You think one vote doesn’t matter? Hah!
Almost 100 years ago today,* the 19th Amendment was ratified, making it legal for women in the United States to vote.**
The Amendment was ratified thanks to one man’s vote.
In August, 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment; 36 states were needed for it to pass. Tennessee was the only state still in the game. Proponents and opponents of the amendment gathered in a Nashville hotel to lobby legislators. The press dubbed it the War of the Roses because supporters of the suffrage movement wore yellow roses in their labels while its opponents wore red roses.
On August 19, the vote appeared to be tied, assuming the count of red and yellow roses was correct. When the roll call came, 24-year-old Harry T. Burn stepped into history. Burn came from a very conservative district and wore a red rose in his label, but when asked whether he would vote to ratify the amendment he answered “aye”. What changed his mind? A letter from his mother, who told him to “be a good boy” and vote in favor of the amendment.
Asked later about his change of heart, Burn said “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification. I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as seldom comes to a mortal man to free 17 million women from political slavery was mine.”
If you have the right to vote, use it. Because one vote can in fact change the world.
*Okay, 96 years ago if you’re going to be picky.
**Note that I do not use the phrase “gave them the right to vote”. Women fought hard for that right. Some even died for it.
City of Sedition
I keep thinking I’ll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours.
I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: “check what [someone else] has to say, “compare to X”, or sometimes just “!!!”.* Despite the fact that it looks at the war through the lens of one city, it gave me a new perspective about the war as a whole. Not an easy thing to do given how much time I’ve spent on the Civil War
In City of Sedition:The History of New York City During the Civil War, John Strausbaugh explores New York City’s multi-faceted role in the American Civil War: a role complicated by the city’s close financial ties with the South in the years immediately before the war, conflicts (physical and theoretical) between recent immigrants and anti-immigration “nativists,” political corruption at all levels and the rhetoric of competing “penny daily” newspapers. He portrays a city that was as divided by the war as any border state. So divided that in the months before the war, some city political leaders proposed that New York become a “free port” on the medieval model, seceding not only from the Union but from the state of New York.
Strausbaugh builds his portrait of the city from a multitude of smaller portraits, all set within the context of the larger story of the war. He tells the stories of well known New Yorkers, such as popular preacher Henry Beecher, journalist Horace Greeley, Tammany Hall politician “Boss” Tweed, and poet Walt Whitman. He follows less known figures over the course of the war, introducing readers to characters such as twelve-year-old drummer boy Gus Schurmann, who enlisted with his father in the all-German Mozart brigade and spent an afternoon playing with Todd Lincoln. He considers the fates of slave ship captains, abolitionist businessmen, war profiteers, and military units from all levels of New York society. (I was particularly taken with the volunteer immigrant militias, which were formed in response to laws that kept them from joining the official militia**)
The final result is a richly layered and often surprising history, as crowded and fast-paced as a Manhattan sidewalk.
*I love books that force me to have a conversation with them.
**We’ve been officially stupid about immigration from the beginning. [Insert rant here]
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the Confederacy. I read it and moved on.
In fact, the term “contraband” is derived from the concept of “contraband of war” and was linked to a first step toward the Emancipation Proclamation. According to international law, in times of war goods that can be used for hostile purposes can be legally seized from the enemy or from merchants of a neutral nation who ship such goods to a belligerent power. Typical examples of contraband of war include shipments of arms or the materials needed to make arms.
In May, 1861, only a month after the beginning of the war, lawyer turned Union General Benjamin Butler,* stretched that legal concept to cover three escaped slaves who sought asylum at Fort Monroe, Virginia–a Union fort isolated in newly Confederate territory. The young men–Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend–brought information about an artillery emplacement being built by slave labor across the harbor from Fort Monroe.
Butler was not an abolitionist and the laws regarding escaped slaves were clear: fugitive slaves must be returned to their masters. The Fugitive Slave Act was still in force, and Abraham Lincoln had declared that the purpose of the war was not to overthrow slavery but to keep the union intact. In his inaugural speech, he had explicitly stated “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
The law was clear, but Butler felt the men who had asked for asylum represented a special case. They had brought him useful military intelligence. And if he returned them to their master they would be put back to work building an artillery battery that was aimed directly at his fort. When rebel officers arrived at Fort Monroe demanding that he return the slaves, Butler declared them contraband of war–enemy property being used for hostile purposes–and refused to return them.
Two days later, more escaped slaves arrived at the gates of Fort Monroe. By early June, some 500 escaped slaves had taken shelter within the Union lines, where they quickly became an unofficial part of the garrison.
Newspapers throughout the North picked up the story, quipping about what The Times described as “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight.” Soon the fugitives were being described as “contrabands”, a term that encapsulated the unresolved nature of their legal status as property.
Not the least flattering photo of “Beast” Butler
*Aka “Beast” Butler, not because of his military actions but because of his face and rough manners.