In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...
On a cold Wednesday morning in February, tenant farmers Captain Bishop and the African Americans Coleman, Sandy, and Sam Watkins settled their rent with wealthy Tennessee planter John Houston Bills. The total crop for the year for all four men was worth 2,033 dollars Mr. Bills took 515 dollars for rent, or twenty five percent of the four men's total crop. These landless tenants had no choice...
In January 1870, there was an advertisement in The Weekly Mississippi Pilot for Doctor Porter, the great medical electrician, electric physician, and conqueror of diseases. This doctor claimed to have visited states and major cities all around the United States and was extremely successful in curing all diseases, especially ones that were chronic, long lasting, and that have not been able to be...
On April 13, 1867 the Tennessee Conservatives held a convention in Gallatin. The convention had two speakers: the Honourable Bailey Peyton and an influential African American preacher. Reports on the convention stated that the preacher stood up, declared the present Republican Governor Brownlow a colored man in disguise, and encouraged the few African American present to vote for him. The proclamation...
A young black boy living at Wood?s farm in Norfolk County was employed to go to the grocery store and buy a dollars worth of pork by a black family named Seguine. The family gave the young boy a ten-dollar note to buy the pork. The boy set off to the store down the road and bought the dollars worth of pork for his employers. On the way back from the store the young boy misplaced the change from...
"Susan B. Anthony is the Bismarck; she plans the campaigns, provides the munitions of war, organizes the raw recruits, sets the squadrons in the field," read the first lines of an article entitled "The Women Who Dare: Short Patent Sketches of Prominent Revolutionists" in the Courier Journal. The article continued to compare Anthony, the leader of the women's suffrage movement,...
The first of a long series of Enforcement Acts passed through Congress on February 21, 1870. The Enforcement Acts were designed to enforce the 15th Amendment throughout the South during the elections. The elections of 1870 were plagued by violence throughout the South exerted primarily by members and sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan. Their tactics of lynching, bombing, and otherwise exerting violence...
On a blustery winter day in 1870, a woman traveling through Tennessee surveyed the freedmen preparing their gardens for the early vegetable season atop a bluff along the Elk River. From the bluff she could see freedmen sharecropping cotton for a wealthy doctor who lived in the area. Even though the blacks were desperately poor, she noticed that they were so happy and satisfied with their condition....
Gerrit Smith, a politician and abolitionist from New York, called for more social reform in the United States. Smith, also a financial supporter of the Fredrick Douglass’ Paper, urged for reform that focused on curbing the use and distribution of alcohol after the Civil War. In a public letter to Hon. Henry Wilson, Smith attacked Wilson for his lack of commitment to the temperance...
In the wake of the defeat of the Confederate States of America, the United States instituted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The first African American to take advantage of the new right to vote was Thomas Mundy Peterson. Peterson cast his historic vote on March 31, 1870. The iconic vote was cast in a local election in Perth Amboy, New Jersey for the town’s charter. ...