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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
Read between
February 1 - February 8, 2025
Any enslaved person who worked outside these walls had to wear a special badge, a metal medallion—square, round, octagonal—stamped “Charleston,” with the year, type of job, and an identification number pinned to clothing or hung around the neck.
The Nazis had flair they made the Jews wear
At one point during the day Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.”
Ummmmm idk that that’s how boils works
His praying-mantis frame measured six-four without shoes or hat,
Rude
He accepted without challenge the often espoused argument that the Bible expressly permitted slavery.
Bruh
Fifteen of the largest slaveholders were women who had inherited land and slaves from dead husbands.
Oop
a fifty-page handbook of rules that each boy was required to sign. It included a host of prohibitions, among them bans against playing cards or dice, setting off explosives, blowing trumpets, “lounging under the trees” on Sundays, and sitting “in an indecorous position” on any day.
Wanting to know what sitting indecorously looks kind for a guy
In the dining hall two students reached for a plate of fish at the same time, causing the slower of the two to feel affronted. He issued a challenge. The ensuing duel killed both.
Imagine that being your relative
Catherine Fitzsimons renowned for two things: her stature as a member of one of South Carolina’s richest families, and her plain appearance. As one descendant cruelly put it, “Young wags in Charleston used to say they wouldn’t marry her if every pimple on her face was worth a million dollars.”
:(
Hammond worked his slaves hard. Partly because of that, but also for less clear reasons, they had a penchant for dying. Each death inflicted a financial cost in terms of lost labor and diminished capital. In one diary entry, he bemoaned the death of a three-year-old, not out of any sense of emotional loss, but because this was the seventy-eighth death in just under ten years.
The fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this man’s transgressions against NATURE
“As a class, I say it boldly, there is not a happier, more contented race upon the face of the earth than our slaves.”
Being wrong with their whole chest
Hammond, however, soon found himself engaged in sexual dalliance with all four girls. He confessed it later in his diary. “Here were four lovely creatures, from the tender but precious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19 (in 1840–41),
IS THIS YOUR KING???
The state had turned “prude,” he railed in his diary. “She surrenders herself to be ruled by gossip and gossipers and discards her best servant, because he does not pass immaculate through the hands of the Tea Table Goddesses.
YOU MOLESTED FOUR GIRLS AT THE SAME TIME YOU PIECE OF SHIT
Hammond likely acquired Sally because of her overall appearance, for he promptly made her his mistress. In this case there was no question of his sexual interest: He slept with her repeatedly. Their relationship lasted years, and when Sally’s daughter turned twelve in 1850, Hammond made her his mistress as well.
My god let hell be real
The letter alludes to children sired by both him and Harry and cautioned Harry never to sell Louisa or her offspring. “Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”
DIAF PERVERT
“Fond of reading as I am,” he wrote, “I cannot take pleasure in reading all day, and day after day.”
lol bitch
Buchanan was tall, handsome, blond, and apparently never had to shave.
Erik Larson has a very suspect idea of beauty
For years when he was in Washington he roomed with a fellow senator, William R. King of Alabama, himself an accomplished politician. The pair was so close both in public and in private that newspapers described them as a married couple, with Buchanan the husband, Senator King his wife. The death of King in 1853 left Buchanan bereft and alone.
I mean that’s pretty gay
She offered to make him an admiral in the new secessionist navy. “You will join us,” she said; “we are going to have a glorious monarchy.”
There we go
The water closets drained into the harbor.
No thank you
The state, in seizing Moultrie and the other federal holdings, had merely acted in “simple self-defense.” They closed their letter with a mighty wag of fingers. “By your course,” they wrote, “you have probably rendered civil war inevitable.
Whiteness is truly a hell of a drug
As the nation spiraled into its gravest domestic crisis ever, its senior-most military commander, its general-in-chief, was suffering extravagantly from a several-day siege of diarrhea that had robbed his nights of sleep and left him exhausted and more or less incapacitated.
Sounds about right
Though small, he was also fiery, and in his mind mighty, always willing to express moral certitude. When a fellow Georgian said, “I could swallow him whole and never know the difference,” Stephens shot back, “If you did there would be more brains in your belly than there ever will be in your head!”
NICE
It was up to Congress to save the day, he said.
lol y’all fucked then
At Glackmeyer’s Apothecary on Market, under the eagle sign, you could get a cocaine preparation for your hair,
I would love a cocaine preparation for my hair thanks
Seward waged his campaign of influence across all fronts, shamelessly, even once buying kittens for Lincoln’s sons, Willie and Tad, knowing how much Lincoln adored the boys and kittens too;
I want to be bribed with kittens
The National had been the site five years earlier of a lethal outbreak of ptomaine poisoning caused by fecal matter in food and water.
NOPE
On their honeymoon, Davis took Varina to see his dead wife’s grave.
American men seemed determined to mark every standing object with tobacco juice,
Kill self
Private Young asked, no doubt delicately, how Wigfall expected to approach the fort when he had no white flag with him. Wigfall acknowledged that he had not thought that far ahead.
Corncob
