THE LEGACY OF MR. YANCEY

I recently heard a Tea Party politician called a "fire brand". The original definition is a piece of kindling, a piece of burning wood used to start a larger fire. It is a phrase you don't much hear anymore, in part because we are losing contact with the warmth and the agony fire can provide. It can easily consume our homes and our lives.  And thus, a firebrand is also a perfect description of a dangerous politician. And the original firebrand of American politics, the first self described political fire starter, was William Lowneds Yancey.

Yancey’s (above) South Carolina family were strongly pro-Federalist, and at an Independence Day celebration in 1834 the young man told a crowd, “Listen, not then...to the voice which whispers…that Americans…can no longer exist…citizens of the same republic…”  He also championed the Federal Union as editor of the newspaper the “Greenville Mountaineer”  - at least until 1835, when he married an Alabama widow with an Alabama plantation and 35 slaves. The ownership of human beings converted Yancey to pro-slavery. And then the Panic of 1837 wiped out cotton prices and with them William Yancey’s new found fortune and social status. This traumatic event also converted Yancy into a radical.

Yancey went back to the profession that he knew best, and in 1838 he bought a failing newspaper. Needing to make money quickly, Yancey's very first editorial was a passionate defense of slavery. In a followup editorial he even favored reopening the slave trade with Africa, which had been closed down by British Naval patrols since 1819. Yancey publicly opposed the compromises of 1850, which sought to establish a balance between slave states and “free” states within the Union. By now anything short of total domination by slave states was not a victory, in Yancey’s view.

Also in 1838 the true nature of the man was revealed, when an alleged political insult led to a street brawl between Yancey and his wife’s uncle. Yancey shot the man dead on the street. He later justified this hot blooded murder, writing he had been,  “Reared with the spirit of a man…and taught to preserve inviolate my honor…”,  which seems to me like lousy justification for murder. He was convicted of manslaughter but served only a few months before being pardoned. His reputation as a murderous hot head did nothing to prevent him from being elected to first the Alabama legislature and then, in 1844,  to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1858 Yancey wrote what Horace Greeley called, ‘The Scarlett Letter’, in which he invented the term "fire eater" to describe himself.  He pledged that with like minded southerners, he would, “…fire the Southern heart – instruct the Southern mind - …and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into revolution.” This was why Yancey was called the “Orator of Secession”. He worked hard to split his own (Democratic) party on the issue of slavery, believing the election of a Republican (anti-slavery) presidential candidate in 1860 would radicalize the south. He was, in the words of that genius Bruce Catton, “…one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850’s (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but not do anything more than that.”

That the North had twice the population of the South, that the North had ten times the industrial and agricultural capacity, that slavery was already dieing in the South, that the North would not fight to end slavery but would fight to preserve the union, that Lincoln did not believe the Federal government had the power or the right to outlaw slavery, all this meant nothing to Yancey. Yancey wanted secession not despite the destructive effects it would have on the South, but, it seemed, almost because of them. President-elect Abraham Lincoln described the problem of dealing with hot heads like Yancey. "Not only must we do them no harm, but somehow we must convince them that we mean to do them no harm".

Once war broke out Jefferson Davis sent Yancey (above) to England to seek recognition. The Prime Minister eventually met with Yancey, but then asked if he had been serious about his call for a resumption of the slave trade. Yancey denied it, but that question indicated there was no chance that England would recognize the South. Yancey returned home in frustration and defeat. He now served in the Confederate Senate, opposing Davis’ power to draft troops and blocking Davis’ attempt to form a Confederate Supreme Court in the spring of 1863.

It was during debate over the court when Yancey and Benjamin Hill of Georgia got into a brawl on the Senate floor. It was almost a repeat of the 1838 shooting.  When the hot headed Yancy reached for his gun,  Hill grabbed the only weapon he had at hand - an inkstand. He beaned Yancey on the head with it, cold cocking him.. The Confederate Senate censured Yancey and took no action against Hill.

So it seemed that even his political allies and friends did not like William Yancey very much. And this was the man the South had staked its future upon. I believe it was William Yancey whom Jefferson Davis was thinking of when he said the epitaph of the Confederacy should be, “Died of a Theory.’

After censure, Yancey returned to Alabama,  where he died in July of 1863, just 2 weeks before his 49th birthday. He had lived just long enough to see the twin defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, which together sealed the doom of the Confederacy. But even then the fire brands kept fighting.

The product of William Yancy's life’s work was the death of 500,000 young men and perhaps a million civilians - the vast majority of them southerners -  the  total abolition of slavery in America and the ultimate victory of Federalism over State’s Rights. It is an estate today's firebrand's of the right ought to take note of.

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ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER

I learned early in life not to worry about what was going on in the my bedroom closet, because the number of children eaten by monsters hiding in their closets is miniscule when compared to the millions of five year old's consumed by the monsters hiding under their beds. The deciding factor, I decided, was dust bunnies. If your mother was some kind of obsessive compulsive clean freak who vacuumed under your bed ever week (which mine wasn't) not only were you more likely to develop asthma, but the monsters were driven out to look for food, and there you were right over their heads, a nice plump five year old, all tasty and tucked in tight like a burrito. Having a mother who qualified as anything better than a mediocre housekeeper was almost a death sentence. I thought it was just common sense.

Gun control is also common sense. People with guns kill people, that seems clear and obvious. In 2009, the lasts year for which figures are available, almost 30,000 Americans were killed after a gun went off. However most of those (55%) were suicides. And in 2009  the number of people killed when a gun went off accidentally was a grand total of 776. The remaining 12,600 deaths by guns were all homicides, out of a nation of 310 million.  Pardon me, but is controling every single gun really an economically viable approach to solving this problem? Even considering the most horrific scenario, the odds of a child being killed while playing with a gun are about 1 in 5,000. Zero would be far better, but how much money are we willing to spend to preserve the gene pool of saps susceptible to the gun industry's twin marketing ploys of fear and machismo?

Guns are only responsible for 1.2% of all deaths in the United States last year. Five thousand more Americans were killed in automobile accidents. And deaths by gun violence are dwarfed by the number (616,000) who died of heart disease or cancer (563,000) or strokes (135,000). I can not escape the feeling our fears (liberals and conservatives) are focused on media friendly horrors while the monsters hiding behind the dust bunnies are not getting nearly enough attention. You have a 1 in 128 chance of falling off a ladder or a step stool or slipping in your shower in any given year. That means if you live to be fifty, the odds are you are going down.  It turns out the last words you ever hear are less likely to be, “Stick 'em up” than they are “I've fallen and I can't get up”.

Last year more people died of spticemia than from being shot. You have a far better chance (1 in 1,000 ) of dieing in a house fire than being murdered in a home invasion robbery. And yet liberals don't seem willing to admit that gun control is largely a waste of money, while conservatives won't admit that (even in Montana) that guns for personal protection are at best ineffective and at worst arming your assassin. You want to really play Russian roulette? Try short changing the public education system. Oh, wait, we're already doing that.

Consider what happened in 1552, when Henry Pert of Welbeck, Nottinghamshire England was practicing his archery, as all freemen were required to do by law. Henry drew his bow, aimed at his target and released his bolt, only to have it hang fire. The arrow stuck against the bow's shelf. This was so unusual a hang up that Henry turned the bow around to examine the impediment from the other side, and that movement broke the friction and released the arrow. Henry shot himself in the head. With an arrow. He died the next day. A coroner's inquest adjudged Henry's death to be a misadventure. I would agree. But would England have been safer if peasants were required to be licensed before being allowed to possess a bow and arrows? Oh, wait, they were.

Shortly after 1560, deaths by black powder fire arms surpassed deaths by arrow, so perhaps this discussion will be clearer if we consider a firearm tragedy a little closer to our own time. In the summer of 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, Mr. Thomas Mcgeean was arrested and charged with killing Thomas Myers in a bar fight. Mcgeean hired famous lawyer Clement Vallandigham, who was famous because he was a convicted traitor, who had been expelled to the Confederacy during the Civil War. And this was the most public case Vallandigham had gotten in years. On the evening of Friday, June 16 Vallandigham was joined in his hotel room by Ohio Governor Andrew McBurney. At about 9:00 PM, the governor asked Vallandigham if he had any surprises for his closing arguments the next day, and the 53 year old lawyer sprang nimbly to his feet. “I can show you”, he declared.

He jammed a .32 caliber pistol into his pocket and then abruptly yanked it out again, as if in the midst of an argument. As was intended the pistol went off all by itself. As was not intended, it was loaded. Later that night Mr. Vallandigham dictated the following telegram to be sent to his doctor. “I shot myself with a pistol in the bowels. I fear I am fatally injured. Come at once.” The doctor did, but the lawyer died anyway at 9:45 the next morning. Mr. Vallabdigham's sacrifice was not for nought though, as the jury considered it proof of Thomas Mcgeean's innocence. And the meaning here is that all guns are loaded, and so are all lawyers, but loaded guns usually win. Now,  how many gun control arguements mention the late Mr. Vallandigham?

Okay, let us consider a non-violent alternative. In April of 1558 Mr. Thomas Alsopp of Coventry, England, was killed by a falling maypole. Should medieval liberals have pushed for strengthened regulations on maypole erections? If they had tried, I'm sure the maypole industry would have been eager to remind people that maypoles were part of the cultural heritage of every Englishman and woman. But were maypole safety regulations (fighting and defending them) worth the effort, as opposed to, say, discouraging witch burning? Just because the 16^th century lame stream media (town cryers) could gin up profits by playing off alcoholic circular en dehors enthusiasts and rigid anti-circumspection-ists, were their profits (if any) worth the loss of civil focus?

Several years ago a Red Cross report on Kenya compared the death rates from AIDs there to the “equivalent to two 747 jets crashing every day.” Listen, The Republic of Kenya wishes it had two 747's crashing there every day. Every hotel room in Nairobi would be filled with media big foots, eager to get their faces smeared with as much blood as possible. It would be big news, lots and lots of big news. Money would be pouring in and there would be political pressure to design safer airplanes, better air traffic control. And any idiots who wanted to waste time claiming all that twisted aluminum and gore was God's will or divine punishment would be politically isolated and ignored. Kenya's tragedy is that AIDs victims die individual deaths, 150,000 individual deaths last year.  Just like the victims of gun violence. But many, many more.

America does not have a gun control problem. We have a mind control problem. And as long as there is a profit to be made from our National Attention Deficit Disorder, the news media will continue to be obsessed with news that has not been new for decades.

Think we should tell them?

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THE SECRET LIFE OF CAPITALISM Part Four

I would say that William Ralston (above) had scaled the summit of delusion. In order to stand atop the very precipice of fallacy, this founder of the Bank of California, owner of much of the Comestock Silver Lode and respected member of the monetary elite, had sold $10 million in shares in his new diamond company in a single morning, and had then, with the ruthlessness efficiency he was respected for, had duped the two Kentucky country bumpkins into selling him their lucky find for little more than a half a million dollars. And having done all of that, he had now ascended his ultimate tower of phantasm. He was now poised to come plummeting to earth.

It is easy to see how Ralston had reached his precarious perch. The entire nation was tripping on inflated  dreams, even if they weren't their own. The Alta California newspaper reported, “We have seen a report written by Henry Janin, a mining engineer of an established reputation, who had visited the mines, examined them and reported favorably on them. He has accepted the position of superintendent and has expressed the opinion that with twenty-five men he will take out gems worth at least $1,000,000 a month...Most of the diamonds found by Mr. Janin are small, weighing a karat. One obtained previously weighed over 100 karats... Some of the sapphires are as large as pigeon eggs....The diamond mines are the property of the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company, which has...100,000 shares of stock and they have been selling at $40, making the present market value of the whole property $4,000,000.”

In fact there was no 100 karat diamond. Janin was not the new superintendent. In fact that gentleman had recently sold his 1,000 shares in the claim for $40,000, to maintain his expensive lifestyle. Still Janin had faith in the venture, so perhaps the first man to realize that Raliston was actually a man on the verge was Mr. Clarence King (above). But then it was easy for Clarence because he had no money invested in the mountain. As a trained and thus disinterested geologist, Clarence King knew from the second he saw those lurid headlines that the diamond mountain was a fraud. He knew that diamonds and sapphires are never found together, if for no other reason than that diamonds are formed at temperatures and pressures which would crush and melt sapphires. Proof of this, common knowledge even in 1872, was that you could cut a sapphire with a diamond, but not the reverse. Only later would it be established that diamonds were made of carbon while sapphires were corundum, a form of aluminum.  But more than that, Clarence King knew the area around the alledged diamond mountain as few other people in the world could.

What made the 30 year old Professor King such an expert was that he had just completed (pun alert!) his groundbreaking work on the 40^th Parallel Survey. This massive seven volume catalog of the natural resources made accessible by the transcontinental railroad, had only been completed in September of 1872. As its centerpiece it produced a topographical geological map centered on the 40^th east /west parallel, and covering 50 miles on either side, on a scale of four miles to an inch. And nowhere on this map or in its thousands of pages of supporting geological and biological compendiums, was there even a hint of such a place as Ralston's diamond mountain.

Over dinner at the Pacific Union Club in San Francisco (above), King carefully grilled Henry Janin about the claim. He was stunned to discover that even now Janin was not sure of the exact location of the mine. “I was taken a long distance on a train, about 36 hours. Then we left the railroad at some small station where there was no attendant. We were brought out of the station blindfolded and put on horses” For two days, explained Janin, they had ridden with the sun in their faces.

The consulting mining engineer described the claim itself as a curious place, “...a desert with a conical but flat topped mountain rising right out of it, and on the mountain you find everything from garnets to diamonds!” Familiar with the country, King realized that 36 hours on the train would have taken Janin into eastern Utah territory or Western Wyoming territory. And the sun in his face for two days, meant Janin had been ridding south from the railroad. After lunch, King consulted his maps.

And 36 hours later he arrived at Rawlings Springs, Wyoming. He hired an aging German emigrant prospector and together they set off for a mountain he had surveyed just the year before, in what is today northwestern Colorado. On November 2, 1872 they crossed a creek with a sign marked, “Water Rights – Henry Janin”. Immediately, King began to set up camp while the prospector went off exploring. King was hardly finished pitching the tents when the old man came back holding a gem. He proudly announced, “Look, Mr. King. This diamond field not only produces diamonds but cuts them also!”

The two men working together quickly became adept at finding gems. They had only to look for tool marks on the surface, to find a diamond pushed into the ground, or a sapphire jammed into a crevice in the rocks. And indeed, many of the gems showed signs of having been worked over by lapidary tools. It appeared that the great diamond mine had been “salted”.

The term was an invention of the colonial American frontier. At a time when salt was vital in the preservation of food, poor farmland could still be sold at a premium if the seller poured salt down a well on the property, to give the impression of a “salt lick” or mineral deposits just below ground level. Gold and silver claims were even more easily salted, with a shot gun loaded with the appropriate mineral dust. But salting this diamond mine had required a more labor intensive approach.

A week of examining the property provided King with all the evidence he would need. On the the sixth of November the two men headed back toward the railroad, barely 20 miles away. (It seemed Mr. Harpending had actually heard the Union Pacific engine's whistle, after all!) King did not wait for a scheduled stop at Rawlings Spring, but flagged down a passing train, parted company with the sharp eyed prospector and composed a quick cable to William Ralston, which he dispatched at the next station. The message was short and sour. The great North American Diamond Mine was a hoax.

The sound reverberating out of San Francisco that day was of a hundred egos suddenly deflating - one in particular. How had such wise men been so completly dupped?

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TOO MANY GOVERNORS

I am surprised that nobody in Nebraska got shot during the winter of 1890-91. In fact, a few people may have; probably it just never made the papers. The problem was politics. On Tuesday November 4, 1890, the Republicans and Democrats spilt seven seats in the state senate and forty-six seats in the house. But every other seat, eighteen in the senate and fifty-four in the house, went to a third party, the so called “hogs in the parlor”, the People’s Independent Party. And the presence of that third party set the entire state on fire.

This alliance of destitute farmers was the political response to decades of corruption and corporate influence peddling, and a drought not equaled until the dust bowl of the 1930's. According to one Republican observer the "hayseeds" envisioned the world as a combination of a Victor Hugo plot and a Baptist revival meeting. And indeed, when the Nebraska legislature convened in joint session in January of 1891 things went from the melodramatic to the down right absurd.

To begin with, the new speaker of the House, farmer Sam Elder, decided he was going to bypass the acting President of the Senate, Republican George Meiklejohn, who was also the lieutenant-governor, and preside over both houses of the legislature all by himself. His plans for a grand investigation of election fraud and a remaking of state government were derailed when Meiklejohn grabbed the gavel off the podium and refused to return it. There was a shoving, grasping cat fight for the precious totem, which Meiklejohn eventually won. From this point the business of government in Nebraska got very noisy and ground to a halt, all over the issue of the certification of the new governor.

As these things were normally counted, the clear loser had been the Republican candidate L.D. Richards, who received just 68,878 votes. The Democrat, James Boyd, received 71,331 votes, and was, according to county election officials state wide, the winner. But Speaker Elder was certain the actually winner had been John Powers, of  his People’s Independent Party. Officially Powers had received 70,187 votes, making him second by a mere 1,144 votes. But Elder believed with good reason there had been 2,000 fraudulent votes cast for Boyd in Douglas County, centered on Omaha, and Elder was pushing for an immediate investigation.

Neither side dared to adjourn. Elder presided from the podium, calling on speakers and announcing votes, while Meiklejohn sat at the clerk’s desk, doing the same, but for other people. Nobody got anything done because nobody could hear anybody else. Sometime after midnight, Elder ordered the doors locked and told the sergeant-at-arms to admit no one without a written pass - from him. Meanwhile, the presumed victor, Boyd, requested an immediate hearing before the state supreme court to require Speaker Elder to immediately certify his election as governor.

Boyd (above) asked for a writ of mandamus (“…a court order that requires another court, government official, public body, corporation or individual to perform a certain act”). His attorney argued his case before three judges of the Nebraska state Supreme Court, and a hearing room crowded with armed angry spectators. After the hearing it was expected that the judges would retire to consider the arguments.

Instead the justices held an immediate huddle and Chief Justice Cobb announced that the weighty issues of freedom and public order and good government were irrelevant. The court had decided that certifying election results was simply a clerical duty and not a matter of choice. Cobb signed the writ of mandamus on the spot. The spectators were so stunned they were frozen. And that was probably the only reason why none of freshly disenfranchised voters in the room started shooting.

The sheriff of Lincoln County, surrounded by deputies, smashed down the locked doors of the state legislature, charged to the front of the chamber and forcefully handed the writ to Speaker Elder. And to everyone’s surprise, Speaker Elder did as the law required. John Boyd was officially declared the official governor of the state of Nebraska. “Thus”, said Judge Bayard Paine forty-five years later, “tragedy was averted in Nebraska statecraft.” Instead, tragedy was converted into low comedy.

The outgoing governor, Republican John Thayer (above), was the most hated man in Nebraska, the man whose behavior over the past year had been most responsible for the defeat of the Republican Party in the past election. And he now refused to surrender his office, saying he would “hold on to the chair, the seat, and the office of Governor until the cows come home.” While the legislature bickered downstairs, Thayer barricaded himself in the governor’s offices. He called up a company of State militia and local police to stand guard. Having finally taken the oath, Boyd moved into other offices in the state house and dispatched the Lincoln County sheriff (again) to take procession of the executive suites. But this time the sheriff ran up against a militia and the local cops, who refused to surrender. Fist fights broke out.

 On January 10th it finally occurred to Captain Rhody, in command of Thayer’s little army of 25 men, that he was out on a limb on by himself. Rhody announced to Thayer that “I saluted you for the last time.” He did, and then marched his little army back to their barracks. Abandoned, Thayer surrendered the offices, and Boyd moved in. But Thayer was far from ready to give up.

He hired his own attorney and on January 13th 1891, appealed to the state Supreme Court. His argument was inventive; John Boyd was not qualified to be governor because he was not an American citizen because he had not been born in America. And that made John Thayer the original “birther”.

Indeed Boyd had been born in Ireland in 1834. His family had emigrated to America when he was 14. His father had begun the naturalization paperwork in 1849 but events, both personal and political, had intervened. In 1856 the Boyd family had moved to Nebraska territory and had become involved in business and local politics. And then the Civil War and broken out.

The Boyd family were still residents in 1867 when Nebraska was admitted to the union. But Boyd’s father had never completed the naturalization paperwork. Ergo, argued ex-Governor Thayer, John Boyd was not qualified to be governor of Nebraska. And on May 5th, 1891 the State Supreme Court agreed with him. Boyd was out and ex-governor Thayer was Governor again. The Nebraska governor's office was beginning to resemble a game of musical chairs.

What Thayer had done was a desperate power grab and doomed to failure, if for no other reason than it assured that any Irish Republicans in Nebraska were not likely to vote Republican again in the near future.

More immediatly, Boyd appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their decision was announced by Chief Justice Fuller: “Manifestly the nationality of the inhabitants of territory acquired by conquest or cession becomes that of the government under whose dominion they pass…The judgment of the supreme court of Nebraska is reversed…” It was that troublesome old 14th Amendment again, this time upheld in an 8 to one decision, issued on January 2nd, 1892. Boyd resumed his office on February 3rd of 1892.

But, since the Governor of Nebraska served just a two year term, the antics of Governor Thayer and his political allies had cut Boyd’s term in half. And that is the kind of political victory that only makes sense when figured by the quarterly profit and loss statements of a corporation, like the big railroads in the 19th century, or the big banks in the 21st century. And that kind of corporate influence left the citizens of Nebraska up the creek without a paddle for yet another generation.

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