GENERAL, THEN PRESIDENT, ANDREW “LONG KNIFE” JACKSON
A Jacksonian motto: “Desperate courage makes one a majority.” Question: Did Thoreau access such a motto while he was crafting his tropes? HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
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, James Madison, et al. representing 1796 the South and landowning interests
1817- James Monroe’s “factionless” era of good feelings, ho ho ho 1824
ROUND 2A DEMOCRATS NATIONAL REPUBLICANS
John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, 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
THOMAS JEFFERSON APRIL 13, 1743 1800 DITTO
1804
JAMES MADISON 1808 HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Our Fearless Leaders
NAME BORN INAUGURATED EX OFFICIO DIED
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
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1526
November: There is something we need to bear in mind about our term “settler,” which has for so long been a code designation for people who are privileged to be inheritors due to the white color of their skins. The thing we need to bear in mind is that in this month of this year there were some 500 Spaniards under Francisco Gordillo, a skipper for Lucás Vasquéz de Ayllon, with some 100 black slaves, at Cape Fear, forming the 1st “settlement” on the lands that would someday be included within the United States of America. Their settlement was called San Miguel de Gualdape, and it was located on the Pee Dee River, probably near Winyah Bay at what is now Georgetown, South Carolina. They’d been there since August, and during this month of November, since the whites were being decimated by a sickness, the black slaves of the settlement were able to enter into an alliance with the local tribe of red Americans (Chicora or Shakori or Chiquola) and stage a successful revolt. CHARLESTON HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Approximately 150 of the 500 whites managed to make their way back to Hispaniola, leaving these approximately 100 blacks to become (disregarding for the moment, as is unfortunately conventional, native American settlers who had been on this continent already for some 10,000 to 20,000 years) our first permanent “settlers.”
Which is to say, when General Andrew Jackson would be down in Georgia and Florida attempting to exterminate “Seminoles” of mixed red and black origins who had found refuge in the swamps a dozen or so generations later, it is plausible that the persons whom he was attempting to exterminate were in actuality a people whom we ought to be honoring as the legitimate descendants of our “first settlers”! Had these 100 persons been white, there would now be an extensive shelflist honoring them in every bookstore in our grand nation. They’d be part of the perennial Search For The Blue-Eyed Indian. But no, they were black, and so they are ignored. I will quote from the presumptuous just-so story as it is told by Kevin Mulroy in 1993 in his FREEDOM ON THE BORDER: THE SEMINOLE MAROONS IN FLORIDA, THE INDIAN TERRITORY, COAHUILA, AND TEXAS (Lubbock TX: Texas Tech UP, pages 10-11): At the very time the Seminole band were establishing a separate political identity in Florida, therefore, their neighbors were treating Africans favorably. The Spaniards welcomed runaways from southern plantations, gave them their freedom, and asked for little in return save for their cooperation in repelling elements hostile to both parties. The way these Europeans treated their African associates well may have made an impression upon the Seminoles. The Spaniards allowed Africans to live apart, own arms and property, travel at will, choose their own leaders, organize into military companies under black officers, and generally control their own destinies. Several of the Mose men even had wives in the nearby Indian villages. A separate, armed settlement of free blacks, which enjoyed the full support of the adjacent Spanish residents, had been established just outside St. Augustine, the two communities being joined in a mutually beneficial alliance based primarily upon their joint opposition to British expansionism. It seems probable that the early Seminoles would have been aware of these developments and that their initial perceptions helped determine the course of their own relations with blacks.... Attracted by the semitropical climate, sparse white settlement, and chronic political instability of Florida, ... runaways continued to cross the border in ever- increasing numbers. They seemingly founded maroon communities and sought military and trading alliances with the nearby Seminole villages. Africans became associated with the Seminoles in the late eighteenth century in two other ways: by capture from plantations and by purchase from whites or from other Native Americans. Those blacks also would come to reside in the adjacent Florida maroon communities. Though it cannot be pinpointed with any degree of accuracy, the ethnogenesis of the Seminole maroons took place during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The true beginnings of this ethnic group date from the time its individual members were HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW forced to accept common values and interests to counter the threat of domination and reenslavement. The group’s members would have come together as a people primarily for survival and then to pursue mutual goals. Ethnicity would have acted as a structural principle long before their society emerged clearly as an ethnic group. Whether runaways, captives, or slaves to the Seminoles, these blacks preferred to live beyond the pale and ally with Europeans and Native Americans rather than remain enslaved on Southern plantations. Of major significance to their ethnohistory, the maroons’ early and close association with the Seminoles would contribute strongly to the development of their identity. Yet these people would go on to establish a culture and history of their own and in so doing define themselves, and be defined by others, as a separate and distinct entity. The above is not based upon historic evidence. It is based only on the known fact that later there were dusky skins in the area, combined with a.) the standard white-racist presumption that white people are innovative whereas dark people are obviously merely imitative, and with b.) the standard white-racist presumption that these 100 black men who had set themselves free would continue in a native context to be classified as escaped slaves rather than becoming a tribe of “Indian warriors” in their own right, and with c.) the standard white- racist presumption that free darkies are obviously mere escapees. This sort of account can stand only on the basis of presumption. The presumption involved is the idea that since this is the only available explanation, it must be true regardless of lack of research into confirming evidences.
But the above presumptuousness is not all that is available. Also available is a demographic model which, beginning with 100 black males in this 1526 timeframe, assuming a 20-year reproductive cycle and assuming that these old-world blacks would have had great survival potential when set suddenly in the midst of a native red population being decimated by its first contact with old-world diseases such as smallpox, becomes the genetic equivalent1 of 105 black individuals in the 1546 timeframe, becomes the genetic equivalent of 110 black individuals in the 1566 timeframe, becomes the genetic equivalent of 116 black individuals in the 1586 timeframe, becomes the genetic equivalent of 122 black individuals in the 1606 timeframe, becomes the genetic equivalent of 128 black individuals in the 1626 timeframe, becomes the genetic equivalent of 135 black individuals in the 1646 timeframe, becomes the genetic equivalent of 143 black individuals in the 1666 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 171 black individuals in the 1686 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 200 black individuals in the 1706 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 250 black individuals in the 1726 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 350 black individuals in the 1746 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 450 black individuals in the 1746 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 550 black individuals in the 1746 timeframe, attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 750 black individuals in the 1746 timeframe, and attracts recruitments from slave populations and becomes the cultural core of the genetic equivalent of 1,000 black individuals in the 1826 timeframe.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE HISTORIAN TYPICALLY SUPPOSES NOW TO 1. For simplicity I am counting in terms of the equivalent of persons of 100% African heredity. In actuality these figures, of say 200 black individuals in the 1706 timeframe, would have amounted actually to something like 50 fully African persons, 200 half-African and half-American persons, and 100 quarter-African and three-quarter-American persons, for a total influenced population of perhaps 350 mingled-heredity individuals rather than 200 unmingled-heredity individuals. Thus, when we get to the year 1826, after some 15 generations or so of New-World interbreeding with reds and with whites, instead of a population of 1,000 genetic Africans we would see what we actually do see: a Florida native population of thousands upon thousands of “maroons” of varying complexions known collectively as “Seminoles” and “Black Seminoles.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW BE THE WHY OF THEN. THE REALITY IS VERY MUCH TO THE CONTRARY, FOR NOW IS NOT THE WHY OF THEN: INSTEAD, THEN WAS THE HOW OF NOW. ANOTHER WAY TO SAY THIS IS THAT HISTORIANS WHO ANTICIPATE OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. A HISTORY WRITTEN IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS AMOUNTS TO SPURIOUS MAKE- BELIEVE. TO DO A GOOD JOB OF RECORDING HISTORY, ONE MUST BECOME IGNORANT (OR FEIGN IGNORANCE) OF EVERYTHING THAT WE NOW KNOW TO HAVE FOLLOWED.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1765
Some Ulster Scots, ancestors of Andrew Jackson, in this year emigrated to the North American continent, bringing with them their Ulster Scot Protestant notions of the nature of “democracy.” Here we may consider the words of William W. Freehling, who in his ROAD TO DISUNION has characterized this peculiar mind-set in the following manner: Jackson, race-obsessed authoritarian ... aimed at institutionalizing classic herrenvolk democracy: both the complete equality of white men and the absolute superiority of whites over non-whites. IRELAND SCOTLAND DISUNION
TRALFAMADORIANS EXPERIENCE REALITY IN 4 DIMENSIONS RATHER THAN 3 AND HAVE SIMULTANEOUS ACCESS TO PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. THEY ARE ABLE TO SEE ALONG THE TIMELINE OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE AT WHICH AS THE RESULT OF A TRALFAMADORIAN EXPERIMENT, THE UNIVERSE IS ANNIHILATED. BILLY PILGRIM, WHILE CAGED IN A TRALFAMADORIAN ZOO, ACQUIRES THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD TIME, AND SO WHEN HE RETURNS TO EARTH, HE BECOMES A HISTORIAN VERY LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HISTORIANS: ALTHOUGH HE CANNOT HIMSELF SEE INTO THE FUTURE THE WAY THE TRALFAMADORIANS DO, LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HUMAN HISTORIANS DO HE PRETENDS TO BE ABLE TO SEE ALL PERIODS OF OUR PAST TRAJECTORY NOT WITH THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE LIVING DURING THOSE PERIODS, BUT WITH THE OVERARCHING EYE OF GOD. THIS ENABLES HIM TO PRETEND TO BE VERY VERY WISE AND TO SOUND VERY VERY IMPRESSIVE!
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1767
March 15, Sunday: According to the most likely account, Andrew Jackson was born in a cabin of a settlement on the banks of Crawford’s Branch of Waxhaw Creek, along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, the 3d son of Andrew Jackson and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, immigrant parents from northern Ireland. At the time that cabin was being considered to be in South Carolina, whereas later more definitive surveys have placed it instead above the recognized demarcation line, in North Carolina. (Allan W. Eckert, in THE FRONTIERSMAN, has however contended that Jackson may have been born earlier, and may have used a younger brother’s birth certificate as his own.)
THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1787
Friend Charles Brockden Brown came to be apprenticed to a Philadelphia lawyer.
Since his service in the American Revolution as a 13-year-old mounted courier, Andrew Jackson had been residing in North Carolina. He had devoted himself to legal studies. At this point, at the age of 20, he was admitted to the bar.
CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES. “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, WE SAY, BUT THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS AS THERE CAN BE DRAWN RADII FROM ONE CENTRE.”
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1788
Andrew Jackson followed the Cumberland Road to the frontier settlement Nashville, carrying with him his appointment papers as a public prosecutor for this transmountain “western district of North Carolina.”
The curate John Newton’s THOUGHTS UPON THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE. With our ships, the great object is, to be full. When the ship is there, it is thought desirable she should take as many as possible. The cargo of a vessel of a hundred tons, or little more, is calculated to purchase from two hundred and twenty to two hundred and fifty slaves. Their lodging-rooms below the deck, which are three (for the men, the boys, and the women), besides a place for the sick, are sometimes more than five feet high, and sometimes less; and this height is divided towards the middle, for the slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close that the shelf would not, easily, contain one more. And I have known a white man sent down, among the men, to lay them in these rows to the greatest advantage, so that as little space as possible might be lost. Let it be observed, that the poor creatures, thus cramped for want of room, are likewise in irons, for the most part both hands and feet, and two together, which makes it difficult for them to turn or move, to attempt either to rise or to lie down, without hurting themselves, or each other. Nor is the motion of the ship, especially her heeling, or stoop on one side, when under sail, to be omitted; for this, as they lie athwart, or cross the ship, adds to the uncomfortableness of their lodging, especially to those who lie on the leeward or leaning side of the vessel. Dire is the tossing, deep the groans. — The heat and smell of these rooms, when the weather will not admit of the slaves being brought upon deck, and of having their rooms cleaned every day, would be almost insupportable to a person not accustomed to them. If the slaves and their rooms can be constantly aired, and they are not detained too long on board, perhaps there are not many who die; but the contrary is often their lot. They are kept down, by the weather, to breathe a hot and corrupted air, sometimes for a week: this added to the galling of their irons, and the despondency which seizes their spirits when thus confined, soon becomes fatal. And every morning, perhaps, more instances than one are found, of the living and the dead, like the captives of Mezentius, fastened together. Epidemical fevers and fluxes, which fill the ship with noisome and noxious effluvia, often break out, and infect the seamen likewise, and thus the oppressors, and the oppressed, fall by the same stroke. I believe, nearly one-half of the slaves on board, have, sometimes, died; and that the loss of a third part, in these circumstances, is not unusual. The ship, in which I was mate, left the coast with two hundred and eighteen slaves on board; and though we were not much affected by epidemical disorders, I find by my journal of that voyage (now before me), that we buried sixty-two on our passage to South Carolina, HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW exclusive of those which died before we left the coast, of which I have no account. I believe, upon an average between the more healthy, and the more sickly voyages, and including all contingencies, one fourth of the whole purchase may be allotted to the article of mortality: that is, if the English ships purchase sixty thousand slaves annually, upon the whole extent of the coast, the annual loss of lives cannot be much less than fifteen thousand.
William Cowper’s “The Negro’s Complaint” — an attempt, necessarily unsatisfactory, to grasp how life must seen when experienced from the perspective of the “ultimate other,” one’s victim and servant: Forc’d from home and all its pleasures, Afric’s coast I left forlorn; To increase a stranger’s treasures, O’er the raging billows borne; Men from England bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold; But though theirs they have enroll’d me Minds are never to be sold. Still in thought as free as ever, What are England’s rights, I ask, Me from my delights to sever, Me to torture, me to task? Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot forfeit nature’s claim; Skins may differ, but affection Dwells in white and black the same. Why did all-creating Nature Make the plant for which we toil? Sighs must fan it, tears must water, Sweat of ours must dress the soil. Think, ye masters iron-hearted, Lolling at your jovial boards; Think, how many backs have smarted For the sweets your cane affords. Is there, as ye sometimes tell us, Is there one who reigns on high? Has he bid you buy and sell us, Speaking from his throne, the sky? Ask him, if your knotted scourges, Fetters, blood-extorting screws, Are the means that duty urges Agents of his will to use? Strewing yonder sea with wrecks, Wasting towns, plantations, meadows, Are the voice with which he speaks. He, foreseeing what vexations Afric’s sons should undergo, Fix’d their tyrants’ habitations Where his whirlwinds answer — No. By our blood in Afric wasted, Ere our necks receiv’d the chain; By the mis’ries which we tasted, Crossing in your barks the main; By our suff’rings since ye brought us To the man-degrading mart; All sustain’d by patience, taught us Only by a broken heart: Deem our nation brutes no longer Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard and stronger Than the colour of our kind. Slaves of gold! whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted pow’rs, Prove that you have human feelings, Ere you proudly question ours. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
You’ve presumably gathered from the above ruminations that the poet Cowper was generally opposed to human slavery. –But the devil is, as always, in the details.
Which is worse, enslavement to another human being by virtue of leg irons and handcuffs, or enslavement to Satan through an attachment to sin? For this British poet, in his poem “Charity,” clearly it would be the latter rather than the former which would constitute far the worse condition, and the conclusion to this comparison, Whitey, is as plain as the nose on your face: although it would be horrific for a black African to be enslaved to some cruel and un-Christian master who would lead him into sin and temptation, it might be on the other hand beatific, a true freeing, for that black African to be enslaved instead to some gentle and tolerant white Christian master who would only by example and by teaching be raising up that African into a true appreciation of the glories of our Christ Jesus. In fact if the black man is enslaved to a true Christian, then “one flash of heav’nly day” will “heal his heart and melt his chains away”! See, the thing is, “slaves by truth enlarg’d are doubly freed.” His service to you would be something done out not out of fear and obligation, but out of “gratitude and love,” and it would be “sweet” to him, and he would be “submissive at thy feet” out of this sweet gratitude and sweet love! For you the provident white slavemaster had delivered him “out of hopeless night.” You had bought his body — but only to give his soul light. He had previously been held fast by chains of sin and ignorance, and now you were merely binding him with chains and shackles of iron while your lips might have the opportunity to “shed instruction as the dew” and teach him “what path to shun, and what pursue.” Truly, in service to a benefactor such as you, although nominally enslaved he would be truly freed, and while not torn away from such a master, he would consider himself to be at his “best home”!
Here is a plan of each deck and the allowable “tight packing” aboard the slaver Brookes engaging quite properly and legally in the international slave trade under improved conditions dictated by the parliamentary Act of this year.
“EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”: In 1788, the House of Commons voted Parliamentary inquiry. In 1791, a bill to abolish the trade was brought in by Wilberforce, and supported by him, and by Fox, and Burke, and Pitt, with the utmost ability and faithfulness; resisted by the planters, and the whole West Indian interest, and lost. During the next sixteen years, ten times, year after year, the attempt was renewed by Mr. Wilberforce, and ten times defeated by the planters. The king, and all the royal family but one, were against it. These debates are instructive, as they show on what grounds the trade was assailed and defended. Every thing generous, wise, and sprightly is sure to come to the attack. On the other part, are found cold prudence, barefaced selfishness, and silent votes. But the nation was aroused to enthusiasm. Every horrid fact became known.
Under the new limitations, the Brookes would be allowed to carry on its cross-Atlantic voyages only up to 454 slaves as depicted on the following screen (in the broadside collection of the Rare Book Room, Library of Congress, Portfolio 282-43, Lot 4422A; LC-US Z 62-44000).2
The image “an African in Chains in a Supplicating Posture” bearing the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” motto was used on the cover of a London pamphlet addressed to Parliament, and on the cover of a publication
2. There are more images of this sort available at
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW about a voyage to Guinea.
In about this year, according to William Chauncey Fowler’s LOCAL LAW IN MASSACHUSETTS AND CONNECTICUT, HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED; AND THE HISTORICAL STATUS OF THE NEGRO, IN CONNECTICUT, ETC. (Albany, 1872, and New Haven, 1875, page 125), “one or two” negrero vessels were being fitted out in Connecticut.
The Underground Railroad and the Manumission and Colonization Society of North Carolina were both tools of the Guilford County Quakers. At Wells Meeting in Perquimans County, the Quaker yearly meeting was held with representatives from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and a minute was made of their progress or lack of progress against their previously agreed goal of cleaning all Quaker hands of slave holding:
As it appears that all Friends have not yet cleansed their hands of slave holding this meeting directs the inferior meetings to put the former advices of our yearly meeting in practice such who continue to hold them as slaves and hand up a report of their service to next yearly meeting to be held at Centre Meeting in Guilford County for further trial with which this meeting concurs.
The old committee was discharged and a new committee appointed made up of 24 prestigious North Carolina Friends — a lifetime commitment for each and every of them: • Zacharias Dick • David Vestal • Jeremiah Reynolds HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW • Thomas Winslow • John Talbot • Obediah Harris • Jesse Coffin • Strangeman Stanley • John Carter • Joseph Cloud • John Beals • Samuel Millikan • Hezekiah Sanders • Tristain Barnard • William Coffin, Jr. • John Hackett • John Davis • Samuel Chambers • Issac Beeson • Benjamin Coffin • John Sanders •Seth Coffin • Thomas Thornbourgh • William Tomlinson
W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The slave-trade was hardly touched upon in the Congress of the Confederation, except in the ordinance respecting the capture of slaves, and on the occasion of the Quaker petition against the trade, although, during the debate on the Articles of Confederation, the counting of slaves as well as of freemen in the apportionment of taxes was urged as a measure that would check further importation of Negroes. “It is our duty,” said Wilson of Pennsylvania, “to lay every discouragement on the importation of slaves; but this amendment [i.e., to count two slaves as one freeman] would give the jus trium liberorum to him who would import slaves.”3 The matter was finally compromised by apportioning requisitions according to the value of land and buildings. After the Articles went into operation, an ordinance in regard to the recapture of fugitive slaves provided that, if the capture was made on the sea below high-water mark, and the Negro was not claimed, he should be freed. Matthews of South Carolina demanded the yeas and nays on this proposition, with the result that only the vote of his State was recorded against it.4 On Tuesday, October 3, 1783, a deputation from the Yearly Meeting of the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware Friends asked leave to present a petition. Leave was granted the following day,5 but no further minute appears. According to the report of the Friends, the petition was against the slave-trade; and “though the Christian rectitude of the concern was by the Delegates generally acknowledged, yet not being vested with the powers of legislation, they declined promoting any public remedy against the gross national iniquity of trafficking in the persons of fellow-men.”6 The only legislative activity in regard to the trade during the 3. Elliot, DEBATES (1861), I. 72-3. Cf. Article 8 of the ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION. 4. JOURNALS OF CONGRESS, 1781, June 25; July 18; Sept. 21, 27; November 8, 13, 30; December 4. 5. JOURNALS OF CONGRESS, 1782-3, pages 418-9, 425. 6. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 1st Congress 2d session, page 1183. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Confederation was taken by the individual States.7 Before 1778 Connecticut, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia had by law stopped the further importation of slaves, and importation had practically ceased in all the New England and Middle States, including Maryland. In consequence of the revival of the slave-trade after the War, there was then a lull in State activity until 1786, when North Carolina laid a prohibitive duty, and South Carolina, a year later, began her series of temporary prohibitions. In 1787-1788 the New England States forbade the participation of their citizens in the traffic. It was this wave of legislation against the traffic which did so much to blind the nation as to the strong hold which slavery still had on the country.
IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
7. Cf. above, Chapters ii., iii., iv. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW August 12, Tuesday: In Concord, the Reverend Ezra Ripley united Ammi White, a cabinetmaker in his early 30s, with Mary Minot (page 256, CONCORD BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, AND DEATHS).
Andrew Jackson was serving as an attorney in a criminal case before the Jonesboro court, with Colonel Waightstill Avery serving as the opposing counsel. When Avery was severe in his comments on some of the legal positions taken by Jackson, Jackson had responded by playing a prank, substituting in Avery’s saddlebag a slab of bacon for a legal text by Francis Bacon.8 When Avery didn’t think that even a bit funny, Jackson challenged him to a duel. Avery responded, “This evening after Court is adjourned,” and when they went on the field, Jackson fired 1st with no effect, and then Avery fired into the air. After this formality Avery walked up to Jackson and delivered him a good talking-to.
ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
8. This certainly would not have been THE CHARGE OF SIR FRANCIS BACON KNIGHT, HIS MAJESTIES ATTOURNEY GENERALL, TOUCHING DUELLS, VPON AN INFORMATION IN THE STAR-CHAMBER AGAINST PRIEST AND WRIGHT.… (London, 1614). Would it have been THE ELEMENTS OF THE COMMON LAVVES OF ENGLAND, BRANCHED INTO A DOUBLE TRACT: THE ONE CONTAINING A COLLECTION OF ſOME PRINCIPALL RULES AND MAXIMES OF THE COMMON LAW, WITH THEIR LATITUDE AND EXTENT. EXPLICATED FOR THE MORE FACILE INTRODUCTION OF ſUCH AS ARE ſTUDIOUSLY ADDICTED TO THAT NOBLE PROFEſSION. THE OTHER THE UſE OF THE COMMON LAW, FOR PRESERVATION OF OUR PERSONS, GOODS, AND GOOD NAMES. ACCORDING TO THE LAWES AND CUſTOMES OF THIS LAND… (London, 1639)? This was the earliest of Bacon’s legal texts, though it was not published during his lifetime. It consists of 25 maxims from common law and civilian sources, followed by an analysis of each, with examples and exceptions. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1790
Andrew Jackson had been doing well for himself, by speculating in parcels of land and the purchase and sale of slaves, and was residing in the boardinghouse of Rachel Stockley Donelson. There he met Mrs. Rachel Donelson Robards, a daughter of the landlady who was being driven to seek refuge with her mother against a coarse and violently jealous husband, Captain Lewis Robards. Her expectation, an expectation that she surely confided to the boarder, was that this man from whom she had fled would soon be filing a petition for divorce. And, she was gorgeous.
YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW May 26, Wednesday: The Southwest Territory (Tennessee) was allowed to create a Territorial government. The federal Congress also accepted the last of North Carolina’s western lands, designating them the “Territory South of the River Ohio.”
The Reverend Daniel Foster (1750-1795), pastor of New Braintree, Massachusetts, preached the Election Day sermon before Governor John Hancock, Lieutenant-Governor Samuel Adams, and both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, enumerating the duties of magistrates as well as the duties of the people in a Christian country, and detailing God’s design for our civil government.
HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, THAT A PARTICULAR INFANT WOULD INVENT THE SEWING MACHINE, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE HISTORIAN IS SETTING CHRONOLOGY TO “SHUFFLE,” WHICH IS NOT A PERMISSIBLE OPTION BECAUSE IN THE REAL WORLD SUCH SHUFFLE IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET. THERE IS NO SUCH “BIRD’S EYE VIEW” AS THIS IN THE REAL WORLD, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD NO REAL BIRD HAS EVER GLIMPSED AN ACTUAL HISTORICAL SEQUENCE.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1791
Smitten by the beauty and misfortune of Mrs. Rachel Donelson Robards, the landlady Rachel Stockley Donelson’s married but separated daughter, boarder Andrew Jackson had devoted himself to her protection. In this year, with an inaccurate perception that the husband Captain Lewis Robards had obtained a legal divorce from the Virginia legislature, they were married. Actually, the husband had not yet had the marriage dissolved, which was going to create a problem or the perception of a problem.
FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1793
When Captain Lewis Robards belatedly secured his divorce from Mrs. Rachel Donelson Robards, it was news of this that made Andrew Jackson and Mrs. Rachel Donelson Robards aware of the illegality of their newlywed relationship.
BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1794
January: While Thomas Paine was in prison on the continent, the first part of THE AGE OF REASON; BEING AN INVESTIGATION OF TRUE AND FABULOUS THEOLOGY, a work setting out his views on deistic religion at which he had been at work when arrested, was published in Paris.
Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson Robards, who had presumed themselves to be husband and wife until they had received unexpected and unpleasant news, remarried. However, the perception of Captain Lewis Robards had been and would be that Jackson had from 1791 to 1794 been living in adultery with another man’s wife. Such hints of lack of virtue were quite sufficient to induce a person such as Jackson to seek violence, with horsewhip or dueling pistol (it’s no joke: killing people was his fave activity).
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1796
June 1, Wednesday: Tennessee became the 16th state. Andrew Jackson’s service as a member of the Tennessee constitutional convention would lead to his election as the state’s 1st representative in the federal Congress. In Washington DC his strong anti-British sentiments would set him in opposition to the federal administration.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1797
Tennessee congressman Andrew Jackson’s alliance with Senator William Blount of Tennessee, against a Tennessee faction led by Governor John Sevier, brought about Congressman Jackson’s rise to the federal Senate (personal financial difficulties would induce him to resign that post during April of the following year).
THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1798
April: Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Fears in Solitude.”
Personal financial difficulties led to Andrew Jackson’s resignation as a federal Senator from Tennessee.
YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.
September: Andrew Jackson was appointed to the superior court of Tennessee, and this appointment would relieve his economic situation (he would continue in this judicial trajectory until 1804).
Burwell Bassett Jr., a nephew of George and Martha Washington, traveled to New Hampshire on business and tried to convince Oney Judge Staines to return with him. By this point, she was married to the free seaman Jack Staines who was away at sea, and was the mother of the infant Eliza. She of course refused to return to Virginia with him. Bassett was Senator Langdon’s houseguest, and in the course of a dinner revealed his plan to kidnap her and return her securely to her enslavement at Mount Vernon. (I have no idea whether Burwell’s plan contemplated his kidnapping also her newborn Eliza Staines, who would likewise under existing law have been born as Martha’s dower property — but wouldn’t it have been unthinkably cruel to tear this newborn infant from its mother’s breast and abandon it in New Hampshire to starve?) This time Langdon helped Oney, secretly sending word for her to immediately go into hiding. Bassett was obliged to return to Virginia without her. Although George and Martha Washington could have used the federal courts to recover Staines — the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act which he had signed into law required a legal process to return an escaped slave over state lines and any such court case would be part of the public record and would attract unwelcome attention.
With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth issued LYRICAL BALLADS. Coleridge’s contributions
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW included “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Nightingale.”
The publication may function for us to illustrate the nature of our culture’s myth of sole authorship, for it appeared without any author’s name attached to it. Within this volume several references of the prefatory Advertisement were to monolithic constructs such as “the author,” “his expressions,” “his personal observation,” “his friends,” and to “the author’s own person,” yet the volume included poems bearing the titles “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tintern Abbey” which we now routinely ascribe to different British poets. There would be subsequent editions, in 1800, in 1802, and in 1805, in which the prefatory materials would mention “the assistance of a Friend,” but the title page would be extended only to mention “By W. Wordsworth” and the name “S.T. Coleridge” would nowhere appear. Only in 1817 would Coleridge obtain credit for his “The Ancient Mariner” and “The Nightingale” and other poems. Why was this? —For two overlapping reasons, neither of which has to do with Wordsworth wanting to take undue credit for another’s productions. First, in a very important respect the affiliation between these two poets and their writerly collaboration was so intense that in a very important manner a number of these poems actually were co- authored, and, second, the myth of solitary genius which was prevalent in those days, a myth inherited from the legitimation myth current for sacred scripture, and the myth of undivided authorial authority which was prevalent in those days, a myth inherited from the legitimation myth current for kingship or sole-leader status HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW (Führerprinzip), were so overwhelming, that they simply had to be deferred to as the default understanding
This famous book, which included Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” introduced Romanticism into England.
In this month the boy friends, and Dorothy Wordsworth, went together to Germany to learn of Herr Professor Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental idealism. Coleridge would prepare himself in Germany to argue, for the benefit of his friends in England, that as soon as we knew enough about universal science, and the manner in which attractive and repulsive forces created a web of interactions throughout nature, both our ideas about matter and our ideas about deity would be seen as subsumed within one simple explanatory structure, as “different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum.” This would impress almost everyone. Coleridge, in Germany in this year and the next, would be studying under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the professor of natural history who had in the 1770s classified the human races into 28 varieties and attributed the differences between these varieties to varying sorts of degeneration or deterioration on account of influences of gender, of geography, or both gender and geography, from a uniform originary white male standard. However, while Herr Professor Blumenbach had thus laid the groundwork for the Nazi racial thinking which would come later by coined the term “Caucasian,” the term “Aryanism” had not yet come into HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW being and he presumed Semites to be a portion of his honorable white race.9 As [Martin] Bernal has argued in one of the most interesting parts of [BLACK ATHENA: THE AFROASIATIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION. VOLUME I, THE FABRICATION OF ANCIENT GREECE 1785-1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987, page 220)], the curious and disturbing fact is that the rise of professional scholarship and the transmutation of knowledge into the different forms of academic disciplines, decisively established at the University of Göttingen (founded in 1734) and then in the new university of Berlin and elsewhere, was intimately bound up with the development of racial theory and the ordering of knowledge on a racial basis. As [Edward W.] Said observes, “What gave writers like [Joseph Ernest] Renan and [Matthew] Arnold the right to generalities about race was the official character of their formed cultural literacy” [ORIENTALISM: WESTERN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ORIENT (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, page 227)]. The blunt fact that has even now not been faced is that modern racism was an academic creation. What we are dealing with here is the dominance of racial theory so widespread that it worked as an ideology, permeating both consciously and implicitly the fabric of almost all areas of thinking of its time. This racialization of knowledge demonstrates that the university’s claim to project knowledge in itself outside political control or judgement cannot be trusted and, in the past at least, has not been as objective as it has claimed; the university’s amnesia about its own relation to race is a sign of its fear of the loss of legitimation.
“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
9. Refer to THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TREATISES OF JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH [1775-1795], edited and translated by T. Bendyshe and published by the Anthropological Society in London in 1865. Young, Robert J.C. COLONIAL DESIRE: HYBRIDITY IN THEORY, CULTURE AND RACE (London: Routledge, 1995, page 64). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1802
Judge Andrew Jackson was designated as the new major general over the Tennessee militia. Retiring from the bench, he dedicated himself to development of a new home at The Hermitage, a few miles northeast of Nashville, where the uncertainties of cotton growing were partly forgotten in the pleasantries of tending to thoroughbred horses.
ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1803
October 1, Saturday: Publication of the Variations for piano and flute op.14 by Johann Nepomuk Hummel was announced in the Wiener Zeitung.
Governor John “Nolichucky Jack” Sevier, who had already served 3 consecutive 2-year terms as Tennessee’s governor but then had been unable to obtain a 4th term because state law prohibited this, and was in this year running again for Governor, against Judge Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson’s friend Archibald Roane (Sevier would serve 3 consecutive 2-year terms again, into 1809). The candidate made the accusation that the Judge was committing adultery with Rachel Donelson (“Great God! Do you mention her sacred name?”), hostilities were exchanged in Knoxville without blows being struck, and the deadly duo determined that they would travel across the Cherokee Nation boundary line and have themselves a nice duel with pairs of horse pistols.
NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE OCTOBER 1ST, 1803 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).
October 16, Sunday: Ferdinand Karl Erzherzog von Österreich-Este replaced Ercole d’Este, Duke of Modena as Duke of Modena-Bresigau.
John “Nolichucky Jack” Sevier had been Tennessee’s governor for 3 consecutive 2-year terms but then had been unable to obtain a 4th term because state law prohibited this, and was in this year running again for Governor, against Judge Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson’s friend Archibald Roane (Sevier would serve 3 consecutive 2-year terms again, into 1809). The candidate had made the accusation that the Judge was committing adultery with Rachel Donelson (“Great God! Do you mention her sacred name?”), hostilities had been exchanged in Knoxville without blows being struck, and the two had determined that they would travel across the Cherokee Nation boundary line to have themselves a nice duel with braces of big ol’ horse pistols. Sevier’s entourage of approximately 20 persons was stuck enroute at Campbell’s Station outside Knoxville when the Jackson entourage came along, and the insults hurled by both parties caused the governor’s horse to bolt, carrying off with it his horse pistols still in their saddle holsters. When the judge took aim with his “great rifle pistols” at the disarmed governor, the governor sought cover behind a tree. The governor’s son took aim at the judge while the judge’s second took aim at the son — it was the plot device that in Western movies is termed a “Mexican standoff.” Fortunately, or unfortunately, all parties held their fire. For some time this deadly duo would have fun exchanging hot insults and heated political orations in local bars.
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1805
At about this point the gazettes in the United States began a practice of posting the names and deeds of men who were too cowardly to accept challenges to duel. Such postings were often harsh, as were the responses. For example, after a Southern duelist named Charles Dickinson hired space in a newspaper to characterize Major General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee as “a damned liar, a worthless scoundrel, a poltroon, and a coward,” and then went on to do the unforgivable, describing Jackson’s wife as a harlot. Old Hickory responded by taking Dickinson’s shot, then calmly gut-shooting the man.
For $75,000, Aaron Burr sold half of Greenwich Village north of the city of New-York to John Jacob Astor. In this year Major General Jackson received Burr as his guest at the Hermitage, apparently crediting that the agenda of this filibuster was not anything disloyal to the United States of America, but merely to seize the Mexican possessions of the nation of Spain. Although Jackson would eventually become more aware about what this dude was actually up to, in later years he would reaffirm his faith that Burr had been merely a misunderstood patriot, and one beset by a pursuing political enmity, the enmity of President Thomas Jefferson.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1806
May 30, Friday: In a duel between the lawyers and horse breeders Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickinson at Harrison’s Mills on the Red River in Logan, Kentucky, both were wounded but Dickinson would bleed out. Jackson would carry the bullet near his heart for the remainder of his life. (Estimates of the number of duels participated in by Jackson run from 5 to 100. Jackson would for instance involve himself in a “free fighting” barroom encounter with the Benton brothers Thomas and Jesse.)
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6 day of 5 M / Spent the evening at D Williams in company with Susanne Barker, tho’ my company was agreeable yet felt but little inclination to join with them in conversation my mind being dipt into an exercise which hath attend it closely for some time... ——————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1809
December 22, Friday: December 22, 1809: At about this point Andrew Jackson, Junior was born in Nashville as one of the infant twins of Rachel Stockley Jackson’s brother Severn Donelson (the other twin was named Thomas Jefferson Donelson). He would be adopted by Andrew Jackson and Rachel Stockley Jackson and Lyncoya, a young Native American orphan, would be taken in to function as his companion during youth. By some accounts they took this white infant in because of the mother’s ill health and inability to care for her children. Andrew Jackson, Junior and his twin Thomas Jefferson Donelson would remain close all of their lives. Andrew Jackson, Junior and his wife Sarah Yorke Jackson of Philadelphia would produce Rachel Lawrence, Thomas Jefferson Jackson, Samuel Jackson, Robert Armstrong Jackson, and Col. Andrew Jackson, III, Confederate States Army.
George Gordon, Lord Byron and Hobhouse left Mazi and arrived in Thebes.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 22nd of 12 Mo// The mind unpleasantly affected, but Patience must be exercised. Wm Stanton a poor thing has moved here from Hudson & has undertaken Clock Making & Watch repairing, but if he goes on in insinuating false hoods about his fellow craftsmen will not be of long standing here, especially when his Caracter in Hudson is known. - ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1812
An expeditionary force of the United States of America raided York in Canada and burned the library of the Canadian parliament there. (York is now known as Toronto. We hear from time to time about an English army burning our US Library of Congress in 1814, but, strangely, it seems we almost never hear the whole story — that this book-burning done by the English may well have been in retaliation for our previous book-burning.)
Companies of soldiers of color fought in several battles during this war, on the side of the United States of America, but I do not know whether any of those battles involving soldiers of color were fought in Canada.
Indignant at what he identified as cowardly submission to Britain in Jefferson’s and Madison’s foreign policy, Major General Andrew Jackson rejoiced in the eruption of war and offered to organize an invasion of Canada, or of Florida. Whatever. However, the “Virginia Dynasty,” not really trusting him, offered him only a commission as major general of US volunteers, to lead a force to Natchez, Mississippi in support of General James Wilkinson. In that capacity he would never be allowed to come within firing distance of a foe, but nevertheless he would along the way pick up a moniker, “Old Hickory.”
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1813
Andrew Jackson found on a battlefield next to his dead mother a Native American child, Lyncoya, and sent him back to The Hermitage to grow up as companion for his adopted son Andrew Jackson, Junior.
In Illinois in this year it was determined that if any black Americans were to seek to establish residency — they were to be subjected to repeated public lashings until this brought about the desired change in their persuasion.
September: A massacre of white settlers at Fort Mims, Mississippi Territory, by the Creek brought Andrew Jackson back into the field.
September 4, Saturday morning: Andrew Jackson nearly got himself killed in a gunfight in a Nashville tavern. The gunfight was the result of a feud between Jackson and Thomas Benton and his brother Jesse Benton. A bullet would remain lodged in his left shoulder for decades, producing chronic health problems such as irritability, paranoia, severe mood swings, and kidney failure due to the dissolved lead burden in his body, until surgically removed in 1832. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1814
Since the United States and the British were at war, General Andrew Jackson took Pensacola in Florida in order to drive out the British who had been there under Spanish protection.
March 27, Sunday: General Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee militiamen defeated Upper Creek Muscogee/Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend in the Tallapoosa River of Alabama. More than 600 were killed, 146 were wounded, and some 300 native women and children survived to be captivated. Headman Red Eagle surrendered, ending the uprising. After the battle, while Jackson’s militiamen were conducting their body count by collecting the noses, and stripping items of clothing off the corpses that they could send as souvenirs to “the ladies of Tennessee,” and further mutilating the bodies in order to fabricate bridle reins out of human skin, a 3-year-old was observed wandering there, still living. When the surviving women in the village refused to take charge of him, Jackson ordered a trooper take him to The Hermitage. His name was said to be Lyncoya or something that sounded like that. The defeated tribalists would flee to the Florida peninsula. Sam Houston, who had been twice wounded, caught Jackson’s eye.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 27 of 3 M / Silent Meetings & I thought pretty good ones After tea took a Walk round the Hill with Br D Rodman — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 1, Sunday: Andrew Jackson was commissioned a major general in the regular army with command of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 1 of 5th Mth 1814 / Our Meetings were both Silent & I considerd lean poor seasons - - After meeting took tea with My H & John father Rodmans RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
September: Perceiving the danger of a British move against New Orleans after a strike along the Gulf Coast, Andrew Jackson wrecked any such plan by a decisive repulse of an attack on Mobile.
November: Andrew Jackson had driven the enemy from its position in Pensacola and was free to journey to New Orleans to inspect the defenses of that key to the Mississippi.
Mid-December: Andrew Jackson arrived in New Orleans none too soon, for the British had anchored their fleet in Mississippi Sound and were disembarking their troops on the banks of the Mississippi some 10 miles below New Orleans. From their position on the Plains of Chalmette they launched a series of strikes against the city. Jackson countered with a polyglot mixture of Louisiana militia, Tennessee and Kentucky riflemen, and Baratarian pirates. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1815
January 1, Sunday: The British were repulsed in a 2d attack upon General Andrew Jackson’s system of ditches around the sea approaches to New Orleans, in a War of 1812 that because of the Treaty of Ghent was already over. News of the Treaty of Ghent arrived at the Congress of Vienna — this would significantly raise the influence of Britain on the continent because it meant that that nation, undistracted, could in the future field many more troops there.
Lowell Mason entered upon his new duties as choir director at the Independent Presbyterian Church of Savannah, Georgia.
The followers of Joanna Southcott had allowed her corpse to putrefy for 4 days while they waited around to see if a magical bouncing baby was going to spring from it. Finally they allowed a postmortem, which gave no indication of any pregnancy. Joanna had left behind her, however, a sealed Great Box, and the expectation that if this box were not properly opened in the presence of 24 Bishops of the Church by the end of the year 2004, there was going to be all hell to pay. (The box has been opened, although not in the presence of any 24 Bishops of the Church –it proved to contain a horse-pistol, a few coins of the period, various scribblings, some trinkets, and odds and ends– and, as we now notice, the year 2004 has come and has gone.) MILLENNIALISM
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 1st M 1815 / We commence the Week, the Month & the Year together - a day of thoughtfulness it has been to me. Our Meetings have both been Silent & to me pretty good seasons, tho’ roving of mind intruded a little —— Father & Mother Rodman set the evening with us -10
RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
10. Stephen Wanton Gould Diary, 1812-1823: The Gould family papers are stored under control number 2033 at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, Box 7 Folder 11 for July 1, 1812-August 20, 1815 and Folder 12 for August 24, 1815-September 25, 1823. Series 7 Microfilm Reel #4, positive, is made up of Friend Stephen Wanton Gould’s Diaries #12-16, 1815-1838 (August 24, 1815-September 20, 1838 and Extracts from the records of the monthly meeting held by Rhode Island Quakers, 1676-1707) (Reel #12 is the negative copy of Reel #4) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW January 8, Sunday: On the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, the British army, unaware that a treaty of peace had been signed, made a 3d assault against General Andrew Jackson’s system of ditches around the sea approaches to New Orleans. Whoever won control over this port and river city supposed they would “win” the war that was already over, because the port was the key to all of the American Inland South facing the Caribbean, a general territory which went under the name “Louisiana,” that is, “Land of Louis XV, King of France,” although whatever paltry “rights of ownership” Louis XV had had to this real estate (which were debatable) had passed to his (erstwhile) heir the Emperor Napoléon subsequent to his having lost his head, and had then been sold to the national government of the United States of America in 1803 for the paltry sum of $0.04 per acre.11 However, Jackson had been reinforced with levies from Kentucky as well as by US Marines under Major Daniel Carmick, and the British troops were being led by a brother-in-law of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, Packenham, who had achieved his position of military mastery from political connections of rank and privilege rather than from any demonstrated facility in getting other men to die when he told them to. The watchword of the British was “Booty and Beauty.” The troops were chiefly drawn from Wellington’s peninsular army. This relative Packenham did a no-no. He led a manly frontal assault against a fully prepared and alerted defensive position under fine daylight conditions with no thought of surprise or other trickiness. The attackers were cut down in half an hour of concentrated rifle and cannon fire with losses of almost 2,000 dead and injured. Only one of their general officers was still alive. American casualties were 6 killed and 10 wounded (Jackson’s loss in the entire campaign was merely 333 souls). The British withdrew to their original landing-place and re-embarked.
This Battle of New Orleans, the last campaign of the War of 1812, was being fought subsequent to the signing of the Peace of Ghent on December 24, 1814. There is no merit, however, in the frequent assertion that Jackson’s great victory was won after the war was over, for the Ghent treaty specifically called for continued hostilities until ratification by both governments, and this mutual ratification would be effected only during February 1815. After so many distressing months of failure in a war in which the enemy had burned and sacked the federal capital and which had led disaffected citizens to question the value of the Union itself, Jackson’s victory at New Orleans would seem to wipe away the nation’s memories of incompetent leadership. Overnight, Old Hickory would be transfigured into a symbol of distinctive American strengths and virtues, and his path would turn inevitably toward the freshly painted because scorched “White House.” But for the moment the Virginia Dynasty still commanded, and Jackson would retire with his honors to his beloved Hermitage. Some admirers of Jackson would be able to obtain a locket of his hair, which hair, now tested, shows lead poisoning which would fully explain his severe abdominal cramping and constipation during this period. (The lead bullet lodged in his body produced chronic health problems such as irritability, paranoia, severe mood swings, and kidney failure, until it would be surgically removed in 1832 and the dissolved lead burden in his body would be able to decrease. The calomel which he took due to this constipation, since it contained mercury, may explain why his teeth would fall out at such an early age.)
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 8th of 1st M 1815 / Our Meetings were silent excepting a short offering in the forenoon — Went with Father Rodman to visit of our friend D Buffum who had for a week or two been confined by indisposition. took tea with him & set most of the evening. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE
11. When the national government of the United States of America purchased rights to such territories from weaker people, such as the Dakota nation, they weren’t in the habit of paying nearly as much as this per acre, even when the rights to the real estate were far more real than the rights of King Louis. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.
February 10, Friday: The town bells pealed all across Massachusetts, and cannon were discharged, as news arrived of a great victory over the British at New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
February 13, Monday: The news arrived in Boston, by express stage out of New-York through Worcester, that in Ghent “on the 24th December last,” a peace had been concluded between the United States of America and Great Britain, and that the Battle for New Orleans had been merely a waste of everyone’s lives.
Spring: General Andrew Jackson belatedly won the battle of New Orleans after the War of 1812 had been over for a number of weeks. John Franklin served at the battle.
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1816
May 16, Thursday: Andrew Jackson ordered General Edmund Gaines to destroy Fort Barrancas at Pensacola,
Florida and “return” its black population to “their former owners.” The parapet of this earthworks was fifteen feet high and eighteen feet thick. The strong point was situated on a cliff commanding the Apalachicola River, with a swamp to the rear preventing the approach of cannon, and it was mounted with nine cannon. The garrison was identified as more than 300 black, 11 Seminole, and about 20 Choctaw. The commander of the fort was a maroon known as Garçon. WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE “OLD COMERS” ENSLAVEMENT
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 16 of 5 M / Our Meeting pretty well attended — a short testimony & I thought seasonable. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
July 27, Saturday: On their boat tour around Lake Geneva, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Ouchy, where Byron wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon.” He finished Canto III of “Childe Harold” and wrote “The Dream,” “Stanzas to Augusta,” and other poems.
A heated cannonball fired from the gunboats of the white attacking force blew up the powder magazine of Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, Florida, causing the instant death of 270 of its defenders. After the recognizable leaders among the few survivors had been summarily executed there remained 64 black persons to “return” per the orders of Andrew Jackson “to their former owners,” which is to say, 64 burned and maimed persons to be transported to Georgia and there shared out among the owners of various plantations for whatever remaining usefulness could be extracted from such survivors as field slaves.12 WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE “OLD COMERS”
12. News of the event would be suppressed by the US federal government. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Christmas Season: During this holiday season at our nation’s puzzle palace in Washington DC, Virginia congressman Charles Fenton Mercer was founding what we now refer to as the American Colonization Society, the “American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States.” Africa for Africans, America for Americans — what an excellent Christmas present from the Christ child! As the Reverend Robert Finley of Princeton University put the matter, “Every thing connected with their condition, including their colour, is against them, nor is there much prospect that their state can ever be greatly ameliorated, while they continue among us.” The Brits had done this, in Sierra Leone, so why couldn’t we? The movers and shakers in this new benevolent association included: LIBERIA
The American Colonization Society
Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay
Representative from Virginia John Randolph
Representative of New Hampshire Daniel Webster
Secretary of the Treasury William Harris Crawford
Attorney General Richard Rush
Author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” Francis Scott Key
General Andrew Jackson
Justice of the Supreme Court Bushrod Washington
The agenda of this association was the lightening of America.
The plan had been urged by Thomas Jefferson, who knew the value of enlightenment, as early as 1777, and the legislature of Virginia had been advocating it since 1801. Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington would function as the 1st president of the society and his immediate successors would be signer Charles Carroll, signer James Madison, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay.
Congress appropriated ten millions to the sinking fund. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
needs his Freedom
needs his Africa HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW The city of Baltimore had begun, in this year, to illuminate (lighten?) some city streets with gas lights on light poles. By December some night streets in London were also being thus brightened, and the envoy John Quincy Adams, witnessing this, has recorded that the illumination seemed “almost too dazzling for my eyes.” The police in particular liked this lighting and began to explore the ever-popular project of relocating crime from well-to-do districts which could afford street lamps to poor districts which could not. As one authority of this period put the matter:
Without presuming to play on words, I regard gas as essential to an enlightened police.
The 1st theaters to be presumably mainly lit by coal-gas rather than oil or candles are said to have been the East London Theatre and a theater in Philadelphia. Gas of course offered a measure of dimming control, but it also generated heat, and toxic gases which caused headaches, eye discomfort, and sore throats. So now we have an enlightened planet:
The talk of New-York and Boston during this month was an arson-for-profit scheme that had just been exposed in the course of a lawsuit against an insurance company that had been refusing to pay out on a policy. A New Jersey judge was suing in regard to the supposedly accidental loss of his home, and the insurance company was responding in court that it believed the home had been set on fire by a slave at the judge’s instigation. The legal outcome was hinging on the admissibility of the testimony of that black man. When this black was allowed to testify, the judge “fell lifeless,” the report had it, and for the remainder of the trial he appeared “much agitated.” The court concluded that this judge had indeed ordered his own home to be torched, and released the insurer from obligation. (We know about the case by way of a letter from Henry Dwight Sedgwick to Jane Minot dated December 9, 1816 and completed on the following day, in Box 8.9 of the Henry Dwight Sedgwick V Papers, and by way of a letter from Robert Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick dated December 12, 1816, in Box 3.7, at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1817
November 30, Sunday: Native Americans attacked a boat on the Appalachicola River that was carrying supplies to Fort Scott on the Flint River, a boat containing about 40 men and a number of women and children, and killed all except 6 men and 1 woman. They were retaliating for an attack that had been made by General Gaines upon the Indian village of Fowltown, a few miles below Fort Scott, in order to force the natives to surrender some murderers who had found refuge with them. When this frontier news would arrive, General Andrew Jackson would be sent to take command in person, and given authority to call on the militia from Tennessee.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his diary: 1st day 30th of 11th M 1817 / At Meeting this forenoon we had the company of Obadiah Davis & Ruth his wife, who were both acceptably engaged in testimony & endeavord to awaken our minds to a sense of duty They went out of town After meeting — In the Afternoon we had a silent meeting & to me it was a season of activity as respects the creature; I wrestled a little, but alass could not boast of much overcoming. — Set the evening with my H at the late residence of our friend Thos Robinson - I missed the dear old folks from their corners by the sides of the fireplace & their very interesting conversation with which I have been many times entertained, instructed & edified, but Alass they are Gone to their rest, after long lives of usefulness in the World, & may we who remain endeavor to fill their stations with equal propriety in our several sphears, then when the Awful separation which they have recently passed thro’, of Soul & body, comes to us, survivors may trust with equal confidence that our heads are laid in rest & our spirits joined with those that are blessed. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
December 26, Friday: In the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, Lanassa, a melodramma eroico by Johann Simon Mayr to words of Rossi and Merelli after Lemierre, was performed for the initial time.
William McDonald, who had been sentenced to be hanged in Boston for the murder of his wife, died of natural causes before he could be executed.
Command over the American forces organizing to “pursue” the Seminoles of the Georgia border with Spanish East Florida was assumed by General Andrew Jackson. The black Seminoles were conveniently and readily presumed to be mere escaped slaves, a presumptive status which —unexamined and unchallenged— they occupy in our “history” books even today. This was race war. Our General Andrew “Long Knife” Jackson was HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW ordered by the US government to do “anything necessary” to subdue them.
“Father, after the war — will the Ten Commandments hold again?”
In the process of capturing St. Marks and Pensacola, our general would execute two British subjects. (This is generally considered a no-no.) The invasion would cause an international furor. President James Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun would simply deny having authorized Jackson’s deeds, and for awhile the cabinet would consider apologizing to Spain and Britain. They even debated the possibility of taking disciplinary action in regard to their general. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams would strongly demur, however, and would persuade Monroe that the thing to do was to justify his general’s behavior as having been necessitated by Spanish negligence. Adams would so deviously exploit the whole affair that he would be able to obtain, in 1819, the final cession of the Floridas to the United States, along with a favorable definition of the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1818
Thomas Say accompanied his friend William Maclure (1763-1840), president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (1817-1840), the geologist Gerard Troost (1776-1850), and others scientists on an expedition to the offshore islands of Georgia and Florida.
Say would have occasion to notice the US federal government to be engaging in “most cruel and inhuman war” against swamp dwellers, “these poor wretches whom we call savages.” This was our 1st attempt at a final solution13 of the problem presented by the “Black Seminole.” General Andrew “Long Knife” Jackson was establishing that he had a perfect right to be hanged, or to be President of the United States of America — or Der Führer or something. Our hero was riding through the Spanish territories exterminating entire villages of women and children (and at night he wrote home to describe the villages as “Sodom and Gomorrah” to his beloved wife Rachel Jackson on their slave plantation — we find no response in which the beloved Rachel wrote “Well, I’m glad to hear you’re behaving yourself”). To close out the 1st Seminole War after the loss of Pensacola and St. Marks, and to obtain US assurances about Spain’s claim to Texas, Spain would cede Florida and the Oregon Territory to the United States.
January 6, Tuesday: General Andrew Jackson sent off a letter to President James Monroe by way of Representative John Rhea of Tennessee, proposing that in a campaign of less than 60 days he would seize Spanish Florida. (When he would receive no response, he would presume tacit approval and begin the assault, presumably under the principle that it is easier to apologize for success than to obtain prior formal permission for adventurism.)
Great Britain annexed the dominions of the Holkar of Indore while the Rajputana States were placed under British protection.
Dervis Mehmed Pasha replaced Mehmed Emin Rauf Pasha as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.
13. In the German language, Auflösung is used for the answer to a word problem in algebra. Although its meaning is “final solution,” it is not exactly the same as the Endlösung or “genocide” which our favorite general was seeking. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW March 15, Sunday: 1,500 United States troops under General Andrew Jackson, with questionable authority, crossed into Spanish Florida destroying the homes or property of any native Americans or blacks they came across.
April 1, Wednesday: United States troops under General Andrew Jackson burned 300 Seminole homes at Mikasuki in Spanish Florida.
April 7, Tuesday: The invasion forces under General Andrew Jackson took possession of the Spanish fort at St. Marks on Apalachee Bay.
April 12, Sunday: In an attack on the camp of the Red Stick leader Peter McQuee, the forces of General Andrew Jackson and their allies succeeded in killing many native Americans.
“...the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” — Declaration of Independence
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 12th of 4th M / Our Meeting this forenoon was quite full - D Buffum engaged in a lively testimony & Jonathon Dennis, Spoke a little in a religious way with his hat on towards the close. - In the Afternoon father Rodman was engaged in a short but lively testimony RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 26, Sunday: Major General Andrew Jackson issued a written general order at his headquarters in Fort St. Marks, Florida directing “a special court martial, to meet at 12 o’clock, A.M., for the purpose of investigating charges exhibited against A. Arbuthnot, R.C. Ambrister, and such others, who are similarly situated, as may be brought before it.” (This order is of special interest in our current national situation under the Homeland Defense Act, because the Obama Administration has been arguing that whether or not General Jackson’s actions were hasty, poorly considered, immoral, and/or indecent, nevertheless they do constitute one of the valid legal precedents for the Bush Administration’s still-open prison at Guantánamo and for our current actions against persons whom the current administration chooses to characterize as “extremists,” and as such may be fairly offered in argument in court. Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, Jeh Johnson, has sent to the Seminole Tribe of Florida what amounts to an apology for having likened al Qaida as of 2012 to their tribe as of 1818!)
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 26th 4 M 1818 / The forenoon meeting was silent in the Afternoon Lydia Almy & Abigail Sherman was concerned in short testimonys. — to me they were remarkably dull meetings. —-After HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW tea took a walk with father Rodman to see Isaac Mitchell & wife & spent a little time very pleasantly with them — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 29, Wednesday: Before sunrise, Major General Andrew Jackson executed two British subjects in occupied Florida for inciting the natives against him. The merchant Alexander George Arbuthnot, probably innocent, was hanged from the masthead of his schooner. A former Royal Marine, Robert Chrystie Ambrister, probably guilty, had been sentenced by the Court Martial to 50 lashes and a year at hard labor — but instead General Jackson put him before a firing squad.
May 1, Friday: David Greene Haskins was born in Boston, the 3d child of Ralph Haskins, Sr. and Rebecca Rose Greene Haskins (the father was descended from a Virginia family and had become a well-known Boston merchant in partnership with Theodore Lyman, while the mother was descended from a Rhode Island family that had relocated to Antigua in the West Indies).
Major General Andrew Jackson raided and burned a native village on Red Stick Creek in Florida (this time he did not kill the women and children).
May 11, Monday: During a 12-day march from Fort Gadsden on the lower Apalachicola River to the Escambia River, the army of Major General Andrew Jackson crossed the Natural Bridge over the Chipola River, in what has by now become the Florida Caverns State Park.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 11th of 5 M / My mind is brought into a state of feeling HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW this evening which is a precious evidence of divine favor. — I expect thro’ the remainder of my life many Baptisms & hope I may be found worthy of them, & that they may wash away all that is impure, but Alass be fore that can be effected how deep the dippins in Jordon & how hot the furnace must be made I know not, but have no doubt if I can abide under them & become faithful to the Manifestation of truth that they will work out my Salvation & Secure my peace here & hereafter — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 26, Tuesday: The Prussian government eliminated all internal trade restrictions.
A constitution for Bavaria was promulgated providing for a bicameral parliament and limited freedom of speech.
Major General Andrew Jackson completed the conquest of Spanish Pensacola which would prompt Spain to cede Florida to the USA. The resulting influx of English-speaking settlers would quite overwhelm the Seminoles, who would break off hostilities.
June 3, Wednesday: The execution in occupied Florida of the British subjects Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister was beginning to cause a reaction against the exploits of this out-of-control general Andrew Jackson both in London and in Washington DC, a reaction which would need to be managed very careful by Jackson’s privy supporter, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams — until finally Britain blinked and Foreign Secretary Castlereigh was persuaded to save face by declaring that by their actions or something, these two royal subjects had somehow chosen to place themselves “outside of the royal protection.” In other words, “Face facts guys, you’re already dead and nobody’s going to try to prove anything by going to war over a couple of cold cadavers.”)
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 3rd of 6th M / This Afternoon was called on by Jonathon Biegelow a student at Andover Seminary, he wished to be informd of the Number of members that belong to this Moy [Monthly] Meeting as he was travelling for the purpose of Assertaining the number of professors of religion in New England - from minutes which I had by me I could pretty readily give him the Number in this Preparative Meeting which I made about 222 - while looking over the Members my feelings were forceably struck with the necessity I was under of including some in the number who were barely professors, & from appearance (at least) were very small possessors of those requisites which constitute the real christian. I made this remark to him, & observed that there were many who stood within the pale of no Church, that were much HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW nigher the Kingdom than some who did. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1819
In the general assembly of Alabama, as he had in the general assembly of Kentucky, James Gillespie Birney opposed interstate rendition of fugitive slaves and championed liberal slave-laws. His tariff and anti-slavery views were leading him more and more away from the Democratic party and toward the Whigs. Although he had great local political prospects, his political career in Alabama was abruptly wrecked when he opposed Andrew Jackson, whose friends were in control of that state.
“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
January 12, Tuesday: A Congressional report sponsored by Henry Clay condemned the conduct of General Andrew Jackson in Florida. (This report would fail of adoption by the Congress.)
Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E.Burghardt Du Bois: “Letter from the Secretary of the Navy, transmitting copies of the instructions which have been issued to Naval Commanders, upon the subject of the Importation of Slaves, etc.” –HOUSE DOCUMENT, 15 Cong. 2 sess. IV. No. 84. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW February 8, Monday: The censure of Andrew Jackson for entering and seizing Florida without authorization was voted down by the US House of Representatives (victory has a thousand fathers).
John Ruskin was born in London.
The US Senate considered changing the rules in regard to the international slave trade, and then put this off. “A bill supplementary to an act, passed the 2d day of March, 1807, entitled,” etc. SENATE JOURNAL, 15th Congress, 2d session, pages 234, 244, 311-2, 347.
February 23, Tuesday: Johann Nepomuk Hummel signed the contract with Grand Duke Carl August of Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach making him Kapellmeister.
At Concord, Peter Rice of Concord got married with Sarah Buttrick of Alexandria.
Major General Andrew Jackson visited New-York and was presented with the freedom of the city. At an entertainment given him by the Fourteenth Regiment, he offered a politically risky complimentary toast to Governor De Witt Clinton. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1821
Henry Marie Brackenridge entered the diplomatic service of General Andrew Jackson, the new commissioner of Florida. He would serve as US judge for the western district of Florida until 1832. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Nathaniel Hathorne left the home of his Manning relatives in Salem and journeyed to Bowdoin College, where Franklin Pierce was already in residence, and he would reside there into 1825 (one could hardly term him a student) and would luck into a lifelong alliance with some other undistinguished young men one of
whom would amount to something.14 No-one, not even Hawthorne, has ever represented that his college drinking companion Frank was the greatest president we’ve ever had, or that he possessed native strength of intellect, or native strength of character — as Hawthorne later was to represent an immensely popular genocidal racist named Andy “Long Knife” Jackson:
the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the cunninger the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.
Nevertheless, Hawthorne would later be willing to write a campaign biography for this drunkard, and lie about the man’s attitudes, and help him follow Andrew Jackson as President of the United States, merely because of this superficial personal connection and from a realistic expectation and hope that through the political reward system set up by Jackson and inherited by Pierce he, Hawthorne, would receive a personal and generous reward. Also hovering in the background in those grand years at Bowdoin was a shorty student named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who would go on to provide the stuff of legends. During these years of semi-idleness 14. He also would become lifelong friends with Horatio Bridge and Jonathan Cilley. Of these college years he would write:
“I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Statesman Chum and Pretty Boy
15 and dissipation he would begin working at FANSHAWE, with its Bowdoin-like setting, and, perhaps, on some of the series of stories that would be issued as SEVEN TALES OF MY NATIVE LAND.
Allmendinger, David F. PAUPERS AND SCHOLARS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF STUDENT LIFE IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY NEW ENGLAND. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1975
15. The “Hartley College” of this narrative had been in fictive existence for 19 years as the aged narrator of this tale recollects upon his youthful matriculation, and in Hawthorne’s 1st year at Bowdoin College as of 1821, it had likewise been inexistence for 19 years, having opened its doors in 1802. It is possible that no such inscription as recorded in this narrative (“borrowed ... SCHOLAR”) has ever been placed upon the grave of Mather. In the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND the author recorded of his brother Nathanael that “He was as hard student, and quickly became a good scholar.” As republished in Hartford CT in 1820, there is at the front of the first volume an “Attestation” by the Reverend John Higginson in which it is stated that over the grave of Cotton’s brother Nathanael in Salem there had been written THE ASHES OF AN HARD STUDENT, A GOOD SCHOLAR, AND A GREAT CHRISTIAN. During the lifetime of Hawthorne, the inscription above Nathanael Cotton’s grave in Salem read as it now reads: “An Aged person that had seen but Nineteen Winters in the World.” If this is an unaccountable substitution of inscription, the switch would have needed to have been effected after the end of the 17th Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
COLLEGES Allmendinger’s history is a refreshing look into the collegial history of New England. Instead of the usual focus on Harvard, Yale, and the other Ivy League schools as the central forces of university history, Allmendinger turns his glance upon smaller New England institutions like Williams, Bowdoin, and Amherst and upon the students who populated these schools. What he has unearthed is telling: since most of these “new,” smaller schools were broke, they attracted poorer students looking for educational bargains and academic schedules that allowed them time to work. Hawthorne knew of, and was one of these “new” students himself. In PASSAGES FROM THE AMERICAN NOTE-BOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, he saw these students at a commencement in the Berkshires of Williams College and wrote that “Country graduates, — rough, brown featured, schoolmaster-looking, half-bumpkin, half- scholarly figures, in black ill-cut broadcloth, — their manners quite spoilt by what little of the gentlemen there was in them” (quoted in Allemendinger 2). On the surface the admission and matriculation of these non-traditional students in “marginal” institutions may seem unimportant, but Allemendinger show that their effect on American university life was profound. Penniless sons of farmers and small businessmen affected the style and tone of college life. They imposed, Allmendinger observes, “their need for economy upon college arrangements for food and shelter,” forcing “Young gentlemen who sought refinement did so on their own.” They also introduced the frugality, independence, and, in general, the kind of self-reliant student experience that has become so deep a part of popular myth about college life today. These young men also contributed to the notion that a college experience should lead to a practical and rewarding middle class career. [Shawn Gillen, February 1992]
In 1820, at the age of sixteen, he became a student of Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine. It was in the autumn of the next year, that the author of this memoir entered the class below him; but our college reminiscences, however interesting to the parties concerned, are not exactly the material for a biography. He was then a youth, with the boy and man in him, vivacious, mirthful, slender, of a fair complexion, with light hair that had a curl in it: his bright and cheerful aspect made a kind of sunshine, both as regarded its radiance and its warmth; insomuch that no shyness of disposition, in his associates, could well resist its influence. We soon became acquainted, and were more especially drawn together as members of the same college society. There were two of these institutions, dividing the college between them, and typifying, respectively, and with singular accuracy of feature, the respectable conservative, and the progressive or democratic parties. Pierce’s native tendencies inevitably drew him to the latter. His chum was Zenas Caldwell, several years elder than himself, a member of the Methodist persuasion, a pure-minded, studious, devoutly religious character; endowed thus early in life with the authority of a grave and sagacious turn of mind. The friendship between Pierce and him appeared to be mutually strong, and was of itself a pledge of correct deportment in the former. His chief friend, I think, was a classmate named Little, a young man of most estimable qualities, and high intellectual HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW promise; one of those fortunate characters whom an early death so canonizes in the remembrance of their companions, that the perfect fulfilment of a long life would scarcely give them a higher place. Jonathan Cilley, of my own class, —whose untimely fate is still mournfully remembered,— a person of very marked ability and great social influence, was another of Pierce’s friends. All these have long been dead. There are others, still alive, who would meet Franklin Pierce, at this day, with as warm a pressure of the hand, and the same confidence in his kindly feelings, as when they parted from him, nearly thirty years ago. Pierce’s class was small, but composed of individuals seriously intent on the duties and studies of their college life. They were not boys, but for the most part, well advanced towards maturity; and, having wrought out their own means of education, were little inclined to neglect the opportunities that had been won at so much cost. They knew the value of time, and had a sense of the responsibilities of their position. Their first scholar —the present Professor Stowe— has long since established his rank among the first scholars of the country. It could have been no easy task to hold successful rivalry with students so much in earnest as these were. During the earlier part of his college course, it may be doubted whether Pierce was distinguished for scholarship. But, for the last two years, be appeared to grow more intent on the business in hand, and, without losing any of his vivacious qualities as a companion, was evidently resolved to gain an honorable elevation in his class. His habits of attention, and obedience to college discipline, were of the strictest character; he rose progressively in scholarship, and took a highly creditable degree. The first civil office, I imagine, which Franklin Pierce ever held, was that of chairman of the standing committee of the Athenaean Society, of which, as above hinted, we were both members; and, having myself held a place on the committee, I can bear testimony to his having discharged not only his own share of the duties, but, that of his colleagues. I remember, likewise, that the only military service of my life was as a private soldier in a college company, of which Pierce was one of the officers. He entered into this latter business, or pastime, with an earnestness with which I could not pretend to compete, and at which, perhaps, he would now be inclined to smile. His slender and youthful figure rises before my mind’s eye, at this moment, with the air and step of a veteran of the school of Steuben; as well became the son of a revolutionary hero, who had probably drilled under the old baron’s orders. Indeed, at this time, and for some years afterwards, Pierce’s ambition seemed to be of a military cast. Until reflection had tempered his first predilections, and other varieties of success had rewarded his efforts, he would have preferred, I believe, the honors of the battle field to any laurels more peacefully won. And it was remarkable how, with all the invariable gentleness of his demeanor, he perfectly gave, nevertheless, the impression of a high and fearless spirit. His friends were as sure of his courage, while yet untried, as now, when it has been displayed so brilliantly in famous battles. At this early period of his life, he was distinguished by the same fascination of manner that has since proved so magical in winning him an unbounded personal popularity. It is wronging him, however, to call this peculiarity a mere effect of manner; HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW its source lies deep in the kindliness of his nature, and in the liberal, generous, catholic sympathy, that embraces all who are worthy of it. Few men possess any thing like it; so irresistible as it is, so sure to draw forth an undoubting confidence, and so true to the promise which it gives. This frankness, this democracy of good feeling, has not been chilled by the society of politicians, nor polished down into mere courtesy, by his intercourse with the most refined men of the day. It belongs to him at this moment, and will never leave him. A little while ago, after his return from Mexico, he darted across the street to exchange a hearty gripe of the hand with a rough countryman upon his cart — a man who used to “live with his father,” as the general explained the matter to his companions. Other men assume this manner, more or less skilfully; but with Frank Pierce it is an innate characteristic; nor will it ever lose its charm unless his heart should grow narrower and colder — a misfortune not to be anticipated, even in the dangerous atmosphere of elevated rank, whither he seems destined to ascend. There is little else that it is worth while to relate, as regards his college course, unless it be, that, during one of his winter vacations, Pierce taught a country school. So many of the statesmen of New England have performed their first public service in the character of pedagogue, that it seems almost a necessary step on the ladder of advancement.
Martin Van Buren was a delegate to the convention for the revision of the New York state constitution. From this year into 1828, he would be a U.S. Senator and would be helping to form the Democratic party; then in 1828 he would be managing Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign.
June 1, Friday: Lady Caroline Amelia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Princess of Wales was on her way north from Italy, and had reached St. Omer near Calais. She rejected the British government’s offer of £50,000. Parting from Bartolomeo Pergami or Bergami, she embarked to cross the channel.
Andrew Jackson resigned his military commission in order to become the provisional governor of Florida. His activities there would be again surrounded with conflict, highlighted this time by his jailing of the former Spanish governor, José Callava, for refusal to surrender official documents to US custody.
December 1, Saturday: The Republic of San Domingo was established independent of Spain and nominally part of Gran Colombia.
Andrew Jackson resigned as provisional governor of Florida because President James Monroe had been neglecting to respond to his recommendations, particularly concerning appointments. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1822
A short young gentleman embarrassed about his name, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, entered Bowdoin
College as a sophomore at the age of 15, along with an undistinguished student named Hathorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and an undistinguished student named Franklin Pierce, who were in the process of forming a lifelong alliance. No-one, not even Hawthorne, has ever represented that this college drinking buddy was the greatest president we ever had, or that he possessed native strength of intellect or native strength of character — as Hawthorne later was to represent an immensely popular genocidal racist named Andrew “Long Knife” Jackson:
the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the cunninger the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.
Nevertheless, Hawthorne would later be willing to write a campaign biography for this drunkard, and lie about the man’s attitudes, and help him follow Andrew Jackson as President of the United States, merely because of this superficial personal connection and from a realistic expectation and hope that through the political reward system set up by Jackson and inherited by Pierce he, Hawthorne, would receive a personal and generous HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW reward.
Statesman Chum and Pretty Boy
These lads would go on to provide the stuff of legends:
THE SCARLET LETTER: Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; BROOK FARM after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the WALDO EMERSON Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau ELLERY CHANNING about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that LONGFELLOW I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. BRONSON ALCOTT Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Whittier-Holmes-Emerson-Motley-Alcott-Hawthorne-Lowell-Agassiz-Longfellow
March 30, Saturday: The US Congress approved territorial status for the lands seized by General Andrew Jackson in Florida — thus ending military jurisdiction. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: Hezikiah Prince Jr. lived in the small port town (for the coasting trade) of Thomaston, Maine, and in his journal of 1822-1828 (published by the Maine Historical Society in 1965) he described the July 4th celebrations there. A modest celebration this year was:16 ushered in by the discharge of cannon ... the ringing of bells, and the halloos of the true Sons of Liberty.... The spirit and patriotism of ’76 seamed still to flame in the breast of every citizen, especially the young who appeared very much animated. The few surviving veterans around us ... appeared to renew their age and glow with the same spirit which filled their breast in those ever to be remembered days. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY Judge Bushrod Washington announced that since Mount Vernon was his private property, he was no longer going to tolerate the celebrants who were in the habit of coming up the river to indulge themselves at annual “Steam-boat parties” and “eating, drinking, and dancing parties.”
In Saratoga County, New York, 5,000 citizens and 52 authentic soldiers of the Revolution assembled at the field upon which General Burgoyne had surrendered on October 17th, 1777.
In Nashville, Tennessee, after Governor William Carroll presented a sword to General Andrew Jackson, as might well be expected, both these dignitaries made speeches.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 4th of 7 M / In the forenoon meeting Hannah Dennis appeard in supplication, then D Buffum in solemn impressive testimony. - Then Hannah Dennis & then Jonathon Dennis in testimony. - it was a solemn favoured testimony. — In the Afternoon the meeting was Silent & good — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
16. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, or Hathorne’s, 18th birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1823
July: Giacomo Costantino Beltrami hung out with United States Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro and Stephen H. Long as they traveled — but after 3 months of this the men had begun to wear on each other’s nerves.
The New-York Evening Post described a bout between an 18-year old butcher and “a man they called the champion of Hickory Street.” The stakes were $200, an amount roughly equal to a working man’s annual income.
The Tennessee legislature nominated Andrew Jackson for the presidency, representing the Jeffersonian Republican party. This was accomplished by a Tennessee political faction representing creditor and banking interests, headed by John Overton and other old cronies of the Blount clique. Their cynical agenda was to attach their man Pleasant Miller to Jackson’s populist coattails and thereby unseat incumbent Senator John Williams, protégé of a faction headed by Governor William Carroll. They were presuming that once their man Miller became a Senator, a Jackson presidential candidacy could be readily hijacked. They simply did not take into consideration that Jackson would be able to gain support from debtors by urging the adoption of relief measures to ease the economic hardships resulting from the Panic of 1819. The Miller candidacy would falter, and Jackson’s allies, such as William B. Lewis and John H. Eaton, would present Jackson as an alternative to Senator Williams.
November: The canalboat Mary and Hannah arrived in New-York with a cargo of wheat, the first to arrive from Seneca Lake via the Erie Canal. The owners were presented with an engraved urn.
When the whaler Globe out of Martha’s Vineyard reached Hawaii six of its frustrated and disappointed crewmembers deserted. Captain Thomas Worth was able to recruit seven local replacements, but of course these were not sailors of the highest quality — of these seven new crewmembers, five would be involving themselves, with Samuel B. Comstock, in a mutiny.
Andrew Jackson was elected to the US Senate, to represent Tennessee as a Jeffersonian Republican. Endorsements by political conventions in other states would put him in the front rank of contenders for the HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW presidency, facing off against Jeffersonian Republican candidates Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford (since this was the Era of Good Feelings, the only political party that mattered was the Jeffersonian Republicans). Jackson run as the proponent of a “judicious tariff” and as a man who was strong on the national defense. The final canvass would give Jackson 99 electoral votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37, and in the absence of any majority for a particular candidate, the Electoral College would be required to submit the election to the US House of Representatives (Clay, with the least electoral support, was eliminated from consideration). Jackson’s followers would take the line that his plurality in both the electoral college and the popular vote amounted to a “Jacksonian Democracy” mandate, but it was soon evident that Speaker of the House Clay was unimpressed by this argument. Clay preferred Adams, who with less support would be easier to manipulate. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1824
February 15, Sunday: Following the new principle of nomination just tested a few years earlier by Andrew Jackson, the legislature of the home state of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams nominated their favorite son to run for the office of President of the United States of America. Objections to such a nomination procedure, such as that it would provide greater power to large states than to small states, had begun to be ignored.
George Gordon, Lord Byron has an epileptic seizure.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 15th of 2nd M 1824 / Silent meetings & seasons of mental labour In the evening visited Abigail Robinson. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
December 1, Wednesday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –AMERICAN STATE PAPERS, NAVAL AFFAIRS, I. No. 249.
In the national election, for the 2d time in American political history, no candidate achieved a majority of the total electoral votes in the Electoral College and the body became deadlocked. The decision of who would become President would need to be held over to be determined in the House of Representatives in the following year (131 electoral votes, just over half of the 261 total, were necessary to elect a candidate as the president; votes were counted for the initial time in this election, but that had no effect on the outcome; the 12th Amendment to the US Constitution dictated that Congress turn over the presidential election to the House of Representatives). Would it be General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee with 99 electoral votes and 153,544 popular votes, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams with 84 electoral and 108,740 popular votes, Secretary of State William H. Crawford of the Democratic-Republican party (who had suffered a stroke before the election) with 41 electoral votes, or Henry Clay of Virginia with 37 electoral votes? (Clay, allowed by this to become the President-maker, would throw his electoral votes in the direction of Adams in exchange for being appointed as Adams’s Secretary of State — the repercussions of this deal would split the Democratic- Republican party into Whigs and Democratic-Republicans.)
The Quaker traveling preacher, Elias Hicks, bluntly embraced in a sermon in Philadelphia what must be the ultimate consequence of religious leveling, to wit, that: “We are on a level with all the rest of God’s creatures.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW December 7, Tuesday: The Reverend Henry Root Colman’s A DISCOURSE ON RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS: DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE INDEPENDENT CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, IN BARTON SQUARE, SALEM, TUESDAY, 7 DEC. 1824.
After traveling for a month, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee arrived in the District of Columbia to await the outcome of the hung presidential election.
A hack version of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz, called Robin des bois ou les trois balles, opened at the Theatre de l’Odeon in Paris (this would have a run of more than 300 performances).
Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Documents accompanying the Message of the President ... to both Houses of Congress, at the commencement of the Second Session of the Eighteenth Congress: Documents from the Department of State.” – HOUSE DOCUMENT, 18 Cong. 2 sess. I. No. 1. pp. 1-56. Reprinted in SENATE DOCUMENT, 18 Cong. 2 sess. I. No. 1. (Matter on the treaty of 1824.) “It is a cause of serious regret, that no arrangement has yet been finally concluded between the two Governments, to secure, by joint co-operation, the suppression of the slave trade. It was the object of the British Government, in the early stages of the negotiation, to adopt a plan for the suppression, which should include the concession of the mutual right of search by the ships of war of each party, of the vessels of the other, for HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW suspected offenders. This was objected to by this Government, on the principle that, as the right of search was a right of war of a belligerant towards a neutral power, it might have an ill effect to extend it, by treaty, to an offence which had been made comparatively mild, to a time of peace. Anxious, however, for the suppression of this trade, it was thought adviseable, in compliance with a resolution of the House of Representatives, founded on an act of Congress, to propose to the British Government an expedient, which should be free from that objection, and more effectual for the object, by making it piratical.... A convention to this effect was concluded and signed, in London,” on the 13th of March, 1824, “by plenipotentiaries duly authorized by both Governments, to the ratification of which certain obstacles have arisen, which are not yet entirely removed.” [For the removal of which, the documents relating to the negotiation are submitted for the action of Congress].... “In execution of the laws for the suppression of the slave trade, a vessel has been occasionally sent from that squadron to the coast of Africa, with orders to return thence by the usual track of the slave ships, and to seize any of our vessels which might be engaged in that trade. None have been found, and, it is believed, that none are thus employed. It is well known, however, that the trade still exists under other flags.” HOUSE JOURNAL, 18th Congress, 2d session, pages 11, 12, 19, 27, 241; HOUSE REPORTS, 18th Congress, 2d session, I. No. 70; Gales and Seaton, REGISTER OF DEBATES, I. 625-8, and Appendix, page 2 ff.
December 14, Tuesday: Daniel Webster visited Monticello, and during a 5-day visit Thomas Jefferson would confide to him that: I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible. When I was President of the Senate, he was Senator; and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage. His passions are, no doubt, cooler now; he has been much tried since I knew him, but he is a dangerous man. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1825
Walter Colton graduated from the Andover Theological Seminary and was ordained as a minister. He would become Professor of Moral Philosophy and Letters at the Scientific and Military Academy at Middletown, Connecticut, but would then relocate from Connecticut to Washington DC in order to edit the American Spectator and Washington City Chronicle. He would be elected to preach at a church attended by President Andrew Jackson and would become so well known that the President would offer him the choice of becoming a chaplain in the Navy or, alternatively, a consul abroad. At some point he would get married with a Philadelphia woman who happened also to bear the name “Colton.”
February 9, Wednesday: The hung presidential election was decided in the US House of Representatives, where Kentucky’s Henry Clay controlled the deciding block of votes. John Quincy Adams was selected as President on the 1st ballot. Clay had opted for the Democratic-Republican Adams over General Andrew Jackson and the ailing William Crawford as the lesser of three evils and would in return be designated to become Secretary of State. Adams of course had views on slavery acceptable to Clay: Adams’s attitude was “Westward the star of empire takes its way, in the whiteness of innocence.” Also, “slavery in a moral sense is an evil, but in commerce it has its uses.” Fanny Wright was in the gallery witnessing all this, being in Washington DC because of her sailing in the wake of Lafayette.
On this day Waldo Emerson was moving into his college room at the Harvard Divinity School. However, this was a year in which he had medical problems, in particular with his eyes, that slowed his studies.
February 29, Tuesday: The US Congress accepted John Quincy Adams as the new President of the United States, holding the electoral privileges of 13 of the 24 states. General Andrew Jackson, who had received a plurality not only of the electoral votes but also of the popular vote, laid charges of corrupt dealings.
March 4, Friday: General Andrew Jackson had polled the most popular votes in the 1824 presidential election, but had not obtained enough electoral votes to win outright. The election being thrown to the Electoral College, each state having one vote, the whole thing came down to which way the State of New York would cast its ballot — and New York, being evenly split, came down to one swing elector. This would be the guy who would get to choose the next President of the United States of America. There is a story, that this guy saw the name of John Quincy Adams on a slip of paper on the floor, and interpreted that to be a sign from God. With the electoral college system in such a shameful mess, Henry Clay, one of the front-runners, threw his support to Adams so that Jackson’s candidacy would fail, and that enabled the House of Representatives to settle upon this son of a former President. The oath of office was then administered in this chamber by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. Here is President Adams’s inaugural address: HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW In compliance with an usage coeval with the existence of our Federal Constitution, and sanctioned by the example of my predecessors in the career upon which I am about to enter, I appear, my fellow-citizens, in your presence and in that of Heaven to bind myself by the solemnities of religious obligation to the faithful performance of the duties allotted to me in the station to which I have been called. In unfolding to my countrymen the principles by which I shall be governed in the fulfillment of those duties my first resort will be to that Constitution which I shall swear to the best of my ability to preserve, protect, and defend. That revered instrument enumerates the powers and prescribes the duties of the Executive Magistrate, and in its first words declares the purposes to which these and the whole action of the Government instituted by it should be invariably and sacredly devoted—to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to the people of this Union in their successive generations. Since the adoption of this social compact one of these generations has passed away. It is the work of our forefathers. Administered by some of the most eminent men who contributed to its formation, through a most eventful period in the annals of the world, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war incidental to the condition of associated man, it has not disappointed the hopes and aspirations of those illustrious benefactors of their age and nation. It has promoted the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all; it has to an extent far beyond the ordinary lot of humanity secured the freedom and happiness of this people. We now receive it as a precious inheritance from those to whom we are indebted for its establishment, doubly bound by the examples which they have left us and by the blessings which we have enjoyed as the fruits of their labors to transmit the same unimpaired to the succeeding generation. In the compass of thirty-six years since this great national covenant was instituted a body of laws enacted under its authority and in conformity with its provisions has unfolded its powers and carried into practical operation its effective energies. Subordinate departments have distributed the executive functions in their various relations to foreign affairs, to the revenue and expenditures, and to the military force of the Union by land and sea. A coordinate department of the judiciary has expounded the Constitution and the laws, settling in harmonious coincidence with the legislative will numerous weighty questions of construction which the imperfection of human language had rendered unavoidable. The year of jubilee since the first formation of our Union has just elapsed; that of the declaration of our independence is at hand. The consummation of both was effected by this Constitution. Since that period a population of four millions has multiplied to twelve. A territory bounded by the Mississippi has been extended from sea to sea. New States have been admitted to the Union in numbers nearly equal to those of the first Confederation. Treaties of peace, amity, and commerce have been concluded with the principal dominions of the earth. The people of other nations, inhabitants of regions acquired not by conquest, but by compact, have been united with us in the participation of our rights and duties, of our burdens and blessings. The forest has fallen by the ax of our woodsmen; the HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW soil has been made to teem by the tillage of our farmers; our commerce has whitened every ocean. The dominion of man over physical nature has been extended by the invention of our artists. Liberty and law have marched hand in hand. All the purposes of human association have been accomplished as effectively as under any other government on the globe, and at a cost little exceeding in a whole generation the expenditure of other nations in a single year. Such is the unexaggerated picture of our condition under a Constitution founded upon the republican principle of equal rights. To admit that this picture has its shades is but to say that it is still the condition of men upon earth. From evil—physical, moral, and political—it is not our claim to be exempt. We have suffered sometimes by the visitation of Heaven through disease; often by the wrongs and injustice of other nations, even to the extremities of war; and, lastly, by dissensions among ourselves—dissensions perhaps inseparable from the enjoyment of freedom, but which have more than once appeared to threaten the dissolution of the Union, and with it the overthrow of all the enjoyments of our present lot and all our earthly hopes of the future. The causes of these dissensions have been various, founded upon differences of speculation in the theory of republican government; upon conflicting views of policy in our relations with foreign nations; upon jealousies of partial and sectional interests, aggravated by prejudices and prepossessions which strangers to each other are ever apt to entertain. It is a source of gratification and of encouragement to me to observe that the great result of this experiment upon the theory of human rights has at the close of that generation by which it was formed been crowned with success equal to the most sanguine expectations of its founders. Union, justice, tranquillity, the common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty—all have been promoted by the Government under which we have lived. Standing at this point of time, looking back to that generation which has gone by and forward to that which is advancing, we may at once indulge in grateful exultation and in cheering hope. From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future. Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country, the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error. The revolutionary wars of Europe, commencing precisely at the moment when the Government of the United States first went into operation under this Constitution, excited a collision of sentiments and of sympathies which kindled all the passions and imbittered the conflict of parties till the nation was involved in war and the Union was shaken to its center. This time of trial embraced a period of five and twenty years, during which the policy of the Union in its relations with Europe constituted the principal basis of our political divisions and the most arduous part of the action of our Federal Government. With the catastrophe in which the wars of the French Revolution terminated, and our own subsequent peace with Great Britain, this baneful weed of party strife was uprooted. From that time no difference of principle, connected either with the theory of government or with our HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW intercourse with foreign nations, has existed or been called forth in force sufficient to sustain a continued combination of parties or to give more than wholesome animation to public sentiment or legislative debate. Our political creed is, without a dissenting voice that can be heard, that the will of the people is the source and the happiness of the people the end of all legitimate government upon earth; that the best security for the beneficence and the best guaranty against the abuse of power consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency of popular elections; that the General Government of the Union and the separate governments of the States are all sovereignties of limited powers, fellow-servants of the same masters, uncontrolled within their respective spheres, uncontrollable by encroachments upon each other; that the firmest security of peace is the preparation during peace of the defenses of war; that a rigorous economy and accountability of public expenditures should guard against the aggravation and alleviate when possible the burden of taxation; that the military should be kept in strict subordination to the civil power; that the freedom of the press and of religious opinion should be inviolate; that the policy of our country is peace and the ark of our salvation union are articles of faith upon which we are all now agreed. If there have been those who doubted whether a confederated representative democracy were a government competent to the wise and orderly management of the common concerns of a mighty nation, those doubts have been dispelled; if there have been projects of partial confederacies to be erected upon the ruins of the Union, they have been scattered to the winds; if there have been dangerous attachments to one foreign nation and antipathies against another, they have been extinguished. Ten years of peace, at home and abroad, have assuaged the animosities of political contention and blended into harmony the most discordant elements of public opinion. There still remains one effort of magnanimity, one sacrifice of prejudice and passion, to be made by the individuals throughout the nation who have heretofore followed the standards of political party. It is that of discarding every remnant of rancor against each other, of embracing as countrymen and friends, and of yielding to talents and virtue alone that confidence which in times of contention for principle was bestowed only upon those who bore the badge of party communion. The collisions of party spirit which originate in speculative opinions or in different views of administrative policy are in their nature transitory. Those which are founded on geographical divisions, adverse interests of soil, climate, and modes of domestic life are more permanent, and therefore, perhaps, more dangerous. It is this which gives inestimable value to the character of our Government, at once federal and national. It holds out to us a perpetual admonition to preserve alike and with equal anxiety the rights of each individual State in its own government and the rights of the whole nation in that of the Union. Whatsoever is of domestic concernment, unconnected with the other members of the Union or with foreign lands, belongs exclusively to the administration of the State governments. Whatsoever directly involves the rights and interests of the federative fraternity or of foreign powers is of the resort of this General Government. The duties of both are obvious in the general principle, though sometimes perplexed HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW with difficulties in the detail. To respect the rights of the State governments is the inviolable duty of that of the Union; the government of every State will feel its own obligation to respect and preserve the rights of the whole. The prejudices everywhere too commonly entertained against distant strangers are worn away, and the jealousies of jarring interests are allayed by the composition and functions of the great national councils annually assembled from all quarters of the Union at this place. Here the distinguished men from every section of our country, while meeting to deliberate upon the great interests of those by whom they are deputed, learn to estimate the talents and do justice to the virtues of each other. The harmony of the nation is promoted and the whole Union is knit together by the sentiments of mutual respect, the habits of social intercourse, and the ties of personal friendship formed between the representatives of its several parts in the performance of their service at this metropolis. Passing from this general review of the purposes and injunctions of the Federal Constitution and their results as indicating the first traces of the path of duty in the discharge of my public trust, I turn to the Administration of my immediate predecessor as the second. It has passed away in a period of profound peace, how much to the satisfaction of our country and to the honor of our country's name is known to you all. The great features of its policy, in general concurrence with the will of the Legislature, have been to cherish peace while preparing for defensive war; to yield exact justice to other nations and maintain the rights of our own; to cherish the principles of freedom and of equal rights wherever they were proclaimed; to discharge with all possible promptitude the national debt; to reduce within the narrowest limits of efficiency the military force; to improve the organization and discipline of the Army; to provide and sustain a school of military science; to extend equal protection to all the great interests of the nation; to promote the civilization of the Indian tribes, and to proceed in the great system of internal improvements within the limits of the constitutional power of the Union. Under the pledge of these promises, made by that eminent citizen at the time of his first induction to this office, in his career of eight years the internal taxes have been repealed; sixty millions of the public debt have been discharged; provision has been made for the comfort and relief of the aged and indigent among the surviving warriors of the Revolution; the regular armed force has been reduced and its constitution revised and perfected; the accountability for the expenditure of public moneys has been made more effective; the Floridas have been peaceably acquired, and our boundary has been extended to the Pacific Ocean; the independence of the southern nations of this hemisphere has been recognized, and recommended by example and by counsel to the potentates of Europe; progress has been made in the defense of the country by fortifications and the increase of the Navy, toward the effectual suppression of the African traffic in slaves; in alluring the aboriginal hunters of our land to the cultivation of the soil and of the mind, in exploring the interior regions of the Union, and in preparing by scientific researches and surveys for the further application of our national resources to the internal improvement of our country. In this brief outline of the promise and performance of my immediate predecessor the line of HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW duty for his successor is clearly delineated. To pursue to their consummation those purposes of improvement in our common condition instituted or recommended by him will embrace the whole sphere of my obligations. To the topic of internal improvement, emphatically urged by him at his inauguration, I recur with peculiar satisfaction. It is that from which I am convinced that the unborn millions of our posterity who are in future ages to people this continent will derive their most fervent gratitude to the founders of the Union; that in which the beneficent action of its Government will be most deeply felt and acknowledged. The magnificence and splendor of their public works are among the imperishable glories of the ancient republics. The roads and aqueducts of Rome have been the admiration of all after ages, and have survived thousands of years after all her conquests have been swallowed up in despotism or become the spoil of barbarians. Some diversity of opinion has prevailed with regard to the powers of Congress for legislation upon objects of this nature. The most respectful deference is due to doubts originating in pure patriotism and sustained by venerated authority. But nearly twenty years have passed since the construction of the first national road was commenced. The authority for its construction was then unquestioned. To how many thousands of our countrymen has it proved a benefit? To what single individual has it ever proved an injury? Repeated, liberal, and candid discussions in the Legislature have conciliated the sentiments and approximated the opinions of enlightened minds upon the question of constitutional power. I can not but hope that by the same process of friendly, patient, and persevering deliberation all constitutional objections will ultimately be removed. The extent and limitation of the powers of the General Government in relation to this transcendently important interest will be settled and acknowledged to the common satisfaction of all, and every speculative scruple will be solved by a practical public blessing. Fellow-citizens, you are acquainted with the peculiar circumstances of the recent election, which have resulted in affording me the opportunity of addressing you at this time. You have heard the exposition of the principles which will direct me in the fulfillment of the high and solemn trust imposed upon me in this station. Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my predecessors, I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence. Intentions upright and pure, a heart devoted to the welfare of our country, and the unceasing application of all the faculties allotted to me to her service are all the pledges that I can give for the faithful performance of the arduous duties I am to undertake. To the guidance of the legislative councils, to the assistance of the executive and subordinate departments, to the friendly cooperation of the respective State governments, to the candid and liberal support of the people so far as it may be deserved by honest industry and zeal, I shall look for whatever success may attend my public service; and knowing that “except the Lord keep the city the watchman waketh but in vain,” with fervent supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence I commit with humble but fearless confidence my own fate and the future destinies of my country. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
The historian Paul C. Nagel has identified John Quincy Adams’s ambitious presidential address as his downfall because it displayed his political naiveté and opened him to sharp criticism of usurping the public’s will. In response, Adams would become a bitter and disengaged president who considered that critics were attempting to destroy his character and undermine his reputation. His later political career would amount to an attempt to restore his reputation by attacking those who in his consideration had driven him from the presidency. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1827
William Cullen Bryant became an editor of the New-York Evening Post. While working at the Evening Post, Parke Godwin would become associated with Bryant, and eventually he and Bryant’s daughter would marry.
The Andrew Jackson campaign for the Presidency was being advanced by the poets William Leggett and William Cullen Bryant, the poet George Bancroft, the sculptor Horatio Greenough, the authors James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in general by every careerist man of genius, each careerist humanitarian, and all the careerist underprivilegeds who were seeking privilege. And why not? There were 1,972 men in debtor’s prison, subsisting upon a daily ration of a quart of soup — and that was in the State of New York alone.17
17. As reported in the National Gazette of November 15, 1827. The national estimate, for the population of debtors’ prisons in the USA in the second half of the 1820s, is 75,000 souls. For a debt as low as $3.00 you could find your ass in jail, and you’d stay in the slammer in debt too, maybe for the rest of your life unless you could provide someone with some money with some good reason to buy you out of the place. What, did you suppose that having a society based upon human bondage would have no ramifications? HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1828
Lyncoya, a Native American whom Andrew Jackson had picked up on a battlefield as a child from next to his dead mother, and sent back to The Hermitage to grow up as companion for his adopted son Andrew Jackson, Junior, had in adulthood become a saddle-maker in Nashville. In this year Lyncoya died of tuberculosis.
18 The following is a snippet from Charles Haskell’s REMINISCENCES OF NEW YORK BY AN OCTOGENARIAN: The daily issue of all the papers published in the city was given as fifteen thousand. In the canvass for the Presidency in this year (John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson), party lines were very stringently drawn. The party in power, the whilom Federalists, recognized the popularity of General Jackson, and in view to weaken it, every act of his, public or private, that could be brought to his disadvantage, was published and disseminated; notably his duel with Dickinson. James K. Paulding, a popular author, published “The New Pilgrim’s Progress,” a burlesque on the guide-books and writings of English travellers, and a satire on fashionable life in this city.... There were at this time, of my personal knowledge, ten ship-yards where vessels of all descriptions were built ... added to which there were several ship-carpenters without yards, that repaired vessels; as Henry Steers, Cornelius Poillon, etc., etc.
18. This 1806 duel was so exceptional in condition and result that it is worthy of notice: pistols at 8 paces and toss for fire. Dickinson won it, his ball wounding Jackson in the breast, from which he never fully recovered, but he did not flinch, as he was unwilling that his adversary should know he was wounded; whereupon Dickinson exclaimed, “Great God have I missed him?” Jackson then fired and wounded him so that he died soon after. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW A general, Andrew “Long Knife” Jackson, was to become, frighteningly, President of the United States of America.
What had we done to deserve this fate? —Oh, I suppose “genocide” is as good an answer as any.
Speaking of genocide, in Africa the chief of the Zulu nation, Shaka, was killed by a brother and by his half- brother Dingane, who took over as ruler of the Zulu nation. There were no objections, as it was hard for anyone to imagine a ruler more bloodthirsty than Shaka. “Long Knife,” whatever his personal problems, really never was in the same ballpark with this guy, who had what you’d call a democratic penchant for slaughtering not only his enemies but also his friends.
The genocidal Jackson’s presidential campaign had been managed by Martin Van Buren of New York, whose attitude presumably amounted to “What’s a little genocide, among friends?” Van Buren took the wind out of the sails of his Southern agrarian allies by a highly protective “Tariff of Abominations.” This obtained support for Jackson in pivotal industrial states. This presidential campaign would be characterized as “perhaps the most unscrupulous in American history.” The press would be full of stories of Rachel’s adultery with Jackson, with Jackson himself accurately characterized as soaking in the gore of his victims. The press would also be full of stories about John Quincy Adams — as a pimp for the Czar of Russia, and as looting public funds to place pool tables in the White House. Although the popular vote would be 647,292 for Jackson and 507,730 for Adams, which could never be described as a mandate, the electoral vote would be 178 for Jackson and but 83 for Adams. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW November: Andrew Jackson was elected president and John Quincy Adams’s vice president, John Caldwell Calhoun, as vice-president — sooner or later, is this dude going to get lucky?
The veep would be advocating, behind the scenes, James Madison’s doctrine of state supremacy and nullificationism, for instance by writing anonymously to the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.
LET US CONQUER SPACE. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW December: Inexpressibly saddened by the death of Rachel (or enraged, or aroused, or whatever), President Andrew Jackson turned to a group of trusted unofficial advisers, his infamous “kitchen cabinet” made up of such gents as William Berkeley Lewis, Isaac Hill, Duff Green, Amos Kendall, and Jackson’s nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson, to fill up his administration with appointees. Though what would happen would hardly the first use of the “spoils system” in American history, this clutch of groupies would transform the practice into a plague.
5 slavers or “negreros” flying the Spanish flag were arriving at the island of Cuba during this month: the Ferme, master J. Sandrino, on its one and only known Middle Passage with 492 pieces of cargo out of PoPo but arriving with only 485 as seven of these pieces of cargo had died in transit: the Gallito, master J. Ferrer, completing its first of two known Middle Passages; the Indagadora, master M.D. de Medina, on one of its six known Middle Passage voyages; the Herculina, master A. Cortina, completing its second of two known Middle Passages; and the Cristina, master F. de los Reyes, completing its first of two known Middle Passages.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW December 3, Wednesday: The Democrat from Tennessee, General Andrew Jackson, was elected President of the United States of America, with 648,286 popular votes and 178 electoral votes.
Presumably you are unaware, as Donald Trump is unaware, that of all the United States presidents, Jackson is the very least likely to have actually been born a citizen. There was in fact a “birther” controversy in this year, a controversy that compares and contrasts with the controversies generated by Trump in 2015-2016 over whether Barak Obama had been born in Hawaii as he claimed, or in Kenya. There is the possibility that Jackson was using a younger brother’s birth certificate as his own, for according to an unnamed midwife he had been born at sea “three days from land” while his parents Andrew Jackson and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson were on their way across the Atlantic Ocean from County Antrim, Ireland. This is per Alan Eckert’s THE FRONTIERSMEN: A NARRATIVE, and I do not myself regard Eckert as a top-caliber historian, but rather as a mere popularizer, and it seems clear that when he claimed that this voyage had occurred in 1755, he was for some reason off by an entire decade: the Jackson parents came to the New World in 1765 (maybe this was merely a typo in his trade press book?). The candidacy was valid because what Article II actually says is “a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution,” and Jackson fought as a teenager in the Revolution and was indubitably that. On this basis he was exactly as legit as George Washington and others of that period. The political controversies of the period also included challenges as to whether Jackson’s father was a bigamist, or perhaps a man of color, and as to whether Jackson’s mother was perhaps a common prostitute (birthers then weren’t any politer than they are now).
“A large and respectable meeting of the citizens of Concord was convened ... at the Centre brick school-house, pursuant to public notice given by Rev. Dr. Ripley after the religious exercises on Thanksgiving Day [that was the week before], to take into consideration the expediency of forming a Lyceum in Concord.” John Keyes became the chairman of that Concord Lyceum project, and Lemuel Shattuck became its secretary. A committee consisting of Samuel Hoar, John Keyes, Nathan Brooks, Daniel Shattuck, Daniel Starr Southmayd, Samuel Burr, Daniel Stone, and Lemuel Shattuck was charged to prepare a constitution for this new society.
In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 3 of 12 M / Our week day Meeting which Mary B Allen Attended & had searching & powerful labour much to my consolation & edification & I have no doubt she spoke to the States & condition of many present. — Called a little while at Moses Browns on buisness found him more bright than yesterday — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1829
From 1829 into 1837, the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Martin Van Buren would have been in office as Governor of New York for only 71 days when he would be tapped for the position of Secretary of State. He would function as President Jackson’s primary advisor.
Although during this period, most hotels and private mansions had indoor plumbing, particularly in bathrooms and kitchens, the Executive Mansion in Washington DC still lacked running water. The idea of installing it had been conceived during the Madison administration before the house burned, but as Andrew Jackson took office, the Committee on Public Buildings opted to expend available funds instead on the construction of the North Portico. When this portico facing Pennsylvania Avenue was completed, the digs would resemble the White House image as we think of it today.
At some point during this year, President Jackson signed US Patent 259 for an invention by William A. Burt of Detroit. This device was the 1st writing machine built in the United States and is considered to have been the 1st typewriter capable of practical work. Burt’s “typographer” device had no keyboard: to bring a selected character to the printing point, the operator rotated a wheel.
January 19, Monday: Andrew Jackson, a man of the people, embarked aboard the steamboat Pennsylvania heading for Washington DC to assume the presidency.
March 3, Tuesday: President-elect Andrew Jackson having neglected to pay the customary visit to the outgoing President in the Executive Mansion, John Quincy Adams moved out on this night, and on the following day would not show up for the swearing-in ceremony on the East Portico of the Capitol building. Daniel Webster would characterize these Jacksonians arriving in Washington DC in the following manner: “I never saw anything like it before. They really think the country is to be rescued from some dreadful danger.”
According to an almanac of the period, the previous “Congress adjourned, sine die.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
March 4, Wednesday: King George IV granted an audience at Windsor Castle to the Duke of Wellington as his Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, and Baron Lyndhurst. After almost six hours of this interaction the Prime Minister became preoccupied with the thought that his king was mad.19
According to an almanac of the period, “Andrew Jackson inaugurated as President of the United States at Washington. Senate convened, and John C. Calhoun sworn in as Vice-President of the United States.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
General Andy would be bringing with him to the Executive Mansion Sam Patches, his wartime mount, plus Emily, Lady Nashville, and Bolivia, racing fillies, plus Truxton, a champion race horse, plus other assorted ponies, plus of course Poll, a parrot that could swear.
Per the ceremony which went down on the East Portico of the Capitol building on this day, the general known as “Andy” or “Long Knife” or “Old Hickory” became 7th President of the United States of America until 1837. 19. We know that sometimes George would claim to have been at the Battle of Waterloo — but we do not know for sure that this was dementia because there is a possibility that he was merely attempting to annoy the Iron Duke. At any rate, he would die in about a year. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW As the first military leader to be elected President since George Washington, he was much admired by his electorate. In fact the election of this general was being heralded by many white Americans as a new page in the history of their Republic. Outgoing President John Quincy Adams did not at all share in this enthusiasm and disdained to be present at the swearing-in ceremony. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall administered the oath of office. Jackson was inaudible in delivering his inaugural address. A large group walked with him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and entered the executive mansion. There was such public cheer that the White House staff had to relocate the munchies out onto the lawn. To avoid the crush the President himself needed to make his exit by way of a window. This was our 1st president born in a log cabin and, in the drunken carouse that night at his inaugural ball, his rough buddies would be doing considerable damage to White House furnishings.
These had been the President’s (inaudible) remarks: Fellow-Citizens: About to undertake the arduous duties that I have been appointed to perform by the choice of a free people, I avail myself of this customary and solemn occasion to express the gratitude which their confidence inspires and to acknowledge the accountability which my situation enjoins. While the magnitude of their interests convinces me that no thanks can be adequate to the honor they have conferred, it admonishes me that the best return I can make is the zealous dedication of my humble abilities to their service and their good. As the instrument of the Federal Constitution it will devolve on me for a stated period to execute the laws of the United States, to superintend their foreign and their confederate relations, to manage their revenue, to command their forces, and, by communications to the Legislature, to watch over and to promote their interests generally. And the principles of action by which I shall endeavor to accomplish this circle of duties it is now proper for me briefly to explain. In administering the laws of Congress I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the Executive power, trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority. With foreign nations it will be my study to preserve peace and to cultivate friendship on fair and honorable terms, and in the adjustment of any differences that may exist or arise to exhibit the forbearance becoming a powerful nation rather than the sensibility belonging to a gallant people. In such measures as I may be called on to pursue in regard to the rights of the separate States I hope to be animated by a proper respect for those sovereign members of our Union, taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the Confederacy. The management of the public revenue —that searching operation in all governments— is among the most delicate and important trusts in ours, and it will, of course, demand no inconsiderable share of my official solicitude. Under every aspect in which it can be considered it would appear that advantage must result from the observance of a strict and faithful economy. This I shall aim at the more anxiously both because it will facilitate the extinguishment of the national debt, the unnecessary duration of which is incompatible with real independence, and because it will counteract that tendency to public and private profligacy which a profuse expenditure of money by the Government is but too apt to engender. Powerful auxiliaries to the attainment of this desirable end are to be found in the regulations provided by the wisdom of Congress for the specific appropriation of public HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW money and the prompt accountability of public officers. With regard to a proper selection of the subjects of impost with a view to revenue, it would seem to me that the spirit of equity, caution, and compromise in which the Constitution was formed requires that the great interests of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures should be equally favored, and that perhaps the only exception to this rule should consist in the peculiar encouragement of any products of either of them that may be found essential to our national independence. Internal improvement and the diffusion of knowledge, so far as they can be promoted by the constitutional acts of the Federal Government, are of high importance. Considering standing armies as dangerous to free governments in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment, nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power. The gradual increase of our Navy, whose flag has displayed in distant climes our skill in navigation and our fame in arms; the preservation of our forts, arsenals, and dockyards, and the introduction of progressive improvements in the discipline and science of both branches of our military service are so plainly prescribed by prudence that I should be excused for omitting their mention sooner than for enlarging on their importance. But the bulwark of our defense is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible. As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending; and so long as it is worth defending a patriotic militia will cover it with an impenetrable aegis. Partial injuries and occasional mortifications we may be subjected to, but a million of armed freemen, possessed of the means of war, can never be conquered by a foreign foe. To any just system, therefore, calculated to strengthen this natural safeguard of the country I shall cheerfully lend all the aid in my power. It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people. The recent demonstration of public sentiment inscribes on the list of Executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands. In the performance of a task thus generally delineated I shall endeavor to select men whose diligence and talents will insure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation, depending for the advancement of the public service more on the integrity and zeal of the public officers than on their numbers. A diffidence, perhaps too just, in my own qualifications will teach me to look with reverence to the examples of public virtue left by my illustrious predecessors, and with veneration to the lights that flow from the mind that founded and the mind that reformed our system. The same HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW diffidence induces me to hope for instruction and aid from the coordinate branches of the Government, and for the indulgence and support of my fellow-citizens generally. And a firm reliance on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy, and has since upheld our liberties in various vicissitudes, encourages me to offer up my ardent supplications that He will continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 4th of 3 M 1829 / Today I got into the Stage & rode to Bristol and the travelling very bad & finding a Packet at Bristol was going to Newport where I was bound got on board her & arrived at Aunt nancy Carpenter about 7 OClock in the evening. Found she & Polly Mc Cush with the rest of the family all very glad to see me. After taking a dish of tea & calling to see my Mother & Brother Isaacs family & then making a visit to Father Rodmans & calling at [—] Taylors shop I returned to Aunt Nancy Carpenters & lodged RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
March 23, Monday: According to an almanac of the period, “Turkish fleet of four ships of the line, two frigates, and three corvettes with fire ships, &c., sailed from Constantinople towards the Black Sea.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
President Andrew Jackson, man of the (white) people, told the (red) people of the Creek Nation that they could either subject themselves to the laws of the state of Alabama or hie themselves to the far side of the Mississippi River. He didn’t care which. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 25th birthday.
According to an almanac of the period, “Navigation opened on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, by the removal of the embankment at the summit level. Cornerstone of an edifice for the accommodation of the United States’ Mint, laid at Philadelphia.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
Sam Patch leaped at Little Falls on the Passaic River: “One thing can be done as well as another.”
CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was complete. The embankments at the summit of the canal were opened and water filled the canal, with large crowds and the Mayor of Philadelphia, Benjamin W. Richards, in attendance.
The ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of one of the Eastern locks of the C&O Canal near Georgetown was HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW canceled on account of rain. It must not have been raining in Augusta, Maine, for a corner stone of the “New State House” was ceremonially laid. It must not have been raining in Cincinnati, for an illuminated balloon 15 feet in diameter was sent aloft.
General Van Ness, on behalf of the Board of Aldermen and Common Council of Washington DC, presented a written statement of confidence to President Andrew Jackson — because at the moment he was encountering in that city a significant degree of unpopularity.
Lowell Mason directed the music at Boston’s celebration. At 4PM at the orthodox Congregationalist church on Park Street on Beacon Hill, William Lloyd Garrison made his 1st major antislavery speech, “Dangers to the Nation” (in attendance was John Greenleaf Whittier). Expected to orate acceptably in favor of colonization as a way to dispose of American blacks and restore racial separation, he instead espoused abolitionism in the name of freedom and of equal rights.20
James Henry Hammond, at the age of 25, opinioned at the Columbia Presbyterian Church that the citizenry had begun “to question the value of the American Union ... Patience under usurpation is a word for slaves.”
YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.
September 10, Thursday: Felix Mendelssohn arrived back in London from Scotland.
The opening of the New Theatre and Circus in Baltimore was attended by some 3,000.
At 7:00PM, a meeting of President Andrew Jackson’s cabinet was called, with the Reverend John Campbell invited, for the purpose of debating Peggy Eaton’s chastity. The President got excited and shouted “She is as chaste as a virgin!”
20. During the following decade of the 1830s the number of free black Americans would increase by nearly 86,000 to over 319,000 while the American Colonization Society would raise some $113,000, but by use of that money only 1,430 freed American blacks would be transported from “our” shores toward Liberia. (A significant %age of such persons had been freed on condition that they were to “volunteer” for such transportation to a foreign shore.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
December 7, Monday: In President Andrew Jackson’s first address to Congress, he wrote (it was usual in those times for such addresses to be in writing rather than delivered orally) of “setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, ... guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it”; and he called the Bank of the United States a failure at the very thing it had done really well, establishing uniform and sound currency.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 7th of 12th M 1829 / Got into the Stage this Morning & rode to Newport where I had been intending for some days - Stoped at Portsmouth & visited my Mother at Uncle Stantons then took the Boston Stage & rode - Newport finding our friends all well RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1830
While visiting Washington DC, John James Audubon was received by President Andrew Jackson. The House of Representatives became an early subscriber to the THE BIRDS OF AMERICA. Audubon, accompanied by Lucy, went to England to monitor the progress being made in the production of his volumes.
May 25, Tuesday: In Purfleet, England, another successful test of the limelight.
John C. Calhoun, having been confronted as to his attitude toward Andrew Jackson while Secretary of War, with many other tensions in the background, responded to a demand for explanations with a 52-page letter, beginning “I cannot recognize the right on your part to call into question my conduct,” and at one point says “I should be blind not to see that this whole affair, is a political manoeuvre ... and that a blow is mediated against me” (untactfully implying that Jackson wasn’t his own man, and was being manipulated by Van Buren and company).
May 27, Thursday: President Andrew Jackson wrote his veto message on the Maysville Road bill.
A convict ship, the Mellish, set sail from England for Van Diemen’s Land, Australia. Of the 118 convicts undergoing transportation, 19 had received life sentences and the average sentence was 9 years.
Fromental Halevy’s “Attendre et courir,” an opera comique to words of Fulgence and Henri, was performed for the initial time on the composer’s 31st birthday, in Paris’s Theatre Ventadour.
May 28, Friday: Nicolò Paganini consulted Dr. Himly in Gottingen in regard to failing eyesight.
President Andrew Jackson signed a race act providing for the compulsory exclusion of all red Americans from the watershed of the continent to the east of the Mississippi River. America for the Americans! Aryan Nationhood! (Some ideas die hard.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
“...the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” — Declaration of Independence
May 30, Sunday: President Andrew Jackson responded to John Caldwell Calhoun’s letter of the 25th: “... I have a right to believe that you were my sincere friend, and until now, never expected to have the occasion to say to you, in the language of Caesar, Et tu Brute.... Your letter to me... is the first intimation to me that you ever entertained any other opinion...”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 30th of 5th M 1830 / Silent Meeting in the Morning In the Afternoon Wm Almy was here & engaged in a very appropriate testimony from the Scripture “Wherewith shall a young man clinse his way &c. — Enoch & Lydia went away last 2nd dy to attend the Moy [Monthly] Meeting of New Bedford & Dartmouth - they returned Yesterday having accomplished their visit & I have no doubt they had seasonable service. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
June 17, Thursday: After his 1st year in office, President Andrew Jackson and his entourage headed home for Tennessee.
July 21, Wednesday: Belgium gained its independence from the Netherlands; King Leopold I was crowned.
John Henry Eaton arrived at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, where he and his wife Peggy Eaton would continue to suffer ostracism as they did in Washington DC. “I will govern my Household or I have none.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 21 of 7 M / Benj B Hussey & Deborah Ramsdell returned from a visit of a fortnight to their relatives in the State of Mane. — Our Meeting Silent. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW July 28, Wednesday: Andrew Jackson went to Franklin, Tennessee, home of John Henry Eaton, where he witnessed, for a change, the greatest courtesies being extended to Peggy Eaton (courtesies which Jackson was unable to obtain for her, even in his own household).
In the Paris fighting, the Hotel de Ville changed hands three times. Citizens captured cavalry barracks in the Rue de Babylone. A tricolor flag appeared atop Notre Dame. In his loge in the Institute, composing his Prix de Rome cantata, Hector Berlioz heard the gunfire and drums.
Der Alchymist, an opera by Louis Spohr to words of Schmidt under the pseudonym Pfeiffer after Irving, was performed for the initial time, in the Kassel Hoftheater.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 28th of 7 M / Our first Meeting was silent - but to me a season of feeling & close reflection. — The last (Moy [Monthly]) was a time of exercise - mingled with pain & encouragement. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 23, Monday: Heinrich replaced Friedrich Ferdinand as Duke of Anhalt-Kothen. Ludwig replaced Heinrich as Prince of Anhalt-Kothen-Pless.
President Andrew Jackson confronted a Chickasaw delegation at the Presbyterian church in Franklin, Tennessee (not insignificantly, this was the hometown of the Secretary of War), providing them an ultimatum to move to new territories across the Mississippi River — or else suffer the consequences. The Choctaw were also supposed to have arrived at this “conference” but for some reason didn’t show up.
October 24, Sunday: Andrew Jackson, in a letter to Mary Eastin, copped the attitude that John Caldwell Calhoun was “persecuting Peggy Eaton in order to renew the assault on Rachel Jackson.”
The State of Venezuela was renamed the Republic of Venezuela.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 24th of 10th M / In the Afternoon Wm Almy attended & deliverd an excellent testimony. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
December 28, Tuesday: Noah Webster, Esq. had relocated to Washington DC to lobby on behalf of copyright protection. On this day he visited the White House and had dinner with President Andrew Jackson, and in recording this hospitality would display the churlish chauvinism for which he was notorious by remarking on the un-Americanness of his President’s many courses of foods and wines. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1831
With the sponsorship of President Andrew Jackson, the Reverend Walter Colton was nominated as chaplain of the West India Squadron of the US Navy. He would visit ports around the world and write a book, DECK AND PORT, about his travel experiences.
A general and politician, “Long Knife” Andrew Jackson, was President of these United States of America. He would nominate his good ‘ol buddy Martin Van Buren as ambassador to Great Britain (which has always been our highest US diplomatic post), but the Senate would refuse to confirm this person.
February 17, Thursday: John Caldwell Calhoun published a pamphlet containing his correspondence with Andrew Jackson over the Seminole war matter. Calhoun believed, and slanted his presentation to demonstrate, that his troubles were the result of a conspiracy by Martin Van Buren to undermine him. The result of the publication, as President Jackson would write on March 7th, would be that Calhoun and Duff Green “destroyed themselves in a shorter space of time than any two men I ever knew.”
The territory of Luxembourg was divided between the Grand Duchy and the Belgian province of Luxembourg.
April 7, Thursday: Emperor Pedro I of Brazil abdicated in favor of his son Pedro II so that he might return to Portugal to help his daughter, Queen Maria II, keep the throne.
Finding his seat on President Andrew Jackson’s cabinet to be untenable due to the persistent hostility expressed by Vice President John Caldwell Calhoun (or his wife) toward his wife Margaret O’Neal Timberlake Eaton,21 Secretary of War John H. Eaton resigned. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June: Alleging that the international traffic in slaves was on the increase, President Andrew Jackson asked the US House of Representatives to suppress it by means of the most “vigorous efforts.” INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The enhanced price of slaves throughout the American slave market, brought about by the new industrial development and the laws against the slave-trade, was the irresistible temptation that drew American capital and enterprise into that traffic. In the United States, in spite of the large interstate traffic, the average price of slaves rose from about $325 in 1840, to $360 in 1850, and to $500 in 1860.22 Brazil and Cuba offered similar inducements to smugglers, and the American flag was ready to protect such pirates. As a result, the American slave-trade finally came to be carried on principally by United States capital, in United States ships, officered by United States citizens, and under the United States flag. Executive reports repeatedly acknowledged this fact. In 1839 “a careful revision of these laws” is recommended by the President, in order that “the integrity and honor of our flag may be carefully preserved.”23 In June, 1841, the President declares: “There is reason to believe that the traffic is on the increase,” and advocates “vigorous efforts.”24 His message in December of the same year acknowledges: “That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable.”25 The special message of 1845 explains at length that “it would seem” that a regular policy of evading the laws is carried on: American vessels with the knowledge of the owners are chartered by notorious slave dealers in Brazil, aided by English capitalists, with this intent.26 The message of 1849 “earnestly” invites the attention of Congress “to an amendment of our existing laws relating to the African slave-trade, with a view to the effectual suppression of that barbarous traffic. It is not to be denied,” continues the message, “that this trade is still, in part, carried on by means of vessels built in the United States, and owned or navigated by some of our citizens.”27 Governor Buchanan of Liberia reported in 1839: “The chief obstacle to the success of the very active measures pursued by the British government for the suppression of the slave-trade on the coast, is the American flag. Never was the proud banner of freedom so extensively used by those pirates upon liberty and humanity, as at this season.”28 One well-known American slaver was boarded fifteen times and twice taken into port, but always escaped by means of her papers.29 Even American officers report that the English are doing all they can, but that the American flag protects the trade.30 The evidence which literally poured in from our consuls and ministers at Brazil adds to the story of the guilt of the United States.31 It was proven that the 21. The young lady had been a pert tavern maid married to a Navy man, John Timberlake. Eaton had escorted her to Washington social functions while her husband was at sea, and then her husband, purser aboard the USS Constitution, had committed suicide — whereupon the couple had gotten married. The bride was rumored to have miscarried an infant by Eaton prior to the marriage. 22. Cf. United States census reports; and Olmsted, COTTON KINGDOM. 23. HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, page 118. 24. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 1st session, pages 31, 184. 25. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 2d session, pages 14, 15, 86, 113. 26. SENATE JOURNAL, 28th Congress, 2d session, pages 191, 227. 27. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, III. pt. I. No. 5, page 7. 28. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 152. 29. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, pages 152-3. 30. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 241. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW participation of United States citizens in the trade was large and systematic. One of the most notorious slave merchants of Brazil said: “I am worried by the Americans, who insist upon my hiring their vessels for slave-trade.”32 Minister Proffit stated, in 1844, that the “slave-trade is almost entirely carried on under our flag, in American-built vessels.”33 So, too, in Cuba: the British commissioners affirm that American citizens were openly engaged in the traffic; vessels arrived undisguised at Havana from the United States, and cleared for Africa as slavers after an alleged sale.34 The American consul, Trist, was proven to have consciously or unconsciously aided this trade by the issuance of blank clearance papers.35 The presence of American capital in these enterprises, and the connivance of the authorities, were proven in many cases and known in scores. In 1837 the English government informed the United States that from the papers of a captured slaver it appeared that the notorious slave-trading firm, Blanco and Carballo of Havana, who owned the vessel, had correspondents in the United States: “at Baltimore, Messrs. Peter Harmony and Co., in New York, Robert Barry, Esq.”36 The slaver “Martha” of New York, captured by the “Perry,” contained among her papers curious revelations of the guilt of persons in America who were little suspected.37 The slaver “Prova,” which was allowed to lie in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and refit, was afterwards captured with two hundred and twenty-five slaves on board.38 The real reason that prevented many belligerent Congressmen from pressing certain search claims against England lay in the fact that the unjustifiable detentions had unfortunately revealed so much American guilt that it was deemed wiser to let the matter end in talk. For instance, in 1850 Congress demanded information as to illegal searches, and President Fillmore’s report showed the uncomfortable fact that, of the ten American ships wrongly detained by English men-of- war, nine were proven red-handed slavers.39 The consul at Havana reported, in 1836, that whole cargoes of slaves fresh from Africa were being daily shipped to Texas in American vessels, that 1,000 had been sent within a few months, that the rate was increasing, and that many of these slaves “can scarcely fail to find their way into the United States.” Moreover, the consul acknowledged that ships frequently cleared for the United States in ballast, taking on a cargo at some secret point.40 When with these facts we consider the law 31. Cf. e.g. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 28th Congress, 2d session, IV. pt. I. No. 148; 29th Congress, 1st session, III. No. 43; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 2d session, VII. No. 61; SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 1st session, IV. No. 28; 31st Congress, 2d session, II. No. 6; 33d Congress, 1st session, VIII. No. 47. 32. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 218. 33. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 221. 34. Palmerston to Stevenson: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, page 5. In 1836 five such slavers were known to have cleared; in 1837, eleven; in 1838, nineteen; and in 1839, twenty-three: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 220-1. 35. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1839, Volume XLIX., SLAVE TRADE, class A, Further Series, pages 58-9; class B, Further Series, page 110; class D, Further Series, page 25. Trist pleaded ignorance of the law: Trist to Forsyth, HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 36. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 37. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 290. 38. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 121, 163-6. 39. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, XIV No. 66. 40. Trist to Forsyth: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. “The business of supplying the United States with Africans from this island is one that must necessarily exist,” because “slaves are a hundred per cent, or more, higher in the United States than in Cuba,” and this profit “is a temptation which it is not in human nature as modified by American institutions to withstand”: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW facilitating “recovery” of slaves from Texas,41 the repeated refusals to regulate the Texan trade, and the shelving of a proposed congressional investigation into these matters,42 conjecture becomes a practical certainty. It was estimated in 1838 that 15,000 Africans were annually taken to Texas, and “there are even grounds for suspicion that there are other places ... where slaves are introduced.”43 Between 1847 and 1853 the slave smuggler Drake had a slave depot in the Gulf, where sometimes as many as 1,600 Negroes were on hand, and the owners were continually importing and shipping. “The joint-stock company,” writes this smuggler, “was a very extensive one, and connected with leading American and Spanish mercantile houses. Our island44 was visited almost weekly, by agents from Cuba, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans.... The seasoned and instructed slaves were taken to Texas, or Florida, overland, and to Cuba, in sailing-boats. As no squad contained more than half a dozen, no difficulty was found in posting them to the United States, without discovery, and generally without suspicion.... The Bay Island plantation sent ventures weekly to the Florida Keys. Slaves were taken into the great American swamps, and there kept till wanted for the market. Hundreds were sold as captured runaways from the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave State; and our coasters were built in Maine, and came out with lumber. I could tell curious stories ... of this business of smuggling Bozal negroes into the United States. It is growing more profitable every year, and if you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in it, hundreds would fill their places.”45 Inherent probability and concurrent testimony confirm the substantial truth of such confessions. For instance, one traveller discovers on a Southern plantation Negroes who can speak no English.46 The careful reports of the Quakers “apprehend that many [slaves] are also introduced into the United States.”47 Governor Mathew of the Bahama Islands reports that “in more than one instance, Bahama vessels with coloured crews have been purposely wrecked on the coast of Florida, and the crews forcibly sold.” This was brought to the notice of the United States authorities, but the district attorney of Florida could furnish no information.48 Such was the state of the slave-trade in 1850, on the threshold of the critical decade which by a herculean effort was destined finally to suppress it.
41. STATUTES AT LARGE, V. 674. 42. Cf. STATUTES AT LARGE, V., page 157, note 1. 43. Buxton, THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND ITS REMEDY, pages 44-5. Cf. 2D REPORT OF THE LONDON AFRICAN SOCIETY, page 22. 44. I.e., Bay Island in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Honduras. 45. REVELATIONS OF A SLAVE SMUGGLER, page 98. 46. Mr. H. Moulton in SLAVERY AS IT IS, page 140; cited in FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (Friends’ ed. 1841), page 8. 47. In a memorial to Congress, 1840: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 1st session, VI. No. 211. 48. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, pages 883, 968, 989-90. The governor wrote in reply: “The United States, if properly served by their law officers in the Floridas, will not experience any difficulty in obtaining the requisite knowledge of these illegal transactions, which, I have reason to believe, were the subject of common notoriety in the neighbourhood where they occurred, and of boast on the part of those concerned in them”: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, page 990. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW 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 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.)
September 19, Monday: Alexis de Tocqueville interviewed the Reverend Jared Sparks, “a distinguished Boston literary man,” and they discussed the political prospects of the American union under General, then President, Andrew Jackson: • American: “Most enlightened men now recognize that General Jackson is not fitted to fill the office of President; his limited experience of anything to do with civil government and his great age make him incompetent. But he will be re-elected.” • Frenchman: “And why will that be?” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW • American: “Our people is not like yours. With us public opinion forms slowly. It is never carried away by surprise, although it is very subject to mistakes. It took long and patient work to put it into the head of the public that General Jackson was a great man and that he brought honor to America. The people were persuaded to believe this. There has not been time yet to bring them round to other feelings and the majority is still at the General’s disposal.”
November 24, Thursday: Andrew Jackson, Junior, adopted by President Andrew Jackson, got married in Philadelphia with Sarah Yorke, daughter of a formerly wealthy Philadelphia merchant (who had died just after losing his fortune). The couple would honeymoon in the White House, which would almost certainly be the initial meeting of the father with his new daughter-in-law: “Sarah became a joy and comfort to him for the rest of his days.” He gave her a young woman as her personal slave, Gracie.49
Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont arrived in Pittsburgh.
Michael Faraday read the initial part of his paper “Experimental Researches on Electricity” to the Royal Society in London. This described his work over the last few months, during which he had pioneered the 1st electrical transformer and the 1st electric generator, and discovered the electromagnetic induction that would become the basis of our thinking in this new field.
December: A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Diedade, master J.P. Carneiro, on its first of two known Middle Passage voyages, bringing an unknown number of enslaved people out of an unknown area of Africa, cast anchor at its destination, a port of Cuba.
The Diedade in particular may have been flying the Portuguese flag, but what concerned President Andrew Jackson in his message to the US Congress was that there were any number of such slaver vessels that were defending themselves against interception by flying at sea the “Stars and Bars” of the United States of America. They were sailing under false colors. Our flag, he suggested, was being “grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations.” THE MIDDLE PASSAGE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The enhanced price of slaves throughout the American slave market, brought about by the new industrial development and the laws against the slave-trade, was the irresistible temptation that drew American capital and enterprise into that traffic. In the United States, in spite of the large interstate traffic, the average price of slaves rose from about $325 in 1840, to $360 in 1850, and to $500 in 1860.50 Brazil and Cuba offered similar inducements to smugglers, and the American flag was ready to protect such pirates. As a result, the American slave-trade finally came to be carried on principally by United States capital, in United States ships, officered by United States citizens, and under the United States flag. Executive reports repeatedly acknowledged this fact. In 1839 “a careful revision of these laws” is recommended by the President, in order that “the integrity and honor of our flag may be carefully preserved.”51 In June, 1841, the President declares: 49. During his presidency, Jackson purchased several slaves from a Colonel Hebb in the Washington DC area. One, known as “Old Nancy,” had daughters Gracie (1810-1887), Louisa (about 1816-1888), and Rachel (about 1816-1868), and a son Peter Ferguson (1820-1885). Following emancipation, Gracie and her children would choose the surname Bradley. 50. Cf. United States census reports; and Olmsted, COTTON KINGDOM. 51. HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, page 118. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW “There is reason to believe that the traffic is on the increase,” and advocates “vigorous efforts.”52 His message in December of the same year acknowledges: “That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable.”53 The special message of 1845 explains at length that “it would seem” that a regular policy of evading the laws is carried on: American vessels with the knowledge of the owners are chartered by notorious slave dealers in Brazil, aided by English capitalists, with this intent.54 The message of 1849 “earnestly” invites the attention of Congress “to an amendment of our existing laws relating to the African slave-trade, with a view to the effectual suppression of that barbarous traffic. It is not to be denied,” continues the message, “that this trade is still, in part, carried on by means of vessels built in the United States, and owned or navigated by some of our citizens.”55 Governor Buchanan of Liberia reported in 1839: “The chief obstacle to the success of the very active measures pursued by the British government for the suppression of the slave-trade on the coast, is the American flag. Never was the proud banner of freedom so extensively used by those pirates upon liberty and humanity, as at this season.”56 One well-known American slaver was boarded fifteen times and twice taken into port, but always escaped by means of her papers.57 Even American officers report that the English are doing all they can, but that the American flag protects the trade.58 The evidence which literally poured in from our consuls and ministers at Brazil adds to the story of the guilt of the United States.59 It was proven that the participation of United States citizens in the trade was large and systematic. One of the most notorious slave merchants of Brazil said: “I am worried by the Americans, who insist upon my hiring their vessels for slave-trade.”60 Minister Proffit stated, in 1844, that the “slave-trade is almost entirely carried on under our flag, in American-built vessels.”61 So, too, in Cuba: the British commissioners affirm that American citizens were openly engaged in the traffic; vessels arrived undisguised at Havana from the United States, and cleared for Africa as slavers after an alleged sale.62 The American consul, Trist, was proven to have consciously or unconsciously aided this trade by the issuance of blank clearance papers.63 The presence of American capital in these enterprises, and the connivance of the authorities, were proven in many cases and known in scores. In 1837 the English government informed the
52. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 1st session, pages 31, 184. 53. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 2d session, pages 14, 15, 86, 113. 54. SENATE JOURNAL, 28th Congress, 2d session, pages 191, 227. 55. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, III. pt. I. No. 5, page 7. 56. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 152. 57. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, pages 152-3. 58. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 241. 59. Cf. e.g. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 28th Congress, 2d session, IV. pt. I. No. 148; 29th Congress, 1st session, III. No. 43; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 2d session, VII. No. 61; SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 1st session, IV. No. 28; 31st Congress, 2d session, II. No. 6; 33d Congress, 1st session, VIII. No. 47. 60. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 218. 61. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 221. 62. Palmerston to Stevenson: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, page 5. In 1836 five such slavers were known to have cleared; in 1837, eleven; in 1838, nineteen; and in 1839, twenty-three: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 220-1. 63. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1839, Volume XLIX., SLAVE TRADE, class A, Further Series, pages 58-9; class B, Further Series, page 110; class D, Further Series, page 25. Trist pleaded ignorance of the law: Trist to Forsyth, HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW United States that from the papers of a captured slaver it appeared that the notorious slave-trading firm, Blanco and Carballo of Havana, who owned the vessel, had correspondents in the United States: “at Baltimore, Messrs. Peter Harmony and Co., in New York, Robert Barry, Esq.”64 The slaver “Martha” of New York, captured by the “Perry,” contained among her papers curious revelations of the guilt of persons in America who were little suspected.65 The slaver “Prova,” which was allowed to lie in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and refit, was afterwards captured with two hundred and twenty-five slaves on board.66 The real reason that prevented many belligerent Congressmen from pressing certain search claims against England lay in the fact that the unjustifiable detentions had unfortunately revealed so much American guilt that it was deemed wiser to let the matter end in talk. For instance, in 1850 Congress demanded information as to illegal searches, and President Fillmore’s report showed the uncomfortable fact that, of the ten American ships wrongly detained by English men-of- war, nine were proven red-handed slavers.67 The consul at Havana reported, in 1836, that whole cargoes of slaves fresh from Africa were being daily shipped to Texas in American vessels, that 1,000 had been sent within a few months, that the rate was increasing, and that many of these slaves “can scarcely fail to find their way into the United States.” Moreover, the consul acknowledged that ships frequently cleared for the United States in ballast, taking on a cargo at some secret point.68 When with these facts we consider the law facilitating “recovery” of slaves from Texas,69 the repeated refusals to regulate the Texan trade, and the shelving of a proposed congressional investigation into these matters,70 conjecture becomes a practical certainty. It was estimated in 1838 that 15,000 Africans were annually taken to Texas, and “there are even grounds for suspicion that there are other places ... where slaves are introduced.”71 Between 1847 and 1853 the slave smuggler Drake had a slave depot in the Gulf, where sometimes as many as 1,600 Negroes were on hand, and the owners were continually importing and shipping. “The joint-stock company,” writes this smuggler, “was a very extensive one, and connected with leading American and Spanish mercantile houses. Our island72 was visited almost weekly, by agents from Cuba, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans.... The seasoned and instructed slaves were taken to Texas, or Florida, overland, and to Cuba, in sailing-boats. As no squad contained more than half a dozen, no difficulty was found in posting them to the United States, without discovery, and generally without suspicion.... The Bay Island plantation sent ventures weekly to the Florida Keys. Slaves were taken into the great American swamps, and there kept till wanted for the market. Hundreds were 64. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 65. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 290. 66. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 121, 163-6. 67. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, XIV No. 66. 68. Trist to Forsyth: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. “The business of supplying the United States with Africans from this island is one that must necessarily exist,” because “slaves are a hundred per cent, or more, higher in the United States than in Cuba,” and this profit “is a temptation which it is not in human nature as modified by American institutions to withstand”: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 69. STATUTES AT LARGE, V. 674. 70. Cf. STATUTES AT LARGE, V., page 157, note 1. 71. Buxton, THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND ITS REMEDY, pages 44-5. Cf. 2D REPORT OF THE LONDON AFRICAN SOCIETY, page 22. 72. I.e., Bay Island in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Honduras. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW sold as captured runaways from the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave State; and our coasters were built in Maine, and came out with lumber. I could tell curious stories ... of this business of smuggling Bozal negroes into the United States. It is growing more profitable every year, and if you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in it, hundreds would fill their places.”73 Inherent probability and concurrent testimony confirm the substantial truth of such confessions. For instance, one traveller discovers on a Southern plantation Negroes who can speak no English.74 The careful reports of the Quakers “apprehend that many [slaves] are also introduced into the United States.”75 Governor Mathew of the Bahama Islands reports that “in more than one instance, Bahama vessels with coloured crews have been purposely wrecked on the coast of Florida, and the crews forcibly sold.” This was brought to the notice of the United States authorities, but the district attorney of Florida could furnish no information.76 Such was the state of the slave-trade in 1850, on the threshold of the critical decade which by a herculean effort was destined finally to suppress it.
73. REVELATIONS OF A SLAVE SMUGGLER, page 98. 74. Mr. H. Moulton in SLAVERY AS IT IS, page 140; cited in FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (Friends’ ed. 1841), page 8. 75. In a memorial to Congress, 1840: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 1st session, VI. No. 211. 76. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, pages 883, 968, 989-90. The governor wrote in reply: “The United States, if properly served by their law officers in the Floridas, will not experience any difficulty in obtaining the requisite knowledge of these illegal transactions, which, I have reason to believe, were the subject of common notoriety in the neighbourhood where they occurred, and of boast on the part of those concerned in them”: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, page 990. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Meanwhile, in downtown Boston, abolitionists were holding their 2d meeting in the law offices of Samuel Eliot Sewall on State Street. How to persuade white people to oppose the enslavement of black people? –Were they going to be able to figure out how to get from here to a land of freedom and justice for all? This time, due to the winter weather, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May was unable to attend, but the group had picked up three concerned individuals who had not been present for the initial November 13th meeting: • The Reverend Abijah Blanchard • Alonzo Lewis • William Joseph Snelling
STATE STREET, BOSTON HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1832
A leading politician of an anti-Jacksonian persuasion, John Eastburn, invited Richard Hildreth to begin a gazette, The Atlas, as the publicity arm in Boston of a new political organization, one that would come to be understood as “the Whigs.” The new gazette would go on the attack against the “imbecility, venality, and corruption” of the administration of President Andrew Jackson. A fellow journalist would comment of Hildreth’s political writing, that “His pen was like the sword of the Arab chieftain: ‘ornament it carried none, but the notches on the blade.’”
Never met a man he didn’t want to kill HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Three reminisces pertaining to this year, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”
STARTING NEWSPAPERS I commenced when I was but a boy of eleven or twelve writing sentimental bits for the old “Long Island Patriot,” in Brooklyn; this was about 1832. Soon after, I had a piece or two in George P. Morris’s then celebrated and fashionable “Mirror,” of New York city. I remember with what half-suppress’d excitement I used to watch for the big, fat, red-faced, slow-moving, very old English carrier who distributed the “Mirror” in Brooklyn; and when I got one, opening and cutting the leaves with trembling fingers. How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper, in nice type.
On another occasion he reminisced about this period: “Specimen Days”
PRINTING OFFICE. — OLD BROOKLYN After about two years went to work in a weekly newspaper and printing office, to learn the trade. The paper was the “Long Island Patriot,” owned by S. E. Clements, who was also postmaster. An old printer in the office, William Harts-horne, a revolutionary character, who had seen Washington, was a special friend of mine, and I had many a talk with him about long past times. The apprentices, including myself, boarded with his grand-daughter. I used occasionally to go out riding with the boss, who was very kind to us boys; Sundays he took us all to a great old rough, fortress-looking stone church, on Joralemon street, near where the Brooklyn city hall now is — (at that time broad fields and country roads everywhere around.1 Afterward I work’d on the “Long Island [Page 700] Star,” Alden Spooner’s paper. My father all these years pursuing his trade as carpenter and builder, with varying fortune. There was a growing family of children — eight of us — my brother Jesse the oldest, myself the second, my dear sisters Mary and Hannah Louisa, my brothers Andrew, George, Thomas Jefferson, and then my youngest brother, Edward, born 1835, and always badly crippled, as I am myself of late years.
1.Of the Brooklyn of that time (1830-40) hardly anything remains, except the lines of the old streets. The population was then between ten and twelve thousand. For a mile Fulton street was lined with magnificent elm trees. The character of the place was thoroughly rural. As a sample of comparative values, it may be mention’d that twenty-five acres in what is now the most costly part of the city, bounded by Flatbush and Fulton avenues, were then bought by Mr. Parmentier, a French emigré, for $4000. Who remembers the old places as they were? Who remembers the old citizens of that time? Among the former were Smith & Wood’s, Coe Downing’s, and other public houses at the ferry, the old Ferry itself, Love lane, the Heights as then, the Wallabout with the wooden bridge, and the road out beyond Fulton street to the old toll-gate. Among the latter were the majestic and genial General Jeremiah Johnson, with others, Gabriel Furman, Rev. E. M. Johnson, Alden Spooner, Mr. Pierrepont, Mr. Joralemon, Samuel Willoughby, Jonathan Trotter, George Hall, Cyrus P. Smith, N. B. Morse, John Dikeman, Adrian Hegeman, William Udall, and old Mr. Duflon, with his military garden. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Also in about this year, he sighted a J.J. Aster and wrote it down in his book of odd American birds: “Specimen Days”
BROADWAY SIGHTS Besides Fulton ferry, off and on for years, I knew and frequented Broadway — that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. Here I saw, during those times, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Clay, William Henry Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Lajos Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents. I remember seeing James Fenimore Cooper in a court-room in Chambers street, back of the city hall, where he was carrying on a law case — (I think it was a charge of libel he had brought against some one.) I also remember seeing Edgar A. Poe, and having a short interview with him, (it must have been in 1845 or ’6,) in his office, second story of a corner building, (Duane or Pearl street.) He was editor and owner or part owner of “the Broadway Journal.” [Page 702] The visit was about a piece of mine he had publish’d. Poe was very cordial, in a quiet way, appear’d well in person, dress, &c. I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner and matter; very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded. For another of my reminiscences, here on the west side, just below Houston street, I once saw (it must have been about 1832, of a sharp, bright January day) a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs, for a ride. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw. (You needn’t think all the best animals are brought up nowadays; never was such horseflesh as fifty years ago on Long Island, or south, or in New York city; folks look’d for spirit and mettle in a nag, not tame speed merely.) Well, I, a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, stopp’d and gazed long at the spectacle of that fur- swathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants, and the careful seating of him in the sleigh. I remember the spirited, champing horses, the driver with his whip, and a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. The old man, the subject of so much attention, I can almost see now. It was John Jacob Astor. The years 1846, ’47, and there along, see me still in New York city, working as writer and printer, having my usual good health, and a good time generally. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Henry Clay characterized himself as a “self-made man” — in fact originating this conceit.
He would be defeated for president because supporters of President Andrew Jackson countered with the notion of a “rebirth” of the Jefferson Democratic Party.
January: Sam Houston disembarked from a Mississippi River steamboat in New Orleans, on his way by sea to Washington DC.
When President Andrew Jackson nominated Martin Van Buren as minister to Britain, Henry Clay denounced Van Buren for bringing Albany, New York’s patronage practices with him to Washington DC. A fellow New York politico, Senator William Learned Marcy, then reproached Clay in defense of Van Buren: “It may be, sir, that the politicians of the United States are not so fastidious as some gentlemen are, as to disclosing the principles on which they act. They boldly practice what they preach. When they are contending for victory, they avow their intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated, they expect to retire from office. They see nothing wrong in the rule, that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”
Another way to parse this is to observe that it is fakelore, that President Jackson authored such a remark as “To the victors belong the spoils.”
At this point President Jackson, who had been financially damaged by speculation and a tightening of bank credit early in his career, in effect declared war on the Second Bank of the United States, opposing its recharter by the federal Congress, and withdrawing from it all federal funds: “The Bank is trying to kill me, Sir, but I shall kill it!” The bank’s charter would expire unrenewed in 1836.
A surgeon offered to remove the bullet that Jesse Benton had put in his left shoulder in 1813. There was no anesthesia in the White House, so the operation was done without anesthesia, but it would prove a success and Jackson's health would improve remarkably. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW March 3, Saturday: The Liberator.
The decision of the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of Worcester v Georgia was that it was government at the federal level which had exclusive jurisdiction over relationships with native American tribes, and over all negotiations in regard to their land claims even within a state. (As it turned out, the state of Georgia, in its lust for the Cherokee farms, would ignore this decision of the Supremes, and would be supported in this defiance by President Andrew Jackson, who did not ever exclaim “Well: John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!”
Incorporation of the Concord Bank. Its new building would house also the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company. The Concord Bank was incorporated March 3, 1832, with a capital of $100,000. Daniel Shattuck, Esq., President, John M. Cheney, Esq., Cashier, and the President, Abiel Heywood, John Keyes, Nathan Brooks, Abel Moore, and Phineas How, of Concord, Rufus Hosmer of Stow, George F. Farley of Groton, John Merriam of Bedford, Benjamin Muzzy of Lexington, and Timothy Prescott of Littleton, Directors. A neat and appropriate building was erected for its own accommodation and that of the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company, in 1832.77
77. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry David Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June 15, Friday: General Henry Atkinson was in charge of some 3,400 armed white men. Native Americans allies reported that Black Hawk was lodged above Lake Koshonong, but Atkinson made no attempt to engage them. Black Hawk attacked a fort on the Apple River near Galena, Illinois. Because of General Atkinson’s overcautiousness, President Andrew Jackson would order in Major General Winfield Scott.
August 18, Saturday: The Liberator.
Sam Houston went to The Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee to meet with President Andrew Jackson. Jackson would be reported to have given or loaned money to Houston to go to Texas.
November: Andrew Jackson, Democrat, was elected President.
December 10, Monday: Waldo Emerson, suddenly no longer a minister of the gospel with responsibility for a flock, and suddenly a gentleman of leisure without any need of gainful employment, determined to make use of his new-found pelf by embarking on the sort of grand European tour that was elevating the social standing of so many new gentlemen of his era, “a purpureal vision of Naples & Italy & that is the rage of yesterday & today in Chardon St.”
President Andrew Jackson declared any act of nullification to be an act of rebellion and threatened to use force against South Carolina or any state which neglected to uphold federal law. READ THE FULL TEXT
In Paris on the eve of his 29th birthday, Hector Berlioz was officially introduced to Harriet Smithson, the English actress with whom he had for five years been infatuated.
Sam Houston crossed the Red River, entering Texas. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1833
Seth Luther’s AN ADDRESS ON THE RIGHT OF FREE SUFFRAGE was printed in Providence. Luther, who had done time in a debtor’s prison during the early 1820s, was going just apeshit over an idea of taxation without representation that he had retrieved out of obsolete Revolutionary-War rhetoric, and had begun beating the drum on behalf of “twelve thousand vassals” in Rhode Island who, because they lacked $134 worth of real property, could not be “freemen” and could not, under that state’s antique charter, be allowed to choose their own governors. The US Constitution, he averred, had guaranteed to us a republican form of government, so what ought we to do? Perhaps, he suggested with tongue in cheek, we might rewrite our Declaration of Independence, to make it read “all men are created equal, except in Rhode Island.” (Upon the failure of the Dorr Rebellion, this Luther would find himself once again in prison — and so much for empty rhetoric.)
Richard Hildreth’s A REPORT OF THE TRIAL OF THE REV. EPHRAIM K. AVERY, BEFORE THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT OF RHODE ISLAND, ON AN INDICTMENT FOR THE MURDER OF SARAH MARIA CORNELL: CONTAINING AFULL STATEMENT OF THE TESTIMONY, TOGETHER WITH THE ARGUMENTS OF COUNSEL, AND THE CHARGE TO THE JURY: WITH A MAP (Russell, Odiorne and Co.). REV. EPHRAIM K. AVERY
January 13, Sunday: Clara Wieck played her Caprices en forme de valse pour le piano op.2 for the initial time, in a private concert given in her father’s house. She also played what might be the 1st performance of any solo piano music by Robert Schumann, two of the op.3 studies after Nicolò Paganini.
President Andrew Jackson provided a full and succinct explanation for his federalism in terms of the considerable contempt he held toward weakness: “nothing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad.”
HMS Beagle, south of 48° off False Cape Horn, was being “Sorely Tried.” After 4PM, between the Ildefonsos and Diego Ramirez, it had a sea roller heel it well over, breaking over its quarter and poop decks. Its bowsprit was sprung, its lee-quarter gig was carried away, and some netting and one of the ship’s barometers. “Mr. Darwin’s collections, in the poop and forecastle cabins on deck, were much injured.” After the vessel had righted itself and the water had poured off its deck, the crew brought it to anchor under shelter of the land in Wind Bound Bay, where Charles Darwin wrote in his journal: The gale does not abate: if the Beagle was not an excellent sea- boat & our tackle in good condition, we should be in distress. A less gale has dismasted & foundered many a good ship. The worst part of the business is our not exactly knowing our position: it has an awkward sound to hear the officers repeatedly telling the look out man to look well to leeward. — Our horizon was limited to a small compass by the spray carried by the wind: — the sea looked ominous, there was so much foam that it resembled a dreary plain covered by patches of drifted snow. — Whilst we were heavily labouring, it was curious to see how the Albatross with its widely expanded wings, glided right up the wind. At noon the storm was at its height; & we began to suffer; a HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW great sea struck us & came on board; the after tackle of the quarter boat gave way & an axe being obtained they were instantly obliged to cut away one of the beautiful whale-boats. — the same sea filled our decks so deep, that if another had followed it is not difficult to guess the result. — It is not easy to imagine what a state of confusion the decks were in from the great body of water. — At last the ports were knocked open & she again rose buoyant to the sea. — In the evening it moderated & we made out Cape Spencer (near Wigwam cove), & running in, anchored behind false Cape Horn. — As it was dark there was difficulty in finding a place; but as the men & officers from constant wet were much tired, the anchor was “let go” in the unusual depth of 47 fathoms. — The luxury of quiet water after being involved in such a warring of the elements is indeed great. — It could have been no ordinary one, since Capt. FitzRoy considers it the worst gale he was ever in. — It is a disheartening reflection; that it is now 24 days since doubling Cape Horn, since which there has been constant bad weather, & we are now not much above 20 miles from it.
March 4, Monday: The Miguelites besieging Oporto in Portugal attempted another assault, that again failed.
The ailing President Andrew Jackson and his Vice President Martin Van Buren rode together to the Capitol from the White House in a carriage made of timbers from the USS Constitution. Due to cold weather and presidential poor health, if not to embarrassment at the antics of the 1st inauguration, the 2d inauguration was
not so noteworthy. For the first and only time, the election for Vice President had been decided by the Senate, as provided for by the Constitution when the electoral college could not select a winner. The selected Vice President, Richard M. Johnson, was administered his oath in the Senate Chamber. The President was administered his oath of office in the Hall of the House of Representatives. Chief Justice John Marshall administered the oath of office for the 9th and last time. The President delivered his brief inaugural address. That evening, for the 1st time, 2 inaugural balls were held, one at Carusi’s and the other at the Central Masonic Hall. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Prexy Veep
1789-1797 George Washington No party John Adams 1789-1797
1797- 1801 John Adams Federalist Thomas Jefferson 1797- 1801
1801-1809 Thomas Jefferson Democratic- Aaron Burr 1801-1805 Republican George Clinton 1805-1809
1809-1817 James Madison Democratic- George Clinton 1809-1812 Republican [No “Veep”] April 1812-March 1813 Elbridge Gerry 1813-1814 [No “Veep”] November 1814-March 1817
1817-1825 James Monroe Democratic- Daniel D. Tompkins 1817-1825 Republican
1825-1829 John Quincy Adams Democratic- John Caldwell Calhoun 1825-1829 Republican
1829-1837 Andrew Jackson Democrat John Caldwell Calhoun 1829-1832 [No “Veep”] December 1832-March 1833 Martin Van Buren 1833-1837
1837-1841 Martin Van Buren Democrat Richard M. Johnson 1837-1841
1841 William Henry Harrison Whig John Tyler 1841
1841-1845 John Tyler Whig [No “Veep”] 1841-1845
1845-1849 James Knox Polk Democrat George M. Dallas 1845-1849
1849-1850 Zachary Taylor Whig Millard Fillmore 1849-1850
1850-1853 Millard Fillmore Whig [No “Veep”] 1850-1853
1853-1857 Franklin Pierce Democrat William R. King 1853 [No “Veep”] April 1853-March 1857
1857-1861 James Buchanan Democrat John C. Breckinridge 1857-1861
1861-1865 Abraham Lincoln Republican Hannibal Hamlin 1861-1865 Andrew Johnson 1865
1865-1869 Andrew Johnson Democrat / [No “Veep”] 1865-1869 National Union HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Fellow-Citizens: The will of the American people, expressed through their unsolicited suffrages, calls me before you to pass through the solemnities preparatory to taking upon myself the duties of President of the United States for another term. For their approbation of my public conduct through a period which has not been without its difficulties, and for this renewed expression of their confidence in my good intentions, I am at a loss for terms adequate to the expression of my gratitude. It shall be displayed to the extent of my humble abilities in continued efforts so to administer the Government as to preserve their liberty and promote their happiness. So many events have occurred within the last four years which have necessarily called forth—sometimes under circumstances the most delicate and painful— my views of the principles and policy which ought to be pursued by the General Government that I need on this occasion but allude to a few leading considerations connected with some of them. The foreign policy adopted by our Government soon after the formation of our present Constitution, and very generally pursued by successive Administrations, has been crowned with almost complete success, and has elevated our character among the nations of the earth. To do justice to all and to submit to wrong from none has been during my Administration its governing maxim, and so happy have been its results that we are not only at peace with all the world, but have few causes of controversy, and those of minor importance, remaining unadjusted. In the domestic policy of this Government there are two objects which especially deserve the attention of the people and their representatives, and which have been and will continue to be the subjects of my increasing solicitude. They are the preservation of the rights of the several States and the integrity of the Union. These great objects are necessarily connected, and can only be attained by an enlightened exercise of the powers of each within its appropriate sphere in conformity with the public will constitutionally expressed. To this end it becomes the duty of all to yield a ready and patriotic submission to the laws constitutionally enacted, and thereby promote and strengthen a proper confidence in those institutions of the several States and of the United States which the people themselves have ordained for their own government. My experience in public concerns and the observation of a life somewhat advanced confirm the opinions long since imbibed by me, that the destruction of our State governments or the annihilation of their control over the local concerns of the people would lead directly to revolution and anarchy, and finally to despotism and military domination. In proportion, therefore, as the General Government encroaches upon the rights of the States, in the same proportion does it impair its own power and detract from its ability to fulfill the purposes of its creation. Solemnly impressed with these considerations, my countrymen will ever find me ready to exercise my constitutional powers in arresting measures which may directly or indirectly encroach upon the rights of the States or tend to consolidate all political power in the General Government. But of equal, and, indeed, of incalculable, importance is the union of these States, and the sacred duty of all to contribute to its preservation by a liberal support of the General Government in the exercise of its just powers. You have been wisely admonished to “accustom yourselves to think and speak of the Union as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity, watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety, discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of any attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” Without union our independence and liberty would never have been achieved; without union they never can be maintained. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Divided into twenty-four, or even a smaller number, of separate communities, we shall see our internal trade burdened with numberless restraints and exactions; communication between distant points and sections obstructed or cut off; our sons made soldiers to deluge with blood the fields they now till in peace; the mass of our people borne down and impoverished by taxes to support armies and navies, and military leaders at the head of their victorious legions becoming our lawgivers and judges. The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union. In supporting it, therefore, we support all that is dear to the freeman and the philanthropist. The time at which I stand before you is full of interest. The eyes of all nations are fixed on our Republic. The event of the existing crisis will be decisive in the opinion of mankind of the practicability of our federal system of government. Great is the stake placed in our hands; great is the responsibility which must rest upon the people of the United States. Let us realize the importance of the attitude in which we stand before the world. Let us exercise forbearance and firmness. Let us extricate our country from the dangers which surround it and learn wisdom from the lessons they inculcate. Deeply impressed with the truth of these observations, and under the obligation of that solemn oath which I am about to take, I shall continue to exert all my faculties to maintain the just powers of the Constitution and to transmit unimpaired to posterity the blessings of our Federal Union. At the same time, it will be my aim to inculcate by my official acts the necessity of exercising by the General Government those powers only that are clearly delegated; to encourage simplicity and economy in the expenditures of the Government; to raise no more money from the people than may be requisite for these objects, and in a manner that will best promote the interests of all classes of the community and of all portions of the Union. Constantly bearing in mind that in entering into society “individuals must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest,” it will be my desire so to discharge my duties as to foster with our brethren in all parts of the country a spirit of liberal concession and compromise, and, by reconciling our fellow-citizens to those partial sacrifices which they must unavoidably make for the preservation of a greater good, to recommend our invaluable Government and Union to the confidence and affections of the American people. Finally, it is my most fervent prayer to that Almighty Being before whom I now stand, and who has kept us in His hands from the infancy of our Republic to the present day, that He will so overrule all my intentions and actions and inspire the hearts of my fellow-citizens that we may be preserved from dangers of all kinds and continue forever a united and happy people. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June: The city of Philadelphia presented President Andrew Jackson with a white horse. He was immediately limned, astride this animal, by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl.
This horse was named, or he named it, “Sam Patch,” after the famous Pawtucket, Rhode Island “jumper,” and it would become his favorite.78 He would ride it every morning at the Hermitage during his retirement. When the horse eventually would die, its body would be buried at the Hermitage with full military honors. This happens to be is one Sam Patch’s, but not the other Sam Patch’s, gravestone (and from the dates on this inscription you ought to be able to figure out for yourself, whether it marks the buried body of the man, who
78. Paul E. Johnson’s SAM PATCH, THE FAMOUS JUMPER (NY: Hill & Wang). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW received no funeral, or the buried body of the horse, which was buried with full military honors):
President Jackson also made himself during this year the first American president to ride on a railroad train (the Baltimore & Ohio RR, completed in 1830) — the first American president, that is, other than the presidents of the various railroad companies.
During this year, also, “Long Knife” Jackson stopped by Norwich, Connecticut to dedicate a memorial to Uncas, the man who had inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Next to the stone commemorating the sachem, there are stones for the sachem’s grandchildren — so much for this romantic idea that Uncas was the end of his line! –Perhaps it was just a fantasy, perhaps this was just what the white man secretly wanted?
The Compromise Tariff Act, written by Henry Clay, was passed by the United States Congress, and signed into law by President Jackson. The law was meant to resolve the bitter conflict concerning “nullification,” inspired by the Tariff of Abominations (1828), between industrialists in the north and cotton exporters of the South. It stipulated that by 1842, no tariff was to exceed 20%.
President Jackson pursued the banking system with a vengeance. During this year he forced the removal of the federal deposits from the national bank vaults, distributing them among a select group of “pet banks,” a move that led the Senate to adopt formal resolutions censuring his actions as arbitrary and unconstitutional. Excessive retrenchment by the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, created a financial depression in 1834 sufficient to win Jackson another victory over a new opposition party, the Whigs, which in the congressional elections of 1834 represented themselves as the combined forces of all anti-Jacksonians protesting the tyrannies of “King Andrew I.” Jackson was equally successful in foreign affairs. In 1830 a long dispute with Britain had been ended with the reopening of British West Indian ports to American commerce. France would be brought to heel in 1836 after resisting payment of spoliation claims dating from 1815, and in 1837, Jackson would formally recognized the independence of Texas, although he would resist attempts at annexation in order to avoid splitting the Democratic party on the slavery question. Jackson’s last months in office would be clouded by the consequences of his destruction of the national bank. That would be followed by wildcat expansion of paper money, land speculation, and inflation, which Jackson would attempt to halt with the Specie Circular of 1836, requiring payment of federal obligations in gold or silver. This measure likely would help precipitate the Panic of 1837, but by that time Jackson would have yielded office to his successor, Van Buren, whose victory in 1836 over a disorganized Whig party would be in large measure a testimony to the political invincibility of his patron. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June: President Andrew Jackson visited Newport, Rhode Island and then, at the “Linden Place” mansion in downtown Bristol, the President was entertained by William Henry DeWolf.79
While the President stayed overnight at Providence’s City Hotel, Friend Moses Brown managed to visit him despite his 95 years and despite his severe and debilitating vertigo, mentioning that he had come down to meet him simply because he’d “met all the others.” The aged man “thee’d” and “thou’d” Old Hickory after the Quaker manner, and invited him to visit the Yearly Meeting School, an invitation which the President was able to honor on the following day. The next morning, the Pawtucket artillery’s salute shattered a number of windows (repair costs would be reimbursed). As the President reached the bridge at the state line of Massachusetts, he was welcomed by Josiah Quincy, Jr.
Passing through Boston, the president was ill, and was unable to view the new figurehead of the USS Constitution, shaped in his image.
When President Jackson arrived at Salem, Massachusetts, a large parade had been organized, but he was ill and was taken directly to his hotel. The people who cheered the presidential carriage were not aware that in the dusk they were cheering merely the shadowy bowing figures of Josiah Quincy, Jr. and Martin Van Buren inside the carriage, rather than the President himself. Nathaniel Hawthorne was present and cheered with the deluded crowd, for he happened to believe that this genocidal racist, this precursor of Adolf Hitler, was
the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the cunninger the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.
But then, Hawthorne never had much judgment in these matters, as witness the fact that later in life he was willing to write a campaign biography for a drunkard who couldn’t even stay on a horse, and lie about this man’s racist attitudes, and help him become President of the United States, not out of any belief that he was the best person for the job but because of a personal connection (Franklin Pierce had been a “college buddy”)
79. Birds of a feather flock together. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Pretty Boy Admires His Hero and purely out of the expectation and hope that thereby he would receive a personal and magnificent reward.
President Jackson, in making his triumphal tour of the North, was escorted by Josiah Quincy, Jr., son of the Josiah Quincy who had been the president of Harvard College. Jackson’s appearance in Cambridge to pick up his obligatory, honorary Harvard degree became something of a spectacle when, as a man of the people, he mocked an address in Latin by spouting nonsense Latin.80
[NOTE: Compare and contrast this episode with Thoreau’s later remark about John Brown, with regard to the comparative unimportance of being able to set a Greek accent remark at the correct slant, versus being able to prop a fallen human being into an upright posture.]
80. Quincy, Josiah. Jr. “President Jackson Gives ’Em a Little Latin,” pages 364-7 in THE HARVARD BOOK: SELECTIONS FROM THREE CENTURIES. Bentinck-Smith, William, ed. (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, revised edition 1982). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June 21, Friday: Andrew Jackson visited Boston.
June 24, Monday: The USS Constitution, saved from the salvage yard by the famous poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was the 1st ship to enter the new John Quincy Adams Drydock at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and would remain in drydock through 1834.81 While this frigate was being repaired, a controversy arose over its new figurehead, which represented Andrew Jackson.
From this day to the 29th, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Cambridge, attending meetings of the British Association.
81. This ship had been designed by a Philadelphia Quaker, Friend Joshua Humphreys, who evidently had held no qualms about the creation of such an instrument for killing. He designed a frigate that would normally carry 44 cannon, although eventually the Constitution would be mounted with more than 50 cannon, some firing a 12-pound or an 18-pound ball, some a 32-pound ball, some a 24-pound bundle of round shot, some a lead canister of small shot and miscellaneous deadly junk. For speed, Friend Joshua designed the hull to resemble underwater “a cod’s head and a mackerel’s tail.” To withstand enemy shot and shell, the ribs of the ship were placed only about an inch apart. Which is to say, at most places the hull of this ship is two or three feet thick. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1834
The Ohio Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Zanesville.
Theodatus Garlick graduated from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. While a college student he had prepared wax medallion portraits of Dean of the Faculty Eli Geddings and of several of his professors, and had been invited to fashion wax medallion portraits also of Dr. Jared Kirtland, Henry Clay, and President Andrew Jackson (the President had in fact sat for him 4 times).
Fire destroyed much of the main house at The Hermitage in Tennessee.
By a vote of 28 to 18, the US Senate censured President Andrew Jackson.
(But see the events of 1837 ) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW January 29, Wednesday: President Andrew Jackson instructed Secretary of War Lewis Cass to use troops to quell workers’ riots along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal — this would be the initial use of federal troops to quell labor conflicts.
The waters of the Thames River passing through London were so extraordinarily high that it was necessary to have watermen to convey Londoners from street to street.
Fellow student Augustus Goddard Peabody checked out for David Henry Thoreau, presumably from Harvard Library, GRECIAN ANTIQUITIES OR, AN ACCOUNT OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE OF THE GREEKS; RELATING TO THEIR GOVERNMENT, LAWS, MAGISTRACY, JUDICIAL PROCEEDINGS, NAVAL AND MILITARY AFFAIRS, RELIGION, ORACLES, FESTIVALS, GAMES, EXERCISES, MARRIAGES, FUNERALS, DOMESTIC EMPLOYMENTS, ENTERTAINMENTS, FOOD, DRESS, MUSIC, PAINTING, PUBLIC BUILDINGS, HARBOURS, BATHS, &C. &C. CHIEFLY DESIGNED TO EXPLAIN WORDS IN THE GREEK CLASSICS, ACCORDING TO THE RITES AND CUſTOMS TO WHICH THEY REFER. TO WHICH IS ADDED, A CHRONOLOGY OF REMARKABLE EVENTS IN THE GRECIAN HISTORY, FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE KINGDOM OF ARGOS UNDER INACHUS, TO THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER. BY THE REV. THOMAS HARWOOD, LATE OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. (London: Printed for T. Cadell & W. Davies, in the Strand, 1801). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
GRECIAN ANTIQUITIES
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 29 of 1 M / Moy [Monthly] Meeting held in Providence With the exception of a short testimny from H R - it was silent - both to me pretty good Meetings. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.
March 28, Good Friday, and March 29, Great Saturday: President Andrew Jackson was censured by the Whig-dominated US Congress for failing to turn over cabinet documents relating to the dismantling of the Bank of the United States (this censure would be expunged by a Democrat-dominated US Congress in 1837).
The Liberator.
According to English traveler Robert Curzon reporting in 1849, Christian pilgrims had been jammed into the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem since midnight, preparing to participate in a ceremony of the Holy Fire. The church was filled to standing-room capacity with the exception of a gallery reserved for the Turkish governor of Jerusalem, Ibrahim Pasha, and his English guests.
The ceremony marks the occurrence of the longest-attested annual miracle of the Christian world, an event that has been consecutively documented since 1106AD. Each year the Tomb of Christ is carefully inspected by neutral authorities to verify that it contains no mechanism for the making of fire. Before the patriarch enters he takes off his garments and submits himself to careful examination to verify that he is not carrying any technical means for the creation of a flame. When he enters the chamber he is carrying only a bundle of 33 white candles, and when he emerges, they are alight. It is reported that during the first 33 minutes of this fire, it cannot be made to burn the hair, faces, or clothing of the worshipers. Goy vey! The people were by this time become furious; they were worn out General Andrew “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW with standing in such a crowd all night and as the time approached for the exhibition of the holy fire could not contain themselves for joy. Their excitement increased until about one o’clock a magnificent procession moved out of the Greek chapel. It conducted the Patriarch three times round the tomb; after which he took off his robes of cloth of silver, and went into the sepulchre, the door of which was then closed. The agitation of the pilgrims was now extreme; they screamed aloud, and the dense mass of people shook to and fro, like a field of corn in the wind. There is a round hole in one part of the chapel over the sepulchre, and up to this the man who had agreed to pay the highest sum for this honour was conducted by a strong guard of soldiers. There was silence for a minute; and then a light appeared out of the tomb, and the happy pilgrim received the holy fire from the Patriarch within. It consisted of a bundle of thin wax candles, lit, and enclosed in an iron frame to prevent their being torn asunder and put out in the crowd; for a furious battle commenced immediately; everyone being so eager to obtain the holy light, that one man put out the candle of his neighbour in trying to light his own. This was the whole of the ceremony: no sermon, no prayers, nothing except a little chanting during the processions. Soon you saw the lights increasing in all directions, everyone having lit his candle from the holy flame: the chapels, the galleries and every corner where a candle could possibly be displayed, immediately appeared to be in a blaze. The people in their frenzy put bunches of lighted tapers to their faces, hands, and breasts, to purify themselves from their sins. In a short time the smoke of the candles obscured everything in the place, and I could see it rolling in great volumes out of the aperture at the top of the dome. The smell was terrible; and three unhappy people, overcome by heat and bad air, fell from the upper range of galleries, and were dashed to pieces on the heads of the people below. One poor Armenian lady, seventeen years of age, died where she sat, of heat, thirst, and fatigue. After a while, when he had seen all that was to be seen, Ibrahim Pasha got up and went away, his numerous guards making a line for him by main force through the dense mass of people which filled the body of the church. As the crowd was so immense, we waited for a little while, and then set out all together to return to our convent. I went first and my friends followed me, the soldiers making way for us across the church. I got as far as the place where the Virgin is said to have stood during the Crucifixion, when I saw a number of people lying one on another all about this part of the church, and as far as I could see towards the door. I made my way between them as well as I could, till they were so thick that there was actually a great heap of bodies on which I trod. It then suddenly struck me they were all dead! I had not perceived this at first, for I thought they were only very much fatigued with the ceremonies, and had lain down to rest themselves there; but when I came to so great a heap of bodies I looked down at them, and saw that sharp, hard appearance of the face which is never to be mistaken. Many of them were quite black with suffocation, and further on were others all bloody and covered with the brains and entrails of those who had been trodden to pieces by the crowd. At this time there was no crowd in this part of the church; but a little further on, round the corner towards the great door, the people, who were quite panic-struck, continued HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW to press forward, and everyone was doing his utmost to escape. The guards outside, frightened at the rush from within, thought that the Christians wished to attack them, and the confusion soon grew into a battle. The soldiers with their bayonets killed numbers of fainting wretches, and the walls were spattered with blood and brains of men w ho had been felled, like oxen, with the butt-ends of the soldiers’ muskets. Everyone struggled to defend himself or to get away, and in the mêlée all who fell were immediately trampled to death by the rest. So desperate and savage did the fight become, that even t he panic-struck and frightened pilgrims appeared at last to have been more intent upon the destruction of each other than desirous to ave themselves. For my part, as soon as I perceived the danger, I had cried out to my companions to turn back, which they ha done; but I myself was carried on by the press till I came near the door, where all were fighting for their lives. Here, seeing certain destruction before me, I made every endeavour to get back. An officer of the Pasha, who by his star was a colonel, equally alarmed with myself, was also trying to return; he caught hold of my cloak and pulled me down on the body of an old man who was breathing out his last sigh. As the officer was pressing me to the ground, we wrestled together among the dying and the dead with the energy of despair. I struggled with this man till I pulled him down, and happily got again upon my legs — (I afterwards found that he never rose again). I stood up for a minute among the press of people, held up on the uncomfortable footing of dead bodies by the dense crowd who were squeezed together in this narrow part of the church. We all stood still for a short time, when of a sudden the crowd swayed, a cry arose, the crowd opened, and I found myself standing in the centre of a line of men, with another line opposite to me, all pale and ghastly with torn and bloody clothes, and there we stood glaring at each other; but in a moment a sudden impulse seized upon us, with a shriek that echoed in the long aisles of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the two adverse lines dashed at each other, and I was soon engaged tearing and wrestling with a thin, half naked man, whose legs were smeared with blood. The crowd again fell back, and by desperate fighting and hard struggles, I made my way back into the body of the church, where I found my friends, and we succeeded in reaching the sacristy of the Catholics, and thence the room which had been assigned to us by the monks, but not without a fierce conflict at the door of the sacristy with a crowd of frightened pilgrims who tried to press through with us. I thanked God for my escape — I had a narrow chance. The dead were lying in heaps, even upon the stone of unction; and I saw full four hundred unhappy people, dead and living, heaped promiscuously one upon another, in some places about five feet high. Ibrahim Pasha had left the church only a few minutes before me, and very narrowly escaped with his life; he was so pressed upon by the crowd on all sides, and it was said attacked by several of them, that it was only by the greatest exertions of his suite, several of whom were killed, that he gained the outer court. He fainted more than once in the struggle, and I was told that some of his attendants at last had to cut a way for him with their swords through the dense ranks of the frantic pilgrims. He remained outside, giving orders for the removal of the corpses, and making his men drag out the bodies of those who appeared to be still alive from the heaps HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW of the dead.
December: During this month, and January 1835, Andrew Jackson would be sitting at the age of 68 to be modeled from life by Hiram Powers at the White House. “Make me as I am,” the old man instructed. This marble bust would not be finished until 1839 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1835
In Washington DC, the 1st central heating system was installed in the White House. Andrew Jackson created the executive mansion’s orangery. Not necessarily in this year but at some unknown point between 1829 and 1837, he had his slaves bring up from the grounds of his Hermitage plantation near Nashville TN a cutting from one of his southern magnolia trees, and had them plant this cutting near the steps leading from the South Portico to what now is the Rose Garden and the South Lawn of the Executive Mansion. He had his slaves do
this for him in memory of his wife Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson, a white woman who had died just before he took office. (He loved his wife very much, in fact one of the white men he had killed, he had killed either because he loved his wife very much or because he loved honor very much and supposed that killing white people was a demonstration of this honor.)82 This graceful tree is now depicted on the back of our $20.00 bill, toward the left as we face the White House:
January: The President, age 68, continued to sit to be modeled from life by Hiram Powers at the White House. The marble bust would not be finished until 1839, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Make me as I am,” Andrew Jackson instructed.
82. But see the event of September 12, 1994: Long Knife Jackson killed nonwhite people too, but that assuredly was not because he was demonstrating his honor and does not seem to have been he loved his wife — in general, he just enjoyed killing someone, it made a day a special day. The Washington newspapers stated that he planted this cutting, quote unquote; however, planting trees would not have been something this man would have enjoyed doing for himself, like killing people –planting a tree was never the sort of thing that made a day a special day for him– but was rather one of that category of things he enjoyed ordering other people to do at his convenience, as he sat in the portico and stirred his bourbon-and-branchwater. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW January 30, Sunday: Seminole headman Osceola died in prison.
Richard Lawrence attempted to discharge a brace of brass derringers at President Andrew Jackson while he was attending the funeral service in the chamber of the House of Representatives for deceased Representative Warren R. Davis. Both pistols misfired because although the percussion caps detonated, the powder failed to ignite. The President rushed at the would-be assassin and repeatedly clubbed him with his walking stick (when the derringers would be reloaded and tested, both would discharge on the 1st try and the projectiles would penetrate inch boards at 30 feet, so the preferred hypothesis became that on this very misty day, the powder in the brass pistols, a design which was known to be problematic, had become just damp enough not to ignite). Lawrence, an unemployed house painter who had come to believe that he was the unrecognized heir to the British throne and the US government owed him a phenomenal amount of money, would be locked up in a mental institution for the remainder of his life.
A report of an interesting incident aboard the Pilgrim in Monterey harbor.
AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: Sunday came again while we were at Monterey, but as before, it brought us no holyday. The people on shore dressed themselves and came off in greater numbers than ever, and we were employed all day in boating and breaking out cargo, so that we had hardly time to eat. Our cidevant second mate, who was determined to get liberty if it was to be had, dressed himself in a long coat and black hat, and polished his shoes, and went aft and asked to go ashore. He could not have done a more imprudent thing; for he knew that no liberty would be given; and besides, sailors, however sure they may be of having liberty granted them always go aft in their working clothes, to appear as though they had no reason to expect anything, and then wash, dress, and shave, after they get their liberty. But this poor fellow was always getting into hot water, and if there was a wrong way of doing a thing, was sure to hit upon it. We looked to see him go aft, knowing pretty well what his reception would be. The captain was walking the quarter-deck, smoking his morning cigar, and F______went as far as the break of the deck, and there waited for him to notice him. The captain took two or three turns, and then walking directly up to him, surveyed him from head to foot, and lifting up his forefinger, said a word or two, in a tone too low for us to hear, but which had a magical effect upon poor F______. He walked forward, sprang into the forecastle, and in a moment more made his appearance in his common clothes, and went quietly to work again, What the captain said to him, we never could get him to tell, but it certainly changed him outwardly and inwardly in a most surprising manner.
February: The Boston attorney David Lee Child sent his wife Lydia Maria Child to Washington DC, to appeal to Attorney General Benjamin Butler and then to President Andrew Jackson on behalf of a prisoner, for a stay of execution. (Since the Spaniards aboard the pirate vessel Panda would be hanged in Boston in June, and since the master of that vessel would be pardoned by the President, and since David was in fact the defense attorney on that case, may we presume that Maria’s visit asking for a stay of execution had to do with these pirates?) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June 11, Thursday: Pedro Gilbert, Manuel Costello, Monelle Bogga, Jose Bassello De Costa, and Angeloa Garcia, Spanish pirates from aboard the Panda, were hanged in the rear of the Leverett Street jail of Boston. Although the Reverend Henry C. Wright had faithfully attended the trials in Boston of the accused dozen pirates, on the day of execution of the 6 who had committed murder he was so alienated by the jeering, drunken mob of spectators that he had to walk away before the hangings began.83
(One of the convicted men, Don Bernardo de Soto, a native of Corunna, Spain and the mate and owner of the pirate vessel Panda, had been pardoned by President Andrew Jackson after a personal appeal from his lovely young wife, Donna Petrona Pereyra de Soto, and on consideration of his having while previously the captain of the brig Leon rescued 70 individuals on board the American ship Minerva during a voyage from Philadelphia to Havana.)
83. Beginning at about this point, in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, the authorities were becoming uncomfortable and embarrassed at the enthusiasm with which the crowds attending public hangings were greeting the public humiliation of the condemned. Sheriffs gradually would be beginning to enhance their personal standing among the influential members of the communities which they served, by carrying out such executions within prison courtyards to which they could admit as spectators only the privileged few to whom they might be willing to grant passes.
During this year, also, England was beginning to proscribe the use of hanging as a punishment for housebreaking, forgery, and “bodily harm dangerous to life with the intent to murder.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Andrew Jackson, President of the United States of America, to all to whom these presents shall come,
Greeting: Whereas, at the October Term, 1834, of the Circuit Court of the United States, Bernardo de Soto was convicted of Piracy, and sentenced to be hung on the 11th day of March last from which sentence a respite was granted him for three months, bearing date the third day of March, 1835, also a subsequent one, dated on the fifth day of June, 1835, for sixty days. And whereas the said Bernardo de Soto has been represented as a fit subject for executive clemency —
Now therefore, I, Andrew Jackson, President of the United States of America, in consideration of the premises, divers good and sufficient causes me thereto moving, have pardoned, and hereby do pardon the said Bernardo de Soto, from and after the 11th August next, and direct that he be then discharged from confinement. In testimony whereof I have hereunto subscribed my name, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed to these presents.
Done at the City of Washington the sixth day of July, AD. 1835, and of the independence of the United States and sixtieth.
Andrew Jackson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW October: The British abolitionist lecturer George Thompson, after having been met with brickbats in Concord,
New Hampshire and garbage, raw eggs, and rocks in Lowell MA, and after being seriously injured by being hit in the face with a rock in Ohio, and having been denounced by President Andrew Jackson in a message to Congress, took passage in Boston for return to England. His return plans were made in secret because of concern that pro-slavery activists would attempt to kidnap him (presumably to tar and feather him).84 To the people who were engaging in the antislavery struggle, this year of 1835 would become known as “the mob year.” In the face of William Lloyd Garrison’s campaign to use the postal system to distribute abolitionist literature, the President proposed that Congress impose censorship, banning all these incendiary abolitionist pieces of literature from delivery by the US Mail. And, in fact, in South Carolina and in Washington DC, groups of indignant citizens had mobilized into vigilante committees which were sitting around opening mail bags, and removing and destroying abolitionist communications. ABOLITIONISM
October 21, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson made a note in his journal about an initial visit to his home in Concord by Bronson Alcott:
Last Saturday night came hither Mr Alcott & spent the Sabbath with me. A wise man, simple, superior to display. & drops the best things as quietly as the least. Every man, he said, is a Revelation, & ought to write his Record. But few with the pen.
That night, just back in Boston from his visit to Emerson in Concord, Alcott would be visiting William Lloyd Garrison in the jail on Leverett Street. (What was Garrison doing in the Boston lockup? –Read on.)
Having met with brickbats in Concord, New Hampshire and garbage, raw eggs, and rocks in Lowell MA, and having been seriously injured by being hit in the face with a rock in Ohio, and having been denounced by President Andrew Jackson in a message to Congress, the English anti-slavery reformer George Thompson had been reduced to making his return plans in secret because of concern that pro-slavery activists would attempt to kidnap him (presumably to tar and feather him).85 He had fled Boston Harbor in a rowboat in order to board a British ship leaving for New Brunswick.
84. George Thompson fled Boston in a rowboat in order to board a British ship. Safely back in England, he would win election to Parliament. 85. Safely back in England, George Thompson would be elected to Parliament. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Back ashore, in what would come to be known as the “Gentlemen’s Riot” carried out by a downtown Boston group of swells associated with State Street and Milk Street which sometimes referred to itself as “the broadcloth mob,” what had been planned as a protest against a scheduled lecture by Thompson on behalf of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society transformed itself into a mob of several thousand persons which stormed the meeting while the women prayed for the protection of God. They came uncomfortably close to tarring and feathering the substitute speaker.86
STATE STREET, BOSTON
This substitute, Garrison, was saved only by the intervention of Boston’s mayor, who –despite the fact that there was a mayoral election coming up in December– dealt personally with this proslavery mob.
To the people who were engaging in the antislavery struggle, this year of 1835 would become known as “the mob year.” The riot against Garrison in Boston was far from the only one. The North was having what Grimsted refers to as a “riot conversation” with the South, in an attempt to reassure it that its institution of human enslavement would be tolerated, and that opposition to this institution would not be allowed to interfere with the flow of business. There was therefore also an assault on this day upon Henry B. Stanton in Newport, and an assault upon Samuel May in Montpelier. No great personal injury or property damage resulted, as that was not the point: PAGE 27 GRIMSTED: The day’s riotous work was the North’s final offering of works to prove the sincerity of its stream of words against abolition ... few in the South noted how little damage to property and none to people these careful mobs perpetrated.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould recorded in his journal: 4th day 21 of 10 M / We rode to Portsmouth to attend the Select Meeting - After which we went to Aunt Stantons & spent the Afternoon with her in sympathy with her lonely situation
86. This mob was witnessed by William Cooper Nell, who, being himself a person of color, of course was unable to interfere. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW At this annual meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society at the Anti-Slavery Hall, the women were trapped in rooms on the 3d floor as the mob roamed the corridors of the building. The mayor of Boston belatedly arrived with a group of policemen and got the women to disperse, but Garrison was in his office and was left alone in the building with the mob. When he crawled through the back window and jumped down into the street, someone saw him and the mob gave chase. He was cornered in a 2d-floor room above a carpenter’s shop into which he had dodged, whereupon there was a wrestling match to see whether he would be flung from the window, or into a tar kettle that had been prepared. The police jailed for the night for his own safety, in the jail on Leverett Street, and he inscribed on the wall there that his offense was “preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that all men have been created equal.” Here is a fuller account of the action: It was in the midst of such intense and widespread excitement that Boston called its meeting to abolish the Abolitionists. It was the month of August, and the heat of men’s passions was as great as the heat of the August sun. The moral atmosphere of the city was so charged with inflammable gases that the slightest spark would have sufficed to produce an explosion. The Abolitionists felt this and carried themselves the while with unusual circumspection. They deemed it prudent to publish an address to neutralize the falsehoods with which they were assailed by their enemies. The address drawn up by Garrison for the purpose was thought “too fiery for the present time,” by his more cautious followers and was rejected. The Liberator office had already been threatened in consequence of a fiery article by the editor, denouncing the use of Faneuil Hall for the approaching pro-slavery meeting. It seemed to the unawed and indignant champion of liberty that it were “better that the winds should scatter it in fragments over the whole earth — better that an earthquake should engulf it — than that it should be used for so unhallowed and detestable a purpose!” The anti- abolition feeling of the town had become so bitter and intense that Henry E. Benson, then clerk in the anti-slavery office, writing on the 19th of the month, believed that there were persons in Boston, who would assassinate George Thompson in broad daylight, and doubted whether Garrison or Samuel J. May would be safe in Faneuil Hall on the day of the meeting, and what seemed still more significant of the inflamed state of the public mind, was the confidence with which he predicted that a mob would follow the meeting. The wild-cat-like spirit was in the air — in the seething heart of the populace. The meeting was held August 21st, in the old cradle of liberty. To its call alone fifteen hundred names were appended. It was a Boston audience both as to character and numbers, an altogether imposing affair, over whom the mayor of the city presided and before whom two of the most consummate orators of the commonwealth fulmined against the Abolitionists. One of their hearers, a young attorney of twenty-four, who listened to Peleg Sprague and Harrison Gray Otis that day, described sixteen years afterward the latter and the effects produced by him on that audience. Our young attorney vividly recalled how “‘Abolitionist’ was linked with contempt, in the silver tones of Otis, and all the charms that a divine eloquence and most felicitous diction could throw around a bad cause were given it; the excited multitude seemed actually ready to leap up beneath the magic of his speech. It would be something, if one must die, to die by such a hand — a hand somewhat worthy and able to stifle anti-slavery, if it could be stifled. The orator was worthy of the gigantic task attempted; and thousands crowded before him, every one of their hearts melted by that eloquence, beneath HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW which Massachusetts had bowed, not unworthily, for more than thirty years.” Here is a specimen of the sort of goading which the wild-cat-like spirit of the city got from the orators. It is taken from the speech of Peleg Sprague. The orator is paying his respects to George Thompson, “an avowed emissary” “a professed agitator,” who “comes here from the dark and corrupt institutions of Europe to enlighten us upon the rights of man and the moral duties of our own condition. Received by our hospitality, he stands here upon our soil, protected by our laws, and hurls firebrands, arrows, and death into the habitations of our neighbors and friends, and brothers; and when he shall have kindled a conflagration which is sweeping in desolation over our land, he has only to embark for his own country, and there look serenely back with indifference or exultation upon the widespread ruin by which our cities are wrapt in flames, and our garments rolled in blood.” The great meeting was soon a thing of the past but not so its effects. The echoes of Otis and Sprague did not cease at its close. They thrilled in the air, they thrilled long afterward in the blood of the people. When the multitude dispersed Mischief went out into the streets of the city with them. Wherever afterward they gathered Mischief made one in their midst. Mischief was let loose, Mischief was afoot in the town. The old town was no place for the foreign emissary, neither was it a safe place for the arch-agitator. On the day after the meeting, Garrison and his young wife accordingly retreated to her father’s home at Brooklyn, Conn., where the husband needed not to be jostling elbows with Mistress Mischief, and her pals. Garrison’s answer to the speeches of Otis and Sprague was in his sternest vein. He is sure after reading them that, “there is more guilt attaching to the people of the free States from the continuance of slavery, than those in the slave States.” At least he is ready to affirm upon the authority of Orator Sprague, “that New England is as really a slave-holding section of the republic as Georgia or South Carolina.” Sprague, he finds, “in amicable companionship and popular repute with thieves and adulterers; with slaveholders, slavedealers, and slave-destroyers; ... with the disturbers of the public peace; with the robbers of the public mail; with ruffians who insult, pollute, and lacerate helpless women; and with conspirators against the lives and liberties of New England citizens.” To Otis who was then nearly seventy years of age Garrison addressed his rebuke in tones of singular solemnity. It seemed to him that the aged statesman had transgressed against liberty “under circumstances of peculiar criminality.” “Yet at this solemn period,” the reprobation of the prophet ran, “you have not scrupled, nay, you have been ambitious, to lead and address an excited multitude, in vindication of all imaginable wickedness, embodied in one great system of crime and blood — to pander to the lusts and desires of the robbers of God and his poor — to consign over to the tender mercies of cruel taskmasters, multitudes of guiltless men, women, and children — and to denounce as an ‘unlawful and dangerous association’ a society whose only object is to bring this nation to repentance, through the truth as it is in Jesus.” These audacious and iconoclastic performances of the reformer were not exactly adapted to turn from him the wrath of the idol worshipers. They more likely added fuel to the hot anger burning in Boston against him. Three weeks passed after his departure HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW from the city, and his friends did not deem it safe for him to return. Toward the end of the fourth week of his enforced absence, against which he was chafing not a little, an incident happened in Boston which warned him to let patience have its perfect work. It was on the night of September 17th that the dispositions of the city toward him found grim expression in a gallows erected in front of his house at 23 Brighton street. This ghastly reminder that the fellow-citizens of the editor of the Liberator continued to take a lively interest in him, “was made in real workmanship style, of maple joist five inches through, eight or nine feet high, for the accommodation of two persons.” Garrison and Thompson were the two persons for whom these brave accommodations were prepared. But as neither they nor their friends were in a mood to have trial made of them, the intended occupants consented to give Boston a wide berth, and to be somewhat particular that they did not turn in with her while the homicidal fit lasted. This editing his paper at long range, and this thought of life and safety Garrison did not at all relish. They grew more and more irksome to his fearless and earnest spirit. For his was a “pine-and-fagot” Abolitionism that knew not the fear of men or their wrath. But now he must needs have a care for the peace of mind of his young wife, who was, within a few months, to give birth to a child. And her anxiety for him was very great. Neither was the anxiety of devoted friends and followers to be lightly disregarded. All of which detained the leader in Brooklyn until the 25th of the month, when the danger signals seemed to have disappeared. Whereupon he set out immediately for his post in Boston to be at the head of his forces. He found the city in one of those strange pauses of popular excitement, which might signify the ebb of the tide or only the retreat of the billows. He was not inclined to let the anti-Abolition agitation subside so soon, before it had carried on its flood Abolition principles to wider fields and more abundant harvests in the republic. Anxious lest the cat- like temper of the populace was falling into indifference and apathy, he and his disciples took occasion to prod it into renewed wakefulness and activity. The instruments used for this purpose were anti-slavery meetings and the sharp goad of his Liberator editorials. The city was possessed with the demon of slavery, and its foaming at the mouth was the best of all signs that the Abolition exorcism was working effectively. So, in between the glittering teeth and the terrible paws was thrust the maddening goad, and up sprang the mighty beast horrible to behold. One of these meetings was the anniversary of the formation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society which fell on October 14th. The ladies issued their notice, engaged a hall, and invited George Thompson to address them. Now the foreign emissary was particularly exasperating to Boston sensibility on the subject of slavery. He was the veritable red rag to the pro- slavery bull. The public announcement, therefore, that he was to speak in the city threw the public mind into violent agitation. The Gazette and the Courier augmented the excitement by the recklessness with which they denounced the proposed meeting, the former promising to Thompson a lynching, while the latter endeavored to involve his associates who were to the “manner born” in the popular outbreak, which was confidently predicted in case the “foreign vagrant” wagged his tongue at the time appointed. Notwithstanding the rage of press and people the HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW meeting was postponed through no willingness on the part of the ladies, but because of the panic of the owners of the hall lest their property should be damaged or destroyed in case of a riot. The ladies, thereupon, appointed three o’clock in the afternoon of October 21st as the time, and the hall adjoining the Anti- Slavery Office, at 46 Washington street, as the place where they would hold their adjourned meeting. This time they made no mention of Mr. Thompson’s addressing them, merely announcing several addresses. In fact, an address from Mr. Thompson, in view of the squally outlook, was not deemed expedient. To provide against accidents and disasters, he left the city on the day before the meeting. But this his enemies did not know. They confidently expected that he was to be one of the speakers. An inflammatory handbill distributed on the streets at noon of the 21st seemed to leave no doubt of this circumstance in the pro- slavery portion of the city. The handbill referred to ran as follows: THOMPSON, THE ABOLITIONIST! That infamous foreign scoundrel, THOMPSON, will hold forth this afternoon at the Liberator office. No. 48 Washington street. The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union to snake Thompson out! It will be a contest between the Abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse of $100 has been raised by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson, so that he may be brought to the tar-kettle before dark. Friends of the Union, be vigilant! Boston, Wednesday, 12 o’clock. That Wednesday forenoon Garrison spent at the anti-slavery office, little dreaming of the peril which was to overtake him in that very spot in the afternoon. He went home to an early dinner, since his wife was a member of the society, and he himself was set down for an address. As he wended his way homeward, Mischief and her gang were afoot distributing the aforesaid handbills “in the insurance offices, the reading- rooms, all along State street, in the hotels, bar-rooms, etc.,” and scattering it “among mechanics at the North End, who were mightily taken with it.” Garrison returned about a half hour before the time appointed for the meeting. He found a small crowd of about a hundred individuals collected in front of the building where the hall was situated, and on ascending to the hall more of the same sort, mostly young men, choking the access to it. They were noisy, and Garrison pushed his way through them with difficulty. As he entered the place of meeting and took his seat among the ladies, twenty had already arrived, the gang of young rowdies recognized him and evinced this by the exclamation: “That’s Garrison!” The full significance of the crowd just without the hall did not seem to have occurred to the man whom they had identified. He did not know that they were the foam blown from the mouth of a great mob at the moment filling the streets in the neighborhood of the building where he sat with such serenity of spirit. His wife who had followed him from their home saw what Garrison did not see. The crowd of a hundred had swelled to thousands. It lay in a huge irregular cross, jammed in between the buildings on Washington street, the head lowering in front of the anti-slavery office, the foot reaching HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW to the site where stood Joy building, now occupied by the Rogers, the right arm stretching along Court street to the Court House, and the left encircling the old State House, City Hall and Post- office then, in a gigantic embrace. All hope of urging her way through that dense mass was abandoned by Mrs. Garrison, and a friend, Mr. John E. Fuller, escorted her to his home, where she passed the night. Meantime the atmosphere upstairs at the hall began to betoken a fast approaching storm. The noises ominously increased on the landing just outside. The door of the hall was swung wide open and the entrance filled with rioters. Garrison, all unconscious of danger, walked over to these persons and remonstrated in his grave way with them in regard to the disturbance which they were producing, winding up with a characteristic bit of pleasantry: “Gentlemen,” said he, “perhaps you are not aware that this is a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, called and intended exclusively for ladies, and those only who have been invited to address them. Understanding this fact you will not be so rude and indecorous as to thrust your presence upon this meeting.” But he added, “If, gentlemen, any of you are ladies in disguise — why only apprise me of the fact, give me your names, and I will introduce you to the rest of your sex, and you can take seats among them accordingly.” The power of benignity over malignity lasted a few moments after this little speech, when the situation changed rapidly from bad to worse. “The tumult continually increased,” says an eye-witness, “with horrible execrations, howling, stamping, and finally shrieking with rage. They seemed not to dare to enter, notwithstanding their fury, but mounted on each other’s shoulders, so that a row of hostile heads appeared over the slight partition, of half the height of the wall which divides the society’s rooms from the landing place. We requested them to allow the door to be shut; but they could not decide as to whether the request should be granted, and the door was opened and shut with violence, till it hung useless from its hinges.” Garrison thinking that his absence might quiet these perturbed spirits and so enable the ladies to hold their meeting without further molestation volunteered at this juncture to the president of the society to retire from the hall unless she desired him to remain. She did not wish him to stay but urged him to go at once not only for the peace of the meeting but for his own safety. Garrison thereupon left the hall meaning at the time to leave the building as well, but egress by the way of the landing and the stairs, he directly perceived was impossible, and did what seemed the next best thing, entered the anti- slavery office, separated from the hall by a board partition. Charles C. Burleigh accompanied him within this retreat. The door between the hall and the office was securely locked, and Garrison with that marvelous serenity of mind, which was a part of him, busied himself immediately with writing to a friend an account of the scenes which were enacting in the next room. The tempest had begun in the streets also. The mob from its five thousand throats were howling “Thompson! Thompson!” The mayor of the city, Theodore Lyman, appeared upon the scene, and announced to the gentlemen of property and standing, who were thus exercising their vocal organs, that Mr. Thompson was not at the meeting, was not in the city. But the mayor was a modern Canute before the sea of human passion, which was rushing in over law and authority. He besought the rioters to disperse, but HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW he might as well have besought the waves breaking on Nastasket Beach to disperse. Higher, higher rose the voices; fiercer, fiercer waxed the multitude; more and more frightful became the uproar. The long-pent-up excitement of the city and its hatred of Abolitionists had broken loose at last and the deluge had come. The mayor tossed upon the human inundation as a twig on a mountain stream, and with him for the nonce struggled helplessly the police power of the town also. Upstairs in the hall the society and its president are quite as powerless as the mayor and the police below. Miss Mary S. Parker, the president, is struggling with the customary opening exercises. She has called the meeting to order, read to the ladies some passages from the Bible, and has lifted up her voice in prayer to the All Wise and Merciful One “for direction and succor, and the forgiveness of enemies and revilers.” It is a wonderful scene, a marvelous example of Christian heroism, for in the midst of the hisses and threats and curses of the rioters, the prayer of the brave woman rose clear and untremulous. But now the rioters have thrown themselves against the partition between the landing-place and the hall. They are trying to break it down; now, they have partially succeeded. In another moment they have thrown themselves against the door of the office where Garrison is locked. The lower panel is dashed in. Through the opening they have caught sight of their object, Garrison, serenely writing at his desk. “There he is! That’s Garrison! Out with the scoundrel!” and other such words of recognition and execration, burst from one and another of the mob. The shattering of the partition, the noise of splitting and ripping boards, the sharp crash caused by the shivering of the office door, the loud and angry outcries of the rioters warn the serene occupant of the office that his position has become one of extreme peril. But he does not become excited. His composure does not forsake him. Instead of attempting to escape, he simply turns to his friend, Burleigh, with the words, “You may as well open the door, and let them come in and do their worst.” But fortunately, Burleigh was in no such extremely non-resistant mood. The advent of the mayor and the constables upon the scene at this point rescued Garrison from immediately falling into the hands of the mob, who were cleared out of the hall and from the stairway. Now the voice of the mayor was heard urging the ladies to go home as it was dangerous to remain; and now the voice of Maria Weston Chapman, replying: “If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.” The ladies finally decided to retire, and their exit diverted, while the operation lasted, the attention of the huge, cat-like creature from their object in the anti-slavery office. When the passing of the ladies had ceased, the old fury of the mob against Garrison returned. “Out with him!” “Lynch him!” rose in wild uproar from thousands in the streets. But again the attention of the huge, cat-like creature was diverted from its object in the second story of the building before which it was lashing itself into frenzy. This time it was the anti-slavery sign which hung from the rooms of the society over the sidewalk. The mob had caught sight of it, and directly set up a yell for it. The sensation of utter helplessness in the presence of the multitude seemed at this juncture to return to the chief magistrate of the city. It was impossible to control the cataract-like passions of the rioters. He heard their awful roar for the sign. The din had risen to HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW terrific proportions. The thought of what might happen next appalled him. The mob might begin to bombard the sign with brickbats, and from the sign pass to the building, and from the building to the constables, and then — but the mayor glanced not beyond, for he had determined to appease the fury of the mob by throwing down to it the hateful sign. A constable detached it, and hurled it down to the rioters in the street. But by the act the mayor had signified that the rule of law had collapsed, and the rule of the mob had really begun. When the rioters had wreaked their wrath upon the emblem of freedom, they were in the mood for more violence. The appetite for destruction, it was seen, had not been glutted; only whetted. Garrison’s situation was now extremely critical. He could no longer remain where he was, for the mob would invade the building and hunt him like hounds from cellar to garret. He must leave the building without delay. To escape from the front was out of the question. A way of escape must, therefore, be found in the rear. All of these considerations the mayor and Garrison’s friends urged upon him. The good man fell in with this counsel, and, with a faithful friend, proceeded to the rear of the building, where from a window he dropped to a shed, but in doing so was very nearly precipitated to the ground. After picking himself up he passed into a carpenter’s shop, meaning to let himself down into Wilson’s Lane, now Devonshire street, but the myriad-eyed mob, which was searching every portion of the building for their game, espied him at this point, and with that set up a great shout. The workmen came to the aid of the fugitive by closing the door of the carpenter’s shop in the face of his pursuers. The situation seemed desperate. Retreat from the front was cut off; escape from the rear anticipated and foiled. Garrison perceived the futility of any further attempts to elude the mob, and proposed in his calm way to deliver himself up to them. But his faithful Achates, John Reid Campbell, advised him that it was his duty to avoid the mob as long as it was possible to do so. Garrison thereupon made a final effort to get away. He retreated up stairs, where his friend and a lad got him into a corner of the room and tried to conceal his whereabouts by piling some boards in front of him. But, by that time, the rioters had entered the building, and within a few moments had broken into the room where Garrison was in hiding. They found Mr. Reid, and demanded of him where Garrison was. But Reid firmly refused to tell. They then led him to a window, and exhibited him to the mob in the Lane, advising them that it was not Garrison, but Garrison’s and Thompson’s friend, who knows where Garrison is, but refuses to tell. A shout of fierce exultation from below greeted this announcement. Almost immediately afterward, Garrison was discovered and dragged furiously to the window, with the intention of hurling him thence to the pavement. Some of the rioters were for doing this, while others were for milder measures. “Don’t let us kill him outright!” they begged. So his persecutors relented, coiled a rope around his body instead, and bade him descend to the street. The great man was never greater than at that moment. With extraordinary meekness and benignity he saluted his enemies in the street. From the window he bowed to the multitude who were thirsting for his destruction, requesting them to wait patiently, for he was coming to them. Then he stepped intrepidly down the ladder raised for the purpose, and into the seething sea of human passion. Garrison HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW must now have been speedily torn to pieces had he not been quickly seized by two or three powerful men, who were determined to save him from falling into the hands of the mob. They were men of great muscular strength, but the muscular strength of two or three giants would have proven utterly unequal to the rescue, and this Mr. Garrison’s deliverers evidently appreciated. For while they employed their powerful arms, they also employed stratagem as well to effect their purpose. They shouted anon as they fought their way through the excited throng, “He is an American! He shan’t be hurt!” and other such words which divided the mind of the mob, arousing among some sympathy for the good man. By this means he was with difficulty got out of Wilson’s lane into State street, in the rear of the old State House. The champion was now on historic ground, ground consecrated by the blood of Crispus Attucks and his fellow-martyrs sixty-five years before. His hat was lost, much of his clothing was stripped from his body, he was without his customary glasses, and was therefore practically blind. He could hear the awful clamor, the mighty uproar of the mob, but he could not distinguish them one from another, friend from foe. Nevertheless he “walked with head erect, calm countenance flashing eyes like a martyr going to the stake, full of faith and manly hope” according to the testimony of an eye-witness. Garrison himself has thrown light on the state of his mind during the ordeal. “The promises of God,” he afterward remembered, sustained his soul, “so that it was not only divested of fear, but ready to sing aloud for joy.” The news now reached the ears of the mayor that Garrison was in the hands of the mob. Thereupon the feeble but kindly magistrate began to act afresh the role of the twig in the mountain stream. He and his constables struggled helplessly in the human current rushing and raging around City Hall, the head and seat of municipal law and authority. Without the aid of private citizens Garrison must inevitably have perished in the commotions which presently reached their climax in violence and terror. He was in the rear of City Hall when the mayor caught up to him and his would-be rescuers. The mayor perceived the extremity of the situation, and said to the Faneuil Hall giants who had hold of Garrison, “Take him into my office,” which was altogether more easily said than done. For the rioters have raised the cry “to the Frog Pond with him!” Which order will be carried out, that of the magistrate or that of the mob? These were horrible moments while the two hung trembling in the balance. But other private citizens coming to the assistance of the mayor struck the scales for the moment in his favor, and Garrison was finally hustled, and thrust by main force into the south door of the City Hall and carried up to the mayor’s room. But the mob had immediately effected an entrance into the building through the north door and filled the lower hall. The mayor now addressed the pack, strove manfully in his feeble way to prevail upon the human wolves to observe order, to sustain the law and the honor of the city, he even intimated to them that he was ready to lay down his life on the spot to maintain the law and preserve order. Then he got out on the ledge over the south door and spoke in a similar strain to the mob on the street. But alas! he knew not the secret for reversing the Circean spell by which gentlemen of property and standing in the community had been suddenly transformed into a wolfish rabble. The increasing tumult without soon warned the authorities that what advantage the mayor may HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW have obtained in the contest with the mob was only temporary and that their position was momentarily becoming more perilous and less tenable. It was impossible to say to what extreme of violence a multitude so infuriated would not go to get their prey. It seemed to the now thoroughly alarmed mayor that the mob might in their frenzy attack the City Hall to effect their purpose. There was one building in the city, which the guardians of the law evidently agreed could resist the rage of the populace, and that building was the jail. To this last stronghold of Puritan civilization the authorities and the powers that were, fell back as a dernier resort to save Garrison’s life. But even in this utmost pitch and extremity, when law was trampled in the streets, when authority was a reed shaken in a storm, when anarchy had drowned order in the bosom of the town, the Anglo-Saxon passion for legal forms asserted itself. The good man, hunted for his life, must forsooth be got into the only refuge which promised him security from his pursuers by a regular judicial commitment as a disturber of the peace. Is there anything at once so pathetic and farcical in the Universal history of mobs? Pathetic and farcical to be sure, but it was also well meant, and therefore we will not stop to quarrel with men who were equal to the perpetration of a legal fiction so full of the comedy and tragedy of civilized society. But enough — the municipal wiseacres having put their heads together and evolved the brilliant plan of committing the prophet as a disturber of the peace, immediately set about its execution, which developed in the sequence into a bird of altogether another color. For a more perilous and desperate device to preserve Garrison’s life could not well have been hit upon. How was he ever to be got out of the building and through that sea of ferocious faces surging and foaming around it. First then by disguising his identity by sundry changes in his apparel. He obtained a pair of trousers from one kindly soul, another gave him a coat, a third lent him a stock, a fourth furnished him a cap. A hack was summoned and stationed at the south door, a posse of constables drew up and made an open way from the door to it. Another hack was placed in readiness at the north door. The hack at the south door was only a ruse to throw the mob off the scent of their prey, while he was got out of the north door and smuggled into the other hack. Up to this point, the plan worked well, but the instant after Garrison had been smuggled into the hack he was identified by the mob, and then ensued a scene which defies description; no writer however skillful, may hope to reproduce it. The rioters rushed madly upon the vehicle with the cry: “Cut the traces! Cut the reins!” They flung themselves upon the horses, hung upon the wheels, dashed open the doors, the driver the while belaboring their heads right and left with a powerful whip, which he also laid vigorously on the backs of his horses. For a moment it looked as if a catastrophe was unavoidable, but the next saw the startled horses plunging at break-neck speed with the hack up Court street and the mob pursuing it with yells of baffled rage. Then began a thrilling, a tremendous race for life and Leverett street jail. The vehicle flew along Court street to Bodoin square, but the rioters, with fell purpose flew hardly less swiftly in its track. Indeed the pursuit of the pack was so close that the hackman did not dare to drive directly to the jail but reached it by a detour through Cambridge and Blossom streets. Even then the mob pressed upon HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW the heels of the horses as they drew up before the portals of the old prison, which shut not an instant too soon upon the editor of the Liberator, who was saved from a frightful fate to use a Biblical phrase but by the skin of his teeth. Here the reformer safe from the wrath of his foes, was locked in a cell; and here, during the evening, with no abatement of his customary cheerfulness and serenity of spirit, he received several of his anxious friends, Whittier among them, whom through the grated bars he playfully accosted thus: “You see my accommodations are so limited, that I cannot ask you to spend the night with me.” That night in his prison cell, and on his rude prison bed, he slept the sleep of the just man, sweet and long: “When peace within the bosom reigns, And conscience gives th’ approving voice; Though bound the human form in chains. Yet can the soul aloud rejoice. “’Tis true, my footsteps are confined — I cannot range beyond this cell — But what can circumscribe my mind, To chain the winds attempt as well!” The above stanzas he wrote the next morning on the walls of his cell. Besides this one he made two other inscriptions there, to stand as memorabilia of the black drama enacted in Boston on the afternoon of October 21, 1835. After being put through the solemn farce of an examination in a court, extemporized in the jail, Garrison was discharged from arrest as a disturber of the peace! But the authorities, dreading a repetition of the scenes of the day before, prayed him to leave the city for a few days, which he did, a deputy sheriff driving him to Canton, where he boarded the train from Boston to Providence, containing his wife, and together they went thence to her father’s at Brooklyn, Conn. The apprehensions of the authorities in respect of the danger of a fresh attack upon him were unquestionably well founded, inasmuch as diligent search was made for him in all of the outgoing stages and cars from the city that morning. In this wise did pro-slavery, patriotic Boston translate into works her sympathy for the South. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW December 17, Thursday: President Andrew Jackson inaugurated a decade of angry tugging in the federal Senate over what to do about the James Smithson bequest which would eventually become the “Smithsonian Institution.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 17th of 12th M 1835 / Attended Meeting which was silent but a pretty good one RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW December 29, Tuesday: At New Echota, President Andrew Jackson, completing a removal treaty with persons representing one group of the Cherokee, declared that the white people were going to consider this treaty as binding upon the entire Cherokee nation.
In return for $5,000,000 and a promise of land in Oklahoma, all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi River would be considered to have been forfeited.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and the Alert came to anchor in the bay of Monterey. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR:
It was ten o’clock on Tuesday morning when we came to anchor. The town looked just as it did when I saw it last, which was eleven months before, in the brig Pilgrim. The pretty lawn on which it stands, as green as sun and rain could make it; the pine wood on the south; the small river on the north side; the houses, with their white plastered sides and red-tiled roofs, dotted about on the green; the low, white presidio, with its soiled, flying, and the discordant din of drums and trumpets for the noon parade; all brought up the scene we had witnessed here with so much pleasure nearly a year before, when coming from a long voyage, and our unprepossessing reception at Santa Barbara. It seemed almost like coming to a home. The only other vessel in port was the Russian government bark, from Asitka, mounting eight guns, (four of which we found to be Quakers,) and having on board the ex-governor, who was going in her to Mazatlan, and thence overland to Vera Cruz. He offered to take letters, and deliver them to the American consul at Vera Cruz, whence they could be easily forwarded to the United States. We accordingly made up a packet of letters, almost every one writing, and dating them “January 1st, 1836.” The governor was true to his promise, and they all reached Boston before the middle of March; the shortest communication ever yet made across the country. The brig Pilgrim had been lying in Monterey through the latter part of November, according to orders, waiting for us. Day after day, Captain Faucon went up to the hill to look out for us, and at last, gave us up, thinking we must have gone down in the gale which we experienced off Point Conception, and which had blown with great fury over the whole coast, driving ashore several vessels in the snuggest ports. An English brig, which had put into San Francisco, lost both her anchors; the Rosa was driven upon a mud bank in San Diego; and the Pilgrim, with great difficulty, rode out the gale in Monterey, with three anchors ahead. She sailed early in December for San Diego and intermedios. The brig Pilgrim had been lying in Monterey through the latter part of November, according to orders, waiting for us. Day after day, Captain Faucon went up to the hill to look out for us, and at last, gave us up, thinking we must have gone down in the gale which we experienced off Point Conception, and which had blown with great fury over the whole coast, driving ashore several vessels in the snuggest ports. An English brig, which had put into San Francisco, lost both her anchors; the Rosa was driven upon a mud bank in San Diego; and the Pilgrim, with great difficulty, rode out the gale in Monterey, with three anchors ahead. She sailed early in December for San Diego and intermedios. As we were to be here over Sunday, and Monterey was the best place to go ashore on the whole coast, and we had had no liberty-day for nearly three months, every one was for going ashore. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1837
In 1834 the US Senate had censured President Andrew Jackson.
ANDREW JACKSON
In this year, with Jacksonian Democrats having come into control of the Senate, black lines were drawn around the record of that censure and, superimposed over it, the inscription “Expunged by order of the Senate” was written. Jackson retired to his “Hermitage” plantation upon the beginning of the presidency of Martin Van Buren.
HERMITS
During President Van Buren’s tenure the shower stalls in the East Wing of the White House were improved and several copper bathtubs were added to the two that had been brought there under President Jackson. Portable tin tubs had long been used for bathing in the bedrooms and dressing rooms upstairs, with servants bringing the water in buckets up the little service stair from water heaters in the kitchen. There would not be running water upstairs for many years to come. The bathing room below was spruced up with compartments and wardrobes in the interest of privacy and convenience and was probably used only by the President and other men of the family, with the women continuing to rely on tin tubs in their bedrooms.
During President Van Buren’s tenure at the White House, also, the Sultan of Oman would send him a pair of tiger cubs. Rather than allow these animals to roam the executive mansion and its grounds, and mature, the Congress would require the President to pack them off to the Washington DC zoo.
At the age of 24, Benjamin Day sold his The Sun newspaper to his brother-in-law, Moses Beach, and retired HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW on his profits.
The Jacksonian journal United States Magazine and Democratic Review published out of New-York by J.& H.G. Langley would begin publication with its October 1837 issue and would continue until its October 1859 issue. Its financing began with campaign funds the Democratic party made available during the 1836 presidential campaign in which their candidate was Van Buren — although after he came into the White House, Van Buren threw his party’s patronage instead to the Washington Globe. Cornell University Library has the entire series of 43 volumes, with the exception of Volume 39. All the issues except those in that missing Volume 39 have been disbound and OCR-scanned and Volumes 1-3 have been made available for on-line viewing at: http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/MOA-JOURNALS2/USDE.html This new magazine would carry on its masthead the motto
“The Best Government Is That Which Governs Least.”
This appeared in an article titled “Introduction: The Democratic Principle — The Importance of Its Assertion and Application” which appeared on page 6 in the initial issue: “The best government is that which governs least. No human depositories can, with safety, be trusted with the power of legislation upon the general interests of society so as to operate directly or indirectly on the industry and property of the community.” Although the article was unsigned, the editor –John Louis O’Sullivan– almost certainly was the author that Thoreau would adapt. Sullivan had derived this, of course, from President Thomas Jefferson, who had opinioned that “That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.” The publication would, however, support the administration of Democratic president Polk, and it would support imperialism, and it would support war upon Mexico. Hence the 1st sentence of Henry Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience can only be characterized as ironic, and cannot be said to have derived directly from anything that President Jefferson had said or thought.87
Interestingly, when in Chapter 37 of THE AGE OF JACKSON, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. would attempt to render this political mag’s motto, he would produce it as “That government is best which governs least” — which instead of being the historical masthead was instead Thoreau’s more famous adaptation.
87. Lee A. Pederson, “Thoreau’s Source of the Motto in ‘Civil Disobedience,’” Thoreau Society Bulletin 67 HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW March 3, Friday: “An Act making appropriations for the naval service,” etc. “For carrying into effect the acts for the suppression of the slave trade,” etc., $11,413.57 (STATUTES AT LARGE, V. 155, 157). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
Completion of the 2d (lame duck) session of the 24th federal Congress, with human enslavement still legal in the United States of America.
On his final full day in office, United States President Andrew Jackson recognized the independence of the Republic of Texas.
Waldo Emerson lectured at the lyceum in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He would receive $15. THE LIST OF LECTURES
David Henry Thoreau’s essay on his Harvard College assignment “Compare some of the Methods of gaining or exercising public Influence: as, Lectures, the Pulpit, Associations, the Press, Political Office.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1838
John Lyde Wilson’s THE CODE OF HONOR attempted to regulate, and therefore moderate, dueling at such venues as “The Oaks” outside New Orleans and “Bloody Island” in the Mississippi River near St. Louis. Technically, such dueling by white gentlemen was illegal, of course they were being discouraged from honorably killing one another, man to man, but practically, it would have been difficult for a prosecutor, assuming he was willing to try this, to get a jury to convict a gentleman for “defending his honor” against another gentleman if he considered that that other gentleman had impugned it. The book was published in South Carolina, where the law had established a penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000.00 for any person guilty of taking part in a duel — which tells us a lot about the status of “legality” in those years.88
Is this of any importance? Why, yes, anything that pertains to white men is important: I freely admit that, according to white writers, white teachers, white historians and white molders of public opinion, nothing ever happened in the world of any importance that could not or should not be labeled “white.” — W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Superior Race”
88. I ran into precisely the same ideas about the nature of legality in Austin, Texas in 1958, when I went to Woolworths to purchase a pistol. There were laws, of course, regulations having to do with waiting periods and permits and such, but when I inquired at the gun counter about the status of these regulations, the response I received was a grin and the remark “Oh, but you’re not a nigger.” So I paid the man $14.99 for a .455 Webley plus a few dollars for a box of 50 rimmed .45-caliber cartridges, he put them in a paper sack for me, and I walked out onto the Texas street free, white, and twenty-one. I hadn’t even been asked to produce an ID. From this I learned that the purpose of the law is to protect the good people from the bad people, and since then I’ve never had occasion to be surprised at American justice, or at the conduct of our law officers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
Approximately one of these duels in seven –of the ones which were not interrupted by negotiations between “seconds”– resulted in a death, since it frequently happened that the principals would resolve on the field before exchanging balls, or would prematurely and ostentatiously discharge their ball into the air and thus render themselves defenseless. When wounded, it was traditional to forgive one’s opponent.
After an initial misunderstanding with John L. O’Sullivan, editor of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, over Salem coquette Mary Silsbee, Nathaniel Hawthorne became friendly with him and an active contributor to his journal (he would produce 24 tales and sketches for its pages in the next seven years). Deeply moved by his friend Jonathan Cilley’s having been killed in this rifle duel by a young fellow congressman from the South –this is complicated: because he had supposed Hawthorne to have been supposing that responding to the challenge would be the gentlemanly thing to do– Hawthorne authored a memorial essay for this friend.
The Louisville Journal reported, at some time during this year, that “The trial of John Wilson, who officiated as Speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives, during the last legislative session of that State, and who walked down from his chair and slew Major T.T. Anthony with a Bowie knife on the floor of the house, took place a few days ago. The verdict of the jury was, not guilty of murder, but excusable homicide.”
James Bowie HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW February: 15,665 of the Cherokee Nation petitioned the US Congress in opposition to the Treaty of New Echota. TRAIL OF TEARS
[L]ike the thousands of Irish woodkernes whom Lord Deputy Chichester shipped by force to Sweden, at a stroke thousands of Cherokee families were uprooted in 1837 and 1838 from their ancestral lands in northern Georgia and Alabama, western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and force-marched over the Trail of Tears a thousand miles to a country that was, as Sweden to the Irish, “remote and of no good fame to them.” The protesting Cherokees invoked United States government treaty promises; but as it had been with the king’s mislaid reassurances to O’Dohety, it was “already too late,” gold having been discovered within Cherokee lands in northern Georgia ten years before.
November: Thirteen contingents of the Cherokee nation crossed Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois, and the 1st groups reached the Mississippi River, only to be unable to cross due to ice floes.
TRAIL OF TEARS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1839
The Phrenological Association met in Birmingham. THE SCIENCE OF 1839
Hiram Powers finished his white marble bust of President Andrew Jackson, for which Jackson had sat to be modeled from life while at the White House at the age of 68. “Make me as I am,” the old man had instructed, which pretty well excluded carving the bust out of ebony, perhaps even out of hickory! The bust is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It would be interesting to determine how craniologically PC or non-PC this bust is, in consideration of contemporaneous phrenological theory.
Dr. Charles Caldwell, a racist who was a professor at a university in Kentucky, had at this point become the most popular phrenologist in America partly by pandering to the American need for a scientific legitimation of genocide.
Who knows what the white man knows? — The white man knows. However, the mainline American scientific establishment –under the leadership of the American school of ethnology based in Philadelphia– would over the course of the next ten years take this cudgel away from phrenology, by developing their own scientific legitimations for genocide that could not so easily be dismissed as a sideshow-tent fad. You may have been exposed, in your early schooling, to some of this ethnological material, in the strange scientific case study called “the Dukes versus the Kalikaks” — in which the names of two Appalachian families were changed in order to protect innocent victims of scientific study and in order to protect guilty perpetrators of scientific fraud. In this day and age, to be against slavery was to be antiscientific. In this year Alexander Kinmont’s TWELVE LECTURES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN and Professor HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Samuel George Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA; OR, A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE SKULLS OF VARIOUS ABORIGINAL NATIONS OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: TO WHICH IS PREFIXED AN ESSAY ON THE VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. ILLUSTRATED BY SEVENTY-EIGHT PLATES AND A COLOURED MAP (Philadelphia: J. Dobson) changed the American focus for such theorizing, by supposedly demonstrating that the inferiority of the Native American race was based on breeding rather than on environment, a conclusion supported by detailed scientific examination of the world’s largest collection of human skulls (world’s largest in pre-Nazi times, that is). The intellectual faculties of this great family appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races. CRANIA AMERICANA
Henry David Thoreau would read and make notes on Professor Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA, including in his notes the professor’s remark that the American Indians “have made but trifling progress in mental culture or the useful arts.” “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
The prevailing viewpoint in America had for many years been that attitude enunciated by the Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith (1750-1819) in his influential 1787 treatise, AN ESSAY ON THE CAUSES OF THE VARIETY OF COMPLEXION AND FIGURE IN THE HUMAN SPECIES... in which he had argued that the intellectual and moral condition of black people in America had been produced by “the humiliating circumstances in which they find themselves” just as the color of their skin had been produced by their long exposure to the African sun and thus eventually could be expected under better conditions to fade to whiteness. Race, in other words, rather than constituting an inflexible biological category, had been considered to be mutable. This presumption was apparently being demolished at this point by the “objective” craniological analyses being presented in such great detail in Dr. Morton’s treatise.
June 25, 1852: What a mean & wretched creature is man by & by some Dr Morton may be filling your cranium with white mustard seed to learn its internal capacity. Of all the ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man — this seems to me the worst — as it is the most belated. You would learn more by once paring the toe nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of which the spirit has more completely departed — & in which it has left fewer significant traces. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
In CRANIA AMERICANA Professor Morton divided humankind primarily into four races with the following racial characteristics:89 • Europeans: “The Caucasian Race is characterized by a naturally fair skin, susceptible of every tint; hair fine, long and curling, and of various colors. The skull is large and oval, and its anterior portion full and elevated. The face is small in proportion to the head, of an oval form, with well- proportioned features.... This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.... The spontaneous fertility of [the Caucasus] has rendered it the hive of many nations, which extending their migrations in every direction, have peopled the finest portions of the earth, and given birth to its fairest inhabitants....” • Asians: “This great division of the human species is characterized by a sallow or olive colored skin, which appears to be drawn tight over the bones of the face; long black straight hair, and thin beard. The nose is broad, and short; the eyes are small, black, and obliquely placed, and the eyebrows are arched and linear; the lips are turned, the cheek bones broad and flat.... In their intellectual character the Mongolians are ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation [i.e. learning]....So versatile are their feelings and actions, that they have been compared to the monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another....” • Native Americans: “The American Race is marked by a brown complexion; long, black, lank hair; and deficient beard. The eyes are black and deep set, the brow low, the cheekbones high, the nose large and aquiline, the mouth large, and the lips tumid [swollen] and compressed.... In their mental character the Americans are averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war, and wholly destitute of maritime adventure. They are crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to purely selfish motives. They devour the most disgusting [foods] uncooked and uncleaned, and seem to have no idea beyond providing for the present moment.... Their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood.... [Indians] are not only averse to the restraints of education, but for the most part are incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects....” • Africans: “Characterized by a black complexion, and black, woolly hair; the eyes are large and prominent, the nose broad and flat, the lips thick, and the mouth wide; the head is long and narrow, the forehead low, the cheekbones prominent, the jaws protruding, and the chin small. In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.... The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations.... The Negroes are proverbially fond of their amusements, in which they engage with great exuberance of spirit; and a day of toil is with them no bar to a night of revelry. Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty. They appear to be fond of warlike enterprises, and are not deficient in personal courage; but, once overcome, they yield to their destiny, and accommodate themselves with amazing facility to every change of circumstance. The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.”
In this year Dr. Samuel George Morton was made Professor of Anatomy at Pennsylvania College (later to be known as the University of Pennsylvania).
89. Professor Morton claimed to be able to evaluate the intellectual capacity of a race as a function of its skull volume. A large skull meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity, and a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity. Of course, since female skull sizes are smaller than male skull sizes ... but I don’t know that Professor Morton went there. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Summer: Sam Houston continued his trip through the states, visiting Andrew Jackson at The Hermitage near Nashville, Tennessee. On his return to Mobile, Alabama, Margaret Lea agreed to get married with him. On his return to Nacogdoches, Texas, he made a speech denouncing President Lamar’s campaign against the Indians (his old friend Cherokee Headman Bowl had been killed). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1841
Thomas Wilson Dorr, a lawyer and legislator in Rhode Island, failing in his reform efforts, organized a People’s Party which would call a convention, rewrite the Rhode Island charter of 1836, and hold elections. The proposed new constitution was to extend suffrage and introduce a range of liberal reforms.90
Dorr wasn’t just some dope, and would obtain the backing of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren. READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT
90. Thomas Wilson Dorr had been born in Providence as the son of a wealthy businessman who lived in a mansion. He was from a distinguished family, his grandfather having been one of Paul Revere’s companions on that famous ride in 1775. (His grandfather’s name would be left out of the poetic, patriotic legend as it developed — because nothing much could be made to rhyme with it.) Dorr had attended Harvard College where he had definitely been not a rebellious youth; in fact, when there had been a serious student revolt in the 1820s he had taken no part in it and had thus been one of the very few in his class who actually received a diploma. He had returned to Providence to became an attorney and a member of the Legislature and had then become involved in the attempts to correct the very unjust form of government based on the old colonial Charter of 1663. The main problem of his era that the Charter was being used to deny voting rights to thousands of men in the growing urban industrial areas of the state, thus retaining power for the old Yankee farmers. Matters came to an armed struggle in this year when a People’s Convention tried to stage a coup. Dorr was elected as the Rhode Island Governor but, after an involved set of events involving an armory and an old cannon, would in the following year be deposed, captured, and imprisoned. After his release he would die in 1854. The Charter would be revised into a new state Constitution. Dorr’s efforts were the most dramatic in the early battle for suffrage for all disenfranchised people — immigrants, women, and racial minorities. (Unfortunately, somewhere along the way toward implementation, there being many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, his People’s Party would be hijacked into being in effect a White People’s Party, and his People’s Constitution would be hijacked into being in effect a White People’s Constitution — please don’t presume that that was what he personally would actually have preferred.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1845
May: Sam Houston and his family began a trip to visit former President Andrew Jackson on his plantation The Hermitage near Nashville, Tennessee. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June 8, Sunday: Frederick Douglass lectured in Springfield, Massachusetts. At his Hermitage plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, former President Andrew Jackson died.
When the family of Sam Houston arrived they learned that they were an hour too late.
Even in his years of retirement at the Hermitage, Jackson had remained a potent force in the Democratic party. His final years, however, had been primarily plagued by the personal financial distress that had resulted from his having assumed the debts of an improvident adopted son, Andrew Jackson, Jr. His remaining political efforts had been in support of US annexation of another slave state, Texas, an agenda that had caused him to switch his backing in 1844 from Martin Van Buren to James K. Polk in the contest for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Jackson had lived long enough to celebrate not only passage of the Texas annexation treaty but also the victory of Polk over Jackson’s old opponent, Henry Clay. Did you suppose someone as wicked as this would live forever?
He would be buried beside Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson. Within a few weeks the American nation would HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW have learned of this death: HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW June 17, Tuesday: The nation was learning that former president Andrew Jackson had died:
On the last leaves of a book of ITALIAN EXERCISES, the Concord schoolteacher Miss Martha Emmeline Hunt was keeping a journal of sorts prior to her suicide in the Concord River. On this day her jottings included the following: The world smiles; many people are living happy harmless lives. Thank God, that He has made some people so happy, ... It is well that the world knoweth not, what unutterable and inconceivable things are burning the very being of those who seem so happy. Apparently after reading the new book NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE by Frederick Douglass or reading in the New-York Tribune the review of this book by Margaret Fuller (or perchance memorializing the memorable appearance that Frederick had made in Concord, at which she presumably had been present, or after attending some more recent local anti-slavery lecture that is not of record), her comment was: We cry loudly for the poor, oppressed Slave, and well we may. Our loudest cry is but a faint voice which should burst forth in such anguish, as should rouse the whole earth for freedom. But slaves are not confined to color. O, God perhaps in thy sight HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW they are least slaves. Slaves! Are we not all slaves? We murmur that Thou hast tried us beyond our strength. We think of ourselves, more than of Thee. — Then we are lost. This is slavery — this is death.
June 28, Saturday: At Vicksburg, Mississippi, Jefferson Davis delivered an “Eulogy on the Life and Character of Andrew Jackson.”
A GOOD AND GREAT MAN HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1860
“One man with courage makes a majority” is attributed, as of the 1968 edition of BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, to Andrew Jackson, although without citing a provenance. Such a phrase appears, however, in no biography of Jackson, and in no history of his era. At the project “The Papers of Andrew Jackson” at the University of Tennessee, every authenticated Jackson writing and utterance is on record, and nothing like this is found in any of these documents. Bartlett’s derived it uncritically from a biography by James Parton published by Mason Brothers in 1860, LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON. LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON
On the title page of each of his volumes this author placed an epigraph “Desperate Courage Makes One a Majority.” Framed within quotation marks, this was not a Jackson quote, nor does the biographer suggest this.
Parton did not approve of Jackson either as a president or as a human being. The best word he used to describe this American military and political figure was “uncontrollable.” He cited a gazette cartoon in which Jackson is being crowned by Martin Van Buren and handed a scepter by Satan. He considered his subject to have been a headstrong ignoramus who had been able to bully other Americans and dominate their better sense. Clearly, he had intended this epigraph as an epithet, if not as an epitaph. FAKE NEWS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1930
“One man with courage makes a majority” is attributed, as of the 1968 edition of BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, to Andrew Jackson, although without citing a provenance. Such a phrase appears, however, in no biography of Jackson, and in no history of his era. At the project “The Papers of Andrew Jackson” at the University of Tennessee, every authenticated Jackson writing and utterance is on record, and nothing like this is found in any of these documents. Bartlett’s derived it uncritically from a biography by James Parton published by Mason Brothers in 1860, LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON. LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON
On the title page of each of his volumes this author placed an epigraph “Desperate Courage Makes One a Majority.” Framed within quotation marks, this was not a Jackson quote, nor does the biographer suggest this.
Parton did not approve of Jackson either as a president or as a human being. The best word he used to describe this American military and political figure was “uncontrollable.” He cited a gazette cartoon in which Jackson is being crowned by Martin Van Buren and handed a scepter by Satan. He considered his subject to have been a headstrong ignoramus who had been able to bully other Americans and dominate their better sense. The process of converting this derogatory authorial comment into a piece of folk wisdom was well underway by the 1930s and had been completed by the end of the 1950s. FAKE NEWS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1938
Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN.
John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A.
Marquis James’s THE LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1937) received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (or Storytelling or Something). This relates a gang brawl that one marvels has never been made into a movie: that during September 1813 when Thomas Benton and Jesse Benton, two of the sons of Jesse B. Benton and Ann Gooch Benton, arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, they took their saddle-bags to the City Hotel to avoid, according to Colonel Benton, a possibility of unpleasantness, because Andrew Jackson’s gang was accustomed to hang out diagonally across the Court-House Square in the Nashville Inn.
Each of the brothers was armed with a brace of pistols. At about the same time Jackson and two very large buddies, Colonel John R. Coffee, and Stokely Donelson Hays, arrived at the Inn, armed to the teeth with pistols and dirks of course, with Jackson in addition clutching a riding whip and a sword cane. According to Marquis James the news was over town in a moment. Jackson and Coffee walked the short way to the post-office a few doors beyond the City Hotel, crossing the Square and passing some distance in front of another tavern, where the Benton brothers were standing on the boardwalk. On their return from the post-office, however, Jackson and Coffee walked along that boardwalk. As they approached, Jesse Benton stepped inside the barroom, while Thomas Benton remained standing in the doorway of the hall that led to the rear porch overlooking the river. Jackson moved toward him, brandishing his riding whip. “Now, defend yourself you damned rascal!” Before Thomas Benton was able to draw a pistol Jackson had his pistol at his chest, and he backed Benton slowly along the corridor, step by step, until they reached the rear porch of the hotel. There, looking past Jackson and the muzzle of his pistol, Thomas saw his brother Jesse Benton slip out a doorway behind Jackson, raise a pistol and fire. As Jackson, struck, pitched forward, he pulled the trigger of his pistol and the powder of the charge burned a sleeve of Thomas Benton’s coat. Thomas Benton discharged both his pistols as Jackson fell, but when Jesse Benton lunged forward to discharge his other pistol, a bystander, James Sitler, shielded the fallen man, HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW who was gushing blood. The large form of Colonel Coffee strode through the smoke, firing over the prostrate Sitler and Jackson at Thomas Benton. When he missed, and advanced with his pistol clubbed, Thomas Benton fell backward down a flight of steps. When Stockley Hays, also a large man, lunged at Jesse Benton with his sword cane, the slender blade struck a button and snapped off. Jesse Benton had a loaded pistol left, so, as Hays closed to stick him with a dirk knife, he thrust the muzzle against Hays’s body and pulled the trigger — the charge failed to detonate. General Jackson’s blood soaked 2 mattresses at the Nashville Inn. His left shoulder had been shattered, and one of the pistol balls had embedded itself against the upper bone of the arm. As the doctors prepared to amputate, Jackson whispered “I’ll keep my arm.” While physicians were attempting to keep Jackson from bleeding out, Thomas Benton and his gang were raising hell in front of the establishment. For instance, Thomas picked up a small-sword of Jackson’s that he had found, and snapped it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1959
“One man with courage makes a majority” is attributed, as of the 1968 edition of BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, to Andrew Jackson, although without citing a provenance. Such a phrase appears, however, in no biography of Jackson, and in no history of his era. At the project “The Papers of Andrew Jackson” at the University of Tennessee, every authenticated Jackson writing and utterance is on record, and nothing like this is found in any of these documents. Bartlett’s derived it uncritically from a biography by James Parton published by Mason Brothers in 1860, LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON. LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON
On the title page of each of his volumes this author placed an epigraph “Desperate Courage Makes One a Majority.” Framed within quotation marks, this was not a Jackson quote, nor does the biographer suggest this.
Parton did not approve of Jackson either as a president or as a human being. The best word he used to describe this American military and political figure was “uncontrollable.” He cited a gazette cartoon in which Jackson is being crowned by Martin Van Buren and handed a scepter by Satan. He considered his subject to have been a headstrong ignoramus who had been able to bully other Americans and dominate their better sense. The process of converting this derogatory authorial comment into a piece of folk wisdom was well underway by the 1930s and had been completed by the end of the 1950s. FAKE NEWS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1968
“One man with courage makes a majority” is attributed, as of this year’s edition of BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, to Andrew Jackson, although without citing a provenance. Such a phrase had appeared, however, in no biography of Jackson, and in no history of his era. At the project “The Papers of Andrew Jackson” at the University of Tennessee, every authenticated Jackson writing and utterance had been placed on record, and nothing like this was found in any of these documents. Bartlett’s had derived this uncritically from a biography by James Parton published by Mason Brothers in 1860, LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON. LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON
On the title page of each of his volumes this author had placed an epigraph “Desperate Courage Makes One a Majority.” Framed within quotation marks, this was not a Jackson quote, nor had the biographer suggest such.
Parton had not approved of Jackson either as a president or as a human being. The best word he had used to describe this American military and political figure had been “uncontrollable.” He had cited a gazette cartoon in which Jackson was crowned by Martin Van Buren and handed a scepter by Satan. He considered his subject to have been a headstrong ignoramus who had been able to bully other Americans and dominate their better sense. However, the process of converting this derogatory authorial comment into a piece of folk wisdom had been well underway by the 1930s and had been completed by the end of the 1950s, and as of this point in time had been made official and cast in a pair of concrete boots. FAKE NEWS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1977
Robert V. Remini’s THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON: THE COURSE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE, 1767-1821. Volume 1 (NY: Harper & Row, 1977, 1981, 1984. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998); ANDREW JACKSON: THE COURSE OF AMERICAN FREEDOM, 1822-1832. Volume 2 (NY: Harper & Row, 1977, 1981, 1984); ANDREW JACKSON: THE COURSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, 1833-1845. Volume 3 (NY: Harper & Row, 1977, 1981, 1984). Reviewed for [email protected] (March 1999) by R. Scott Burnet
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Donelson had, indeed, abandoned Nashville for Natchez (then in Spanish territory) and lived as husband and wife while she was still married to another man. This occurred a year before Jackson later claimed it had, at a time when Jackson could not have been, as he later maintained, under the misapprehension that a divorce had been granted. Although not as scathing in his portrayal of early Tennessee politics as such historians as Thomas Perkins Abernethy and Richard Hofstadter, Remini does a masterful job tracing Jackson’s rise through the cutthroat world of frontier politics from ambitious young lawyer to trusted lieutenant of corrupt boss William Blount. Moving from law and politics to a second career as a military leader, first in the Tennessee militia and then in the regular Army, Jackson achieved national fame for his campaigns against the Native nations of the Southeast and, especially, for his defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1815. Remini provides clear and convincing accounts of these campaigns, balancing praise of his battlefield courage and tactical skill with well-founded criticism of his occasional strategic errors and his obsessive determination to secure removal, by force or treaty, of the Indian nations within the United States and to wrest Florida and other territories from Spain. Marred somewhat by an annoying use of supposedly dramatic sentence fragments, the first volume offers the most nuanced interpretation of the three, as well as sound analysis of the formation of Jackson’s complex character. The second volume, THE COURSE OF A MERICAN FREEDOM, covers a much more limited period, the ten years encompassing Jackson’s rise to national political prominence, his controversial defeat for the Presidency in the House of Representatives in 1824, his triumphant election in 1828, and his first term as President. Remini again provides a compelling narrative based upon extensive knowledge of manuscript and newspaper sources, but in this volume he announces an overarching thesis: The “Era of Good Feelings” should really be regarded as America’s first “Era of Corruption.” In a biography of Andrew Jackson, of course, this means that Jackson’s passionate belief in the decline of virtue among politicians, sparked largely by his fury over the so- called corrupt bargain between Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams which deprived Jackson of the Presidency in 1824, was essentially correct and his reform goals were justified, sincere, and consciously revolutionary. Remini regards this interpretation as shockingly revisionist, but few recent historians have portrayed this period as a genuine “Era of Good Feelings” characterized by political cooperation, public virtue, and an end to partisanship. The personality-based factionalism which temporarily succeeded the First Party System was, and has routinely been portrayed as, rife with malfeasance, manipulation, and unbridled ambition--not unlike the Tennessee politics of Jackson’s earlier career. Remini presents what is often a narratively complex but interpretatively simplistic portrait of a spotlessly honest General Jackson courageously striving to advance the interests of the common man against his almost uniformly corrupt and reactionary opponents. Aside from a new preface to the first volume, Remini has not revised these volumes; had he done so, this hostile characterization of Jackson’s opponents would likely have been moderated because, since the original publication of the Jackson volumes, Remini HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW has written large-scale biographies of anti-Jacksonians Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The third and final volume, THE COURSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, 1833- 1845, concludes the story of the Nullification Crisis and the Bank War, and then follows Jackson through his second term and his efforts, after he left office, to aid and influence his party and his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren. Perhaps most striking in this final volume is the realization that Jackson was in nearly constant pain and discomfort throughout the peak years of his power, much of which resulted from a bullet from an old tavern gunfight which remained lodged in his chest. Episodes of coughing and hemorrhaging could leave him confined to his White House chambers for weeks, but he was almost always able to muster the power of will to conduct business and greet visitors. During this period, the personal following surrounding Jackson coalesced into the Democratic party. Remini reminds readers that Jackson shaped the party not simply by force of personality but by his outspoken commitment to certain principles. Although personally wealthy (at least until his adopted son squandered much of that wealth), Andrew Jackson was consciously and sincerely devoted to working men, both agricultural and industrial, and to the democratization of American government- -that is, to opening government to all (white male) Americans and to crushing the influence of quasi-aristocratic cliques. Jackson’s ideas crystallized during his Presidency and his hostility to all banks--not simply the Bank of the United States (the “Monster”)--became party doctrine. Banks, to Jackson, deprived working men of their independence as well as their money and allowed financiers undue influence over public affairs. Widening the suffrage, Jackson believed, had not only secured his election as the champion of the People but would guarantee that eventually virtue and justice would triumph. Jackson insisted upon limited government and public economy, except where the power of the Presidency was needed to protect the interests of the People. Remini does an admirable job clarifying Jackson’s own ideas; although he quite properly criticizes Jackson’s economic ignorance, Remini also makes a largely convincing case for Jackson as a serious political thinker and not a naive frontiersman. Too often, however, Remini equates Jackson’s beliefs with those of his entire party; given Jackson’s dominance, this is not an illogical equation by any means, but it is still misleading. Seeking to refute accusations that the Democratic party was the party of rising, ambitious men of business rather than of workingmen, Remini provides evidence of Jackson’s own commitment to the interests of workers; what Jackson believed, of course, may not have been what all members of his party believed. American parties have always been diverse coalitions whose members support common goals with a multiplicity of motivations. As even Remini’s own evidence suggests, for example, many Democrats did not share Jackson’s opposition to all banks, and subsistence farmers and factory workers--both groups objects of Jackson’s sympathy--were not always in accord. Some Democrats considered themselves progressive reformers striving to end aristocratic privilege, while others considered themselves conservatives fighting the “innovations” of Whiggish social reform; both groups could wholeheartedly support Democratic HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW policies of limited government. While one would hardly turn to a Jackson biography for a detailed discussion of party ideology, greater attention to such works as Rush Welter’s THE MIND OF AMERICA (available when these volumes originally appeared) might have produced a more subtle interpretation. Reprinting the Jackson biography without updating, moreover, deprives Remini of the opportunity to discuss the hotly debated interpretation of Charles Sellers in THE MARKET REVOLUTION, an interpretation with which Remini might be expected to have some sympathy. In addition, Michael Holt’s forthcoming history of the Whig party will likely make Remini’s portrayal of the dynamics of the Jacksonian party system seem especially simplistic. That said, no historian has done so much to illuminate the labyrinthine personal relationships among Jackson’s family, friends, cabinet, and staff. Remini rightly criticizes Jackson’s choices in appointments and his poor judgements of character. His loyalty to friends such as Secretary of War John H. Eaton shaped and even created many of the controversies of his administration; the personal relations of these men with Jackson also often determined their political future, as those who broke with Jackson over personal matters found their way into Whig ranks. At the same time, Remini--with equal justice--details the extraordinary managerial skills of such successful appointments as Amos Kendall, Jackson’s second Postmaster General. No other historian has devoted such attention to Jacksonian foreign policy, especially the drawn-out squabble with France. No other biographer has achieved a more nearly complete understanding of Jackson’s personality, and certainly few have placed such emphasis on his religious beliefs. On even the most familiar major events, such as the Nullification Crisis, or the Bank War, Remini has new evidence and original insights, especially relating to Jackson’s own actions and motivations. He can convey at least a bit of sympathy for Old Hickory to even the most anti- Jackson reader; readers, whatever their views on Jackson, will at least emerge with a solid grasp of Jackson’s character and ideas. Whatever quibbles this reviewer and other readers may have, these three volumes constitute one of the great American biographies. Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [email protected]. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1987
October 10, Saturday: His nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court having run into trouble, President Ronald Reagan reminisced on his weekly radio broadcast that “Andrew Jackson once said that one man with courage makes a majority. Obviously, Bob Bork has that courage.” President Reagan had not heard President Jackson say such a thing, but instead, he or more likely one of his speechwriters had extracted this from BARTLETT’S FAMOUS QUOTATIONS. It is yet another piece of Bartlett fakelore, because Jackson never said it or anything remotely like it, nor did Bartlett cite any credible source material for such an invention. FAKE NEWS
October 11, Sunday: John David Munday ventured down the Great Gorge Rapids and the Whirlpool of the Niagara River in the same barrel that had on September 26th been temporarily confiscated by the police. Interestingly, he could not swim and said he hated the water.
Two hours after Munday’s successful completion of the trip Nolan Whitsell of Atlanta Georgia went through the same trajectory in an open 4.2-meter plastic canoe — and came out the other end in one piece.
Rena G. Kunis of Bellrose, Queens wrote to the New York Times to point out that although in the 16th Century the Reverend John Knox had written that “A man with God is always in the majority,” as if any man could ever know that he was with God, and although in the 19th Century Wendell Phillips had orated that “One on God’s side is a majority,” as if any man could ever know that he was on God’s side, and although Henry Thoreau had written very much more reasonably that “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one,” the questionable verity “One man with courage makes a majority” cannot be provenanced as a remark ever authored or uttered by President Andrew Jackson. “Long Knife” may or may not have been an incarnation of wickedness, but he had never been such a fool as to issue this sort of “might makes right” dictum. FAKE NEWS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
1994
September 12, Monday: A European Union official opened a new bridge across the Neretva River in Mostar, built by the British Army.
Leaders of 3 warring factions in Liberia signed a peace agreement in Akosombo, Ghana, ending civil war and setting elections for October 1995.
The separatist Parti Quebecois wins power in Quebec provincial elections.
While the First Family was temporarily residing at Blair House, an unemployed truckdriver, Frank Eugene Corder stole a red-and-white Cessna 150 trainer and made a name for himself by diving it into the White House. The sniper nest on the roof of the Executive Mansion had a maximum of 14 seconds to get off the Stinger missiles that were planned to disintegrate such an aircraft in the air, and failed to get off even one, possibly because the sort of threat they were on the lookout for was from substantially more high-tech attack bomber aircraft. The plane hit the magnolia tree that had been planted by the slaves of President Andrew HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW Jackson. This graceful tree is the one that is depicted on the back of our $20.00 bill, and the Cessna broke off one shapely limb and damaged the bullet-proof glass of the window of an aide-de-camp’s office on the ground floor. When First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton got back to the White House, she came out onto the upstairs portico that had been added by President Harry S Truman and leaned over to take a peek (as simulated in red, above, on this snip from the currency) as the dead body of what’s-his-face was being cut out of the wreckage.
In an AFA press release, a veteran/congressman delivered his personal blast at the Enola Gay exhibit: “In 1943, I left the United States for the Pacific theater as an 18-year-old Army Air Force recruit prepared to defend my country against one of the most brutal aggressors of our time. Fifty years later, I find myself again defending our country from another surprise attack, this time from American scholars attempting to rewrite history.” WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW
2017
March 15, Wednesday: President Donald Trump had already redecorated the Oval Office, with a portrait of President Andrew Jackson from the White House collection. The Hermitage was closed to the public for the 250th anniversary of the 7th President’s birth so that the President could safely place a wreath on his tomb, salute as taps was played, speak about similarities he claimed between his own nativism and the populist Jackson, characterize Jackson as “the people’s president,” and observe a moment of silence without any tweets. Outside the gate the American Indian Coalition was staging a protest that didn’t amount to much. In Nashville’s downtown park a larger protest involved students from Fisk University and from LEAD Academy, while Trump supporters serenaded them with “God Bless America.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW 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 2017. 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
Prepared: April 28, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW 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.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT ANDREW GENERAL ANDREW 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