The great meteor shower? :-)
Whether we were libertarian in those days depends on one’s definition, I suppose. Were we a libertarian nation in the classical tradition of the Founding Fathers? For the most part, yes. But we certainly weren’t libertarian in the modern political sense.
For example, I doubt there were homosexual parades through 1823 Philadelphia. I doubt if pornography was mainstream. I don’t believe there were any federal court edicts ordering states to dismantle their sodomy laws. People weren’t rusing to amend their state constitutions to define marriage as being between a man and a woman because libertine judges were on the verge of declaring marriage to be an “evolving paradigm”. Unmarried teens weren’t being instructed that they had sexual rights.
It wasn’t long after 1833 that Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the high standards of morality in America, and the high degree of chivalry toward women. Burke, you may recall, positively portrayed the American Revolution to the French one, since the latter was dominated by libertine and atheistic thinking.
The Leonid Shower?
help me out here I may be ignorant of somthing ... I know it induced a panic but ...