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Show Page 12 The Ogden Valley News Volume XXVIII Issue VI February 1, 2021 Attacks on the U.S. Capitol Building through Time Compiled by Shanna Francis The U.S. Capitol Building has a long history, beginning with the laying of the historic building’s first cornerstone September 18, 1793 by George Washington. It’s interesting to note that enslaved black people acted as the labor for its actual construction. Congress began using the building in 1800 after the United States moved its capital from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Washington D.C. In the book Women of the Blue & Gray: True Civil War Stories of Mothers, Medics, Soldiers, and Spies by Marianne Monson, we learn the story of political advisor and military strategist Anna Ella Carroll. A prolific, passionate, and persuasive writer, many politicians were grateful to have her on their side during an extremely disruptive time of political upheaval during America’s history. Anna grew up underfoot and at the side of her father, whom she was very fond of with feelings of admiration and affection mutually shared between the two. Her father served in the Maryland legislature, and as governor of Maryland beginning in 1829. The author states, “By age 12, Anna regularly assisted her father in his professional work, locating legal passages to serve as evidence for his legislative debates.” By age 15, she was off to a boarding school where she also spent seven years working as a publicity writer and advertiser. Trained in marketing, she later used the skills she had learned toward the art of political persuasion. Anna’s career took off after authoring two books on political topics, bringing her national notoriety, and motivating U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates, serving under the Lincoln Administration, to call her “a person of superior mind, highly cultivated, especially in… American literature, political history, and constitutional law… a writer fluent, cogent, and abounding with evidence of patient investigation and original thought.” Although a highly controversial character, Anna was thrilled with the victory of Lincoln as President of the United States and followed the movements of the Civil War with intense interest—her room filled with military maps and papers, and war documents, which she poured over. Her state of Maryland was a key actor in the Civil War. Situated north of the Capitol, strategically, it was a vital state for the success of the Union. However, most of the state’s residents were aligned with the Confederacy—with the exclusion of a few western-most parts of the state, which were home to a few manufacturing towns. Monson writes, “[P]eople in eastern cities like Annapolis and Baltimore held significant slave holdings and were far more sympathetic to the Confederacy. In the presidential elections of 1861, Lincoln carried only two percent of the state’s votes, and in some counties, he did not receive a single ballot. When Lincoln emerged as victor, some in Maryland even called for seizing control for the capital city by force to prevent his inauguration. Should Maryland topple towards secession, their departure would cut off Washington, D.C., from the rest of the Union, stranding the capital in the midst of Confederate territory—in short, the war would soon be over.” The author continues, explaining the precarious situation the capital faced. “To pacify voters, Maryland’s political leaders walked a precarious balancing act, knowing how quickly the situation could turn to all-out anarchy. Representatives voted to stay in the Union but preserved slavery and forbade passage to any Union troops attempting to make war on their southern neighbors. Governor Hicks, a slave owner himself, waffled on the issue of secession. [Confederate] President Jefferson Davis sent 5,000 muskets to Maryland in April 1861, hoping the gift would persuade the state to rise up against Union forces, but when Anna Ella Carroll learned of the Confederate plan, she felt no ambivalence. Calling upon Hicks, who trusted Anna’s opinion, Carroll persuaded him to confiscate the firearms and clarify his intent to remain in the Union. Hicks followed Anna’s advice and held an emergency session of Congress in Frederick instead of the customary location of Annapolis, a city seething with Confederate support. Anna advised and assisted Hicks as he negotiated the compromise with Congress that kept Maryland in the Union. “Given the strategic position of the state, Lincoln saw no way to allow Maryland to remain neutral. The tension erupted into violence in April 1861 when pro-Confederacy rioters attacked Union troops as they marched through the streets of Baltimore on their way to Washington D.C. Riots continued for days across the city, leaving 42 soldiers and 12 civilians dead. In a bold and widely criticized reaction, Lincoln sent 1,000 Federal soldiers led by General Benjamin Butler to occupy Baltimore. Turning Federal guns upon the city, President Lincoln declared martial law and rescinded the right of habeas corpus. Southern sympathizers found themselves arrested at will, their lands confiscated as the United States Supreme Court chimed in to rule Lincoln’s arrests unconstitutional. Rather than changing course, the president ignored the verdict and continued shutting down state newspapers and jailing reporters and other members of the press. Thousands of Confederate-inclined Marylanders fled south, including 25,000 soldiers who would join ranks with the Confederacy, while 60,000 Maryland men enlisted with Union forces.” In defense of Lincoln, Anna wrote and published a series of pamphlets arguing on behalf of the president’s actions, drawing on her extensive knowledge of Constitutional law, arguing that extraordinary actions were called for in times of war. “In the summer of 1861, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky delivered a scathing speech on the floor of the Senate, claiming that Lincoln had violated the Constitution with his actions in Maryland. Anna was seated in the balcony as Breckinridge delivered his attack, and she wrote a pamphlet in response, using informed legal argument to claim that Lincoln had acted within his role as commander-in-chief in order to preserve the unity of the nation. ‘By virtue of the express and implied powers of the Constitution,’ she wrote, ‘it is impossible to question the duty of the President to use every belligerent right, every instrument known to the law of war:--To annoy, to waken, to destroy the enemy, until its armies are overthrown and the civil authority is re-established.’ The publication was so successful that the U.S. War Dept. distributed it to all members of Congress.” Governor Hicks later expressed his appreciation to Anna by saying, “’Your moral and material support I shall never forget in that trying ordeal…. When all was dark and dreadful for Maryland’s future… you stood nobly by and watched the storm and skillfully helped to work the ship, until, thank god helmsmen and crew were safe in port.’” Additional Threats to the U.S. Capitol Building - The History Channel’s website History.com/news/us-capitol-building-violence-fires and Wikipedia.org expand on a chronological list of the most serious threats and attacks on the Capitol. • Prior to 1861, the British attempted to burn down the capitol August 24, 1814 during the Chesapeake Campaign of the War of 1812. Fire damaged much of it—primarily the Senate and House wings. They also set fire to other federal buildings in Washington D.C., including the White House. This was, for the most part, in retaliation of American troops setting fire to the capital in colonial Canada. • On July 2, 1915, former German Harvard professor Erich Muenter planted three sticks of dynamite in the Capitol near the Senate Reception room as a way of protesting U.S. wartime aid to Britain, stating that he hoped BOOK REVIEW cont. from page 8 When Churchill spoke at Oxford University in 1934 about his concern for the safety of England, he was greeted with “derisive laughter.” As Churchill continued to fall out of favor in Britain shortly before the war, others began stirring up anger and warnings against him. Baron Ponsonby, whose father had been Queen Victoria’s private secretary, warned of the danger the man was to his country, stating that “it may be necessary to imprison Churchill at some point: ‘I have got the greatest possible admiration for Mr. Churchill’s Parliamentary powers, his literary powers, and his artistic powers, but I have always felt that in a crisis he is one of the first people who ought to be interned.’” Regarding Orwell, Ricks explains his early roots and efforts at writing while developing his views and skills. In order to understand his characters, Orwell would spend long lengths of time living among the most destitute groups of the time, the underbelly of society. Through his many experiences, he concluded “with shock, that the left-wing newspapers did not report the situation accurately, and did not want to. Rather, they willingly accepted lies. ‘One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right,’ he wrote. This set him on his life’s work, to push continually to establish the facts, no matter how difficult or • • • • the detonation would “make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for war.” Though an on-dusty guard was severely jarred by the explosion, no one was injured. Four Puerto Rican Americans fired guns in the House of Representatives during a live session March 1, 1954. They claimed that their motive was a demand for independence of the Puerto Rican Territory. One congressman was injured but survived. March 1, 1971, a bomb exploded at the Capitol, causing an estimated $300,000 in damage. The Weather underground Organization claimed responsibility in response to the U.S. bombing of Laos. On November 7, 1983, a bomb tore through the second floor of the Senate wing. While no one was injured in the late-night attack, the explosion caused $250,000 in damage. Responsibility was claimed by a group that called themselves the “Armed Resistance Unit,” a cover name for the militant leftist group May 19th Communist Movement. The attack was said to be motivated by U. S. military actions in Grenada and Lebanon. The U.S. Capitol building was stormed January 6, 2021 after thousands gathered at a peaceful Donald Trump rally in Washington D.C. and the U.S. Congress met to count Electoral College votes with the aim of officially and formally ratifying the election of Joe Biden as President in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. Five people died in the mob violence, including a U.S. capitol Police officer. unpopular that might be.” Orwell’s first great work was Homage to Catalonia, written in 1938. “Today Homage to Catalonia reads like a five-alarm warning about the future, a vision of the nightmarish collision of fascism with communism…. In his introduction to the first American edition of the book, issued in 1952, the literary critic Lionel Trilling called it ‘one of the most important documents of our time.’ In 1999, the conservative American magazine National Review named it the third most important nonfiction book of the century. Coming in first was Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War; in second place, between Churchill and Orwell, was, appropriately enough, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.” Orwell also wrote a popular essay titled “Why I Write,” which he wrote between finishing his classic Animal Farm and beginning 1984. These two books would define the stakes of the Cold War, and continue to provide inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. The lives of Churchill and Orwell, in Ricks “masterful hands… are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin.” I would highly recommend reading Churchill and Orwell, which seems relevant timely given today’s currently political climate. Much can be learned and gleaned from this fascinating and informative book. |