On December 8, 1776, Thomas Paine (while serving with General Greene in the retreat from New York) arrived in Philadelphia. “In what I may call a passion of patriotism,” he remembered, he “wrote the first number of the Crisis.”

This was to be the first in a series of 18 essays collectively called “The American Crisis,” Paine’s major writing effort for the remainder of the war. They were printed at his own expense. He turned over all profits to the American cause.

“Crisis One” is familiar: it begins “These are the times that try men’s souls….” Some say that his invigorating words carried the day for Washington’s troops in Trenton on Christmas Day.

It was in “Crisis Two” that Paine wrote the phrase “The United States of America” for the first time in history. It quickly caught on.

–Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom

Now the man is doubly great in my book:

This Week in History – June 19, 1865 – Juneteenth

Jesús Vico and Marisa Ollero / VCoins.com / June 19, 2020

Juneteenth (a portmanteau of June and nineteenth; also known as Freedom Day) is an unofficial American holiday and an official Texas state holiday, celebrated annually on the 19th of June in the United States to commemorate Union army general Gordon Granger announcing federal orders in the city of Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, proclaiming that all slaves in Texas were now free. 

Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed them almost two and a half years earlier and the American Civil War had largely ended with the defeat of the Confederate States in April, Texas was the most remote of the slave states, with a low presence of Union troops, so enforcement of the proclamation had been slow and inconsistent.

Although this day marks the emancipation of all slaves in the Confederacy, the institution of slavery was still legal and existed in the Union border states after June 19, 1865. Slavery in the United States did not officially end until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States on December 6, 1865, which abolished slavery entirely in all of the U.S. states and territories.

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. It was formally issued on January 1, 1863, declaring that all enslaved persons in the Confederate States of America in rebellion and not in Union hands were to be freed.

More isolated geographically, planters and other slaveholders had migrated into Texas from eastern states to escape the fighting, and many brought enslaved people with them, increasing by the thousands the enslaved population in the state at the end of the Civil War. Although most lived in rural areas, more than 1,000 resided in both Galveston and Houston by 1860, with several hundred in other large towns. By 1865, there were an estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas.

Yikes!

The news of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, reached Texas later in the month. The western Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until June 2. On June 18, Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops to occupy Texas on behalf of the federal government. The following day, standing on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, Granger read aloud the contents of “General Order No. 3”, announcing the total emancipation of those held as slaves:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

Although this event is popularly thought of as “the end of slavery”, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to those enslaved in Union-held territory, who would not be freed until a proclamation several months later, on December 18, 1865, that the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified on December 6, 1865. The freedom of formerly enslaved people in Texas was given legal status in a series of Texas Supreme Court decisions between 1868 and 1874.

Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, it was eclipsed by the struggle for postwar civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African American freedom and arts. By the 21st century, Juneteenth was celebrated in most major cities across the United States.

Library of Congress

Ashmole …

Heh

… met the botanist and collector John Tradescant the Younger around 1650.

Tradescant had, with his father, built up a vast and renowned collection of exotic plants, mineral specimens and other curiosities from around the world at their house in Lambeth.

Ashmole helped Tradescant catalogue his collection in 1652, and, in 1656, he financed the publication of the catalogue, the Musaeum Tradescantianum.

In 1659, Tradescant, who had lost his only son seven years earlier, legally deeded his collection to Ashmole.

Under the agreement, Ashmole would take possession at Tradescant’s death.

When Tradescant died in 1662, his widow, Hester, contested the deed, claiming her husband had signed it when drunk without knowing its contents, but the matter was settled in Chancery in Ashmole’s favour two years later.

Hester was to hold the collection in trust for Ashmole until her death.

Ashmole’s determined aggressiveness in obtaining the Tradescant collection for himself has led some scholars to consider that Ashmole was an ambitious, ingratiating social climber who stole a hero’s legacy for his own glorification.

In 1677, Ashmole made a gift of the Tradescant Collection, together with material he had collected independently, to the University on the condition that a suitable home be built to house the materials and make them available to the public.

Ashmole had already moved into the house adjacent to the Tradescants’ property in 1674 and had already removed some items from their house into his.

In 1678, in the midst of further legal wrangling over the Tradescant Collection, Hester was found drowned in a garden pond.

By early 1679, Ashmole had taken over the lease of the Tradescant property and began merging his and their collections into one.

The Ashmolean Museum was completed in 1683, and is considered by some to be the first truly public museum in Europe. 

The collection filled twelve wagons when it was transferred to Oxford. It would have been more, but a large part of Ashmole’s own collection, destined for the museum, including antiquities, books, manuscripts, prints, and 9,000 coins and medals, was destroyed in a disastrous fire in the Middle Temple on 26 January 1679.

— per vcoins.com

Dude! Chill!

— From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

[The paragraph breaks are inserted for easier reading.]

Mr. Hume told me that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric observer, had perceived, that, to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced;

that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effects;

that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance, which succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age;

that now nothing was left to a writer but that species of the marvellous which might still be produced, and with as great an effect as ever, though in another way—that is, the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals.

I believe, that, were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical frenzy of his scholars…

— From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

… how little you seem to know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of this nation from certain publications, which do, very erroneously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent [in our country]. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals

[Could have said “cables”]

who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing and mutual quotation of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a general mark of acquiescence in their opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the … oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field,—that, of course, they are many in number,—or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

A long tweet, but there was no character limit back then. And he had tons of it!