Seating for the “ladies” was limited to the upper gallery of the auditorium. This arrangement affected not only the rowdiness but the design and construction of the house. Shouts and noises emanating from the upper gallery often bore little relation to the action on the stage. Back staircases leading directly to the upper gallery began to be designed for many theaters, assuring that good citizens merely out for the show would not have to enter or leave by the same door as those going to work. This door also provided an easy exit in case any theatergoers decided they were no longer interested in watching the show.
If receipts were low, managers would sometimes send messengers directly to a house of prostitution to distribute block tickets. This type of publicity attracted even more girls than usual and brought scores of men eager to pay money to get into the theater.
Occasionally, however, public pressure forced a theater manager to close the upper gallery. Almost without fail, this reduced patronage and profits. Many theatergoers were simply not interested in seeing only the show that occurred onstage. At Boston’s Tremont Theater, after one such interdiction, “scarcely fifty persons were present.”
Churchmen and “respectable” members of society despised the theater and the upper gallery. According to the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley, President Lincoln’s assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth was God’s way of showing Americans the evil character and influence of the theater.
SOURCE: Claudia Johnson, “That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American Theaters,” American Quarterly, XXVII (December 1975), 581.
DIVORCE, AMERICAN STYLE
When Ruthey Ann Hansley of Hanover County, North Carolina, sued her husband for divorce in March of 1845, the state supreme court revealed how difficult marriage dissolutions could be in mid-century.
Ruthey Ann married Samuel G. Hansley in 1836. According to later divorce proceedings, the couple lived together for years “enjoying much happiness.” Yet, for reasons unknown to Mrs. Hansley, her husband suddenly began drinking and was often intoxicated for periods of up to a month. Samuel then began committing a great number of “outrages against the modesty and decency” of his wife, including cruel beatings and all-night absences from their bed. Ruthey Ann next discovered that her husband had been cohabiting with a black slave woman, Lucy. Yet, as was reasonable for any middle-nineteenth-century wife, she “tried to endure.”
Samuel then became bolder. He abandoned Ruthey Ann’s bed completely. Lucy moved into the house and was given responsibility for the running of the home. Labeling his wife an “incumbrance,” Samuel openly and repeatedly ordered her to give place to the slave Lucy, and encouraged the slave to treat his wife with disdain and disrespect.
But Samuel’s ill treatment had just started. He began starving his wife for two to three days, and at other times literally threw her out of the house and locked the doors behind her. There she would be compelled to remain for an entire night, unprotected from the weather. Samuel’s cruelest brutality occurred when he repeatedly compelled Ruthey Ann to sleep in the same bed with him and Lucy. Once in bed, Lucy was treated “as his wife.” Ruthey Ann was too afraid to object. Finally, she could bear no more and fled to the home of her brother, in August 1844. Six months later Ruthey Ann filed for divorce.
The Superior Court of Hanover County granted Ruthey Ann a divorce from Samuel and began an inquiry into a proper financial settlement. Samuel appealed the divorce to the North Carolina Supreme Court, probably to try to avoid a severe alimony ruling. In Raleigh, the high court concluded that although Ruthey Ann’s treatment had been unfortunate, and that Samuel’s conduct certainly constituted grounds for divorce, it could not be proved that an adulterous relationship between Samuel and Lucy still existed. The major witness to this relationship, Ruthey Ann, had left in August! No further evidence of continued adultery had been introduced, save an off-the-cuff comment by Samuel that he would sooner sell everything he owned than part with Lucy. Therefore, a marriage reconciliation was not beyond hope. The lower court’s ruling was overturned and the divorce denied.
SOURCE: Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 428.
THE SENATOR ELECTED BY A MEXICAN BULLET
“In 1848, [James Shields] was elected to the United States Senate [from Illinois], succeeding Senator Breese, who was a candidate for re-election. At the battle of Cerro Gordo, in the war against Mexico, he was shot through the lungs, the ball passing out at his back. His nomination over a man so distinguished as Judge Breese was a surprise to many, and was the reward for his gallantry and wound. His political enemies said his recovery was marvelous, and that his wound was miraculously cured, so that no scar could be seen where the bullet entered and passed out of his body, all of which was untrue. The morning after the nomination, Mr. Butterfield, who was as violent a whig as General Shields was a democrat, met one of the judges in the Supreme Court room, who expressed his astonishment at the result, but added the judge, ‘It was the war and that Mexican bullet that did the business.’ ‘Yes,’ answered Mr. Butterfield dryly, ‘and what a wonderful shot that was! The ball went clean through Shields without hurting him, or even leaving a scar, and killed Breese a thousand miles away.’”
James Shields is the only man in American history who ever represented three different states in the U.S. Senate: Illinois for six years, Minnesota for one year, and Missouri for thirty-nine days. Remarkably, Shields was an Irish immigrant.
SOURCE: Isaac N. Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Company, 1918), p. 58n.
TWELVE STROKES FOR BAD COOKING
Following is an actual list of some of the punishments meted out to sailors in the United States Navy in 1848:
For bad cooking 12 strokes of the whip
For stealing a major’s wig 12 strokes of the whip
For skulking 12 strokes of the whip
For running into debt on shore 12 strokes of the whip
For tearing a sailor’s frock 9 strokes of the whip
For filthiness 12 strokes of the whip
For striking a schoolmaster 12 strokes of the whip
For drunkenness and breaking into the liquor closet 12 strokes of the whip
For noise at quarters 6 strokes of the whip
For bad language 12 strokes of the whip
For dirty and unwashed clothes 12 strokes of the whip
For being out of hammock after hours 12 strokes of the whip
For throwing overboard the top of a spittoon 6 strokes of the whip
For taking bread out of oven 9 strokes of the whip
For neglecting mess utensils 12 strokes of the whip
For taking clothes on shore to sell 12 strokes of the whip
For skylarking (running up and down the rigging of a ship) 6 strokes of the whip
For being naked on deck 9 strokes of the whip
SOURCE: Horace Greeley, ed., The Tribune Almanac for the Years 1838 to 1868 (New York: New York Tribune, 1868), I. 37.
THE FORGOTTEN PRESIDENT
His gravestone reads, “President of U.S. one day.” His name? David Rice Atchison.
Atchison may have been president of the United States for one day, but no one is sure. The facts are these. Atchison was president pro tempore of the Senate on March 4, 1849, the day President James K. Polk’s term expired at noon and one day before Zachary Taylor was sworn in (Taylor refused to take the oath on March 4, since that was a Sunday). Because Polk’s vice president had resigned a few days before, Atchison, it would seem, was technically the only person legally allowed to exercise the powers of the presidency—by virtue of his being third in line in the succession. According to the law, the president pro tempore automatically became president when the presidency and vice presidency were vacant.
Nothing happened during Atchison’s one day in office, though a few friends jokingly requested appointments to the cabinet. Atchison later told the St. Louis Globe-Demo
crat: “I went to bed. There had been two or three busy nights finishing up the work of the Senate, and I slept most of that Sunday.”
SOURCE: David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, The People’s Almanac # 2 (New York: Bantam, 1978), pp. 178–80.
THE RELATION OF TWO PRESIDENTS
Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, was once married to the daughter of President Zachary Taylor. In 1832, at Fort Crawford, in present-day Wisconsin, Davis met and fell in love with Sarah Knox Taylor. He was twenty-three and fresh out of West Point; she was eighteen. Sarah Knox’s father, future president Zachary Taylor, was the post’s commandant.
“Knox,” as she was called by family and friends, loved Davis as much as he loved her. But Zachary Taylor saw only ill fortune for the couple. He was a military officer, and because of this his wife had spent a good part of her life in isolated army forts. He did not wish to see his daughter face the same type of existence. Legend has it that Taylor also disliked Davis for personal reasons. But whatever the reason, Taylor absolutely denied the young couple his permission to marry. Instead, they waited two and a half years, until Knox was of legal age. Davis then resigned from the army, presumably to prevent any interference Taylor might have attempted through military channels, and Jeff and Knox married with the full knowledge—and full disapproval—of Zachary Taylor.
Before the newlyweds reached the home on Davis’s Mississippi cotton plantation, however, they traveled to Louisiana, where they visited some of Davis’s relatives whom Knox had never met. There, near St. Francisville, both bride and groom contracted malarial fever. Davis recovered, but Sarah Knox, after waiting two and a half years to marry, died in her husband’s arms on September 15, 1835, just three months to the day after her wedding. Brokenhearted, Jefferson Davis traveled awhile to regain his health, then became a total recluse at Brierfield, his Mississippi plantation. For the next eight years he saw virtually no one except his slaves and his brother.
In the middle 1840s, Davis began to reappear in public. He remarried in 1845 and was elected to the House of Representatives from Mississippi.
When the Mexican War broke out, he was chosen to lead a regiment of Mississippi volunteers. His commanding officer during a large part of the war was General Zachary Taylor, his former father-in-law. Davis and his regiment fought gallantly at the Battle of Monterey, and Davis himself was wounded at the Battle of Buena Vista. The night after he was wounded, General Taylor appeared at Davis’s tent and told the Mississippian, “My daughter was a better judge of men than I was.”
Zachary Taylor, a Whig, became president in 1849. Jefferson Davis was a United States senator from Mississippi and the recognized leader of the Southern Democrats. Politically, Davis and Taylor were on opposite sides of the fence, Davis edging toward secessionism, Taylor threatening to lead the army personally against any state that declared its independence from the Union. Persons taken in rebellion, Taylor promised, he would hang—more speedily than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico. Yet, personally, Davis and his second wife were treated as part of the Taylor family. Throughout the general’s short term as president, the Davises were in and out of the White House almost as constantly as if Knox had never died.
SOURCE: Holman Hamilton, The Three Kentucky Presidents (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1978), pp. 12–13.
TEN CENTS TOO MUCH TO PAY TO BE PRESIDENT
Some people would spend every cent they had to be nominated for the U.S. presidency. Not Zachary Taylor. When the Whig party nominated him as their presidential candidate in early June 1848, their letter officially notifying him of the nomination carried no postage. When it reached Taylor’s home, the future president refused to pay the ten cents’ postage due. It was not until July that Taylor learned he was the Whig candidate.
Actually, the Post Office had issued its first stamp only one year before Taylor’s nomination, in 1847. Before that time, and continuing for a time afterwards, mail was paid for by the recipient. Taylor, one of America’s great heroes in the Mexican War, received volumes of postage-due mail from all across the country. Rather than spend a small fortune on unsolicited mail from total strangers, the hero of the Battle of Buena Vista routinely refused most of his mail. Thus, when the Whig presidential nomination letter came, it was turned away unread. Taylor, of course, won the presidency in November 1848. He was the last Whig ever to be elected president.
SOURCE: Joseph Kane, Facts about the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p. 83.
THE TRUE VALUE OF THE MEXICAN WAR
Following the Mexican War, President Zachary Taylor commissioned Captain William Tecumseh Sherman to explore and survey the newly acquired lands of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. For two years Sherman traversed the sandy, cactus-ridden areas, then returned to Washington. Later, the future Civil War hero called at the White House.
“Well, Captain,” inquired the President, “will [the new possessions] pay for the blood and treasure spent in the war?”
“Well, General,” replied Sherman, “it cost us one hundred millions of dollars and ten thousand men to carry to the war with Mexico.”
“Yes, fully that,” returned a satisfied Taylor, “but we got Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California.”
“Well, General,” reminisced Sherman about the arid land he had just left, “I’ve been out there and looked them over,—all that country,—and between you and me I feel that we’ll have to go to war again. Yes, we’ve got to have another war.”
“What for?” asked the surprised President.
“Why,” answered the captain, “to make ’em take the darn country back!”
SOURCE: Melville D. Landon, Eli Perkins: Thirty Years of Wit (New York: Cassell, 1891), p. 32.
Billy Yank and Johnny Reb
“There they are, cutting each other’s throats, because one half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other by the hour.”
—THOMAS CARLYLE
SCRAPBOOK OF THE TIMES
• In the wake of the discovery of gold in California, sailors in July 1850 deserted 500 ships in San Francisco to seek their fortunes.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe received torrents of abuse from Southerners for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She also received a black man’s ear.
• Eighteen fifty-one was the first year a Christmas tree was put in an American church—in Cleveland, Ohio.
• While president, Franklin Pierce was arrested after accidentally running down an old woman with his horse. He was released after the arresting officer discovered the identity of the prisoner.
• In 1856, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered seventy camels brought to the United States. He wanted the camels to provide transportation for military personnel pending the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The camels were used for about two years with some success.
• James Buchanan, the only bachelor president, almost married. It was in 1819, when he became engaged to a Miss Anne Caroline Coleman. Buchanan apparently loved his fiancée dearly, but she broke off the engagement and a week later died, probably by suicide. During the rest of his life Buchanan maintained an ironclad silence about his relationship with Miss Coleman.
• The noted abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, commenting on politicians in 1860: “You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the presidency.”
• The first time anyone used the temporary-insanity defense in a trial in the United States was in 1859. The defendant, Congressman Dan Sickles, was accused of murdering his wife’s paramour. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Sickles had indeed killed his wife’s lover, but the jury acquitted him on the grounds of temporary insanity.
• The first shot of the Civil War was fired by Edmund Ruffin at Fort Sumter. Ruffin was a leading sectionalist who, at the end of the war, committed suicide rather than face the defeat of the Confederacy.
• One of the c
orrespondents of the New York Tribune during the Civil War was Karl Marx, who reported on politics in Europe.
• Julia Ward Howe sold her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 for five dollars.
• In late 1862, General Grant issued the following order: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours.” It has been said, in Grant’s defense, that by “Jews” he simply meant peddlers and traders, and that he was not anti-Semitic.
• By 1861 there were only two countries in the Western world other than the United States which maintained slavery: Cuba and Brazil.
• General Stonewall Jackson sent this message to the Confederate War Department: “Send me more men and fewer questions.”
• The last veteran of the American Revolution died in 1867.
• The expression, “waving the bloody shirt,” meaning the desire to stir up the passions of the Civil War, came into use in 1867 after Senator Ben Butler stood up during the trial of Andrew Johnson and waved a shirt stained with blood.
• Republican Senator Benjamin Wade voted to convict Johnson though he would have become president if Johnson had been found guilty. Johnson was acquitted by only one vote.
• The first racially mixed jury in the United States was impaneled after the Civil War to judge Jefferson Davis. Davis was allowed to go free before the trial began, however.
• The first Negro elected to the U.S. Senate was Hiram Revels of Mississippi. Ironically, Revels’s seat had last been filled by Jefferson Davis.
• During his presidency U. S. Grant put many relatives on the federal payroll, including his father, as postmaster at Covington, Kentucky; a brother-in-law, as minister to Denmark; another brother-in-law, as appraiser of customs in San Francisco; and still another brother-in-law as collector of the Port of New Orleans. In all, Grant gave federal positions to thirteen relatives.
• While president, Grant was arrested for speeding in his horse carriage.
One-Night Stands with American History Page 8