#antebellum era

[pamietniko]

Bonaventure Cemetery

Savannah, Georgia

[lttledog]

American or European silk ensemble, ca. 1855

[deadpresidents]

James K. Polk was rare among Presidents in that he didn't just inherit slaves. Polk, like [Andrew] Jackson, actively -- but secretly -- bought slaves while President. Unlike Jackson, however, Polk didn't buy them in Washington, D.C., but secretly back down south. Why the secrecy? Because during his career, Polk straddled the lines between slaveholders and abolitionists, never completely joining either side. Polk was already a major slave owner when he became President but was very cautious about letting people know about his ownership of other people. Perhaps he was afraid of the American people -- especially abolitionists -- finding out that he was buying children. "Of the nineteen slaves Polk bought during his Presidency, one was ten years old, two were eleven, two were twelve, two were thirteen, two were fifteen, two were sixteen, and two were seventeen," said William Dusinberre, author of the great Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk (BOOK | KINDLE). "Each of these children was bought apart from his or her parents and from every sibling. One or two of these children may possibly have been orphans, but it would strain credulity to suggest many of them were." So Polk, who needed more labor for his plantation, did what most rich politicians would do in his situation: he found a way to increase his personal wealth without his constituents finding out about it. He set up agents to buy the slaves in their names and then transferred them to his possession at home... ...He even made sure he had plausible deniability. Dusinberre noted that Polk -- living in a pre-Civil War America -- made sure that while he bought slaves in the White House, he never used his Presidential salary. "He used his savings from his salary to pay campaign debts, to buy and refurbish a mansion in Nashville, and to buy U.S. Treasury certificates, but never to buy slaves," Dusinberre said. "Evidently he distinguished (between) his private income -- from the plantation --(and) the public salary he received from government revenues. Thus, if the public had ever learned of his buying young slaves, he could always have truthfully denied that he had spent his Presidential salary for that purpose. Polk may have been careful about how he bought his slaves because he knew slavery was an evil institution. But Polk kept his slaves throughout his life and didn't even free them upon death, leaving that for his wife.

-- A closer look at the extent of President James K. Polk's record as a slave owner while he was in the White House, including a troubling tendency towards buying children and separating them from their families.

This excerpt is from Jesse J. Holland's excellent and very revealing book, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO).

[apushdril]

so long suckers! i rev up my motorcycle and create a huge cloud of smoke. when the cloud dissipates i am lying basically dead on the floor of congress

[rmstitanics]

a small selection of period dramas i would like to see about american history // inspired by @winterhalters

[adacarii]

[dwellordream]

- Jacqueline Jones, “"My Mother Was Much of a Woman": Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery”

[disloyalroyal]

Imagine a US president being your comfort character

[ichesserosinen]

Have you ever heard about the time the South got so offended about a new tarriff they tried to leave the union? Yeah, they claimed that the new law was unconstitutional since the constitution doesn't explicitly give the government the right to help industries, which was the tarriff's stated goal. So South Carolina told D. C. to go screw itself with this Tarriff of Abominatons. They thought this was perfectly legal because the Founding Fathers wanted it to be this way. Only problem: This was 1828-33. Some Founding Fathers were still alive and got involved. You know, no-names like fourth president and father of the constitution James Madison. So they told him to go srew himself too because they thought they knew better what the founders intended than the founders themselves. In the end, Henry Clay arranged a compromise like he always did. Lower Tarriffs and no telling the feds to go Screenshots themselves.

(I've gotten this from Drew McCoys Book about James Madisons retirement.)

[pamietniko]

dinning room

Savannah, Georgia

[soviet-space-ace]

@antebellumbitch

rejected historical barbies

[deadpresidents]

“Compassion is always due to an enraged imbecile”

Attempting to besmirch each other, the two men ranted like spoiled adolescents. [Commanding General of the U.S. Army Winfield] Scott informed [Secretary of War Jefferson] Davis that he would treat all of Davis’s letters as official, “whether designed as private and scurrilous, or public missives of arrogance and superciliousness.” He characterized them as “examples of chicanery and tergiversation, of prodigality in assertion and utter penury in proofs and probabilities.” At one point, Scott declared: “My silence, under the new provocation, has been the result, first, of pity, and next, forgetfulness. Compassion is always due to an enraged imbecile, who lays about him in blows which hurt only himself, or who, at their worst, seeks to stifle his opponent by the dint of naughty words.”

Davis likewise leaped into the epistolary gutter. “Your petulance, characteristic egotism and recklessness of accusation have imposed on me the task of unveiling some of your deformities...” Davis went on to tell the general that his reputation had been “clouded by grovelling vices” such as “querulousness, insubordination, greed of lucre and want of truth.” Although Davis’s depictions of Scott were apt, he was seemingly unaware that he had descended to his antagonist’s level...To make matters even more embarrassing, Congress in December 1856 called for all the correspondence, publishing it in a volume of more than 250 pages for the entire country to see personal hostility and professional jealousy turned into acrimonious hatred.

-- William J. Cooper Jr. on the bitter feud between Commanding General of the U.S. Army Winfield Scott and then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis during the Pierce Administration, in Cooper’s excellent 2000 biography Jefferson Davis, American (BOOK | KINDLE).

I’ve spent years looking for an original copy of the collected correspondence featuring this pre-Civil War feud between General Scott, the longtime commanding general of the United States Army and Jefferson Davis, who was the civilian leader of all military forces as Secretary of War during the Administration of President Pierce (1853-1857). The letters that Davis and Scott fired back at each other -- through official channels! -- are amazing due to both the viciousness and the pettiness of the language they used.

Over the years, I’ve found incomplete batches of the letters and fragments of the correspondence in various books that I’ve bought, but I could never find everything that I was looking for. However, I finally found the collected correspondence in the U.S. Senate’s Executive Documents from the 3rd Session of the 34th Congress (thanks 34th Congress!), and after searching all over the place, also found a place that would print them in book form for a reasonable price. So, I’m going to start sifting through the letters and will probably end up sharing some of the more entertaining exchanges because this feud is an absolute masterpiece of 19th Century shit-talking. 

[apushdril]

turning a big dial taht says “Racism” on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right

[rmstitanics]

ROBERT TODD LINCOLN at the Dedication Ceremony for the LINCOLN MEMORIAL, 1922, Colorized by Yours Truly.

[chunkecheeks]

The whole “the southern soldiers in the civil war weren’t fighting for slavery they were fighting for their homes because they loved the south” is so stupid: What was southern culture built around answer quickly.

[dwellordream]

Acts of Sale

- Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market