A bloody massacre of immigrants on route to California by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) and aided by local Native Americans occurred in Mountain Meadows, Utah. The blame for the massacre originally fell on the Native Americans. The Pittsfield Sun, a Massachusetts newspaper, provided an eyewitness account to the horrific crime and indicted the Mormons...
In September of 1856, during the race for the presidency, James Buchanan addressed the Senate on the subject of slavery. The issue of slavery was central to the Presidential Election of 1856. Buchanan, reticent of the fact that he needed to find middle ground on the topic in order to appeal to both pro-slavery southerners and abolitionist northerners, crafted his statements on slavery so as not...
Harriet Beecher Stowe just published Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp in 1856. In the book, Stowe posits that slavery caused the corrosion of society. Dred is the second book by Stowe that centered on the topic of slavery. Stowe's first work, Uncle Tom's Cabin which was published in 1853, also addressed the issue of slavery and highlighted the institutions' inadequacies. Raised...
Xenophobic men established the Know Nothing or American Party in the late 1940s in response to the growing number of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics flooding into the United States because of the Irish Famine of 1845. They were known as the Know Nothing Party because when asked questions about the organization and their affiliation with it, members responded that they knew nothing. The...
The life of a slave was a grim one during the 19th century. Most slaves belonged to large plantations that required labor intensive work. Large groups of slaves would work on these plantations utilizing the resources the Americas had to offer so that their plantation owners could remain profitable. Because of this permanent life of servitude, many slaves tried to escape while dying in...
On October 14, 1856 the Board of Alderman held a city council meeting to discuss the climate in the city of New Orleans. In the meeting, the Mayor advocated for the increase of the police force by more than one hundred men. The call for an increased police force stemmed from his desire to protect “the persons and property of our citizens (Daily Picayune, Oct 14, pg. 4).' In other words,...
The Seminole Wars were bitter fights between the white settlers of Florida and the Seminole Indians, a tribe founded in the 1700s after tribes migrated further south. The First Seminole War began in 1817 when Andrew invaded Eastern Florida, backed by the U.S. Army. While the first war only lasted a year, the Second Seminole War began in 1821 and did not end 1842, although no peace treaty was ever...
In an article written on August 19, 1856, The Daily Dispatch commented on the growing sectionalism between the North and the South in the United States. In a then recent speech by a Missouri Senator it was stated that “there existed more comity between any two foreign nations now on the face of the earth than there exists on the part of the Northern States towards the South (The Daily Dispatch,...
Joseph Addison Waddell was a wealthy and influential man in nineteenth-century Augusta County, Virginia. He owned the Staunton Spectator from 1856-1860. The Spectator reached many residents of Augusta County. He kept an extensive diary during his life, of which the years 1855-1865 are still preserved. On October 15, 1856, after having contemplated the hopeless Know-Nothing campaign...
On August 14th, 1856 a man was arrested on the charges of disseminating incendiary material. The man, John Duberry, was caught distributing the speeches of Senators Sumner and Seward amongst slaves in Columbus, Mississippi. For committing a “crime' such as this, Duberry could have received a sentence of ten years in jail. Unfortunately though, the newspaper did not print a follow up...