History of the USA
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History of the USA’
Two years into America’s Civil War, cotton workers in Manchester defied current opinion among politicians and the press, and pledged their support to the Union.
Two years into the American Civil War (1861-65) many in England believed that economic self-interest may yet lie with the South. Nevertheless, the day before Lincoln’s historic declaration of emancipation on January 1st, 1863, cotton workers defied an urgent editorial in the Guardian and met at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall to approve a message of support for the Union.
In replying to a letter of support from Manchester’s cotton workers, US President Lincoln showed how deeply touched he had been.
Washington’s embargoes on cotton from the American South during the Civil War (1861-1865) hit the British cotton industry hard. Nonetheless, on New Year’s Eve, 1862, the day before the historic Emancipation Proclamation took effect, workers defied scare-mongering politicians and journalists to gather in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, and pledge their support to Abraham Lincoln. On January 19th, he replied.
On July 4th, 1776, a group of American colonists gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to present delegates of the Thirteen Colonies with a historic document.
At a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4th, 1776, Thomas Jefferson and four colleagues presented to the Second Continental Congress a document setting out why the Thirteen American Colonies held themselves to be “absolved from all allegiance to the British crown”. It marked the birth of the United States of America, grudgingly recognised by King George III in 1783.
French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the USA in the 1830s, and found a degree of contentment that he rarely found in Europe.
Alexis De Tocqueville went to the USA in 1831, to see for himself how the former colony’s experiment in Constitutional liberty, now almost fifty years old, was working out. His own experience in Europe was that no government could hold back the destructive forces of democracy once they had been unleashed, but he found that in America some of those forces were kept under restraints stronger than any law.
John Adams, the second President of the USA, told army officers in Massachusetts that the Constitution he had helped to draw up could not guarantee them liberty.
On October 11th, 1798, President John Adams told officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade that the United States’ historic Constitution (which he had helped to write) was never about centralised Power. Unlike politicians over in Europe, he said, he would not promise to conjure up order out of a selfish, thoughtless and pleasure-seeking society.
Shortly before the American Civil War, an attack by pro-slavery militants on the city of Lawrence prompted John Brown to try to clean up Kansas.
As the United States of America lurched towards the Civil War, the State of Kansas found herself torn into two. Two rival ‘governments’ sprang up, each with its own capital, one for a Slave-owning state and one for a Free state. In 1861, Kansas declared for the Union but it had been a close-run thing and some of her sons had not been too nice in their methods.