On December 20 Thomas Jefferson wrote a long letter to his good friend James Madison about the Constitution. At his post as minister to France, Jefferson had received a copy in November and had scrutinized it carefully since then. “I like much the general idea of framing a government which should go on of itself peacefully, without needing continual recurrence to the state legislatures,” he wrote. “I like the organization of the government into Legislative, Judiciary and Executive. I like the power given the Legislature to levy taxes.…” Madison must have sensed that this cursory listing of likes was building to an outburst of criticism. It soon came.
“I will now add what I do not like,” Jefferson wrote. “First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of Nations.…a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
Jefferson also objected to the Constitution’s allowing reelection of government officials, especially the President. But whatever the document’s failings, Jefferson hoped that if it was ratified, the people would amend it over time.
He concluded his letter with an avowal of faith in his country: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”
1812 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
In the bright afternoon of December 29 off the coast of Brazil, the U.S. frigate Constitution closed in on HMS Java. Five months earlier the Constitution had earned the nickname Old Ironsides in her devastating victory against HMS Guerrière, and she was to prove as invincible in this engagement. At two o’clock Capt. William Bainbridge ordered his men to fire the first shot of the battle, and during the next forty minutes the two frigates struggled to outmaneuver each other. The Java had greater speed but was unsuccessful in attempting to rake the Constitution. Even when Old Ironsides’ wheel was shot off, superior ship handling and firepower made up for it; within two hours the lethally accurate American gunners had smashed the Java. Twenty-two of her crew were dead and another 102 were wounded; only 12 Americans had been killed, and 22 wounded. The Java, hopelessly wrecked, was sent to the ocean floor, and Old Ironsides returned to a jubilant reception in America. Her victories and several others at the outset of the conflict elated Americans, but they had little effect on the course of the war.
1837 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
At the opening of the Twenty-fifth Congress on December 18, Rep. William Slade of Vermont rose to present several petitions for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Since the gag rule of 1836 had not yet been reenacted, the Southerners, who grew increasingly outraged by his attack on slavery, could do nothing to stop him. Some tried to interrupt, and others called him to order, but Slade shouted over them, refusing to be silenced. Men gathered in groups on the floor, ignoring the Vermonter and talking angrily among themselves. Finally Virginia’s Henry A. Wise let it be known that his state’s delegates were retiring to another room, and other Southern representatives joined him. That evening they discussed holding a Southern convention; several days later they passed a strengthened gag rule to prevent further abolitionist speeches.
John Quincy Adams, Congress’s principal and notorious opponent of the gag rule and slavery, sat down with his diary the night after the gag resolutions were passed. “The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue,” he wrote. “Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom. That the fall of slavery is predetermined in the counsels of Omnipotence I cannot doubt; it is a part of the great moral improvement in the condition of man, attested by all the records of history. But the conflict will be terrible, and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.”
1862 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported on December 6 that all the ailanthus trees on the nation’s Capitol grounds were being uprooted and carted off. “The odor had become so offensive,” Leslie’s explained, “that the removal was necessary.
Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside believed he was unfit for high command, and on December 13, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he proved his opinion true. The Army of the Potomac arrived at the Rappahannock River opposite Fredericksburg, Virginia, in mid-November, but instead of launching an immediate attack on Robert E. Lee’s unprepared forces across the river, Burnside waited two weeks for misplaced pontoon bridges to arrive. When he finally did move on December 13, the Confederates, though numerically inferior, were assured of success. From a well-defended hilltop they fired down upon the Union men, who sacrificed their lives in a series of futile frontal assaults. Watching the slaughter, General Lee observed: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” When the encounter was over, 5,300 Confederates were dead or wounded; Union casualties reached 12,700.
A recently patented invention was advertised in December’s publications: “Dr. G. W. Scollay’s Air-Tight Deodorizing Burial Case.” Dr. Scollay claimed to have devised a “new and useful improvement in Burial Cases, by means of which a human body may be withheld from interment some sixty to ninety days, or more, without the emission of the usual offensive odor, and at a small expense beyond that of the ordinary wooden burial case.”
The Union blockade of Confederate ports not only hampered Southern business but severely affected those employed in Europe’s mills. Without the South’s cotton, work at the mills slowed to a trickle. Yet while London appealed to Washington to lift the blockades in the name of England’s working class, the workers themselves continued to support the North. On December 31, the day before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a letter went to President Lincoln: “As citizens of Manchester, assembled at the Free-Trade Hall, we beg to express our fraternal sentiments toward you and your country.…We honor your free States, as a singular, happy abode for the working millions. One thing alone has, in the past, lessened our sympathy with your country and our confidence in it; we mean the ascendency of politicians who not merely maintained negro slavery, but desired to extend it and root it more firmly. Since we have discerned, however, that the victory of the free north, in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you, will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy.” The letter ended: “Accept our high admiration of your firmness in upholding the proclamation of freedom.”
1887 One Hundred Years Ago
President Grover Cleveland delivered his third annual message to Congress on December 6, setting a precedent by devoting the entire speech to tariff reform. His concern stemmed from the fact that the growing Treasury surplus kept money out of circulation; the federal income needed to be reduced. The solution favored by most politicians—and by most businessmen, who profited from the tariff—was cutting internal revenue taxation. But Cleveland was sufficiently impolitic to challenge business interests by insisting that “present tariff laws, the vicious, inequitable, and illogical source of unnecessary taxation, ought to be at once revised and amended.” The higher prices of imported products allowed domestic manufacturers to raise their prices; the tariff laws “thus create a tax upon all our people,” Cleveland said. The President attacked trusts as “selfish schemes” and argued that tariffs on “the necessaries of life used and consumed by all the people…should be greatly cheapened.” Despite the priority Cleveland gave tariff reform, no measure passed both houses before the next election, when the issue cost Cleveland several key states. He lost to Benjamin Harrison.
1937 Fifty Years Ago
On December 12 Japanese bombers sank the clearly marked U.S. gunboat Panay and three Standard Oil supply ships in China’s Yangtze River, killing two Americans and wounding thirty. At the time, Japan was at war with China, and the American vessels were on the Yangtze to evacuate American officials. The news of the sinkings angered Americans, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanded redress. The incident ended when Japan apologized, promised full indemnity, and agreed to punish those responsible.
“You should have heard the howls of warning when we started making a fulllength cartoon,” Walt Disney said years after completing the ground-breaking Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “It was prophesied that nobody would sit through such a thing. But there was only one way we could do it successfully and that was to plunge ahead and go for broke—shoot the works.” Disney and his 750 artists did just that from 1934 to 1937, spending not the projected $150,000 but $1,500,000 to create the first seven-reel cartoon feature. Out of some 1,000,000 drawings, 250,000 went into the finished work, and on December 21 at Los Angeles’s Cathay Circle it was proved that “Disney’s Folly” was, in fact, a masterpiece. During its first three months in the nation’s theaters, more than 2,000,000 people watched the film. Today Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has grossed $383,000,000 for Disney.
The Carnegie Institute closed its annual international art show on December 5, having exhibited 407 paintings from thirteen countries. The work of artists of radically different persuasions was hung together—Georges Braque with Salvador Dali beside Grant Wood. Carnegie’s fine arts director, Homer SaintGaudens, had returned recently from a trip to Europe to declare, “There are no geniuses or masters in Europe today.” But the show’s judges gave seven of eight awards to Europeans, including the top prize of one thousand dollars to Braque for The Yellow Cloth.
