Know-Nothingism

NATIVISM

“To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.”

— Rebecca West

During the lifespan of Henry Thoreau there existed a group of “nativist” Americans who were as mortally opposed to the immigration of Irish and German Catholics to the United States as, in a later timeframe with a later problem, they would become to the immigration of Jews. They formed a secret society which was referred to in public as the “Order of United Americans.” To be accepted into this group it was not enough merely to agree to detest Catholicism: one would also need to document the fact that one had been born here in America and that one’s family was entirely untainted by any connection with any Catholic either by blood or marriage. The code of silence of these nativists was similar to the Mafia’s “omerta”: if asked anything at all about the group, the initiate’s response was a set phrase “I know nothing.” Abraham Lincoln would warn in 1856 that “If the Know- Nothings get control, the Declaration of Independence will read: All men are created equal except for Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1816

The preaching of Thomas Oxnard in Baltimore led to the organization of the Unitarian church there, at which the Reverend William Ellery Channing would deliver his famous 1819 sermon. He met every two weeks with about 20 liberal ministers in the Boston area, mostly Congregational, for discussions relating to religion, morals, and civic order. Freeman was appointed to a committee charged with considering the creation of a formal body. The work of this committee led, in 1825, to the founding the American Unitarian Association.

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Little Harriet Beecher, five years old, was fascinated with the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; ORTHEECCLEFIASTICAL HIFTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRFT PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620, UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698. IN SEVEN BOOKS. (Well, the mentality of the reverend author of this tome was approximately the mentality of a five-year-old, so there you are.)

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Meanwhile, her daddy the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who had done so much to safeguard Boston against the spiritual errors of the Unitarians, was urging that to counter the threat of Roman Catholicism there should be created a Protestant school for each district of the community, and that there should be at least one Protestant minister available for each 1,000 residents, and that –since Roman Catholicism feared the common man with his Holy Bible and his ability to read and understand it for himself– there must be a copy of the Holy Bible in each and every home. The Reverend, it is to be mentioned, was not a member of the Know-Nothing Party: he approved of their objectives but he thought of himself nevertheless as standing aloof from the “hatreds” which that political group tended to nurture and he thought of himself as standing aloof from the “violence and secrecy” of the means they tended to employ. ANTI-CATHOLICISM

(I think it is important for me here to emphasize this for you, because my sense of the matter is that very few of us now think of the development of 19th-Century “bible societies” as in any sense prejudicial or partial or sectarian. This was the year in which, in New-York, the American Bible Society was being founded and of course that was righteous. Of course it was. This was the year in which Noah Webster not only was helping found and write the constitution for a “charitable society,” but also was becoming a director of the New Hampshire Bible Society, and of course that was righteous. –It is relevant for you to recognize that what you are gazing at is the kindly countenance of American anti-Catholic prejudice.)

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1825

The millennialism of the Irish “Rockites” would be absorbed because the 1771 prophesy based upon the interpretation of the Apocalypse of St. John by Bishop Charles Walmsley Pastorino, that God would destroy all Protestantism by this year 1825 –a prophecy that had been credited by these lower-class Catholic rock throwers since 1821– had become no longer functional.

In England, the Catholic Relief Bill was defeated in the House of Lords.

The Catholic pro-cathedral was opened in Marlborough Street, Dublin. Some 50,000 Irish were applying for some 2,000 assisted places on shipping to America, in a British Colonial Office scheme to depopulate the southern counties.1

More than a hundred periodicals had appeared by this point in the United States, three out of every four religious in nature. Of these roughly 75 American religious periodicals, fully half were anti-Catholic. During

1. By the end of the potato famine, 1/3rd of the surviving Irish population would be in the USA.

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the first half of the 19th Century, American Know-Nothing nativists would produce a vast amount of propaganda against the Roman Catholic Church, propaganda which focused on the same core reason why the Nazis would be so hostile to Jews. Just as the Nazis would consider themselves to be inherently nationalistic and patriotic and Jews to be essentially internationalists and therefore implicitly disloyal and the most deadly enemy of the Fatherland, so also these American nativists were considering themselves to be patriotic nationalists and considering Roman Catholics to constitute our most mortal threat, any Catholic being essentially internationalistic, and merely another sworn servant of a foreign potentate — the Pope in Rome. The great number of Catholic immigrants, mostly German and Irish, who were finding new homes in what we now refer to as “the Midwest,” caused the Know-Nothings and other nativists to fear that the power of the Pope might be able to find a new homeland there.

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1828

Washington Irving’s three-volume fiction LIFE AND VOYAGES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, boldly termed a biography of Christopher Columbus, boldly proclaimed the earth to be a globe, against the folly of a putative medieval consensus proclaiming the earth to be flat like the floor of a tent. 1 2

4 3 Photographic proof... (The four corners have been arbitrarily numbered clockwise.) “Care should be taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition.” This of course would help our Know-Nothings vastly to elaborate their contempt for different others (well, that is, if they needed any help):

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WASHINGTON IRVING AND THE SPECTRE OF THE “FLAT-EARTHER” RELIGIOUS BIGOT Where did this preposterous rationalist conceit originate, that some superstitious religious people had believed that the earth was flat? If one really wants to ascribe such a geographical conception to early Christians, one can find flat-earth theories both in Lactantius (circa 265CE-345CE) and Cosmos Indicopleustes (circa 540CE), but by the Middle Ages neither of these authors were being taken at all seriously.1 What was the dominant intellectual movement of the High Middle Ages? Scholasticism. What ancient Greek author was idolized as “The Philosopher” by the Scholastics? Aristotle. And what had been Aristotle’s views on the shape of the Earth? In DE CÆLO 2:14, he had offered at least three arguments why the Earth must be spherical. First, if all falling objects are attracted to the center of the Earth, the accumulation of debris landing at the Earth’s center would naturally assume the shape of a sphere. Secondly, the Earth’s shadow, as projected on the Moon during lunar eclipses, is clearly an arc- segment of a circle. Given enough observations of such eclipses, the shape of the Earth’s shadow would be revealed as circular. Since spheres cast circular shadows, and the Earth casts a circular shadow, the Earth must be a sphere. Thirdly, the Earth must be a sphere of no great size, since even a short journey across its surface causes a considerable difference in the altitude and rising/setting times of the fixed stars. Aristotle even hazarded a guess derived from contemporary astronomers, that the Earth’s circumference was 400,000 stades (9,987 miles). So Aristotle obviously understood that the Earth was a sphere, and of course his close students among the medieval Byzantines, Arabs, and Western Europeans also understood. Though the roots of the “flat-earther” derogation of religious people may be sought among the enlightened philosophes, as Voltaire suggested that the ancient Hebrews had believed in a flat earth although he did not assert that this had been picked up by the Christian inheritors of Jewish scriptures, and then in 1737 Thomas Paine suggested that wise Europeans had been burned at the stake for believing in a spherical earth (of course without bothering to name names or specify places and dates), Washington Irving’s CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, written while he was a US official stationed at the Alhambra in Spain, played a significant role in the retroactive construction of flat-earthers whom all loyal New-Worlders could come to love to despise. Why had this preposterous tale taken root and persisted?

1. Jeffrey Russell. INVENTING THE FLAT EARTH. Praeger, 1991: “…the search for truth is long and laborious and easily set aside. And since the present is transformed day by day, minute by minute, second by second, into the past, while the future is unknown and unknowable, we are left on the dark sea without compass or astrolabe, more unsure of our position and our goal than any of Columbus’s sailors. The terror of meaninglessness, of falling off the edge of knowledge, is greater than the imagined fear of falling off the edge of the earth. And so we prefer to believe a familiar error than to search, unceasingly, in the darkness.”

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WASHINGTON IRVING AND THE SPECTRE OF THE “FLAT- EARTHER” RELIGIOUS BIGOT [CONCLUDED] AfterIn Europe Irving ,it it hadwas Antoine-Jeanbeen a feature Letronne of (1747-1848)early middle-class who first reallyEnlightenment put the anti-clericalism, flat earth on the and map when as ofit 1834,was transferred so to speak, to imbibingthe United his States ideology it becamefrom the useful Encyclopedists, as a feature for of itKnow-Nothing was he who assertedanti-Catholicism in DES OPINIONSand continued COSMOGRAPHIQUES with that DES movement’s PERES DE L’EGLISEvarious thatillegitimate until Kepler offspring. and Newton After had Irving, come along,it was astronomers Antoine-Jean had beenLetronne forbidden (1747-1848) by theologians who first toreally believe put inthe a flatspherical earth earth.on the Williammap as ofWhewell 1834, (1794-1866)so to speak, wrote imbibing of a WhisARFARE ideology BETWEEN SfromCIENCE theAND REncyclopedists,ELIGION and then forJohn it Draper was he(1811-1882) who asserted intensified in DES thisOPINIONS in CHISTORYOSMOGRAPHIQUES OF THE DES CPONFLICTERES DE LBETWEEN’EGLISE thatRELIGION until AND Kepler SCIENCE and, Newtonbut such had comederogations along, didastronomers not become had really been popularforbidden until by thetheologians generations to believebetween in1870 a sphericaland 1920. earth. In 1896 William the capstoneWhewell (1794-1866)was put on wrotethis ofedifice a WARFARE of mythinformationBETWEEN SCIENCE AND by RELIGION Andrew and Dickson then JohnWhite Draper (1813-1918) (1811- with1882) HintensifiedISTORY OF THE thisWARFARE in OFH ISTORYSCIENCE OF WITHTHE CTONFLICTHEOLOGY BETWEENIN CHRISTENDOM RELIGION. ANDBy thatSCIENCE point, but itsuch had derogations become an didarticle not becomeof faith really in anti-religious popular until circlesthe generations that there between was or 1870 had andbeen 1920. such Inbigotry, 1896 the and capstone the spectre was ofput onthe this“flat edifice earther” of mythinformation could be effectively by Andrew Dicksonused duringWhite controversies(1813-1918) with over H ISTORYDarwinism. OF THE The WARFARE spectre OF SofCIENCE the WITH“flat T HEOLOGYearther” IN religiousCHRISTENDOM .bigot By that lives point on wellit had into become our modern an article era, despiteof faith very in clearanti-religious repudiation circles by Samuel that Eliotthere Morisonwas or had among been others, such bigotry, and has moreand the recently spectre been of thefeatured “flat earther”in such verycould derivative be effectively materials used asduring Daniel controversies Boorstin’s 1981over TDarwinism.HE DISCOVERERS The. spectre of the “flat earther” religious bigot lives on well into our modern era, despite very clear repudiation by Samuel Eliot Morison among others, and has more recently been featured in such very derivative materials as Daniel Boorstin’s 1981 THE DISCOVERERS.

June 5?, Thursday: The Reverend Lyman Beecher preached in Concord at the formal opening of the Trinitarian Congregational Church on Walden Street (this body had split away from the First Parish Church as it had begun its slide toward Unitarianism, and its edifice was already a year and a half old).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5th of 6th M 1828 / This Morning in the Steam Boat Washington our only & dear Son John S Gould arrived home from Hudson after an absence of one Year & four Months It is nearly three years since he left us & enter’d as a Schollar at the Yearly Meeting School in Providence. - we feel thankful for the priviledge of again seeing him for a little while. — Our meeting which he attended was small, but solid, & a short acceptable testimony from Father Rodman. - We Drank tea with John at Father Rodmans RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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1830

In this timeframe, according to historian Ruth Elson, a typical American adult “had already as a youth been fully indoctrinated in anti-Catholicism.”

Touring Italy, Samuel F.B. Morse was amazed at the axes he saw in use. They were out of the middle ages, and were nothing like American axes which were balanced so that the bit, the cutting edge, weighed about the same as the poll, or flat side! The American axes could be swung straight and clean, without wavering and with power, and they had handles shaped to the height and reach of the axman. Thus, he noted, an American laborer could fell three times as many trees in a day as a European laborer, for the same wage. Morse failed to notice that in Italy while he was there, in a move strikingly similar to the move made in regard to the Jews of Germany approximately a century later, the Waldenses of the Italian mountains were being from all universities, and their “barbes,” their lay preachers and teachers, were being proscribed from all the learned professions.

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When Morse learned, however, that a Catholic charity in Vienna, Austria calling itself the Leopoldine Society (Leopoldinen Stiftung) to Aid the Missions was making contributions to the Bishop of Cincinnati, Ohio to build churches and schools for Catholics who were emigrating to Ohio, and that this charity had actually raised $15,456.04 in Europe to help with the good work in America, he dedicated his life to helping the American Know-Nothings to defeat the Roman Catholic Church. Taking his cue from the machinations and cheap tricks of his father, the Reverend Jedediah Morse, who had made brownie points by attacking Freemasonry as an international conspiracy, he would write a series of articles describing Roman Catholicism as a “foreign conspiracy” and urging all Protestants to put aside their petty religious differences in order to unite against Catholic schools, the Society of Jesus, and lenient immigration laws by which these despicable disloyal Catholics were being enabled to emigrate to the United States of America.

ANTI-CATHOLICISM

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This sort of superpatriotic bullshit having been so very good for the career of his reverend father, hopefully a similar cheap attack on Catholicism as an international conspiracy would be very good for the career of the painter son!

ANTI-MASONRY

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“AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND ITS LITERATURE”

BY JOSEPH G. M ANNARD

(excerpted from EX LIBRIS Volume 4, Number 1, 1981, pages 1-9)

Today the Roman Catholic Church has sewn itself firmly into the crazy-quilt pattern of American society. Although prejudice and hostility towards Catholics continue to exist in various forms, no longer does any intelligent person believe tales of Vatican intrigues against the United States. Witness the popular effusions during the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to this country. In the nineteenth century, however, the nation’s capitulation to Roman legions appeared an imminent possibility to thousands of American Protestants. Although a conspiracy to subjugate the United States to Papal authority never existed, this belief constituted reality to many anti-Catholic nativists. Anti-Catholic literature played an important role in the growth of nativism by reflecting and helping to shape public opinion about Catholicism. American Anti-Catholicism and fears of Papal conspiracy did not suddenly spring full-blown from the feverish brains of Protestant ministers and nativist propagandists. Nativist literature found a ready acceptance in part because anti- Catholic xenophobia and conspiracy theories traced back to the first English colonists. Two forms of anti-Papal rhetoric existed in colonial society. The first derived from the heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth century. These writings depicted the Pope as the Anti-Christ, the “Man of Sin” and the “Whore of Babylon” described in Revelation, who schemed to deliver the Christian world into the hands of his master, Satan. This primarily Scriptural argument dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late seventeenth century. More secular writers then proposed political anti-Papal theories to supplement religious polemics. John Locke, John Milton, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon influenced British subjects to view Rome as a center of intrigue intent on extending its medieval despotism worldwide. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 upheld the triumph of English government and liberties over Vatican cabals. Revolutionary America inherited this twin tradition of conspiracy theory. The founding fathers, in part, reflected these fears by their insistence on separation of church and state, freedom of the press, and public education as fundamentals of republican government. On the darker side, the nation accepted the idea of foreign conspiracy as normal to the American political situation.

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However, enough Catholics supported the War for Independence to erase many old myths about the inherently treasonable nature of Catholicism. Yet, “anti-Popery” remained vigorous, if less vocal, ready to re-emerge given optimal conditions. Childhood education reinforced underlying fears. Textbooks used in American grade schools from the Revolution until the Civil War sowed the seeds of nativism in young minds. Anti-Catholicism appeared as a prominent theme in these texts. The authors consistently lauded Protestantism as the true faith of Christianity. By contrast, they portrayed Catholicism as opposed not only to the valid Church but also to the free Republic. “An American adult in 1830,” according to historian Ruth Elson, “had already as a youth been fully indoctrinated in Anti- Catholicism.” The cultural transformations of Jacksonian America coupled with events from across the Atlantic convinced many Protestant Americans that the Pope hoped to add the United States to his imperial realm. In Europe the 1820s had witnessed the suppression of republican revolutions by the Holy Alliance, the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in England, and the formation of Catholic missionary societies in Austria and France dedicated to proselytizing throughout the world, including the United States. In America the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening professed an evangelical Protestantism inimical to Roman dogma. Disestablishment of their state churches led some Congregationalist ministers to try to regain their authority by leading the fight against Catholic infiltration. Most importantly, an unprecedented wave of foreign immigrants, mainly Irish and German Catholics, fed the fires of indigenous nativism. Throughout the nineteenth century numerous works of nativist literature helped to keep the Catholic issue before the American public. The printing of nativist newspapers, pamphlets, and books did not cause Anti-Catholicism. These publications mirrored and helped to mold attitudes which grew out of rapid social, economic, and political disruptions as well as ethnic and religious conflicts. Anti-Catholic writings often presented the most extreme and irrational side of nativist thought. Still, anti-Catholic literature constitutes an invaluable source on the intellectual history of American nativism. Analysis of these works illuminates the social and political concerns of their authors, audience, and age. Most writers sincerely sought to alert their fellow citizens to the Catholic threat, others sincerely sought to make a dollar. The vast amount and variety of anti-Catholic literature testified to the great appetite of the reading public for this kind of material. Anti-Catholic writings were theological, political, or sensational in content, although a single work frequently contained all three of these elements. Books like THOUGHTS ON POPERY (1836) by Reverend William Nevins and ERRORS OF THE PAPACY (1878) by E.M. Marvin opposed Rome chiefly on matters of doctrine.

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In sermons, tracts, and debates Protestant clergymen challenged their Catholic counterparts on points of Christian dogma. These controversies did not necessarily involve anti-Catholic nativism, for theological sparring also occurred among denominations of Protestantism. All forms of Catholic- Protestant conflict, however, aggravated existing religious and ethnic animosities. If some readers showed interest in doctrinal matters, others prepared to meet and defeat the Papal invasion. In the 1830s Protestant America awaited a spokesman who could articulate its fears regarding Catholicism and expose Rome’s designs on the young republic. This task initially fell to two individuals, Samuel F.B. Morse, later the inventor of the telegraph, and Lyman Beecher, Presbyterian minister and father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Morse’s FOREIGN CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE LIBERTIES OF THE UNITED STATES (1835) receives the dubious distinction of being the first book to connect the flood of foreign immigrants into eastern ports to Vatican plans for world conquest. Supposedly, the immigrants formed the Pope’s vanguard in his struggle against true religion and free government in America. Expanding on Morse’s revelations, Beecher, in his influential work A PLEA FOR THE WEST (1835) discussed the more subtle sides of Vatican strategy. Beecher’s title indicated where his major concerns lay. “It is equally plain,” he prophesied, “that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West.” The West, the largely undeveloped area of the Mississippi River Valley, promised to be the ultimate proving ground for Protestantism. Here some Protestants expected Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil, with Protestantism representing the forces of light, and Catholicism standing with the powers of darkness. Beecher warned that Rome planned to send hordes of Catholic immigrants into the region. Priests and nuns had already established schools that welcomed Protestant children in order to indoctrinate them with Papist ideas. Following his victory, the Pope expected to establish his new throne in the West. The “Papal Conspiracy” which Morse and Beecher unveiled remained, with modifications, the favorite theme of anti- Catholic propaganda throughout the nineteenth century. Despite dire predictions, nativists soon realized that foreigners would never overrun the native population. Writers, therefore, shifted their focus to the manipulation of immigrant voters by the Catholic Church. Nativists alleged that this control permitted Jesuits to dictate the political balance of power in the country. In 1855 Reverend Edward Beecher, a son of Lyman Beecher, wrote THE PAPAL CONSPIRACY EXPOSED. This apocalyptic chronicle of Papist depredations through the centuries added little to the revelations of the previous generation, but gained an audience among Know-Nothing party members and their allies. Religious antagonisms alone fail to explain why antebellum

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America proved receptive to the sirens of Anti-Catholicism. The Jacksonian era experienced sweeping, often abrupt, political, economic, and social change. Together with increased immigration came industrialization and urbanization, causing the transition into “modern America.” These changes supplied numerous opportunities to individuals to succeed through personal merit. But a lack of permanency also resulted-a person’s fortunes might plunge as quickly as they had ascended. Jacksonian society exhibited a sense of dislocation, of rootlessness. The belief in individual enterprise belied the people’s attempts to re-establish lost security and identity by joining voluntary associations. The tendency to strike out at groups different from themselves magnified the frustration of certain members of society. For these people the Catholic Church became a convenient scapegoat for their dissatisfaction. In the 1840s and 1850s these feelings manifested themselves in the growth of nativist political organizations, chiefly the American Republican party and the American (Know-Nothing) party. The 1860s marked a temporary quiescence in Anti-Catholicism. Nativism declined swiftly following the debacle of the 1856 presidential campaign in which the Know-Nothing party, having split over the slavery question, suffered a crushing defeat. Furthermore, the temporary drop in the rate of immigration and most significantly the coming of the Civil War, replaced xenophobia with more concrete fears in the mind of the American public. During the Civil War the heavy enlistments of Irish and Germans into the Union Army helped to dispel notions of immigrant and Catholic disloyalty. The post-bellum period never saw Anti-Catholicism regain its former strength in national politics, although it remained a significant force at the state and regional levels. The 1870s experienced some Protestant alarm over Catholic attempts to challenge the exclusive reading of the King James version of the Bible in the public schools, and to obtain state funding for parochial schools. During these controversies anti-Catholics tended to direct their fire at the Catholic hierarchy rather than at the immigrants. In the next decade another influx of foreigners entered America. The overwhelming majority of the “new immigrants” hailed from Southern and Eastern Europe, and many practiced the Catholic faith. The recent arrivals spurred a resurgence of nativist and anti-Catholic feelings. Two other forms of nativism, anti- foreign radicalism and Anglo-Saxon racism, also increased. Besides believing the newcomers to be inferior races, nativists associated them with labor problems and socialist ideologies. In 1887 a secret society known as the American Protective Association (APA) organized to oppose Catholics and immigrants. The APA attained its greatest strength in the Midwest. The views of the APA in the 1880s found an able supporter in Reverend Justin Fulton. In ROME IN AMERICA (1887) and WASHINGTON IN THE LAP OF ROME (1888), Fulton revived half-a-century-old arguments that outlined the constant peril which Popery posed to the nation.

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The depression of 1893 further stimulated the movement as some Americans seeking a cause for their misfortunes again found an answer in tales of Papal plots. But, within a year, its failure to verify its allegations, along with its own internal dissent, hastened the decline of the APA in most areas of the country. By the turn of the century, the waning influence of Anti- Catholicism on nativism resulted principally from the greater secularization of American society. Anti-Catholicism, nevertheless, reappeared on many occasions in the twentieth century. The phenomenal growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s, and the smear tactics employed against Alfred E. Smith in the presidential campaign of 1928 are the most familiar examples. Although the presidential contest of 1960 included anti-Catholic attacks on a candidate, the election of John Kennedy ended the specter of a Papist in the White House and effectively signaled the acceptance of Catholics in national government. Perhaps the primary appeal of anti-Catholic literature rested on its titillating aspects. Books promising to divulge the esoteric rites and rituals of the Catholic Church sold briskly Former priests and nuns reputedly authored these exposes. Nativists scrutinized the Mass, the sacraments, and the priesthood in works such as William Hogan’s AURICULAR C ONFESSION AND POPISH N UNNERIES (1848), HIGH AND L OW M ASS IN THE C ATHOLIC C HURCH (1846), William Potts’ DANGERS OF JESUIT INSTRUCTION (1846), and the anonymous POPE OR P RESIDENT? STARTLING D ISCOVERIES OF R OMANISM AS R EVEALED BY ITS OWN WRITERS (1859). Judging from the number of volumes concerning them, convents stimulated the imaginations of anti-Catholic authors as did no other facet of Romanism. Writers pictured nunneries as dens of sex, secrecy, and sedition. The secrecy surrounding convents intrigued nativists and allowed free rein to their creative energies. They described the convent system as a subversive network seeking to undermine the institutions of church, family and nation. A convent education prepared Protestant maidens to be “Romish mothers.” Moreover, anti-convent material proved doubly attractive to readers imbued with Victorian sexual mores. Here was the opportunity to condemn the depravity of convent life and guiltlessly to enjoy the legal pornography that described such conditions. The genre of convent literature, long a popular standard in Europe, established itself with American readers upon the success of Rebecca Reed’s SIX MONTHS IN A CONVENT (1835). The sales of Miss Reed’s account of life in a nunnery reportedly reached 10,000 copies in one week. One optimistic nativist editor predicted “that one or two hundred thousand copies of this work can be disposed of in one month.” Narratives of other “runaway nuns” continued to tantalize portions of the American public throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century Josephine M. Bunkley’s THE TESTIMONY OF AN ESCAPED NOVICE FROM THE SISTERHOOD OF ST. JOSEPH appeared in 1855 at the height of Know-Nothing power and influence.

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After the war, books like Edith O’Gorman’s TRIALS AND PERSECUTIONS OF MISS EDITH O’GORMAN (1871) showed the sustained market for convent themes. The most infamous of these works, Maria Monk’s AWFUL DISCLOSURES OF THE HÔTEL DIEU NUNNERY OF MONTRÉAL, became the best selling volume of 1836, and eventually sold over 300,000 copies. As late as the 1960 presidential campaign, extreme opponents of John Kennedy reprinted copies of AWFUL DISCLOSURES in an effort to besmirch his Catholicism. The mystery surrounding the convent made it a popular setting for anti-Catholic novels laced with Gothic motifs. Writers substituted the convent for the traditional castle with winding passageways and diabolical torture chambers, or the ancient mansion with its legend of bloody deeds and haunted attics. Instead of nymphs skirting across foggy moors, virginal novices fled the clutches of debauched Jesuits. Such titles as DANGERS IN THE DARK; A TALE OF INTRIGUE AND PRIESTCRAFT (1854) and THE HAUNTED CONVENT (1855) deftly played on an audience’s desire to encounter the unknown. In addition, nativists asserted that they based their portraits of convent fife on actual situations. For example, the subtitle for the novel THE CONVENT (1853) declared it to be A NARRATIVE FOUNDED ON FACT. Anti-Catholic fiction had great appeal. In the mid-1850s Charles Frothingham earned a comfortable living from the sale of three tales that were set around the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The publisher’s preface to THE C ONVENT’S D OOM (1854) boasted that “more than 40,000 copies were sold within ten days after publication in their original form....” By 1857 Frothingham’s SIX HOURS IN THE CONVENT had entered its sixteenth edition, each edition accounting for 10,000 printings. In the post-war period Julia McNair Wright seems to have been the most prolific and successful novelist of nativism, producing such provocative titles as ALMOST A NUN (1868), ALMOST A PRIEST (1870), PRIEST AND NUN (1871), and the obligatory SECRETS OF THE CONVENT AND CONFESSIONAL (1873). Fiction or non-fiction, novel or expose, anti-Catholic writings provide fascinating insight into the thinking of another age. Furthermore, they remind Americans that religion may still be twisted by frightened people to deny basic rights and freedoms to others.

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1832

Rebecca Theresa Reed, a charity pupil of the Ursuline Convent on Mount Benedict, ran away and began to retail self-justifying stories to receptive Protestants of girls held there against their will. Soon the Reverend Lyman Beecher would be lecturing on the topic. “To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.”

— Rebecca West

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Harriet Beecher, a daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, pastor of the Church of St. John the Evangelist on Bowdoin Street in Boston, who had lived since 1826 at 42 Green Street and had there experienced her religious conversion, followed her reverend father to Cincinnati and began to teach at her sister’s newly founded Western Female Institute. The Reverend Beecher, father also of Henry Ward Beecher, had been made the president of Lane Theological Seminary. In a Nativist or Know-Nothing magazine, the Reverend would confess that he had relocated in order “to battle the Pope for the garden spot of the world.” The need was to grow a crop of young Protestant ministers who would protect the western United States from becoming a colony of Catholics. ANTI-CATHOLICISM

Nicholas Marcellus Hentz and his wife the novelist Mrs. Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz relocated from Covington, Kentucky to Cincinnati, where they would conduct a female academy. The wife would become friends with Harriet Beecher, although they would differ considerably in their politics (Caroline was decidedly

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pro-slavery).

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1833

January: Prudence Crandall, headmistress of the Canterbury, Connecticut female academy, visited Boston, Providence, New-York, and New Haven to recruit 20 students of color, and sought the counsel of William Lloyd Garrison. When she returned to Canterbury she announced that she had decided to do without the white students and instead educate free young black women: “Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.” The town fathers of course went apeshit.

When the school reopened, some of its students were from out of state, from for instance such foreign municipalities as Boston and Philadelphia. The Selectmen of the town responded by declaring: “Open this door, and New England will become the Liberia of America.”2 Merchants refused to sell supplies. The town doctor refused to treat the students. The local church refused to admit the students. Manure was thrown into their drinking water. Rocks were thrown at the school building while these “young ladies and little misses of color” were inside. The local authorities began to threaten the application of a local “vagrancy” ordinance, a law that would provide such visitors with ten lashes of the whip (to my knowledge, however, not one of these young ladies of color ever was actually whipped in accordance with this “vagrancy” idea, the idea of torturing

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them being, apparently, merely a nasty threat).

2. Had, through the efforts of Prudence, New England become the Liberia of America — this is what its currency would have looked like:

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1834

Summer: The Reverend Lyman Beecher returned from his presidency of Lane Theological Seminary near Cincinnati, Ohio to Boston to deliver three anti-Catholic sermons in various churches on a single day. He succeeded in rallying the Protestants together and the next day a mob gathered at the Ursuline Convent school in Charlestown, carrying banners which said, “Down with Popery” and “Down with the Cross.”

While the sisters and their charges were being rescued and sheltered by farmer neighbors, 50 men broke down the doors of the Catholic convent and set everything on fire. The mob was led by people such as a local brickmaker and teamster, but also present were at least two of the selectmen of Charlestown, and their complicity went at least to the extent of failing to call out the militia.

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Also present in the mob which watched the Ursuline Convent burn to the ground were members of Charlestown’s volunteer fire department:

Although the arsonists made no secret of their identity, none would ever be found guilty. They would be tried in Concord in Middlesex County Court in 1836 but would declare that they were attempting to free young girls who were being held captive inside the convent by the Papist nuns and would all be acquitted.3 Mob attacks on Catholic churches in New England would soon become so frequent that insurance companies would refuse to insure Catholic buildings. The Reverend Beecher would return to Cincinnati and publish his rabble-rousing 3.There was one particular woman who was being given shelter in the convent, who was having some sort of mental difficulties, and this act of consideration by the sisters may have been just the thing that was needed to inflame the active imaginations of the righteously malicious Beast-of-Rome haters in the Protestant Boston area. In fact the mob made no particular effort to identify and retrieve this woman, who was fleeing with the sisters and taking refuge at a neighboring farm. Refer to:

Whitney, Louisa G. THE BURNING OF THE CONVENT. Boston, 1844. Lord, Robert H., John E. Sexton, and Edward T. Harrington. HISTORY OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF BOSTON IN THE VARIOUS STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT, 1604 TO 1943. New York, 1944.

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sermon as a pamphlet titled PLEA FOR THE WEST. He amplified the papal plot envisaged by Samuel F.B. Morse, maintaining that Catholic schools would win converts who would ally themselves with Catholic immigrants to control the west. Many would join the Reverend Beecher, allying themselves against immigrant Catholics. The Nativist presence under the leadership of Beecher in Cincinnati would prompt the Catholic bishop of that city, in erecting a new cathedral which would become the tallest building west of the Allegheny River at the time, to design the structure without any windows at all in the lower walls. The circumference of the building is solid stone all the way up to 45 feet, in order to protect against anyone throwing incendiaries into the building as had been happening in New England church burnings.

The missing Protestant girl whose absence had triggered the mob turned up safe and sound. It had all been a mistake or a presumption:

Subsequently, there were rumors going around that enraged Papists were going to exact their revenge by attacking Harvard College, and the selectmen of Cambridge responded by creating a “patrol watch” around

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Harvard Yard and stationing men at alarm bells.

There were “criars” (sic) sent into the streets of Cambridge to summon the populace to an indignation meeting, and this meeting created a committee which was charged with having at least two of its members “in session through the night,” so that it could promptly summon “military power” from Boston if this were needed to defend the edifices of their College. This committee, with its “patrol watch” and official bell-ringers, would evolve over the course of years into the first municipal police force and the first alarm system of the city of Cambridge.

Here is a portion of the report of the committee of investigation:

At the time of this attack upon the Convent there were within its wall about sixty female children and ten adults; one of whom was in the last stages of pulmonary consumption, another suffering under convulsion fits, and the unhappy female, who had been the immediate cause of the excitement, was by the agitation of the night in raving delirium. No warning was given of the intended assault, nor could the miscreants, by whom it was made, have known whether their missiles might not kill or wound the helpless inmates of this devoted dwelling. Fortunately for them, cowardice prompted what mercy and manhood denied: after the first attack, the assailants paused awhile from the fear that some secret force was concealed in the Convent or in ambush to surprise them; and in this interval the Governess was enabled to secure the retreat of her little flock and terrified sisters into the garden. But before this was fully effected, the rioters, finding they had nothing but women and children to contend against, regained their courage, and ere all the inmates could escape, entered the building.

July 28, Monday: Elijah Pierson of The Kingdom was having spells which sometimes –when he became intensely lonely for his lost wife Ann, and disoriented– caused him to reach into his trousers in public to play with himself. He had asked Isabella Van Wagenen and the others to restrain him whenever these devils appeared. That evening, for supper, in a display of rage, the prophet Matthias spooned out plates of blackberries for Pierson but then himself ate only dry toast and coffee. It turned out that he had become enraged because when the dish of blackberries had been placed on the table, it had not been placed directly in front of him.

Sister Mary John sought shelter with Protestants.4 While the Catholic sisters of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown and their charges were being rescued and sheltered by farmer neighbors, a mob of Protestants from Boston and Charlestown destroyed the convent building. The mob was led by people such as a local brickmaker and teamster, but also present were at least two of the selectmen of Charlestown, and their complicity went at least to the extent of failing to call out the militia. Also present in the mob which watched 4. She would voluntarily return to her Catholic context after getting her wits about her.

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the Ursuline Convent burn to the ground were members of Charlestown’s volunteer fire department. The mobs were prevented from marching to burn down Harvard Library on Tuesday night. The mobs were kept out of Boston on Wednesday night by raising the draw of the Charlestown bridge. Nothing would ever be done to punish the members of this protesting mob, who were tried in Concord in Middlesex County Court in 1836 but were acquitted, which operated under the declaration that they were attempting to free young girls who were being held captive inside the convent by the Papist nuns.5 Subsequently, there would be rumors going around that enraged Papists were going to exact their revenge by attacking Harvard College, and the selectmen of Cambridge would respond by creating a “patrol watch” and stationing men at alarm bells. There were “criars” (sic) sent into the streets of Cambridge to summon the populace to an indignation meeting, and this meeting created a committee which was charged with having at least two of its members “in session through the night,” so that it could promptly summon “military power” from Boston if this were needed to defend the edifices of their College. This committee, with its “patrol watch” and official bell-ringers, would evolve over the course of years into the first municipal police force and the first alarm system of the city of Cambridge MA.

Here is the after-mob Ursuline convent, and a portion of the report of the committee of investigation:

5. There was one particular woman who was being given shelter in the convent, who was having some sort of mental difficulties, and this act of consideration by the sisters may have been just the thing that was needed to inflame the active imaginations of the righteously malicious Beast-of-Rome haters in the Protestant Boston area. In fact the mob made no particular effort to identify and retrieve this woman, who was fleeing with the sisters and taking refuge at a neighboring farm. Refer to:

Whitney, Louisa G. THE BURNING OF THE CONVENT (Boston, 1844). Lord, Robert H., John E. Sexton, and Edward T. Harrington. HISTORY OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF BOSTON IN THE VARIOUS STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT, 1604 TO 1943 9New York, 19440.

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1835

Rebecca Reed, a nun who had escaped from the Ursuline Convent in 1832, left little to the imagination when she described her SIX MONTHS IN A CONVENT. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

What sort of person would be impressed by this sort of literature? Well, for one thing, a person who had helped burn down this convent in Charlestown would be impressed, very impressed. “Hey, we did the right thing!”

To Henry C. Wright, of course, Rebecca Read’s SIX MONTHS IN A CONVENT bore “the impress of Truth.” Damn those Catholics anyway. ANTI-CATHOLICISM

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology:

• Creation of a book, FOREIGN CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE LIBERTIES OF THE UNITED STATES (New- York: Leavitt, Lord & Company), out of a series of articles which had been published in a weekly periodical, New-York Observer. The book is a Know-Nothing treatise against the political influence of Catholicism in which the author announced the discovery of an internationalist Catholic conspiracy: “its plans are already in operation … we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, or forts, or our armies.” The publisher of the weekly periodical ANTI-CATHOLICISM

SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM was the author’s brother. The author was the son of the Congregationalist minister of Boston, the Reverend Jedediah Morse, the divine who had in May 1798 warned of an internationalistic atheistic conspiracy he termed “the Illuminati.” This demagogue’s name was Samuel F.B. Morse, and you will remember him not only as the person who laid claims to unique insight which led to his detection of an internationalist Catholic conspiracy but also as the person who laid claims to the unique insights which led to the “invention” of the electric telegraph. (In the case of the electric telegraph, it is now clear that funding and organization and social anthropology were more important ingredients of such a success than any of his technological tinkering — for a whole lot of people had been developing these technological capabilities without possessing his good connections and without attaining the funding and legitimation that would get them anywhere.) The source of the present danger, Morse fils announced, was Jesuits operating out of a base within the

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Austrian government.6 And it was in this very year that Morse constructed the first working model of the telegraph upon the frame of an old picture from his painting studio: The Johannes Gutenberg age of print, then, perhaps stretches from roughly 1448 and the printing of the “Forty-Two Line Bible” to approximately 1835. — Docherty, Thomas. ON MODERN AUTHORITY: THE THEORY AND CONDITION OF WRITING INTO THE PRESENT DAY. NY: St. Martin’s P, 1987, page 284

6. During this year also there appeared a book, PLEA FOR THE WEST (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith; New-York: Leavitt, Lord & Company), alleging that the USA was presently the site for an immense life-or-death struggle, of Protestants vs. Catholics. “Whatever we [Protestants] do, it must be done quickly.…” One of the things we could do quickly would be to call a halt to the immigrant stream of people who were “inexperienced” in our way of life, unaccustomed to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as it is enacted in these great and United States of America. The author of this paranoid masterpiece was the Reverend Lyman Beecher, the father of, among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe. (She didn’t get her divisiveness –her ability to create an enemy who must be utterly destroyed whereupon we will all be purified– from out of the blue sky, you know.) The most recent such piece of shit I have discovered is by the clown who wrote the book upon which the Bertolucci movie “The Last Emperor” was based. Take a look at the Japan-bashing in that book! He claims that before the 2d World War, the Sun Emperor was positioning a group of a dozen or so diplomatic conspirators in Switzerland to run the world. –Which is not to say that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere wouldn’t have wanted to take over the world and run it for the benefit of all, it is merely to say that what keeps any one group of us who believe they could fruitfully take over the world and run it from taking over the world and running it is the existence of a whole bunch of other groups of us who believe they could fruitfully take over the world and run it, and is merely to say, also, that we’re damned lucky that that’s so.

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There is an argument that Morse got a lot of his plans for the electric telegraph in America from Harrison Gray Dyar of Concord. Dyar was an inventor, and had batteries, and he had the idea of sending electric impulses along a wire and he had the idea of spacing the sparks in such a way as to form an alphabetic code. Using glass apothecary phials as insulators, he strung a wire from tree to tree alongside the Red Bridge road (Hunt’s Bridge on the Lowell Road over the Concord River at Gleason E6) “all the way to Curtis’s.”7

7. And ain’t that just great, the brothers George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis who helped Henry Thoreau raise the frame of his shanty on Walden Pond are not shown on the Concord map. Did they live in some adjoining town?

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He recorded the sparks on a ribbon of moistened litmus paper on a spool that revolved by clockwork. The nitric acid that was formed on the litmus paper by the action of the electricity left little red marks on the blue litmus paper. His experiment worked well enough that he got some cash backing and proposed to string a wire from New-York to Philadelphia. However, the New Jersey legislature called him “dangerous,” and refused permission for this larger experiment, and then one of his backers threatened to take him to court to get his money back. We know that Samuel F.B. Morse married the sister of Charles Walker, and we know that Charles Walker worked with Dyar on this scheme and retained many of Dyar’s sketches, so we may presume that Walker or his sister showed the sketches to Morse. We have also established that Morse knew a number of other people, besides Charles Walker, who had worked with Dyar. Is this not much too much of a coincidence?

Boundary disputes between Michigan and Ohio brought about a “Toledo War.”

The Reverend Lyman Beecher had returned from his rabble-rousing and convent-burning in Boston to the directorship of the Lane Theological Seminary near Cincinnati, Ohio. His rabble-rousing and convent-burning Know-Nothing sermon was being published by Truman & Smith in Cincinnati and by Leavitt, Lord & Company in New-York as PLEA FOR THE WEST. There was a student revolt against his religious institution. The consequences of this revolt would be the relocation of the majority of the students to Oberlin College’s Theological Seminary, where they could continue their abolitionist activism. The leader of this revolt was Theodore Dwight Weld.

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1836

Politics were a little strange. Protestant rioters who had torched the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown in the summer of 1834 were tried in Concord, and despite the most overwhelming evidence, were acquitted.8 ANTI-CATHOLICISM

In this year the Reverend William Nevins was producing his THOUGHTS ON POPERY. The most infamous of the many Know-Nothing propaganda works created during this year, however, would be Maria Monk’s AWFUL DISCLOSURES OF THE HÔTEL DIEU NUNNERY OF MONTRÉAL, which we suspect was ghostwritten by Theodore Dwight, Jr., a nephew of the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, and a great-grandson of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards. It seemed that Catholic nuns were under orders to “obey the priests in all things,” and that their illegitimate babies were being baptized and then stifled in the cradle so that their souls would ascend innocent at once to Heaven. This book created a sensation despite the testimony of the Protestant mother of this girl, that her daughter, never having been in a convent, had not escaped from one, but had simply been paid by a Protestant minister to sign her name to an utterly fictitious story. According to Maria’s mom, since she had rammed a pencil into her skull as a child, she should perhaps be excused for this fantasy. (This “pornography for the Puritan” would sell more than 300,000 copies. In 1849 Maria, having been detained on charges of having picked the johns’ pockets in a brothel, would die in prison.) SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

8. In order to understand how rioters who had committed an anti-Catholic arson could be acquitted in the Middlesex County courts, it is necessary to understand a great deal about the political ferment and the group hatreds of the time, and I can’t get into this here. For now just receive it as a surd — something to marvel at and wonder about.

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By this point the Reverend Hersey B. Goodwin had died and Dr. Edward Jarvis and Lemuel Shattuck had left Concord. The attempt made by these three educators to put the educational principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi into practice at the Town School was a thing of the past. The School Committee had fallen into the hands of conservatives who seemed much more interested in their own local internecine political struggles than in the welfare of the students. The cream of the college crop was being skimmed by the private Concord Academy, leaving in the public system the children of the poor, the dullards, and the discipline problems. Too bad. Phineas Allen, the Preceptor at the Concord Academy, who had alienated the Academy Committee through his anti-Masonic activities, ran for Town Clerk, and was elected. In order to understand how such a change of power in the little town of Concord could be related to the torching of the Ursuline Convent near Boston, and in order to understand how rioters who had committed an anti-religious arson could be acquitted in the Middlesex County courts, it is necessary to understand something of the anti-Masonic fervor which was sweeping the nation. Here is the story, in brief: William Morgan, a Mason, had become disaffected in a struggle internal to the fraternity and had published, in defiance of his oath of secrecy, the rites of the order. He had then, in Canandaigua NY, mysteriously disappeared, and it was rumored that the Masons had ordered that he be executed. John Quincy Adams, former president of the US, lost his head and published an attack on this fraternal organization. Then, while visiting Boston, Adams had happened to meet Squire Samuel Hoar of Concord, and had asked for his opinion. Old Sam had given it to him straight between the headlights:

It seems to me, Mr. Adams, there is but one thing in the world sillier than Masonry. That is Antimasonry.

But in Concord, a 3d-degree Mason and the owner of the Gazette, Hermon Atwill, resigned from the fraternity and republished the secrets published by the defector William Morgan. Concord became as bitterly divided as the nation. The sheriff of Middlesex County, Abel Moore, collected and consolidated all the outstanding bills that could be charged against the Gazette, and presented them for immediate payment in cash in an attempt to drive the paper out of existence. The Concord Bank, newly founded, called for payment of its note. John Keyes attempted to foreclose the mortgage. Atwill was no longer the owner of the Gazette, which became the Whig paper, and so he funded the Freeman in order to continue his Antimasonic crusade. With the harmlessness of the Masonic conspiracy and the ridiculousness of the Antimasonic evil-mongering becoming more and more obvious to everyone, Francis Richard Gourgas soon took over this undercapitalized gazette and turned it into a Democratic newspaper.

At the Concord Town Meeting, the citizens were so bitterly divided that it took them four ballots before they could even agree on a presiding officer. In the election of public officials, all the old Masonic affiliates were unseated and replaced with new Antimasonic officials. On the first ballot for the main position, Clerk of the Town of Concord Phineas Allen, representing the Antimasons, tied with Dr. Abiel Heywood, who had been clerk for 38 years and was sympathetic with Masonry. On the second ballot, Allen was elected by a margin of seven votes. The electorate was then persuaded to give Dr. Heywood a vote of thanks for 38 years of uninterrupted service to the town.

EDUCATION.— Many of the original inhabitants of Concord were well educated in their native country; and, “to the end that learning be not buried in the graves of the forefathers,” schools were provided at an early period for the instruction of their children. In 1647, towns of 50 families were required to have a common school, and of 100 families, a grammar school. Concord had the latter before 1680. An order was sent to this town, requiring “a list of the names of those young persons within the

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bounds of the town, and adjacent farms, who live from under family government, who do not serve their parents or masters, as children, apprentices, hired servants, or journeymen ought to do, and usually did in our native country”; agreeably to a law, that “all children and youth, under family government, be taught to read perfectly the English tongue, have knowledge in the capital laws, and be taught some orthodox catechism and that they be brought up to some honest employment.” On the back of this order is this return: “I have made dillygent inquiry according to this warrant and find no defects to return. Simon Davis, Constable. March 31, 1680.” During the 30 years subsequent to this period, which I [Lemuel Shattuck] have denominated the dark age in Massachusetts, few towns escaped a fine for neglecting the wholesome laws for the promotion of education. Though it does not appear that Concord was fined, a committee was appointed in 1692, to petition the General Court, “to ease us in the law relating to the grammar school-master,” or to procure one “with prudence for the benefit of learning, and saving the town from fine.” From that time, however, this school was constantly maintained. For several years subsequent to 1700, no appropriations were made to any other school. In 1701, grammar scholars paid 4d. and reading scholars 2d. per week towards its support; and from that time to 1712, from £20 to £30 were annually raised. In 1715, it was kept one quarter, in different parts of the town, for £40. The next year £50 were raised for schools; £35 for the centre, and £5 for each of the other three divisions. In 1722, Timothy Minott agreed to keep the school, for ten years, at £45 per year. In 1732, £50 were raised for the centre and £30 for the “out-schools”; and each schoolmaster was obliged to teach the scholars to read, write, and cipher, — all to be free. In 1740, £40 for the centre, and £80 for the others. These grants were in the currency of the times. In 1754, £40 lawful money were granted, £25 of which were for the centre. Teachers in the out-schools usually received 1s. per day for their services. The grammar-school was substituted for all others in 1767, and kept 12 weeks in the centre, and 6 weeks each, in 6 other parts, or “school societies” of the town. There were then 6 schoolhouses, 2 of which were in the present [1835] limits of Carlisle, and the others near where Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 6, now [1835] stand. This system of a moving school, as it was termed, was not, however, continued many years. In 1774 the school money was first divided in proportion to the polls and estates. The districts were regulated, in 1781, nearly as they now [1835] are. The town raised £120, in 1784, for the support of schools, and voted, that “one sixteenth part of the money the several societies in the out-parts of the town pay towards this sum, should be taken and added to the pay of the middle society for the support of the grammar-school; and the out-parts to have the remainder to be spent in schools only.” This method of dividing the school-money was continued till 1817, when the town voted, that it should be distributed to each district, including the centre, according to its proportion of the town taxes.

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The appropriations for schools from 1781 to 1783, was £100; from 1784 to 1792, £125; 1793, £145; 1794 and 1795, £200; 1796 to 1801, £250; 1802 to 1806, $1,000; 1807 to 1810, $1,300; 1811, $1,600; 1812 to 1816, $1,300; 1817 and since, $1,400. There are 7 districts, among which the money, including the Cuming’s donation, has been divided, at different periods, as follows. The last column contains the new division as permanently fixed in 1831. The town then determined the amount that should be paid annually to each district, in the following proportions. The whole school-money being divided into 100 parts, district, No. 1, is to have 52½ of those parts, or $761.25 out of $1,550; 5 district, No. 2, 7 /8 parts; district, No. 3, 8¼ parts; district, 5 No. 4, 8 /8 parts; district, No. 5, 8¼ parts; district, No. 6, 1 1 7 /8 parts; district No. 7, 7 /8 parts; and to individuals who pay their money in Lincoln and Acton, ½ a part.

District. Old Names. 1801. 1811. 1821. 1830. 1832.

No. 1. Central $382.92 $791.48 $646.15 $789.18 $761.25

No. 2. East 95.28 155.45 160.26 109.69 110.56¼

No. 3. Corner 68.49 135.48 142.48 117.00 119.62-½

No. 4. Darby 70.53 130.69 123.10 138.23 125.06¼

No. 5. Barrett 107.29 163.51 145.89 125.11 119.62¼

No. 6. Groton Road 64.63 105.41 93.55 79.16 103.31¼

No. 7. Buttrick 67.64 126.68 114.16 84.77 103.31¼

Individuals 22.22 41.30 24.41 6.86 7.25

$884.00 1,650.00 1,450.00 1,450.00 1,450.00

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At the erection of new school-houses in 1799, the first school committee was chosen, consisting of the Rev. Ezra Ripley, Abiel Heywood, Esq., Deacon John White, Dr. Joseph Hunt, and Deacon George Minott. On their recommendation, the town adopted a uniform system of school regulations, which are distinguished for enlightened views of education, and which, by being generally followed since, under some modification, have rendered our schools among our greatest blessings. The amount paid for private schools, including the Academy, was estimated, in 1830, at $600, making the annual expenditure for education $2,050. Few towns provide more ample means for acquiring a cheap and competent education. I [Lemuel Shattuck] have subjoined the names of the teachers of the grammar-school since the Revolution, — the year usually beginning in September.

1785 Nathaniel Bridge 9 months 1812 Isaac Warren 1 year

1786 JOSEPH HUNT 2½ years 1813 JOHN BROWN 1 year

1788 William A. Barron 3 years 1814 Oliver Patten 1 year

1791 Amos Bancroft 1 year 1815 Stevens Everett 9 months

1792 Heber Chase 1 year 1815 Silas Holman 3 months

1793 WILLIAM JONES 1 year 1816 George F. Farley 1 year

1794 Samuel Thatcher 1 year 1817 James Howe 1 year

1795 JAMES TEMPLE 2 years 1818 Samuel Barrett 1 year

1797 Thomas O. Selfridge 1 year 1819 BENJAMIN BARRETT 1 year

1798 THOMAS WHITING 4 years 1820 Abner Forbes 2 years

1802 Levi Frisbie 1 year 1822 Othniel Dinsmore 3 years

1803 Silas Warren 4 years 1825 James Furbish 1 year

1807 Wyman Richardson 1 year 1826 EDWARD JARVIS 1 year

1808 Ralph Sanger 1 year 1827 Horatio Wood 1 year

1809 Benjamin Willard 1 year 1828 David J. Merrill 1 year

1810 Elijah F. Paige 1 year 1829 John Graham 1 year

1811 Simeon Putnam 1 year 1831 John Brown

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The Concord Academy was established, in 1822, by several gentlemen, who were desirous of providing means for educating their own children and others more thoroughly than they could be at the grammar-school (attended, as it usually is, by a large number of scholars) or by sending them abroad. A neat, commodious building was erected, in a pleasant part of the town, by the proprietors, consisting of the Hon. Samuel Hoar, the Hon. Abiel Heywood, and Mr. Josiah Davis, who own a quarter each, and the Hon. Nathan Brooks and Colonel William Whiting, who own an eighth each. Their intention has always been to make the school equal to any other similar one. It was opened in September, 1823, under the instruction of Mr. George Folsom, who kept it two years. He was succeeded by Mr. Josiah Barnes and Mr. Richard Hildreth, each one year. Mr. Phineas Allen, son of Mr. Phineas Allen of Medfield, who was born October 15, 1801, and graduated at Harvard College in 1825, has been the preceptor since September 1827.9 I [the young John Shepard Keyes] had played truant every afternoon that previous winter spending the school hours at the foundry or the shops or the stables with no rebuke from the teacher, report to my parents or effect on my lessons. The nervous irritable Phineas had been worsted in a regular fight with Isaac Fiske a big boy from Weston whom he attempted to ferule, and who took away the ruler and broke it over the teachers head, ruining the gold spectacles, and the little discipline there had been in the school with a single blow. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

9. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston MA: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy, 1835 (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry 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.)

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Spring: Samuel F.B. Morse ran for mayor of New-York as a Know-Nothing candidate. (He garnered 1,496 votes but lost the election.)

1837

In a continuation of the previous year’s anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic political furor, Concord postmaster John Keyes was thrown out of office because he was a Mason (and therefore –per one of the Know-Nothing controlling fantasies of the time– a man whose loyalties were to a secret cabal rather than to the American nation). Charles B. Davis became the postmaster, and would serve intermittently as postmaster for Concord from that point forward, whenever the Democrats were in power.

1841

Spring: Samuel F.B. Morse ran again for mayor of New-York as a Nativist or Know-Nothing candidate. A forged letter appeared in a newspaper announcing that he has withdrawn from the election and, in the confusion, he received fewer than a hundred votes.

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1844

The nativist American Republican Party (reactionary Whigs AKA Native American Party, AKA Know- Nothing Party) was formed and gained control in Boston over issues of water supply and restriction of immigration.

May 3, Friday: Ramón María Narváez y Campos, duque de Valencia replaced Luis González-Bravo López de Arjona as Prime Minister of Spain.

Irish-Americans attacked a nativist rally in Philadelphia. The nativists retreated.

The Concord Freeman reported that: Fire in the Woods A fire broke out in the woods near Fair Haven Pond, in this Town, about ten o’clock, last Tuesday forenoon. It extended with great rapidity, and was not subdued until late in the afternoon. The extent of ground over which the fire prevailed is variously estimated, the

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lowest estimate placing it at not less than 300 acres.

At the start of Volume II of his journal Henry Thoreau would include seven leaves of miscellaneous jottings prior to the initial recorded day date (that of May 12, 1850). These miscellaneous jottings would include the following curious retrospective of the events of April 30, Tuesday, 1844:

I once set fire to the woods. Having set out, one April day, to go to the sources of Concord River in a boat with a single companion, meaning to camp on the bank at night or seek a lodging in some neighboring country inn or farmhouse, we took fishing tackle with us that we might fitly procure our food from the stream. Indian-like. At the shoemaker's near the river, we obtained a match, which we had forgotten. Though it was thus early ill the spring, the river was low, for there had not been much rain, and we succeeded in catching a mess of fish sufficient for our dinner before we had left the town, and by the shores of Fair Haven Pond we proceeded to cook them. 'The earth was uncommonly dry, and our fire, kindled far from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside on thc east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the previous year which grew about the stump on which it was kindled. We sprang to extinguish it at first with our hands and feet, and then we fought it with a board obtained from the boat, but in a few minutes it was beyond our reach; being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly upward, through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed with bushes. “Well, where will this end?” asked my companion. I saw that it might be bounded by Well Meadow Brook on one side, but would, perchance, go to the village side of the brook. “It will go to town,” I answered. While my companion took the boat back down the river, I set out through the woods to inform the owners and to raise the town. The fire had already spread a dozen rods on every side and went leaping and crackling wildly and irreclaimably toward the wood. 'That way went the flames with wild delight, and we felt that we had no control over the demonic creature to which we had given birth. We had kindled many fires in the woods before, burning a clear space in the grass, without ever kindling such a fire as this. As I ran toward the town through the woods, I could see the smoke over the woods behind me marking the spot and the progress of the flames. The first farmer whom I met driving a team, after leaving the woods, inquired the cause of the smoke. I told him. “Well,” said he, “it is none of my stuff,” and drove along. The next I met was the owner in his field, with whom I returned at once to the woods, running all the way. I had already run two miles. When at length we got into the neighborhood of the flames, we met a carpenter who had been hewing timber, an infirm man who had been driven off hy the fire, fleeing with his axe. The farmer returned to hasten more assistance. I, who was spent with running, remained. What could I do alone against a front of flame half a mile wide? I walked slowly through the wood to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the highest rock, and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I

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knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person, — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” (It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still.) So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames.' It was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of the cliff and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were powder. When I found I was about to be surrounded by the fire, I retreated and joined the forces now arriving from the town. It took us several hours to surround the flames with our hoes and shovels and by back fires subdue them. In the midst of all I saw the farmer whom I first met, who had turned indifferently away saying it was none of his stuff, striving earnestly to save his corded wood, his stuff, which the fire had already seized and which it after all consumed. It burned over a hundred acres or more and destroyed much young wood. When I returned home late in the day, with others of my townsmen, I could not help noticing that the crowd who were so ready to condemn the individual who had kindled the fire did not sympathize with the owners of the wood, but were in fact highly elate and as it mere thankful for the opportunity which had afforded them so much sport; and it was only half a dozen owners, so called, though not all of them, who looked sour or grieved, and I felt that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them better and should feel their loss more, than any or all of them. The farmer whom I had first conducted to the woods was obliged to ask me the shortest way back, through his own lot. Why, then, should the half-dozen owners [and] the individuals who set the fire alone feel sorrow for the loss of the wood, while the rest of the town have their spirits raised? Some of the owners, however, bore their loss like men, but other some declared behind my back that I was a “damned rascal;” and a flibbertigibbet or two, who crowed like the old cock, shouted some reminiscences of “burnt woods” from safe recesses for some years after. I have had nothing to say to any of them. The locomotive engine has since burned over nearly all the same ground and more, and in some measure blotted out the memory of the previous fire. For a long time after I had learned this lesson I marvelled that while matches and tinder were contemporaries the world was not consumed; why the houses that have hearths were not burned before another day; if the flames were not as hungry now as when I waked them. I at once ceased to regard the owners and my own fault, — if fault there was any in the matter, — and attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of it. To be sure, I felt a little ashamed when I reflected on what a trivial occasion this had happened, that at the time I was no better employed than my townsmen. That night I watched the fire, where some stumps still flamed at midnight in the midst of the blackened waste, wandering through the woods by myself; and far in the night I threaded my way to the spot where the fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish, — which had been dressed, — scattered over the burnt grass.

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May 6, Monday: Frederick Douglass spoke in New-York’s Broadway Tabernacle and Concert Hall, at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society (this would continue into the 11th, Saturday).

Fighting broke out again in Philadelphia between Irish and nativists. Four people were killed and a convent and several dwellings of Catholics were attacked.

May 7, Tuesday: The Reverend Adin Ballou went with Stephen Symonds Foster to the 10th Anniversary Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New-York.

Once again nativists invaded an Irish district in Philadelphia and rioting ensued. This continued until the militia arrived. Dozens of buildings burned.

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May 8, Wednesday: Brigham Young “got married with” Clarissa Decker.

Felix Mendelssohn once again arrived in London to direct a series of concerts.

Giuseppe Verdi purchased Il Pulgaro, a farm near Bussetto (this would be his parents’ primary home).

In Philadelphia, nativists torched two Catholic churches, a convent, and several more Irish homes. Over this week of rioting, 14 people had been killed in communal violence.

July 7, Sunday: After attacking and occupying a Catholic church, nativist mobs battled soldiers on this day and the following one in the streets of Philadelphia. Over 20 people would be killed.

July 18, Thursday: The Pennsylvania Freeman reported on the events at Pennsylvania Hall as representing a “Civil War in Philadelphia” and laid the blame upon the city’s Know-Nothings: This riotous and bloody city has just completed another terrible tragedy, which will probably beget another and another, till even ruffianism itself shall grow weary and sick of its dreadful deeds, and mobocracy be sated with human carnage. The immediate cause of these frightful outbreaks is unquestionably to be attributed to the formation of the Native American Party — a party which should be discountenanced by every friend of human brotherhood, which is animated by a spirit hostile to our race, which is anti-republican and tyrannical in its purposes, which makes hatred of one particular class of our fellow countrymen an act of patriotism, and which occupies a position that, sooner or later, it if it be not abandoned, will assuredly spread a civil war throughout the country, and lead to scenes of desolation and horror too awful even for the imagination to contemplate. In the present instance, the blame is as usual, thrown upon the Irish population; and no doubt they are very much to blame. But, insulted, proscribed and denounced as they are by the party to which we have alluded, is it surprising that they have been goaded to deeds of madness, which, but for the provocation given to them, they never would have committed? However justly, therefore, they deserve to be censured, let the weight of censure rest the most heavily on the party which arrogantly styles itself the Native American party. There will be no

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safety, no repose, no end to mobocratic excesses, until that party every where be resolved into its original elements, and cease to wound the heart and vex the ear of the suffering humanity. But the primary cause of these sanguinary conflicts finds its root in southern slavery, which fosters the spirit of caste, tramples all law and order under foot, and revels in human blood. It was in Louisiana, among slaveholders, that this native party originated. They were fearful that the warm appeals of Daniel O’Connell and Father Mathew to the Irish in this country, to join with the abolitionists for the overthrow of slavery, and vote for no candidate known to be a slaveholder or an apologist for slavery, would be heartily responded to by them; and therefore they contrived this scheme to exclude them from office and the ballot box. But the Irish have disregarded the noble entreaties of their countrymen at home, and instead of aiding the anti-slavery movement, have basely turned their backs upon it; and verily, they have their reward. Philadelphia has endeavored (and most successfully) to surpass all other places in murderous opposition to the cause of negro emancipation. To propitiate southern slavemongers, and secure southern trade, she has treated abolitionists as outlaws, broken up their meetings my mobocratic assaults, burnt the dwellings and brutally maltreated the persons of many of her colored inhabitants, given Pennsylvania Hall to the consuming fire, &c. &c; and her reward has been, the loss of seventy million of dollars at the South the blackening of her character with infamy throughout the civilized world, incendiary and bloody riots, and fiendish anarchy. Behold how awful, how just, and how swift has been the retribution of Heaven! Alleluia! For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!! Truly, they who sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind; and what shall be the end of these things! *** The number killed and wounded in the late affray, are fifteen of the former and about fifty of the latter. The rioters were the principal sufferers, four-fifths of the killed and wounded being of their party. *** Arrest of one of the Committee. — on the oath of Mr. Hugh Cassiday, head police officer of Southwark, Mr. John W. Smith, whose name is the first attached to the report of the committee that searched the Church, was yesterday arrested, and taken before Judge Jones. It is in evidence against the prisoner that he was one of the men who brought the cannon before the Church at the time Mr. Naylor was confined therein; that he stood near the breech of the gun; and when it was about to be removed, insisted upon its being discharged. As was committed to prison in default of bail to the amount of £2,5000, being the sum asked on the charges of high treason, murder and riot.

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A man named George Merrick, was arrested yesterday, charged with riot, and inciting to riot, on the occasion of the burning of Saint Augustine’s Church. He was held to answer in the sum of $2000. A man named Hugh Develin, was on Monday evening committed by Alderman Boilieu on a charge of being one of the participants in the Kensington riots. There were other arrests than those reported; but we judge it improper to mention names until hearings shall have taken place. — U.S. Gazette. *** The following taken from last Tuesday’s Ledger is one of the most auspicious signs we have seen since the cessation of the riots: Committed for Arson.-Abraham Freymine was yesterday arrested, by Constable Charles Roberts, on the charge of having set fire to the Pennsylvania Hall, and committed to answer by Alderman Erety. The defendant has been absent from the city nearly all the time since the destruction of that building. *** From the evidence taken by the Court of Common Please we are enabled to present a more accurate account of the principal features of the origin and progress of the late riots, than that which was given in the reports of the daily newspapers at the time. ANTI-CATHOLICISM It appears that J. Patrick Dunn, the pastor of the congregation worshipping at the Catholic church, in Southwark, called St. Philip de Neri, received a letter from a female teacher of the schools connected with the church, informing him of a conspiracy to burn the church either on the evening of Friday the 5th of July, or, in case of failure, then on one of two succeeding evenings. Believing this information to be in all probability well founded, the proprietors of the church caused twelve muskets to be taken into it during the day of the 5th, in addition to some which had remained there since the previous riots. This was done without any concealment. In the evening of that day, crowds calling themselves “Natives,” collected about three of the Catholic churches, the largest amounting perhaps to one thousand people, being at St. Philip’s. The pretext for the gathering was the existence of arms in the church, and an alleged fear that they were to be used offensively. From the number of the assemblage, however, and the early period at which so large a number gathered, it may be doubted whether many of them did not come in pursuance of a previous arrangement as referred to in the letter above mentioned. Sufficient evidence has not been elicited, as yet, to determine this point. The Sheriff, having been sent for, he arrived on the ground about 10 o’clock, but unaccompanied by assistants, he having had no time to obtain any. He held a parley with the mob, who demanded the surrender of the arms. The Rev. Mr. Dunn and his brother,

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Wm. H. Dunn, consented to the delivery of the arms which had been taken in during the day and they were accordingly surrendered, the Sheriff, as he testifies, being at the same time informed by the Rev. Mr. Dunn that there were other muskets in the church which had been placed there at the time of the previous riots. The charge of deception on the part of Priest Dunn, as to the number of arms in the church is thus shown by the Sheriff’s testimony to be unfounded. The mob, with the assent of the Sheriff, selected twenty persons to accompany him in the church. He required them to act as his posse and to assist him to protect the building, and requested them to desist from further search until morning. They, however, according to an account published by them in the Sun under their own signature, refused to obey the Sheriff, and went on to search the various apartments of the church. They found the other arms which Mr. Dunn had mentioned, and also discovered several armed individuals who had been stationed by the proprietors to guard different passages in the building. Most of the arms were not loaded. This proceeding was countenanced by an alderman of the district, who appears throughout to have acted in sympathy with the mob. It was clearly an act of riot, and a violation of the Constitution of the Union, and of Pennsylvania. The former declares, in Art. 3, of amendments, that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed:” and the latter declares, in Sec. 21, of Art. 9, that “right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.” It is also a maxim of the common law, that every man’s house is his castle, and he has a right to defend it to the utmost against intruders coming without lawful authority. It may have been imprudent, and in the view of many not strictly Christian, for the owners of the church to undertake to defend it themselves, by arms, instead of relying on the civil authorities, and looking to the county for compensation in case of loss. But when we consider that a vast majority of professing Christians hold to the rightfulness of defensive force-that Pennsylvania Hall, Smith’s Hall, and Saint Augustines’ Church had all been surrendered to the protection of the civil authorities, and that that protection had in each instance failed: — that the owners of the Pa. Hall at the end of six years are not yet compensated, and are without prospect of compensation for more than half their loss-that the mayor is said to have advised the catholics at the time of the burning of St. Augustine’s to defend their churches themselves; — and that, in almost every other case, the community enmasse justify people in arming to defend their property against threatened mob violence, — under such circumstances, we say, it is not surprising that the catholics should have prepared for defence, according to their constitutional right, and the ordinary usage of most classes of men in like cases. Soon after the sheriff arrived, hearing that the troop called the “city guard” were rendevouzed at a certain place, be requested that they should come to his assistance, being at the

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time under the impression that they were not a military body. When they came however, after midnight, he thought it his duty to retain them for the rest of the night to protect the church, as the mob continued to be large, turbulent and threatening, and appeared not satisfied with the fact that their own friends had taken all the arms from the church. *** Early in the morning of Saturday the 6th, the sheriff called on Generals Patterson and Cadwallader for aid, as well as on many private citizens to act as a civil posse. Next day, the mob increased in numbers and violence, until they at length attacked the military with stones and brick bats, knocking some down, and among them Capt. Hill, with a view to force the lines and get at the church. Gen. Cadwallader repeatedly addressed them in the mildest and most persuasive manner, urging them to respect themselves and the law to which they replied with derision. He at length told them that if they did not desist he would be obliged to fire upon them. This they disregarded, and at the moment of a violent assault upon the force under the sheriff’s command, orders to fire were given. At the instant, Charles Naylor stepped forward and exclaimed-”don’t you fire.” He was arrested, together with several of the active portion of the mob, and placed in custody in the church. The orders given upon this occasion was not an order to fire with cannon, as has been stated, but with musketry. In consequence of Naylor’s sudden interposition, however, no firing at that time occurred. *** On Sunday morning the 7th, Capt. Hill’s company was relieved from the charge of the church, after having been on duty about thirty hours, almost without food. It’s place was supplied by the Hibernia Greens under the command of Capt. Collahan. The mob soon became more violent. Captain Collahan, under a discretionary power given him by Gen. Cadwallader, who had retired for rest, surrendered, on the request of Aldermen McKinley and Hurtz, about twenty of the rioters that had been arrested. This he did with the expectation that the Aldermen would take bail for their appearance at court. The alderman however discharged them without any recognizance. Charles Naylor being still in custody, the mob undertook to deliver him, by battering the church with cannon. They at length succeeded in releasing him. They were not content however with that, but demanded that the Hibernia Greens should quit the church. The force of the mob being then overwhelming, this demand was acceded to, under the assurance of the leaders of the Native party, that the Greens should not be molested in their withdrawal. This assurance was violated. They were assaulted, pelted, and beaten. When they had left, the Native party and the mob took full possession of the church, and held it for some hours, a portion being engaged in attempts to set it on fire, which would probably have been consummated, had not the military returned.

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At length Gen. Cadwallader, at the head of a military force, and aided by a civil posse, arrived, and ordered the mob to clear out of the church and from the street in its immediate vicinity. These order were obeyed for the moment: but the mob refused to disperse, and attempted repeatedly to break the lines of the military. They attacked the troops with stones, &c and at one time with discharge of fire arms, according to the testimony of a respectable witness who was in the Mayor’s posse, and who states that a boy was shot at his side by the mob, before any firing was made by the military. At the moment of a violent attack by the mob, and after repeated warnings, the order to fire was given and obeyed. The result was the wounding of some persons and the killing of Crozier, one of the mob, by the firing of a gun which he was in the act of attempting to wrest from the soldier who held it. The mob was thus temporarily repulsed. After this repulse, the mob betook themselves to gathering the means of a military assault on the troops. They added a third cannon to the two which they had before employed against the church; they obtained muskets and ammunition, having got some powder by breaking into the dwelling and store of John McCoy, one of the Southwark Commissioners, who had left home in consequence of the threats of violence against him. At about 10 in the evening, they commenced a fire upon the military with their cannon, loaded with grape shot, spikes and missiles of various kinds. By one of the first shots serjeant Guyer was killed and corporal Troutman badly wounded. The fire was returned, and the combat kept up till near one in the morning, when the mob was completely repulsed, after the death of Cook one of their leaders, a member of the Weccacoe Hose Co. notorious for his desperate character and his participation in the firemen’s riots. On Monday, the mob prepared to renew the contest on the ensuing night. A deputation of their sympathizers, the Southwark authorities, proposed to the Sheriff the withdrawal of the troops, promising to protect the church themselves from destruction. By the advice of the County Commissioners and Judge Jones of the Court of common Please, the Sheriff accepted the terms proposed. It should be mentioned, that the measures of the Sheriff on Saturday morning for the defence of the church, were taken at the request of the County Commissioners, and with the approbation of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Shortly after the compromise above mentioned, the Governor arrived in town, and soon after several companies of cavalry and other militia from the country came in. Since that time the city has worn in some measure, the aspect of a military encampment. *** On Thursday morning last, Lewis C. Levin, Editor of the Sun, was arrested on the charge of publishing articles having the effect of “exciting to riot and treason.” He was held to bail in the sum of $3000. Samuel R. Kramer, Editor of the “Native American” was arrested and held to bail on a similar charge. As, however, the most

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objectionable matter which appeared in his paper was shown to have been published without his knowledge, he was held only in his own recognizance in the sum of $500 to be of good behavior for three months. Col. J. G. Watmough, Surveyor of the Port, was arrested on a warrant charged with language and conduct calculated to excite a riot and obstruct the execution of the laws. William O. Hanna, was also arrested on the same day, charged with a similar offence. Since then quite a number of further arrests have been made and some on charges still more serious.-Among these was E. Harwood, a young man in a china store, having a wife and infant family, was charged with “murder, treason and riot.” The testimony against him on his examination before the court was very strong. His young wife was in the court room and wept bitterly. He was held to bail in the sum of $13,000 and in default thereof was committed to Moyamsensing. William H. Springer, of Southwark, a member of the present Grand Jury, was arrested and on the testimony of an individual that he had used certain seditious language, he was held to bail in $2000 for a further hearing. A young man ... charged with having knocked down Captain Hill, accused of “riot, treason and murder,” was held to bail in $13000 and in default thereof, was sent to Moyamsensing. A number of other persons were arrested and on different charges fully committed. The authorities aided by the Governor and sustained by the military, are busy ferreting out the rioters and seem determined to go to the full length of the law in their punishment. *** The impression seems to obtain among our most intelligent and sober judging citizens, that the mob is now completely suppressed, and permanent peace established; that law and reason have at length recovered their ascendancy, and that this last outbreak will prove a crisis, to be followed by a better order of things. We would fain hope that this may be the case, though it must be confessed we are not very sanguine. But surely we have suffered enough to make further retribution unnecessary. Never was a city more disgraced; never a city more justly punished. Our sins have been their own punishment, and we have been made to eat most bitterly the fruits of our own doings. It is to be hoped that our city will now learn wisdom and put away the evil of her doings, and that she will at last be persuaded to respect the rights of the poorest and most unpopular of her citizens. If she does not, further scourges surely await her. *** It is instructing, and may conduce to future improvement, to trace back to its causes that spirit of which has risen to so fearful a height, and cast such discredit upon the former fair name of Philadelphia, as to render the epithet of Mob-town applicable to it above all other American cities.

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The primary cause has been the selfish and anti-christian spirit little if at all better in its nature or in its effects than that of the thief, the robber and the pirate, which arrogates to one portion of mankind a superior right over another portion, either as to freedom of opinion religious or political, the right to use its faculties for its own profit and advancement, or to participate in the government which all are required to support and obey. It is a spirit opposed to the great Christian rule of doing as we would be done by, of which spirit, robbery, slavery, political proscription, and religious persecution are only different manifestations. It makes a crime of that which the individual cannot avoid of possessing a particular skin, being born in a particular spot, or being convinced by the irresistible force of circumstances or of argument, of the truth or particular doctrines. It is a spirit which has covered the earth with misery and crimes. It is a spirit in which too many high professors of religious or political-purity partake, and upon which they act in one or other respect, while they are loud in their execrations of those who exhibit precisely the same spirit, only in a different form of manifestation. It is a spirit which makes the Creator a partial and grossly unjust being, and which, with the self conceit of the Pharisee that thanked God that he was not like the poor publican always assumes itself to be the favorite, and its opponents to be the proscribed of the and unjust Deity, which it has imagined. Against this wicked and absurd spirit, abolitionists have arrayed themselves as to one form of its manifestation. Against it, we as a portion of the abolitionists, are resolved to array ourselves under whatever form it may assume. We hold that thieves, robbers, slaveholders, persecutors of aliens, or of persons of any religious or political faith, should all be ranked in the same category, as to the radical character of the crime they commit, although, doubtless many of each class may be partially if not wholly excused from the peculiar circumstances of their education, condition, &c. Against this spirit the law and the administrators of the law should ever be arrayed. It is because those administrators have been too often either neutral or arrayed on the same side with it, that its encroachments have at length become so alarming. Ever since our national independence, the law has been enlisted in support of this spirit in reference to the colored man. They must be bad reasoners who would not carry out the principle, and apply it to other classes of men, if they believed in its justice in reference to the African descendant. During the whole period of the history of the settlement of this continent by the whites, the law in more or less of the states, and in one feature or another, has recognized the right of one act of religious professors to lord it over the consciences of another set, to punish them for non-conformity, or to subject them to pecuniary tribute. Not only so, but we have constantly had a class of persons striving to extend the range of this religious tyranny and it is to the efforts of this class that the recent mobs are in a great measure attributable.

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Though freedom of speech has been, in general, guaranteed by law, it has not been maintained in practice. For the last ten years the abolitionists have been subject to mob violence in three-fourths of the Union for the simple expression of their opinions-This violence has been either winked at, or indirectly approved, by a large portion of the men in authority, as well as of the political and religious leaders of the people. Coming more directly to the city of Philadelphia, we find that about the year 1837 a few colored and white boys at a scene of amusement called the “flying horses,” got into a quarrel in which the white boys, who were probably the aggressors, were worsted. They sallied forth and collected a mob of men and boys with whom they made an indiscriminate assault on the colored people of Southwark and Moyamensing who had given them no provocation. They tore down some houses, ransacked others, destroyed furniture, beat women and children, and killed an inoffensive man who was too ill to escape by fight. A large portion of the community sanctioned this horrible crime on the pretext that the colored people must be taught to know their places: the public authorities winked at it, and the rioters and murderers were never even brought to trial. It was previous to this last occurrence we believe that a public meeting had been held in the Musical Fund Hall, to intimidate abolitionists, at which meeting the present member of Congress from the city declared that the people of the North had no right to discuss the subject of slavery: and also previously that a mob meeting headed by prominent politicians from that day to this, send a deputation and seized on the wharf a box of abolition tracts and threw them into the river, some handkerchiefs which were in the box being stolen and carried off by a portion of the patriotic mob. The perpetrators of this outrage were never prosecuted. In May, 1838, the celebrated burning of the Pennsylvania Hall took place: after it had been delivered into the hands of the Mayor, under a solemn promise of protection-a promise which he did not even attempt to keep, by any thing having the appearance of efficient means. This burning was palliated by clergymen and others in public speeches. It was applauded by a large portion of the merchants of the city. One of them went so far as to issue his card or advertisement, with a picture on it of Pennsylvania Hall in flames, thinking thereby to conciliate the slave holding merchants of the South. Although some of the rioters were known, and two or three indicted, the Attorney General never brought them to trial. To the claim of the proprietors for compensation the County Commissioners opposed an obstinate resistance, in consequence of which they have not yet been paid at the end of more than six years: and they have a prospect when paid of receiving but half their real loss. Some two or three years after the burning of the Hall, a mob in Kensington tore up the railroad, and burned a house belonging to the president of the company. It is an instructive fact that this man had been among those who applauded and justified the burning of the Hall. It was not long ere be experienced the

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verification of the Scripture maxim, that “the measure ye mete unto others shall be measured to you again.” Two of these railroad rioters were convicted, but pardoned by the Governor after a few days imprisonment. As to the mass of them, hardly an effort was made to bring them to justice. In 1842, a colored procession walking peaceably along the streets was assailed and dispersed by a mob. The colored people were pursued every where with savage ferocity. The Mayor and police being called on to suppress the riot, instead of arresting the rioters arrested those who were attacked. The mob thus encouraged proceeded to the burning of Smith’s Hall and the African Presbyterian Church. Although the Mayor had seasonable notice of the intent to burn the church, he had scarcely any portion of his force on the ground, and none of it we believe stationed within the building. This burning was followed the succeeding days and nights by indiscriminate attacks and beatings of colored people, without the pretence of any offence on their part, and by efforts to burn the remaining churches. No efficient attempt was made to arrest any considerable portion of the rioters: and the Mayor actually refused to take measures for the arrest of some whose names were given him, together with those of the witnesses, by a highly respectable citizen. Of the few arrested some were never brought to trial; others were tried in the most lenient manner by the court and Attorney General, and escaped conviction. Some three or four who were convicted received sentences of the very mildest character. For some years past our city has been disturbed by continual riots, among the firemen and weavers, accompanied by most atrocious outrages, and our public authorities have been distinguished by a remarkable failure to arrest and try the criminals, especially the firemen. In May last, several dwelling houses and two churches were burned, upon no pretext, but that persons of the same religious faith with the proprietors had acted in that riotous spirit, of which they had had so many encouraging examples. When the mob was assembled to burn St. Augustine, the Mayor ordered the military who had come for its defence to depart; he assured the mob that there were no persons inside of the church to defend it, and omitted to station any of his own police there. It was burned, as a matter of course. Upon the next meeting of the Criminal Court, Judge Parsons, in a charge which did him much credit, called the attention of the Grand Jury to the investigation of these riots. But the jury, conducted the investigation with manifest partiality. They neglected and refused, as we are assured, to examine persons who could give them information, but who were either Catholics or of foreign birth; and they made a presentment in which they gravely attributed the mob to the attempt to exclude the BIBLE from the public schools; as if such an attempt, if really made, would be either a justification or a material palliation of the outrages. In short the presentment seemed to be a palpable glossing over of the conduct of the mob. This presentment was followed by a charge from Judge Jones, to

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the next Grand Jury, in which he told them that our riots proceeded principally from foreigners, an assertion which we believe untrue in reference to Philadelphia, and which if true, was peculiarly inappropriate to the occasion. The opponents of the Catholics and foreigners were highly pleased with the presentment of the Grand Jury and the charge of Judge Jones. They considered them as a proof that the official authorities took their side in the controversy: and it is extensively believed, that the last and greatest riot in Southwark, would not have taken place, were it not for the encouragement thus afforded. In connecxion with our general subject, we may here mention, that within the last two years, Governor Porter pardoned, even before sentence, several persons who had been found guilty of mobbing an abolition lecturer, and assaulting and breaking the windows of the house of the friend with whom he lodged. This pardon was not founded on the pretext that the lecturer had violated any law, — but only that his doctrines were not acceptable to the mob and the Governor. From this sketch it appears evident that the state of intolerable anarchy to which we have at last arrived, might have been reasonably anticipated from the causes that were in operation. That the first and the main cause, was the recognition by a great portion of the people, including many of the clergy, the professional men, the politicians and the public authorities, of the doctrine, that the rights of men were unequal-that a portion of society might be trampled on at pleasure by other portions. The doctrine that black men were by birth the rightful subjects of oppression naturally led to the extension of the same principle to foreigners. The idea that abolitionists were entitled to no protection, because their doctrines were unpalatable, was naturally extended to Catholics, whose doctrines were equally unpalatable to sectarians. Almost every class and every sect of men, are responsible for the mischief, for almost every class and sect have encouraged mob violence, when it was directed against what they deemed the right objects. And expecially guilty are the public authorities, from the Governor down to the Constable and Watchmen, not only for having neglected to enforce the law, but for having given positive encouragement by word and deed to its violators. We may hope that recent events will produce such a change of opinion and feeling, that an end may be put the reign of terror and proscription. To accelerate this happy result, it is the duty of every man to set his face resolutely against all manner of religious, politician and personal interference; and to maintain, to the full that equality of rights, and of claims to benevolence, which is alike the doctrine of the New Testament and of the Declaration of Independence.

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1845

By this point the Yankee oracle was a persona firmly ensconced in the imagination of America. The situation in regard to Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam: Following a hiatus during the early 1840s, the character called Brother Jonathan resurfaced in political cartoons of the mid- decade. By the 1850s onward however, the same visual representation was frequently labeled Uncle Sam. [Continuing in a pair of footnotes, first:] Given the eventual triumph of Uncle Sam over Brother Jonathan, a curious detail was that during the 1850s the Know-Nothings called themselves “Sams.” [Then also:] While Uncle Sam took over as an embodiment of the national response, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the American cowboy had replaced Jonathan as the American original in popular mythology. RURAL WIT [In the cartoon on the following screen, the “John Bull” English traveller character goes: “Hi Say, Sir, Ham I on the right road to ’Artford?” to which the American Jonathan character with the umbrella helpfully responds “Well, you be.” Then John thinks to inquire further of Jonathan “How far shall I ave to go before I get there?” and Jonathan elaborates on this: “Well, if you turn round and go ’tother way may be you have to travel abeout ten mile. But if you keep on the way you are going, you’l have to go abeout eight thousand, I reckon.”]

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1846

William Potts’s DANGERS OF JESUIT INSTRUCTION. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

The Reverend John B. Fitzpatrick, pastor of St. John’s Church and coadjutor-bishop of the Catholic diocese, succeeded Bishop Fenwick as the Bishop of Boston, and the Reverend Manasses P. Dougherty became the pastor at St. John’s. John Langdon Sibley jotted into his journal that: The Catholics within a few years have erected a church at East Cambridge and have just purchased five acres to build another church about one mile west from the University buildings. They are very quiet but zealous in all their movements and the time will come when many of the old battles, the theological at least, must be fought over again, and that too in this country. It is incidentally remarked in the paper today that one-quarter of the population of Boston is Catholic.

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1847

Hoping to provoke a Boston street battle, the Native American Party (white “Know-Nothings,” not native Americans) staged a rally on Fort Hill, in the center of the tenement slums of new Irish immigrants. The Catholic hierarchy, getting wind of this in advance, had ordered all faithful to remain indoors. The provocation was foiled.

1848

William Hogan’s AURICULAR CONFESSION AND POPISH NUNNERIES. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

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November 7, Tuesday: Presidential election day. The candidates were the Whig Zachary Taylor, the Democrat Lewis Cass, and the Free Soil Party candidate Martin Van Buren. Until this point the Whigs had been the expectable victors in Massachusetts elections. However, dramatic “Free-Soil” gains over the Whigs in this election marked the beginning of a long period of political instability. From this point until December 1853, when the tenuous aggregation of the Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, temperance one-issue people, and Irish Catholics with the Democratic Party would begin to unravel, this uneasy coalition would have to hope for divisions within the Whig Party in order to achieve any victory at the Massachusetts polls.

This defeat marked the end of Martin Van Buren’s political career.

After the election of a Whig as president, Zachary Taylor, the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, took up a subscription for his support.

William J. Brown of Providence, Rhode Island would recollect a tactful speech he made (we will forgive him if what he would report later is perhaps more like the speech he could have made, would have made, should have made, than like the speech he actually did make, as such is a common failing among aged recollectors), as follows: PAGES 94-95: The Law and Order party broke up, the colored voters went over to the Whig party, the most of the Law and Order party being Whigs, still claiming our support. Their candidate for President was a slaveholder, Zachary Taylor. We did not like the idea of voting for a slaveholder, and called a meeting on South Main Street to see what we should do. I opposed the meeting being held in that part of the city, fearing it would prove injurious to my interest. I was in that part of the city working at shoe making, my custom was good, and I knew that if I attended that meeting and spoke in favor of the Whig candidate, I should lose their custom and perhaps get hurt. I could not speak in favor of the Democratic candidate for I was opposed to that party. I was obliged to attend the meeting in the third ward. I was at my wit’s ends to know what to do. I attended the meeting and found the place packed with people, and about one hundred and fifty people filled out to the hall door. The meeting was opened when I arrived, Mr. Thomas Howland presiding as chairman. I went in and took the farthest corner of the room. George C. Willis was called, and took his position in front of the stage; addressing the chairman, he remarked, that we were in a very curious position; we must be decided in favor of one party or the other, and his opinion was of the two evils, we must choose the least; and his choice was in favor of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate. Several others spoke, and in harsh terms denounced the Democratic party. I was then called, and tried to decline, but the call came from every one, Brown, Brown. I was compelled to speak. I arose, addressed the president, and told the audience we were called together to settle a very grave question, which as citizens, it was our duty to decide which of the two parties we were to support. We were not to decide upon the man, but the party. If we were to decide on the candidate, it would be not to cast a vote for Taylor, for he is a slaveholder; and this I presume is the feeling of every colored voter, but we are identified with the Whig party, and it is the

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duty of every colored person to cast his vote for the Whig party, shutting his eyes against the candidate; as he is nothing more than a servant for the party; but I wish it understood that I am not opposed to either party as such; because I believe there are good and bad men in both parties. I have warm friends in the Democratic party, which I highly esteem, and who would take pleasure at any time in doing me a favor. Some of them are my best customers; but in speaking of the party, those men know well the duty demanded of them by their party, and would not neglect it for the sake of accommodating me. I blame no man for carrying out the principles of his party. He has a perfect right to do so, for this is a free country, and we all have a right alike to enjoy our own opinion; there being two parties we are stirred up to action. It makes lively times, and I hope the times will continue to be lively, and our meetings to increase in number, for the more we have, and the larger the attendance upon them, the more my business will increase, for the more shoes that are worn out in attending these meetings, the more custom I shall have. I sat down amid loud cheering. It was a bitter pill for us to vote for a man who was a slaveholder; but placing him in the light of a servant for the party, and we identified with that party, we managed to swallow it down whole. After voting to sustain Zachary Taylor as a candidate for the next Presidential election, we closed the meeting.

1849

Maria Monk, who in 1836 had published the pornographic antiRomish fantasy AWFUL DISCLOSURES (presumably ghostwritten by Theodore Dwight, Jr., a nephew of the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, and a great-grandson of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards), died under detention on charges of having picked johns’ pockets in a brothel. (Well, we don’t all have the opportunity to lead unblemished lives.) ANTI-CATHOLICISM

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May 7, Monday: There was an uproar in front of the New-York opera house10 in Astor Place which was, ultimately, about whether a British actor, as a foreigner, would be allowed to play a role when there was an American actor available for this work. The demonstration of this date had its ties to an inflammatory book by Ned Buntline, THE MISTERIES AND MISERIES OF NEW YORK, which blamed the city’s problems on its recent waves of immigrants. Down with immigrants! Jobs are for Americans! The popular American actor Edwin Forrest, an outspoken Know-Nothing, had been attracting chauvinists as, excuse my French, flies gather to shit.11

May 10, Thursday: Edwin Forrest’s 20-year rivalry with the British actor William Macready put the torch to a powder- keg of nativist sentiment when –due to head-on competition between simultaneous New-York productions of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and due to Macready’s status as a mere foreigner, and due to Forrest’s Americans-first Know-Nothing jingoism– that professional rivalry induced a riot of 25,000 nativists at the Astor Place Opera House during which 22 of his manly fans were killed by the police and the 7th Regiment of the militia, and 36 very seriously wounded. Commenting on the Scorsese movie “Gangs of New York”: “In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.” — Kevin Baker

10. This Astor Place Opera House would also house, starting in 1855, the Mercantile Library of New-York. 11. An entertaining account of the riot is to be found in Luc Santé’s LOW-LIFE.

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Though Edwin Forrest was only indirectly responsible for the New-York militia’s having fired into this mob he had so endeavored to create, as his manly fans attempted to invade and disrupt Macready’s effete performance, his reputation would suffer, and then he would fall further in the eyes of his public due to a protracted and, once again, very public attempt at divorce. For Edwin Forrest, reenacting “King Phillip’s War” was a step on the path toward an American national drama. Like so many other artists of his generation, Forrest appropriated Indianness and Indian ancestors to make himself American, to distance himself from all that was English. In this he exactly reversed what writers like Increase Mather and William Hubbard had tried to do so furiously –and so prolifically– a century and a half earlier. Late-seventeenth-century colonists had tried to purify themselves of the contamination of America’s indigenous inhabitants and make themselves more English. Early-nineteenth-century Americans tried to take on the attributes of Indianness to make themselves less English.

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On the 2nd of June, the Illustrated London News would be providing its readership with a front-page illustration of the rioting in front of the New-York opera house, complete with the powder smoke from the police volley into the crowd:

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May 12, Saturday: On the 3d day of the Astor Place Opera House riot in New-York, Lydia Maria Child and John and Rosa Hopper needed to go to the rescue of a friend, Marianne Silsbee, who happened to be staying at a hotel beleaguered by the Know-Nothing mob because it was occupied by the Shakespearean actor William Macready: While bullets flew over their heads the three pushed their way through the infuriated mob then blocking the entrance to the hotel. They found Mrs. Silsbee inside, brought her back out through the excited crowd and, depositing her safely in a friend’s carriage, drove back to the Hoppers’ by a circuitous route. When the terrified Mrs. Silsbee exclaimed, ‘Oh what a frightful city N. York is!’ Maria could not resist reminding her friend that Boston had its own history of mob violence. Brave as she was under fire, and scornful as she might be of aristocratic squeamishness, Maria herself had little tolerance for mobs and even less for the “ruffianly” actor Edwin Forest, whom she accused of making “coarse wicked appeals to bad, petty” national prejudices. Nor did she have any good words for Isaiah Rynders, whom she dismissed as “that Jacobin demon, who guides the destinies of Tammany Hall,” and who was “doing his best to kindle a war between rich and poor by attacks on ‘the white kid gentry who frequent the opera.’” In a letter to Louisa Loring she described her anger and frustration with the whole incident: “God knows my sympathies are with the ignorant million. There are instants, when the sight of rags and starvation make me almost ready to smash thro’ the plate-glass of the rich, and seize their treasures of silver and gold. But alas for such outbreaks as these! They right no wrongs. Lydia Maria Child would write to Ellis Gray Loring and Louisa Loring later during this month, describing these Astor Place riots. LETTERS FROM NEW YORK

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1851

May 26, Monday: Four people were killed and dozens wounded as a nativist mob attacked German immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey during Pentecost celebrations.

At the American Unitarian Association’s spring convention in Boston, known as the Berry Street Conference, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May introduced a resolution in condemnation of Daniel Webster, Millard Fillmore, Edward Everett, Samuel A. Eliot, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, and even the president of the AUS, the Reverend Orville Dewey as accomplices to the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Law. May charged that Gannett was acting in a manner “utterly subversive of Christian morality and of all true allegiance to God.”12 (Although the initial vote on this day was 72 to 27 to refuse to consider such a resolution, the convention would find that it had not heard the last of it.)

Meanwhile, in England, Unitarianism was doing very well, and thank you for asking:

English Unitarians

1830 200

1851 50,000

The Transcript had been keeping an eye on the more daring ladies: The Turkish Dress. On Saturday afternoon, says the [Boston] Times, a young lady of 18, daughter of a well-known West End citizen, made her appearance on Cambridge Street, accompanied with her father, dressed in a round hat, short dress, fitting tightly, and pink satin trousers.... The same young lady was out yesterday afternoon, for a walk around the Common and upon the Neck.... The “Bee” says the daughter of Dr. Hanson, of this city, appeared in the Bloomer suit at a convention at South Reading last week.

12. The force of such an accusation can be felt if you reflect that this divine here being criticized was a teacher of the new crops of Unitarian reverends, at the Harvard Divinity School.

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Summer: The friends Orestes Augustus Brownson and Isaac Hecker were able to get together again, for the first time since they had gone off on their respective excellent adventures in 1845. By this time Brownson was not only an essayist and a publisher, but also a welcome lecturer who made regular tours of paying Catholic audiences in New-York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, at times venturing on through the major cities of the Midwest and the South, and even as far as Montréal. Among the favorite hobby-horses about which he was lecturing were “The Compatibility between Democracy and Catholicism” in which to be an American Catholic was to be a member of the Democratic Party whether or not one was officially enrolled and vice versa, “Catholicity and Civilization” in which to be in favor of civilization was to be in favor of the Holy Roman Catholic Church whether or not one recognized that fact and vice versa, and “Civil and Religious Liberty” in which one had true civil liberty if and only if one had true religious liberty and true religious liberty amounted to freedom to know the truth and the truth was what Orestes Brownson speaking on behalf of the True Church said that it was. (How he was getting away with this is anybody’s guess. Presumably the Church in America was pulling together under the real external threat of Protestant viciousness and narrow-mindedness, represented by among other antiRomanist organizations a party whose members described themselves as “Know-Nothings,” and in this siege mentality Brownson had to be countenanced. But the man had genius, in positioning himself so that as a paid lecturer to the faithful he was able to put himself across to his audiences as Defender of the Faith.)

1852

For the following three decades, Edward Jarvis would be President of the American Statistical Association.

Due to the rapid increase, largely as a result of immigration, of the Roman Catholic minority, by this year of the convening of the First Plenary Council of Baltimore the Church had become the largest religious institution in the USA. This statistic did not go unnoticed at the time, as witness the incredible viciousness and narrow- mindedness of the Know-Nothings, whose AntiPapist furor would last into 1856. ANTI-CATHOLICISM

1853

April 6, Wednesday: Catholic rioters attacked a Protestant church in Cincinnati that was hosting a nativist rally.

April 6: 6 A.M. –To Cliffs. The robin [American Robin Turdus migratorius] is the singer at present, such is its power and universality, being found both in garden and wood. Morning and evening it does not fail, perched on some elm or the like, and in rainy days it is one long morning or evening. The song sparrow [Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia] is still more universal but not so powerful. The lark [Lark (Eastern Meadowlark Sturnella magna)], too, is equally constant, morning and evening, but confined to certain localities, as is the blackbird to some extent. The bluebird [Bluebird, Eastern Sialia sialis], with feebler but not less sweet warbling, helps fill the air, and the phœbe [Bridge Pewee (Eastern Phoebe Sayornis phoebe)] does her part. The tree sparrow, F. hyemalis [Tree Sparrow, American Spizella arborea)], and fox-colored sparrows [Fox Sparrow Passerella iliaca (Fox-colored Sparrow)] make the meadow-sides or gardens where they are flitting vocal, the first with its canary-like twittering, the second with its lively ringing trills or jingle. The third

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is a very sweet and more powerful singer, which would be memorable if we heard him long enough. The woodpecker’s tapping, though not musical, suggests pleasant associations in the cool morning, — is inspiriting, enlivening. I hear no hylas nor croakers in the morning. Is it too cool for them? The gray branches of the oaks, which have lost still more of their leaves, seen against the pines when the sun is rising and falling on them, how rich and interesting! From Cliffs see on the still water under the hill, at the outlet of the pond, two ducks sailing, partly white. Hear the faint, swelling, far-off beat of a partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)]. CURRENT YOUTUBE VIDEO Saw probably female red-wings [Red-wing (Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus)] (?), grayish or dark ashy-brown, on an oak in the wood., with a male (?) whose red shoulder did not appear. How many walks along the brooks I take in the string! What shall I call them? Lesser riparial excursions? Prairial? rivular? When I came out there was not a speck of mist in the sky, but the morning without a cloud is not the fairest. Now, 8.30 A.M., it rains. Such is April. A male willow, apparently same with that at H.’s Bridge, or No. 2, near end of second tract on west. Another male by ring-post on east side, long cylindrical catkins, now dark with scales, which are generally more rounded than usual and reddish at base and not lanceolate, turning backwards in blossom and exposing their sides or breasts to the sun, from which side burst forth fifty or seventy-five long white stamens like rays, tipped with yellow anthers which at first were reddish above, — spears to be embraced by invisible Arnold Winkelrieds; — reddish twigs and clear gray beneath. These last colors, especially, distinguish it from Nos. 1 and 2. Also a female, four or five rods north of last, just coming into bloom, with very narrow tapering catkins, lengthening already, some to an inch and a half, ovaries conspicuously stalked; very downy twigs, more reddish and rough than last below. If we consider the eagle as a large hawk , how he falls in our estimation! Our new citizen Sam Wheeler has a brave new weathercock all gilt on his new barn. This morning at sunrise it reflected the sun so brightly that I thought it was a house on fire in Acton, though I saw no smoke, but that might well be omitted. The flower-buds of the red maple have very red inner scales, now being more and more exposed, which color the tree-tops a great distance off.

P. M. — To Second Division Brook. Near Clamshell Hill, I scare up in succession four pairs of good-sized brown or grayish-brown ducks . They go off with a loud squeaking quack. Each pair is by itself. One pair on shore some rods from the water. Is not the object of the quacking to give notice of danger to the rest who cannot see it? All along under the south side of this hill on the edge of the meadow, the air resounds with the hum of honey- bees, attracted by the flower of the skunk-cabbage. I first heard the fine, peculiarly sharp hum of the honey-bee before I thought of them. Some hummed hollowly within the spathes, perchance to give notice to their fellows that plant was occupied, for they repeatedly looked in, and backed out on finding another. It was surprising to see them, directed by their instincts to these localities, while the earth has still but a wintry aspect so far as vegetation is concerned, buzz around some obscure spathe close to the ground, well knowing what they were about, then alight and enter. As the cabbages were very numerous for thirty or forty rods, there must have been some hundreds of bees there at once, at least. I watched many when they entered and came out, and they all had little yellow pellets of pollen at their thighs. As the skunk-cabbage comes out before the willow, it is probable that the former is the first flower they visit. It is the more surprising, as the flower is for the most part invisible within the spathe. Some of these spathes are now quite large and twisted up like cows’ horns, not curved over as usual. Commonly they make a pretty little crypt or shrine for the flower, like the overlapping door of a tent. It must be bee-bread (?), then, they are after. Lucky that this flower does not flavor their honey. I have noticed for a month or more the bare ground sprinkled here and there with several kinds of fungi, now conspicuous, — the starred kind, puffballs, etc. Now it is fair, and the sun shines, though it shines and rains with short intervals to-day. I do not see so much greenness in the grass as I expected, though a considerable change. No doubt the rain exaggerates a little by showing all the greenness there is! The thistle is now ready to wear the rain-drops. I see, in J.P. Brown’s field, by Nut Meadow Brook, where a hen has been devoured by a hawk probably. The feathers whiten the ground. They cannot carry a large fowl very far from the farmyard, and when driven off are frequently baited and caught in a trap by the remainder of their quarry. The gooseberry has not yet started. I cannot describe the lark’s song. I used these syllables in the morning to remember it by — heetar-su-e-oo. The willow in Miles’s Swamp which resembles No. 2 not fairly in blossom yet. Heard unusual notes from, I think, a chickadee [Chicadee, Black-capped Parus atricapillus Titmouse, Titmice] in the swamp, elicited, probably, by the love season, - che che vet, accent on last syllable, and vissa viss a viss, the last sharp and fine.

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Yet the bird looked more slender than the common titmouse [Titmouse, Titmice (Black-capped Chicadee Parus atricapillus)], with a longer tail, which jerked a little, but it seemed to be the same bird that sang phebe and he-phebe so sweetly. The woods rang with this. Nuttall says it is the young that phebe in winter. I noticed some aspens (tremuliformis) of good size there, which have no flowers! The first lightning I remember this year was in the rain last evening, quite bright; and the thunder following very low, after. A thunder-shower in Boston yesterday. One cowslip, though it shows the yellow, is not fairly out, but will be by to-morrow. How they improve their time! Not a moment of sunshine lost. One thing I may depend on: there has been no idling with the flowers. They advance as steadily as a clock. Nature loses not a moment. tubes no vacation. These plants, now protected by the water, just peeping forth. I should not be surprised to find that they drew in their head in a frosty night. Returning by Harrington’s, saw a pigeon woodpecker [Yellow-shafted Flicker Colaptes auratus (Golden- winged Woodpecker or Pigeon Woodpecker)] flash away, showing the rich golden under side of its glancing wings and the large whitish spot on its back, and presently I heard its familiar long-repeated loud note, almost familiar as that of a barn-door fowl, which it somewhat resembles. The robins , too, now toward sunset, perched on the old apple trees in Tarbell’s orchard, twirl forth their evening lays unweariedly. Is that a willow, the low bush from the fireplace ravine which from the lichen oak, fifty or sixty rods distant, shows so red in the westering sunlight? More red, I find, by far than close at hand. To-night for the first time I hear the hylas in full blast. 1s that pretty little reddish-leaved star-shaped plant by the edge of water a different species of hypericum from the perforatum?

1854

Williams, Stevens, Williams & Company, art dealers on Broadway Avenue in Manhattan, crafted an exceedingly fine lithographic representation of “Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing” (see following screen).

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Father Bernard Flood began regular Catholic masses in Concord.

The American (AKA Know-Nothing) Party, an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-slavery party, ran in opposition to the Whig party and obtained an election landslide in Massachusetts, receiving more votes than the Whigs, Democrats, National (pro-slavery) Democrats, and Free-Soilers all put together, putting into office their entire state ticket and seizing every seat in the Federal legislature that was open. “To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.”

— Rebecca West

However, Simon Brown of Concord, himself not much of a bigot, managed to get himself elected Lieutenant- Governor as part of this slate — and then as the political climate would gradually become less inflamed he would gradually come out of the closet, as an abolitionist.

Dr. Edward Jarvis was appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts to the Lunacy Commission, to study the insane population of the state.

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Former US Congressman Fernando Wood defeated Know-Nothing candidate James W. Barker and Reform candidate Wilson G. Hunt to become the “Soft Shells-Hard Shells” mayor of New-York.

June 4, Sunday: At 8 AM Henry Thoreau, H.G.O. Blake, and Theophilus Brown went up the Assabet River to Barbarea Shore, and thence to Walden Pond.

20,000 nativists invaded the Irish districts of Brooklyn, injuring scores before troops arrived.

At the base of Fisher’s Peak in the Raton Range, the column of cavalrymen led by Lieutenant Philip St. George Cooke managed to surprise a camp of 22 lodges of the Jicarilla Apache.

In Worcester, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister of the Worcester Free Church, preached a sermon entitled “Massachusetts in Mourning” which would first be published in the Worcester Daily Spy and then reprinted as a pamphlet by James Munroe and Company of Boston at the press of Prentiss and Sawyer of No. 19, Water Street. Massachusetts in Mourning. Shall the iron break the Northern iron and the steel? — Jeremiah xv. 12. You have imagined my subject beforehand, for there is but one subject on which I could preach, or you could listen, to-day. Yet, how hard it is to say one word of that. You do not ask, at a funeral, that the bereaved mourners themselves should speak, but you call in one a little farther removed, to utter words of comfort, if comfort there be. But to-day is, or should be, to every congregation in Massachusetts, a day of funeral service — we are all mourners — and what is there for me to say? Yet, even in this gloom, the faculty of wonder is left; as at funerals, men ask in a low tone, around the coffin, what was the disease that smote this fair form, and are we safe from the infection? So we now ask, what is lost, and how have we lost it, and what have we left? Is it all gone, (men say,) that old New England heroism and enthusiasm? Is there any disinterested love of Freedom left in Massachusetts? And then they think with joy, (as I do,) that, at least, Freedom did not die without a struggle, and that it took thousands of armed men to lay her in the grave at last. I am thankful for all this. Words are nothing — we have been surfeited with words for twenty years. I am thankful that this time there was action also ready for Freedom. God gave men bodies, to live and work in; the powers of those bodies are the first things to be consecrated to the Right. He gave us higher powers, also, for weapons, but, in using those, we must not forget to hold the lower ones also ready; else we miss our proper manly life on earth, and lay down our means of usefulness before we have outgrown them. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's.” Our souls and bodies are both God's, and resistance to tyrants is obedience to Him. If you meet men whose souls are contaminated, and have time enough to work on them, you can deal with them by the weapons

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of the soul alone; but if men array brute force against Freedom — pistols, clubs, drilled soldiers, and stone walls — then the body also has its part to do in resistance. You must hold yourself above men, I own, yet not too far above to reach them. I do not like even to think of taking life, only of giving it; but physical force that is forcible enough, acts without bloodshed. They say that with twenty more men at hand, that Friday night, at the Boston Court House, the Slave might have been rescued without even the death of that one man — who was perhaps killed by his frightened companions, then and there. So you see force may not mean bloodshed; and calm, irresistible force, in a good cause, becomes sublime. The strokes on the door of that Court House that night for instance — they may perchance have disturbed some dreamy saint from his meditations, (if dreamy saints abound in Court Square,) — but I think they went echoing from town to town, from Boston to far New Orleans, like the first drum beat of the Revolution — and each reverberating throb was a blow upon the door of every Slave-prison of this guilty Republic. That first faint throb of Liberty was a proud thing for Boston; Boston which was a scene so funereal a week after. Men say the act of one Friday helped prepare for the next; I am glad if it did. If the attack on the Court House had no greater effect than to send that Slave away under a guard of two thousand men, instead of two hundred, it was worth a dozen lives. If we are all Slaves indeed — if there is no law in Massachusetts except the telegraphic orders from Washington—if our own military are to be made Slave-catchers—if our Governor is a mere piece of State ceremony, permitted only to rise at a military dinner and thank his own soldiers for their readiness to shoot down his own constituents, without even the delay of a riot act—if Massachusetts is merely a conquered province and under martial law—then I wish to know it, and I am grateful for every additional gun and sabre that forces the truth deeper into our hearts. Lower, Massachusetts, lower, kneel still lower! Serve, Irish Marines! the kidnappers, your masters; down in the dust, citizen soldiery! before the Irish Marines, and for you, 0 Governor, a lower humility yet, and your homage must be paid, at second hand, before the stained and soiled “citizen soldiery.” I remember the great trades-procession in Boston, a few years since, in honor of the visitors from the North, from the free soil of Canada. Then all choice implements, which Massachusetts had invented to supply the industry of the world, were brought forth for exhibition, and superb was the show. This time we had visitors from the South — the South which uses tools also — and imports them all, “hoes, spades, axes, politicians, and ministers.” So the last new implements, for her use, were to be exhibited now. There were twenty-one specimens of Boston military companies. There were the two hundred more confidential bullies, for whom the city was ransacked, men so vile, that it was said the police had no duties left, for all the dangerous persons were employed as policemen themselves,— men whom a

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Police Judge having inspected, recognized criminal after criminal, who had been sentenced by himself to the House of Correction; these came next. Truly as there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repenteth, so there was joy in Boston that day, over one sinner who had not repented, — over every man in whom the powers of hell were strong enough, aided by public brandy, to fit him for that terrible service. Those were the tools marshalled forth for exhibition. But why were these only shown? Why were the finer, the more precious implements kept invisible that day, the real engines of that Slaveholder's triumph? Why not make the picture perfect? Place, O Chief Marshal, between the Slave and the guardian cannon, the crowning glory of that sad procession, the Slaveholder in his carriage, and chain) on the one side, the Mayor of Boston, and, on the other side, the Governor of the Commonwealth, with the motto, “The Representative Men of Massachusetts, — These tools she gives, Virginia, to thee!” I mean no personality. The men who occupy these offices, are men who (I have always thought) did them honor. I suppose that neither would own a Slave, nor (personally) catch one. No doubt they favorably represent the average of Massachusetts men. But I introduce them for precisely this reason, to show the tragedy of our American institutions, that they take average Massachusetts men, put them into public office, and then, demanding more of them than their education gives them manliness to meet, — use them, crush them, and drop them, into the dishonor with which these hitherto honored men are suddenly overwhelmed to-day. If such be the influence of our national organization, what good do our efforts do? Our labor to reform the North, with the whole force of nationalized Slavery to resist, is like the effort of Sir John Franklin; on his first voyage, to get north-ward by travelling on the ice. He travelled toward the pole for six weeks, no doubt of that; but at the end of the time he was two hundred miles farther from it than when he started. The ice had floated southward — and our ice floats southward also. And so it will be, while this Union concentrates power in the hands of Slaveholders, and gives the North only commercial prosperity, the more thoroughly to enervate and destroy it. Here, for instance, is the Nebraska Emigration Society; it is indeed, a noble enterprise; and I am proud that it owes its origin to a Worcester man — but where is the good of emigrating to Nebraska; if Nebraska is to be only a transplanted Massachusetts, and the original Massachusetts has been tried and found wanting? Will the stream rise higher than its source? Settle your Nebraska ten years, and you will have your New England harvest of corn and grain, more luxuriant in that virgin soil;— ah, but will not the other Massachusetts crop come also, of political demagogues and wire-pullers, and a sectarian religion, which will insure the passage of the greatest hypocrite to heaven, if he will join the right church before he goes? And give the emigrants twenty years more of prosperity, and then ask them, if you dare, to break law and disturb order,

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and risk life, merely to save their State from the shame that has just blighted Massachusetts? In view of these facts, what stands between us and a military despotism? “Sure guarantees,” you say. So has every nation thought until its fall came. “The outward form of Roman institutions stood uninjured till long after Caligula had made his horse consul.” What is your safeguard? Nothing but a parchment Constitution, which has been riddled through and through whenever it pleased the Slave Power; which has not been able to preserve to you the oldest privileges of Freedom — Habeas Corpus and Trial by Jury! Stranger still, that men should think to find a security in our material prosperity, and our career of foreign conquest, and our acquisition of gold mines, and forget that these have been precisely the symptoms which have prophesied the decline of every powerful commercial state — Rome, Carthage, Tyre, Venice, Spain, Holland, and all the rest. In the third century after the birth of Jesus, Terullian painted that brilliant picture of the Roman power, which describes us, as if it were written for us: “Certainly,” says he, “the world becomes more and more our tributary; none of its secret recesses have remained inaccessible, all are known, frequented, and all have become the scene or the object of traffic. Who now dreads an unknown island? who trembles at a reef? our ships are sure to be met with everywhere—everywhere is a people, a state; everywhere is life. We crush the world beneath our weight — onerosi sumus mundo.” And Rome perished, almost when the words were uttered! How simple the acts of our tragedy may be! Let another Fugitive Slave case occur, and more blood be spilt (as might happen another time;)— let Massachusetts be declared insurrectionary, and placed under martial law, (as it might;)— let the President be made Dictator, with absolute power; let him send his willing Attorney General to buy up officers of militia, (which would be easy,) and frighten Officers of State, (which would be easier;)— let him get half the press, and a quarter of the pulpits, to sustain his usurpation, under the name of “law and order “;— let the flame spread from New England to New York, from New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Wisconsin;— and how long would it take for some future Franklin Pierce to stand where Louis Napoleon stands, now? How much would the commercial leaders of the East resist, if an appeal were skilfully made to their pockets?— or the political demagogues of the West, if an appeal were made to their ambition? It seems inconceivable! Certainly—so did the coup d' etat of Louis Napoleon, the day before it happened! “Do not despair of the Republic,” says some one, remembering the hopeful old Roman motto. But they had to despair of that one in the end,— and why not of this one also? Why, when we were going on, step by step, as older Republics have done, should we expect to stop just as we reach the brink of Niagara? The love of Liberty grows stronger every year, some think, in some places. Thirty years ago, it cost only $25 to restore a Fugitive Slave from Boston, and now it costs $100,000;—but still the Slave is restored. I know there are thousands of hearts which stand

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pledged to Liberty now, and these may save the State, in spite of her officials and her military; but can they save the Nation? They may give us disunion instead of despotism, but can they give us anything better? Can they even give us anything so good? We talk of the Anti-Slavery sentiment as being stronger; but in spite of your Free Soil votes, your Uncle Tom's Cabin, and your New York Tribunes, here is the simple fact: the South beats us more and more easily every time. So chess-players, when they have once or twice overcome a weak antagonist, think it safe, next time, to give up to him a half dozen pieces by way of odds;— and after all gain the victory. Compare this Nebraska game with the previous ones. The Slave Power could afford to give us the Whig party on our side, this time—could give up to us the commercial influence of Boston and New York, so strong an ally before—it has not had the name and presence of Daniel Webster to help it now, nor the voices of clergymen, nor the terror of disunion, nor the weariness after a long Anti-Slavery excitement: it has dispensed with all these;— nay, the whole contest was on our own sail, to defend the poor little landmark we had retreated to long before;— and for all this, the Slave Power has conquered us, just as easily as it conquered us on Texas, Mexico, and the compromises of 1850. No wonder that this excitement is turning Whigs and Democrats into Free Soilers, and Free Soilers into disunionists. But this is only the eddy, after all; the main current sets the wrong way. The nation is intoxicated and depraved. It takes all the things you count as influential,— all the “spirit of the age,” and the moral sentiment of Christendom,” and the best eloquence and literature of the time,— to balance the demoralization of a single term of Presidential patronage. Give the offices of the nation to be controlled by the Slave Power, and I tell you that there is not one in ten, even of professed Anti-Slavery men, who can stand the fire in that furnace of sin; and there is not a plot so wicked, but it will have, like all its predecessors, a sufficient majority when the time comes. Do you doubt this? Name, if you can, a victory of Freedom, or a defeat of the Slave Power, within twenty years, except on the right of petition, and even that was only a recovery of lost ground. Do you say, the politicians are false, but the people mark the men who betray them! True, they mark them, but as merchants mark goods, with the cost price, that they may raise the price a little, when they want to sell the same article again. You must go back to the original Missouri Compromise, if you wish to prove that even Massachusetts punishes traitors to Freedom, by any severer penalty than a seat on her Supreme Bench. For myself, I do not believe in these Anti-Slavery spasms of our people, for the same reason that Coleridge did not believe in ghosts, because I have seen too many of them myself. I remember when our Massachusetts delegation in Congress, signed a sort of threat that the State would withdraw from the Union if Texas came in, but it never happened. I remember the State Convention at Faneuil Hall in 1845, where the lion and the lamb lay down together, and George T. Curtis and John G. Whittier were

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Secretaries; and the Convention solemnly pronounced the annexation of Texas to be the “over-throw of the Constitution, the bond of the existing Union.” I remember how one speaker boasted that if Texas was voted in by joint resolution, it might be voted out by the same. But somehow, we have never mustered that amount of resolution; and when I hear of State Street petitioning for the repeal of its own Fugitive Slave Law, I remember the lesson. For myself, I do not expect to live to see that law repealed by the votes of politicians at Washington. It can only be repealed by ourselves, upon the soil of Massachusetts. For one, I am glad to be deceived no longer. I am glad of the discovery—(no hasty thing, but gradually dawning upon me for ten years)— that I live under a despotism. I have lost the dream that ours is a land of peace and order. I have looked thoroughly through our Fourth of July,” and seen its hollowness; and I advise you to petition your City Government to revoke their appropriation for its celebration, (or give the same to the Nebraska Emigration Society,) and only toll the bells in all the churches, and hang the streets in black from end to end. 0 shall we hold such ceremonies when only some statesman is gone, and omit them over dead Freedom, whom all true statesmen only live to serve! At any rate my word of counsel to you is to learn this lesson thoroughly—a revolution is begun! not a Reform, but a Revolution. If you take part in politics henceforward, let it be only to bring nearer the crisis which will either save or sunder this nation—or perhaps save in sundering. I am not very hopeful, even as regards you; I know the mass of men will not make great sacrifices for Freedom, but there is more need of those who will. I have lost faith forever in numbers; I have faith only in the constancy and courage of a “forlorn hope.” And for aught we know, a case may arise, this week, in Massachusetts, which may not end like the last one. Let us speak the truth. Under the influence of Slavery, we are rapidly relapsing into that state of barbarism in which every man must rely on his own right hand for his protection. Let any man yield to his instinct of Freedom, and resist oppression, and his life is at the mercy of the first drunken officer who orders his troops to fire. For myself, existence looks worthless under such circumstances; and I can only make life worth living for, by becoming a revolutionist. The saying seems dangerous; but why not say it if one means it, as I certainly do. I respect law and order, but as the ancient Persian sage said, “always to obey the laws, virtue must relax much of her vigor.” I see, now, that while Slavery is national, law and order must constantly be on the wrong side. I see that the case stands for me precisely as it stands for Kossuth and Mazzini, and I must take the consequences. Do you say that ours is a Democratic Government, and there is a more peaceable remedy? I deny that we live under a Democracy. It is an oligarchy of Slaveholders, and I point to the history of a half century to prove it. Do you say, that oligarchy will be propitiated by submission? I deny it. It is the plea of the

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timid in all ages. Look at the experience of our own country. Which is most influential in Congress—South Carolina, which never submitted to anything, or Massachusetts, with thrice the white population, but which always submits to everything? I tell you, there is not a free State in the Union which would dare treat a South Carolinian as that State treated Mr. Hoar; or, if it had been done, the Union would have been divided years ago. The way to make principles felt is to assert them—peaceably, if you can; forcibly, if you must. The way to promote Free Soil is to have your own soil free; to leave courts to settle constitutions, and to fall back (for your own part,) on first principles: then it will be seen that you mean something. How much free territory is there beneath the Stars and Stripes? I know of four places—Syracuse, Wilkesbarre, Milwaukie, and Chicago: I remember no others. “Worcester,” you say. Worcester has not yet been tried. If you think Worcester County is free, say so and act accordingly. Call a County Convention, and declare that you leave legal quibbles to lawyers, and parties to politicians, and plant yourselves on the simple truth that God never made a Slave, and that man shall neither make nor take one here! Over your own city, at least, you have power; but will you stand the test when it comes? Then do not try to avoid it. For one thing only I blush—that a Fugitive has ever fled from here to Canada. Let it not happen again, I charge you, if you are what you think you are. No longer conceal Fugitives and help them on, but show them and defend them. Let the Underground Railroad stop here! Say to the South that Worcester, though a part of a Republic, shall be as free as if ruled by a Queen! Hear, O Richmond! and give ear, O Carolina! henceforth Worcester is Canada to the Slave! And what will Worcester be to the kidnapper? I dare not tell; and I fear that the poor sinner himself, if once recognized in our streets, would scarcely get back to tell the tale. I do not discourage more peaceable instrumentalities; would to God that no other were ever needful. Make laws, if you can, though you have State processes already, if you had officers to enforce them; and, indeed, what can any State process do, except to legalize nullification? Use politics, if you can make them worth using, though a coalition administration proved as powerless, in the Sims case, as a Whig administration has proved now. But the disease lies deeper than these remedies can reach. It is all idle to try to save men by law and order, merely, while the men themselves grow selfish and timid, and are only ready to talk of Liberty, and risk nothing for it. Our people have no active physical habits; their intellects are sharpened, but their bodies, and even their hearts, are left untrained; they learn only (as a French satirist once said,) the fear of God and the love of money; they are taught that they owe the world nothing, but that the world owes them a living, and so they make a living but the fresh, strong spirit of Liberty droops and decays, and only makes a dying. I charge you, parents, do not be so easily satisfied; encourage nobler instincts in your children, and appeal to nobler principles; teach your daughter

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that life is something more than dress and show, and your son that there is some nobler aim in existence than a good bargain, and a fast horse, and an oyster supper. Let us have the brave, simple instincts of Circassian mountaineers, with-out their ignorance; and the unfaltering moral courage of the Puritans, without their superstition; so that we may show the world that a community may be educated in brain without becoming cowardly in body; and that a people without a standing army may yet rise as one man, when Freedom needs defenders. May God help us so to redeem this oppressed and bleeding State, and to bring this people back to that simple love of Liberty, without which it must die amidst its luxuries, like the sad nations of the elder world. May we gain more iron in our souls, and have it in the right place;— have soft hearts and, hard wills, not as now, soft wills and hard hearts. Then will the iron break the Northern iron and the steel no longer; and “God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” will be at last a hope fulfilled.

June 11, Sunday: While her husband Robert Schumann resided in an asylum, Clara Schumann gave birth to their 8th and final child, a boy, whom she names Felix after Felix Mendelssohn.

When two Irishmen threw rocks at a nativist speaker in Brooklyn, a mob of 10,000 rioted in the city and troops were deployed.

The day was cloudy and cool but without rain. At 8:30 AM Henry Thoreau escorted Mrs. Brown to Framingham MA. At noon he walked up the Sudbury River above Frank’s to Ashland “at first through the meadows, then over the high hills in the vicinity.”

From a Connecticut letter written by Lizzie Goodwin to her Aunt Emma Whipple: ... I like Mr. Whipple myself very much and if he wasn't an abolitionist I should feel much more amicably disposed towards him, but since mother is married to him I am afraid he may make her ... a violent abolitionist too, which she never was before. I was so afraid [that] in the great fugitive slave excitement in Boston she might be drawn into some extravagance of conduct. I am glad he was carried off in triumph. Frank is very well and I will give your love to him the next time I write which will be soon.

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June 17, Saturday: At 5 AM Henry Thoreau went to climbing fern.

On this day, in New-York, the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party was meeting under the name “Order of the Star Spangled Banner.”

July: Someone bombed the Catholic Church in Dorchester. ANTI-CATHOLICISM

July 11, Tuesday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau took his boat to Fair Haven.

Ellen Channing recorded that subsequent to her separation from Ellery Channing due to her fear of him in his mental condition (“Oh Wentworth I am really afraid of him”) and her resettlement with their children in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the forlorn husband had been writing letters replete with affectionate regard:

He really persuades himself that he has been a fond & devoted father.

Commodore Matthew Perry signed an agreement with the “King of the Lew Chew (Ryukyu) Islands” recognizing the islands as independent of Japan and China and opening them to western trade.

An armed nativist mob attacked the Irish district of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

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August 6, Sunday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went on the Concord River to Tarbell Hills (Buttrick’s Hill, Davis’s Hill, and Ball’s Hill at the W. Tarbell place, Gleason C8-D9).

On this day and the following one there would be anti-Catholic rioting by the nativists of Louisville, Kentucky (the Irish district of town would be attacked with small arms and cannon). ANTI-CATHOLICISM

August 7, Monday: The Barony of Knyphausen was annexed by Oldenburg.

On this day and the following one there would be anti-Catholic rioting by the nativists of St. Louis, Missouri (10 would be killed and 30 injured). ANTI-CATHOLICISM

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked on Peter’s Path (Gleason E7-E9) to Beck Stow’s Swamp (Gleason E9), and thence to Walden Pond.

A remark was made about WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by “Algoma” (Charles Creighton Hazewell) in his column titled “Our Boston Correspondence” in the New-York Herald, page 6, column 2.

Mr. Thoreau’s new work, “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” is advertised to be out on the 9th.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Winter: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 4

I. Uncle Jack and His Nephew KNOW-NOTHINGS II. The Know-Nothings CATHOLICISM III. Sumner on Fugitive Slaves IV. Works of Fisher Ames V. Church and State VI. Literary Notices and Criticisms VII. End of the Eleventh Volume

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON

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1855

The Reverend Edward Beecher, a son of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, wrote on the ever-popular conspiracy- theorist topic THE PAPAL CONSPIRACY EXPOSED.

Josephine M. Bunkley’s THE TESTIMONY OF AN ESCAPED NOVICE FROM THE SISTERHOOD OF ST. JOSEPH. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

February 17, Saturday: At Loudon Centre, New Hampshire, while making a political stump speech in favor of Know- Nothingism, 59-year-old Cyrus Barton fell into the arms of his political opponent Walter Harriman and departed from this mortal coil.

February 17. It is still cloudy and a very fine rain. The river very high, one inch higher than the evening of January 31st. The bridge at Sam Barrett’s caved in; also the Swamp Bridge on back road. Muskrats driven out. Heard this morning, at the new stone bridge, from the hill, that singular springlike note of a bird which I heard once before one year about this time (under Fair Haven Hill). The jays were uttering their unusual notes, and this made me think of a woodpecker. It reminds me of the pine warbler, vetter vetter vetter vetter vet, except that it is much louder, and I should say had the sound of l rather than t, — veller, etc., perhaps. Can it be a jay? or a pig[eon] woodpecker? Is it not the earliest springward note of a bird? In the damp misty air Was waked up last night by the tolling of a bell about 11 o’clock, as if a child had hold of the rope. Dressed and went abroad in the wet to see if it was a fire. It seems the town clock was out of order, and the striking part ran down and struck steadily for fifteen minutes. If it had not been so near the end of the week, it might have struck a good part of the night

P.M.— A riparial excursion over further railroad bridge; return by Flint’s Bridge At 2 P. M. the water at the Sam Wheeler Bridge is three inches above straight truss, or two inches higher than at 9 A. M. The ice is not broken over the channel of this stream, but is lifted up and also for a good distance over the meadows, but, for a broad space over the meadows on each side, the freshet stands over the ice, which is flat on the bottom. It rains but a trifle this afternoon, but the snow which is left is still melting. The water is just beginning to be over the road beyond this stone bridge. The road beyond the opposite, or Wood’s, bridge is already impassable to foot-travellers I see no muskrats in the Assabet from the Tommy Wheeler bank. Perhaps they provided themselves holes at the last freshet. It is running over both sides of Derby’s Bridge for a dozen rods (each side), as over a dam. The ice in the middle of this stream is for the most part broken up. Great cakes of ice are wedged against the railroad bridge there, and still threaten its existence. They are about twenty feet in diameter and some twenty inches thick, of greenish ice, more or less tilted up and commonly another, if not two more, of equal size, forced directly underneath the first by the current. They stretch quite across the river, and, being partly tilted up against the spiles of the bridge, exert a tremendous power upon it. They form a dam between and over which the water falls, so that it is fully ten inches higher on the upper side of the bridge than on the lower. Two maples a little above the bridge –one a large one– have been levelled and carried off by the ice. The track-repairers have been at work here all day, protecting the bridge. They have a man on the ice with a rope round his body, —the other end in their hands, —who is cracking off the corners of the cakes with a crowbar. One great cake, as much as a dozen rods long, is slowly whirling round just above the bridge, and from time to time an end is borne against the ice which lies against the bridge. The workmen say that they had cleared the stream here before dinner, and all this had collected since. (Now 3 P. M.) If Derby’s Bridge should yield to the ice which lies against it, this would surely be swept off. They say that three (?) years ago the whole of the east end of the bridge was moved some six inches, rails and all. Waded through water in the road for eight or ten rods, beyond Loring’s little bridge. It was a foot deep this morning on the short road that leads to Heywood’s house. I had to go a quarter of a mile up the meadow there and down the college road. Sam Barrett’s bridge is entirely covered and has slumped. They cross a broad bay in a boat there. I went over on the string-piece of the dam above. It is within eight or nine inches of the top of the little bridge this side of Flint’s Bridge at 5.3O P. M. So, though it is within

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five and a half inches of where it was three years ago in the spring at the new stone bridge, it is not so high comparatively here. The fact is, the water is in each case dammed not only by the bridges and causeways but by the ice, so that it stands at as many levels as there are causeways. It is perhaps about a foot lower at Flint’s Bridge now, than when it stood where it does now at the new stone bridge three years ago. So that a metre at one point alone will not enable you to compare the absolute height or quantity of water at different seasons and under different circumstances. Such a metre is the more to be relied on in proportion as a river is free from obstructions, such as ice, causeways, bridges, etc Everywhere now in the fields you see a green water standing over ice in the hollows. Sometimes it is a very delicate tint of green. Would this water look green on any white ground? It is commonly yellow on meadows in spring. The highway surveyor is on the alert to see what damage the freshet has done. As they could not dig in the frozen ground, they have upset a cartload of pitch pine boughs into the hole at the Swamp Bridge.

February 24, Saturday: In Manhattan’s Stanwix Hall, Know-Nothing Party leader Bill “The Butcher” Poole picked an argument with a political opponent, John Morrissey, and was gunned down by Lewis Baker. Three trials would result in hung juries and the killing would never be punished.

February 24. Clear, but very cold and windy for the season. Northerly wind; smokes blown southerly. Ground frozen harder still; but probably now and hereafter what ground freezes at night will in great part melt by middle of day. However, it is so cold this afternoon that there is no melting of the ground throughout the day The names of localities on the Sudbury River, the south or main branch of Concord or Musketaquid River, beginning at the mouth of the Assabet, are the Rock (at mouth), Merrick’s Pasture, Lee’s Hill, Bridge, Hubbard Shore, Clamshell Hill and fishing-place, Nut Meadow Brook, Hollowell Place and Bridge, Fair Haven Hill and Cliffs, Conantum opposite, Fair Haven Pond and Cliff-and Baker Farm, Pole Brook, Lee’s and Bridge, Farrar’s or Otter Swamp, Bound Rock, Rice’s Hill and [Blank Space]’s [sic] Isle, the Pantry, Ware Hill, Sherman’s Bridge and Round Hill, Great Sudbury Meadow and Tall’s Isle, Causeway Bridges, Larned Brook, the Chestnut House, Pelham Pond, the Rapids. I saw yesterday in Hubbard’s sumach meadow a bunch of dried grass with a few small leaves inmixed, which had lain next the ground under the snow, probably the nest of a mouse or mole P. M.—To young willow-row near Hunt’s Pond road Here is skating again, and there was some yesterday, the meadows being frozen where they had opened, though the water is fast going down. It is a thin ice of one to two inches, one to three feet above the old, with yellowish water between. However, it is narrow dodging between the great cakes of the ice which has been broken up. The whole of the broad meadows is a rough, irregular checker-board of great cakes a rod square or more, — arctic enough to look at. The willow-row does not begin to look bright yet. The top two or three feet are red as usual at a distance, the lower parts a rather dull green. Inspecting a branch, I find that the bark is shrunk and wrinkled, and of course it will not peel. Probably when it shines it will be tense and smooth, all its pores filled Staples said the other day that he heard Phillips speak at the State-House. By thunder! he never heard a man that could speak like him. His words come so easy. It was just like picking up chips Minott says that Messer tells him he saw a striped squirrel (!) yesterday [Vide Mar. 4th and 7th.]. His cat caught CAT a mole lately, not a star-nosed one, but one of those that heave up the meadow. She sometimes catches a little dark-colored mouse with a sharp nose. Tells of a Fisk of Waltham who, some thirty years ago, could go out with a club only and kill as many partridges as he could conveniently bring home. I suppose he knew where to find them buried in the snow. Both Minott and Farmer think they sometimes remain several days in the snow, if the weather is bad for them. Minott has seen twigs, he says, of apple, in their crops, three quarters of an inch long. Says he has seen them drum many times, standing on a log or a wall; that they strike the log or stone with their wings. He has frequently caught them in a steel trap without bait, covered with leaves and set in such places. Says that quails also eat apple buds. I notice that, in the tracks, hens’ toes are longer and more slender than partridges and more or less turned and curved one side The brightening of the willows or of osiers, — that is a season in the spring, showing that the dormant sap is awakened. I now remember a few osiers which I have seen early in past springs, thus brilliantly green and red (or yellow), and it is as if all the landscape and all nature shone. Though the twigs were few which I saw, I remember it as a prominent phenomenon affecting the face of Nature, a gladdening of her face. You will often fancy that they look brighter before the spring has come, and when there has been no change in them Thermometer at 10° at 10 P. M.

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March 7, Wednesday: Anthony Burns, back from his 2nd enslavement at a ransom price of $1,325.00, was feted at the Tremont Temple and handed manumission papers. The former slave, free at last, would attend the School of Divinity at Oberlin College and become a minister of the gospel, pastor at the Zion Baptist Church of St. Catherine’s, Canada West.

During that spring, however, in Boston, due to the parental boycott of racially segregated school facilities, enrollment at Boston’s all-black Smith School was standing at but 28. In the petition drive to desegregate Boston’s system, William C. Nell would obtain 311 signatures and Lewis Hayden would obtain 87. A bill prohibiting all distinction of color and religion would be passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives, at that time under the control of Know-Nothings. Then that bill would be passed by the Massachusetts Senate, also at that time under the control of these people.13

March 7. P. M. — To Red-Ice Pond. A raw east wind and rather cloudy. Methinks the buds of the early willows, the willows of the railroad bank, show more of the silvery down than ten days ago. Did I not see crows flying northeasterly yesterday toward night? The redness in the ice appears mostly to have evaporated, so that, 13. In Massachusetts at least, this party was not only nativist and anti-immigrant but also anti-aristocratic and anti-slavery. Nothing in this blazing amazing world is so strange and strained as politics! An explanation for this phenomenon might be that the Catholic Irish, who had to compete with free blacks for the roughest and dirtiest of laboring jobs, were violently pro-slavery and, since the Know-Nothings were violently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish and the Catholic Irish were reaching what were seen as dangerous proportions, actually in Boston by that point the majority of the citizenry, then, on the principle “an enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Know-Nothings were making common cause with the free black minority. One Know-Nothing representative is recorded as having stated that he resented the idea that some black children had to travel a long way to Black Smith, passing other schools on the way, when the “dirtiest Irish” could step directly from their teeming tenements into the nearest and most convenient public school. The Boston Pilot, a Catholic paper, suggested that this integration of the public schools was intended “as an insult” to Boston’s Catholics, who were of course all white. Boston Catholics were at this time so anti-black that they didn’t even bother to establish a segregated section in their cathedral for blacks. When a temperance speaker who had spoken against slavery in Ireland, where it was unpopular, came to speak of temperance in the Catholic churches of America, for the most pragmatic of reasons he needed to cease saying anything at all about this topic of slavery. ANTI-CATHOLICISM

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melted, it does not color the water in a bottle. Saw, about a hemlock stump on the hillside north of the largest Andromeda Pond, very abundant droppings of some kind of mice, on that common green moss (forming a firm bed about an inch high, like little pines, surmounted by a fine red stem with a green point, in all three quarters of an inch high), which they had fed on to a great extent, evidently when it was covered with snow, shearing it off level. Their droppings could be collected by the hand probably, [550307a.jpg (2597 bytes)] a light brown above, green next the earth. There were apparently many of their holes in the earth about the stump. They must have fed very extensively on this moss the past winter [Vide Mar. 14th.]. It is now difficult getting on and off Walden. At Brister's Spring there are beautiful dense green beds of moss, which apparently has just risen above the surface of the water, tender and compact. I see many tadpoles of medium or full size in deep warm ditches in Hubbard's meadow. They may probably be seen as soon as the ditches are open, thus earlier than frogs. At his bridge over the brook it must have been a trout I saw glance, — rather dark, as big as my finger. To-day, as also three or four days ago, I saw a clear drop of maple sap on a broken red maple twig, which tasted very sweet. The Pyrola secunda is a perfect evergreen. It has lost none of its color or freshness, with its thin ovate finely serrate leaves, revealed now the snow is gone. It is more or less branched. Picked up a very handsome white pine cone some six and a half inches long by two and three eighths near base and two near apex, perfectly blossomed. It is a very rich and wholesome brown color, of various shades as you turn it in your hand, — a light ashy or gray brown, somewhat like unpainted wood. as you look down on it, or as if the lighter brown were covered with a gray lichen, seeing only those parts of the scales always exposed, — with a few darker streaks or marks ([DRAWING]) and a drop of pitch at the point of each scale. Within, the scales are a dark brown above (i. e. as it hangs) and a light brown beneath, very distinctly being marked beneath by the same darker [550307b.jpg (3940 bytes)] brown, down the centre and near the apex somewhat anchorwise. We were walking along the sunny hillside on the south of Fair Haven Pond (on the 4th), which the choppers had just laid bare, when, in a sheltered and warmer place, we heard a rustling amid the dry leaves on the hillside and saw a striped squirrel eying us from its resting-place on the bare ground. It sat still till we were within a rod, then suddenly dived into its hole, which was at its feet, and disappeared. The first pleasant days of spring come out like a

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squirrel and go in again

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March 22, Thursday: Prejudice toward Irish Catholic immigrants, fanned by the Providence Journal (nowadays this paper is referred to locally as the “ProJo”), was using as its vehicle the American, or “Know-Nothing” party, a secret organization that was sweeping town, city, and state elections in the mid-fifties. In this year its candidate, William W. Hoppin, had captured the Rhode Island governorship. Some of the party’s more zealous adherents even planned a raid on St. Xavier’s Convent, home of the “female Jesuits,” supported by a fake rumor they were circulating to the effect that a Protestant girl, named Rebecca Newell, was being held against her will by the nuns of Sisters of Mercy.

The password of these Know-Nothing Protestant rioters was “show yourself.” (Is the password of the Ku Klux Klan “expose yourself”?) ANTI-CATHOLICISM

In Providence, Rhode Island on this day, an angry mob instigated by the ProJo and the Know-Nothings dispersed when confronted with Bishop Bernard O’Reilly and an equally militant crowd of Irishmen. On this day, God’s providence was definitely on the side of the big shillelaghs!

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Spring: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 1

I. Gratry on the Knowledge of God II. Ritter’s History of Philosophy CATHOLICISM III. Radowitz’s Fragments IV. Luther and the Reformation V. Russia and the Western Powers VI. The Know-Nothings VII. Literary Notices and Criticisms

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON

April 28, Saturday: At what would be known as the Battle of Poncha Pass, white vigilantes and soldiers killed 40 native Americans. The governor of the Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, was concluding the Yakima War with a treaty binding the native Americans to relinquish their territories and live on a reservation. Although the headman Kamiakin and a group of Yakima refused to sign, twelve days later Stevens would be announcing that their lands were open to white settlement.

The Know-Nothing governor of Massachusetts signed the school desegregation bill into law. After eleven years of the most intense black boycott, under black leadership Boston’s public schools had become again integrated. SMITH SCHOOL

Henry Thoreau was on the Concord River near Ball’s Hill (Gleason D9):

A second cold but fair day. Landed at Ball’s Hill to look for birds under the shelter of the hill in the sun. There were a great many myrtle-birds [Yellow-rumped Warbler Dendroica coronata] there, –they have been quite common for a week,– also yellow redpolls, and some song sparrows, tree sparrows, field sparrows, and one F. hyemalis. In a cold and windy day like this you can find more birds than in a serene one, because they are collected under the wooded hillsides in the sun. The myrtle-birds flitted before… in great numbers, yet quite tame, uttering commonly only a chip, but sometimes a short trill or che che, che che, che che. Do I hear the tull-lull in the afternoon? It is a bird of many colors, –slate, yellow, black and white,– singularly spotted.

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August 16, Thursday: The Whig party had been destroyed by the Know-Nothing victory in the state election of 1854. Therefore the anti-slavery wing of the Whigs was reorganized as a new party, named the Republican Party. Samuel Hoar of Concord presided at the meeting in Boston that called for a State convention of this party, to be held in Worcester on September 20, 1855. Hoar’s son George Frisbie Hoar was also active in the founding of this Republican Party, in a minor way.

THE HOARS CONCORD’S “ROYAL FAMILY”

Fall: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 3

I. Gratry on the Knowledge of God II. Rome after the Peace CATHOLICISM III. Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysic IV. Wilberforce on Church Authority V. Italy and the Christian Alliance VI. A Know-Nothing Legislature VII. Literary Notices and Criticisms

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON

Winter: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 4

CATHOLICISM I. The Temporal Power of the Pope II. Hume’s Philosophical Works III. The Know-Nothing Platform IV. Ventura on Philosophy and Catholicity V. Wordworth’s Poetical Works VI. The Irish in America

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON

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1856

Land was acquired in mid-Manhattan for a park. 300,000 Catholic immigrants arrived in New-York during the year, each bringing an estimated average of $68 (which means that by the standard of those times, they were not paupers). The Democratic incumbent mayor, Fernando Wood, won re-election, defeating Know-Nothing candidate Isaac O. Baker, Republican Anthony J. Bleeker, and fellow Democrat James S. Libby.

June 2, Monday: An antislavery splinter faction of the Know-Nothing party met in New-York and nominated John C. Frémont and Pennsylvania’s W. F. Johnston. They advocated a free Kansas Territory, that is, a land in which only white people would be allowed to live.

According to a roadside marker on US 56 east of Baldwin in Douglas County, Kansas, the “battle of Black Jack” on this day had amounted to:

part of the struggle to make Kansas a free state. In May 1856, proslavery men destroyed buildings and newspaper presses in Lawrence, Free-State headquarters. John Brown’s company then killed five proslavery men on Pottawatomie creek not far from this spot. In retaliation Henry C. Pate raided near-by Palmyra and took three prisoners. Early on the morning of June 2 Brown attacked Pate’s camp in a grove of black jack oaks about 1/4 mile south of this sign. Both sides had several wounded and numerous desertions before Pate and 28 men surrendered, Brown claiming he had only 15 men left. As evidence of civil war this fight received much publicity and excited both North and South.

Erected by the Kansas State Historical Society and State Highway Commission.

Three Jews who had a store together in Lawrence, Kansas were in Captain John Brown’s group at this engagement: • Jacob Benjamin, originally from Bohemia, died 1866 • Theodore Wiener, immigrant from Poland, died 1906. Although Wiener would be described by Bondi as “a rank pro-slavery man” he needed John Brown’s help to oust a squatter on his claim. • August Bondi, who as a lad in Vienna had taken part in the 1848 revolution, and who would enlist in the Kansas cavalry and serve as a 1st sergeant

Bondi would later write that the three of them were “Free State men,” which he would explain meant that they were hostile to any “increase in the colored population.” They were taking part in this fighting, he wrote, out of “antipathy at the degradation of labor” (presumably, white labor) — certainly not out of any “sympathy with the negro slave.” According to this record Bondi was alongside John Brown and ahead of the other men, going up a hill while under fire:14 We walked with bent backs, nearly crawled, that the tall dead grass of the year before might somehow by courtesy hide us from the Border Ruffian marksmen, yet the bullets kept whistling.... Weiner puffed like a steamboat, hurrying behind me. I called out to him “Nu, was

14. Bernard Postal and Lionel Koppman. GUESS WHO’S JEWISH IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, pages 34-5

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meinen Sie jetzt?” (“Now what do you think of American this?”). His answer, “Sof odom muves” (a Hebrew phrase meaning “the end of man is death” or, in modern Jewish phraseology, “I guess we are up against it”).

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John E. Cook first met Captain John Brown after this battle of Black Jack.

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1857

In previous years, Indiana Friends who had been disowned by their Orthodox Indiana Yearly Meeting due to their antislavery sentiments had formed an association of their own, known as “Anti-Slavery Friends of Indiana.” In this year the Orthodox Yearly Meeting that had disowned them decided that it would allow them to rejoin the Religious Society of Friends without requiring any “acknowledgement of wrongdoing” for having previously been seduced into supposing human slavery to be an abomination. Nearly all of them therefore rejoined the Orthodox Indiana Yearly Meeting, and the Anti-Slavery Friends of Indiana was laid down.

Hey, here come d’judge. The freedoms and liberties of America’s slavemasters were protected by the US Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. In this year and the next President Buchanan’s pro-slavery policies, combined with this determination that slaves are not freed when they are moved into free states with their owners, that Congress can not bar slavery from a territory, and that blacks could not become citizens, would kill off both the Whig and the Know-Nothing parties. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supremes in effect declared that the already-discarded Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been unconstitutional because the effect of it had been to deprive citizens –white people– of their property –black people– without due process of law.

The court also determined that slaves were neither citizens of any state nor citizens of the USA (this latter part

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of the decision would be overturned in 1868 by ratification of the XIVth Amendment).

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

We ought to notice, says Richard F. Teichgraeber III, that for five years after the summer of 1854 (with its agitation against the infamous Daniel Webster sellout that produced the Fugitive Slave Law), “Thoreau chose not to speak again in public against slavery.” In particular, he allowed this year of 1857 (with its Dred Scott supreme court decision that no American slave had any rights which any American slaveholder was obliged to respect), to pass “without any comment in his diary, private letters, or later published writings.” Although Henry Thoreau would in 1862 visit the site at which Dred and Harriet Scott had been held in slavery, on the grounds of a US military reservation south of St. Paul, Minnesota, Teichgraeber points out that evidently at this point he was “unclear” as to exactly how he might effectively intercede in the nation’s racial situation. Only when John Brown entered the picture would Thoreau find his way clear “to take an effective stand for abolition.”

1859

Publication of the anonymous volume POPE OR PRESIDENT? STARTLING DISCOVERIES OF ROMANISM AS REVEALED BY ITS OWN WRITERS. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

In the Eliot Public School in Boston’s North End, a Catholic student, required to recite the Ten Commandments 15 as per the King James translation of the BIBLE, caused a furor by refusing his teacher’s demand. The teacher of course punished this student, the known ringleader of a group of students who had sadly fallen under the influence of one Father John Wiget, a parish priest. After about half an hour of being struck across the palm with a rattan cane, young Thomas Wall found that he had become able to read from the King James BIBLE — but on the following day some 300 Irish children would be truant.

15. The Catholic and Protestant translations of the commandments differ in significant details, such as in their numbering, and both differ substantially from Jewish interpretations, a Jewish reading of “Thou shalt not steal,” for instance, being that this one did not originally have to do with the theft of objects, which was covered adequately under “coveting one’s neighbor’s possessions,” but dealt instead probably with such activities as kidnapping.

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1860

January 30, Monday: Recognizing, after any number of votes in which he had failed to win the necessary 119 supporters, that his endorsement of Helperism had destroyed any possibility of his becoming Speaker of the House, Representative Sherman withdrew his name. The Republicans in the House selected another person, not even a member of their party, a member instead of Know-Nothings, William R. Pennington of New Jersey, as their candidate for the Speakership. However, Pennington had been a Sherman supporter during the previous ballots, which made his name virtually as unacceptable to them as Sherman’s: “The endorser of an endorser is just as accountable, in the eyes of the law, as the principle.” In subsequent ballots Pennington would be unable to achieve the necessary 119, until the Democratic candidate, to break the logjam and allow government to continue, withdrew from the contest.

Henry Thoreau instanced for the 20th time (Dr. Bradley P. Dean noticed) a cloud form category of Luke Howard: “Fair with a few cumuli of indefinite outline in the north and south, and dusky under sides. A gentle west wind and a blue haze.”

Jan. 30. 2 P.M.—To Nut Meadow and White Pond road. Thermometer 45°. Fair with a few cumuli of indefinite outline in the north and south, and dusky under sides. A gentle west wind and a blue haze. Thaws. The river has opened to an unusual extent, owing to the very long warm spell, — almost all this month. Even from Hubbard’s Bridge up and down it is breaking up, is all mackerelled, with lunar-shaped openings and some like a thick bow.

They [ARE] from one to twelve feet long. Yesterday’s slight snow is all gone, leaving the ice, old snow, and bare ground; and as I walk up the river-side, there is a brilliant sheen from the wet ice toward the sun, instead of the crystalline rainbow of yesterday. Think of that (of yesterday), — to have constantly before you, receding as fast as you advance, a bow formed of a myriad crystalline mirrors on the surface of the snow!! What miracles, what beauty surrounds us! Then, another day, to do all your walking knee-deep in perfect six-rayed crystals of surpassing beauty but of ephemeral duration, which have fallen from the sky. The ice has so melted on the meadows that I see where the musquash has left his clamshells in a heap near the riverside, where there was a hollow in the bank. The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook. It is pleasant also to see the very distinct ripple-marks in the sand at its bottom, of late so rare a sight. I go through the piny field northwest of M. Miles’s. There are no more beautiful natural parks than these pastures in which the white pines have sprung up spontaneously, standing at handsome intervals, where the wind chanced to let the seed lie at last, and the grass and blackberry vines have not yet been killed by them. There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. The crow, flying high, touches the tympanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. What does it avail to look at a thermometer or barometer compared with listening to his note? He informs me that Nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and I hear the very flutterings of her heart. Crows have singular wild and suspicious ways. You will [SEE] a couple flying high, as if about their business, but lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile; and this is their business, — as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away. This even in winter, when they have no nests to be anxious about. But it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat (as at F. Wheeler’s wood) which the choppers are laying low. I saw the other day (apparently) mouse (?)-tracks which had been made in slosh on the Andromeda Ponds and then frozen, — little gutters about two inches wide and nearly one deep, looking very artificial with the nicks

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on the sides.

I sit on the high hilltop south of Nut Meadow, near the pond. This hazy day even Nobscot is so blue that it looks like a mighty mountain. See how man has cleared commonly the most level ground, and left the woods to grow on the more uneven and rocky, or in the swamps. I see, when I look over our landscape from any eminence as far as the horizon, certain rounded hills, amid the plains and ridges and cliffs, which have a marked family likeness, like eggs that belong to one nest though scattered. They suggest a relation geologically. Such are, for instance, Nashoba, Annursnack, Nawshawtuct, and Ponkawtasset, all which have Indian names, as if the Indian, too, had regarded them as peculiarly distinct. There is also Round Hill in Sudbury, and perhaps a hill in Acton. Perhaps one in Chelmsford. They are not apparently rocky. The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. It seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. That thaw which merely excites the cock to sound his clarion as it were calls to life the snow-flea.

1871

Edith O’Gorman’s TRIALS AND PERSECUTIONS OF MISS EDITH O’GORMAN. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

Friend John Greenleaf Whittier’s MIRIAM AND OTHER POEMS.

When she found that Friend John and Lucy Larcom had included an Italian poem in CHILD LIFE, Lydia Maria Child informed him that this had been a mistake for such material might have the effect of seducing a Protestant child into Catholicism! But Friend John had not included the material because of any sympathy for Popery: “Ireland is cursed with Popery. The Protestant section of the island never starves and never begs.” The victims of the Irish Potato Famine, it appears, had come to pester us here in America because their superstitious religion had caused them to become lazy beggars! ANTI-CATHOLICISM “To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.”

— Rebecca West

April 20, Thursday: President Ulysses S. Grant signed a 3d Force Act, authorizing him to use force against the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations.

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1872

February 24, day: The following illustration of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, by Henry Thoreau’s friend Frank

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Henry Temple Bellew, appeared in a national magazine:

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December 12: Edwin Forrest died in Philadelphia. Today he is remembered not for his larger-than-life masculism or his larger-than-life estate or his larger-than-life divorce petition against actress Catherine Sinclair but for his larger-than-life rivalry with British actor William Macready, which in 1849 had put the torch to a powder-keg of nativist sentiment and induced a riot at the Astor Place Opera House which had resulted in the deaths of a number of his manly fans.

1873

April 13, Easter Sunday,: The 1st Enforcement Act had been passed in 1870 –only 62 days after the XVth Amendment to the US Constitution had established that citizens were entitled to vote regardless of the color of their skins– prohibiting either private individuals or state officials from taking any of a series of specific actions that might discourage anyone qualified to vote in a state or local election from voting or from completing any prerequisite to voting. After all, what would have been the point of erasing the word “white” from state suffrage laws if state governments had been allowed to disfranchise their African-American citizens by other means or had provided no protection to those who sought to vote, or to those who sought to assume offices to which they had been legally elected? –Such a law having been enacted, the job had been done, and the bleeding heart liberals could go safely to sleep! Nothing to worry about! Therefore, in Colfax, Louisiana on this holy Sunday, the largest peacetime massacre of African-Americans in 19th-Century America was enabled to take place, without any punishment whatever of the white genocidal murderers — and I bet you’ve never heard tell of any such thing!

What happened was, there was a disputed election which resulted in an armed mob of some 300 white Democrats. They killed at least 105 of their Black Republican neighbors. The mob was led by Columbus Nash, the white man who had been the Democratic candidate for sheriff, who apparently had been defeated at the polls. Some 50 of these 105 black men were massacred after having disarmed themselves and surrendered and been taken prisoner. The US Supreme Court would see to it that none of the white men involved would ever receive a slap on the wrist for this.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by [email protected] (January 2003) Robert Goldman. RECONSTRUCTION AND BLACK SUFFRAGE: LOSING THE VOTE IN REESE AND CRUIKSHANK. Landmark Law Cases and American Society Series. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2001 Reviewed for H-Pol by J. Morgan Kousser , Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: [email protected]. The Easter Massacre and Legal Abstraction

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When the largest peacetime massacre of African-Americans in 19th-Century America took place on Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, the US government possessed the tools to prosecute the murderers. The 1st Enforcement Act, passed 62 days after the ratification of the XVth Amendment, prohibited private individuals, as well as state officials, from taking any of a series of specific actions aimed at prohibiting or discouraging anyone qualified to vote in a state or local election from voting or from performing any prerequisites to voting. After all, what was the use of removing the word “white” from state suffrage laws if the states disfranchised blacks by other means or offered no protection to African-Americans who sought to vote or to assume offices to which they were legally elected? And the law clearly applied to the “Colfax Massacre” of at least 105 black men, about 50 of whom where executed after surrendering to the well- organized group of about 300 armed whites, because the massacre was the direct result of a disputed election. After an election in which they had almost surely won a majority of the votes, local black Republican candidates had attempted a peaceful occupation of the Grant Parish courthouse. Their slaughter was not a conventional assault that a local or state government could be expected to handle, but the climactic event in a struggle for control of local government — Columbus Nash, the Democratic candidate for sheriff, led the white mob. The events in Colfax evoked national outrage. In response, federal District Attorney James R. Beckwith indicted and eventually convinced a southern jury to convict three of the murderers. Although hardly equal and exact justice, the punishment of at least a few of the white terrorists signaled that the Grant Administration would continue to try to protect its loyal followers’ voting rights. That signal sent a bolt of fear through the southern Democratic establishment, whose efforts to mount coups d’etat against the Republican Reconstruction state governments depended on having a free hand to murder and intimidate its white and especially its black opponents and to stuff ballot boxes to overcome the votes of those who were not cowed. The trio’s upper class lawyers, the flower of the state and national Democratic bar, contested the case in the US Circuit Court. When the two circuit court judges, including Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, disagreed with each other, the case was certified to the US Supreme Court as US v Cruikshank. Just as clearly covered by the provisions of the Enforcement Act was the refusal of Lexington, Kentucky tax collector James F. Robinson, Jr. to accept the poll tax payment of the African-American William Garner, who proffered his $1.50 in an attempt to qualify to vote. Faced with a probable black majority within its city limits, white Democratic officials, one month after the ratification of the XVth Amendment, had gotten the state legislature to amend the city charter to increase its residency requirement and mandate the payment of a poll tax before any person could vote in municipal elections. In the January 1873 election, the poll tax reportedly disfranchised 2/3rds of black voters and preserved white Democratic supremacy. Even those like Garner, who could raise the money to pay their taxes, could be denied the suffrage if officials pleased. For when Garner appeared at the polls, election supervisors Hiram Reese and Matthew Foushee refused to accept his vote unless he presented a receipt showing that he had paid his poll tax, which Collector Robinson, another Democrat, had refused to allow Garner to do. Although Robinson’s action apparently seemed so indirectly connected with voting that he was not charged under the Enforcement Act, the denial of Garner’s right to vote by Reese and Foushee clearly qualified as related to voting, for the prescient framers of the Enforcement Act had foreseen that official as well as unofficial, bureaucratic as well as violent, subtle as well as blatant means would be employed to deny African-Americans an equal political voice. Even before Reese could be tried, his lawyers demurred (objected) to his indictment, and as in US v Cruikshank, two circuit court judges divided.16 The US Supreme Court would now have two cases with which to consider the interpretation and constitutionality of the 1st Enforcement Act. Although historians have long prominently mentioned these cases and there are lengthy and detailed discussions of them in larger monographs,17 this is the 1st book-length treatment easily accessible to students. Goldman’s book illustrates the proposition that squinting at legal cases by narrowing one’s view to the strictly 16. As Charles Fairman, RECONSTRUCTION AND REUNION, 1864-1888 (NY: Macmillan, 1987), II, 251-53, points out, it has been known since 1892 that the Supreme Court erred in considering the whole cases of Reese and US v Cruikshank, instead of just those points of law on which the circuit court judges disagreed. Technically, therefore, the Supreme Court’s opinions were invalid. Goldman, who cites Fairman’s book in his bibliography, leaves out this curious fact.

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legal materials of one or a few cases inevitably produces serious distortions. Despite the existence of congressional hearings, an army report, a long trial that featured 300 witnesses in US v Cruikshank, and a plethora of recent work on Reconstruction in both Louisiana and Kentucky, Robert Goldman only briefly sketches the backgrounds of each case and tells us almost nothing about the plaintiffs or defendants and not much more about the lawyers who represented them or the federal judges who decided the cases at each level. Nor does he examine the consequences of the cases for the parties involved. Were Cruikshank, Reese, and their compatriots rewarded for their labors for the party of white supremacy with higher office? Were the blacks who survived Colfax driven from politics? How comparatively effective were violence and legal maneuvers in stemming the Republican threat? Although Goldman does not note it, the Republican ticket in Grant Parish polled nearly as high a percentage in the 1876 presidential election as the percentage of African-American males of voting age in the parish, an indication that the epic violence was less of a final solution than the Democrats hoped it would be. Such stirring events, such a chance to recover the memory of so many sufferers and villains, such an opportunity to breathe life into the abstract formalism of the law — squandered! It is not that the formal legal issues in Reese and US v Cruikshank are uninteresting. Indeed, they are as weighty as they are complex. The bevy of legal talent representing the Democrats, which included a former senator, two former US Attorney Generals, and even ex-US Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell, launched a similar barrage of criticisms of the indictments in both cases. The most extreme declared that the only effects of the three Reconstruction constitutional amendments were to ban slavery and to force states to remove the word “white” from their suffrage laws. In this view, the national government had no more power to protect any rights, including those related to the right to vote, such as the right not to be killed when going to the polls, than it did before the Civil War. States could not be required to protect their citizens, and the national government could not intervene to protect individuals if the states failed to do so. It is interesting to note, though Goldman does not, that former Justice Campbell had argued an equally extreme nationalist position, that the Reconstruction Amendments brought nearly all rights under national protection (“conscience, speech, publication, security, freedom, and whatever else is essential to ... liberty” is the way he put it), as attorney for the Butchers’ Benevolent Association in the 1873 Slaughter House Cases. Next in ideological radicalism came the view, espoused in oral argument by David Dudley Field, the brother of sitting Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field (who did not recuse himself in the case), that the Enforcement Act and all other acts that Congress had so far passed pursuant to the Reconstruction Amendments were unconstitutional, because the Amendments granted Congress power only to prescribe judicial remedies for any state laws that violated the Amendments, not to criminalize specific actions by individuals or state officials. Goldman, who offers few explicit comments or critiques of the arguments for the defendants, inexplicably characterizes Fields’s argument as “moderate” (page 86). Third was the contention that the constitutional amendments applied only to explicit state legislation, not to the actions of state officials. A 4th position was that the Amendments constrained only the actions of a state, not those of private parties. This might have invalidated the provisions of the Enforcement Acts banning private persons or officials who could claim not to be acting in their official capacities from interfering with voting, but it could hardly have saved Reese, whose refusal to accept Garner’s vote would have been meaningless if he had lacked the authority to do so. The 5th argument was that the only constitutional justification of the Enforcement Act was the XVth Amendment’s ban on discrimination in voting “on account of race,” and that the sections of the Enforcement Act that defined crimes lacked justification under the XVth Amendment because they did not explicitly mention race, as other sections of the Act did. A contradictory 6th stance attacked the words of the indictments because they failed to mention race as the cause of the discrimination, words that the law, on this reading, required. It was this last argument, that although the Enforcement Acts were constitutional, the indictments were deficient, because they did not allege a racial purpose for the murders in US v Cruikshank, that Justice Bradley, sitting on circuit, as Supreme Court justices had to before 1891, latched onto. Disagreeing with the other judge 17. In addition to Fairman’s very detailed chapter, II, 225-89, there is a lengthy treatment in Robert J. Kaczorowski, THE POLITICS OF JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION: THE FEDERAL COURTS, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AND CIVIL RIGHTS, 1866-1876 (NY: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1985), 173-227.

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in the trial, US Circuit (and later Supreme Court) Judge William B. Woods, Bradley ruled that the defendants should go free. The split vote automatically brought the issue before the US Supreme Court on a division of opinion. It was very curious for Bradley to take that position in his June 27, 1874 opinion in US v Cruikshank, because he had espoused a much more nationalistic view in his forceful dissent to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in the Slaughter House cases. A Louisiana case, Slaughter House was the 1st by the US Supreme Court to construe the XIVth Amendment, and it was decided, coincidentally, the day after the Colfax Massacre, on April 14, 1873. In Slaughter House, the majority ruled that the XIVth Amendment did not nationalize rights such as the right to practice an occupation, unrestrained by state laws aimed at protecting people’s health and safety. In his dissent from that ruling, Bradley took the position that the XIVth Amendment did nationalize such “privileges or immunities,” a stance that was entirely consistent with the theory under which federal attorneys throughout the South had been interpreting the Enforcement Act — that the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Amendments gave Congress the power to protect all peoples’ positive rights to assemble freely, to bear arms, and not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, rather than merely providing that the states could not deny to blacks whatever rights they granted to whites. The purpose of the XIVth Amendment, Bradley said in Slaughter House, was to make American citizenship “a sure guaranty of safety ... [so that] every citizen of the United States might stand erect in every portion of its soil, in the full enjoyment of every right and privilege belonging to a freeman, without fear of violence or molestation.” The black bodies rotting in the swamp in Colfax could not hear and would not have appreciated the delicate irony of Bradley’s transformed words only 14 months later in US v Cruikshank. The nationalistic position, based principally on the XIVth Amendment, which does not mention race, allowed Congress and the courts considerably more power, power that they clearly needed in order to protect African-Americans from a different sort of white butchers than those involved in Slaughter House. By contrast, under the theory that Bradley adopted in US v Cruikshank, Congress’s powers to pass the Enforcement Acts derived only from the XVth Amendment, which does mention race, and prosecutors had to allege and prove a racial intent behind every discrimination. Goldman (pages 58-59) suggests that Bradley adopted the narrow construction of congressional powers not to follow the previous year’s Supreme Court majority or to agree with the Democratic lawyers’ constricted views of congressional power, which left them free to overthrow Reconstruction by violence and chicanery, subject only to the laws of the states once they controlled them, but simply to bring the issue before the Supreme Court, perhaps without a strong view on how it should be decided. There are three difficulties with Goldman’s interpretation: First, since widespread violence and electoral discrimination offered the Grant Administration so many chances to indict well-connected perpetrators, it was inevitable that the issues would eventually come to the Supreme Court. There was no need for Bradley to disagree with Woods to raise the issue to the highest judicial level.18 Indeed, the Reese case had been on the Supreme Court’s docket for five months when Bradley issued his opinion. Second, if the New Jersey Republican justice had been at all ambivalent about the legality of Enforcement Act prosecutions, and if he had wished to preserve the lives of at least a few black political activists, he could have agreed with Woods’s decision and allowed the Enforcement Acts to retain their vigor in the extremely important circuit in which the case took place, perhaps inhibiting some of the later terrible violence there. Third, if Bradley had been even the slightest bit unsure of his newfound position, he would not have personally sent his opinion to federal district judges throughout the South, members of the US House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and the editors of three legal periodicals.19 Bradley’s liberal ideals were for white businessmen alone, and more than any other figure, he shaped the US v Cruikshank case. It is unfortunate that Goldman spends so little time trying to explain Bradley’s motives and account for his role. The government was represented by distinguished counsel in the cases, including future Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan in the circuit court trial in Kentucky, and one of the longest serving Solicitor Generals 18. As Fairman, II, 269, but not Goldman, points out, there was no general right to appeal to the Supreme Court in a criminal case until 1889. But a disagreement between two circuit court judges did result in an automatic appeal. The Supreme Court received its current extensive discretionary power to choose cases in 1925. 19. Fairman, II, 265.

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in American history, North Carolina Republican Samuel F. Phillips, in the Supreme Court. Phillips, assisted by Attorney General George Williams, argued that the Kentucky officials’ actions, taken in their official capacities, were those of the state, and that because the XVth Amendment did not specifically mention a particular protected race, the sections of the Enforcement Act were clearly within the purview of the Amendment, even though they did not make racial considerations an explicit part of the crimes they announced. Phillips contended, as well, that the right to vote was either one of the undefined privileges and immunities of citizenship according to the original constitution (a position, though Goldman does not note it, similar to that taken on fundamental rights by the principal framer of the XIVth Amendment, John A. Bingham) or that it had become such a privilege since the passage of the XIVth Amendment. Although insisting on the power of the national government to protect the political rights of citizens of any race, for this case, Phillips relied purely on the XVth Amendment’s authorization of protection of the right against discrimination on account of race. The evidence produced at the trials, Phillips believed, had demonstrated the requisite racially discriminatory intent. In US v Cruikshank, Phillips further asserted that under common law, inherited by the American legal system, the English government had enjoyed extensive power to punish conspiracies, a power invoked by Section 6 of the Enforcement Acts, under which US v Cruikshank and his confederates were convicted. The defense’s counter-argument, that conspiracy law had often been used in the past to trample civil liberties, was not only outrageous in this case, coming as it did not from the slaughtered, but from the poor, persecuted mass murderers, but it also contradicted the defendants’ other arguments that the national government had no business concerning itself with individual rights, such as, in this instance, the right to form a violent conspiracy. The Supreme Court docketed Reese in February 1874 and US v Cruikshank in October 1874, and heard oral arguments in the cases in January and March 1875, but did not issue opinions in them until March 27, 1876. Goldman neither explains why it took so long nor compares the decision time in this with that in other cases of the era to see how extraordinary this length of time was then. After all, the Court was nearly unanimous in both cases, and Justice Bradley had already written an opinion that tracked the final outcome on most issues. The timing of the decisions remains an interesting puzzle. More important, Goldman does not recount the events of the period between the Circuit and Supreme Court decisions, events that provided a stark background to the issues and almost certainly affected the decisions. All over the South, Democrats, gleefully, and Republicans, fearfully, interpreted Bradley’s opinion as a signal for the escalation of racial violence of whites against blacks and political violence of Democrats against Republicans.20 In the guise of the “White League,” “Red Shirts,” or Ku Klux Klan, Democrats then brought terror to a crescendo. In Louisiana itself, a “riot” in New Orleans, one of whose leaders, Robert H. Marr, represented US v Cruikshank in both the Circuit and Supreme Courts, prepared the way for the complete overthrow of the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana. In the fall of 1874, Democrats won a shocking and decisive national victory in the congressional elections, taking control of the House for the 1st time since secession and threatening to overturn every facet of Reconstruction except perhaps the antislavery XIIIth Amendment. Outraged by the violence and frightened by the prospect that Democrats would win the 1876 elections, the Republican caucus in the House in February 1875, before the newly elected Congress could take office, agreed on a new, far-reaching Enforcement Act. Among other provisions, the bill gave federal election supervisors the right to arrest people for intimidating voters, increased the penalties for election irregularities, mandated federal registration of voters, prohibited excessive poll taxes, forbade carrying guns on election day, and greatly enhanced the powers of election supervisors in rural areas. After overcoming Democratic delaying tactics and blustery, racist, partisan rhetoric that briefly transfixed the nation, Republicans passed a slightly weakened bill in the House on February 28th. The bill failed in the Senate in the last days of the lame duck session in early March, after Reese had been argued and a few weeks before the oral argument in US v Cruikshank. To rule the 1st Enforcement Act unconstitutional in Reese or US v Cruikshank was to sweep away the strongest existing protection of African- American suffrage and to abort more comprehensive protection, such as the 1875 bill, whenever the Republicans regained a majority in both houses of Congress, not just to invite Congress to amend the Act to 20. Kaczorowski, 188-93.

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cure slight flaws. A decision like Justice Bradley’s, which merely threw out the indictments, was unjust, but probably remediable. But finding the law even a little bit unconstitutional was fatal. It would be 82 years before Congress managed to pass other legislation to protect minority voting rights. From 1789 to 1875, the Supreme Court had overturned only three laws of Congress — in Marbury v. Madison, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and The Legal Tender Cases. This record implies that the Court followed two more recent conventions: if it can avoid a constitutional issue by deciding on the basis of a statute, it does so; and if it can equally well construe a law in ways that make it constitutional and unconstitutional, it chooses the constitutional construction. Adhering to these conventions minimizes conflicts with the legislature. Ignoring them prompts charges that the judges are seeking uncontrollable power. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, President Grant’s seventh choice to replace the deceased abolitionist Salmon P. Chase, presented his strike for judicial –and white– supremacy as an instance, instead, of judicial deference. Although Sections 1 and 2 of the brief 1st Enforcement Act mentioned race and claimed XVth Amendment justification, Sections 3 and 4 did not repeat such formulas, referring only to the “wrongful act or omission as aforesaid” or using similar locutions. Writing for an 8-1 majority in Reese, Waite contended that to interpret Sections 3 and 4 as in the context of Sections 1 and 2, instead of separately, as if no other part of the law existed, would have effected the judicial, not the legislative, will, requiring the Court “to make a new law.” Ruling that the XVth Amendment was the only possible justification of the law, and finding that Sections 3 and 4 did not mention race, Waite threw out these sections as beyond the constitutional power of Congress and dismissed the indictments based on them. The Chief Justice never examined the congressional debates or any other materials besides the text of the law in reaching the conclusion that the two sections of the law had nothing to do with the provisions that immediately preceded them. Neither does Goldman. That Waite forced the constitutional issue, instead of avoiding it and allowing later prosecutions for interfering with political rights, is underlined by the reactionary Justice Nathan Clifford’s concurring opinion, which had originally been scheduled to be the opinion of the Court.21 Clifford doubted that William Garner was properly qualified to vote, either because of Clifford’s racist view that the black Garner could not have raised $1.50 to pay his poll tax (as Goldman believes), or because poll tax payment and depositing a ballot were separate acts under the control of different officials. It followed for Clifford that Reese and Foushee had not illegally disfranchised Garner, and the justice therefore did not need to reach the question of constitutionality. His opinion could have been circumvented by drafting indictments and presenting evidence more carefully to include tax collectors and show their connection to voting. Waite’s view was thus more racially retrogressive than that of the last antebellum appointee still sitting on the Supreme Bench in 1875. Waite’s opinion in US v Cruikshank expanded on that in Reese, dispatching the constitutional bases for national protections with as little concern as the Louisiana thugs had shown in finishing off their black prisoners. In what might be viewed as the essential part of his opinion, Waite echoed Justice Bradley’s opinion on circuit, holding that the indictments were deficient because they did not allege that the victims had been targeted because of their race. But the Chief Justice did not stop there. Instead, he adopted virtually the whole states’ rights program of the most extreme defendants and commented not just on the XVth Amendment issues, to which Phillips and Williams had primarily confined their brief, but to explicating the whole Reconstruction constitutional settlement. According to the Chief Justice, the XIVth and XVth Amendments created no national rights except the right not to be discriminated against because of race, which had to be shown explicitly. For the protection of virtually all other rights, such as the rights to assemble peacefully and to bear arms, or to take any action related to voting in a state or local election, citizens had to look to the states alone. This position, so contradictory not only to the view of the four dissenters in Slaughter House, three of whom remained on the Court in 1875, but also inconsistent with the expansive tone with which Justice Samuel Miller’s majority opinion in that case had promised protection of black rights, severely constrained all future national legislation. Violence, intimidation, ballot box stuffing, restrictive election laws, suppression of all means of exercising or enjoying political rights — none of these, at least in connection with state and local

21. Waite took the opinion for himself when he concluded that, in his words, it “would be decided on constitutional grounds.” Goldman, page 89.

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elections, could be counteracted by national legislation unless it could be proven in court that those who perpetrated them did so on account of race. The debate over the 1875 Enforcement Act, which only a year earlier had convulsed the Congress for a month, was futile, for it would all have been unconstitutional. Thus, Waite’s opinions disarmed federal protectors of voting rights just as political violence reached a climax, enabling white Democratic supremacists to overthrow Reconstruction governments without fear of effective prosecution. The opinions were not simply part of the Compromise of 1877; without them, Hayes would have won easily and there would have been no crisis and no need for a compromise at all. In a lone, persuasive dissent, Justice Ward Hunt strongly criticized Waite’s interpretative severing of parts of the Enforcement Act from each other in Reese as violative of the intent of Congress in passing the law, as well as of the XVth Amendment. Concerning himself with legal exegesis on the narrowest part of Waite’s opinions, he effectively treated the other parts as dicta, that is, as inessential to the Court’s holding. Characteristically, Goldman praises Hunt’s narrowness and condemns the Solicitor General’s expansive brief for not following the Justice’s strategy (page 100). Goldman’s revisionist claims, the major themes of his book, that the Waite opinions were “narrow” and “moderate,” and that they did not adopt the defendants’ extreme states’ rights positions, abort future national protection of voting rights, or even declare certain sections of the 1st Enforcement Act unconstitutional (pp. 100-06), are insupportable.22 They are the product not only of what I have indicated above that I believe to be misreadings of the opinions themselves, but more basically, of abstract, static, internalist legal history itself. Although abstractions are important, segregating legal history into a doctrinal ghetto, apart from elections, legislative policy making, and the currents of popular opinion, distorts both the explanations for legal decisions and the evaluation of the consequences of those decisions. The argument, which Fairman had previously developed, that Waite’s opinions in Reese and US v Cruikshank were moderate because they did not expressly foreclose national protection of voting, is unconvincing for four reasons. First, it is based on hindsight. In Ex Parte Yarbrough (1884), a unanimous Supreme Court upheld an Enforcement Act prosecution not under the XVth Amendment, but under the Article I, Section 4 power of Congress to control the “times, places, and manner” of congressional elections, and Justice Miller implied in his opinion that congressional power under this provision was quite extensive. If such a novel reading of this section of the Constitution had been imagined either at the time of consideration of the Enforcement Acts or during the litigation of Reese and US v Cruikshank, however, some lawyer would surely have included it in a speech or brief. Since no one did, it is anachronistic to impute it to Chief Justice Waite or to those who interpreted his opinions when they were issued. Waite’s statements were sweeping, seeming to preclude any national protection of the rights of voters, and it was impossible to know at the time which of his sentiments would be considered as dicta. Indeed, dicta in general become visible only by hindsight; at the time an opinion is written, all of it seems essential, for otherwise, it would have been omitted. Second, the argument for moderation ignores the fact that state and local elections and office-holding could be and often were separated from national elections and office-holding. Both the Colfax Massacre and the Lexington poll tax issue concerned local government, and it is difficult to see how they would have been affected by a law growing out of Yarbrough, such as the Lodge Elections Bill of 1890, which passed the House and was shelved in the Senate by one vote. Third, the argument disregards the timing of Reese and US v Cruikshank. The circuit court opinion preceded and the Supreme Court opinion followed the heated battle over the last really strong voting rights legislation considered in Congress until 1965. Bradley’s opinion in US v Cruikshank gave congressional Democrats constitutional ammunition for the debate and hope that the Court would disallow any resulting law. By requiring a proof of a racially discriminatory purpose and eliminating the states’ failure to protect rights equally as a justification for national intervention, Waite’s opinions made framing any law to safeguard voters exceedingly difficult and severely constrained what any such law could accomplish. Coming when they did, the decisions also, as I have said before, greatly facilitated the overthrow of the remaining Republican

22. After Clifford initially drafted his opinion, Waite reassigned the majority opinion to himself because of his desire “that the enforcement cases would be decided on constitutional grounds.” Quoted in Fairman, II, 244.

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governments in the South. Fourth, the 1st Enforcement Act was almost by definition within the original intent of the framers of the XVth Amendment, for it was passed in the same session of Congress that wrote the Amendment and got it ratified in virtually record time. Cobbled together from several shorter bills, the Act was broad and complex, and a few Republicans raised objections to the wording of some of its sections. But they voted 181-1 for it in both houses of Congress, as they had voted 183-5 in favor of the XVth Amendment earlier in the session, which is as strong an endorsement of a law’s alignment with original intent as one could imagine. How can opinions that disregarded such evidence and nullified the law only six years later be regarded as “moderate”? We cannot understand the significance of Reese and US v Cruikshank unless we set them in their whole racial, partisan, and policymaking context, place them in the actual time when they were decided, and consider both their human causes and their human consequences. Since, like most legal historians, Goldman does not complete this task, his book leaves much to correct and much to be done.

1875

In Michigan and Minnesota, women obtained the franchise to vote in school elections. FEMINISM

Ellen Emerson, when she obtained a seat on the School Committee, became the 1st woman to be elected to public office in Concord.

May Alcott opened an art gallery and workshop on the 2d floor of the Town School building, above the Concord fire engines.

The new public school establishment had no clue that the 1st Amendment might be used to rule out government aid for the religious schools they sought to destroy, so what they worked toward was a new, separate constitutional amendment that would prohibit public funds, tax money, from being used for such independent schools. This was known as the Blaine Amendment, and in this year it fell short by four votes of the necessary 2/3ds margin needed for passage in the US Senate. The nativist Know-Nothing Party enrolled in the struggle, and in addition the Ku Klux Klan. The campaign for the new constitutional amendment was taken to the legislatures of the various states. Eventually, 29 state legislatures, including the state legislature of New York, would add Blaine Amendments to their state constitutions in order to destroy the Catholic school system. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

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1876

Another edition of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST was put out, with further changes. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. was serving as delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, and thus playing his own minor role in the infamous “Hayes-Tilden” compromise whereby Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes got to be President of the United States of America basically by promising to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for southern Democratic political support, thereby abandoning to a condition of “Jim Crow” apartheid the black Americans who had been freed as a result of the civil war.

(Note that at this point –since the federal legislature had not as yet enacted any legislative definition for the terms of art “slave,” “slavery,” and “enslavement,” and since subsequent to this it would not ever be politically possible to enact such a legislative definition– the XIIIth Amendment to the US Constitution, which had authorized the federal congress to regulate or prohibit this undefined “slavery,” was rendered essentially nugatory. There is simply no force whatever to a law which purports to prohibit something, when that “whatever it is” has been provided with no legal definition. If someone were to come before a federal court saying “You must protect me, I have been ‘enslaved’,” the court would be forced to respond “We are prepared to grant that it would be a crime to ‘enslave’ you, but there is simply no way for you to prove to us that you have been ‘enslaved’ because we have been provided with no legislative act or Common Law case precedent which would instruct us as to the meaning of this term ‘enslaved’ — and thus there is no way on earth by which we might be able to determine whether you have or have not in fact been subjected to a crime of having been ‘enslaved’.” This explains why it is that no American citizen has ever been arraigned or convicted or punished for the crime of having enslaved someone.)

1878

E.M. Marvin’s ERRORS OF THE PAPACY. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

Per an article published in this year in a religious organ23 by Father Isaac Hecker,

[T]he incompleteness and failure of [Thoreau’s] life cannot be concealed by all the verbiage and praise of his biographers.

One marvels at the fact that this man of religion had sought out such a companion with whom to saunter toward the Vatican!

(On the next page you can look in the eye and ask him this question yourself.)

23. Catholic World 1878, page 296.

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1887

Isaac Hecker’s THE CHURCH AND THE AGE.

The Reverend Justin Fulton’s ROME IN AMERICA. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

1888

In Buffalo, New York, the Assumption Roman Catholic Church was founded to serve the Polish community.

The White Caps, an Indiana Ku Klux Klan offshoot, surfaced in the city of Rochester, New York.

Publication of the Reverend Justin Fulton’s WASHINGTON IN THE LAP OF ROME. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

1893

The Prohibition Party’s venture into partisan politics having collapsed, an Anti-Saloon League took over leadership of the abolition movement. The movement’s appeal was spreading primarily among middle-class, nativist Protestants, who had become so desperate to maintain their prerogatives in society against threats from massive immigration, industrialization, and urbanization that they were embracing “family values” such as industry, frugality, sobriety, and religiosity.

The state of Washington banned the sale and use of cigarettes.

Under pressure from Joshua Rowntree and the Anglo Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, the British Government of India appointed a royal commission to inquire into the prevalence of opium use on that subcontinent. The commission would discover oral use to be so common as to be impossible to prohibit, but would describe this primarily medical or quasi-medical use as nonproblematic. The commission would report that the East’s reliance upon opium was rather similar to the West’s reliance upon alcohol, in that it was

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a practice against which the government would have no real need to crusade. The smoking of the substance, although more dangerous, was found to be still “comparatively rare and novel.”

Initial presentation of the Glass Flowers to Harvard University (created under the guidance of Harvard Professor Ware by artists Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph).

A Supreme Court decision written by Justice Horace Gray declared the tomato to be a vegetable based on common usage of the term “vegetable” as opposed to the term “fruit.” On this basis tomato importer John Nix would be obligated to pay a 10% vegetable tariff on shipments of tomatoes (declared to be honorary vegetables for tax purposes) grown in the West Indies.24 PLANTS

1900

May 5, Saturday: Peking and Tientsin newspapers reported demands by the I-ho ch’üan “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” known to the west as “Boxers,” that foreign devils be killed. Although the Boxers were indeed nativist, anti-foreign, specifically they were anti-Christian, and were antagonistic not merely toward foreign Christians but also toward Chinese ones.

General Arthur MacArthur (father of General Douglas MacArthur) replaced General Elwell S. Otis as military governor of the Philippines. He would set up his office at the Malacañang Palace in Manila.

24. It would be on this basis that, eventually, the Reagan administration would determine that in the planning of the child’s nutritional needs in the public school lunch program, french fries with catsup was to count as “two servings of vegetables.”

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1905

The Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s THE CLANSMAN: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE KU KLUX KLAN. Racial conflict is an epic struggle with the future of civilization at stake. Maybe we can’t have human slavery anymore but American blacks cannot be allowed to be politically equal with American whites as that would lead to social equality, and social equality would lead to miscegenation, and miscegenation would lead to the destruction of the family, and the destruction of the family would lead to the destruction of civilized society. Everything we admire and respect would fall like a row of damn dominoes, you fool.

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In this year the Reverend Egisto Fabbri Chauncey’s son Henry ChaunceyHENRY CHAUNCEY was born. In his baby book, carefully preserved, there was a place to write down what “people are reading,” and we note that Mrs. Chauncey has listed the Reverend Dixon’s THE CLANSMAN, one of the books on which the movie The Birth of a Nation would be based, as well as Edith Wharton’s THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and Jack London’s WAR OF THE CLASSES — reading matter that characterized our country as one that was still, despite the best improving efforts of two and a half centuries of Chaunceys, after fighting a devastating Civil War, still in a state of upheaval over matters of race, class, and social exclusion.

A homophobic theory of Walt Whitman’s “sex pathology” began to surface and was promptly countered among Whitman afficionados by a less accurate but less damaging “dark lady” theory.

In order to identify slow learners, Alfred Binet devised the first test that could measure general intelligence, providing for each personnel folder a single overall IQ number. By comparing this number with a person’s physical age, he felt that he could determine that person’s mental age. The following anonymous remark about Henry Thoreau appeared in Joel Benton’s PERSONS AND PLACES (NY: Broadway, pages 12-13): I am not sure whether you had personal knowledge of Thoreau, whom I had seen a little of from time to time, and a good deal more about thirty years ago, when I spent several Sundays at his mother’s house (having the same expectation of becoming a resident of Concord), and had a good many talks with him. He was a surveyor by profession, and kept a local map, which served him for a guide in his long tramps. He avoided the highways, and was reluctant even to have his feet off the turf or out of the woods. One may believe that he knew every rabbit-burrow and squirrel- hole in Concord, if not the individual physiognomy of each wild creature. He watched them as individuals; would bring turtles’ eggs in his pocket to hatch in the garden, and had an undue contempt for book-and-study naturalists, unjustly disparaging Agassiz. As Mr. Emerson said to me, he was “so good—and so bad!” His hermit-like and ascetic theories were eked out by frequent sharing of Emerson’s conversation and hospitality. Before “Walden” was published I heard him give a lecture before a small audience, which began: “I have been a good deal of a traveler— about my native village,” and went on with a very entertaining account of his experiments in living. Nonconformist as he was, he once spent a week [sic] in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes. His mother lived very quietly near the railroad station, and took occasional boarders — like myself. His sister was (I believe) a nurse by profession, and a grave woman of bright intelligence. She used to beat me easily at chess. His out-door life probably kept at bay the consumption he died of; though his hermitage could hardly have been good for him.

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1915

November 25, Thursday: British and colonial troops were forced to retreat from Ctesiphon to Lajj.

William J. Simmons and 16 other Protestant white men clambered up Stone Mountain, Georgia to set a large cross on fire and proclaim the rebirth of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They dedicated their revitalized organization, among other desiderata, to “Americanism” and “white supremacy.”

Up to this date, 500,000 Armenian deportees were estimated to have passed through Bozanti (northwest of Adana).

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1916

A white Atlanta, Georgia schoolgirl, Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, was vastly impressed at the age of 15 with the works of the Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr., such as THE CLANSMAN: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE KU KLUX KLAN (from which the black-and-white blockbuster movie she had viewed, The Birth of a Nation, had been adapted),

THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS: A ROMANCE OF THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, and THE TRAITOR: A STORY OF THE RISE AND FALL OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE. Racial conflict is an epic struggle with the future of civilization at stake. Maybe we can’t have human slavery anymore but American blacks cannot be allowed to be politically equal with American whites as that would lead to social equality, and social equality would lead to

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miscegenation, and miscegenation would lead to the destruction of the family, and the destruction of the family would lead to the destruction of civilized society. Margaret would gush to this evangelical author that “I was practically raised on your books, and I love them very much.”

July 1, Saturday: At 7:28AM a huge mine blew up the German positions near Beaumont-Hamel.

At 7:30AM the week-long bombardment of the Germans, consuming over 1.7 million shells, stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then 60,000 British and some French soldiers went over the top across a 25- kilometer front along the Somme River, 130 kilometers north of Paris just east of Amiens. 40,000 more would join the attack later in the day. They captured Montauban, two kilometers past the German line, but lost 60,000 casualties on the 1st day of battle, the greatest number of losses in any one day in the history of the British army. Germans loses totaled 8,000. British attacks at Gommecourt, Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, and La Boiselle were repulsed with extremely heavy casualties. The offensive would last five months.

Turkish forces captured Kermanshah.

Both north and south of the Somme River, the British and the French forces went on the attack.

Lord Bryce submitted to Lord Grey, British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, his book on THE TREATMENT OF THE ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE.

The State of Georgia granted a new charter to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

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1922

The Ku Klux Klan, which had adopted a “one hundred percent Americanism” theme along with a ceremony of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before the national flag, became a political power in the state of Oregon and sponsored legislation requiring all Catholic children to attend the public schools rather than their own parochial schools (the US Supreme Court would overturn this law as Unamerican or, at least, as unconstitutional). SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

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When in this year the state of New York was invaded by the gypsy moth, the Ku Klux Klan did diddly squat nothing — they didn’t even march, let alone burn a cross (go figure).

December 31, Sunday, New Year’s Eve: The Ku Klux Klan held a large parade in Gainesville, Florida.25

1923

September 15, Saturday: The civilian government of Spain under Manuel Garcia Prieto, marqués de Alhucemas resigned. King Alfonso XIII appointed a military government headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, marqués de Estella, who instituted a dictatorship.

To deal with the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan, Governor J.C. Walton declared martial law and called up 6,000 National Guardsmen.

25. The film Rosewood would be based on Florida’s race history during the 1920s.

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1924

At its Newport Torpedo Station on what little still remained above water level of Goat Island in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island, the US Navy completed the development of a Mark 14 proximity fuse, brainchild of Ralph Waldo Christie, that would fit on the nose of a torpedo. MARY DYER

During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was active in Rhode Island, with one of its monster rallies being held during June of this year on the Old Home Day grounds of Foster, with 8,000 in attendance and the honor of delivering the keynote address going to a white Protestant man from the South, United States Senator J.

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Thomas Heflin of Alabama.

The focus of this KKK anger in the rural northwest corner of Rhode Island was largely upon the Catholic immigrants of the cities rather than upon the local black citizenry.

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1925

In Indiana, Madge Oberholtzer died.

Unlike most deaths, such as yours and mine, which, quite frankly, tend to be insignificant, this one was a very significant death. For the details, you should consult M. William Lutholtz’s GRAND DRAGON: D.C. STEPHENSON AND THE KU KLUX KLAN IN INDIANA (West Lafayette IN: Purdue UP, 1991. HS2330.K63 L87 1991). The relevant detail of this young woman’s death is that it was caused by her having been raped by the most powerful man in Indiana, David Curtiss Stephenson. As the head of the Ku Klux Klan of the Realm of Indiana and a leader of the Indiana Republican Party, Grand Dragon Stephenson had been the epitome of white

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righteousness and Americanism.26

He had been Mom and home and apple pie, wrapped neatly in the flag — bear in mind that at its peak the KKK counted 30% of the white male population of the state of Indiana in its membership! Stephenson had had State Governor Ed Jackson, and the state’s legislators, and its judges, and its county officials, at his beck and call. He once stated, very truthfully, “I am the law in Indiana.” Indeed he had been the law in Indiana, and if you had been living in Indiana at that time, he might have spoken at your church. If you were an Indiana Quaker, he might well have made an honored appearance in your meetinghouse: In Wayne County, home to the town of Richmond and the Quaker- administrated Earlham College, one-forth of the adult male Quakers belonged to the Klan at one point, including two Earlham 26. During this period the only white racists in the Republican Party were northerners! (There weren’t as yet any politically active black racists, and the “Southern Strategy” by which disaffected white Southerners, enraged at the national Democratic Party for its integrationism, would be attracted to become Republicans, would be a feature of the 1960s.)

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students and another seventy-nine or more former students or alumni.27

(I don’t know whether his victim died because of the brutalization while being raped, or whether afterward she poisoned herself, but Grand Dragon Stephenson was convicted and went to jail. Some have said it was for a life sentence, but I rather doubt that — the influential are often quietly released on parole after a public furor has died down.28 Also, when he realized that his political allies were not going to pardon him or get him out of jail, he began to “sing” and talk about the bribes and corruption, and this would lead to the governor being put on trial for corruption, although on a technicality Governor Jackson would be found not guilty. I don’t have all the details on this, because my relatives were so ashamed that they would never talk about it with me. Also, the 2,347-page transcript of this trial has been officially losted and has never been recovered.)

August 8, Saturday: Friend Elbert Russell’s “Mary and the Master” appeared in the Friends’ Intelligencer.

40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington DC.

27. Page 217 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). 28. We have reason to believe that Grand Dragon Stephenson was still in prison as of 1931, six years after the conviction for rape and murder — because in that year one of the famous Chicago adventure-killing duo “Leopold and Loeb” would write to him from prison to prison, averring that his punishment had been unjustly severe and pledging support.

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1927

In this year (or, possibly, in the previous year), John R. Kellam, ten or eleven years of age, heard of a Ku Klux Klan cross burning that had taken place up on the bluff above the Northland Country Club of Duluth, on the Minnesota North Shore, and so he walked up 40th Avenue East and around to the top of the bluff, where he

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was able to personally inspect the ashes of the KKK’s cross.29

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29. The original Ku Klux Klan of the South during Reconstruction years had pretty much disintegrated, but a new organization appropriating that name had been founded by William J. Simmons, a former minister of the gospel, in a meeting atop Stone Mountain GA in 1915. The new Klan, since it was not only anti-black but also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, amounted to a resurgence of the Know-Nothing movement of the mid-19th Century. It was not sectional and was strong in the North as well as in the South. The northern headquarters were in Kokomo IN, near where Austin Meredith would grow up, and its religion was of course fundamentalist. In 1922, 1924, and 1926 the new KKK brought about the election of many state officials and a number of Congressmen. Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon, and Maine were particularly under its influence. Its power in the Midwest would be broken during the late 1920s when David C. Stephenson, a major Klan leader there, would be convicted of 2nd-degree murder, and the governor of Indiana and the mayor of Indianapolis, Klan members, would be indicted for corruption. At its peak in the mid- 1920s its membership had been estimated at 4,000,000-5,000,000. Membership was on the decline and by 1930 only an estimated 30,000 diehards would remain. ASSLEY

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1930

August 7: In Marion, Indiana, two black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were suspected of robbing a white couple and raping the woman:

The crowd of white people attending the lynching was estimated at 10,000. Since the incident would not in any serious manner be investigated, we do not know whether there was any Ku Klux Klan organizational connection with this populist race retribution.

Was the federal Bureau of Investigation in any way concerned about this? –No, of course not, for this was merely a matter of local custom and local law enforcement. The robbery of the white people would be recorded as a robbery, among the robbery crime statistics, and the rape of the white woman would be recorded as a rape, among the rape crime statistics, but there would be no entry in the murder crime statistics and of course there would be no such thing at all as race lynching crime statistics. On one framed copy of this photograph, a lock of the curly hair of one of these men has been preserved.

September 8: Ku Klux Klan members in Westchester County, New York pledged their All-American support for Naziism.

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1931

At about the age of 15, John R. Kellam was walking in the Jay Cooke State Park west of the Fond du Lac neighborhood near the western boundary of his home town, Duluth, Minnesota when he noticed, probably within a few hundred yards of the battery of penstocks carrying dammed water down into the generating station of a power facility on the St. Louis River, a 6"x6" marker set in the ground sticking up about six inches like a surveyor’s monument. In the concrete of the marker were the initials KKK: “The marker may have had a date on its side, but I don’t remember that. It appeared to be pre-cast, set in a dug hole that was refilled with earth and tamped tight, years before I saw it.” (We know it to have been a practice of the Ku Klux Klan, after holding a night cross-burning ceremony, to position such a marker.)

We have reason to believe that as of this year Grand Dragon David Curtiss Stephenson was still in prison in Indiana six years after being convicted of rape and murder because at this point one of the famous Chicago adventure-killing duo “Leopold and Loeb” wrote to him from prison to prison — averring that his punishment had been unjustly severe, and pledging support.

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1936

A poorly educated white Southern writer, not a historian, delivered his considered opinion regarding the Reconstruction era he had been hearing about, that “The former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild — either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.” This treatise upon America’s race problem after the US Civil War by the Reverend Thomas Dixon, THE CLANSMAN: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE KU KLUX KLAN, would be selected by the Book-

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of-the-Month Club and would become the script for a major Hollywood movie, GONE WITH THE WIND.

A white Atlanta, Georgia schoolgirl, Margaret Mitchell, herself a successful practitioner of the art of fiction, had been vastly impressed at the age of 15 with the works of the Reverend Dixon and would gush to this author

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“I was practically raised on your books, and I love them very much.”

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In this year, the publication of Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.

During this year and the next, proposals for union-wide bans of interracial marriages would be being introduced to the South African House of Assembly by Major Roberts and General Pienaar but would be defeated; the minister of the interior, Jan H. Hofmeyr, would strongly oppose these proposals. A Mixed Marriage Commission would be formed. Our Margaret Mitchell would have been right at home in South Africa! (This author could just as well have been run down by a taxi driver in South Africa as in the USA, and I simply do not know whether the incautious cabbie who thus destroyed this “cultural treasure” was a black creature of small intelligence who had run her down because of incapacity, or had simply run wild from perverse pleasure in destruction.)

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1943

In response to Japan’s full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. began research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (It would never have occurred to us to get involved in such a thing, of course, had they not been planning to do it to us.)

During this timeframe the USA was weaponizing anthrax, tularemia, Q fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, botulinum, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. We were busy busy busy. Because of the short shelflife of such weapons we had stockpiled two and a half million biological bomb casings, empty, available to be filled with the ultimate filth upon our decision. At Vigo near Terre Haute, local officials of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, on war contract with the US government, began a production facility for the filling of these “N-bombs,” as they were called, to be sent to England because Winston Churchill wanted to drop them on a list of German cities (germ=German, get it?), making the entire areas of these cities and the surrounding countryside unavailable for human use for centuries into the future.30 GERM WARFARE

30. “N” was the military code for the Bacillus anthracis. The plant would be completed in May 1944 on 6,100 acres in Vigo, near Terre Haute, would contain a dozen 20,000-gallon fermentation tanks, and would become contaminated not with Bacillus anthracis but with Bacillus globigii (now considered a strain of Bacillus atrophaeus). Although Churchill would order 500,000 4-pound anthrax bombs during the summer of 1944, the plant would not be able to deliver (the Ku Kluxers of Indiana were chock full of faith and devotion, and they were of course corn-fed prime American stuff, but not many of them were what you’d want to call smart), and after the war the Vigo Ordinance Plant of the Chemical Warfare Service would be sold to a pharmaceutical firm. It’s OK for you to ask me how I know all this. Or, for the general picture, you can take a look at Barton J. Bernstein’s “Churchill’s secret biological weapons” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February 1987, page 46-50, based on the partial information that is on the public record as of this point.

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In a series of war posters, Norman Rockwell illustrated the freedoms of which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had spoken in his message of January 6, 194131 — in defense of which we were having the KKK begin to manufacture these anthrax distribution devices:

WORLD WAR II

31. “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want ... everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear ... anywhere in the world.”

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1944

May: It was the consideration of the Nazi Burgomeister of the village of Velpke near Helmstedt, Germany, that Polish female slave laborers were spending far too much time attending to their own infants, and not being productive enough at their slave tasks on the local farms as well as in the factories of the area, such as the Volkswagen factory at nearby Wolfsburg. A center was established for these infant charges in an old factory building lacking running water, electric lights, and a telephone connection, and they were forcibly removed from their slave mothers. The Reich labor Office ordered a former teacher, Frau Billien, to take charge of this institution and supervise the four Polish and Russian slave girls who were installed in the building to tend these infants. None of these attendants had ever before cared for an infant. Some months later Volkswagen required possession of the old building, and it would be discovered that 84 of the infants had already died through the disregard of their caretakers and the deprival of mother’s milk. According to the Velpke village register the most common causes of death had been general weakness, dysentery, and intestinal catarrh. (A British Military Court would sentence two of these care providers to death, and three to long terms of imprisonment.) WORLD WAR II

Walter Roy Harding wrote in this notes that “Rather the significant contribution of Thoreau is what might be termed his ‘mind-set.’ We need to produce more citizens who will question things as he did. If we study his pattern, we may learn the secret of producing such men. If we succeed, we will have taken one of the greatest strides toward producing that ideal democracy about which so much is said and so little done these days. For it is only through an enlightened, questioning citizenry that we may achieve such a utopia. Therein lies the value of Thoreau.”

In a poll of 52 correspondents conducted by Look Magazine, Senator Harry S Truman was selected as one of the ten most useful officials in Washington DC (it is an interesting comment on the innocence of those times, that anybody would have dared to ask news media people for their judgement about the merits of politicians, or that anybody would have considered such opinions to be of any relevance).

At this point Winston Churchill had received his first small batch of germ bombs from the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in Vigo near Terre Haute, for testing, but construction of the Chemical Warfare Service’s 6,100-acre Vigo

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Ordinance Plant had only just been completed and American production was far behind schedule.

The plant was supposed to be producing some 50,000 4-pound bombs per month by that summer, out of an order for 500,000 such devices, but there wasn’t a fat chance in hell of that happening.32 There was another plant in Indiana that was due to start production late in 1944 and was to begin producing about 625,000 germ bombs monthly, with a portion of this grand supply to be available to the English air force early in 1945, but that was all big talk and at this point they had to confess to a disgruntled Churchill that there would not be enough anthrax bombs for even a “token” destruction of German cities until the end of 1944 at the earliest. What if the wicked Germans had a chance to surrender before we righteous people had a chance to rise up in

32.The Ku Klux Klan has been accused of a lot of stuff, but it has never been accused of efficiency.

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our wrath and kill them all?33 GERM WARFARE

Here is the matter, as it has been recorded on the Internet by the Vigo County, Indiana people themselves (emphasis supplied; see URL http://web.indstate.edu/community/vchs/thhist.htm): The Second World War created abnormal economic conditions in many cities, but Terre Haute escaped the problem due to its lack of durable goods manufactures. Instead, Terre Haute produced peacetime goods, largely food items, and supplied labor to three nearby ordnance plants. The A and P (Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea) Company’s Quaker Maid plant was said to have been the world’s largest food processing factory under one roof. In one of these plants, the Terre Haute Ordnance Depot, biological agents for antipersonnel bombs would have been produced had the war continued. The city received the nation's 100th United Service organizations (USO) facility in 1943, and it proudly accepted designation as the country's foremost recruitment center of women serving in the navy (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES). In 1945 when the navy launched the SS Terre Haute Victory, a 10,800 ton armed cargo ship, it carried a library and recreational equipment purchased with funds raised in a city campaign. The rousing activities of the war effort — troop send-offs, victory gardens, bond sales, civil defense drills, parades, and ceremonies — only briefly diverted attention from Terre Haute's almost congenital social and economic plight. In all years but two between 1940 and 1961 the city found itself on some form of federal chronic unemployment list. New factories, such as Pfizer Chemical (1948), Allis-Chalmers (1951), Columbia Records (1954), and Anaconda Aluminum (1959), could absorb only a 33.The German populations that had been selected for extermination had been, in alphabetical order, those of Aachen, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Wilhelmshafen.

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portion of job seekers from folded businesses. Manufacturing establishments declined from 134 in 1947 to 131 twenty years later. The community lost about 6,000 jobs between 1950 and 1960. The census tally that showed an increased of 9,807 residents in the 1940-60 period masked the loss of work places and jobholders. The census figure represented gains through annexations, including the attachment of Harrison Township in 1957, not a net gain of recent arrivals. National magazines and state newspapers persisted in featuring the iniquities of the city. The image of a debauched community plagued local administrators. Successive mayors tried, more or less, to blot out gambling and prostitution, the volume of which, in any case, had decreased significantly from prewar levels. Isolated incidents, such as the 1957 disclosure that Terre Haute was a base for a large gambling syndicated, stoked

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the media's fires. WORLD WAR II

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1947

It wasn’t until the Everson case of this year that the US Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of denying government funding to religious schools, such as the schools of the Catholics, by declaring that such funding was contrary to the historical intent of the 1st Amendment. The question before the court was whether it was wrong for New Jersey to use tax money to pay the school transportation costs of all children, including those attending parochial schools. Just about all right-thinking Americans were opposed to letting those Catholics have tax money to use to tell religious lies to the kiddies, for instance the Ku Klux Klan was red hot under the collar about this. Not being able to find anything else to hang their hats on, the justices ventured into the realm of historic falsehood, by declaring a sudden reinterpretation of the 1st Amendment’s nonestablishment clause. Justice Hugo Black (who, before he became a Justice, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan) pulled out of nowhere that heretofore-obscure letter Thomas Jefferson had sent in 1803 to a group of worried Connecticut Baptists, in which Jefferson had written the magic words “intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state.” Black was omitting to mention, of course, that none of the other writers of the constitution, including James Madison, who had proposed and written the 1st Amendment, had supported such a conceptualization. Writing for the majority, Justice Black hung the court’s hat on this perversion of historical intent. No money for Catholics: the reinterpreted US Constitution forbade it!

1956

February 3, day: The US State Department reimposed a ban on travel by its citizens to Hungary (the ban had been lifted the previous October 31st). This action was in retaliation for the imprisonment of two US embassy employees for espionage and the sentencing of two Hungarian employees of western wire services.

Under orders from the US Supreme Court, the University of Alabama accepted its initial African-American student, Autherine Lucy. The Ku Klux Klan and white students began two days of rioting.

The Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa resumed publication for the 1st time since January 25, 1951, under the leadership of its owner Alberto Gainza Paz.

1957

January 23, day: Tennessee made itself the 7th state to enact legislation intended to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling requiring racial desegregation of public schools.

Four members of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan obliged Willie Edwards, an African-American, to leap from the Tyler Goodwin Bridge into the Alabama River, a fatal drop of 15 meters (his body would not be found for three months; no one would ever be punished).

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1958

March 20, day: Elections in Cuba scheduled for June 1st were postponed until November 3d at the insistence of followers of President Batista.

Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were convicted in Charlotte, North Carolina of conspiracy to blow up, and attempting to blow up, a predominantly black school. They would receive sentences ranging from two to ten years. Two others were acquitted.

1960

March 26, day: An agreement was signed in Paris providing for the independence of the Malagasy Republic.

Governor Buford Ellington of Tennessee ordered the investigation of a CBS camera crew who had filmed a sit-in by civil disobedience practitioners in Nashville.

On this day and the following one, hundreds of crosses were being turned into rural torches by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. An Alabama Klan member would explain

“We just wanted to show the public we are organized and ready for business.”

Concerted Piece for tape recorder and orchestra by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky was performed for the initial time, in New York, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. This was a taped “Young People’s Concert” which would air on the following day. The official premiere would take place on March 31st.

Evocation no.1 for violin with piano and percussion by Ralph Shapey was performed for the initial time, at the Third Street Music School Settlement, New York.

1961

June 2, day: A federal judge in Montgomery, Alabama banned civil disobedience “freedom rides,” but also ordered the Montgomery police to protect all riders on interstate buses and ordered the Ku Klux Klan to refrain from interfering with interstate travel.

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1962

September 1, day: A popular referendum in Singapore voted on the terms of merger with Malaysia.

An earthquake in northwestern Iran caused 12,230 deaths.

Crosses were torched by the Ku Klux Klan in 14 Louisiana communities and the capital, Baton Rouge, as a protest against racial integration.

1963

September 15, day: During Sunday services a bomb detonated at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls and blinding one, while injuring 14 other worshipers. Black citizens erupted in violence. The Alabama state troopers who were dispatched were led by an admitted Ku Klux Klan sympathizer. Later in the day to more black children were killed.

1964

June 21, day: “Freedom Summer” had recruited 700 young people to practice civil disobedience by registering new voters34 in Mississippi. On this night, civil rights workers James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared after being released from jail near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

(Following the FBI’s supremely reluctant MIBURN investigation,35 eight men, including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and Sam Holloway Bowers, Jr., the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, would be convicted of murdering the young men and burying their bodies in a dam under construction, and sentenced to imprisonment under federal civil rights statutes.)

June 23, day: A car belonging to the three civil rights workers missing since June 21st was found in a swamp near Philadelphia, Mississippi. It had been burned.

Fantasy for organ, brass and timpani by Roy Harris was performed for the initial time, in Philadelphia, the composer conducting.

34. “New voters” is a code term. Can you break the code? 35. Real life FBI guys aren’t anything like the principled movie actor heros in a film such as “Mississippi Burning” — they’re more like a bunch of suits who never forget they are working for the establishment and keep constantly in mind which side of the butter their bread is on.

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1964

November 25, day: Rioting by Buddhists against the South Vietnamese government took place throughout Saigon.

An all-white jury in Jacksonville, Florida acquitted four Ku Klux Klan of dynamiting the home of Donald Godfrey, a 6-year-old who had been admitted to a previously all-white school.

1969

May 10, day: A federal jury in Meridian, Mississippi acquitted 3 members of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1966 murder of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer (in regard to 7 others they were unable to reach a verdict).

In a “search-and-destroy” assault on North Vietnamese positions atop “Hamburger Hill” in the A Shau Valley near Hue, 46 soldiers of the 101st Airborne would be killed in the course of a fierce 10-day battle beginning on this day, and 400 others wounded. After this hill was secured the soldiers would be ordered by their commander to simply walk away from it. The hill itself meant nothing whatever to us and the North Vietnamese Army was allowed to promptly move right back in and re-establish their positions atop the hill unopposed. At home this would not be understood: did this mean that American lives were being wasted? One of our senators labeled such a conflict “senseless and irresponsible.” Orders went out from Washington DC to the MACV Commander, General Creighton Abrams, that in the future he was to avoid any such incidents. “Hamburger Hill” would thus be the last major such search and destroy mission by large units of US troops during the war. A long period of decline in morale and discipline would begin among the American draftees serving involuntarily. Nearly 50% of our soldiers would be playing their war games with the marijuana, opium, heroin and whatever that were so cheaply available in theater. US military hospitals would be deluged with chemical-related cases rather than with the more usual causalities of war.

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1971

A couple of amazing things were accomplished by America’s white people in this year, to rectify their past errors: • The first was a scenario straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, with its “Ministry of Truth”: For a nativist fantasy and environmental warning film entitled “Home” being made by the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission, a Texas screenwriter named Ted Perry created a politically correct environmentalist speech for “Chief Seattle” to have delivered as of 1854. In this creation he had the actor playing Headman Seattle (See-Ahth of the Susquamish) describe birds not from his own region of the country, had him describe from his personal experience American bison See-ahth had surely never been within 800 miles of, and had him deliver reminiscences about white people indiscriminately shooting these bison from the windows of trains — trains magically running on transcontinental tracks that had not yet been surveyed as of 1854 and that would not be laid down for over a decade. (An environmentalist “Letter from Chief Seattle to President Franklin Pierce” has also been created out of this material, but I am not sure who invented this portion of our national story, or when. I’ll have to admit, however, that the idea of a letter is a neat credibility touch, isn’t it? How can we doubt if there is somewhere, misfiled in a Presidential Library, a preserved document?)

• The other was that the remaining deformed and mutilated body parts of Taoyateduta, Headman Little Crow V who had during his lifetime been Headman Little Crow IV of the Woodland Dakota tribes, were taken out of their case and off public display at the Minnesota Historical Society and given to a grandson, Jesse Wakeman, so he could inter them decently in a family cemetery. DIGGING UP THE DEAD

August 30, day: Ten buses intended for use in the desegregation of Pontiac, Michigan schools were fire-bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

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1977

Our national birthday, the 4th of July: At a Ku Klux Klan rally in Columbus, Ohio it turned out that the klansmen needed to defend themselves from a group of protestors. What’s the USA turning into? CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

1979

November 3, day: The Ku Klux Klan prevented an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina (5 were gunned down, 8 wounded).

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1981

In his 1981 book on the origins of America’s white nativism, RACE AND MANIFEST DESTINY: THE ORIGINS OF RACIAL ANGLO-SAXONISM (Cambridge: Harvard UP), Reginald Horsman recognizes 1815-1850, the period of the flourishing of the “Native American Party” or Know-Nothingism, as the period during which white USer society was explicitly rejecting the red native as American. It was the white man who was the native American! Prior to this period an attitude had tended to hold sway, that the “Indian” was a “fully

improvable being.” By the time we had reached the year 1830, the consensus attitude among whites had become that no way could “we” ever hope to “enlighten” the native American enough to fully integrate “him” into “our” society: Before 1830 there was a bitter struggle as those who believed in the Enlightenment view of the Indian as an innately equal, improvable being desperately defended the older ideals, but year by year the ideas of those who felt the Indians were expendable were reinforced by a variety of scientific and intellectual arguments. Indian Removal represented a major victory for ideas which, though long latent in American society, became fully explicit only after 1830. Political power was exercised by those who believed the Indians to be inferior, who did not wish them to be accepted as equals within American society, and who expected them ultimately to disappear. In shaping an Indian policy American politicians reflected the new ruthlessness of racial confidence. 1815 had been a “watershed year” for our New World nomenclature of racial privileging. Prior to that year the

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designator “American” had been in use among us as a code word indicating one race (the indigenous race that had also been color-coded, as the “red” skinned ones) and subsequent to that year the designator “American” was in play as a code word for a new group of persons considering themselves indigenous here, the descendants of intrusive Europeans who were color-coding themselves as “white” or as “not of color.”36

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 2013. 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, 20 Miles Avenue, Providence RI 02906. 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: July 1, 2013

36. Hence, here’s a little joke for you: “I know a family of American Indians! —Their family name is Ramakrishna and they came here a generation or so ago from the Punjab.”

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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, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which 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 your requests with . Arrgh.