: Richard Wagner conducted music from his unperformed music-dramas Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Vienna in a concert attended by the Empress of Austria.

LISTEN TO IT NOW

Confederate President Jefferson Davis addressed the state legislature in Jackson, Mississippi. US CIVIL WAR

Witnessing the 38 of natives and half-breeds ordered by President Abraham Lincoln in Mankato, Minnesota, allegedly, was a worker in a traveling circus, Albert Woolson, 15 years of age, who would enlist as a drummer boy and would eventually become the last survivor of the Union Army, dying in 1956 at the age of 106 (allegedly, that is, unless all these memories were merely part of some elaborate extended circus con). The hangings were carried out to the cheers of a local crowd. After the mass murder the bodies were disposed of in a mass grave, but that night several local doctors would dig them back up as unprotected objects for dissection.89

RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA The decomposing bodies of Indians evidently made the most excellent fertilizer, for in the panorama description of the aftermath of the Sioux War, white maidens in party dresses were only needing to shake the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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89. The famous medico sons of Dr. William Mayo, in particular, would learn their osteology by studying the skeleton of Marpiya Okinajin, or “Cut Nose,” and a specimen of his skin would be preserved in a white museum.

Whether anyone learned more than osteology from this curious contact with the native Other is presently unknown. THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE trees in order to produce a plentiful crop of white babies: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December 31, Wednesday: There was fighting at Parker’s Cross Roads.

Confederate troops attacked Federal troops at Stones River / Murfreesboro, Tennessee and gained the advantage. The day cost 23,000 total casualties. Fighting would continue on the following day. One of my ancestors, Joseph Maynard, had signed up in Indiana, intending to use his enlistment bonus to buy himself a farm, and had marched off to this conflict, in which he was quickly wounded, a wound to which he would quickly succumb in the town’s sickbay crowded with wounded soldiers.

Private Joseph Maynard US CIVIL WAR President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill admitting West Virginia to the Union.

That evening a crowd of some 3,000 assembled at the Tremont Temple to count down the clock from 8PM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE until, at the last stroke of midnight, President Lincoln’s martial law declaration, written by Washington lawyers, attempting to weaken the enemy by offering a government program by which the slaves of the enemy might perhaps eventually, if they cooperated effectively with the Union armies, secure manumission papers, the so-called “Emancipation Proclamation,” would become effective.90 Speakers included not only Frederick Douglass but also the Reverend John Sella Martin and William Wells Brown, who were former slaves, and Anna M. Dickinson. At midnight they all marched to the 12th Baptist Church, which was popularly known at the time as the fugitive slave’s church, to be led in a prayer of thanksgiving by the black minister there, the Reverend Leonard Grimes.

Not many people present at this celebration on this evening would be making reference to the sort of words that the white man Abraham Lincoln had been using to reassure the white man Horace Greeley: If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. No, for purposes of the celebration on this evening, they were all agreeing to pretend to presume the presumption that we nowadays still prefer to presume — that this Honest Abe from Illinois had the best interests of Americans of color in his heart.

90. In fact President Abraham Lincoln’s own attitude toward an Emancipation Proclamation had been that it was, if it was anything, a mere military tactic of last resort. He would become famous in American history as “The Great Emancipator” not because of any affection for the American negro but only after the course of events had caused him to begin to muse in desperation that “Things have gone from bad to worse ... until I felt that we had played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game!” Never had a man been more reluctant to do the right. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1863

Accused of treason in his own neighborhood in Connecticut, fearing arrest during these Civil War times, Elihu Burritt gave up on America and settled his family for the time being in England. President Abraham Lincoln, putting a good face on a bad thing, would appoint him as a United States consul in Birmingham, England. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase made his move to replace President Abraham Lincoln on the Republican ticket.

George William Curtis became the Political Editor of Harper’s Weekly.

Anna Haining Swan, a teenager of Scottish descent from Nova Scotia, went to work at Barnum’s American Museum in New-York under the billing “The Tallest Woman in the World.” Two years earlier, at the age of 15, she had reached her full adult height of 7 feet 11 inches. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

After working as a journalist for the Boston Journal and in various other printing and publishing enterprises, Charles Wesley Slack acquired the weekly Boston Commonwealth. He would edit and publish this for the remainder of his life.

January 1, Thursday: Caroline Cushing Andrews got married with Rufus Leighton, a clerk for the Department of Treasury and professional stenographer.

The Reverend William Rounseville Alger delivered the annual election sermon before the Massachusetts Legislature.

The metric system became mandatory in Italy.

Two Schmiedelieder from Siegfried by Richard Wagner were performed for the initial time, in a concert setting in the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, directed by the composer.

Major General John B. Magruder, who had become the Confederate commander of military forces in Texas on November 29, 1862, gave the recapture of Galveston, Texas top priority. At 3AM four Confederate gunboats appeared, coming down the bay toward Galveston. Soon afterward, the Rebels commenced a land attack. The Union forces in Galveston were three companies of the 42d Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment under the command of Colonel Isaac S. Burrell. The Confederates captured or killed all of them except for the regiment’s adjutant. They also took the Harriet Lane, by boarding her, and two barks and a schooner. Commander W.B. Renshaw’s flagship, the USS Westfield, ran aground when trying to help the Harriet Lane and, at 10AM, she was blown up to prevent her capture. Galveston was in Confederate hands again although the Union blockade would limit commerce in and out of the harbor. Soon afterward, the Rebels would be commencing a land attack upon the port city.

Congress had enacted in 1861 that all slaves employed against the Union were to be considered free, and in 1862 that all slaves of men who supported the Confederacy were to be considered free. At this point President Abraham Lincoln, who had been dragging his feet, more or less got on board this onrushing train. Having made a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862 that emancipation from slavery would become effective, at the turn of the year, in those states which had not renounced their rebelliousness, at this point he made good on his threat by issuing a proclamation of emancipation that had been drafted by a bunch of Washington lawyers. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE A devout man, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Portland Chase read the BIBLE daily and sought comfort in God for the loss of so many of his wives and so many of his children. When Chase had called to the President’s attention that there was no mention of the Deity in the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had allowed as a new last line “And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of all mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

At the clock tick which began this year he, as a martial law measure, offered to “emancipate” all those slaves he did not have the power physically to touch, without offering anything at all to any slave whom he did have the power physically to touch. It was a neat trick, especially since we have no reason to suspect that he would have been willing to touch any black person whom he did have the power physically to touch. Although to all appearances he grandly was declaring to be free all slaves residing in territories in rebellion against the federal government, his “Emancipation Proclamation,” so called, would turn out to be actually only a temporary martial-law proclamation, which in accordance with the deliberate intention of its careful drafters would free precious few. (I don’t know that a head count has ever been conducted, and here suggest that such a count would prove to be alarming if not nauseating.) The proclamation explicitly stated that it did not apply at all to any of the slaves in border states fighting on the Union side; nor would it be of any applicability to slaves in southern areas already under Union control; nor would it be of any use to any other slaves, since, naturally, the states in rebellion would take no action on Lincoln’s order.91 To avail themselves of this opportunity, slaves would have to vote with their feet. At great risk they would need to make their way across the battle lines into

91. The hypocrisy of this was being well commented on in French newspapers at that time. For a review of this French commentary on the American white hypocrisy, refer to Blackburn, George M. FRENCH NEWSPAPER OPINION ON THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. Contributions in American History No. 171. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the Northern-controlled territories, where they would need to volunteer for war labor and get their names registered in the emancipation program. Pacifists and noneffectives need not apply.

Abraham Lincoln had been quite reluctant to see affairs come even to such a straited pass as this. A believer in white supremacy, he never viewed the war in any other manner than in terms of preserving the Union and his own control as President over the entirety of it. The simple fact was that, as pressure for abolition mounted in Congress and the country, as a practical politician similar to President Richard Milhouse Nixon (who would espouse and finance the Head Start program because of its political popularity although he believed the money was being wasted on children who, because they were black, would be incapable of profiting from the attention and the expenditure), Lincoln was willing to cave in and make himself more responsive. Thus it had come about that: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE y A PROCLAMATION

WHEREAS on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

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. That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States.

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for supressing [sic??] said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton [sic??], Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued. And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The federal government’s temporary instrument of war allowed that, while human slavery would continue to be tolerated everywhere within its sphere of influence, it would no longer tolerate this practice in any area not within said sphere of influence.

Nevertheless, before a black audience in Tremont Temple in Boston, this governmental declaration was read aloud and Frederick Douglass led in the singing of the hymn “Blow ye the trumpet, blow!” , President of the sponsoring Union Progressive Association, addressed the group. For this occasion Waldo Emerson composed “Boston Hymn,” a poem in which he neatly cut the Gordian Knot of compensation:

Pay ransom to the owner And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is the owner, And ever was. Pay him.

We may imagine that on this occasion hands were shaken all around, with no distinction of color. Imagine then, if you will, the author of this Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln, during one of his many electoral campaigns, reaching down from the stump and grasping the hand of a black man. Do you fancy that this ever happened?

The word “emancipation,” after all, comes to us from the Latin manus, meaning “hand,” and capio, meaning “take.” When a Roman purchased something, it was considered that the act of purchasing was not complete, either conventionally or legally, until he had grasped it with his hand. If he was purchasing land, he picked up a handful of soil and thereby took title. If he was purchasing a slave, he took hold of the slave and thereby took title.

The power of this paterfamilias over his son was, in fact, the same as the power of this man over his slave – HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE he could execute either one– but there was a legal ceremony by which, when his son became of age, his son could be set free to form his own familias. In that ceremony the father took the son by the hand, as if he were taking possession of a slave, but then dropped his son’s hand. After he had done this three times in succession, his son was emancipio. Emancipation, therefore, had a lot to do with shaking hands. Except during the US Civil War.

I am leading up to saying that Abraham Lincoln “emancipated” all those slaves he did not have the power physically to touch, but did not emancipate any slave he did have the power physically to touch. It was a neat trick. Here, in this painting, we can see how it was done:

The Emancipation Proclamation was an offer to place names on a list, which persons, should they fulfil the preconditions, would, at the end of the period of hostilities, be granted papers of manumission by the Federal Government. This was a very formal matter. It required prior registration. Whose names were actually so registered? Who actually received such papers of manumission? There should be such a list somewhere, if anyone did initiate or complete this process and if anyone did actually get freedom through this vehicle. Where is that list? How long is it? Does it exist? No, my friend, you’ve been conned. After a long and bloody civil war which was fought over whether we were going to be one nation state or two rather than over racial issues, we got ourselves out of this holiday from the Commandments in part by a carefully worded temporary martial law measure denominated the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been created by a team of white Washington DC lawyers. Under the terms of that martial law measure, which lapsed as soon as martial law lapsed, if a Southern slave could make it across the battle lines intact, and then perform labor for the Northern armies, and if that Southern slave could arrange to have his or her name recorded as part of the indicated program, as one of its beneficiaries, then, and only then, could he or she hope that at the successful conclusion HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of the war he or she would receive freebie manumission papers from the federal government. Read the fine print, and weep. I don’t know how few people managed to avail themselves of this very restricted opportunity, but I do know it must have been very few, and I suspect in fact that it was zero. Perhaps one reason why we don’t have a list of the names of people who obtained freedom in this way is embarrassment, at how short or null such a list would prove to be. We don’t want to know about such things. I have come across one such actual named military emancipation from this period. This emancipation did not, however, relate in any way to the Emancipation Proclamation. It related, instead, to a military Board of Claims for Enlisted Slaves which was instituted under General Order No. 329 of the War Department during 1863. Here is the original certification of manumission document, from this Office of the Board of Claims, and it seems to be based on military service that had been rendered by the slave Isaac Gorden as a member of H Company, 30th Regiment. of the U.S. Colored Troops. It includes an order to reimburse the owner of this soldier Isaac Gordon, a man named N. Hammond Esgless. The document reads as follows: “OFFICE OF

BOARD OF CLAIMS for slaves enlisted in U.S. Service, No. 19 South Street, Baltimore, Maryland. I HEREBY CERTIFY, That Philip Pettibone of [blank] county, State of Maryland, has filed with the Board of Claims for Enlisted Slaves, instituted under General Order No. 329, War Department, 1863, - a valid Deed of Manumission and Release of service of Isaac Gorden a man of African decent, of Anne Arundel county, Md., enlisted on the 10th day of March, 1864, in the 30th Regiment U.S. Colored Troops, Co. H, as per Muster-rolls and descriptive list of said Regiment, filed at this office, appears. Witness my hand and seal this 21st. day of November, eighteen hundred and sixty four [signed] John S. Sears, Clerk to Board of Claims.” There is an impress seal that says: Board of Claims for Enlisted Slaves No. 19 South St. Baltimore, Md. At the bottom of the document the following appears: “$100.00 Annapolis Md. Nov. 29, 1864. The Treasurer of the State of Maryland, Pay to N. Hammond Esgless, or Order, the sum of One Hundred Dollars, being the sum appropriated for my slave Isaac Gorden, of Anne arundel County, Md. enlisted as described in the above Certificate, under Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland, chapter 15, 246 and 373, of 1864. [signed] Philip HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Pettibone Test, [signature illegible]” There are two Revenue stamps, a 5-cent and 2-cent, attached to the document and they are dated “Nov 29.” The document has two folds. There is writing on the back of the document which appears to be for filing purposes.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, however, Headman Seattle (See-Ahth of the Susquamish) of the Susquamish, the same “Chief Seattle” who is famous for an environmentalist speech in the manner in which we all should be famous for our environmental speeches, that is, famous for an environmental speech which in fact wasn’t made (his actual speech seems to have been about the deep spiritual differences between peoples of widely differing cultures), did free his eight Native American slaves.

In this year, the Union army would begin to enlist black soldiers, to serve of course under white officers, of course at a lower rate of pay than white soldiers. Notice this unit’s drummer, who was paid at a lower rate still, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE paid less for being not only black but also, indeed, only a little boy. A quite emancipated little boy.

The lithograph which pictured this little drummer was based on a daguerreotype made indoors, next door to HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “Roadside”, the country home of Friends James and Lucretia Mott near Philadelphia.

This was a military training camp, on which people were preparing for the task of killing other people, and it was named “Camp William Penn,” after a Quaker pacifist who was being alleged to have given up the wearing HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of the sword of nobility, whose favorite punch line went:

It is not our ends that justify our means.

The image is a fraud. In the original, there is no flag waving bravely in the background. There is no tent. There is no greenery. There is no little drummer boy flanking to the right. Looking carefully at the fraud, we can see that the countenances of the black men have been sketched on, exaggerating their negroid features in such manner as to emphasize, that the important thing which we are to grasp about these Union soldiers, is their ethnicity.

Here is a real photograph of Camp William Penn. As you can clearly see, a waving flag looks quite a bit HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE different in a real photograph of the period!

The irony of this seems rather heavy. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, as his contribution to the recruitment campaign for the war (what if they gave a war and nobody came?), the immortal patriotic doggerel HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “one if by day, and two if by night.”92

Frederick Douglass traveled through the cities of the North, recruiting black men to serve the Union Army. His son Lewis, age 22, and his son Charles Remond, age 19, were among the first to enlist. But the Union armies were routinely returning runaways to their owners. General McClellan ordered that slave rebellions were to be put down “with an iron hand.” But there were so many runaways. Finally, in Virginia, a Union general who believed in slavery, Benjamin Butler, began to declare them “contraband of war” and put them to work. Although Abraham Lincoln had twice disciplined Union generals who had freed slaves, putting slaves to work was something the President could accept, and the result was the Confiscation Act.

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson described a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation at Camp Saxton on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, that had been occupied by Northern black

92. Well, at least that was the way Gerald Ford’s teleprompter had it, when he gave the keynote address at the Concord Bicentennial Celebration of April 19, 1975 at the Old North Bridge. And perhaps no poet has been parodied more: it’s all because, while he was at Bowdoin College in 1822 with author-to-be Nathaniel Hawthorne (still Hathorne) and president-to-be Franklin Pierce, he was accustomed to play whist without a helmet.

[Acting on a news story about ex-Presidents selling their autographs, I have sent a copy of this page to ex-President Gerald Rudolph Ford, along with a $1.00 bill and a reminder that in the era in question a dollar bill was worth almost precisely what a C-note is worth today, and asked if he could in good humor initial below:

X ______]

Longfellow’s thing about “one if by land, and two if by sea” was of course inaccurate in that the Atlantic Ocean didn’t ever get involved. The militia’s concern was whether the regular troops stabled in Boston were going to march down the Neck and through Roxbury, or first row themselves across the Charles River so they could march through Cambridge. In quoting Longfellow before the Concordians on April 19, 1975 as having said “one if by day, and two if by night,” Former President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., seems to me to have been saying something very Thoreauvian to these people, he was almost saying:

Look, this history stuff you have been passing off is drivel, and besides, you aren’t at all like your ancestors. For one thing your ancestors didn’t worship themselves, the way you worship yourselves through your ancestors. For another thing, it’s way past time you people got busy and did something for others, rather than wanting other people to come around and make your bacon for you. Would you look at this dump, you’re turning Concord into a damned tourist trap! By creatively “misquoting” this poem, I’m going to show you how little it, and you, are worth in the great scheme of things. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE troops and were being protected by the ships of the US Navy.

The services began at half past eleven o’clock, with a prayer.... Then the President’s Proclamation was read.... Then the colors were presented.... Then followed an incident so touching, so utterly unexpected and startling, that I can scarcely believe it on recalling, though it gave the keynote to the whole day. The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women’s voices instantly blended, singing as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow. —

My Country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!

After the ceremony the white officers visited a nearby plantation and viewed the instruments of torture still lying in the local slave-jail. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

In Beaufort, South Carolina, the Reverend Dr. William Henry Brisbane, the Union officer in charge of auctioning off the lands and structures of the former slave plantations of the district, read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud to thousands of freedmen.

General John Pope sent General Henry Hastings Sibley and General Alfred Sully onto the Dakota reservation in Minnesota, to hunt down the remaining tribespeople and get them off their land so it could be divided into HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE farm acreage for white people.

RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA (Early in this year, Stephen Grover Cleveland, a future president, was 26 years of age and it was time to serve his country — so he hired a man to serve in his stead. He was just as much a draft dodger, in his era, as William J. Clinton and George W. Bush, in our own era!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE After Frederick Douglass met with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the treatment of northern black soldiers during the insurrection, he began to travel through the cities of the North, recruiting free black men to fight under the banner of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers.

Then Dr. Martin Robison Delany also began to recruit for this newly forming regiment.

Charles Lenox Remond also would recruit for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.

US CIVIL WAR

January 3, Saturday: The Stevenson family of Edinburgh departed with their son and his nanny on a 5-month tour of Europe. They would first spend some time in Montone in the south of France. (In this year the Edinburgh Academy list ceased to refer to Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson as Robert Stevenson, referring to him instead as Lewis Robert Stevenson. From this point forward, he would be addressed as Louis by his family and the name would uniformly be spelled “Louis.”)

As soon as President Abraham Lincoln learned of General Grant’s order of December 17th, he rescinded it. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE January 25, Sunday: In the morning the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway spoke in the chamber of the Senate of the United States in Washington DC, and proclaimed that God had a plan and he was privy to it. God’s plan was an end to slavery and “It is a terrible error when men have one idea about that which they are doing, while God has another.” The problem people were having with each other in the United States of America reduced to the fact that although he, the Reverend Conway, knew God’s plan, nobody would pay attention to this. In the evening, when he and Wendell Phillips, George Luther Stearns, and Elizur Wright, Jr. went to the office of Abraham Lincoln, they found themselves being referred to with scant courtesy as “that Boston set.” Lincoln suggested to them that they were hard people to satisfy, because they had gotten into the habit of being dissatisfied. The delegation proposed to the Commander in Chief that he forgive and forget about General John Charles Frémont having exceeded his authority, in prematurely releasing the slaves of Missouri from bondage, but the Commander in Chief demurred. US CIVIL WAR

(On this day the president did make a personnel change, in replacing Burnside with Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac.)

Returning from this disappointing visit to the nation’s puzzle palace, Conway renewed his attempt to get out of this wartorn country. You’d have thought that, with his family ensconced in a grand mansion in a nice town like Concord chock full of literary light, with a cushy job in downtown Boston and lots of opportunity to express himself and a war to keep everything interesting, he’d have been in the proverbial catbird seat. But no, he still wanted to rub elbows with really civilized types. This time, when he went to make a case for this, his arguments were different from before, although not one bit more honest. The song and dance this time was that English society needed to meet him, and the American abolitionists needed for them to meet him. Why? Well, there was this other Virginia aristocat who was over there rubbing elbows, who was pro-slavery. . Conway’s pitch was that he would mingle and press the flesh and munch the hors d’oeuvres and sip the claret and meanwhile he’d be telling all these really important people the truth about the horror of slavery in the American South. They would believe him and disbelieve the lies being told by James Murray Mason. This would take awhile and then he’d be right back home in the trenches with the rest of the abolitionists. Phillips and Stearns immediately put up $100.00 each to get this scheme going, and Conway would spend the next couple of months getting other people to match these contributions until he had raised enough money to make sure he had a comfortable and indefinitely prolonged trip. In this time period he confided to Emerson that it was part of his plans to put the Frost home in Concord back on the market.

Well, this might all have been realistic enough in the 1861-1862 time frame, when there was a real chance that the British government was going to recognize the Confederate States of America. But that had all been disposed of as of November 1862. The period when there was a need to influence British opinion was past. The whole thing was smoke and mirrors, concealing the fact that Conway was making his permanent escape. He had simply had enough of this war he had helped to start. Now it was going to be somebody else’s problem. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Eventually he was drafted, and a $300.00 commutation fee was paid so somebody else’d have to go and fight.

Incidentally, while rubbing elbows in England, Conway was going to disgrace himself and the abolitionist cause by a particularly egregious piece of volunteer diplomatic blundering. He was going to offer, in writing, to his fellow Southerner James Murray Mason, a deal between the Northern abolitionists and the Southern states. They would see to it that the peculiar institution was abolished and the abolitionists would see to it that they got their separate country. Of course, once Mason got his hands on this piece of paper, he would first use it to blackmail and threaten Conway, and then use it to embarrass him publicly and through him embarrass the abolitionists and through the abolitionists embarrass the federal government of the United States of America. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

January 26, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Major General Joseph Hooker. US CIVIL WAR Executive Mansion Washington, January 26, 1863 Major General Hooker: General. I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons. And yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and a skilful soldier, which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm. But I think that during Gen. Burnside's command of the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of it's ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can, to put it down. Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it. And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories. Yours very truly A. Lincoln HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

February 24, Tuesday: Feramors, a lyric opera by Anton Rubinstein to words of Rodenberg after Moore, was performed for the first time, in the Dresden Hoftheater.

“Il brigidino”, a stornello for voice and piano by Giuseppe Verdi to words of Dall’Ongaro, was performed for the first time, in Parma.

Frederick Douglass became an agent for the US government to recruit Negro soldiers into its Union Army. Until sometime in July he would be traveling throughout the North recruiting black troops. His sons Lewis and Charles would be among first recruits, and both would see action with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. US CIVIL WAR

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE WHITE HOUSE BY MOONLIGHT A spell of fine soft weather. I wander about a good deal, sometimes at night under the moon. To-night took a long look at the President’s house. The white portico — the palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow — the walls also — the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint languishing shades, not shadows — everywhere a soft transparent hazy, thin, blue moon-lace, hanging in the air — the brilliant and extra-plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the faade, columns, portico, &c. — everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet soft — the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon — the gorgeous front, in the trees, under the lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of illusion — the forms of the trees, leafless, silent, in trunk and myriad-angles of branches, under the stars and sky — the White House of the land, and of beauty and night — sentries at the gates, and by the portico, silent, pacing there in blue overcoats — stopping you not at all, but eyeing you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move.

February 25, Wednesday: On his 3d try, Johann Strauss, Jr. was named Hofball-Musik-Direktor.

The Federal Banking Act was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. This created a system of federally chartered banking system in which rebels might not participate. US CIVIL WAR

March 3, Tuesday: President Abraham Lincoln signed a Federal Draft Act obligating all males between the ages of 20 and 45 to register for conscription (or, alternatively, fork over the sum of $300 so that someone else could be persuaded serve their nation on their behalf).

The federal Congress declared a Joint Resolution. Joint Resolution respecting the Compensation of the Judges and so forth, under the Treaty with Great Britain and other Persons employed in the Suppression of the Slave Trade (STATUTES AT LARGE, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE XII. 829). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

There was fighting at Fort McAllister Island. US CIVIL WAR

The United States Congress chartered the National Academy of Sciences, a society of scholars “dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare,” was established by an Act of Congress, which empowered it to create its own organization and bylaws and called upon it to serve as an official adviser to the federal government on any question of science or technology. Among the Academy’s fifty founding members were four scientists associated with Princeton University: besides Arnold Henri Guyot, there were Stephen Alexander, Joseph Henry, and John Torrey. In this year Guyot became able to make sense of the labyrinth of mountains forming the Appalachian Summit. [T]he Appalachian System rises from the point of its lowest depression around New York and in New Jersey both toward the North and toward the South, and reaches its maximum of elevation on its two extremities. The Southern section is, however, by far the most elevated, both as regards the highest peaks and the general elevation of the whole country. Unlike any other portion of the Appalachian System, the whole of that vast area of over 170 miles long and over 600 miles square, is divided by traverse chains, running on the whole, North-west and South-east, into a series of closed basins, surrounded by high ridges and lofty peaks. Each of these basins is drained by a main river which gathers the waters of the numerous mountain torrents, and carries them through deep gorges across the western chain into the Great Valley where they join the Tennessee river. The Big Yellow Mts. separate the basin of the Watauga from that of the Nolechucky. The high group of the Black Mts. from which rises the highest peak this side of the Rocky Mts., separates by several of its spurs the Nolechucky from the wide valley of the French Broad River. The New Found Mts. and Pisgah Ridge separate the high valley of the Big Pigeon from that of the French Broad, - The rough very elevated and continuous chain of the Balsam Mts. The average altitude of which is seldom below 6,000, and which reaches over 6,400 ft., separates the Big Pigeon valley from that of the Tuckaseegee, a tributary of the Little Tennessee; - and the Cowee chain of Mts. (from 4,000 to 5,000 ft.) divides the valley of the Tuckaseegee from that of the Little Tennessee. These two basins unite at the foot of the Great Smoky Mts. and their combined waters find a single outlet in the wild gorges of the Little Tennessee. The double chain of the Nantihala Ridge (from 5,000 to 5,500 ft.) and the Valley Town Mts., between which flows in deep gorges the wild torrent of the Nantihala, separates the basin of the Little Tennessee from the large open valleys and plains of the Hiwassee. The Frog Mts. with their continuation the Cohota Mts. separate the basin of the Occoa and Hiwassee from the outside of the mountain region, and are the last traverse chains which close that series of interior basins. These transverse chains are by no means inconsiderable obstacles to the intercourse between the various HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE valleys - they are just as high, nay, higher on the whole than the Blue Ridge itself, and they bear besides the highest summits of this vast Mountain tract. THE SCIENCE OF 1863 GEOLOGY

April 18, Saturday, evening: In Washington DC, President Abraham Lincoln’s surviving son Thomas (Tad) and a companion attended a play at Grovers Theater and were intrigued by the leading actor, a dark, handsome man with brilliant black eyes. During the intermission Tad and his companion went backstage and got themselves introduced in John Wilkes Booth’s dressing room.

June 28, Sunday: President Abraham Lincoln appointed George G. Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac, replacing General Hooker.

There was fighting at Donaldsonville. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July 13, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln sent a message of congratulations to General Ulysses S. Grant, acknowledging that he had understood better than the President had, how to achieve success in the struggle at Vicksburg. Major General Grant My dear General I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did — march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition, and the like, could succeed. When you got below, and took Port-Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong. Yours very truly A. Lincoln

This Monday morning was hot and muggy, and William Waterman Chapin (1834-1922) of Providence, Rhode Island was being drafted to serve in the Union army. What a downer! Lucky boy, this was America and he had enough money — he would not be forced to serve so much as a single day in uniform.

At 10:30AM, after several dozen names had been pulled in the draft lottery at the provost marshal’s office on 3d Avenue between 46th Street and 47th Street in New-York, it became clear to the members of a local volunteer firefighting company that they had not been exempted from the military draft. Well, firemen are blunt men of action and reaction, in an intense, high-energy occupation — daily they drink and swear and risk their lives. Becoming aware of their draft predicament, the firefighting company stormed the building that housed the draft center and set it ablaze. The fire would spread and consume not only this structure but also neighboring stores and a tenement. US CIVIL WAR

July 14, Tuesday: President Abraham Lincoln wrote to General Meade complaining about his failure to capture General Robert E. Lee, but did not then send the letter.

There was a very serious conscription riot in Boston’s North End after a draft lottery, while the police were notifying the losers that their service in the US federal military would be required. At the Cooper Square Armory, it took the discharge of a cannon loaded with canister shot, plus an on-line bayonet advance, to get the mob to disperse, and many Bostonians were injured. At least 20 would die. — As a result of this emphatic display of popular sentiment, from this point to the end of the war only 713 of the able-bodied men of military age in this town would be unsuccessful in evading federal attempts to draft them. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July30, Thursday: Henry Ford was born.

Tsar Alyeksandr II signed a manifesto in Hämeenlinna making the Finnish language equal to Swedish, in Finland.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis had reacted to Union President Abraham Lincoln’s arming of black men, deemed by Davis to be “human beings of an inferior order,” by orating that this was going to produce “the most execrable massacre recorded in the history of guilty man.” He had therefore directed his Confederate soldiers not to treat any Union black soldiers they might capture as prisoners of war, but instead, to either enslave or execute them. In addition, if any of their white officers surrendered, they were to be charged with a crime against the proper conduct of warfare, and executed. Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon had asserted the South’s policy as “never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners ... summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken.” This Southern policy was not merely jawboning, but had been fully implemented. On this day, therefore, the Union President formally instructed his soldiers to execute any (white, of course) Confederate soldiers who surrendered, in retaliation for the South’s policy of execution of captured black Union soldiers. It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.

Lincoln’s Order of Retaliation, had it been enforced, would have been isomorphic with President George W. Bush’s demand that we torture captured terrorists regardless of whether or not such treatment was likely to produce any usable military intelligence. The prime difference between Lincoln’s reaction and this cowboy’s reaction was not that Lincoln’s reaction involved execution whereas the later President’s reaction involved torture, but that W’s reaction was actually implemented through “enhanced interrogation” whereas Lincoln’s reaction was not ever in any manner implemented. The hostages W took would be endlessly tortured in the government’s “black site” facilities whereas the hostages Lincoln took never had been executed. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 8, Saturday: President Abraham Lincoln wrote to his wife regarding their surviving son Tad’s lost goat.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HOME-MADE MUSIC To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory- square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the ward where the music was, I walk’d half- way down and took a seat by the cot of a young Brooklyn friend, S. R., badly wounded in the hand at Chancellorsville, and who has suffer’d much, but at that moment in the evening was wide awake and comparatively easy. He had turn’d over on his left side to get a better view of the singers, but the mosquito-curtains of the adjoining cots obstructed the sight. I stept round and loop’d them all up, so that he had a clear show, and then sat down again by him, and look’d and listen’d. The principal singer was a young lady-nurse of one of the wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join’d by the lady-nurses of other wards. They sat there, making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces, and standing up a little behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, [Page 732] &c., with books in their hands, singing. Of course it was not such a performance as the great soloists at the New York opera house take a hand in, yet I am not sure but I receiv’d as much pleasure under the circumstances, sitting there, as I have had from the best Italian compositions, express’d by world-famous performers. The men lying up and down the hospital, in their cots, (some badly wounded — some never to rise thence,) the cots themselves, with their drapery of white curtains, and the shadows down the lower and upper parts of the ward; then the silence of the men, and the attitudes they took — the whole was a sight to look around upon again and again. And there sweetly rose those voices up to the high, whitewash’d wooden roof, and pleasantly the roof sent it all back again. They sang very well, mostly quaint old songs and declamatory hymns, to fitting tunes. Here, for instance: My days are swiftly gliding by, and I a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger; For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover. We’ll gird our loins my brethren dear, our distant home discerning, Our absent Lord has left us word, let every lamp be burning, For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 10, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln was meeting with Frederick Douglass to consider his petition for the full equality of the Union’s “Negro troops.” While they were at it, the President wrote Douglass out a pass enabling him to go with safety through Union lines. US CIVIL WAR

Meanwhile, Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College was writing to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, who was at the time on the American ’s Inquiry Commission, to warn him against government policies that might allow our “manly population descended from cognate nations” to deteriorate into “effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood,” like our neighbor to our south, Mexico. That would reduce us to the same “degradation” as that mongrel nation. Amalgamation was clearly an “unnatural” thing. The scientist recommended to the medical doctor that “all legislation with reference to [half-breeds] ... be regulated with this view & so ordained as to accelerate their disappearance from the Northern States.” EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429 We may presume that Dr. Howe was persuaded by this scientifically objective information about race purity, coming as it was from a prominent scientist of impeccable credentials. (At some point during this year Dr. Howe confided to a friend that the Reverend Theodore Parker’s brain had come into his possession and that he was planning to deposit this grisly object in the family crypt at Mt. Auburn — whether Dr. Howe ever would carry out this resolution, we do not know.)

August 25, Tuesday: According to a letter from Frederick Douglass to Theodore Tilton dated October 15, 1865, Douglass met with President Abraham Lincoln on this date and it was suggested that Douglass’s objective ought to be to work through his contacts, to get as many slaves as possible to place themselves in Union hands before the cessation of hostilities. The President evidently meant to convey an intention that after the war was over, only these slaves would be free. US CIVIL WAR

You understand, in this timeframe Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee were consulting with one another in Richmond, Virginia. Things going on in the North were very, very different from things going on in the South, and vice versa. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE September 19, Saturday: Federal and Confederate forces met along a 10-kilometer front at Lee & Gordon’s Mill on the Chickamauga Creek in Georgia south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. After a brief period of fighting, Union forces retreated into the town, while the Confederacy maintained control of the battlefield. The heavy fighting produced high casualties but negligible results. After Federal General Rosecrans’s debacle at Chickamauga, Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s army occupied the mountains that ring the vital railroad center of Chattanooga. US CIVIL WAR

Among the corpses that littered the field of battle near Chickamauga Creek was that of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott’s and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott’s son James Deas Nott II.93

93. In case you’re wondering: since concern over the right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of the federal Constitution is a concern that has arisen in post-Civil War years, the Liberty for which they died could only have been either 1.) the right to leave the federal union, 2.) the right to own other human beings, or 3.) a combination of the above. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

“It is a consolation to those who mourn their loss and erect this monument to know that they died in defence [sic] of Liberty and left behind untarnished names.”

September 20, Sunday: After the dust-up just south of Chattanooga, the Federals stopped the Confederate advance but retreated in great disorder to the north. The fighting had produced 34,500 total casualties. President Abraham Lincoln appointed General Ulysses S. Grant to command all operations in the western theater. US CIVIL WAR

October 3, Saturday: President Abraham Lincoln established the 1st regularly scheduled, national Thanksgiving holiday: US CIVIL WAR By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE William H. Seward, Secretary of State

November 19, Thursday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis was working on a Trans-Mississippi strategy for the Confederacy. US CIVIL WAR

President Abraham Lincoln took the train down from Washington DC to participate in a ceremonial dedication of the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as a national military cemetery. After a 2-hour oration by Edward Everett that must have exhausted the 15,000 citizens present, he offered his own “little speech,” or “Gettysburg Address.” As he delivered this he was probably in the early stages of infection by the small pox. READ THE FULL TEXT

During the early 1860s, in the early throes of our civil war, our Declaration of Independence had been being very carefully reexamined and reconsidered. In this Gettysburg Address it found itself transformed into “first and foremost a living document for an established society” and this president’s brief words of dedication would became in due course “an American sacred text” (Maier, Pauline. AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: MAKING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, page 207). As in 1776, the power of the locution would come from the fact that rather than echoing what all Americans presumed, it broadcast what a number of them were preparing to ram down the throats of the others as what all Americans henceforth were to presume.

Lincoln wasn’t the only orator on this occasion. According to the Steubensville Weekly Herald, “President Lincoln was there, too,” We don’t know for certain sure which particular phases Lincoln used in his brief address. There are a number of drafts of the speech, which differ somewhat from one another, and there is the problem that one reporter who bothered to transcribe the President’s words from the podium, either indulged in free phrase substitution on his reportorial notepad or else faithfully recorded phrases that are somewhat less polished than those we now read in one or another of the manuscript documents. The Providence, Rhode Island Journal would report not only of the brief address’s power but also of its “charm”: We know not where to look for a more admirable speech than the brief one which the President made at the close of Mr. Everett’s oration.... Could the most elaborate and splendid oration be more beautiful, more touching, more inspiring than those thrilling words of the President? They have in our humble judgment the charm and power of the very highest eloquence. The Harrisburg Patriot and Union would be considerably less tactful than this: We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the Nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Edward Everett –who had himself addressed the assembly for a solid two hours– would write to the President after hearing his brief address, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

EVERETT’S TWO HOURS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE December: Late in this year, and continuing through the next, Frederick Douglass would be delivering many times an oration entitled “The Mission of the War” in which he would be declaring, in response to Abraham Lincoln’s sentiment “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” the counter-sentiment “We want a country which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.” “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” — Abraham Lincoln

“We want a country which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.” — Frederick Douglass

December 8, Tuesday: British forces occupied Ngaruawahia, to the southeast of Auckland, the center of Maori resistance.

When the Church of La Compañia in Santiago de Chile burned down at about 7PM during a worship service, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 of the faithful were incinerated. (Never, never, never ever, place a lit candle in any position in which a chance breeze might cause a curtain to drift momentarily across its flame!) TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

President Abraham Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction for restoration of the Union. US CIVIL WAR

The Reverend Robert Collyer wrote to Charles Wesley Slack while making plans for his impending relocation from Chicago to Boston to become pastor of the 28th Congregational Society that held its Sunday meetings at the Boston Music Hall. UNITARIANISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1864

President Abraham Lincoln called for 500,000 men to serve three years or the duration of civil war. New-York photographer Mathew Brady traveled through the war-torn South to record scenes of the conflict — including for some reason lots and lots of people lying down on the ground holding very still.

Adam Gurowski’s DIARY, FROM NOVEMBER 18, 1862, TO OCTOBER 18, 1863 (more notes on the civil war). 11/18/1862 TO 10/18/1863

In this year Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau and Ellery Channing were jointly editing Henry Thoreau’s several magazine articles about Maine travels into an edition entitled THE MAINE WOODS. Their effort was reviewed by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in The Atlantic Monthly, saying of Thoreau that “the world repaid him with lifelong obscurity and will yet repay him with permanent renown.”94 TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS

94. Earlier typographical errors were corrected, and some material was added from Thoreau’s reading after 1848. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE CAPE COD also was being posthumously edited by Ellery Channing and Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, and would be published by Ticknor & Fields.

Fields would publish two more of those chapters in The Atlantic Monthly during October and December, omitting (perhaps out of concern for the genteel sensibilities of that mag’s readers) only the passage from Chapter 5 on the breakfast foods that were sustaining “detriment from the old man’s shots.” Thoreau had added the second paragraph of Chapter 1 (although parts of this were in his February 1850 lecture), the paragraph on Greenland (60-61), two historical footnotes (15, 38), and a half dozen minor pieces of a sentence or two. These additions supplement rather than alter what was already in the published articles in Putnam’s.

The 1st reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, as fantasized by Francis Bicknell Carpenter during this year (and then subsequently modified by 1878 so that the pen was put in Abraham Lincoln’s right hand, the document in his left hand, the area behind his head lightened as in a halo, and his figure turned toward the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE painting’s audience rather than toward Seward): Edward Bates, Attorney General Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury Edwin McMasters Stanton, Secretary of War

Abraham Lincoln, President

William Henry Seward, Secretary of State In accordance with the rule of thumb “Don’t bunch up, guys, one grenade’ll getcha all!” that scene has more HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE recently been reimagined:

In the famous painting, the guy standing behind Lincoln was Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Portland Chase, but is that supposed to be Chase above, standing behind the President, or is it merely some amorphous unnamed supporting character, maybe a Secret Service agent, or his personal attorney? Anyway, in this year “In God We Trust” was being printed on the paper currency for the 1st time by order of Chase, who since his face was gracing the $1 bill and since the bills had plain green backs would come to be known to the public as “Old Mr. Greenbacks.”95 SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

I can’t show you what Chase looked like on this Civil-War one-dollar greenback — but I can show you what Old Mr. Greenbacks looked like on a subsequent denomination:

95. No high American public official would dare protest against this breach of the barrier between religion and government — until Theodore Roosevelt would take it upon himself to attempt a removal — and would be overridden by a pious Congress. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Disagreements between Salmon Portland Chase and Lincoln had been common occurrences, and when such a matter of disagreement arose it had been Chase’s habit to tender his resignation. The 4th time he played this card, to Chase’s great surprise Lincoln accepted the resignation as Secretary of the Treasury. “....I will tell you how it is with Chase. Chase has fallen into two bad habits. He thinks he has became indispensable to the country.... He also thinks he ought to be President. He has no doubts whatever about that. It is inconceivable to him why people have not found it out, why they don’t as one man rise up and say so.... He is either determined to annoy me, or that I shall pat him on the shoulder and coax him to stay. I don’t think I ought do it. I will not do it. I will take him at his word.... And yet there is not a man in the Union who would make as good a Chief Justice as Chase, and if I have the opportunity I will make him Chief Justice of the United States.” Lincoln’s only concern about his subsequent appointment of Chase to the US Supreme Court during this year was that black robes of the court might not cloak Chase’s persistent ambition to be president. Lincoln thought about asking Chase to agree not to seek the presidency but Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, Chase’s friend, advised Lincoln against asking for such a pledge. A few days later, Lincoln’s secretary, Mr. Nicolay, brought in a letter from Chase. Lincoln asked what it was about and Nicolay responded “Simply a kind and friendly letter.” Instead of reading it, Lincoln went “File it with his other recommendations.”

In the following decade, Chief Justice Chase would involve himself in five significant opinions:

In 1866 he would deliver a separate opinion in Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 In 1866 he would present the opinion of the court in Mississippi v. Johnson, 71 U.S. 475 In 1868 he would present the opinion of the court in Ex parte McCardle, 74 U.S. 506 In 1868 he would present the opinion of the court in Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 In 1871 he would present the opinion of the court in United States v. Klein, 80 U.S. 128

Frederick Douglass met with President Abraham Lincoln to formulate plans to lead blacks out of the South in case of a Union defeat. US CIVIL WAR “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

Benjamin Wade would be opposing President Abraham Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan. He and Henry Winter Davis sponsored a bill that provided for the administration of the affairs of southern states by provisional governors until the end of the war, arguing that civil government could be re-established only after at least half of the male white citizens had taken an oath of loyalty to the Union.

US CIVIL WAR President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting the valley of Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the State of California as state park lands — which amounted to our 1st national act of wilderness preservation.

The 12th National Negro Convention. Frederick Douglass was present.

March 12, Saturday: President Abraham Lincoln appointed Ulysses S. Grant as general-in-chief of all the Union armies. William T. Sherman succeeded Grant as commander in the West. US CIVIL WAR

April 5, Tuesday: George Pullman received a US patent for his railroad car designed specifically for sleeping.

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “I have been reading “Prince Vitale” for the second time, and have been lost in admiration of it. What wealth of color, facts, ideas — what learning, what fine-edged satire, what esprit, science, and talent, and what an irreproachable finish of style — so limpid, and yet so profound! It is not heartfelt and it is not spontaneous, but all other kinds of merit, culture, and cleverness the author possesses. It would be impossible to be more penetrating, more subtle, and less fettered in mind, than this wizard of language, with his irony and his chameleon-like variety. Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx, is able to play all lyres, and takes his profit from them all, with a Goethe-like serenity. It seems as if passion, grief, and error had no hold on this impassive soul. The key of his thought is to be looked for in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind,” remolded by Greek and French influences. His faith, if he has one, is that of Strauss-Humanism. But he is perfectly master of himself and of his utterances, and will take good care never to preach anything prematurely. What is there quite at the bottom of this deep spring? In any case a mind as free as any can possibly be from stupidity and prejudice. One might almost say that Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to know, without the trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles, with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this jeweler is a subtle musician; and this fine singer and storyteller, with his amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE making mock of us all the while. He takes a malicious pleasure in withdrawing his own personality from scrutiny and divination, while he himself divines everything, and he likes to make us feel that although he holds in his hand the secret of the universe, he will only unfold his prize at his own time, and if it pleases him. Victor Cherbuliez is a little like Proudhon and plays with paradoxes, to shock the bourgeois. Thus he amuses himself with running down Luther and the Reformation in favor of the Renaissance. Of the troubles of conscience he seems to know nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason. At bottom he is Hegelian and intellectualist. But it is a splendid organization. Only sometimes he must be antipathetic to those men of duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and humility the measure of individual worth.”

A letter to the widowed Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, from the Executive Mansion, Washington DC: Mrs. Horace Mann, Executive Mansion, Madam, Washington, April 5, 1864. The petition of persons under eighteen, praying that I would free all slave children, and the heading of which petition it appears you wrote, was handed me a few days since by Senator Sumner. Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that, while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it. Yours truly A. LINCOLN96 The “Petition of the Children of the United States; that the President will free all slave children” bore, it seems, 195 signatures. In reply to Abraham Lincoln’s letter, forwarded by Senator Sumner, Mrs. Mann would write: “It was wholly without my knowledge that my name was sent to you in connection with the petition of persons under eighteen in Concord ... but I cannot regret it, since it has given me this precious note from your hand.... We intend immediately to scatter fac-similes of your sweet words to the children like apple blossoms all over the country—and we look with more hope than ever for the day when perfect justice shall be decreed, which shall make every able bodied colored man spring to the defence of the nation which it is plain the white man alone cannot save....” (In deference to Mrs. Mann’s desire to remain anonymous, the facsimiles, which were widely distributed, would show instead of “Mrs. Horace Mann” “Mrs.——— (of Concord Mass.).”

US CIVIL WAR

96. In 2008 this holograph letter from the President would be sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York by the trust of the retired physician Richard Small to a private collector for the largest amount of money ever paid to date for such a document: $3,400,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE June 8, Wednesday: Abraham Lincoln was renominated for president by a coalition of Republicans and War Democrats.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis inspected the defenses at Bottom’s Bridge. US CIVIL WAR July 2, Saturday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Message of the President ... communicating ... information in regard to the African slave trade.” –SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 38 Cong. 1 sess. No. 56.

By United States statute, the coastwise slave-trade was prohibited forever (§9 of Appropriation Act repeals §§8 and 9 of Act of 1807; STATUTES AT LARGE, XIII. 353).

The Wade-Davis Bill passed with only one dissenting Republican vote. However, President Abraham Lincoln refused to sign it. Lincoln defended his decision by telling Zachariah Chandler, one of the bill’s supporters, that it was a mere matter of timing: “this bill was placed before me a few minutes before Congress adjourns. It is a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.” Six days later Lincoln would issue a proclamation explaining his dissent. Senator Benjamin Wade would argue that the President had rejected it, not for the reasons which he was stating, but simply because he did not wish “to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration.”

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July 10, Sunday: Thaddeus Stevens wrote to Edward McPherson about President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation

after his rejection of the Wade-Davis Bill: What an infamous proclamation! The president is determined to have the electoral votes of the seceded States. The idea of pocketing a bill and then issuing a proclamation as how far he will conform to it is matched only by signing a bill and then sending in a veto. How little of the rights of war and the law of nations our president knows!97 US CIVIL WAR

97. Thaddeus Stevens, complete with not only his trademark black wig but also with his club foot, would be satirized in D.W. Griffith’s film “Birth of a Nation” as “Senator Stoneman,” a conniving Northern hater of the Southern white man, and a conniving befriender of the Negro persecutors of white civilization — who gets his comeuppance when a mulatto tries to entrap his sweet and pure white daughter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July 17, Sunday: Horace Greeley, under President Abraham Lincoln’s sanction, met at Niagara Falls with alleged Confederate peace commissioners.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaced Joseph E. Johnston with John Bell Hood in command of the Army of Tennessee outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

On this day and the following one there would be fighting at Cool Spring / Island Ford / Parkers Ford. US CIVIL WAR

July 18, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 500,000 volunteers for military service. US CIVIL WAR

August 2, Tuesday-23, Tuesday: There was fighting at Mobile Bay, Alabama. A combined Union force initiated operations to close Mobile Bay to blockade running. Some Union forces landed on Dauphin Island and laid siege to Fort Gaines. On August 5, Farragut’s Union fleet of eighteen ships entered Mobile Bay and received devastating a fire from Forts Gaines and Morgan and other points. After passing the forts, Farragut forced the Confederate naval forces, under Admiral Franklin Buchanan, to surrender, which effectively closed Mobile Bay. By August 23, Fort Morgan, the last big holdout, fell, shutting down the port. The city, however, remained uncaptured. US CIVIL WAR

August 5, Friday-7, Sunday: There was fighting at Utoy Creek. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 5, Friday: Federal naval forces captured or destroyed all Confederate shipping in Mobile Bay, Alabama, closing the port to the rebels.

The Radical Republicans, distressed by President Abraham Lincoln’s veto of the Wade-Davis Bill, published an attack by Senators Benjamin Wade and Henry Winter Davis in the New-York Tribune. In what would become known as the Wade-Davis Manifesto, the senators were arguing that the actions of the president who belonged to their own political party had been taken “at the dictation of his personal ambition.” The president stood accused in the popular press of a “dictatorial usurpation.”

The bill directed the appointment of provisional government by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The President, after defeating the law, proposes to appoint, without law and without the advice and consent of the Senate, military governors for the rebel States! Whatever is done will be at his will and pleasure, by persons responsible to no law, and more interested to secure the interests and execute the will of the President than of the people; and the will of Congress is to be “held for naught unless the loyal people of the rebel States choose to adopt it.” The President must realize that our support is of a cause and not of a man and that the authority of Congress is paramount and must be respected; and if he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his executive duties - to obey and execute, not make the laws - to suppress by armed rebellion, and leave political reorganization to Congress. US CIVIL WAR

August 19, Friday: According to the diary of Joseph T. Mills, President Abraham Lincoln had an interview with Mills and with Alexander W. Randall in which he legitimated the emancipation of the slaves on the basis of military necessity: The President was free & animated in conversation. I was astonished at his elasticity of spirits. Says Gov Randall, why cant you Mr P. seek some place of retirement for a few weeks. You would be reinvigorated. Aye said the President, 3 weeks would do me no good — my thoughts my solicitude for this great country follow me where ever I go. I don’t think it is personal vanity, or ambition — but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in the approaching canvas. My own experience has proven to me, that there is no program intended by the democratic party but that will result in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of the Union. But Genl McClellan is in favor of out the rebellion, & he will probably be the Chicago candidate. The slightest acquaintance with arithmetic will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the north to do it. There are now between 1 & 200 thousand black men now in the service of the Union. These men will be disbanded, returned to slavery & we will have to fight two nations instead of one. I have tried it. You cannot concilliate the South, when the mastery & control of millions of blacks makes them sure of ultimate success. You cannot concilliate the South, when you place yourself in such a position, that they see they can achieve their independence. The depends upon conciliation. He must confine himself to that policy entirely. If he fights at all in such a war as this he must economise life & use all the means which God & nature puts in his power. Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks. We have to hold territory. Where are the war democrats to do it. The field was open to them to have enlisted & put down this rebellion by force of arms, by concilliation, long before the present policy was inaugurated. There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will. My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of 200 000 able bodied men, born & raised on southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has sub[t]racted from the strength of our enemies, & instead of alienating the south from us, there are evidences of a fraternal feeling growing up between our own & rebel soldiers. My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it. The President appeared to be not the pleasant joker I had expected to see, but a man of deep convictions & an unutterable yearning for the success of the Union cause. His voice was pleasant — his manner earnest & cordial. As I heard a vindication of his policy from his own lips, I could not but feel that his mind grew in stature like his body, & that I stood in the presence of the great guiding intellect of the age, & that those huge Atlantian shoulders were fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies. His transparent honesty, his republican simplicity, his gushing sympathy for those who offered their lives for their country, his utter forgetfulness of self in his concern for his country, could not but inspire me with confidence, that he was Heavens instrument to conduct his people thro this red sea of blood to a Canaan of peace & freedom. Comr. Dole then came in. We were about to retire, but he insisted on our remaining longer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Dismissing the present state of the country, he entertained us with reminiscences of the past — of the discussions between himself & Douglass. He said he was accused of of [sic] joking. In his later speeches, the seriousness of the theme prevented him from using anecdotes. Mr. Harris a democratic orator of Ill, once appealed to his audience in this way. If these republicans get into power, the darkies will be allowed to come to the polls & vote. Here comes forward a white man, & you ask him who will you vote for. I will vote for S A Douglass. Next comes up a sleek pampered negro. Well Sambo, who do you vote for. I vote for Massa Lincoln. Now asked the orator, what do you think of that. Some old farmer cried out, I think the darkey showd a damd sight of more sense than the white man. It is such social tete a tetes among his friends that enables Mr Lincoln to endure mental toils & application that would crush any other man. The President now in full flow of spirits, scattered his repartee in all directions. He took his seat on the sofa by my side. Said I Mr President I was in your reception room to day. It was dark. I suppose that clouds & darkness necessarily surround the secrets of state. There in a corner I saw a man quietly reading who possessed a remarkable physiognomy. I was rivetted to the spot. I stood & stared at him. He raised his flashing eyes & caught me in the act. I was compelled to speak. Said I, Are you the President. No replied the stranger, I am Frederick Douglass. Now Mr P. are you in favor of miscegenation. That’s a democratic mode of producing good Union men, & I dont propose to infringe on the patent. We parted from his Excellency, with firmer purpose to sustain the government, at whose head there stands a man who combines in his person all that is valuable in progress in conservatism — all that is hopeful in progress. President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglass on this day, asking that he develop a strategy for inducing Southern slaves to escape across the Union lines. US CIVIL WAR

August 20, Saturday: King Vittorio Emanuele II designated Gioachino Rossini as Commander of the Order of Sts. Maurice and Lazarus.

There was fighting at Lovejoy’s Station. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August 25, Thursday: When Franz Liszt and his daughter Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt von Bülow arrived at Villa Pellet on Lake Starnberg, Richard Wagner was attending King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s birthday party at Hohenschwangau (he would return that evening).

People were killing each other at Ream’s Station. Elsewhere in the nation, there wasn’t much of this mutual murder going on, except that beginning on this day and continuing into the 29th, people would be killing each other at Smithfield Crossing. President Abraham Lincoln summoned Frederick Douglass to the White House to advise on problems of Lincoln’s re-election campaign. (Reversing his earlier stance, he would endorse Lincoln.) US CIVIL WAR

August 29, Monday: Frederick Douglass responded to President Abraham Lincoln’s letter of August 19th, asking that he develop a plan for inducing Southern slaves to escape across Union lines. As part of this response, he asked the President to discharge his son Charles Remond Douglass from military service, alleging illness98 and mentioning that one reason for his son’s enlistment had been propagandistic –to encourage others to enlist

OHNE MICH!

in the new black regiments– and that by this point such a purpose had been amply fulfilled.99 (The President would write in the margin “Let this boy100 be discharged.”)

US CIVIL WAR 98. Well, isn’t everybody just sick of war? 99. At the slaughterhouse they keep a bell-wearing sheep in their holding pen. Its function is to lead the other sheep up the ramp to be slaughtered. Each time the one with the bell around its neck comes up the ramp, the workers with the mallets and knives let it on through and back into the holding pen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

August 31, Wednesday: The Reverend Francis Ellingwood Abbot was ordained minister of the Unitarian society in Dover, New Hampshire.

President Abraham Lincoln made a speech to the 148th Ohio Regiment.

Fighting began at Jonesborough, that would continue into September 1st. US CIVIL WAR

October 20, Thursday: President Abraham Lincoln issued Proclamation 118: US CIVIL WAR By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year, defending us with His guardian care against unfriendly designs from abroad and vouchsafing to us in His mercy many and signal victories over the enemy, who is of our own household. It has also pleased our Heavenly Father to favor as well our citizens in their homes as our soldiers in their camps and our sailors on the rivers and seas with unusual health. He has largely augmented our free population by emancipation and by immigration, while He has opened to us new sources of wealth and has crowned the labor of our workingmen in every department of industry with abundant rewards. Moreover, He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us

100. Twenty years old and still a boy. Tsk, tsk. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions: Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may then be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend to my fellow-citizens aforesaid that on that occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations. In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, this 20th day of October, A.D. 1864, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty- ninth. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. By the President: WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

November 8, Tuesday: President Abraham Lincoln was re-elected, defeating Democrat George B. McClellan. The Republican incumbent received 212 of 233 electoral votes, and 55 percent of the popular vote.

Thanksgiving: Herbstlied for two sopranos, male chorus, and piano by Anton Bruckner to words of von Sallet was performed for the initial time, in Linz, with the composer conducting.

Benjamin Silliman died in New Haven, Connecticut.

President Abraham Lincoln had declared that this last Thursday of November was to be celebrated as our national day of Thanksgiving. Some soldiers disobeyed, for instance at Columbia in Tennessee where people would be killing one another from the 24th into the 29th more or less without much interruption. US CIVIL WAR

Men responding to advertisements offering specialized medical treatment for venereal disease had been being sold worthless tonics at exorbitant prices and then, when they began to refuse to purchase more, had been being threatened with exposure. After an extensively reported trial, during this month some of the culprits were given sentences of two years at hard labor, and the New-York Times denounced this “infamous trade,” referring to it as “a sort of moral garroting.”

During this month, also, the Republican Party had nominated President Abraham Lincoln as its presidential candidate, and Andrew Johnson as its candidate for vice-president. The Democratic party had chosen to run General George B. McClellan for president, and George Pendleton for vice-president. War-weariness in the North was widespread. Lincoln’s veto of the Wade-Davis Bill –requiring the majority of the electorate in each HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Confederate state to swear past and future loyalty to the Union before the state could officially be restored– had lost him the support of the Radical Republicans. The President, aware that he might very well be unseated, had ordered General William T. Sherman to take Atlanta, Georgia in time for him to have election-year bragging rights. In the course of this march through Georgia to the sea, the general had been obligated to cut his troops off from all sources of supply. Living off the land, the northern army had cut a path 300 miles in length and 60 miles wide as they had passed through Georgia, destroying factories, bridges, railroads, and public buildings. Sherman’s victory in Atlanta had boosted Lincoln’s popularity and he would achieve re- election by a substantial margin.

November 25, Friday: VOYAGE AU CENTRE DE LA TERRE was published by Jules Verne.

Confederate terrorists set fires in 10 New-York hotels, 2 theaters, and Barnum’s Museum, without causing much damage. US CIVIL WAR

December 15, Thursday: Federal troops drove back Confederate troops around Nashville, Tennessee. US CIVIL WAR

A bankrupt who out of his personal experience had become a flaming advocate of Representative Thomas Allen Jenckes’s federal uniform bankruptcy act wrote to him that President Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was going to lose at the polls “if this administration refuse to grant us that which they do not refuse to the meanest negro.”

Racist comparisons defined failure and rebuked the government for letting white men fall so low. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1865

J.G. Holland’s PLAIN TALKS, ON FAMILIAR SUBJECTS. PLAIN TALKS

Nobody ever reads this now.

Josiah Gilbert Holland’s LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

LIFE OF A. LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Nobody ever reads this now.

January 18, Wednesday: Dr. Robert Montgomery Smith Jackson died of pneumonia at the age of 51 in Hospital Number Three on Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. John Gemmill would be appointed as 14- year-old daughter Jennie Jackson’s guardian. US CIVIL WAR

That evening, President Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to attend a performance of “Jack Cade, or The Kentish Revolution” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. John Wilkes Booth and his crew of kidnappers were ready and waiting — but the president unfortunately was detained by business. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE February: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. successfully presented the federal administration’s position concerning “Prize Cases” before the US Supreme Court.

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman moved from Georgia through South Carolina, destroying virtually everything in his path. Confederate President Jefferson Davis agreed to send delegates to a conference with President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward to put an end to our Civil War, but insisted on Northern recognition of the South’s independence as the prerequisite (Lincoln would refuse and such a conference would never occur). US CIVIL WAR

February 1, Wednesday: A federal army began to advance from Savannah into South Carolina. US CIVIL WAR

Amendment XIII to the federal Constitution had been proposed by Congress on January 31, 1865. The amendment, when first proposed by a resolution in Congress, had been passed by the Senate, 38 to 6, on April 8, 1864, but had been defeated in the House, 95 to 66 on June 15, 1864. On reconsideration by the House, on January 31, 1865, the resolution had passed, 119 to 56. It had been ratified by a sufficient number of the states on December 6, 1865. President Lincoln added his own signature on this day — even though the Supreme Court had decided in 1798 that no President has anything at all to do either with the proposing of amendments to the US Constitution, or with their adoption: 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. We notice that the amendment is merely permissive. Giving Congress the power to enforce the article by appropriate legislation would be a mandate by which it might enact such legislation, but it did not create any obligation that such legislation be enacted. We note however that when considered in conjunction with the “separation of powers” doctrine –that a power granted to one of the three branches of the federal government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, is thereby denied to the other two of those three branches– this amendment forever removes any constitutional possibility that the judicial branch would itself attempt to regulate or forbid human enslavement in the United States of America, and also, this amendment forever removes any constitutional possibility that the executive branch would issue another martial law order such as the Emancipation Proclamation, and renders the Emancipation Proclamation which had been issued during the civil war by President Lincoln into a document that retroactively is void ex post facto, as unconstitutional.

We notice also that the language used, “slavery” and “involuntary servitude,” is language which had never received either a federal juridical or a federal legislative definition. The language “persons held to labor or service,” which had been used in the various fugitive slave laws and which had been included in the proposed HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 13th Amendment which had been delivered to the state legislatures for approval on March 2, 1861, had been effective, defined language. This, quite the opposite, was undefined language, which could only be activated when (and if) the federal congress chose to provide it with an effective definition. In other words, the amendment placed the federal congress in sole and total control over the issue of whether slavery would ever be effectively abolished.

(No such legislative definition of a federal crime of enslavement would ever be forthcoming. No American, therefore, could ever be arrested, arraigned, prosecuted, convicted, and punished, for a crime of enslaving another human being — because no federal judge would ever be able to infer, in what such enslavement might consist.) “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The signatures of Abraham Lincoln, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, and members of the federal Senate and House of Representatives appear upon this ceremonial copy:

So much changed as a result of this amendment! After this sort of amendment to the Constitution, the parents of “Blind Tom” needed to be persuaded to sign papers of indenture amounting to an extension of their black son’s slavery, so that his “former” owner could continue to profit enormously from the proceeds of his piano HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE performances!

You do agree, don’t you, that Blind Tom was a whole lot better off after he became a free indentured man, than he had been when he was a mere slave before the passage of the XIIIth Amendment. Don’t you? Come on, admit it, it does sound a whole lot better to be indentured, than to be enslaved! Doesn’t it?

February 3, Friday: President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens off Hampton Roads, Virginia. They were not able to come to an understanding about anything, as Stephens was intransigent in regard to Southern independence.

There was fighting at Rivers’ Bridge (Owens’ Crossroads). Confederate force under McLaws held the crossings of the Salkehatchie River against the advance of the right wing of Sherman’s Army. Federal soldiers began building bridges across the swamp to bypass the road block. In the meantime, Union columns worked to get on the Confederates’ flanks and rear. On February 3, two Union brigades waded the swamp downstream and assaulted McLaws’s right. McLaws retreated toward Branchville after stalling Sherman’s advance for only one day. US CIVIL WAR

February 5, Sunday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis met with his commissioners as they returned from the failed Hampton Roads peace conference.

Peace having remained less desirable than war, on this day and the following two there would be fighting at Hatcher’s Run / Dabney’s Mill / Rowanty Creek. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 3, Friday: President Abraham Lincoln signed a new law, which had been sponsored by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, opponent of the “separate but equal” laws, requiring the Washington horsecars to provide service to blacks. Suddenly there were no more Jim Crow cars, but the attitude of some white riders would be such as to make blacks fearful to board the cars and attempt to utilize the newly integrated seating — when, that is, the conductor was forced to stop by someone standing in the path of his team, or unable to carry off the pretense that he simply wasn’t noticing them as they yelled out that they were waiting to board the horsecar. From March into September, Sojourner Truth would be riding the Washington DC horsecars, campaigning to make this new law effective in practice. In one incident a conductor who injured her would be fined.

The President on this day also signed “An Act to Incorporate the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company.” Although the act did not provide for branch offices outside the District of Columbia, the Reverend John W. Alvord always planned for his bank to open branches wherever there were large black communities, especially in the South.101

101. Carl R. Osthaus. FREEDMEN, PHILANTHROPY, AND FRAUD: A HISTORY OF THE FREEDMAN’S SAV IN GS BANK (1976), pp. 4-5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 4, Saturday morning: Pennsylvania Avenue was an expanse of muck and standing water during Abraham Lincoln’s 2d inaugural address.

Thousands stood in this mess at the Capitol grounds in Washington DC to hear the President, on the East Portico, renew his oath of office and comment upon the nation’s predicament, with the completed Capitol dome over the President’s head a physical reminder of the resolve of his Administration throughout the years HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of crisis.

The actor John Wilkes Booth was able to be present through the good graces of his fiancée Bessie Lambert Hale, daughter of New Hampshire senator John Parker Hale. (The senator was endeavoring at the time to get rid of this unsuitable suitor in a roundabout manner, by getting the President to appoint him as an ambassador — whereupon he would be able to take his family abroad and thus separate this daughter from her guy.) A photograph of the ceremony published at the time by the Illustrated London News, when enhanced and blown up, reveals him standing in the required beaver top hat on a balcony above and to the side of the inaugural platform from which, with pistol extended through the open railing, the muzzle of his pistol would have been about four feet, line of fire, from Lincoln’s head, an easy and accurate shot. Other of the Booth conspirators were scattered through the crowd.

Chief Justice Salmon Portland Chase administered the oath, after which Lincoln commented as follows: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Fellow-Countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending Civil War. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Not only did Frederick Douglass attend this inauguration, but also, at the Inaugural Ball, he was personally greeted by the President.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SCENE AT THE CAPITOL I must mention a strange scene at the capitol, the hall of Representatives, the morning of Saturday last, (March 4th.) The day just dawn’d, but in half-darkness, everything dim, leaden, and soaking. In that dim light, the members nervous from long drawn duty, exhausted, some asleep, and many half asleep. The gas-light, mix’d with the dingy day-break, produced an unearthly effect. The poor little sleepy, stumbling pages, the smell of the hall, the members with heads leaning on their desks, the sounds of the voices speaking, with unusual intonations — the general moral atmosphere also of the close of this important session — the strong hope that the war is approaching its close — the tantalizing dread lest the hope may be a false one — the grandeur of the hall itself, with its effect of vast shadows up toward the panels and spaces over the galleries — all made a mark’d combination. In the midst of this, with the suddenness of a thunderbolt, burst one of the most angry and crashing storms of rain and hail ever heard. It beat like a deluge on the heavy glass roof of the hall, and the wind literally howl’d and roar’d. For a moment, (and no wonder,) the nervous and sleeping Representatives were thrown into confusion. The slumberers awaked with fear, some started for the doors, some look’d up with blanch’d cheeks and lips to the roof, and the little pages [Page 762] began to cry; it was a scene. But it was over almost as soon as the drowsied men were actually awake. They recover’d themselves; the storm raged on, beating, dashing, and with loud noises at times. But the House went ahead with its business then, I think, as calmly and with as much deliberation as at any time in its career. Perhaps the shock did it good. (One is not without impression, after all, amid these members of Congress, of both the Houses, that if the flat routine of their duties should ever be broken in upon by some great emergency involving real danger, and calling for first-class personal qualities, those qualities would be found generally forthcoming, and from men not now credited with them.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Later that day: “Specimen Days”

THE INAUGURATION The President very quietly rode down to the capitol in his own carriage, by himself, on a sharp trot, about noon, either because he wish’d to be on hand to sign bills, or [Page 758] to get rid of marching in line with the absurd procession, the muslin temple of liberty, and pasteboard monitor. I saw him on his return, at three o’clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look’d very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach’d to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native western form of manliness.) By his side sat his little boy, of ten years. There were no soldiers, only a lot of civilians on horseback, with huge yellow scarfs over their shoulders, riding around the carriage. (At the inauguration four years ago, he rode down and back again surrounded by a dense mass of arm’d cavalrymen eight deep, with drawn sabres; and there were sharpshooters station’d at every corner on the route.) I ought to make mention of the closing levee of Saturday night last. Never before was such a compact jam in front of the White House — all the grounds fill’d, and away out to the spacious sidewalks. I was there, as I took a notion to go — was in the rush inside with the crowd — surged along the passage-ways, the blue and other rooms, and through the great east room. Crowds of country people, some very funny. Fine music from the Marine band, off in a side place. I saw Mr. Lincoln, drest all in black, with white kid gloves and a claw-hammer coat, receiving, as in duty bound, shaking hands, looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.

On this and the following day, Confederate President Jefferson Davis would be meeting with General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia to discuss the feasibility of evacuating their capital (this would be his final known wartime meeting with General Lee). US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March 17, Friday: At Rochester, New York the Genesee River flooded, washing away part of the Erie Canal’s banks and flooding the downtown’s Crossroads area. The D.R. Barton Building (the Commercial Bank Building) was among those destroyed, as were the offices of the Rochester Democrat in the Eagle Hotel Building. The New York Central and Erie Railroad bridges and the tracks between Rochester and Syracuse were washed out. An island below Lower Falls and a bar at the mouth of the Genesee River were created. The floodwaters lasted two days. Damages would be estimated at $1,000000.

A kidnap plot by John Wilkes Booth failed when President Abraham Lincoln did not arrive as expected at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington DC. The presidential itinerary had changed, and Lincoln –ironically– was attending at the time a reception in the lobby of Booth’s hotel. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Here is the President’s last photograph, showing him carefully posed as always in the manner which, photographers had learned, would minimize the impact of the one eye that stared always toward the nose:

The front page of The Liberator featured General Lee’s famous letter to a member of the Confederate Congress who had asked Lee whether it was a good idea to consider enlisting slaves owing to the lack of Southern manpower. Lee had replied: “I think the measure not only expedient, but necessary. The enemy will certainly use them against us if he gets possession of them. In answer to your second question, I can only say that, in my opinion, the negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers I think that those that are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise, in my opinion, to require them to remain as slaves. The course to pursue, it seems to me, would be to call for such as are willing to come, with the consent of their owners.”

Also in this issue of The Liberator there appeared the following notice: COLORED MEN WANTED, For the United States Navy.

April 2, Sunday-9, Sunday: Canby’s forces, the XVI and XIII corps, moved along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, forcing the Confederates back into their defenses. Union forces then concentrated on Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely. By April 1st Union forces had enveloped Spanish Fort, thereby releasing more troops to focus on Fort Blakely. Brigadier General St. John R. Liddell, with about 4,000 men, held out against the much larger Union force until other Confederate forces disengaged and Spanish Fort fell on April 8th, allowing Canby to concentrate 16,000 men for the attack on April 9th. Sheer numbers breached the Confederate earthworks compelling the Confederates to capitulate. The siege and capture of Fort Blakely was basically the final combined-force battle of the war. African-American forces played a major role in the successful Union assault. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 3, Monday: There was fighting at Namozine Church. US CIVIL WAR

As federal troops entered Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia they began dousing fires started by the retreating Confederates.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk sailed from New-York making for California.

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “What doctor possesses such curative resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope? The mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy is the vital air of the soul, and grief is a kind of asthma complicated by atony. Our dependence upon surrounding circumstances increases with our own physical weakness, and on the other hand, in health there is liberty. Health is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health. To make any one happy, then, is strictly to augment his store of being, to double the intensity of his life, to reveal him to himself, to ennoble him and transfigure him. Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty. The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel. In paradise, then, everybody will be beautiful. For, as the righteous soul is naturally beautiful, as the spiritual body is but the visibility of the soul, its impalpable and angelic form, and as happiness beautifies all that it penetrates or even touches, ugliness will have no more place in the universe, and will disappear with grief, sin, and death. To the materialist philosopher the beautiful is a mere accident, and therefore rare. To the spiritualist philosopher the beautiful is the rule, the law, the universal foundation of things, to which every form returns as soon as the force of accident is withdrawn. Why are we ugly? Because we are not in the angelic state, because we are evil, morose, and unhappy. Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthusiasm, weave a halo round the brow, for they are a setting free of the soul, which through them gains force to make its envelope transparent and shine through upon all around it. Beauty is, then, a phenomenon belonging to the spiritualization of matter. It is a momentary transfiguration of the privileged object or being — a token fallen from heaven to earth in order to remind us of the ideal world. To study it, is to Platonize almost inevitably. As a powerful electric current can render metals luminous, and reveal their essence by the color of their flame, so intense life and supreme joy can make the most simple mortal dazzlingly beautiful. Man, therefore, is never more truly man than in these divine states. The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things: it is their type, their sum, their raison d’être, their formula in the book of the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact and the most condensed expression of them.”

April 4, Tuesday: President Abraham Lincoln visited Richmond, Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

April 5, Wednesday: There was fighting at Amelia Springs. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 6, Thursday: There was fighting at Sailor’s Creek / Hillsman Farm, and fighting at Rice’s Station. US CIVIL WAR

April 6, Thursday-7, Friday: There was fighting at High Bridge. US CIVIL WAR

April 11, Tuesday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrived in Greensboro and met with P.G.T. Beauregard.

President Abraham Lincoln made his final public speech, which focused on the problems of reconstruction. The flag of the United States of America, the “Stars and Stripes,” was again raised over what was left of Fort Sumter (which, actually, wasn’t all that much). US CIVIL WAR

April 12, Wednesday: Federal troops occupied Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama without opposition. While Confederate President Jefferson Davis was consulting with J.E. Johnston, Beauregard, and his cabinet, they received confirmation of the surrender of General Robert E. Lee. US CIVIL WAR

April 13, Thursday: Union forces occupied Raleigh, North Carolina and headed for Greensborough, where the Confederate government was sitting. US CIVIL WAR

April 14, Friday morning: There was another raising-of-the-flag celebration at Fort Sumter. The flag of the Union, lowered in the surrender of 1861 and raised again the previous Tuesday but without adequate ceremony, was again run up the pole. Some 30,000 African-Americans were present for this piece of theater, among them Dr. Martin Robison Delany and the son of Denmark Vesey. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was present and orated, and William Lloyd Garrison was present and sobbed. Federal photographers under the supervision of Matthew Brady recorded the flag-raising ceremony at Ft. Sumter, marking the anniversary of Major Anderson’s surrender to Confederate forces. They then moved through Charleston, documenting damage from bombardment and fire.102 US CIVIL WAR

Times change and attitudes change with them. In the aftermath of our civil bloodletting the Brooklyn, New York proslavery newspaper Brooklyn Eagle would celebrate the Reverend Beecher, our “Barnum of religion,” by means of a postcard of his magnificent statue in front of the borough hall of the municipality (see following screen).

102. A good time was had by all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 14, 10:13PM: As President Abraham Lincoln was watching the 3rd act of the British comedy “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC with his wife Mary, he was shot in the head from behind by John Wilkes Booth, an actor from Maryland obsessed with avenging the Confederate defeat.103

Booth also stabbed Major Henry Rathbone in the presidential box before leaping to the stage, breaking his leg. US CIVIL WAR

Secretary of State William Seward was stabbed several times at his home by Lewis Payne (or Powell).

Fleeing from Washington DC, Booth and another conspirator, David Herold, arrived at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd in Virginia, and that physician would set Booth’s snapped leg bone.

After this martyed President’s demise, some person unknown would clean up his credit record at Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency. They cleansed the page not with an eraser but by scraping with a knife, in such a manner that no ultraviolet or infrared scanning has been able to recover even a trace of the writing. Only the scraped, blank sections of the page remain, in between the various positive comments. What sort of negative credit remarks might have been thus purged? — Professor Scott A. Sandage’s BORN LOSERS: A HISTORY OF FAILURE IN AMERICA, which contains a clear photograph of the altered page, hypothesizes that it might well have been mentioned that he had an “extravagant wife,” or there might have been an echoing of Wendell

103. Shortly after this, the President’s admirer P.T. Barnum would position a cabin replica in his American Museum in New-York, for display with “a playbill of Ford’s Theater picked up in President Lincoln’s box on April 14th.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Phillips’s derogation of Lincoln: “a first-rate second-rate man.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 15, Saturday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis left Greensboro, North Carolina making for Lexington, Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

Totentanz for piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt was performed for the initial time, at The Hague.

The Boston Evening Transcript reported that an informant named Borland had claimed to have seen the well- known actor John Wilkes Booth at Edwards’s shooting gallery near the Parker House, practicing firing a pistol “in various difficult ways such as between his legs, over his shoulder and under his arms.”

Abraham Lincoln, who had in 1830 been constructing a log cabin in Macon County, Illinois, died at 7:22AM: HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, was sworn in to succeed him as President of the United States of America at 11:00AM.104

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

That evening Frederick Douglass would speak at a memorial meeting in Rochester, New York.

April 19, Wednesday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis reached Charlotte, North Carolina to discover that his family has already left there. He received word that the other President, Abraham Lincoln, had been assassinated. US CIVIL WAR

The White House funeral of President Lincoln, followed by a funeral procession along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building. A freeborn black Baptist minister from Boston, the Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, found the White House fence lined with blacks. At the main gate in front of the North Portico he spoke with “a poor old contraband woman” who was weeping, sharing with her his belief that “God would raise up another Moses for them.” She replied “Ah, but we had him,” he would report this conversation in the New- York antislavery weekly Independent read by Frederick Douglass, and on June 1st during his Fast Day speech at the Cooper Union in New-York, Douglass would elaborate on the incident by pretending that it had been the contraband woman rather than the minister who had produced the reference to Moses (this speech would be reported in the National Anti-Slavery Standard and along the way “Ah, but we had him” morphed into what by now has become a standardized story about the iconic significance of the martyred national leader: “We have lost our Moses”).

Black men were allowed a place to march together in the official parade while black women watched from the sidewalks. Among these black female onlookers New York Tribune reporter Charles Page found one who was willing to make a sharp contrast between the 1st President, Washington, who had stopped with freedom for the white folks, and the latest President, Lincoln, who “didn’t stop with white folks, but kept straight ahead, and took all us too.”

Abraham Lincoln “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

104. Shortly after this assassination, the President’s admirer Phineas Taylor Barnum would position a cabin replica in his American Museum in New-York, for display with “a playbill of Ford’s Theater picked up in President Lincoln’s box on April 14th.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 20, Thursday: The 2d day of laying-in-state, with the corpse of President Abraham Lincoln on display in the White House subsequent to the funeral service and the procession to the Capital building.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE April 26, Wednesday, darkness: Southern armies in North Carolina surrendered. A large number surrendered at Bennett Place outside Durham, North Carolina.

WINDING IT DOWN Jefferson Davis and his former cabinet left Charlotte, North Carolina. US CIVIL WAR

John Wilkes Booth, with a broken leg, cornered in a burning Virginia tobacco shed outside Bowling Green, Virginia, either shot himself or was shot by a Union soldier. As he was being dragged, near death, out of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE shed he looked at his palms and muttered:

“Useless ... useless.”

(His companion David Herold surrendered. Of the 9 involved in the assassination other than Booth, 4 would hang, 4 would be imprisoned, and 1 would be acquitted. Even the medic who set Booth’s broken leg, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who could not be said to have had certain knowledge of the identity of his patient, would be packed off to a dreadful military prison, to serve out a sentence of 133 years.) ABRAHAM LINCOLN Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

1864 General John Sedgwick Battle of Spotsylvania “They couldn't hit an elephant at this dis- tance.”

1865 Abraham Lincoln on stage, an actor ad-libbed a reference The President laughed to the presence of the President

1865 John Wilkes Booth with his leg broken, surrounded by “Useless ... useless.” relentlessly angry armed men, in a burning barn

1872 Samuel F.B. Morse doctor tapped on his chest and said: “Very good, very good.” “This is the way we doctors telegraph, Professor.”

1872 Horace Greeley took over the Tribune “You son of a bitch, you stole my newspa- per!”

1881 Billy the Kid in the dark, he heard Pat Garrett enter “Who is it?”

1882 Charles Darwin fundamentalists tell lying stories of his “I am not the least afraid to die.” abandoning his heretical theories in favor of Christ Jesus and His salvation

1883 Sojourner Truth advice for us all “Be a follower of the Lord Jesus.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 4, Thursday: The remains of Abraham Lincoln were laid to rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery outside Springfield, Illinois. (In 1871 the corpse would move.)

Jefferson Davis met with some former cabinet members in Washington, Georgia and decided to temporarily dissolve the Confederate government. He left town in mid-morning.

the last Confederate forces east of the Mississippi River, those of Major General Edward R.S. Canby, surrendered beneath an oak tree at Citronelle, Alabama. WINDING IT DOWN US CIVIL WAR

May 6, Saturday: Jefferson Davis was reunited with his family in the evening, near Dublin, Georgia.

Surrender of the last Confederate troops in North Carolina. WINDING IT DOWN US CIVIL WAR

May 30, Tuesday: Frederick Douglass spoke in New-York at a memorial meeting on the life and death of Abraham Lincoln which had needed to be called because, during the passage of the President’s body through the city, the Common Council had prevented citizens of color from participating in his funeral procession.

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. Non possum capere te, cape me, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which is a moral reality. Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another which tells me that sophistry is at the bottom of human wickedness, that the majority of monsters like to justify themselves in their own eyes, and that the first attribute of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this. It is all very well to say that hatred is murder; the man who hates is determined to see nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to do himself good that he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid of his thirst. To injure others while at the same time knowingly injuring one’s self is a step farther; evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens into a cold ferocity. Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he must seem to the angels a madman — a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the circles of hell have this property — that they have no end. It seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But no; for if so, evil would be the true God, and hell would swallow up creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace — which is as much as to say that the divine order will be everywhere re-established. Love will be more potent than hatred; God will save his glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very true that all gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action of those dark corrosive forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the divine plan.”

June 30, Friday: All 8 defendants in the murder of Abraham Lincoln were found guilty and 4 of them were sentenced to death. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July 7, Thursday: L’Africaine op.299, a quadrille by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Volksgarten, Vienna.

Hanged for conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln were Mary E. Surrat (the Catholic landlady of the boarding house in which they had been staying while in Washington DC), David E. Herrold, George A. Atzerodt, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Lewis Payne (or Powell). Four others convicted in the conspiracy received prison terms. US CIVIL WAR

August 17, Thursday: Frederick Douglass formally thanked the widowed Mrs. Lincoln for having sent him her husband’s walking stick. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1878

Lydia Maria Child had Roberts Brothers of Boston print her own “eclectic Bible” of quotations from the world’s religions, ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD: A CHAIN OF OPALS, her motive being stated as: “to do all I can to enlarge and strengthen the hand of human brotherhood.” ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD

The Virginia supreme court, in Kinney v. Commonwealth, 71 Virginia 858, 869, considered it the state’s duty to protect the moral welfare of both races by banning any and all sorts of interracial mingling: “The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent — all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.” Folks, let’s not go there.

NARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTH; A BONDSWOMAN OF OLDEN TIME, EMANCIPATED BY THE NEW YORK LEGISLATURE IN THE EARLY PART OF THE PRESENT CENTURY; WITH A HISTORY OF HER LABORS AND HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE CORRESPONDENCE DRAWN FROM HER “BOOK OF LIFE.”105 SOJOURNER TRUTH NORTHAMPTON MA ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION

You do know that Sojourner kept an autograph collection, don’t you? Here are some of her specimens:106

105. You will notice that I do not have here an illustration of the correct edition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

106. William Lloyd Garrison President Abraham Lincoln Parker Pillsbury Gilbert Haven Susan B. Anthony Calvin Fairbanks Wendell Phillips Harriet Beecher Stowe Charles S. White Friend Lucretia Mott Lydia Maria Child George Thompson Gerrit Smith Captain Jonathan Walker R.S. Griffing Reverend Samuel Joseph May O.O. Howard Rowland Johnson Lydia Mott Friend Amy Post HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1894

A “Lincoln birthplace” log cabin was constructed for lease to amusement parks such as Coney Island. Eventually this hoax would be commingled with another similar hoax that had been offered as the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, and then chopped down to a size that would fit inside a marble edifice in Kentucky. (This creation, as far as authenticity is concerned, might as well have been assembled out of the Lincoln Logs that would be invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John in 1920.) ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“If Lincoln was alive today, he’d roll over in his grave.” — Gerald Ford

ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1900

Thomas Jefferson had hoped to eliminate religion from his proposed public university by removing theology from the curriculum. However, as evangelical Protestantism came in the early 19th Century to dominate Virginia’s culture, he had been forced to compromise and his University of Virginia had begun to provide nonsectarian religious instruction (under the rubric “Moral Philosophy”). Jefferson’s compromise had then been reenacted at all the other institutions of higher education in the state, so that even denominational colleges had been able to adhere to one or another such “nonsectarian” pretense while offering an essentially religious education. By the end of the 19th Century separation of church and state in Virginia’s public school system had become compatible with a generalized evangelical Protestantism — complete with all its Bible-thumping, all its obligatory-lecture “praying,” all its singing of tendentiously worded “hymns,” and all its dissing of any other religious understanding. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE When asked to nominate the “Americans most deserving representation” for inclusion in a hall of fame that was being planned in Massachusetts, the Honorable George Frisbie Hoar needed to exclude his world-class heroes William Ewart Gladstone, John Milton, the Marquis de Lafayette, General Simon Bolivar, Giuseppe Mazzini, Lajos Kossuth, and Miss Florence Nightingale because they were not Americans (well, in addition to being disqualified as a mere Brit, Miss Florence was not even male and not even yet deceased), and he excused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne because to be great a man must possess “more than the quality of a great artist,” and he banished Benjamin Franklin to the outer darkness for having been “without idealism, without lofty principle, and, on one side of his character, gross and immoral,” and, finally, aware that he could not get away with submitting his own name because he wasn’t dead yet (and besides that it would have been utterly immodest), he submitted the following dozen dead white American malenesses: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• President George Washington (the most “noble” on the list, representing “the prime meridian of pure, exalted, human character”) • President Thomas Jefferson (the most “influential” on the list, because of his alleged authorship of the Declaration of Independence, a document endorsed by the Honorable George Frisbie Hoar’s grandfather Roger Sherman) • President Abraham Lincoln • The Reverend Jonathan Edwards • President John Adams •Sam Adams • Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton • Senator • Chief Justice John Marshall • Senator Charles Sumner • Waldo Emerson •Friend John Greenleaf Whittier HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Daniel Chester French did an equestrian statue of George Washington, for Paris.

(This isn’t it — bronze horses are so easily mistaken for one another.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Oh, all right. How can I keep it from you?

The general had of course ridden various horses at various times. At least two of his mounts had been killed in combat. “Old Nelson,” “Roger Leo,” “Ellen Edenberg,” and “Blueskin” were among the survivors. We seem to have lost track of which of these the sculptor was here attempting to render immortal in bronze — perhaps he was merely immortalizing the spirit of horseness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1901

After several attempts to steal the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, it was inspected and then reburied, this time not only under a flag but beneath a layer of concrete several feet in thickness. DIGGING UP THE DEAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1922

Electric vacuum cleaners began to be used in the White House. President Warren G. Harding has a radio set installed in a bookcase in his study on the 2d floor.107

Daniel Chester French’s seated Abraham Lincoln was dedicated at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. (In addition it was French who sculpted the standing Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska.)

During this year the Concord sculptor was doing a bust of Edgar Allan Poe.

107. Warren Gamaliel Harding was in part of black ancestry, both on his father’s side of the family and on his mother’s. He was evidently one of those whose “passing for white” required them to mentally suppress all suspicions, although admittedly, from a white political perspective, he did take remarkably liberal positions in regard to racial fairness. During his period of service as President, however, 183 black Americans were lynched. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1926

Summer: Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who would become the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, was “white to all appearances, having blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and light, almost blond, hair.” During his freshman year at Colgate University, his roommate only learned of his racial identity by meeting his father, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., after which he was no longer able to be friends or roommates. He worked during the summer as a bellhop at a summer resort in Manchester, Vermont, and Abraham Lincoln’s dying son Robert Todd Lincoln visited this resort. Now, Lincoln was a man of such pronounced “Negrophobia” that he could not bear to be waited on by a black person or to have one of them touch his luggage, his automobile, or any of his possessions. He was known to have whacked the knuckles of a helpful black servant with his cane. However, at this resort the dying man did not decline Powell’s services — as he took him to be a white boy!

“Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition of racism.” — Lerone Bennett, Jr., FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM (Johnson Publishing, 1999) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1942

February 13, Friday: The Allies evacuated 3,000 important persons from Singapore. Almost all of them were killed or captured at sea by the Japanese.

Japanese forces captured Bandjermasin (Banjarmasin) on the southern coast of Borneo.

The following headline appeared in The Los Angeles Times: LINCOLN WOULD INTERN JAPS. [Mayor] Bowron Says Civil War President HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Would Move Aliens If In Office Today.

J APANESE CALIFORNIA ABRAHAM LINCOLN US CIVIL WAR THIS DEAD WHITE MAN WOULD HAVE DONE THE DIRTY DEED

The following Walter Lippmann byline appeared: THE FIFTH COLUMN ON THE COAST The enemy alien problem on the Pacific Coast, or much more accurately, the fifth column problem, is very serious and it is very special.... The peculiar danger of the Pacific Coast is in a Japanese raid accompanied by enemy action inside American territory.... It is the fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast more or less continually and HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE for a considerable period of time, testing and feeling out the American defenses. It is the fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land. These are facts which we shall ignore or minimize at our peril. It is the fact that since the outbreak of the Japanese war there has been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast. From what we know about Hawaii and about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.... The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone; some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1988

In this year Terry Bisson created a piece of science fiction or alternate history, a novel FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN. Thoreau appears in this novel. The synopsis of this alternate history is that Captain John Brown and his men are able to adhere to their original schedule and conduct their raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia on the symbolic 4th of July 1859. In this version Harriet Tubman does not claim at the last moment that she has “gotten sick” and cannot come (as in real life she claimed, after having a prophesy dream foretelling doom) and became a general for them. They succeed in getting away from the federal arsenal with weapons, up into the mountains, and General Tubman attracts an army of runaways. The result, however, in this alternative history, is not the sort of genocide or racial pogrom which I myself fear would actually have been the resultant of a temporary “success,” but a 2nd Revolutionary War between American blacks and American whites in which our one nation splits permanently rather than temporarily into two. Clearly, this author Terry Bisson was struggling to use the form of science fiction and the form of the alternative-history novel to create a disruptive story in which Harpers Ferry is not the initiating event of the US Civil War which freed the slaves through the benevolence of The White People Who Want To Do What Is Right, but the initiating event of a 2nd American Revolution in which the American slaves free themselves from the whites precisely as the whites had previously freed themselves from the crown. Abraham Lincoln, in this novel, becomes just another racist white cracker determined to hold the United States of America together as one nation indivisible; in order to achieve this grand objective he is determined to off all the black Americans — whom he disdains (just like in real life) as subhumans. Frederick Douglass, in this novel, rather than running away to England (as he did in real life), upon seeing the initial success of the raid, thinks better of abandoning the cause, and puts himself forward as a political leader for it. In the course of the novel the Douglass character has an opportunity to deliver a truly awesome speech — every bit as good as ones he actually did deliver in real life. Walt Whitman, instead of becoming a male nurse in Washington-area war hospitals (as he did in real life), joins the rebel forces in the mountains. Giuseppe Garibaldi of the red shirt, instead of disdaining the war (as he did in real life, when the northern government would not promise him that it would eventually free the slaves), comes over from Italy and raises an army of liberators in Mexico that invades north to assist the black rebels.

“Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition of racism.” — Lerone Bennett, Jr., FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM (Johnson Publishing, 1999) On page 147 of Terry Bisson’s alternate-history FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN, in Concord, Massachusetts, Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau are having their own little Civil War with one another, a war of words with Henry apparently taking the side of Douglass, Tubman, and the black freedom fighters and with Waldo –but of course– taking the side of the established white-supremacist crackers under General Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“History is the how of now.”

— Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1993

Fall: Alan K. Leahigh’s “The history of -quote, unquote- public relations” appeared in Public Relations Quarterly volume 38, number 3, beginning on page 24. This study provided quotations amply demonstrating that the doctrines of public relations had been being recognized, evaluated, and practiced long before public relations began to emerge as a “profession.” The historical personages quoted include George Ade, Lewis Carroll, James Fenimore Cooper, Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, , Ben Jonson, Carl Gustav Jung, Abraham Lincoln, Walter Lippmann, St. Matthew, Margaret Mead, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dan Rather, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, E.B. White, Osmo A. Wiio, Oscar Wilde, and Admiral Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1997

Daniel Walker Howe, MAKING THE AMERICAN SELF: JONATHAN EDWARDS TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Studies in Cultural History. Cambridge MA.: Harvard UP, 1997 JONATHAN EDWARDS ABRAHAM LINCOLN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2001

February 10, Saturday: The Washington Post contained an essay by Allen C. Guelzo, “A Reluctant Recruit To the Abolitionist Cause.” Guelzo is professor of American history at Eastern College in St. David’s, Pennsylvania, and the author of Abraham Lincoln: REDEEMER PRESIDENT (William Eerdmans). A longer version of this had appeared in the Autumn 2000 issue of Wilson Quarterly. Excerpts follow: A Reluctant Recruit To the Abolitionist Cause Whatever his larger reputation as the liberator of 2 million black slaves, Abraham Lincoln has never shaken off the imputation that he was something of a half-heart about it. “There is a counter-legend of Lincoln,” acknowledges historian Stephen B. Oates, “one shared ironically enough by many white southerners and certain black Americans of our time” who are convinced that Lincoln was “a white racist who championed segregation, opposed civil and political rights for black people”.... From the start, abolitionists regarded Lincoln as a suspect recruit to the antislavery cause. Suspicions only deepened when he stepped into the national spotlight as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1860. And the new president’s inaugural promise not to interfere with Southern slavery if the Southern states attempted no violent withdrawal from the union confirmed Frederick Douglass’s “worst fears,” that Lincoln was “showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes, and his canting hypocrisy”.... Many biographers have written off much of this to the not-inconsiderable egos of many of the abolitionist leaders, to the impatience that three decades of agitation had bred into their followers, or to political naiveté. Most have oversimplified the philosophical differences between the president and the abolitionists, viewing them as a convergence waiting to happen. Lincoln himself fed that notion from time to time. John Roll, a Springfield, Ill., builder and longtime acquaintance of Lincoln’s, remembered his friend’s reply when asked whether he was an abolitionist: “I am mighty near one.” Being “near one” was precisely the point. If opposing slavery was to be “near” abolitionism, then almost the entire population of the Northern free states was “near” abolitionism, too. Opposition to slavery never necessitated actual abolition. Antislavery might just as easily have taken the form of containment (opposing the legalization of slavery in any new states); colonization (forced repatriation of blacks to Africa); gradual emancipation (freedom keyed to decades-long timetables); or, in the minds of most Northerners, nothing at all, so long as slavery got no nearer than it was. Lincoln’s analysis of the abolition radicals as “fiends” had long roots in his own personal history. His parents were Separate Baptists, a small denomination that taught God’s absolute control over each and every human choice. Though opposed to slavery, HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Separates were also hostile to reform movements, since such movements smacked too strongly of human efforts at self- improvement. Lincoln rebelled against his parents’ religion early in adolescence. He understood that the universe was run not by a god who could be influenced by prayer to change the course of human events, but by “Law & Order.” Asked by an acquaintance whether he belonged to any secret society, his answer was, “I do not belong to any society except it be for the good of my country.” That one exception was his political allegiance to the Whig Party. Like the Whigs, Lincoln was a liberal nationalist; he looked for his political identity not in regional or ethnic sources but in an expansive sense of American nationality. If there was such a thing as an American identity for Lincoln, it was founded on appeals to a universal human nature and universal human rights, and discovered not in the passionate romanticist ideals of race or gender but through reason.... The importance Lincoln laid in “propositions” was underscored by the reverence with which he approached the Constitution. As early as 1848, as a congressman advocating his Whig hero Henry Clay’s programs, Lincoln attacked proposals to amend the Constitution. “Better, rather, habituate ourselves to think of it as unalterable,” Lincoln said. “The men who made it have done their work, and have passed away. Who shall improve on what they did?” On this point more than any other, Lincoln expressly condemned the abolitionists as enemies of constitutional government. It is not that Lincoln’s cautious constitutionalism made him indifferent to slavery. But what he meant by slavery before the 1850s was any relationship of economic restraint. This slavery was what he experienced as a young man under his father, and he came to associate it with agrarianism. “I used to be a slave,” Lincoln said in an early speech; in fact, “we were all slaves one time or another.” It is difficult to see that Lincoln had any corresponding concern about slavery as a system of personal injustice when only blacks were the slaves. He did not openly oppose black slavery until passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, when it became evident that black slavery might extend across the Western territories and perhaps even into the free states, where slave labor could then compete with wage labor. Even so, the only solution he could imagine was to “send them to Liberia -- to their own native land.” As late as 1863, Lincoln was still experimenting with such schemes. Thus, Lincoln’s approach to slavery as a political-economic problem as much as a moral one stands in dramatic contrast to the most basic instincts of American abolitionism. The basic difference was the centrality of religion to the abolitionist movement, providing its imagery, its tactics and its uncompromising urgency. The day that abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution at the annual Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society picnic was the day the Southern-born abolitionist Moncure Conway recognized “that Garrison was a successor of the inspired axe-bearers — John the Baptist, Luther, Wesley, George Fox”.... A swelling confidence HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE in the human will to achieve salvation by its own efforts had marked much of evangelical Protestant thinking in the 19th century, as Methodists, Baptists and even many Presbyterians turned to revivals, awakenings and mass conversions to expand Protestantism’s influence in American life. Revivalism was a spiritual act one could perform for oneself, instead of waiting patiently for God to do it. That, in turn, allowed preachers to demand immediate compliance with their moral directives. For the revivalists, this translated into demands for “the great fundamental principle of immediate abolition” — exactly the attitude that had alienated Lincoln from his ancestral Protestantism. Lincoln did, of course, find his way to the abolition of slavery, first undercutting the Confederacy’s war effort by emancipating the slaves who provided labor services to the Confederate armies through the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, then abolishing slavery in the Confederate states through the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and finally eradicating slavery in the entire United States by pushing the 13th Amendment through Congress in 1865. By the same token, some of the abolitionists gradually warmed to Lincoln and openly supported his reelection in 1864. Lincoln himself finally had to concede that “Sumner and Wade and Chandler are right.... We can’t get through this terrible war with slavery existing.” Thus Lincoln came to emancipation by a road very different from that taken by the abolitionists. Where they built their argument on the demand of evangelicalism for immediate repentance, Lincoln instead preferred gradualism and compensation to the owners of emancipated slaves. Where the abolitionists preached from passion and choice, Lincoln worked from reason and patience. And where they brushed aside the Constitution’s implicit sanctions for slavery –and with them the Constitution– Lincoln proceeded against slavery no further than the Constitution allowed. The abolitionists were racial egalitarians in an age of unthinking racism. Lincoln was a natural-rights egalitarian in the tradition of John Locke.... So what, as historian Eric McKitrick recently asked, was the role of the extremists in preparing the way for the end of slavery? Recent abolitionist histories, by Henry Mayer and Paul Goodman, have joined older works by historians such as Howard Zinn and Martin Duberman in answering with a resounding affirmation of the strategic centrality of the abolitionists. By hallowing zealotry, these neo-abolitionist historians identify direct (even if nonviolent) action as the only morally legitimate stance in American reform. Only by means of dauntless radicalism was justice achieved and the way paved for further reform in American society. By extension, we are encouraged to go and do likewise. Lincoln, by contrast, embodied the complexity of American opposition to slavery. The end of slavery owed something to a sense of awakened moral responsibility, but it also owed far more than we have been willing to admit to the long swing of ideas about political economy, and to the public’s revulsion toward specific events, such as the efforts of slaveholders to gag debate over slavery in Congress. The president had no illusions about his own HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE sanctity or his enemies’ depravity, and he was constantly aware of the price being paid in human lives and treasure for even the noblest of results. “If I had been allowed my way,” Lincoln told the English Quaker activist Eliza P. Gurney a month after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, “this war would have been ended before this,” perhaps before the proclamation had even been contemplated. That sentiment has earned him the execration of every abolitionist and neo-abolitionist, from Garrison to Ebony editor Lerone Bennett Jr., whose book “Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream” depicts Lincoln as the kind of fence straddler “we find in almost all situations of oppression.” For all of his rant, Lincoln biographers will ignore Bennett at their peril, because both Garrison and Bennett had a point: Lincoln’s plan for emancipation (without the helping hand of the war) was a gradual scheme that would have allowed the grandparents of some of today’s adult African Americans to have been born in slavery. The question Lincoln might have asked the neo-abolitionists was whether the costs of their way of immediate emancipation –costs that included a civil war, 600,000 dead, a national economic blow worse than the Great Depression would bring and the broken glass of Reconstruction to walk over– were part of the calculation of results. Neither alternative was particularly pretty. Lincoln never doubted that emancipation was right and that slavery was wrong. But he had an inkling that it was possible to do something right in such a way that it fostered an infinitely greater wrong. “If I take the step” of emancipation purely because “I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right,” Lincoln asked Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase in 1863, “would I not thus give up all footing upon Constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?” Between the word of abolition and the deed of emancipation falls the ambiguous shadow of Abraham Lincoln. For more than a century, the genius of American reform has been its confidence that men like Garrison were right. The realities of American reform, however, as the example of Lincoln suggests, have been another matter. © 2001 The Washington Post Company HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2005

Daniel Altshuler prepared a bust of Henry Thoreau:

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, a pseudohistory that would be optioned by Stephen Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2012

October 8, Monday: The premier in New York City of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln” (offering Daniel Day- Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln because Liam Neeson had walked away from the project under a pretext). The premise of the screenplay by Tony Kushner, inspired in part by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (which Spielberg purchased before the book was finished), turned out to be an utter historical falsehood — that President Day-Lewis’s motives in prompting the delightful James Spader to grease the gears for the adoption of the XIIIth Amendment to the United States Constitution in the House of Representatives were A.) to ensure that his Emancipation Proclamation would not at the completion of civil war be voided by the federal judicial branch, and B.) to prevent human enslavement from coming back into existence as representatives of the Confederate states returned to the federal government. Kushner, no historian, defends this prevarication as utterly accurate.

The historian Eric Foner would respond on November 26th in a letter to the New York Times that the movie was a gross exaggeration. Harold Holzer, hired as “content consultant,” would report that when his name appeared nine minutes into the scrolling credits, he feared he would be blamed for the historical bloopers in the film, and he pointed out that being responsible for historical accuracy doesn’t mean anyone will pay attention to you (no such protest has been registered by Doris Kearns Goodwin, presumably due to the fact that she is a panderer who lacks this concern for historical accuracy).

My own objection to the film is that in its invention of motives of various politicians in the passage of the XIIIth Amendment, it quite ignores what said amendment actually does and does not do in its final wording after being pried out of the hands of the Women’s National Loyal League: it neither defines human enslavement nor requires the legislature to define human enslavement; by assigning all powers to end slavery to the federal legislative branch, under the separation-of-powers doctrine this amendment forever nullifies any attempt of the executive branch or the judicial branch of our federal apparatus, to define the legal construct “enslavement” or actually bring human slavery to an end (as an act of the executive branch the Emancipation Proclamation was in fact nullified by the Amendment and not a single enslaved person would ever be granted one of the manumission documents that had been described in that proclamation).

A major, major blooper in the film is its failure to mention the uncomfortable fact that President Lincoln had opposed the amendment in its original wording, while it was still being forwarded by the abolitionists, and only overcame his opposition when its wording had been altered in a lawyerly way from a requirement that slavery shall end to a mere permission that slavery may end if and when the federal Congress would so enact.

Some of the more minor cinematic details are amusing on account of the nature of this filmic blooperismus. Lincoln’s brief address at Gettysburg actually was hearable only by a few people at the front of the crowd and made no particular impact, so it is preposterous to represent ordinary contemporary soldiers of any color as having committed to memory any portion of it — presenting them more or less in the mode of 20th-Century schoolboys performing for their doting parents. Flags were not then raised or lowered by crank but instead by tugging on a lanyard. Connecticut did not ever vote “Nay.” The amendment was not then being referred to as the “13th.” The voting was alphabetical. The President’s earlobes were not pierced. Although Thaddeus Stevens’s actual club foot has been frankly portrayed, nothing in Daniel Day-Lewis’s appearance was made to suggest Lincoln’s crossed eyes (if you don’t know about this you don’t know much about Lincoln, for it is abundantly evident in the Daguerreotypes). Sally Field looks remarkably like the pudgebucket Mrs. Lincoln and in the film persuades us that she is quite as nasty a piece of work, but although Representative Steven’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith presumably functioned as his common law wife, she was nor more than a quarter black and her Daguerreotypes do not alert us to race mixture — her skin tone, her physiognomy, and her hair texture didn’t at all resemble those of actress S. Epatha Merkerson:

This movie definitely suggests (by having the bill in question brought home to show to Mrs. Smith in their bed) that he was an abolitionist out of love for her, but this bringing of the bill home is entirely unhistorical and anyway no record suggests that Stevens had any high regard for this available women whether or not he happened to be routinely having sex with her. Although it is true that Representatives were during that era more free in their speech than they are in our present PC era, it would have been as impossible then as now to derogate a colleague to his face using terms such as “nincompoop” — Washington DC was a courtly southern metropolis, and an impolite gentleman ran a steady risk of winding up bleeding to death of a ball from a dueling pistol just outside the city limits in one or another well used pasture of honor. Although there were many black soldiers, many of them provided with blue uniforms, most were at constant hard labor and none ever got assigned sensitive duties such as providing ceremonial escort services for notable personages. Lincoln and all members of his audience knew full well that there had been no such thing as an indoor “water closet” either in America or in England until very long after the period of the American Revolution. The President’s lifelong practice was not to resort to curse words such as “God damn.” Lincoln’s face never appeared on a 50- cent coin or on any wartime piece of paper fractional currency. Lincoln was a white racist who wanted to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE rid of all the troubles created by black Americans as soon as some device could be found. He is not deserving of anywhere near as much credit as he is awarded in this film for “ending slavery,” that credit belonging rather –if it belongs to any white persons– to radical abolitionists. The vote in favor of this bill was not nearly as critical as depicted in this film, for had it failed the President would merely have called a special session in March and would then have had a 2/3ds Republican majority, enacting the amendment by an abundant margin of yeas. The First Lady never appeared in the galleries of the House either alone or accompanied by any servant of color. Neither Stevens nor any other Representative ever publicly espoused the conceit that blacks and whites were “equal in all things” and no period debate in the House turned on the issue of whether equality between the races was or was not confined to “equality before the law only,” the only matter of any concern at the moment being never to allow free black citizens the vote. I have not yet uncovered any historical confirmation that the President regarded the amendment as an influential part of a surrender negotiation with the three diplomats Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, and John Archibald Campbell sent north by the secessionists in Richmond. No record of the conversations that took place over the negotiating table aboard the federal steamboat has ever existed, and thus the conversations presented are a free cinematic invention; however, no US President of any persuasion would have desired to do permanent damage to the economy of fully a third of the American nation by suddenly depriving it of its obligate labor force. Although the President’s adult son was indeed present at Appomattox Courthouse as one of the aides, the surrender itself was in no sense any more interesting than your typical real estate closing. The body of Lincoln was laid naked on the bed, diagonally because the bed was too short. We lack confirmation that anyone actually muttered anything dramatic over the President’s body, such as “Now he belongs to the ages.”

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Prepared: July 24, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.