Posted on 10/01/2016 6:22:25 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Had to go look up “sobriquet” ......:o)
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
See, even then, people made sweeping election predictions that turned out to be wrong.
Today we call it an October surprise.
Calling it the October Mine would be cooler.
Continued from October 16 (reply #42)
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
Thurlow Weed has a bit of a Bernie Sanders look.
Mr. Strong’s thoughts on slavery are forceful but nuanced. It will be interesting to see how this develops. It’s also interesting that he believes the “masses” of Northern voters are vehemently opposed to abolitionism or anything like it.
That "conversation on race" we are always being told it is time for has been going on for a long time already.
Good thing we're all adults here.
;-)
Good points. It took me a few entries to figure out what he meant to convey by the terms he was using.
Still working hard to square the circle on the issue of slavery. (See Strong Aug. 5 entry & henkster reply.)
He is correct about lack of popular enthusiasm for abolition in the north. It really wasn’t a popular idea, but at least you could speak about abolition in the north and not be murdered for it.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
His reports about Bronson Alcott are so amusing!
October 27. After a chilly, wet day the city is steeping and stewing in a tepid mucilage of fog, such fog as prevails in cities, definable as the gaseous form of mud and civic filthiness; Fat Fog, lit up in every direction by the glare of tar-barrels and straw-bonfires that blaze before the multitudinous lager-beer saloons and pot-houses in which we, the people, congregate tonight, as we do every night now, and call ourselves ratification meetings, and the like.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
October 28. “I rise, Mr. President, for the purpose merely of stating for the information of this meeting” that I am aweary of ward-meetings, and that my soul is sick of vigilance committees. I suppose it’s one’s duty in this country to mix in these matters and that like the majority of my friends, I’ve been criminally negligent all my life in omitting to exercise my sovereign functions otherwise than by voting and in letting the machinery that is practically so much more important than any single vote take care of itself. But it’s a very dreary function. A ward-meeting is no Witenagemot. Gas, bad grammar, bad manners, bad taste, bad temper, unnecessary rhetoric, and excitement, and affected enthusiasm about “our” candidate for this or that twopenny office, agonizings and wrestlings over momentous points of order, conscientious misgivings whether we can “legally” take this question till we’ve taken that other question, dirty little substrata of intrigue and jealousy about chairmanships and the like. It doesn’t raise one’s estimate of humanity.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
I’m starting to believe, Homer, that you have invented George Templeton Strong for the purpose of infiltrating your brilliant satires of the current political scene into the historical record.
When I read the business about a “tepid mucilage of fog” the other day I suspected that George had taken his time machine to 2016 on a quest for inspiration.
Yes, that was a brilliant description.
[Continued from July 23 (reply #48) ]
Lee tried to keep cheerful, but was depressed by the heat and by the arrival of news that his sister Mildred, Mrs. Edward Vernon Childe, who was only forty-five, had died in Paris.
. Soon after the tidings of Mrs. Childe’s death, there came orders for the detail that Lee must by this time have learned to expect along with changing weather and hard fare: once again he was summoned to court-martial duty – not at Fort Mason or Fort Chadbourne, but 700 miles away, on the Rio Grande, at Ringgold Barracks. The assignment meant weary days of riding across Texas. He was twenty-seven days on the road, but he enjoyed the company of his friend Major George H. Thomas, who met him at Fort Mason.
At Ringgold Barracks, where he arrived on September 28, work was tedious, and the principal case before the court was protracted by two Texas lawyers. On October 30, 1856, the court adjourned to Fort Brown, on the site of the present Brownsville. Lee was now in closer touch with the outside world, and he had already made friends among the families of the other officers, who, like himself, had to travel about to form courts-martial. His duties were not heavy. Soon he recovered his old poise and wrote home in better spirits.
Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee, an abridgement by Richard Harwell
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