June 22, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
The Irreconcilable
Tonight we shall continue with the relevant
extracts from the second inaugural address of 1865 delivered in March just a
month before Lincoln would be shot in the head and killed.
The man who shot Lincoln was no cheap hired
assassin but an ideologist from a prominent theatrical family of Maryland known
as Booth Family which was of English-Jewish descent.
John Booth the assassin was a stage actor
and a popular one at that who strongly opposed the proposed ending of slavery
by the abolitionists and thereby had a strong sympathy towards the demands of
Confederate States of America.
Even Americans from up north particularly
from the state of Baltimore (where I happened to spend 10 months ignorant of
its rich history) were deeply divided on this subject.
The state of Maryland even though it
opposed the secession of Southern States in 1861 was against the use of its
soil by the Federal forces to wage war against the Confederate States.
By 1864 when it was evident that the
Confederates would end up on the losing side of the Civil War and when Lincoln
was re-elected as the President in the landslide election of November 1864 on
the promise of legislating the 13th Amendment to the Constitution
that would abolish the slavery once and for all Booth and his fellow
sympathizers could take it no more.
He knew that now he would have to take the
war and its cause in his own hands; what the whole mighty army of the
Confederacy could not achieve would be his destiny to fulfill (or at least that
is the way I see thoughts unfolding in his restless and furiously agitated mind
similar to what must have transpired in the minds of men like Ibrahim Dawood
and Tiger Memon post demolition of Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992).
So Booth planned an audacious scheme of
mass assassinations that would get rid of not only the Negro-loving President
but would decapitate the top echelons and thereby the head of the Union
Government.
Surely with the head been severed it would
not take long for the government to totter, bleed and then collapse in the
ensuing political chaos.
Booth had contrived quite meticulously to
assassinate the top Presidential team that included Vice President Andrew
Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward.
Actually among the target were also the
highly successful General of Union Army and the future President of the United
States Ulysses S. Grant who was also to attend the play “Our American Cousin”
along with his wife.
But Grant cancelled the theatre trip at the
very last moment at the behest of his wife and instead went off to visit their
relatives in Jew Jersey that evening.
I shall not waste any more letters on the
actual assassination but the point that I am making is that the United States
was an extremely divided nation in the mid nineteenth century both religiously
and ideologically (besides economically which is always an important factor in
most historical and politically significant events of world history), far more
than India or Britain is today.
It was not simply the North versus the
South or the Union versus the Confederates but the American society in general was
deeply fissured on the irreconcilable chasm of slavery.
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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