Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 72

Who Said It (9/30/2015)

…observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving…

ANSWER: President Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation for Thanksgiving” (October 3, 1863)

Abraham Lincoln (November 1863) Photo by Alexander Gardner

President Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation for Thanksgiving” (October 3, 1863)

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.

Full Text and Source: Teaching American History

Lincoln’s Proclamation is considered the first in a string of unbroken Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations. Note well that there is no reference to the Pilgrims, Plymouth or the “First” Thanksgiving, which occurred sometime in October 1621.

For more on the first Thanksgiving, check out this video blog and Pop Quiz or read Don’t Know Much About the Pilgrims  (HarperCollins)

Who Said It (9/30/2015)

…observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving…

Abraham Lincoln (November 1863) Photo by Alexander Gardner

President Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation for Thanksgiving” (October 3, 1863)

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.

Full Text and Source: Teaching American History

Lincoln’s Proclamation is considered the first in a string of unbroken Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations. Note well that there is no reference to the Pilgrims, Plymouth or the “First” Thanksgiving, which occurred sometime in October 1621.

For more on the first Thanksgiving, check out this video blog and Pop Quiz or read Don’t Know Much About the Pilgrims  (HarperCollins)

Christmas Riot, Bible Riots, Orange Riots-America When the Pope Was Not Welcome

 

The American River Ganges by Thomas Nast (Originally published 1875- Source: HarpWeek Cartoons)

As New York and Philadelphia prepare for the Pope’s arrival, perhaps it is a good thing that famed cartoonist Thomas Nast is no longer wielding his acid-dipped pen. Or that Samuel F.B. Morse is not the Mayor who rolls out New York’s papal red carpet

Best known for his attacks on Tammany Hall, Nast was virulently anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant.  One of his most notorious illustrations depicted crocodiles emerging from “The American River Ganges” with mouths formed of bishop’s miters and wearing Catholic vestments. (Above)

Back in 1836, Morse –not yet famous or wealthy as the man behind the telegraph and code that bear his name—was a prominent portrait painter who also taught at New York University. That year, Morse ran for Mayor of New York as the Nativist candidate, believing that “Popery” was a “system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism.”

Morse’s anti-Papist feelings had apparently been heightened during a visit to Rome when the American painter refused to doff his hat as the Pope passed and a Vatican guard knocked it to the ground.

Samuel Morse did not win City Hall in 1836. But it was not due to the virulence of his anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant positions. In fact, these were widely held popular views across much of nineteenth-century America. The belief then was that Catholics, and specifically the waves of Irish immigrants, would destroy American democracy and turn the country over to the Pope who would occupy a new Vatican to be built in Cincinnati. That was not a fringe view but a mainstream notion preached in prominent pulpits by such men as Lyman Beecher, father of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This anti-Catholic venom was an accepted American truism long before the nation’s birth –a deep sectarian divide with roots in Europe’s deadly wars between Catholic and Protestant. The hatred of all things Roman Catholic was part of America’s Puritan and Protestant roots.

But the fear and loathing of Catholics went beyond sermons. It had led to some notable violence. In 1806, a New York Nativist gang attacked worshippers leaving church after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. In what became known as the “Christmas Riots,” the Irish Catholics fought back the next day in a skirmish that left a city watchman dead and led to Nativist reprisals on Irish neighborhoods.

And it was not just New York. The Ursuline convent outside Boston was attacked and burned in 1834.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1844, Philadelphia saw anti-Catholic, anti-Irish hatred boil over in the Bible Riots that left dozens dead and churches and homes in flames.

“A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia”: Burning of St. Michael’s Church, on Wednesday afternoon, May 8
Historical Society of Pennsylvania

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waves of Irish immigrants later transformed New York’s politics. William Tweed would use their votes to secure power for Tammany Hall and himself. But the growth of Irish Catholic power in New York only deepened ancient animosities.

New York’s virulent anti-Catholic sentiment peaked most violently with the largely overlooked “Orange Riots” of 1870 and 1871. In the first of these, Irish Protestants marched in celebration of the July 12, 1690 victory of the Protestant King William III over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne. Taunting Irish Catholic workmen as they paraded up Eighth Avenue, the Protestant “Orangemen” went to a park where a pitched battle ensued. Eight people died.

The Orange Riot of 1871 as depicted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The view is at 25th Street looking south down Eighth Avenue (Source Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_...)

An “Orange Day” march planned in 1871 was nearly banned. But prominent businessmen and cartoonist Thomas Nast objected vehemently to this affront to Protestant rights. With Boss Tweed guaranteeing protection for the marchers, the 1871 parade stepped off, guarded by some 5,000 policemen and National Guard militia units. Almost immediately, the marchers were pelted with bottles, bricks, shoes and stones. Pitched battles continued along the parade route. When it was over, the rioting and street-fighting left sixty people dead, most of them Irish Catholic laborers as well as three Guardsmen.

The bloodshed of the successive “Orange Riots” and Tweed’s failure to secure the parade were crucial factors in the demise of his stranglehold on New York. The city’s newspapers and largely Protestant-controlled business and financial world turned on him. Tweed was deposed, eventually arrested and later convicted of corruption.

The deep enmity towards Catholics was alive and well when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960. He confronted questions of his faith in a memorable speech in Texas.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

Source: “JFK’s speech on His Religion” (September 12 ,1960)

But that did not stop New York’s most prominent Protestant voice, Norman Vincent Peale, from opposing him. Peale had very few positive thoughts about Kennedy’s faith. Working with Billy Graham and other Protestant clergy, Peale vigorously sought to defeat Kennedy –solely on the basis of his Catholic faith. “Faced with the election of a Catholic,” Peale was quoted in Newsweek, “our culture is at stake.”

As the Pope makes what will be a largely celebratory visit to New York –where almost everyone now pretends to be Irish for a day honoring the patron saint who brought Catholicism to Ireland – these reminders of America’s dark anti-Catholic past are an important corrective. The Pope’s sojourn in the Big Apple comes as the question of religion has been thrust into the political spotlight again. Republican contender Ben Carson told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Islam was “not consistent with the Constitution.”

Once upon a time in America, it was Catholics whose faith was the sinister religion that Americans feared. The Pope, not the Ayatollah, was the threat to American democracy.

So welcome to America, Pope Francis. Say hello to the Statue of Liberty where we still talk a pretty good game about those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The subject of America’s anti-Catholic history is treated in my books America’s Hidden History  and  A Nation Rising.

America’s Hidden History, includes tales of “Forgotten Founders”

 

Who Said It (9/21/20150

 

Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

 

President Eisenhower (Courtesy: Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum)

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Little Rock”

(September 24, 1957)

In that city, under the leadership of demagogic extremists, disorderly mobs have deliberately prevented the carrying out of proper orders from a Federal Court. Local authorities have not eliminated that violent opposition and, under the law, I yesterday issued a Proclamation calling upon the mob to disperse.

This morning the mob again gathered in front of the Central High School of Little Rock, obviously for the purpose of again. preventing the carrying out of the Court’s order relating to the admission of Negro children to that school….

They thus demonstrated to the world that we are a nation in which laws, not men, are supreme.

I regret to say that this truth–the cornerstone of our liberties-was not observed in this instance…

The interest of the nation in the proper fulfillment of the law’s requirements cannot yield to opposition and demonstrations by some few persons.

Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

Source and Complete Text: “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Little Rock.,” September 24, 1957. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.

 

Learn more about the Little Rock Crisis at the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Read more in Don’t Know Much About® History and Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents.

Don’t Know Much About® History: Anniversary Edition (Harper Perennial and Random House Audio)

Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hyperion Paperback-April 15, 2014)

 

 

Don’t Know Much About the “First Pilgrims”

Old etching of Fort Caroline, from the Florida State Archives.

On September 20, 1565, 450 years ago, America’s first Pilgrims were wiped out in a dawn raid –a religious bloodbath — in what was then Spanish Florida. Leaving their base at the newly established St. Augustine, Spanish troops led by Admiral Menéndez assaulted the small French colony of Fort Caroline –near present-day Jacksonville,

Attacking before dawn on September 20, 1565 with the frenzy of holy warriors, the Spanish easily overwhelmed Fort Caroline. With information provided by a French turncoat, the battle-tested Spanish soldiers used ladders to quickly mount the fort’s wooden walls. Inside the settlement, the sleeping Frenchmen—most of them farmers or laborers rather than soldiers—were caught off-guard, convinced that no attack could possibly come in the midst of such a terrible storm. But they had fatally miscalculated. The veteran Spanish harquebusiers swept in on the nightshirted and naked Frenchmen who leapt from their beds and grabbed futilely for weapons. Their attempts to mount any real defense were hopeless. The battle lasted less than an hour.

Although some of the French defenders managed to escape the carnage, 132 soldiers and civilians were killed in the fighting in the small fort. The Spanish suffered no losses and only a single man was wounded. The forty or so French survivors fortunate enough to reach the safety of some boats anchored nearby, watched helplessly as Spanish soldiers flicked the eyeballs of the French dead with the points of their daggers.

Excerpt from America’s Hidden History 

[Admiral] Menéndez had many of the survivors strung up under a sign that read, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics.” A few weeks later, he ordered the execution of more than 300 French shipwreck survivors at a site just south of St. Augustine, now marked by an inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas, from the Spanish word for “slaughters.”

Fort Matanzas Courtesy National Park Service

A brief account of this story is told in this New York Times Op-Ed, “A French Connection.”

The full story is recounted in “Isabella’s Pigs,” the first chapter of America’s Hidden History.  An excerpt from this book, “America’s First True ‘Pilgrims,'” was published in Smithsonian magazine (May 2008).

America’s Hidden History, includes tales of “Forgotten Founders”

Friday Quiz: What law passed on Sept. 18 inspired “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?

Answer: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Frederick Douglass would call it the “man-stealing act.”

The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. … There is more protection there for a horse, for a donkey, or anything rather than a colored man — who is therefore justified in maintaining his right with his arm.

Under the Fugitive Slave Act, aid to escaping slaves was a federal crime, punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in prison. Under a bounty system, the law created the office of commissioners, who determined whether a black person was in fact a slave. They were paid $10 for every slave they returned to slavery but only $5 for every one they determined to be free.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I will not obey it, by God.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe decided to begin a series of sketches of life among enslaved people that was serialized in the National Era. In March 1852, they were published in book form as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly.

Read more in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War.

Don’t Know Much About the Civil War (Harper paperback, Random House Audio)

Constitution Day Pop Quiz: Who was the first man to sign the Constitution?

Answer: On September 17, Washington signed the parchment copy first, as President of the convention. 

On September 17, 1787, 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention meeting in Philadelphia, voted to adopt the United States Constitution.

United States Constitution (Image Courtesy of the National Archives)

To recap these events:

Working from May 25, when a quorum was established, until September 17, 1787, when the convention voted to endorse the final form of the Constitution, the delegates gathered in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House were actually obligated only to revise or amend the Articles of Confederation. Under those Articles, however, the government was plagued by weaknesses, such as its inability to raise revenues to pay its foreign debts or maintain an army. From the outset, most the convention’s organizers, James Madison chief among them, knew that splints and bandages wouldn’t do the trick for the broken Articles.

The government was broke –literally and figuratively– and they were going to fix it by inventing an entirely new one. James Madison had been studying more than 200 books on constitutions and republican history sent to him by Thomas Jefferson in preparation for the convention. The moving force behind the convention, Madison came prepared with the outline of a new Constitution.

A reluctant George Washington, whose name was placed at the head of list of Virginia’s delegates without his knowledge, was unquestionably spurred by recent events in Massachusetts (Shay’s Rebellion, a violent protest by Massachusetts farmers). Elected president of the convention, he wrote from Philadelphia in June to his close wartime confidant and ally, the Marquis de Lafayette:

I could not resist the call to a convention of the States which is to determine whether we are to have a government of respectability under which life, liberty, and property will be secured to us, or are to submit to one which may be the result of chance or the moment, springing perhaps from anarchy and Confusion, and dictated perhaps by some aspiring demagogue.

On September 17, Washington signed the parchment copy first, as President of the convention. He was followed by the remaining delegates from the twelve states that sent delegates in geographical order, from north to south, beginning with New Hampshire. (Rhode Island was the only state that did not send a delegation.) When the last of the signatures was added –that of Abraham Baldwin of Georgia– Benjamin Franklin gazed at Washington’s chair, on which was painted a bright yellow sun. He then spoke, as James Madison recorded it:

I have, said he, often in the course of a session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell if it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.

In another perhaps more apocryphal tale, Franklin left the building and was confronted by a lady who asked, “Well Doctor, do we have a monarchy or a republic?” The witty sage of Philadelphia replied,

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

This post is excerpted from America’s Hidden History, which offers fuller account of the Convention and the events that led to it.  You can also read more about the Constitutional Convention and the Constitution in Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

For more about the Constitution, visit these sites:

The National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia:

James Madison’s Montpelier:

Charters of Freedom at the National Archives

New York Times Bestseller
America’s Hidden History

Don’t Know Much About® History: Anniversary Edition (Harper Perennial and Random House Audio)

Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents-now available in hardcover and eBook and audiobook

The Hidden History of America At War (C-Span video)

I recently spoke at the historic Fraunces Tavern Museum  in Lower Manhattan about my new book THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah.

The event was filmed by C-Span and can be seen here.

Fraunces Tavern was the scene of Washington’s farewell to his troops in 1783. The book includes a chapter about the battle of Yorktown.

Read more about these events in…

The Hidden History of America At War (Hachette Books Random House Audio)

 

Who Said It? (9/19)

President George Washington: “Farewell Address” (September 19, 1796)

“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.”

Addressed “To the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES,” Washington’s Farewell was published as a letter in David Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper. First drafted during Washington’s first term  by James Madison, the text was sent to Alexander Hamilton with Washington’s notes added as his second term came to an end and the election of 1796 approached. The  final version was written by Hamilton.

Washington and Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow wrote:

“It was not in Hamilton’s headstrong nature to bow to another scribe, and while he would offer Washington a revised version of Madison’s 1792 address, he also forged a magisterial new version of his own.”

Washington: A Life (page 753)

And it is considered, according to the Library of Congress, “one of the most important documents in American history.”

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to snake the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying. afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Toward the preservation of your Government and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect in the forms of the Constitution alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what can not be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember especially that for the efficient management of your common interests in a country so extensive as ours a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.

 

Source and Complete Text: George Washington: “Farewell Address,” September 19, 1796. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. 

Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hachette Paperback-April 15, 2014)

Don’t Know Much About® Field Trip: the National Anthem

 

(Video shot, edited and produced by Colin Davis)

Two hundred and one years ago, Francis Scott Key penned the words that later became the national anthem. This video is from my 2009 field trip to Fort McHenry.

It was September 13, 1814. America was at war with England for the second time since 1776. Francis Scott Key was an attorney attempting to negotiate the return of a civilian prisoner held by the British who had just burned Washington DC and had set their sights on Baltimore. As the British attacked the city, Key watched the naval bombardment from a ship in Baltimore’s harbor. In the morning, he could see that the Stars and Stripes still flew over Fort McHenry. Inspired, he wrote the lyrics that we all know –well some of you know some of them.

But here’s what they didn’t tell you:

•Yes, Washington, D.C. was burned in 1814, including the President’s Home which would later get a fresh coat of paint and be called the “White House.” But Washington was torched in retaliation for the burning of York –now Toronto—in Canada earlier in the war.

•Yes, Key wrote words. But the music comes from an old English drinking song. Good thing it wasn’t 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.Here’s a link to the original lyrics of that drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven via Poem of the Week.

•The Star Spangled Banner did not become the national anthem until 1916 when President Wilson declared it by Executive Order. But that didn’t really count. Finally, in 1931, it became the National Anthem by Congressional resolution signed by President Herbert Hoover, on March 3.

Now, here are a couple of footnotes to the Francis Scott Key story—his son, Philip Barton Key, was a District Attorney in Washington. DC. He was shot and killed by Congressman Daniel Sickles. Sickles was acquitted with the first use of the defense of temporary insanity in 1859. And went on to serve as a Civil War general –and not a very good one.

And speaking of the Civil War, Key’s grandson was later imprisoned in Fort McHenry along with Baltimore’s Mayor and other pro-Confederate sympathizers.

Here are some places to learn more about Fort McHenry, Francis Scott Key and the Flag that inspired the National Anthem: Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine

The images and music in this video are courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of American History

This version of the anthem in the video is performed on 19th century instruments also courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum.

Don’t Know Much About® History: Anniversary Edition (Harper Perennial and Random House Audio)