According to the Elizabeth City Star, the proposal to send free blacks to the colony of Liberia was a "scheme entirely Utopian." This North Carolina newspaper praised the American Colonization Society's ideas about how to handle the "race problem," as they deemed the growing number of newly freed blacks in America. A group of prominent Americans convened in December 1816 and established...
Sectional tensions between the North and South increased following the Tariff of 1828. The tariff placed a high tax on foreign goods to stimulate domestic manufacturing, and, in turn, placed strains on the Southern economy as the British reduced their imports of cotton. Many declared the tariff unconstitutional and thought that it infringed upon the individual states' rights. To quell the...
In the early 1830s two of the most pressing questions in the nation were the issues of nullification and secession. A common trend among politicians was to use the ideas of the founders to argue both for and against these ideas, hence it is not surprising that on December 28, 1832 Alexander Rives, a Virginia lawyer, wrote to James Madison, one of the last surviving Founding Fathers, seeking council...
In 1832, Sophia Hunt, a Democrat living in Woodville, Mississippi, received a letter from her father in South Carolina describing the recent crisis of his state. The Nullification Crisis threatened to hurl South Carolina into warfare with the rest of the country. In her November 4 reply, Sophia expressed her sorrow upon hearing this news, as well as her doubt that South Carolina would be successful...
After Andrew Jackson lost the close presidential election of 1824, he focused on defeating John Quincy Adams four years later. Jackson easily succeeded, becoming the first president to hail from a state other than Virginia or Massachusetts. This distinction can help symbolize the expansion of the United States during his eight years in office. Originally, the Democrats had not anticipated Jackson's...
Today's well intended celebrations of Halloween were nothing compared to the horrors that took place one haunting October in 19th century Charleston. On a Saturday night in late October 1832, Joseph Wienand, the manager of the Neptune Hotel in Charleston, was murdered. Apparently, he was in possession of between 200 and 300 in cash. His murder was discovered by his African-American female servant...
Augusta County, Virginia was clearly Whig Country come the election of 1832. The Annals of Augusta County, a historical record, speaks of an imposing and influential political convention in 1832. Attended by people from all over the State, the delegates called themselves National Republicans and adopted resolutions which called for Henry Clay for president. Four years earlier, the Staunton...
On February 12, 1833, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky asked the Senate to modify the Tariff of 1832 in order to make it more agreeable towards both northern and southern interests. He began his speech by explaining that he refused to get rid of the tariff simply because one side did not agree with it, nor would he keep it exactly as it because one side was happy with it. He believed that it...
When cholera swept through Richmond in the fall of 1832, it was an unfamiliar disease with no cure. Originating in India in 1826, the world's first cholera epidemic traveled over trade routes and down polluted waterways - spreading through Asia, Europe, Canada, and the northern United States in the span of just a few years. Unable to identify a cause much less a cure, doctors were powerless...
Cyrus McCormick gave a public demonstration of his newly improved Reaper near the little town of Lexington, Virginia in 1832. Around 100 people were present to watch the twenty-three year-old innovator’s contraption take to a field of grain. Herbert N. Casson explained in his book, Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work, that the crowd included “several political leaders of local fame,...