Tom McMahon

Official 1840 U.S. Census Statistics "Proved" That Freedom Was Bad For Black Slaves

Clayton Cramer explains:

In my book Black Demographic Data, 1790-1860, I devote a chapter to discussing how the 1840 census data was used to prove that free blacks were more likely to be "insane or idiot" or disabled the further north you went in the U.S.--and partisans of slavery used the data to prove that freedom was bad for slaves, based on this data.

While it does appear that there was actually an increase in physically disabled free blacks just north of the border, it was not because freedom was bad for blacks. It appears that the reason was that slave owners would dump disabled slaves across the border as a way of getting rid of slaves that they would otherwise have to support. (They could not free a slave in their home state without legislative permission, and this would not be granted if the goal was to dump a disabled slave onto the county poorhouse.)

All sorts of dark conspiracies were imagined for a very long time to explain how the 1840 census data ended up with these astonishing numbers--but Patricia Cline Cohen's A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America contains what I consider by far the most satisfying explanation--miscoding errors. The column for "idiot and insane" whites was right next to the "idiot and insane" column for blacks--and these columns were very, very long. It was therefore very easy for census marshals to accidentally enter the "idiot and insane white" count in the "idiot and insane Negro" column. Especially the further north you went, the fewer blacks there were in the population--so even moving one or two mentally disabled whites into the back column would have very disproportionate influence: the mentally ill and retarded whites who might be 1% of the white population in a small town magically became 10% of the black population.

Lilacs and Rhubarb: Signs of Long-Ago Settlers

An excerpt of a terrific piece by Trudy Fisk:

They are survivors. Scattered throughout the West, their presence marks the settler's paths, often when all other traces of settlement have vanished. Many a spot now returned to wilderness or pasture, or, even transmogrified into housing developments, has, still a stubborn patch of rhubarb or a grimly determined lilac as a reminder that, once, people equally resolute built their homes here, tilled the fields or logged the forests, raised their families, and tried to make a living on the wild frontier.

Not all succeeded. Some had no skills as farmers. Others lacked the myriad abilities, from farrier to cabin-builder and well digger to be self-sufficient. The vagaries of markets and shipping their goods defeated others. Many lost to drought and grasshoppers. Thousands of men locked their cabin doors and went to fight in the two World Wars and not all returned. Many settlers were routed by sheer loneliness. The ceaseless wind gusting across open prairie or secret rustlings among tall, dark trees finally drove them back to towns where a neighbor's light was visible.

When they went, they left behind their cabins, barns, cellars, fences and gardens. It's a tribute to the power of Nature that the plants have endured longest. Many of you have noticed crumbling cabins, roofs long ago fallen in, side logs askew, still companioned by a healthy stand of lilac, as if the trees were comforting the old place. I have come upon a pasture in the woodland from which all signs of human habitation have disappeared and found a flourishing patch of rhubarb which would have delighted a 1910 housewife.

Wanderers along railway tracks discover lilacs and rhubarb still growing by boarded up houses, evidence that, decades ago, when each section had its section foreman and station agent along the CPR and CNR, and most of those foremen and agents had wives, there were tidy gardens here and the derelict old houses were homes full of activity.

Special thanks to Sara Rath for telling me about all this. I had no idea.

The Swedish Warship Vasa: Sank After Sailing Less Than A Mile On Her Maiden Voyage In 1628

The Swedish Warship Vasa: Sank After Sailing Less Than A Mile On Her Maiden Voyage In 1628

An excerpt from Wikipedia:

Vasa was a warship that was built for King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden from 1626 to 1628. The ship foundered and sank after sailing less than a nautical mile (ca 2 km) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. Vasa fell into obscurity after initial attempts at recovering her valuable cannons in the 17th century but was located again in the late 1950s, in a busy shipping lane just outside the Stockholm harbor. She was salvaged with a largely intact hull on 24 April 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet ("The Wasa Shipyard") until 1987, and was then moved to the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. The ship is one of Sweden's most popular tourist attractions and, as of 2007, has attracted more than 25 million visitors.

Vasa was built top-heavy with insufficient ballast. Despite an obvious lack of stability in port, she was allowed to set sail and foundered a few minutes later when she first encountered a wind stronger than a breeze. The impulsive move to set sail resulted from a combination of factors. King Gustavus Adolphus, who was abroad on the date of her maiden voyage, was impatient to see Vasa join the Baltic fleet in the Thirty Years' War. At the same time, the king's subordinates lacked the political courage to discuss the ship's structural problems frankly or to have the maiden voyage postponed. An inquiry was organized by the privy council to find someone responsible for the disaster, but no sentences were handed out.

Old German Marine Jack

Old German Marine Jack

(via Cold Spring Shops)

The Mau Mau: Slaughter in Kenya

From the Monday, Nov. 02, 1953 issue of Time:

A band of Kikuyu women, naked except for thongs of leather tied round their shaven heads, recently stole out from a bamboo thicket on the slopes of the Aberdare Mountains in Kenya. Armed with shiny pangas, they crept into a Kikuyu village, killed three Kikuyu men and a 14-year-old boy. The victims were Kikuyu guards, loyal to the white men and pledged to fight the Mau Mau.

The women walked half a mile down a jungle track, dragging with them the severed head of one of the men they had slain. They showed it to his widow before slowly strangling her with the thongs that they wore. Then they hacked her four children to pieces and disappeared.

125 Years Ago Today: Theodore Roosevelt's Mother and Wife Die Hours Apart

125 Years Ago Today: Theodore Roosevelt's Mother and Wife Die Hours Apart

That's his diary entry above. The story:

On this day in 1884, future President Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother die, only hours apart.

Roosevelt was at work in the New York state legislature attempting to get a government reform bill passed when he was summoned home by his family. He returned home to find his mother, Mittie, had succumbed to typhoid fever. On the same day, his wife of four years, Alice Lee, died of Bright’s disease, a severe kidney ailment. Only two days before her death, Alice Lee had given birth to the couple’s daughter, Alice.

The double tragedy devastated Roosevelt. He ordered those around him not to mention his wife’s name. Burdened by grief, he abandoned politics, left the infant Alice with his sister Bamie, and, at the end of 1884, struck out for the Dakota territories, where he lived as a rancher and worked as a sheriff for two years. When not engrossed in raising cattle or acting as the local lawman, Roosevelt found time to indulge his passion for reading and writing history. After a blizzard wiped out his prized herd of cattle in 1885, Roosevelt decided to return to eastern society. Once back in New York in 1886, he again took up politics and took over raising his precocious daughter, Alice, who later became a national celebrity.

Out in North Dakota, a legend was born:

On April 11, 1886, the town doctor in Dickinson, North Dakota spotted a figure coming down the street. He described the figure as being "the most bedraggled figure" he'd ever seen. The man was limping and covered with mud. His clothes were in tatters. He was scratched and bruised, but determined as a "bull dog". In short, the figure was "the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson" in the three years the doctor had lived there. It was Theodore Roosevelt. After a chase and being out in the near-zero degree temperatures for nearly ten days, he had just walked forty-five miles in two days guarding a wagon containing three outlaws, without even taking a break to sleep in those two days!

All told, his adventure as a ranchman was a losing venture monetarily. Including lost interest, his losses totalled about seventy thousand dollars. His other investments made up for the loss. It was a time Theodore would not have traded for anything. In later years he wrote many accounts of his experience on the frontier. These experiences would later add to Theodore's popular appeal, and do much dispel the prejudices about his aristocratic upbringing, showing him to be a hardworking man of the people.

A reflection from his autobiography:

It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home. No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living. There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph. But there is no other success that in any shape or way approaches that which is open to most of the many, many men and women who have the right ideals. These are the men and the women who see that it is thc intimate and homely things that count most. They are the men and women who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and only to those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty.

Control of the US Congress, 1966 - 2008

Control of the US House, 1966 - 2008

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Control of the US Senate, 1966 - 2008

From the final issue of the Evans-Nowak Political Report

Fifty Years Ago 92 Children and Three Nuns from Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago Died in a Fire

Fifty Years Ago 92 Children and Three Nuns from Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago Died in a Fire

From the Sun-Times:

On Wednesday, the City Council relived the nightmare, then approved a resolution urging public and private schools to observe a moment of silence on the Dec. 1 anniversary and public buildings to lower their flags to half-staff.

Mayor Daley recalled that one of his teachers at De La Salle High School lost his sister in the fire. And his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, was never quite the same.

"My father recalled when [Fire Department officials] Bob Quinn and Tim O'Connor asked him to come out there to go from one classroom to another. I don't think my father could even talk about it for months," Daley recalled.

The World’s Most Dangerous Jobs From The August 1935 Issue of Modern Mechanix

An excerpt:

For many years coal mining has led all other employments in the annual number of fatal and permanent injuries suffered in accidents. Death dogs every stroke of each miner’s pick and no one can tell when the next one, by disturbing the fine balance of nature, will bring an avalanche down upon another helpless human being in the darkness. Over fifty per cent of the fatal and permanent injuries suffered by coal miners occur in these sudden falls of walls and roofs.

Other disabilities are caused by the cars used underground, which run wild and kill and maim. Motors short circuit, to burn and sear before currents can be cut off. Hoisting apparatus fails and cages filled with men plunge down to death. Fuses miss fire; someone goes back to see what’s wrong and the delayed explosion blows him to atoms. Black damp suffocates; dust explodes; gas shoots out with the force of a projectile.

And then, on top of all this frequent horror, a bale of hay is lowered down a shaft. It stands for a moment beneath a leaking kerosene torch and a catastrophic Cherry mine disaster with its awful record of 256 fatalities is written into the history of coal mining.

The construction industry, perhaps, comes closer home, as most persons have watched the steel men, riveting the girders together; they have seen the bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, roofers, tile setters, glaziers, at their work. Yet few persons probably realize that construction work ranks as one of the three most dangerous occupations. One-half the casualties in this field are caused either by falls of persons or by falling objects. Men ride on loaded cranes. They walk across narrow, partially suspended beams. They lay their tools down on girders, whence they are kicked off to strike some other workman below. Boards and debris are tossed out without warning or clutter up walks and stairways to cause broken bones. Defective chains, rotten ropes, unsafe derricks and ramps, wheelbarrows with hasty “home-made” repairs, tools with split or loose handles and a hundred other serious matters give the construction industry its black eye as one of the three biggest man killers.

Black Damp Danger of Caissons

“The construction industry,” says W. Dean Keefer, chief engineer of the National Safety Council, “is twenty years behind the safety movement. Hundreds of boards lie around on every job with projecting nails that are paid for with amputated legs, long periods of enforced idleness, doctors’ bills and workmen’s compensation. Floor openings are unguarded, ladders rotten, material hoists unsafe. Conditions change from one hour to the next and many supervisors and workers alike seem blind to opportunities for accident prevention.”

There’s a black damp danger inherent in the construction industry also, encountered by the men who dig the deep wells into which is poured the concrete for the piers on which skyscrapers rest. Sinking these wells, the caisson diggers are often buried by cave-ins of sand or clay. Sometimes an underground stream of water is tapped and brings death by drowning. Sometimes deadly air at the bottom of the narrow treacherous shaft gets another shovel man. And occasionally the “black damp” brings unconsciousness or death.

Unemployment Doubly Dangerous

The revival of industry has brought one reason for rejoicing that may be overlooked. According to the statistics, the man who has a job is twice as sure of getting through the day without being killed as is the unemployed man who has to hang around home from morn to night.

Click on the link to find the (somewhat surprising) safest job back then.

Kaskaskia, Population 9: The Only Illinois Town West of the Mississippi River, and The First State Capital of Illinois

Map of Kaskaskia, Illinois

From Wikipedia:

In 1950 112 people lived in Kaskaskia. By 1970 the population had fallen to 79, and it continued its precipitous decline to only 33 in 1980. By 2000, with a mere 9 people, the place hardly existed at all.

And from the Ecology of Absence blog:

The villages of Dozaville (once Goshen) and Kaskaskia, Illinois remain as vestiges of settlement on Kaskasia Island. Dozaville is a complete ghost town, at least officially -- it has been legally dissolved for decades. Kaskaskia remains incorporated, although with less than a dozen residents in four households within its boundaries has no real need for civil government. Kaskaskia is one of those places that has achieved zero population growth according to the US Census -- a bizarre stasis for a town once of great importance. ...

In 1993, flood waters again submerged the island and caused residents to flee. Nowadays, the population of Kaskaskia is about 9 and the population of the island is about 93 people. Kaskaskia still retains its street grid, which carves out blocks punctuated by the few remaining buildings. ...

A few frame and brick homes comprise the rest of Kaskaskia. The wide sight lines of the island ensure views of the church spire and school house framed by expanses of fields. Settlement has come full circle for Kaskaskia, but somehow it endures.