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February 19 - May 27, 2018
The Gilded Age was corrupt, and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.
Without slavery, there would have been no war. The South fought in defense of slavery; it had said so, vociferously and repeatedly, and the South had lost.
Pretty straightforward lesson that some still want to ignore.
Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men.
Johnson gave an impromptu speech that provided more evidence that he should never give impromptu speeches. He equated Stevens, Sumner, and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips with the Confederate leadership. They were, he said, as bad as traitors since they too aimed to undermine the Constitution. The president referred to himself 210 times in a speech of little more than an hour, or three times every minute.7
On April 6, 1866, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. It was the first time in American history that Congress had overridden a presidential veto of a major piece of legislation.
On November 29, 1864, at Sand Creek in the Territory of Colorado, Col. John Chivington, a former Methodist minister, attacked a camp of Cheyennes who thought themselves under military protection. With Cheyenne men absent hunting, Chivington’s command slaughtered roughly two hundred Indians, mostly women and children, in a bloody dawn assault that typified American tactics against Great Plains tribes.
Iron Man 3 reference.
Among the squatters was the Ingalls family, whose residence in Kansas from 1869 to 1871 inspired Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. That the Ingalls family was squatting, illegally taking Indian land, was not featured in the Little House books.39
Go figure.
Charles Tidwell was a white man, a tenant farmer who had never owned slaves, but it never occurred to him that he could not command black people or that he could not have ready sexual access to black women.
The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.
The Republican Party originated as an awkward coalition of ex-Whigs, who advocated federal policies to aid and subsidize development, and laissez-faire liberals, who distrusted both a strong federal government and those who benefited from its intervention.
“Liberal” in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.
