(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 ...

  In the North, freedom from slavery was traded for no rights as free men.     The Abolitionists movement did not start to spread until the 1830s. All through the Civil War, Abolitionists were viewed as a loud and often extreme minority.  While Abolitionists fought to free the enslaved, most still thought blacks were an inferior race and should not have all the privileges of whites.  A good modern analogy might be PETA -People for Ethical Treatment of Animals—movement. Most people agree in general animals should not be treated cruelly, but few people even in PETA believe goats, snails, chimpanzees or gorillas should be given the right to vote or testify in court.  Negroes in Indiana September 12, 1858 Rising Sun Visitor newspaper              In the Floyd Circuit Court, recently, the Judge decided the law forbidding the introduction of Negroes in this State unconstitutional. The Judge of the Circuit is ...