Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
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(RoDP) The Susquehanna Museum would like to invite you to this years museum re-opening. Please join them at 1:00 pm on April 10 on the grounds of the Lock house to celebrate the beginning of the 2010 museum season. Come tour our new exhibits highlighting the War of 1812, a virtual ride along the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, and the evolution and development of Havre de Grace. Continued
Photo: Falmanac
(Wikipedia) The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program for unemployed men, providing vocational training through the performance of useful work related to conservation and development of natural resources in the United States from 1933 to 1942. As part of the New Deal legislation proposed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), the CCC was designed to aid relief of the unemployment resulting from the Great Depression while implementing a general natural resource conservation program on federal, state, county and municipal lands in every U.S. state, including the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The CCC became one of the more popular New Deal programs among the general public, providing economic relief, rehabilitation and training for a total of 3 million men. The CCC also provided a comprehensive work program that combined conservation, renewal, awareness and appreciation of the nation's natural resources. Continued
Image: "CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) boys at work, Prince George's County, Maryland" (Carl Mydans/Library of Congress).
(YDR) A .31-caliber, five-shot Allen & Wheelock revolver with ivory grips and a customized wooden case sold for $8,000 at an auction on Sunday, all on the assumption it might have belonged to one of the Civil War's most well-known spies.
The firearm some believe belonged to Belle Boyd, of Martinsburg, W.Va., was sold to a private collector in Chambersburg, said Patrick E. Redding, firearms manager of Redding Auction Service outside Gettysburg. Continued
Also: York County man buys Washington portrait for $925K at auction
Photo of Belle Boyd courtesy of the Library of Congress.
(Wikipedia) - Secretariat (March 30, 1970 – October 4, 1989) was an American thoroughbred racehorse. Secretariat won the 1973 Triple Crown, becoming the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, and set still-standing track records in two of the three races in the Series, the Kentucky Derby (1:59 2/5), and the Belmont Stakes (2:24). Like the famous Man o' War, Secretariat was a large chestnut colt and was given the same nickname, "Big Red." Continued
(Wikipedia) The National Road or Cumberland Road was one of the first major improved highways in the United States to be built by the federal government. Construction began in 1811 at Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac River. It crossed the Allegheny Mountains and southwestern Pennsylvania, reaching Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) on the Ohio River in 1818. Plans were made to continue through St. Louis, Missouri, on the Mississippi River to Jefferson City, Missouri, but funding ran out and construction stopped at Vandalia, Illinois in 1839.
A chain of turnpikes connecting Baltimore, Maryland, to the National Road at Cumberland was completed in 1824, forming what is referred to as an eastern extension of the National Road. In 1835 the road east of Wheeling was turned over to the states for operation as a turnpike. It came to be known as the National Pike, a name also applied to the Baltimore extension. The modern U.S. Route 40 between Baltimore and Cumberland continues to use the name Baltimore National Pike today, and a spur into the Washington, D.C. area (part of Interstate 270) is known as the Washington National Pike. ... Construction of the Cumberland Road (National Road) was authorized on March 29, 1806 by President Thomas Jefferson. Continued
Photo: Wikipedia
(Baltimore Sun) Brian Witte, an Associated Press writer, recently revived an old debate that's been going on since Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, when the Army of Northern Virginia stacked its arms, parked its artillery and furled its flags for the last time at Appomattox Court House, Va. The bloody Civil War had at long last come to an end with a handshake in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house. ... "Though Marylanders live just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, their attitudes and even their accents straddle that border," Witte wrote. Continued
(NYTimes) Richard Anderson set out to build a Maxwell from scratch, using century-old parts. Then his daughter drove it across the country. Continued
(LoC) - On March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. The event celebrated the Japanese government's gift of 3,000 trees to the United States. Trees were planted along the Potomac Tidal Basin near the site of the future Jefferson Memorial, in East Potomac Park, and on the White House grounds. Continued
Photo: Theodor Horydczak, circa 1920-1950.
(LoC) On March 25, Marylanders celebrate the 1634 arrival of the first colonists to the land that King Charles I of England had chartered to Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. Named for the king's wife, Henrietta Maria, Maryland was the first proprietary colony in what is now the United States. As the head of a proprietary colony, Lord Baltimore had almost absolute control over the colony in return for paying the king a share of all gold or silver discovered on the land.
From its founding, Maryland was seen as a safe haven for Catholics escaping religious persecution in England. In 1649, Governor William Stone, under the direction of Lord Baltimore, passed an act ensuring religious liberty and justice to all who believed in Jesus Christ.
Annapolis was named the capital of Maryland in 1694, and is home to the nation's oldest statehouse. Continued
(Wikipedia) George Clyde Kell (August 23, 1922 – March 24, 2009) was an American baseball third baseman who played for the Philadelphia Athletics (1943–46), Detroit Tigers (1947–52), Boston Red Sox (1952–54), Chicago White Sox (1954–56), and Baltimore Orioles (1956–57) in the American League, who went on to become a baseball broadcaster for 40 years. Continued
(North County News) A project will begin this summer to reroute the Little Falls in White Hall so it no longer spills over a dam. The $280,000 project is part of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources Fish Passage program, aimed at opening blocked waterways so fish can swim unimpeded.
Fish Passage coordinator Jim Thompson gave details at a March 2 meeting in Hereford. He said the dam was originally built to accommodate a paper mill in White Hall. Continued
Visit and have your photo taken with the B&O Easter Bunny while enjoying a breakfast buffet of pancakes, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, fruit, juice, and coffee. After breakfast take an exclusive train ride with the B&O Bunny for a special treat too! Tickets only available for Friday, April 2. Event sold out on Saturday. LIMITED SEATING! www.BORAIL.org
(Wikipedia) The Cullen-Harrison Act, enacted by the United States Congress March 21, 1933 and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt the following day, legalized the sale in the United States of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2% (by weight) and wine of similarly low alcohol content, thought to be too low to be intoxicating, effective April 7, 1933. Each state had to pass similar legislation to legalize sale of the low alcohol beverages in that state. Roosevelt had previously sent a short message to Congress requesting such a bill. Sale of even such low alcohol beer had been illegal in the U.S. since Prohibition started in 1920 following the 1919 passage of the Volstead Act. Throngs gathered outside breweries and taverns for their first legal beer in many years. Link
(NYTBR) Paranoia is a bipartisan temptation. Amid last August’s town hall frenzy, there was a stir over a poll showing that roughly a third of Republicans believed that Barack Obama had been born outside the United States. Liberals trumpeted the finding as proof of the Republican base’s slide into madness. But conservatives had a rebuttal: As recently as 2007, they pointed out, polls showed that a third of Democrats believed George W. Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.
Neither statistic would come as a surprise to a reader of “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,” a sweeping tour of the paranoid style in Western politics by David Aaronovitch, a British journalist. Continued
(Wikipedia) Pocahontas (c.1595 – March 21, 1617) was a Virginia Indian princess notable for having assisted colonial settlers at Jamestown in present-day Virginia. She was converted to Christianity and married the English settler John Rolfe. After they traveled to London, she became famous in the last year of her life. She was a daughter of Wahunsunacawh, better known as Chief or Emperor Powhatan (to indicate his primacy), who headed a network of tributary tribal nations in the Tidewater region of Virginia (called Tenakomakah by the Powhatan). These tribes made up what is known as the Powhatan Chiefdom and were part of the Algonquian language family. Continued
(NYTimes) Fess Parker, whose television portrayal of the American frontiersman Davy Crockett catapulted him to stardom in the mid-1950s and inspired millions of children to wear coonskin caps in one of America’s greatest merchandising fads, died on Thursday at his home in the Santa Ynez Valley in California, where he ran a successful winery. Continued
(Wikipedia) Thomas McKean (March 19, 1734 – June 24, 1817) was an American lawyer and politician from New Castle, in New Castle County, Delaware and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the American Revolution he was a delegate to the Continental Congress where he signed the United States Declaration of Independence and served as a President of Congress. He was at various times a member of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, who served as President of Delaware, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, and Governor of Pennsylvania. Continued
(AP) For 68 years, John E. Love has been haunted by the memory of carrying fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. Now, at last, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.
After six months of research, The Associated Press this week is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. Continued
Photo: Library of Congress
In the more than two decades since the fight against a proposed rubble landfill outside Havre de Grace began, some of the most active opponents have died and others have moved, but those who remain in a historic black community are celebrating as the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled Thursday against the project.
... She and her husband are among about 250 white and black families who live within a half-mile of the proposed 55-acre site off Gravel Hill Road, just west of Interstate 95. Established by emancipated slaves in the 19th century, the settlement's key landmark is the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the graveyard contains remains of several black veterans of the Civil War. Continued
Photo: Falmanac, some rights reserved.
(YDR) County commissioners approved a plan to run a Civil War-era tourist train along the rail trail between New Freedom and Hanover junction.
At Wednesday's meeting, they voted to lease the Northern-Central rail corridor for 15 years to Steam Into History, Inc., a group backed by local investors that's pursuing the project as a tourist draw. Their goal is to get the train running in time for 2013, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address. Continued
Photo: Strasburg Railroad (MDRails)
(Wikipedia) Edward Everett Horton (March 18, 1886 – September 29, 1970) was an American character actor with a long career in film, theater, radio, television and voice work for animated cartoons.
Horton was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Isabella S. Diack and Edward Everett Horton. His mother was born in Matanzas, Cuba to Mary Orr and George Diack, immigrants from Scotland. Many sources state that Edward Everett Horton's grandfather and namesake was Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man Without a Country. Horton attended the Baltimore City College high school in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was inducted into that school's Hall of Fame. Continued
(NYTimes) William John Scott is a freshman at Drew University. He studies political science. He plays defense on the lacrosse team. He describes himself on Facebook as a night person who likes to party.
But federal prosecutors say he is something else: a busy archives thief who stole famous letters written by a founder of the United Methodist Church and world leaders, including Abraham Lincoln and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(Wikipedia) Roger Brooke Taney (pronounced "tawny"; March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864, and was the first Roman Catholic to hold that office. He was also the eleventh United States Attorney General. He is most remembered for delivering the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), that ruled, among other things, that African Americans, being considered "of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race" at the time the Constitution was drafted, could not be considered citizens of the United States.
Described by his and President Andrew Jackson's critics as ". . . stooped, sallow, ugly . . . [a] supple, cringing tool of Jacksonian power," as the new Chief Justice, Taney was as ideally suited for the complex and contradictory period of American history as any man could be: he was a Southerner who loved his country over his state; a believer in states' rights yet a firm believer in the Union; a slaveholder who regretted the institution and manumitted his slaves. Continued
Photo: Library of Congress
(NYTimes) Dust off a disc. Maybe it’s video of a Bob Hope Christmas show, or maybe it’s the Apollo 11 moon landing. Insert a blank disc. Duplicate.
It sounds monotonous because it is. But every time Liz Pruszko presses the start button on a DVD machine, she knows she is helping to unlock the thousands of videos tucked away in the National Archives. Continued
(Via boingboing)
(Wikipedia) Sergeant Stubby (1916 or 1917 – March 16, 1926), was the most decorated war dog of World War I and the only dog to be promoted to sergeant through combat. ... After returning home, Stubby became a celebrity and marched in, and normally led, many parades across the country. He met Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Warren G. Harding. Starting in 1921, he attended Georgetown University Law Center with Conroy, and became the Hoyas' mascot. He would be given the football at halftime and would nudge the ball around the field to the amusement of the fans.
In 1926, Stubby died in Conroy's arms. His remains are featured in The Price of Freedom: Americans at War exhibit at the Smithsonian. Continued
(Wired) Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registers symbolics.com, the internet’s first domain name. The market for these unique addresses would not heat up for years, but this click heard ’round the world would eventually provide just about anyone a place in cyberspace to call their own. Continued
(Sean Wilentz) RONALD REAGAN deserves posterity’s honor, and so it makes sense that the capital’s airport and a major building there are named for him. But the proposal to substitute his image for that of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union, freedom and equality — and damage its historical identity. Although slandered since his death, Grant, as general and as president, stood second only to Abraham Lincoln as the vindicator of those principles in the Civil War era. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
Marjorie Merriweather Post a.k.a. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May (March 15, 1887 – September 12, 1973) was a leading American socialite and the founder of General Foods, Inc. She was 27 when her father died, and she became the owner of the rapidly growing Postum Cereal Company later becoming the wealthiest woman in America when her fortune reached approximately USD$250 million. Continued
Photo: Marjorie Merriweather Post Hutton Davies (Library of Congress).
After Bruce C. McKenna wrote part of the HBO Band of Brothers miniseries, his writing career in Hollywood soared. His "Bastogne" episode won a Writers Guild Award and was a finalist for the Hamanitas Prize. In 2003, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks hired him to research and oversee the writing of a new epic miniseries, The Pacific, which debuts Sunday, March 14, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on HBO. ... On March 9, he talked with HistoryNet in an exclusive interview about his career and especially his work on The Pacific. Continued
Poster: Library of Congress
(NYTBR) When European merchants, navigators and chancers began searching for a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Henry VIII was still a bachelor. The mazy waterways were navigable for a scant three months a year, and as late as 1819 only two white men had seen the north coast of Canada. By the time a wooden ship finally pushed through, an indifferent world was looking elsewhere. But the fabled Northwest Passage has returned to the news pages as a warming climate unlocks its deep channels, allowing access to hydrocarbons below the seabed. Anthony Brandt anchors his robust new history, “The Man Who Ate His Boots,” in that modern context. Continued
Photo: Library of Congress
(Wikipedia) - Leon Day (October 30, 1916 - March 13, 1995) was an American right-handed pitcher in the Negro Leagues. He played for the Baltimore Black Sox, the Brooklyn & Newark Eagles, and the Baltimore Elite Giants.He was born in Alexandria, Virginia. Day is noted for pitching a perfect season in 1937 (13-0) while playing for the Newark Eagles, and for his fastball. Day was also a good hitter and baserunner, batting .320 in 1937. Continued
(Wikipedia) - Titian Ramsay Peale (November 2, 1799 – March 13, 1885) was a noted American artist, naturalist, entomologist and photographer. He was the sixteenth and youngest son of noted American naturalist Charles Willson Peale. Peale was first exposed to the study of natural history while assisting his father on his many excursions in search of specimens for the Peale Museum. The family moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, where he began collecting and drawing insects and butterflies. Like his older brothers, Peale helped his father in the preservation of the museum's specimens for display, which included contributions from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Continued
BOSTON (WCVB) - The USS Constitution will continue firing its cannons twice a day across Boston Harbor as it has done for more than 200 years despite the objections of well-heeled neighbors.
Timothy Cooper, the commanding officer of the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, told the Boston Herald that he has decided to carry on the tradition even after getting a letter from some neighbors asking for a sit-down meeting to discuss the noise. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(ÆGIS) Residents who enjoy Kilgore Falls in the Falling Branch area of Rocks State Park near Pylesville will soon have even more parkland to explore.
The 67-acre Falling Branch area will more than double in size, as the state announced Wednesday the acquisition of 130 more acres to expand the woodland park. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) ... hopes are high for a hearty band of Harford County preservationists and fans of local history. Members of the Historical Society of Harford County and the Aberdeen Room Archives and Museum rallied to help preserve the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station in Aberdeen, currently a battered but historic hulk that has suffered from years of neglect. It is now on the verge of an extensive restoration and a new tomorrow. Continued
(Wikipedia) The Storm of the Century, also known as the ’93 Superstorm, No-Name Hurricane[citation needed] , the White Hurricane, or the (Great) Blizzard of 1993, was a large cyclonic storm that occurred on March 12–March 13, 1993, on the East Coast of North America. It is unique for its intensity, massive size and wide-reaching effect. At its height the storm stretched from Canada to Central America, but its main impact was on the Eastern United States and Cuba. Areas as far south as central Alabama and Georgia received 6 to 8 inches (20 cm) of snow and areas such as Birmingham, Alabama, received up to 12 inches (30 cm) with isolated reports of 16 inches (41 cm). Even the Florida Panhandle reported up to 4 inches (10 cm), with hurricane-force wind gusts and record low barometric pressures. Between Louisiana and Cuba, hurricane-force winds produced high storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, which along with scattered tornadoes killed dozens of people. Continued
(Wikipedia) John Forbes (5 September 1707 – March 11, 1759) was a British general in the French and Indian War. He is best known for leading the Forbes Expedition that captured the French outpost at Fort Duquesne and for naming the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after British Secretary of State William Pitt the Elder. Continued
(HistoryNet) Among the best-known and most prolific modern writers on military conflict as both news and history, Britain's Sir Max Hastings has experienced war firsthand. As a television reporter and print journalist, he covered 11 conflicts, ranging from Northern Ireland and Vietnam to Biafra and the Falklands. He has held senior editorial positions at London's Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph and is the author of nearly two dozen books of military history. Highly regarded for both his prose style and the depth of his research, Hastings has also drawn criticism for his willingness to look beyond patriotic or political clichés to find the hard truths that underlie mankind's fascination with war. Continued
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - The superintendent of a rural Montana school district says he was showing students his black powder muzzleloader when he accidentally fired the weapon into a classroom wall during a history lesson.
Dwain Haggard, who used to be a Civil War re-enactor, was showing the gun to five students in Reed Point High School's American history class Friday when it fired. Continued
(NYTimes) Dr. Barton Childs, a founder of pediatric genetics and an important contributor to the understanding of inherited diseases, died on Feb. 18. He was 93, lived in Baltimore, and taught at Johns Hopkins University for nearly 70 years until shortly before his death at its hospital. Continued
(Wikipedia) The Emergency Banking Act (the official title of which was the Emergency Banking Relief Act) was an act of the United States Congress spearheaded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. It was passed on March 9, 1933. The act allowed a plan that would close down insolvent banks and reorganize and reopen those banks strong enough to survive. In summary, the provisions of the act were as follows: Continued
(Wikipedia) The Gnadenhutten massacre, also known as the Moravian massacre, was the killing on March 8, 1782, of ninety-six Christian American Indians by American militia from Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War. The incident took place at the Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhütten, Ohio, located near what is now the town of Gnadenhutten, Ohio. Already in 1755, their previous village of Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania had been subject to a massacre of converted Native Americans by other Native Americans. Continued
Image: "Zeisberger preaching to the Indians" (Library of Congress).
(YDR) In 2005, York County veterans lined up to donate their military decorations, uniforms and other artifacts of their service to the York County Heritage Trust.
As they signed the donation papers, veterans said they were glad their grandchildren would be able to see these objects in an exhibit that gave them context. The Trust's chief curator at the time spoke of collecting oral histories so veterans' full stories could be preserved. Continued
Poster: Library of Congress
(NYTBR) Is the Hatter mad? Since 1865, when “Alice in Wonderland” was published, readers have quoted and parsed his every utterance. He’s called simply the Hatter in “Alice” and Hatta in “Through the Looking-Glass,” but we know he’s mad; the Cheshire-Cat tells us so. Continued
(NPR) As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct. Click through the gallery below to see examples of endangered professions, from milkman to telegrapher, and hear from people who once filled those oft-forgotten jobs. Continued
(LoC) Texans or Texians, according to some sources, began fighting for independence from Mexico in 1835. By December the small Texas army had captured the important crossroads town of San Antonio de Bexar and seized the garrison known as the Alamo. Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna recaptured the town on March 6, 1836, after a thirteen-day siege; the Mexican army suffered an estimated 600 casualties. Of the official list of 189 Texan defenders, all were killed. Historians continue to debate the number of defenders inside the Alamo.
The defense of the Alamo is well-known for those who fought for Texas. David Crockett, James (Jim) Bowie, and William Barret Travis were among those remembered by the "Remember the Alamo" reported to be yelled at the victory at San Jacinto. Continued
(NYTimes) The people of Arizona kept their upper lips stiff when officials mortgaged off the state’s executive office tower and a “Daily Show” crew rolled into town to chronicle the transaction in mocking tones. They remained calm as lawmakers pondered privatizing death row. But then the state took away their toilets, and residents began to revolt. Continued
Photo: NJ rest stop (Library of Congress).
(Wikipedia) ... Prior to the introduction of air brakes, stopping a train was a difficult business. In the early days when trains consisted of one or two cars and speeds were low, the engineer (driver) could stop the train by reversing the steam flow to the cylinders, causing the locomotive to act as a brake. However, as trains got longer, heavier and faster, and started to operate in mountainous regions, it became necessary to fit each car with brakes, as the locomotive was no longer capable of bringing the train to a halt in a reasonable distance.
... The introduction of brakes to railcars necessitated the employment of additional crew members called brakemen, whose job it was to move from car to car and apply or release the brakes when signaled to do so by the engineer with a series of whistle blasts. Occasionally, whistle signals were not heard, incorrectly given or incorrectly interpreted, and derailments or collisions would occur because trains were not stopped in time. Continued
(The Record) The historic Malcolm Mitchell House on the outskirts of Aberdeen Proving Ground has served as everything from office space to a natural history museum, but the U.S. Army is hoping someone else can take over the building’s upkeep.
Built in 1905 near what is now Ruggles Golf Course, the Queen Anne-style house was a wedding present from Mitchell to his son and daughter-in-law, according to an Army report.
The family had a farm on the property and also ran a vegetable canning business there until the property was absorbed into Aberdeen Proving Ground more than 90 years ago. Continued
(Wikipedia) Harry W. Gilmor (January 24, 1838 – March 4, 1883) served as Baltimore City Police Commissioner in the 1870s, but he was most noted as a Confederate cavalry officer during the American Civil War. Gilmor's daring raids, such as The Magnolia Station Raid gained his partisans fame as "Gilmor's Raiders."
During the American Civil War, as a member of Captain Charles Ridgely's Baltimore County Horse Guards, Gilmor was arrested and imprisoned in Fort McHenry following the occupation of Baltimore by Federal troops. Upon his release, he traveled South and eventually rejoined the fighting serving, for a while, under General Turner Ashby. He was again captured during the Maryland Campaign and spent five months in prison. During the Gettysburg Campaign, Major Gilmor was assigned command of the First Maryland Cavalry and Second Maryland Cavalry, supporting Brig. Gen. George Steuart's infantry brigade. Gilmor was the provost marshal of the town of Gettysburg while it was occupied by the Confederates July 1–4. Continued
Images: Library of Congress
(LoC) On March 3, 1859, journalist Q. K. Philander Doesticks (Mortimer Thomson) attended an auction of 436 men, women, and children formerly held by Pierce M. Butler. Butler's slaves were auctioned in order to pay debts incurred in gambling and the financial crash of 1857-58. Doesticks' account, What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation?, includes vivid descriptions of the largest recorded slave auction in U.S. history. The grim sale, which took place over two rainy days on the eve of the Civil War, was referred to as "The Weeping Time."
Many of the slave families described in Doesticks' report were the subject of a series of letters, written twenty years earlier, by famous British actress and author Frances Ann Kemble. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, 1838-1839, published in 1863 to galvanize English support of the North during the Civil War, is an unusual account of Southern planter culture from the perspective of an outspoken outsider who considered herself an abolitionist. Continued
Photo: Former Slave Quarters of Hermitage Plantation, Savannah, Georgia, circa 1907. (Library of Congress)
(Wikipedia) Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game, named by the National Basketball Association as one of its greatest games, was a regular-season game between the Philadelphia Warriors and the New York Knicks held on March 2, 1962 at Hersheypark Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The Warriors won the game 169–147, setting what was then a record for the most combined points in a game by both teams. The game is most remembered, however, for the 100 points scored by Warriors center Wilt Chamberlain. This performance ranks as the NBA's single-game scoring record; along the way Chamberlain also broke five other NBA scoring records, of which four still stand. Continued
(Cannonball) ... Despite the loss of the bridge and several businesses and houses in Wrightsville that burned in the ensuing conflagration, the events did have one favorable outcome: new-found respect for the black volunteers. They had shouldered arms alongside the white soldiers and performed courageously. They had not been among the frightened men who had walked away before the skirmish. Lancaster's Examiner and Herald trumpeted that "the only Columbia volunteers in the fight were fifty-three negros, who after making entrenchments with the soldiers, took muskets and fought bravely."
In his official report, Colonel Jacob Frick praised the excellent conduct of these black civilians. "After working industriously in the rifle-pits all day, when the fight commenced they took their guns and stood up to their work bravely. They fell back only when ordered to do so." Lieutenant Francis Wallace wrote to his Pottsville newspaper on June 30, "All honor to the colored men of Columbia. They will die in defense of life and liberty, which is more than a majority of the whites here seem disposed to do--the cravens." Continued
(Wikipedia) ... President Thomas Jefferson was determined to seize control of the judiciary from the Federalists and to his own party. His allies in Congress abolished lower courts, which removed Federalist judges despite their lifetime appointments. Chase had to be impeached and Jefferson launched the process from the White House when he wrote to Congressman Joseph Hopper Nicholson of Maryland asking: "Ought the seditious and official attack [by Chase] on the principles of our Constitution . . .to go unpunished?"
Virginia Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke took up the challenge and took charge of the impeachment. The House of Representatives served Chase with eight articles of impeachment in late 1804, one of which involved Chase's handling of the trial of John Fries. Two more focused on his conduct in the political libel trial of James Callender. Four articles focused on procedural errors made during Chase's adjudication of various matters, and an eighth was directed at his “intemperate and inflammatory … peculiarly indecent and unbecoming … highly unwarrantable … highly indecent” remarks while "charging" or authorizing a Baltimore grand jury. The Jeffersonian Republicans-controlled United States Senate began the impeachment trial of Chase in early 1805, with Vice President Aaron Burr presiding and Randolph leading the prosecution. Continued
