Missouri Quotes
Public Hangings in America were not abolished for another six decades. See Quotation 644484 in Related Quotes.
This was one of the several early unofficial Emancipations that was issued in the Civil War.
This quotation is very interesting historically. Despite the fact that Washington DC was a thoroughly racially segregated city, and the Southern racists controlled much of Congress, Blacks as well as whites were welcome in the Congressional galleries, and they attended many debates. Slavery and equality were not just debated in the 1850s but the issue was in constant friction from the earliest Congress.
She was a nondescript minor functionary in a Tea Party Active Southern County, and her hatred of the Black president was hardly noteworthy. What makes this an important quotation is that it was frequently shown to foreigners who really did not understand the great degree of freedom of speech. Here a public official being paid by the government, not only calls for the removal of a sitting president, but also openly asked the army to rebel against their commander in chief. She was not punished, nor even arrested or tried. She was not even dismissed from her elected government job. That was up to the voters in the next election. There likely is no other country in the world where that can happen.
The founding fathers assumed that as the West was settled, there would be more states in the Union. However, Morris, a bit of a snob and an aristocrat, assumed that the Westerners would be a little rougher than the established Eastern States and in particular would be more inclined to use violence and engage in war. So he wanted some provision that the original “maritime” East Coast states could not be outvoted. He did not prevail and all states were treated as equal in the Senate, but he turned out to be right about the warlike propensity. Kentucky and other “Western” areas were strong advocates for the War of 1812. The Atlantic states were much more vulnerable to a British invasion and the Maritime States’ economy could be easily ruined (and was) by a naval blocade, where the Western states’ economics were not much affected by the war. The West was also more strongly for the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, and even the Mormon Wars.
These facts were gross contradictions of what the Governor had been hearing from numerous community leaders who were in a panic of hatred.
