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Daniel Cregg article: Irish Independent Newspaper breaks EU law: illegal photo, address and name published and listed on the Internet. EU articles of fundamental Human Rights.
Code of practice violations (the Irish Press Council) by Irish media
Irish Law violations by Irish media
EU Law violations by Irish media
by Daniel Cregg Aug 2023.
The following Irish media newspapers and publications are breaking Irish law, EU law, International law and the Irish Press Council code of practice in sensitive court cases by allowing media to publish the name, photo and address of an individual or persons:
Irish Independent Newspaper
Sunday World
The Code of practice of the Irish Press Council principles violated:
For the full story please click on the below www.youtubexposed.com web page link
DanielCreggExposesIrishIndependentNewspaperBreakingEUlaw (youtubeexposed.com)
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The Great American Novel- An INL News Group Film Promo 6
Larry Norman-The Great American Novel 1972
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CIA-LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 1
LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 2
LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 3
LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 4
LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 5
LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 6
LAPD's Involvement In the Illegal Drug Trade
talk by Former Los Angeles Drug Investigator Mike Rupert Part 7
Mike Ruppert-The CIA Drug Running Part 10 of 11
Bill Gates was a senior C.I.A Officer
Was Michael C. Rupert Murdered?
https://isgp-studies.com/cia-heroin-and-cocaine-drug-trafficking#michael-ruppert-cia-drug-trafficking
This question remains. There is every reason that many powerful groups and people including the CIA would have been keen to see the end of Michael Rupert because he was constantly exposing the CIA's involvement in the distribution of illegal drugs, which Michael Rupert sated was a multi trillion dollar industry. Michael Rupert claimed that if all the illegal drug proceeds where withdrawn from the major banks around the world, this would cause a major depression in the world economy.
Michael Rupert also outed Bill Gates as a senior C.I.A Officer
http://youtubeexposed.com/index.php/cia-illegal-activities-exposed
Also See
https://inltv.co.uk/index.php/cia-mkultrabrainwashing-drugs-mafia
CIA Hitman Man in Black Joseph Spencer CIA Whistleblower Speaks Out
MI6 Are The Lords Of The Global Drug Trade
International Politics
Commentary by James Casbolt, Former MI6 Agent
2 May 2007
It may be a revelation to many people that the global drug trade is controlled and run by the intelligence agencies. In this global drug trade British intelligence reigns supreme. As intelligence insiders know MI5 and MI6 control many of the other intelligence agencies in the world (CIA, MOSSAD etc) in a vast web of intrigue and corruption that has its global power base in the city of London, the square mile.
My name is James Casbolt and I worked for MI6 in 'black ops' cocaine trafficking with the IRA and MOSSAD in London and Brighton between 1995 and 1999. My father Peter Casbolt was also MI6 and worked with the CIA and mafia in Rome, trafficking cocaine into Britain.
https://inltv.co.uk/index.php/julianassange-travestyofjustice
https://inltv.co.uk/index.php/cia-mkultrabrainwashing-drugs-mafia
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Dr. SHIVA LIVE - How Britain Engineered Pearl Harbor
A Historical Systems Analysis
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Some Unpopular History of the United States
Book One -- 1610 to 1933 by Richard McManus
1610 - 1622 - Deliberate genocide of Powhatans by the Virginia Company of London. It involved the manipulation of English Law by Sir Edward Coke, a prominent jurist whose writings on English common law were the definitive legal texts for some 300 years. There were two Anglo-Powhatan Wars accompanied by racist polemics preached by associates of this Company in London.
From 1620 to 1691 the Pilgrims founded the Plymouth Colony an English colonial located about 40 miles south of Boston, MA and about 400 miles southwest of Jamestown. The Mayflower departed Plymouth, England, in September 1620, with 102 passengers and about 30 crew members, the worst time of the year to sail to North America. They arrived in December 1620.
During the winter, the colonists suffered greatly from diseases like scurvy, lack of shelter and lived on board Mayflower ship. Many of the able-bodied men were too infirm to work and 45 died. By the end of February, five cannons had been defensively positioned in a fort on a hill. Of the 18 adult women, 13 died the first winter while another died in May. Only four adult women were left alive for the Thanksgiving in 1621.
The Pilgrims distinguished themselves from the Puritans in that they sought to separate themselves from the Anglican Church, rather than reform it from within. In Plymouth Colony, a simple profession of faith was all that was required for acceptance. This was a more liberal doctrine than some other New England congregations where it was common to subject those seeking formal membership to strict and detailed cross examinations. There was no central governing body for the churches. Each individual congregation was left to determine its standards of membership, hire its own ministers, and conduct its own business. The colony's laws were based on a hybrid of English common law. The colony offered nearly all adult males potential citizenship in the colony. Most men were elevated to “freeman” status between the ages of 25 and 40, averaging somewhere in their early thirties and thereby had voting rights at an assembly called the General Court. It was both the chief legislative and judicial body of the colony. The colony's most powerful executive was its Governor, he and a seven member cabinet was elected by the freemen. The Governor and cabinet then appointed Constables who served as the chief administrators for the towns who were responsible for publishing announcements, performing land surveys, carrying out executions, and etc.
On May 26, 1637, English troops attacked a large Pequot village on the Mystic River in what is now Connecticut. The village was set on fire and the women and children were killed as they attempted to flee. One observer later wrote: "it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same and horrible was the stink and scent thereof." In this and the succeeding campaign about 700 members of the tribe were killed including men taken captive. The tribe was disbanded and the survivors were adopted by neighboring tribes. (1)
The Plymouth Colony Puritans of New England eliminated the use of musical instruments in their religious services for theological and practical reasons. The only music remaining in church services was the setting of the psalms. Puritans disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time. Celebrations were outlawed in Boston from 1659 onward. The ban was revoked in 1681 by the English-appointed governor, who also revoked a Puritan ban on festivities on Saturday nights. Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region. Likewise, the colonies banned many secular entertainments on moral grounds, such as games of chance, maypoles, and drama. A maypole dance would occur in May or mid-summer. It consisted of pairs of boys and girls (or men and women) standing alternately around the base of the pole, each holding the end of a ribbon. They would weave in and around each other, boys going one way and girls going the other, while the ribbons were woven together around the pole until the merry-makers met at the base.
They were not, however, opposed to drinking alcohol in moderation. Early New England laws banning the sale of alcohol to Native Americans were criticized because it was "not fit to deprive Indians of any lawful comfort alloweth to all men by the use of wine." Laws banned the practice of individuals toasting each other, with the explanation that it led to wasting God's gift of beer and wine, as well as being carnal. Bounds were not set on enjoying sexuality within the bounds of marriage, as a gift from God.
Married women and men were equally expected to have sex. Women and men could file for divorce based on this issue alone. In Massachusetts colony, which had some of the most liberal colonial divorce laws, one out of every six divorce petitions was filed on the basis of male impotence, an issue which held significant cultural ramifications. The Puritans publicly punished drunkenness as well as sexual relations outside marriage.
In Britain in the 1170s, it was common practice for ordinary couples to cohabit before marriage and for cousins to marry one another. In 1650, during the ascendancy of the Puritans, fornication was made a felony. The word was understood as consensual sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other. At the Restoration in 1660, this statute was not renewed, and prosecution of the mere act of fornication itself was abandoned. However, notorious and open lewdness, when carried to the extent of exciting public scandal, continued to be an indictable offence at common law. Sex before marriage only became equated with sinfulness with the passing of the Marriage Act 1753. Prior to the passing of this Act, laws against bastard children became stricter during the 1730s and 1740s. Indeed, there was very little stigma around bastards at any social level in medieval England.
Puritans believed in demonic forces, as did almost all Christians of this period. Puritan pastors undertook exorcisms for demonic possession in some high-profile cases, and believed in some allegations of witchcraft.
In January 1692, a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts became had seizures or violent contortions, and made blood curdling screams. A doctor diagnosed the children as being victims of black magic, and over the next several months, allegations of witchcraft spread like a virus through the small Puritan settlement. Twenty people were eventually executed as witches, but contrary to popular belief, none of the condemned was burned at the stake. In accordance with English law, nineteen of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials were instead taken to the infamous Gallows Hill to die by hanging. Still more accused sorcerers died in jail while awaiting trial.
Historians have noted that many of the accused were wealthy and held different religious beliefs than their accusers. This, coupled with the fact that the accused also had their estates confiscated if they were convicted, has led many historians to believe that religious feuds and property disputes played a big part in the witch trials. As the years went by, the colonists felt ashamed and remorseful for what had happened during the trials. In 1711, the colony passed a bill restoring some of the names of the accused and paid restitution to their heirs.
Public schools, as we know them today, were few and far between in the early American republic. The Puritans believed literacy was a religious duty (so that everyone could read the Bible), and most children learned basic math and reading at home. By the 1670s, all New England Colonies (except Rhode Island) had passed legislation that mandated literacy for children. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law that required towns with 50 or more people to have a public school for boys and to hire a schoolmaster to teach writing. In the 1700s, elite, private, grammar schools opened in New England to prepare boys to enter the Ivy League colleges, many of which are among America's most prestigious college prep schools today. Throughout the Middle Colonies, individual communities sometimes opened schools to instruct boys in their language, religion and traditions. And Southern plantation owners might hire a teacher to educate their children at home. Wealthy families from every region sometimes sent their sons back to England for school.
During the Revolution, many Americans (like Thomas Jefferson) believed strongly that education was a necessary component of democracy, but despite their arguments, not many of the Founding Fathers thought it was a good idea for the federal government to be involved in such matters. The US Constitution places schools squarely in the hands of the states. Some towns, cities, territories and states began enacting laws providing education for local children around the turn of the 19th century. For example, St. Louis, Missouri opened a school in 1808, and many other localities opened their own one-room schoolhouse. But children in outlying areas couldn't always attend and poor kids might need to help provide for their families. Other places, like Georgia, began closing public schools after 1800, and it was illegal almost everywhere to educate a slave. A free, public education was still out of reach for most American children.
Some strong religious beliefs common to Puritans had direct impacts on the culture. Education was essential to the masses, so that they could read the Bible for themselves. New England differed from its mother country, where nothing in English statute required literacy of children. Catholics who fled England settled in Maryland, and their colony's legislature passed the Act of Toleration of 1649 to ensure the religious liberty of Maryland's Catholics. The law made it a crime to jeer at other believers by calling them names such as a papist, heretic, or puritan. The death penalty could be meted out to anyone who denied the Trinity (notwithstanding no such concept was written about or described within the Bible or rejected Jesus Christ's “son-ship.” Those who profaned Sunday by swearing excessively, becoming drunk or working unnecessarily could be fined. Anyone who spoke against the virgin Mary could be fined and whipped.
The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the most active of the New England persecution of Quakers, and the persecuting spirit was shared by the Plymouth Colony and the colonies along the Connecticut River. In 1660, one of the most notable victims of the religious intolerance was an English Quaker who was hanged in Boston for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. She was one of four executed Quakers. In 1661, King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism. In 1684, England revoked the Massachusetts charter, sent over a royal governor to enforce English laws in 1686 and, in 1689, passed the broadly religious Toleration Act.
Merchants in the American colonies of the 1690s often funded piracy in waters off India, Arabia, and Madagascar. In 1763, many of colonies’ richest merchant families owed 30 to 40 percent of their wealth to the fruits of war and piracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fornication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan
http://historyofmassachusetts.org/the-salem-witch-trials/#sthash.xhnMz89k.dpuf
By the mid-1700s throughout the colonies, most people, including men, wore their hair very long. Women and girls kept their hair covered with hats, hoods, and kerchiefs. Men and boys tied their hair into ponytails until wigs came into vogue in the port cities. Colonials made their own clothes from linen (flax) and wool; every home had a spinning wheel and a loom, and women sewed and knitted constantly, as cotton cloth would not be readily available until the nineteenth century. Plentiful dyes like indigo, birch bark, and berries made colorful shirts, pants, dresses, socks and caps.
Americans grew their own food and ate a great deal of corn—roasted, boiled, and cooked into cornmeal bread and pancakes. Hearty vegetables like squash and beans joined apples, jam, and syrup on the dinner table. Men and boys hunted and fished; rabbit, squirrel, bear, and deer. Pig-raising grew important, but beef and milk cows were scarce until the eighteenth century and beyond. Given the poor quality of water, many colonials drank cider, beer, and corn whiskey—even the children! As cities sprang up, cattle drank beer, yielding a disgusting variant of milk known as “swill milk” that propagated childhood illnesses.
Infant mortality was high, and any sickness usually meant suffering, and often, death. Doctors were few and far between. The colonies had no medical school until the eve of the American Revolution, and veterinarians usually doubled as the town doctor, or vice versa. Going to a physician usually constituted an absolute last resort, as without anesthesia, any serious procedures would involve excruciating pain and extensive recovery. Into the vacuum of this absence of professional healers stepped folk healers and midwives. “Bleeding” (make a sick person bleed), was a common medical practice in order to rid the body of any illness.
While most New England children went to school for a short time, schools in the south were less frequent, and, well into the 19th century, required attendance for fewer months of the year. Boys studied longer than girls. The girls, it was believed, needed only to learn to cook and raise children. Laws prohibited the schooling of African-Americans, though some whites ignored such regulations. Schools were uncomfortable; students sat on wooden benches in damp rooms heated by a single fireplace, with grades first to eight and even high school lumped together in one room. Students wrote on bark with lumps of lead or quill pens dipped in homemade ink. Their main text was The New England Primer. Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe sufficed in the absence of children’s literature and Bible reading was always acceptable. Teachers punished ill-behaved boys with whips, dunce caps, and cards hung around their necks that read “Idle Boy.” If you bit your nails you had to wear a card that said “bite-finger baby.” While some boys as young as twelve went on to college at Harvard or William and Mary, others joined the workforce as soon as they learned to read, write, and cipher (do arithmetic).
Children worked hard because all Americans were given to hard work all their lives. Most boys and girls, certainly in frontier areas, learned how to plow, mend fences, skin animals, dress meat, fish, shoot, hunt, and ride. Their lives, like their parents’ lives, were tied to the seasons as they worked and played and cultivated the raw land and their survival depended on being very good at shooting a rifle. It was not unusual for a father to go away for days or even weeks, leaving a young teenager in charge of the farm, the livestock, the house, and the other family members. At twelve or thirteen, most boys sought work in the form of apprenticeships, where they learned a craft or trade from a cobbler, barrel-maker, tanner, fisherman, or other skilled artisan.
Women, expected to bear between five and ten children and lots of mothers died as a result getting pregnant and giving birth. With high infant mortality, families typically did not name a child until he or she had reached the age of two: prior to that time, parents would refer to the baby as “it,” “the little angel,” or “the little visitor.” Overall life expectancy hardly tells the tale of everyday life, where work was hard and even most minor illnesses were potentially life-threatening. Despite the reality of such a very hard life for common folk, it is worth noting that by 1774 colonists already had attained a standard of living that far surpassed any found in rest of the world.
The Patriots numbered 40 to 45 percent of the colonists and they were violent toward the Tories/Loyalists who accounted for ten to 15 percent and 35 to 40 percent were neutral.
In the end, many Loyalists simply left America. About 80,000 of them fled to Canada or Britain during or just after the war. Because Loyalists were often wealthy, educated, older, and Anglican (held beliefs and membership within Church of England), the American social fabric was altered by their departure. American history brands them as traitors. But most were just trying to maintain the lifestyles to which they had become accustomed.
Even before the war started, a group of Philadelphia Quakers were arrested and imprisoned in Virginia because of their perceived support of the British. The Patriots were not a tolerant group, and Loyalists suffered regular harassment, had their property seized, or were subject to personal attacks. (tar and feather has got to hurt).
http://www.patriotshistoryusa.com/teaching-materials/bonus-materials/everyday-life-in-america/
1765: James Watt invents the improved steam engine utilizing a separate condenser.
1769: invents the first steam-powered vehicle capable of carrying passengers
The development of new political organizations preceded the American Revolutionary War and played a central role in making the revolution happen. New groups calling themselves Sons of Liberty and the Stamp Act Congress met in 1765. Committees of Correspondence whose purpose it was to share information about the resistance movement were formed in 1772. For an entire generation of Americans the one unifying idea that led to the American Revolution was that the British were conspiring to enslave the colonies.
The Sons of Liberty was a secret organization of dissidents that originated in the North American British thirteen colonies with recognized members and leaders. Their talking point was "No taxation without representation." The leaders of the organization heralded mostly from artisans, traders, lawyers and local politicians and they knew they needed to appeal to the masses that made up the lower classes.
The Sons of Liberty had been responsible for attacking, looting, and burning the British ship in June 1772 off the coast of Rhode Island. Previous attacks by the colonists on British naval vessels had gone unpunished. In one case, a customs yacht was actually destroyed (also by fire) with no administrative response. But in 1772, the British Admiralty would not ignore the destruction of one of its military vessels on station.
The War of Independence (1774–1783)
The government of the First Continental Congress started on September 1774 is referred to as the Revolutionary Congress. Acts of rebellion against British authority began in September 9, 1774 by a county militia and effectively abolished the legal government of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. President John Adams commented in his diary: "This was one of the happiest days of my life. In Congress we had generous, noble sentiments, and manly eloquence. This day convinced me that America will support Massachusetts or perish with her.” The tensions caused by this would lead to the outbreak of fighting between Patriot militia and British regulars at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
The First Continental Congress that met in Philadelphia was a new assembly of the colonies except Georgia. A total of 55 delegates had been appointed by their legislatures. The Congress called for the formation of local political bodies in every town that were called Committees of Safety and Inspection. This committee enforced the importation of British goods and later began to collect taxes and recruit soldiers. They had also of solidified ties with other communities.
The Second Continental Congress of delegates from the thirteen colonies was convened on May 10, 1775. Some 1,200 colonial troops under the command of William Prescott started and fought a battle against British troops June 17, 1775. The Second Congress managed the colonial war effort, and moved incrementally towards independence. King George III of Great Britain issued, what amounted to a declaration of war on August 23, 1775 (a Proclamation of Rebellion) stating elements of the American colonies to be in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."
By raising armies, directing strategy, appointing diplomats, and making formal treaties the Continental Congress acted as the de facto national government of what became the United States. The Congress had no authority to levy taxes, and was required to request money, supplies, and troops from the states to support the war effort. Individual states frequently ignored these requests.
During the American Revolutionary War in February 1776, Esek Hopkins, the first Commander in Chief of the Continental Navy, was given orders to attack the British Navy. He disobeyed orders and led a group of over eight ships south to Nassau Island in the Bahamas. He felt that it would be much more advantageous than take a chance of risking defeat from a far superior British Naval fleet. He knew that the British port in Nassau would be poorly guarded and had friends there who would help his cause.
On March 3 and 4, 1776, Hopkins landed the first-ever amphibious assault by American military forces consisting of 250 marines and sailors. Under the canon fire from his ships his forces overwhelmed Fort Montague and force the British retreat and then to surrender. Hopkins’ forces captured 88 cannons, 15 mortars, two British merchant/cargo ships and a six-gun schooner.
They spent two weeks loading his ships with the booty before finally returning home to Rhode Island on April 8, 1776.
Esek Hopkins was born in Rhode Island. Before the Revolutionary War he had sailed to nearly every quarter of the earth. He commanded a privateer in the French and Indian War and served as a deputy to the Rhode Island General Assembly. The Continental Congress and individual state governors through their legislatures allowed privately owned ships to make war on British ships by issuing government permission in what was called, letters of marque (aka privateering). There were virtually thousands of these ships attacking the British ship. After this offensive attack, the New England fleet was mostly blockaded in port by the superior British Naval power and also Hopkins could not find adequate men to man his ships. So he was viewed as lacking in skill and character and the Continental Congress voted in January 1778 to relieve Hopkins of his command permanently.
Rhode Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, mounting over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the abolition of the trade in 1807. There were scores more illegal voyages thereafter. By the time the transatlantic slave trade was suppressed in the 1860s, a total of ten million to twelve million Africans had been carried into New World slavery. People were packed so close that they could not get to the toilet buckets, and laid in their own urine and poop. The average death rates were between ten and 20 percent, through sickness, suicide and even murder at the hands of the slave crew and captains. Ten percent means over one million Africans died on board the ships, 20 percent represents over two million deaths.
The vast majority of African slaves were imported into the sugar colonies of the Caribbean and South America, where massive mortality of enslaved workers necessitated a constant infusion of laborers. Brazil alone imported at least four million enslaves. The average life expectancy of a slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation was less than seven years. Between 500,000 and 600,000 enslaved Africans were imported into what is today the United States.
By the era of the American Revolution such rationalizations had been supplanted by an explicit theory of race, in which black people’s inferiority was assumed to be innate and ineradicable, a product not of their circumstances or condition but of their physical nature. An early anti-slavery treatise, published in the Providence Gazette in 1773 wrote, “Slave keeping,” the anonymous author wrote, was a “custom that casts the most indelible odium on a whole people, causing some...to infer that they are a different race formed by the Creator for brutal service, to drudge for us with their brethren of the stalls.”
But slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and, for a time, in all thirteen original states. The first slaves in New England were Native Americans that had been captured in the warfare between European settlers. New Englanders began to import Africans in 1638, initially by exchanging captured Native Americans for black slaves from the West Indies. The arrival of the first shipload of slaves from the West Indian in 1638 occasioned no guilt (scruples), however when a Massachusetts ship returned from West Africa seven years later with a cargo of new captives it provoked a scandal. By mid-1700 about ten percent of people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about six percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World.
The British promised to liberate slaves who fled from their Patriot masters. This powerful incentive led to about ten percent of the total slave population to flee their Patriot masters in the 1770s. The southern colonies were the richest in North America because of slaves, making up 80 percent of their wealth. Half of the southern wealth was in slaves, some 600,000 by the 1780s.
During the Civil War, roughly 180,000 black men served in the Union Army, and another 29,000 served in the Navy. Three-fifths of all black troops were former slaves.
http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/documents/SlaveryAndJustice.pdf
Some Unpopular History of the United States
Book One -- 1610 to 1933 by Richard McManus
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this book is to inform reader about historical facts that most US history books omit. Most US citizens do not know about the unnecessary and unjust wars, violations of international law, and covert operations by the CIA and other US government agencies
--------------------------------
Historical background: the development of rules of conduct for an assembly’s decision making of their organization.
By the end of 200 AD (or Current Era or CE), bishops began congregating in regional synods (historically a council of a church) to resolve doctrinal and policy issues. By the 3rd century, the bishop of Rome began to act as a court of appeals for problems that other bishops could not resolve. The Greek word “assembly” was translated into the word "church" in the King James Henry the VIII’s Bible printed after the invention of the printing press.
The first recorded application of the word "catholic" or "universal" to the church was by Ignatius of Antioch in about 107 CE.
The Roman general Julius Caesar overthrew the Celtic tribes in two expeditions to Britain in 55 and 54 BC as an offshoot of his conquest of Gaul (western France). Caesar He played a critical role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman dictatorship. He installed a friendly king and returned to Gaul. Germanic pirates/raiders “Saxones” attacked the shore of Britain and Gaul (western France) in the 3rd century CE. At the end of the 3rd century, Britannia was divided into four provinces under the direction of a vicar who administered the Diocese of the Britain.
The Anglo-Saxon tribes (aka Germanic tribes) that migrated to the British Isles in 400’s when freemen came together in a village-moot for their village and to administer justice. The name “Anglo-Saxon” itself only began to be used in the 8th century (700’s) to distinguish Germanic groups in Britain from those on the continent. The native Britons were already partly Christianized by the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain.
The Christianization of the Roman Empire happened around 312 CE. By this date Christianity had already converted a significant proportion of at least the urban population of the Roman Empire, including a number of the elite classes. Constantine ended the intermittent persecution of Christians with an edict which granted tolerance to all religions, specifically mentioning Christianity. From the 6th century, Germanic tribes were converted (and re-converted) by catholic missionaries. The Viking invasions of Britain destroyed many monasteries and new Viking settlers restored paganism.
Many of Rome's legal and legislative structures were later codified into the Justinian Code. The Corpus Juris (translated: a Body of Civil Law) is the modern name for a collection of fundamental works in jurisprudence, issued from 529 to 534 CE by order of Emperor Justinian I.
As time passed most kingdoms incorporated the few still existing Roman institutions. Holy Roman Catholic Monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianized European pagans continued. The term "pagan" is from Latin, it means "villager, rustic, civilian" and is derived from this historical transition.
Duke William II of Normandy (aka William the Conqueror) used his army to invaded and occupied England in 1066. William II had familial relations with the English Saxons and became the King of England. He held a Council of feudal barons who advised him.
In 1525-1526 a theologian and scholar, William Tyndale, was the first person to translate and print New Testament of the Bible from the original language of Greek and Hebrew into the English language. Tyndale used the word "senior" and "elder" rather than "priest" in translating from Greek. He was the first person to take advantage of Gutenberg’s movable-type press for the purpose of printing it. Tyndale also held and published views which were considered heretical, first by the Catholic Church, and later by the Church of England which was established by King Henry VIII. Tyndale's translation was banned by the authorities, and Tyndale himself was burned at the stake in 1536, at the instigation of agents of Henry VIII and the Anglican Church. In 1537, the first printing of a complete English language Bible was translated from the original language of Greek and Hebrew.
Lawyer Thomas More served as secretary and personal adviser to King Henry VIII, More became increasingly influential serving as a liaison between the King and Catholic Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. More and Wolsey opposed the Protestant Reformation, in particular the theology of Martin Luther and William Tyndale. They prevented Lutheran books from being imported into England and they spied on and investigated suspected Protestants, especially publishers. They arrested anyone holding in his possession, transporting, or selling the books of the Protestant Reformation. More vigorously suppressed the travelling country ministers who used Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament.
More also refused to acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England. An Oath of Supremacy required any person taking public or church office in England to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was convicted of treason and beheaded.
The Privy chamber (privacy) was the most influential department in the English King’s royal household. It contained the king's privy lodging, consisting of library, study, and lavatory. What was known as the Chamber was later divided into a Privy chamber (distinguished from bedchamber in 1559), and outer chamber (often styled Presence chamber), and the Great Hall. Thomas Wolsey's position in power relied solely on maintaining good relations with Henry. He grew increasingly suspicious of the "minions"—young, influential members of the Privy chamber. He reduced the members of the Privy Council from twelve to six. These six men were of noble birth were empowered to execute the King's verbal command without producing any written order; their person and character being deemed sufficient authority.
Know as the Groom of the Stool, this was the job of one of a male servant to the household, in charge of the royal poop (which meant he had the task of cleaning the monarch's anus after defecation). His standing was of the highest and this service was seen as entirely honorable, without a trace of being demeaning or humiliating.
Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, (1485 to July 28, 1540), was an English lawyer and statesman who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540. Common law originated during the Middle Ages in England from 500 to 1000 AD (CE) for which people use the terms Medieval Times, Middle Ages, and Dark Ages. The Dark Ages is usually referring to the first half of the Middle Ages. Common law (also known as case law), laws developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals that decide individual cases.
Cromwell was one of the strongest and most powerful advocates of the English Reformation. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king's marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon, to allow Henry to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. After failing in 1534, to obtain the Pope's approval of the request for annulment, Parliament endorsed the King's claim to be head of a breakaway Church of England, thus giving Henry the authority to annul his own marriage. King Henry VIII of England also made Catholicism illegal. Thomas Cromwell subsequently plotted a reformist course for Church of England after his appointment by the King to posts of vicegerent in spirituals and vicar-general. He sold off many of the monitories to rich English barons on behalf of the King.
A vicar general is the principal deputy of the bishop of a diocese for the exercise of administrative authority and possesses the title of local ordinary. As vicar of the bishop, the vicar general exercises the bishop's ordinary executive power over the entire diocese and, thus, is the highest official in a diocese or other particular church after the diocesan bishop or his equivalent in canon law.
Canon law is the body of laws and regulations made by Church leadership, for the government of a Christian church and its members.
Thru the Middle Ages the European feudal system was adopted by the Catholic Church. The church's revenue streams came from, amongst other things, rents and profits arising from assets gifted and profits from money making assets given to the church by believers, be they monarch, lord of the manor or vassal, and later upon a percent of their incomes. The word “diocese”, is from a Greek word meaning "administration", is the district under the supervision of a bishop
The Years 1610 to 1909 -- Unjust and Unnecessary US Wars
From 1415 onward, the Portuguese Empire killed five million people. Their arrested some 4.5 million slaves and shipped them out of Africa. Twice as many as were enslaved by other nations. From 1492 to 1892 the Spanish Empire killed five million people in South America. Of the total three million died from smallpox. In 1521 they murdered some 200,000 Aztecs in their capital city in Mexico. In south eastern India a Portuguese Inquisition by Catholic extremists from 1560 to 1812 was the most severe and cruel. They massacred some 16,000 Hindus, Muslims, Indian Jews and non-Catholic Indian Christians, twice as many as any other colonial power.
In 1534, France started sailing and exploring the coast of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River and during the 1600’s and 1700’s. They colonized the Great Lakes area, the Atlantic coast, and the Mississippi River area of the United States. Since the early 1500s Portuguese, Breton, and Bristol fishermen; Basque whalers; French fur traders; or English cod fisherman who had established a presence on the North Atlantic coast. In 1578, an observer noted 100 Spanish sails, 20–30 Basque whalers, approximately 150 French and Breton fishing ships, and 50 English sails along the coast of Newfoundland. English traders and fishermen had daily contact with Native Americans but lived on ships or in segregated enclaves on land where salt-dried codfish stations were built along Massachusetts Bay.
For 23 years until about 1815, recurrent warfare between the French army of Napoleon Bonaparte and against the other powers of Europe. And France became the dominant power in much of continental Europe. As a result the French killed some ten million people. The French kill some 100,000 slaves in their colony in Haiti. From 1885 onward, the Belgian Empire ten million people in the Congo. Using forced labor, murder and mutilation to force indigenous Congolese who did not fulfill quotas for rubber collections. Smallpox killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River. In 1876 the Ottoman Empire (aka Turkey) beheaded and burnt alive at least 5,000 people at the city of Batak in Bulgaria.
Between 1616 and 1619, Native American populations in New England, with no immunity to European diseases, were nearly eradicated by a mysterious epidemic—likely smallpox. The estimated death rates ranged from one third to as high as 90 percent in Massachusetts and other Algonquin tribes. European-induced epidemics in Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia between 1519 and 1750, including smallpox, bubonic plague, typhus, mumps, influenza, yellow fever, and measles. Other possibly diseases included chickenpox and trichinosis (round worms), and leptospirosis (a bacteria that causes sickness) that is spread by rats or mice that arrived on infested European ships. The duration of the epidemics reportedly ranged from three to six years. In New England, “three plagues in three years successively two hundred miles along the coast” of southern Massachusetts to Cape Cod and inland for 15 miles to extending 60-mile into the interior which corresponds to the area of native corn horticulture.
Also herd immunity among the European colonists reduced the spread of diseases. Europeans had been the caretakers of domestic animals for thousands of years, and had over time grown somewhat immune to the common diseases that accompanied the domestication of such food sources. Native Americans, on the other hand, were largely hunters and gatherers. Second, Europeans had lived in more densely populated areas than Native Americans. When so many humans live together in relatively close quarters (particularly with lack of good, or any, sewage systems and the like), disease spreads quickly with the general population continually getting exposed to numerous germs. The third factor is travel and trade. Groups of people and animals moved around a lot in Europe resulting in the spread of disease across continents—and, eventually, some level of immunity for the survivors. This also resulted in Europeans becoming more genetically diverse than Native Americans.
That said, it should be noted that Europeans were also commonly killed off by the diseases they brought to the New World. It’s just that over time those who were more susceptible to these diseases died off and the survivors’ immune systems had developed to the point where the general populace wasn’t typically being wiped out at rates anywhere close to 95 percent, though the numbers were often still extreme by today’s standards.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/03/native-americans-didnt-wipe-europeans-diseases/ and http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/2/09-0276_article
The Jamestown settlement on the James River, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, VA, and some 100 miles south of Washington DC, was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. It was established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" in May 1607 and too late in the year to get crops planted. Two-thirds of the settlers died before arriving ships brought supplies and German, Polish and Slovak craftsmen the next year in 1608. Some of the survivors deserted to the Native American tribes. There were an estimated 14,000 Native Americans living in the region. Jamestown served as the capital of the colony for 83 years, from 1616 until 1699.
1610 - 1622 - Deliberate genocide of Powhatans by the Virginia Company of London. It involved the manipulation of English Law by Sir Edward Coke, a prominent jurist whose writings on English common law were the definitive legal texts for some 300 years. There were two Anglo-Powhatan Wars accompanied by racist polemics preached by associates of this Company in London.
From 1620 to 1691 the Pilgrims founded the Plymouth Colony an English colonial located about 40 miles south of Boston, MA and about 400 miles southwest of Jamestown. The Mayflower departed Plymouth, England, in September 1620, with 102 passengers and about 30 crew members, the worst time of the year to sail to North America. They arrived in December 1620.
During the winter, the colonists suffered greatly from diseases like scurvy, lack of shelter and lived on board Mayflower ship. Many of the able-bodied men were too infirm to work and 45 died. By the end of February, five cannons had been defensively positioned in a fort on a hill. Of the 18 adult women, 13 died the first winter while another died in May. Only four adult women were left alive for the Thanksgiving in 1621.
The Pilgrims distinguished themselves from the Puritans in that they sought to separate themselves from the Anglican Church, rather than reform it from within. In Plymouth Colony, a simple profession of faith was all that was required for acceptance. This was a more liberal doctrine than some other New England congregations where it was common to subject those seeking formal membership to strict and detailed cross examinations. There was no central governing body for the churches. Each individual congregation was left to determine its standards of membership, hire its own ministers, and conduct its own business. The colony's laws were based on a hybrid of English common law. The colony offered nearly all adult males potential citizenship in the colony. Most men were elevated to “freeman” status between the ages of 25 and 40, averaging somewhere in their early thirties and thereby had voting rights at an assembly called the General Court. It was both the chief legislative and judicial body of the colony. The colony's most powerful executive was its Governor, he and a seven member cabinet was elected by the freemen. The Governor and cabinet then appointed Constables who served as the chief administrators for the towns who were responsible for publishing announcements, performing land surveys, carrying out executions, and etc.
On May 26, 1637, English troops attacked a large Pequot village on the Mystic River in what is now Connecticut. The village was set on fire and the women and children were killed as they attempted to flee. One observer later wrote: "it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same and horrible was the stink and scent thereof." In this and the succeeding campaign about 700 members of the tribe were killed including men taken captive. The tribe was disbanded and the survivors were adopted by neighboring tribes. (1)
The Plymouth Colony Puritans of New England eliminated the use of musical instruments in their religious services for theological and practical reasons. The only music remaining in church services was the setting of the psalms. Puritans disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time. Celebrations were outlawed in Boston from 1659 onward. The ban was revoked in 1681 by the English-appointed governor, who also revoked a Puritan ban on festivities on Saturday nights. Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region. Likewise, the colonies banned many secular entertainments on moral grounds, such as games of chance, maypoles, and drama. A maypole dance would occur in May or mid-summer. It consisted of pairs of boys and girls (or men and women) standing alternately around the base of the pole, each holding the end of a ribbon. They would weave in and around each other, boys going one way and girls going the other, while the ribbons were woven together around the pole until the merry-makers met at the base.
They were not, however, opposed to drinking alcohol in moderation. Early New England laws banning the sale of alcohol to Native Americans were criticized because it was "not fit to deprive Indians of any lawful comfort alloweth to all men by the use of wine." Laws banned the practice of individuals toasting each other, with the explanation that it led to wasting God's gift of beer and wine, as well as being carnal. Bounds were not set on enjoying sexuality within the bounds of marriage, as a gift from God.
Married women and men were equally expected to have sex. Women and men could file for divorce based on this issue alone. In Massachusetts colony, which had some of the most liberal colonial divorce laws, one out of every six divorce petitions was filed on the basis of male impotence, an issue which held significant cultural ramifications. The Puritans publicly punished drunkenness as well as sexual relations outside marriage.
In Britain in the 1170s, it was common practice for ordinary couples to cohabit before marriage and for cousins to marry one another. In 1650, during the ascendancy of the Puritans, fornication was made a felony. The word was understood as consensual sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other. At the Restoration in 1660, this statute was not renewed, and prosecution of the mere act of fornication itself was abandoned. However, notorious and open lewdness, when carried to the extent of exciting public scandal, continued to be an indictable offence at common law. Sex before marriage only became equated with sinfulness with the passing of the Marriage Act 1753. Prior to the passing of this Act, laws against bastard children became stricter during the 1730s and 1740s. Indeed, there was very little stigma around bastards at any social level in medieval England.
Puritans believed in demonic forces, as did almost all Christians of this period. Puritan pastors undertook exorcisms for demonic possession in some high-profile cases, and believed in some allegations of witchcraft.
In January 1692, a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts became had seizures or violent contortions, and made blood curdling screams. A doctor diagnosed the children as being victims of black magic, and over the next several months, allegations of witchcraft spread like a virus through the small Puritan settlement. Twenty people were eventually executed as witches, but contrary to popular belief, none of the condemned was burned at the stake. In accordance with English law, nineteen of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials were instead taken to the infamous Gallows Hill to die by hanging. Still more accused sorcerers died in jail while awaiting trial.
Historians have noted that many of the accused were wealthy and held different religious beliefs than their accusers. This, coupled with the fact that the accused also had their estates confiscated if they were convicted, has led many historians to believe that religious feuds and property disputes played a big part in the witch trials. As the years went by, the colonists felt ashamed and remorseful for what had happened during the trials. In 1711, the colony passed a bill restoring some of the names of the accused and paid restitution to their heirs.
Public schools, as we know them today, were few and far between in the early American republic. The Puritans believed literacy was a religious duty (so that everyone could read the Bible), and most children learned basic math and reading at home. By the 1670s, all New England Colonies (except Rhode Island) had passed legislation that mandated literacy for children. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law that required towns with 50 or more people to have a public school for boys and to hire a schoolmaster to teach writing. In the 1700s, elite, private, grammar schools opened in New England to prepare boys to enter the Ivy League colleges, many of which are among America's most prestigious college prep schools today. Throughout the Middle Colonies, individual communities sometimes opened schools to instruct boys in their language, religion and traditions. And Southern plantation owners might hire a teacher to educate their children at home. Wealthy families from every region sometimes sent their sons back to England for school.
During the Revolution, many Americans (like Thomas Jefferson) believed strongly that education was a necessary component of democracy, but despite their arguments, not many of the Founding Fathers thought it was a good idea for the federal government to be involved in such matters. The US Constitution places schools squarely in the hands of the states. Some towns, cities, territories and states began enacting laws providing education for local children around the turn of the 19th century. For example, St. Louis, Missouri opened a school in 1808, and many other localities opened their own one-room schoolhouse. But children in outlying areas couldn't always attend and poor kids might need to help provide for their families. Other places, like Georgia, began closing public schools after 1800, and it was illegal almost everywhere to educate a slave. A free, public education was still out of reach for most American children.
Some strong religious beliefs common to Puritans had direct impacts on the culture. Education was essential to the masses, so that they could read the Bible for themselves. New England differed from its mother country, where nothing in English statute required literacy of children. Catholics who fled England settled in Maryland, and their colony's legislature passed the Act of Toleration of 1649 to ensure the religious liberty of Maryland's Catholics. The law made it a crime to jeer at other believers by calling them names such as a papist, heretic, or puritan. The death penalty could be meted out to anyone who denied the Trinity (notwithstanding no such concept was written about or described within the Bible or rejected Jesus Christ's “son-ship.” Those who profaned Sunday by swearing excessively, becoming drunk or working unnecessarily could be fined. Anyone who spoke against the virgin Mary could be fined and whipped.
The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the most active of the New England persecution of Quakers, and the persecuting spirit was shared by the Plymouth Colony and the colonies along the Connecticut River. In 1660, one of the most notable victims of the religious intolerance was an English Quaker who was hanged in Boston for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. She was one of four executed Quakers. In 1661, King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism. In 1684, England revoked the Massachusetts charter, sent over a royal governor to enforce English laws in 1686 and, in 1689, passed the broadly religious Toleration Act.
Merchants in the American colonies of the 1690s often funded piracy in waters off India, Arabia, and Madagascar. In 1763, many of colonies’ richest merchant families owed 30 to 40 percent of their wealth to the fruits of war and piracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fornication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan
http://historyofmassachusetts.org/the-salem-witch-trials/#sthash.xhnMz89k.dpuf
By the mid-1700s throughout the colonies, most people, including men, wore their hair very long. Women and girls kept their hair covered with hats, hoods, and kerchiefs. Men and boys tied their hair into ponytails until wigs came into vogue in the port cities. Colonials made their own clothes from linen (flax) and wool; every home had a spinning wheel and a loom, and women sewed and knitted constantly, as cotton cloth would not be readily available until the nineteenth century. Plentiful dyes like indigo, birch bark, and berries made colorful shirts, pants, dresses, socks and caps.
Americans grew their own food and ate a great deal of corn—roasted, boiled, and cooked into cornmeal bread and pancakes. Hearty vegetables like squash and beans joined apples, jam, and syrup on the dinner table. Men and boys hunted and fished; rabbit, squirrel, bear, and deer. Pig-raising grew important, but beef and milk cows were scarce until the eighteenth century and beyond. Given the poor quality of water, many colonials drank cider, beer, and corn whiskey—even the children! As cities sprang up, cattle drank beer, yielding a disgusting variant of milk known as “swill milk” that propagated childhood illnesses.
Infant mortality was high, and any sickness usually meant suffering, and often, death. Doctors were few and far between. The colonies had no medical school until the eve of the American Revolution, and veterinarians usually doubled as the town doctor, or vice versa. Going to a physician usually constituted an absolute last resort, as without anesthesia, any serious procedures would involve excruciating pain and extensive recovery. Into the vacuum of this absence of professional healers stepped folk healers and midwives. “Bleeding” (make a sick person bleed), was a common medical practice in order to rid the body of any illness.
While most New England children went to school for a short time, schools in the south were less frequent, and, well into the 19th century, required attendance for fewer months of the year. Boys studied longer than girls. The girls, it was believed, needed only to learn to cook and raise children. Laws prohibited the schooling of African-Americans, though some whites ignored such regulations. Schools were uncomfortable; students sat on wooden benches in damp rooms heated by a single fireplace, with grades first to eight and even high school lumped together in one room. Students wrote on bark with lumps of lead or quill pens dipped in homemade ink. Their main text was The New England Primer. Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe sufficed in the absence of children’s literature and Bible reading was always acceptable. Teachers punished ill-behaved boys with whips, dunce caps, and cards hung around their necks that read “Idle Boy.” If you bit your nails you had to wear a card that said “bite-finger baby.” While some boys as young as twelve went on to college at Harvard or William and Mary, others joined the workforce as soon as they learned to read, write, and cipher (do arithmetic).
Children worked hard because all Americans were given to hard work all their lives. Most boys and girls, certainly in frontier areas, learned how to plow, mend fences, skin animals, dress meat, fish, shoot, hunt, and ride. Their lives, like their parents’ lives, were tied to the seasons as they worked and played and cultivated the raw land and their survival depended on being very good at shooting a rifle. It was not unusual for a father to go away for days or even weeks, leaving a young teenager in charge of the farm, the livestock, the house, and the other family members. At twelve or thirteen, most boys sought work in the form of apprenticeships, where they learned a craft or trade from a cobbler, barrel-maker, tanner, fisherman, or other skilled artisan.
Women, expected to bear between five and ten children and lots of mothers died as a result getting pregnant and giving birth. With high infant mortality, families typically did not name a child until he or she had reached the age of two: prior to that time, parents would refer to the baby as “it,” “the little angel,” or “the little visitor.” Overall life expectancy hardly tells the tale of everyday life, where work was hard and even most minor illnesses were potentially life-threatening. Despite the reality of such a very hard life for common folk, it is worth noting that by 1774 colonists already had attained a standard of living that far surpassed any found in rest of the world.
The Patriots numbered 40 to 45 percent of the colonists and they were violent toward the Tories/Loyalists who accounted for ten to 15 percent and 35 to 40 percent were neutral.
In the end, many Loyalists simply left America. About 80,000 of them fled to Canada or Britain during or just after the war. Because Loyalists were often wealthy, educated, older, and Anglican (held beliefs and membership within Church of England), the American social fabric was altered by their departure. American history brands them as traitors. But most were just trying to maintain the lifestyles to which they had become accustomed.
Even before the war started, a group of Philadelphia Quakers were arrested and imprisoned in Virginia because of their perceived support of the British. The Patriots were not a tolerant group, and Loyalists suffered regular harassment, had their property seized, or were subject to personal attacks. (tar and feather has got to hurt).
http://www.patriotshistoryusa.com/teaching-materials/bonus-materials/everyday-life-in-america/
1765: James Watt invents the improved steam engine utilizing a separate condenser.
1769: invents the first steam-powered vehicle capable of carrying passengers
The development of new political organizations preceded the American Revolutionary War and played a central role in making the revolution happen. New groups calling themselves Sons of Liberty and the Stamp Act Congress met in 1765. Committees of Correspondence whose purpose it was to share information about the resistance movement were formed in 1772. For an entire generation of Americans the one unifying idea that led to the American Revolution was that the British were conspiring to enslave the colonies.
The Sons of Liberty was a secret organization of dissidents that originated in the North American British thirteen colonies with recognized members and leaders. Their talking point was "No taxation without representation." The leaders of the organization heralded mostly from artisans, traders, lawyers and local politicians and they knew they needed to appeal to the masses that made up the lower classes.
The Sons of Liberty had been responsible for attacking, looting, and burning the British ship in June 1772 off the coast of Rhode Island. Previous attacks by the colonists on British naval vessels had gone unpunished. In one case, a customs yacht was actually destroyed (also by fire) with no administrative response. But in 1772, the British Admiralty would not ignore the destruction of one of its military vessels on station.
The War of Independence (1774–1783)
The government of the First Continental Congress started on September 1774 is referred to as the Revolutionary Congress. Acts of rebellion against British authority began in September 9, 1774 by a county militia and effectively abolished the legal government of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. President John Adams commented in his diary: "This was one of the happiest days of my life. In Congress we had generous, noble sentiments, and manly eloquence. This day convinced me that America will support Massachusetts or perish with her.” The tensions caused by this would lead to the outbreak of fighting between Patriot militia and British regulars at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
The First Continental Congress that met in Philadelphia was a new assembly of the colonies except Georgia. A total of 55 delegates had been appointed by their legislatures. The Congress called for the formation of local political bodies in every town that were called Committees of Safety and Inspection. This committee enforced the importation of British goods and later began to collect taxes and recruit soldiers. They had also of solidified ties with other communities.
The Second Continental Congress of delegates from the thirteen colonies was convened on May 10, 1775. Some 1,200 colonial troops under the command of William Prescott started and fought a battle against British troops June 17, 1775. The Second Congress managed the colonial war effort, and moved incrementally towards independence. King George III of Great Britain issued, what amounted to a declaration of war on August 23, 1775 (a Proclamation of Rebellion) stating elements of the American colonies to be in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."
By raising armies, directing strategy, appointing diplomats, and making formal treaties the Continental Congress acted as the de facto national government of what became the United States. The Congress had no authority to levy taxes, and was required to request money, supplies, and troops from the states to support the war effort. Individual states frequently ignored these requests.
During the American Revolutionary War in February 1776, Esek Hopkins, the first Commander in Chief of the Continental Navy, was given orders to attack the British Navy. He disobeyed orders and led a group of over eight ships south to Nassau Island in the Bahamas. He felt that it would be much more advantageous than take a chance of risking defeat from a far superior British Naval fleet. He knew that the British port in Nassau would be poorly guarded and had friends there who would help his cause.
On March 3 and 4, 1776, Hopkins landed the first-ever amphibious assault by American military forces consisting of 250 marines and sailors. Under the canon fire from his ships his forces overwhelmed Fort Montague and force the British retreat and then to surrender. Hopkins’ forces captured 88 cannons, 15 mortars, two British merchant/cargo ships and a six-gun schooner.
They spent two weeks loading his ships with the booty before finally returning home to Rhode Island on April 8, 1776.
Esek Hopkins was born in Rhode Island. Before the Revolutionary War he had sailed to nearly every quarter of the earth. He commanded a privateer in the French and Indian War and served as a deputy to the Rhode Island General Assembly. The Continental Congress and individual state governors through their legislatures allowed privately owned ships to make war on British ships by issuing government permission in what was called, letters of marque (aka privateering). There were virtually thousands of these ships attacking the British ship. After this offensive attack, the New England fleet was mostly blockaded in port by the superior British Naval power and also Hopkins could not find adequate men to man his ships. So he was viewed as lacking in skill and character and the Continental Congress voted in January 1778 to relieve Hopkins of his command permanently.
Rhode Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, mounting over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the abolition of the trade in 1807. There were scores more illegal voyages thereafter. By the time the transatlantic slave trade was suppressed in the 1860s, a total of ten million to twelve million Africans had been carried into New World slavery. People were packed so close that they could not get to the toilet buckets, and laid in their own urine and poop. The average death rates were between ten and 20 percent, through sickness, suicide and even murder at the hands of the slave crew and captains. Ten percent means over one million Africans died on board the ships, 20 percent represents over two million deaths.
The vast majority of African slaves were imported into the sugar colonies of the Caribbean and South America, where massive mortality of enslaved workers necessitated a constant infusion of laborers. Brazil alone imported at least four million enslaves. The average life expectancy of a slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation was less than seven years. Between 500,000 and 600,000 enslaved Africans were imported into what is today the United States.
By the era of the American Revolution such rationalizations had been supplanted by an explicit theory of race, in which black people’s inferiority was assumed to be innate and ineradicable, a product not of their circumstances or condition but of their physical nature. An early anti-slavery treatise, published in the Providence Gazette in 1773 wrote, “Slave keeping,” the anonymous author wrote, was a “custom that casts the most indelible odium on a whole people, causing some...to infer that they are a different race formed by the Creator for brutal service, to drudge for us with their brethren of the stalls.”
But slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and, for a time, in all thirteen original states. The first slaves in New England were Native Americans that had been captured in the warfare between European settlers. New Englanders began to import Africans in 1638, initially by exchanging captured Native Americans for black slaves from the West Indies. The arrival of the first shipload of slaves from the West Indian in 1638 occasioned no guilt (scruples), however when a Massachusetts ship returned from West Africa seven years later with a cargo of new captives it provoked a scandal. By mid-1700 about ten percent of people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about six percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World.
The British promised to liberate slaves who fled from their Patriot masters. This powerful incentive led to about ten percent of the total slave population to flee their Patriot masters in the 1770s. The southern colonies were the richest in North America because of slaves, making up 80 percent of their wealth. Half of the southern wealth was in slaves, some 600,000 by the 1780s.
During the Civil War, roughly 180,000 black men served in the Union Army, and another 29,000 served in the Navy. Three-fifths of all black troops were former slaves.
http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/documents/SlaveryAndJustice.pdf
The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, then at war with Great Britain. They also regarded themselves as thirteen newly independent sovereign states. Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration, in his original draft included a long passage that condemned King George for allowing the slave trade to flourish, implying criticism of slavery. By a vote of the Continental Congress it was deleted.
In the United States of America, many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the State's richest families. The likes of John Hancock of Massachusetts, Livingston of New York, Carroll of Maryland, Lee of Virginia, Rutledge of South Carolina and George Washington. Men like John Adams and Hancock in the business of seaports, the Virginia plantations of Jefferson and Washington, and New York financial district of Hamilton. Hierarchy was a fact of life in the 1700s American colonies.
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was the first constitution of the United States. It was drafted by the Second Continental Congress from mid-1776 through late-1777, and ratification by all thirteen states was completed in early 1781. Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government's power was kept quite limited. The Confederation Congress could make decisions, but lacked enforcement powers. Implementation of most decisions, including modifications to the Articles, required unanimous approval of all thirteen state legislatures.
The origins of the American Revolution can largely be located in urban centers like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where artisans were numerous. The representatives elected to the new state governments during the Revolution reflected the dramatic rise in importance of independent yeomen (family farmers) and artisans. A comparison of the legislatures in six colonies (New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina) before the war reveals that 85 percent of the assemblymen were very wealthy. By 1720, assets of Philadelphia’s wealthy elite own 56 percent of all assets compared to the artisans and workers on landed estates.
Loyalists counted among their ranks royal officials, doctors, lawyers, and ministers, while others had engaged in shipping and commerce, often with close ties to England. Strong concentrations of Loyalists existed in New York and the Carolina's, especially in the coastal cities where trade flourished. In several incidents in 1780, several militia officers and justices of the peace rounded up suspects who were thought to be a part of a Loyalist uprising in southwestern Virginia. The suspects were given a summary trial at an informal court; sentences handed down included whipping, property seizure, coerced pledges of allegiance, and conscription into the military. A judge’s extralegal actions were retroactively legitimized by the Virginia General Assembly in 1782.
Loyalists were ostracized from society, prohibited from practicing their trades, disarmed, and even confined to their homes. Those who refused to sign loyalty oaths were tarred and feathered, dunked in nearby lakes, hoisted on Liberty poles, or drafted into the Continental Army. But the most severe punishment was the denial of the most fundamental of all “rights of Englishmen,” property rights. Rebel governments did not permit Loyalists to vote or hold office. Colonies denied a free press to them, and confiscated their land and possessions, which were never returned. Those who remained in the new United States and decided to tough it out eventually were assimilated back into the population, but it took several decades for the ill feelings to vanish. Nor did the colonial governments allow Tories to practice their Anglican religion.
The war rapidly took on denominational overtones: Anglicans on George’s side, Congregationalists and Presbyterians on the side of the Patriots. But even before Lexington and Concord, numbers alone worked against the Anglicans, and by 1780 they counted only 406 churches in the American colonies, compared to a combined Presbyterian/Congregationalist total of 1,244.
Thomas Paine played an important role as a pamphleteer whose stirring words helped rally Americans to independence. George Washington ordered that Paine’s pamphlet The American Crisis be read aloud to the Continental Army as a morale booster on Dec. 23, 1776. Common Sense was similarly popular with the people. These seminal documents were crucial to winning over the public to the side of independence.
He was a radical Deist and in The Age of Reason, Paine attacked institutionalized religion. He rejected prophecies and miracles and called on readers to embrace reason. The Bible, Paine asserted, can in no way be infallible. He called the god of the Old Testament “wicked” and the entire Bible “the pretended word of God.”
In the end, many Loyalists simply left America. About 80,000 of them fled to Canada or Britain during or just after the war. Many settled in Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia where they (and their children) received land grants of 200 acres apiece. Because Loyalists were often wealthy, educated, older, and Anglican, the American social fabric was altered by their departure. American history brands them as traitors. But most were just trying to maintain the lifestyles to which they had become accustomed. Benjamin Franklin’s son, William, fled to England during the Revolution and remained a proud Loyalist throughout his life. http://www.patriotshistoryusa.com/teaching-materials/bonus-materials/the-barbarism-of-the-times/
As the British entered major cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, many people fled to the countryside, looking for food and work. Traditional markets were disrupted. Farmers who one week sold their wares to their usual American customers might the next week be selling to an occupying British army. The British blockade caused widespread unemployment. Almost anyone dependent on the foreign market was out of work, from shippers to merchants. Both armies were sometimes followed by men and women willing to work in any way for a hot meal. The Colonial economy was in shambles. The women of the household had to stand up for themselves when confronted by both American and British armies. When militias appealed to the public for uniforms and food, homespun garments and farm crops came from patriotic women. And when British armies and soldiers appeared at homes being occupied by women, they did not always find a friendly face. Many men would have returned to bankruptcy had it not been for the efforts of their spouse.
Per-revolution ministers, particularly in Puritan Massachusetts, preached the moral superiority of men over women. The first American female academies were founded in the 1790s. Women were expected to be the primary caretakers of children and so they must be schooled in the virtues that she could pass onto her kids.
At Valley Forge over the course of the winter, many wives of soldiers spent time there. The Continental Army encamped at Valley Forge in the fall of 1777 with about 12,000 men in its ranks. Death claimed about a quarter of them before spring arrived. Another thousand didn't reenlist or deserted. Washington's main force never had more than 18,000 men. The terms of service were such that only men with relatively few other options chose to join the Continental Army.
In 1783 the state of Massachusetts ended slavery with the words “that all men are born free and equal” and that every subject is entitled to liberty.” In Virginia 44 percent of the population was Black slaves, and in some places a majority. Whites lived in perpetual fear, ever mindful that if the right opportunity presented itself, black slaves might cut their heads off. Northerners wanted to emancipate the slaves, while Southerners tended to want to deport them.
One historian identified about 250 slave rebellions or conspiracies involving at least ten slaves. Here is an example. On Sunday morning in September 1739, a group of about 20 slaves broke into a store near Stono, South Carolina and stole guns and gun powder. They decapitated the two storekeepers. Fleeing the area they sacked and burned homes and killing white people. They marched while flying banners, beating drums, and calling out “Liberty!” to attract more slaves to their rebellion. Their numbers increased to some 60 to 100. The mob was spotted and a contingent of some 120 white planters (a militia) took up arms and on horses attacked the rebel slaves. About 44 blacks were killed with 21 whites in the ensuing battle. After a week of hunting the rebels only about 12 slaves escaped a second battle.
One scholar describes slavery as more than an economic system, but as a gigantic police system. Over time the south had developed an elaborate system of slave control. Armed groups of white men made regular rounds. They made sure that blacks were not wandering where they did not belong, gathering in groups, or engaging in other suspicious activity. These militias impressed upon the slaves that whites were armed, watchful, and ready to respond to rebellious plotting at all times. The state required white men and female plantation owners to participate in the patrols and to provide their own arms. The rich were permitted to send white servants as replacement to do this duty for them.
Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia all had regulated slave patrols. By the mid-1700s, the patrols became the duty of the militia. Georgia statutes enacted in 1755 and 1757, legislation required all white males between the ages of 18 and 45 to patrol as members of a slave policing militia. These militias kept plantation slaves in check, going so far as to rally once a month to inspect the living quarters of all slaves for offensive weapons and ammunition, and to apprehend and give 20 lashes to any slave found outside the plantation grounds. Therefore in the South, patrols and militia were largely that synonymous with virtually all able-bodied white men having slave control duties under the direction and discipline of the local militia officers.
Post-colonial America was predominantly agrarian, and about 90 percent of the population was farmers. The largest city in 1790 was New York, with a population of 33,000 residents. There was a small middle class of artisans, shopkeepers, and even a handful of industrial workers, but the politically and economically powerful people were the relatively few big-time merchants and landowners – who also fulfilled the function of bankers.
America was not quite a feudal society, but it resembled one. Commoners did not call at the front doors of the rich, but were received around back. Most states had official religions, some with compulsory church attendance backed by fines. Commodity-barter was the currency of the day for the vast majority. Debtors were imprisoned. Parents sold their children into bondage.
All states restricted voting only to men who owned a requisite amount of property, while the majority: un-widowed women, servants, and tenants owned no property. Moreover, most states had property requirements for eligibility to elective office, some with the higher offices reserved for those with the most property. Such restrictions had discriminated against the urban underclass and farmers since the beginning of American colonization.
Nobody at the time characterized this land of masters and servants as a “democracy.” Indeed, the master class considered “democracy” synonymous with “mob rule.”
The Revolutionary War had stirred passions among the servant class for social and economic liberty, but when the war ended nothing much had changed. In fact, the war proved not to have been a revolution at all, but represented only a change from British overlords to American overlords. Edmund Morgan, considered the dean of American history in the colonial era, characterized the “non-Revolutionary War” this way:
“The fact the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established.”
About one percent of the American population had died in a war fought, they had been told, for “liberty.” Yet after the war, economic liberty was nowhere in sight.
Moreover, the very concept of liberty meant one thing to a farmer and quite another to his rich landlord or merchant. Liberty for a common or subsistence farmer meant staying out of debt. Liberty for merchants and property owners – whose business it was to make monetary profits – meant retaining the ability to lend or rent to others and access to the power of government to enforce monetary repayment from debtors and tenants.
Much like the American Indians who had first communally owned the property now occupied by American subsistence farmers, agrarian debtors faced the unthinkable prospect of losing their ability to provide for their families (and their vote) if their land were confiscated for overdue taxes or debt.
Loss of their land would doom a freeholder to a life of tenancy. And the servitude of tenants and slaves differed mainly as a function of iron and paper. Slaves were shackled by irons, but tenants were shackled by debt contracts. But irons and paper were both backed by the law.
By the end of the Revolutionary War, as few as a third of American farmers owned their own land. When the urban elites began to foreclose on the debts and raise the taxes of subsistence farmers – many of whom had fought a long and excruciating war to secure their liberty – it amounted to a direct assault on the last bastion of Americans’ economic independence.
After the war, British merchants and banks no longer extended credit to Americans. Moreover, Britain refused to allow Americans to trade with its West Indies possessions. And, to make matters worse, the British Navy no longer protected American ships from North African pirates, effectively closing off Mediterranean commerce. Meanwhile, the American navy could not protect American shipping, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, because America did not happen to possess a navy.
The most prominent result of America's’ war against Britain for turned out to be a full-blown economic recession that lasted a decade. The Continental Congress had attempted to pay for its war with Britain by printing paper money. As Continental paper money lost its value Congress and state governments continued to pay for the war with coin borrowed at interest. When that ran short, government paid only with promises to pay at a later date, merely pieces of paper that promised to pay coin (or land) at some indeterminate time after the war was won.
This was how the government supplied the troops (whenever it managed to do so) and also how it paid its troops. In actual practice, however, Congress often did not pay the troops anything, not even with paper promises, offering only verbal promises to pay them at the end of the war.
Congress paid the soldiers in bonds worth only a fraction of the amount of time most had served, promising (again!) to pay the balance later – which it never did. Thousands of steadfast, longsuffering troops were abandoned this way. Most had not been paid any money in years (if ever), and many were hundreds of miles from their homes – ill, injured, and starving – as they had been for months and years. Others literally were dressed only in rags or pieces of rags. Some carried paper promises of money; some carried paper promises of geographically distant land – none of which would be available until years in the future, if at all.
A seven-year Revolutionary War veteran Philip Mead described his plight in a memoir entitled A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier. He wrote, “We were absolutely, literally starved. I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals in my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood, if that can be called victuals. I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them…. When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them on.”
Starving soldiers in a war for were taking their lives into their hands to oppose the tax policies of the government of Massachusetts in 1787. The principal leader of this revolt was a farmer and war veteran Daniel Shays. Shays’ Rebellion. Outbreaks of disorder punctuated the last quarter of the 1600s, toppling established governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. In the end, the Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, could raise no money from the states to provide an army, and so a privately-financed, for-profit Massachusetts militia successfully defeated Shays’ rebels.
Other farmers had rebelled in New Jersey in the 1740s; in the New York Hudson Valley rent wars in the 1750s and 1760s and concurrently in Vermont by Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys; for a decade in North Carolina in the 1760s, where vigilantes called Regulators battled the government of the urban elite; and in Virginia in the 1770s. Likewise, American cities had been scenes of labor unrest, riots, and strikes for a century. American class rebellion, apparently unbeknownst to most history teachers in America, was closer to the rule than the exception.
The government of Massachusetts duly raised taxes on farmers. To make matters far worse, the taxes were to be paid only in gold or silver – which was completely out of the question for most western farmers, who had no way to obtain coined money.
When the farmers complained, their complaints were ignored. When farmers petitioned the government to issue paper money and accept it as payment of debts and taxes, the government refused their petitions. When the farmers pleaded for the passage of “legal tender laws” that would allow them to settle their debts or taxes with their labor, they were rebuffed.
Samuel Adams was a former mastermind of the Boston Tea Party and one time propagandist against unfair British taxes, sponsored a Massachusetts law that allowed sheriffs to kill tax protesters outright. He was the cousin to John Adams.
Another rich bondholder and speculator, ex-Revolutionary War General Henry Knox (the fitting namesake of Fort Knox) wrote an alarming letter to his former commander George Washington, accusing the Shays’ rebels of being “levelers” (which was the closest term to “communists” then in existence). He informed Washington that the country needed a much stronger government (and military) to prevent any riffraff challenge to the elite. His message was not wasted on General Washington, America’s richest slave owner.
During the American Revolution against the British, the Southern states often refused to commit their militia troops, reserving them instead for slave control. The South also could not help by sending much in the way of arms, because rifles were in short supply and necessary to prevent against possible slave rebellion.
In 1775 American Minutemen won victories at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, displaying great willingness and respectable competence shooting at advancing Redcoats crouching behind walls. These militiamen inflicted overwhelming losses on the British who suffered 90 percent causalities. But with the third attack by the British at Bunker Hill, the Americans were forced to retreat. This was not because the British had a superior force ratio, but because of the steady trickle of desertions had weakened the American defensive lines and militia reserve troops nearby refused to come forward.
More astute military leaders of the American Revolution realized almost immediately that the militias were not up to the job. By 1776 there was little attachment to the idea untrained, part-time soldiers, rather a disciplined standing army was necessary. A required musters usually held but once a year. “Seldom a day passes but some persons are shot by their friends, George Washington wrote in 1776 about the partying ongoing at these camp outs. He wrote Congress, “The militia …are dismayed, intractable and impatient to return home. Great numbers have gone off, in some instances whole regiments.”
The New England militia panicked in the Battle of Long Island. The New Jersey’s militia surrendered rather than help defend retreating Continental Army troops, and in the battle of Camden, South Carolina, the North Carolina and Virginia militia, although outnumbering the British and supported by substantial Continental Army forces, bolted without firing a shot. When positioning their force for battle, American commanders learned to not only place militia units between regular troops, but to station Continental soldiers behind the militia with orders to shoot the first militiamen who ran. Most militiamen were not even good shots. This is a myth. In reality, few Americans owned guns. Research shows that only about 14 percent of frontier people owned guns and 53 percent of those guns were not functional, were broken. Few Americans hunted game. From the time of the earliest colonial settlements, frontier families had relied on Indians or professional hunters for game. Colonial local governments regulated all forms of hunting, just like what was the law back in England.
Patrick Henry, then Governor of Virginia, informed General George Washington that the state was unable to fill it quota of regular troops, but would send volunteers to make up the difference. Whereupon, Washington refused the offer, replying that volunteers were “ungovernable.” According to professors of history Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson’s faith that the militia could be counted on at least to defend home and family was shattered as time and again the raw troops broke ranks and ran from seasoned British regulars.”
Alexander Hamilton’s post-war attitude is expressed as follows. “A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, nor a week nor even a month, that will suffice for the attainment of it…The attention of the government ought particularly to be directed to the formation of a select corps of moderate size, upon such principles as will really fit it for service in case of need,” (aka a well-regulated militia) …”to discharge the duties of the camp and the field with mutual intelligence and concert.” In the South, after the militia disgraced themselves a second time in the war of 1812, public jeering of the militia became so much a problem that southern legislatures enacted statutes making it a crime to heckle or disrupt a militia muster. (Source: University of California, Davis Law Review, Hidden History of the Second Amendment Volume 31/2: 309, by Carl T. Bogus, (1998), pp. 332 to 343) http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/31/2/Articles/DavisVol31No2_Bogus.pdf
The British surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Though substantial combat had ended, the war had not, and a formal treaty of peace was months away. The British still had 26,000 troops occupying New York City, Charleston and Savannah, together with a powerful fleet.
The Treaty of Paris signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War. In November 1783 the British evacuated New York City. The Treaty granted the United States land out to the Mississippi River, which created a great opportunity for land hungry citizens to go west. Despite the fact that much of this land was gobbled up by rich land speculators, the removal of the Loyalists served to be a great social leveler. This treaty, along with the separate peace treaties between Great Britain and the nations that supported the American cause: France, Spain and the Dutch Republic.
The Sons of Liberty were able to gain enough seats in the New York assembly elections of December 1784 to have passed a set of punitive laws against Loyalists. In violation of the Treaty of Paris they called for the confiscation of the property of Loyalists. Alexander Hamilton defended the Loyalists citing the supremacy of the treaty.
After the war huge changes were made regarding land holding. English law required land to be passed down in its entirety from father to eldest son (aka primogeniture). This kept land concentrated in the hands of few individuals. Within fifteen years of the Revolution, not a single state had a primogeniture law on the books. Huge estates of the Loyalists were divided into smaller units. These land seizures were harshest in New England, but existed to some extent throughout the American colonies.
Many slaves in the north were granted their freedom if they agreed to fight for the American cause. Revolutionary sentiments led to the banning of the importation of slaves in 1807.
The decline of slavery in the period was most noticeable in the states north of Delaware, all of which passed laws outlawing slavery quite soon after the end of the war. However, these gradual emancipation laws were very slow to take effect — many of them only freed the children of current slaves, and even then, only when the children turned 25 years old. However, a clear majority of African Americans remained in bondage. http://www.ushistory.org/us/14.asp
During the American Revolutionary War the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army led the US military. In 1783, the title was simplified to Senior Officer of the United States Army. In 1821, the title was changed to Commanding General of the United States Army. The office was often referred to by various other titles, such as "Major General Commanding the Army" or "General-in-Chief." From 1789 the position of Commanding General was legally subordinate to the Secretary of War, although this was at times contested. The position was abolished with the creation of the statutory Chief of Staff of the Army in 1903.
When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, Colonel Henry Knox, 25, befriended General George Washington, age 43, and quickly rose to become the chief artillery officer of the Continental Army. In this role he accompanied Washington on most of his campaigns, and had some involvement in many major actions of the war. He established training centers for artillerymen and manufacturing facilities for weapons that were valuable assets to the fledgling nation.
The American Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. As the Revolutionary crisis deepened, Benjamin Lincoln joined the town's committee of safety, served in the Massachusetts provincial Congress, and, after Lexington and Concord, saw extensive militia duty alongside George Washington's Continentals. Lincoln was appointed to the congressional committee of safety, and also was elected to its executive council, which exercised executive authority over the province outside besieged Boston. He was deeply involved in ensuring that supplies of all sorts reached the newly developing, Continental Army outside Boston, procuring supplies from blankets to gunpowder.
In January 1776 Lincoln, age 43, was promoted to major general of the Massachusetts militia, overseeing the coastal defenses of the state. After the British evacuated Boston, he and Continental Army Brigadier General Artemas Ward, 49, oversaw attempts to improve the state's coastal fortifications, and he was ordered to hold the state's militia brigades in readiness in case the British returned. In May 1776, Major General Lincoln directed the state forces that successfully drove the last Royal Navy ships from Boston Harbor.
The Continental Congress was creating a Continental Army and on June 17, 1776, they commissioned Artemas Ward a major general (MG), and second in command to George Washington. On March 20, 1777, MG Ward’s health forced his resignation from the army. Other major generals in the Continental Army were Charles Lee, Philip Schuyler, Israel Putnam, Benjamin Lincoln. Benjamin Lincoln served as the first Secretary of War from 1781 to 1783.
Benjamin Franklin went to France in 1776 to gain French aid against Great Britain, securing shipments of crucial munitions from France. He stayed in France as America’s first diplomat there. Franklin returned to American in 1785. Even after the age of 80, Franklin attended the Constitutional Convention from 1775 to 1776. The US Constitution was created in September 1787 and ratified in June 1788. He initially owned and dealt in slaves but, by the 1750s, he argued against slavery from an economic perspective and became one of the most prominent abolitionists. Franklin had a major influence on the emerging science of demography, or population studies. Thomas Malthus is noted for his rule of population growth and credited Franklin for discovering it. In the 1730s and 1740s, Franklin began taking notes on population growth, finding that the American population had the fastest growth rates on earth. Emphasizing that population growth depended on food supplies. Franklin charted the eastbound, Gulf Stream current and named it the “Gulf Stream.” Avoiding this three mile per hour current, save several weeks sailing from Europe to the US. Franklin published his Gulf Stream chart in 1770 in England, but it was completely ignored. He did not discover it, but rather charted/map its general location in the Atlantic. He provided an early response to British surveillance through his own spy network of counter-surveillance and manipulation (aka propaganda). In June 1773 Franklin obtained private letters of governor and lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, that proved they were encouraging the Crown to crack down on Bostonians. The letters were finally leaked to the public in the Boston Gazette in mid-June 1773, causing a political firestorm in Massachusetts and raising significant questions in England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
In April 1783 Congress began to order the demobilization of the army, and Washington gave Major General Henry Knox, age 33, day-to-day command of what remained of the army and Secretary of War. In this role he oversaw the development of coastal fortifications, worked to improve the preparedness of local militia, and oversaw the nation's military activity in the Northwest Indian War. He was formerly responsible for the nation's relationship with the Indian population in the territories it claimed, articulating a policy that established federal government supremacy over the states in relating to Indian nations, and called for treating Indian nations as sovereign. Knox's idealistic views on the subject were frustrated by ongoing illegal settlements and fraudulent land transfers involving Indian lands.
Maj. Gen. Knox also drafted plans for the establishment of a peacetime army, many of whose provisions were eventually implemented. He established two military academies (one naval and one army, the latter occupying the critical base at West Point, and bodies of troops to maintain the nation's borders. (1)
In September 1781, British allied Native Americans, primarily Wyandots and Delawares, were forcibly removed by the Christian Native Americans and the white missionaries from the Moravian villages, and relocating them to a new village on the Sandusky. The missionaries were taken to Detroit and tried for treason by the British—but they were acquitted. At their Sandusky village, Christian Indians were going hungry. In February of 1782, over 100 of them returned to their old Moravian villages in order to harvest the crops they had been forced to leave behind.
In early March 1782, a raiding party by the 160 Pennsylvania militia under Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson, rounded up the Christian Native Americans and accused them of taking part in the ongoing raids into Pennsylvania. They truthfully denied the charges. The Pennsylvanians held a council, and voted to kill them all anyway. Informed of their fate, they spent the night praying and singing hymns.
The next morning, March 8, the Christian Native Americans were killed in pairs as they knelt, their skulls crushed with a mallet. In all, 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children were murdered and then scalped. The corpses were then heaped into the mission buildings, and the town was burned to the ground. The other abandoned Moravian towns were then burned as well. Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre.
Many white Americans were outraged by the Gnadenhutten massacre. This massacre also known as the Moravian massacre was the killing on March 8, 1782, during the American Revolutionary War, of 96 Christian Lenape (Delaware) by colonial American militia from Pennsylvania. The militia attacked Lenape at the Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhütten, Ohio. Many white frontiersmen, embittered by a cruel war unlike anything in the East, voiced support for the militia's actions. No criminal charges were filed.
The Delawares at war with the Americans sought revenge for this massacre. When Lieutenant General George Washington heard about the massacre, he ordered his soldier allow himself to be taken alive. He knew they would be tortured to death. Washington's friend, Colonel William Crawford, was captured and tortured for hours by Delawares and Wyandots before finally being burned at the stake.
Thomas Jefferson the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote of Native Americans as the "merciless Indian Savages." He was known to romanticize Native Americans and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "(W)e shall destroy all of them."
In order to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation a Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia on May 14, 1787. At the Convention, Alexander Hamilton captured the prevailing sentiment: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born; the other the mass of the people … turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government. … Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.”
Hamilton further proposed that both the President and the Senate be appointed (not elected) for life. His vision was but half a step removed from monarchy. Hamilton’s political ally, John Jay, stated the purpose of republicanism was: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” Jay was not a Convention delegate, yet he became the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Historian Jerry Fresia sums up the Founders’ views succinctly: “The vision of the Framers, even for Franklin and Jefferson who were less fearful of the politics of the common people than most, was that of a strong centralized state, a nation whose commerce and trade stretched around the world. In a word, the vision was one of empire where property owners would govern themselves.” (Source: Towards an American Revolution: Exposing the Constitution & Other Illusions, by Jerry Fresia)
“On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings… ‘Our chief danger,’ Randolph announced, ‘arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions. … None of the constitutions’ – he meant those of the states’ governments – ‘have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.’” “Democracy” to the Convention delegates meant the same thing as it does today: “rule by the people.” (Source: Founding Finance William Hogeland)
Under the original Constitution, the House members represented the people who vote for them, while the Senate represented states, not persons, and was therefore not a democratic body, at all. It was generally expected that the Senate would check the democratic House. Indeed, this was the entire purpose of bicameralism wherever it has existed.
Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures (until the 17th Amendment in 1913). It was expected that the Senate would function in Congress as the House of Lords functioned in Parliament: the voice of the aristocracy. Even though Senators are now popularly elected, it is far more difficult to challenge an incumbent because of the prohibitive expense of running a state-wide campaign.
Although US Representatives now run for election in equal-populated districts, until the 1960s, some House members were elected by voters in the whole state (aka at-large). This disadvantaged all but the richest and best-known candidates from winning.
In Philadelphia, for example, a mob kidnapped elected State legislators who were boycotting their State’s convention vote for ratification of the US Constitution, physically dragged them into the state house, and tied them to their chairs in order to force a convention vote.
Two groups the Federalists and the Anti-federalists, debated in the States their State’s ratification. Federalists’ beliefs could be better described as nationalist. The Federalists were instrumental in 1787 in shaping the new US Constitution, which strengthened the national government. The Anti-federalists opposed the ratification of the US Constitution. On June 21, 1788, nine of the 13 states’ conventions ratified the Constitution (as specified in the Constitution’s own Article VII) and the document became the supreme law of the land for those nine states. By 1789, even the democratic holdout Rhode Island had followed suit. (Source: Dissecting American History: A Theme-Based Narrative, Professor Jada Thacker, Ed.D)
The Federalists were a minority in at least six and probably seven states, they ought surely to have been defeated, but they never organized efficiently across all thirteen states. The Anti Federalists’ great success was in forcing the first Congress to establish a bill of rights to ensure the liberties that they felt the Constitution violated.
The first American political party, the Federalist Party, came into being between 1792 and 1794 as a national coalition of bankers and businessmen in support of Alexander Hamilton's fiscal policies. These supporters developed into the organized Federalist Party, which was committed to a fiscally sound and nationalistic government. The only Federalist president was John Adams; although George Washington was broadly sympathetic to the Federalist program, he remained officially non-partisan during his entire presidency.
1786: The first threshing machine was invented. No longer were thousands of men needed to tend the crops, a few would suffice. With fewer jobs, lower wages and no prospects of things improving for these workers the threshing machine placed them on the brink of starvation.
1790: Thomas Saint invents the sewing machine.
President George Washington (April 30, 1789 – March 4, 1797)
The first US Supreme Court appointed in 1789 by President Washington was made up of the landed class, by virtue of their wealth, cohesiveness, and long hold on government, according to Gustavus Myers in his book, History of the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices included a member of an old South Carolina land-holding family, the son and grandson of Royal British judges in Massachusetts, the owner of an old New York land holding family, son of a Royal Governor of Virginia, and a lawyer serving rich clients.
The Secretary of War was the head of the War Department. At first, he was responsible for all military affairs, including naval affairs. In 1798, the Secretary of the Navy was created by statute, and the scope of responsibility for this office was reduced to the affairs of the United States Army.
President Washington dispatched a newly trained army to the Northwest Territory, which decisively defeated the Indian confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1795. The Northwest Territory covered all of the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as the northeastern part of Minnesota.
President Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape." (2) (3)
George Washington was nominally an Anglican but seemed more at home with Deism. Desists believed in God but didn’t necessarily see him as active in human affairs. The god of the Deists was a god of first cause. He set things in motion and then stepped back.
Washington said god was a “supreme architect” of the universe. Washington saw religion as necessary for good moral behavior but didn’t necessarily accept all Christian dogma. He seemed to have a special gripe against communion and would usually leave services before it was offered.
Washington was widely tolerant of other beliefs. He assured America’s Jews that they would enjoy complete religious liberty in America, officially “Christian” nation. He outlines a vision of a multi-faith society where all are free.
Washington wrote, “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”
Pious legends invented after his death, noting Washington’s deep religiosity, such as tales of him praying in the snow at Valley Forge, can be ignored.
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The French involvement in the American War of Independence began with their loans to the United States caused King Louis XVI in 1789 to call an Assembly of Notables wherein he impose new tax laws. As a result France the government was driven to the brink of bankruptcy. France was the most populous country in Europe and crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties.
The French Revolution is generally accepted as covering the period 1789 to 1799, ending with Napoleon’s coup d’éta. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic.
The first of the general causes of the revolution was their feudal regime had been weakened step-by-step and had already disappeared in parts of Europe. The increasingly numerous and prosperous elite of wealthy commoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie—aspired to political power in those countries where it did not already possess it. The peasants, many of whom owned land, had attained an improved standard of living and education and wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of feudalism so as to acquire the full rights of landowners and to be free to increase their holdings. Furthermore, from about 1730, higher standards of living had reduced the mortality rate among adults considerably. Faced with the heavy expenditure that the wars of the 18th century entailed, the rulers of Europe sought to raise money by taxing the nobles and clergy,
The political and administrative face of France was wholly altered: a republic based around elected – mainly bourgeois - deputies replaced a monarchy supported by nobles while the many and varied feudal systems were replaced by new, usually elected institutions which were applied universally across France. As the revolution in France continued, King Louis XVI of France was executed in 1792. Bloody measures called “The Terror”, sent over 16,000 people to the guillotines.
A French historian Reynald Secher has shown there had been genocide during the French Revolution. Prior to 2011, the rebellion in the region in the west of France (1793–1795) was historically noted as an abortive civil war, rather than genocide.
In this part of France, residents became renowned for their piety after Protestants were driven out of the area in the wake of King Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau (1685). Throughout the 18th century, it was culturally, politically and economically, a backwater. The closest major city, Nantes, remains noted for its role in the slave trade. People there seem to have welcomed the French Revolution.. Everybody was annoyed with high levels of taxation. Even the pious were fed up with what they had to pay to the Church. The problem was not so much with the clergy as with parish assemblies which controlled parish finances.
On November 2 1789, the newly-created National Constituent Assembly (NCA) in Paris (formerly the National Assembly) declared that all revenue-generating Church property in France was to be nationalized. On April 19 1790 Revolutionary legislators decided to help themselves to the rest of the Church’s property. It would be sold; the wealth would be redistributed by the Revolutionary government.
On July 12, 1790, the National Constituent Assembly passed a law, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, that completely subordinated the Catholic Church to the Revolutionary government, and forbade Catholic allegiance to any foreign authority (for example, the Vatican, or the Pope). There would be no more recognizing the authority of bishops who had been appointed by non-French powers. Clergy were also ordered to swear allegiance to the Revolutionaries. They were now to be made civil servants, completely subject to the new French state.
Most priests and bishops not only condemned the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but refused to swear the oath. The clergy stood in the way of their plans to conscript three hundred thousand men for the Revolutionary army. On March 6 1793, all Catholic churches not served by “constitutional” clergy were permanently closed. Then the hillbillies with pitchforks took up arms against soldiers.
On November 16 1793, the first of 80 priests “refractory” were drowned together in a boat, instead of wasting a bullet. On December 5th or 6th a further 58 were killed in the same manner; 10 days later drowning was opened up for peasants more generally, and 129 were drowned.
Historian Reynald Secher estimates that just over 117,000 people in the west of France disappeared as a result of the rebellion, out of a population of just over 815,000. This amounts to roughly one in seven people. Though some areas lost half their population or more, with notably heavy losses at Cholet where three fifths of its people killed and houses destroyed. Colleges, libraries and schools were destroyed as well as churches, private houses, farms, workshops and places of business. The people lost 18 percent of its private houses and saw the destruction of 50 percent or more of all habitable buildings. Other consequences of the Crusade for Liberty included a widespread epidemic of venereal disease. I assume from the soldiers raping the woman before they killed them and their children.
Historians have also tried to characterize the extermination of the French people as genocide but met with hostile reaction. The jurist Jacques Villemain argues that the Revolutionary government may fairly be charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide.
General Louis Turreau’s career demonstrates how easily a thirst for blood can be harnessed He was rewarded for his leadership during the Crusade for Liberty, and spent eight years as Napoleon’s ambassador to the United States (1803–1811).
(Source: The French Genocide That Has Been Air-Brushed From History by Jaspreet Singh Boparai https://quillette.com/2019/03/10/the-french-genocide-that-has-been-air-brushed-from-history/?fbclid=IwAR1RNpDwwBnZzzWDGszt7Oq1PH3VwSVWvKVJyNyCQvp7XQUkYIzldWlXWQI#menuopen
When revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain in 1793, the United States sought to remain neutral via a treaty with Great Britain. This treaty angered the French government, which viewed it as a violation of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance between the US and France. French privateers began to seize US vessels, which led to an undeclared war between the two nations.
United States had already declared neutrality in the conflict between Great Britain and revolutionary France, and American legislation was being passed to approve a trade deal with Britain. Also Congress refused to continue repay a debt owed to France on the grounds that the debt had been owed to the French Crown, not to the French Republic after they overthrew their king. The French were outraged and French privateers began seizing American ships trading with Britain and in December 1796, the French government refused to receive the new US minister (ambassador), Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, when he arrived in Paris.
1793: Eli Whitney invents the modern cotton gin. It separated the cotton from the plant’s seeds and leaves. Very little cotton cloth was imported to England before the 1400s and the small amounts that had been imported were used chiefly for candlewicks. Wood and linen were what clothing was made out of. Linen is made from the flax plant. The British desire for cotton cloth imported from India increased the 1600s. The East India Company began importing cotton fabrics from India around 1793. The English did not like paying the Indians for cotton cloth, therefore, part of the reason they invaded India was to import the raw cotton, to turn it into cloth in English factories and then sell the cloth back to the people in India.
President John Adams (March 4, 1797 – March 4, 1801)
The Franco-American War (aka the Quasi-War) was an undeclared war fought mostly at sea between the United States, Batavian Republic, and Great Britain against the French Republic and Spain from 1798 to 1800. In the United States, the conflict was sometimes also referred to as the Undeclared War with France, the Pirate Wars, and the Half-War. The Kingdom of France had been a crucial ally of the United States in the American Revolutionary War since the spring of 1776, and had signed in 1778 a treaty of alliance with the United States.
The French Navy inflicted substantial losses on American shipping. On February 21, 1795, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering reported to Congress that France had seized 316 American merchant ships during the previous eleven months. Furthermore, French marauders cruised the length of the Atlantic seaboard virtually unopposed. The President Adam administration had no warships to combat them, the Navy having been abolished and its last vessel sold in 1785. The US possessed only a flotilla of small revenue cutters and some neglected coastal forts.
Increased depredations by French privateers led to the rebirth of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps to protect the expanding American merchant fleet. Congress authorized the president to acquire, arm, and man not more than 12 ships of up to 22 guns each. Several merchantmen were immediately purchased and converted into ships of war, and construction of the frigate USS Congress resumed. On July 7, 1798, Congress rescinded treaties with France, is considered to be the beginning of the Franco-American War. This was followed two days later with the passage of the Congressional authorization to attack French warships.
The United States won a string of victories in the Caribbean fought at sea. In the Dominican Republic city of Puerto Plata, US marines captured a French privateer under the guns of the forts. George Washington was called out of retirement to head a "provisional army" in case of invasion by France, but President John Adams managed to negotiate a truce, in which France agreed to terminate the prior alliance and cease its piracy.
By the autumn of 1800, the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy, combined with a more conciliatory diplomatic stance by the government of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, had reduced the activity of the French privateers and warships. The Convention of 1800, signed on 30 September, ended the Franco-American War. (4)
John Adams was a Unitarian, although he was raised a Congregationalist and never officially left that church. Adams rejected belief in the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, core concepts of Christian dogma. In his personal writings, Adams makes it clear that he considered some Christian dogma to be incomprehensible.
In February 1756, Adams wrote in his diary about a discussion he had had with a man named Major Greene. Greene was a devout Christian who sought to persuade Adams to adopt conservative Christian views. The two argued over the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. Questioned on the matter of Jesus’ divinity, Greene fell back on an old standby: some matters of theology are too complex and mysterious for we puny humans to understand. Adams wrote, “Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”
Adams on signing the Treaty of Tripoli boldly stated, “[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”
1798: the first successful vaccine, the smallpox vaccine discovered. In the 1700s in Europe smallpox was a leading cause of death, killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year. During the 1900s, still an estimated 300 million to 500 million people died from smallpox worldwide, compared to 100 million from tuberculosis. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977 and it likely no longer is it a disease anymore on Earth.
1799: The first paper making machine was invented. The rise of publishing by the 1700s led to the use of newspapers and cheap editions of popular books, this paper was used for cleansing ones ass with paper.
President Thomas Jefferson (March 4, 1801 – March 4, 1809)
With the American Republic's barely formed, the loyalty of the army posed a particular danger. The military structure with a rigid hierarchy and unquestioning obedience to orders from above was thought to make professional soldiers sympathetic to the values of autocratic rulers. In the early years of the United States’ very identity was tenuous. The federal union was newly knit, and its government untested. There was no certainty that the experiment in democracy would take hold, no inevitability about the survival of liberty, no guarantee about the growth of power and territory. Failure threatened every political choice.
A standing army was always viewed as a threat to democratic, civilian government. Especially in light of the nightmare in France on November 9, 1799, when Napoleon used his troops to sweep aside a government and constitution approved by French voters. For many of the founding generation of Americans, and especially to Thomas Jefferson's followers, it was clear that the republic had to counter this inescapable threat.
George Washington and John Adams sought to gather information on Federalist sympathizers into the US Army and Navy in the mid and late 1790s. After his election, President Jefferson ordered Secretary of War Dearborn to identify the political persuasions of all officers in the Army. As a result some of the rabid Federalist Army officers were dismissed and some promoted who were followers of Jefferson’s Democratic - Republican Party. The Federalist Party was the first American political party, from the early 1790s to 1816, the era of the First Party System, with remnants lasting into the 1820s.
From 1789 to 1797 Federalist Party was built mainly with the support of bankers and businessmen in order to support Alexander Hamilton's fiscal policies. These supporters grew into the Federalist Party committed to a fiscally sound and nationalistic government. The United States' only Federalist president was John Adams; although George Washington was broadly sympathetic to the Federalist program, he remained an independent during his entire presidency. The Federalist policies called for a national bank, tariffs, and good relations with Britain.
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton under President Washington proposed the ambitious economic program that involved assumption of the state debts incurred during the American Revolution, creating a national debt and the means to pay it off, and setting up a national bank. James Madison would later be joined by Jefferson, opposed Hamilton's program.
National income was desperately needed, and the government determined that a great deal of this income would come from import tariffs. Because of rampant smuggling, the need was immediate for strong enforcement of tariff laws, and in August 1790, the United States Congress, urged on by Alexander Hamilton, created the Revenue-Marine (which in 1915 became the US Coast Guard).
Between 1790 and 1798, the Revenue-Marine was the only armed maritime service of the United States, as the Navy had been disbanded. Each cutter master was answerable to and received his sailing orders directly from the Collector of Customs of the port to which his ship was assigned. All crew pay, requests for supplies, arrangements for repairs to the cutter, and mission-specific tasking came directly from the port's Customs House. After the Slave Trade Act of 1794 was enacted, the Revenue-Marine began intercepting slave ships illegally importing slaves into the United States.
Thomas Jefferson skepticism of traditional Christianity is well established. He did not believe in the Trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, original sin and other core Christian doctrines. He was hostile to many conservative Christian clerics, whom he believed had perverted the teachings of that faith.
Jefferson once famously observed to Adams, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
Although not an orthodox Christian, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral teacher. In one of his most unusual acts, Jefferson edited the New Testament, cutting away the stories of miracles and divinity and leaving behind a very human Jesus, whose teachings Jefferson found “sublime.” Jefferson was confident that a coolly rational form of religion would take root in the fertile intellectual soil of America.
Jefferson refused to issue proclamations calling for days of prayer and fasting, saying that such religious duties were no part of the chief executive’s job. His assertion that the First Amendment erects a “wall of separation between church and state.”
Led by Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic - Republican Party denounced most of the Federalist policies, especially the bank and implied powers. Jefferson was convinced that the Federalists had threatened republican government by levying oppressive taxes, stretching the provisions of the Constitution, and subverting civil liberties.
Aaron Burr and Jefferson each received 73 electors’ votes each during the presidential election. Alexander Hamilton, however, regarded Burr as far more dangerous than Jefferson and used all his influence to ensure Jefferson's election.
Hamilton's son, Philip, was killed in a duel in a November 1801 by a man who made critical remarks to Philip about a speech his father had made in July 1801.
In July 1804, Vice President Arron Burr shot and mortally wounded Hamilton (his political rival) in a duel. Burr was indicted for murder in both New York and New Jersey, though these charges were later either dismissed or resulted in acquittal, he was never tried for the illegal duel, and all charges against him were eventually dropped.
Aaron Burr left the Vice-Presidency at the end of his term in 1805 and journeyed into what was then the Western frontier. Burr gathered and began to train an army, on the assumption that Britain would provide him with warships and monetary support. The British did not do so. Burr traveled down the Mississippi river to New Orleans, recruiting frontiersmen, filibusters, adventurers, and others along the way. When he arrived in New Orleans in 1806, he was fervently welcomed by many of the people because of the plan to colonize or conquer the Spanish possessions. Rumors of this plan reached George Washington.
In February and March 1806, United States District Attorney for Kentucky, wrote Jefferson several letters warning him of possible conspiratorial activities by Burr. He warned Jefferson that Burr was meditating the overthrow of his administration and “conspiring against the State.” This letter to Jefferson stated flatly that Burr planned to provoke a rebellion in Spanish-held parts of the West, in order to join them to areas in the Southwest and form an independent nation under his rule. Jefferson alerted Congress of the plan, and ordered the arrest of anyone who conspired to attack Spanish territory. He warned authorities in the West to be aware of suspicious activities. Convinced of Burr’s guilt, Jefferson ordered Burr arrested. Burr was apprehended in late 1806 near Nachez, Mississippi, while attempting to flee into Spanish territory.
Major General James Wilkinson learned of Washington's reaction and decided to inform on Burr to avoid being charged with treason. Wilkinson also had been a co-conspirator with Burr and working for Spain (which I will describe below). In November 1806 a courier arrived in Washington carrying a dispatch for Jefferson. In the dispatch, Wilkinson warned Jefferson about Burr's threatening plan.
Burr was taken back to Richmond, Virginia in February 1807 to stand trial. Burr was charged with treason. The prosecuting US Attorney compiled a list of over 140 witnesses, one of whom was Andrew Jackson. Burr was acquitted due to lack of evidence of treason, but his prospects for a political career were quashed.
President John Adams appointed former President George Washington as Commanding General of the US Army. This happened after Washington had served as president. Washington served about a year and a half, until Washington’s death in December 14, 1799. In June 1800 Major General James B. Wilkinson was appointed the Commanding General of the US Army and he served during bother terms of Jefferson’s presidency until retiring in February 1812.
Wilkinson had been offering advice to the Spanish regarding how to contain American expansion. Aaron Burr had approached an old friend, James Wilkinson; both had served as aides to then Colonel Benedict Arnold during the Quebec expedition. In July 1775, amid concerns that the British might use Quebec as a base for military movements into New York, they authorized an invasion of Quebec via Lake Champlain. And the US mission failed.
Americans had been allowed to trade on the Mississippi River, but they had to pay a hefty tariff to Spain. Wilkinson met with Spanish Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró and managed to convince him to allow Kentucky to have a trading monopoly on the River; in return he promised to promote Spanish interests in the west. He started spying on a trip in April 1787 to New Orleans which was the capital of the Spanish Louisiana colony. Wilkinson spied for money from Spain and they promised to give him a large grant of land. Wilkinson was also in debt at the time.
In 1804 to 1805, Major General Wilkinson had already begun to engage in a plot with Aaron Burr. Wilkinson exchanged secret, coded communications with Aaron Burr regarding Burr's conspiracy to set up an independent nation in the west. While complete details of the plot are still open to debate, they probably included plans to separate Louisiana from the US and perhaps even to conquer Mexico. They had conceived a plan to scheme to organize a revolution in the West, take the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and form them into a separate republic. Burr sought to detach Kentucky from the Union and wrote detailed plans advising the Spanish authorities on the best way to prevent American expansion beyond the Mississippi.
Letters were sent to the first four US presidents warning of Maj. Gen. Wilkinson’s activities. Numerous pamphlets were printed accusing him of being a traitor. In Kentucky an entire newspaper, the Western World, was devoted to exposing him. Accusations of collusion were made by congressmen of every political persuasion. Nor were these charges overlooked. Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, together with half a dozen different secretaries of war, not to mention a score of their cabinet colleagues, were all aware of his close contacts with the Spanish authorities in New Orleans and Madrid. No fewer than four official inquiries were mounted into the allegations against the general but the suspicions about his loyalty were ruled unfounded.
Jefferson, who not only confirmed Wilkinson as Commanding General of the US army, but in 1803 Jefferson commissioned him to take formal possession of the Louisiana Purchase from the French. After arriving in the South, Wilkinson wheeled and dealer in land speculation and lucrative Army contracts and contrived to become governor or surveyor-general of the Mississippi Territory. In 1805 Jefferson also appointed him to the posts of Governor of Louisiana Territory and Commissioner of Indian affairs. He was also administratively in charge of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Wilkinson informed the Spanish of the Lewis and Clark expedition and its secret goal of finding a land route through the Western mountains and to the Pacific Ocean. He suggested to the Spanish that they send armed patrols to intercept the expedition — which the Spanish did. But they fail to find the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Wilkinson administration of Louisiana was so openly corrupt that President Monroe ordered a court-martial in 1811. The court found him not guilty. Following a devastating defeat at Montreal during the War of 1812, Wilkinson retired in disgrace.
Burr left the United States for a self-imposed exile in Europe after his acquittal. He first travelled to England in 1808 in an attempt to gain support for a revolution in Mexico. Upon returning to the United States until 1811, he assumed the surname of "Edwards" and returned to New York to resume his law practice. using a different surname in part to escape from his creditors, as he was deeply in debt. Burr died on September 14, 1836. (Source: An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson, by Andro Linklater)
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The First Barbary War (1801 to 1805) was the first of two wars fought between the United States and the Northwest African Berber Muslim states, known collectively as the Barbary States nominally under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The Barbary States continued to raid US shipping, until the Second Barbary War in 1815 ended the practice.
Capturing US merchant ships and enslaving or ransoming their crews provided the Muslim rulers of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis with wealth and naval power. These were quasi-independent entities nominally belonging to the Ottoman Empire, and the independent Sultanate of Morocco,
The US paid Algiers the ransom, and continued to pay up to $1 million per year over the next 15 years for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. These $1 million payment in ransom and tribute amounted to approximately ten percent of the US government's annual revenues in 1800. The continuing demand for tribute ultimately led to the formation of the United States Department of the Navy, founded in 1798 to prevent further attacks upon American shipping and to end the extremely large demands for tribute.
Although John Adams agreed with Jefferson, he believed that circumstances forced the US to pay tribute until an adequate navy could be built. The US had just fought an exhausting war, which put the nation deep in debt. Federalist and Anti-Federalist forces argued over the needs of the country and the burden of taxation. Jefferson's own Democratic-Republicans and Anti-navalists believed that the future of the country lay in westward expansion, vs. Atlantic trade threatening useless wars in the Old World, which they believe could siphon money and energy away from building America’s new nation. In 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France; the revolution was over, the empire had begun. Napoleonic Wars lasted from 1803 until it ended Waterloo on June 18, 1815. (6)
Americans were having a serious debate about the purpose and function of navy. There were two factions. On one side, there was the group that has come to be called the “navalists,” who saw the Royal Navy as its model. For them, the new navy should be the most effective expression and symbol of the nation’s power, honor, and prestige as well as a potent and capable and effective fighting force that played a major role in the world balance of power as an instrument of political influence. Their ideal was to use American naval force as an arbiter in world politics. This navy’s potential capabilities could serve as a continual deterrent to aggression as well as show America’s power abroad while her ships protected American commerce and interests abroad. In opposition to this view, another group, who have come to be called the “anti-navalists.” This group saw use for a navy, but argued that the navalists’ vision was impractical and far too costly. Their navy would be a sea-going militia force, smaller in size, with vessels whose capabilities were limited to a very few vessels operating singly on distant stations with the emphasis in home waters on coastal protection and the suppression of piracy. For much of the first century of the new country’s existence, the anti-navalists held sway over American naval policy, but there remained a constant tension between the two viewpoints. By and large, the leaders of the young nation was satisfied to accept the benefits that came indirectly to the United States from the Royal Navy’s exercise of global naval power
President Jefferson refused the demand to pay tribute to Tripoli. Consequently, on May 10, 1801, the Tripoli declared war on the US, not through any formal written documents but in the customary Barbary manner of cutting down the flagstaff in front of the US Consulate. Algiers and Tunis did not follow their ally in Tripoli.
In response, President Jefferson sent a small force to the area to protect American ships and citizens against potential aggression, but insisted that he was “unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense." He told Congress: "I communicate [to you] all material information on this subject, that in the exercise of this important function confided by the Constitution to the Legislature exclusively their judgment may form itself on a knowledge and consideration of every circumstance of weight."
Although Congress never voted on a formal declaration of war, they did authorize the President to instruct the commanders of armed American vessels to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli "and also to cause to be done all such other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war will justify." A Pasha was a governor and had a rank similar to a Lieutenant General or General. Only a Sultan was the sovereign commander in chief.
In Virginia, it hardly seemed appropriate to support the Episcopalian Church with tax dollars. Thomas Jefferson helped win the battle for religious freedom in Virginia. The Congregational Puritan churches in New England held on longer; however, by 1833, all states abandoned the practice of a state-supported church.
In June 1802, a group of Tlingit warriors (Native Alaskans) attacked a Russian fort.. The Battle of Sitka (1804) was the last major armed conflict between Russians and Alaska Natives, and was initiated in response to the destruction of a Russian trading post two years before. The Alaskan Natives were permanently displaced from their ancestral lands. They fled north and reestablished an old settlement. Animosity though greatly diminished between Russians and Alaska Natives, continued in the form of sporadic attacks by the natives against the Russian settlement as late as 1858.
In 1826, Thomas Jefferson was at one of the lowest points of his life of 83 years. In February his beloved eldest granddaughter, Ann Cary Randolph Bankhead, had died after childbirth. She had suffered abuse from her alcoholic husband, and Jefferson tried his best to support her. But now everything was crumbling. He was in so much debt from mismanaging Monticello that he and his grandson petitioned the Virginia General Assembly for permission to raise cash through a lottery. People around the country felt embarrassed for the country’s third president and sent a few donations. Jefferson’s family tried to shield him from the truth, but he was going to lose Monticello.
Jefferson was born into a world that accepted monarchy and all that went along with it — social hierarchy, wars brought on by disputes between royals, established churches that ran everyday people’s lives. He built his world on slave labor and most likely fathered children with an African American woman he owned. And he supported the idea that blacks would one day have their own nation that would “meet Americans as an equal among nations. That was the position of the founders who spoke about this matter.” (Source: Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination, by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf)
1804: Morphine was discovered to use as a pain killer and was the first active alkaloid extracted from the opium poppy plant.
1804: the steam (train/rail) locomotive was invented.
1804: was the first general anesthetic for surgery. The stuff was composed of extracts of several different plants whose properties were discovered from Chinese herbal medicine. The active ingredients of this mixture are scopolamine, hyoscyamine, atropine, aconitine, and angelicotoxin.
1807: the first internal combustion engine capable of doing useful work was invented.
1807: the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine fuelled by hydrogen was developed.
1807: Robert Fulton expands water transportation and trade with the workable steamboat.
1809 to 1810: During the first years of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) one of the factors forcing military campaigns to the summer and autumn months was the limited food availability in the other times of the year. In 1809 a French confectioner and brewer, observed that food cooked inside a jar did not spoil unless the seals leaked, and developed a method of sealing food in glass jars. The reason for lack of spoilage was unknown at the time, since it would be another 50 years before Louis Pasteur demonstrated the role of microbes in food spoilage.
Canned food: Canning in metal cans is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a shelf life typically ranging from one to five years, although under specific circumstances it can be much longer.
President James Madison (March 4, 1809 to 1817)
When the United Kingdom and France went to war again in 1803, the United States sought to remain neutral while pursuing overseas trade. This proved difficult and the United States finally declared war on the United Kingdom in 1812, the War of 1812. Two incidents that resulted in war were the restrictions on the US trade with France because of the British war against France and second Britain started were taking sailors off of American merchant ships forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy. During the War of 1812, James Monroe served in critical roles as Secretary of State and the Secretary of War. This war ended in a stalemate and fighting gradually ended in about 1815. On both sides, roughly three times as many soldiers and Indian warriors died from diseases than from combat.
It was the first time the US had officially declared war. After defeating Napoleon in 1814, the United Kingdom was able to send troops from Europe to the United States. In August 1814, the British set fire to many public buildings in Washington DC, including the White House, and the Capitol, as well as other facilities of the US government.
The attack was in part of the retaliation for the recent American destruction of Port Dover in Upper Canada. At the instigation of an American Army Lieutenant Colonel, he ordered his soldiers set fire to every building in the settlement: twenty houses, three flour mills, three sawmills, three distilleries, twelve barns and some other buildings. All livestock was shot, and their bodies left to rot. There was no plundering. Although the local women and children were allowed to remove their personal possessions from their houses before they were set on fire, they were able to remove only small items, so this was an empty gesture. Almost all the Canadian’s flour in the settlement (several hundred barrels) had already been removed to safety. The United States Army to hold a Court of Enquiry. The Lieutenant Colonel was found to have made an error of judgment in destroying private houses. No further disciplinary action was taken. Destroying Canadian infrastructure was meant to starve the threatening British.
British offensive was defeated by Major General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. By this time, US diplomats in Europe had worked out a peace treaty. Florida was annexed into the United States during this war. The real losers in this war were the Native Indians (aka “First Nations” as the aboriginal people were called in Canada) who had suffered the heaviest casualties.
Following the War of 1812, a spirit of nationalism pervaded the nation, evident in the creation of a second Bank of the United States; enactment of a tariff to protect industry, and a series of Supreme Court decisions strengthening the power of the central government. The United States acquired Florida from Spain, convinced Russia and Spain to relinquish their claims to the Oregon country, and delivered a strong warning, in the Monroe Doctrine, that European powers were not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere.
In President Madison first inaugural address, he stated that the federal government's duty was to convert the American Indians by the "participation of the improvements of which the human mind and manners are susceptible in a civilized state". Like President Jefferson, Madison had a paternalistic attitude toward American Indians, encouraging the men to give up hunting and become farmers. Although there are scant details, Madison often met with Southeastern and Western Indians who included the Creek and Osage. As pioneers and settlers moved west into large tracts of Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw territory, Madison ordered the US Army to protect Native lands from intrusion by settlers, to the chagrin of his military commander Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson.
In terms of slavery and the Constitution, James Madison viewed African American slaves as an "unfortunate race" and believed their true nature was both human and property. Like other Virginia statesmen, he was a slaveholder who inherited his plantation and owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime to cultivate tobacco and other crops. Madison became known as a protégé of Thomas Jefferson. Madison attained prominence in Virginia politics, working with Jefferson to draft the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
When Jefferson was in France, he was kept informed about the developments at the Philadelphia Convention by letters from James Madison. Jefferson generally supported the Constitution with the addition of a Bill of Rights. Few in the new Congress wanted to debate a possible Bill of Rights. As the youngest delegate to the Continental Congress (1780 to 1783), Madison pressed the issue. Most Congressmen for the next century thought that the Declaration of Independence constituted the true Bill of Rights, not the first ten constitutional amendments.
James Madison is perhaps the most perplexing of all the founders when it comes to religion. To this day, scholars still debate his religious views.
Nominally Anglican, Madison was really a Deist. He went through a period of enthusiasm for Christianity as a young man, but Madison was notoriously reluctant to talk publicly about his religious beliefs.
Madison was perhaps the strictest church-state separationist among the founding fathers. He opposed government-paid chaplains in Congress and in the military. As president, Madison rejected a proposed census because it involved counting people by profession. Madison said, for the government to count the clergy, would violate the First Amendment.
Madison, who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, also opposed government-issued prayer proclamations. He issued a few during the War of 1812 at the insistence of Congress but later concluded that his actions had been unconstitutional. As president, he vetoed legislation granting federal land to a church and a plan to have a church in Washington care for the poor through a largely symbolic charter. In both cases, he cited the First Amendment.
From 1814 to 1825, there was an undeclared war in Caribbean. Engagements between pirates and American ships or squadrons took place repeatedly especially ashore and offshore about Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Yucatan. Three thousand pirate attacks on merchantmen were reported between 1815 and 1823. In 1822 Commodore James Biddle employed a squadron of two frigates, four sloops of war, two brigs, four schooners, and two gunboats in the West Indies.
Major General Andrew Jackson was a forceful proponent of Indian removal. In 1814 he commanded the US military forces that defeated a faction of the Creek nation. In their defeat, the Creeks lost 22 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama.
In 1814, during the War of 1812, the British Royal Marines established Negro Fort along the Spanish side of the Apalachicola River. Shortly after the end of the war in 1815, the British
withdrew from the post and left about 300 African Americans and 30 Seminole and Choctaw Indians in charge of the fort, As many as 800 black fugitives settled in the surrounding area. Over the next few years the fort became a colony for escaped slaves from Pensacola and Georgia.
When British forces threatened New Orleans, MG Jackson took command of the defenses, including militia from several western states and territories. His soldiers said he was "tough as old hickory" wood on the battlefield. They gave him the nickname of "Old Hickory." In the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, Jackson's 5,000 soldiers won a decisive victory over 7,500 British. At the end of the battle, the British suffered 291 dead (including three senior generals), 1,262 wounded, and 484 captured or missing. The Americans had 71 casualties: 13 dead, 39 wounded, and 19 missing.
During the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson, at age thirteen, joined a local militia as a courier. On June 20, 1779, his eldest brother, Hugh, died from heat exhaustion during a battle. Jackson and his brother Robert were captured by the British and held as prisoners; they nearly starved to death in captivity. When Andrew refused to clean the boots of a British officer, the officer slashed at him with a sword, leaving scars on his left hand and head, as well as an intense hatred for the British. While imprisoned, the Andrew Jackson and his brother contracted smallpox. His brother died as a result. In 1801 at 34, he was appointed a Colonel in the Tennessee militia. In 1802 he was elected as a Major General and commander of the Tennessee militia.
In March of 1816, under mounting pressure from Georgia slaveholders, Maj. Gen. Jackson petitioned the Spanish Governor of Florida to destroy the settlement. At the same time, he instructed Major General Edmund P. Gaines, commander of US military forces "in the Creek nation," to destroy the fort and "restore the stolen negroes and property to their rightful owners." MG Jackson then dispatched gunboats to reduce Negro Fort. A cannon shot entered the opening to the Fort's powder magazine igniting an explosion that destroyed the fort and its occupants.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams justified the attack and subsequent seizure of Spanish Florida by MG Jackson as national "self-defense," a response to alleged Spanish and British complicity in fomenting the "Indian and Negro War." Adams even produced a letter from a Georgia planter complaining about "brigand Negroes" who made "this neighborhood extremely dangerous to a population like ours." Fort Negro was a symbol of slave insurrection. Southern leaders worried that even a small, impoverished island of rebel slaves in the Caribbean or a parcel of Florida land occupied by a few hundred blacks could threaten the institution of slavery.
1816: the first working electric telegraph using electrostatic means was invented.
President James Monroe (March 4, 1817 to March 4, 1825)
Monroe rose to national prominence as a diplomat in France, when he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. He fought in the American Revolutionary War and was wounded in the shoulder by a musket ball. After studying law under Thomas Jefferson from 1780 to 1783, he served as a delegate in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789. In 1790 he was elected to the Senate of the first United States Congress, where he joined the Democratic-Republican Party.
Under the successful diplomacy of his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the United States, in addition to the acquisition of Florida an 1819 treaty secured the westernmost section of the southern border of the United States along the 42nd Parallel to the Pacific Ocean.
A severe economic depression, the Panic of 1819, and a bitter controversy over slavery in Missouri in 1819 and 1820, provoked growing political divisions and a deepening sectional split between North and South.
More undeclared wars
1816-1818 -- Spanish Florida - First Seminole War:
In December 1817 Jackson was ordered by President Monroe to lead a campaign in Georgia against the Seminole and Creek Indians. The Seminole Indians, whose area was a resort for escaped slaves and border ruffians. Maj. Gen. Jackson's troops invaded Spanish Florida, spurred in part by the motivation to punish the Seminoles for their practice of harboring fugitive slaves. Spanish posts were attacked and occupied, British citizens executed. In 1819 Florida was ceded to the United States.
Though relations between Europeans (and later Americans) and Native Americans were often peaceful, they increasingly grew tense and sometimes violent, both on the part of American settlers and the Indians. From George Washington to John Quincy Adams, the problem violence by both sides was typically ignored or dealt with lightly. The problem was especially acute in the south (in particular the lands near the state of Georgia), where Naïve American populations were larger, denser, and more Americanized than those of the north. There had developed a growing popular and political movement to deal with the problem, and out of this developed a policy to relocate certain Indian populations.
The Second Seminole War, started in December 1835, lasted over six years, finally ending in August 1842 under President John Tyler. Jackson was President from 1829–1837.
1818 -- Oregon. The USS Ontario dispatched from Washington, landed at the Columbia River and in August took possession of Oregon territory. Britain had conceded sovereignty but Russia and Spain asserted claims to the area.
1824 -- Puerto Rico (Spanish territory). Commodore David Porter with a landing party attacked the town of Fajardo which had been sheltering pirates and insulted American naval officers. He landed with 200 men in November and forced an apology. Commodore Porter was later court-martialed for overstepping his powers. (7)
In the 1820s Cherokees were given blankets infested with small pox bacteria when they were evicted from Georgia in the infamous Trail of Tears march to the Oklahoma territory. (8)
In 1823 the US Supreme Court handed down a decision which stated that Indians could occupy lands within the United States, but could not hold title to those lands. This was because their "right of occupancy" was subordinate to the United States' right of discovery." In response to the great threat this posed, the Creeks, Cherokee, and Chickasaw instituted policies of restricting land sales to the government.
Although the five Indian nations had made earlier attempts at resistance, many of their strategies were non-violent. One method was to adopt Anglo-American practices such as large-scale farming, western education, and slave-holding. This earned the nations the designation of the Five Civilized Tribes. They adopted this policy of assimilation in an attempt to coexist with settlers and ward off hostility. But it only made white’s jealous and resentful.
The Cherokee used legal means in their attempt to safeguard their rights. They sought protection from land-hungry white settlers, who continually harassed them by stealing their livestock, burning their towns, and squatting on their land.
In 1831, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole (sometimes collectively referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes) were living as autonomous nations in what would be called the American deep south. The Choctaw nation was in what are now the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the Seminole in Florida, the Creek in Alabama, and the Cherokee in North Carolina.
The process of cultural transformation proposed by George Washington and Henry Knox was gaining momentum, especially among the Cherokee and Choctaw.
1824: the bolt-action rifle was invented.
1825: the electromagnet was invented.
1826: the match that could ignite via friction was invented.
1828: a mechanical reapers used to cut the grass (hay) was invented. In 1837 as a horse-drawn reapers was invented to cut small grain crops like wheat, barley and oats. Hand reaping continued to the present to be done by hand, cutting the grain stalks with a sickle, cutting them with a scythe.
1829: the first true center fire cartridge (bullets) However, it would not be perfected until 1855.
1829: the compound air compressor is invented.
President Andrew Jackson (March 4, 1829 – March 4, 1837)
With the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, President Jackson was the first President to implement removal of the Native Americans. The removal was supposed to be voluntary and peaceful, and was that way for the tribes that agreed to the conditions. But the southeastern nations resisted and Jackson forced them to leave,
Map of where aboriginal/native American Indians were removed/Ethnic Cleansed 1830-1835.
By 1837, Native Americans from these southeastern nations had been removed from their homelands. In 1838 and 1839, as part of the Indian removal policy of President Andrew Jackson and his Secretary of War, Lewis Cass, the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw tribes were forced to give up their lands in the southeastern parts of the United States east of the Mississippi River. In the winter, they were marched to the eastern sections in present-day Oklahoma. European Americans and African American freedmen and slaves also were forced to move there. Of the 16,542 Cherokees who stated out and some 2,000 to 6,000 died of starvation, exposure, and disease. This march is called “Trail of Tears.” (9) (10)
In 1831 the Choctaw were the first to be removed, and they became the model for all other removals. After the Choctaw, the Seminole were removed in 1832, the Creek in 1834, then the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838 for a total of some 46,000 Native Americans. On November 1, 1831 the first group of Choctaws encountered flash floods, sleet, and snow.
Initially they were transported by wagon but floods halted operation. The temperature stayed below freezing for almost a week with the rivers clogged with ice. Food rationing consisted of a handful of boiled corn and one turnip.
Nearly 17,000 Choctaws made the move and about 2,500 to 6,000 died. Approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Choctaws remained in Mississippi in 1831 after the initial removal efforts. The Choctaws who chose to remain in newly formed Mississippi "have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died." (11)
Seminole Indians in Florida began a seven-year war to resist forced removal to the West. In 1837, Colonel Zachary Taylor was directed to Florida and he defeated the Seminole Indians.
Bad Axe River Massacre
President Andrew Jackson’s administration ordered Major General Winfield Scott's 1,000 regulars and 300 mounted volunteers into action.
In about 1828, Brevet Major General Edmund P. Gaines was given Command of the Western Department of the US Army and commanded it during the Black Hawk War. Major General was at the time the highest rank in the Army. 1n 1830, MG Gaines opposed President Andrew Jackson's policy of Indian removal. He was still in command of the department during the Seminole Wars in which he personally led an expedition. At the Battle of Ouithlacoochie he was wounded in the mouth. In the war of 1812 he also was wounded by artillery fire.
In 1836, he was placed in command of the Southwest Military District and remained in command at the outbreak of the Mexican-American War (April 25, 1846 – February 2, 1848) He was given orders to post guards preventing any US soldiers from crossing into Texas and fighting in the rebellion. He was reprimanded by the US government for overstepping his authority by calling up Louisiana volunteers for Major General Zachary Taylor's army. He nevertheless called up volunteers from other southwestern states and received a court-martial but was able to successfully defend himself. He was in command of the Western Division when he died on June 6, 1849.
Brevet Brigadier General Henry Atkinson was in overall command of 6th US Infantry during the Black Hawk War. In 1833 a larger-scale cholera epidemic affected large regions of the United States likely was spread by Major General Winfield Scott’s expedition.
Colonel Zachary Taylor commanded the 1st Infantry Regiment under BG Henry Atkinson.
In April 1832, Chief Black Hawk, with some 400 braves and their families, returned to Illinois. Not receiving the support he expected, he admitted defeat, but when a member of his three-man, parley team (peaceful emissaries) was shot down in cold blood by the Illinois militia, Chief Black Hawk successfully attacked a larger white force. He then retired into what is now Wisconsin. Major Isaiah Stillman was the commander of this Illinois militia group.
The Bad Axe Massacre occurred on August, 1 to August 2, 1832, between Sauk (Sac) and Fox Indians and United States Army regulars and militia. This final battle of the Black Hawk War took place near present-day Victory, Wisconsin. It marked the end of the war between white settlers and militias in Illinois and Michigan Territory, and the Sauk and Fox tribes under Chief Black Hawk. The Battle of Bad Axe, one of the last major battles during the Black Hawk War, was fought by US soldiers against the combined forces of the Sauk (Sac) and Fox tribes.
The battle occurred in the aftermath of the Battle of Wisconsin Heights, as Black Hawk's band fled the pursuing militia. The militia caught up with them on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, a few miles downstream from the mouth of the Bad Axe River. The battle that followed was very one-sided. The fighting took place over two days, with the Warrior steamboat present on both days. By the second day, Black Hawk and most of the Native American commanders had fled, though many of the band stayed behind.
Trapped, Chief Black Hawk displayed a white flag, but this was ignored and almost all of his tribe 850 people, including women and children, were killed. Black Hawk himself escaped, surrendered to the Winnebago tribe, was turned over for imprisonment, and was released in 1833.
Abraham Lincoln served in Reynolds' militia during the time of the Black Hawk War, but never saw action.
President Jackson’s detractors and critics said he was “pleasingly vague”. He was willful, vindictive, and ignorant. Anyone who did not endorse his actions he regarded as a personal enemy. He confused personal enemies with enemies of the State. He felt that he had a right to override precedent when it was expedient. He considered himself above the law. He considered himself wiser than all his predecessors. He attempted to govern independently of Congress. He rejected the principle of Separation of Powers and the doctrine Checks and Balances. He repudiated the principle of Judicial Review. He believed that the president, not Congress, was the chief instrument and interpreter of the people's will. He claimed that he and he alone knew what was best for the country. In every way, he met the classical definition of a tyrant.
Those who portray Andrew Jackson as the herald of a New Age, the Age of the Common Man, see him thus primarily because of his conflict with president of the Second Bank of the United States. Nicholas Biddle (1822 to 1836), his stand on the issue of tariffs, and his position on Nullification. Nullification was the doctrine that States had a right to ignore Acts of Congress - like tariffs - when they deemed them contrary to their interests.
The Bank of the United States was chartered by Congress to be the bank of the United States; that is, it would be the bank where the national government deposited all the money it received from the sale of western lands, tariffs, etc., etc. That money would then be loaned to private individuals to finance the development of the country’s infrastructure. In 1833, Jackson ignored expert advice and refused to sign the legislation Congress passed re-chartering the Bank then, he withdrew the government’s deposits from the Bank and re-deposited them in various state-owned banks. Jackson's enemies referred to them as "pet banks". Just as the experts predicted, first there was an inflationary boom, fueled by land speculation, then the economy went bust.
Jackson’s views on political economy ran contrary to the prevailing views of the US elite, which were strictly laissez faire. He opposed the re-chartering of the Bank, and protective tariff, the other great issue of the day, because he believed they favored the interests of the few at the expense of the nation as a whole. Protective tariffs were a byproduct of something called the American system. A system whereby the Industrial East provided a domestic market for southern cotton, and western grain and meat, and the South and West provided a market for eastern manufacturers. Eastern manufacturers would be protected by high tariffs so that cheaply manufactured foreign goods would still cost more that domestically produced goods. The South, the West, and Andrew Jackson were opposed to high tariffs; but when the Southern states, citing the Tenth Amendment, claimed they had the right to nullify or to ignore acts of Congress they didn’t support. It was said, Jackson was all for State-rights, except when he was against them; and he was against them when they threatened the cohesion of the Union.
As Jackson understood the Constitution, everyone is subject to the same laws; that was what bound the States together. You don’t have one set of laws for one group of people and another set of laws for everyone else. Or, one group of people isn’t exempted from obeying a law that everyone else has to follow. He also believed that when the Government passed laws that exclusively benefited one group of people at the expense of everyone else, the people had a right to complain. (Source: Patrick Hayes)
Nullification by States:
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison set forth the theories of nullification and interposition in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798 which was about Congress's passages of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 argued that each individual state has the power to declare that federal laws are unconstitutional and void.
The Alien and Sedition Acts made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act). It allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act of 1798) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemy Act of 1798), and criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act of 1798).
The Federalists argued that the bills strengthened national security during an undeclared naval war with France. Critics argued that they were primarily an attempt to suppress voters who disagreed with the Federalist Party, and violated the right of freedom of speech in the First Amendment.
Courts at the state and federal level, including the US Supreme Court, repeatedly have rejected the theory of nullification. The courts have decided that under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, federal law is superior to state law, and that under Article III of the Constitution, the federal judiciary has the final power to interpret the Constitution. Therefore, the power to make final decisions about the constitutionality of federal laws lies with the federal courts, not the states, and the states do not have the power to nullify federal laws. The US Civil War basically ended the debate about this.
Mexican–Texas War
In 1834, General Santa Anna became the dictator of Mexico. He decided to quash the semi-independence of Texas. Stephen F. Austin called Texans to arms; they declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and thereafter Santa Anna massacred Texans at the Alamo. The Texas-Mexico war lasted from October 2, 1835 to April 21, 1836. The war was won after Major General Sam Houston led the Republic of Texas Army, of 600 to 1,500 soldiers to victory over a portion of the Mexican Army under Santa Anna. He was captured shortly after the battle. The Republic of Texas was the result when this war ended. This war at sea between Mexico and Texas would continue into the 1840s.
Sam Houston fought during the War of 1812. He was promoted in the US Army from private to third lieutenant, and he was wounded in the groin by an Indian arrow. Later he received two gunshot wounds, and recovered in a hospital. Houston moved from the state of Virginia to Tennessee. He spent time with the Cherokee tribe and married a Cherokee woman. He was elected as US Representative from Tennessee and later Governor of the State. After the Mexican-Texas War he was elected the first and third President of the Republic of Texas. After Texas became a US State, Houston was elected as US Senator and as Governor. In 1861 he refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy when Texas seceded from the Union. Whereupon he retired as the Governor.
Martin Van Buren (March 4, 1837 – March 4, 1841)
1839: the steam engine powered excavating machine invented (aka the steam shovel) using wire ropes and pulleys.
More undeclared Wars
July 1840 -- Fiji Islands - Naval forces landed to punish natives for attacking American exploring and surveying parties.
February 24, 1841 -- Samoa - after the murder of an American seaman on Upolu Island, a naval party landed and burned towns. (12)
John Tyler (April 4, 1841 – March 4, 1845)
1842: a doctor first used ether as a general anesthetic during surgery. By the time the American Civil War broke out in 1861, both ether and chloroform had been developed around the 1840s. Chloroform soon emerged as the more widely used, as it took action faster and was non-flammable. Chloroform (aka trichloromethane) was first prepared through the chlorination of methane gas in 1831.
1842: superphosphate was invented, the first man-made fertilizer.
1842: in Massachusetts a law was passed limiting children under twelve years old to a maximum of working ten hours per day.
1845: “Portland cement” was developed to become the most common type of a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco, and non-specialty grout after water is added. Something called clinker is made in a kiln and it is part of making cement, I guess.
Concrete was used by the Romans for the foundations of large buildings, such as the Colosseum, bridges and temples. By using concrete they were able to make use of the dome. By the middle of the 1st century, the principles of underwater construction in concrete were well known to Roman builders. They developed underwater concrete technology on a large scale. After the fire in 64 AD, which destroyed large portions of Roman city, the new building code by Nero consisted of largely brick-faced concrete. This appears to have encouraged the development of the brick and concrete industries.
Concrete technology took a huge leap in the 1700s. He discovered in 1774 that quicklime made a harder cement. In 1793 he took that discovery another step forward when he realized that the calcinations of limestone that contained clay produced hydraulic lime, a lime that hardens under water. This technology was used in 1816 to build the world's first unreinforced concrete bridge in Souillac, France. 1824 when an English bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin made an important discovery. He learned that burning finely ground chalk with divided clay in a lime kiln produced a cement that is much stronger than the previously used crushed limestone cement.
In the 20 years after the Civil War the open-range cattle industry dominated the Great Plains, then died and was replaced by closed-range ranching and stock farming.
President James K. Polk (March 4, 1845 – March 4, 1849)
President Polk claimed the Rio Grande river boundary, and this provoked a dispute with Mexico. In June 1845, President Polk sent Major General Zachary Taylor to Texas, and by October, 3,500 Americans were on the Nueces River, prepared to defend Texas from a Mexican invasion. Texas agreed to the offer of annexation by the US Congress and Texas became a state on December 29, 1845.
President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for a war, saying that Mexico had shed American blood upon the American soil. President Polk, a slave-owning aristocrat, coveted half of Mexico. The US Congress declared war on Mexico on May 13, 1846. During the war, the telegraph lines/wires were deployed and updated people with the latest news from the reporters, who were usually on the scene.
Alfred Vail developed the Morse Code for the telegraph and in 1838 he successfully demonstrated it as a messaging capability. In 1843, the US began work on the first city-to-city line between Washington and Baltimore.
The Mexican–American War was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 US annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution. In addition to a naval blockade of the Mexican coast, American forces invaded and conquered New Mexico, California, and parts of northern Mexico. Another American army captured Mexico City, forcing Mexico to agree to the sale of its northern territories to the US.
Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna attacked MG Taylor with 20,000 men at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847, leaving around 700 Americans dead or wounded at a cost of over 1,500 Mexican soldiers dead.
President Polk sent by ship a second army under Major General Winfield Scott, which was transported to the port of Veracruz by, to begin an invasion of the Mexican heartland. On March 9, 1847, Scott performed the first major amphibious landing in the history of the United States in preparation for the Siege of Veracruz. Included in the invading force were Robert E. Lee, George Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.
The Mexican army fought against a numerically superior American army, and Mexico surrendered the city after 12 days under siege. US troops suffered 80 casualties, while the Mexican side had around 180 killed and wounded, about half of whom were civilian. During the siege, the US soldiers began to fall victim to yellow fever.
As a result of this war, the US suffered 13, 283 causalities and Mexico approximately 16,000 casualties. Of these deaths, only about 1.5 percent was from actual combat (approximately 195 soldiers); the rest stemmed from disease and unsanitary conditions during the war. It is also estimated that, if post-war deaths from war-related causes are counted, the combined US casualty rate for the war was very high, 30 to 40 percent. Mexican casualties remain somewhat of a mystery, and are estimated at 25,000.
US Army Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant served in Mexico under Major General Taylor and Grant wrote; "The occupation, separation and annexation [of Texas] were ... a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union….Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” (13) (14)
A group of several hundred immigrant soldiers, mostly Irish-American, deserted and joined the Mexican army (treason) calling themselves the San Patricio (St. Patrick) Battalion. They were later captured by the US Army. The punishment for desertion was death.
Major General Winfield Scott's army was still facing a dangerous enemy and possible insurgency, so he placed the prisoners before courts martial to have them settle it. MG Scott knew that the deserters were Irish-born Catholics, who had deserted Taylor's army because they allegedly felt mistreated and had witnessed atrocities "sufficient to make Heaven weep" against fellow Catholics who were Mexicans. He concluded that some men deserved less punishment than was order by their court martial. In the end he approved the death penalty for 50 of the 72
deserters, but later pardoned five and reduced the sentence of fifteen others, including the ringleader, Sergeant John Riley. (13)
MG Scott served as the military governor of Mexico City.
For his valor at Lundy's Lane, Scott received a brevet (an honorary promotion) to major general to date from July 25, 1814. However, the severity of his wounds prevented his return to active duty for the remainder of the war. He served as Commanding General of the United States Army for 20 years, longer than any other holder of the office. Maj. Gen. Scott earned the nickname of "Old Fuss and Feathers" for his insistence on military appearance and discipline in the Army. (14)
MG Scott, nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers,” he served 53-years on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history. In March of 1814, he was promoted at the young age of 27 to Brigadier General. Maybe his being six feet, five inches tall had a lot to do with this promotion. In addition to the Mexican-American War, he commanded troops in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War, and briefly during the Civil War.
In 1952, MG Scott ran for President of the United States as a Whig Party candidate. The Whig Party refused to nominate President Millard Fillmore. Winfield Scott lost the election to Democrat Franklin Pierce. In 1855 Scott a brevet promotion to Lieutenant General, becoming the second American to hold this rank since George Washington.
The Winnemem Wintu are a band of the Native American Wintu tribe originally located along the lower McCloud River, above Shasta Dam near Redding, California. The Winnemem band state that in 1854, 42 Winnemem men, women, and children were killed by white settlers at Kaibai Creek, California. This action has become known as the Kaibai Creek Massacre.
In the mid to late 1980s, the Winnemem Wintu argue that they were accidentally erased from the Bureau of Indian Affairs list of recognized tribes. They have not been able to regain this recognition. (15)
1847: Nitroglycerin was invented. It was the first explosive made that was stronger than black powder.
1848: the pneumatic drill was invented (aka the jackhammer).
Zachary Taylor (March 4, 1849 – July 9, 1850)
Millard Fillmore (July 9, 1850 – March 4, 1853)
1852: when a steam-powered machine brick-making machine was invented. The first bricks were made by hand in the English colonies in North America, probably in Virginia as early as 1612. New England saw its first brick kiln erected at Salem, Massachusetts in 1629. Some bricks were imported from Europe. The clay was dug from the shore or from under bodies of water (such as the Hudson River). Beach sand was mixed in very well and improved the quality of the brick. The clay was screened to remove rocks and baked in a kiln. Brick-making centers developed in Albany, New York; near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Burlington. As railroads were built, bricks were moved by trains.
1852: the safety brake for elevators was invented.
More undeclared wars
1853-1854 -- Japan - Commodore Perry and his expedition made a display of force leading to the "opening of Japan" and the Perry Expedition.
1853-1854 -- Ryukyu and Bonin Islands - Commodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration, twice landing marines and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa; he also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands with the purpose of securing facilities for commerce.
Franklin Pierce (March 4, 1853 – March 4, 1857)
1853: iron-reinforced concrete was invented. Concrete's has a relatively low tensile strength, so embedding steel reinforcing bars in the liquid concrete mix before it sets (get hard, turns into concrete), makes it stronger.
1855: the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron, decreasing the cost, from £40 per long ton to £6–7 per long ton.
James Buchanan (March 4, 1857 – March 4, 1861)
October 6 to 16, 1858 -- Fiji Islands - A marine expedition chastised natives for the murder of two American citizens at Waya.
1856: the world's first practical ice making machine and refrigerator was invented.
1859: the lead acid battery, the first rechargeable battery was it invent.
In July 13, 1854 the US Navy fired cannons for two hours onto the town Greytown (another source says it was the town of San Juan del Norte) located at the mouth of the San Juan River in Nicaragua. After that US Marines set fire and burnt the remains of the town. The attack was an act of revenge for attempting to charge taxes and duties on the yacht Cornelius Vanderbilt for use of the port. Vanderbilt's steam yacht North Star was the first one in the US and was launched in 1854. Steam yachts were commissioned by wealthy individuals and often heads of state as extravagant symbols of wealth and/or power. (Source: A Norm Chomski lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZRsdHgxgA&
and US Presidents and Foreign Policy by Carl Cavanagh Hodge, Cathal J. Nolan, p. 116)
When the California gold rush began in 1849, Cornelius Vanderbilt switched from regional steamboat lines to ocean-going steamships. Many of the migrants to California, and almost all of the gold returning to the East Coast, went by steamship to Panama, where mule trains and canoes provided transportation across the isthmus. (The Panama Railroad was soon built to provide a faster crossing.) He started a steamship line to Nicaragua, and founded the Accessory Transit Company to carry passengers across Nicaragua by steamboat on the lake and river, with a 12-mile carriage road between the Pacific port of San Juan del Sur and Virgin Bay on Lake Nicaragua. He donated a steam ship to the Union Navy during the Civil War. Cornelius Vanderbilt made is wealth in railroads and shipping and at the time of this death 1877 he was worth $100 million (or $48 billion in 2015 dollars).
On August 17, 1854 a cow belonging to a Mormon traveling on the nearby Oregon Trail wandered into the Brulé Sioux camp and was killed. East of Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory (in present-day Wyoming), 2nd Lieutenant John L. Grattan, in front of the Brulé Sioux chief Conquering Bear insisted on taking the guilty party in to custody. Conquering Bear understood the nature of the situation and tried to negotiate, but Grattan continued to escalate tensions. When Conquering Bear stood up, he was shot in the back and killed. This started a volley of fire from both sides; Grattan and all of his 28 men were killed. News of the massacre reached the War Department and plans were put into motion for retaliation. They set out on August 24, 1855 to find and exact payment on the Sioux.
This then lead to the Battle of Ash Hollow (also known as the Battle of Bluewater Creek) on September 3, 1855, in which US soldiers killed a number of Brulé Sioux near Ash Hollow on Bluewater Creek. (17)
Cholera-infected blankets were distributed to native Americans in the 1860s. (18)
March 3, 1860 - Eureka, California - 80-100 men, women, children, of the Wiyot tribe were killed by local hooligans.
The question of whether Oregon should allow slavery dates back to at least the 1840s. The majority of Oregonians (which is to say the territory's new white residents who were systematically and sometimes violently oppressing its Native peoples) opposed slavery. But they also didn't want to live anywhere near anyone who wasn't white.
Keeping non-white people out of the in the Oregon Territory
Even before it was a state, those in power in Oregon were trying to keep out non-white people. In the summer of 1844, for example, the Legislative Committee passed a provision that said any free black people who were in the state would be subject to flogging if they didn't leave within two years. The floggings were supposed to continue every six months until they left the territory. That provision was revised in December of 1845 to remove the flogging part. Instead, free black people who remained would be offered up "publicly for hire" to any white person who would remove them from the territory.
When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926.
In the 1950s it was far too common in Portland, OR for the owner of a restaurant to exclude non-white patrons.
Walidah Imarisha, an educator and expert on black history in Oregon says, "But the same ideology, policies, and practices that shaped Oregon shaped every state in the Union, as well as this nation as a whole."
The white people of La Grande, OR burned that city's Chinatown to the ground in 1893. The Chinese residents fled, with some people getting on the first train out. But some Chinese residents weren't about to be intimidated and set up camp nearby. This wasn't enough for the hateful mobs of La Grande, who broke up the camp and forced anyone remaining to get on trains out of town.
These efforts were decentralized and not officially sanctioned by the state. But as the 1910s and 1920s would roll around, a new hate group would re-emerge to expel, harass, and brutalize anyone who wasn't "100 percent American." Some pioneers of the era weren't going to stand for it.
The Golden West Hotel was unique in that it was owned, operated, and exclusively patronized by black people in Oregon. It was the only place that black people from out of town could rent a room, and it was the central hub of black entertainment, recreation, and dining in Portland.
First opened in 1906, Portland authorities continually tried to shut down the place on trumped up charges of prostitution, gambling, and later for not having the "proper licenses."
When the owners of the Golden West were forced to plead for their license back in 1921 they "pointed out that the hotel and club was practically the only place in the city where negroes could congregate."
The arrival of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon was swift and terrifying. In 1922 the Klan in Oregon boasted membership of over 14,000 men, with 9,000 of them living in Portland. And they were setting the state aflame. There were frequent cross burnings on the hills outside Portland and around greater Oregon.
The Klan held meetings, openly participated in parades, and held enormous gatherings for initiation ceremonies. One such gathering in 1923 at the Oregon State Fairgrounds in Salem attracted over 1,500 hooded klansmen. They reportedly burned an enormous cross, of course.
http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040
President Abraham Lincoln (March 4, 1861 – April 15, 1865)
1862: celluloid was invented, the first man-made plastic.
1864: Louis Pasteur invents the pasteurization process.
1865: Gregor Mendel experiments on plant hybridization, effectively founding the science of genetics.
1n the 1860 about one and a half percent US population were slaveholders of the total 27,167,529. The distribution of slaveholders was very unequal. Fewer than 4,000 or one percent of all the US slaveholders held 200 or more slaves, and 0.015 percent of the US population, held an estimated 20 to 30 percent of all slaves (800,000 to 1,200,000 slaves). There were 19 holders of 500 or more slaves. The largest slaveholder was Joshua John Ward, of Georgetown, South Carolina, who in 1850 held 1,092 slaves. His heirs in 1860 held 1,130 or 1,131 slaves. He was dubbed "the king of the rice planters." In 1860, in the south, there were some 10 million free people, and four million slaves. (20)
President Lincoln has been characterized as growing up poor, splitting rails for fences, and by being smart and hard working, he became president. Yet not much has been said about him being melancholy or suffering from depression. Wolf Shenk in his book, Lincoln’s Melancholy (2005) suggests, Lincoln’s depression led him to develop the skills and fortitude he needed to lead the nation through its most dire crisis, the Civil War. It was in an attempt to master his depression that Lincoln applied himself so single-mindedly to the study of such things as grammar, logic, and law, disciplines that served him well in public life.
The Confederate States of America actually existed more than a month before Lincoln even took office: South Carolina and six other states had already declared themselves a sovereign nation with no interest in America's business. The start of the Civil War was sparked in part by a major military fumble on Lincoln's part. He and top aides botched plans to resupply one of the last forts held in the seceded Confederate States. This mistake led to the violent evacuation of Fort Sumter. Despite heavy bombardment from both sides, there was no loss of life during the battle.
The South primarily produced cotton, rice, sugar, indigo and tobacco. The North purchased these raw materials and turned them into manufactured goods. By taxing foreign imported manufactured goods, northern producers could sell their products at a lower price. And the north did not have to pay tariffs to import crops and importing them was often cheaper than those shipped from the South. Therefore, the South paid most of the federal tariffs. Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. At the time, 90 percent of the federal government's annual revenue came from these taxes on imports. People believe the Civil War was fought over this tariff situation, but slavery was the real reason for the war.
https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/was-civil-war-about-slavery
During 1861 to 1862, France’s Napoleon III considered recognizing the American Confederacy. The United States repeatedly warned that this meant war. The Union blockade of southern ports stopped the supply of cotton to textile mills in France, and caused unemployment. Through 1862, Napoleon III met unofficially with Confederate diplomats, raising their hopes that he would unilaterally recognize the Confederacy. France was too weak to act alone without British collaboration, and the British rejected intervention.
Lincoln did not advocate equality between blacks and whites and asserts that due to insurmountable natural differences, the races should be separated. For most of his political career, his favored solution to slavery was the removal of slaves and their descendants to all-black colonies to be established in Africa, Central and South America, or the Caribbean.
President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, first in 1861 in the state of Maryland, and then a year later nationwide. Tens of thousands of US citizens, war protesters in some cases, were jailed without due process or were tried before a military tribunal. There were instances where US senators and congressmen were put behind bars. Breaking an agreement with the South not too resupply a Union fort in South Carolina, Lincoln was able to get the Confederacy to shoot first. At this point, Lincoln had the authority to declare war on the Confederacy, ignoring Congress and the Constitution.
The border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia had a “shadow government” opposing the official state government and supporting the opposite side in the war during part or all of the war. In each case proclaiming itself to be the real and legitimate government of the state, On June 20, 1863, the new state of West Virginia was admitted to the Union.
Both houses of the state Kentucky legislature on May 20, 1961 voted for neutrality when it seemed everyone was taking sides in the war. The stance of neutrality was not completely original to Kentucky, but they made a formal declaration and tried desperately to stay out of the war. Kentucky had a unique situation; they were tied to the South with slavery.
The Northern states which bordered Kentucky were concerned that neutrality would make their states the battlegrounds of the war and tried to push Lincoln to be more assertive with Kentucky. Though many were pushing Lincoln to act with more force against Kentucky, Lincoln realized he needed to be patient. Acting too quickly or aggressively could send Kentucky to the side of the Confederacy, which he was desperately trying to avoid. Lincoln’s inaction, however, did not mean he supported neutrality. In a speech to Congress in June of 1860, he called neutrality “treason in effect” meaning that though neutrality did not bear the same name as treason, staying neutral had the same effect as siding with the rebels. However, Lincoln tolerated neutrality to ensure he did not have another state leave the Union.
Neutrality ends on September 4, 1861, when the Confederates invaded Kentucky in the early fall of 1861. Then Kentucky joined the Union.
In 1863, after the Indiana state legislature failed to pass a budget and left the state without the authority to collect taxes, so the Governor acted outside his state's constitutional authority to secure funding through federal and private loans to operate the state government and avert a financial crisis.
In the last years of the war, Indiana threatened to succeed if the Mississippi River was not opened so its farmers could transport their crops down the river to markets. But thru out the civil war years, there was political conflicts among people against the war and do did not like being drafted (conscripted) to serve in the war.
The Civil War forever altered Indiana's economy. Despite hardships during the war, Indiana's economic situation improved. Farmers received higher prices for their agricultural products, railroads and commercial businesses thrived in the state's cities and towns, and manpower shortages gave laborers more bargaining power. The war also helped establish a national banking system to replace state-chartered banking institutions; by 1862 there were 31 national banks in the state. Wartime prosperity was particularly evident in Indianapolis, whose population more than doubled during the war, reaching 45,000 at the end of 1864.
Increased wartime manufacturing and industrial growth in Indiana’s cities and towns ushered in a new era of economic prosperity. By the end of the war, Indiana had become less rural that it previously had been. Overall, the war caused Indiana's industries to grow exponentially. The state's population shifted to central and northern Indiana as new industries and cities began to develop around the Great Lakes and the railroad depots erected during the war. Indianapolis was also the wartime home of Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling Gun, one of the world's first machine guns. Although his invention was used in some Civil War-era campaigns, it was not fully adopted for use by the U.S. Army until 1866.
The federal government had a harder time deciding what to do about escaping slaves. Because there was no consistent federal policy regarding fugitives, individual commanders made their own decisions. Some put them to work for the Union forces; others wanted to return them to their owners.
Except for the Union Navy, the North was refused to accept the military services of African American volunteers and freed slaves, the very people who most wanted to defeat the slaveholders. Most white northerners were not interested in fighting to free slaves or in giving rights to black people. For this reason, the government turned away African American volunteers who rushed to enlist. Lincoln upheld the laws barring blacks from the army, proving to northern whites that their race privilege would not be threatened.
The vast majority of slaves crossed Union lines as soon as Northern troops entered their vicinity. Neither the federal authorities nor the army were prepared for the flood of people, and many of the refugees suffered as a result. Though the government attempted to provide them with confiscated land, there was not enough to go around.
But by 1862, Lincoln was considering emancipation as a necessary step toward winning the war. A Confederate general stated in 1862 that North Carolina was losing approximately a million dollars every week because of the fleeing slaves. The South was using enslaved people to aid the war effort. Black men and women were forced to build fortifications, work as blacksmiths, nurses, boatmen, and laundresses, and to work in factories, hospitals, and armories. Several governments in Europe were considering recognizing the Confederacy and intervening against the Union. If Lincoln declared this a war to free the slaves, European public opinion would overwhelmingly back the North.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation freed about three million the slaves, but about a million individuals were still legally slaves. If you were a slave in Delaware, Kentucky or the recently-captured Confederate territories of New Orleans or Tennessee, the proclamation did not grant you freedom, it only applied to states and territories in rebellion against the United States. Abolition of slavery was not the kind of thing the average Northerner would gladly have his head exploded over. It was still a touchy subject in the four border states that remained loyal to the Union, but were still hardcore slave states. President Lincoln took a measured step. He said, "I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and three more states would rise."
True, the North had a larger number of abolitionists, but they also had blatantly racist laws preventing free black people from actually getting rights as citizens. And also, lynch mobs. Which was why it was the North, not the South, that hosted the country's most violent race riot in history. What started out as a protest against the Union's draft policy, ended as a full-on assault on any African-Americans unfortunate enough to exist and get caught.
When African American soldiers were allowed to join the Union army, they faced discrimination as well as segregation. The army was extremely reluctant to commission black officers -- only one hundred gained commissions during the war. African American soldiers were also given substandard supplies and rations. Probably the worst form of discrimination was the pay differential. At the beginning of black enlistment, it was assumed that blacks would be kept out of direct combat, and the men were paid as laborers rather than as soldiers. Black soldiers therefore received $7 per month, plus a $3 clothing allowance, while white soldiers received $13 per month, plus $3.50 for clothes.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2967.html
Lincoln had a self-effacing humility. For example, one evening General George B. McClellan returned home to learn that Lincoln was waiting for him in the parlor. McClellan was President Lincoln’s appointee to General of the Army. Instead of receiving the president, the general simply went to bed without a word. Most Lincoln biographers note the president’s temperate response to the snub: he told his fuming secretary that “it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.”
At age 34, Major General George B. McClellan's rapid promotion was partly due to his acquaintance with Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, and many influential political friends. McClellan became one of the few commanders in US history to desert his troops three times on the battlefield. Lt. General Winfield Scott, 74, resigned on November 1, 1861 and McClellan succeeded him as general-in-chief.
Chase careful worked behind the scene to replace Lincoln as the Republican candidate for re-election 1864, Chase had his friends place his name in consideration for the race, but the plot failed. Biographers suggest that Lincoln most likely saw through Chase’s paper-thin lies but consciously decided to “shut his eyes to all these performances” because Chase was doing an invaluable service to the nation in his management of fiscal policy and his reform of the banking system. Chase continued to defy and undermine the president, and President Lincoln was finally forced to accept his resignation, saying, “You and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems cannot be overcome, or longer sustained.”
In early 1861, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency assumed responsibility for President Abraham Lincoln's safety. Lincoln also hired William A. Lloyd, a railroad publisher, to infiltrate the Confederacy and provide reports directly to him at the cost of $200 a month plus expenses.
Shortly after the start of the Civil War, Allan Pinkerton was contacted by a friend and his former client, Major General George B. McClellan and asked to provide intelligence for the Department of the Ohio. Starting in 1862, Lt. General Winfield Scott hired Captain Lafayette C. Baker to provide similar services for him that Pinkerton provided for McClellan. Captain Lafayette C. Baker swiftly took charge of the Union Intelligence Service from Pinkerton.
Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, who commanded a division, called the Corps of Observation, were guarding the fords along the upper Potomac River in fall of 1861 and he used detectives to report intelligence matters to him.
On October 20, 1861, Brigadier General Stone was ordered by MG McClellan to conduct a reconnaissance across the Potomac River to report on Confederate activities in Leesburg, Virginia. On crossing the river from the east, a battle occurred and BG Stone lost about 1,000 men killed, wounded, captured, and drowned while the Confederates lost less than 160. BG Stones’ recon troops crossed the Potomac River some 15 to 20 miles northwest of Washington DC where a bluff overlooks the river. The Union army did not have enough small boats to reinforce Stone’s troops if they ran into a large Confederate force.
In February 1862 under a cloud for suspected disloyalty and treason, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered Maj. Gen. McClellan to arrest BG Stone. Contrary to US Army regulations, no charges were ever filed against BG Stone. He was put in solitary confinement at Fort Lafayette. He stayed at Fort Lafayette for 50 days, and would spend another 139 days at Fort Hamilton. Stone was finally released without explanation or apology on August 16, 1862. MG McClellan had ordered BG Stone not to testify "regarding his [McClellan's] plans, his orders for the movement of troops, or his orders concerning the position of troops." This made it impossible for BG Stone to explain his conduct of the battle, and this kept MG McClellan out of the investigation.
On February 27, 1893, BG Stone was finally allowed to hear the charges that caused him to be arrested. Now with MG McClellan no longer his commander, BG Stone freely answered the accusations. The Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War found BG Stone not guilty and the New York Times reported, “General Stone has sustained a most flagrant wrong—a wrong which will probably stand as the very worst blot on the National side in the history of the war.”
BG Stone become Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks's chief of staff, however, on April 4, 1864, Stanton ordered Stone mustered out of his volunteer commission as a brigadier general and he reverted to his rank of colonel within the regular army. He served briefly as a brigade commander in the Army of the Potomac during the Siege of Petersburg, but finally resigned from the Army on September 13, 1864, before the end of the war.
In 1964 military historian Ezra J. Warner says BG. Stone's treatment following Ball's Bluff ; “The arrest and imprisonment of Stone is without parallel in the annals of American military and/or civil jurisprudence.... he was victim of a demonstration on the part of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.”
The following year US Army's Commanding General Sherman recommended Colonel Stone for service in the Egyptian Army. From 1870 to 1883 he served as chief of staff and general aide-de-camp for the khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt.
Lincoln biographers include the president’s observation that McClellan had a case of “the slows.” In Lincoln’s words, "If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time." Lincoln stated giving his generals orders on how to fight the war. Although officially retired, Scott was still occasionally consulted by Lincoln for strategic advice during the war. Eventually Lincoln relieved McClellan of his command and appointed Generals Grant and Sherman.
McClellan, as a Democrat, ran against Lincoln in 1864 presidential election backed by powerful forces, including industrialists, bankers, and the railroads. The deep division in the Republican party, and the military successes by Union forces in the fall of 1864 resulted in Lincoln winning the election, with 212 Electoral College votes to 21 and a popular vote of 55 percent to 45 percent. For all his popularity with the troops, McClellan failed to secure their support and the military vote went to Lincoln nearly 3 to 1. Lincoln's share of the vote in the Army of the Potomac was 70 percent. (Sources: Lincoln, Inc. - Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America by Jackie Hogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._McClellan
http://ir.nmu.org.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/142587/88e2abf4545f67f6cf32957947086354.pdf?sequence=1
Early Civil War battles like Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862) killed more soldiers than every war in American history up to that point put together and in just two days. Early Civil War battles like Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862) killed more soldiers than every war in American history up to that point put together and in just two days.
The Siege of Vicksburg was the first time in the war that civilians were directly fired upon. General Ulysses S. Grant decided to besiege the city beginning on May 25, 1863. With no reinforcements or supplies nearly gone, and after holding out for more than forty days, the garrison finally surrendered.
Union forces bombarded the city all night, from 220 artillery pieces and naval gunfire from Rear Adm. David D. Porter's fleet on the river, and while causing little property damage, they damaged Confederate civilian morale. On the morning of May 22, the defenders were bombarded again for four hours before the Union attacked once more along a three-mile front at 10 a.m.
A new problem confronted the Confederates. The dead and wounded of Grant's army lay in the heat of Mississippi summer, the odor of the deceased men and horses fouling the air, the wounded crying for medical help and water. Grant first refused a request of truce, thinking it a show of weakness. Finally he relented, and the Confederates held their fire while the Union recovered the wounded and dead, soldiers from both sides for the moment mingling as if no hostilities existed.
Civilian casualties were surprisingly light. Not because the Union didn't fire on civilian targets, as some historians argue, but because of the inaccuracy of Civil War artillery and mortar fire. Also because the people of Vicksburg hid in snake-infested caves they dug with the help of their slaves. Heat, hunger, and sickness finally broke the Confederates.
Confederate General Pemberton was boxed in with lots of munitions and little food. The poor diet was showing on the Confederate soldiers. By the end of June, half were out sick or hospitalized. Scurvy, malaria, dysentery, diarrhea, and other diseases cut their ranks. At least one city resident had to stay up at night to keep starving soldiers out of his vegetable garden. The constant shelling did not bother him as much as the loss of his food. As the siege wore on, fewer and fewer horses, mules, and dogs were seen wandering about Vicksburg. Shoe leather became a last resort of sustenance for many adults. During the siege, Union gunboats lobbed over 22,000 shells into the town and army artillery fire was even heavier. As the barrages continued, suitable housing in Vicksburg was reduced to a minimum. Over 500 caves were dug into the yellow clay hills of Vicksburg. Whether houses were structurally sound or not, it was deemed safer to occupy these dugouts. People did their best to make them comfortable, with rugs, furniture, and pictures. They tried to time their movements and foraging with the rhythm of the cannonade, sometimes unsuccessfully. Because of these dugouts or caves, the Union soldiers gave the town the nickname of "Prairie Dog Village." Despite the ferocity of the Union fire against the town, fewer than a dozen civilians were known to have been killed during the entire siege.
On July 3, 1863 General Pemberton sent a note to Gen. Grant, who first demanded unconditional surrender. But Grant reconsidered not wanting to feed 30,000 hungry Confederates in Union prison camps, and offered to parole all prisoners. Considering their destitute state, dejected and starving, he never expected them to fight again; he hoped they would carry home the stigma of defeat to the rest of the Confederacy. In any event, it would have occupied his army and taken months to ship that many troops north. Most of the men who were paroled on July 6 were exchanged and received back into the Confederate Army on August 4, 1863, at Mobile Harbor, Alabama. They were back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by September and some fought in the Battles for Chattanooga in November and against Sherman's invasion of Georgia in May 1864. The Confederate government protested the validity of the paroles on technical grounds and the issue was referred to Grant who, in April 1864, was general in chief of the Army. The dispute effectively ended all further exchanges during the war except for hardship cases. (21)
Brigadier General Sherman's attacked against the city of Randolph, Tennessee in 1862. Professor DiLorenzo writes in his work, Targeting Civilians, that in 1862 Sherman wrote to his wife his purpose in the war would be "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" of the South.
In October of 1864, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered a subordinate, General Louis Watkins, to go to Fairmount, Georgia, "burn ten or twelve houses" and "kill a few at random," and "let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon."
Professor DiLorenzo (an economist and not a historian) says, "Although it is rarely mentioned by 'mainstream' historians, many acts of rape were committed by these federal soldiers. The University of South Carolina's library contains a collection of thousands of diaries and letters of Southern women that mention these unspeakable atrocities."
DiLorenzo continues: "Sherman's' band of criminal looters (known as "bummers") sacked the slave cabins as well as the plantation houses. "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked." A routine procedure would be to hang a slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners' valuables were hidden. "
Then there is his march to the sea, starting on May 6, 1864, wherein Sherman claimed in his memoirs that his army "destroyed more than $100 million in private property and carried home $20 million more." (23)
During the War Between the States the Union forces were waging war on women and children on two separate fronts, raping, pillaging and murdering in the South as well as in the West. The most notorious of these thugs reported to Maj. Gen. Sherman, famous for his march to the sea. But long before that he had adopted a policy of total war against civilians.
In 1862 Sherman was having difficulty subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing federal gunboats on the Mississippi River near Memphis. He then implemented the theory of “collective responsibility” to “justify” attacking innocent civilians in retaliation for such attacks. He had the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee burned to the ground. He also took civilian hostages and either traded them for federal prisoners of war or executed them.
Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi were also destroyed by Sherman’s troops even though there was no Confederate army there to oppose them. After his soldiers sacked the town, stealing anything of value they burned the rest. As Sherman biographer John Marzalek writes, his soldiers “entered residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value those articles which they could not carry they broke. After the destruction of Meridian Sherman boasted “for five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, claw bars, and with fire, Meridian no longer exists.”
Sherman often ordered his soldiers, many of whom were street criminals from Northern as well as European cities, to shoot civilians at random. And the thousands of letters and diaries that survived the war attest to the rape of both black and white women by Sherman's men.
This war on citizens was not simply restrained to be applied against men and women but it was also against children. General Sherman in a June 21, 1864 wrote a letter to Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Station; "There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." Stanton replied, "Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval." While the war on civilians started much earlier than 1864, the above is simply proof that the war on children was part of that scheme.
Sherman’s atrocities were not just relegated to his enemies though. For pragmatic reasons, Sherman knowingly bypassed Andersonville prison instead of liberating it. In addition, he was less than kind to the newly freed slaves that followed his troops through Georgia. Sherman's contraband policy was to only allow those that could work to stay with the troops, as long as there were enough supplies and food to support their numbers. In one incident, Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis of the Union Army prevented a group of freed slaves from crossing Ebenezer creek near Savannah on a pontoon bridge with his troops. Several hundred of these freed slaves drowned while trying to swim across the creek, fearing that they would be left behind to be re-enslaved or killed by a group of nearby Confederates. Sherman not only condoned Davis's actions, but also endorsed them.
Here are a few of Sherman’s other quotes; “The young bloods of the South; sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will. War suits them. They are splendid riders, first rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.”
“Look to the South and you who went with us through that land can best say if they have not been fearfully punished. Mourning is in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin and poverty and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding to the very cap sheaf (translated: the crowning or finishing part of a thing, slang from the term used for the top of a shaft of grain crop like wheat) of their stack of misery.”
"The government of the US has any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war - to take their lives, their homes, their land, their everything...war is simply unrestrained by the Constitution...to the persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.”
In January 1862, he reported for duty to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis and served under him at the Battle of Pea Ridge. Sheridan soon discovered that officers were engaged in profiteering. They stole horses from civilians and demanded payment from Sheridan. He refused to pay for the stolen property and confiscated the horses for the use of Curtis's army. When Curtis ordered him to pay the officers, Sheridan brusquely retorted, "No authority can compel me to jayhawk or steal." Curtis had Sheridan arrested for insubordination but Halleck's influence appears to have ended any formal proceedings.
Captain Philip Sheridan was promoted to colonel on May 27, 1862 on September 1862 he was promoted to brigadier general, on April 10, 1863 promoted to major general.
In 1864, he defeated Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley and his destruction of the economic infrastructure of the Valley, called "The Burning" by residents, was one of the first uses of scorched earth tactics in the war. He was promoted to major general in the regular army as of November 8, 1864, making him the fourth ranking general in the Army, after Grant, Sherman, and Meade.
Major General Philip Sheridan is another celebrated war hero who also used similar tactics to those of MG Sherman in attacking defenseless civilians. After the Confederate army had finally evacuated the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 Sheridan’s 35,000 infantry troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan described it in a Oct. 7, 1864 report to General Grant, “I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay and farming implements; over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat, and have driven in front of the Army over 4,000 head of stock and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep. Tomorrow I will continue the destruction down to Fisher’s Mill. When this is completed, the Valley from Winchester to Staunton, 92 miles, will have but little in it for man or beast”.
In letters home Gen. Sheridan’s troops described themselves as “barnburners” and “destroyers of homes.” One soldier wrote home that he had personally set 60 private homes on fire and opined that “it was a hard looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” A Sergeant William T. Patterson wrote that “the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy by defenseless women I never saw or want to see again.”
In historian Mark Grimsley novel, The Hard Hand of War, he concluded that the Shenandoah Valley war crime was actually “one of the more controlled acts of destruction during the war’s final year.” General Sherman himself admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged for the things he did. But that did not stop Lincoln from personally conveying to Sheridan “the thanks of the Nation.”
In Marion County, Missouri one of the most hideous of war crimes, the “Palymra massacre” took place. After Missouri attempted to secede from the Union, the state was quickly overrun by Yankee troops. Anyone who expressed Southern sympathies was quickly persecuted by the 19th Missouri Volunteers (Yankee-backed) government officials. In the little town of Palmyra, Missouri, the war was very personal and ugly. After a local Union supporter/ informer, Andrew Allsman came up missing it was presumed by the Federal authorities that he had been abducted.
Colonel John McNeil of the 19th Missouri Volunteer troops demanded the return of his informer; otherwise he would execute ten Southerners whom he held in jail." The men held in jail were not criminals they had been thrown into jail for expressing a pro-Southern point of view. It should be noted that the Yankees claimed that the Union informer had been captured by Confederate military forces. The Southern hostages held by the Yankees had no connection with said military forces. Let me emphasize the fact that these men were civilians.
When the Union informer did not return Colonel McNeil ordered ten men to be chosen for execution. He gave orders that only those of high social, military, educational, and professional background were to be chosen. Both pro-Southern and pro-Northern citizens made pleas on behalf of the innocent men. Those who thought they had some influence with the Yankee government and who had a sense of decency implored the military authorities not to commit this act. But the order had the highest backing from all levels of the Yankee government. At 1:00 pm on October 18, 1862, the ten men were loaded on wagons, seated on newly made coffins, and taken to the Palmyra fairgrounds. On reaching the fairgrounds the men were placed in a row and seated on their coffins. A few feet away stood 30 United States soldiers who killed them. Behind the thirty soldiers were an equal number of reserve troops. Only three of the men were killed instantly. One man was not even hit by the bullets and the others were wounded. Then the reserve troops were ordered to kill the wounded men.
This incident did not pass without some protest. Not only in the South, but also in London, England and even in the North decent people made loud protests about such a barbaric act. The local loyalist paper however supported McNeil: "The madness of rebellion has become so deep seated that ordinary methods of cure are inadequate." (Palmyra Courier, October 18, 1862) and McNeil himself would respond years later "...cherishing, as I do, the firm conviction that my action was the means of saving lives and property of hundreds of loyal men and women, I feel that my act was the performance of a public duty." (July 1889 response to an article in The Century magazine).
Twice in Lincoln's Cabinet meetings the issue was brought up about how to put the best spin on this atrocity. But finally the incident was just ignored because the South had its hands full and could not pursue the matter. Shortly after the war crime, on November 29, 1862, Col. John McNeil was given a promotion to the rank of Brigadier General of United States Volunteers by Abe Lincoln.
"Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants." (24)
It also must be noted that these same tactics used against Southern civilians by Brigadier General George Custer, Major Generals Sheridan and Sherman taught led them to the extermination against Native Americans. (25) (26)
Bureau of Military Information for the Union Army
Samuel Morse’s telegraph, first successfully demonstrated in May 1844, became a booming business during the next four years. By 1860, there were 50,000 miles of telegraph in the United States, all built during the previous 16 years. General Grant used the military telegraph both for grand tactics and for strategy in its broadest sense. He kept under direct control military forces exceeding half a million of soldiers, operating over a territory of eight hundred thousand square miles in area. Through concerted action and timely movements, Grant prevented the reinforcement of Lee's army and so shortened the war. General Sherman said, "The value of the telegraph cannot be exaggerated, as illustrated by the perfect accord of action of the armies of Virginia and Georgia." Telegraph wires were tapped by both sides by sending units behind enemy lines. A whole battle-front was covered by field telegraph lines which enabled Sherman to communicate at all times with his fighting and reserve commands.
The Civil War, through the introduction of the telegraph, a relatively recent technology, revolutionized military communication in the United States. The telegraph allowed for near real-time, two-way communication. It gave senior commanders the ability to exercise command and control throughout the war. Union and Confederate leaders could communicate with their senior field commanders on strategies, movements, and events on the field. President Lincoln spent hours each day in his military telegraph office in Washington receiving updates and directing his commanders. Sending messages along the 15,000 miles of wire strung for telegraph operations during the war was easy; it was also easy to intercept them. Both the North and the South needed to use decoding methods to secure their communications. Within messages important words were encrypted with code words found in the code book. The words were then transmitted following an assigned pattern using the disarrangement of words. This is a simple word transposition ciphers, which sends the plain text message with word order jumbled. This resulted in a completely unintelligible encoded and jumbled message. This cipher system was adequate delaying the time it took to break the coped message.
On February 11, 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker established the Bureau of Military Information for the Union Army headed by his deputy provost marshal, Colonel George H. Sharpe. Col. Sharpe assumed the intelligence role for MG Hooker that Allan Pinkerton had performed for MG McClellan. Scottish detective Allan Pinkerton and Captain Lafayette C. Baker’s Union Intelligence Service handled similar operations for their respective regional commanders. Col. Sharpe was assisted by John C. Babcock, a civilian and former employee of Pinkerton.
Their first order was to establish intelligence collection operations with some 70 field agents. Ten of them were killed during the war. In addition to field agents, information was gathered through interrogation of prisoners of war and refugees, newspapers, and documents taken from Confederate officers who had retreated or who had been killed.
In all cases, the detectives and spies in question were civilians, despite the fact that they reported to military heads and served in wartime. Allan Pinkerton, however, used the false rank of major in the US Army. They also reported directly to and were paid at the leisure of their superiors, not to any military or government agency. In fact, Pinkerton and Baker's organizations actively competed against one another, to the point of arresting each other's agents to maintain an upper hand.
MG Hooker appointed Colonel Sharpe to brevet brigadier general of volunteers in 1864 and brevet major general of volunteers in 1865. A “brevet” is/was a rank appointed by warrant without the pay of the temporary rank.
In July, 1864 General Grant, in preparation of the campaign to capture Richmond, stationed Brigadier General Sharpe and his staff at his command headquarters, in order to ensure he would have the most up to date knowledge of the battlefield. They continued to serve Gen. Grant up until the Battle of Appomattox Court House, where they were responsible for paroling the former members of the Army of Northern Virginia, including General Robert E. Lee himself.
By 1840 steam powered trains traveled on 2,800 miles of railroad tracks were in use. By 1850 more than 9,000 miles of railroad track were in use. By 1860 the northern states has some 24,000 miles of track and the south had some 9,000 miles. During the civil war the north added some 4,000 miles and the south only added some 400 miles. This advantage greatly aided the north’s strategic logistics capability. It took only seven or eight days for Northern troops to get to the battle fronts vs. it taking two months by road to travel 1,200 miles. In 1863 the Confederate troops were starving in Virginia because the south could not supply them with enough food.
Encouraged by President Lincoln — himself a former railroad lawyer — who understood how vital they were for moving men and supplies. The North had better equipment and a locomotive factory. The South had converted its locomotive factory into an armaments factory. The trains allowed generals to move their soldiers, supplies and armaments to where they were most needed.
Lincoln’s Secretary of War Simon Cameron (March 1861 to January 1862) was forced to resign when it was discovered he was trying to profit from War Department contracts for railroad shipping. Cameron made his fortune in railways, canals and banking. In May 1869 train travel began running from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, CA.
When Lincoln arrived for his inauguration in 1861 there was not even a telegraph line to the War Department. As the Civil war began, if the US Army wanted to send a telegram they did like everyone else: sending a clerk with a hand written message to stand in line at Washington’s central telegraph office. That situation changed rapidly, however, as wires were strung to the War Department. Four months into his presidency Lincoln sat with his generals and waited while the thunder of cannon could be heard from the battlefield at Manassas, just 30 miles outside the capital. Thirteen months later Lincoln was actively in communication with his General at the front lines. http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/30860#sthash.EcoaGnHG.dpuf
Some 207,000 American lives were lost on the Civil War battlefields, as opposed to the nearly 300,000 who died in combat during World War Two. In combat, the rifles had an effective range of about 400 yards, over four times that of a Revolutionary War musket. And the projectile wasn't an iron ball. It was a minie ball, which is really not a ball, but a cone-shaped bullet. When fired, it expanded in the barrel and the rifling gave it a spin, which made it travel further and more accurately. The Army tactics did not keep up with military technology. Civil War soldiers fought in Napoleonic style, in the open, standing up, moving forward in long lines, the men marching shoulder to shoulder. This threw the advantage to the forces in the defense by fighting in trenches or behind fortifications. Even though the defense won nine of ten Civil War engagements, generals still charged heavily defended positions, recklessly stubborn. (22)
Some of the Civil War casualties died simply because the mid-19th century was a terrible time for five million men to go camping for six months. Medicine in the 19th century was still medieval. Add in all of the soldiers who died of disease or infections during the war and you get a horrific 414,000 additional lives lost. So for every one soldier who died in battle, two more died of sickness.
You have to remember that back then, learning to be a doctor was like learning to be a plumber. Most American physicians learned their trade by attending a couple of lectures and then apprenticing with an older doctor. And at a time when even the best doctors in the world had a only a shaky understanding bacteria causing disease. So many men living in close quarters, under great stress and often with poor nutrition, were subject to epidemics. Many rural soldiers became sick because for the first time they lived in a large group of people and had no immunity to diseases such as chickenpox, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and whooping cough. These epidemics ran rampant through many regiments. Near swamps, mosquitoes brought malaria. And already-weakened soldiers who caught a common cold often developed pneumonia. Diarrhea and dysentery affected 78 percent of the troops annually.
But the biggest cause of disease was a lack of sanitation. Open latrines were placed too close to drinking water sources. Decomposing food and manure attracted disease-carrying insects. Typhoid fever, caused by salmonella bacteria in food and water, was responsible for as many as a quarter of all non-combat casualties in the Confederate army. Not until World War Two would the US fight a war in which more soldiers died of battle wounds than from disease.
The solider was moved, by ambulance, to a hospital further from the fighting. This was a bumpy ride, and the soldier was already in horrible pain. From this point, the soldier was often moved by rail. In the winter, the rail car was freezing cold. On the long, horrible trip, there was no water and nothing to kill the pain.
Fewer than 200 million newspaper copies were printed in 1840, but by 1860 almost 900 million copies by some 3,725 American newspapers were published daily or weekly. New York City became the nerve center of American journalism. During his presidency, Lincoln had opposition newspapers suppressed by his administration, at points going as far as jailing editors without due process of law -- all because they were critical of him during wartime.
The Civil war also was a war for public opinion via propaganda. . There were some 1,500 photographers taking pictures of the dead and woodcarvings of these photos were printed in the newspapers. Some newspapers were known to falsely report casualty rates or results of battle to bolster public morale. Desertion was a particularly galling problem for both the Union and Confederate armies throughout the war and newspapers often printed editorials encouraging loyalty and shaming deserters and those who aided them.
Many poor southern whites became disillusioned during the course of the war. Wealthy planters had been granted exemptions from military service early on. This became especially inflammatory when the South instituted the draft in 1862 and the exemptions remained in place. It became clear to many poor southern whites that the war was being waged by the rich planters and the poor were fighting it. In addition, the common people were hit hard by wartime scarcity. By 1863, there was a food shortage. Riots and strikes occurred as inflation soared and people became desperate.
There were also northerners who resisted the war effort. Some were pacifists. Others were white men who resented the fact that the army was drafting them at the same time it excluded blacks. And there were whites who refused to fight once black soldiers were admitted. The North was also hit by economic depression, and enraged white people rioted against African Americans, who they accused of stealing their jobs.
http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/mcdonald/civil-war/war/
Starting in at about 1861, families wanted to see their fallen sons once more and railroads were refusing to carry decaying bodies due to the very bad smell of them. Embalming caught on during the American Civil War and the Army Medical Corps to embalm the corpses of dead Union officers to return to their families. At that time, the chemicals were a mixture of arsenic, zinc and mercuric chlorides, creosote, turpentine and alcohol. Formaldehyde was only discovered in 1867 and it soon became the primary ingredient.
The actual numbers of people who were embalmed were actually relatively small. Because of the difficulty in identifying bodies and communicating with families about sending a body home, only about 40,000 of the approximately 650,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War were embalmed. Military authorities also permitted private embalmers to work in military-controlled areas and they became rich.
http://americacomesalive.com/2010/08/03/wars-drive-advances/#.Vlqb-OSFOZ8
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/30860#sthash.EcoaGnHG.dpuf
http://www.civilwarhome.com/telegraph.htm
https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/media_center/agency/video/civilwarsignals/Transcript.html
The South never, ever had a chance of winning the Civil War. Never. It all came down to a numbers game, starting with population. The North had a population of 22 million against the South's 9.1 million which included the slaves. The Union possessed a navy the South couldn't touch, industry and armaments the South couldn't match, currency backed up in California gold.
Now, this is not meant to suggest that there weren't some close calls for the Union throughout the war -- there were. But the US government had already been through several wars the past fourscore years while the Confederate government was never able to get their ship together. While the Union had transformed Washington, D.C., into the most fortified city on the planet, the Rebels were still fighting over what flag to use.
When the threat of foreign intervention cropped up, Lincoln threw ambassadors like John Quincy Adams' son at the Europeans while the Confederates had nothing to offer. In short, the South never stood a chance against the Union politically, militarily or diplomatically.
Yes, the South had Robert E Lee. Yet, even he ordered Major General George Pickett to lead over 12,000 soldiers across an open field and into the firing rifles of Union soldiers, getting half of his men killed on the spot. The case has been made that the Confederates had the larger share of bad generals. http://www.cracked.com/article_19223_6-civil-war-myths-everyone-believes-that-are-total-b.s..html
On April 9, 1865 General Lee surrendered to Union General Grant. President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1965. Few biographers choose to include President Lincoln’s stated doubts about there being a god and a heaven, his declaration that he was not a Christian, or his alleged description of Christ as a “bastard.”
It took until about August 1866 for all Confederate troops to stop fighting and dying.
Bear River Massacre (aka Massacre at Boa Ogoi) occurred on January 29, 1863 at the confluence of the Bear River and Beaver Creek (now Battle Creek) near in present day Preston, Idaho.
Col. Patrick Edward Connor was put in command of the 3rd California Volunteer Infantry Regiment and ordered to move his men to Utah, with specific orders to protect the Overland Mail Route and keep the peace in the region. Upon arriving in Utah, he established Fort Douglas as the primary base of operations for his unit, within sight of the Mormon Temple construction site and downtown Salt Lake City.
As the Shoshone tribe was reaching desperate measures to fight off the US Army, including the use of tomahawks and archery, the soldiers seemed to lose all sense of control and discipline. After most of the men were killed, soldiers proceeded to rape and molest the women of the encampment, and many of the children were also shot and killed. In some cases, soldiers held the feet of infants by the heel and "beat their brains out on any hard substance they could find." Those women who refused to submit to the soldiers were shot and killed. One local resident, Alexander Stalker, noted that at this time many soldiers pulled out their pistols and shot several Shoshone people at point blank range. The soldiers also deliberately burned almost everything they could get their hands on, especially the dwelling structures that the Shoshone had been sleeping in, and killing anybody they found to be still inside.
The Shoshone bands lost between 200 and 400 members, including at least 90 women and children, with the official U.S. Army report listing 272 dead.
At the age of 25, in the summer of 1835, fur trapper, Kit Carson married an Arapaho woman who gave birth to two of his children. In 1840, Carson married another married a Cheyenne woman. At 33, Carson married his third wife, 14-year-old Josefa Jaramillo, the daughter of a prominent Taos, New Mexico family
As for Colonel Connor and the California Volunteers, they were treated as heroes upon arrival at Fort Douglas as well as by members of their community in California, according to published newspaper articles. As a direct result of this military campaign, Connor was promoted to the permanent rank of Brigadier General and given a brevet promotion shortly afterward to the rank of Major General.
Under Federal District of New Mexico was Brigadier General James H. Carleton’s direction, Colonel Kit Carson instituted a scorched earth policy, which coerced the Navajo to surrender.
The Long Walk” in the spring of 1864, Colonel Carson when rounded up 8,000 Navajos and forced them to walk more than 300 miles from northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to a desolate tract on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. 8,000 Navajo men, women and children were forced to march or ride in wagons 300 miles from Fort Canby to Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Carson had left the Army and returned home before the march began, but some Navajo held him responsible for the events. He had promised that those who surrendered would not be harmed, and indeed, they were not attacked directly, but the journey was hard on the people, as they were already starving and poorly clothed, and the provisions were scanty. An estimated 300 Navajo died along the way.
The brackish Pecos water caused severe intestinal problems, and diseases were rampant. Armyworm destroyed the corn crop, and the wood supply was soon depleted.
Many more died during the next four years on the encampment at Fort Sumner. Carleton had underestimated the number of Navajo that would arrive at Sumner, and also had ordered insufficient provisions, a factor that Carson deplored. The Navajos endured the wretched camp for four years, when the government relented and returned them to their homeland. Lincoln also presided over the largest mass execution of American Indians with the hanging of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota.
In November 1864, Carson was sent by General Carleton to deal with the Indians in western Texas. Carson and his 400 troopers and Indian scouts met a combined force of Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache numbering as much as 1,500 at the ruins of Adobe Walls, Texas. In the Battle of Adobe Walls, the Indian force led by Dohäsan made several assaults on Carson's forces which were supported by two mountain howitzers. Carson retreated after burning a Kiowa village. Carson lost the battle, but most authorities give him credit for a skillful defense and a wise decision to withdraw when confronted by numerically superior Indian army.
A few days later, Colonel John M. Chivington led US troops in a massacre at Sand Creek. Chivington boasted that he had surpassed Carson and would soon be known as the great Indian killer. Carson expressed outrage at the massacre and openly denounced Chivington's actions.
The Southern Plains campaign led the Comanche to sign the Little Rock Treaty of 1865. In October 1865, General Carleton recommended that Carson be awarded the brevet rank of brigadier general, "for gallantry in the battle of Valverde, and for distinguished conduct and gallantry in the wars against the Mescalero Apaches and against the Navajo natives of New Mexico".
The entire campaign against the Indian was to make safe passage for the railroads and secure the land for population. Abraham Lincoln was the chief lawyer for many of the railroads before he was elected president. (19)
The Keyesville Massacre Kern County, California on April 19, 1863, 35 Tehachapi men are killed by whites.
President Andrew Johnson (April 15, 1865 – March 4, 1869)
On August 20, 1866, President Andrew Johnson signed a Proclamation—Declaring that Peace, Order, Tranquility, and Civil Authority Now Exists in and Throughout the Whole of the United States of America. It cited the end of the insurrection in Texas, and declared, “that the insurrection which heretofore existed in the State of Texas is at an end and is to be henceforth so regarded in that State as in the other States before named in which the said insurrection was proclaimed to be at an end by the aforesaid proclamation of the 2d day of April, 1866. And I do further proclaim that the said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now existed in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.”
The Bureau of Military Information was disbanded in 1865, at the end of the Civil War.
After the assassination of President Lincoln on April 15, 1865, within two days of his arrival in Washington, Captain Lafayette C. Baker's agents in Maryland had made four arrests and had the names of two more conspirators, including the assassin John Wilkes Booth. Before the month was out, Booth along with David Herold were found holed up in a barn and Booth was himself shot and killed by Sgt. Boston Corbett. Captain Baker was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and received a generous share of the $100,000 reward offered to the apprehender of the president's killer.
In 1866, with Reconstruction barely started, Major General Philip Sheridan was appointed military governor of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana). On July 30, 1866, while Sheridan was out of town, a white mob broke up the state constitutional convention in New Orleans. Thirty-four blacks were killed. Shortly after Sheridan returned, he wired Grant, “The more information I obtain of the affair of the 30th in this city the more revolting it becomes. It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre.” An inquiry implicated the Mayor of New Orleans and President Andrew Johnson. Sheridan, under his authority, relieved the Mayor. The governors of Texas and Louisiana complained so much that he finally removed them. First the Louisiana governor went, and the Texas governor followed for being an “impediment to the reconstruction of the State”. Within a month of the Texas governor’s firing, President Johnson removed Sheridan.
In 1871, the Major General Sheridan, oversaw military relief efforts during the Great Chicago Fire. He became the Commanding General of the United States Army on November 1, 1883, and on June 1, 1888, he was promoted to General of the Army of the United States. In August 1888, at 57, he died after a series of heart attacks.
By 1866, cattle could be sold to northern markets for as much as $40.00 per head (over $990.00 in 2018 dollars) making it potentially profitable for cattle, particularly from Texas, to be herded long distances to market. Ranchers banded together to drive their cattle to the closest point that railroad tracks reached, which at that time was in Sedalia, Missouri. However, farmers in eastern Kansas, afraid that Longhorns would transmit cattle fever to local animals as well as trample crops, formed groups that threatened to beat or shoot cattlemen found on their lands. Therefore, the 1866 drive failed to reach the railroad, and the cattle herds were sold for low prices. However, in 1867, a cattle shipping facility was built west of farm country around the railhead at Abilene, Kansas, and became a center of cattle shipping.
The US cattle ranching industry with the price of cattle cheap and grass free, European syndicates bought large ranches on the Plains and Texas. However they did not get rich as expected due to the cost of freezing winters and stifling drought. General ignorance of livestock became their biggest liability, and the only controllable cost they could find was the labor of the cowboy.
Being a cowboy, 15 to 25 years of age was a dangerous and not an easy job. Aside from working roundups twice a year, they rode the fence line, branded cattle, and doctored sick animals. They slept in a dank dugout, or perhaps a tent, if anything. Everything they ate came out of one pot. But a ranch hand could take part of his pay in calves, or if he was lucky, he could round up enough maverick cows to begin his own small herd. He was furnished several horses to do his work, and the longer he worked for the ranch, the better the horses he was given. Few cowboys own their own horse.
In 1870 the year it was founded, Standard Oil controlled some four percent of the nation's oil refineries. Within a decade, it controlled ninety percent of the refining industry. The head of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, propelled his company to dominance in part by shrewd manipulation of the railroads. Rockefeller would offer a particular railroad the opportunity to transport his oil; in return, the railroad would provide Standard Oil with rebates. If the railroad carried a competitor's product, it had to pay a fee, known as a drawback, to Standard Oil. The opportunity to transport vast quantities of oil was too good a deal for railroad owners to pass up, so they agreed to the rebates and drawbacks. Soon, many railroads became dependent upon Standard's business. For example, when the Pennsylvania Railroad continued to carry a rival's oil, Rockefeller stopped using that line. The loss of Standard's business ruined the Pennsylvania, and its owner decided to sell. The purchaser of the Pennsylvania Railroad was none other than Standard Oil.
A British-French flotilla of ships arrived at Veracruz, Mexico in December 1861 and landed 7500 French soldiers and 700 British soldiers, joined later by 6000 Spanish soldiers from Cuba.
General Grant was concerned about the situation in neighboring Mexico, where 40,000 French soldiers propped up the puppet regime of the King of Mexico, Austrian Archduke Maximilian. Maximilian’s wife was Empress Carlota of Mexico, daughter of King Léopold I of the Belgians.
He gave Sheridan permission to gather a large Texas occupation force. Sheridan assembled 50,000 men in three corps, quickly occupied Texas coastal cities, spread inland, and began to patrol the US- Mexico border.
The Army's presence, US political pressure, and the growing resistance by force loyal to President Benito Juárez induced the French to abandon their claims against Mexico. Napoleon III withdrew his troops in 1866, and the following year Emperor Maximilian was executed for treason. Sheridan later admitted in his memoirs that he had supplied arms and ammunition to Juárez's forces: "... which we left at convenient places on our side of the river to fall into their hands.
When President Johnson could get no support in Congress, he had the Army lose some supplies including rifles near or across the border with Mexico.
The government of the United States was sympathetic to the elected Benito Pablo Juárez as President of the Mexican Republic, refusing to recognize Kingdom of Mexico under Maximilian, and opposed the French invasion as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. After being distracted by the American Civil War and following the end of the war, President Andrew Johnson demanded the French evacuate Mexico and imposed a naval blockade in February 1866.
Facing a guerrilla war and a financial catastrophe, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico became more and more depressed, leaving the capital for long periods Unwilling to have a war with the United States, Napoleon III, decided at the beginning of 1866 to withdraw French troops from Mexico. Maximilian was captured by Benito Juárez forces, judged and shot on June 19, 1867. Benito Juárez served as constitutional president for five elections/terms from 1858 to 1872.
Benito Juárez is remembered as being a progressive reformer dedicated to democracy, equal rights for his nation's indigenous peoples, his antipathy toward organized religion, especially the Catholic Church (motivated by his adherence to freemasonry), and what he regarded as defense of national sovereignty. The period of his leadership is known in Mexican history as La Reforma del Norte (The Reform of the North), and constituted a liberal political and social revolution with major institutional consequences: the expropriation of church lands, the subordination of the army to civilian control, liquidation of peasant communal land holdings, the separation of church and state in public affairs, and also the almost-complete disenfranchisement of bishops, priests, nuns and lay brothers.
Following Juárez's death on July 18, 1872 the lack of adequate democratic and institutional stability soon led to a return to centralized autocracy and economic exploitation.
Sand Creek Massacre
The Colorado War (1863 to 1865) was an armed conflict between the United States and a loose alliance among the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes of Native Americans (the last two were particularly closely allied).
Territorial governor John Evans sent Colonel John Chivington at the head of a locally raised militia to quiet the Indians. Chivington and his 800 troops of the First Colorado Cavalry marched to their campsite. On the morning of November 29, 1864, the army attacked the village and massacred the majority of its mostly-unarmed inhabitants, although an American flag and a white flag were being flown over Black Kettle's lodge as he had been instructed. Chivington proclaimed before the attack "Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice." The Dog Soldiers were not part of this encampment. Assured by the US Government's promises of peace, he sent out most of his warriors to hunt.
Between 150 and 184 Cheyenne were reported dead. One source from the Cheyenne side said that "about 53 men were killed and 110 women and children killed." Some of the dead were reportedly mutilated, and most were women, children, and elderly men. Chivington and his men later displayed scalp and other body parts, including human fetuses and genitalia in the Apollo Theater and saloons in Denver.
Questions were raised about a possible massacre. Several investigations were conducted; two by the military, and one by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The panel declared:
"As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the verist (translated: It is a meaningless word in today’s English) savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenseless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.”
"Whatever influence this may have had upon Colonel Chivington, the truth is that he surprised and murdered, in cold blood, the unsuspecting men, women, and children on Sand creek, who had every reason to believe they were under the protection of the United States authorities, and then returned to Denver and boasted of the brave deed he and the men under his command had performed.”
"In conclusion, your committee are of the opinion that for the purpose of vindicating the cause of justice and upholding the honor of the nation, prompt and energetic measures should be at once taken to remove from office those who have thus disgraced the government by whom they are employed, and to punish, as their crimes deserve, those who have been guilty of these brutal and cowardly acts."
A Civil War memorial installed at the Colorado Capitol in 1909 listed the Sand Creek massacre as one of the Union's great victories. (27)
In 1867, Ulysses S. Grant charged MG Sheridan with pacifying the Great Plains, where warfare with Native Americans was wreaking havoc. In an effort to force the Plains people onto reservations, Sheridan used the same tactics he used in the Shenandoah Valley. He attacked several tribes in their winter quarters and he promoted the widespread slaughter of American bison their primary source of food.
On March 30, 1867, the United States reached an agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia for a price of $7.2 million. The Treaty with Russia was negotiated and signed by Secretary of State William Seward. Russia wanted to sell its Alaskan territory, fearing that it might be seized if war broke out with Britain. Russia's primary activities in the territory had been fur trade and missionary work among the Native Alaskans.
Russia was in a difficult financial position and feared losing Russian America without compensation in some future conflict, especially to the British, whom the Russians had fought in in the Crimean War (1853–1856). The Crimea is the area of southern Ukraine bordering the Black Sea. While Alaska attracted little interest at the time, the population of nearby British Columbia started to increase rapidly a few years after hostilities ended, with a large gold rush there prompting the creation of a British crown colony on the mainland in addition to the one that was already established on Vancouver Island, where the French and British fleets had retreated after the Battle of Petropavlovsk in the Russian Far East.
The Russians decided that in any future war with Britain, their hard-to-defend colony might become a prime target, and would be easily captured. Therefore, the Russian emperor, Alexander II, decided to sell the territory. Perhaps in the hope of starting a bidding war, both the British and the Americans were approached. However, the British expressed little interest in buying Alaska. In 1859 the Russians offered to sell the territory to the United States, hoping that its presence in the region would offset the plans of Russia's greatest regional rival, Great Britain.
Grand Duke Konstantin, a younger brother of the Tsar, began to press for the handover of Russian America to the United States in 1857.
In 1867 Russians had settled at 23 trading posts, placed at accessible islands and coastal points. At smaller stations only four or five Russians were stationed to collect furs from the natives for storage and shipment when the company's boats arrived to take it away. There were two larger towns. New Archangel, now named Sitka, had been established in 1804 to handle the valuable trade in the skins of the sea otter and in 1867 contained 116 small log cabins with 968 residents. St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands had 100 homes and 283 people and was the center of the seal fur industry. The District of Alaska and and later called the Alaska Territory became the state of Alaska in 1959.
The Marias Massacre is a little-known massacre that took place in Montana during the late-19th century Indian Wars between the United States government and the American Indians
Relations between the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Blackfoot, Blood, and Piegan tribes) and whites had been largely hostile for years. Amidst low-level hostilities, sometime in 1869, Owl Child, a young warrior, stole several of horses from Malcolm Clarke, a white trader. Clarke was able to track Owl Child down and beat him in front of his camp. Humiliated, Owl Child with a band of rogue Piegans sought revenge and killed Clarke. The killing of Clarke inflamed the public, leading to Major General Sheridan sending out a band of cavalry led by Major Eugene Baker to track down and punish the offending party.
On January 23, 1870, Major Baker received a scouting report that the group of Piegans, led by Mountain Chief, was camped along the Marias River. They attacked the site, but Mountain Chief had received warning and left the area, so Baker's men instead ended up attacking the camp of Chief Heavy Runner, who had enjoyed friendly relations with the white men. As the men of the camp were mostly out hunting, the raid was a massacre of mostly women and children. A hasty count by Maj. Baker's men show that 173 dead with 140 women and children that were captured, while only one cavalryman died after falling off his horse and breaking his leg. Mountain Chief's band, in the meantime, escaped to Canada.
Responsibility for the massacre and failure to capture Mountain Chief's men was placed by many on Major Baker's well-known alcoholism though in the subsequent controversy General Sheridan expressed his confidence in Baker's leadership, and managed to prevent an official investigation into the incident. (28)
Rations to the Sioux were cut in half and with the American bison virtually eradicated from the plains a few years earlier, the Sioux began to starve. The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as The Battle at Wounded Knee Creek, was the last major armed conflict between the Lakota Sioux and the United States, subsequently described as a massacre by Major General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Major General Nelson Miles denounced Colonel James W. Forsyth, who commanded the 7th Cavalry Regiment during the massacre and relieved him of command. Forsyth had been order to disarm the Lakota. An exhaustive Army Court of Inquiry convened by Miles criticized Forsyth for his tactical dispositions, but otherwise exonerated him of responsibility. Miles continued to criticize Forsyth, whom he believed had deliberately disobeyed his commands in order to destroy the Indians. Miles was promoted at the conclusion that Wounded Knee was a deliberate massacre rather than a tragedy caused by poor decisions, in an effort to destroy the career of Forsyth. This was later whitewashed and Forsyth was promoted to Major General. Miles wrote to his wife, describing Wounded Knee as "The most abominable criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children."
By the time the shooting was over, four infants were found still alive, wrapped in their deceased mothers' shawls. In all, 84 men, 44 women, and 18 children lay dead on the field, while at least seven of Lakota were mortally wounded. Twenty-five troopers also died during the massacre, some believed to have been the victims of friendly fire as the shooting took place at point blank range in chaotic conditions. Around 150 Lakota are believed to have fled the chaos, an unknown number dying from hypothermia. “A large number of women and children who tried to escape by running and scattering over the prairie were hunted down and killed. (29) (30)
In 1871, the MG Sheridan oversaw military relief efforts during the Great Chicago Fire. He became the Commanding General of the United States Army on November 1, 1883 and on June 1, 1888 he was promoted to General of the Army of the United States. (31)
On February 24, 1868, the United States House of Representatives, led by Radical Republicans, impeached President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat. Johnson faced trial before the US Senate. They failed to remove President Johnson by one vote short of the required two-thirds needed for conviction.
The reason for impeachment was that Congress was up-in-arms about Johnson’s attempt at firing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and replacing him with another guy. The US had a law called the Tenure of Office Act from 1867 to 1887 and it prevented the President from firing certain office-holders without the approval of the Senate. The law was enacted on March 3, 1867, over the veto of President Johnson. Congress repealed the act in its entirety in 1887. In 1926, a similar law (though not dealing with Cabinet secretaries) was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. (32)
Radical Republicans were convinced that President Johnson would enact their hardline Reconstruction policies of protection for newly freed slaves and punishment for former slave owners, government, and military officials. Radical Republicans demanded civil rights for the slaves, such as measures ensuring suffrage. Instead, Johnson unexpectedly switched course, rejecting the Radicals. Johnson had offered proclamations of general amnesty for most former Confederates. Though a Southerner himself, Johnson had been a fierce and unrelenting critic of the Southern secession.
They initiated the Reconstruction Acts and limited political and voting rights for ex-Confederates. Johnson also vetoed legislation that extended civil rights and financial support for the former slaves. Congress was able to override only a few of his vetoes, setting the stage for a confrontation between Congress and the president. Congress' control of the military Reconstruction policy was mitigated by Johnson's command of the military as president; however, Johnson had inherited, as Secretary of War, Lincoln's appointee Edwin M. Stanton, a staunch Radical Republican, who as long as he remained in office would comply with Congressional Reconstruction policies.
Abraham Lincoln had offered a model for reinstatement of Southern states. It decreed that a state could be reintegrated into the Union when ten percent of the 1860 vote count from that state had taken an oath of allegiance to the US and pledged to abide by emancipation. Voters could then elect delegates to draft revised state constitutions and establish new state governments. All southerners except for high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials would be granted a full pardon. Lincoln guaranteed southerners that he would protect their private property, though not their slaves. By 1864, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had established fully functioning Unionist governments.
Radical Republicans hoped to control the Reconstruction process, transform southern society, disband the planter aristocracy, redistribute land, and develop industry.
The Enforcement Acts were three bills passed by the United States Congress between 1870 and 1871. They were criminal codes which protected African-Americans’ right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. The laws also allowed the federal government to intervene when states did not act.
US Army Brigadier General Henry M. Robert wrote a book entitled Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies in around 1875, which was later published as Robert’s Rules of Order. A Deeply religious Baptist, Robert was unexpectedly asked to chair a meeting of the local Baptist Church. The challenge proved formidable with Robert losing control of the church meeting. He later wrote, "One can scarcely have had much experience in deliberative meetings of Christians without realizing that the best of men, having wills of their own, are liable to attempt to carry out their own views without paying sufficient respect to the rights of their opponents." He sought guidance from existing manuals of parliamentary procedure and found them to be next to useless, even occasionally absurd.
After graduating from the Military Academy 1857, Robert was commissioned in the Corps of Engineers, he taught at the Military Academy and then explored routes for wagon roads in the West and engaged in fortification work in Puget Sound. During the Civil War he worked on the defenses of Washington and Philadelphia. Robert served as Engineer of the Army's Division of the Pacific in 1867-1871. He then spent two years improving rivers in Oregon and Washington. He was made brigadier general on April 30, 1901, and was appointed Chief of Engineers. He served until May 2, 1901, when he retired from the Army. http://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/HistoricalVignettes/GeneralHistory/038ChurchMeetings.aspx
The British Royal Navy dominated the world’s oceans to protect their colonies and trade routes from 1814 to 1914. By 1870 Britain had reached in economic peak.
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President Ulysses S. Grant (March 4, 1869 to March 4, 1877)
February 12 to 20, 1874 -- Hawaiian Islands - A detachments from American vessels were landed to preserve order and protect American lives and interests during the coronation of a new king.
In the 1868 election, the black vote was counted in only 16 of the 37 states, nearly all in the South. Twelve percent of the total votes for President Ulysses S. Grant were African American voters. Grant, age 46, won the election by 300,000 votes out of some 5.7 million votes cast.
President Grant sought to grant citizens the right to vote regardless of race or previous servitude. He lobbied hard to get the amendment passed, angering many Southern whites in the process. A majority of Americans—both Northerners and Southerners—rejected civil and political rights for blacks. Racism plagued much of American society, and although the North supported abolishing slavery to hasten the end of the war, many whites did not equate black freedom with racial equality. In this social climate, the President faced a unique challenge: How could he actively protect the rights of the newly freed slaves without alienating a large segment of the American public? In the beginning of his presidency, Grant continued the policies of congressional Reconstruction, and he used both the military and federal legislation to protect black citizens. He also wanted to help the Republican Party flourish in the South, a goal unattainable without black voters and at least a portion of the white voters.
Beginning in 1870, Congress passed a series of laws known collectively as the Enforcement Acts to help protect the right to vote. One of these was the Ku Klux Klan Act, which Grant signed in April 1871 to counter the rise of terrorist activity in the South. When white Southerners could not prevent blacks from voting legally, they terrorized them to try to keep them away from the polls. The President used South Carolina as an example to prove that the federal government would intervene in extreme cases of violence. In October 1871, he instituted martial law in nine counties in South Carolina and used federal troops to restore law and order in those areas. The Enforcement Act of 1871, the third Enforcement Act passed by Congress and authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus if violence rendered efforts to suppress the Klan ineffective. It was passed at the request of Grant.
In 1870, the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote, was ratified. Grant signed legislation aimed at limiting the activities of white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan that used violence to intimidate blacks and prevent them from voting. At various times, the president sent federal troops throughout the South and stationed them there to maintain law and order. Critics charged that Grant’s actions violated states’ rights.
In 1872, however, Grant won reelection by a landslide. Violence in the south increased. During Grants second term American Indians killed Brigadier General Custer and his troops.
In his first inaugural address, Grant pledged to rethink the treatment of Native Americans, referring to them as "the original occupants of this land." He wanted to shift federal Indian policy toward what became known as the Peace Policy. This approach attempted to move Indians closer to white civilization (and ultimately US citizenship) by housing them on reservations and helping them become farmers. Grant appointed a former military aide and Seneca Indian, Brigadier General Ely S. Parker, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker was the first nonwhite appointment to a major federal position. To address corruption in federal Indian affairs, Grant also created a new Board of Indian Commissioners headed by philanthropic leaders. The board recommended the government stop using political appointees as Indian agents. Grant adopted that recommendation and turned to missionaries—especially Quakers—and Army personnel to serve as agents. However, these changes fell short of radically altering conditions for Native Americans in the United States. White settlers, with governmental support, continued to push Indians aside to take land, and they relied on the Army to prevent Indian attacks. At the same time, Native Americans on reservations had little chance of creating farms out of desolate pieces of land and were beset by poverty and desperation. While Grant's approach marked an improvement in US Indian policy, it is remembered more for its good intentions than for lasting changes. http://millercenter.org/president/biography/grant-domestic-affairs
During the Civil War, Britain had declared its neutrality but some of its citizens, interested in the cotton trade and other profits, aligned with the South. English firms constructed Confederate warships, which the South used to disrupt Northern shipping. After the war ended, the United States claimed that Britain owed it compensation for disrupting shipping, prolonging the length of the war, and violating its neutrality. Known collectively as the Alabama Claims these accusations strained British and American relations. The Alabama was a Confederate cruiser. A Joint High Commission made up of American, Canadian, and British negotiators met in Washington, D.C., in 1871 to hammer out an agreement. The commission resolved most of the issues and agreed to submit the Alabama Claims to international arbitration. The Senate quickly approved the resulting Treaty of Washington, which determined that Britain owed the United States $15.5 million.
When it came to prosecuting those guilty of graft, Grant used his presidential power to protect close friends, particularly his military associates.
1872: corrosion resistant stainless steel was invented.
1873: the first commercial electrical generator was invented.
1876: the telephone was invented by several inventors.
President Rutherford B. Hayes (March 4, 1877 – March 4, 1881)
1877: Thomas Edison invents the first working phonograph.
1879: a practical design for a functional Incandescent light bulb was invented.
1881: carbon arc welding was invented.
President James A. Garfield (March 4, 1881 - September 19, 1881)
Opposed slavery and secession, Brigadier General James Garfield while serving in the field, was elected by the Republicans to the US House of Representatives for Ohio. On December 5, 1863 resigned from the US military, to take his seat in Congress. Major general Garfield fought at the Battle of Shiloh. He entered congress as a Republican in 1863. In 1876, Garfield became the Republican floor leader of the House.
A central controversial issue during the Election of 1880 was Chinese immigration; an issue that could make or break any Presidential contender during this time period. Those in the West, particularly California, were against Chinese immigration claiming that growth in the Pacific would be limited. Easterner US Congressmen took a more philosophical and religious stand in favor of Chinese immigration. Garfield favored limiting Chinese immigration whom he labeled as "an invasion to be looked upon without solicitude."
In the general election, Garfield defeated the Democratic candidate another distinguished former Union Army general.
On July 2, 1881 less than four months after taking office, President Garfield was gun shot from behind at point-blank range. He was walking through Washington D.C. at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station. One bullet grazed Garfield's shoulder; the other lodged in his spine in the first lumbar vertebra, but missing the spinal cord. He would probably have survived his wounds if not for the medical practices of the day, which included the repeated probing of the path of the gunshot by doctors who did not yet know of the threat of infection via their unprotected hands. Garfield died eleven weeks later on September 19, 1881. The assassin was promptly hanged, having his neck stretched as a crowd of thousands cheered. His Vice President, Chester Arthur, succeeded him.
President Chester Alan Arthur (September 20, 1881 – March 4, 1885)
President Chester Alan Arthur had no vice president. From 1886 onward, the Secretary of War was third in the line of succession to the presidency, after the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of State.
From 1882 to 1887, the US Supreme was filled with monopoly corporate lawyers. The nine member court was made up of; a justice who notoriously favored railroads, a politician and railroad lawyer, the son of the counsel for Bank of England and Bank of the US and worked for a law firm the represented Wells Fargo, justice whose grandfather a wealthy shipbuilding in Boston, a noted New Jersey railroad lawyer, a lawyer who specialized in land, steamboat, and commercial law, an Ohio banking and railroad lawyer, a justice whose brothers were lawyers for robber barons and who later befriended the founder of Pacific Railroad, and a the chief attorney for railroad mogul and who as a US Senator represented several railroad companies.
President Arthur was the son of a Baptist preacher who had emigrated from Northern Ireland. He taught school, was admitted to the bar, and practiced law in New York City. Early in the Civil War he served as Quartermaster General of the State of New York. His commission in the Army was a political appointment and carried the rank of brigadier general.
President Grant in 1871 appointed him Collector of the Port of New York. In 1878 President Hayes, fired him as Hayes was attempting to reform the Customs House staffed by employees of the political spoils system.
President Arthur was a supporter and beneficiary of the spoils system, which rewarded supportive political party members with government jobs and positions after winning an election. However, as President, he signed into law the Pendleton Act of 1883 which created the Civil Service Commission. This law required government jobs and positions to be awarded to qualified candidates regardless of political affiliation. His Secretary of War was Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln.
He signed the Edmunds Act that banned bigamists and polygamists from voting and holding office. The act was specifically enforced in Utah, a highly populated Mormon territory and establishes a five-man "Utah commission" to prevent bigamists and polygamists from voting.
In relation to Asia and Asians, President Arthur was also in office when the United States became the first Western country to establish diplomatic relations in modern times with Korea in 1882 by with the signing a treaty. Korea had existed in a state of virtual hermetic isolation for centuries until 1876, when it was forced to establish diplomatic relations with Japan on an unequal basis. In 1905, Korea became an unwilling protectorate of Japan following the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
In 1884, the International Meridian Conference was held in Washington, DC at President Arthur's behest. This established the Greenwich Meridian and international standardized time, both in use today.
He wrote, "The surrender of Sitting Bull and his forces upon the Canadian frontier has allayed apprehension, although bodies of British Indians still cross the border in quest of sustenance. Upon this subject a correspondence has been opened which promises an adequate understanding. Our troops have orders to avoid meanwhile all collisions with alien Indians."
Arthur suffered from a fatal kidney disease called Bright's Disease, whereby his body could not properly flush toxins out of its system. When a journalist became too inquisitive about his personal life, he replied: "I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business." He died only one year after leaving office. (33) (34) (35)
1883: the earliest United States patents for toilet paper was produced
1884: the steam turbine used to drive an electrical generator was invented.
1885: the bicycle that looks like today was invented and produced.
President Stephen Grover Cleveland (1885 to 1889)
Stephen Cleveland was the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was the winner of the popular vote for president three times—in 1884, 1888, and 1892. He worked as a teacher and was admitted to the bar as a lawyer in 1859. He paid thirty-two year-old Polish immigrant, $150 to serve in his place in the Civil War.
Soon after taking office, President Cleveland was faced with the task of filling all the government jobs for which the president had the power of appointment. These jobs were typically filled under the spoils system, but Cleveland announced that he would not fire any Republican who was doing his job well, and would not appoint anyone solely on the basis of party service
In 1887 he signed an act creating the Interstate Commerce Commission. He and Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney undertook to modernize the navy and canceled construction contracts that had resulted in inferior ships. Cleveland angered railroad investors by ordering an investigation of western lands they held by government grant. Secretary of the Interior Lucius Q.C. Lamar charged that the rights of way for this land must be returned to the public because the railroads failed to extend their lines according to agreements. The lands were forfeited, resulting in the return of approximately 81,000,000 acres (330,000 square km)
As industrialization increased, more job opportunities opened. Factory jobs were perfect for women and children, with their smaller hands and their lower pay rates. Despite terrible work conditions, increasing numbers of women moved from the home to factories. But while women became part of the factory floor, virtually none were trusted with management, or even with handling money. The factories also took in immigrants and used them as cheap labor. Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Jews from Eastern Europe were second-class citizens in the workplace, with very low wages and no benefits. Without safety precautions, workers often suffered serious injury and lost their jobs. In the cities, laborers and employers often clashed over wages, sanitary conditions, working hours, benefits, and several other issues. Laborers organized themselves into unions to negotiate with companies. The companies, however, attempted to shut down labor unions. Some imposed yellow dog contracts, under which an employer could dismiss a worker who participated in union activity.
In the late nineteenth century, many Americans labored long hours in unsafe working environments. Bakers in New York often worked 11 to 13 hours a day, seven days a week, in small basement shops that were frequently filthy. In 1895 the New York legislature passed the Bakeshop Act, which limited bakers to a ten-hour day and a sixty-hour week and created an inspections system. Five years later Joseph Lochner, a bakeshop owner in Utica, New York, received a fifty dollar fine for violating the law, as Lochner required his employees to work more than ten hours a day. He appealed his conviction, and in 1905 the US Supreme Court issued its ruling in Lochner v. New York. The court invalidated the Bakeshop Act, arguing that the state could not regulate contracts between employers and employees. The court acknowledged that the state could provide for the safety of workers in hazardous workplaces such as mines but maintained that baking was not a dangerous profession. The ruling in Lochner made it difficult for states to establish a minimum wage or regulate the workplace.
The nation's agricultural sector grew dramatically during the late nineteenth century, as American farmers brought an additional 430 million acres under cultivation between 1860 and 1900. The subjugation of the American Indians opened lands for farming on the Great Plains, and the expansion of the nation's railroad system enabled farmers in the West to send the crops to markets. In addition, new technologies improved efficiency and productivity. For example, a single person in 1900 could harvest as much wheat as twenty men had four decades earlier. As a result, yields increased. U.S. farmers produced 254 million bushels of wheat in 1870; in 1900, they harvested 599 million bushels. Production of other crops grew at a similar pace. However, these remarkable increases in production were matched by falling prices for farm goods. A bushel of wheat that sold for $1.20 in 1870 was worth only 71 cents some twenty years later.
The nation's railroad system grew erratically over the course of the nineteenth century. As a result, there were no uniform standards regarding the gauge, or distance between the rails, on railroad tracks. By the 1880s most railroads in the northern and western states had adopted a standard gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches. In the southern states, however, some 13,000 miles of track had a gauge three inches wider. The difference in gauges necessitated moving goods and people onto different trains at points where the two gauges met, or using railroad cars with unusually wide wheels that worked on both gauges. To resolve this problem, railway workers gathered on Sunday May 30, 1886, to move 13,000 miles of southern rails three inches closer together, a monumental effort that brought uniformity to the nation's rail system.
American farmers helped to create regulation of the railroads. When domestic farmers needed to transport their crops, they also had to rely on the railroad system. But railroads often charged outrageous prices. Farmers, small merchants, and reform politicians started to demand rate regulation. In 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the Supreme Court upheld the principle of state regulation, declaring that grain warehouses owned by railroads acted in the public interest and therefore must submit to regulation for the common good. By 1880 fourteen states had established commissions to limit freight and storage charges of state-chartered lines.
In the late 1880s and early 1900s, a typical farm would be about 100 acres. Farmers could only plow with the aid of a horse or a mule. Between 1860 and 1905 the number of farms tripled from two million to six million. In 1905 the number of people living on farms grew to 31 million. The value of farms went from eight billion in 1860 to thirty billion in 1906. Then as now, wheat was a major crop, creating such common food as bread, a major source of both starch and protein for poorer people.
In 1879 the centrifugal cream separator was patented. In 1885, raising chicken became a lot more profitable due to the invention of the mechanized incubator. Complicated horse-drawn mechanical combines and threshers were used about this time. With the aid of machines a farmer could harvest about 135 acres of wheat; without them, he or she could only harvest about 7.5 acres of wheat in the same amount of time.
The Pullman Strike occurred in 1894, in response to Pullman Company workers' wages being cut following the Panic of 1893, an economic depression which was caused in part by excessive railroad speculation. Approximately 3,000 workers began the strike on May 11. Many of the workers were members of the American Railway Union, and although the strike began without authorization from union officials (known as a "wildcat strike"), the ARU eventually supported the strike by launching a nationwide boycott of Pullman cars on June 26. Within four days, approximately 125,000 ARU members had quit their jobs rather than switch Pullman cars. On July 6, President Cleveland sent Army troops to break up the strike, ostensibly because it prevented delivery of mail and was considered a threat to public safety.
On January 17, 1893, the Queen, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, was deposed in a coup d'état led largely by American citizens opposed to her attempt to establish a new Constitution. Dole was named president of the Provisional Government of Hawaii formed after the coup, and was recognized within forty-eight hours by all nations with diplomatic ties to the Kingdom of Hawaii, with the exception of the United Kingdom.
US Foreign policy
Cleveland was a committed non-interventionist who had campaigned in opposition to expansion and imperialism. He refused to promote the previous administration's Nicaragua canal treaty, and generally was less of an expansionist in foreign relations. Cleveland's Secretary of State, negotiated with Joseph Chamberlain of the United Kingdom over fishing rights in the waters off Canada in spite of opposition from American fisherman. Cleveland also withdrew from Senate consideration the Berlin Conference treaty which guaranteed an open door for US interests in the Congo.
President Cleveland, like a growing number of Northerners (and nearly all white Southerners) saw Reconstruction as a failed experiment, and was reluctant to use federal power to enforce the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution, which guaranteed voting rights to African Americans.
Cleveland initially appointed no black Americans to patronage jobs, but did allow Frederick Douglass to continue in his post as recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C. When Douglass later resigned, Cleveland appointed another black man to replace him.
Although Cleveland had condemned the outrages against Chinese immigrants, he believed that Chinese immigrants were unwilling to assimilate into white society.
The debate over tariff reduction continued into the 1888 presidential campaign. American tariffs had been high since the Civil War, and by the 1880s the tariff brought in so much revenue that the government was running a surplus. In the election of 1889, the Republicans were victorious in Indiana, largely as the result of fraud. Cleveland lost in Indiana by just 2,348 votes, sufficient to propel Benjamin Harrison to victory, despite his loss of the nationwide popular vote.
The British sided with the US in its 1889 war with Spain, negotiated a treaty over Alaska and Washington State vs. Canada, and ceded to America the exclusive rights to build, operate, and fortify the Panama Canal and the Britain withdrew her fleet from the Caribbean. The passage of the British battle fleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific was now by the courtesy of the US. The Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, now US colonies, were gradually closed to British merchants by protective tariffs.
In 1890 it is estimated that more than half of the wealth in the US was held by just one percent of families, up from 29 percent in 1860. Many of the rich got richer from the corruption by Civil War profiting. The nation’s political culture was in the grip of laissez-faire and social Darwinism, aka survival of the fittest millionaire capitalist. President Jackson’s idea was that government should not interfere on the side of the rich was changed to the idea government had no business interfering on behalf of the downtrodden.
By the 1890s US business, railroading, and finance had gained de facto control over many state legislatures, the federal judiciary, and the US Senate. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. wrote, “America, in an ironical perversion of Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, and had become a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.” (36)
1888--1889 -- Samoa -- November 14, 1888 to March 20, 1889, US forces were landed to protect American citizens and the consulate during a native civil war.
1886: the zinc-carbon battery, the first dry cell battery was invented.
1886: the first gasoline powered auto-mobile was produced.
1887: the industrial means of refining bauxite to produce aluminum.
1888: the ballpoint pen was invented.
Benjamin Harrison (March 4, 1889 – March 4, 1893)
1890s: the first chlorofluorocarbons to be applied as refrigerant.
1891: the zipper was invented.
1893: Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine.
President Stephen Grover Cleveland (1893 to 1897)
Shortly after President Cleveland's second term began, the Panic of 1893 struck the stock market, and he soon faced an acute economic depression. He took strong positions and in turn took heavy criticism. His intervention in the Pullman Strike of 1894 to keep the railroads moving angered labor unions nationwide and angered the party in Illinois. He supported the gold standard and was opposed to free silver alienated the agrarian wing of the Democratic Party.
When Cleveland took office he faced the question of annexation of the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands. On November 28, 1843, at the Court of London, the British and French Governments formally recognized Hawaiian independence. The Anglo-Franco Proclamation, a joint declaration by France and Britain. President John Tyler had verbally recognized Hawaiian Independence,
In his first term, President Cleveland had supported free trade with Hawai'i and accepted an amendment that gave the United States a coaling and naval station in Pearl Harbor. In early 1893, a committee of Honolulu residents who were businessmen of European and American ancestry dethroned Queen Liliuokalani. Historians suggest that businessmen were in favor of the overthrow and wanted the annexation to the US in order to benefit from more favorable trade conditions with its main export market. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 eliminated the previously highly favorable trade terms for Hawaii's sugar exports, a main component of the economy.
A United States Government Minister for Hawaiian Islands summoned a company of uniformed US Marines and two companies of U.S. sailors to land and take up positions at the US Consulate in the afternoon of January 16, 1893. This deployment was at the request of the Honolulu residents/businessmen, which claimed an "imminent threat to American lives and property". Historian William Russ concluded that "the injunction to prevent fighting of any kind made it impossible for the monarchy to protect itself" (her nation from invasion) and a republican government was set up under Sanford B. Dole, and sought to join the United States.
The Harrison administration had agreed with the Hawaiian representatives of the new government on a treaty of annexation and submitted it to the Senate for approval. Five days after taking office on March 9, 1893, President Cleveland withdrew the treaty from the Senate.
By December 1893, the matter was still unresolved, and Cleveland referred the issue to Congress. In his message to Congress, Cleveland rejected the idea of annexation and encouraged the Congress to continue the American tradition of non-intervention. The US Senate was hostile to Cleveland, so he dropped all talk of reinstating the Queen, and went on to recognize and maintain diplomatic relations with the new Republic of Hawaii.
The 1895 Counter-Revolution in Hawaii
On July 17, 1893, Sanford B. Dole and his committee took control of the government and declared itself the Provisional Government of Hawaii "to rule until annexation by the United States" and lobbied the United States for it.
Cleveland adopted a broad interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that did not just simply forbid new European colonies but declared an American interest in any matter within the hemisphere. When Britain and Venezuela disagreed over the boundary between the latter nation and the colony of British Guiana, Cleveland and his Secretary of State protested. A tribunal convened in Paris in 1898 to decide the matter, and in 1899 awarded the bulk of the disputed territory to British Guiana. By standing with a Latin American nation against the encroachment of a colonial power, Cleveland improved relations with the United States' southern neighbors. (37)
In 1861 John W. Foster volunteered into the Union Army in the American Civil War. Initially commissioned as a major, he rose to the rank of colonel. Foster served successive Republican Presidents Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield as US Ambassador to Mexico (1873–1880), then to Russia (1880–1881). Under President Chester A. Arthur, Foster was appointed US Ambassador to Spain (1883–1885).
In Benjamin Harrison's administration, Foster served as a State Department trouble shooter before becoming Secretary of State for the final six months of Harrison's term (June 1892 to February 1893). Foster helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
After leaving public office, Foster remained in Washington and invented a new type of legal practice, lobbying for large "corporations seeking favors in Washington and chances to expand abroad." Foster also used his government and political contacts to secure legal fees as counsel to several foreign legations. He also continued to serve Presidents part-time on diplomatic missions. As such, Foster negotiated trade agreements with eight countries, brokered a treaty with Britain and Russia.
His daughter Edith Foster married Allen Macy Dulles, and their children included John Foster Dulles (who also became a US Secretary of State) and Allen W. Dulles, (future Director of the CIA).
William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic Party’s candidate for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908 and he lost to Republicans. Bryan, a Populist argued against the railroads, banks, insurance companies. In 1886 there was strike by more than 200,000 workers at the Great Southern Railroad Company. In June 1894 there was a strike of 125,000 workers at 29 railroads in support of after the Pullman railroad car factory cut wages. President Cleveland ordered the US Marshals and 2,000 Army troops to break the strike. During the strike 13 strikers were killed and 53 wounded.
1895: Mr. Marconi invents a system of wireless communication using radio waves.
1895: the first radiograph (x-ray) was invented.
President William McKinley (1897 to 1901)
President William McKinley's star first rose on the national scene as the staunchest advocate of protectionism. He believed that high tariffs discouraged the importation of foreign goods, thereby helping keep prices high for American goods and producing profits for industries and high wages for workers. Using protectionism as his platform for election, McKinley established himself as his party's standard-bearer. According to biographer Margaret Leech, McKinley carried to Congress an emotional conviction that the solution for all the country's economic ills was to make the already high tariff rates higher still. By 1900, however, he saw reciprocity as a means for commercial expansion and a way to promote world peace.
Employee unions had progressively become a more dominant force in American life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century as they sought to improve working conditions. Strikers had clashed violently with police and the military in Chicago's Haymarket Riot in 1886 and again in the Pullman strike eight years later, leaving scores of people dead in the streets. In 1892, Pinkerton detectives in Homestead, Pennsylvania, suppressed a steel strike and protected scab laborers. The government had sided with management against workers in each instance
The US government had done little for the American working class. Already frustrated by years of economic depression that began with the Panic of 1893, and by the lack of progress toward more humane working conditions, American workers wondered why some of the vast wealth of the industrial boom wasn't trickling down to them. Millionaires like railroad king Cornelius Vanderbilt, oil baron John D. Rockefeller, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and banker J.P. Morgan had accumulated unprecedented private wealth and were known to spend more on an evening's entertainment than a coal miner or tradesman could earn in a lifetime. Such ostentatious displays bred discontent. Rubbing salt in the wound, the industrialists routinely relied on the government to help squelch worker uprisings.
On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded and sunk in Havana harbor. President McKinley told the American people the USS Maine had been sunk by a Spanish mine in Havana Harbor. The American people were outraged by this apparent unprovoked attack.
In 1976, US Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover took an interest in the case. He published his findings in the book How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed and he concluded that the mine story was not consistent with the damage. He believed that an explosion was caused by a flash fire in a coal bunker which ignited an adjacent ammunition magazine.
While the Spanish were reluctant to have the battleship present, they agreed to allow it to visit the harbor to protect American citizens on the island. The Captain of the Maine was extended every courtesy by his Spanish hosts. Even after the explosion the crew of a Spanish ship assisted with the recovery efforts. The Maine’s Captain stated this on his telegram to Washington "Public opinion should be suspended until further report." (38)
McKinley was a veteran of the Civil War and retained vivid memories. As president, he was reluctantly drawn into the Spanish-American War of 1898. At first he downplayed stories of Spanish atrocities against Cuban nationals. But the yellow journalism of competing newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fired American’s passions after the battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana's harbor. Big business, looking to expand markets, added to the inexorable forces pushing the president toward war.
While it did not declare war with Spain after this event, it was the precipitating event that led to the Spanish American war. (39) (40)
Under President McKinley, the Republic of Hawaii succeeded in its goal in 1898 when Congress approved a joint resolution of annexation creating the US Territory of Hawaii. The overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the subsequent annexation of Hawaii is cited as the first major instance of American imperialism. Dole was appointed to be the first governor of the Territory of Hawaii. This followed the precedent of Texas which was also annexed by a joint resolution of Congress. (41)
President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. (42)
Spain proved little challenge though, as American forces easily defeated the outnumbered and outgunned army and navy. As the victor, the United States gained Puerto Rico, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines. The Pacific Islands were particularly significant as they established an American presence in a new hemisphere. Moreover, the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands that summer. American business concerns became ecstatic over the prospects for expanded influence overseas. But not everyone supported the president. Hearst in particular continued to publicly criticize him. The condemnation reached a low point on April 10, 1901, when the publisher's Journal printed an editorial that declared, “if bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” Although Hearst had been responsible for many attacks on President McKinley, he maintained that the editorial had been published without his knowledge. He ordered the presses stopped, but a number of newspapers were already on the streets.
The Spanish–American War
Revolts against Spanish rule had been endemic for decades in Cuba. The Spanish ordered the Cubans to relocate near the military headquarters in what were termed re-concentration camps. While the application of this strategy was brutally effective at slowing the spread of rebellion, it had the unwelcome effect of stirring indignation in the United States The Spanish reconcentrados placed nearly all of Cuba’s native population into camps, causing President McKinley to remark that this “was not civilized warfare" but "extermination.” In schoolbooks and in the minds of the mostly Protestant American public, the Catholic Spanish Empire was a backward, immoral union built on the backs of enslaved natives and funded with stolen gold.
Spain declared war on April 23, 1898; the U.S. Congress on April 25 declared the official opening as April 21. The ten-week war was fought in both the Caribbean and the Pacific and was notable for a series of one-sided American naval and military victories.
President William McKinley appointed a delighted Theodore Roosevelt to the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. Because of the inactivity of Secretary of the Navy John D. Long at the time, and Roosevelt assertively took control over the department. Upon the 1898 Declaration of War with Spain, Roosevelt resigned from the Navy Department. Originally Roosevelt held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and served under Army Colonel Leonard Wood.
President McKinley, however, was of the Official Opinion that the cruel bloodshed was "God's Will." Teddy Roosevelt reveled in bloodshed and thought it was all just "Bully!" Both he and McKinley echoed the mass-media of their day: the openly racist, nationalistic, "jingoistic" "yellow journalism" of the corporate press.
McKinley lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to civilize the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that. (43) (44)
Supporting fire by Gatling guns was critical to the success of the assault by US Army troops. The major port of Santiago de Cuba was the main target of naval operations during the war. The US fleet attacking Santiago needed shelter from the summer hurricane season. Thus Guantánamo Bay with its excellent harbor was chosen for this purpose. The 1898 invasion of Guantánamo Bay happened June 6–10, with the first US naval attack and subsequent successful landing of U.S. Marines with naval support.
The Battle of Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898, was the largest naval engagement of the Spanish–American War and resulted in the destruction of the Spanish Caribbean Squadron (aka the Flota de Ultramar). (45)
The outcome by late 1898 was the Treaty of Paris which was favorable to the US, followed by temporary American control of Cuba and indefinite colonial authority over Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The defeat was subsequently the end of the Spanish Empire.
Casualties
Cuban Republic: 10,665 dead
Spanish Navy: 560 dead, 300–400 wounded
Spanish Army: 3,000 dead or wounded, 13,000 diseased in Cuba war
US Navy: 16 dead, 68 wounded
US Army: 345 dead, 1,577 wounded, 2,565 diseased
On August 7, 1898, the American invasion force started to leave Cuba. The problem was yellow fever, which had quickly spread amongst the American occupation force, crippling it. A group of concerned officers of the American army chose Theodore Roosevelt to draft a request to Washington that it withdraw the Army, a request that paralleled a similar one from General Shafter, who described his force as an “army of convalescents.” By the time of his letter, 75 percent of the force in Cuba was unfit for service.
The evacuation was not total. The US Army kept the black Ninth Infantry Regiment in Cuba to support the occupation. The logic was that their race and the fact that many black volunteers came from southern states would protect them; this logic led to these soldiers being nicknamed “Immunes”. Still, by the time the Ninth left, 73 of its 984 soldiers had contracted the disease.
American Genocide of the Philippine People
The Philippine-American War occurred from February 1899 to 1902.
Estimated civilian deaths: 200,000 to 600,000 people.
President McKinley made it explicit in Washington that he did not intend to give up the Philippines once the war with Spain had been concluded: "Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the commercial opportunity to which American statesmanship cannot be indifferent. ... The United States cannot accept less than the cession in full right and sovereignty of the island of Luzon." He later explained his motives in deciding to seize the Philippines out of a sense of Christian mission: …”we could not give them (the Philippines) back to Spain - that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany - our commercial rivals in the Orient - that would be bad business and discreditable…”
In November 1897, over five months before the outbreak of war between the US and Spain, the U.S. consuls-general in Hong Kong and Singapore, along with Commodore Dewey, met with the revolutionary government in exile. They assured Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipino leader, of US support.
The Filipinos took the opportunity to renew the revolutionary struggle against Spain. By May 1898 when Dewey fought his famous battle of Manila Bay and defeated the outmoded Spanish navy, the Filipinos were vigorously fighting the Spanish all over the archipelago.
By Aug. 12, 1898, when the Spanish-American War ended, they had issued a Declaration of Independence. Filipino freedom fighters were in control of almost the entire country, with the exception of the walled city of Manila.
America defeated Spain with the help of the Filipino nationalist guerrillas. The US government had promised independence to them. The US deployed 126,468 US troops in the war. Of these, 4,234 were killed--almost twice as many as had died in the preceding Spanish-American War.
Starting in the late 1880s, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were embroiled in a battle now known as the War of the Currents. As a 28 year old Serbian in 1884, Tesla immigrated to the US immediately landed a job at Edison General Electric. He disagreed with Edison by believing multi-phase alternating current (or AC) was the solution to this problem that Direct Current could not be sent long distances over power line, but AC could very efficiently at very high voltages and voltage AC current could be lowered to 120 votes for the use by homeowner and businesses using transformers. Tesla amazed Americans buy lighting up the Chicago World’s Fair at night in 1893. That same year, the Niagara Falls Power Company awarded Westinghouse Company a contract to generate DC power from Niagara Falls. Tesla was approached by the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company and offered a generous deal to license his technology. In 1888 Tesla met with George Westinghouse and agreed to license his patents for the sum of $60,000 (some $1.4 million in 2017 dollars), plus 150 shares of stock and a royalty per horsepower generated by his AC motor. Tesla was also given a $2000 a month salary to work for Westinghouse, the equivalent of $48,000 per month today. Tesla tore up his contract with Westinghouse single-handedly saved the Westinghouse Electric company from bankruptcy. In 1907, when he tore up the contract, it was worth to more than $300 million in 2017 dollars. Had he not ripped up that contract, today those same AC motor royalties would generate billions of dollars every year for Tesla's relatives. When Tesla died in 1943 at the age of 87, he was bankrupt and living alone. Westinghouse grew rich. But he was an honest millionaire in the days of robber barons and he refused to form a trust with J.P. Morgan who owned General Electric. Banker Morgan was so rich that he controlled the US money supply and Westinghouse was unable to get capital to sustain his business. Tesla saved Westinghouse’s company which when on to invent and produce many products. https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/in-1897-nikola-tesla-tore-up-a-contract-that-would-have-made-him-the-worlds-first-billionaire/
Tesla was the first to present the principles of a multi-phase induction motor. From 1856 to 1873 the inventions of the dynamo to the dc motor occurred. https://www.eti.kit.edu/english/1390.php
On Nov. 16, 1896, Buffalo, New York turned on electric lights.
A six-day workweek was the rule when George Westinghouse inaugurated the first Saturday half holiday in his Pittsburgh factory in 1881. He invented air brakes for trains and the worked on developing a steam turbine for the generation of electricity. He made great improvement to and manufactured the Parson Steam Turbine that had been invented in England. In so doing allowed the generation of electricity anywhere. He died in 1914. http://guerrillatycoon.com/2016/02/how-george-westinghouse-became-a-billionaire/
On leaving the Army, Theodore Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1898 as a Republican and later he became President McKinley’s Vice Presidential running mate in the 1900 election.
On September 6, 1901, a poor, reclusive, and often unemployed man from Cleveland fired two bullets into the President McKinley's chest which resulted in his death on September 14, 1901.
1898: polyethylene was synthesizes (aka plastic).
President William McKinley (March 4, 1897 – September 14, 1901)
1903: The first manually controlled, fixed wing, motorized aircraft flies.
President Theodore Roosevelt (September 15, 1901 to March 3, 1909)
There were at least 20,000 Filipino military casualties, by the U.S. count. No official records were kept of civilian casualties. However, in 1901 the New York Times interviewed Brigadier General Franklin Bell, who was responsible for setting up concentration camps in the province of Batangas. He estimated that 600,000 Filipino civilians had been killed as a direct or indirect result of the war on the island of Luzon alone. BG Bell ordered the forced relocation of almost the entire civilian population into selected towns which served as prison camps, freeing him to destroy everything outside the "zones” or called "deadlines." During the Vietnam War this was known as “free fire zones.”
The Philippine-American War began in February 1899 when the U.S. forces assaulted the Philippine positions surrounding Manila. Because they were within range of the guns of the U.S. fleet, casualties were high for the Filipinos. The Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare.
By the summer of 1899, the US had 60,000 troops in the Philippines. A year later the number had grown to more than 75,000--three quarters of the entire US Army. The US response to counter the guerrilla war was genocide. Villages were systematically burned and civilians were slaughtered in reprisals for guerrilla attacks. Torture, such as the "water cure," was used to interrogate captives. Villagers were herded into concentration camps called "reconcentrados" surrounded by free-fire zones. The conditions in these camps were dreadful, overcrowded, and filled with disease, that resulted in a very high death rates.
A correspondent covering an operation called it relentless. The US soldiers killed "men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino ... was little better than a dog who belonged on "the rubbish heap.” (46)
After a US platoon was wiped out in an ambush, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre of Native peoples--issued orders to kill "all persons of 10 years and older."
"The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness," Smith said. "I want no prisoners, I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms [10 years of age and above] in actual hostilities against the United States." (47) (48)
"Howling" Jake Smith, he had surrounded villagers, who had sought refuge from the fighting, in an old volcano crater. These were typical villagers, men, women, children, and the elders. BG Smith had his cannons surround the villagers, from atop of the crater walls. He then ordered them to fire continuously until all were dead, or they were out of cannon shot. The riflemen, would shoot any who would try to escape. All 600 plus villagers were killed.
In May of 1902, Smith faced "trials" for his actions, and the court-martial found him guilty. He returned to the United States and was retired with no further punishment. (49)
A “kill and burn” policy was quickly adopted on Samar, and civilians were routinely killed along with soldiers. Whenever Filipino soldiers were found with food or equipment suspected, and every other Filipino in the vicinity were immediately executed. Major General Adan R. Chaffee Jr. agreed that more severe methods must be adopted to win the war, and brutality increased across the islands.
War crimes trials were held in the fall of 1902, as a result of an investigation by Lt. General Miles’s, Theodore Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff. Captains Ryan and Brownwell and Major Glenn faced charges of murder. Major Glenn was accused of having ordered the execution of 47 Filipino prisoners, accusations he did not bother to deny. All three were acquitted by citing MG Chaffee’s orders as their defense. MG Chaffee never faced trial and the US Army named a Fort Chaffee in honor of him.
He appointed BG J. Franklin Bell to Batangas and BG Jacob H. Smith to Samar, with orders to do whatever was necessary to destroy the opposition--he wanted an Indian-style campaign instead of the previous humanitarian warfare. MG Chaffee’s orders were largely responsible for the atrocities that marked the later stages of the war. When the war ended in 1902, Chaffee returned to the States, where he served as lieutenant general and Chief of Staff for the US Army from 1904-1906.
The actual death toll will never be known, but estimates of the number of civilians that perished from famine, disease, and other war-related causes range from 200,000 to 600,000. In March 1906 an estimated 600 Muslim Filipinos - men, women, and children - were massacred over a four-day period under troops commanded by General Leonard Wood, who later became the Philippine governor general. (50)
In February 1899, the Filipinos rose in revolt against American rule. It took 70,000 American soldiers, marines and sailors three years to brutally crush the rebellion. The death toll of Filipinos was enormous, both from battle casualties and disease.
In Manila, a United States Marine named Major Littleton Waller was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar.
In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease. A British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." (51)
General Adna Chaffee’s orders were largely responsible for the atrocities that marked the later stages of the Philippine war. He ordered his generals to do whatever was necessary to destroy the opposition. He wanted an American Indian-style campaign of genocide. President Roosevelt supported MG Chaffee's tactics in the Philippines. Roosevelt was reelected in 1904. (52)
The actual death toll will never be known, but estimates of the number of civilians that perished from famine, disease, and other war-related causes range from 200,000 to 600,000. In March 1906 an estimated 600 Muslim Filipinos - men, women, and children - were massacred over a four-day period under troops commanded by Brigadier General Leonard Wood, who later became the Philippine governor general. In honor of Gen Leonard Wood and Gen. Adna Chaffee, the US Army named two forts, Fort Leonard, Wood, MO and Fort Chaffee, Arkansas after these two war criminals. (53)
US attacks into the Philippine countryside often included scorched earth campaigns where entire villages were burned and destroyed, Filipinos tortured, and the concentration of civilians into “protected zones” (aka concentration camps). Many of the civilian casualties resulted from disease and famine.
From almost the beginning of the war, soldiers wrote home describing, and usually bragging about, atrocities committed against Filipinos, soldiers and civilians alike. Increasingly, such personal letters, or portions of them, reached a national audience as newspaper editors across the nation reproduced them.
Once these accounts were widely reproduced, the War Department was forced to demand that General Otis investigate their authenticity. For each press clipping, he forwarded it to the writer’s commanding officer, who would then convince the soldier to write a retraction.
Private Charles Brenner of the Kansas regiment resisted such pressure. He insisted that Colonel Funston had ordered that all prisoners be shot and that Major Metcalf and Captain Bishop enforced these orders.
Major General Elwell S. Otis was obliged to order the Northern Luzon sector commander, Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur Jr., (General Douglas MacArthur's father) to look into the charge. Pvt. Brenner confronted MacArthur’s aide with a corroborating witness, Private Putman. Pvt. Putman confessed to shooting two prisoners after Bishop or Metcalf ordered, “Kill them! Damn it, Kill them!” BG MacArthur sent his aide’s report on to General Otis with no comment.
Funston was promoted to Brigadier General. In 1902, BG Funston toured the United States to increase public support of the Philippine-American War and became the focus of controversy by stating, "I personally strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller's 'dispatching' a few 'treacherous savages'?
BG Otis ordered Brenner court-martialed “for writing and conniving at the publication of an article which... contains willful falsehoods concerning himself and a false charge against Captain Bishop.” (54)
The United States Senate Investigating Committee on the Philippines was convened from January 31, 1902. For six months officers and political figures involved in the Philippine adventure, both pro and anti-imperialists, testified as to the brutal nature of American anti-insurgent operations. Although attempts were made to justify the amount of damage US troops were doing, as well as the number of Filipino lives lost, the evidence provided by several individuals was damning.
- That the destruction of Filipino life during the war has been so frightful that it cannot be explained as the result of ordinary civilized warfare.
- That at the very outset of the war there was strong reason to believe that our troops were ordered by some officers to give no quarter, and that no investigation was had because it was reported by Lieut.-Colonel Crowder that the evidence "would implicate many others.”
- That the Secretary of War Elihu Root never made any attempt to stop this barbarous practice, while the war was in progress.
- That the statements of Mr. Root’s, whether as to the origin of the war, its progress, or the methods by which it has been prosecuted, have been untrue.
- That Mr. Root has shown a desire not to investigate, and, on the other hand, to conceal the truth touching the war and to shield the guilty, and by censorship and otherwise has largely succeeded.
- That Mr. Root, then, is the real defendant in this case. The responsibility for what has disgraced the American name lies at his door. He is conspicuously the person to be investigated. The records of the War Department should be laid bare, that we may see what orders, what cablegrams, what reports, are there. His standard of humanity, his attitude toward witnesses, the position which he has taken, the statements which he has made, all prove that he is the last person to be charged with the duty of investigating charges which, if proved, recoil on him.
From 1899 to 1904 the US Secretary of War was Elihu Root. In 1905, President Roosevelt named Root as the United States Secretary of State after the death of John Hay.
In May 1902, MG Smith faced court-martial for his orders, being tried not for murder or other war crimes, but for "conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline." The court-martial found Smith guilty and sentenced him "to be admonished by the reviewing authority."
To ease the subsequent public outcry in America, Secretary of War Elihu Root recommended that Smith be retired. President Roosevelt accepted this recommendation, and ordered Smith's retirement from the Army, with no additional punishment. BG J. Franklin Bell, BG MacArthur, and MG Otis were never investigated.
From 1901 to 1903, William Howard Taft served as the first civilian Governor-General of the Philippines, a position in which he was very popular with both Americans and Filipinos. In 1902, Taft visited Rome to negotiate with Pope Leo XIII for the purchase of Philippine lands owned by the Roman Catholic Church. Taft then persuaded Congress to appropriate more than $7 million to purchase these lands, which he sold to Filipinos on easy terms. (55)
While Theodore Roosevelt was President, the United States requested that Columbia sign a treaty turning the isthmus over to a North American consortium and Columbia refused to sign.
President Roosevelt’s unilateral intervention into the internal affairs of sovereign Colombia, in order to acquire free reign to construct and protect an inter-oceanic canal, Roosevelt, responding to criticisms that he violated Colombia’s sovereignty, stated that the US had a moral duty to overcome Colombia’s "selfish" interests and delays in granting US canal rights in the Isthmus of Panama. He cited considerations of "treaty rights and obligations," of "national interests and safety," of "collective civilization," and in the "interests of its inhabitants." (FDR’s message to Congress Jan. 4, 1904).
Columbia refused this treaty, so in 1903 Roosevelt sent the warship Nashville with troops to invade at Colon preventing Colombian troops using the railway. They killed the local militia commander and this helped the success of the revolutionary Junta to become the independent nation of Panama. A puppet government was installed and a treaty was signed which established an American zone on both sides of the future waterway. Washington assumed full control over this "new" nation. Thereafter, Panama was ruled by Washington sponsored wealthy right-wing dictators whose first priority was American interests. This included big American interests like Standard Oil and United Fruit Company. Meanwhile Panamanian citizens lived in poverty. (56)
In 1904, Roosevelt appointed William Taft as Secretary of War. In 1905, he issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which allows the United States to "exercise international policy power" so they can intervene and keep smaller countries on their feet.
James Bradley in his book, The Imperial Cruise (2009), he reveals that in 1905 Roosevelt encouraged the Japanese to begin their military expansion onto the Asian continent when the president agreed a secret treaty that allowed Japan to take Korea. Bradley asserts that with this secret and unconstitutional maneuver, Roosevelt inadvertently ignited the problem of Japanese expansionism in Asia.
Taft met with the Emperor of Japan who alerted him of the probability of war with Russia. In 1905, Taft met with Japanese Prime Minister and the two signed a secret diplomatic memorandum now called the Taft-Katsura Agreement. The memorandum did not establish any new policies but instead repeated the public positions of both nations.
Theodore Roosevelt introduced the phrase “Square Deal” to describe his progressive views in a speech delivered after leaving the office of the Presidency in August 1910. In his broad outline, he stressed equality of opportunity for all citizens and emphasized the importance of fair government regulations of corporate special interests.
In 1908 in his annual message to Congress, Roosevelt mentioned the need for federal government to regulate interstate corporations using the Interstate Commerce Clause, also mentioning how these corporations fought federal control by appealing to states' rights.
In an 1894 article on immigration, Roosevelt said, "We must Americanize in every way, in speech, in political ideas and principles, and in their way of looking at relations between church and state. We welcome the German and the Irishman who becomes an American. We have no use for the German or Irishman who remains such... He must revere only our flag, not only must it come first, but no other flag should even come second.
The Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan came into play in 1907, banning all school segregation of Japanese, yet controlling Japanese immigration in California. That year, Roosevelt signed the proclamation establishing Oklahoma as the 46th state of the Union.
Roosevelt was the first president to appoint a representative of the Jewish minority to a cabinet position, Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Oscar S. Straus, 1906-1909.
Roosevelt said about African Americans: "I have not been able to think out any solution of the terrible problem offered by the presence of the negro on this continent, but of one thing I am sure, and that is that inasmuch as he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away, the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less that he shows himself worthy to have."
Theodore Roosevelt, a sportsman and naturalist, sided emphatically with the conservationists. Legislative effort was devoted to changing the way America used its land, especially in the West. The Newlands Act of 1902 placed the federal government in an activist role in the areas of water management and reclamation.
The president, with the aid and encouragement of Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, worked to preserve more than 170 million acres, mostly in the West, in the forms of national parks and monuments.
Roosevelt's most important legacies led to the creation of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. His executive orders saved such treasures as Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest.
As a young man, Roosevelt was influenced by the works of John James Audubon and Charles Darwin. His Harvard education in Darwinian biology and naturalist studies “gave him a perspective on western wildlife that no ordinary cowboy or hunter could have had.” After surveying the Dakota Territory in 1887 and finding only a smattering of elk, buffalo or pronghorn, he “understood that the winning of the West had been accomplished at the expense of natural resource management.” (57)
Some world history related to the US getting into World War I and World War Two
In the First Sino-Japanese war of 1894 -1895, Japan defeated China, seized Taiwan, and occupied the Liaotung Peninsula. China abandoned its protectorate over Korea.
In December 1897, a Russian fleet appeared off Port Arthur in China. After three months, in 1898, a convention was agreed between China and Russia by which Russia was leased Port Arthur. The Russians lost no time in occupation and in fortifying Port Arthur, their sole warm-water port on the Pacific coast, and of great strategic value. A year later in order to consolidate their position, the Russians began a new railway to Port Arthur. The Russians also began to make inroads into Korea; by 1898 they acquired mining and forestry concessions near Yalu and Tumen rivers, causing the Japanese much anxiety. Japan decided to strike before Trans-Siberian Railway was complete.
With a Russian army in Manchuria menacing Korea and Russian warships in ports near Vladivostok, Japan needed an ally to balance off Russia’s ally, France. On January 30, 1902, a British-Japanese treaty was signed. Each nation agreed to remain neutral should the other got into an Asian war with a single country, and should either Japan or Britain get into a war with TWO nations at the same time, each would come to the aid of the other.
In 1905, Britain made friends with (allies of) Germany and Austria-Hungary. Russia was Britain's great rival in the 1800s. Germany was the sole European force against a French-Russian dominance of Europe against Britain’s imperialism. In August 1907, Britain entered into a British-Russian agreement on what parts of the world each would call their colonies, ending their 80 year conflict. The Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 stipulated that a partial mobilization by any member of the Triple Alliance – Austria, Italy, or Germany – would trigger hostilities against all three.
The Russo-Japanese War -- (February 10, 1904 - September 5, 1905) -- Russia, a major Imperial power, had ambitions in the East. By the 1890s it had extended its realm across Central Asia to Afghanistan, absorbing local states in the process. The Russian Empire stretched from Poland in the west to the Kamchatka peninsula in the east with its construction of the 5,772 mile long, Trans-Siberian Railway to the port of Vladivostok. Russia hoped to further consolidate its influence and presence in the region. This was precisely what Japan feared, as they regarded Korea (and to a lesser extent Manchuria) as a protective buffer.
In January 30, 1902 Japan formed an alliance with Britain, the terms of which stated that if Japan went to war in the Far East and that a third power entered the fight against Japan, then Britain would come to the aid of the Japanese. In 1904 this treaty was elevated to a full alliance. This was a check to prevent either Germany or France from intervening militarily in any future war with Russia. British reasons for joining the alliance were also to check the spread of Russian expansion into the Pacific arena, which would have threatened British interests.
Russia’s ally was France and a 19th century revival of Britain. France was Britain’s ancient enemy and imperial rival in Africa and Egypt. Russian expansionism was pressing down on China, India, Afghanistan, the Turkish Straits, and the Middle East. Britain’s allies were Germany and the Habsburg Empire.
As a result of Russia's unwillingness to enter into a compromise and the prospect of Korea falling under Russia's domination, compelled Japan to take action. This would be the deciding factor and catalyst that would lead to the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 to 1905. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War
Japan issued a declaration of war on February 8, 1904. However, three hours before Japan's declaration of war was received by the Russian Government, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur. Czar Nicholas II was stunned by news of the attack. He could not believe that Japan would commit an act of war without a formal declaration.
The requirement to declare war before commencing hostilities was not made international law until after the war had ended in October 1907, effective from January 26,1910. This was the first time the tactics of entrenched positions for infantry defended with machine guns and artillery became vitally important.
The number of Japanese dead in combat is put at around 47,000 killed in action with around 80,000 if disease is included. It is estimated the Russian dead range from around 40,000 to around 70,000. China suffered 20,000 collateral deaths, and financially the loss amounted to over 69 million taels worth of silver.
This was the first major victory of an Asian power over a European one in the modern era. Russia's defeat had been met with shock both in the West and across the Far East, that an Asian country could defeat an established European power in a large military conflict. Japan's prestige rose greatly as it began to be considered a modern Great Power. Concurrently, Russia lost virtually its entire Pacific and Baltic fleets, and also lost international esteem. This was particularly true in the eyes of Germany and Austria–Hungary; Russia was France and Serbia's ally, and that loss of prestige had a significant effect on Germany's future when planning for war with France, and Austria–Hungary's war with Serbia.
Russia had lost two of its three fleets. Only its Black Sea Fleet remained, and this was the result of an earlier treaty that had prevented the fleet from leaving the Black Sea. Japan became the sixth-most powerful naval force, while the Russian navy declined to one barely stronger than that of Austria–Hungary. The actual costs of the war were large enough to have affected the Russian economy; and despite grain exports, the nation developed an external balance of payments deficit. The cost of military re-equipment and re-expansion after 1905 pushed the economy further into deficit, although the size of the deficit was obscured.
Japanese had intended to retain all of Sakhalin Island, but they were forced to settle for half of it after being pressured by the US.
In the absence of Russian competition and with the distraction of European nations during World War One, combined with the Great Depression (1929 to 1940) which followed, the Japanese military began its efforts to dominate China and the rest of Asia, which eventually led to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, theatres of World War II.
Popular discontent in Russia after the war added more fuel to the already simmering Russian Revolution of 1905, an event Nicholas II of Russia had hoped to avoid entirely by taking intransigent negotiating stances prior to coming to the table at all. In ten more years, that discontent boiled over into the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In April 1904, Britain and France came to a negotiated agreement wherein France would yield all claim to Egypt and Britain would agree to support France’s preeminence in Morocco. This agreement ended centuries of hostility between their empires.
Panic of 1907
By the beginning of the 20th century the most influential business men and bankers were the J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg, and the Rothschilds.
The Panic of 1907 was a run on the American banking system as a result of a public announcement by J.P. Morgan that a prominent bank in New York was insolvent. The results were widespread mass withdrawals on the entire banking system. This forced the banks to call in their loans. Bankruptcies, repossessions and financial turmoil emerged.
Congress created the National Monetary Commission after the Panic of 1907 to draft up a plan for banking reform.
Allegedly, in exchange for financial support for his presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson agreed that if elected, he would sign a bill that would lead to the formation of a central bank for the United States.
More undeclared wars
1899 -- Samoa -- February-May 15. American and British naval forces were landed to protect national interests and to take part in a bloody contention over the succession to the throne.
1900 -- China -- May 24 to September 28. American troops participated in operations to protect foreign lives during the Boxer rising, particularly at Peking. For many years after this experience a permanent legation guard was maintained in Peking, and was strengthened at times as trouble threatened.
1901 -- Columbia (State of Panama) -- November 20 to December 4. US forces protected American property on the Isthmus and kept transit lines open during serious revolutionary disturbances.
The infrastructure of the Panama Railway was of vital importance for the construction of the Panama Canal over a parallel route half a century later. The principal incentive for the building of the rail line was the vast increase in traffic to California owing to the 1849 California Gold Rush. Construction on the Panama Railroad began in 1850 and four years later the first train ran the full length from Atlantic to Pacific Oceans. An estimated 12,000 workers had died during the construction many from tropical diseases.
In 1888, France started building the Panama canal with a huge labor force of about 40,000 men, nine-tenths of these being Afro-Caribbean workers from the West Indies. Between 1881 and 1889 it is estimated over 22,000 workers died from injuries, exhaustion, (aka most likely heat stroke) and from tropical diseases particularly malaria and yellow fever.
The French companies went bankrupt, and work was finally suspended in 1889 with the canal about two-fifths completed and some $234,795,000 had been spent.
President Theodore Roosevelt believed that a US controlled canal across Central America was a vital strategic interest to the U.S. He pushed through the acquisition of the French Panama Canal effort and the US purchased the French-held land for $40 million, taking control of the French property on May 4, 1904.
By 1906, yellow fever was virtually wiped out in the Canal Zone, and the number of deaths caused by the other top disease, malaria, was also reduced significantly. In 1897 it was proved by Britain's Ronald Ross in India that malaria was spread by mosquitoes. This scientific discovery was slowly accepted and the US waged a war on mosquitoes and sanitation was improved. Individuals who became who became sick with yellow fever or malaria were quarantined from the rest of the workforce. Those who were diagnosed with either disease were put into "Portable Fever Cages", easily transportable screened structures used to prevent mosquitoes from biting an infected person and carrying the disease to others. Also it was required that canal workers sleep in screened verandas, as the mosquitoes that spread malaria are nocturnal and would infect the most people at night.
While disease reduction dramatically improved the health of white workers, Black workers - the majority of the canal workforce - continued to die in large numbers, at ten times the rate of white workers in 1906. While medical care was provided to all, housing was not provided to Black workers, many of whom had to live in tents and tenements outside the mosquito-controlled zone. In the end, 350 white workers had died compared to 4,500 Black workers. It was far less than during the French era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_construction_of_the_Panama_Canal
1902 -- Colombia -- April 16 to 23. U.S. forces protected American lives and property at Bocas del Toro during a civil war.
1902 -- Colombia (State of Panama) -- September 17 to November 18. The United States placed armed guards on all trains crossing the Isthmus to keep the railroad line open, and stationed ships on both sides of Panama to prevent the landing of Colombian troops.
1903 -- Honduras -- March 23 to 30 or 31. U.S. forces protected the American consulate and the steamship wharf at Puerto Cortes during a period of revolutionary activity.
1903 -- Dominican Republic -- March 30 to April 21. A detachment of marines was landed to protect American interests in the city of Santo Domingo during a revolutionary outbreak.
1903 -- Syria -- September 7 to 12. U.S. forces protected the American consulate in Beirut when a local Muslim uprising was feared.
1903-1904 -- Abyssinia. Twenty-five marines were sent to Abyssinia to protect the U.S. Consul General while he negotiated a treaty.
1903-1914 -- Panama. US forces sought to protect American interests and lives during and following the revolution for independence from Colombia over construction of the Isthmian Canal. With brief intermissions, United States Marines were stationed on the Isthmus from November 4, 1903, to January 21 1914 to guard American interests.
1904 -- Dominican Republic -- January 2nd to February 11th. American and British naval forces established an area in which no fighting would be allowed and protected American interests in Puerto Plata and Sosua and Santo Domingo City during revolutionary fighting.
1904 -- Tangier, Morocco -- A squadron demonstrated to force release of a kidnapped American. Marine guard was landed to protect the consul general.
1904 -- Panama -- November 17 to 24th, U.S. forces protected American lives and property at Ancon at the time of a threatened insurrection.
1904-1905 -- Korea -- January 5, 1904, to November 11, 1905, a Marine guard was sent to protect the American legation in Seoul during the Russo-Japanese War.
1906-1909 -- Cuba -- September 1906 to January 23, 1909 a US forces sought to restore order, protect foreigners, and establish a stable government after serious revolutionary activity. (58)
In his book, The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter analyzed American presidents. He found that Democratic leaders as well as Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, invaded other countries, sought to expand U.S. power across the globe.
In 1907, US warships seized several of Nicaragua's seaports.
In 1908 William Jennings Bryan again ran as a Democrat for President. He supported the prohibition against alcohol, was a peace advocate, was against US imperialism, and supported trust-busting of the big banks and corporations.
President William Howard Taft (March 4, 1909 to March 1913)
Taft’s history:
Chief Justice of the United States June 30, 1921 – February 3, 1930
1st Provisional Governor of Cuba September 29, 1906 – October 13, 1906
1st Civil Governor of the Philippines July 4, 1901 – December 23, 1903
Throughout the early part of his presidency, President Taft had difficulties with Nicaragua. When the United States shifted its interests to Panama to build a canal, Nicaraguan President negotiated with Germany and Japan in an unsuccessful effort to have a canal constructed in his country. US intervention in Latin America occurred from 1898 until 1935.
US Marines landed on Nicaragua's Caribbean Sea coast and on December 17, 1909, the president of Nicaragua resigned and left for exile in Mexico. The US sponsored a new conservative regime in his place. Military invasions with marine landings took place in 1910 and 1912, and the Marines stayed in Nicaragua through 1925.
One of Taft's main goals while President, was to further the idea of world peace. Given his judicial sensibilities, he believed that international arbitration was the best means to effect the end of war on Earth. As a result, he championed several reciprocity and arbitration treaties. In 1910, he persuaded congressional Democrats to support a reciprocity, or free trade, treaty with Canada, but the Liberal Canadian government that negotiated the treaty was turned out of office in 1911 and the treaty collapsed. A US-Canada reciprocity treaty would not come into effect until 1988.
In 1910 and 1911, however, Taft secured the ratification of arbitration treaties that he had successfully negotiated with Britain and France, and thereafter was known as one of the foremost advocates of world peace and arbitration.
On 1910, a secret meeting took place on the Morgan estate on Jekyll Island, Georgia. Such men included Henry Davison (senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company), Frank Vandelip (President of the National Bank of New York associated with the Rockefellers), Charles D. Norton (president of the Morgan-dominated of First National Bank of New York), Benjamin Strong (representing J.P. Morgan), and the primary architect of the Act, Paul Warburg (representing Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) Source: http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/US_central_banking_rothschild_102320072
In August 1907, Britain entered into an Anglo-Russian convention, ending their 80-year conflict. Russia’s Czar accepted Britain’s dominance in southern Persia (the Iran area) and Britain accepted Russia’s dominance in the north. Both agreed to stay out of central Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were now allied and Britain, Japan, France and Russia were allied. Only the United States among the great powers remained free of alliances.
Chinese Revolution of 1911 The overthrow of the Manchu Qing dynasty and the establishment of a Chinese republic. After half a century of anti-Manchu risings, the imperial government began a reform movement that gave limited authority to provincial assemblies, and these became power bases for constitutional reformers and republicans. Weakened by provincial opposition to the nationalization of some major railways, the government was unable to suppress the republican Wuchang Uprising (October 10, 1911). By the end of November 15th provinces had seceded and on December 29, 1911 provincial delegates proclaimed a republic, with Sun Yat-Sen as provisional President. In February 1912, the last Qing emperor Puyi was forced to abdicate and Sun stepped down to allow Yuan Shikai to become President. The Provisional Constitution of March 1912 allowed for the institution of a democratically elected parliament, but this was ignored and eventually dissolved by Yuan Shikai after the abortive Second Revolution of 1913, which challenged his authority. Yuan had himself proclaimed emperor in 1915, but by that time central government was ineffective and China was controlled by provincial warlords. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O48-ChineseRevolutionof1911.html
The Qing Dynasty, the last of the ruling Chinese dynasties, collapsed in 1911. China was left under the control of several major and lesser warlords in the Warlord era. To defeat these warlords, who had seized control of much of Northern China, the anti-monarchist and nationalist Kuomintang party and the president of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen, sought the help of foreign powers. Sun Yat-sen's efforts to obtain aid from the Western democracies were ignored, however, and in 1921 he turned to the Soviet Union.
A nationalist revolt from 1911 to 1912 led to a provisional republican constitution being proclaimed and a government established in Beijing (Peking) headed by Yuan Shihai. The Kuomintang was faced with the problems of restoring the authority of central government and meeting the challenges from militaristic factions (led by warlords) and the growing communist movement.
For political expediency, the Soviet leadership initiated a dual policy of support for both Sun and the newly established Communist Party of China, which would eventually found the People's Republic of China. Thus the struggle for power in China began between the KMT and the CPC.
Under the leaders Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalists, or “Kuomintang”, were increasingly challenged by the growing communist movement. On February 12, 1912 the Republic of China formally replaced the Qing Dynasty.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War#Background
More undeclared wars
1907 -- Honduras -- March 18 to June 8th, to protect American interests during a war between Honduras and Nicaragua, troops were stationed in Trujillo, Ceiba, Puerto Cortez, San Pedro Laguna and Choloma.
1910 -- Nicaragua -- May 19 to September 4th, U.S. forces protected American interests at Bluefields, a city on the Atlantic coast.
1911 -- Honduras -- January 26. American naval detachments were landed to protect American lives and interests during a civil war in Honduras.
1911 – China -- As the nationalist revolution approached, in October an ensign and 10 men tried to enter Wuchang to rescue missionaries but retired on being warned away and a small landing force guarded American private property and consulate at Hankow. A marine guard was established in November over the cable stations at Shanghai; landing forces were sent for protection in Nanking, Chinkiang, Taku and elsewhere.
1912 – Honduras -- A small force landed to prevent seizure by the government of an American-owned railroad at Puerto Cortes. The forces were withdrawn after the United States disapproved the action.
1912 -- Panama. -- US troops, on request of both political parties, supervised elections outside the Canal Zone.
1912 -- Cuba -- June 5 to August 5th, a US forces protected American interests on the Province of Oriente, and in Havana.
1912 -- China -- August 24 to 26th, on Kentucky Island, and August 26 to 30th at Camp Nicholson. a US forces protect Americans and American interests during revolutionary activity.
1912 -- Turkey -- November 18 to December 3rd, a US forces guarded the American legation at Constantinople during a Balkan War.
1912 - 1925 -- Nicaragua -- August to November 1912, a US forces protected American interests during an attempted revolution. A small force, serving as a legation guard and seeking to promote peace and stability, remained until August 5, 1925.
1912 - 1941 -- China -- The disorders which began with the Kuomintang rebellion in 1912, which were redirected by the invasion of China by Japan and finally ended by war between Japan and the United States in 1941, led to demonstrations and landing parties for the protection of U.S. interests in China continuously and at many points from 1912 to 1941. The guard at Peking and along the route to the sea was maintained until 1941. In 1927, the United States had 5,670 troops ashore in China and 44 naval vessels in its waters. In 1933 the United States had 3,027 armed men ashore. The protective action was generally based on treaties with China concluded from 1858 to 1901.
President Taft fought for the prosecution of trusts, further strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission, established a postal savings bank and a parcel post system, and expanded the civil service. He was reluctant to use federal authority to enforce the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. As a result, state governments were able to enforce voter registration requirements that prevented African Americans from voting. Lynching by whites was common throughout the South at the time; however, Taft did nothing to stop the practice.
Teddy Roosevelt, along with key allies such as Gifford Pinchot and Albert Beveridge created the Progressive Party, structuring it as a permanent organization that would field complete tickets at the presidential and state level. It was popularly known as the Bull Moose Party, which got its name after Roosevelt told reporters, "I'm as fit as a bull moose.”
Roosevelt's Progressive Party 1912 platform echoed his 1907 to 1908 proposals, calling for vigorous government intervention to protect the people from the selfish interests.
Roosevelt said,”This assertion is explicit. ... Mr. Wilson must know that every monopoly in the United States opposes the Progressive party. ... I challenge him ... to name the monopoly that did support the Progressive party, whether ... the Sugar Trust, the Steel Trust, the Harvester Trust, the Standard Oil Trust, the Tobacco Trust, or any other. ... Ours was the only program to which they objected, and they supported either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Taft...”
On October 14, 1912, a saloon keeper shot former President Teddy Roosevelt, but the bullet lodged in his chest only after penetrating both his steel eyeglass case and passing through a thick 50 page copy of the speech he was carrying in his jacket. He gave his 90 minute political campaign speech immediately after being shot.
Just as Pres. Taft was leaving office, the 16th Amendment of the Constitution authorizing a federal income tax was ratified and it became law on February 3, 1913. This was after the Supreme Court, in Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., upheld the tax in 1911. (59)
President William Howard Taft (March 4, 1909 – March 4, 1913)
President T. Woodrow Wilson (March 4, 1913 – March 4, 1921)
Woodrow Wilson belonged to the Democratic Party and believed government should take an active part in efforts for social reforms. He had spent most of his life as a professor at Princeton University and serviced as the university president. As a professor he taught ancient Greek and Roman history, became the Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy and lectured on US Constitutional Law. Next, Wilson was elected governor of the state of New Jersey. Wilson defeated President William Howard Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt in the election.
Wilson wasted no time. He immediately called a special session of Congress to act on Democratic campaign promises to reduce import taxes, or tariffs. This passed Congress but the lower tariffs reduced the amount of money taken in by the federal government. So the Senate also approved a tax on income on earnings. A constitutional amendment had been passed earlier to permit such a tax.
President Wilson and the Democratic Party next turned their efforts to reform of the banking industry. He noted a report that said just two men controlled ten percent of the total wealth of the United States, and he said laws were needed to prevent a few wealthy men from using the economic resources of the country for their own purposes. As a result the Federal Reserve System was established.
Over a period of ten days the Federal Reserve Act was drafted and was voted on in Congress on December 22, 1913. It was a day when much of Congress was either sleeping or at home with their families for the Christmas holidays. It passed through the Senate the following morning and Woodrow Wilson signed the bill into law. This Act transferred control of the money supply of the United States from Congress as defined in the US Constitution to the private banking elite.
The deceptive terminology of the name was carefully chosen because the American public did not want a central bank similar to those in Europe. The Federal Reserve is not a federal governmental entity. It is a legalized cartel of the money supply owned by private national banks, operating for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting public interests. Source: http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/US_central_banking_rothschild_102320072
Wilson told Congress that new legislation was needed to control the power of monopolies and trusts. These were the giant companies and business alliances that controlled complete industries. Wilson proposed a new antitrust law, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 clarified the Sherman Act, to control the actions of large companies. As a result, no longer could a company set prices that would reduce competition or create a monopoly. No longer could corporations buy stocks of competing companies. No longer could they demand that a store refuse to sell competing products. A law was passed to set up a government agency called the Federal Trade Commission. The commission was given the job of investigating wrongdoing in business. A bill was passed that protected labor unions from being charged with antitrust violations. Both the antitrust law and the Federal Trade Commission helped protect small business owners from the power of business giants.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century strikes, union-instigated boycotts, and organizing campaigns were front and center in American society during the Wilson years. Employers, many of whom enjoyed close relationships with Wilson, launched a violent, and mostly successful, open-shop movement (meaning employers could be allowed to only hire non-union workers. In 1909, after thousands of employers’ busted unions, broke strikes, and blacklisted labor activists, Wilson went on record offering his wholehearted approval, saying of “a fierce partisan of the Open Shop and everything that makes for individual liberty.” He promoted anti-unionism in numerous ways: by supporting the open-shop principle, by imposing anti-labor and anti-leftist policies during World War One, and by encouraging those employers hiring detectives who killed strikers. One copper mine owner in Arizona, kidnapped some 1,200 workers and with the help of the railroad, shipped them out of the state. The mine owner was not indicted for this crime.
In 1916 when the Wilson nominated the eminent lawyer Louis Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. A Court that at the time was intensely anti-union. Brandeis had established himself as a union foe on a number of occasions. In 1877, during the Louisville great railroad strike, Brandeis armed himself and joined a capitalist militia. He joined Louisville’s wealthiest neighborhoods against biracial crowds of angry protesters. Brandeis defended the interests of independent businessmen and several employers’ associations from closed-shop-demanding labor activists (workers had to join a union in order to work for a company). He had routinely helped his rich friends secure injunctions against the working class.
Brandeis became a good liberal over time and he frequently declared his discomfort with industrial bigness, supported some labor reforms, and advocated privacy rights. But he was uncompromising in his support for the open-shop principle, believing that scabs, like efficient union members, must enjoy access to workplaces. In 1909, he insisted that closed shops were “un-American and unfair to both sides.”
Wilson remained intolerant of outbursts of working class solidarity and for example, at the end of his life, he said that strikes constituted “a crime against civilization.” https://lawcha.org/wordpress/2015/12/01/woodrow-wilson-and-anti-unionists/
In 1916, under threat of a national railroad strike, Wilson approved legislation that increased wages and cut working hours of railroad employees; there was no strike. With the President reaching out to new constituencies, a series of programs were targeted at farmers. The Smith–Lever Act of 1914 created the modern system of agricultural extension agents sponsored by the state agricultural colleges. The agents taught new techniques to farmers. The 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act provided for issuance of low-cost long-term mortgages to farmers. Child labor was curtailed by the Keating–Owen Act of 1916, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1918.
Wilson defended his administration's segregation policy in a July 1913 letter suggested that segregation removed "friction" between the races. The president's African-American supporters, who had crossed party lines to vote for him, were bitterly disappointed, and they and Northern leaders protested. Segregation in government offices and discriminatory hiring practices had been institutionalized by President Theodore Roosevelt and continued by President Taft; the Wilson administration continued and escalated these practices.
In an early foreign policy matter, Wilson responded to an angry protest by the Japanese government when the state of California proposed legislation that excluded Japanese people from land ownership in the state. Japan's sense of humiliation remained high for decades to come.
Racist claimed that the Shinto religion was the basis for life in Japanese culture and government, going so far as to say that, “religion and government in Japan have been one and the same. Therein any person of Japanese heritage who practices the Shinto religion was alleged to ultimately be devoted to the government of Japan. Shut out of local unions, Japanese were forced into business and finding considerable successes primarily in farming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/Japanese_restriction.htm
More undeclared wars
1913 -- Mexico -- September 5 to 7th, a few marines landed at Ciaris Estero to aid in evacuating American citizens and others from the Yaqui Valley, made dangerous for foreigners by civil strife.
President Wilson in April of 1914, he ordered the bombardment of the Mexican coast, and the occupation of the city of Veracruz, in retaliation for the arrest of several US sailors. US forces occupied Veracruz for over six months in 1914. The incident came in the midst of poor diplomatic relations with the United States, related to the ongoing Mexican Revolution.
1914 -- Haiti -- January 29 to February 9, February 20 to 21, October 19. Intermittently U.S. naval forces protected American nationals in a time of rioting and revolution.
Marines attacked Haiti in 1915, killing thousands of Haitians who resisted, beginning a long military occupation of that tiny country. He sent Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic in 1916. (Source: A People's History of the US, by Howard Zinn and
Source: http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0406
1914 -- Dominican Republic -- June and July. During a revolutionary movement, United States naval forces by gunfire stopped the bombardment of Puerto Plata, and by threat of force maintained Santo Domingo City as a neutral zone.
1914 to 1917 -- Mexico. Undeclared Mexican--American hostilities followed the Dolphin affair and Villa's raids and included capture of Vera Cruz and later Pershing's expedition into northern Mexico.
War between the United States and Mexico was averted through negotiations, and in 1916 Wilson’s reelection campaign for president boasted he had "kept us out of war" (with Mexico).
1915 to 1934 -- Haiti -- July 28, 1915, to August 15, 1934. U.S. forces maintained order during a period of chronic and threatened insurrection.
1916 -- China. American forces landed to quell a riot taking place on American property in Nanking.
American troops in Haiti, under the command of the federal government, forced the Haitian legislature to choose the candidate Wilson selected as Haitian president. American troops occupied Haiti between 1915 and 1934. President Wilson ordered the military occupation of the Dominican Republic shortly after its president resigned in 1916. The US military worked in concert with wealthy Dominican landowners to suppress a campesino guerrilla force fighting the occupation. The occupation lasted until 1924, and was notorious for its brutality against those in the resistance.
1916 to 1924 -- Dominican Republic -- May 1916 to September 1924. American naval forces maintained order during a period of chronic and threatened insurrection.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
What triggered World War One
In the 1815 to 1914, Germany was the least militaristic of the European powers, having been in three wars. By 1914, Germany was the world’s third largest overseas empire. France and Russia were expansionists.
Britain had been in ten wars; seven with Prussia, five with France, and three with Austria. Germans freed greatly a Britain blockade her ports and if war broke out, German warships would have had to pass the North Sea and pass through the English Channel or sail around the Scottish coast near the Royal naval base.
Britain on the other hand, refused to give Germany a neutrality pledge in return of limits on the German High Seas Fleet. When the Kaiser changed his national policy and started building up their navy for superiority in the North Sea. The British saw this as a threat to their empire survival which depended on seaborne free trade, and the supremacy Royal Navy of the high seas.
Germany had decided to start building ships and therefore this build up threatened the British navy and the flow of raw materials from its colonies. The British had a national defense strategy where their navy was to remain ten percent larger than the combined fleets of the next two strongest sea powers. After the Kaiser increased spending on Germany’s military and navy, any misunderstanding could seriously affect the precarious balance of power among the European powers.
All because a bunch of kings in Europe could not just stay out of each other's land, the world got World War One. (Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, pgs. 1-24)
In the 20 years preceding World War One, national policy was made more and more by the army and the bureaucracy. And the German constitution was working less and less well. Reich chancellors (aka prime ministers) were not responsible to parliament, but to the Kaiser. While it is, of course, unlikely that the Kaiser would have been overthrown, it is highly probable that there would have been some constitutional crisis which would have drastically altered the relationship between the branches of government. Source: http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/ifgermany.htm
In 1914 the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, who had received death threats from Freemasons, was killed (at the second attempt) by a Serbian secret society. This was used as an excuse for Austria, backed by Germany, to declare war on Serbia, backed by Russia and France. Rasputin, the peasant mystic, was actually the political power in the house of Nicholas II and effectively ran the administration in Russia, could have averted the war. However he was temporarily removed by an assassination attempt which occurred at almost exactly the same time as the murder in Serbia.
When the German Empire began to mobilize on July 30, 1914, France ordered their military mobilization on August 1st Germany declared war on Russia on the same day. Britain declared war on Germany, on August 3, 1914, following an “unsatisfactory reply” to the British ultimatum that Belgium must be kept neutral.
In August 1914, German geologists posing as archaeologists discovered oil around Mosul in Mesopotamia (aka northern Iraq near the Turkish and Syrian borders). Rich oilfields in the Caucasus made Russia the world’s top oil producer. The oil era was just beginning. After war broke out in 1914, the battlefield presence of cars, trucks, and aircraft, as well as British navy’s reliance on oil rather than coal power, made oil an even more important war resource. Large new oil fields in the US and British development in Persia, together with Russian production still accounting for 15 percent of world output, gave the Allies a leg up in dominating oil geography. After Germany failed to win a quick victory advancing into France in 1914, the war moved into trenches. Motor transport and aircraft use mushroomed, and Germany’s lack of oil became perilous. Germany did have an advantage in coal, iron, and rail transportation. Through 1916, German war managers got some oil from overseas but relied mainly on supplies from neutral Romania, Europe’s second-largest producer. Commercial oil and natural gas development was not yet under way in Mesopotamia
The British navy blockade German ports to prevent her from getting any oil. The Germans responded by controlling surface waters with a submarine campaign that decimated British ships and oil tankers. In late 1916, neutral Romania joined the Allies, and the Germans attack their oil fields, but the oil production equipment and pipelines had been destroyed and it took a year for the Germans to repair them. (American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips, pgs. 250-253)
President Woodrow Wilson spent 1914 through the beginning of 1917 trying to keep America out of the war in Europe. He offered to be a mediator, but neither the Allies nor the Central Powers (aka Triple Alliance) took his requests seriously. The US had made a declaration of neutrality in 1914.
The British intercepted and censored news reports or stories coming from the battlefront. Any unfavorable news from the front was axed and only British approved news was allowed to be forwarded to the United States. Despite the disapproval and protest of the American press, the British held on to this power of censorship for the duration of the war. And the information they did let through was much of their own fabrication, designed to make the Germans (or Huns) look evil.
Republicans, led by Theodore Roosevelt, strongly criticized President Wilson's refusal to build up the US Army in anticipation of the threat of war. Wilson won the support of the US peace element by arguing that an army buildup would provoke war. William Jennings Bryan was appointed Secretary of State in 1913. He did not getting involved in the German-French war and he resigned in June 1915. Wilson hired Robert Lansing as his new Secretary of State (June 1915 – February 1920). The US House of Representatives began to preach the need to for increase defense spending and improved readiness of the army and navy.
In 1915 Germany announced that it would not discriminate between merchant ships and vessels of war. They warned the Allies that any ship moving into hostile waters was at risk of being attacked. This, the Germans hoped, would convince the United States to slow or even stop its arms trade with England and France.
German submarines were killing US sailors and civilian passengers and President Wilson demanded that Germany stop, but he kept the US out of the war. Britain had declared a blockade of Germany to prevent neutral ships from carrying goods to Germany. Wilson protested some British violation of neutral rights, where no one was killed. His protests were mild, and the British knew America would not take action.
On May 7, 1915 when the British passenger liner the Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo. Nearly 1,200 passengers perished, including 128 Americans. The United States was secretly (and the Germans knew this) using passenger liners to ship war goods to the British.
“No one told the Americans (or the Lusitania's passengers) that the liner was carrying 4.2 million rifle cartridges (the equivalent of ten tons of gunpowder) and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells (supposedly empty) in its hold. Insiders such as Secretary of State Bryan and Dudley Field Malone, Collector of Customs in New York, suspected these explosives, not a second torpedo, were the source of the blast that sank the ship so swiftly. But the Wilson administration said nothing in public to counteract British claims of a second torpedo, (From Thomas Fleming's Illusion of Victory: pp. 55-56).
President Wilson would not allow warnings telling people not to get on the British passenger liner, Lusitania because there was the threat of U-boats. Colin Thompson's book Lusitania implicates President Wilson in the sinking of the Lusitania. Thompson demonstrates that Wilson knew four days beforehand that the Lusitania was carrying ammunition plus explosives and passengers in violation of US statute. German records indicate that a large secondary explosion followed the torpedo hit leading some to speculate the storing of ammunition.
(Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Antony C. Sutton, 1976, p. 175)
After the international outrage that followed this incident, the Germans apologized and promised to halt the unrestricted use of their submarines. This promise only lasted until early 1917 when the Germans, realizing the only way to defeat the Allies was to undermine their superiority on the high seas, therefore Germany started unrestricted submarine warfare, declaring they would sink any vessel approaching the ports of Great Britain, Ireland or any of the Western Coasts of Europe.
Super-rich US bankers had huge economic investments with the British and French. If they were to lose, then they would not be able to pay back this debt (amounting to about $2 billion while Germany only borrowed a mere $27 million). France and England were financing their war with US loans. In addition, they were buying massive amounts of arms from the US on credit. The US wanted to make sure that it got paid back. Germany also purchased arms, but in a much more limited fashion. President Wilson was also told that the US economy could collapse if we did not enter the war to assure payment from Great Britain, and so he caved in to the US arms manufacturers.
In 1914, a German spy organizes the bombing of ships in New York harbor. In 1916, German saboteurs blow up an ammunition depot in an Island in New York harbor. On January 11, 1917, they blow up an ammunition factory in Kingsland, NJ.
President Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916.
In January 1916 Pancho Villa’s Villistas stopped a train in northern Mexico and killed eighteen American passengers. On March 9, 1916, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, for supplies. The raid did not go as planned and Villa's 500 guerrilla fighters on horseback were defeated by over 300 US Army infantry and cavalry who were stationed in a border fort outside of town. Columbus’ buildings were heavily damaged by fire by the Villistas. Sixty to 80 Villistas were killed along with over a dozen American troops and civilians.
In response to the attack on Columbus, President Wilson ordered General John J. Pershing to proceed into Mexico with and expedition of over 5,000 men to capture or kill Pancho Villa. Pershing led his brigade from San Francisco on April 24, 1914 and arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas on the 27th. From November 11, 1909 till December 1913, Brigadier General John J. Pershing had been tasked as the third and final military governor of southern most Province in the Philippines.
On May 5, 1916, 200 Villa's guerrillas attacked two more American border towns nearby the US/Mexico border with the intention of capturing supplies.
On May 1916, President Wilson ordered the National Guard to reinforce the United States Army garrisons at the border. By August, an estimated 117,000 guardsmen were stationed along the border in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Raids on American border towns still continued. Future General George S. Patton of the 8th Cavalry conducted America's first assault with armored vehicles. This was the first US military invasion/mini-war using mechanized vehicles, including automobiles and airplanes. In January 1917, having failed in their mission to capture Villa for eleven months, and under continued pressure from the Mexican government, the Americans were ordered home.
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President-elect Wilson had little interest in the nuts and bolts of party politics, including the distribution of patronage and the selection of men for cabinet and other high-level positions, and he left these decisions largely in Edward M. House’s hands. House became the de facto US foreign minister (Secretary of State).
While Americans today are aware of many of these facts, few know that Zionism appears to have been one of those factors. Zionism was a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine. During 1916, a disastrous year for the Allies, Zionist leaders started telling the British government that Zionists in the US would help push America to enter the war on the side of the British, if the British promised to support a Jewish home in Palestine afterward.
In 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued a letter to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild. Known as the Balfour Declaration, this letter promised that Britain would “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and “use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The letter, while officially signed by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, had been in process for two years and had gone through a number of edits by British and American Zionists and British officials.
Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George similarly referred to the deal, telling a British commission in 1935: “Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”
The official biographer of Lloyd George, author Malcolm Thomson, stated that the “determining factor” in the decision to issue the Balfour Declaration was the “scheme for engaging by some such concession the support of American Zionists for the allied cause in the first world war.”
Similarly, Zionist historian Naomi Cohen calls the Balfour Declaration a “wartime measure,” and writes: “Its immediate object was to capture Jewish sympathy, especially in the United States, for the Allies and to shore up England’s strategic interests in the Near East.”
“To a certain extent America had played a decisive role in the First World War, and American Jewry had a considerable part, knowingly or not, in the achievement of the Balfour Declaration.”
Most Jews in the US and elsewhere, including in Palestine itself, were not Zionists, and some strenuously opposed Zionism. (Source: excerpted by Alison Weir from Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.)
In February 1917, German announced that they were resuming unconditional submarine warfare against US merchant ships doubling the tonnage sunk from a year earlier. President Wilson refused to budge from his neutralist stance. The British Navy’s oil supply was reduced to levels that threatened paralysis of its ships. Great Britain was buying massive amounts of munitions, foodstuffs and other provisions for the war. They were also selling these war essentials to Russia at up to 1000 percent markup. Yes that is correct, what they bought for one pound from us they sold for ten pounds to Russia and other countries, and all on credit from the US.
The US had monitored and decoded a telegram from Germany to Mexico. This message contained a proposed by Germany that if Mexico joined them in war, and if the German’s won World War One, German would give Mexico a large slice of the US territory.
President Wilson disclosed this secret diplomatic message to the Associated Press and as a result on April 6, 1917 the US Congress declared war against Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. Had President Wilson refused to make public this message, the he may have kept the US out of this unnecessary war.
Wilson also established the first western propaganda office, the United States Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, the "Creel Commission", which circulated patriotic anti-German appeals and conducted censorship of materials considered seditious. From April 14, 1917, to June 30, 1919, this “Committee on Public Information” (aka information warfare operation) used every medium available to create enthusiasm for the war effort and to enlist public support against the foreign and perceived domestic attempts to stop America's participation in the war.
Many recent immigrants, resident aliens without US citizenship who opposed America's participation in the war were deported to Soviet Russia or other nations under the powers granted in the Immigration Act of 1918.
In 1914 the United States Army comprised 98,000 men, of whom some 45,000 were stationed overseas. The regular army was backed up by the 27,000 troops in the National Guard. The USA declared war in April 1917 and about 4 million were ultimately drafted into the armed services.
All males between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for military service. By September 12, 1918, 23,908,566 American men had registered.
By July 1918 there were over a million US soldiers in France. More than two million troops eventually reached Europe but a large number arrived too late to see any action. The American Expeditionary Force suffered 264,000 casualties during the war. It has been calculated that 112,432 Americans died. Of these, around 50 per cent died from disease (mainly influenza).
https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWusa.htm
The US lost 116,708 soldiers killed and 205,690. It cost the US tax payers $32 billion or 334 billion in 2011 dollars. Had the US not gotten into World War One, most likely the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), the Allies (British, French, etc.) would have made peace in early 1917 because both sides were badly beaten down/suffering.
Like Wilson, Edward House “believe that the war had been imposed on the peoples of Europe by the monarchies and their aristocracies”, and therefore both men maintained that a postwar settlement should include, among other things, the destruction of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the creation of a number of new, democratic states in central Europe.
The peace plan created called Wilson’s Fourteen Points was his principal proposals at the Versailles conference. The Germans justly complained that they had been hoodwinked into the Armistice by Wilson’s promises of a postwar settlement.
The Treaty of Versailles ended up with the following points.
- Forced Germany to sign a "war guilt" clause and accept full responsibility for the war.
- Prohibited further alliances between Germany and Austria.
- Created a demilitarized zone between France and Germany.
- Made Germany responsible for paying millions of dollars in reparations to the victors.
- Limited Germany to a defensive army only, with no tanks.
- Limited Germany's navy to six capital ships and no submarines.
- Prohibited Germany from having an air force.
President Wilson was disappointed by the punitive atmosphere of Versailles. Wilson’s got his planned League of Nations, but once created, it became the issuer of mandates which were former German territories handed over to allied nations for administration. Most Americans were in an isolationist mood after the war and did not want any part of a global organization which could lead them into another war. Wilson was also unable to convince Americans to join the League of Nations. He campaigned throughout the US trying to convince Americans to accept the League of Nations. And in so doing, he suffered a series of strokes resulting in him be was debilitated for the rest of his presidency in 1921. His wife basically became President.
US Signals Intelligence
After war with Germany began on August 4, 1914, the British General Post Office ship CS Alert located and cut the five German telegraph cables heading into the Atlantic. A similar operation cut the German cables that connected Great Britain to the German coast. Successive missions by the Telconia and other ships later in the war eliminated the remainder of Germany's cable network and, in some instances, pulled the cables up with their grapples and re-laid them into British and French ports for use by the Allied powers instead.
The Germans then used Sweden and American Trans-Atlantic, diplomatic telegraph cables to send coded messages to their overseas embassies. By letting the Germans, a belligerent nation, use these cables was a callous disregard of the neutral status by Sweden and the US. In April 1915 the British got their hands on the German diplomatic code numbered 13040 which helped the British code breakers to read some, but not all of the German diplomatic telegraph messages.
First let me review the development of military intelligence during World War One. Adopting an organizational system for his American Expeditionary Force (AEF) staff, General Pershing took the four main staff sections from the French (Personnel, Intelligence, Operations, and Logistics) and added the British prefix “G” for General Staff. So his intelligence staff, led by Colonel Dennis E. Nolan, a Spanish- American veteran and close friend of Colonel Ralph Van Deman. Col. Van Deman was the head of the Military Intelligence Section, War College Division, War Department General Staff, was created on 3 May 1917.
The G2 was organized into various subsections and duties:
G2A (Information): 1-Order of Battle and Strategic Intelligence, 2-Translation/Interpretation and Technical Intelligence, 3-Situation Maps and Aerial Reconnaissance, 4-Summaries and Terrain Studies, 5-Artillery Target Development, 6-Radio Intelligence and Carrier Pigeons, and 7-Dissemination and G2 Journal.
G2B (Secret Service): 1-Counterespionage Policy and Investigation of Atrocities, 2-
Dissemination of Information from Secret Sources and Control of Intelligence Contingency
Funds (cash to bribe people or buy special equipment), and 3-Index of Suspects (black list), Control of the Civil Population and Counterespionage Operations.
G2C (maps)
G2D (Censorship): 1-Press Relations and Press Censorship, 2-Censorship Regulations and Postal and Telegraphic Censorship, and 3-Photograph and Movie Censorship and Visitors.
G2E (Intelligence Corps): Nolan had far-reaching plans for his intelligence network, extending it beyond the collection of battlefield intelligence. He wanted his G2 to reach beyond the front in France and Belgium and collect strategic intelligence from theaters in Italy and Macedonia, places where the American Expeditionary Force might be expected to fight later in the war. For this purpose he formed a G2, Secret Service unit which also had a counterespionage staff with stations in neutral countries.
At the Corps level, the G2 could rely upon observation posts, balloons, aero squadrons with both visual and photographic recon, and flash or sound-ranging teams which targeted enemy artillery. These tools gave him the ability to look five miles beyond the enemy’s front-line positions. Psychological warfare mission were done by bombarding German troop concentrations with propaganda leaflets delivered by balloon, plane and infantry patrols.
During World War One, the field army headquarters (located most likely in France) had a radio intelligence section working on decoding and translating enemy messages. Intercept was done by a Signal Corps radio section using a combination of direction-finding equipment, listening posts, and induction coils (wire taps) of enemy field wire telephone lines.
Communications security (using codes) was undertaken by the Signal Corps. A Radio Intelligence Sub-section (direction finding) was created under the American Expeditionary Force G2 early in 1917, long before the first American fighting forces would arrive. These Signal Corps radio intelligence personnel had arrived in France in December 1917.
Back in the US, MI-8 was operating a radio intelligence service with a line of listening posts along the Mexican border. The 14 radio tractors spaced along the border were eventually replaced with permanent stations. A large station in Houlton, Maine, picked up radio signals from the North Atlantic.(Source: A Brief History of US Army Military Intelligence by US Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca.)
US infantry battalion started using long range reconnaissance platoon out in front of the main US forces
At the field army headquarters, a radio intelligence section working on decoding and translating enemy messages. Intercept was done by a Signal Corps radio section using a combination of direction-finding equipment, listening posts, and induction coils (wire taps) of enemy field wire telephone lines.
Communications security (using codes) was undertaken by the Signal Corps. A Radio Intelligence Sub-section (direction finding) was created under the American Expeditionary Force G-2 early in 1917, long before the first American fighting forces would arrive. These Signal Corps radio intelligence personnel had arrived in France in December 1917.
Between July1 and November 11, 1918, 1.3 million aerial photos were taken. And the products were approaching a “real time” usefulness as the time between a photograph being taken and the time it was developed, printed and interpreted, was as little as twenty minutes. On November 20, 1925 he took the first night aerial photograph, using a flash-powder bomb with timing fuses.
Back in the US, MI-8 was operating a radio intelligence service with a line of listening posts along the Mexican border. The 14 radio tractors spaced along the border were eventually replaced with permanent stations. A large station in Houlton, Maine, picked up radio signals from the North Atlantic.
(Source: A Brief History of US Army Military Intelligence, by US Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca, AZ)
During World War One the British Intelligence Division of the Naval Staff had been able to decode German cable messages. In early 1916, a US signal intelligence officer Capt. Parker Hitt wrote a training manual on how to break codes.
Herbert O. Yardley’s career in cryptology began with his work in the State Department worried about the weakness of US codes. Yardley accepted a Signal Corps Reserve Officer commission and served as a cryptology officer with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War One. Yardley was able to break US codes and so he began wondering about the codes of other countries. American participation in the war gave Yardley an opportunity to sell the US government on his idea to set up a section to break other countries' codes. As a result of his suggestion, in June 1917 Yardley became head of the United States' first peacetime cryptanalytic, military intelligence section, MI-8 or Cipher Bureau.
Japanese diplomatic communications were broken by MI-8 in 1922. Jointly funded by the Army and the State Department, MI-8 was disguised as a New York City commercial code company; it actually produced and sold such codes for business use. Its actual mission, however, was to break the communications (chiefly diplomatic) of other nations. In 1929, the State Department and the Army closed down MI-8’s code-breaking operations. (Source: Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century by James Gannon, pp. 11-23)
On January 17, 1917, the British decoded a new German 0075 diplomatic code that was used to send a telegram to the German Ambassador in Washington, DC. The British disclosed this message to President Woodrow Wilson, and doing so, pushed President Wilson into going before Congress for a declaration for war with Germany. Historians debated what could have happened had President Wilson not given in to the pressure to enter World War One.
To remove Russia from the war, Germany openly supported the Russian Revolution by funding Bolshevik propaganda and safeguarding Lenin's passage through Germany. However, it was also coordinated by the Rockefellers and Rothschild’s (via Kuhn, Loeb and Co) who funded both Trotsky and the anti-Bolshevik reaction in America. Trotsky himself was most probably a German who left the US in 1917 on a passport arranged by President Wilson. Final details were arranged in a 24 man Red Cross mission to Russia in 1917 – a medical mission in which only seven were doctors, the others being leading financiers including William Boyce Thompson, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. With the Bolsheviks successfully installed, media opposition in Britain and America was suppressed and agents dispatched to control diplomatic and intelligence reports.
Because the Russian signed a peace treaty on August 3, 1917, Germans troops that have been fighting the Russians were moved to the western front. Had the US not entered the war, the Germans would likely have suffered less economic hardship imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. World War One ended on November 11, 1918.
In 1917 to 1918, the Justice Department orders internment of 4,000 Germans and Austro- Hungarian enemy aliens. In 1918, a German saboteur planted a bomb on the USS San Diego off the New York City, killing six sailors. By the time the US entered the war saboteurs had damaged or destroyed 40 factories and 50 ships. These attacks were done to cripple the production and delivery of goods to Britain without provoking the US to enter the war.
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From 1915 to 1918, 1.5 million of the two million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey, to get rid of Muslims. The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labor, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre.
The new threat of COMMUNISM!
After the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated, and began to ask for the redistribution of all land.
The Russian Bolshevik took part in of 1917. When Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia on April 16, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Land and Bread," the latter two appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land and a fair share of food for every worker respectively.
The US State Department sent DeWitt Clinton Poole to Russia to serve as Vice Consul General in Moscow and he arrived in September 1917. Soon after the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, Poole worked with Secret Intelligence Service (later named MI6) to help the Russian Provisional Government. Working with consuls of several Western nations, he gathered information on the political, economic and military situation in Russia. In December 1917, Poole went on a rather dangerous reconnaissance mission, traveling undercover in South Russia, and returned to Petrograd (modern St. Petersburg, which was then the Russian capital) in mid-January 1917 to report to the US Ambassador. In May 1918, Poole became the Consul General in Moscow. By that time, he was running a clandestine espionage network, which at its height in the summer of 1918 numbered 30 sources in Moscow and various other Russian cities. Poole had also become a self-initiated back channel between the Bolshevik Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the US Department of State — trying to push for American aid to Russia as a “carrot” to lead the Bolsheviks to cooperate in the face of German advances on military and commercial fronts. However, by early August 1918 his efforts were exhausted, and Poole had to burn his codes, close the American Consulate General in Moscow and arrange for the evacuation of all Americans left in Moscow. He barely managed to escape to Finland in September 1918.
In June 1917, British playwright, novelist and short story writer, Somerset Maugham was asked by British Secret Intelligence Service Sir William Wiseman to serve as a special mission in Russia. As the head of the British intelligence mission in the United States, Sir Wiseman was extensively involved in the counterintelligence and he acted as British liaison to President Woodrow Wilson. He was closely associated with Wilson’s Special Advisor Edward M. House. and he met with Wilson on a regular basis. Sir Wiseman was also a mentor to MI6 boss William Stephenson. Stephenson prior to the US entering World War Two was head of a British MI6 propaganda operation directed at Americans aimed at speeding the US declaring war on Germany.
President Woodrow Wilson was initially opposed to intervention against the Bolshevik government. This was partly because he did not want to do anything that increased the power of the British and French empires. Secondly, as a democrat, he had no desire and did not want to help the return of the Russian monarchy. In March 1918 he sent a telegram to the Bolshevik government, via the American consulate in Moscow: "The whole heart of the people of the United States is with the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever from an autocratic government and to become the masters of their own fate."
Born into poverty, Joseph Stalin became involved in revolutionary politics, as well as criminal activities, as a young man. He was not born Stalin, he changed his last name to “Stalin” which translated means “man of steel. Bolshevik leader Stalin was appointed general secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922. In 1924, Vladimir Lenin died.
Farming communes had developed and did little to encourage improvement in farming techniques. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow, it remained quite small, and the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulaks. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, since only about one percent of the peasantry employed laborers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist), and 82 percent of the country's population were peasants.
Beginning in about 1906, the word “kulak” originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged from the peasantry and became wealthy. The label of kulak was broadened in 1918 to include any peasant who resisted handing over their grain to detachments from Moscow. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stereotyped kulaks by calling them “class enemies of the poorer peasants, bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine.”
On April 13, 1917, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) (aka the Creel Commission) to promote the war domestically while publicizing American war aims abroad. Under the leadership of a muckraking journalist named George Creel, the CPI recruited heavily from business, media, academia, and the art world. The CPI blended advertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology, and its efforts represent the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda on such a large scale. This “Committee of Public Information” used pamphlets, posters and news releases to sell the war to the public. The most effective PR technique was that Creel recruited over 70,000 volunteer prominent citizens across the nation to speak to large audiences in locations like churches and movie theaters.
Invoking the threat of German propaganda, the CPI implemented "voluntary guidelines" for the news media and helped to pass the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The CPI did not have explicit enforcement power, but it nevertheless "enjoyed censorship power which was tantamount to direct legal force." Like modern reporters who participate in Pentagon press pools, journalists grudgingly complied with the official guidelines in order to stay connected to the information loop. Radical newspapers, such as the socialist Appeal to Reason, were almost completely extinguished by wartime limitations on dissent. The CPI was not a censor in the strictest sense, but "it came as close to performing that function as any government agency in the US has ever done."
With all the sophistication of a modern advertising agency, the CPI examined the different ways that information flowed to the population and flooded these channels with pro-war material. The CPI's domestic division was composed of 19 sub-divisions, and each focused on a particular type of propaganda, that is, the use of newspapers, academics, artists, filmmaking and even tracks inside workers payroll envelopes.
One of the most important elements of the CPI was the Division of News, which distributed more than 6,000 press releases and acted as the primary conduit for war-related information. According to Creel, on any given week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns were filled with material gleaned from CPI handouts. Realizing that many Americans glided right past the front page and headed straight for the features section, the CPI also created the Division of Syndicated Features and recruited the help of leading novelists, short story writers, and essayists. These popular American writers presented the official line in an easily digestible form, and their work was said to have reached twelve million people every month.
A progressive and intellectual, Randolph Bourne, savagely attacked his colleagues who worked for CPI as self-consciously guiding the country into the war.. "[T]he German intellectuals went to war to save their culture from barbarization," wrote Bourne. "And the French went to war to save their beautiful France!... Are not our intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good?"
http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ww1.cpi.html
In 1917, J.P. Morgan, Warburg and Rockefeller learned that if they control 25 big US newspapers they could generally control the policy being reported by all daily press in the United States. So they bought these 25 newspapers and put editor in charge of them who then shaped the news to the liking of these crony capitalists. These three crony capitalists also stated the Council on Foreign Relations. (Source: US Congressional Record of the statements by US Representative Oscar Callaway, a Democrat from Texas.)
In 1919 the American working class continued to rise up and four million workers (21 percent of the labor force) participated in 3,600 strikes. With some labor leaders joining the Communist and Socialist political parties, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1918 authorized the deportation of radical non-citizens “who believed in or who are opposed to all organized government.” Reading between the lines, this is translated, people who want a revolution and overthrow the capitalist elites (the banksters). The Department of Justice formed the Radicals Division. In 1919, mail bombs were sent to 34 business and political leaders. In 1919 to 1920, the Palmer Raids arrested 6,000 suspected anarchists and communists who were mostly immigrants.
On November 11, 1918 an armistice was signed ending World War One.
Had the war ended in April 1917 the following casualties could have been prevented. Unnecessary US casualties: Killed In Action (KIA) 126,000, Wounded In Action (WIA) 234,000, Missing In Action (MIA): 4,500
German : ~2,280,000 KIAs
Allies: ~4,480,000 KIAs
total: ~6,760.000 KIAs
Because the Americans brought the Spanish flu with them and that disease managed to kill off nearly 14 to 20 million mostly young European citizens far more than were actually killed by the war.
The number of casualties in World War One (both military and civilian) were about 37 million: 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 6.8 million civilians. Twenty-two million civilians killed or wounded.
Allies
Military dead: 5,525,000
Military wounded: 12,831,500
Military missing: 4,121,000
Central powers
Military dead: 4,386,000
Military wounded: 8,388,000
Military missing: 3,629,000
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
After the war, the treaty negotiations were held at Versailles, hosted by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Accompanying Lloyd George was Alfred Milner and the US delegation with President Wilson included Colonel Edward M. House, Max and Paul Warburg, the Dulles brothers and Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan. The Treaty of Versailles served three main purposes: it spawned the League of Nations which was the first attempt at world; it confirmed the State of Israel creating instability in the Middle East; and it created the financial situation to lead inevitably to a second war. This was achieved through setting German reparations at a level to cripple the new German republic and by returning all economies to a gold standard which affected all the European countries that were already in serious debt to the American banks, especially to J.P. Morgan.
President Wilson spent six months in Paris for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference (making him the first US president to travel to Europe while in office). He worked tirelessly to promote his plan. The charter of the proposed League of Nations was incorporated into the conference's Treaty of Versailles. The United States never joined the League. The key point of disagreement was whether the League would diminish the power of Congress to declare war. During this period, Wilson became less trustful of the press and stopped holding press conferences for them, preferring to use his propaganda unit, the Committee for Public Information, instead.
Post war: 1919–1920
Demobilization proved chaotic and violent. Four million soldiers were sent home with little planning, little money, and few benefits. Returning soldiers spread an influenza epidemic that killed 14 million more Europeans and Americans. (Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, p. x)
After the war in the US, the price of farmland fell and this left many farmers bankrupt or deeply in debt after they purchased new land. Major strikes in steel, coal, and meatpacking followed in 1919. Serious race riots hit Chicago, Omaha and two dozen other cities. Wilson worked to integrate immigrants into the Democratic Party, the army, and American life.
The railroad brotherhoods threatened in summer 1916 to shut down the national transportation system. President Wilson tried to bring labor and management together, but when management refused he had Congress pass the Adamson Act in September 1916, which avoided the strike by imposing an 8-hour work day in the industry (at the same pay as before). It helped Wilson gain union support for his reelection; the act was approved by the Supreme Court. His wartime policies were strongly pro-labor. He worked closely with Samuel Gompers and the AFL, while suppressing anti war groups trying to impede the war effort. The American Federation of Labor, the railroad brotherhoods and other 'moderate' unions saw enormous growth in membership and wages during Wilson's administration. http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0406
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
1917 -- China. American troops were landed at Chungking to protect American lives during a political crisis.
After Russia left the war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Allies sent troops there to prevent a German or Bolshevik takeover of allied-provided weapons, munitions and other supplies, previously shipped as aid to the pre-revolutionary government. Wilson sent armed forces to assist the withdrawal of Czech and Slovak prisoners along the Trans-Siberian Railway, hold key port cities at Arkangel and Vladivostok. Though not sent to engage the Bolsheviks, the U.S. forces engaged in several armed conflicts against forces of the new Russian government.
Revolutionaries in Russia resented the American intrusion. Wilson withdrew most of the soldiers on April 1, 1920, though some remained until as late as 1922.
http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
By 1907, the Department of Justice most frequently called upon Secret Service operatives to conduct investigations. In 1918, when the FBI was formed within the Justice Department, the idea of a law enforcement agency at a national level was highly controversial. The US Constitution is based on federalism: a national government with jurisdiction over matters that crossed boundaries, like interstate commerce and foreign affairs, with all other powers reserved to the states. Through the 1800s, Americans usually looked to cities, counties, and states to fulfill most government responsibilities. In 1914, an FBI was established in major US cities with a FBI Special Agent in Charge as the office head and who reported directly to the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. In 1924, J. Edgar Hoover was named head of the FBI.
In 1915, the US outlawed opium-based patent medicines with the adoption of the Harrison Narcotics Act. In 1921, the Hague Convention made it illegal to import opium from India to China. In 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for doctors to prescribe narcotic drugs to addicts. Arnold Rothstein was not unlike the robber barons of the 1920’s, but unlike Morgan, Mellon, and Rockefeller, Rothstein was America’s premier Labor racketeer, bookmaker, bootlegger, and drug trafficker, He was financing an international drug cartel and supplied millions of dollars’ worth of illicit drugs to American gangsters.
(The Strength of the Wolf, The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine, pgs. 6-10)
From 1919 to 1920 following the Russian Revolution, a Red Scare developed among the hysterical super rich Americans. In 1919 the Communist Party USA was established. They published a newspaper called the Daily Worker and at its peak it had achieved a circulation of some 35,000. In the US presidential election of 1924, the left-wing, Progressive Party candidate received 16.6 percent of the vote. By 1939 the Communist Party claimed it had 100,000 members. Sources: http://spartacus-education.com/USAcommunist.htm
http://spartacus-education.com/USAthomas.htm
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international labor union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Many IWW members opposed United States participation in World War One. The organization passed a resolution against the war at its convention in November 1916. This echoed the view, expressed at the IWW's founding convention, that war represents struggles among capitalists in which the rich become richer.
At the outset of World War One, Congress passed legislation designed to suppress anti war speech. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime or speech that discouraged full compliance with the military draft. In September 1917, US Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on 88 IWW meeting halls across the country. In 1917, 165 Wobbly leaders were arrested for conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes, one hundred and one went on trial. They were all convicted — even those who had not been members of the union for years — and given prison terms of up to 20 years.
A five time Socialist candidate for President Eugene V. Debs was convicted for making an anti war speech in Canton, Ohio (1919). He served three years in prison of a ten year sentence before President Harding commuted his sentence.
In the 1932 presidential election Socialist Party of America candidate, Norman Thomas, won 2.23 percent of the vote.
In 1950 the US Attorney General Thomas Clark, decided on his own to place the Industrial Workers of the World on the list of subversive organizations in the category of "organizations seeking to change the government by unconstitutional means" under Executive Order 9835, which offers no means of appeal, and which excludes all IWW members from Federal employment and even federally subsidized housing. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
In 1915, the Division of Naval Intelligence (DNI) was created. Its major responsibility was security. Working through the growing network of Naval District Intelligence Offices and primarily using Naval Reserve personnel, Naval Intelligence took responsibility for all aspects of security--from war materials plant protection, to security checks on Navy personnel, censorship, and ferreting out spies and saboteurs. Ships arriving from foreign countries were inspected, investigations were made of anyone deemed suspicious, and shipyards and munitions factories were supervised and advised on security procedures. After World War One, many Naval District Intelligence Offices retained their counterintelligence functions and served as the nucleus from which a similar counterintelligence effort grew during World War Two. By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, there were 306 Naval Reservists and 18 civil service employees in naval intelligence. DNI also worked with the Army's Military Intelligence Division and other executive departments to obtain useful information about foreign governments; social, political, economic, and industrial conditions.
The year 1919 saw a great deal of social conflict--a wave of strikes and the Chicago race riot. A series of bombings by suspected anarchists began in summer 1919. There were about 70, 000 self-professed Communists in the United States in 1919 and Congress refused to seat the duly elected socialist from Wisconsin, Victor Berger.
Source: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/red.html
US Attorney General Mitchell Palmer viewed them as responsible for a wide range of social ills, including the bombings. He began a series of showy and well publicized Palmer raids against radicals and leftists. Without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters' of Communist and Socialist organizations. They concentrated whenever possible on aliens rather than citizens, because aliens had fewer rights.
Palmer targeted a group with approximately 4,000 members called the Union of Russian Workers. Justice officials knew its publications but were unaware that in the immigrant group had become nothing more than a social club. The government prepared coordinated raids against the background of further labor unrest. On October 31, Palmer got an injunction to prevent a strike against the coal industry by the United Mine Workers. The Palmer raids, fueled by extremist, anti-immigrant sentiments, were the most spectacular anti-civil rights excesses of the Red Scare of 1919-1920.
At 9:00 pm on November 7, 1919, a date chosen because it was the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, together with local police, executed a series of well-publicized and violent raids against the Russian Workers in 12 cities. Newspaper accounts reported some were "badly beaten" during the arrests. Many later swore they were threatened and beaten during questioning. Government agents cast a wide net, bringing in some American citizens, passers-by who admitted being Russian, some not members of the Russian Workers. Others were teachers conducting night school classes in space shared with the targeted radical group. Arrests far exceeded the number of warrants. Of 650 arrested in New York City, the government managed to have just 43 deported. In December of 1919, in their most famous act, Palmer's agents seized 249 resident aliens. Those seized were placed on board a ship, the USS Buford, bound for the Soviet Union.
The Justice Department launched a series of raids on January 2, 1920 with follow up operations over the next few days. Smaller raids extended over the next six weeks. At least 3000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time. The entire enterprise replicated the November action on a larger scale, including arrests and seizures without search warrants, as well as detention in overcrowded and unsanitary holding facilities. Hoover later admitted "clear cases of brutality." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
Congress and President Wilson assigned the three hundred employees responsibility for espionage, sabotage, sedition, and selective service matters. In 1920, antichrists detonate a bomb on Wall Street which killed 40 people and wounded hundreds. The Deportation Act of 1920 authorized the deportation of aliens found guilty of sedition or violating national security laws.
Sedition is the National crime of advocacy of insurrection against the government or support for an enemy of the nation during time of war, by speeches, publications and organization. Sedition usually involves actually conspiring to disrupt the legal operation of the government and beyond expression of an opinion or protesting government policy. Sedition is a lesser crime than "treason," which requires actual betrayal of the government or espionage. Actually making war or providing aid and comfort to the enemy, is guilty of treason.
Seditious conspiracy is committed when two or more persons in any state or US territory conspire to levy war against the US government. A person commits the crime of advocating the violent overthrow of the federal government when she willfully advocates or teaches the overthrow of the government by force, publishes material that advocates the overthrow of the government by force, or organizes persons to overthrow the government by force. A person found guilty of seditious conspiracy or advocating the overthrow of the government may be fined and sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. States also maintain laws that punish similar advocacy and conspiracy against the state government.
In 1940, to silence radicals and quell Nazi or communist subversion during the burgeoning Second World War, Congress enacted the Smith Act which outlawed sedition and seditious conspiracy. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the act.
Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001, Among other things, the act increases the president's authority to seize the property of individuals and organizations that the president determines have planned, authorized, aided, or engaged in hostilities or attacks against the United States.
More undeclared wars
1918 to 1919 -- Mexico. After withdrawal of the Pershing expedition, US troops entered Mexico in pursuit of bandits at least three times in 1918 and s times in 1919. In August 1918 American and Mexican troops fought at Nogales.
1918 to 1920 -- Panama. US forces were used for police duty according to treaty stipulations, at Chiriqui, during election disturbances and subsequent unrest.
1918 to 1920 -- Soviet Russia. US Marines were landed at and near Vladivostok in June and July to protect the American consulate and other points in the fighting between the Bolshevik troops and the Czech Army which had traversed Siberia from the western front. A joint proclamation of emergency government and neutrality was issued by the American, Japanese, British, French, and Czech commanders in July. In August 7,000 men were landed in Vladivostok and remained until January 1920, as part of an allied occupation force. In September 1918, 5,000 American troops joined the allied intervention force at Archangel and remained until June 1919. These operations were in response to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and were partly supported by Czarist or Kerensky elements.
1919 -- Dalmatia. U.S. forces were landed at Trau at the request of Italian authorities to police order between the Italians and Serbs.
1919 -- Turkey. Marines from the USS Arizona were landed to guard the US Consulate during the Greek occupation of Constantinople.
1919 -- Honduras -- September 8 to 12. A landing force was sent ashore to maintain order in a neutral zone during an attempted revolution.
Then, on October 2, 1919, President Wilson suffered a serious stroke that almost totally incapacitated him leaving him paralyzed on his left side and blind in his left eye. He was confined to bed for weeks, sequestered from nearly everyone but his wife and his physician,
With few exceptions, Wilson was kept out of the presence of Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, his cabinet and Congressional visitors to the White House for the remainder of his term. His wife, Edith, served as his steward, selecting issues for his attention and delegating other issues to his cabinet heads. Eventually, Wilson did resume his attendance at cabinet meetings, but his input there was perfunctory at best. This was one of the most serious cases of presidential disability in American history. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
1920 -- China -- March 14. A landing force was sent ashore for a few hours to protect lives during a disturbance at Kiukiang.
1920 -- Guatemala -- April 9 to 27. US forces protected the American Legation and other American interests, such as the cable station, during a period of fighting between Unionists and the Government of Guatemala.
1920 to 1922 -- Russia (Siberia) -- February 16, 1920, to November 19, 1922. A Marine guard was sent to protect the United States radio station and property on Russian Island, Bay of Vladivostok.
President Warren G. Harding (March 4, 1921 – August 2, 1923)
Its 1907 constitution and laws had voter registration rules that effectively disenfranchised most blacks; this also barred them from serving on juries or in local office, a situation that whites enforced until after passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Major cities passed additional restrictions.
On August 4, 1916, Tulsa passed an ordinance that mandated residential segregation by forbidding blacks or whites from residing on any block where three-fourths or more of the residents were of the other race.
As returning veterans tried to reenter the labor market following World War One, social tension and anti-black sentiment increased in cities where job competition was high. At the same time, black veterans pushed to have their civil rights enforced, believing they had earned full citizenship by military service. In what became known as the "Red Summer" of 1919, industrial cities across the Midwest and North experienced severe race riots, most often led against blacks by recent immigrant groups, who often competed with blacks for low-paying jobs.
On May 31, 1921 a riot happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma resulting with between 300 to 3,000 people were killed or wounded and left 1500 homeless. This was the first American city bomb by airplanes. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained, many for several days.
In 1921, an estimated 300,000 ounces of heroin were being produced by manufacturers every month in New York, much more than was needed by area hospitals. Huge amounts of narcotics were being diverted onto the black market. As a result, the Jones-Miller Act of 1922 required standardization of manufacturing licenses and registration practices, and made the mere possession of narcotics a crime. This Act also created a federal narcotics commission. (The Strength of the Wolf, The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine p. 26)
Mafia groups limited their activities to gambling and theft until 1920, but the enactment of the Prohibition of alcohol/liquor from January 16, 1920 till March 22, 1933, made possible for the American mafia to grow rich and powerful. Around 1925, dope peddlers Charles Luciano, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky became self appointed heirs to Rothstein’s drug trafficking operation. By 1929, the two main sources of illicit drugs from the Far East were the Ezra brother’s gang in China and the Eliopoulos ring in Paris. In 1926, the U.S. War and State Departments thwarted the Treasury Department‘s Narcotics Division and accommodated the Nationalist Chinese, whose survival depended on profits from drug smuggling.
In the future, national security and political interests superseded those of the drug law enforcement agencies of the US government. In the process of penetrating the mafia and the French connection, case-making agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) would uncover (FBI’s and CIA’s) “Establishment‘s” ties to organized crime and the FBN would be prevented from investigating the CIA and its Nationalist Chinese allies who operated the world‘s largest drug-trafficking syndicate. (Ibid, pgs. 3 and 10-12)
In 1924, an American citizen formed a relationship the intelligence officer for General Chang Tsung-chang, a Shantung warlord contending with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang Party for control of Shanghai. This American with the knowledge of the State and the War Department provided 6,500 Mausers (rifles) acquired from an Italian arms merchant, in exchange for $500,000 worth of opium. (Ibid, pg. 12)
During the Great Depression there was a controversy over national drug policy. Social scientists and other liberals were advocating legalization and a reduction in the price of prescription medicines as a most cost-effective way of putting drug traffickers out of business. Harry J. Anslinger, an apparatchik of corporate America, convinced Congressmen to wage a popular “tough on crime” campaign that to ensure their re-election. He promoted mandatory sentencing and longer prison terms. Relying on Anslinger’s contacts in the press, the drug industry, and the Southern American evangelical religious movement, he conjured up a rogue’s gallery of undesirable minorities that appealed to traditional race and class prejudices. Pushing the idea of Killer Weed (Reefer Madness) used by lazy Mexicans on the southwest border, sex-crazed Negroes and Puerto Rican seamen, inscrutable Chinese pagans who turned weak willed white women into prostitution, and lewd Lost Generation atheists preaching free love and Bolshevism in Greenwich Village Cafes.
On June 30, 1930 the Bureau of Narcotics was formed from the remnants of the Narcotics Division and the Treasury Department's Foreign Control Board. In September 1930, Anslinger, 38 years old, took charge - became the head of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He had served as a US Foreign Service officer (with the State Department) from 1918 to 1926 in Germany, Venezuela, and the Bahamas qualified him in view of the mandate imposed by Congress upon the Commissioner of narcotics, go to the foreign source of America’s narcotics problem, without upsetting the State Department’s apple cart. For the next, 32 years until he retired in 1962, defined the nations war on drugs. Anslinger put top agents in France, Germany, Holland, Canada, and Italy. Anslinger would become one of the founding fathers of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the CIA in 1947. (Ibid, pgs. 16 and 22, 26)
In addition Anslinger in 1926 was transferred from the State Department to the Treasury Department, where he served until 1929 as chief of the Probation Unit’s Division of Foreign Control which had the mission stopping the flow of illegal liquor and narcotics into US ports, arresting smuggling rings, and eliminate corruption. Anslinger’s staff assistant Malachi Harney, in the 1920s oversaw Eliot Ness and the Untouchables in the successful pursuit of Al Capone in Chicago. (Ibid, p. 22)
The first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850, however, suffrage was becoming an increasingly important aspect of the movement's activities. The US Congress and in state legislatures, the 19th Amendment became part of the US Constitution on August 20, 1920.
States granting women the right to vote prior to the 19th Amendment as indicated:
Wyoming 1890
Colorado 1893
Utah 1896
Idaho 1896
Washington 1910
California 1911
Arizona 1912
Kansas 1912
Oregon 1912
Montana 1914
Nevada 1914
New York 1917
Michigan 1918
Oklahoma 1918
South Dakota 1918
Full Voting Rights before 19th Amendment and before statehood
Territory of Wyoming 1869
Territory of Utah 1870
Territory of Washington 1883
Territory of Montana 1887
Territory of Alaska 1913
Could vote for President prior to the 19th Amendment:
Illinois 1913
Nebraska 1917
Ohio 1917
Indiana 1917
North Dakota 1917
Rhode Island 1917
Iowa 1919
Maine 1919
Minnesota 1919
Missouri 1919
Tennessee 1919
Wisconsin 1919
Businesses, such as southern cotton mills, opposed suffrage because they feared that women voters would support the drive to eliminate child labor. Although the Catholic Church did not take an official position on suffrage, very few of its leaders supported it, and some of its leaders, such as Cardinal Gibbons, made their opposition clear.
The New York Times after first supporting suffrage reversed itself and issued stern warnings. A 1912 editorial predicted that with suffrage women would make impossible (preposterous observed/crazy) demands, such as, "serving as soldiers and sailors, police patrolmen or firemen...and would serve on juries and elect themselves to executive offices and judgeships." It blamed a lack of masculinity for the failure of men to fight back, warning women would get the vote "if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_the_United_States
After the president became incapacitated by a major stroke in September 1919, his wife, Edith Wilson, acted as de facto president of the United States for the rest of his term that ended on March 4, 1921. During Wilson's stroke and illness, Lansing called the cabinet together for consultations on several occasions. In addition, he was the first cabinet member to suggest that Vice President Thomas R. Marshall assume the powers of the presidency. Edith Wilson was displeased by Lansing's independence, and requested Lansing's resignation in 1920.
On March 23, 1920, Wilson appointed Bainbridge Colby as Secretary of State, after firing his predecessor, Robert Lansing for insubordination. In December 1920, Colby embarked on the battleship Florida for an official goodwill cruise to South American. He served until Wilson left office on March 4, 1921. Colby advocated his policies firmly even as Wilson suffered the debilitating side effects of a series of strokes. Colby supported the League of Nations and established a precedent for not recognizing newly-Communist Russia; that would be reversed only in 1933. (Source: DeWitt Clinton Poole’s “An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia” was edited by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Roder and is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
President Warren G. Harding (March 4, 1921 – August 2, 1923)
1921 -- Panama -- Costa Rica. American naval squadrons demonstrated in April on both sides of the Isthmus to prevent war between the two countries over a boundary dispute.
From 1918 to 1940 the US and Japan were both growing as naval powers. Americans and Japanese were rapidly building expensive new warships. Britain and Japan were allies in a treaty that was due to expire in 1922. Although there were no immediate dangers, observers increasingly pointed to the American-Japanese rivalry for control of the Pacific Ocean as a long-term threat to world peace. By this time, the British realized they had best cast their lot with Washington rather than Tokyo. To stop a needless, expensive and possibly dangerous arms race, the major countries signed a series of naval disarmament agreements. In November 1921 to February 1922 at a Washington Naval Disarmament Conference, the US and Britain agreed to slow production and to naval parity.
1922 -- Turkey -- September and October. A landing force was sent ashore with consent of both Greek and Turkish authorities, to protect American lives and property when the Turkish Nationalists entered Smyrna.
1922 to 1923 -- China: Between April 1922 and November 1923 marines were landed five times to protect Americans during periods of unrest.
At its January 1923 Convention, Commander in Chief of the American Legion, Alvin Owsley endorsed Mussolini and Fascism:
Source: http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/American_Legion
During the 1920s, J.P Morgan had financed Italy's Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In 1925, for example, Morgan partner Thomas Lamont arranged a $100 million loan to the Mussolini regime, at a point that the regime was in deep political trouble. At the same time that Morgan was bailing out Mussolini, the DuPont and Morgan interests were launching a fascist movement in the United States. http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/smedley.htm
US Prohibition 1920 to 1933,
Joseph H. Reinfeld (1891–1958) (last name later changed to Renfield) during the Prohibition era he was a major bootlegger smuggling liquor from Canada in the United States using ships. After prohibition ended, he owned several large liquor import and distribution companies. Testimony during the Kefauver Committee hearings estimated that Reinfeld's mafia syndicate imported nearly 40 percent of all the alcohol consumed in the U.S. during Prohibition. Reinfeld was charged in 1925 for the murder of a former government prohibition agent, but the government failed to get an indictment from the grand jury and the charges were dropped.[ After Prohibition ended in 1933, Reinfeld founded Browne-Vintners, a liquor import and distribution company.
Abner "Longie" Zwillman (1904 –1959) a Jewish American was a member of Reinfeld’s gang. After Dutch Schultz's murder in 1935, Zwillman took over those of Schultz's criminal operations that were in New Jersey. The press began calling Zwillman the "Al Capone of New Jersey."In 1929, Zwillman helped organize the Cleveland Conference, one of the first meetings between Jewish and Italian organized crime leaders, later resulting in the establishment of the Mafia Ruling Commission and also associated with Murder Incorporated. Shortly after taking over Dutch Schultz's operations, Zwillman became involved in local politics, eventually controlling the majority of local politicians in Newark for over twenty years. During the 1940s Zwillman dominated gambling operations in New Jersey, in particular the Marine Room inside Zwillman's Riviera nightclub, The Palisades. He was suicided (murdered made to look like a suicide) by the mafia in 1959.
Joseph Stacher (1902 – 1977) in the 1920s, he was running much of Zwillman's gambling operations. In 1931, Stacher helped Meyer Lansky organize a conference of Jewish organized crime leaders at the Franconia Hotel, which later would see the alleged merging of the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national crime syndicate. Running West Coast and Caribbean gambling operations for Lansky during the 1930s, as well as becoming a silent partner of movie studio Columbia Pictures in the late 1930s, Stacher would later supervise gambling in Las Vegas, Nevada, particularly the Sands and Fremont Casinos.
During Joseph P.”Joe” Kennedy Sr own bootlegging days in Prohibition he entered into a coalition with Newark's Reinfeld Syndicate. It was 50 percent owned by the Bronfman gang. During Canada's four dry years from 1915 to 1919, the Bronfmans established their contacts with US criminal figures for illegally importing liquor into Canada. In 1916, the Bronfmans established their first link with the opium trade. In Yiddish Bronfman means "liquorman." Yechiel “Ekiel” Bronfman, emigrated to Canada in 1889. Since 1920 the Bronfmans had been importing British scotch whiskey from the Distillery Company of London (DCL) with Bronfmans splitting 50-50 the profits.
Joe retained his business dealings with the syndicate thugs all the way until 1946. His father Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy (1858 – 1929) began his rise to fortune as owner of three taverns and he who bought his way into the corrupt Democratic Party machine. At the age of 26, he sold his taverns and went into the more lucrative wholesale whisky business. P.J. Kennedy was one of the shanty-town mobsters of late 19th century Boston. South Boston teemed with them. “Shanty” meant rough, uncouth, usually a drinker. As historian Lawrence McCaffrey notes, from the 1830s to the 1960s, Irish Catholics voted heavily Democratic. Their precincts showed average support levels of 80 percent. During the 1920s, mobsters Frank Wallace and his brothers lead a crime family in Boston during prohibition and due to their local political influence; they were rarely convicted, and spent relatively little time in prison. Frank is reported to have been arrested more than 25 times, but only served time twice, at Deer Island House of Correction in 1919 and 1928.
Joe Kennedy sold his liquor company, Somerset Importers Ltd., for $8 million to the "Renfield Importers," the legal version of the Reinfeld Syndicate after prohibition ended in 1933.
Joseph Linsey (1899 –1994) was an organized crime figure in Boston's underworld during the Prohibition era, associated with Joe Kennedy and Meyer Lansky, At the start of Prohibition, the 21-year-old Linsey began bootlegging illegal liquor with Charles "King" Solomon.
Charles "King" Solomon (1884 –1933) was a Jewish-Russian mob boss who controlled Boston's bootlegging, narcotics, and illegal gambling during the Prohibition era. Attending the Atlantic City Conference in 1929, Solomon was one of the several leaders in the "Big Seven" who helped negotiate territorial disputes and establish policies which would influence the later National Crime Syndicate in 1932.
Joseph Linsey was one of the top contributors to John F. Kennedy's 1976 senatorial campaign. Linsey sits on the board of International Airport Hotel Systems Inc., a Miami-based company whose board also includes Lansky. Hotel Systems is also connected to Resorts International. Linsey also owned two liquor distributing firms and a dog racing track in Tauton, Massachusetts.
Linsey also has dealings with Raymond Patriarcha, the titular godfather of New England narcotics trafficking and who became the boss of the New England mafia in 1955.
John Torrio was a Bronfman man and by 1928 he was able to cal1 a meeting in Cleveland to establish a nationwide crime syndicate. Under the auspices of Lansky and Torrio, Lucky Luciano succeeded in wiping out all recalcitrant godfathers. In the early 1930s Murder, Incorporated was formed as a regulatory commission of sorts to police any overzealous free enterprise style crime advocates who might try to buck the syndicate. A special assassination bureau was set up by Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugs" Siegel. The Bugs and Meyer Gang had originally been used to protect Bronfman liquor shipments across the border against freelance hijackers.
The third item on the agenda at the meeting in Cleveland was what to do after Prohibition. The commodity, Torrio proposed the commodity to replace big profits from selling liquor was to focus on selling narcotics. http://www.lyndonlarouche.org/dope9.pdf
Here is a summary of the history of the little know American Jewish super mafia.
- Edward "Monk" Eastman (New York's crime boss), died in December 1920.
- Arnold Rothstein (New York's crime boss) was shot and killed in 1928.
- Dutch Schultz (aka Arthur S. Flegenheimer); (Newark's crime boss) died 1935.
- In 1931, Joseph “Doc” Stacher built up Las Vegas by pairing the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national organized crime syndicate. He helped Meyer Lansky organize a conference of Jewish organized crime leaders which later would see the alleged merging of the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national crime syndicate (American mafia). Stacher ran the West Coast and Caribbean gambling operations for Meyer Lansky during the 1930s, as well as becoming a silent partner of movie studio Columbia Pictures in the late 1930s. Stacher continued running mafia gambling operations until 1964, when Federal authorities arrested him for tax evasion. While the US government was in favor of deporting him to his native Poland, federal law prohibited deporting anyone to a communist-controlled country. Because of the Law of Return, Stacher was successfully immigrated to Israel in 1965 where he lived until he died 1977.
- Harry ‘Pittsburg Phil’ Strauss was a Murder Incorporated hit man who killed over 100 men from the late 1920s up to 1940 died by electric chair in 1941.
- Abraham “Abe” Reles a hit man of Brooklyn-based Murder, Incorporated which was an almost totally Jewish organization, who turned informant on Dutch Strauss and was murdered in 1941.
- Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter was the original head of Murder Inc, He was the only national crime boss ever to have been convicted executed by the electric chair in 1944.
- Benjamin "Bugsy" Sigelbaum (aka Siegel) who came from New York. He became the Las Vegas' crime boss and was instrumental in creating the legalized gambling starting things off at the Flamingo Hotel and Sands Hotel. He died 1947.
- Meyer Lansky was born in Belarus to a Polish-Jewish family. His family immigrated to the US and settled New York City. Lansky met Bugsy Siegel when they were children. They became lifelong friends, as well as partners in the bootlegging trade. He was never found guilty of anything more serious than illegal gambling. Lansky was also close friends with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the two met as teenagers. He Lansky died in 1983.
- Mickey Cohen was raised by an Orthodox Jewish family living in the Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn of New York City. In 1939, Mickey Cohen arrived in Los Angeles to work under Jewish American mafia boss Bugsy Siegel. Cohen helped Siegel founding the Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas and ran its sports book gambling operation. Siegel used money from the syndicate to build a drug trade route from the US to Mexico and he was also was instrumental in setting up the race wire, gambling with the Chicago mafia crime family. In the mid-1940s, while Siegel was setting up the casino in Las Vegas, his lieutenant, Mickey Cohen worked to secure all illegal gambling in Los Angeles.
- Abe Bernstein, leader of the Detroit Purple Gang which was responsible for the deaths of more than 500 men during the so-called ‘bootleg wars.’ Abe and his gangsters joined the National Crime Syndicate in 1931. He died in 1968.
- A wealthy family, the Abe and Sam Bronfman family immigrated to Canada from Russia by their rabbi and two servants. In 1903, the family bought a hotel during Prohibition they r made tremendous profits by shipping liquor into the United States, reportedly shipping booze through Cleveland, Detroit and New York. The Bronfman crime family of Montreal, Canada set Kemper Marley up in liquor business and for 40 years, Marley was Meyer Lansky syndicate’s front man in Phoenix, Arizona. Marley headed the Valley National Bank, which lent Bugsy Siegel, the money to build the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas. Siegel was murdered on orders from the nation mafia syndicate in 1947. Siegel nationwide gambling wire was turned over to Kemper Marley in Phoenix, Arizona. The murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles, in Phoenix set off an important investigation of the influence of Kemper Marley in Phoenix. Bolles was killed in a 1976 car bombing. Law enforcement believed that the Marley gang was behind his murder, but they could not prove it. http://americanfreepress.net/the-king-of-the-jews-is-dead/
- The Bronfman’s makes Seagram brand alcohol that was the largest distiller in the world. The Seagram assets have since been acquired by other companies, notably The Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, a British distiller and Pernod Ricard, a French distiller. The aggregate assets held by the various branches of the Bronfman family were estimated to be $7 billion in 1978, by Peter C. Newman in his book King of the Castle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-American_organized_crime
http://eurofolkradio.com/2015/10/18/jewish-gangsters/
- Reuben Sturman was born in 1924, the son of immigrant Russian Jews and who grew up on Cleveland's East Side. By the late 1970s, he owned perhaps 800 retail pornography stores in the US, often through very complex patterns of concealed ownership. In England he worked in close collaboration with local organized criminals, like the Holloway family, a well-established pornography group. On the European continent, his chief foothold was through a firm called Intex Nederland, a key distributor of pornographic videos. A subsidiary of Intex is Video-Rama, which distributed pornographic videos throughout Europe and to the extremely lucrative Middle Eastern market of Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait City, and Riyadh. It was Sturman's refusal to pay taxes properly that finally brought him down. In 1989, Sturman was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to ten years in jail and $2.5 million in fines. Another charge, this time for the interstate transportation of obscene material, resulted in a plea bargain for Sturman, but he was later caught trying to bribe a juror, via his ex-wife, and was sentenced to 19 additional years for extortion. He died in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky on 1997.
President John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (August 2, 1923 – March 4, 1929)
In 1906, the Burke Act granted citizenship to those Native Americans who privately farmed their land and left the jurisdiction of the reservation. But it would not be until 1924 that Congress would pass the Indian Citizenship Act granting all Native Americans, on or off the reservation,
lroad fortune. In 1906 J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. The Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institution was founded in 1911 As late as the 1920s, this private organization was one of the leading organizations in the American eugenics movement. In years to come, the Eugenics Record Office collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds.
Eugenics Record Office served as a data repository for the trait pedigree records of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Also they offer a training institute for eugenics field workers. A total of 258 field workers were trained between 1910 and 1924, most of whom had bachelor degrees in biology, though many had advanced degrees. A large number of the field workers were women. For graduates of institutions of women’s higher education, becoming a field worker in eugenics was one of the few career options open at the time. Many of the field workers went on work as eugenics specialists at hospitals, asylums, and other state-run institutions. The field workers gathered data from individual persons on a variety of physical, mental, and moral or behavioral traits. Such traits were listed in the Trait Book, a publication created by Charles Davenport, a geneticist and biologist. The Eugenics Record Office also archived a massive amount of data in the form of voluntary questionnaires, such as the Record of Family Traits and the Family Tree Folder. In 1935 the Carnegie Institution ordered this group to stop all work.
In 1944 its records were transferred to the Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota. When this Institute closed in 1991, the genealogical material was filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah and given to the Center for Human Genetics.
In the Deep South, women’s associations played an important role in rallying support for eugenic legal reform. Eugenicists recognized the political and social influence of southern clubwomen in their communities, and used them to help implement eugenics across the region. Between 1915 and 1920, federated women’s clubs in every state of the Deep South had a critical role in establishing public eugenic institutions that were segregated by sex. For example, the Legislative Committee of the Florida State Federation of Women’s Clubs successfully lobbied to institute a eugenic institution for the mentally retarded that was segregated by sex. Their aim was to separate mentally retarded men and women to prevent them from breeding more “feebleminded” individuals.
Public acceptance in the US was the reason eugenic legislation was passed. Almost 19 million people attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, open for ten months from February 20 to December 4, 1915. A subject of eugenics received a large amount of time and space point out the new developments concerning health and disease. Thus it was advertized under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like good course of action to better American society.
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble minded" from marrying
Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organization that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms.
One of the most prominent feminists to champion the eugenic agenda was Margaret Sanger, the leader of the American birth control movement. Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and incorporated the language of eugenics to advance the movement. Unlike other eugenicists, she rejected euthanasia.
The first state to introduce a compulsory sterilization bill was Michigan, in 1897 but the proposed law failed to garner enough votes by legislators to be adopted. Eight years later Pennsylvania's state legislators passed a sterilization bill that was vetoed by the governor. Indiana became the first state to enact sterilization legislation in 1907, followed closely by Washington and California in 1909. Sterilization rates across the country were relatively low (California being the sole exception) until the 1927 US Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell which legitimized the forced sterilization of patients at a Virginia home for the mentally retarded. The number of sterilizations performed per year increased until another Supreme Court case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 1942, complicated the legal situation by ruling against sterilization of criminals if the equal protection clause of the constitution was violated. That is, if sterilization was to be performed, then it could not exempt white-collar criminals. The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s.
While California had the highest number of sterilizations, North Carolina's eugenics program which operated from 1933 to 1977, was the most aggressive of the 32 states that had eugenics programs. An IQ of 70 or lower meant sterilization was appropriate in North Carolina. The North Carolina Eugenics Board almost always approved proposals brought before them by local welfare boards. Of all states, only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. "Here, at last, was a method of preventing unwanted pregnancies by an acceptable, practical, and inexpensive method," wrote Wallace Kuralt in the March 1967 journal of the N.C. Board of Public Welfare. "The poor readily adopted the new techniques for birth control."
Founded in 1894 the Immigration Restriction League was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. They lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897, 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. htttp://embryo.asu.edu/pages/eugenics-record-office-cold-spring-harbor-laboratory-1910-1939#sthash.Vbm0qNKc.dpuf
More undeclared wars
1924 -- Honduras -- February 28 to March 31st, and September 10th to 15th US forces protected American lives and interests during election hostilities.
1924 -- China -- September. Marines were landed to protect Americans and other foreigners in Shanghai during Chinese factional hostilities.
1925 -- China -- January 15 to August 29. Fighting of Chinese factions accompanied by riots and demonstrations in Shanghai brought the landing of American forces to protect lives and property in the International Settlement.
1925 -- Honduras -- April 19 to 21. US forces protected foreigners at La Ceiba during a political upheaval.
1925 -- Panama -- October 12 to 23. Strikes and rent riots led to the landing of about 600 American troops to keep order and protect American interests.
In 1925 Dillon, Read, and Company helped Thyssen Steel and from 1926 to 1927 Germany’s United Steelworks produced 40 percent of Germany’s steel plate sheeting, pipes, and tubes.
(American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips, pp. 171-173
1926 -- China -- August and September. The Nationalist attack on Han brought the landing of American naval forces to protect American citizens. A small guard was maintained at the consulate general even after September 16th, when the rest of the forces were withdrawn. Likewise, when Nation forces captured Kiukiang, naval forces were landed for the protection of foreigners November 4 to 6.
1926 to 1933 -- Nicaragua -- May 7 to June 5, 1926; August 27, 1926, to January 1933. The coup d'etat of General Chamorro aroused revolutionary activities leading to the landing of American marines to protect the interests of United States. United States forces came and went intermittently until January 3, 1933. Their work included activity against the outlaw leader
Sandino in 1928.
1927 -- China -- February. Fighting at Shanghai caused American naval forces and marines to be increased. In March a naval guard was stationed at American consulate at Nanking after Nationalist forces captured the city. American and British destroyers later used shell fire to protect Americans and other foreigners. Subsequently additional forces of marines and naval
forces were stationed in the vicinity of Shanghai and Tientsin.
From 1929 to 1933, Stalin order the total campaign to collectivize the peasantry meant that "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors" were being labeled "kulaks". However, the economic changes moving the Soviet Union toward more industrial economy resulted in/coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labor camps.
President Herbert Clark Hoover (March 4, 1929 – March 4, 1933)
On October 24, 1929 a initial stock market crash occurred and it caused general panic five days later on October 29th was known as "Black Tuesday".
Instead of expanding the money supply, the Federal Reserve Bank (FED) contracted it, thereby creating the period known as the Great Depression (1929 until 1940) which spread to the rest of the world..
From 1921 to 1929 the FED increased the money supply by 62 percent by making loans to the public and banks (at interest). A few months before October 1929, J.P. Morgan, Joe F. Kennedy, J.D. Rockefeller Sr. and Bernard Baruch quietly sold their stock holdings on October. 24, 1929 banks started calling in loans. This allowed the international bankers to buy rival banks at a discount, but also to buy whole corporations at pennies on the dollar.
And instead of expanding the money supply, the FED decreased the money supply, resulting in the great depression. Congressman Wright Patman in his book, A Primer On Money reported that the money supply decreased by eight billion dollars from 1929 to 1933, causing 11,630 banks of the total of 26,401 in the United States to go bankrupt. With business closing, five million people became unemployed, some 25 percent of the labor force.
It is interesting to note that biographies of J.P. Morgan, Joe F. Kennedy, J.D. Rockefeller and Bernard Baruch indicate that they all managed to transfer their assets out of the stock market and into gold just before the crash of 1929.
http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/US_central_banking_rothschild_102320072
Averill Harriman went from shipbuilding, but kept his stake in Brown Brothers, Harriman in the interwar period. American investments of 1920’s in both Germany and Russia were controversial. Harriman, George H. Walker, Clarence Dillon, and others were criticized for reckless lending and aiding previous or potential enemies. (1929-1932). The Harriman firms arranged a major shareholding in the Hamburg-Amerika Line. It set up a US bank to serve the German Thyssen Steel interests, bought a one-third interest in the principal German-owned coal and zinc mines in Poland (through a holding company), and took a position in Germany’s Trans Atlantic cable company. (Source: American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips, pp. 171-173)
1932 -- China. American forces were landed to protect American interests during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.
1933 -- Cuba. During a revolution against President Gerardo Machada naval forces demonstrated, but no landing was made.
1934 -- China. Marines landed at Foochow to protect the American Consulate.
Second Sino-Japanese War - Since 1931 the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan had been fighting intermittently. Full-scale war started in earnest on July 7, 1937 and lasted till World War II. The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy aiming to dominate China politically and militarily to secure its vast raw material reserves and other resources.
Beginning in 1931 or 1932 and continuing throughout the duration of the Asian/Pacific wars, the Japanese Government instituted a system of sexual slavery throughout the territories it occupied. During that time, women were recruited by force, coercion, or deception into sexual slavery for the Japanese military. These women were euphemistically referred to as "comfort women" by the Japanese Imperial Army. Although historians often disagree about the number of women, the most widely used figure is estimated at 200,000. The majority (approximately 80 percent) came from Korea. (Source: AP and The Seattle Times, April 26, 2007, page A11)
In the early 1930s, Japan produced only seven percent of the oil it consumed. They had to import most of the rest from the US (80 percent), and the Dutch East Indies (ten percent). If Japan seized the oil in Indochina, Borneo, and the Dutch East Indies, that would cause the US to go to war with them or at least an oil embargo.
In 1903, negotiations between Russia and Japan had proved futile. Japan chose war to maintain exclusive dominance in Korea. Japanese military consistently won battles over the Russian forces in their Russo-Japanese War. The war was the result of rival imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire and Japanese Empire over Manchuria and Korea and the seas around Korea, Japan, and the Yellow Sea. The defeats inflamed the Russian people's dissatisfaction with their inefficient and corrupt Tsarist government, and proved a major cause of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
In 1911, the Anglo (British)-Japanese treaty of 1902, freed up the British fleets do deploy in home waters do defend against the German high seas fleet. The Japanese took over Germany’s possessions in China and the Pacific during World War One. With the Bolsheviks in power in Russia, Britain had as an ally and co-defender of India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The US was however, demanding this Anglo-Japanese alliance be ended and in February 1922 it was. As a result, Australia and New Zealand ceased to be strategic assets and became liabilities for Britain because the Royal Navy lacked the ships to defend these two nations. To Japan the British-Japanese treaty had been her link to being a great power and was without it she was isolated in the world. Japan no longer has an incentive for good behavior, the Japanese military rose in influence in Japan, and by 1930, Japan became ruled by a military dictatorship of imperialist generals and admirals.
The Great Depression hit Japan especially hard because its prosperity depended on foreign trade. The government of Japan seemed unable to solve its economic crisis. Many people turned to the military, which began to take matters into its own hands. By 1932, military leaders had set up a military dictatorship in Japan. In the 1930s, Japan had many features of a totalitarian state. The government arrested critics, imposed censorship, and employed a secret police force to hunt down and punish so-called enemies of the state. Extreme nationalists glorified war and empire. To strengthen Japan, the government was interested in gaining overseas raw materials such as coal and oil. Therefore, the Japanese military invaded Manchuria, a province in northeastern China. When China protested to the League of Nations, the league condemned the invasion but took no further action.
1931: the electron microscope was invented.
1933: the FM radio was invented.
Some Russian history:
After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals to gain control of the government. Stalin was determined to transform the Soviet Union into a powerful industrial state. In 1928, therefore, he launched his first five-year plan. The plan included two goals: rapid growth of heavy industry and increased farm production through collectivization of agriculture. In a series of five-year plans, Stalin poured the nation's resources into building steel mills, electric power stations, and other industries needed in a strong modern state. He also forced millions of peasants to give up their land and work on collective farms, large, government-run enterprises. Many peasants opposed the change, and millions died in Stalin's brutal crackdown.
To achieve his goals, Stalin created a new kind of government, a totalitarian state. The Soviet government was a single-party dictatorship that controls every aspect of the lives of its citizens.. In the 1920s, when some communist uprisings did occur in Europe, they were quickly suppressed.
Some Italian history:
After World War One, Italy was plagued by economic and political problems. Workers went on strike in the cities, while in the countryside; landless peasants seized the property of wealthy landlords. The unrest made the middle class fear a socialist revolution. An ambitious politician, Benito Mussolini, used the turmoil to gain power. Mussolini founded the Fascist party and condemned democracy because they believed rival parties divided the state. They also opposed communism and defended private property. In the early 1920s, Mussolini and his followers, known as Black Shirts, won the support of many Italians by attacking communists and socialists.
Then in 1922, Mussolini led a "March on Rome" supposedly to prevent a communist revolution but in fact to frighten the government. In October 1922 the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III decided to tolerate Mussolini and appointed him prime minister
Mussolini increased his power and in 1925, he dropped all pretenses of democracy, appointing Fascists to top offices, censoring the press, organizing a secret police, and banning any criticism of the government. He controlled the army and the schools. Here is yet another example of how Kings were involved in causing World War Two. Italy did not become a republic until 1946. Source: http://www.fresno.k12.ca.us/divdept/sscience/history/totalitarianism.htm
All the bad and strange things which happened in Germany in the 1920s are conventionally blamed on the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. The practical effect of these terms however, was really very limited. The diplomatic disabilities on Germany were eliminated by the Locarno Pact of 1925. The great Weimar inflation, which was engineered by the government to defeat French attempts to extract reparations, was ended in 1923.
The reparations themselves, of course, were a humiliating drain on the German budget, but a system of financing with international loans was arranged which worked satisfactorily until the world financial system broke down in the early 1930s. Even arms development was continued through clandestine projects with the Soviet Union. It is also false to assert that German culture was driven to insanity by a pervasive sense of defeat. There was indeed insanity in culture in the 1920s, but the insanity pervaded the whole West.
Something very like the Nazi Party would still have come to power in Germany, even if that country had won the First World War. Nazism was simply an extension of the trends that had dominated German culture for a generation. Politics is a part of culture, and the Nazis represented a kind of politics which was integral with Weimar culture. The connection is deep, as with the Nazi affinity for the modernist post-rationalism of the philosopher Heidegger, and also superficial, in the styles the party promoted.
People with no fascist inclinations at all love to watch film footage produced by the Nazis, for the simple reason that it is very good cinema. The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich formed a historical unit. The Nazi Party was other things besides a right wing populist group. The term "Third Reich," is an old term for the Millennium, the belief by a religious, social, or political group in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed. “Millennialism” is a specific form of millenarianism based on a one-thousand-year cycle.
The Nazi Party's core began as a sort of occult lodge, like the Thule Society of Munich to which so many of its important early members belonged. It promoted a racist theory of history.
The leadership had some very odd notions that, at least to some degree. These ideas were not unique to them, that they were spreading among the German elites. The Nazi Party was immensely popular on university campuses. The intellectual climate of early 20th century Germany was extraordinarily friendly to mysticism of all types, including in politics. The Nazi leadership was just particularly nasty people. The same would probably have been true of anyone who ruled Germany in the 1930s. There is no reason to think that the heirs of a German victory in 1918 would have been less likely to pursue the Nazi objectives. http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/ifgermany.htm
In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler gained control of the Nazi party, a nationalistic, anti-communist, anti Semitic organization. The Great Depression caused unemployment to rise in the early 1930s in Germany. In 1933, Hitler used the threat of a communist uprising to gain power. He then moved against all opposition parties and set up a fascist state in Germany. The Gestapo, or secret police, arrested anyone suspected of opposing Nazi rule. The Nazis used the press, schools, and even churches to glorify their goals. The League of Nations condemned German rearmament. http://www.fresno.k12.ca.us/divdept/sscience/history/totalitarianism.htm
On December 20, 1922, the New York Times reported that Henry Ford was financing Adolph Hitler. The German Monarchist Parties even complained to the American Ambassador to investigate and shop Ford’s intervention into German domestic affairs, aiding Hitler’s anti-semitic Fascist (corporate socialism), party. Ford’s money was used by Hitler to foment the Bavarian rebellion. Hitler used sections o Ford’s book, The International Jew, verbatim in his writing of Mein Kampf. (Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, p. 90)
Fritz Thyssen, a German steel magnate had helped fund the Nazi movement in early 1920s.
Thyssen’s US partners were prominent members of the Wall Street financial establishment. Putzi Hanfstaengl, an American citizen born into a New England family, helped Hitler from early 1920s till late 1930s, when he fell out of favor with the Nazis. He took part in the conspiracy to commit arson of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933. This fire was a false flag operation designed to put the blame onto the Communist Revolution and justify Hitler’s repression of free speech and protests. (Ibid, pgs. 102 and 117)
John Jakob Raskob had been named chairman of the Democratic Party. This was done because he had had managed the campaign of Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Al Smith. Following the disastrous 1928 Hoover victory over Smith, the Democratic Party had fallen deep into debt.
Raskob had been a life-long Republican up until that point. Born in 1879, Raskob went to work for Pierre du Pont in 1900, and rose rapidly through the ranks of the J.P Morgan-financed chemical and arms combine. By 1914, Raskob was treasurer of the DuPont Corporation. Four years later, after DuPont took control of 43 percent of the stock in General Motors, Raskob was named vice president for finance of both GM and DuPont. By the early 1920s, Morgan had bought a $35 million stake in GM, making it a joint DuPont-Morgan venture. Raskob remained vice president of GM until 1928, when he took over Al Smith's Presidential campaign, steering the New York Governor hard-right, into the Morgan camp. Raskob remained at DuPont for another decade, amassing a very large personal fortune. Throughout the 1920s, Raskob was on Morgan's list of ``preferred customers,'' who were beneficiaries of insider trading, and privileged stock purchases.
During the 1920s, J.P Morgan had financed Italy's Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In 1925, for example, Morgan partner Thomas Lamont arranged a $100 million loan to the Mussolini regime, at a point that the regime was in deep political trouble. At the same time that Morgan was bailing out Mussolini, the DuPont and Morgan interests were launching a fascist movement in the United States.
Retired Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC, reported to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives, that a group of leading Morgan and DuPont operatives, including the recently deposed Democratic Party chairman John J. Raskob, and his executive director, Jouett Shouse, had conspired to organize a military coup d'etat against FDR. These coup leaders believed that Roosevelt was a “Jew Communist,'' who would destroy the United States through New Deal hyperinflation.
Maj. Gen. Butler had been repeatedly approached by one of the J.P Morgan operatives, Gerald MacGuire. MacGuire had spent seven months in Europe, at the start of 1934, making contacts with leading Fascists in Italy, France, and Germany. Hesitant to signal Butler that the Morgan gang was plotting a Hitler-Mussolini-style takeover of America, MacGuire told Butler that the new movement, to save America from FDR, was modeled on the French secret military organization, Croix de Feu (Fiery Cross). He lied, calling this group like America's Veterans of Foreign Wars or American Legion. In fact, the Croix de Feu was a hard-core pro-Fascist, pro-Nazi apparatus that had failed in coup plots in France, and ultimately became part of the collaborationist Vichy regime.
In December 1929, speaking to veterans in Pittsburgh, he stated that in his deployment in 1912 in Nicaragua, he had helped rig elections in favor of the Wall Street-backed candidate. He was immediately called on the carpet by Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams, a man whose name was later to appear on the J.P. Morgan (bank) preferred list of investors.
In August 1931, Butler, in a speech to the American Legion, declared: ”I have spent 33 years ... being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism....”I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.... In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.... I had ... a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents....''
To the dismay of the bankers who directed the Legion, Butler's remarks were greeted with riotous applause. Butler was an overt anti-fascist, who in 1931, openly denounced Mussolini as a murderer and thug, and warned against signing treaties with him. When the Italian government filed a protest, all hell broke loose. Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, cabled a personal apology, on behalf of Herbert Hoover, to Benito Mussolini. MG Butler was the commandant of the Quantico Marine base at the time, was placed under arrest and told that he was to be court-martialed by President Hoover, with the full approval of Navy Secretary Adams.
The plans for the court martial provoked a tremendous outpouring of support for Butler. The anti-fascist local press charged that the Hoover administration was kowtowing to the ``thug'' Mussolini and throwing up for sacrifice America's most distinguished military figure. Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, and a friend of Butler's dating from FDR's days as Secretary of the Navy, worked to help the General, and spoke out against what was being done. Hoover and Adams were forced to back down: the court martial was cancelled, and Butler was given only a mild reprimand. He refused, however, to retract his statement.
http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/smedley.htm
Bush family fortune, Thyssen, and genocide profits from Auschwitz
Nazi Germany is where the Bush family fortune came from, and where the Harrimans, and the Rockefellers increased their fortunes to obscene proportions.
Of course some of them were quite rich to begin with. The Harriman railroad monopoly helped create the Rockefeller oil monopoly in the 1800's. Their despicable price fixing schemes earned them the label "the Robber Barons" in the press. Republican Teddy Roosevelt ruined their rapacious profits with his anti-monopoly and antitrust legislation.
The Robber Barons bribed Congress into passing a loophole, the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918 which legalized cartels and monopolies outside the borders of the United States. This loophole law let the Robber Barons loose to prey on a helpless world already ravaged by the human and financial cost of World War One.
- Averell Harriman (patriarch of the famous Democratic family) promptly broke another American law by secretly financing the Bolsheviks. The FBI "ARCOS" files on Harriman's connections with the Soviets prove Harriman bribed Lenin into letting him take over the Czar's cartels, which exported manganese, iron ore and other raw materials. Harriman shipped the Russian raw materials to his German partners, the Thyssens.
When German currency was almost worthless after World War One, the Rockefellers were able to buy the stock of nearly every German company for a song. The great sucking sound that preceded the Great Depression was the whistling of Wall Street money out of America into Germany, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Early in 1924, Hendrick J. Kouwenhoven, the managing director of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, traveled to New York to meet with George Herbert Walker and the Harriman brothers, a wealthy railroad family since the 1800s. Together, they established the Union Banking Corporation.
In 1926 Fritz Thyssen created the United Steel Works, the biggest industrial conglomerate in German history. Through Union Banking Corporation, Prescott Bush, and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War Two. (The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 1994)
A classified Dutch intelligence file which was leaked by a courageous Dutch intelligence officer, along with newly surfaced information from US government archives, confirms absolutely, according to author John Loftus the direct links between Prescott Bush and Fritz Thyssen and the genocide at Auschwitz and Prescott Bush made considerable profits off the slave labor at Auschwitz.
American Fascism 1930 to 1936
Through the 1920s and 1930s, loans from Wall Street financed German rearmament and the rise of Hitler. One German company which benefited substantially from these loans was I.G. Farben which by 1939 had become the biggest chemical manufacturer in the world, and enabled Germany to become self-sufficient in rubber, petrol, oil and explosives. On the supervising board of I.G. Farben was Max Warburg and on the board of American I.G. Farben were US and German bankers. Rockefeller's Standard Oil assisted I.G. Farben's program of research into making oil from coal. US bank money was channeled through subsidiaries of General Electric Company (GEC), International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and Ford located in Germany.
Max Warburg served on the board of directors of I.G. Farben. The Warburg family is a financial dynasty (bankers) of German Jewish origin. Max’s brother Paul Warburg served on the board of directors of I.G. Farben's wholly owned American subsidiary. Paul Warburg died in January 1932, before Hitler was elected Chancellor. All of the I.G. Farben board members attempted to restrict industrial production materials to countries marked for invasion by Nazi Germany, all of this to such a degree that all German board members other than Max Warburg were charged after World War II as war criminals. Virtually all members of the German Warburg family had fled to the United States or Great Britain by 1938.
Prescott Bush sent Max Warburg to represent the American Ship and Commerce Line on the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s board of directors. Prescott and Max were old buddies and Max Warburg was a close friend of Montagu Norman. Warburg was also an executive at Hitler’s Reichsbank. Max Warburg’s brothers had run the Kuhn Loeb investment bank. Warburg was also a close advisor to Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht and John Foster Dulles (the man for whom Dulles Airport was named), worked closely to arrange an agreement whereby all trade between the United States and Hitler’s Germany would be funneled through the Harriman International Company under Oliver Harriman.
American industrialist Fred Koch, helped build the third-largest oil refinery in Germany from 1934 until it was finished in 1935 - a project approved personally by Adolf Hitler. The refinery was critical to the Nazi war effort, by making really high-octane fuel for German warplanes. Before that, Fred Koch built a refinery for Joseph Stalin’s Russia. Fred Koch went on to become an original leader of the right-wing John Birch Society. Koch had a partner named William Rhodes Davis. Davis was a Nazi sympathizer. The FBI considered him a Nazi agent. Davis needed an OK from Hitler t build the refinery and he got it. He had to go speak with Hitler himself.
The book by author Jane Meyer disclosing this does not say that Fred Koch or the sons were Nazis. She says she doesn’t know the political belief of Fred Koch. (Source: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer)
In 1926 Allen Dulles joined Sullivan and Cromwell, the world’s largest law firm, and became the lawyer for Thyssen’s Rotterdam bank.
In 1929, Bush, Harriman and Dillon established the German Steel Trust (GST) with Fritz Thyssen and his partner, Friedrich Flick. The GST later provided the Third Reich with much of the explosives, steel plate, wire, pig iron, pipes, tubing and other materials they needed to construct projects like the Atlantic Wall and the 155mm cannons that rained death on our servicemen as they hit the beaches at Normandy. The GST was directly linked to George Bush’s grandfather’s bank in New York and was presided over by Albert Voegler, another German industrialist who paved the way for Hitler’s ascent. Voegler, incidentally, held a directorship on the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The Hamburg-Amerika Line was funneling propaganda to thwart the German government’s battle against Hitler’s brown shirts in the streets. Hamburg-Amerika Line was also acting as a front for I.G. Farben spies, propaganda and bribery on behalf of the Nazis.
Fritz Thyssen (a German industrialist and bankster), Bush, Walker and W. Averell Harriman (son of American railroad baron E. H. Harriman ) were in direct partnership with Flick’s zinc, steel, and coal conglomerate in Germany and Poland. Together they owned one third of Flick’s sprawling empire and renamed it the Consolidated Silesian Holding Co. From 1924 to 1929, Thyssen’s bank in Holland (Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart) was far from a neutral Dutch institution. It was the holding company for Thyssen’s entire financial empire was the spigot through which Hitler’s military machine was funded.
In 1931, it merged with Brown Bros. and Co. to create the highly successful Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman and Co. Notable employees included George Herbert Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush.
Between 1930 and 1931, as admitted at the Nuremberg trials, Thyssen arranged with Rudolf Hess for the transfer of 250,000 to 300,000 Deutsche Marks to the Nazi Party through his bank in Holland. During that same period, W. Averell Harriman merged with the Anglo-American investment house, Brown Brothers, to create Brown Brothers Harriman. Prescott and two Harriman brothers were made senior partners along with Thatcher Brown and Montagu Norman, the notorious Nazi sympathizer. Brown ran the London office while Prescott ran the New York office. Montagu Norman often stayed with Prescott when he came to New York and was an ex-Brown partner.
- Averell Harriman was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by President Truman but lost to Adlai Stevenson. Harriman served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Europe and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and US Ambassador to Britain. He served in numerous U.S. diplomatic assignments in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Harriman's main properties included Brown Brothers & Harriman and Co, Union Pacific Railroad, Merchant Shipping Corporation, and venture capital investments that included the Polaroid Corporation. Harriman's associated properties included the Southern Pacific Railroad (including the Central Pacific Railroad), Illinois Central Railroad, Wells Fargo and Co., the Pacific Mail Steamship Co., American Shipping & Commerce, Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actiengesellschaft (HAPAG) (translated in English, Holland-American Trading Corporation) the American Hawaiian Steamship Co., United American Lines, the Guaranty Trust Company, and the Union Banking Corporation.
American Liberty League, a group made up of rich industrialists and bankers like Heinz, Colgate and General Motors, in 1933 plan was to seize the White House by force and impose a fascist state in America. Prescott Bush approached Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, asking him to lead a 500,000-man army of rogue veterans in a military coup against President Roosevelt on behalf of a wealthy group of industrialists and bankers. This coup was stopped when MG Butler disclosed the plot to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee refused to even question any of the people he implicated and went so far as to strike MG Butler’s testimony completely from the record.
Three years later US Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, wrote a chilling letter to President Roosevelt: “A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent [on bringing] a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime…. A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.”
In 1939, Bank of England then relinquished the £6 million of Czechoslovakia gold deposited in London to the Nazis after they invaded and took over Czechoslovakia. In order to be self-sufficient, Hitler's Germany needed the resources of Czechoslovakia.
During the war, the American-German banksters made fantastic amounts of money. Their German factories were left amazingly unscathed amidst the bomb devastation, and after the war the same people were appointed by Roosevelt to supervise the fate of German industry.
In 1941, the Trading with The Enemy Act was enacted and stock shares of Union Banking Corporation were also seized by the US government. The list of shareholders were Prescott S. Bush, (director and largest shareholder);“Bunny” Harriman; Cornelis Lievense (president; responsible for all New York banking finances for the Nazis); H.J. Kouwenhoven (director; helped establish UBC as a conduit to Fritz Thyssen; managed the Holland office during the Nazi occupation in 1940; served as the director of the German Steel Trust), and two other associates of Bush. Other UBC companies were also seized, including the Seamless Steel Equipment Co., long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law Bert Walker, Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corp and the Holland-American Trading Corp.
The importance of the Holland-American Trading Corp was discovered by a former U.S. Intelligence officer, William Gowen, who noticed a paragraph from Thyssen’s investigation files.
“Thyssen’s first step in a long dance of tax and currency frauds began [in the late 1930's] when he disposed of his shares in the Dutch Hollandische-Amerikanische Investment Corporation (Holland-American Trading Corp.) to be credited to the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, the bank founded in 1916 by August Thyssen Senior.”
That passage clearly demonstrated that the bank in Holland was founded by Thyssen Sr. (and therefore not neutral( and that the shares of the Holland-America Trading Corp, dumped by Thyssen as part of a money laundering scheme, ended up in the hands of Union Bank Corporation and ultimately in the Bush family.
The former CIA Director Allen Dulles’ near treasonous dealings with the Nazis before and during World War Two: As a lawyer for the powerful Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell he helped Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman conceal their Union Banking Corporation’s role as a Nazi money-laundering machine. As the top OSS spy in Switzerland during the war, Dulles continued to meet with Nazis, as busy serving his private clients’ interests as aiding the national war effort. Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that “the Dulles brothers were traitors.” And author James Trento has reported that James Jesus Angleton told him how he was named CIA counterintelligence chief: by agreeing not to submit “sixty of Allen Dulles’ closest friends” to a polygraph test concerning their covert business dealings with the Nazis.
Sources: http://populistreview.wordpress.com/tag/max-warburg/
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Politicians/Bush_Nazi_Dealings.html
In 1924 John J. McCloy joined Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff. The three senior partners were Paul Cravath, Hoyt Moore and Carl de Gersdorff. During this period he became friendly with W. Averell Harriman and Robert A. Lovett. In 1927 McCloy was sent to establish an office in Milan. Over the next few years he traveled throughout Italy, France and Germany on business. McCloy worked as an advisor to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. According to Anton Chaitkin (George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography).
McCloy developed the view that German Reparations as a result of the First World War were both unwise and unfair. According to McCloy: "Practically every merchant bank and Wall Street firm, from J. P. Morgan and Brown Brothers on down, was over there (Germany) picking up loans. We were all very European in our outlook, and our goal was to see it rebuilt." McCloy argued that if this did not happen, Germany would be taken over by the communists, who were getting support from the Soviet Union.
In his dealings with Germany, McCloy worked closely with Paul M. Warburg, the founder of M. M. Warburg in Hamburg, who argued that the "United States should throw open its doors to European imports and pay for them with the gold the Allies had used to pay for U.S. war material". Warburg argued that this strategy would result in New York becoming the world's financial and commercial centre. In July, 1929, McCloy became a partner in the Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff law firm.
Holodomor (to kill by starvation) 1929 to 1932
The a great famine occurred in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia.
When Ukraine resisted Soviet attempts at collectivization in the 1920s and '30s, the Soviet Union under Stalin used labor camps, executions, and starvation (Holodomor) to kill over ten million of Ukrainians (20 percent) and about two million died in Kazakhstan (40 percent).This atrocity was known to the Roosevelt administration, but not to the American people at large.
Stalin accomplished genocide against Ukraine by two means. One was massive executions and deportations to labor camps. But his second tool of murder was more unique: an artificial famine created by confiscation of all food. Ukraine was the last place one would have expected famine, It had been known for centuries as the "breadbasket of Europe.
Ukrainians experienced a relatively high degree of freedom extending into the mid-1920s. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and non-communist Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were allowed to operate independently. However, as the Soviet Union consolidated its power, and Joseph Stalin ascended to the party's top, these freedoms became expendable.
Despite a communist push for collectivization, Ukraine's farms had mostly remained private — the foundation of their success. But in 1929, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party decided to embark on a program of total collectivization. Private farms were to be completely replaced by collectives.
The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" was announced by Stalin on December 27, 1929. The decision was formalized in a resolution, "On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization", on January 30, 1930. The kulaks were divided into three categories: those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police; those to be sent to Siberia, North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property; and those to be evicted from their houses and used in labor colonies within their own districts.
The most prominent villagers were among those arrested.... This was frightening. Our official leadership had been taken away in one night. The farmers, mostly illiterate and ignorant, were thereby left much more defenseless.
There is nothing wrong with farmers pooling their resources and efforts in a cooperative venture. But this was not what the communists meant by collectivization. On the collectives, the government owned everything — the land, animals, equipment, and produce. The worker kept no fruits of his labor, and was at the state's mercy to receive a pittance of pay. Soviet collectives never succeeded. On the collectives livestock, poorly cared for, easily died, and equipment fell into disrepair. This was because the workers did not own them, nor did they have any stake in the collective. Stalin announced that the solution to better grain production was to "struggle against the capitalist elements of the peasantry, against the kulaks," and he proclaimed the goal of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." In reality, however, Ukraine had never had a distinct social class of kulaks. Those accused of being kulaks were either shot, deported to remote slave labor camps in Russia, or put in local labor details. Few survived. One could be accused of being a kulak on the flimsiest evidence. This process killed off the most productive farmers, guaranteeing a smaller harvest and a more impoverished Soviet Union. The remaining farmers did not dare take steps to improve their lands or prosper, for fear they would be reclassified as kulaks.
By 1932, virtually all kulaks had been liquidated, but many of the remaining poor peasants still resisted communism and collectivization. Stalin now began war upon Ukraine's poorest. The communists had not already ruined the nation's productivity by eliminating the best farmers and forcing others onto the feeble collectives.
In 1932, Stalin demanded that Ukraine increase its grain output by 44 percent, and that didn’t occur. Stalin then issued the orders if quotas were not met, all grain was to be confiscated. "All the grain without exception was requisitioned for the fulfillment of the Plan, including that set aside for sowing next year’s crop and fodder for animals.
At the famine's height, 25,000 people per day were dying. As the winter wore on, Ukraine became a panorama of horror. The roadsides were filled with the corpses of those who died seeking food. Many others died of starvation in their own homes. Some chose to end the process by suicide, commonly by hanging — if they had the strength to do it. A few people even resorted to cannibalism, eating those who had died and, in some cases, murdering those still living.
Many peasants attempted to reach Ukraine's cities like Kiev, where factory workers were still allowed a little pay and food. However, in December 1932 the communists introduced the "internal passport." This made it impossible for a villager to get a city job without the Party's permission, which was almost universally denied.
The famine has been deliberately planned by the Moscow government and implemented by means of brutal requisition. The definite aim of this crime is to liquidate the Ukrainian problem over a few months, sacrificing from 10 to 15 million people. Much of the confiscated grain was exported to the West, large portions were simply dumped into the sea by the Soviets, or allowed to rot.
The Soviets suppressed all information regarding the famine. Russia's state-controlled press was prohibited from discussing it, and for ordinary citizens, just mentioning the famine carried a penalty of three to five years' imprisonment.
Although some Western observers did report the magnitude of the Ukrainians' plight, such comments were extremely rare. During the famine, the Soviets prohibited foreign journalists from visiting Ukraine.
Ukrainians did resist the genocide. Hundreds of riots and revolts, on various scales, erupted throughout Ukraine. There are even a number of stories where groups of heroic women overran the communist-guarded kolkhozes and seized grain for their starving children. And it was not unusual for a village's local party tyrant to suddenly be found dead. Resistance largely constituted pitchforks against machine guns. The GPU and Soviet army dealt with revolts; aircraft were brought in to suppress the more serious ones. And the famine of 1932-1933 left peasants too weak to resist. In January 1933 Ukraine's borders were sealed in order to prevent Ukrainian peasants from fleeing to other republics. By the end of February 1933 approximately 190,000 Ukrainian peasants had been caught trying to flee Ukraine and were forced to return to their villages to starve.
By the end of the 1930s, approximately four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite had been eliminated.[Although famine, caused by collectivization, raged in many parts of the Soviet Union in 1932, special and particularly lethal policies were adopted in and largely limited to Ukraine at the end of 1932 and 1933. (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder Yale historian)
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Russia has maintained its innocence. Discussion regarding the famine was banned and falsification of evidence took place and Russia, to this day, continues to deny their role in the genocide. Russian officials regard evidence of the genocide as “falsifications of history,” and claim that the famine was due to a natural disaster that affected the entirety of the Soviet Union.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4656-holodomor-the-secret-holocaust-in-ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor
The End
NOTES
- Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, page 296.
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Gnadenhutten-massacre
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States4
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States
- http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/thefrenchrevolution/p/ovfrenchrev.htm
- http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/waterloo.htm
- http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
- http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book13Ch.1.html
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
- "Three Efforts at Development among the Choctaws of Mississippi" Southeastern Indians: Since the Removal Era, by Walter Williams (1979).
- http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfield_Scott
- http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/Mexicoweb/factfile/Unique-facts-Mexico10.htm
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Winnemem-Wintu
- http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Grattan-Massacre
- http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book13Ch.1.html
- http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/04/05/20/gaddy.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vicksburg
- http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog11/transcript/page02.html
- http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/04/05/20/gaddy.htm
- Marching through Georgia: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Lee Kennett, p. 286.
- War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco
- http://www.examiner.com/article/generals-sherman-and-sheridan-the-war-criminals
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Sand-Creek-Massacre
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Marias-Massacre
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Wounded-Knee-Massacre
- http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Native-American-massacres
- http://www.civil-war-battles.com/People/general-philip-sheridan
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/grant-impeachment/
33.http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2022794/little_known_facts_about_president_pg2.html?cat=37
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/chesterarthur
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_A._Arthur
- Wealth and Democracy, by Kevin Phillips, pp. xi to 43.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland
- http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq71-1.htm
- http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread180409/pg1
- http://www.historynet.com/president-william-mckinley-assassinated-by-an-anarchist.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland
- http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0406
- http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0406
- http://alfutuhat.edaama.org/WTC/p2.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War
- In Our Image, American Empire in the Philippines, by Stanley Karnow, 1989, p. 188.
- A Short History of the Philippines by Teodoro A. Agoncillo, 1969.
- http://www.workers.org/ww/1999/philip0218.html
- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/9782/people.htm" \l "smith
- http://www.greatdreams.com/war_peace.htm
- From A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/9782/summary.htm
- http://www.greatdreams.com/war_peace.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_War
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Howard_Taft
- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, page 17.
- http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/teddy-roosevelt-the-wilderness-warrior
- http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Howard_Taft
- Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick J. Buchanan, 2008 pgs. 7-14.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War
- http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/US_central_banking_rothschild_102320072
- http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O48-ChineseRevolutionof1911.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War#Background
- A People's History of the US, by Howard Zinn.
- http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0406
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
- Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, pgs. 1-24.
- http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/ifgermany.htm
- http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/US_central_banking_rothschild_102320072
- Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century by James Gannon, pp. 11-23.
- Illusion of Victory, by Thomas Fleming, pp. 55-56.
- Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Antony C. Sutton, 1976, p. 175.
- American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips, pgs. 250-253.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
- Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, p. x.
- http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0406
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
- http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
- The Strength of the Wolf, The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine, pp. 6-10.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
- http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/red.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
- The Strength of the Wolf, The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine, p. 26.
- Ibid, pp. 3 and 10-12.
- Ibid, p. 12.
- Ibid, pp. 16 and 22, 26.
- Ibid, p. 22.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
- http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/American_Legion
- http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/smedley.htm
- American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips, pp. 171-173.
- http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/US_central_banking_rothschild_102320072
- American Dynasty, by Kevin Phillips, pp. 171-173.
- AP and The Seattle Times, April 26, 2007, p. A11.
- http://www.fresno.k12.ca.us/divdept/sscience/history/totalitarianism.htm
- http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/ifgermany.htm
- http://www.fresno.k12.ca.us/divdept/sscience/history/totalitarianism.htm
- Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Antony C. Sutton, p. 90.
- Ibid. pp. 102 and 117.
- http://larouchepac.com/news/2008/03/29/lessons-denver-fdrs-1932-victory-over-londons-wall-street-fa.html
- http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/smedley.htm
- The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 1994.
- The Strength of the Wolf, The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine, p. 38.