Coming Forth to Glory

I am perfectly aware of that, but even AH has to have some basis in reality.

So unless we are to assume that the government is keeping the army massively bigger than normal peacetime levels (surely ASB when they already have a major war to pay for) then any really drastic measures in support of Black rights are simply unenforceable. So unless the OP can offer a credible way round this - - -.

I thought I did - Richardson is bending the truth a little. He's also ignoring the fact that that "firm hand" was unsustainable - many of the strides were made under military rule, but were curtailed by the withdrawal. In addition, he ignores that many of the laws were unenforced.

It does, in retrospect, seem wrong to use a work of what is essentially propaganda and present it as historically accurate, but I will keep it in for reasons of foreshadowing.
 
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I am perfectly aware of that, but even AH has to have some basis in reality.

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't *have* to have anything. I think it's nice when it's tied to reality, but it's his creation. He can do with it what he wants. I understand your criticism of the "firm hand" premise, and for what it's worth, I think you're onto something. Let's let it play out a little bit though. He might surprise us.

So unless we are to assume that the government is keeping the army massively bigger than normal peacetime levels (surely ASB when they already have a major war to pay for) then any really drastic measures in support of Black rights are simply unenforceable. So unless the OP can offer a credible way round this - - -.

Yeah, but the strength of the Army in 1867 was 57,000. In 1860 it was about 16,000. Grant (in 1867) had wanted it set at 80,000, but Stanton and Johnson were against it, so a larger army is at least something which was discussed at the time. They're not going to have a million men under arms or anything, but it's not ASB to imagine that a politically savvy, more fiscally liberal Northern Republican President who actually wanted Reconstruction to happen might be able to keep it at 100,000 men. That's not enough to remake Southern society in the image of Frederick Douglass, but it might be enough to put down White League types of incidents and add a bit more teeth to the efforts of Southern blacks to resist armed white militants.
 
Yeah, but the strength of the Army in 1867 was 57,000. In 1860 it was about 16,000. Grant (in 1867) had wanted it set at 80,000, but Stanton and Johnson were against it, so a larger army is at least something which was discussed at the time. They're not going to have a million men under arms or anything, but it's not ASB to imagine that a politically savvy, more fiscally liberal Northern Republican President who actually wanted Reconstruction to happen might be able to keep it at 100,000 men. That's not enough to remake Southern society in the image of Frederick Douglass, but it might be enough to put down White League types of incidents and add a bit more teeth to the efforts of Southern blacks to resist armed white militants.

Keep it at 100,000 for how long? OTL it didn't even stay at 57,000 - by 1876 iirc it was around 27,000 of which only about 3,000 could be spared for duty in the South. I don't quite see how having a different POTUS is likely to alter this in any major way.
 
"One can't - one cannot - have both amnesty for former combatants and maintain rights for the oppressed - if, indeed, this is the intended goal of the United States Government with this bill. When President Lincoln tried to do so, it destroyed his Presidency and it destroyed his Party."

-John Seawright (Sen., RR-IL), Congressional Globe (published January 22, 1960)


"In a very real sense, Reconstruction was as intensive and as difficult as it would have been to construct the South from the ground up, perhaps moreso. 18 percent of Southern white males 13-43 had died over the course of the war. Essentially all the wealth stored as Confederate bonds was destroyed, and most Southern banks and railroads collapsed. And, of course, slavery - the economic engine of the South - had been ended.

"Much of the South only stayed under Union control due to the presence of U.S. soldiers. The wartime Departments were reorganized by executive order on June 2, 1865, into six Reconstruction districts: District 1, in Red, District 2, in Orange, District 3, in Yellow, District 4, in Green, District 5, in Blue, and District 6, in Purple:

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"These Districts served as unofficial super-governments and as a predecessor to the Yellowstone System.

"Congress would not reconvene until December, which gave Lincoln the better part of a year to govern essentially by decree. Early in that period, he proclaimed amnesty for all Confederate soldiers except the high-ranking and those with incomes above $20,000. He also proclaimed, in August, the beginning of black Southern suffrage - specifically, for those blacks who either were literate or had served with distinction in the Union Army. This led to some reprisals by organizations like the Knights of Lady Magnolia, although events like the Battle of Society Street would not occur until the elections in October and November."

"Lincoln also supported the Louisiana Plan, under which any state in which ten percent of white voters took loyalty oaths and the state constitution explicitly banned slavery would be readmitted into the union. In practice, while this did allow the speedy readmission of those states, many of these states were still rife with sedition and disloyalty.

"In addition, while those constitutions may have barred slavery, many denied rights such as voting, learning to read and write, and freedom of employment and movement - in essence, an effort to resurrect slavery in deed if not in name. Prince Rivers, one South Carolinian former slave, veteran, and politician, was notably arrested for crossing the Edgefield County line without a permit. One Frederick Douglass speech in September of that year stated that "the Negroes of the South may no longer be slaves, but they cannot honestly be said to be free."

"One success, however, was the December passing of the 13th Amendment. In early December of 1865, when state legislatures began again to convene, the final vote in favor of the Amendment came in from the Alabama state legislature. On December 24, 1865, the abolition of slavery was enshrined forever in the Constitution."

-Charles Nguyen, Reconstruction (Public American History Source, retrieved 2015)

"The conditions of the South are abysmal for free Negroes. Perhaps hundreds or thousands have been killed, savagely beaten, and intimidated by whites, especially in those areas not under strong Union control. As so many of such incidents go unreported, I shall simply state this: In the two days I spent in Atlanta, two Negroes were killed, one in broad daylight in the middle of a street - one other was beaten by a mob and left for dead, but survived. In Birmingham, during the day I spent there, two Negroes were poisoned, both nearly fatally. Another was shot for attempting to buy flour. Attached are more reports, which may allow you to form a fuller picture of the true state of events."

-Carl Schurz, Report on the Condition of the South (U.S. Senate Document 39E2, 1865)

"I was born in Illinois, on the farm where my grandparents had settled after leaving Bavaria. It was, I'm told, a backwater, equally far from Chicago as from Springfield. A cornfield in the middle of nowhere. My folks didn't even have neighbors for miles.

"I don't remember anything of it. When I was six months old, my father went down South into the former Confederacy - specifically, Atlanta, which had been annihilated by General Sherman about a year prior. They were looking for laborers to rebuild the city, and they paid, a fact enormously interesting to my father, whose parents had not seen fit to give him a share of the land.

"I suppose that's where it began, rebuilding the cities of the South. Sooner or later, I got to thinking on the matter of how they were built in the first place..."

-Walter Snyder, Cities in America (Bodley Books, 1944)


"Info on O'Reilly's early life is hard to find - she had a very common name, making it hard to find records on her, and tended to play her cards close to her chest with regards to her background. However, it is known that she was born in late 1865, likely in County Kerry, and emigrated to the United States in early 1867. Both parents died - of consumption, it is believed - before she reached the age of three, and she was taken in by the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum soon after.

"Interviews with surviving residents reveal a familiar character. Martha was rebellious, prone to sudden mood swings, excitable, and an inveterate busybody. But she was also a good student when sufficiently motivated, a good friend to those willing to tolerate her behavior, and possessed of a keen sense of justice and a hatred of bullies. All of these traits would persist throughout her career, and many would serve her well.

"She was expelled from the orphanage at the age of 9 for reasons lost to history, and disappears from the historical record soon after. She does not provably resurface for many years."

-Crystal De Palma, Martha O'Reilly: A Biography (Whitehead-Wood, 1998)
 
"The election of 1865 was a rather dull affair, mainly notable for being the first election officially contested by the Liberal Party. Palmerston moderately increased his majority from 58 to 72. He very nearly did not live to see this - he was 81, after all, and had an attack of poor health shortly after the election - but he recovered, and returned to Parliament in November in better health than he had had in years.

"He was going to need it. Being a staunch opponent of electoral reform, Palmerston would have to contend with reformists within and without his party. One such rival was William Gladstone, his Chancellor, with whom he quarreled on many issues - reform was one particular sticking point, as Gladstone had previously disobeyed Palmerston's directive not to commit to anything. Tensions also rose between Palmerston and the Queen, who found him difficult to work with. While their relationship had improved, Victoria had better relations with people such as Palmerston's Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell.

"Palmerston's health began to decline again in early 1866, and he passed away on March 4th. In his wake, the cracks in the Liberal Party began to show."

-Louise Strong, Mother of Parliaments (Stop The Press, 2014)


"With regards to my childhood - if you will not excise the whole thing and begin at Oxford, as you ought to - there's not much to say. I was born in Morningside on 5 Sept 1865. Grew up, as some might expect, devoutly of the High Kirk.

"My advice to you - scrap the whole thing. Anyone who knows my work knows how I feel about biography, but the sense of false inevitability is magnified a hundredfold by writing on children. Despite the ravings of the behaviorists, we make ourselves - we are not made by our experiences."

-William McLeod, to Walter Beasley (published in The Life of William McLeod, Walter Beasley, Harper and Row, 1933)

"Jamaica was a volatile place in 1865. Though, legally, free blacks could vote, high poll taxes meant that very few could. In addition, various plagues and weather conditions had made conditions much worse for many former slaves and descendants thereof. It's also likely a factor that, less than 1000 kilometers away, the United States had just freed its slaves by war - if they could revolt for greater freedom, then what could Jamaicans do?

"On October 15, two black men whose names have been lost to history were arrested for trespassing on an abandoned plantation. Their trial soon devolved into a riot, which spread across Morant Bay and was put down by police. Arrest warrants were put out the next day, many for people who appear to have, in fact, been uninvolved - or, at least, only indirectly involved.

"Paul Bogle was a preacher who had previously led a protest march. One particularly enterprising policeman went to his house to arrest him before he could find out about the warrant. It is unknown what really happened, but soon Bogle had been shot and killed - it was claimed, for "resisting arrest".

"The city of Morant Bay erupted in rioting for several weeks, and it spread to other cities in Jamaica. The riots eventually were quelled by the military. The then-governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, blamed mulatto Assemblyman and Bogle ally George William Gordon for the riots, but no charges ever materialized. Thus, the Morant Bay Rebellion passed into history..."

-Peter Byrnes, A History of the Ackee Isle (Kingston University Press, 2002)

"About 200 km southeast of Bombay is the village of Kupwar. Kupwar has a curious link to Patkar's later career - it has three main languages, Urdu, Marathi, and Kannada, but those languages, over time, developed into very similar local dialects. Specifically, while their vocabulary remained separate, the grammar of the three languages converged on a single point.

"It is there where Patkar grew up. A Jain by birth, he spoke Kupwar Kannada. When he later went to school in Sangli, he was struck by the differences between his dialect and that of others, an experience which no doubt informed his choice of area of study."

-Maria Iones, The System Of The World: The Life of Anil Patkar (Emegir House, 2010)
 
"On May 1, 1865, the nations of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay signed a treaty establishing a Triple Alliance against Paraguay.

"This requires some explanation. As anybody who watches the news knows, Brazil and Argentina don't have the best relations, and never have. Brazil is the biggest power in South America - Argentina is the second-biggest, and both nations have interests in the Rio de la Plata region. Nevertheless, Paraguay under President Solano Lopez was enough of a threat to both nations (and Uruguay) to, at least temporarily, unite them.

"They would need that unity. Paraguay had won most of the war thus far, and it continued to rack up victories. It won a major naval battle at the Riachuelo in June, boarding many Brazilian ships and destroying a large part of the Brazilian Navy. However, the first major land battle at Yatay in August led to a decisive Allied victory, and the Paraguayan garrison at Uruguiana, Brazil, was overrun in mid-September. Paraguay, however, was not really on the retreat - an army led by General Francisco Resquin pillaged the Argentine province of Corrientes, taking large numbers of cattle to Paraguay.

"By Christmas 1865, cracks were beginning to show in the Triple Alliance. Both Brazil and Argentina regarded themselves as humbugged in the Treaty, with Argentina demanding certain territories disputed with Paraguay, and Brazil seeing the Treaty as the precursor to the outright annexation of Paraguay by Argentina. Meanwhile, Uruguay's pro-Paraguay Blanco Party was becoming restive, even considering that the opposing Colorados had just defeated them earlier that year.

"Meanwhile, President Solano Lopez was steadfastly refusing to switch to a more defensive stance. Paraguay, he thought, could still win the war, but only if it were able to negotiate from a position of strength. However, there was dissent fomenting - dissident Cirilo Rivarola was hard at work building an anti-Solano Lopez opposition in Asuncion, and military leaders such as Pedro Meza, victor at Riachuelo, were growing disenchanted with their leadership.

"Here's something of an interlude: Rodrigo Serafim, a name that will become important a few decades down the line, was born in December, to a father who was currently serving in the Brazilian Navy. As a child, Serafim's greatest ambition was, it is said, following his father there. Who knows what would have happened had he continued on that path?"

-Hube Watson, Paraguayan War (Public World History Source, retrieved 2015)


"Dr. Chang Bin-Hui, also known as Chang Ah and Chang Gwan-ting, was born May 18, 1865, in Kaifeng. The child of a judge, Chang was a cheerful and gregarious child, noted for honesty and intelligence but not for studiousness. He passed the imperial exam by the skin of his teeth, and went to work in the diplomatic corps."

-Shu Chong-Shan, Chang Bin-Hui - The Chinese Brutus (Office of the Executive Biographies of Historical Figures, archived 2003)

"Three years after the birth of Ichiro Yamazaki, the Meiji Emperor came to power. When you think about it, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? The kid grew up while Japan was in the middle of some of the most radical advances ever, anywhere. That must have had - I'm not a behaviorist, but just look at his biography, it must have had one hell of an effect on his views and goals and career."

-Ross Alderton, Nipponese History A (excerpted from lecture, 2016)


I'm going to be doing a slightly different, more chronological, format for the next few updates - let's see how it goes. Thank you all for reading - anybody have suggestions or comments?
 
1866 Part One

-"January 1, 1866, marked the dawn of a new era for the American Negro. Unlike the end of the Civil War or that of slavery, however, this beginning was not at all obvious to any except perhaps a thousand people. That day, Grant University, named for the late General, opened its doors. It was a Houston, Alabama-based university dedicated to the education of freedmen - among the first in the South to allow them through the doors. In the commencement address, then-District Four administrator Adalbert Ames (chosen as a sop to Radicals) stated that "the new South will be built with and by the graduates of this university, and others like it."
"He was not wrong. In its first three classes alone, future United States Representative James Bell, entrepreneurs Jenkins Marshall and Matilda Smythe, and architect Nimrod Paul graduated from Grant. And while Grant University was the first in the South, it was not long before others were established."

-Vonda Lookinland, The Peaceful Crusade: Education in the United States, 1852-1916 (Georgetown University Press, 2006)


-"It is important on this day - one hundred fifty years to the day after the birth of George Srinivasan - that we remember and renew our commitment to being a nation not only for those of us born south of the 22nd parallel, but also those who have arrived on our shores and are striving for a better life. For Srinivasan - in many ways, the father of our nation - was born, not in Durban, but in Madras, and he did not come to South Africa until he was eight."

-Alexander Pukwana, Presidential Address 2016-01-06a (published in Oratorical Archive, 2016)


-"On January 18, an Argentine force under José Murature met Paraguayan forces near Mburucuyá. The battle ended with an Argentine rout, and Paraguay continued its progress through Corrientes Province, eventually crossing into Brazil in early February. This led to Brazilian accusations that Argentina was not pulling its weight in the alliance - or, in the most conspiritarian theories, that Paraguay itself was bankrolling Argentine caudillos in exchange for safe passage. And more and more Brazilians were subscribing to such theories by the day."

-Hube Watson, Paraguayan War (Public World History Source, retrieved 2015)


-"After the passing of the Freedman's Bureau Bill of 1866 on February 15, Congressional Radical Republicans turned their attention back toward Civil Rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 would guarantee some freedoms - citizenship, equal justice, and property rights were all enshrined in law, if not rigorously enforced. But a constitutional amendment would be stronger, especially for the purposes of fighting the "black codes", laws passed by reconstructed Southern governments that reduced the rights of freedmen.
"On February 20, Senator Thaddeus Stevens wrote in a letter to Charles Sumner that the President "would not be opposed to such an Amendment and, in fact, may be in favor of one." Soon after, various proposals for a Fourteenth Amendment began to circulate through Congress."

-Floride Ripley III, Inside The Egg: The Growth of the Radical Party (Bodley Books, 1993)


-"Caroline Baker Day is a holiday observed in several U.S. states, including Pennsylvania, on the last Monday of February. It is observed in memory of American suffragette and founder of the Artemisian Society Caroline Baker, who was born on February 26, 1866 in Philadelphia (see Pennsylvania Personages). 11 states currently observe it, and there have been several attempts to implement it as an official federal holiday."

-Various Authors, Pennsylvania State Handbook (Keystone Press, 2014)

-"Time: 20 Oct, 1784 to 4 Mar, 1866
"Field: Statesman
"Location: Western Wing
"Type of memorial: Grave with bronze statue"

-Unknown author, Lord Palmerston (New Westminster Abbey, retrieved 2016)


-"After I was expelled from Moscow State University, I resigned myself to martyrdom. I believed that the best thing I could do for the Russian proletariat was to destroy the people's totem - the Tsar. To that end, I prepared to shoot him in St. Petersburg in April of 1866.
"As can be seen, I did not make the attempt. Perhaps I was merely a coward, as I cursed myself for many years after. But with the benefit of hindsight, I know now that even had I succeeded I would only have killed a man, and his son Nicholas would have ascended the throne. I know now that in order to bring about real change, it is necessary to kill the idea of Capital itself..."

-Dmitri Karakozov, Letter to the Russian Working Class (Archives of the Museum of the Free World, written 1882)


-"Olivier is the type of man who will build the new Empire. He seems infinitely knowledgeable and resourceful on matters of gears and machines, and he prognosticates on such freely and with much accuracy. It is unsurprising that he grew up in Paris, which seems the font of all technology. I am aware of M. Mullins' new interest, and thus shall disclose that Marcel Olivier was born 22 April 1866."

-Laurence Colbert, letter to Emperor Napoleon IV (published in Celui Qui Est Éclatant, originally written 1891)


-"Since his May 1866 death at the hands of student Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, many have created analyses of how Otto von Bismarck would have changed the world had he survived. One notable treatment of the idea is the 1920s serial Das Reich, which postulated that he would have created a United States of Germany which would have grown to cover most of Europe. While the original German novel was more equivocal on the virtue of the Empire, the American serial - being focused on spy Bob Cass rather than police officer Franz Hoffmann - showed a far more negative view of the USG, which has informed Anglo-American attitudes toward German unification ever since. Another counterfactual, the 1950s Fifty Years In Berlin by the author Mathilde Fertig, shows a Germany locked in stalemate between a Communard North and a corrupt Kowalskiist South. That work, written from an explicitly Marxist perspective, was written to analytically expose the cyclotropes of works such as Das Reich. Most recently, works such as The Storm and the Rainbow and Germany Forever have sought to synthesize both views, though both have been criticized for their own biases."

-Adolph Waters, CounterChronic Archive IPs 1850-1875 (CounterChronic Archive, retrieved 2013)


-"OVEREND, GURNEY, AND COMPANY APOLOGIZE FOR "UNTENABLE" LOAN POLICY
"US MINT DIRECTOR ANNOUNCES HALF-DIME REDESIGN"

-Various, headlines of Mercurial Times (retrieved 2016)


-"The first decisive Coalition victory took place at the Estero Bellaco marshes on May 24. There, Uruguayan President and General Venancio Flores launched a surprise attack against Paraguay's southern borders, and managed to cut deep into the nation. His objective was to seize the Fortress of Humaitá, a Paraguayan military installation often called the Gibraltar of South America.
"In early June, his armies reached the Fortress. Surrounding the Fortress on the land side and backed up by the Brazilian Navy on the Paraguay River, they began a long-term siege. But there were doubts that the Alliance would last as long as the fortress. In Uruguay, pro-Blanco riots were almost a daily occurrence. In Brazil, influential nobles openly opposed the continuing alliance, arguing variously that Argentine forces had hindered the war or that the war itself was pointless. And in Argentina, there was much the same sentiment toward Brazil."

-Hube Watson, Paraguayan War (Public World History Source, retrieved 2015)


-"Most of modern North Dublin dates back no earlier than the 1950s. The Central Square Zone, for example, was not completed until 1972, and the earliest element of it - Kevin Farley Park - was not completed until May of 1966. It officially opened on the centenary of its namesake's birth - the eleventh of June that same year."

-Thom McBride, Tourist's Guide to Dublin (Royal Irish Printing House, 2007)
 
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1866 Part Two

-"It's not a surprise that Alexandra Norwood was born in 1866. So many neo-Romantic poets were born in that general time, a time of calm before storms. What's more of a coincidence - I'm not sure, maybe it's ironic - a day before she was born, the Reform Act of 1866 - which was ultimately doomed - was introduced. Given her later politics, that's quite interesting."

-Prof. Myrtle James, English Neo-Romantic Poetry (excerpted from lecture, 2015)


-"On July 3, 1866, the Reform Act of 1866 was introduced into the British Parliament. The act was of the same strand of thought as the prior Reform Act of 1832 - begun by raving ideologues and propagated by shortsighted mediocrities hoping to be re-elected. Had it passed, the class-restricted electorate of one million or so would have at least doubled. Thankfully for Britain, a faction of Whigs led by Robert Lowe managed to block the passage of the bill. In fact, the premiership of John Russell was thus sunk, as his prioritization of paupers' votes over the late Lord Palmerston's and his own party's wishes meant that he could no longer command the confidence of Parliament. Rather quickly, a government under Disraeli was formed - first as an interim measure, and then through election in September."

-George Gibbs Richardson, The Mob And The Government (self-published, 1914)


-"There have been many times that new communications were first tested. We ascribe significance to the first messages sent - Morse's "What hath God wrought?", Dickson's "This is a new age calling.", Lee's "Good morning, Tucson." But all too often, those messages are arbitrary.
"One example is the first message over the reconnected cable between North America and Europe. It was intended to be "The world is now reunited by the toil of man." However, the unauthorized broadcast "Send my regards to Lilah" was sent twenty minutes earlier. It is unknown who sent it, who Lilah was, or why the broadcast was made - but it is now enshrined alongside all the other messages of note."

-Manfred Petrov, The Transatlantic Cables (New York Museum of Communications, retrieved 2011)


-"The official readmission of Tennessee into the United States was originally slated for mid-July, but it was delayed by political violence. In Nashville, a meeting of a club within the Republican Party whose name has been lost to history - attended by 20 whites and over a hundred Negroes - was attacked by a mob of Confederate veterans on July 18. The club members, largely veterans, fought back, and the violence soon spilled into the streets of Nashville. Reconstruction soldiers were powerless to quell the violence, and when the rioting ended two days later, 131 people - mostly Negro - lay dead.
"Head of District Four Adalbert Ames wrote to Congress, stating that the resources allotted to him were not equal to the task of maintaining peace in the South. But Congress would not approve such an increase until the next session."

-Kai Mulholland, 1866 (Public American History Source, retrieved 2016)


-"After the death of von Bismarck, Germany was in a bit of an unstable position. The Prussians had been caught flatfooted, but still had the advantage in technology and speed. However, Austria had better numbers and would be fighting a defensive war.
"In the end, the war never came to pass. King Wilhelm was fighting his own legislature tooth and nail for every inch of political ground - he simply could not push the war through. Prussian ambitions would have to wait."

-Gerhard Kaminski, One Thousand Years of Tension: A History of the Germans (Harper and Row, 2013)


-"On August 24, the Blanquistas rose. An organized Blanco force, under the command of former President Atanasio Aguirre, rose up and began taking over government buildings in Montevideo.
"Ordinarily, they would have been suppressed rather quickly. But most of the Uruguayan army was otherwise occupied, and the revolt was able to last almost a week before being suppressed. But it was one thing to fight a war in a faraway country - it was quite another to have the war in one's own cities, especially when Uruguay had just ended a civil war.
"The same was happening in Argentina, albeit with less organization and severity. In rural areas across the nation, people rose up against the federal government. While the revolts were much weaker than the ones in Uruguay, they were more widespread and lasted longer, with some lasting into October.
"The governments of Flores and Mitre would continue the war - both due to lack of regard for popular opinion, and Paraguayan threat to their power. But more and more, support for the government leaked away."

-Hube Watson, Paraguayan War (Public World History Source, retrieved 2015)


-"VICENTE IGNACIO JIMENEZ Y MENDEZ
"1 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 1866
"A 9 DE ENERO DE 1929
"EL DEFENSOR"

-Jaime Jimenez, inscribed on gravestone of Vicente Jimenez (National Cemetery of Mexico, retrieved 2014)


-"At the time of Sr. Jimenez's birth, the nation was in a state of war, albeit one that was winding down. France had attempted to install Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, but had just withdrawn support from Imperial forces. Those Imperial forces were on the defensive, and Emperor Maximilian would have to escape with French forces or die.
"After some deliberation, he chose the former. He left via Mazatlan on September 18. So it was that the Second War of Mexican Independence ended, not with the boom of a rifle, but with the splash of a ship."

-Laura Ordonez, Mexican History from Maximilian to Jimenez (Arizona State Press, 2009)


-"I entered the office. The room was not bare like Senator Davidson's - it was the kind of opulent that one gets when the only way one could leave was feet-first. My eyes were drawn to a large painting on the wall. It was a blue-grey sky over a large, languid river - something by Abram Watson, I guessed. A product of the Senator's home state.
""Do you like it?" he said. His voice was vaguely hoarse and sounded tired, but I still felt a jolt of surprise. Senator Timothy Andrews slumped into the chair at his desk.
"I turned to look. He was turning a pen in his hand, swooping it over some documents like a pendulum. "That's a genuine Watson," he said. "From the Arkansas Series. Number Eight, I believe."
"He suddenly stood up and stalked toward the painting, like a museum docent. "Watson was born a year after the War Between The States, y'know. October 13, 1866. Back when the corpses still covered the fields, and the buildings were riddled with bullet holes. Maybe that's why there's nary a sign of man, woman, or child."
"He jabbed at the left bank. "Except here," he continued. "If you look closely enough, there's a wooden cross. I don't know if it was a war death or a peace death, a Northerner or a Southerner or a Westerner. But I can't help but think that it's something Abram saw looking over the deck of his daddy's riverboat. That he saw the dead of the War, and he knew that he'd never forget that."
"I looked closely at the Senator. He looked tired, as if he hadn't slept well in years. At all, perhaps."
"In a much quieter voice, he asked, "Are we ever going to stop fighting the War?"
"I couldn't answer."

-Al Murphy, The Brothers Of Dragons (Bodley Books, 1983)


-"The first postwar election, as expected, saw gains for both parties. After all, the Constitutional Union Party had folded. Nevertheless, much more of those gains went to the Republicans than the Democrats - the Republicans gained 42 seats, and the Democrats only 5. The other two went to a new party called the Conservatives, a Virginia-based party considered a forerunner to the Moderate Democrats."

-Atlas of American Elections 1800-1900 (Tarrant Street, 2015)


-"The most famous act of political violence against Southern blacks is the Battle of Society Street on November 6, 1866. While South Carolina was not yet eligible to send representatives to Congress, the head of District 2 was Q.A. Gilmore. A staunch egalitarianist who had led an integrated group of soldiers against Fort Wagner in the war, Gilmore attempted an elected, albeit only consultative, city council for Charleston.
"The riot started when a mob of KLMs attacked a group of blacks en route to a polling place. Several were alleged members of the Society of the Red Bridge, a secret society formed by freed slave Congo Willis and dedicated to improving the lot of freedmen and previously-free blacks, both through education and through political actions such as strikes and voter organization. The attack was, at least temporarily, stopped by several Army troops.
"A few hours later, Pursuivant of Charleston Amos Whitfield led an army of Knights of Lady Magnolia into central Charleston. The area from Calhoun to Society Street quickly devolved into pitched battle between the KLM and SRB. Both sides were armed, and both sides experienced heavy casualties - over two hundred dead overall.
"Further monuments to the battle can be found as shown on the map below."

-Battle of Society Street (South Carolina State Historical Society, retrieved 2015)


-"COLUMBIA: It wakes me up, you know? I feel a jolt. Every time someone is born who's going to change the world. I don't know the rules or understand the criteria, but the day Abe Lincoln was born I knew.
"ITALIA TURRITA: The last time I felt it was when Carlotta Franco was born. Except then, I thought that she was either going to save me or kill me. Turns out, it was both. If you're feeling the same sense about some newborn, then you're going to want to watch that person like a hawk."

-Daniel Lopez, The National Conversations (transcribed from R12993, March 3, 2014)


-"It's now, in the European calendar, 1890. December 30. I've lived twenty-four years, and I feel that I'll live at least twenty-four more. In that time, I want to see us all free from the spell of the Capitol's empty promises. We all know how much those are worth, and how much more freedom is."

-Lawrence Three Rivers, quoted in Western Herald (January 18, 1890 issue)
 
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