April 22, 1793 – George Washington Issues Proclamation of Neutrality

King Louis XVI of France was beheaded in January of 1793. Ten days later, France, already fighting Austria and Prussia, declared war on England, Holland, and Spain. Having helped America in her war of independence, France now felt entitled to reciprocation from the former colonies. To that end, France sent Edmond Charles Genêt, who called himself “Citizen Genêt” as minister to the United States, for the purpose of enlisting American assistance to the fullest extent possible.

Engraving of Edmond-Charles Genêt

Genêt’s mission, as recounted by Joel Richard Paul in Without Precedent: John Marshall and His Times, was to persuade the U.S. to help France liberate Canada, Louisiana, and Florida from rule by Britain and Spain. If the Americans refused to enter the war on France’s side, Genêt was instructed to “germinate the spirit of liberty” by instigating a popular uprising in favor of France. He had other assignments as well, all of which were designed to advance the position of France in the U.S. to the detriment of Britain.

Genêt launched an immediate campaign to realize his goals, taking assertive actions that amounted to “an astounding breach of diplomatic protocol and international law” (per Paul, p. 73).

President George Washington wanted the U.S. to remain neutral in the war between France and Britain, much to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s chagrin. Jefferson, besotted with France as well as its revolution, fiercely opposed neutrality. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, strongly supported it.

Jefferson had already been meeting secretly with Genêt, and was anxious for Genêt’s help to elect a republican majority in Congress in return for support for an alliance with France and a removal of tariffs on French imports. Paul writes:

Jefferson made clear that his enemies – the federalists [which included President George Washington], particularly Adams and Hamilton – were France’s enemies. . . . From these conversations, Genêt formed the misimpression that the president was irrelevant and that an appeal to Congress, or to the people directly, would be more effective.”

Genêt also confided his plans to arm regiments in South Carolina and Kentucky to attack Spanish holdings in Florida and Louisiana, and Jefferson helped put Genêt in touch with people who could help him.

Paul observes:

Jefferson’s relationship with the French envoy was ill-advised, probably illegal, and certainly disloyal to Washington.”

One of President Washington’s great fears was foreign entanglements, which he saw as inimical to the success of an American project in its infancy. Thus he resisted the attempt to draw the new United States into a European war, and on April 22, 1793, this day in history, he issued his Proclamation of Neutrality, declaring the U.S. a neutral nation in the conflict and threatening legal proceedings against any American providing assistance to the warring countries. Attorney General Edmund Randolph wrote the 293-word Proclamation for the president’s signature.

As a Mount Vernon history of the proclamation reports, it ignited a fire storm of criticism. Much of the American population, like Jefferson, sympathized with the cause of revolutionary France.

Republicans denounced the proclamation as exceeding the president’s constitutional powers. Using the pseudonym Pacificus, Alexander Hamilton wrote a series of essays in support of Washington’s authority to determine the country’s foreign relations. Jefferson, as was his usual modus operandi, remained silent in public while stealthily prodding his henchman James Madison to attack.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson sent a letter to Madison, bemoaning the fact that nobody was taking exception to the writings of Pacificus:

Nobody answers him, and his doctrine will therefore be taken for confessed. For god’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”

[When Jefferson himself was president, he of course would feel differently about presidential authority.]

The sniping over Genêt, Paul writes, would eventually lead to the spawning of two competing political parties. Madison (writing for Jefferson) and Hamilton (writing for Washington) provided each side of the growing partisan chasm between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans with powerful talking points.

The tide of public opinion finally shifted when Hamilton leaked to the press information about Genet’s attempts to act against President Washington and destroy the new union.

Congress responded by passing the Neutrality Act in 1794, giving Washington’s policy the force of law. The act marked an acknowledgment by the legislative branch that foreign policy resided largely in the constitutional domain of the executive. It made it illegal for a United States citizen to wage war against any country at peace with the United States. [The act, repealed and replaced several times while also being amended, is in force as 18 U.S.C. § 960.]

On July 7, 1798, during the Quasi-War crisis in the presidency of John Adams, Congress formerly annulled the twenty-year-old Treaty of Alliance with France.

April 19, 1832 – Birth of Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, Who Became First Lady of the US in 1881

Lucretia Rudolph was born on this day in Garrettsville, Ohio. She met her future husband, James Garfield, in 1849 at Geauga Seminary, a Free Will Baptist school in Chester Township, Geauga County, Ohio. [Free Will Baptist is a Baptist Christian denomination and group of people that believe in free grace, free salvation, and free will.]

As an article on her in PotusGeeks recounts, after Geauga, Lucretia attended the Ohio Hiram Eclectic Institute, a non-sectarian institution that her father had helped found. She studied French and took a rigorous classical course of study, continuing in Greek and Latin and widening her expertise in classical literature, British literature and French literature. She helped to organize a literary society which staged elocution, debate and oratorical presentations, often taking to the stage herself and defending the rights of women to do so at a time when many men considered it improper for women to so publicly present themselves. She also worked as editor and illustrator of “The Eclectic Star,” a school magazine.

Lucretia married James Garfield in 1858 and had seven children together. James, a lawyer and Civil War general, served nine terms in the US House of Representatives before being elected as US President.

James A. Garfield and Lucretia Rudolph was taken around the time of their engagement. (Western Reserve Historical Society)

PotusGeeks reports that the marriage had its problems from the start. Lucretia expressed to her husband:

. . . the tremendous degree of frustration and anger she felt towards him for his lack of passion towards her, and his frequent absences from home, her being left with the responsibility for his demanding mother and enduring the presence of one boarder, his admiring woman teacher and friend Almeda Booth. With his serving in the Union Army and as a member of Congress in Washington, she calculated that they had spent a total of six weeks together during their first six years of marriage. Garfield had a love affair with a New York woman, Lucia Calhoun which he later greatly regretted and confessed to his wife. After the death of their first child and more separation, James Garfield firmly committed himself to the marriage and it improved, aided by their mutual love of literature and the classics.”

Notably, in 1861, James wrote to her that he had the opportunity to meet Abraham Lincoln for the first time, when the president-elect stopped in Columbus on his train journey through the north before reaching Washington, D.C., for his March 4 inauguration. Garfield was favorably impressed by Lincoln, but not so much by his wife Mary, writing to Lucretia, “His wife is a stocky, sallow, pug-nosed plain lady, and I think has much of the primitiveness of western life. He stands higher, on the whole in my estimation than ever. She considerably lower.”

Lucretia, early feminist that she was, wrote back to her husband, “Don’t you think you were rather severe on poor Mrs. Lincoln? You were not called on to admire her beauty if she possess none of course, but must you place her lower in your estimation because she lacks it?”

In Washington, D.C. she went with her husband to meetings of a locally celebrated literary society. They read together, made social calls together, dined with each other, and traveled in company until by 1880 they were as nearly inseparable as his career permitted.

Lucretia Garfield

In the White House, she hosted dinners and twice-weekly receptions. More importantly, she advised her husband on whom to select as cabinet officers and her choice for Secretary of State, James Blaine, proved to be successful.

Lucretia had been convalescing from malaria at a seaside resort in New Jersey when her husband was shot by Charles Guiteau on July 2, 1881 at a railway station in Washington. The President was planning to take a train north to New Jersey that same day in order to meet his wife, before continuing on to a function at his former college in Massachusetts. The First Lady hurriedly returned to Washington by special train—”frail, fatigued, desperate,” reported an eyewitness at the White House, “but firm and quiet and full of purpose to save”. As her train raced south, it was speeding so fast that the engine broke a piston in Bowie, Maryland and nearly derailed. Lucretia Garfield was thrown from her seat, but not injured. After an anxious delay, she reached the White House and immediately went to her husband’s bedside.

Lucretia Garfield in 1920

One of the doctors hired to take care of President Garfield was a woman, Dr. Susan Edson. However, she was paid half the amount the men were being paid. Upon hearing about this discrepancy in pay, Lucretia wrote a letter expressing her outrage, using the word “discrimination” to express her fury. Dr Edson then received the same amount as the men.

During the three months that the President fought for his life, her grief and devotion won the respect and sympathy of the country. After his death and funeral, the bereaved family went home to their farm in northern Ohio. For another 36 years, she led a strictly private, but busy and comfortable life, active in preserving the records of her husband’s career. She created a wing to the home that became a presidential library of his papers.

She died at her winter home in South Pasadena, California on March 14, 1918, at the age of 85.Her casket was placed above ground beside the coffin of her husband in the lower level crypt of the James A. Garfield Memorial at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.

Thanks to the Library of Congress, you can read the full correspondence of James and Lucretia Garfield online in the James A. Garfield Papers, online here.

April 15, 1930 – Birth of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, 1st Democratically Elected Female President in the World

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, inaugurated as president of Iceland on August 1, 1980, was the first woman to be democratically elected president in any nation. She served for 16 years, also making her the longest- serving elected female head of state to date.

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in September 1985

She was born at Reykjavík on this day in history, April 15, 1930. Vigdís studied French and French literature at the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris from 1949 to 1953, then studied the history of theater at the University of Copenhagen. She then acquired a BA in French and English, as well as a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education, at the University of Iceland. She married a physician in 1954, but divorced in 1963, and at the age of 41 she adopted a daughter, becoming the first single woman in Iceland to be allowed to adopt a child.

After graduation, Vigdís taught French and French drama at the university and worked with experimental theatre. She worked with the Reykjavík Theatre Company from 1954 to 1957 and again from 1961 to 1964. During the summers, she also worked as a tour guide.

She was the Artistic Director of the Reykjavík Theatre Company, later the Reykjavík City Theatre from 1972 to 1980. From 1976 to 1980, she was a member of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Affairs in the Nordic countries.

She got involved in politics as well. Vigdís participated in the 1960s and 1970s in numerous rallies held to protest against the U.S. military presence in Iceland (and in particular at Keflavík).

In 1996, she became founding chair of the Council of Women World Leaders at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Two years later she was appointed president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology.

As reported by the Law Library of Congress, the role of the president in Iceland is different than that of the president of the United States and more ceremonial. Nevertheless, Finnbogadóttir certainly put Iceland on the map when she hosted the Reykjavik Summit where U.S. President Ronald Reagan met with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 11-12, 1986.

Some have argued, the Law Library writes, that her presidency contributed to more pro-women and family-friendly legislation. Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index for 11 years straight.

Since her presidential career ended, Finnbogadóttir has served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for world languages. She is also a member of the Fondation Chirac’s honour committee, ever since the foundation was launched in 2008 by former French president Jacques Chirac in order to promote world peace.

April 10, 1869 – Congress Increased Number of Supreme Court Justices to Nine

Per the Constitution Annotated site compiled by the Library of Congress:

Congress first enacted legislation to structure the Supreme Court in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Under the 1789 act, the Court comprised one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. Congress enacted legislation to change the size of the Court multiple times during the nineteenth century. In 1801, Congress reduced the size of the Court to five Justices. The 1801 statute did not eliminate an occupied seat on the Court; instead, it provided that the change would take effect ‘after the next vacancy’. Congress repealed the 1801 law before any vacancy occurred, leaving the size of the Court at six Justices.

. . .

At its largest, during the Civil War, the Court had ten Justices, with the addition of the tenth seat on the Court coinciding with the establishment of the Tenth Circuit. In 1866, Congress reduced the size of the Court to seven Justices, a change widely viewed as one of the Reconstruction Congress’s restrictions on President Andrew Johnson.”

The Judiciary Act of 1869 (41st Congress, Sess. 1, ch. 22, 16 Stat. 44), formally “An Act to amend the Judicial System of the United States” and sometimes called the Circuit Judges Act of 1869, increased the size of the Supreme Court to nine justices and established separate judgeships for the U.S. circuit courts, allotting each Supreme Court justice one of the nine circuits in which that justice had to attend at least one term in each of the circuit’s districts every two years. It also included the first provision allowing judges to retire without losing their salary.

In early 1869 there were eight men on the bench. As the History Channel online reports: “Congress routinely changed the number of justices to achieve its own partisan political goals, resulting in as few as five Supreme Court justices required by law under John Adams to as many as 10 under Abraham Lincoln.”

As the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) recounts:

The first version of the act [proposed by Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull] was approved by Congress at the close of the session in March 1869 but fell victim to a pocket veto from outgoing President Andrew Johnson. After the new Congress convened a day later, the Senate quickly reintroduced and passed the measure. The House of Representatives then amended the bill to permit the retirement of federal judges appointed during good behavior. Justices and judges who reached the age of seventy and had served at least ten years could retire and receive their current salary for the remainder of their lives.”

According to Stanley I. Kutler, writing for The Journal of Southern History, Vol 32, No 1 (Feb 1966) in “Reconstruction and the Supreme Court: The Numbers Game Reconsidered” (online here), “The increase of one Supreme Court member provoked absolutely no controversy, Republicans and Democrats alike conceding the need.”

The bill’s progress, however, bogged down in the Senate over the circuit-court reform. Apparently “partisan descendants of Jefferson” felt it was desirable for members of the Supreme Court to deal with people and law on the local level. Some senators also resisted the idea of expanding federal power with an increase of ten federal jurists.

Lyman Trumbull, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee 1861-1873

Trumbull argued however that the establishment of circuit judgeships was made necessary by the increased workload of the federal courts in the wake of the Civil War. The docket of the Supreme Court was two to three years behind schedule. The appointment of circuit judges would better enable the Supreme Court justices to focus on cases before the Court. Trumbull and his fellow Republicans also hoped that the appointment of circuit judges would provide a more uniform administration of federal justice, particularly in the South, where federal authority only recently had been reestablished.

In addition, by virtue of the act allowing all federal judges to retire with full salary after serving for at least 10 years, provided they had turned 70, it provided an incentive for older judges to leave their courts before their deaths. The salary of the circuit court judgeships created was set at $5,000 a year. In addition, the act stipulated that federal judges (including Supreme Court justices) who had served for ten years or more and who was at least 70 would receive a pension upon their retirement. ($5,000 in 1869 would be approximately $110,600 in 2023 dollars.)

April 5, 1856 – Birth of Booker T. Washington, “The Great Accommodator”

Booker T. Washington was born on April 5, 1856 near Hale’s Ford, Virginia on a tobacco plantation. He was born into slavery to Jane, an enslaved Black woman impregnated by a white man. He, his siblings, and mother gained freedom after the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Washington’s mother was a major influence on his schooling. Even though she couldn’t read herself, she bought her son spelling books so he could learn to read. She then enrolled him in an elementary school, where Booker took the last name of Washington because he found out that other children had more than one name. He worked with his mother and other free Blacks as a salt-packer and in a coal mine. He was hired as a houseboy for Viola Ruffner, whose husband owned the salt-furnace and coal mine. Booker’s diligence impressed Mrs. Ruffner, and she encouraged him to attend school. Soon he sought more education than was available in his community.

In 1872 at the age of sixteen, Washington enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in Hampton, Virginia. Students with little income such as Washington could work at the school to pay their way. The normal school (teachers college) at Hampton was founded to train teachers and was chiefly funded by church groups and religious individuals. From 1878 to 1879 he attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to teach at Hampton. Soon, Hampton president Samuel C. Armstrong recommended Washington to become the first principal at Tuskegee Institute, a similar school being founded in Alabama. Such positions heading schools, even Black schools, had traditionally been held by whites. Booker T. Washington was 25 years old.

The new school opened on July 4, 1881, initially using space rented from a local church. The next year, Washington purchased a former plantation, which became the permanent site of the campus. Under his direction, his students literally built their own school: constructing classrooms, barns and outbuildings; growing their own crops and raising livestock, and providing for most of their own basic necessities. Both men and women had to learn trades as well as academics. The Tuskegee faculty utilized each of these activities to teach the students basic skills to take back to the mostly rural Black communities throughout the South. The school later grew to become the present-day Tuskegee University.

Tuskegee provided an academic education and instruction for teachers, but placed emphasis on providing Black males with practical skills, such as carpentry and masonry, which many would need for the rural lives most Blacks led in the South. The Institute illustrated Washington’s philosophy about his race. His theory was that by providing needed skills to society, African Americans would gain acceptance by white Americans. He believed that Blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens. Washington was head of the school until his death in 1915.

Washington gained national prominence in 1895, after a famous speech in Atlanta where he called for racial conciliation and urged Blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. The address would make him the central figure in American race relations for the next two decades.

His 1901 autobiography, Up From Slavery, was translated into seven languages. Washington, as the guest of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, was the first African-American ever invited to the White House. (This event caused such an uproar, however, that Roosevelt never repeated it.) Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America’s other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors to the Tuskegee Institute. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees (in 1896 and 1901, respectively). Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him “a public man second to no other American in importance.”

Late in his career, Washington was criticized by leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was formed in 1909. W.E.B. Du Bois especially favored a harder line on activism to achieve civil rights. He labeled Washington “the Great Accommodator,” arguing that political power was necessary to protect any economic gains. Washington’s response was that confrontation could lead to disaster for the outnumbered Blacks. He believed that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way in the long run to overcome pervasive racism. Nevertheless, Washington quietly contributed money for court challenges to the segregation and disfranchisement of Blacks. In his public role, he believed he could achieve more by skillful accommodation to the social realities of the age of segregation. Through his own personal experience, Washington knew that good education was a powerful tool for individuals to collectively accomplish that better future.

Washington’s reputation among Blacks grew tarnished again in the radical 1960’s. Appeasement was rejected in favor of confrontation. Even Martin Luther King, Jr.’s style was bitterly contested by more radical Black activists.

Washington was not as accommodating as he seems to modern eyes. During his lifetime, Washington was fighting an upsurge in white backlash against Reconstruction as well as a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Whites, particularly in the South, were opposed to giving Blacks educational opportunites, preferring that they had no options but to sign “contracts” that put them in virtual bondage to white employers. Booker T. Washington fought aggressively just to give Blacks the chance to learn. Furthermore, his efforts at fund-raising spurred philanthropic contributions to the construction of more schools throughout the South.

Washington did make some public protests against discrimination, writing in 1899, “I do not favour the Negro giving up anything which is fundamental and which has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States.”

On November 14, 1915, Washington died at the age of 59 from hypertension and arteriosclerosis. He was buried on the campus of Tuskegee University near the University Chapel. At his death Tuskegee’s endowment exceeded $1.5 million in 1915 dollars. His greatest life’s work, the work of education of Blacks in the South, was well underway and expanding.

Laboratory at Tuskegee Institute, 1902, Library of Congress

You can read Up From Slavery online here.

March 30, 1870 – 15th Amendment Adopted

Together, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are referred to as the Reconstruction Amendments, as they were passed after the US Civil War during the Reconstruction Era that followed. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, established, inter alia, that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

On this day in history, March 30, 1870, the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted. It was meant to protect the freedoms outlined in the 13th and 14th Amendments. It granted Backs, now free from slavery, the right to vote, declaring that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was passed by the House of Representatives on February 25, 1869, and the Senate on February 26, 1869. It was ratified on February 3, 1870.

Upon the adoption of the amendment on March 30, President Ulysses S. Grant thought the occasion momentous enough to merit special notice:

A measure which makes at once 4,000,000 people voters who were heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so (with the assertion that ‘at the time of the Declaration of Independence the opinion was fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race, regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, that black men had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’), is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.”

President Ulysses S. Grant

However, the 14th and 15th amendments were only sporadically enforced until 1876 (the end of Reconstruction). Thereafter, they were only rarely enforced until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision by the Supreme Court provided the legal foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

In particular, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a law regarded, as the Brennan Center points out, “as the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in American history.”

In the 2000s, however, Republican legislatures around the country, aided by the US Supreme Court, have taken measures to erode the civil rights built up until then.

In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Shelby County v. Holder, a 5–4 conservative majority struck down the law’s Section 5, which required states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get certification in advance, or “pre-clearance,” that any election change they wanted to make would not be discriminatory.

Within 24 hours of the Shelby ruling, the Brennan Center reports, states started implementing new laws in an attempt to disenfranchise voters (most specifically, voters who tend to vote for Democrats). Multiracial democracy in America, write Brennan Center staffers Wendy Weiser and Madiba Dennie, “is under siege”:

State lawmakers have released an unprecedented wave of antidemocratic legislation. And the Supreme Court broke the dam that would have restrained the flood, dramatically rolling back longstanding legal protections for voting rights and fair representation. The consequences of these developments are grim.”

After over 150 years, the 15th Amendment is under siege as well.

March 28, 1787 – Birth of Theodore Frelinghuysen, American Politician & Whig VP Nominee in 1844

Theodore Frelinghuysen was an American politician who represented New Jersey in the US Senate. He was the Whig vice presidential nominee in the election of 1844, running on a ticket with Henry Clay.

He was born on this day in history in New Jersey, where he established a law practice after graduating from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

He became Attorney General of New Jersey in 1817; turned down an appointment to the New Jersey Supreme Court; and became a United States Senator in 1829, serving in that capacity until 1835.

As a senator, he led the opposition to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. His six-hour speech against the Removal Act was delivered over the course of three days, and warned of the supposed dire consequences of the policy:

How shall we justify this trespass to ourselves? Sir, we may deride it, and laugh it to scorn now; but the occasion will meet every man, when he must look inward, and make honest inquisition there. Let us beware how, by oppressive encroachments upon the sacred privileges of our Indian neighbors, we minister to the agonies of future remorse.”

Theodore Frelinghuysen

Jackson supporters chided Frelinghuysen for mixing his evangelical Christianity with politics, and the Removal Act was passed.

At the 1844 Whig National Convention, competing with Millard Fillmore, John Davis and John Sergeant, he was selected as the Whig vice-presidential candidate. He took the lead on the first ballot and never lost it, eventually being chosen by acclamation. The Whig presidential candidate, Henry Clay, was not present at the convention and expressed surprise upon hearing the news.

Frelinghuysen’s previous opposition to Indian removal may have put off southern voters. He was was also unpopular with Catholics because groups of which he was a member, such as the Protestant American Bible Society, promulgated the idea that Catholics should convert to Protestantism. Clay and Frelinghuysen lost the 1844 election.

Frelinghuysen, who called himself a “Christian Statesman” may have been respectful of the “sacred privileges” of Native Americans, but he was not so respectful of any rights for Black slaves. He declared that “nine-tenths of the horrors of slavery were imaginary,” and that emancipationists were “seeking to dissolve the Union.”

He feared that abolitionism “would be the madness of self-destruction” since slaves would want revenge (in spite of horrors being “imaginary”). In his public advocacy for colonization, or the deportation of free people of color from the United States, Frelinguysen described Black people as “licentious, ignorant, and irritated” and therefore not suited for full citizenship within their present country.

He died in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on April 12, 1862, and he was buried there at the First Reformed Church Cemetery.

March 23, 1801 – Jefferson on the Need for the Clergy to Defer to Science

In early March of 1801, Jefferson received a letter from Moses Robinson, a prominent Vermont politician and supporter of Jefferson. Robinson congratulated Jefferson on winning the presidency. He stressed the importance of having the government administered by leaders who believed in a republican form of government in order to safeguard the rights of the people (as opposed to, he implied, those who led the previous administration).

Jefferson of course concurred, noting in his reply on this date in history:

I sincerely wish with you we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles.”

In particular he focused on the “dominion of the clergy” in the eastern states. He accused them of looking backward rather than forward for “improvement”:

. . . but I am in hopes their good sense will dictate to them that since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain: that they will find their interest in acquiescing in the liberty & science of their country, and that the Christian religion when divested of the rags in which they have inveloped it, and brought to the original purity & simplicity of it’s benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, & the freest expansions of the human mind.”

Thomas Jefferson

March 21, 1861 – Confederacy VP Alexander Stephens Declares Slavery as “the Immediate Cause of the Late Rupture and Present Revolution”

On this day in history the recently elected vice president of the Confederacy spoke about the “Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States of America,” adopted on March 11. He emphasized:

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . . This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. . . .

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Alexander H. Stephens. Oil painting by John White Alexander. Published as cover of “Harper’s Weekly,” 27:145 (March 10, 1883), via Wikipedia

Apparently this history is not taught in American schools, however, as evinced even by presidential candidate Nikki Haley. “MAGA” supporters also, who tend to come from less educated walks of American life, also are unaware of the cause of the Civil War.

March 16, 1810 – Supreme Court Decides Fletcher v. Peck, Expanding Parameters of Judicial Review

The state of Georgia claimed sovereignty over a large tract of land (some 35-40 million acres) known as “Yazoo,” most of which was occupied by native tribes (but far be it from white settlers to recognize their claims.) In any event, in 1794, Georgia passed the Yazoo Land Act and sold most of these same lands to four companies. The companies then quickly sold the property off to to private speculators at a very low price.

Map showing the four initial Yazoo Act land deals

Shortly thereafter, it came out that most of the legislators voting for the Yazoo Land Act had been bribed or owned stakes in the businesses purchasing the property. After several lawmakers were voted out of office in response to these revelations of corruption, the new legislature in 1795 declared the earlier grants void, basically maintaining that the sales had legally never happened. Such a declaration flew in the face of one of the few early constitutional restrictions on state power, namely the Contracts Clause of Article I, Section 10 prohibiting states from passing any “law impairing the obligation of contracts.” Meanwhile, as reported on the website Big Think, all extant copies of the original act were collected and burned at high noon on the grounds of the state capitol under construction, then in Louisville. One copy escaped destruction — the one sent to President Washington.

Several years after the legislature revoked the land grants, John Peck, a speculator from Massachusetts, purchased some of the land in question and subsequently sold it to Robert Fletcher, a colleague from New Hampshire. Fletcher sued Peck for breach of contract, alleging that Peck had falsely represented that he had good title to the land. Peck defended the suit by arguing that the Georgia legislature had violated the Contracts Clause by improperly interfering with the original land grant contract. Since the law was invalid, he claimed, he had held good title to the land and had every right to sell it to Fletcher.

In Fletcher v. Peck (10 U.S. 87, 1810), in a unanimous decision for Peck written by Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court found the legislature’s repeal of the law unconstitutional under Article I, Section 10, Clause I. They concluded the sale between Fletcher and Peck was a binding contract, which under the Contract Clause cannot be invalidated even if it were illegally secured. 

As the Federal Judicial Center maintains, the decision in Fletcher v. Peck expanded the parameters of judicial review, as it marked the first time the Supreme Court struck down a state law as unconstitutional, establishing the principle that federal laws were supreme over state laws. The case also firmly established that a legal contract could not be nullified by a later law, which became an important tenet of contract law.

John Marshall by Henry Inman, 1832

There was a further consequence. Journalist Frank Jacobs points out:

Without the scandal, Georgia might conceivably have managed to hold on to its western lands. This hypothetical Greater Georgia, running from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, would have comprised most or all of the current states of Mississippi and Alabama. That would make it one of America’s most populous states, its 20 million inhabitants, on par with Florida and New York and surpassed only by Texas (30 million) and California (40 million).”