This Week in People’s History, Oct 16–22
Harpers Ferry, a Bridge Too Far
165 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 16, 1859, the militant abolitionist John Brown and 23 comrades launched an assault on the U.S. Army’s arsenal in Harpers Ferry, a town on the Potomac River about 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
Brown and his men conceived of the attack as the beginning of a war to put an end to slavery in the U.S.; they hoped that Harpers Ferry would be a base of operations from which they would march south, freeing as many enslaved people as possible and recruiting some to join a growing insurrectionary force.
The attack on the town was successful at first, but the attackers were soon surrounded and outnumbered by militiamen and Marines. Within 36 hours the attack was over; 11 of the attackers were killed, eight were captured and five escaped. Brown and seven of his followers were convicted of treason and executed. Their hope to spark an immediate insurrection that would put an end to slavery in the U.S. was not fulfilled, but the fighting at Harpers Ferry contributed to the tension between the North and the South that resulted in the Civil War, which began just 18 months later. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56106/56106-h/56106-h.htm
A Lynch Mob Gets Served
130 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 17, 1894, in the town of Washington Court House, Ohio, National Guard troops used deadly force to prevent a mob from lynching an African-American prisoner who was awaiting transfer to the state prison.
The National Guard had been summoned by the county sheriff, who realized his squad of deputies was too small to keep their prisoner safe. The confrontation took place at a moment when vigilante justice was on the minds of many Ohio residents, because during the previous 10 months two other African-American men had been kidnapped from legal custody and lynched in the vicinity of Washington Court House.
The Washington Court House shooting occurred after a standoff lasting many hours between guardsmen and the mob. At first, the Guard had taken positions outside the county courthouse, but the soldiers were ordered inside when the crowd began to pelt them with rocks. As the crowd continued to grow, the Guard commander announced in a voice that all could hear that live ammunition would be used to prevent any attempt to invade the courthouse.
Nevertheless, the mob attacked the building’s wooden double door with a battering ram. When the door began to break open, the Guard commander gave the order to fire through the doors. The simultaneous discharge of many rifles killed four attackers and wounded roughly 20 more.
After the bloodshed, the mob quickly dispersed.
The following day the prisoner was delivered to the state prison without incident, but there was one further development; a Fayette county grand jury indicted the on-scene National Guard commander for manslaughter. At trial, the commander was acquitted. https://www.abhmuseum.org/memorial-to-victims-of-lynching/ohio-lynching-victims-memorial/
In 1989, a 15-Year-Old Frame-Up Falls Apart
35 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 19, 1989, a British court corrected a miscarriage of justice that had resulted in the convictions of the Guildford Four, three men and one woman who had spent more than 14 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. After a campaign for justice that continued for years, the court ruled that the convictions had been improperly obtained. The four were released and the charges against them dropped.
The Four had been accused of setting bombs that exploded in two pubs in Guildford, England, as part of the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s long campaign against the British Army. The pubs, which were near an army base, were well known gathering places for off-duty soldiers. The bombs killed four soldiers and injured more than 60.
An appeals court threw the convictions out when the defense proved that the police had tortured the Four to obtain confessions and also that the police were aware of evidence that specifically cleared the Four of responsibility.
In the years after the Four were convicted and even after they were exonerated, many of the officials who had been responsible for the prosecution – including the head of the police investigation, the trial judge, and the chief prosecutor – were each promoted to the highest levels of English law enforcement and the judiciary, as detailed in this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven
George Washington’s Indigenous ‘Enemies’
245 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 20, 1779, in the midst of the U.S. War of Independence, George Washington, the revolutionary army’s commander-in-chief (and future president), wrote about his satisfaction with his army’s genocidal actions during the summer of 1779: “General [John] Sullivan has completed the entire destruction of the country of the [Iroquois people in central New York]; driven all the inhabitants, men women and children, out of it.”
Washington continued, “While the [Iroquois] were under this rod of correction, the Mingo and Muncy tribes, living [in the vicinity of what is now Pittsburgh] met with similar chastisement from Colonel [Daniel] Brodhead, who with 600 men advanced upon them . . . and laid waste their country. These unexpected and severe strokes has disconcerted, humbled, and distressed the Indians exceedingly; and will, I am persuaded, be productive of great good; as they are undeniable proofs to them, that Great Britain cannot protect them, and that it is in our power to chastise them, whenever their hostile conduct deserves it." https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/ford-the-writings-of-george-washington-vol-viii-1779-1780
Civil Servants In the Cross-Hairs
FOUR YEARS AGO, on Oct. 21, 2020, President Trump, who had less than three months remaining in his term of office, signed Executive Order 13957. The order remained in effect until it was repealed by President Biden in January 2021, but if Trump had been reelected and his order had stayed on the books, the staff of the federal government’s executive branch would be a very different set of men and women than they are now.
The vast majority of workers in the executive branch have considerable, but not unlimited, job security, because they can only be dismissed in accordance with the rules of the federal civil service. Those rules give federal civil servants specific rights to appeal an attempt to fire them. Essentially, if a federal civil servant is working competently and wants to keep their job, the rules give that worker job security.
The Executive Order that Trump signed gave all executive branch agencies the right to hire employees that had no civil service protection. Anyone hired under the newly created civil service Schedule F could be fired for any reason or no reason and would have no appeal. Anyone hired under Schedule F could have been ordered to sign an oath of loyalty to President Donald John Trump, or else.
Would a newly elected President Trump issue a new, improved, version of E.O. 13957? It’s a good bet that a majority of the federal government’s 2.3 million workers are not eager to find out. https://portside.org/2022-07-26/next-gop-president-will-replace-civil-s…
A Guilty Verdict Reversed by Trump
10 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 22, 2014, a federal court jury in Washington, D.C., convicted four former employees of Blackwater USA for crimes during Nisour Square Massacre, in which 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians had been machine-gunned to death in Baghdad in 2007. In so doing the jury agreed with the prosecutors' contention that the shooting was a criminal act, and not a battlefield encounter gone wrong. One of the accused was convicted of first-degree murder and three were convicted of voluntary and attempted manslaughter and criminal use of a machine gun.
On Dec. 22, 2020, President Trump granted all four men complete pardons, resulting in strong objections from Iraq and from UN experts, who said the pardons "violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre
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