1492: Christopher Columbus lands on the largest of the Windward Islands, which he names Hispaniola. Over the course of the next ten years, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas made three more voyages of discovery throughout the Caribbean basin and along the coast of Central America, establishing himself as one of the great sailors of all time. His reputation was tarnished by administrative abuses committed in his name by the Spanish colonial authorities in Santo Domingo, of whom he was Governor of the Indies.
1768: Publication in Edinburgh of the first edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, a systematic attempt to categorize and explain in English the world’s catalog of knowledge. Of note for your DLH erudition: the fact that this tome was published in Edinburgh “By a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland” and not in London, is a strong indicator of the strength of the Scottish Enlightenment, the intellectual underpinnings of which played such a huge role in the founding of the American republic.
1790: The United States Congress moves the capitol of the country from New York City to Philadelphia.
1815: Death of Michel Ney, Marshall of France (b.1769), one of the brightest of Napoleon’s team of brilliant subordinate commanders, whose loyalty to France and its leadership not only drove him to his greatest battlefield victories, but also to his final political defeat and execution on this day. When one reads of Napoleon’s multiple victories across the continent, Ney is always in the thick of it. As a measure of France’s perpetual war with the other countries of Europe, ponder this: between 1787 and this day, 28 years on, Ney fought in 36 major named battles across six “Coalition” wars, the Peninsular War in Spain and the invasion of Russia. It was Ney who led the massive but ultimately unsuccessful cavalry charges at Waterloo against Wellington’s infantry squares, actually having five horses killed from under him. After Napoleon’s final exile to St. Helena, Ney was arrested and charged with high treason. Although his lawyer tried to prove Ney was actually a Prussian by birth, Ney interrupted and sealed his fate by declaiming, “I am French, and I will remain French.” Wikipedia notes that at his execution, he refused to wear a blindfold, and was permitted to give the order to fire, saying: “Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her … Soldiers, fire!” They obeyed, one last time.
1865: The legislature of the former Confederate State of Georgia votes to approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, providing the final ratification of the end of slavery as the Supreme Law of the Land.
1917: In Halifax, Nova Scotia, a French ammunition ship, SS Mont-Blanc, suffers a slow-speed collision with an empty Norwegian freighter, SS Imo, and catches fire. The crew is unable to contain the blaze, and they abandon ship, leaving the ship to drift toward the Richmond district of the city. Twenty minutes later, the cargo detonates and completely flattens everything within a half mile of the ship. The explosion remains the largest non-nuclear detonation in history, estimated at 2.6 kilotons of TNT. Over 2000 Halifax residents die as a result of the blast.
1941: The Empire of Japan launches an attack on the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet moored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
1955: Death of Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop, Honus Wagner (b.1874), one of the first five players to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, along with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. He is also the featured player on the most valuable baseball card of all time. The 1909-11 T206 Honus Wagner set a new world record price for a baseball card, selling for $3.12 million through Goldin Auctions. This breaks the old record of $2.8 million, which was paid for a different copy of the card in 2007.
Paul Plante says
Just to say how much I appreciate this section on history, but I would disagree that slavery was ever “supreme law of the Land” in this nation, and in support of that assertion, I rely on the “Speech to the Pennsylvania Conventions” of James Wilson on December 04, 1787, to wit:
I recollect, on a former day, the honorable gentleman from Westmoreland (William Findley) and the honorable gentleman from Cumberland (Robert Whitehill) took exceptions against the first clause of the 9th section, Article I, arguing very unfairly, that because Congress might impose a tax or duty of ten dollars on the importation of slaves, within any of the United States, Congress might therefore permit slaves to be imported within this state, contrary to its laws.
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If on December 04, 1787, slavery was contrary to the laws of Pennsylvanai, it would seem to stand to reason that in 1787, slavery was not in fact the supreme law of the whole land.
Paul Plante says
And since the 13th Amendment, which states in Section 1, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” and in Section 2, “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” is on the menu for today, perhaps some background on that amendment is in order, especially in the face of these football protests and the liberal howl we keep hearing these days that if you have white skin and you don’t suffer from white guilt because of your white privilege, then you have to be a racist pig and a misogynist to boot, which is liberal horse****, plain and simple.
As to the 13th Amendment, FINDLAW tells us under “Origin and Purpose” in the Annotations as follows:
In 1863, President Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation declaring, based on his war powers, that within named States and parts of States in rebellion against the United States ”all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; . . .”
The Proclamation did not allude to slaves held in the loyalist States, and moreover, there were questions about the Proclamation’s validity.
Not only was there doubt concerning the President’s power to issue his order at all, but also there was a general conviction that its effect would not last beyond the restoration of the seceded States to the Union.
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So there is some necessary background to ponder.
Moving along, FINDLAW continues as follows:
Because the power of Congress was similarly deemed not to run to legislative extirpation of the ”peculiar institution,” a constitutional amendment was then sought; after first failing to muster a two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives, the amendment was forwarded to the States on February 1, 1865, and ratified by the following December 18.
In selecting the text of the Amendment, Congress ”reproduced the historic words of the ordinance of 1787 for the government of the Northwest Territory, and gave them unrestricted application within the United States.”
By its adoption, Congress intended, said Senator Trumbull, one of its sponsors, to ”take this question [of emancipation] entirely away from the politics of the country.”
“We relieve Congress of sectional strifes. . . .”
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Back in those days, when Alabamian Roy Moore thought America was great, slavery was a very politically charged issue, just as it has again become today.
And back to FINDLAW:
An early Supreme Court decision, rejecting a contention that the Amendment reached servitudes on property as it did on persons, observed in dicta that the ”word servitude is of larger meaning than slavery, . . . and the obvious purpose was to forbid all shades and conditions of African slavery.”
But while the Court was initially in doubt whether persons other than African Americans could share in the protection afforded by the Amendment, it did continue to say that although ”[N]egro slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which proposed the thirteenth article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or hereafter.”
“If Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race within our territory, this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void.”
”This Amendment . . . is undoubtedly self-executing without any ancillary legislation, so far as its terms are applicable to any existing state of circumstances.”
“By its own unaided force and effect it abolished slavery, and established universal freedom.”
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Those words are from the United States Supreme Court decision in what were known as the CIVIL RIGHTS CASES, (1883), decided October 15, 1883, which cases were all founded on the first and second sections of the act of congress known as the ‘Civil Rights Act,’ passed March 1, 1875, entitled ‘An act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights.’ 18 St. 335.
Two of the cases, those against Stanley and Nichols, are indictments for denying to persons of color the accommodations and privileges of an inn or hotel; two of them, those against Ryan and Singleton, are, one an information, the other an indictment, for denying to individuals the privileges and accommodations of a theater, the information against Ryan being for refusing a colored person a seat in the dress circle of Maguire’s theater in San Francisco; and the indictment against Singleton being for denying to another person, whose color is not stated, the full enjoyment of the accommodations of the theater known as the Grand Opera House in New York, ‘said denial not being made for any reasons by law applicable to citizens of every race and color, and regardless of any previous condition of servitude.’
The case of Robinson and wife against the Memphis & Charleston Railroad Company was an action brought in the circuit court of the United States for the western district of Tennessee, to recover the penalty of $500 given by the second section of the act; and the gravamen was the refusal by the conductor of the railroad company to allow the wife to ride in the ladies’ car, for the reason, as stated in one of the counts, that she was a person of African descent.
The jury rendered a verdict for the defendants in this case upon the merits under a charge of the court, to which a bill of exceptions was taken by the plaintiffs.
The case was tried on the assumption by both parties of the validity of the act of congress; and the principal point made by the exceptions was that the judge allowed evidence to go to the jury tending to show that the conductor had reason to suspect that the plaintiff, the wife, was an improper person, because she was in company with a young man whom he supposed to be a white man, and on that account inferred that there was some improper connection between them; and the judge charged the jury, in substance, that if this was the conductor’s bona fide reason for excluding the woman from the car, they might take it into consideration on the question of the liability of the company.
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That case contains a wealth of information on the development of federal law stemming from the 14th Amendment, for anyone who is interested.
Getting back to FINDLAW:
These words of the Court in 1883 have generally been noncontroversial and have evoked little disagreement in the intervening years.
The ”force and effect” of the Amendment itself has been invoked only a few times by the Court to strike down state legislation which it considered to have reintroduced servitude of persons and it has not used Sec. 1 of the Amendment against private parties.
A major change, however, has recently been wrought with regard to the scope of congressional power under Sec. 2 to enforce Sec. 1 of the Amendment.
Certain early cases suggested broad congressional powers, but the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 began a process, culminating in Hodges v. United States, which substantially curtailed these powers.
In the former decision, the Court held unconstitutional an 1875 law guaranteeing equality of access to public accommodations.
Referring to the Thirteenth Amendment, the Court conceded that ”legislation may be necessary and proper to meet all the various cases and circumstances to be affected by it, and to prescribe proper modes of redress for its violation in letter or spirit.”
“And such legislation may be primary and direct in its character; for the amendment is not a mere prohibition of State laws establishing or upholding slavery, but an absolute declaration that slavery or involuntary servitude shall not exist in any part of the United States.”
Appropriate legislation under the Amendment, the Court continued, could go beyond nullifying state laws establishing or upholding slavery, because the Amendment ”has a reflex character also, establishing and decreeing universal civil and political freedom throughout the United States” and thus Congress was empowered ”to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States.”
But these badges and incidents as perceived by the Court were those which Congress had in its 1866 legislation sought ”to secure to all citizens of every race and color, and without regard to previous servitude, those fundamental rights which are the essence of civil freedom, namely the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, lease, sell and convey property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
But the Court could not see that the refusal of accommodations at an inn or a place of public amusement, without any sanction or support from any state law, could inflict upon such person any manner of servitude or form of slavery, as those terms were commonly understood.
”It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make. . . .”
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These football players taking the knee when the National Anthem is played and the liberal howlers who have taken up their cause really ought to pay some heed to that last sentence there: ”It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make. . . .”
I think that sums up accurately the point we have reached in this country today on this “slavery” issue – it has been run into the ground and then some.
And as to those so-called “fundamental rights which are the essence of civil freedom, namely the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, lease, sell and convey property, as is enjoyed by white citizens,” what white citizens in America enjoy those rights?
I am white, and I certainly do not enjoy those so-called but actually quite chimeric “fundamental rights” to sue, to be a party, and to give evidence, and that is thanks to then-federal 2d Circuit Court of Appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court justice, God help the nation, who stripped me of those so-called fundamental rights because I had successfully employed them in court actions against the corrupt State of New York and its political subdivisions.
So how fundamental of rights could they really have been, when a political federal judge on the make can strip you of them with the stroke of a pen?
And if a white person like myself can have those rights stripped from me, why not a black person , as well, since they get to enjoy what I get to enjoy, which is no rights to sue, to be a party, and to give evidence?
And once again back to FINDLAW:
Then in Hodges v. United States, the Court set aside the convictions of three men for conspiring to drive several African Americans from their employment in a lumber mill.
The Thirteenth Amendment operated to abolish, and to authorize Congress to legislate to enforce abolition of, conditions of enforced compulsory service of one to another and no attempt to analogize a private impairment of freedom to a disability of slavery would suffice to give the Federal Government jurisdiction over what was constitutionally a matter of state remedial law.
The latter case was overruled by the Court in a far-reaching decision in which it concluded that the 1866 congressional enactment, far from simply conveying on all persons the capacity to buy and sell property, also prohibited private denials of the right through refusals to deal and that this statute was fully supportable by the Thirteenth Amendment.
”Surely Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation.”
“Nor can we say that the determination Congress has made is an irrational one. . . .”
“Just as the Black Codes, enacted after the Civil War to restrict the free exercise of those rights, were substitutes for the slave system, so the exclusion of Negroes from white communities became a substitute for the Black Codes.”
“And when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery. . . .”
“At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live.”
“If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much, then the Thirteenth Amendment made a promise the Nation cannot keep.”
The Amendment, then, could provide the constitutional support for the various congressional enactments against private racial discrimination which Congress had previously based on the commerce clause; because the 1866 Act contains none of the limitations written into the modern laws it has a vastly extensive application.
Whether the Court will yet carry its interpretation of the statute to the fullest extent possible is, of course, not now knowable.
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And that, people, is some more American history on that subject.