Locofocos, Barn Burners, and Putty Heads Torchlight rally of Know Nothings in NY City  Don't you wish you could call some politician a " Locofoco ?" Or protest "all those  Barnburner   Putty Heads ?"      Plus  Know Nothings ,  Hards  and  Softs ,  Conscience Whigs , Free Soilers, Putty Heads  and  Fusionists  just to name a few of the political parties or factions of political parties. Modern political terms just lack this sort of colorful speech. Sept. 25, 1852 NY Herald (On the NY State Democratic convention)      Thus was the State ticket made up of two  softs , one  barnburner  and one  hard shell hunker ; and having formed an electoral ticket upon which are eighteen  hunkers  to seventeen  barnburners  and  softs , and a State committee which reckons nine  barnburners  and  softs  to seven  hunke...

Slave Auction 1853-- Richmond, VA        By 1859 Pierce  Butler was no longer America's richest man.  At age 52, he had squandered the fortune inherited from his grandfather. Following the spectacle of his very public and very expensive divorce from English actress Fanny Kemble in 1849, gambling, and "bad investments," Butler declared bankruptcy in 1857.  His bankruptcy administrators  forced the immediate sale of his magnificent mansion in Philadelphia for $30,000.     It wasn't enough.      Now, all that was left to sell were the 436 human beings he held in slavery on two plantations in Georgia.      It would be the largest slave auction ever held in America.      Jonathan Bryan, a notorious slave dealer, was hired to run the auction. Bryan printed a catalogue of the "goods to be auctioned"  much as an auction house might publish a catalogue, listing paintings, jewelry or furniture to ...

Mortimer Thomson AKA Q.K. Philander Doesticks, R.B. New York Tribune March 9, 1859 The largest sale of human chattels that has been made in Star- Spangled America for several years, took place on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, at the Race-course near the City of Savannah, Georgia. The lot consisted of four hundred and thirty-six  men, women, children and infants, being that half of the negro stock remaining on the old Major Butler plantations which fell to one of the two heirs to that estate. Major Butler, dying, left a property valued at more than a million of dollars, the major part of which was invested in rice and cotton plantations, and the slaves thereon, all of which immense fortune descended to two heirs, his sons, Mr. John A. Butler, sometime deceased, and Mr. Pierce M. Butler, still living, and resident in the City of Philadelphia, in the free State of Pennsylvania. Losses in the great crash of 1857-8, and other exigencies of business, have compelled the latter gen...