The Code Duello             Southern congressmen used the threat of dueling to bully Northern members into supporting—or, at least not opposing—pro slavery bills. It was one of several ways a wealthy minority could control the country’s governance against the clear sentiment of the majority. By the 1850s  a Southern congressman  refusing a duel   meant certain defeat at the next election. By contrast, a Northern member accepting a duel challenge could count of being defeated at the next election as the North’s repulsion against both slavery and duels grew. 25 Congressional Challenges New York Herald August 31, 1856             There have been 25 congressional challenges to fight duels since the organization of the First Congress, and the greater number of these originated in quarrels which, though political, had no reference to matters which occ...

  It’s 1859--Let’s Get Fracking!      The recent rush for underground energy called “fracking” and its attendant environmental consequences has happened before.      Demand for cheaper lighting, not the automobile, drove the first oil boom.       In 1859 when the first successful oil well started producing near Titusville, Pennsylvania, speculators rushed in to buy drilling rights on farms throughout the area. Small farmers were offered more money than they ever expected to see in their lifetime.     Many of the farmers found their land damaged or ruined by oil wells which spewed salt water and oil spills into surrounding streams and rivers.   Farmers downstream from the area suffered the effects too without ever receiving any money.      You might wonder why would petroleum be valuable in era before the automobile? Petroleum had little to no commercial value until a serial entrepreneur and invent...

    The Fox Sisters   In 1850, near Rochester, NY  13 year old and 15 year old sisters, Leah and Margaretta Fox started playing a joke on their mother, cracking their toes and dropping apples on the attic floor, convincing their mother and their neighbors ghosts were communicating with the girls.  Thus, started the modern era of the paranormal as the “rapping” craze swept the nation.      It did not take long before the girls were making money giving seances.  Their eldest sister took charge of them, and they never did tell their gullible parents the truth.  Though unmasked as "humbugs" early and repeatedly, the Fox sisters continued to hold seances.  They soon had competition. Dozens of imitators started giving seances, communicating with spirits "rapping" their answers back from the beyond. Young women in particular were “using society’s natural modesty” to conceal cracking their toes, or other gimmicks beneath long dre...

  Slave Holding in the South Isaac & Rosa slave children from New Orleans Disunion the Doom of Slavery Hon, W.W. Boyce of South Carolina, in 1851, speaking of the hostile spirit of the age to the institution of slavery said—“Secession, separate nationality with all its burdens, is no remedy. It is no redress for the past; it is no security for the future. It is only a magnificent sacrifice to the present, without any wise gaining in the future. For various reasons I have stated, I object in strong terms as I can, to the secession of South Carolina. Such is the intensity of my conviction on this subject, that if secession should take place—of which I have no idea, for I cannot believe in the existence of such a stupendous madness— I shall consider the institution of slavery as doomed, and that the Great God, in our blindness, has made us the instruments of its destruction.” 1863 Emancipated Slaves from New Orleans   Slave...