Amalgamationist & Abolitionists "Amalgamation"--the code word for sexual relations between the races--was feared.  "Amalgamationists vs Abolitionists"      Anybody liberal enough to publicly espouse the view that Blacks were human and deserved the same legal rights as Whites was labeled "an Amalgamationist." Further, it implied legal inter racial marriages.   It was possible--quite common, in fact--to be an abolitionist and not  an amalgamationist.        Abolitionists were considered a Northern fringe group of eccentrics demanding the impossible.  Abolitionists existed before the founding of the republic, but the movement stirred the South's ire starting in the 1830s.      In modern terms they were a bit like PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.) For example, most people do not think animals should be treated with mindless cruelty--that does not mean most people think chickens should h...

  Map of the State of Coahuila & Texas The Truth About Texas Davy Crokett circa 1834  after losing re-election to the US Congress "Y'all can go to Hell!  I'm going to Texas!"            Davy Crockett  on leaving his seat in the Tennessee legislature.  Spanish Mexico with vast stretches of thinly or completely uninhabited lands needed hardworking immigrants as much as the young USA. Spanish representatives touring the US to recruit settlers in 1820 met Moses Austin, in southeast Virginia.  Austin was agreeable and enthusiastic about moving to Mexico so Spain granted him a large stretch of land for him and his friends. Sadly, like Moses, this Moses never saw the promised land.  He died in June 1821 three months before Mexico declared independence in September of 1821.    His son, Stephen F. Austin, took over his father’s dream of a new settlement in Texas and soon received recognition of the Spanish...

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 ...

(This is the first in a four part series)            If America's richest man married the most beautiful and talented actress in the English speaking world--and then she went to work in his warehouse or auto factory for four months and wrote a blistering report about conditions under which workers labored...      Well, that's happened before.      Pearce Mease Butler  had it all—and then some.  Handsome, well educated, charming, and very, very, very rich.   Pearce Mease Butler      His grandfather and namesake had been a British Officer who resigned his commission and settled in South Carolina in 1771 and soon built a fortune by the time of the Revolution.  Major Butler joined the Patriot cause.  An able soldier and distinguished politician, he was one of South Carolina’s representatives to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later wrote ...

     A slave whipping   I am going to let the transcripts of several articles from the Edgefield, SC, Advertiser of March 23, 1859 speak for themselves. I have added a few notes in red to clarify terms or allusions to current events, modern readers would not understand. There is not much a decent or sane person can add otherwise, so I won't.       Edgefield SC—letter from a Northern lady of Oswego, NY   Re-Printed in the Edgefield, S.C. Advertiser, March 23, 1859   From the Oswego Times in New York State.   The following is an extract from a private   letter, by a New York lady to her brother. She is spending the winter with an invalid daughter in South Carolina:   AIKEN, S. C., Feb. 2d, 1859.        My DEAR BROTHER:-We are in what is called the Pine Woods District, 120 miles   west of Charleston. Aiken is a small town of not more than 1000 inhabitants, and the dullest pl...

  "Socialism in Arkansas"  1858         As you can read in the two excerpts from newspapers below, socialism was once acceptable in Arkansas as long as it did not promote abolitionists and "...other isms, germinating in the north."           Utopian communities of all sorts were promoted in  the twenty years before the Civil War and the two decades following.  The most enduring of these was the Amana group in Iowa, founded in 1840.  Amana morphed from an agricultural commune into a manufacturing commune. Eventually, it was sold to corporate America and endures today as a brand of microwaves sold in the US.         Over the next several weeks, I'll take a look at some of the more interesting and/or exemplary specimens  of ante bellum utopians.            There were "free love" communities with varying definitions of "free love." Most of the defi...