That… That sounds just awful.
I hope he’s saved by some esoteric fact about how sweet and dry vermouth tasted different in those days.
I’m skeptical of the recipe. I couldn’t find primary or secondary sources verifying that Jackson drank the cocktail. It seems to just be urban myth around New Orleans. It may just be a vermouth peddler’s attempt to sell product that caught on and turned into part of the Jackson myth.
I’ve mixed 50/50 dry and sweet vermouth and found it ok (I’m not a huge fan of dry vermouth, really).
I’m pretty sure I got the idea from searching for “how do I use all this dry vermouth”.
Unrelated to alcohol or Andrew Jackson, today I learned the source of the great quote “Prussian monarchy is not a country which has an army, it is an army which has a country,” and it was an aide to Frederick the Great in the Seven Years War named Georg Heinrich Baron Horst.
Duke has a March Madness of Presidents going on. You can fill out a bracket and there’s still time to submit I think.
https://sites.duke.edu/polis/curriculum/
Here’s mine. The President at the bottom left of the bracket who got beat by Jimmy Carter is Thomas Jefferson. I think WHH, Carter, and Coolidge all got way further in my bracket than most people’s
Also, can we update the thread title?
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I reuploaded my John Brown’s Body cover. Give it a listen for Confederate Heritage Month.
https://gregvonteig.bandcamp.com/track/john-browns-body-single
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Done (fifteen stupid characters)
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So during the Civil War a Confederate slave could make more than a black Union soldier. Here’s the details.
So I think I’ve talked about Robert Smalls before but if not here’s an overview of what’s relevant: Smalls was a South Carolinian slave during the Civil War who commandeered a Confederate steamer and delivered it to Union forces, securing his freedom by escaping to the North and a hefty paycheck for delivering the planter.
Now, weird part: The ship Smalls commandeered was the Planter, a steamer owned not by the Confederate navy but by a Scottish immigrant named John Ferguson and leased to the CSA naval forces. It was Ferguson who paid much of the crew and he hired Smalls as a “wheelman” (a term for pilot used exclusively for black people) paying him $16 a month. Smalls likely wouldn’t have supported the Confederacy for any amount of money if he had the choice, but he was a slave (something that’s easy to forget when discussing wages) and did what his owner, an apparent Confederate named Henry McKee, ordered him to.
Now, why is this weird? Because eight months after Smalls brought the Planter to the Union the Emancipation Proclamation would be signed allowing the Massachusetts 54th Regiment to be formed completely of black soldiers. An act of Congress capped they pay for these Union soldiers at $13 a month (War Secretary Edwin Stanton threatened to take the matter to the courts, where he had a great track record, but for once his threats were empty). A cheap district commander would lower this to 7 dollars when the Regiment reached South Carolina.
So, in short, Robert Smalls made more than twice as much when he was a slave in the Confederacy than he would have had he joined the Union army. By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation he had already secured a non-combatant job in the Union navy making $40 a month defusing mines in the Charleston Harbor, but the juxtaposition is strange and painful.
Here’s your Memorial Day reading. For July 4th 1845, on the eve of war with Mexico, state Senator Charles Sumner was invited to give a speech for the patriotic occasion. His speech lambasted the very notion that any human was superior to another because of nationality and laid waste to the premise of war and the military. Here’s an excerpt from page 17.
“War is utterly ineffectual to secure or advance the object at which it aims. The misery which it excites, contributes to no end, helps to establish to right, and therefore, in no respect determines justice between the contending nations”
This is also the speech where Sumner covers his ass about any possible failings he could have in his career (though at the time he couldn’t have known he’d be significant enough that I’d be obsessing over him in 2018) when he writes “It is often said, ‘let us not be wiser than our fathers.’ Rather let use try to excel our fathers in wisdom. Let us imitate what in them was good, but let us not bind ourselves as in the chains of Fate, by their imperfect example" (27). It’s reminiscent of George Washington’s Farewell Address, specifically the part that’s in Hamilton where he says "I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors.” But while Washington merely admits he might’ve screwed up here and there, Sumner takes it one step further and encourages future generations to disregard his defects. Of course, unlike Washington, Sumner had an impeccable moral compass marred only by his dubious effectiveness as a statesman.
The full speech is available here. It’s 79 pages so I’m kind of astonished people sat through the whole thing but I guess there wasn’t much else to do in 1845.
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Y’know that one character that dies in your favorite movie and you tear up every time you watch it?
That’s Thaddeus Stevens in every book I read on Reconstruction.
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Just looked him up on Wikipedia, what an absolute bad ass. Had a face only the 1800’s could give you, but a bad ass nonetheless.
Know, Reconstruction is something I’ve been meaning to read about as of… recently. It seems like it was… well ineffective.
Layman’s understanding to follow - Reconstruction was the part after the civil war where the winners got to be the winner and the losers got to be the losers. Kinda like a Nuremberg but for the confederates. Except Nuremberg was pretty effective. From what I’ve seen on twitter and remember from middle school, confederate like senators got to be United States senators, judges, and, stuff like that.
All this really means is I need to learn more as the only thing I feel certain on is that I don’t know shit about it.
TL;DR in 1864 Abraham Lincoln made a Southern Democrat Vice President. Then John Wilkes Booth made that Vice President the President. Reconstruction from 1865-1869 (when Grant became President for better and for worse) was therefor a contest between the Republican Congress and the (effectively) Democratic President. Confederate office holders were largely due to President Johnson pardoning the entire Confederacy, either by his Amnesty Proclamation or personal pardon (save for Jefferson Davis who had the good sense to go to Canada where no one would recognize him), which was then undone by our 14th Amendment.
Congress was very much the friend of the freedman in Reconstruction, tho. Five men born into slavery served in it, including black war hero Robert Smalls. When Mississippi was readmitted into the Union, Jefferson Davis’s seat in the Senate was taken by a black man named Hiram Revels. Black suffrage was actually legally obtained for the black masses, with the primary obstacle between them and the ballot being the extralegal terrorism of the Klan. The first veto override was pulled off by Congress during Reconstruction, renewing the charter of the Freedman’s Bureau, a department providing for the welfare of freed slaves. Once Grant took office the Executive became kind to the black man as well. Grant created the Department of Justice because local law enforcement wasn’t investigating crimes against black people, and maintained a military garrison of the insurrectionist states to fight the growing domestic terror problem there.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive but accessible book on Reconstruction, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution is pretty great and also available as an audiobook if that’s easier for you.
Also unrelated to that but related to history and that period, I met a woman who was raised in Georgia recently and her favorite Civil War general was Sherman. She’s the best.
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For this type of book, yes, an audiobook would be easier. I appreciate your summary and am currently downloading this book and it’ll be done likely before I finish writing this post. I continue to enjoy that you post here. Thank you.
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OK I’m reading WEB Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction in America” (1935) and he describes Reconstruction as “The greatest experiment in Marxism before the Russian Revolution” which is how I’m going to sell it to people from now on.
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This is the only place I can post this where anyone will understand what I’m saying. Whenever I read about how black soldiers were treated returning home after the Civil War, I can only imagine Suitcase Jefferson saying “We thought we’d be heroes, but we were just negroes.”
This was a really interesting read on the Washingtonian Temperance Society which was named after the country’s largest distiller for reasons lost to history.
Any Dollop fan knows where this is going…
My very dear Sarah: The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days — perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.
I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly Australian civilization now leans on the triumph of he Human species and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the first Emu war. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain our species, and to pay that debt.
Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my hate of giant battle turkeys comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field.*
The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to Steve Irwin and to you that I have enjoyed them for so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, Steve Irwin willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood, around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Irwinian Providence, but something whispers to me — perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Bruce, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness.
But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights, always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.*
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