Great Britain paid a high price to drive French arms from North America. The French and Indian War doubled the national debt and brought to the British Empire vast new territory populated with Indians and Frenchmen who remained hostile to British rule. Parliament decided that the colonies should begin to pay for their own defense and passed two acts in March designed to support a ten-thousand-man army. On March 22 King George III signed the Stamp Act, requiring colonists to pay a tax on all legal documents, newspapers, almanacs, and even playing cards and dice. Two days later the Quartering Act, George III’s arrangment for the army’s lodging, went into effect.
Political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic questioned whether the crown could impose a direct tax upon the colonists, to which the British prime minister, George Grenville, responded, “God damn them, we will show them that we have the power to tax them, and will tax them.” Though the colonists were lightly taxed compared with English citizens, they protested that the London government had no right to tax British subjects who lacked representation in the House of Commons.
Mob resistance to the law grew so violent throughout 1765 that colonial stamp agents dared not even attempt to enforce it. New Yorkers rioted, and Boston residents hanged Grenville in effigy on the public gallows. By the spring of 1766 the British had committed fifteen hundred troops to maintaining order around New York alone, and the Stamp Act was raising little revenue. That May the colonists celebrated news of the act’s repeal.
Housing British troops proved to be less objectionable to the colonists than paying for them. Comparatively little protest hindered the first year of the Quartering Act, which required the colonies to house British troops and to provide them “with Fire, Candles, Vinegar, and Salt, Bedding, [and] utensils for dressing their Victuals.” In addition the colonies had to supply a daily ration of “Small Beer or Cyder, not exceeding Five Pints, or Half a Pint of Rum mixed with a Quart of Water, to each Man, without paying anything for the same.” The Quartering Act was renewed in 1766 and its provisions strengthened in 1774.
1865 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
March 4 was Inauguration Day in Washington, D.C., for Abraham Lincoln and his new Vice President, Andrew Johnson. Precisely at noon Johnson entered the Senate to take his oath of office and to make an unscheduled address. “I am made the presiding officer of this body,” Johnson told the Senators assembled before him. “I therefore present myself here in obedience to the high behests of the American people to discharge a constitutional duty, and not presumptuously to thrust myself in a position so exalted. … Deem me not vain or arrogant; yet I should be less than man if under such circumstances I were not proud of being an American citizen… .”
“All this is in wretched bad taste,” said Lincoln’s friend Joshua Speed to Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy. “Johnson is either drunk or crazy,” Welles whispered back. “I hope it is sickness.” Grasping the Bible as he took his oath, Johnson bellowed, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States.”
Lincoln “looked badly and felt badly” that day, according to Speed, “apparently more depressed than I have seen him since he became President.” His brief inaugural address on the steps of the Capitol was philosophical rather than political in tone. “With malice toward none,” Lincoln said, “with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan— to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
∗“His name might be Audacity,” said an admiring Confederate soldier of Robert E. Lee. “He will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker, than any other general in the country, North or South.” With Federal armies closing the vise around the sagging Confederacy, desperate chances were all Lee had left when he launched his final long-shot counterpunch on March 25.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was pinned down at Petersburg, while Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee was struggling to halt Sherman’s steamroller in North Carolina. Lee’s only hope was to combine the two Confederate armies and take on Sherman and Grant one at a time at something like equal strength. Lee decided to strike the Federal center at Fort Stedman, only 150 yards from his own trenches, hoping to blast a hole through which his cavalry could escape. The young Georgia general John B. Gordon attacked at dawn with twelve thousand men, took the fort, and sent columns of his men forward to capture a number of smaller forts and seize Federal trenches. “He’s the most prettiest thing you ever did see on a field of fight,” said one of Gordon’s men. “It would put heart in a whipped chicken just to look at him.”
Gordon probably was looking for forts that didn’t exist; the advance units wandered in futility until Gen. John Hartranft’s Union division counter-attacked. By eight that morning the Federals had recovered the fort and sent the Rebels back to their original lines in disarray. “The slope between Stedman and the Confederate salient [was] a place of fearful slaughter,” wrote a New York artilleryman. “My mind sickens at the memory of it.” The Confederates lost thirty-five hundred troops, almost two thousand of whom surrendered under the crossfire that cut off their lines of retreat.
Lee was trapped. Federal infantry would continue to prod his right wing through the end of the month, but the Army of Northern Virginia had made its last offensive surge.
1915 Seventy-five Years Ago
The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s epic film of the Civil War and Southern Reconstruction, opened on March 3 at the Liberty Theater in New York City. The film’s $110,000 budget and fifteen-week schedule were unheard of at a time when most features cost $10,000 and took one week to shoot. Griffith sank his entire personal fortune as well as his weekly paychecks into the project, in the belief that it would be the greatest and most profitable film of all time.
The director’s search for a monumental subject for his masterpiece led him to The Clansman, Thomas Dixon’s novel and play celebrating a former Confederate soldier’s role in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. The story appealed to Griffith’s romantic vision of the antebellum South. President Woodrow Wilson, himself a scholar of the Reconstruction era, watched a private screening in the White House and said: “It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
The White House was soon trying to disavow Wilson’s remarks. Though Griffith had been persuaded to cut several blatantly racist scenes from the final version, his representations of black Americans provoked a flood of protest. The Nation termed it “a deliberate attempt to humiliate ten million American citizens and portray them as nothing but beasts.” Riots attended the Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta openings, and eight states refused to allow the movie to be shown. “To make a few dirty dollars,” charged the New York Globe, “men are willing to pander to depraved tastes and to foment a race antipathy that is the most sinister and dangerous feature of American life.”
Griffith answered his critics with a pamphlet on free speech, but his skills as a film maker required no explanation. The Birth of a Nation was a stunning technical achievement that showed for the first time the power of motion pictures as a medium of political and social persuasion. Griffith’s virtuosity made the film’s ideology all the more potent. “Never before,” remarked the philosopher Thorstein Veblen, “have I seen such concise misinformation.”
1965 Twenty-five Years Ago
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 destroyed the legal foundations of segregation in America, but it did nothing to end the literacy tests and terrorism that Southern states used to deny black Americans the right to vote. In Alabama’s Wilcox and Lowndes counties, for example, not a single black voter was on the registration rolls. Nearby Selma was the logical place to take a stand for voting rights, explained Martin Luther King, Jr., “because it had become a symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement in the Deep South.” King announced plans for a protest march from Selma to Montgomery to take place on March 7. “We’re not on our knees begging for the ballot,” he said. “We are demanding the ballot.”
“NEVER” read a button on the lapel of Selma’s sheriff, James Clark, who in the past had revealed an uncanny ability to rejuvenate the civil rights movement with galvanizing acts of violence against demonstrators. On March 7 he did it again, sending his posse men to help five hundred Alabama state troopers disperse the Selma marchers with clubs, cattle prods, bull whips, and attack dogs. “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam, and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama,” said one of the injured protesters. “Next time we march … we may have to go on to Washington.”
A national television audience that evening saw ABCs broadcast of Judgment at Nuremburg interrupted by footage of America’s own racial hatred. The Minnesota senator Walter Mondale declared that the Selma violence made “legislation to guarantee Southern Negroes the right to vote an absolute imperative for Congress this year,” and later in the week President Johnson introduced a voting rights bill to Congress. But the fatal beating on March 9 of the Reverend James J. Reeb demonstrated that the battle was far from won. King announced his determination to undertake the march to Montgomery as “part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement” and declared that further acts of brutality would take place “in the glaring light of television.”
Beginning on March 21, three thousand federal troops lined U.S. Highway 80 as King’s legion left Selma for the five-day, fifty-four-mile journey. Outside Montgomery nearly twenty-five thousand people joined the marchers and accompanied them to the Capitol building. “We are on the move now,” King told the largest-ever civil rights demonstration in the South, “and no wave of racism can stop us…. We are moving to the land of freedom.”
That night Ku Klux Klansmen shot and killed Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer and mother of five, as she was driving to Montgomery. This shocking postscript to the Selma march intensified pressure for passage of the Voting Rights Bill, which Johnson signed into law in August.
∗On March 8 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that conscientious objectors with a sincere belief “in a relation to a supreme being involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation” could be exempted from combat service in the U.S. military.
∗Thirty-five hundred American Marines began to arrive in South Vietnam on March 8 to guard the Air Force base at Da Nang. These men, the first American combat troops to land on the Asian mainland since the Korean War ended, joined twenty-three thousand American advisers already serving with the South Vietnamese military.
∗On March 24 Sen. Robert Kennedy became the first person to scale Mount Kennedy in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Kennedy overcame an acute case of acrophobia before reaching the summit, where he left several mementos of his brother John, in whose honor the mountain had been named. Kennedy said he made the climb for “personal reasons which seemed compelling,” but his wife Ethel had a different theory: “I think he wants to take his mind off the fact that he’s not an astronaut.”
∗The most popular motion picture in March was George Stevens’s biblical blockbuster The Greatest Story Ever Told. Critics attacked the film’s ponderous length and numerous celebrity cameo appearances but admired the American debut of the Swedish actor Max von Sydow as the Messiah. Von Sydow had previously established an international reputation for his anguished work in the films of Ingmar Bergman.
