BLAMING GOD

 

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

KJ Bible, Genisus 2:17

I admit it may be unfair to blame 53 year old Boston Puritan, Increase Mather for the 4,000 deaths in Jamaica - unlike the 25 "witches he helped murder in Salem.   But he was so damn certain in his ignorance, that he lacked any compassion which might have honored those 4,000 lives.  

An Anglican minister and an Anglican preacher, "The Godly" Increase always pontificated from a pulpit standing on solid moral bedrock - even as the sand beneath his feet liquefied and swallowed his soul.  The Reverend Mather was certain, for example, that what Yehaweh said about the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 was "All of those people were sinners and deserved their fate!"  And that seems a little arrogant, doesn't it?  Considering he did not actually know any of those people.

"God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand."

Richard Feynman Nobel winning American physicist

As the 17 million square miles of the South American Tectonic Plate drove west at just over an inch a year, it elbowed aside the 1 million square miles of the Caribbean plate, shoving it at half an inch a year into the southeastern edge of 29 million square miles of the North America plate. These large collisions accommodated the curvature of the earth by cracking like a plate of glass dropped onto a concrete slab. For example, Cuba rested firmly on the North American Plate. 

But just off its southern shore was the 25,000 foot deep and 250 mile long Cayman trench, which was consuming the 73,000 square miles of the Conave micro-plate, driving north.  Ninety miles to the south the island of Jamaica is thus being shoved inexorably toward that trench, until, eventually, it will be consumed by it. But in the meantime Jamaica was also being pulled apart by the Walton fault, moving west at half an inch a year, connected by transverse faults to the Plantain Garden Fault, slipping west at a full inch a year and running 300 miles from the island of Hispaniola to the once volcanic Blue Mountains in Jamaica's interior. As the waxing quarter moon set on the evening of 6 June, 1693, the delicate balance of all this intricate geological machinery was on the verge of snapping.

"Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah...Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities..."

KJ Genesis 19:24 - 25

Dawn of Wednesday, 7 June, 1692 greeted Port Royal - the second largest English city in the New World and "the richest and wickedest city in the world"- with the continued promise of unending wealth. 

Approaching Jamaica from the Caribbean Passage any Spanish or French threat had to first navigate the mile wide entrance between the eastern heights of Salt Pan Hill, defended by a row of cannon called the 12 apostles, and the 14 guns in the star shaped brick edifice of Fort Charles, perched on western tip of the 18 mile long sand spit called the Palisadoes.

Protecting the 60 full rigged transports, slave ships, schooners and cutters anchored safely in Cagway Bay this morning were the additional 26 cannon in Fort James and Fort Carlisle.  

Blocking any land assault across the narrow neck of the Palisadoes was Fort Rupert with another 22 guns. And for good measure defending the south sea side of Port Royal were the 26 cannon of Fort Morgan, named to honor the 4 year deceased Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica and infamous privateer, Sir Henry Morgan.

"Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped."

William H. Bragg 20th century British Nobel physicist, chemist, and mathematician.

During the first 50 years of English occupation, Jamaica's income had come from stealing what the Spanish had stolen from the Aztecs and Incas - in other words, piracy. But within the last decade the economics had shifted. Jamaica's Royal Governor, the Earl of Inchiquin, was no longer the unquestioned lord, and the dominant arm of the British government was no longer the Royal Navy, Both of those powers had been superseded by  the corporate-like Board of Trade and Plantations. 

Civilian lawyer and businessman John White, the new Vice President of the Jamaica Council, was the regional head of operations, directly responsible for the 4,000 Europeans in Port Royal that June morning, men, women and children, who were all employees one way or another, of the Board of Trade. There were also 2,000 to 2,500 Africans - but  almost all of them were not people, but property

"Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire."

KJ Bible Judges 1:7

Port Royal was a company town - a slice of London transplanted to the Caribbean, 2,000 Tudor brick and mortar multi-story homes and shops tightly packed into 51 sandy acres between the sea and Cagway Bay, where Puritans, Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews and Muslims labored with one purpose - to get rich. The venal sins of the sailors and pirates were tolerated since they were making so many so wealthy. 

In the words of observer Edward Ward, Port Royal was “...as sickly as a hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot as Hell, and as wicked as the devil”.  Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck saw, "The parrots of Port Royal gather to drink...ale with just as much alacrity as the drunks that frequent the taverns that serve it."  

As Rector of St. Peter's Anglican Church near the junction of the High and Lime Streets, the Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Heath was God's official representative to this den of hypocrisy. Before ten this morning he walked the few yards south to the Merchants' Exchange, to have coffee with Vice President White. The Reverend would later credit Mr. White's lively conversation with delaying his luncheon date with the garrison's commander, Captain  Rudend,  and his family, on Queens Street along the harbor front - and thus saving Dr. Heath's life.

"I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance."

Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan author

Some 20 minutes before noon, on 9 June, 1692, the rocks which restrained one of the faults to the north or west of the Jamaica snapped.  As it did the primary compressing wave of energy raced away from the epicenter of the break at 4 miles a second, like a giant hammer, slamming each successive molecule of rock into the next. Just behind it came the Secondary wave, "...perpendicular to the direction it is traveling" and moving at 3 miles a second. The combination of the 2 waves produced the shaking, which lasted for about 4 minutes - estimated as the equivalent of a magnitude 7.3 on the standard Richter scale. 

In that brief time the over 4 million square miles of Jamaica jerked a foot or more closer to Cuba, dropping parts of the southern shore of the island as much as thirty feet. A pocket watch found on the harbor bottom 260 years later recorded the time of doomsday as 11:43am.

"Let death steal over them...for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart."

KJ Psalm 55:15

Seated in the tavern, Emmanuel Heath and Vice President White felt the earth begin to "heave and roll". "Said I, “Lord, Sir, what’s this?” He replied, very composedly, “It is an earthquake, be not afraid, it will soon be over.” But...(when) we heard the church and tower fall...we ran to save ourselves." In other words, they did the one thing you should never do in an earthquake - run outside where your head has no protection and all the heavy things are falling to the ground. 

Another survivor described the scene which greeted him. "The sand on the street rose like waves at sea, lifting up all persons that stood upon it....And at the same instant water rushed in...Some were seen catching hold of beams and rafters of houses."

"It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law."

Franz Kafka, 20th century writer

It seems likely John White was hit by some of the falling debris, and in a panic the Reverend abandoned him, running south for the safety of Fort Morgan. But as he reached it, "...I saw the earth open and swallow up a multitude of people, and the sea mounting in upon us over the fortifications." The sea did not so much rush in as rise up from the sand." The vibrations released the water table bonded to the sand grains a few feet below the surface, which could no longer support weight. Forts, buildings, animals and people simply sank into the quicksand. 

A Frenchman, Lewis Galdy, was swallowed by it.  But as the street that swallowed him dropped thirty feet into the harbor, his buoyancy sent him bobbing to the surface of what was abruptly the enlarged bay. Half an hour later he was picked up by a rescue boat.

"For, behold, the LORD cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain."

KJ Bible Isaiah 26:21

"Careened" at the docks - tilted so barnacles could be scrapped off her elm wood bottom - the HMS Swan, a 74 foot long fifth rate warship, snapped her lines and plowed into the sinking homes and shops along Queen street, perhaps killing Captain Rudend and his family.  In a primeval fit, the Reverend Heath chose now to run home. "The houses and walls fell on each side of me; some bricks came rolling over my shoes...When I came to my lodging, I found all things in the order I had left them." Emmanuel Heath was lucky. His home was one of the 10% of buildings not destroyed, in the one third of Port Royal not swallowed by the bay.  He lived. His breakfast companion, John White, would also survive the shaking, but die of his injuries a few hours later.

"Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things."

Richard Dawkins, 20 century British evolutionary biologist

There were 2,000 dead in 4 minutes, and another 3,000 who would die over the following year of broken bodies, hearts and minds. The brick forts of James and Carlisle disappeared into Cagway Bay.  Fort Rupert flooded. The least damaged was Fort Morgan. More morbid, among the 33 acres dropped into the harbor was the graveyard, leaving the recently dead floating with their ancestors. Quaker John Pike later wrote his brother, “Great men who were so swallowed up with pride...now lie stinking upon the water, and are made meat for fish and fowls of the air” - and the target for human scavengers, “...their Pockets picked, their fingers cut off for their rings, their gold buttons taken out of their shirts."

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”

KJ Isaiah 66:24

The survivor Samuel Bernard dealt directly with the trauma. "We shall be unworthy of God’s mercies if we be not by His judgments taught to learn righteousness.” John White's survivors on the Council declared themselves "an instance of God Almighty's severe judgment." But distance made the ignorant more certain, and mercenary. Wrote one distant observer, "A God of limited patience had punished a wicked people." 

London Presbyterian minister John Shower used the deaths as pulp for his first publication: "Practical Reflections on the late Earthquakes in Jamaica”, blaming the disaster on "Atheism, and infidelity...and barefaced deism..." He denounced those who thought there must be a rational cause for such horrors, because, "...the Hand of God is not to be overlooked in such things", and warned his readers, "If you do not truly repent...your judgment is near, your destruction is at hand." 

And in the largest English city in the new world, Boston, the Reverend Cotton Mather wrote to his uncle John, in terms that were almost jubilant. "Behold, an accident speaking to all our English America." He was looking for a victory, as that summer his father had executed five "witches" in Salem, but those executions would only lead to more witch trials.

"For the belief in a single truth is the root cause for all evil in the world."

Max Born, Nobel physicist and mathematician

Increase Mather was busy that summer, and would not set down his reaction to the Port Royal Quake for a decade - by which time his reputation was suffering because of the witch hunts. But disaster tales are always popular, and time had moderated the old Puritan's views. He now acknowledged  "...many times, earthquakes proceed from natural causes."  

But then he asserted they were "...usually, a sign that men have sinned, and that God is angry.  Certain it is, that if men had never sinned, they had never been terrified with earthquakes...Whole towns...with all the people in them...(have) gone down alive into the pit.  Would such a thing be, if God were not infinitely displeased by the sins of men?"

"Early the next morning Abraham...looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah...and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace."

KJ Genisus 19: 27-28

But Increase, now over 60 years old, was just warming up, reminding his readers, "...Was it not so with the Sinners in Sodom? An earthquake swallowed up their houses, and all the bodies in them. But what became of their souls? Does not the scripture say, that they are suffering the Vengeance of eternal fire?...Shall we that call our selves Christians be worse than the heathen Romans, of whom it is said, that when they saw the earthquake they feared greatly...have we forgotten what God did in Jamaica ...  when two thousand people (whites and blacks) perished by the earthquakes there."

"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

J.R.R. Tolkien writer

The people of Jamaica did not forget. Almost half a century after the earthquake, in solid ground across the bay in the new city of Kingston, they buried the mortal remains of Lewis Galdy. He had experience a religious rebirth after the earth spit him back up, but had used his time not to preach faith but live it, for better and for worse.  He remained a businessman, and in Jamaica. If he left little of value behind, that was not an act of God, it was an act of Galdy.  And when he died at 80 years of age - 16 years after and ten years older than Increase Mather when he died - Lewis's tombstone would read, "Beloved by all and much lamented at his Death".  If he was, he was more loved by his peers, than bitter old Increase Mather.

"Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone."

KJ Bible John 8:7

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SLEEP TIGHT AMELIIA EARHART

 

This mystery began in broad daylight,  on Tuesday, 2  July 1937, when the Lockheed Electra lifted off the grass airfield (above) before climbing eastward out over the Solomon Sea.  Almost 90 years later, we still don't know what happened to either the plane or it's pilot,  Amelia Earhart,

The Electra 10 - E,  identification NR 16020 - serial number 1055 -  was built specifically for Earhart. The standard Lockheed Electra 10 had three years of dependable service, a 55 foot wingspan and was powered by 2 Pratt and Whitney 9 cylinder Wasp Junior engines with two 9 foot bladed Hamilton Standard propellers.     

As modified for her "round the world flight" it carried 1,151 gallons of fuel in ten tanks in the wings and fuselage - directly behind the cockpit. It also carried 80 gallons of lubricating oil for the engines in four tanks.   

A single Western Electric model 13C radio transmitter and a Model 20B receiver (above) were installed above the fuel tanks, with a navigators work station created mid-fuselage behind the fuel tanks.  

With a full fuel load the Electra 10-E would become airborne at 177 miles an hour, and have an maximum estimated range of 4,500 miles, at 5,000 feet.  As the NR 16020 lifted off the ground in Lae, it had 181 hours and 17 minutes successful and safe flying time.  

Five hours after take off the thirty year old aviatrix reported back to Lea, via her 50 watt transmitter, that she was crossing 150 degrees east longitude, and 7 degrees south of the equator at 10,000 feet. 

The Electra's estimated ground speed was 140 knots (160 mph), the air temperature was 90 degrees Fahrenheit and visibility limited only by the humidity. She signed off with her call sign, KHAQQ. Three hours later, in the dark and right on time, Earhart's Electra flew over the United States Navy tug, Ontario. But it was here that things started to go wrong.

The tug was right where it was supposed to be, at 165 degrees 20 minutes east, and 2 degrees 59 minutes south, approximately the half way point for this leg of Earhart's round the world flight. The seas were calm, and the Ontario reported visibility of at least 40 miles, cloud cover of only 20 - 40%. But Amelia was expecting the Ontario to broadcast the letter “N” in Morse code (dash -dot) for five minutes, beginning ten minutes after the hour, on 400 kilocycles. However the Ontario was instead broadcasting the letter” A” (dot-dash), every hour on the half hour, at 7500 kilocycles. They never contacted each other, but at 0800 GMT, Amelia reported back to New Guinea, that she was at 12,000 feet, on time and on course.

Despite the miscue, we know Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on time and close to being on course because they overflew the tramp steamer Mytlebank, about a hundred miles northeast of the Ontario. The third mate heard the plane to his starboard, at just about the same time the ship's radio operator heard Amelia broadcast, “Ship in sight, ahead”. That encounter, ten hours out of New Guinea, had Earhart and Noonan flying into the rising sun of 2 July, 1937, well over half way toward their destination across the international date line, where it was still Tuesday morning on tiny Howland Island.

It was a curious target. The kidney shaped coral atoll was just a mile long and about a half mile wide. It's highest point was just nine feet above the surf. To spot it from the air, you had to practically be parked on its crushed coral runway.  But it was United States territory, its bird droppings mined by American nitrate companies since the middle of the 19th century. 

Howland was occupied in three month rotations by four students of an Hawaiian boys school, and they called their tiny collection of huts Itascatown, after the 250 foot long Coast Guard cutter that supplied the outpost. And it was the USGC Itasca, anchored just outside the western reef , commanded by Walter Thompson, that was supposed use it's two hundred foot mast to make radio contact and guide Earhart's plane to a safe landing.

The sun rose over Howland Island at 17:15 GMT. Forty-five minutes later, with Amelia reporting she was within 100 miles of the Itasca, radioman 3rd class William Galten heard Amelia' asking, “Please take bearings on us and report in half an hour."  It was a simple request, but Galten would be unable to comply, because the Itasca's CGR-321 transmitters did not have any directional capability or meters on 3105 frequency to indicate her signal strength.

Rather, Galten estimated the Electra's distance based on the volume of Amelia's voice, which Galten labeled as a four out of a possible five. She was close, but it was purely a subjective measurement. To get direction to her signal and thus a better distance, required the use of a separate unit on the Itasca's bridge, operated by radio man third class George Thompson. But he found Amelia's broadcasts were too short to give him a fix.  At its core, the problem was not merely technical, but generational.

The established military and shipping industry, traveling at ten to twenty miles an hour, still relied on Morse code, because it provided longer range at lower power (and lower frequencies). But aviators, like Earhart, traveling at over a hundred miles an hour, preferred the shorter range of higher frequency voice communications. This mismatch manifested itself when Galten was forced to tell Amelia, “Cannot take bearing on 3105 (kilocycles)...Please send on 500 (kilocycles) or do you wish take bearing on us?” At 18:58 GMT Amelia asked Itasca to send signals at 500, but three minutes later radioed, “We received your signals but unable to get a minimum. Please take bearing on us and answer 3105 with voice.” But he had just told her, he could not do that!

Nothing was working, and panic began to mount on the Itasca. Forty minutes later Earhart was reduced to telling Galten, “We are on the line 157, 337. Will repeat this message on 6210”. Now she was introducing a third, even higher frequency, on which the Itasca equipment could not broadcast voice. The frustration was palpable. One five seven and three three seven were north, south compass headings, and both passed directly over Howland Island. Amelia seemed so close and yet out of reach.

Captain Thompson (above) felt the urge to do something, to move. At 22:10 GMT, when Thompson figured Amelia's fuel would have run out, Itasca raised anchor and made steam toward the north and west, where Thompson thought there was enough cloud cover that might have hidden Howland Island from Amelia's eyes. But after three fruitless days, he switched his search to the north and east of Howland Island. 

When that also failed, the battleship USS Colorado (BB-45) was ordered to take over the search, using her Vought 0S2U Kingfisher search planes.

Joined by biplanes from the aircraft carrier Lexington, and even two Japanese ships, the searchers spent 19 days covering some 94,800 square miles in a surface search, and another 167,481 square miles by air. It was not until a week after Amelia disappeared that a search plane from the Colorado, piloted by Lt. John Lambrecht, flew over a small island on the 157 line, 360 miles south east of Howland. The pilot reported, “signs of recent habitation were clearly visible” despite the island having been uninhabited for forty years. However “repeated circling...failed to elicit any answering wave...” That tiny oasis was named Gardner Island, and no one inspected it on foot for another 30 months.

After 19 days, and $4 million (64 million in today's dollars), the search was called off. Amelia Earhart was legally declared dead on 5 January, 1939.  And on 20 December of that same year, 20 Gilbertese natives were landed on Gardner Island, for the same reason the Hawaiian students had occupied Howling - to establish a legal international claim.

It was the British government's last attempt at empire expansion, and was headed by colonial officer Gerald Gallagher. The next year (1940) Gallagher reported finding 13 human bones, a partial skeleton “possibly that of a woman," and “an old-fashioned sextant box” on the island's southeast corner.  Back in Britain, Nazi planes were bombing London, and the report was given little thought. The bones were shipped off to colonial offices on Fiji, where they were given a cursory examination by Doctor D.W. Hoodless,  He judged them to be those of a short, stocky European man. They were then put in storage, and during the Second World War, were lost.

Were the bones those of Amelia Earhart? Maybe. Amelia stood 5 feet six or seven inches tall, and when Richard Jantz, from the University of Tennessee, compared the ratio of the skeleton's humerus to the radius bones he got a figure of 0.76 - exactly that of Amelia, based on bare armed photos taken before the flight. Added to the apparent campsite found on the island, the remains of make-up and a pocket knife, and "credible" reports of 47 messages heard by professional radio men six hours after she went missing, the case is enticing, better than believable.  But unless the coral encrusted remains of her Electra reside 600 feet below the waves breaking along the reef surrounding Gardner Island, we will never know for certain. And maybe not even then.

There have been no humans living on Gardner Island since 1963, and after 1979 its name was changed to Nikumaroro, as the British Empire finally retreated from the Pacific. Its new native governors abandoned the atoll to its large land crabs and birds. And if they know what happened to Amelia Earhart, they are not talking.

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GREED

 

I cannot conceive of a worse possible moment for the young man to deliver his lie. Two weeks before, the 3 day battle of the Wilderness had killed 2,246 men and wounded some 12,000 more.  Three days ago,  in the Shenandoah Valley, yet another Federal Army had been ambushed at the Battle of New Market, where 96 federal soldiers were killed, 520 were wounded and 225 were captured - 13% of the Federal troops committed on that field.

And this very morning, 18 May, 1864, General Grant was leading his weary army once again into battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse, which would kill 2,725 men, including legendary General John Sedgwick,  and wound another 13,400 men. It seemed as if everything the Federal government attempted in this third spring of Civil War, was producing only more blood. And, at 3:30am that morning, a young man had arrived with a missive, to seemingly drop the other shoe. 

It purported to be a bulletin from the Associated Press, which had been in business since 1848, and contained the text of a White House Proclamation. The operative passage began in the third paragraph. 

“In view...of the situation in Virginia...and the general state of the country, I, Abraham Lincoln (above)...by virtue of the power vested in me by the Constitution...call forth the citizens of the United States, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years, to the aggregate number of four hundred thousand, in order to suppress the existing rebellious combinations...”

The reaction to news of a new half million man draft, in the city which the year before had produced three days of rioting (above) in response to Lincoln's first call for a draft, was expected to be even more violence. One hundred twenty had died in the summer of 1863, at least eleven African-Americans had been lynched, untold numbers beaten, and fifty large buildings had been burned down. Many on Wall Street took this as a sign the Federal government was losing the war, and they expected investors  to dump their stocks for gold.

At first glance the notice seemed legitimate. It was written on the same cheap oily tissue paper used by the Associated Press. But it had not arrived in the usual fashion. Several editors were suspicious, but with only moments before the deadline to start the presses, and fearing hesitation would mean their papers would be scooped by the competition,  three Democratic leaning papers rushed the story into the print – The World, the Journal of Commerce, and the Brooklyn Eagle. 

But the night editor of the New York Times, a Republican paper, did not recognize the handwriting, and found it had not been delivered in an AP envelope. The editor held his own presses while he dispatched a messenger for confirmation from the Associated Press. The AP editor promptly replied , “The 'Proclamation' is false as hell and not promulgated through this office. The handwriting is not familiar.”

By 9:00am Wall Street was in an uproar, with investors and brokers crowding all the newspaper offices (above), demanding an answer. Was the proclamation real or not? When the markets opened, the price of gold rose about 10%, but quickly fell back after Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary-of-War Edward Stanton,  both telegraphed to all the New York papers that the report was  “an absolute forgery.” 

And if the Lincoln administration had stopped there everything would have been all right. But Lincoln himself ordered the Military commander in New York City,  General John Adams Dix (above), to seize the offices of the Journal of Commerce and the New York World, and to ”arrest and imprison...the Editors, proprietors, and publishers.” It seemed the bloody mess in Virginia was making everybody a little jumpy.

The Journal of Commerce was a small anti-slavery newspaper founded by Arthur Tappan and Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and founder of the anti-Catholic "Know Nothing" party. That paper opposed using force to put down the rebellion. So the Postmaster General had refused to deliver the JOC via the mail, crippling the paper outside New York City, where most of its 35,000 readers lived. 

William Cowper Prime (above), a lawyer, an artist and author and "near east enthusiast" as well as business manager of the JOC, wrote to his wife that afternoon, “Found on coming down town that we, in common with the World...had been hoaxed by a most ingenious scoundrel.” That evening Federal soldiers arrived to close down the paper and arrest the guiltless Mr. Prime.

Considerably less innocent was the two cent per copy, “New York World”. The paper was owned by the Democratic National Committee, and directed by the DNC chairman, August Belmont. In its pages anything with a whiff of Lincoln or Republicanism about it was opposed. Every day the paper was filled with articles warning of the threat of the ballooning war debt, and criticism of the administration's military strategy. Its editorials called for repeal of the emancipation proclamation, and a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. It was the platform of the Democratic Party in 1864. But these were not  the position of the World's editor, Mr. Manton Malone Marble.

Marble  (above) was a newspaperman with printer's ink in his veins. Employed as the Night Editor, he had bought the bankrupt World in 1861, dreaming of a non-partisan fact based style of journalism. But after just six months he had been forced to seek new backers, and the Democratic Party had eagerly stepped in. Marble lost friends and staff members when he signed the deal. 

The joke among journalists in the city was that Marble was now little more than a conductor for the stories August Belmont (above) wanted in the paper day in and day out. But there was still a spark of independence in Marble, and when he learned from an alert staffer, before dawn on the morning of 18 May, 1864, that his paper had published the proclamation, he ordered all copies still unsold to be withdrawn from street vendors, and even dispatched a fast ship to stop and board the steamer “Nova Scotia”, carrying bundles of the newspaper bound for England. Marble even ordered the ship's captain to buy back the free copy provided to the Nova Scotia's purser. It made no difference. Marble was arrested the evening of 18 May, and the offices of “The World” padlocked shut.

That very night the member papers of the Associated Press telegraphed the President, strongly defending Prime and Marble. The next day several of the editors, including Horace Greeley, of the Republican leaning Tribune, joined the chorus of demands that Marble and Prime be released. And it began to occur to Lincoln, that he had stepped into something unpleasant. He also had the calming influence of General Dix, who seems to have quickly suspected, along with the members of the AP, that this was not a rebel plot, nor even a Democratic one.

 

At the same time he arrested Prime and Marble, Dix also ordered the arrest of Joseph Howard, jr.,  night editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, the only other paper to actually publish and distribute the false proclamation. 

Within a day Joe Howard (above) confessed. He assumed the false proclamation would drive up the price of gold, in preparation for which he had bought gold futures “short” -  meaning on credit. As one historian has noted, “Nothing worse was ever done for the purpose of speculation.” 

Two days later, on Saturday morning, 21 May,  police detectives stopped and arrested Francis Avery Mallson, a reporter for the Eagle, who had actually authored the fake telegram.  Francis had just been drafted into the army, and he had hoped profits from the scam would provide for his family while he was away at war. The next day, Sunday 22 May, military authorities released both Prime and Marble. But the damage had been done.

Marble was in a rage. He clearly felt betrayed and laid the blame for his arrest directly on Lincoln's head - where it belonged. On Monday, 23 May he unleashed his pen, in a letter that took up several columns of "The World".  “Not until today,” Marble wrote, “has The World been free to speak. But to those who have ears to hear, its absence has been more eloquent than its columns could ever be.” 

Lincoln had acted, wrote Marble (above), “for the purpose of gratifying an ignoble partisan resentment” He wondered “would you, Sir, have suppressed the Tribune and the Times as you suppressed the World and the Journal of Commerce?” He then answered the question for Mr. Lincoln. “You know you would not... Can you, whose eyes discern equality under every complexion, be blinded by the hue of partisanship.” George Templeton Strong, a diarist and observer of politics in New York, noted, “The martyred newspaper...vomits acid bile most copious.”

Marble now became the publicist for the Democratic Party, and its champion, General McClellan (above, center). He spent the next six months retelling every lie, and even creating a few new ones, about Lincoln, charging him with wanting to force "race mixing" on the public, and ignoring the pain and sacrifices of Union soldiers on the battlefield. 

And it might have cost Lincoln the election that November,  excerpt that on 2 September, 1864,  Union General William Tecumseh Sherman captured the rail and industrial heart of the Confederacy - Atlanta, Georgia.  In that instant it was clear Lincoln was winning the war, and the Democrats were revealed as defeatists, with no answers, only protests. That November Lincoln received only 33% of the vote in New York City.  Despite that, he won the state, if barely, on his way to re-election, 55% of the popular vote, and 212 electoral votes to Democrat General George McClellan's 21

The World did not accept defeat, disparaging Lincoln's speech on the night of 13 April, 1865 - the day after Lee had surrendered - it described the President as groping “like a traveler in an unknown country, without a map.” 

The following night, 15 April, 1865,  John Wilkes Booth murdered the President, transforming Abraham Lincoln into a martyr, and the The New York World and it's editor into a petty, vindictive and racist party mouthpiece.  History does that every kind of thing every once in awhile.

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