History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
The Foreign Office had a long tradition of regarding a strong Russian Empire as ‘not in the British interest,’ but John Bright saw only mutual benefit in it.
In January 1878, John Bright MP addressed a meeting in Birmingham on the subject of Russia. Russia and Turkey were at war over Turkey’s treatment of Christians in the Balkans, and there were those in Parliament who said it was ‘in the British interest’ to support Turkey and clip Russia’s wings; but Bright thought that Russian aggression was a Foreign Office myth.
In 1877, John Bright told a meeting of the Manchester India Association that he had wanted to put India on the path to independence nearly twenty years before.
In 1858, government of India’s various Presidencies in Madras, Bombay, Bengal and other centres was taken out of the hands of the East India Company and vested in the Crown — or as John Bright put it, ‘a Governor-General and half-a-dozen eminent civilians in the city of Calcutta.’ Nineteen years later, he told a meeting in Manchester that he had wanted it done very differently.
Richard Cobden realised that John Bright, overcome with grief after seeing his young wife die, needed something worthwhile to live for.
The Corn Laws of 1815, designed to protect English farmers from overseas competition, drove up the price of basic foods and plunged working families into poverty. John Bright, then working in his father’s Rochdale mill, joined Richard Cobden’s repeal campaign on September 10th, 1841, as he sat mourning his young wife Elizabeth, ‘lying still and cold in the chamber above us’.
When Malcolm III, King of Scots, met Princess Margaret of Wessex, he knew at once that he had found a woman capable of setting an example to a whole nation.
Following the Norman Invasion in 1066, Prince Edgar, whose claim to the throne was at least as strong as William of Normandy’s, allied with King Sweyn II of Denmark (who also had a decent claim) to unseat William. However, the crafty William bought Sweyn off at the last moment, leaving Edgar and his sisters little option but to flee into Scotland.
Following a decisive victory in the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln urged his supporters to make sure that liberty’s advantage was not squandered.
The Battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. On November 19th, US President Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the battlefield cemetery. He rightly guessed that the battle had turned the American Civil War; but in thinking that ‘the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here’ he was touchingly mistaken.
Two years into the American Civil War, the Union army responded to a dispiriting defeat at Chancellorsville with a decisive and historic victory at Gettysburg.
The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. Yet it came hard on the heels of a bruising defeat at the hands of General Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville, and the great issues that hung upon the American Civil War were, for a few days, very much in the balance.