Posted on 04/28/2020 5:45:02 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Free Republic University, Department of History presents U.S. History, 1855-1860: Seminar and Discussion Forum
Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, Lincoln-Douglas, Harper’s Ferry, the election of 1860, secession – all the events leading up to the Civil War, as seen through news reports of the time and later historical accounts
First session: November 21, 2015. Last date to add: Sometime in the future.
Reading: Self-assigned. Recommendations made and welcomed.
Posting history, in reverse order
To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by reply or freepmail.
The things I noticed are more the short items:
1: George Elliott’s new novel “Mill on the Floss”. She will join the likes of Charlotte Bronte on the pantheon of English writers.
2: Rules of Baseball whether you want to play the Massachusetts or NY version.
3: The new Zouave Jacket fashion
Ever "fair and balanced" Harpers decries corruption in Albany, NY, noting first that Republicans generally seem more corrupt than Democrats, then remembering that's because Republicans have been in charge in Albany and further, that some of the most corrupt politicians they know are, indeed, Democrats.
Harper's suggests two possible solutions -- 1) more voter participation to elect more honest politicians and 2) revolution to replace a corrupt legislature with a Bonaparte-type demagogue.
160 years later neither alternative seems to have happened, and politicians are still routinely accused of corruption.
But in the interim many new laws & rules were passed to prevent the most blatant forms of corruption, plus agencies (i.e., FBI) powerful enough to enforce them.
The result is a good many corrupt politicians have gone to jail, but also, sadly, politically tainted "enforcement" has sometimes jailed men who's real crime was being on the wrong side of a political divide.
Can anyone say, "Russia, Russia, Russia..."?
For good reason - most politicians are corrupt (to one degree or another). If they were honest they would admit it, albeit whilst bemoaning the costs of reelection.
Of course so are urnalists - but that's a story for another day.
For my part the spell has been broken (thank you mitt!). I no longer vote the party line and look the other way. I vote (or not) for the individual and will sit out an election rather than reward a criminal.
Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865, edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher
BOSTON, April 29th, 1860.
It was so pleasant, my dear Lothrop, to get a letter from you. I have kept it a week or two so as to have something more to tell you, yet I fear it will not be much after all. Yesterday, the Saturday Club had its meeting, I carried your letter in my pocket, not to show to anybody, but to read a sentence or two which I knew would interest them all, and especially your kind message of remembrance. All were delighted with it; and on my proposing your health, all of them would rise and drink it standing. We then, at my suggestion, gave three times three in silence, on account of the public character of the place and the gravity and position of the high assisting personages. Be assured that you were heartily and affectionately, not to say proudly, remembered. Your honours are our honours, and when we heard you had received that superior tribute, which stamps any foreigner's reputation as planetary, at the hands of the French Institute, it was as if each of us had had a ribbon tied in his own button-hole. I hoped very much to pick up something which might interest you from some of our friends which know more of the political movements of the season than I do.
I vote with the Republican party. I cannot hesitate between them and the Democrats. Yet what the Republican party is now doing it would puzzle me to tell you. What its prospects are for the next campaign, perhaps I ought to know, but I do not. I am struck with the fact that we talk very little politics of late at the Club. Whether or not it is disgust at the aspect of the present political parties, and especially at the people who represent them, I cannot say; but the subject seems to have been dropped for the present in such society as I move about in, and especially in the Club. We discuss first principles, enunciate axioms, tell stories, make our harmless jokes, reveal ourselves in confidence to our next neighbours after the Chateau Margaux has reached the emotional centre, and enjoy ourselves mightily But we do not talk politics. After the President's campaign is begun, it is very likely that we may, and then I shall have something more to say about Mr. Seward and his prospects than I have now.
How much pleasure your praise gave me I hardly dare to say. I know that I can trust it. You would not bestow it unless you liked what I had done, but you would like the same thing better if I had done it than coming from a stranger. That is right and kind and good, and notwithstanding you said so many things to please me, there were none too many. I love praise too well always, and I have had a surfeit of some forms of it. Yours is of the kind that is treasured and remembered. I have written in every number of the Atlantic since it began. I should think myself industrious if I did not remember the labours you have gone through, which simply astonish me. What delight it would be to have you back here in our own circle of men — I think we can truly say whom you would find worthy companions: Agassiz, organising the science of a hemisphere; Longfellow, writing its songs; Lowell, than whom a larger, fresher, nobler, and more fertile nature does not move among us; Emerson, with his strange, familiar remoteness of character, I do not know what else to call it; and Hawthorne and Dana, when he gets back from his voyage round the world, and all the rest of us thrown in gratis. But you must not stay too long; if all the blood gets out of your veins, I am afraid you will transfer your allegiance.
I am just going to Cambridge to an “exhibition,” in which Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks a translation (expectatur versio in lingua vernacular), the Apology for Socrates; Master O. W. Holmes, Jun., being now a tall youth, almost six feet high, and lover of Plato and of Art.
I ought to have said something about your grand new book, but I have not had time to do more than read some passages from it. My impression is that of all your critics, that you have given us one of the noble historical pictures of our time, instinct with life and glowing with the light of a poetical imagination, which by itself would give pleasure, but which, shed over a great epoch in the records of our race, is at once brilliant and permanent. In the midst of so much that renders the very existence of a civilisation amongst us problematical to the scholars of the Old World, it is a great pleasure to have the cause of letters so represented by one of our own countrymen, citizens, friends. Your honours belong to us all, but most to those who have watched your upward course from the first, who have shared many of the influences which have formed your own mind and character, and who now regard you as the plenipotentiary of the true Republic accredited to every Court in Europe.
SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Volume 1, p. 340-2
Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury
April 30, MONDAY. Everybody talks of the great Heenan and Sayers prize fight in England – the “international” fight – and of the American champion’s unfair treatment. It occupies a much larger share of attention than the doings of the Charleston Convention, the results of which may be so momentous.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
Thanks for covering this closely, Homer. After the breakup of the Charleston Convention, it’s hard to envision any outcome other than a split Democratic Party, which means a Republican win in November.
Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury
May 1, TUESDAY. . . . Some eight Southern delegations have seceded from the Charleston Convention. It refused to make a slave code for the territories an article of faith, and hence this schism. So the great National Democratic party is disintegrated and dead; broken up, like so many other organizations, by these pernicious niggers. It is a bad sign.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
Our Diarist, being the uber smart man he was, sees right away that Charleston has sundered the national Democratic Party. I don’t think that has soaked in yet with most Democrats.
It had soaked in with some. As Catton wrote about the convention on April 29th, “some of the party faithful, gloomily considering that the party had already taken all the steps necessary for a complete wreck, went about muttering that the next President would be named at Chicago - would, in other words, be a Republican.
unquote.
Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury
Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865, edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury
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