The 1700 and 1800's - The Era of Misery

North America was used for transportation from the early 17th century to the American Revolution of 1776. In the 17th century, it was done at the expense of the convicts or the ship owners. The first Transportation Act in 1718 allowed courts to sentence convicts to seven years' transportation to America. In 1720, extension authorised payments by the state to merchants contracted to take the convicts to America. Under the Transportation Act, returning from transportation was a capital offence.[1][2]

The gaols became overcrowded and dilapidated ships were pressed into service, the hulks moored in various ports as floating gaols. The number of convicts transported to North America is not verified although it has been estimated to be 50,000 by John Dunmore Lang and 120,000 by Thomas Keneally. These went originally to New England, the majority of prisoners taken in battle from Ireland and Scotland. Some were sold as slaves to the Southern states.[3][page needed]

From the 1620s until the American Revolution, the British colonies in North America received transported British criminals. The American Revolutionary War brought that to an end and, since the remaining British colonies in what is now Canada were close to the new United States of America, prisoners sent there might become hostile to British authorities. Thus, the British Government was forced to look elsewhere.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_transportation

No matter how the detractors of America whether so-call down on anything America attempt to blame America. The truth is there to see. European politics and avarice influence American independence during the early stages of America.

 

It's easy to take a snapshot of the era, totally divorced from the thousands of years of history preceding it, and simplistically associate it with slavery, but the reality is much more nuanced. The eventual abolition of slavery in the US has its roots in the seventeen- and eighteen-hundreds. Ben Franklin was the first president of the country's oldest abolitionist society, for example.

Excuse me? Are you trying to say it was legal or common for children to be prostituted in the 1700's and 1800's?

Children worked? The horror!

Evidence? Was it more "rampant" than it is now in places like Chicago and Detroit?

As compared to what?

Women have always been treated like second-class citizens. Even today, women have a about a one-in-five chance of being raped[1]. When future progressives study the late 1900's and early 2000's, they'll probably use words like "rape epidemic" to describe it.

[1] - http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/SV-DataSheet-a.pdf

 

The answer is definitely no. Scientific and medical advancements have been occurring independently of, and sometimes in spite of, political systems for all of human history. Of course, there has been no shortage of politicians to try and take credit for those advancements.

Hardly! If anything, they institutionalized it.

Ah, the myth of the evil company town, many of which supported thousands of workers and their families for years at a time. Apparently, you just want to generalize and dismiss any possibility for nuance.

 

Many words, little substance.

So there wasn't slavery in the 1800s?

Yes.

Wow... someone apparently sees history through rose-colored glasses. Children didn't just work, they worked long hard hours for little pay in extremely dangerous situations.



Notice the overseer with the stick? I'm sure it wasn't to scratch his back when it itched.

Pioneer publications show Old West leaders repeatedly arguing in favor of gun control. City leaders in the old cattle towns knew from experience what some Americans today don't want to believe: a town which allows easy access to guns invites trouble.
What these cow town leaders saw intimately in their day-to-day association with guns is that more guns in more places caused not greater safety, but greater death in an already dangerous wilderness. By the 1880s many in the west were fed up with gun violence. Gun control, they contended, was absolutely essential, and the remedy advocated usually was usually no less than a total ban on pistol-packing.
The editor of the Black Hills Daily Times of Dakota Territory in 1884, called the idea of carrying firearms into the city a “dangerous practice,” not only to others, but to the packer himself. He emphasized his point with the headline, "Perforated by His Own Pistol."
The editor of the Montana’s Yellowstone Journal acknowledged four years earlier that Americans have "the right to bear arms," but he contended that guns have to be regulated. As for cowboys carrying pistols, a dispatch from Laramie’s Northwest Stock Journal in 1884, reported, "We see many cowboys fitting up for the spring and summer work. They all seem to think it absolutely necessary to have a revolver. Of all foolish notions this is the most absurd."

Cowboy president Theodore Roosevelt recalled with approval that as a Dakota Territory ranch owner, his town, at the least, allowed "no shooting in the streets." The editor of that town's newspaper, The Bad Lands Cow Boy of Medora, demanded that gun control be even tighter than that, however. Like leaders in Miles City and many other cow towns, he wanted to see guns banned entirely within the city limits. A.T. Packard in August 1885 called "packing a gun" a "senseless custom," and noted about a month later that "As a protection, it is terribly useless.”

Old West cattlemen themselves also saw the need for gun control. By 1882, a Texas cattle raising association had banned six-shooters from the cowboy's belt. "In almost every section of the West murders are on the increase, and cowmen are too often the principals in the encounters," concurred a dispatch from the Texas Live Stock Journal dated June 5, 1884. "The six-shooter loaded with deadly cartridges is a dangerous companion for any man, especially if he should unfortunately be primed with whiskey. Cattlemen should unite in aiding the enforcement of the law against carrying of deadly weapons."
​

http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~rcollins/scholarship/guns.html

As compared to the work fatalities/injuries today. I would think that was self-obvious...

But at that time it was institutionalized. Women didn't get the universal right to vote until 1920. Prior to that they were barred from owning land and holding public office.

 

Did you ever KNOW anyone who lived in a company town? I did.

 

Except the street, of course.

Unless you need to use calculus, then you need to hark back to the 1600's when Newton and Leibniz were developing it.

 

The 1700's and 1800's were an era of unlimited personal opportunities. Modern liberals/progressives hate that, because they want everyone to be totally dependent on government policies. The purpose of modern ideologies (both leftist and rightist) is to make it easier to control people. In a free society such as those in the 1700's and 1800's, control is difficult. Mussolini is right, after the individualistic freedom of the 1800's, the 1900's and beyond are the era of unlimited and total state power.

 

Of course there was slavery, but there was also a large abolitionist movement. You want to fixate on one and ignore the other.

Where's the evidence?

Wow, apparently, someone doesn't understand the role technology plays in labor markets.

So you have some anecdotes from the western frontier, none of which have been subjected to any kind of statistical examination or best practice, and you think that is enough to demonstrate violence was more "rampant" in the past than it is modern-day Chicago or Detroit? Oh, please...

Which has everything to do with rising standard of living and technological advancements and nothing to do with the progressive regulatory state.

Yes, many individuals were treated poorly back then, but many individuals are treated poorly today, too.

 

I'd rather the economy not as advance as much and the workers be treated better.

 

That's because of conservatism.

 

Well, I'm not normally an optimist, but I don't see any reason why we can't have both.

Germany's economy has advanced rather rapidly while still having better labor rights than us.

 

Major <SIGH>

A Progressive / Populist, protects people from the elite. Advocates indigent sustenance, education and medical care. The costs of government is applied "progressively". Make more, progressively higher % taxation.

Liberals on the other hand pay for the same efforts plus what is termed, "public manipulation" via a "Regressive Tax program" most favored by bipartisan corporationist. They are most prone to try Balkanize the American public into opposing groups.

The path out of our perverted distribution of wealth and current income discrepancy is doable as it was to cure the same ills in the late 1800's to early 1900's.
However, in today's jargon, the name of that path has become so confused with socialism, liberals, etc. that
I sometimes wonder if coffee percolators disappeared so people have no model for Percolate Up economics.


I realized I was a Populist in High School in the mid sixties; not fitting any generally used modern political terms.
Just as "Occupy" was partially stymied by this lack of vocabulary, our future is too. If we cannot communicate clearly - is serves our oppressors, the RepubloCratic corporationist whose rule began with JFK, an avowed anti New Dealer.


Thank you
and I hope I have not bored the reader.


Moi

The Difference Between a Liberal and a Progressive / Populist is the Tax Code !​

 

" can trace my family back a long way.. They died of diarrhea.. and tetanus.. measles, and so on.."

Taxcutter says:
People die even today. Its always something.

 

Wow, That was basically the same situation until WWII. Duh!!!
See:
History of Penicillin - Alexander Fleming - John Sheehan - Andrew ...
http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/Penicillin.htm
Penicillin is one of the earliest discovered and widely used antibiotic agents, ... It was not until 1939 that Dr. Howard Florey, a future Nobel Laureate, ...

 

Moi, you need to explain to people that you don't mean "progressive" in its contemporary sense - Marxist, left-liberal, anti-American - but in its historical sense a propos Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party in 1913. Most readers won't know that much US history. Another word might serve you better.

That said, I don't know what you mean when you say liberals back a regressive tax code. 47% of the population pays no income tax as is - mainly the poor plus one or two highly publicized billionaires. How is that regressive?

 

Don't you see?
Like the conspiracy to remove coffee percolators so we have no model of Percolate Up economics,
the terms Progressive, or Populist have been lost to the benefit of corporations.
Had that vernacular been handy to "Occupy", they may have tapped deeper into the American psyche.

We have no vernacular to refer to Progressive in the Historical Context.
Since we communicate privately, maybe you would like to publicly suggest what modern terms express
Progressive politics in its' historical sense.

Otherwise, YOU know what I mean. Now tell the others. Be an aid to communication.

Moi

 

What part of what I said is incorrect?

 

You don't know anything at all about the early history of the American colonies... how they were settled or by whom.

 

What you call a progressive was called a liberal before the 1960s. That would be correct usage. But the left has cut a path of destruction through our language as well as our lives. In the McCarthy era, communist - the proper word for these folks - became an object of fear and hate, so communists hid themselves behind the word liberal. That concealed communists, but stole the word liberal from true liberals, who were left with no name for themselves. At some point in the 1970s, the public caught on to the communists' ruse. Liberal became synonymous with communists, so the communists had to hide once again. That was when "progressive" became the new code word. Communists stole the linguistic identity of the old Progressives, leaving liberals behind. Those who remember the politics of the late 60s and early 70s know that "liberal" became a term of opprobrium among communists/progressives. "Progressives" thought that liberals - true liberals - were too weak willed and not "down with the revolution." So today communists are "progressives," liberals are embarrassed and have to explain that they're not communists, and true progressives have been maneuvered out of existence. There may not be a single word for you to use. It's clumsy, but you might have to use a phrase describing the key beliefs you support, rather than a single word.

 

The richest man in the world is a Mexican. The standard Mexican has bailed out on Mexican GDP (because he didn't have any) and moved here. If you average the two together, the GDP per capita doesn't look all that bad.

 

And you presumably do?

 

Weeell, at least I know who and when antibiotics were discovered and those who made it possible to save a number of wounded American soldiers through the use of Penicillin if the field along with blood plasma and whole blood. You didn't seem to know that. The first settlements in the Americas were the Spanish, French and Dutch. You've heard of New Amsterdam haven't you. First settled in 1609 by the Dutch East India Company. The Pilgrims landed in 1620.

 

Yes. You might want to read about the Dutch Reformed Church, the Quakers, the Huguenots, the anaBaptists and the various companies that sponsored them.

The ships that brought them to America.. kept detailed manifests with names and occupations.

http://frey.stormpages.com/family/jameslog.htm

 

Nah, I lean toward the Acadians and what the British did to them, and Vikings their history of explorations to Vinland.

 

Yes.. my family built one of the first houses in New Amsterdam.. There is a plaque where it stood. The were Dutch sea captains and in the employ of the Dutch East Indies Company..