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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
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February 3 - June 1, 2025
Charleston was a central hub in the domestic slave trade, which in the wake of a fifty-year-old federal ban on international trading now thrived and accounted for much of the city’s wealth. The “Slave Schedule” of the 1860 U.S. Census listed 440 South Carolina planters who each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district, this when the average number owned per slaveholding household nationwide was 10.2. In 1860, the South as a whole had 3.95 million slaves. One South Carolina family, the descendants of Nathaniel Heyward, owned over three thousand, of whom 2,590 resided
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18th C agribusiness?
“ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ ” “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” He cautioned that he did not expect the Union to dissolve, “but I do expect it will cease to be divided. “It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Lincoln
Underlying these fears was the deeper dread that newly emancipated Blacks would take their place beside whites at all social levels, or even supplant them, perhaps even marry their daughters, the maximally feared “amalgamation.” That Lincoln himself never actually envisioned or encouraged racial equality, let alone intermarriage, became irrelevant.
Another Southern orator, quoted in the New York Herald, issued an even more vivid warning. “What will you do with these people? Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your States, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be president of the United States?”
Racism's fears put out there so blatantly by the southern whites. It would be wonderful for them to have seen Obama in office.
Observing the festivities, James L. Petigru, the staunch unionist, was said to quip, “South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” His mood, however, was somber. “I have seen the last happy day of my life,” he told a friend.
Don't we all feel a little like this when politics don't go our way or align with our own beliefs of what is right?
It did, however, hark back to that earlier declaration in that it quoted, inexactly, Thomas Jefferson’s famous addition, “that whenever any ‘form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.’ ”
License to storm the Capitol by one of the founding Fathers. Will we ever be satisfied with democracy?
The Star of the West was a large vessel and presented an easy target. That the guns failed to do much damage could have been due to the inexperience of the fifty or so cadets who manned them, on duty only since New Year’s Day. In the Citadel’s lexicon, these were “first-classmen,” meaning seniors, and “second-classmen,” juniors. One observer noted that the battery appeared to fire wildly.
The speeches occurred anyway, day in day out, in a ceaseless grind of words having all the verve of a glacier.
