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French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the USA in the 1830s, and found a degree of contentment that he rarely found in Europe.
Alexis De Tocqueville went to the USA in 1831, to see for himself how the former colony’s experiment in Constitutional liberty, now almost fifty years old, was working out. His own experience in Europe was that no government could hold back the destructive forces of democracy once they had been unleashed, but he found that in America some of those forces were kept under restraints stronger than any law.
William Wirt recalls an overpowering sermon from a blind man in a little wooden chapel.
William Wirt, a rising Virginian lawyer, published The Letters of a British Spy in 1803. He took the character of a British tourist (not a secret agent) in the US, and remarked on the habits of the Americans twenty years after the Revolutionary War. This famous passage brings to startling life a blind Christian minister in a roadside chapel in Orange County, as he preaches the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
In August, 1775, King George III responded to the news of rebellion in the American colonies.
On April 19th, 1775, British troops confronted an uprising of American colonists in Lexington and in Concord, Massachusetts, and the American War of Independence began. Many at home urged the Government to come to some mutually acceptable compromise, but on August 23, King George III of England issued orders for a clampdown on all support for the rebels.
However loud his critics shouted their disapproval, Abraham Lincoln would neither deprive them of free speech nor change his opinions.
In 1864, as the American Civil War progressed, talk in Washington had turned to how rebellious Confederate States ought to be handled should the Union win. President Lincoln’s appeals for reconciliation were brushed aside by supporters of the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, a cock-a-doodle-do of victory designed to give Washington sweeping powers.
On the evening of October 7th, 1777, as fighting on Bemis Heights subsided, Harriet Acland came to General Burgoyne with a startling request.
The British surrender at Saratoga on October 17th, 1777, was a turning point in the American Revolutionary War (1776-1783) because it brought France in on the colonists’ side. In his account of the fighting, the English general John Burgoyne recalled what happened on the night of the 7th — with the contest still in the balance — after Harriet Acland heard that her husband John had been captured.
A ‘slight and delicate’ Canadian woman defied twenty miles of rugged terrain in sweltering heat to warn of an impending attack by American invaders.
In 1813, US President James Madison seized the opportunity afforded by Napoleon’s rampage across Europe to order his troops into the British colony of Upper Canada, where they sacked York (Toronto). Monday 21st June found US General Henry Dearborn in Queenston readying a nasty surprise for Lieutenant James Fitzgibbon, garrisoned in a country home at Beaver Dams near Thorold, Ontario.
Twenty teams of dogs ran a life-or-death race against time over Alaska’s frozen trails to bring medicines to desperately sick children.
In the icy winter of 1924-25, the town of Nome in Alaska was completely cut off by road, rail, air and sea. When Curtis Welch, Nome’s only doctor, diagnosed diphtheria among the town’s children in mid-January, the race was on to bring thousands of doses of antitoxin from the nearest railway station, 674 miles away over the old Iditarod Trail. American women were among those agog for the latest updates.