June 09, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Why Edmund Dick Taylor got to Meet the President
Col. Taylor was appointed the commissioner and
director of the newly opened Galena and Chicago Union Railroad in 1831.
All these accomplishments for Taylor came
by 1830s much before the beginning of the American Civil War and therefore he
was a highly respectable and much sought after person who had developed a formidable
reputation of accomplishing almost any feat that he strived for.
By the age of 33 he had achieved far more
as a politician, businessman and a war veteran (he took part in the Winnebago
War of 1827 and the Black Hawk War of 1832 – both against the Native Americans
living along the Upper Mississippi River) than an average ape can imagine or
even dream of in today’s times.
Hence it was not surprising that when the
Civil War broke out and the government of United States needed some mechanism
to finance the prolonged war whose end was nowhere in sight that the newly
elected President Abraham Lincoln agreed to have a private meeting with this
maverick of an entrepreneur.
Actually it was Colonel Taylor who had
proposed his preposterous idea of financing war at the headquarters of General
Ulysses S. Grant who along with the President Lincoln led the Union Army.
It only helped that the headquarters of
this legendary general (and later the 18th President of the United
States) General Grant happened to be in Cairo, which is the southernmost city
of the state of Illinois.
This military fortification during the
Civil War was known as Fort Defiance and is the site of confluence of the Ohio
and the Mississippi Rivers.
Today this site is preserved as a state
park of Illinois but maintained by the city of Cairo and on the very tip of
this park lies a site known as the Mississippi-Ohio River Confluence that
actually is the southernmost tip of the state of Illinois below which lies the
state of Missouri and to its east the state of Kentucky.
You will remember that Col. Taylor had
great influence in his state because of his political and business
accomplishments along with his contributions to the development of the state’s
infrastructure.
It was on a fateful and cold January 16th
morning of the year of 1862 that Col. Taylor in his one-to-one encounter with
the President Lincoln put forth his audacious idea of printing treasury notes.
He suggested to the President Lincoln that
the notes needed to be printed on the best banking paper and should bear no
interest.
Historians have recorded Taylor to have
said the following words to Lincoln:
“Just get Congress to pass a bill
authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes…
…and pay your soldiers with them and go
ahead and win your war with them also.
If you make them full legal tender…they
will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money;
as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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