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In replying to a letter of support from Manchester’s cotton workers, US President Lincoln showed how deeply touched he had been.
Washington’s embargoes on cotton from the American South during the Civil War (1861-1865) hit the British cotton industry hard. Nonetheless, on New Year’s Eve, 1862, the day before the historic Emancipation Proclamation took effect, workers defied scare-mongering politicians and journalists to gather in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, and pledge their support to Abraham Lincoln. On January 19th, he replied.
A US Congressman tells the House why they mustn’t censor the press.
In July 1798, the Government of American President John Adams laid a Bill before Congress designed to criminalise criticism in the press. Censorship of this kind was all too familiar in England, then as now, but the debate in the US House of Representatives deserves careful reading, if only for the magnificent principle here laid down by Edward Livingston, Congressman for New York’s 2nd District.
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.
The tighter the US Government’s stranglehold on dissent grew, the harder Daniel Webster fought for freedom of speech.
In 1814, the USA was still embroiled in the War of 1812 with Great Britain. Many citizens of east coast States were dismayed, holding that the war was wrecking the economy for no demonstrable gain. President James Madison’s pro-France hawks in Washington responded by trying to silence critics as traitors, but young Daniel Webster, recently elected to Congress as Member for New Hampshire, was defiant.