Victoria was also a big proponent of anesthesia, which was really new and untrusted in the 19th century. She tried chloroform during child birth, and swore by it. Once the queen had endorsed it, the use of anesthetic became much more popular.
Fun fact about chloroform, it works nothing like in the movies. You'd have to hold a rag soaked in the stuff over somebody's mouth and nose for a few minutes, without them managing to get it off and get a gasp of fresh air, for it to knock them out. They looked at banning the stuff in the 19th century, fearing chloroform attacks, then found out, none of the attempted attacks had actually been successful. Oddly enough one of the victim's married her attacker. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2044.1998.528-az0572.x
Also, they used to have parties where people inhaled nitrous oxide. Starting in 1799, the British upper class would hold "laughing gas parties". For some people, it was like their version of peyote, having powerful visions under the gas, including William James. He reported of one man, who, under the influence, claimed to know the secret of the universe. Unfortunately, as the effects of the gas passed, so did this "knowledge".
It remains popular with certain British teens (and apparently, Australia) to use as a drug. In Australia, it's called "nangs".
In NYC, in Gramercy Park, there is a statue of John Wilkes Booth's brother, Edwin Booth. He was a well-known Shakespearean actor. Toward the end of his career, Booth founded the Players Club on Gramercy Park South. The Players Club presented the statue of Booth as Hamlet to the park in 1918.
Although the exact number will never be known, during prohibition, there were between 20,000 and 100,000 speakeasies in New York. Texas Guinan, the most famous speakeasy hostess of the time, ran six of them in Manhattan. She is who Whoopie Goldberg's character was named after in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The Famed "Polo Grounds" between 5th and 6th avenue and just north of Central Park was named because there were actual polo grounds there. The game was introduced to New York by Newspaper Editor James Gordon Bennett. As Baseball became more popular, the area was switched over to playing Baseball, but the informal name stuck.
Central Park is the largest park in New York Proper (Manhatten). Central Park, comprised of 843 acres, is tiny compared to Pelham Bay Park's 2765 acres in the Bronx, the largest park in New York City. Greenbelt (1778 acres) in Staten Island, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (1255 acres) in Queens and Van Cortlandt Park (1146 acres). They make Central Park seem almost... tiny.
New York also had a crystal Palace. The New York Crystal Palace exhibition opened in 1853. It was America's first world fair, modeled on the Great Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in London two years earlier. New York's Crystal Palace was located in what is known today as Bryant Park. For a while it was a popular attraction, but it closed in 1854 and burned to the ground in 1858.
Who was the first woman to run for Mayor of New York? The honor goes to Cynthia Leonard, who joined presidential candidate Belva Lockwood's 1888 campaign on the National Equal Rights Party ticket. Leonard wanted to break public utility monopolies, provide free housing for the poor, and disallow "any great poverty or great wealth." The mother of the celebrated theater star Lillian Russell, Leonard also advocated for publicly sponsored performances that would include free meals.
In the nineteenth century, tenements did not have adequate bathrooms, and commercial bathhouses were out of reach for the city's poor. In 1851 the first public bathhouse opened on Mott Street, and in 1901 the city's first free, year-round bathhouse opened on Rivington Street. Some bathhhouses became meeting places for gay men, and others remain popular for cultural or religious reasons to this day. Yea, NYC still has bathhouses!
The Doctor's Riot of 1788 began when a curious boy observed a dissecction and then discovered his very recently-deceased mother's body was missing. Rioters destroyed laboratories in the New-York Hospital, chased the doctors into City Jail, and ransacked their homes in search of cadavers they believed had been stolen for dissection. Five of the mob were killed by the militia.
There are two Statues of Liberty in New York City. One stands in New York Harbor. A replica of "Lady Liberty" has graced the Brooklyn Museum's Sculpture Garden since 2002. She is thirty feet tall and was commissioned by William H. Flattau in 1900 to stand atop his building, the Liberty Warehouse in Manhattan. Other Statues of Liberty are found throughout the world, including two in Paris, France. Originally a bright copper color, the Statue grew a patina of green when exposed to the weather. This is actually a good thing, since the Patina of copper is equal to the rusting of steel. In this case, the patina protects the copper from further erosion, helping it last longer. The book Lady Liberty is holding has the Date of 1776, when America declared independence. It took until 1783 for England to recognize America's Independence.
The New York Yankees was not the Team's first name. Originally, they were called "The Hilltoppers", from where they played, Hilltop Park in Washingon Heights. Also, Greenwich Vilage, actually *was* a village, before Manhattan grew to cover the entirety of Manhattan Island (1700's) and it was quite rural back then!
JFK Airport in New York City, was originally Idlewild Airport. It was named after a planned summer resort and later golf club. The airport, built in the 1940's had no "actual" name, so when it was renamed for President John F. Kennedy, nobody objected and the name was mostly forgotten. You can still sometimes hear about it in 1940's and 50's movies set in NY.
Speaking of renaming things. You can also rename a street in New York. The candidate must be deceased and have had a connection to that street or area. If those two are covered, all you need is 75 names to sign a petition (must be local residents). It's then voted on by the Parks Dept. of the City Council, the City council itself, and finally to the mayor.
Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway are terms used in the theatre district in New York. "off-Broadway" tends to be used as a physical designation, referring to both the location and size of a theater, and "off-off-Broadway" implies an intent to create a theatrical experience that is alternative, experimental, and noncommercial with an emphasis on creative collaboration. Off Broadway came into use in the 1940's and Off-Off Broadway at the end of the 50's.
Other places in NYC: SoHo (south of Houston), NoHo (North of Houston). (Houston being a street in the East Village... Tribeca (Triangle beneath Canal). Canal St. is another Street in the East Village. The shape is more of a trapezoid rather then a Triangle, through. NoLita (North of Little Italy), NoMad (North of Madison Ave.), DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and BoCoCa, which consists of 3 neighborhoods: Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Caroll Gardens. There is also Greenwich Village (called, mosty "The Village") and while the East Village exists, it is NOT part of Greenwich Village (how's that for confusing?). And, it's pronounced "GREN-ich". There is also a West Village and a Far West Village.
They call Tribeca a triangle because it looks like one on maps, or possibly an arrow pointing west across NYC. It's split up into four historic districts, North, east, west and south, dedicated in 1992. South Historic District was extended in 2002. "Wizards of Waverly Place is set there. While the characters attend the fictional "Tribeca Prep", the shots of the school is actually P.S. (Public School) 40 in Gramercy Park. The Subaru Tribeca (out of production since 2102) was named after the district.
One more small bit. The 5 Boroughs are Manhattan, Staten Island, The Bronx, Queens and Brooklym. People ask, "There's a Queens, but why no Kings?" Actually, Brooklyn is. It's Kings County. Why is it called Brooklyn? Because of the Original Dutch name, Breukelen. It's also the largest borough of New York, with an estimated 2,648,771 resident.
The 1970's Show, "Welcome Back Kotter" was set in Brooklyn and one shot in the opening of the show had a sign that said that if it was a city unto itself, it would be the 4th Largest City in America.
That sign was on Verrazano Bridge Ramp. in 1979, the Sign was stolen. Also, the then-Borough President, Sebastian Leone (on the sign "The Hon. Sebastian Leone" was called by Philadelphia to tell him *They* were the 4th largest city. Oops.
How that sign was stolen is unknown, but it's pretty incredible. That's not an easy place to get to, being very busy with traffic, and getting it down must have been a job without a cop stopping to see what was happening. In 2012, a replica sign was made and installed in the Lobby of the Brooklyn Borough Hall, where it can still be seen today.
If you watch the opening Credits, you'll find a very familliar name: John Travolta. He'd been on stage, but this was his first steady acting role on TV. His first movie role, released around the same time, was in Carrie.
Sweathogs, unite! "Up ya nose with a rubba hose. Twice as fah with a Hershey Bah."
If you watch the opening Credits, you'll find a very familliar name: John Travolta. He'd been on stage, but this was his first steady acting role on TV. His first movie role, released around the same time, was in Carrie.
Sweathogs, unite! "Up ya nose with a rubba hose. Twice as fah with a Hershey Bah."
My favorite was Horshack. "It's a very old and respected name. It means 'The cattle are dying.'"
Proper names often have weird pronunciation. I used to live close to Happisburgh, which you wouldn't immediately think of as sounding like Hays-burrer. Checking on this Wikipedia page I was glad to see that on the list .
When we tell our children about the fight for women's suffrage in America, we often tell a sanitized version of the story. We talk about letter-writing campaigns, activist conferences, and stirring speeches — and occasionally, we mention defiant suffragists being hauled to jail. But we often shy away from the darker truths about the sacrifices and suffering many suffragists had to endure in the fight for women's right to vote. One especially notorious event, the "Night of Terror," when 33 suffragists from the National Women's Party, who had been arrested for protesting outside of the White House, were brutally beaten and tortured at the Occoquan Workhouse, a prison in northern Virginia took place a little over 100 years ago on November 14, 1917. For many of the women, the physical and psychological consequences of their harrowing experience would be lifelong. Their stories horrified the nation, galvanizing public support for the Women's Suffrage Movement and bringing new momentum which helped pass the 19th Amendment, recognizing women's right to vote, three years later. The freedom to vote, however, had come at a cost, and that cost was borne in part by these women. By November, many of the Silent Sentinels had been repeatedly arrested and Occoquan superintendent W.H. Whittaker was frustrated. On November 14, he ordered the nearly 40 male guards to "teach the women a lesson." The guards attacked the 33 women with clubs, brutalizing them and throwing them into cells. According to affidavits taken during a later investigation, women were dragged, choked, pinched, and kicked — and some women received even worse treatment. They twisted Dora Lewis' arm behind her back and slammed her into a iron bed twice before leaving her unconscious on the floor. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, believed that Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack, but she was denied medical treatment until the next morning. Dorothy Day, who later co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was slammed repeatedly over the back of an iron bench. After she started a roll call from her cell to check in on her fellow prisoners, Lucy Burns was identified as the group's ringleader. When she refused the guards' orders to stop the roll call, they handcuffed her arms to the cell bars above her head, leaving her standing bleeding all night. In solidarity, other women stood holding their arms above their own heads until she was released. After the Night of Terror, the women refused to eat for three days; the guards tried to tempt the women to eat with fried chicken, which Burns considered an insult: "They think there is nothing in our souls above fried chicken." As the hunger strike continued, Whittaker began to fear that one of the prisoners would die, leading to even more negative publicity, so he ordered Burns to be removed to another jail, where she too was force fed. She was held down by five people as a tube was forced through her nostril, a practice which caused painful, severe nosebleeds. Burns ultimately served more jail time than any other American suffragist. Reflecting on these horrific events years later, Paul observed: "Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn't it? It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote." When the suffragists outside Occoquan learned about the Night of Terror, they were determined to make it public. They had an important ally in the Wilson White House who helped make it possible: Dudley Field Malone, an attorney who served as a campaign adviser to Wilson, resigned his political post so he could represent the Silent Sentinels in court. Malone, who later married Doris Stevens, one of the Occoquan prisoners, also passed on her jailhouse letters about the ordeal to the party newsletter, The Suffragist. Once the story broke, it received broad coverage in the media, outraging many readers and contributing to the growing public support of the suffragists' cause. Malone's work in court paid off in late November, when a hearing into the arrests was ordered; on November 27 and 28, all of the suffragists were released from prison. The women spoke widely about their experiences and brought the attention of the world to the struggle for women's rights in America. The women also appealed their convictions for "unlawful assembly" for "obstructing the sidewalk" in front of the White House and the case went before the D.C. Court of Appeals in January 1918. Although the Night of Terror wasn't even mentioned during the trial, the three judges nevertheless issued a unanimous decision that every one of the women had been illegally arrested, illegally convicted, and illegally imprisoned. Following their release from prison, the former detainees joined their fellow activists in their on-going protests at the White House and continued their organizing work calling for a constitutional amendment. In total, the Silent Sentinels picketed six days a week in front of the White House for two and a half years, with nearly 2,000 women participating in the vigil at different times. All of the negative press attention around the suffragists' arrests and brutal treatment finally drove Wilson to act. In January 1918, Wilson declared that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure" and called on Congress to act. The next year, the Senate passed the suffrage amendment, which began a state-by-state fight to secure ratification by state legislatures. At long last, the 19th Amendment -- declaring that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" -- was adopted on August 18, 1920. When the amendment was finally ratified, little credit was given to the NWP or to the women who had to suffer such brutal treatment in the pursuit of the right to vote, even though, according to scholar Belinda A. Stillion Southard, "the campaign of the NWP was crucial toward securing the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment." Following its passage, many of the NWP's leading activists continued to right for women's rights and other social justice causes, including Alice Paul who later co-authored the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Others felt they simply had no more to give — including Burns, who never fully physically recovered from the Night of Terror and reportedly said, "I don’t want to do anything more. I think we have done all this for women, and we have sacrificed everything we possessed for them, and now let them fight for it now. I am not going to fight anymore."
I know the first part was a downer, so I wanted to end with this:
Did you know that the Empire State Building was also hit by a plane? In 1945, there was a B-25 that hit the side of the Empire State Building. Because of fog, a routine transport mission made a wrong turn in the fog just past the Chrysler building.
At 9:40 a.m., the aircraft crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, between the 78th and 80th floors, carving an 18-by-20-foot (5.5 m × 6.1 m) hole in the building where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council were located. One engine shot through the South side opposite the impact and flew as far as the next block, dropping 900 feet (270 m) and landing on the roof of a nearby building and starting a fire that destroyed a penthouse art studio. The other engine and part of the landing gear plummeted down an elevator shaft. The resulting fire was extinguished in 40 minutes. It is still the only significant fire at such a height to be brought under control.
Fourteen people were killed: Col. William F. Smith, two enlisted men aboard the bomber (Staff Sergeant Christopher Domitrovich and Albert Perna, a Navy Aviation Machinist's Mate, hitching a ride), and eleven people in the building. The remains of Navy hitchhiker Albert Perna were not found until two days later, when search crews discovered that his body had gone through an elevator shaft and fallen to the bottom. The other two crewmen were burned beyond recognition. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver was injured when the cables supporting her elevator sheared and the elevator fell 75 storeys, ending up in the basement. Oliver survived the fall, and rescuers found her amongst the rubble. This still stands as the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator fall.
Despite the damage and loss of life, the building was open for business on many floors on the following Monday. The crash spurred the passage of the long-pending Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, as well as the insertion of retroactive provisions into the law, allowing people to sue the government for the accident.
Everyone thinks of Lincoln as "The Great Emancipator", the man who dissolved lsavery and set colored people free from their bonds of slavery. But while this is true, in a way, he was not personally against slavery. In fact, he was quoted as saying, "If I could have saved the union without freeing a single slave, I would have."
Lincoln had no problem with slavery, and his "Emancipation Proclamation" freed only slaves in the slave states. In fact, the slaves belonging to the north were *Not* freed. This was to avoid aliennating the slaveowers of the North, whose support Lincoln needed.
Lincoln has been hero-worshipped by many subsequent Americans for these achievements. “He moved a nation,” said America’s 44th president, Barack Obama, “and helped free a people.” Meanwhile, its 45th once promised to be “more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office”, with just one exception: that of the “late, great Abraham Lincoln”.
The Great Emancipator’s memorial is itself a sort of physical embodiment of the post-Civil War, reunited Union. Its builders were careful to use stone from both the southern states that had formed their own Confederacy, and the northern states who remained within the Union. Around the top are the names of individual states, including the Union states that had abolished slavery before the Civil War began, and the Confederate states in which slavery remained legal. But the memorial mixes up the names of all the states together, north and south alike, to show that the USA’s indissoluble nature is written in stone.
The Lincoln Memorial makes it seem like the American Civil War is well and truly over. But it was only last year that a woman died in Charlottesville, Virginia during a dispute about how exactly the bloody conflict of 150 years ago should continue to be commemorated. There are many holes in the schoolbook success story of Lincoln emancipating the slaves and healing a divided nation.
For people who believe uncritically in the image of the Great Emancipator, Lincoln made some surprising statements about slavery. Here’s just one of them: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would.” He also believed in the rather barmy idea – or so it seems to modern eyes – that the formerly enslaved had no place in the United States, but instead ought to be sent back to their native Africa, or even to South or Central America.
Lincoln certainly was no abolitionist along the lines of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) did so much to persuade people that slavery was morally wrong. And his achievement was much more subtle than simply ordering emancipation to happen. Lincoln’s skill was to occupy a slowly changing succession of positions that lay well behind the cutting edge of radical thought on the evil of slavery. But, as he made the journey towards the idea that slavery is unacceptable, he was able to take the majority of Americans with him. In other words, he wasn’t a saint, but a human being. And a human being who happened to be a supremely gifted politician.
Some of the behaviour of Lincoln’s Union troops towards the former slaves who’d escaped or been freed by their owners was horribly compromised.
One such controversy marks the epic 1864 march by a Union army across the state of Georgia. Led by General William Sherman and marching under a flag of emancipation, the army left a wide trail of devastation in its wake. Those on the Union side of the story see it as a successful mercy mission to free the slaves. However, Sherman’s campaign can also be read as an unnecessarily brutal act of total war which saw the invaders fail to live up to their supposed ideals.
That might even have become the opinion of the formerly enslaved African Americans who attached themselves to the train of a Union leader operating under Sherman, Brigadier General Jefferson C Davis. A large number – the exact figure is unknown – of escaped slaves joined Davis’s forces. They wanted the protection of Lincoln’s army. After all, troops in the service of the Great Emancipator would surely look after them. But Davis wanted to rid his baggage train of what he saw as an encumbrance of “useless negroes”, slowing him down and increasing risk.
Davis’s army used pontoon bridges to cross a swamp of deep-running black waters at Ebenezer Creek near Savannah. But in an act that stains the memory and motives of the Union side, he left his unwelcome recruits behind and in danger of falling into Confederate hands. One of Davis’s colleagues believed that this must result in “all these negroes being recaptured or perhaps brutally shot”. In the event, many of them died trying to cross the swamp on their own makeshift rafts, or even by swimming through its waters.
Ebenezer Creek was just one shameful incident, but the further undermining of Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator began even as the mourning for his 1865 assassination, and his subsequent commemoration, were still in progress.
Soon after his death, a former slave named Charlotte Scott gave five dollars from her pay to go towards another statue of Lincoln, not the stone memorial on the Mall, but the bronze Emancipation Memorial in a different part of Washington DC.
At the unveiling of the statue, though, a black politician and reformer named Frederick Douglass made an important speech. He pointed out that, even if Lincoln ended slavery, he always chose the course of action that would most advantage white America. “I as much as any other man,” Lincoln once said, “am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Frederick Douglass and others would watch with chagrin as the ending of slavery in a formal sense turned into less official forms of abuse of African Americans. Racial segregation became a fact of life in many formerly Confederate states, as did using the formerly enslaved as poorly paid labour. Indeed, ‘slavery’ was still possible – in all but name.
The Chattahoochee Brick Company was a particularly heinous example of this. Operating at full steam to rebuild the city of Atlanta after the Civil War, it produced millions of bricks a year. To do so, it exploited a loophole in the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which formalised emancipation. Slavery can no longer exist, this amendment says, “except as punishment for crime”.
So, if you were convicted of a crime – a situation that applied disproportionately to black people – you could find yourself working for hardly any money under a scheme called ‘convict leasing’. If particularly unlucky, you might find yourself in the Chattahoochee Brick Company’s yard outside Atlanta, where thousands of convicts were worked to death, and whose bodies are thought still to lie beneath the remnants of the company’s works.
It was all this and more that led Martin Luther King to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 to address a rally of more than 200,000 people marching for civil rights.
It was no accident that King chose this spot to make a speech that included the words ‘I Have a Dream’. He was referring to the American Dream, and signalling that King and his fellow black Americans also, like white people, dreamed of living as full citizens within Lincoln’s Union. By standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King was saying tacitly that the president’s legacy had let him and his like down. Emancipation had promised more to black Americans than it had delivered.
Of course, a lot has changed since 1963. But the Civil War and its memorials are still causing dismay and even violence in 2018. The nexus has been a small park in Charlottesville, Virginia, a quiet college town. When I visited it in June, I was driven by a taxi driver named Mario, whose marriage ceremony had taken place outdoors in the little park. He told me he’d been surprised when his father refused to pose for the wedding photos near the park’s central statue.
Mario’s father had strong negative feelings about the statue because it’s a memorial to another Civil War general – a Confederate this time – named Robert E Lee. To Mario’s older relatives, the statue of General Lee is not ‘just’ an artwork – it’s the legacy of a white supremacist way of life that still restricts the opportunities of black people today.
And Mario’s family certainly weren’t alone in holding the statue of General Lee in contempt. In 2017, Charlottesville city council voted to change the name of the area from ‘Lee Park’ to ‘Emancipation Park’, so as to counter the effect of the statue at its heart. Some went further still, and argued that the statue should come down altogether. Part of the offence lies in the fact that the statue of Lee isn’t a product of the Civil War or its aftermath. It was erected between 1917 and 1924, a period when confidence was returning to the South after the calamity of the 1860s – and when lynchings and other activities by the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise.
However, the threat to remove the statue brought out an alliance of protestors in its defence, including members of an extremist group called ‘Unite the Right’. There were violent clashes and, as a consequence of the actions of one of ‘Unite the Right’s’ supporters, a woman – Heather Heyer – died.
It may seem extraordinary to suggest that a person killed in 2017 was the most recent casualty of the American Civil War, a conflict that’s supposed to be long over. But there’s certainly something in the claim. “We’re still suffering, we have so much healing to do,” said Heather Heyer’s mother in August 2018, one year on from her daughter’s death. “We have a huge racial problem in our city and in our country.”
That’s quite at odds with the message of unity implicit in the memorial to Lincoln that introduces the man and his meaning to so many Americans to this day.
Britain has the advantage of several helpful tools for nation-building: centuries of history, a convenient natural border, even a powerful monarchy formerly unafraid to use force to keep its constituent parts together.
America, on the other hand, lacking all those things, has had to write its own story. And, when it gets to the chapter about the Civil War, it’s clearly very far from having reached its final draft.
The last part is quoted from BBC History : About Lincoln...
Starting with version 6.29 of the original Dota, each update ending in a "9" contained a secret quest, usually showing off an upcoming hero such as Invoker.
@LadyRhian: I think you've got some extra words in that post. I notice some unrelated content and some repeated sections. Also, if this is a quote from someplace, could you put it in quotes and link the source?
Lincoln was indeed not an anti-slavery crusader as he's typically pictured. While he was more progressive on race issues than most of his time, he favored the status quo before the Civil War broke out, and he made it clear that, after the war began, his primary goal was preserving the union. Abolishing slavery was merely a means to that end, since all previous attempts to reach a compromise with the South had failed.
Lincoln's support for deporting freed slaves to a separate colony, perhaps in Africa, was a mainstream position dating back to revolutionary days. The idea was that, once the slaves were free, they'd be rightly incensed at the injustices done to them and seek to exact vengeance on the whites. Removing freed blacks from the country was seen as the only way to prevent a bloody race war. Ultimately, the black population opposed this measure--virtually every black person in America at the time had lived in America their entire life--and eventually the proposal died.
I don't really consider it a detriment to Lincoln's legacy that his opposition to slavery was belated and strictly pragmatic in motive. His actual impact on history is more important than his intent, and even if we prize his means (abolition) more than his ends (the preservation of the Union), we still have a president that gave us a more perfect Union.
And yes, some people back then did want to send slaves back to Africa. I think that's where the common (well, somewhat) saying, "Go back to where you came from!", flung at anyone who isn't white, comes from. Some racists still think black and brown people should self-deport themselves back to Africa. Which is ridicuous, I mean, nobody tells white people to go back to where they came from! I'm somewhat from Ireland (so I can speak English, but it would take me a long time to adjust to speaking/reading Italian!
I mean, black and brown people are just as American as white people. I heard a woman of color say, "When I get told to go back to where I came from, I say, "I do. I go to Detroit to see my family every Thanksgiving."
If someone told me to go back to where I came from, I'd be like... "New York?" Why do people seem to assume if you're not white, you're not from around here?
Oh, some freed slaves did return to Africa and founded... Liberia, named for Liberty.
The full letter by Abraham Lincoln referred to by @LadyRhian. Please don't rush to judgment on the man until you read the entire letter, not just one sentence...
Seems 100% Union-focused to me. Lincoln makes it clear that his overriding objective is to preserve the Union, and that his position on the preservation or abolition of slavery is entirely dependent on whether it serves his overriding objective.
We're rather lucky that Lincoln decided that preserving the Union meant abolishing slavery. He may well have gone the other way if the circumstances were a bit different.
My point is that he was far from a saint. Merely a very human man who made some very savvy political decisions. It's not like he was sent down from heaven to free the slaves. It was much more complicated than that.
Seems 100% Union-focused to me. Lincoln makes it clear that his overriding objective is to preserve the Union, and that his position on the preservation or abolition of slavery is entirely dependent on whether it serves his overriding objective.
We're rather lucky that Lincoln decided that preserving the Union meant abolishing slavery. He may well have gone the other way if the circumstances were a bit different.
It is definitely Union focused. Preserving it was his ultimate goal. How would things have turned out if the Confederacy had won the Civil War? I for one am glad that was his focus. He had some pretty good ideas on how to pursue Reconstruction, as well. It's rather unfortunate that he was assassinated and the racist asshole Johnson took his place. The US would likely be a different country but for that one horrible act of murder. Ironically it didn't work out very well for white southerners either. Reconstruction became a nightmare all the way around...
When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, he jumped from the theater box down to the stage, breaking his leg in the process, yelling “Sic semper tyrannis! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged.” Kurt Vonnegut described it as "the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material."
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https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/victoria.html
Fun fact about chloroform, it works nothing like in the movies. You'd have to hold a rag soaked in the stuff over somebody's mouth and nose for a few minutes, without them managing to get it off and get a gasp of fresh air, for it to knock them out. They looked at banning the stuff in the 19th century, fearing chloroform attacks, then found out, none of the attempted attacks had actually been successful. Oddly enough one of the victim's married her attacker.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2044.1998.528-az0572.x
It remains popular with certain British teens (and apparently, Australia) to use as a drug. In Australia, it's called "nangs".
Although the exact number will never be known, during prohibition, there were between 20,000 and 100,000 speakeasies in New York. Texas Guinan, the most famous speakeasy hostess of the time, ran six of them in Manhattan. She is who Whoopie Goldberg's character was named after in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The Famed "Polo Grounds" between 5th and 6th avenue and just north of Central Park was named because there were actual polo grounds there. The game was introduced to New York by Newspaper Editor James Gordon Bennett. As Baseball became more popular, the area was switched over to playing Baseball, but the informal name stuck.
Central Park is the largest park in New York Proper (Manhatten). Central Park, comprised of 843 acres, is tiny compared to Pelham Bay Park's 2765 acres in the Bronx, the largest park in New York City. Greenbelt (1778 acres) in Staten Island, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (1255 acres) in Queens and Van Cortlandt Park (1146 acres). They make Central Park seem almost... tiny.
New York also had a crystal Palace. The New York Crystal Palace exhibition opened in 1853. It was America's first world fair, modeled on the Great Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in London two years earlier. New York's Crystal Palace was located in what is known today as Bryant Park. For a while it was a popular attraction, but it closed in 1854 and burned to the ground in 1858.
Who was the first woman to run for Mayor of New York? The honor goes to Cynthia Leonard, who joined presidential candidate Belva Lockwood's 1888 campaign on the National Equal Rights Party ticket. Leonard wanted to break public utility monopolies, provide free housing for the poor, and disallow "any great poverty or great wealth." The mother of the celebrated theater star Lillian Russell, Leonard also advocated for publicly sponsored performances that would include free meals.
In the nineteenth century, tenements did not have adequate bathrooms, and commercial bathhouses were out of reach for the city's poor. In 1851 the first public bathhouse opened on Mott Street, and in 1901 the city's first free, year-round bathhouse opened on Rivington Street. Some bathhhouses became meeting places for gay men, and others remain popular for cultural or religious reasons to this day. Yea, NYC still has bathhouses!
The Doctor's Riot of 1788 began when a curious boy observed a dissecction and then discovered his very recently-deceased mother's body was missing. Rioters destroyed laboratories in the New-York Hospital, chased the doctors into City Jail, and ransacked their homes in search of cadavers they believed had been stolen for dissection. Five of the mob were killed by the militia.
There are two Statues of Liberty in New York City. One stands in New York Harbor. A replica of "Lady Liberty" has graced the Brooklyn Museum's Sculpture Garden since 2002. She is thirty feet tall and was commissioned by William H. Flattau in 1900 to stand atop his building, the Liberty Warehouse in Manhattan. Other Statues of Liberty are found throughout the world, including two in Paris, France.
Originally a bright copper color, the Statue grew a patina of green when exposed to the weather. This is actually a good thing, since the Patina of copper is equal to the rusting of steel. In this case, the patina protects the copper from further erosion, helping it last longer.
The book Lady Liberty is holding has the Date of 1776, when America declared independence. It took until 1783 for England to recognize America's Independence.
The New York Yankees was not the Team's first name. Originally, they were called "The Hilltoppers", from where they played, Hilltop Park in Washingon Heights. Also, Greenwich Vilage, actually *was* a village, before Manhattan grew to cover the entirety of Manhattan Island (1700's) and it was quite rural back then!
JFK Airport in New York City, was originally Idlewild Airport. It was named after a planned summer resort and later golf club. The airport, built in the 1940's had no "actual" name, so when it was renamed for President John F. Kennedy, nobody objected and the name was mostly forgotten. You can still sometimes hear about it in 1940's and 50's movies set in NY.
Speaking of renaming things. You can also rename a street in New York. The candidate must be deceased and have had a connection to that street or area. If those two are covered, all you need is 75 names to sign a petition (must be local residents). It's then voted on by the Parks Dept. of the City Council, the City council itself, and finally to the mayor.
Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway are terms used in the theatre district in New York. "off-Broadway" tends to be used as a physical designation, referring to both the location and size of a theater, and "off-off-Broadway" implies an intent to create a theatrical experience that is alternative, experimental, and noncommercial with an emphasis on creative collaboration. Off Broadway came into use in the 1940's and Off-Off Broadway at the end of the 50's.
Other places in NYC: SoHo (south of Houston), NoHo (North of Houston). (Houston being a street in the East Village... Tribeca (Triangle beneath Canal). Canal St. is another Street in the East Village. The shape is more of a trapezoid rather then a Triangle, through. NoLita (North of Little Italy), NoMad (North of Madison Ave.), DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and BoCoCa, which consists of 3 neighborhoods: Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Caroll Gardens. There is also Greenwich Village (called, mosty "The Village") and while the East Village exists, it is NOT part of Greenwich Village (how's that for confusing?). And, it's pronounced "GREN-ich". There is also a West Village and a Far West Village.
They call Tribeca a triangle because it looks like one on maps, or possibly an arrow pointing west across NYC. It's split up into four historic districts, North, east, west and south, dedicated in 1992. South Historic District was extended in 2002. "Wizards of Waverly Place is set there. While the characters attend the fictional "Tribeca Prep", the shots of the school is actually P.S. (Public School) 40 in Gramercy Park. The Subaru Tribeca (out of production since 2102) was named after the district.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0210409
EDIT: It's actually Lake Orion.
The 1970's Show, "Welcome Back Kotter" was set in Brooklyn and one shot in the opening of the show had a sign that said that if it was a city unto itself, it would be the 4th Largest City in America.
That sign was on Verrazano Bridge Ramp. in 1979, the Sign was stolen. Also, the then-Borough President, Sebastian Leone (on the sign "The Hon. Sebastian Leone" was called by Philadelphia to tell him *They* were the 4th largest city. Oops.
How that sign was stolen is unknown, but it's pretty incredible. That's not an easy place to get to, being very busy with traffic, and getting it down must have been a job without a cop stopping to see what was happening. In 2012, a replica sign was made and installed in the Lobby of the Brooklyn Borough Hall, where it can still be seen today.
If you watch the opening Credits, you'll find a very familliar name: John Travolta. He'd been on stage, but this was his first steady acting role on TV. His first movie role, released around the same time, was in Carrie.
Sweathogs, unite! "Up ya nose with a rubba hose. Twice as fah with a Hershey Bah."
One especially notorious event, the "Night of Terror," when 33 suffragists from the National Women's Party, who had been arrested for protesting outside of the White House, were brutally beaten and tortured at the Occoquan Workhouse, a prison in northern Virginia took place a little over 100 years ago on November 14, 1917. For many of the women, the physical and psychological consequences of their harrowing experience would be lifelong. Their stories horrified the nation, galvanizing public support for the Women's Suffrage Movement and bringing new momentum which helped pass the 19th Amendment, recognizing women's right to vote, three years later. The freedom to vote, however, had come at a cost, and that cost was borne in part by these women.
By November, many of the Silent Sentinels had been repeatedly arrested and Occoquan superintendent W.H. Whittaker was frustrated. On November 14, he ordered the nearly 40 male guards to "teach the women a lesson." The guards attacked the 33 women with clubs, brutalizing them and throwing them into cells. According to affidavits taken during a later investigation, women were dragged, choked, pinched, and kicked — and some women received even worse treatment. They twisted Dora Lewis' arm behind her back and slammed her into a iron bed twice before leaving her unconscious on the floor. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, believed that Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack, but she was denied medical treatment until the next morning. Dorothy Day, who later co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was slammed repeatedly over the back of an iron bench.
After she started a roll call from her cell to check in on her fellow prisoners, Lucy Burns was identified as the group's ringleader. When she refused the guards' orders to stop the roll call, they handcuffed her arms to the cell bars above her head, leaving her standing bleeding all night. In solidarity, other women stood holding their arms above their own heads until she was released.
After the Night of Terror, the women refused to eat for three days; the guards tried to tempt the women to eat with fried chicken, which Burns considered an insult: "They think there is nothing in our souls above fried chicken." As the hunger strike continued, Whittaker began to fear that one of the prisoners would die, leading to even more negative publicity, so he ordered Burns to be removed to another jail, where she too was force fed. She was held down by five people as a tube was forced through her nostril, a practice which caused painful, severe nosebleeds. Burns ultimately served more jail time than any other American suffragist.
Reflecting on these horrific events years later, Paul observed: "Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn't it? It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote."
When the suffragists outside Occoquan learned about the Night of Terror, they were determined to make it public. They had an important ally in the Wilson White House who helped make it possible: Dudley Field Malone, an attorney who served as a campaign adviser to Wilson, resigned his political post so he could represent the Silent Sentinels in court. Malone, who later married Doris Stevens, one of the Occoquan prisoners, also passed on her jailhouse letters about the ordeal to the party newsletter, The Suffragist. Once the story broke, it received broad coverage in the media, outraging many readers and contributing to the growing public support of the suffragists' cause.
Malone's work in court paid off in late November, when a hearing into the arrests was ordered; on November 27 and 28, all of the suffragists were released from prison. The women spoke widely about their experiences and brought the attention of the world to the struggle for women's rights in America. The women also appealed their convictions for "unlawful assembly" for "obstructing the sidewalk" in front of the White House and the case went before the D.C. Court of Appeals in January 1918. Although the Night of Terror wasn't even mentioned during the trial, the three judges nevertheless issued a unanimous decision that every one of the women had been illegally arrested, illegally convicted, and illegally imprisoned.
Following their release from prison, the former detainees joined their fellow activists in their on-going protests at the White House and continued their organizing work calling for a constitutional amendment. In total, the Silent Sentinels picketed six days a week in front of the White House for two and a half years, with nearly 2,000 women participating in the vigil at different times. All of the negative press attention around the suffragists' arrests and brutal treatment finally drove Wilson to act. In January 1918, Wilson declared that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure" and called on Congress to act. The next year, the Senate passed the suffrage amendment, which began a state-by-state fight to secure ratification by state legislatures. At long last, the 19th Amendment -- declaring that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" -- was adopted on August 18, 1920.
When the amendment was finally ratified, little credit was given to the NWP or to the women who had to suffer such brutal treatment in the pursuit of the right to vote, even though, according to scholar Belinda A. Stillion Southard, "the campaign of the NWP was crucial toward securing the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment." Following its passage, many of the NWP's leading activists continued to right for women's rights and other social justice causes, including Alice Paul who later co-authored the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Others felt they simply had no more to give — including Burns, who never fully physically recovered from the Night of Terror and reportedly said, "I don’t want to do anything more. I think we have done all this for women, and we have sacrificed everything we possessed for them, and now let them fight for it now. I am not going to fight anymore."
I know the first part was a downer, so I wanted to end with this:
Egyptian Schoolboy’s 1,800-Year-Old Lesson to Go on Display
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/egyptian-schoolboys-1800-year-old-lesson-go-display-180971234/#vyreXjGSEcCIwULK.99
The British Library took the exercise out of storage as part of an upcoming exhibition on the history of writing
Picture at the link.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a25846629/concrete-mirrors-uk-air-raids-world-war-i/?fbclid=IwAR0NJhra5jhMltqkJ79KBNNysxThtHM2RxQ0jOffh6kuPaiFvSmphyMr1Qs
Also, the Empire State Building is built on the site of the Waldorf and Astoria hotels, which were combined to make the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
The Waldorf-Astoria hotel moved uptown in 1931 to make room for the Empire State Building.
Did you know that the Empire State Building was also hit by a plane? In 1945, there was a B-25 that hit the side of the Empire State Building. Because of fog, a routine transport mission made a wrong turn in the fog just past the Chrysler building.
At 9:40 a.m., the aircraft crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, between the 78th and 80th floors, carving an 18-by-20-foot (5.5 m × 6.1 m) hole in the building where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council were located. One engine shot through the South side opposite the impact and flew as far as the next block, dropping 900 feet (270 m) and landing on the roof of a nearby building and starting a fire that destroyed a penthouse art studio. The other engine and part of the landing gear plummeted down an elevator shaft. The resulting fire was extinguished in 40 minutes. It is still the only significant fire at such a height to be brought under control.
Fourteen people were killed: Col. William F. Smith, two enlisted men aboard the bomber (Staff Sergeant Christopher Domitrovich and Albert Perna, a Navy Aviation Machinist's Mate, hitching a ride), and eleven people in the building. The remains of Navy hitchhiker Albert Perna were not found until two days later, when search crews discovered that his body had gone through an elevator shaft and fallen to the bottom. The other two crewmen were burned beyond recognition. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver was injured when the cables supporting her elevator sheared and the elevator fell 75 storeys, ending up in the basement. Oliver survived the fall, and rescuers found her amongst the rubble. This still stands as the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator fall.
Despite the damage and loss of life, the building was open for business on many floors on the following Monday. The crash spurred the passage of the long-pending Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, as well as the insertion of retroactive provisions into the law, allowing people to sue the government for the accident.
Lincoln had no problem with slavery, and his "Emancipation Proclamation" freed only slaves in the slave states. In fact, the slaves belonging to the north were *Not* freed. This was to avoid aliennating the slaveowers of the North, whose support Lincoln needed.
Lincoln has been hero-worshipped by many subsequent Americans for these achievements. “He moved a nation,” said America’s 44th president, Barack Obama, “and helped free a people.” Meanwhile, its 45th once promised to be “more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office”, with just one exception: that of the “late, great Abraham Lincoln”.
The Great Emancipator’s memorial is itself a sort of physical embodiment of the post-Civil War, reunited Union. Its builders were careful to use stone from both the southern states that had formed their own Confederacy, and the northern states who remained within the Union. Around the top are the names of individual states, including the Union states that had abolished slavery before the Civil War began, and the Confederate states in which slavery remained legal. But the memorial mixes up the names of all the states together, north and south alike, to show that the USA’s indissoluble nature is written in stone.
The Lincoln Memorial makes it seem like the American Civil War is well and truly over. But it was only last year that a woman died in Charlottesville, Virginia during a dispute about how exactly the bloody conflict of 150 years ago should continue to be commemorated. There are many holes in the schoolbook success story of Lincoln emancipating the slaves and healing a divided nation.
For people who believe uncritically in the image of the Great Emancipator, Lincoln made some surprising statements about slavery. Here’s just one of them: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would.” He also believed in the rather barmy idea – or so it seems to modern eyes – that the formerly enslaved had no place in the United States, but instead ought to be sent back to their native Africa, or even to South or Central America.
Lincoln certainly was no abolitionist along the lines of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) did so much to persuade people that slavery was morally wrong. And his achievement was much more subtle than simply ordering emancipation to happen. Lincoln’s skill was to occupy a slowly changing succession of positions that lay well behind the cutting edge of radical thought on the evil of slavery. But, as he made the journey towards the idea that slavery is unacceptable, he was able to take the majority of Americans with him. In other words, he wasn’t a saint, but a human being. And a human being who happened to be a supremely gifted politician.
Some of the behaviour of Lincoln’s Union troops towards the former slaves who’d escaped or been freed by their owners was horribly compromised.
One such controversy marks the epic 1864 march by a Union army across the state of Georgia. Led by General William Sherman and marching under a flag of emancipation, the army left a wide trail of devastation in its wake. Those on the Union side of the story see it as a successful mercy mission to free the slaves. However, Sherman’s campaign can also be read as an unnecessarily brutal act of total war which saw the invaders fail to live up to their supposed ideals.
That might even have become the opinion of the formerly enslaved African Americans who attached themselves to the train of a Union leader operating under Sherman, Brigadier General Jefferson C Davis. A large number – the exact figure is unknown – of escaped slaves joined Davis’s forces. They wanted the protection of Lincoln’s army. After all, troops in the service of the Great Emancipator would surely look after them. But Davis wanted to rid his baggage train of what he saw as an encumbrance of “useless negroes”, slowing him down and increasing risk.
Davis’s army used pontoon bridges to cross a swamp of deep-running black waters at Ebenezer Creek near Savannah. But in an act that stains the memory and motives of the Union side, he left his unwelcome recruits behind and in danger of falling into Confederate hands. One of Davis’s colleagues believed that this must result in “all these negroes being recaptured or perhaps brutally shot”. In the event, many of them died trying to cross the swamp on their own makeshift rafts, or even by swimming through its waters.
Ebenezer Creek was just one shameful incident, but the further undermining of Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator began even as the mourning for his 1865 assassination, and his subsequent commemoration, were still in progress.
Soon after his death, a former slave named Charlotte Scott gave five dollars from her pay to go towards another statue of Lincoln, not the stone memorial on the Mall, but the bronze Emancipation Memorial in a different part of Washington DC.
At the unveiling of the statue, though, a black politician and reformer named Frederick Douglass made an important speech. He pointed out that, even if Lincoln ended slavery, he always chose the course of action that would most advantage white America. “I as much as any other man,” Lincoln once said, “am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Frederick Douglass and others would watch with chagrin as the ending of slavery in a formal sense turned into less official forms of abuse of African Americans. Racial segregation became a fact of life in many formerly Confederate states, as did using the formerly enslaved as poorly paid labour. Indeed, ‘slavery’ was still possible – in all but name.
The Chattahoochee Brick Company was a particularly heinous example of this. Operating at full steam to rebuild the city of Atlanta after the Civil War, it produced millions of bricks a year. To do so, it exploited a loophole in the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which formalised emancipation. Slavery can no longer exist, this amendment says, “except as punishment for crime”.
So, if you were convicted of a crime – a situation that applied disproportionately to black people – you could find yourself working for hardly any money under a scheme called ‘convict leasing’. If particularly unlucky, you might find yourself in the Chattahoochee Brick Company’s yard outside Atlanta, where thousands of convicts were worked to death, and whose bodies are thought still to lie beneath the remnants of the company’s works.
It was all this and more that led Martin Luther King to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 to address a rally of more than 200,000 people marching for civil rights.
It was no accident that King chose this spot to make a speech that included the words ‘I Have a Dream’. He was referring to the American Dream, and signalling that King and his fellow black Americans also, like white people, dreamed of living as full citizens within Lincoln’s Union. By standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King was saying tacitly that the president’s legacy had let him and his like down. Emancipation had promised more to black Americans than it had delivered.
Of course, a lot has changed since 1963. But the Civil War and its memorials are still causing dismay and even violence in 2018. The nexus has been a small park in Charlottesville, Virginia, a quiet college town. When I visited it in June, I was driven by a taxi driver named Mario, whose marriage ceremony had taken place outdoors in the little park. He told me he’d been surprised when his father refused to pose for the wedding photos near the park’s central statue.
Mario’s father had strong negative feelings about the statue because it’s a memorial to another Civil War general – a Confederate this time – named Robert E Lee. To Mario’s older relatives, the statue of General Lee is not ‘just’ an artwork – it’s the legacy of a white supremacist way of life that still restricts the opportunities of black people today.
And Mario’s family certainly weren’t alone in holding the statue of General Lee in contempt. In 2017, Charlottesville city council voted to change the name of the area from ‘Lee Park’ to ‘Emancipation Park’, so as to counter the effect of the statue at its heart. Some went further still, and argued that the statue should come down altogether. Part of the offence lies in the fact that the statue of Lee isn’t a product of the Civil War or its aftermath. It was erected between 1917 and 1924, a period when confidence was returning to the South after the calamity of the 1860s – and when lynchings and other activities by the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise.
However, the threat to remove the statue brought out an alliance of protestors in its defence, including members of an extremist group called ‘Unite the Right’. There were violent clashes and, as a consequence of the actions of one of ‘Unite the Right’s’ supporters, a woman – Heather Heyer – died.
It may seem extraordinary to suggest that a person killed in 2017 was the most recent casualty of the American Civil War, a conflict that’s supposed to be long over. But there’s certainly something in the claim. “We’re still suffering, we have so much healing to do,” said Heather Heyer’s mother in August 2018, one year on from her daughter’s death. “We have a huge racial problem in our city and in our country.”
That’s quite at odds with the message of unity implicit in the memorial to Lincoln that introduces the man and his meaning to so many Americans to this day.
Britain has the advantage of several helpful tools for nation-building: centuries of history, a convenient natural border, even a powerful monarchy formerly unafraid to use force to keep its constituent parts together.
America, on the other hand, lacking all those things, has had to write its own story. And, when it gets to the chapter about the Civil War, it’s clearly very far from having reached its final draft.
The last part is quoted from BBC History : About Lincoln...
Starting with version 6.29 of the original Dota, each update ending in a "9" contained a secret quest, usually showing off an upcoming hero such as Invoker.
Lincoln was indeed not an anti-slavery crusader as he's typically pictured. While he was more progressive on race issues than most of his time, he favored the status quo before the Civil War broke out, and he made it clear that, after the war began, his primary goal was preserving the union. Abolishing slavery was merely a means to that end, since all previous attempts to reach a compromise with the South had failed.
Lincoln's support for deporting freed slaves to a separate colony, perhaps in Africa, was a mainstream position dating back to revolutionary days. The idea was that, once the slaves were free, they'd be rightly incensed at the injustices done to them and seek to exact vengeance on the whites. Removing freed blacks from the country was seen as the only way to prevent a bloody race war. Ultimately, the black population opposed this measure--virtually every black person in America at the time had lived in America their entire life--and eventually the proposal died.
I don't really consider it a detriment to Lincoln's legacy that his opposition to slavery was belated and strictly pragmatic in motive. His actual impact on history is more important than his intent, and even if we prize his means (abolition) more than his ends (the preservation of the Union), we still have a president that gave us a more perfect Union.
And yes, some people back then did want to send slaves back to Africa. I think that's where the common (well, somewhat) saying, "Go back to where you came from!", flung at anyone who isn't white, comes from. Some racists still think black and brown people should self-deport themselves back to Africa. Which is ridicuous, I mean, nobody tells white people to go back to where they came from! I'm somewhat from Ireland (so I can speak English, but it would take me a long time to adjust to speaking/reading Italian!
I mean, black and brown people are just as American as white people. I heard a woman of color say, "When I get told to go back to where I came from, I say, "I do. I go to Detroit to see my family every Thanksgiving."
If someone told me to go back to where I came from, I'd be like... "New York?" Why do people seem to assume if you're not white, you're not from around here?
Oh, some freed slaves did return to Africa and founded... Liberia, named for Liberty.
The full letter by Abraham Lincoln referred to by @LadyRhian. Please don't rush to judgment on the man until you read the entire letter, not just one sentence...
We're rather lucky that Lincoln decided that preserving the Union meant abolishing slavery. He may well have gone the other way if the circumstances were a bit different.
https://entomologytoday.org/2019/01/18/fossilized-insect-discovered-amber-opal/?fbclid=IwAR0lwxcZIKqWUvqNpk8Z1H3MY-M9_96dCD_a62s_Q4R4jOcRKETrFFhkL1k
Only that way, can we avoid the curse of Jurassic Park.