Benjamin Hadlock & Abraham Lincoln
February 2, 2010
I am sure you are wondering who Benjamin Hadlock is and how does he connect to Abraham Lincoln. Well, allow me to explain.
In late 1846 or early 1847 Alanson Jenkins and George Jenkins hired Benjamin Hadlock to measure logs and agreed to pay him $0.50 per hundred feet. Jenkins and Jenkins failed to pay, and Hadlock sued in the JP (Justice of the Peace) court. The JP ruled for Benjamin Hadlock and awarded $11.37. Jenkins and Jenkins retained Lincoln and appealed the judgment to the Woodford County Circuit Court. Apparently, the parties reached an agreement, and Hadlock dismissed the suit. All of this occured in the first half of 1847. If you click on the picture above you can see the screen shot of the judges docket document and that #16 lists the lawyers as plantiff- Gridley and Defendant- Lincoln.
Who then, who is Benjamin Hadlock?…Ben is my 5th generation Great Grandfather on my mother’s side and his wife was Almenia White whose grandfather had fought in the American Revolution.
Not bad for a person who when he was a kid was told by the grandparents that most of the family come from Germany in the late 1800’s. That has proven not to be the case.
Texas Wants Rebel Flags Held In Illinois…Then Come and Get Them
January 30, 2010
Official Wants Authentic Confederate Flags Returned to Texas
Updated: Thursday, 28 Jan 2010, 10:07 PM CST
Published : Thursday, 28 Jan 2010, 10:06 PM CST
In the shadow of the Lone Star State capital towers a mounted warrior carved from stone.
It is a monument to Terry’s Texas Rangers – fierce cavalrymen who warred for the Confederacy a century and half ago.
“You would describe them as hell raisers,” says Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson.
Some 1,700 rode off to serve, but less than two hundred were still mounted by war’s end. Somewhere between the battles of Shiloh and Bentonville, Terry’s Texas Rangers lost a treasured flag.
A hundred-fifty odd years later Patterson, a former U.S. Marine, is leading the charge to get the battle flag back.
“Candidly, I don’t think those flags should be there, they should be here,” he says. “They’re in the case of the ranger flag is a museum in Chicago.
“These flags were lost on the battlefield. Their home is in Texas. They were carried into battle by Texas troops and they ought to be in Texas where those of us with a historic interest in these flags are able to view them,” he adds.
It’s a rescue mission some might view as misguided. The emblem, after all, was carried by troops whose government sought to perpetuate slavery.
Among students studying history at the University of Houston the issue aroused strong reactions.
“There may be some value to some people, but there are others who may find it offensive,” said UH student Jessica Capistran.
“We don’t need to, being that its in the past,” said UH student Chris Ramsey of the flag acquisition effort. “Leave it in the past and look to the future.”
UH Senior Brandon Chizer sees the retrieval attempt differently.
“It’s like learning about the holocaust. That’s painful for a lot of people, but should we not learn about it because it was bad? No, if we don’t learn about it, we are doomed to repeat it right? Isn’t that the point of history?” he asked.
Commissioner Patterson couldn’t agree more and believes these emblems of by-gone days can trigger deeper understanding.
Reason enough, he contends, to bring a banner home.
Howard Zinn Passes…
January 29, 2010
Howard Zinn, Historian, Dies at 87
The cause was a heart attack, which he had while swimming, his family said.
Proudly, unabashedly radical, with a mop of white hair and bushy eyebrows and an impish smile, Mr. Zinn, who retired from the history faculty at Boston University two decades ago, delighted in debating ideological foes, not the least his own college president, and in lancing what he considered platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward democracy.
Almost an oddity at first, with a printing of just 4,000 in 1980, “A People’s History of the United States” has sold nearly two million copies. To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.
Such stories are more often recounted in textbooks today; they were not at the time.
“Our nation had gone through an awful lot — the Vietnam War, civil rights, Watergate — yet the textbooks offered the same fundamental nationalist glorification of country,” Mr. Zinn recalled in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I got the sense that people were hungry for a different, more honest take.”
In a book review in The Times, the historian Eric Foner wrote of the book that “historians may well view it as a step toward a coherent new version of American history.” But many historians, even those of liberal bent, took a more skeptical view.
“What Zinn did was bring history writing out of the academy, and he undid much of the frankly biased and prejudiced views that came before it,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University. “But he’s a popularizer, and his view of history is topsy-turvy, turning old villains into heroes, and after a while the glow gets unreal.”
That criticism barely raised a hair on Mr. Zinn’s neck. “It’s not an unbiased account; so what?” he said in the Times interview. “If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”
Few historians succeeded in passing so completely through the academic membrane into popular culture. He gained admiring mention in the movie “Good Will Hunting”; Matt Damon appeared in a History Channel documentary about him; and Bruce Springsteen said the starkest of his many albums, “Nebraska,” drew inspiration in part from Mr. Zinn’s writings.
Born Aug. 24, 1922, Howard Zinn grew up in New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants, and his father ran candy stores during the Depression without much success.
“We moved a lot, one step ahead of the landlord,” Mr. Zinn recalled. “I lived in all of Brooklyn’s best slums.”
He graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and became a pipe fitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he met his future wife, Roslyn Shechter. Raised on Charles Dickens, he later added Karl Marx to his reading, organized labor rallies and got decked by a billy-club-wielding cop.
He joined the Army Air Corps in 1943, eager to fight the fascists, and became a bombardier in a B-17. He watched his bombs rain down and, when he returned to New York, deposited his medals in an envelope and wrote, “Never Again.”
“I would not deny that war had a certain moral core, but that made it easier for Americans to treat all subsequent wars with a kind of glow,” Mr. Zinn said. “Every enemy becomes Hitler.”
He and his wife lived in a rat-infested basement apartment as he dug ditches and worked in a brewery. Later they moved to public housing and he went to college on the G.I. Bill.
He earned a B.A. at New York University and master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. In 1956, he landed a job at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, as chairman of the history department. Among his students were Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund; Alice Walker, the novelist; and the singer and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon.
Mr. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and marched for civil rights with his students, which angered Spelman’s president.
“I was fired for insubordination,” Mr. Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”
Mr. Zinn moved to Boston University in 1964. He traveled with the Rev. Daniel Berrigan to Hanoi to receive prisoners released by the North Vietnamese, and produced the antiwar books “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and Democracy” (1968).
He waged a war of attrition with Boston University’s president at the time, John Silber, a political conservative. Mr. Zinn twice organized faculty votes to oust Mr. Silber, and Mr. Silber returned the favor, saying the professor was a sterling example of those who would “poison the well of academe.”
Mr. Zinn’s book “La Guardia in Congress” (1959) won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award. “A publisher went so far as to publish my quotations, which my wife thought was ridiculous,” Mr. Zinn said. “She said, ‘What are you, the pope or Mao Zedong?’ ”
Mr. Zinn retired in 1988, concluding his last class early so he could join a picket line. He invited his students to join him.
Mr. Zinn wrote three plays: “Daughter of Venus,” “Marx in Soho” and “Emma,” about the life of the anarchist Emma Goldman. All have been produced. His last article was a rather bleak assessment of President Obama for The Nation. “I’ve been searching hard for a highlight,” he wrote.
Rosyln Zinn died in 2008. Mr. Zinn is survived by a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, Mass.; a son, Jeff Zinn, of Wellfleet, Mass.; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Zinn spoke recently of more work to come. The title of his memoir, he noted, best described his personal philosophy: “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”
Lincoln Links Added…
January 29, 2010
I have added numerous links to sited dealing with Abraham Lincoln along the side bar of the blog. I will be adding more soon.
South Carolina Coughs up Another Loser!
January 26, 2010(01.22.10) Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer
More Sesquicentennial Sites Now Online
January 21, 2010More states and the NPS have posted websites for the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War…and here they are:
South Carolina Still Fails to Learn Lesson
January 10, 2010On January 9, 2010 a rally for freedom was held at the state house in Columbia, South Carolina and hosted by the South Carolina 9/12 Project… the brain child of Glenn Beck. (Now I will not go into all the details, but Columbia is one city in the south that I truely loath…for many various reasons… old and new…public and personal!) But I digress. The rally was, for a lack of a better description, an extention of the now famous teabagger rallies of last summer. This was also another event in which those in attendance continued to assert their or their state’s 10th Amendment rights. I am all for the 10th Amendment…states should have their rights within this federal government. But, advocating secession is quite a different story, and of all places South Carolina should understand and remember the consequences of secession!
Maybe these two men need to be reminded of the fruits of secession….
“We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible … [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” W. T. Sherman
I have wondered now for years whether or not enough generations have passed in the south to have forgotten the “hard hand of war”. I would think that for this part of the country whose memory is as long as their vowl sounds, they would not forget what happened nearly 150 years ago when they resorted to secession…bullets instead of ballots.
Here are some more pictures of the rally and the turnout from It’s My Blog…
Again, William T. Sherman…
“My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom. “
Another Debate on “Black Confederates”.
January 6, 2010
Here is the link to another forum discussion of “Black Confederates”. Again, one of the posts gets straight to the point…
I don’t think anyone has ever denied that black troops served the Confederacy, I think the argument lies in the number of them…
