Category Archives: American history

Money

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We are so accustomed to money, the ease of using it and its ubiquity, that we forget that money as a concept had to be invented. And although money is thought to have been invented before 2000 B.C.E. in Babylon, the use of money in the United States was still not standardized in the Federalist Period (roughly late eighteenth century to early nineteenth.) Will Rees, my detective, uses French sous, Spanish pieces of eight (so called because it was formed into eight section that could be broken off), English pounds and more. The new United States created its own money in 1792 but it took many years for for the new money to become common enough for use.

Paper money was used first in China and was soon used by other countries as well. The problem with paper money is this; by itself it is worth nothing. It is not like a piece of gold or silver which at least has the intrinsic value of the metal. Paper money, therefore, is supposed to be back up by reserves of something that has value, such as gold. Otherwise, countries can print paper money to pay with, but the money is virtually worthless. This happened during the American Revolution when, as one point, the Continental dollar was worth only 1/40 of the face value printed on the bill.

The gold standard was officially adopted in the United States in 1900 and abandoned in 1971.

So, the question becomes, what did people use before money? Shells spring to mind. But the value has to be agreed upon by both parties. Imagine going to the grocery story and haggling over every single item in your cart. Barter then becomes the major factor. Even when using a valuable metal such as gold or precious gems, both sides of a transaction have to agree on how much value to assign to the items. Standards – how many grains of gold equals what – have been attempted do achieve uniformity so that all parties can agree on how much a dollar, or a Euro, or, in the past, a franc or a lira are worth.

As complicated as money can be (just try to price an American dollar against a British pound day by day), living without money would be a nightmare.

Policing in Early America

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The rise of the modern police force in a relatively modern phenomenon. Policing in early America was a hodgepodge of constables, sheriffs , night watchmen and justices of the peace. The Boston Night Watch was established in 1631. These were usually poorly paid and untrained. Moreover, although they were paid, it was more of a stipend than a salary. All officers had to have another profession that put food on the table. In my Will Rees series, series, Rouge runs a tavern.

Bands of citizens, like a more powerful Neighborhood watch, was another system employed to keep order. Too often, they became groups of zealots who went after anyone of whom they disapproved.

As the populations increased, especially cities like Boston and New York, port cities where immigrants arrived, these patchwork systems were quickly overwhelmed.

Attempts as establishing some kind of security force were tried. The wealthy usually hired their own men to protect themselves and their possessions. A system that paid the men with rewards was also tried. But abuse was rampant. Innocent men were hanged for crimes so the ‘detective’ could collect the reward.

London was the first city to set up a trained, professional force: the Metropolitan Police. This was a country-wide force with trained officers and it quickly became a model for the United States. New York City became the first police force modeled on the ‘bobbies’. (The American system, however, was decentralized. Politicians chose the officers and they reported to a neighborhood precinct house. Cronyism and corruption were constant problems.) The police did not wear uniforms until 1853, in New York City.

Boston began experimenting with a police force modeled on the British in 1837. By 1860, all large American cities had established full time police forces.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, when Rees is investigating, there was no such thing as a police force.

Currently Reading

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Week of May 2. This week I read The Wages of Sin, by Nancy Allen, Death at Chinatown by Frances McNamara and Death and Hard Cider by Barbara Hambly.

In Wages of Sin, Elsie works on a case in which a man batters his 8 month old pregnant wife to death with a baseball bat.

Of course, the case is more complicated that it first appears, involving a meth lab and a traumatized young girl. Elsie is also negotiating her on/off relationship with Detective Ashcroft. Now that he has taken in his son, Ashcroft has been given a list of rules by his ex-wife and it is seriously impacting his relationship with Elsie. I really enjoy these books although they are dark, and Elsie’s success in court is never assured. Recommended.

The second book I read is Death at Chinatown, a book I picked up at Malice Domestic.

Emily Cabot Chapman is drawn into the murder of a Chinese herbalist in Chinatown. A woman doctor from China has been accused of the murder. The tension in the Chinese community between the traditionalists, (there is a description of some young women with bound feet) and those who want to see China progress – but not always with Western ideals. As in Death at the Homefront, which described the prejudice against the Germans, this book deals with the prejudice against the Chinese.

At the same time, Emily, who has two small children, is trying to balance her responsibilities as a wife and mother with Stephen’s urging for her to go back to work – and the conflict that causes.

Another good mystery, well-researched. I do wish I’d read it in order, though.

Finally, I read Death and Hard Cider. Barbara Hambly is one of my favorite authors. I began reading her when she wrote science fiction and moved with her when she began her Benjamin January mysteries.

It is 1840 and William Henry Harrison (Tippencanoe and Tyler too) is running for President. Henry Clay and his son James visit New Orleans. After one of the many events, a beautiful young girl is found shot to death. One of January’s friends, a former placee, is arrested for the murder. January and his friend Shaw are not satisfied and begin to look into the murder.

As always, the characters and the setting are top rate. I always feel as though I am right there, with the heat and the smell of the swamp and the constant danger of being a black man, although free, in a slave owning community. Highly recommended.

Women’s Rights in Early America

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The short comment on the title is that women had none. Although I would expect that wives had some input in their married lives and the lives of their children, legally they had none.

Women could not vote. The only people who could were white men, and white men with property at that. Women could not inherit from their husbands unless specifically mentioned in a husband’s will. If he did not mention her, she became the responsibility of her son. If the relationship was poor, he could, and frequently did, turn her own to starve on the road.

Women owned nothing. Although a woman might bring a dowry to a marriage, property of such, as soon as the marriage took place, the property became her husband’s. He could spend it as he wished, including on other women. If he chose to gamble it away, she had no legal recourse. (This, by the way, is a common trope in Regency and romance fiction.) One of the sources I read described a case of divorce. When the woman wished to remarry, she had to do so in her petticoat. Even the clothing on her back belonged to her husband and he refused to give her any of it. (This is why the farm Lydia owns becomes Rees’s after their marriage.)

Even her children belonged to her husband. In a dispute, he might remove them and forbid her to see them again. He usually chose his children’s spouses and determined where and when they were apprenticed.

Domestic abuse was not a crime. Although it was expected a husband would not beat his wife to death, English common law gave him the right to beat her with a stick no bigger than his thumb.

This is not a world I would ever wish to return to and it is certainly unfortunate that some people seem to think this is still the way the world should work.

One of the wonderfully progressive facts about the Shakers is that they believed in equality between the sexes. Although their work was divided by gender, and followed along traditional gender roles, women bore a equal share in the governance of the community. Education as well was offered to both boys and girls, a rarity at that time.

The Clotilda, last known slave ship

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Even though the U.S. banned the importation of the enslaved from Africa in 1808, slavery itself was not banned and the enslaved were not freed. Slavery continued to be critical to the economy, particularly in the south but in the north as well. The high demand for slave labor from the cotton trade (the cotton woven into cloth at New England textile factories) encouraged some plantation owners, such as Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher, to risk illegal slave runs to Africa. In 1860, his schooner Clotilda sailed from Mobile to what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey He bought Africans captured by warring tribes back to Alabama, creeping into Mobile Bay under the cover of night. Some of the enslaved were divided between Foster and the Meahers, and others were sold. Foster then ordered the Clotilda taken upstream, burned and sunk to conceal the evidence.

After the Civil War, the freed slaves wished to return to Africa but did not have the money to do so. They set up a town in Alabama, near Mobile, called Africatown. It is set up under the same system as the African villages with a chief, a system of laws, a church and a school.

Based on stories told by modern day descendants living in Africatown, a search for the ship Clotilde was begun. Ben Baines, a reporter, found a shipwreck but it was too large to be the schooner. A company that specializes in maritime shipwreck recovery took on the job. Although the wreckage of the Clotilda was not very deep in the water, maybe eight to ten feet, the visibility was so poor that it was hard to find. It was finally recovered in 2019.

The Clotilda is proof that the slave trade went on for far longer than it should have, by law, and far longer than most of us believe.

Inequality in 1800 US

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Inequality is not a new phenomenon. Through most of human history, recorded history for sure, most of the resources have been coopted by the few. One of the few times in history when there was a big shake up was during the Black Death. Entire villages were wiped out. Crops rotted in the fields. With such a diminished labor pool, surviving serfs were able to negotiate better wages and working conditions for themselves.

However, change usually comes about through some cataclysm or continuous revolts.

In the United States, most of the founding fathers were wealthy and quite a few were plantation owners with slaves. (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, e.g.) Although Will Rees, of the Will Rees mysteries is not poor, he and his family do struggle a bit to make ends meet. Besides farming, Rees takes his loom and weaves for farmwives for a bit of ‘cash money’. Lydia sells her eggs and cheese at market.

Rees comes face to face with the difference in wealth in Murder, Sweet Murder. Lydia receives a frantic letter from her sister begging her to come to Boston. Their father, Marcus Farrell, has been accused of murder. Although Lydia is reluctant, she has been estranged from her father for years, he is still her father. She and Rees, along with the baby and daughter Jerusha, head off to Boston.

Although Rees knew Lydia came from money, he is shocked by the wealth of the Farrell family. The large house is stocked with servants, they own several vehicles including a carriage with a matched foursome, and apparently money is no object.

The Farrells also look down upon Rees for his more humble life. He grew up on a poor farm and certainly does not make enough for servants.

But Marcus Farrell is enmeshed in the Triangle Trade. He owns sugar plantations in the Caribbean as well as a distillery in Boston and a fleet of ships to transport slaves from Africa.

Marcus Farrell, it seems, is morally bankrupt. The question is, is he also a murderer?

Slavery in Murder, Sweet Murder

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In Murder, Sweet Murder, I continued looking at slavery in the United States, following Death in the Great Dismal and Murder on Principle. Since the importation of slaves was not forbidden until1808 (but there was plenty of smuggling through Spanish Florida as well as other slave ships that ignored the law. The Clotilda brought 110 children from Africa in 1859.), Rees’s father-in-law was still bringing in enslaved people during the Rees family’s visit to Boston.

Lydia had already fled the family home, joining the Shakers in Maine as a young woman. This is where she met Will Rees. Now her brother James, a sea captain, is estranged from their father. James refuses to engage in ‘that filthy trade’, his words. Conditions on the ships were horrific.

It is commonly assumed that slavery was wholly a Southern institution. Nothing could be further than the truth. During the Colonial period and through the Revolution, slavery was widespread. However, after the War for Independence, states such as New York and New Jersey began passing laws to abolish slavery gradually. By 1804, all the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or incrementally.

No Southern states abolished slavery although individual owners freed their slaves.

The demand for slaves increased dramatically with the invention of the cotton gin and cotton became ‘King Cotton’. The rising demand for sugar also increased the amount of land on the plantations in Jamaica and the other islands devoted to sugar. Plantations that once grew indigo and cacao switched to sugar, as I describe in the mystery. 

Both sugar and cotton exhaust the soil, so plantation owners looked west for fresh land. That, of course, amplified the conflict between the free states and the slave states and set the stage for the Missouri Compromise where Missouri entered the union as a slave state and Maine, formerly part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as a free state. 

Currently Reading

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The following books, plus a Summoning of Spirits by Hieber, will be discussed by a panel at Murderous March, March 5, 4:45. The topic: Villains: the Characters we love to hate.

The Ninja Daughter, by Tori Eldrige, introduces Lily Wong, a self-styled female ninja. She has made it her mission to protect women and children, primarily by working with a battered woman’s shelter.

We first meet her as she is being beaten by a thug working for the Ukranian mob. Lily is trying to save the wife and child of one of the mobsters – although Katerina takes her son Ilya home despite Lily’s best efforts.

Several deaths that seem to have no relation to one another, a young woman involved with a married man, and a Korean mob all combine together in an action packed and exciting mystery. The characters are wonderfully drawn, especially Lily. I will definitely read more of these.

It is 1975 and Carmen Valdez, working as a secretary at Triumph Comics as a secretary, is desperate to break into the world of comics. A semi-friend from the office, Harvey, suggests they write a comic together. But then he is found dead, and all the scripts are turned in without her name. Carmen is desperate to discover the murderer, and what happened to her name as co-writer on a comic that becomes a runaway hit?

Another exciting and action packed mystery with an added bonus: the inclusion of the comics in the novel,

Recently widowed, Rebecca Parcell is busy struggling to maintain her farm to care about the War for Independence. But rumors are spreading in the winter of 1780 that she’s a Loyalist sympathizer who betrayed her husband to the British. Her husband was a Patriot, everyone knows. But General Washington knows differently. Rebecca’s husband was a British spy. If she can find out what her husband was doing, Washington will protect her farm.

To figure out what Parcell was doing, Becca must speak to an escaped British prisoner of war: Daniel Alloway. He was the last person to see her husband alive. They join forces – now Becca must fight her growing attraction to this drifter.

A wonderful historical novel about the early days of the Revolutionary War. I hope there is a sequel to this one.

Medical care in 1802 – Pain management

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To modern eyes, health care 200 years ago was primitive at best, lethal at worse. A recent knee replacement inspired me to consider medical care and pain management. (A friend of mine told me that a knee replacement is essentially an amputation of one’s leg.) However, it is described, it is a painful procedure.

The choices for treating pain were limited. I think we have all heard the story of the wounded man being treated with a glass of whiskey and a stick clamped between the teeth. Alcohol was used to help the patient into insensibility as well as a disinfectant.

Another choice was salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. Of course, it wasn’t aspirin. yet; the distilling of salicylic acid did not take place until late in the nineteenth center. No, it had to be used in its natural state. The leaves of the willow tree was steeped into a tea which was given to the patient as an analgesic. As a blood thinner and an anti-inflammatory, it is given to surgical patients and heart attack patients alike. It is still one of the most widely used medications in the world.

Finally, there were the opiates. The sap of the opium poppy has been used for millennia to treat pain. Of course, none of the stronger extracts had been distilled from the poppy until 1820 (morphine) and beyond.

One of the early methods of gaining the analgesic effects of the opium was to steep the straw into a tea. (I allude to this in Death in Salem with a character addicted to ‘straw tea’.) But the most common method of ingesting opium was as laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. A reddish brown liquid, it was extremely bitter. By the early eighteen hundreds, laudanum was common and during the eighteen hundreds it became an ingredient in many patent medicines. It was frequently prescribed to women for menstrual cramps and various aches and pains. As might be expected, addiction was prevalent. Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, was an addict. Another fun fact: nurses would spoon feed laudanum to the infants in their care to help them sleep. And if that doesn’t make your hair curl, I don’t know what will.

Laudanum is still available by prescription.

Our world of Tylenol and Ibuprofen seems almost like paradise in comparison.

Sugar, Molasses and Rum

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Before rum, there was sugar – from sugarcane. Sugar is present in many fruits and vegetables. Sugar beets, for example, have more sugar than an apple. There are also many types of sugar: glucose, fructose, lactose, with slight differences in their chemical structures. 

The sweetest of all is sugarcane.

Sugarcane is a picky plant, requiring heat, sunshine and water. It must be grown in a frost free environment. Discovered millennia ago, it grew first in New Guinea and from there spread to India and the Indian subcontinent. It did not reach Europe until many centuries later, during the Middle Ages, and it was rare and expensive. A description of a banquet in 1457 mentions sugar sculptures. As sugar was planted in Madeira and the Canary Islands, the demand for sugar increased tenfold.

Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World and the first sugar plantation was set up in Hispaniola. Slaves were imported to work the plantations and the desire for sugar continued to increase. With the plantations in the West Indies, sugar became cheap enough for most households to afford. From a few pounds consumed per capita in the colonies in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the amount rose to eighty pounds by the end.

Sugarcane is a grass. The crop is chopped into lengths, crushed and boiled. (Now much of this is done by machines but during the time of Will Rees, it was all done by hand.) The sugar we know and love is the crystallized result from the sugarcane syrup. Raw sugar is brown and has a higher molasses content. Slave accounts allude to the difficult and dangerous work connected to the production of sugar, from the chopping of cane to the boiling of the syrup. Slaves in the more northern states did not want to be sold down south: to the cotton or cane fields.

Molasses is a byproduct of this process. Once, it was discarded but the demand for molasses grew exponentially when it was discovered it could be fermented into an alcoholic drink. The fermentation of sugarcane juice is mentioned in Sanskrit texts. By the time of the sugar plantations in the West Indies, the enslaved were fermenting the molasses into ‘Rumbullion”, ‘kill-devil,’ and ‘screech’ – all forms of (probably undrinkable) rum. It rapidly gained in popularity, however, and was used as currency in Africa and was exported to Great Britain.

Sugarcane is a heavy feeder and requires about 660 gallons of water for every 2.2 pounds of sugar. So, not great for the environment as well as its role in obesity, tooth decay, diabetes, and other health risks.