Who Knew Draco Was So Draconian

Etymology is something I've always found highly interesting--or pretty dang interesting, if you will. Do you ever stop and wonder where some of these words we use come from? That's etymology.

In reading Beacon Lights of History, Vol. 3, by John Lord, I came across the etymology of the word "draconian." Of course, the definition of the word is "rigorous; unusually severe or cruel."

Well, turns out that in ancient Greece there was a fellow named . . . drum roll . . . Draco. And Draco was appointed to compile an unstructured collection of court rulings into a coherent set of laws. Draco did as he was asked but, as Lord explains:

Draco's laws were extraordinarily severe, punishing small thefts and even laziness with death.

Wow--punish laziness with death! It kind of makes you wonder how many Athenian teenagers managed to live to adulthood!

Lord adds that:

The formulation of any system of justice would have, as Draco's did, a beneficial influence on the growth of the State; but the severity of these bloody laws caused them to be hated and in practice neglected.

It was not until Solon several decades later, that an acceptable code of laws was assembled.

So there you go: draconian.

Don't Trouble Me With Legalities: the Susan B. Anthony Trial

Susan B. Anthony was tried and convicted in 1872 because, as the court made a point to stipulate, "at that time she was a woman" and she had cast a ballot in the recent election. Of course, women were not allowed to vote at that time. The story of the trial is found in An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony. (Note: this is the third in a series of posts. You may want to start at the beginning.)

As I discussed earlier, her attorney made the argument that, adhering to the wording of the U.S. Constitution, women were eligible to vote. What's more, in another portion of the book, an address by Matilda Joslyn Gage, the speaker noted that at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, "its delegates were partially elected by women's votes, as at that date women were exercising their right of self-government through voting, certainly in the States of Massachusetts and New Jersey, if not in Georgia and Delaware."

After her indictment, but before the trail, Susan Anthony spoke at a number of gatherings to explain her actions and the thinking behind them. Her remarks included the following.

But, it is urged, the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him, in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent, and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties for the violation of laws.

She then offered examples where this principle had been put into practice, among them this one.

Miss Sarah E. Wall of Worcester, Mass., twenty years ago, took this position. For several years, the officers of the law distrained her property, and sold it to meet the necessary amount; still she persisted, and would not yield an iota, though every foot of her lands should be struck off under the hammer. And now, for several years, the assessor has left her name off the tax list, and the collector passed her by without a call.

These cases were, however, the exception. Women were taxed and were held to penalties for violation of laws.

Returning to Matilda Joslyn Gage's speech, she argued that:

We brand this prosecution of Miss Anthony by United States officials, under claim of provisions in this act, as an illegal prosecution--an infamous prosecution, in direct defiance of national law, dangerous in its principles, tending to subvert a republican form of government, and a direct step, whether so designed or not, to the establishment of a monarchy in this country. Where the right of one individual is attacked, the rights of all are menaced. A blow against one citizen is a blow against every citizen.

Clearly, at least from our 21st Century perspective, these were compelling arguments. It would seem they would have been just as compelling in the 19th Century. How is it then that Susan Anthony and the three election inspectors were found guilty?

It was a very simple matter. The judge in both cases, one Ward Hunt, threw out the legal arguments as rubbish, leaving only the question of whether Anthony had knowingly cast a vote she had no right to cast.

Considering that she had consulted beforehand with some of the leading legal thinkers in the country, and that they had agreed that the Constitution did ensure women's right to vote, this would seem to have been a real issue.

But not in Judge Hunt's opinion. He took the extraordinary step of informing the jury that rather than allowing them to deliberate on this issue, he was ordering them to return a guilty verdict. And without any of the jurors saying one word, that verdict was entered.

Was there an appeal? Absolutely. However, under the laws in effect at that time (I have no idea if they are still in effect today, but I doubt it), the only appeal allowed was to the same court that decided the matter. Surprise, surprise, Judge Hunt did not reverse himself.

And thus it was another 48 years before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed and women finally were accepted as voting members of the nation. Now that is a story I consider to be pretty dang interesting.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Law to Let Us Vote: The Susan B. Anthony Trial

The trial of Susan B. Anthony was peculiar from the start in that she was tried under a federal statute on an issue for which there was no federal standard. This was a twist her attorney tried ably, but unsuccessfully, to exploit. (Note: Because this blog displays in reverse chronological order, you might want to go to the first post in this series and start reading there.)

As noted in An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, it was the states that determined the qualifications to vote, not the federal government. Consequentially, all the feds could do was to say "if you violated the mandates of your state, we--not they--will prosecute you." Never mind that what was legal in one state was not legal in another and this federal statute could not possibly be enforced consistently from state to state.

What was the federal government doing poking its nose into what presumably should have been purely a state matter? Recall that the year was 1872, just a few years after the Civil War. Those who had taken up arms against the federal government were disallowed from voting. The law invoked against Susan Anthony made it a crime to vote if you knew you were not permitted to do so.

So the crux of the charge would seem to be, did she vote knowing full well that she had no right to do so?

No big deal. Everyone knew women did not have the right to vote, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. In fact, the argument made by the suffragettes was based--solidly--on the language in the U.S. Constitution. For the most part, the Constitution talks in terms of "the citizen" and "the people," with no specification that the citizen or person at issue was male or female, or black or white, for that matter. In just a few instances the words "he" or "his" or "him" are used but that was the common language of the law and was never otherwise construed to refer directly and solely to men.

For example, the fact that citizens were required to pay taxes did not exclude women, even though no legislation specifically included them in that obligation. Likewise, criminal laws applied equally to women, though that was never stated explicitly. In fact, the only instance where this male vocabulary was deemed to mean men and men only was in the business of voting and serving on juries.

Think about that for a minute and imagine the legal arguments that this could lead to. I'll delve into those in my next post.

Read Part 3

Women's Right to Vote: The Susan B. Anthony Trial

The battle in the U.S. for the right of women to vote ended long ago, with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

How many of us today have any inkling of the issues and arguments that comprised that struggle? We just accept that of course, the Constitution did not originally give women the right to vote, just as it did not declare that all Blacks were free. It took Constitutional amendments to bring them about.

Allow me to refer you to An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony as an exceedingly dang interesting rebuttal of such notions. (Just as a pretty dang interesting aside, I had a couple college classes with a young woman whose name I came to learn was Susan B. Anthony. On questioning, she confirmed that the famous SBA was her great-grandmother.)

I will first lay out the facts of the case so all may be clear on the matter. In the fall of 1872 Susan Anthony and a number of other women registered to vote in Rochester, NY, and then did vote in the November election. Anthony and the others were charged with voting illegally, due to their being women and women not having any such right. Additionally, the three election inspectors who allowed these women to cast ballots were charged with breaking the law by allowing them to vote.

Anthony was tried first, the inspectors next. All were found guilty. Charges were dropped against the other women. It was not until 1920, 48 years later, that the 19th Amendment was ratified and the women's suffrage matter was finally closed.

This story is far too much for a single post, so I'll break it into several. For now, let me just say that its' not only pretty dang interesting, it's pretty dang inspiring. Come back soon and read more.

Read Part 2

One Man's Myth Is Another Man's Religion

"Myth" is defined, in part, by the American Heritage Dictionary as "A traditional story presenting supernatural beings . . ." But let's really get down to it. When we're speaking of Roman or Greek mythology what are we really talking about? Their religions. And what defines them now as mythology? Simply the fact that no one believes in these religions any more.

So I'm reading Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable . Thomas Bulfinch was a 19th Century American writer who felt that many literary references were beyond the general public because many readers were not conversant with the historical subjects they referenced. So he wrote a book intended to be very accessible to the general populace that would help them understand these references when they encountered them. And he seems to have been pretty successful in his intent.

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussions of the Greek and Roman mythologies, that is, religions, and it closes with a discussion of the Norse mythologies, or religions. It's what comes in between that I find pretty dang interesting.

Chapter XXXVII is titled "Eastern Mythology - Zoroaster - Hindu Mythology - Castes - Buddha - The Grand Lama - Prester John." You get the picture. As a good Christian, Bulfinch didn't really care that these religions were still alive--he didn't believe in them so that made them myths.

Now, that's not to dump on Christians. I would have to assume that at some point some Buddhist or Muslim or someone of some other religion has written a book discussing popular myths such as Christianity, Judaism, whatever.

I ran into something very similar to this many years ago when I went in on a job interview. This was pre-internet so all I had to go on was a very short ad printed in the newspaper. There was little way for me to know that the organization where I was going was a conservative Christian organization. But I found out when I got there.

Sitting in the waiting room for about half an hour I had time to peruse their materials. There was a lot about cults. Cults such as those Jim Jones people who commited mass suicide with poisoned Kool-Aid. Cults such as the Mormons. Cults such as Unitarians and Catholics.

Hey, if you have the TRUTH and everyone else is wrong, facts are just facts, right? You bet. But what happens when you and your minister don't quite see eye to eye 100 percent of the way? Is he just a cultist, too? Or are you?

Guerrillas Tested British Resolve in Boer War

Everyone has heard of the Boer War, but how many of us actually know anything about it? I guarantee I knew very little until I started reading The Great Boer War by Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, that Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame. And that's a story in itself.

It seems that Doyle (Conan Doyle?) was already a well known writer at the time of what was actually the Second Boer War. He wanted to see it for himself and tried to enlist in the army, but the generals were skeptical about having a famous writer in their ranks. Ultimately, he was allowed to join a field hospital operation, and it was his exemplary service in that capacity that earned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle his knighthood. Pretty dang interesting all by itself.

So let me try to abbreviate this pretty drastically. The Orange Free State was an independent country. The Transvaal was an independent country. Natal was a British colony. The Dutch settlers, or Boers, were very conservative religiously and socially, and in the Transvaal they were afraid that the influx of workers from around the world would overwhelm their numbers and wrest political -- and social -- control from the Boers.

Under the leadership of Paul Kruger (as in Krugerrand) the Transvaalers heaped enormous taxes on the newcomers and passed laws making it practically impossible for them to become citizens. Because many of these workers were British, the Brits did not take kindly to what they considered mistreatment and exploitation of their people. They tried to bring international pressure on the Transvaal but to no avail. Meanwhile, the Boers were known to be arming rapidly, in anticipation of some conflict with Britain.

Understand, of course, that this is all as told through Doyle's eyes, a loyal Brit, so there is probably another side to it all.

Anyway, one thing lead to another and the British sent troops to Natal to protect against aggression from the Transvaal. The Transvaalers considered this aggression and struck first, along with troops from the Orange Free State, with which Britain had no quarrel.

Ultimately, it was a matter of the Dutch settlers wanting all of South Africa to be under Dutch hegemony or influence, not British.

Long story short, the British won after three years and incorporated the Transvaal and the Orange Free State into the Republic of South Africa. But what happened during those three years?

The Boers had early successes because they were prepared. The Brits had some catching up to do. Eventually, though, the might of the British empire was more than the Boers could resist. Except that long after the fight appeared a lost cause, Boer commandos and guerrillas continued the fight. And the British public got restive. They started asking why they were continuing to sacrifice their sons and their tax dollars for this never-ending battle.

In the end, it was probably just the low population numbers that allowed the British to force the end of the conflict after only three years. Most of the populations were rounded up into relocation camps and the Boer fighters could ill afford losses of personnel even if they won a battle. Had the fighting continued for the length of time the U.S. was in Vietnam or has been in Iraq, public opinion may have forced a different outcome. But the Boers lacked the manpower to continue fighting, and the war was won before the British public got totally fed up.

As for the book itself, Doyle is obviously a talented writer, so it's very readable. On the other hand, he touches on practically every battle and a great many of the skirmishes in the entire war effort and that gives a bit tiring at times. Nevertheless, it's a very interesting read and I would definitely recommend it.

Even the Indians Had Church/State Conflicts

OK, fourth and final remarks on Canyons of the Colorado, John Wesley Powell's account of his boat trip down the river in 1869, since renamed The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons.

We all know that separation of church and state is an important element in our system of government, and the degree of separation in some countries varies from 0% to nearly 100%. Do you have the idea that this sort of conflict is something born of advanced societies? Guess again. Take a look at what Powell had to say about the tribal politics of the Zuni peoples he encountered.

In addition to the secular government there is always a cult government. In every tribe there are Shamans . . . In many tribes, perhaps in all, the people are organized into Shamanistic societies: but that these societies are invariably recognized is not certain. The Shamans are always found.

The purpose of the Shamanistic institutions is to control the conduct of the members of the tribe in relation to mythic personages, the mysterious beings in which the savage men believe . . . It is deemed of prime importance that such deities should be induced to act in the interest of men. Thus it is that Shamanistic government is held to be of as great importance as tribal government, and the Shamans are the peers of the chiefs . . . but always there is a conflict of authority, and there is a perpetual war between Shamanistic and civil government.

Politics and religion. Apparently you can't live with them and you can't live without them!