Coxey's Army

(Wikipedia) Coxey's Army was a protest march by unemployed workers from the United States, led by the populist Jacob Coxey. They marched on Washington D.C. in 1894, the second year of a four-year economic depression that was the worst in United States history to that time. Officially named the Commonweal in Christ, its nickname came from its leader and was more enduring. It was the first significant popular protest march on Washington and the expression "Enough food to feed Coxey's Army" originates from this march. Continued

1861: Maryland's House of Delegates votes Against Secession

(Wikipedia) Maryland, a slave state, was one of the border states, straddling the North and South. Due to its location and a desire from both opposing factions to sway her population to their respective causes, Maryland played an important role in the American Civil War. The first fatalities of the war happened during the Baltimore Riot of 1861, and the single bloodiest day of combat in American military history occurred near Sharpsburg, Maryland, at the Battle of Antietam, which provided the opportunity for President Abraham Lincoln to issue his famed Emancipation Proclamation. The 1864 Battle of Monocacy helped delay a Confederate army bent on striking the Federal capital of Washington, D.C..
Nearly 85,000 citizens signed up for the military, with most joining the Union Army, although nearly a quarter of these enlisted to fight for the Confederacy. Leading Maryland leaders and officers during the Civil War included Governor Thomas H. Hicks, who despite his early sympathies for the South, helped prevent the state from seceding, and General George H. Steuart, who was a noted brigade commander under Robert E. Lee. Continued

Was Lincoln a Tyrant?

 

(NYTimes) When Abraham Lincoln took office in March 1861, the executive branch was small and relatively limited in its power. By the time of his assassination, he had claimed more prerogatives than any president before him, and the executive branch had grown enormously.
Lincoln’s critics witnessed his expanding power with alarm. They accused him of becoming a tyrant and warned that his assertions of authority under the guise of “commander in chief” threatened the viability of a constitutional democracy.
Lincoln ignored his foes and kept moving. And, despite lingering discomfort with some of his actions – particularly around the issue of civil liberties – history has largely vindicated him. Why? Continued

Nancy Pelosi

(Wikipedia) ... Pelosi was born in Baltimore, Maryland. The youngest of six children, she was involved with politics from an early age. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., was a U.S. Congressman from Maryland and a Mayor of Baltimore. Her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, also a Democrat, was mayor of Baltimore from 1967 to 1971, when he declined to run for a second term. Pelosi graduated from Institute of Notre Dame, a Catholic all-girls high school in Baltimore, and from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in Washington, D.C. in 1962. Pelosi interned for Senator Daniel Brewster (D-Maryland) alongside future House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. Continued 

 

Thomas McKean

 

(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
 

1859: First Temporary Insanity Defense in U.S.

(Wikipedia) ... Sickles's career was replete with personal scandals. He was censured by the New York State Assembly for escorting a known prostitute, Fanny White, into its chambers. He also reportedly took her to England, leaving his pregnant wife at home, and presented White to Queen Victoria, using as her alias the surname of a New York political opponent. In 1859, in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, Sickles shot and killed the district attorney of the District of Columbia Philip Barton Key II, son of Francis Scott Key, who Sickles had discovered was having an affair with his young wife.  Continued

Remembering Repudiation Day

 

(Gazette.Net) There are some ill-informed denizens of Frederick County who labor under the misapprehension that the tea party movement is a new phenomenon in Frederick, and that the famous tea party protest against British taxation was basically a Boston adventure.
But a group of Frederick judges met in a long-since demolished wood house on Record Street, behind the current City Hall, a full decade before the Boston Tea Party launched its own protest in what came to be called Repudiation Day. Continued

Cartoon lovingly pilfered from the late John Stees, longtime cartoonist from the Baltimore Sun of my youth.

 

Katharine Byron

(Wikipedia)  Katharine Edgar Byron (October 25, 1903 – December 28, 1976), a democrat, was a U.S. Congresswoman who represented the 6th congressional district of Maryland from May 27, 1941 to January 3, 1943. She was the first woman elected to Congress from Maryland. Continued

The Bonus Army

'On July 28, 1932, protesters known as the "Bonus Army," or "Bonus Expeditionary Forces (B.E.F.)," who had gathered in the nation's capital to demand an immediate lump-sum payment of pension funds (benefits) for their military service during World War I, were confronted by Federal troops (cavalry, machine-gunners, and infantry) following President Herbert Hoover's orders to evacuate. (While Congress had approved the payment in 1924, the bonus was not payable until 1945.)The presence of the Bonus Army was a continuing embarrassment and source of difficulty for Hoover. He sent in troops under the command of Brigadier Perry L. Miles and General Douglas MacArthur. The veterans faced tear-gas bombs, bayonets, and tanks.' - Library of Congress

John Hunn

(Wikipedia) John Hunn (June 29, 1849 – September 1, 1926) was an American businessman and politician from Camden, in Kent County, Delaware. He was a member of the Republican Party who served as Governor of Delaware.
... Hunn's father, also John Hunn, was a noted abolitionist and chief engineer of the Underground Railroad in Delaware. Shortly after the younger John's birth, the family lost their New Castle County farm, "Happy Valley," in a sheriff's sales because of fines assessed for helping runaway slaves. They then went to live with family at Magnolia, Delaware. Continued

Judy Agnew, vice president's wife and Md. first lady

(Baltimore Sun) Elinor Isabel "Judy" Agnew, who as the wife of former Baltimore County Executive, Maryland Gov. and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew preferred quiet domesticity to that of the political limelight, died June 20 in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 91. Continued

Photo: Judy Agnew (2nd from left). 

The Stephen Colbert of the Civil War

(NYTimes) “A nickel-plated son of a bitch.” That was how David R. Locke, an Ohio newspaperman and the most daring comedian of the Civil War, described his alter-ego: Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. Locke’s persona made him the most influential humorist of the era.
His jokes seemed to be in everybody’s mouth, and he became so popular in England that readers there assumed all Americans spoke in Nasby’s tattered dialect. Continued

Photo: Portrait of P. V. (Petroleum Vesuvius) Nasby by Thomas Nast 

Dashiell Hammett

... He had made up honor early in his life and stuck with his rules, fierce in the protection of them. In 1951 he went to jail because he and two other trustees of the bail bond fund of The Civil Rights Congress refused to reveal the names of the contributors to the fund. The truth was that Hammett had never been in the office of the Committee and did not know the name of a single contributor. The night before he was to appear in court, I said, "Why don't you say that you don't know the names?" "No," he said, "I can't say that." "Why?" "I don't know why." After we had a nervous silence he said, "I guess it has something to do with keeping my word, but I don't want to talk about that. Nothing much will happen, although I think we'll go to jail for a while, but you're not to worry because—" and then suddenly I couldn't understand him because the voice had dropped and the words were coming in a most untypical nervous rush. I said I couldn't hear him and he raised his voice and dropped his head. "I hate this damn kind of talk, but maybe I better tell you that if it were more than jail, if it were my life, I would give it for what I think democracy is and I don't let cops or judges tell me what I think democracy is." Then he went home to bed and the next day he went to jail. - Lillian Hellman

Reverdy Johnson

(LoC) On May 21, 1796, attorney and statesman Reverdy Johnson was born in Annapolis, Maryland. Johnson represented Maryland, a slaveholding state south of the Mason-Dixon line, as a Whig, in the U.S. Senate from 1845-49 and again following the Civil War as a Democrat from 1863-68. Under President Zachary Taylor, he served as attorney general from 1849 until Taylor's death in 1850. Johnson was considered a brilliant constitutional lawyer and won an 1854 Supreme Court decision in favor of a patent for the McCormick reaper. Continued

Lincoln’s Abolitionist Wedge

(NYTimes) ... Three days later, Lincoln wrote to Henry J. Raymond, the editor of The New York Times, pointing out that “one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head.” Indeed, “eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky and Missouri at the same price.” The Times subsequently editorialized that the words of Lincoln’s message “will echo round the globe. They will recover us the respect once felt for us in the Old World. In dealing with this vexed subject we think he has hit the happy mean upon which all parties in the North and all loyalists in the South can unite.” Continued

1859: First Temporary Insanity Defense in U.S.

(Wikipedia) Daniel Edgar Sickles (October 20, 1819 – May 3, 1914) was a colorful and controversial American politician, Union General in the American Civil War, and diplomat.
As an antebellum New York politician, Sickles was involved in a number of public scandals, most notably the killing of his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key. He was acquitted with the first use of temporary insanity as a legal defense in U.S. history. He became one of the most prominent political generals of the Civil War. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he insubordinately moved his III Corps to a position in which it was virtually destroyed, an action that continues to generate controversy. His combat career ended at Gettysburg when his leg was struck by cannon fire. Continued

A New History of the Philippine-American War

(NYTBR) What is striking about “Honor in the Dust,” Gregg Jones’s fascinating new book about the Philippine-American War, is not how much war has changed in more than a century, but how little. On nearly every page, there is a scene that feels as if it could have taken place during the Bush and Obama administrations rather than those of McKinley and Roosevelt. American troops are greeted on foreign soil as saviors and then quickly despised as occupiers. The United States triumphantly declares a victorious end to the war, even as bitter fighting continues. Allegations of torture fill the newspapers, horrifying and transfixing the country. Continued

Emma Goldman

(LoC) Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, compelling advocate of free speech, the eight-hour work day, and birth control, was arrested in New York City on February 11, 1916, just prior to giving another public lecture on family planning. She was charged with violating the Comstock Act, an 1873 statute banning transportation of "obscene" matter through the mails or across state lines. At the time, federal courts interpreted the statute as prohibiting distribution of contraception information.
Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in Kovno, a Russian city now part of Lithuania.Like most poor Russian Jews, Goldman's family suffered under the political oppression and anti-Semitism of imperial Russia. She fled Russia with her sister Helena in 1885, settled in Rochester, New York, and was briefly married to a fellow Russian immigrant. Goldman worked in a garment factory, and disillusioned with working conditions there, she joined the labor movement. Continued

O'Malley formally recognizes Piscataway tribe

(Baltimore Sun) For Mervin Savoy, recognition was sweet — even if it came more than two centuries too late.
Savoy was one of hundreds of Piscataways who gathered beneath the State House dome in Annapolis Monday as Gov. Martin O'Malley issued executive orders formally recognizing the Native American tribe as a distinct people.
... In the past, the drive for recognition has been thwarted in part by internal divisions between the rival Piscataway-Conoy Confederacy and the Piscataway Indian Nation. O'Malley's executive orders recognize both groups, as well as the Cedarville Band of the Piscataways. Continued

Martin Van Buren: The Little Magician

(LoC) Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States and a founder of the Democratic Party, was born on December 5, 1782, in Kinderhook, New York.
Just five feet six inches tall, with reddish-blond hair, Van Buren earned the nicknames "The Little Magician" and the "Red Fox of Kinderhook" for his legendary skill in political manipulation. Continued