HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 EVENTS OF 1809 General Events of 1810 SPRING JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER APRIL MAY JUNE FALL JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN THE NEW-ENGLAND ALMANACK FOR 1810. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: John Carter. The United States federal Congress appropriated $4,000 for a lighthouse at Scituate Harbor. George Ticknor began the study of law. Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz was appointed a professor at the Prussian War Academy (Preußische Kriegsakademie) in Berlin, and made responsible for the military education of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. James Monroe was a member of the Virginia Assembly. EVENTS OF 1811 HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 At about this point the Flathead and Shoshone tribespe ople began to obtain firearms from Crow sources so they could struggle more effectively against Blackfeet tribespeople. The Blackfeet, however, under the impression that these firearms were being obtained from Canadian and American white sources, began to target white fur-trappers who ventured onto the northern Plains. The Blackfeet would be so effective in resisting white incursions that by 1825 these fur-trappers, instead of themselves running trap lines in the wilderness, would begin a practice of assembling annually at a “rendezvous” (trade fair) at which they might purchase furs from the natives. The warfare of the Nguni tribes of Natal starts involving more killing than name-calling. Earlier Nguni battles had involved both sides lining up 100 yards apart, then throwing magical weapons, insults, and javelins at one another until it got dark or someone got hurt. Then, around 1810, Nguni battles became savage affairs marked by sophisticated envelopment tactics and the relentless pursuit of fleeing enemies. While this change is often attributed to the creation of new weapons by a Nguni clan leader called Shaka Zulu, it appears to have been due more to the pressure that the Nguni people felt from drought, pestilence, and human overpopulation. The famous French fencer Charles-Genevieve Louis d’Eon de Beaumont died in London. (He had moved to England to escape court intrigues in Versailles before the French Revolution, so unlike many of his peers lived to the ripe age of 87.) A notorious cross-dresser who was known to his friends as Genevieve Louise and to his students as Mademoiselle la Chevalier d’Eon, he was also something of a storyteller, as he claimed to have been an important spy during his younger days. African American boxer Tom Molineaux of Virginia fought English champion Tom Cribb of Bristol at Copthall Common, in Sussex some thirty miles from London. Although Molineaux did not know it, the outcome of the fight was prearranged. In the words of Cribb’s manager (and fight referee) Ap Rhys Price, they “must not let the nigger win for Old England’s sake.” Therefore Molineaux lost the 33-round fight after Price gave Cribb two minutes to recover from a knockout in the 28th round. These boxers would meet again a year later at Thistleton Gap, outside London. While Cribb had spent the time training with Captain Barclay, Molineaux had spent the time in taverns. Molineaux went down in 11 this 2d time, while Cribb became the toast of London. Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo raised the shout of Saint Delores and called upon the Mexican masses to throw off the yoke of Spain. The result was a peasant rebellion. Mexican-born Spaniards soon gunned down the rebels. These same Mexican-born Spaniards would declare their own independence from Spain in 1821. TRAVELS ON AN INLAND VOYAGE THROUGH THE STATES OF NEW-YORK, PENNSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA, OHIO, KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE, AND THROUGH THE TERRITORIES OF INDIANA, LOUISIANA, MISSISSIPPI AND NEW-ORLEANS; PERFORMED IN THE YEARS 1807 AND 1808; INCLUDING A TOUR OF NEARLY SIX THOUSAND MILES. WITH MAPS AND PLATES. BY CHRISTIAN SCHULTZ, JUN. ESQ. (two volumes; New-York: Printed by Isaac Riley). AN INLAND VOYAGE William Jones was a brigadier-general in the Maine militia. Mrs. Jane West’s THE REFUSAL. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 Walter Savage Landor wrote “a brave and good letter to Sir Francis Burdett.” Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs, under attack by Bavarian Catholics who resisted the importation of teachers from northern regions of Germany, returned from München to take charge of the Library and Cabinet of Coins at Gotha. In about this year the Reverend George Croly, after preaching in Ireland for some six years, relocated to London. He would make himself the leading contributor to The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences and Blackwood’s Magazine (published from 1817 to 1825). He would also be associated with the Tory magazine Britannia. The mail from Prince Edward’s Island was brought to Pictou in Nova Scotia on the ice (except for half a mile). BOYS’ OWN BOOK recorded British ice hockey rules. Sir John Franklin would later provide an account of his playing ice hockey in Kingston, Ontario.Thomas Chandler Haliburton graduated from King’s College School in Windsor (his later comment about remembering “playing hurley on the ice” there is taken as the first known reference to hockey in Canada, and is the basis of Windsor’s claim to being the town that fathered that sport). SKATING The Reverend John William Cunningham’s A WORLD WITHOUT SOULS (Boston: Manning & Loring). From a partial index of college reading made in about 1836, we find that at one point or another college student David Henry Thoreau consulted this volume. A WORLD WITHOUT SOULS A SELECTION FROM THE POETICAL WORKS OF THOMAS CAREW.... (Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme; By John Evans ... and sold by Thomas Fry & Co. ..., Bristol, 1810). THOMAS CAREW’S POEMS Thomas Evans and his son Robert Harding Evans (1778-1857)’s OLD BALLADS, HISTORICAL AND NARRATIVE, WITH SOME OF MODERN DATE COLLECTED FROM RARE COPIES AND MANUSCRIPTS... A NEW EDITION, REVISED AND CONSIDERABLY ENLARGED FROM PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, BY HIS SON (London: Printed for R.H. Evans, by W. Bulmer and co.) THOMAS EVANS’S BALLADS I THOMAS EVANS’S BALLADS II THOMAS EVANS’S BALLADS III THOMAS EVANS’S BALLADS IV Under the benign influence of Friend Paul Cuffe, children of color were being accepted into the Friends School at New Bedford “on terms of perfect equality.” The willingness to further racial equality by establishing and managing African American and integrated schools was rarely HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 duplicated in the schools Quakers established for their own children. One exception was the Friends school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which by 1810 admitted African American children “on terms of perfect equality,” notes European American abolitionist Deborah Weston; that school was apparently unique in the yearly meeting. While New England Friends did work to open public schools to children of any race and to organize private schools for African American children and adults, there is no evidence that any other Quaker schools were open to African Americans, even in Rhode Island, home to a large number of both Quakers and African Americans. That includes the Yearly Meeting Boarding School (to be named after donor Moses Brown) which reopened in Providence in 1819 after operating a few years in Portsmouth and the numerous local schools run by Friends meetings throughout the 1700s and 1800s (and in a few cases the 1900s, most in Rhode Island, a few in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.) Some isolated efforts for integration failed. In the 1840s and 1850s, Sarah Grimké and Elizabeth Buffum Chace tried with no success to enroll African American students in Providence and Philadelphia, and during the Civil War the yearly meeting school in Providence refused to admit the motherless children of a highly respected African American physician from Boston who was going to New Orleans to do relief work. Despite Chace’s urging that Friends demonstrate their commitment to the freedmen by enrolling these children, the school committee declared that it was not yet time — even though by then Rhode Island’s public schools were integrated, as were those in Massachusetts. New England Friends were generous and consistent donors when it came to restoring Quaker education in North Carolina or providing schools for the freed people in the South. Annual donations went, sometimes for decades, to a number of southern schools for African Americans, but the major focus of the New England Yearly Meeting was on freedmen’s schools in Washington, D.C., especially in teacher training, and on the Normal Institute at Maryville, Tennessee, for which the meeting bore full responsibility from 1875 to 1905. African American abolitionist and fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward, who preached to white and mixed congregations in Upstate New York, noted the general anomaly in Quaker practice when he wrote in 1855, “They will give us good advice. They will aid us in giving us a partial education but never in a Quaker school, beside their own children. Whatever they do for us savors of pity, and is done 1 at arm’s length.” Professor Augustin Pyramus de Candolle became chair of botany in the faculty of sciences, University of Montpellier. THE SCIENCE OF 1810 Christian C.J. Bunsen completed his work at Marburg University and moved on to Göttingen, where he would support himself by teaching and then by becoming a tutor to William Backhouse Astor, son of John Jacob Astor. 1. Pages 133-134 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 At the age of 16, William Cullen Bryant entered the sophomore class of Williams College. Because of financial problems and also in hopes of being able to attend Yale College, he would withdraw. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Lucien Bonaparte and Alexandrine de Bleschamp family and their 7-year-old son Charles-Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoléon, left Italy with the intent of emigrating to the United States. Apprehended by the British off Sardinia due to their family connections, for four years they would reside in England as celebrities and hostages. Alexander Wilson’s AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY; OR THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIRDS OF THE UNITED STATES (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, Volume II). AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY In this period Wilson was residing primarily in the home of William Bartram so as to be able to make use of his libraries. In addition to his own translations and type designs, Charles Wilkins published a new edition of John Richardson’s PERSIAN AND ARABIC DICTIONARY — A VOCABULARY PERSIAN, ARABIC, AND ENGLISH; ABRIDGED FROM THE QUARTO EDITION OF RICHARDSON’S DICTIONARY AS EDITED BY CHARLES WILKINS, ESQ., LL.D., F.R.S. — BY DAVID HOPKINS, ESQ., ASSISTANT SURGEON ON THE BENGAL ESTABLISHMENT. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 Professor Dugald Stewart’s PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS. Weakened, he gave up most of his active duties as professor at the University of Edinburgh to Dr. Thomas Brown (he would be strong enough to continue to elaborate and publish the substance of his lectures). Walter Channing was studying medicine in Edinburgh and London, and would obtain a second medical diploma, from the University of Edinburgh. Thomas Bewick illustrated THE FABLES OF MR JOHN GAY (T. Wilson & R. Spence, York). Zanesville became the Ohio state capitol. Abandoning his new glassmaking business in upstate New York, the young Henry Rowe Schoolcraft made a journey down the Ohio River to Missouri with his friend Alexander Bryan Johnson. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 Dr. Erik Acharius’s LICHENOGRAPHIA UNIVERSALIS (A UNIVERSAL LICHENOGRAPHY). In upstate New York, Buffalo was incorporated. In upstate New York, Jamestown was founded. The approximate date a windmill was built at Orient, New York, on Paumanok Long Island. There were more than 200 sloops on the Hudson. Alvin Bronson hired a gang of carpenters, placed them under a Mr. Bassett, took them to Oswego Falls, New York to cut the frame for a vessel, built her at Oswego — and launched her in the autumn as the Charles and Ann, placing her under the command of John Hall. 92,677 men were currently enrolled in the New York State militia. Francis Brown, driven ashore by a storm at the mouth of the Genesee River while traveling by canoe from Detroit, Michigan, to Rome, New York, ambled up the river and discovered the high falls of the Genesee. Returning later in the year from Rome, he moved to the west bank of the Genesee (Rochesterville). The Frankfort Tract, on the future site of Rochester, was bought from grist mill owner Charles Harford by Francis Brown, his brother Matthew, and Thomas Mumford and John McKay. Work commenced on a wooden bridge across the Genesee at Main Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 A marble statue commissioned by Louise, Princess of Stolberg, Countess of Albany and crafted by Antonio Canova was placed in the church of Santa Croce in Florence in honor of her long-term live-in lover Vittorio Alfieri. Chester Dewey became the professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Williams College. He would hold this position for the following 17 years. His specialty would be the grasses, and he would discover and describe several new species. He would make himself an authority on sedge plants (plants typically found in damp woodlands and bogs and ditches, and at water margins), and would labor for more than four decades on a monograph on this genus Carex. A careful observer of the weather, he would publish his notes in regular monthly reports over many years. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 Silvio Pellico became a professor of French in the Collegio degli Orfani Militari in Milan, Italy. Michele Felice Cornè painted a mural for the Sullivan Dorr mansion in Providence, Rhode Island. The earliest record of the Moffett Mill site in Lincoln, Rhode Island appears to be a land and building transfer from Job Arnold to Elisha Olney and George Olney in this year. The deed mentions a sawmill and dam. Between this year and 1812, George Olney, who had been involved as a machinist in the thread mill at the dam in Lincoln Woods at Olney Pond and in the mill at Old Ashton, Quinnville, would be building and equipping a machine shop. Little Bett, The Learned Elephant was born (not as a child of Old Bet, and the “Mr. Potato Head” statue below in Chepachet, Rhode Island, where she would be executed by ambush firing squad of local yokels in 1826, is only an approximation of her appearance). HDT WHAT? INDEX 1810 1810 Here’s a story of one side of Narraganset Bay, versus the other side! On the east side of the bay in this year General George DeWolf was erecting “Linden Place” in Bristol as his homestead, using the profits of his large slave plantation in the Caribbean to make this a fine specimen of the finest architecture tastes of the period. His homestead, designed by Russell Warren, is distinguished by a fine portico with lofty Corinthian columns, and an old-fashioned ornamental balustrade of intricate pattern surrounds the roof. In the following year he would purchase adjacent land, to enlarge the grounds. Here in 1817 he would be able to entertain none less than President James Monroe in a manner befitting his position. Hoo-hah! Meanwhile, on the west side of the Narraganset Bay, a couple of years after being caught as a runaway and flogged, Cato Pearce ran away again. He only had a year to go until under Rhode Island law he would no longer be required to serve his master without pay, but he ran away anyway — could he have been fearing that his master would sell him south into life slavery just before he attained his majority, or, could he have been fearing that despite technically becoming a free man, he would not be able to be actually free as a black man in the Rhode Island of that era? At that time there were only a few more than a hundred slaves left in South County, but the situation there for people of color did not seem markedly improved. This time he determined to try crossing the border into Massachusetts, because slavery had there in all its forms been outlawed, and hired himself out as a farmhand to a white family in Rehoboth. I went into Rehoboth, Mass., and hired out to a man by the name of Samuel Lyon. He was a dreadful wicked man, and while livin’ with him I became more wicked and hard than ever. He had rum as plenty almost as water, and I got to drinkin’ badly. I loved with him about three years. He died while I lived with him. His death was dreadful. I think he lay on his sick bed almost a fortnight. He cried bitterly for mercy — mercy, and told his folks that he was going to hell. He said he could n’t be saved. Oh, he said, my feet and legs are in hell. He die in that dreadful state; and the last words that came from his lips were, “O Lord, gone!” I used to stand and look at him in this dreadful state, but I dare not go into the room. I then made up my mind that I would try to do better.