07/24/2026
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Civil War, Reconciliation, Slavery

532 Words: Too Civil

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

So now we come to the ultimate highlight/lowlight in American history.

The Civil War.

Or, as the Bad Guys referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression.

By the way, those Bad Guys never got a proper comeuppance, other than getting their asses whupped in the war itself. The leaders of the so-called Confederate States of America, as well as that “nation’s” generals, its financiers, philosophers, influencers, clerics, and traders in human lives, never were brought to justice, never punished, never compelled to atone for their myriad sins.

As a rule, I tend to be sympathetic to any group of people who wish to rebel or secede but not so in this case. Sadly, it remains necessary to this day, more than a hundred and sixty years later, here in the United States of America, to say what should be universally accepted — that Jefferson Davis,  Alexander Stephens, Judah Benjamin, Robert Toombs, John C. Breckenridge, and their evil collaborators  were wrong, morally, existentially wrong, and deserving of the hangman’s noose.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson lays out the particulars of modern America’s inexcusable winking at the secession and subsequent war in her book, How the South Won the Civil War. It’s as if Germans still celebrated Kristallnacht or the Japanese continued to revere the legacy of Hideki Tojo. Even the Soviets tried to wash their hands of the malignant fallout from the Joseph Stalin era in the years immediately after his death. (On the other hand, just as many Americans embrace the antebellum South,  romanticize its rebellion, and — honestly — long for a return to a time when dark-skinned people knew their place, a good many Russians today wish their country still had a tyrannical leader like the man whose forced famines, brutal gulags, and thought-crime executions resulted in the deaths of at least 10 million people. In other words, we Americans aren’t the only saps on earth.)

Therein lies the essence of the contradictory highlight/lowlight of the Civil War. Lincoln may have been magnanimous and forgiving in his “with malice toward none” stance. He may have been manifesting the most admirable characteristics of his Christian faith. But he allowed evil to survive by not choking it off, its ideas as well as its purveyors, swiftly and decisively. The way to do that would have been to hang Davis et al from the highest trees and outlawing the Confederate flag.

Unhappily, that banner continues to be waved, on front yard flagpoles, on pickup trucks, on tattoos, on blogs and in podcasts, and anywhere else where people can legally display their stupidity. Again, places like Germany flat-out ban the waving of the Nazi flag. They, at least, understand the normalization of it, just as we normalized the “stars and bars,” is a tacit endorsement of everything it stands for.

That normalized Confederate flag stands for the kidnapping, the buying and selling, the terrorizing, the dehumanization, the whipping, the chaining — all the atrocities inherent in the practice of slavery. The United States of America fought a bloody war to stop that practice. Then it said to its former practitioners, All is forgiven, fellas. You’re okay by us.

They weren’t okay.

How Kidnapped Africans Were Transported to America.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/21/2026
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Frederick Douglass

581 Words: A Most Important Life

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

In an ideal world, this highlight in the history of the United States would never have been necessary.

But it had to be. The United States was a slave nation.

The year was 1845. The month, May. The book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published by the Boston Anti-Slavery Society.

It is one of the two or three most important American books ever published. If you say it’s the most important American book, I won’t argue with you.

It was the first of Douglass’s three memoirs. Ironically, for such a person who would delve into and write so forcefully and thoroughly about his life, Douglass had no idea when and where he was born. That was typical for slaves. Any hints of human history, self-inspection, aspiration, curiosity, and even the desire to read had to be beaten out of them.

Douglass taught himself to read as a child after hearing one or another master say slaves shouldn’t be literate, otherwise they’d start thinking they should be free. That, the young Douglass concluded, meant reading was of utmost importance. Douglass would come to understand he, a human being, was, in his keepers’ eyes nothing more than a piece of property.

Frederick Douglass

Slavery, Douglass tells us, is immoral. Now, of course, that sounds elementary. It wasn’t so much in 1845. Oh sure, there were abolitionists here and there but the vast majority of northern White Americans were too busy taking care of their own families and farms and shops to think much about what was going on in southern plantations. Just as obviously, southerners didn’t consider slavery immoral because, hell, their whole economy, their culture, their very identity depended on involuntary servitude.

Think of how earth-shattering it would have been in 1845 to read the memoir of an intelligent, observant, curious, rational, and emotional human being — .whose skin was black and whose rights didn’t exist.

In an ideal world, Frederick Douglass’s memoirs would have recounted his experiences as a college professor, a noted philosopher, an innovative physician, a senator, or even a president. He was born far too soon to have a chance to become any of those things in the United States of America.

His name, on the other hand, will live forever in our history, more so, perhaps, than if he had been a president of Harvard or the doctor who discovered the importance of hand-washing.

His book was as invaluable as anything in the coming overthrow of slave culture in America.

He was one of this country’s most important human beings.

There are scads of ways to read Douglass’s Narrative. Here are a few, online:

  • From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • From Project Gutenberg
  • From Internet Archive
  • An audio/video reading of it from American Writers Museum

Or you can buy the book.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/17/2026
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Andrew Jackson, The Great Moon Hoax

890 Words: A Tough Guy President & Bullshit

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

A couple of weird things, both lowlights (sorta) happened in 1835.

Had there been late night TV comedians in existence back then, they’d have had field days riffing on these happenings.

BTW, thank all gods, odds, stars, Tarot cards, tea leaves, and Ouija boards that there weren’t late night TV comedians, nor TV, nor social media, nor smartphone news alerts 191 years ago. Had there been, think of how awful Americans’ reactions to ensuing world events would have been! We’d probably still be squabbling over the relationship between the races in this holy land. So, again, thankfully there were no…, um…. Oh, yeah…, I take that back.

Anyway, Weird 1835 Event No. 1: The first assassination attempt on the President of the  United States is made on January 30th.

Just a few weeks earlier, former US vice president and future South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun pretty much called for the assassination of the then Chief Executive. Jackson, by early ’35, already was known as “King Andrew” and not in a complimentary way, for a slew of reasons. “Tyrant,” was a word a lot of newspapers and political opponents used to describe him. Among his most vociferous detractors was his own first vice president, Calhoun. Jackson and he never really saw eye to eye on important national matters, especially nullification. Calhoun resigned as VP in a huff, the first in history to do so, and became the US Senator from what would go on to be the first state to secede in 1861. Calhoun said Jackson was becoming America’s Caesar “who ought to have a Brutus.”

Well, if you’re up on your Shakespeare, you know Julius Caesar’s old pal Brutus plunged the coup de grace dagger into the emperor’s chest. Was Calhoun hinting he might do something similar? Who knows?

What is known is an out of work house painter named Richard Lawrence caught up with Jackson outside Washington, DC as the prez walked home from a funeral. Lawrence carried two pistols. He tried to fire both. Click, click. But no Bam, Bam. The odds that two such pistols would misfire simultaneously have been characterized as “astronomical.”

Again, imagine if TV, the internet, etc. were in existence back then! Imagine the conspiracy theories!

What happened next would make a lot of the testosterone-laden, self-proclaimed he-men running around America these days become tumescent. Jackson turned on his would be attacker and beat the living hell out of him with his walking stick.

Lawrence was swiftly apprehended, put on trial, and found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was locked up in insane asylums for the rest of his life.

Yikes. The newspapers must have loved that story.

Which brings us to…

Weird 1835 Event No. 2: The Great Moon Hoax. William Herschel was the noted German-British astronomer who catalogued nebulae and discovered the planet Uranus. His kid, John Herschel, was a polymath who, among other things, picked up on studying the night sky where his old man left off.

(A quick aside: William Herschel is generally credited with scads of astronomical discoveries, sure, but what is much less known is a lot — even most — of his work was done in conjunction with his sister, Caroline Herschel. She’s been credited as being the first woman to earn a salary as a scientist. Like Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, and scores of other brilliant scientists who had the misfortune of being born with the “wrong” genitalia, her name has been lost in the shuffle.)

Anyway, in August, 1835, the New York City daily newspaper, The Sun, ran a series of breathless articles proclaiming that William’s kid/Caroline’s nephew, John, had discovered life on the moon!

A wholly fictional astronomer named Andrew Grant revealed, exclusively, to the newspaper (so it claimed) that he’d accompanied John Herschel on an expedition to the Southern Hemisphere where they could obtain clear telescopic views of the moon. Lo and behold (The Sun reported), Herschel fils and Grant faux observed forests and lush gardens on the moon. Birds and mammals, too. Rather than a big ball of cheese, the moon, if one were to believe the stories (and many did), was actually a rich zoo and nursery, the rival of Earth as a home for flora and fauna.

This Image Accompanied One Installment in The Sun‘s Series.

Digging into this story, I learned that in the mid-19th century, loads of writers tried their hand at such fabulosity. Making up stuff was seen as an almost respectable genre among scribes, including the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and, later, Mark Twain. In fact, writers who concocted cock and bull tales that hoodwinked large numbers of readers were congratulated on their persuasive abilities.

Twain actually became nationally known thanks to his story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The tale, wrote Twain, had been told by a bartender who’d heard it from a gambler. Any number of readers at the time bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Laugh if you want at the gullible dupes of the 1800s. We of the 21st century are far too sophisticated, too discerning, too smart to believe bullshit.

Aren’t we?

07/16/2026
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Trail of Tears

608 Words: The Stain on Our Soul

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

And now, a lowlight. A stinking, shitty, disgusting lowlight in our nation’s history. It’s only nominally less abhorrent than anything the Nazis ever did in Europe. The difference is the Nazis were far more efficient in their approach to genocide.

May 28, 1830: The date President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The legislation effectively allowed the federal government to displace any and all Indigenous Peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi River.

Jackson had been a loud advocate for sweeping Indigenous Peoples off their lands in  the United States.

The Act covered fertile lands, primarily in the southeast, including South Carolina, Georgia, and part of Florida. Jackson and the feds had their eyes on millions of acres of potential farmland that could be occupied by Whites. The legislation opened up vast spreads of land for cotton growing, now exploding in the US thanks to the development of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. In addition to ethnically “cleansing” the region, the Act spurred a huge increase in slavery, even as other federal legislation was enacted to gradually chip away at the practice.

The Act called for negotiations in good faith between the feds and Indigenous Peoples, with the promise of fair exchanges — you agree to move and we’ll let you resettle west of the Mississippi. At the time, the area west of the Mississippi was thought of, largely, as irrelevant to the future of the US.

Good faith negotiations and fair exchanges, though, were the last things Jackson and his gang intended. Seizing land was their first — and only — priority. Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Choctaws had been getting whipped in skirmishes and wars for decades as White “settlers” poured into what had been traditional tribal lands and the US Army forcefully moved the tribes out. Those Indigenous Peoples, known as the Five Civilized Tribes, decided to sit down and bargain with the United States.. Perhaps, they figured, we can get a good deal.

They couldn’t.

Dealmaking was not a top priority for the US. Removal was. And if it couldn’t be accomplished at the bargaining table, it’d be done at the point of a gun. Oh, sure, there some were nice little tracts of land west of the Mississippi where the Natives could relocate, but over the next half century, as the expanding United States began to realize those tracts, too, were mighty attractive, the deals and treaties it made with tribes were broken. Tragically.

Worse, 60,000 Cherokees, among some others, who hadn’t been any too pleased with “negotiations” for their lands, were forced to march from their ancestral homelands in the Smoky Mountains to what was then called “Indian Territory” (present day Oklahoma). As abominable as the Bataan Death March or the Nazi “cattle cars” of the future, the forced relocations that became known as the Trail of Tears resulted in mass suffering and death.

Painting, “Forced Move,” by Max Standley.

By 1840, virtually no Indigenous Peoples lived any longer in the southeastern United States

Hitler would have approved.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/15/2026
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Library of Congress

830 Words: All The World’s Knowledge

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Ready for another highlight in the history of this holy land?

The date was April 24, 1800. President John Adams signed into law an act creating the Library of Congress. It was America’s first national library.

Today, it is one of the world’s largest such repositories of books, audio recordings, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, prints, photographs, films, videos, relics, keepsakes, knickknacks, tchotchkes, gadgets, and whatnots. It contains, in several locations both public and behind the scenes, upward of 180 million things. It maintains some 838 miles of bookshelves. It boasts a mint-ish condition Gutenberg Bible (the darned thing is going on 600 years old!) It has George Washington’s personal papers, Madison’s draft copy of the Bill of Rights, Jefferson’s draft copy of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis & Clark’s map, copies of Frederick Douglass’s North Star abolitionist newspaper, the contents of Lincoln’s pockets the night he was shot, a grainy film clip of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903, a comic book based on the life of Jackie Robinson, perhaps the smallest book in the world (it is tinier than the periods in this post), Harry Houdini’s collection of rare magic books…, in fact, the LoC acquires up to 15,000 items in a day (it employs about 3000 people — I imagine they scarcely have time to eat lunch.)

Unfortunately, neither you nor I can check out books or other materials from the Library of Congress. Dang. I would have loved to bring Rosa Parks’ peanut butter pancakes recipe home.

Rosa Parks’ “Featherlite Pancakes” Recipe, the Librrary of Congress.

The whole idea behind the LoC was to provide Congress, both the House and Senate, a place to do their homework. As the nation’s capital moved from New York to Philadelphia (or vice versa, I forget — the seat of government was awfully nomadic in the country’s early days) a sort of ad hoc congressional library moved with it. Congressbeings were expected to delve through books (imagine that!) to familiarize themselves with issues they’d be legislating on. Now, of course, they simply sit back and wait for lobbyists to bribe them; it’s more efficient. Adams’ signature on the LoC’s creation act authorized the purchase of 3000 tomes from a publisher in England. That collection, plus whatever remained from previous library incarnations, would be housed in the shiny new Capitol building.

Ironically, it was the English who destroyed that first Library of Congress. Our ex-cousins had been teed off that American forces had burned several towns and forts in Canada during the War of 1812, so when British Gen. Robert Ross marched into Washington on August 24, 1814, he ordered the burning of the Capitol as well as several other government buildings. The Capitol fire was a hell of a conflagration; after all, it was chock full of fuel, thanks to the thousands of books in the LoC.

Lucky for us, Thomas Jefferson was strapped for cash. The then-ex-president in 1815 sold his personal collection of 6487 books (he was an insatiable reader and an autodidact) to the United States for the princely sum of $23,950. That purchase seeded what would become one of the world’s biggest libraries. The LoC actually claims to be the world’s largest; other sources say the British Library is bigger. (Fun fact: the Russian and Turkish national libraries rank fourth and fifth in the world, oddly enough. You’d think China and India, each with a population well over a billion, would have bigger national libraries, but no.)

The Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress.

Over the years, the Library of Congress has evolved from legislators’ proto-Wikipedia to a destination for scholars, researchers, historians, you, and me to rifle through most of the world’s curated materials. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I’d bet the entirety of humanity’s knowledge, in some form another, can be found at the LoC.

The Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress.

In this day and age of greed monkey anti-intellectualism, the idea that the federal government should create and maintain such a place, had the LoC not been founded 226 years ago, seems preposterous. The Project 2025/Heritage Foundation/Trump Family Mafia/Christian nationalist/White supremacist/science-denying anencephalics who currently run this land would view any proposal to start a taxpayer-supported public library as the demonic fever dream of commie rats.

Me? I think the existence of the Library of Congress is one very big reason to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

 

 

07/14/2026
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Underground Railroad

661 Words: Fugitives

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Here’s an heroic highlight  — the Underground Railroad.

No need for any contradictory/complimentary lowlight. Let’s just celebrate the incredibly brave people who made this thing go.

The Underground Railroad was a metaphorical moniker. It wasn’t a train and all its routes and “stations” were aboveground.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a museum and shrine, is wedged between Cincinnati’s downtown baseball and football stadiums. You might think that’s an odd locale for such a place but the Queen City was a busy port for runaway slaves, who often rafted across the broad Ohio River from Kentucky in hopes of finding freedom.

All the routes and safe houses of the Underground Railroad were secret and zealously guarded. Maintained primarily by freed Blacks, with help from some sympathetic Whites, the UR ran from about 1780 through 1863. Slaves had escaped before 1780 but they did so on their own. Once freed Blacks and abolitionists began working together to help more slaves run away, a complex system of paths, routes, information nodes, “depots,” safe houses, cryptic signs, and more was set up. Rather than rails, the escape routes, largely, were wooded paths and waterways.

Tens of thousands of escaped slaves made their way through the Underground Railroad. The exact number can never be known because, of necessity, records weren’t kept. Similarly, signs weren’t posted to help fugitive slaves make their way north. Look for such and such a gnarled tree, they were told, or a big bend in the river, or even a distinctive barn and then turn, say, right. The routes were as obscure and mysterious as that. Not only were slaves taking their lives in their hands by running away, they were in danger of getting lost in a vast wilderness, or getting shot on sight by some jittery farmer, or — ironically tragic — even captured and re-enslaved by Native Americans.

At risk of enraging some of my progressive sisteren and brethren, I’m compelled to report that many Indigenous Peoples of North America kept slaves. Native Americans had practiced varying forms of slavery for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years before the Europeans came to this continent. In fact, by watching and learning as the Colonists practiced their brand of primarily Black slavery, some tribes adopted that type of race-based involuntary servitude.

Some routes on the Underground Railroad led to Mexico and a few Caribbean islands but most fugitive slaves made their way north to free states and Canada. Routes and safe houses existed in virtually every state of the Union as well as the western territorie up until 1863.

Even if fugitive slaves made successful escapes, their lives didn’t always turn out to be idyllic. All too few Whites in the late 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, even those in, say, Massachusetts, Minnesota, or Manitoba were eager to embrace them. For every Hollywood-ending slave escape, like Frederick Douglass’s, there were thousands of fugitive slaves whose lives turned, at best, only nominally better after escaping. Many were abused, ostracized, marginalized, and even terrorized.

Nevertheless, the urge to escape was strong among many Black slaves in the South. They were helped in their escapes by the likes of:

Harriet Tubman

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Stephen Myers

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William Henry Johnson

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Henry Highland Garnet

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Abigail Mott

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John Brown

Click on any image to link to that person’s biographical sketch.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/13/2026
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Confusions, Revolutions

525 Words: Ball of Confusion

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

I suppose it makes sense that the new nation, the United States of America, should have been so contradictory. It came into being just as several momentous developments had been or were taking place around the globe:

  • The Scientific Revolution
  • The Enlightenment
  • The Age of Revolution
  • The Industrial Revolution

The Scientific Revolution was hatched in the 1500s and it gave birth to The Enlightenment (1680s-1790s). In those pre-mass media days, both those radical transformations in thought had yet to completely overtake the old ways of thinking in every corner of the world. In fact, neither phenomenon, to this day, has been universally embraced. Millions of people, here and elsewhere, continue to believe an all-powerful god still steers the course of history and his (always his) word forever triumphs over reason, science, natural rights, Newton, Copernicus, Aquinas, and Aristotelian evidence.

The Founders, though — Jefferson, Franklin and others among them — were influenced and driven by both the Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment. But no change ever really happens in the snap of a finger, so their thought processes were both revolutionary and hidebound. Contradictory, in other words.

Today’s contradictions — a modern, computer-driven, post Einstein, post-Heisenberg, space-traveling age in which many leaders implore us to pray for solutions to our problems — exist not only in this country but all around the planet. We humans are a baffling bunch.

The Revolutionary fervor played out here, in France, in Haiti, in Ireland, and in Central and South America. It featured a rejection of hereditary royalty and colonialism. People, revolutionaries preached, could lead themselves. Nations didn’t need god-appointed, blood lineages to boss them around. We, the revolutionaries said, could boss ourselves.

Then again, that hallowed we possessed then, and continues to possess today, an unerring capacity to exclude certain peoples from the club of us.

And then the Industrial Revolution, in which combustion engines and electric motors drove machines that replicated our human motions and labor, freeing us to live lives of leisure and intellectual and artistic pursuits came along. Yeah, sure. The people of 2026 are busier, more stressed, more neurotic, more scared, more in danger of wiping ourselves out than any previous generation.

The world is filled with contradictions and the United States, the most representative nation on Earth, is the most contradictory land of all.

It was born in an age of confusion. Ironically, the smarter we’ve become, the less sure we are of what, where, and who we are. And that’s all of us, not just Americans.

 

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/11/2026
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Eli Whitney, Slavery

477 Words: Unintended Consequences

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was viewed by a lot of abolitionists as a godsend that would swiftly make slavery disappear.

After all, most Southern slaves worked at picking the seeds out of cotton bolls with their fingers, endless, tedious labor in the hot sun. Whitney’s device, patented in 1794, did that task mechanically. Huzzah! No more slaves!

It took human beings a long time to get every stinking seed out of the mass of cotton fiber in each boll. The cotton gin, relatively, did it in the snap of a finger.

Perhaps the new United States could rid itself of its Original Sin — America hadn’t yet fully embarked on its genocide of Indigenous Peoples here, so slavery will suffice as the forbidden fruit in our nascent Garden of Eden — or so went the most pollyannish thinking of the time. Things didn’t quite work out that way.

The Cotton Gin.

What actually happened was Whitney’s gadget turned the South into a humming economic powerhouse. His invention enabled cotton plantations to produce huge amounts of the fiber, quickly and cheaply. Growers immediately expanded their acreage and began supplying the world with the comfortable, breathable, washable fabric. The South went from a sleepy region of slow-moving drawlers into one of the centers of the nascent Industrial Revolution.

So much cotton was planted and grown that more slaves than ever before were needed! Hordes of slaves were imported to trudge through the fields, picking cotton. The cotton gin worked so well it made a certain strain of the plant, short-staple cotton, economically viable. This type of plant grew faster and more abundantly than long-fiber cotton but had been far more difficult to de-seed. Whitney’s gin made it a profitable strain. Short-staple cotton, too, could be grown in areas previously inhospitable to the crop, greatly expanding the range of plantations — and slavery.

Seemingly before anybody knew what was happening, the South had become the new nation’s money tree.

In terms of making the United States a world economic power, the cotton gin was a fabulous highlight. In terms of its effect on human physical and emotional suffering, it was a horrendous lowlight. As such, it might be the most American invention ever.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/10/2026
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Bill of Rights, Fugitive Slave Act

686 Words: Freedom & Slavery

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Contradictions.

The history of the United States of America is chock full of them. Let’s look at two dates. The first is December 15, 1791.

That was the date the Virginia legislature ratified the Bill of Rights. That made the Commonwealth the eleventh state to okay that first package of Amendments to the US Constitution. It takes three fourths of the states to ratify an Amendment before it becomes part of the Constitution. As far as I can recall from my elementary school arithmetic lessons, Virginia’s eleventh vote put the Bill over the top in the then-13 state union. And, BTW, that little bit of figuring foreshadows a future lowlight, in 1982.

We like to believe that we’re the world’s beacon of freedom. The Bill of Rights is the reason why. Those first ten Amendments to the US Constitution, guarantee and/or codify, mainly, the following:

  • Freedom of speech
  • Freedom of the press
  • Freedom of religion
  • Freedom of assembly
  • The right to possess firearms
  • Protections againts unreasonable serach, arrest, and seizure
  • The establishment of the Grand Jury system
  • Protections against double jeopardy
  • Due process
  • Fair compensation for Eminent Domain seizure
  • No self-incrimination
  • The right to a speedy, public trial by an impartial jury
  • The right to confront witnesses
  • The right to legal counsel
  • Explicit distinctions between the roles of judge and jury
  • No excessive bail or fines
  • No cruel and unusual punishment
  • One person’s rights do not trump another person’s
  • and finally, the tasks and duties of the Congress include declaring war, collecting federal taxes, regulating interstate commerce, and other such stuff.

That, Pencillistas, is a highlight. Remember, though, that the Founders were really good at making promises; they and too many of their successors were not so hot at keeping them.

Still, the Bill of Rights is something to brag about.

Not so, the legislation passed on the second date, February 12, 1793. Considering the fact that news traveled slowly in the waning years of the 18th century, there may well have been scads of Americans who hadn’t even heard about the Bill of Rights ratification by then. On a date that, ironically, would eventually be proclaimed a national holiday, President George Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

For all our efforts to relegate responsibility for slavery solely to those misguided, erring souls of the South, the federal government and way, way, way too many people of the North really were complicit in that crime against humanity. The first Fugitive Slave Act (another would be enacted in 1850) meant the entire new nation was guilty for it.

A little background: A couple of years earlier, a Black man named John Davis, who’d been held as a slave in Virginia, had escaped to Pennsylvania. Soon three men from Virginia tracked him down and forced him back into servitude. The Pennsylvania governor hollered that the three Virginia men were criminals — kidnappers, really — and demanded their extradition. The governor of Virginia told him, in so many words, to go to hell. Their conflict eventually reached the halls of Congress and the president’s desk.

More irony. The Pennsylvania governor, Thomas Mifflin, had turned to the feds in hopes his argument would spur legislation to protect the residents of his state, even if they were escaped slaves, from kidnapping by out-of-state miscreants. Instead, Congress passed and Washington signed a new federal law allowing “fugitive” trackers to cross state lines and chase down escaped slaves.

The “property” rights of slaveholders, America now held, trumped the human rights of John Davis and any other slave who might dare flee to the North to escape bondage.

The slave state/free state argument would takes countless twists and turns over the next nearly 70 years, culminating in the Civil War.

Which, as Heather Cox Richardson has written, the South eventually won.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

 

07/08/2026
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Abigail Adams

335 Words: Remember the Ladies

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

America’s first feminist was Abigail Adams.

Oh, this is a highlight!

She was the wife of John Adams, the first Vice-President of the United States and the second President of the United States. Just seven years after the Colonies adopted Britain’s “coverture laws,” relegating women to the status of possessions of their husbands, like their hats and their goats, Abigail Adams in March 1776 wrote a monumental letter to her husband. At the time, he was serving on the Revolutionary committee that would edit Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

Abigail’s letter to her husband arrived just four months before the 13 Colonies announced to the world they were now a new nation. In her letter, she conveyed to him a sentiment  that might have sounded up to date in 1970, say, or even 2026, as long as you ignore her era’s flowery language, that is.

““Remember,” she wrote (all sic), “all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Holy shit!

You want a Revolution? she’s saying. We women’ll show you a revolution if you guys continue to ignore us.

Wow!

Abigail Adams

I imagine John Adams would have acceded to his wife’s wishes but there were far too many hard headed old mules who’d stick their fingers into both the Declaration and the US Constitution (1789) and so Abigail Adams’ plea (or demand) went unfulfilled.

For my money, Abigail Adams ought to be venerated as much as any of the stubborn men whom we call the Founding Fathers.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

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