Most have forgotten that Thomas Jefferson refused to make blackmail payments to the Barbary Pirates for protection in the Mediterranean Sea. Our merchant ships were threatened with destruction or capture. Other nations had complied to their extortion demands. “But not the United States” Tom declared.
He sent his fairly new navy to remedy things. They did. They knocked the Barbary Pirates out of existence essentially. Well, he didn’t go quite far enough. The Barbary Pirates were what we today call extreme Islam. Well, some of us do.
To All You Mothers Out There:
Thomas Jefferson was serving in Congress in August of 1775. At their break he was happy to return to his home at Monticello. His happiness soon turned to grief. A month after he arrived home, his second child, one year old Jane Randolph Jefferson, died. Jane had been born April 3, 1774, only 3 ½ months after the Boston Tea Party had taken place.
One of the character traits that Benjamin Franklin wanted to pursue to perfection as described in his “Project for Moral Perfection” was Tranquility. He defined it thus: “Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.”
“Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, is the only person to have been at the scene of three presidential assassinations. On April 14, 1865, the day his father was shot, Robert Todd rushed to Ford’s Theatre to be with his fatally injured father. In 1881, he was in the room with President James Garfield the day Garfield was assassinated. And twenty years later, he was to join President William McKinley at the Pam American Exposition, arriving shortly after McKinley was assassinated. There are many a mysterious and bizarre happenstance about Abraham Lincoln’s life and death, and so too with Robert Todd. You see, the son of the president would never have witnessed any of these assassinations had he not narrowly escaped death at a young age. While standing on a crowded platform, he stumble and nearly fell onto the tracks. He was grabbed by the back of the shirt and pulled to safety in the nick of time. The person who saved his life was Edwin Booth—the brother of John Wilkes Booth. Yeah, I got chill bumps, too!” (“Stupid History”, by Leland Gregory, 2014, page 252.)
Here’s something I didn’t know before. In addition to being the Father of our Country, George Washington also gave America the first “Mammoth Jackass.” Yes, the large donkey. In Washington’s time the donkeys were short in height and lacked the stamina Washington needed them to have for work.
George Washington learned how to exhibit good manners and good character, especially in public. In his youth he was taught penmanship by writing the “110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation” as they were dictated by his mentor. So at an early age he was introduced into the etiquette of the times.
“Life with fools consists in drinking; With the wise man living’s thinking.” Benjamin Franklin.
In the year 1634, in Boston, Massachusetts, Edward Palmer was a hard working carpenter. He was commissioned to build the first wooden stocks, by the town elders. These stocks were intended to be used for public punishment.