Who is Represented in the National Statuary Hall – Part 5 Louisiana, Maine, Maryland & Massachusetts

I took a look at who represents the states of Illinois, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Kentucky in the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol in Washington, DC, in the last video.

Illinois was represented by soldier/lawyer/politician James Shields and Educator/Temperance Activist/Socialist Frances Willard; Indiana by lawyer and politician Oliver P. Morton and lawyer/military officer/politician/author Lew Wallace; Iowa by agricultural biotechnologist and “Father of the Green Revolution,” with ties to the Rockefeller Foundation, Norman Borlaug and lawyer/politician Samuel P. Kirkwood; in Kansas I found General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower and lawyer/politician John J. Ingalls; and in Kentucky I found lawyer/politician Henry Clay and the physician/pioneer surgeon Ephraim McDowell.

So far the count of U. S. politicians in the National Statuary Hall is at 19-out-of-34 statues, once again over half of them, with thirteen of the politicians being lawyers, and when I get to the last part of this series, I will do an in-depth analysis of interconnections between these historical figures in the National Statuary Hall – some of whom are well-known and others not-so-much.

The two statues representing the State of Louisiana in the National Statuary Hall are Huey Pierce Long and Edward Douglas White.

Huey Pierce Long, Jr, was an American politician, serving as Louisiana’s Governor and as United States Senator.  He was  assassinated in 1935.

Nicknamed “the Kingfish,” he rose to prominence during the Great Depression as a left-wing populist in the Democratic party who was critical of President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which Long didn’t think was radical enough.

Huey Long was born in August of 1893 near Winnfield, Louisiana, the seat of Winn Parish.

His family lived in a comfortable farmhouse, and were well-off compared to others in Winnfield.

In the 1890s, Winn Parish was a bastion of the Populist Party, a left-wing political party that emphasized the idea of “the People” versus “the Establishment.”

In the 1912 election, citizens of Winn Parish voted more for Socialist candidate for President Eugene V. Debs than any other candidate.

When Long was in high school, he and his friends formed a secret society, with a mission to “run things, laying down certain rules the students would have to follow.”

Cautioned by his teachers to obey the school’s rules, some of the rebellious things Long did included distributing a flyer that criticized his teachers and the necessity of a recently-mandated fourth year of secondary education, and successfully petitioning to fire the principal, though he never finished high school.

And even though he won a full academic scholarship to Louisiana State University, his family couldn’t afford to cover his books or living expenses, so he became a travelling salesman instead.

In 1911, at the urging of his mother, he attended seminary classes Oklahoma Baptist University, but only for one semester because it didn’t suit him.

Then, in 1912, he attended the University of Oklahoma College of Law in for a semester, where apparently his grades were poor because he was distracted by the gambling houses when he was attending classes there.

While working as a salesman, Long met his future wife Rose McConnell, who he married in 1913, at a baking contest he promoted to sell Cottolene Shortening, a brand of shortening made of beef suet and cottonseed oil that was produced in the U. S. from 1868 until the early 20th-century, the first mass-produced and mass-marketed alternative to lard, a natural cooking fat derived from rendered pig fat.

Long enrolled in the Tulane Law School in 1914, concentrating on the courses necessary for the bar exam.

He passed the bar, and received his license to practice law in 1915.

Long established his private law practice in Winnfield in 1915, where he represented poor plaintiff’s, mostly in Workers’ Compensation cases.

In 1918, he entered the race to serve on one of the three-seats on the Louisiana Railroad Commission.

His message to the voters throughout his career as an elected official, in a nutshell, was that he was a warrior from and for the people, battling the giants of Wall Street, with too much of America’s wealth being concentrated in too few hands.

He won by just over 600 votes.

While serving on the commission, he forced utilities to lower rates; ordered railroads to service to small towns; and demanded Standard Oil to stop importing Mexican crude oil and use more oil from Louisiana.

Long became chairman of the commission in 1922, known by then as the “Public Service Commission.”

Huey Long announced his candidacy for Louisiana governor in August of 1923.

He campaigned throughout the state, as well as in rural areas disenfranchised by the Louisiana political establishment, known as the “Old Regulars.”

He did not make it past the primary that year, even though received 31% of the vote from the electorate and carried 28 parishes, more than his opponents.

It was the only election Long ever lost.

Long spent the next four years building his political organization and reputation.

Also, Government mismanagement as a result of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 from the people affected by it aided Huey Long.

The most destructive river flood in U. S. history, it was estimated to cost upwards of $1 billion in damages, and caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom joined the “Great Migration,” also known as the “Black Migration,” from the rural south to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest, that took place roughly between 1910 and 1970.

He launched his second campaign for governor in 1927, using the slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”

Among other things, he used trucks with loudspeakers and radio commercials in his campaign.

He won the 1928 election for governor with 96.1% of the vote in the general election, and was the youngest governor elected in state history at the age of 35.

Upon entering office on May 21st of 1928, Long fired hundreds of opponents in the state bureaucracy at all levels, and replaced them with patronage appointments of his political supporters, who were expected to pay a portion of their salary into his campaign fund.

This was his office in the Old Louisiana Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, said to have been built under his supervision in 1930, and inspired to resemble the White House in Washington, DC.

It is now an historic house museum under the stewardship of an organization called “Preserve Louisiana.

The previous Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, the Knox Mansion said to have been built in 1857, was demolished by convicts from the State Penitentiary under the direction of Huey Long.

After Long had strengthened his control over the state political apparatus, he proceeded to push bills through the state legislature to fulfill campaign promises using aggressive tactics to ensure their passage.

Long met considerable resistance from legislators after calling the legislature into special session in 1929 in order to enact a 5-cent per barrel tax on refined oil production, and his opponents introduced an impeachment resolution against him with nineteen charges listed.

He was ultimately impeached on eight-of-the-nineteen charges in the Louisiana House but avoided conviction in the Senate, in which conviction required a two-thirds majority, particularly when fifteen Senators signed a statement pledging to vote not-guilty regardless of the evidence.

In March of 1930, Long established his own newspaper, called the “Louisiana Progress,” which promoted his political aims and attacked his opponents.

The newspaper was renamed “The American Progress” in 1935, and went national to promote Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program and his ambitions for running for President in 1936.

Not long after his impeachment proceedings, Long announced his candidacy for the U. S. Senate in the 1930 Democratic Primary.

By this time, Huey Long was known as “the Kingfish,” a name he bestowed upon himself after an “Amos ‘n’ Andy” character from the radio show which first aired in 1928, and was later turned into a television series from 1951 to 1953.

The Kingfish in “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was a man whose life revolved around his lodge, the Mystic Knights of the Sea.

The radio show had black characters, but was created, written, and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who also happened to be Freemasons and Shriners.

Sure looks like these two Freemasons were engaged in the creation of racial stereotypes…

…like what Bohemian Club member Mark Twain was doing in his literary classic “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

And I don’t think Aunt Polly’s fence was the only thing being white-washed in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

Long won the Senate seat for a term that started while he was still Governor of Louisiana.

This led to a showdown between Long, and his Lieutenant-Governor Paul Cyr, who declared himself the State’s legitimate Governor in October of 1931, and who threatened to undo Long’s reforms.

Using a combination of the Louisiana National Guard and the Louisiana Supreme Court, Long successfully prevented Cyr from claiming the Governorship because he had vacated the Lieutenant-Governorship and had the court eject Cyr, making Long both Governor and Senator-elect.

He was able to concentrate his power into a political machine, and continued his practice of a patronage system placing his supporters into positions of influence and power.

Long’s opponents argued that he became the dictator of Louisiana.

Long’s legacy as Governor of Louisiana was said to be his creation of an unprecedented public works program resulting in the construction of roads, bridges, hospitals, schools and state buildings, which would have taken place during the Great Depression.

Infrastructure attributed to Huey Long includes:

The Huey P. Long Bridge, a cantilevered, steel through-truss bridge carrying six-lanes of U.S. 90 and two-tracks of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad across the Mississippi River, said to have been constructed between January of 1933 and December of 1935…

…the Field House at Louisiana State University, said to have been constructed in 1932 with a post office, ballroom, gymnasium, and the largest swimming pool in the United States at the time…

…the swimming pool of which was abandoned after the Natatorium for the LSU swim teams was completed in 1985…

…and the new Louisiana State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, said to have been constructed between 1930 and 1931, and inaugurated in May of 1932.

The Louisiana State Capitol Building in the middle brings to mind Moscow State University on the left, said to have been built in the Stalinist Architectural style between 1947 and 1953, and on the right, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, said to have been built starting in 1922, and opening in 1932.

Long continued to effectively maintain control of Louisiana as Senator, and by 1935, his consolidation of power led to those in opposition to him forming what was called the “Square Deal Association” in January of 1935, which included two former governors and the Mayor of New Orleans.

On January 25th of 1935, armed “Square Dealers” seized the East Baton Rouge Parish Courthouse.

In response, Long had the Governor, his long-time friend and supporter, Oscar Allen, call in the National Guard and declare Martial Law, banning public gatherings of more than two people and forbidding criticism of state officials.

The Square Dealers left the courthouse, and the only resulting incident was a brief armed skirmish at the airport, leaving one person wounded but no fatalities.

In the summer of 1935, Long called for two special legislative sessions, which passed laws further centralizing Long’s control over the state, and which stripped away the remaining powers of the Mayor of New Orleans.

On September 8th of 1935, Long was at the State Capitol to pass a bill that would gerrymander the district of an opponent, Judge Benjamin Pavy.

After the bill passed, Long was shot in the torso at close range, according to the official narrative, by a lone gunman, Baton Rouge physician Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of Judge Pavy.

Dr. Weiss was immediately shot by Long’s body-guards, with his autopsy findings showing that he was shot over 60 times.

Long’s funeral was held in Baton Rouge on September 12th, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance, and he was buried on the grounds of the Louisiana State Capitol complex and memorialized by a statue of him directly facing the State Capitol building on his gravesite.

So, here we have a man who was beloved by the People for his anti-establishment rhetoric, and hated by his enemies, whose ambition for power was dictatorial in nature and whose platform was radical socialism, even though he was called a “Populist member of the Democratic Party,” and was also credited with monumental building projects as part of his legacy.

Something seems very fishy about this man and his whole story, leading to more questions than answers.

Who was this guy?

Travelling salesman, turned attorney, turned politician, turned virtual dictator?

What was really going on here?

I mean, doesn’t he even loo like he is telling a fish story in this photo of him?

Telling a “fish story” is slang for an improbable, boastful tale after the tendency of fishermen to exaggerate the size of the fish they have either caught or lost.

The other statue representing Louisiana is that of Edward Douglas White, a politician and jurist who was a Supreme Court justice for 27-years, and became the 9th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1910.

Edward Douglas White was born in November of 1845 about 30-miles, or 48-kilometers, west of New Orleans, on his family’s sugar plantation in Thibodaux, the county seat of Lafourche Parish, which is today still-standing at the E. D. White Historic Site.

His father, Edward Douglas White Sr, a lawyer and judge who served in the U. S. House of Representatives and as Governor of Louisiana, died in 1847, and his mother, a descendent of the Lee family of Virginia and Maryland, remarried in 1850, to a French-Canadian immigrant merchant, Andre Brousseau, and the family moved to New Orleans in 1851.

Starting at the age of 6, Edward Douglas White Jr. attended a Jesuit school in New Orleans, and then starting in 1856, he and his brother attended the Catholic Mount Saint Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Then in 1858, White enrolled in Georgetown University, a distinctly Jesuit institution of Higher Education.

White’s Jesuit training was said to have influenced his legal philosophy later in life, with an emphasis on formal logical reasoning.

White left Georgetown without a degree after the American Civil War started, during which time he was mentioned as having fought for the confederacy in Louisiana.

White’s Confederate Civil War service was documented in two places, one in an account of his capture on March 12th of 1865 in an action in Morganza, in Pointe Coupee Parish, in the “War of the the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies…”

…and his service records in the National Archives, the building for which we are told was constructed between 1933 and 1935.

More Depression-era, monumental architecture, like what we saw attributed to Huey Long in Louisiana.

While White’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan was contested, with some saying he was a member, like D. W. Griffith, who made the movie “Birth of a Nation,” others said there was not enough evidence to support that claim…

…he was also reported as having served on the Reception Committee in 1877 of the Knights of Momus in New Orleans, the second-oldest krewe of the Mardi Gras Parade.

The 1877 parade theme for the Knights of Momus was “Hades, a Dream of Momus” and caused an uproar because it took aim at the Reconstruction government established in New Orleans after the Civil War.

Named for Momus, the personification of mockery, satire, and ridicule in Greek mythology, the Knights of Momus has operated continuously as a secret society in New Orleans since its founding there in 1872, the same year the New Orleans Mardi Gras Parade was founded.

The Knights of Momus withdrew from participating in the Mardi Gras parade in 1991 after an ordinance was passed that required all social organizations, including Mardi Gras krewes, to certify publicly that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, handicap, or sexual orientation, to obtain parade permits and other public licensure.

Operating continuously since its founding, the Knights of Momus still hold an annual Bal Masque at the Orpheum Theater on the Thursday before Mardi Gras.

After the Civil War ended, White began studying law in New Orleans at what was named at the time the University of Louisiana Law School, which became Tulane University.

He was admitted to the bar and started practicing law in New Orleans in 1868.

In 1874, White served in the Louisiana State Senate; on the Louisiana Supreme Court from 1878 to 1880; and in 1891, was elected as U. S. Senator by the Louisiana State Legislature to succeed James B. Eustis.

Eustis was another lawyer-turned-politician from New Orleans. He graduated from Harvard in 1854 and was admitted to the bar in 1856. He served as President Grover Cleveland’s ambassador to France from 1893 to 1897.

Eustis was married into the Buckner Family, which included his father-in-law, New Orleans cotton broker Henry Sullivan Buckner, and nephew Mortimer Norton Buckner, a Yale graduate turned travelling salesman and insurance salesman who ended up in New York in 1901, and served as President and Chairman of the Board of the New York Trust Company, the New York Clearing House, and the National Credit Corporation.

Just a little side-trip to give an example of how these interesting connections keep coming up!

White was nominated by President Grover Cleveland to be an Associate Supreme Court Justice on February 14th of 1894, and was confirmed by voice vote on the same day.

This was after President Cleveland’s first two Supreme Court nominees had been rejected by the Senate.

White was part of the majority decision in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case in the Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal.

White also participated in the Insular cases, which took place in the early 20th-century, involving the relationship of the United States to the territories acquired in the 1898 Spanish-American War, and, for example, was part of the majority ruling in the 1901 Downes v. Bidwell case that the newly-annexed territories were not properly part of the United States for the purposes of the Constitution, though the guarantees of a citizen’s rights of liberty and property were applicable to all.

President William Howard Taft nominated White to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on December 12th of 1910, and he was again confirmed by voice-vote on the same day as his nomination.

He officially became the 9th Chief Justice a week later.

White originated the term “Rule of Reason,” which is a legal doctrine used to interpret the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, one of the cornerstones of Anti-Trust law in the United States.

He also joined the ruling that the Federal Government could not ban child labor in the 1918 Hammer v. Dagenhart case, in which the Supreme Court struck down a federal law regulating child labor.

White wrote the Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the 1916 Adamson Act, which mandated an eight-hour workday for railroad employees.

The 1918 Selective Draft Law Cases in his court upheld the 1917 Selective Service Act, which upheld the military draft.

White died in May of 1921 and was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, DC.

The State of Maine is represented by Hannibal Hamlin and William King in the National Statuary Hall.

Hannibal Hamlin was an American attorney and politician who served as the 15th Vice-President of the United States from 1861 to 1865 during President Abraham Lincoln’s first-term, and the American Civil War.

Hannibal Hamlin was born in August of 1809 in Paris, Maine.

He was a grandnephew of Samuel Livermore of New Hampshire.

Along with district schools, Hamlin attended Hebron Academy, one of the nation’s oldest endowed preparatory schools, having been established in 1804.

Beginning in 1827, Hamlin published the political newspaper the “Oxford Jeffersonian” newspaper in Paris, Maine, which became the “Oxford Democrat” under two of his apprentices, George Millet and Octavius King.

I find interesting to note that this said-to-be sparsely populated, agrarian part of Maine, was noted as having over 25 newspapers in the late 1700s to 1900s.

Why so many?

I don’t have an answer…just curious.

Hamlin studied law with attorney and Maine state politician Samuel Fessenden’s law firm and was admitted to the bar in 1833.

He started his law practice in Hampden, Maine, where he lived until 1848.

Hamlin was elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 1835, which marked the beginning of his political career.

He was appointed a major on the staff of Maine’s Governor, John Fairfield, and he served in the militia during the 1839 Aroostook War, in which no blood was shed.

This was a military – civilian-involved international confrontation between the United States and the United Kingdom between 1838 and 1839 over the international boundary between the State of Maine and the British colony of New Brunswick.

The boundary was established in 1842 with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, giving Maine most of the disputed area, while preserving an overland connection between Lower Canada and the Maritime colonies.

Later, Hamlin was elected to two terms in the U. S. House of Representatives, and served between 1843 and 1847.

Then, in 1848, he was elected by the Maine State Legislature to fill a U. S. Senate vacancy, and in 1851, was elected to a full-term in the Senate.

Though elected Governor of Maine in 1857, he was only in office for a month before he resigned and returned to the Senate.

Hamlin started out as a Democrat, but joined the newly-organized Republican Party in June of 1856, after the Democratic Party endorsed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

The Missouri Compromise was federal legislation that had passed in 1820 that balanced the desires of northern states to prevent the extension of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it.

The Republican Party nominated Hannibal Hamlin of Maine to serve as Vice-President of the United States in the 1860 election on the ticket with Abraham Lincoln of Illinois nominated as President, for the given reason of regional balance.

At the time, the office of Vice-President was part of the Legislative branch of the U. S. government with the role of President of the Senate, and not the Executive branch, and as such Hamlin did not attend Cabinet meetings.

In June of 1864, Lincoln was renominated as President by the Republicans, but Hamlin was not. Instead, they nominated former tailor-turned-politician Andrew Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate.

Johnson was seen as a capable military governor of occupied Tennessee, and the Republicans were looking ahead to southern Reconstruction as well as broadening their base of support.

Hamlin’s Vice-Presidency brought in 50-years of sustained national influence for the Maine Republican Party.

Between 1861 and 1911, Maine Republicans were in the offices of Vice-President; Secretary of the Treasury; Secretary of State; President of the U. S. Senate; and Speaker of the U. S. House.

Hamlin was elected to the U. S. Senate two-more times, starting in 1867, and his last political appointment was as U. S. Ambassador to Spain under President James A. Garfield, a position which he held from June of 1881 to October of 1882.

Hamlin died on July 4th of 1891, having collapsed while playing cards at the Tarrantine Club in Bangor, Maine – a club of which he was one of the founders in 1884, and its first club President.

The couch he died on is still on display at the Bangor Public Library…

…and he was buried at the Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, the second-oldest garden cemetery in the United States, after Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts, which it was said to have been modelled after.

Also known as the “Rural Cemetery Movement,” Garden Cemeteries were said to have been a style of cemetery that became popular in the mid-19th-century in both the United States and Europe due to the overcrowding and health concerns of urban cemeteries.

They were typically built, we are told, around 5-miles, or 8-kilometers, outside the city in order to both be: 1) separate from the cities; and 2) close enough for visitors.

Not only that, the “Garden Cemeteries” were beautifully landscaped, containing elaborate memorials and mausoleums, and were places that the general public could go for outdoor recreation around art and sculptures, which previously had only been available to the wealthy.

Their popularity decreased, we are told, towards the end of the 19th-century due to: 1) the high cost of maintenance; 2) the development of true public parks; and 3) the perceived disorderliness of appearance due to independent ownership of family burial plots and different grave markers.

I find the “Rural Cemetery Movement” cropping up in history in the early- mid-19th-century, and ending, for all-intents-and-purposes at the end of the 19th-century to be particularly noteworthy, since the research I have done on what the official narrative tells us points right to this same time-period as being when the New World Order history reset really got underway.

The other statue representing Maine in the National Statuary Hall is one of William King.

William King was an American merchant, ship builder, army officer and statesman from Bath, Maine, who became the first Governor of Maine when Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820.

King’s father Richard was a merchant and ship-owner, and he was born in February of 1768 at Scarborough, Maine.

Maine was part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay of Britain’s colony in America at that time in history.

He was said to have attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for a term, though he was largely self-educated.

Phillips Academy is one of the oldest incorporated secondary-schools in the United States, having been established in 1778.

In 1787, King left Scarborough at the age of 19 to live with his sister and brother-in-law in Topsham, Maine.

Between the years of 1780 and 1820, the District of Maine was the governmental designation for what became the State of Maine when it was admitted to the Union in 1820.

The District of Maine was part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was admitted to the Union as a State in February of 1788.

Interestingly, when I was looking information up on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts becoming a State in 1788, I encountered the Massachusetts Act banning “Any African or Negro,” which was made law on March 26th of 1788, apparently in response to Prince Hall leading black masons to petition the court in 1788 to put an end to the slave trade.

Two things I want to draw to your attention in the wording of this law is that first, it does not apply to African or Negroes that are subjects of the Emperor of Morocco or a citizen of one of the States that can prove it.

Why would subjects of the Emperor of Morocco be specifically mentioned in this law?

What if what became known as America was originally part of Morocco, and this knowledge deliberately removed from our collective awareness and the civilization was intentionally destroyed?

The second is that this law was punitive towards the African or Negroes themselves, not the slave traders. If they didn’t leave within ten days, they would be committed to a house of correction, where it says un-hard labor but would seem to mean on hard labor, and if they continued to stay, they were to be whipped and then forced to leave in ten days.

This is a 1775 map of the Shawmut Peninsula, which we know as Boston, and of which Beacon Hill was the center.

Land reclamation took place here roughly between 1820 and 1900 to create land, where there was originally water, around the original peninsula.

The area originally had three hills.

Pemberton Hill and Fort Vernon Hill were near Beacon Hill, and both of these hills were levelled for Beacon Hill development.

Beacon Hill itself was reduced from 130-feet, or 42-meters, to 80-feet, or 24-meters, between 1807 and 1832.

Boston’s Fort Independence was the location where Prince Hall, and fourteen other men of African-American descent, became Freemasons in their initiation into the British Army Lodge 441 of the Irish Registry, after having been declined admittance into the Boston St. John’s Lodge.

He was the founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry, and the African Grand Lodge of North America.

Until Prince Hall found a way in, Moorish Americans were denied admittance into Freemasonry. There are 360-degrees in Moorish Masonry, compared to the 33-degrees of Freemasonry.

Masonry is based on Moorish Science, which also includes the study of natural and spiritual laws, esoteric symbolism, natal and judicial astrology, and zodiac masonry.

With regards to zodiac masonry, this is where the perfect alignments of infrastructure on earth with the sky comes from – the consummate alignment of earth with heaven that is seen around the world – like the lunar roll along the top of this recumbant stone in Crowthie Muir in Scotland…

…and the alignment with the Orion constellation at the ancient stone circle of Nabta Playa in Egypt.

The Moors were the custodians of the Ancient Egyptian mysteries, according to George G. M. James in his book “Stolen Legacy.”

You see these precise astronomical alignments with what would be considered more modern infrastructure as well.

I mean, someone knows about the Moors and what happened to them.

They are just not telling us directly.

Back to William King.

In 1795, William King became active politically, representing Topsham in the Massachusetts House of Representatives until 1799.

In 1799, King moved to Bath, Maine, where he served as Bath’s Representative in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1800, and then as Senator for Lincoln County in 1807 to 1811.

King worked his way up the ladder from his beginnings working on the family farm and in various mills.

He was credited with buildingat least 14 ships, and was either owner or part-owner of 35 merchant ships involved in trade with England, the West Indies, and various ports in the United States.

He married his wife, Ann Frazier of Boston, shortly after moving to Bath, and they built their home, “Stone House,” overlooking the wharves on the Kennebec River where his merchant fleet was docked.

King was considered Bath’s leading citizen, and besides hosting parties in his mansion, he started the South Church in 1805, initially a Congregational Church but later abandoned by them and purchased by the Irish Catholics.

The South Church was said to have been burned down by an angry mob during what is known to history as the Anti-Catholic Riot in 1854, when a group of local citizens was enraged to violence by a travelling street preacher named John Orr, who called himself the “Angel Gabriel,” preaching anti-Catholic sentiment in town.

At the beginning of the War of 1812, he became a Major-General in the Massachusetts militia in charge of the District of Maine.

He was said to have played a key role in enlisting troops and organizing coastal defenses to protect the Maine coast against attack from the British.

He also was a leader in recruiting efforts for the regular army, for which he was made a Colonel in the U. S. Army.

In 1813, King started a petition process for Maine to become separate from Massachusetts.

King was re-elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 1816, and in 1818, the approval was secured for Maine to become a separate state.

The Missouri Compromise allowed Maine to become a state on March 15th of 1820 and shortly thereafter, William King was elected Governor.

William King was also a Scottish Rite Freemason, and he became the first Grand Master of Maine in June of 1820 after becoming Maine’s first Governor.

President James Monroe named King one of three commissioners in May of 1821 to settle land claims resulting from the Adams-Onis Treaty, a position for which King resigned the Governorship of Maine and held until 1824.

The 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty was a treaty between the United States and Spain that ceded Florida to the United States, and defined the boundary between the U. S. and New Spain.

King was appointed by President Andrew Jackson in 1828 as Customs Collector of Bath.

The job of Customs Collector was to collect taxes on goods imported from other countries.

The construction of the historic Customs House in Bath was said to have started in 1852 and completed in 1858.

The building was made out of granite with iron beams inside the stone wall, and considered unusual for the time because of its “fire-proof” construction.

Even though King’s formal education was limited, he served as a Trustee for both Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, which was chartered in 1794…

…and for Waterville College, now called Colby College, which was established in 1813.

In June of 1852, William King died at home, and was buried in Bath’s Maple Grove Cemetery.

The Governor King Monument pictured here was said to have been erected in 1855 in memory of him at his burial site.

Charles Carroll and John Hanson represent the State of Maryland in the National Statuary Hall.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton was an Irish-American politician, planter, and the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.

He was considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and was known as the “First Citizen” of the American Colonies.

He received the “First Citizen” designation for the given reason this was his pen name for his articles in the “Maryland Gazette.”

Charles Carroll of Carrollton was born in September of 1737 in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of Charles Carroll of Annapolis, a wealthy Maryland planter and lawyer, and the grandson of Charles Carroll the Settler, an Irishman who secured the position of Attorney General of the young colony of Maryland from George Calvert, First Baron Baltimore and immigrated there in October of 1688.

The Colony of Maryland was established in the 1630s on land granted by a hereditary charter to the Calvert family, and intended as a haven for English Catholics and other religious minorities.

The young Charles Carroll received a Jesuit education, starting at the Jesuit preparatory school at Bohemia Manor in Cecil County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay…

…and then starting at the age of 11 was sent to Jesuit schools in France, including the College of St. Omer in northern France…

…and later the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, from which he graduated in 1755.

For the next 10 years, Carroll studied in Europe, and read law in London before returning to Annapolis in 1765.

He was granted Carrollton Manor, known as D0ughoregan Manor, by his father, which was why he received the name “Charles Carroll of Carrollton.”

Doughoregan Manor is located west of Ellicott City, Maryland, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971.

As a Catholic, Charles Carroll of Carrollton was barred by Maryland Statute from entering politics, practicing law and voting.

This did not stop him from becoming not only one of the wealthiest men in Maryland, but of anywhere in the British Colonies, with his extensive agricultural estates, which besides Doughoregan, included Hockley Forge and Mill, called a collection of colonial-era industrial buildings along the Patapsco River near what is now Elkridge, Maryland, and Carroll provided the capital to finance new enterprises on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

In the early 1770s, when the dispute between Great Britain and her colonies in America became more intense, Carroll engaged in a debate via letters that were written anonymously and published in the Maryland Gazette.

Carroll under the pen name of “First Citizen” argued for maintaining the right of the colonies to control their own taxation, becoming a prominent spokesman against the Governor’s proclamation increasing legal fees to state officers and Protestant clergy.

Daniel Dulany the Younger, a noted lawyer and British loyalist politician in Maryland, opposed Carroll in these written debates, writing as “Antillon.”

Carroll’s fame and notoriety began to grow as the identity of the two anonymous debaters became known, and following these written debates, Carroll became a leading opponent of British rule and served on various committees of correspondence, and believed that only the violence of war could break the impasse with Great Britain.

He was a delegate to the Annapolis Convention, the revolutionary government of Maryland before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Charles Carroll was elected to the Second Continental Congress on July 4th of 1776, arriving too late to vote on it, but he was there to sign it.

At the time, he was the richest man in America.

He remained a delegate of the Second Continental Congress until 1778, and during his term, he served on the War Board and gave considerable financial support to the Revolutionary War.

Carroll returned to Maryland in 1778 to help form the state government there.

He declined re-election to the Continental Congress in 1780, but was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1781, and served there until 1800.

I guess by that time, Catholics were no longer barred y statute from hold political office.

He was also elected to the U. S. Senate during this time by the State Legislature, in which he served from March of 1789 to November of 1792.

He had to resign his U. S. Senate seat, however, because Maryland passed a law barring anyone from serving in state and federal office simultaneously, and he preferred his State Senate job.

After retiring from public life in 1801, Carroll helped established the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which was founded in 1827 and broke ground for the construction of its headquarters and America’s first commercial railroad tracks on July 4th of 1828.

This is where aspects of the influential Carroll family of Maryland and Charles Carroll’s life and the history of the B & O Railroad intersect.

Mount Clare is called the oldest Colonial-era structure in Baltimore, Maryland, and was built on a Carroll-family plantation starting in 1763 by Charles Carroll the Barrister, a distant cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

This is what we are told.

The street grid of the city of Baltimore near Mount Clare began to grow and inch towards the southwest, with the dense development of streets and alleys of different styles of brick row-houses by the 1820s, and there was competitive economic pressure with the opening of the Erie Canal to develop the Port of Baltimore and the accompanying transportation systems like the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad with this new transportation technology from Great Britain and the proposed Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, of which both projects broke ground on the same day – July 4th of 1828 – and that there was an intense rivalry between the two.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company was formed in 1827, of which Charles Carroll of Carrollton was one of its Directors, and he was the one that had the honor of laying the first stone for the railroad at the ceremony after the celebratory festivities at the July 4th ground-breaking in 1828, near the Mount Clare Mansion.

The Mount Clare Shops, of which this aerial photo is circa 1971, is the oldest railroad manufacturing complex in the United States, located on a portion of the Carroll family’s Mount Clare Estate, and the mansion left the family’s ownership in 1840.

Mount Clare Station was first said to have been erected in the 1830s and the Roundhouse in 1884, with the current Mount Clare Station building having been constructed in 1851.

Today the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, we are told the original Mount Clare passenger station, the first in the nation, was abandoned, and was located where the parking lot is for the museum is today.

Carroll was elected into the American Antiquarian Society in 1815, a national research library of pre-20th-century American history and culture, and the oldest historical society with a national focus, having been founded in 1812.

Its mission is to collect, preserve, and make available for study all printed records of what is known as the United States of America.

The seal of the American Antiquarian Society translates from the Latin of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 15, Line 872: “Now I have completed my work, which neither sword nor devouring Time will be able to destroy.”

The written word can be manipulated to put out the narrative you want for posterity.

Architecture not so much.

This is the American Antiquarian Society building in Worcester, Massachusetts, said to have been designed by the arciectural firm of Winslow, Bigelow & Wadsworth in Georgian or Colonial-Revival style and completed in 1910.

Carroll died at the age of 95 in November of 1832, the oldest-lived Founding Father.

His funeral took place at the cathedral in Baltimore…

…and he was buried in the Manor Chapel on his estate at Doughoregan.

John Hanson is the other statue representing Maryland in the National Statuary Hall.

This what we are told about John Hanson in today’s historical narrative.

John Hanson was a Founding Father of the United States, and a merchant and public official from Maryland in the American Revolution-era.

He was elected as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1779 and signed the Articles of Confederation in 1781, and that same year was elected as the first “President of the Confederation Congress,” sometimes called the first “President of the United States in Congress Assembled,” with some biographers asserting that this made him first President of the United States.

Hanson was born in Port Tobacco on a plantation called “Mulberry Grove” into a wealthy and prominent family in Maryland’s Charles County in April of 1721.

His father Samuel was a planter, as well as a politician who served two terms in the Maryland General Assembly.

We are told little is known of Hanson’s early life, except that he followed in his father’s footsteps as a planter-turned-politician.

Hanson’s political career began in 1750, when he was appointed Sheriff of Charles County, and 1757, he was elected to represent Charles County in the Lower House of the Maryland General Assembly, serving for 12 years in this capacity, and sitting on many important committees.

In 1769, he sold his land in Charles County, and moved to Frederick County, Maryland, where he held public offices such as deputy surveyor, sheriff, and county treasurer.

It is interesting to note that there are Compass Meridian Stones are in Frederick Maryland, the seat of Frederick County.

We are told they were established in Frederick in 1896 as the result of the work done by two surveyors, Lawrence Brengle and Thomas Woodrow, to accurately measure what was known as “Frederick Town” in 1820, and this helped others, to realize the importance firstly of precise and accurate surveying measurements, and secondly, of the establishment primary reference monuments and survey calibration baselines.

The “Compass Meridian Stones” in Frederick are on opposite sides of the lawn of the old courthouse, which is now the City Hall, and established as a North-South baseline in Maryland that surveyors used to annually check for variations in their compasses here and were required to report them to the Clerk of the Court to register them.

Polaris, commonly known as the “Pole Star” or the “North Star,” is visible from this location, and the two stones have been measured to align with the north.

Polaris is famous for appearing to stand-still in the night sky while the northern sky moves around it.

When relations between the American Colonies and Great Britain went south in 1774, John Hanson became a leading patriot of Frederick County.

He was a delegate to the Maryland Convention in 1775, and, along with the other delegates, he signed the “Association of Freemen” on July 26th of 1775, which expressed hope for reconciling with Great Britain but also called for military resistance to the Coercive Acts, a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774, after the Boston Tea Party.

When hostilities were underway, Hanson chaired the Frederick County Committee of Observation within a patriot organization that assumed control of governing local areas.

Hanson was responsible for recruiting and arming local soldiers and Frederick County was the first to send southern troops to George Washington’s Army, and he financed much of the war effort from western Maryland out of his own money.

Also, Hanson chaired the Frederick County meeting in June of 1776 that urged Maryland leaders in Annapolis to instruct its delegates in the First Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain.

In 1777, Hanson was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates, and then in 1779, the House of Delegates named him as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and he began his time of service in Philadelphia in June of 1780.

Along with Daniel Carroll, Maryland’s other delegate to the Continental Congress at this time, Hanson signed the Articles of Confederation with the other states’ delegates on March 1st of 1781, at which time they officially went into effect.

The Second Continental Congress elected Hanson as its President in November of 1781.

Both Legislative and Executive government was vested in the Congress under the Articles of Confederation, so the Presidency of Congress was largely a ceremonial position, and Hanson served as a neutral discussion moderator, handled official correspondence, and signed documents.

He served in this position for a year, after which time, he retired from public office and was in poor health.

Hanson died on November 15th of 1783 while visiting Oxon Hill Manor, the plantation of his nephew, Thomas Hawkins Hanson, and which where he was buried.

The original Oxon Hill Manor was said to have burned, and the mansion there today was said to have been built in 1928 by Summer Welles, the U. S. Undersecretary of State during President Franklin Roosevelt’s administrations from 1936 to 1943.

Here’s the thing.

There are two versions of who John Hanson actually was, and they definitely do not look like the same person!

I dunno.

I have memories of learning when I was much younger, like it feels like it was before the internet came into being, that the first President of the Continental Congress was a black man named John Hanson, and this is what I was able to find on the subject in an internet search now.

While there is a persistence to that version as to the identity of that John Hanson still in existence to this day…

…the discrepancy with two different historical persons having the same name has been explained that they are in fact different people from different times, and that the black John Hanson was a different John Hanson with very little biographical information that was born in Liberia on an unknown birthdate, was a merchant and Senator from Liberia who was born into slavery and purchased his freedom, who emigrated to Baltimore at the age of 36, and who died in 1860 on an unknown date.

The State of Massachusetts is represented by Samuel Adams and John Winthrop in the National Statuary Hall.

Samuel Adams was an American statesman, politician, Founding Father of the United States, and one of the architects of the principles of American Republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States.

Samuel Adams was born in Boston in the British Colony of Massachusetts in September of 1722, one of three children who survived out of 12 born to his parents, brewer Samuel Adams Sr. and Mary Fifield Adams.

They were Puritans, and members of the Old South Congregational Church, which is famous as the place where the Boston Tea Party was organized.

This is a photo of the original Old South Meeting House circa 1900…

…which still stands today at the corner of Milk and Washington Streets in Boston’s Downtown Crossing area.

We are told that the present building of the Old South Congregational Church was completed in 1873 after the Old South Meeting House was almost destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

Is it just me, or does the Old South Church’s cornerstone look a little strange?

It looks plastered over, and is not the same material as the stone surrounding it.

And the “16” of the “1670” date sure looks like it was worked with more than once.

The elder Samuel Adams, a Deacon of the church, entered politics through an informal political organization known to history as the “Boston Caucus,” which he was one of the founders of.

The “Boston Caucus” promoted candidates who supported popular causes in the years before and after the American Revolution, typically meeting in the smoke-filled rooms of taverns or pubs.

The younger Samuel Adams attended the Boston Latin School, which was established in 1635, and the oldest public school in British America and the oldest existing school in the United States.

Adams entered Harvard College in 1736 and graduated in 1740.

He continued in his studies, earning a Master’s Degree in 1743.

He was particularly interested in politics and colonial rights.

Founded in 1636, Harvard College, the original school of Harvard University, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.

Harvard University is located right across the street from the Boston Latin School, and among many other universities and museums, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is only a short-walking-distance from the Boston Latin School.

The largest art theft in U. S. history took place on March 18th of 1990, at which time twelve paintings and a Chinese Shang Dynasty vase, all together worth $100 to $300 million, were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum.

There is still a $10 million reward in place today for information leading to the recovery of the art work.

The museum was said to have been built between 1898 and 1901, with the design heavily influenced by art-collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner herself on the left, in the style of a 15th-century Venetian Palace, of which the 15th-century Palazzo Santa Sofia in Venice on the right is an example of this type of architecture.

The art museum is located near the Back Bay Fens, one of the areas of Boston that was reclaimed between 1820 and 1900, and said to have been designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace system of parks.

Back to Samuel Adams.

Adams considered going into law after leaving Harvard in 1743, but ended up going into business, working at a counting house until he was let go after a few months because he was too preoccupied with politics.

His father subsequently made him a partner in the family’s malthouse, where the malt necessary for brewing beer was produced.

He was first elected into political office in 1747 as one of the clerks of the Boston Market, and in 1756, he was elected to the position of Tax Collector by the Boston Town Meeting.

In January of 1748, Samuel Adams and some friends launched “The Independent Advertiser,” which advocated republicanism, liberty and independence from Great Britain, after he and his friends became inflamed by British impressment, where men were forcibly taken into military or naval service.

He went into what can best be described as full-on political activism against Great Britain.

The 1764 Sugar Act passed by the British Parliament was a revenue-raising act for goods which could only be exported to Britain.

It was protested in the colonies for its economic impact, as well as the issue of taxation without representation, by merchants boycotting British goods and Samuel Adams drafted a report on the Sugar Act for the Massachusetts Assembly, in which he called the Sugar Act an infringement of the rights of the colonists as British subjects.

The Sugar Act was repealed in 1766 and replaced with the Revenue Act that same year, which reduced the tax to one penny per gallon on molasses imports.

The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, which required colonists to pay a new tax on most printed materials.

Adams supported the calls for a boycott of British goods to pressure Parliament to repeal the tax.

Riots from groups like the Loyal Nine, a precursor to the Sons of Liberty, during this time resulted in some homes and businesses being destroyed, and the jury is out on whether or not Adams was directly involved in directing violent agitators in protest.

Adams was appointed to the Boston Town Meeting in September of 1765 to write the instructions for Boston’s delegation to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and he was selected to become a Representative for Boston later that same month.

Adams was the main author of several House resolutions against the Stamp Act, and he was also said to be one of the first colonial leaders to argue that mankind possessed certain natural rights that governments could not violate.

The Stamp Act did not go into effect when it was supposed on November 1st of 1765 because protestors throughout the colonies had forced stamp distributors to resign and the tax was subsequently repealed in March of 1766.

Next came the Townshend Acts.

The Townshend Acts were established by the British Parliament in 1767, establishing new duties on goods imported to the colonies to help pay for the costs of governing the American colonies.

The revenues generated from this were to be used to pay for governors and judges independent of colonial control and compliance enforced by the newly created American Board of Custom Commissioners, headquartered in Boston.

Resistance grew to the Townshend Acts and Samuel Adams organized an economic boycott through the Boston Town Meeting, and called for other towns and colonies to join the boycott.

Samuel Adams wrote what became known as the “Massachusetts Circular Letter,” calling on the colonies to join Massachusetts in resisting the Townshend Acts, which was approved by the Massachusetts House on February 11th of 1768, after having not been approved at first.

Lord Hillsborough, the British Colonial Secretary, instructed colonial governors to dissolve their assemblies if they responded to the letter, and directed the Massachusetts Governor, Francis Bernard, to have the Massachusetts House rescind the letter, which the House refused to do.

Governor Bernard dissolved the legislature after Samuel Adams presented another petition to remove the Governor from office.

The Commissioners of the Customs Board requested military assistance from Great Britain when they found they could not enforce trade regulations in Boston, and a 50-gun warship arrived in Boston Harbor in May of 1768, the HMS Romney.

Tensions escalated when the captain of the Romney began to forcibly impress local sailors to serve on the HMS Romney.

This led to Customs officials seizing a ship belonging to John Hancock named “Liberty” for alleged customs’ violations, and a riot broke out when sailors from the HMS Romney came to tow the “Liberty.”

This in turn led to Massachusetts Governor Bernard writing to London in response to this incident and requesting that troops be sent to Boston to restore order, and Lord Hillsborough ordered four regiments of the British Army there, with the first troops arriving in October of 1768.

In September of 1768, When Governor Bernard refused the request of the Boston Town Meeting to convene the General Court upon learning about the incoming British troops, the Boston Town Meeting called on other Massachusetts towns to send representatives to meet at Faneuil Hall starting on September 22nd, and one-hundred towns sent delegates to the convention, which issued a letter stating that Boston was a lawful town, and that the pending military occupation would violate the natural, constitutional, and charter rights of the citizens of Boston.

The British occupation of Boston was said to have been a turning point for Samuel Adams according to some accounts, who started working towards American independence and gave up hope for reconciliation with Great Britain.

He wrote a number of letters and essays against the occupation, considering it a violation of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which was an act of Parliament seen as a landmark in English Constitutional Law that laid out basic civil rights.

The “Journal of Occurrences” publicized the occupation of Boston throughout the colonies in a series of unsigned articles that may or may not have been written by Adams.

The articles were claimed to be a factual daily account of events in Boston under British occupation, depicting unruly British soldiers assaulting citizens on a regular basis with no consequences to them.

Publication of the “Journal of Occurrences” ended on August 1st of 1769, when Governor Bernard permanently left Massachusetts.

Two British regiments were removed from Boston in 1769, and two remained.

The Boston Massacre took place in March of 1770.

Five civilians were killed by British soldiers in a crowd of several hundred who were said to have been taunting the soldiers.

The incident was well-publicized by Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, and was depicted in Revere’s 1770 engraving pictured here.

The situation quieted down somewhat after the Boston Massacre, with Parliament repealing the Townshend Acts in April 1770, with the exception of the tax on tea.

Samuel Adams continued to urge the colonists to boycott British goods, but the boycott faltered because of the improvement of economic conditions.

Adams and his associates came up with a system of “Committees of Correspondence” between towns in Massachusetts in November of 1775, where they would consult with each other on political matters by way of messages sent through these committees that recorded British activities and protested British policies.

These committees of correspondence soon formed in other colonies as well.

The new Massachusetts Governor, businessman and Loyalist politician, Thomas Hutchinson, became concerned that the Committees of Correspondence System was becoming an independence movement.

The Governor addressed the Massachusetts legislature and argued that denying the supremacy of Parliament came dangerously close to rebellion.

Adams and the House responded to him by saying that the Massachusetts Charter did not establish Parliament’s supremacy over the province, so Parliament could not claim that authority.

This exchange was published and publicized in the widely distributed “Boston Pamphlet.”

Samuel Adams was said to have been a leader in the events leading up to the Boston Tea Party that took place in December of 1773 in our historical narrative.

The British Parliament had passed the Tea Act in May of 1773 to help the British East India Company, who had amassed a surplus of tea that it could not sell.

The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to sell the tea directly to the colonies , granting them significant cost advantage over local merchants and reduction in their taxes paid in Great Britain while at the same time keeping the Townshend duty on tea imported in the colonies.

In late 1773, seven ships were sent to the colonies carrying the surplus tea, with four bound for Boston Harbor.

Adams and the Committees of Correspondence promoted opposition to the Tea Act, and with the exception of Massachusetts, every colony was successful in not having the tea delivered.

Governor Hutchinson was determined to hold his ground and have the tea delivered to those designated to receive it.

All other efforts to prevent the tea from being unloaded having failed, on the night of December 16th of 1773, approximately 342 chests of tea were dumped overboard in the course of three-hours by a large group of men known as the “Sons of Liberty.”

Samuel Adams publicized the event and defended it, arguing that the Boston Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but the only remaining option left to people to defend their rights.

Great Britain’s response to the Boston Tea Party was the introduction of the Coercive, also known as Intolerable, Acts, of which the first was the Boston Port Act, enacted in March of 1774, and effective June 1st, which closed Boston’s commerce until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea.

The May of 1774 Massachusetts Government Act rewrote the Massachusetts Charter, making numerous officials royally-appointed as opposed to elected.

Also passed by the British Parliament in May of 1774, the Administration of Justice Act allowed colonists charged with crimes to be transported to another colony or to Great Britain for trial.

General Thomas Gage was the new Royal Governor of Massachusetts appointed to enforce the Coercive Acts, and he was also the commander of British Military forces in North America.

Samuel Adams worked to coordinate resistance to the Coercive Acts.

In May of 1774, with Adams moderating, the Boston Town Meeting organized a boycott of British goods.

In June of 1774, he chaired a committee in the Massachusetts House behind locked doors which proposed what became the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and to which Samuel Adams became one of five delegates from Massachusetts.

The First Continental Congress took place at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia between September 5th and October 26th of 1774.

Delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies discussed how the colonies could work together in response to the British government’s coercive reactions in Massachusetts.

They agreed on a “Declaration and Resolves,” a statement that outlined colonial objections to the Coercive Acts, and concluded with the plan of the First Continental Congress to enter a boycott of British trade until the grievances were resolved.

They sent a petition to King George III pleading for resolution of their grievances and repeal of the Coercive Acts, which had no effect.

In November of 1774, Adams returned to Massachusetts and served in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which created the first Minutemen companies – militia ready to act on a moment’s notice.

Both selected as delegates to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, which was scheduled to start meeting in May of 1775, Samuel Adams and John Hancock attended the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Concord, Massachusetts, in April of 1775, and then decided to stay in Hancock’s childhood home in Lexington before heading to Philadelphia after deciding it wasn’t safe to return to Boston.

After having received a letter from Lord Dartmouth, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, on April 14th of 1775 advising arrest of the principal people of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, General Gage, the Massachusetts Governor and commander of British Military forces in North America sent out a detachment of soldiers a few days later, on April 18th, to seize and destroy military supplies that the colonists had stored in Concord, and possibly to arrest Adams and Hancock, though this order is in dispute historically because it wasn’t in his written orders.

Regardless, the Patriots believed otherwise, and Paul Revere was dispatched on horseback from Boston on his famous midnight ride, to both alert the colonial militia that the “British are coming,” and warn Hancock and Adams about their potential arrest.

As Hancock and Adams made their escape, the American Revolutionary War began in Lexington and Concord on April 19th of 1775.

The exact role of Samuel Adams in the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress was not known because of its secrecy rule, but he was believed to have been a major influence in steering the Congress toward independence.

He served on numerous committees, including ones dealing with military matters, and it was he who nominated George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.

On June 7th of 1776, Samuel Adams’ ally, Richard Henry Lee from Virginia, introduced a three-part resolution calling for the Second Continental Congress to declare independence, create a colonial confederation, and seek foreign aid.

This resulted in the Continental Congress approving the language of the Declaration of Independence and its signing on July 4th of 1776.

Adams remained active in the Second Continental Congress, also having a hand in drafting the Articles of Confederation in 1777, the plan for colonial confederation, and he continued to serve on various military committees.

He retired completely from the Continental Congress in 1781.

Not bad for a guy who started out his career in the beer-making business!

Adams had returned to Boston in 1779 to attend a state constitutional convention, at which time he was appointed to a three-man committee to draft a new state constitution.

The new Massachusetts Constitution was amended by the convention approved by voters in 1780, and is among the oldest functioning constitutions in continuous effect in the world.

Adams continued to remain active in politics after his return to Massachusetts, putting his focus on the promotion of virtue.

He occasionally serving as moderator of the Boston Town Meeting, and he was elected to the State Senate.

Shays’ Rebellion took place in rural western Massachusetts from August of 1786 to February of 1787, in response to a debt crisis among the people and in opposition to the state government’s increased efforts to collect taxes on individuals and their trades.

Residents in these areas had few assets beyond their land, and bartered with each other for goods and services, as opposed to the market economy of the developed areas of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut River Valley.

It was led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays who led 4,000 rebels in protest against economic and civil rights’ injustices.

Interestingly, where Samuel Adams approved of rebellion against an unrepresentative government, he opposed the taking up of arms against a Republican form of government, where problems should be remedied through elections.

He urged the Governor, James Bowdoin, to put down the uprising using military force, so he sent 4,000 militiamen to quell the uprising.

Shay’s Rebellion led to the creation of the United State Constitution, which started at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, because it contributed to the belief that the 1777 Articles of Confederation needed to be revised.

The United States Constitution came into force in 1789 as the supreme law of the United States.

The original Constitution is comprised of seven articles.

Its first three articles embody the doctrine of “Separation of Powers;” its next three articles embody the concepts of “Federalism,” and the rights and responsibilities of state governments; and its last article established the procedure used to by the thirteen original states to ratify it.

The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as the “Bill of Rights,” which were ratified by the first U. S. Congress, on December 15th of 1791, offer specific protection for individual liberty and justice, and place restrictions on the power of government.

Samuel Adams was elected Lt. Governor of Massachusetts in 1789, a position in which he served until Governor John Hancock’s death in 1793, at which time he became acting governor.

The following year, Adams was elected as the Massachusetts Governor, a position in which he served between October of 1794 and June of 1797.

In Massachusetts, Samuel Adams was considered a leader of the Jeffersonian Republicans, also known as the Democratic-Republican Party, a political party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1790s that championed things like Republicanism, agrarianism, political equality and expansionism.

This was in opposition to the Federalist Party, a conservative party that was founded in 1789, and the first political party in the United States.

It was led by people like Alexander Hamilton and Samuel’s cousin John Adams, and favored centralization, federalism, modernization, industrialization, and protectionism.

Samuel Adams supported the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion for the the same reasons he supported the suppression of Shay’s Rebellion.

The Whiskey Tax was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government, and was intended to generate revenue for the war debt brought about by the Revolutionary War, and primarily affected people living in rural areas, like farmers in the new country’s western frontier who turned surplus grains into alcohol and where whiskey was used for bartering.

The Whiskey Rebellion was a violent tax protest in the United States that started in 1791 and ended in 1794 during George Washington’s Presidency, and when George Washington himself led 13,000 militiamen provided by Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, to put down the insurgency, however, all the insurgents left before the army arrived, effectively ending the rebellion, and resulting in a handful of arrests of individuals that were later acquitted or pardoned.

The Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that the new national government had the will and ability to suppress violent resistance to its laws.

The Whiskey Tax was very difficult to collect, and was finally repealed in the early 1800s under President Thomas Jefferson.

Adams retired from politics after his term as Governor ended in 1797, and he died on October 2nd of 1803, at the age of 81, and was buried in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground…

…and also where Paul Revere was laid to rest.

No mention of his famous midnight ride, or much of anything on his grave-marker.

Paul Revere’s grave-marker reminded me of the simple grave-markers at Boot Hill in Tombstone, Arizona, famous for the “Gunfight at O. K. Corral” between the Earps and the cowboy outlaws.

The Granary Burying Ground’s Gate and fence was said to have been designed in Egyptian-Revival-style by Isaiah Rogers in 1840…

…and Isaiah Rogers was said to have designed an identical gateway for Newport, Rhode Island’s Touro Synogogue Cemetery in 1842.

Speaking of Egyptian Revival Style architecture, there’s a stunning example of it at the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, said to have been designed by architect William Strickland, and completed in 1846.

One more thing before I move on.

This is what came up when I searched for “Was Samuel Adams a Freemason?”

I found Samuel Adams mentioned as a Freemason in an article from June of 2009 on the antiquesandthearts.com website about the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts celebrating 275 years of brotherhood.

The article mentioned things like the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston being the unofficial Headquarters of the American Revolution…

…as well as the meeting place for the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, which had purchased the Green Dragon Tavern in 1764, and used it as a meeting place until 1818.

Also mentioned in this article is that it was the origin point for the Boston Tea Party participants and Paul Revere’s midnight Ride, as well as mentioning that there were Freemasons among the British soldiers occupying Boston, which are called “Brethren.”

So, who’s their loyalty to? Their countries or each other?

Samuel Adams was mentioned as a Freemason in this article…

…and I wonder if he belonged to the York Rite of Freemasonry, since there is what appears to be a Templar cross next to his gravestone, and “Knights Templar,” the final order joined in the York Rite…

…because Samuel Adams was not mentioned on the “Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite” website, but the following men were listed as Freemasons of the Independence.

George Washington.

Well, no surprise there. I knew that about him a long time ago, and it even says in the description that he was one of the most famous Founding Fathers and Freemasons in American History.

Benjamin Franklin.

No surprise there either, though I don’t think he was as well known to the general public as a Freemason as George Washington was.

The last two mentioned as Freemason on this website page were John Hancock…

…and Paul Revere.

Again, not surprising to find out these men were Freemasons, but it is very interesting to me in terms of what this might represent in the bigger picture of what has been actually been taking place on Earth, especially in light of the role played by other Freemasons in our historical narrative.

John Winthrop is the other statue representing Massachusetts in the National Statuary Hall.

John Winthrop was an English Puritan lawyer, and led the first wave of colonists from England in 1630 and a leader in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the second major British Colony after the founding of Plymouth Colony in 1620.

John Winthrop was born in January of either 1587 or 1588 in Suffolk, England.

His father Adam was a prosperous landowner and lawyer, and his mother Annie came from a well-to-do landowning family as well.

The Winthrop family was granted Groton Manor after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, as the Lord of the Manor had previously been the Abbot of the Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, and John’s parents moved in when he was young.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries took place between 1536 and 1541, in which King Henry VIII disbanded the approximately 850 monasteries, convents and friaries in England, and leaving none.

Their income was taken and assets disposed of, and in many cases, like that of Glastonbury Abbey, the buildings on the property were left in ruins.

The Winthrop Coat of Arms was confirmed to John’s uncle by the College of Arms in 1592.

The College of Arms was said to have been first incorporated as a Royal Corporation in March of 1484 under King Richard III, and then re-incorporated in 1555 under Queen Mary I of England.

Heralds are appointed by the British Monarch and delegated to act on behalf of the Crown on all matters of heraldry, besides the granting of new Coats-of-Arms, including genealogical research and the granting of pedigrees.

During King Henry VIII’s reign, it was said that the College of Arms “…at no time since its establishment, was the college in higher estimation, nor in fuller employment, than in this reign.”

In 1530, King Henry VIII conferred the duty of “heraldic visitation” on the College, that of tours of inspection between 1530 and 1688 around England, Wales, and Ireland to register and regulate the Coats of Arms of Nobility, gentry and boroughs, and to record pedigrees.

During the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1541, this duty gained even more importance as the Monasteries were formerly the repositories of local genealogical records, and from then on, the College was responsible for the recording and maintenance of genealogical records.

The College of Arms has been on Queen Victoria Street in the City of London in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral since 1555.

This is the Coat-of-Arms for the College of Arms, with the motto “Diligent and Secret,” which interestingly the heraldry-wiki doesn’t know the meaning of.

Could it possibly mean exactly what it says – diligent and secret?

Like we don’t want you to know something, but we are sure working hard at what we are doing!

This would explain a question I am often asked – how to explain something like a mud flood event and repopulation effort involving lots of orphans when some people have long genealogies in their families, and I am one of them, with long genealogies on all my family lines, including ancestors on the Mayflower on my paternal grandmother’s side.

Yet my husband’s family got the name Gibson from an orphan ancestor that worked on a cattle drive for a man named Gibson, and he took his name.

Another question that comes to my mind is why does the word “arms” refer both to heraldry devices and weapons?

I have had some major questions about King Henry VIII’s role in the historical narrative.

Many star forts were attributed to having been built during his reign, like the Portland Castle on the Isle of Portland between 1539 and 1541…

…and Sandsfoot Castle in neighboring Weymouth, completed in 1542 and that both were meant to defend the original harbor against French and Spanish invaders.

During this same period of time, the Jesuit Order was formed in 1540 by a papal bull issued by Pope Paul III, under the leadership of Ignatius Loyola, and included a special vow of obedience to the Pope in matters of mission direction and assignment.

In 1542, Pope Paul III also established the Holy Office, also known as the  Inquisition and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 

And in May of 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” offering mathematical arguments for the heliocentric, or sun-centered universe, and denying the geocentric model of the Earth-centered universe of Ptolemy, and the once widely-accepted geocentric model of the Universe was henceforth no longer considered adequate.

Copernicus’ Universe-changing book was published shortly before his death on May 24th of 1543.

Anyway, back to John Winthrop.

Winthrop entered Trinity College at Cambridge University in 1602.

Trinity College was founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII.

Interesting to note that this architectural-style found at Trinity College looks just like college architecture found all around the world, with examples shown here at Korea University in Seoul, Korea, on the top left; Sydney University in Sydney, Australia, on the top right; Mainz University on Mainz, Germany on the bottom left; and at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma on the bottom right.

John Winthrop left Trinity College in 1605 to get married to Mary Forth, the daughter of a family friend.

In 1613, Winthrop’s father transferred the family holdings in Groton to him, and he became Lord of the Manor at Groton.

Lord of the Manor referred to the landholder of a rural estate, enjoying manorial rights, which was the right to establish and occupy a residence, and seignory, the right to grant or draw benefit from the estate.

Also sometime around 1613, Winthrop enrolled in Gray’s Inn, where he read law but did not advance to the Bar.

Gray’s Inn is one of the four inns of court in London – along with the Lincoln Inn, Inner Temple, and Middle Temple – that educate and train barristers in order to be able to practice law in England and Wales.

The early records of all four inns of court were lost, and the exact dates of their founding is not known.

The records of Gray’s Inn are lost up until the year of 1569, but was believed to date back to around 1370.

Winthrop’s wife Mary died in 1616, and he was remarried to Thomasine Clopton, who also died in 1616, in childbirth in December of that year.

Through his legal connections, he began courting Margaret Tyndal, the daughter of chancery Judge Sir John Tyndal and Anne Egerton, the sister of Stephen Egerton, aleading Puritan preacher of his time.

John Winthrop and Margaret Tyndal were married in April of 1618.

At some point not long after they were married, John acquired a position at the Court of Wards and Liveries and travelled between London and Groton, where his wife and eldest son John from his first marriage managed the manor when he was away.

The Court of Wards and Liveries was established starting in 1540 during the reign of King Henry VIII by two Acts of Parliament – the Court of Wards Act of 1540 and the Wards and Liveries Act of 1541.

It was established around the issues of practical matters relating to the Crown’s right of wardship and livery of young orphaned heirs where their father had been a Tenant-in-Chief of the Crown, including having rights over the deceased’s estate, including income and land, so this special court also administered a system of levying and collecting feudal dues.

Does this mean that there were so many orphaned heirs that they had to establish a special court to handle them?!

And what is Livery?

Well,if you look up the meaning, livery is an identifying design, such as a uniform, ornament, symbol, or insignia that designates ownership or affiliation.

Most often it would indicate the wearer of the livery was a servant, dependent, follower or friend of the owner of the livery.

Apparently the “Office of Liveries” was joined with the “Court of Wards” in 1542.

I find this information about the “Court of Wards and Liveries” very intriguing, and would love to know more about what was going on here that is not found in the historical record.

Perhaps there was more to it than just a way of replenishing the Royal Treasury and controlling wards and the administration of their lands, which is found in the historical record.

But was there a connection between the English words “livery” and “delivery,” where definitions of delivery include 1) the transfer of something from one place or person to another; 2) the process of giving birth; and in law 3) the formal or symbolic handing over of property to a grantee or third-party.

Our historical narrative tells us the religious atmosphere for Puritans to started to change in England in the mid-to-late 1620s, after King Charles I ascended to the throne in 1625, and had married a Roman Catholic.

There was an atmosphere of intolerance towards Puritans and this state-of-affairs led Puritan leaders to consider emigration to the New World as means to escape persecution.

The establishment of Plymouth Colony on the shores of Cape Cod Bay in 1620 was the first successful religious colonization of the New World.

In 1629, a charter was received by Puritan investors that became known as the “Massachusetts Bay Company” to govern a land grant of territory between what became known as the Charles River in eastern Massachusetts and the Merrimack River, which starts in New Hampshire and flows southward into Massachusetts.

Puritan John Endecott led a small group of settlers to the area around this time to prepare the way for a larger migration, and he became the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1629 to 1630, and served as governor several more times over the years, for a total of sixteen years all together.

The exact connection by which John Winthrop got involved with the Massachusetts Bay Company is not known, but he had connections with individuals associated with the company.

Also in 1629, King Charles I dissolved Parliament, beginning a historical period known as “11 years of rule” without Parliament.

This worried Massachusetts Bay Company principal investors, and John Winthrop as well, who had lost his position with the Court of Wards and Liveries in the crackdown on Puritans that took place with the dissolution of Parliament.

The Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company proposed the company reorganize and transport its charter and governance to the colony, and as the months went on, John Winthrop became more involved with the company, and a major supporter of emigration there.

John Winthrop was a signatory on the Cambridge Agreement, which was signed on August 29th of 1629 by company shareholders.

Under its terms, those who wanted to emigrate to the New World could purchase shares from those shareholders who didn’t want to leave home.

The Cambridge Agreement also set forth that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would be under local control, and not governed by a London-based corporate board.

The company shareholders met in August of 1629 to enact the agreement.

At this time, John Winthrop was chosen as the new Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and, along with other company officials, set about making all the necessary arrangements for the venture of settling in the New World.

John Winthrop was on one of four ships of the transport fleet that left the Isle of Wight on April 8th of 1630.

All together, there were eleven ships that carried roughly 700 emigrants to the new colony.

John Winthrop, with the charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in hand, and the new colonists arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in June of 1630, and were welcomed by John Endecott.

Winthrop found the Salem area inadequate for the arrival of all the new colonists, so he and his deputy, Thomas Dudley, surveyed the area, and eventually settled on the Shawmut Peninsula, where they founded what became the city of Boston.

They also established settlements along the coast, and banks of the Charles River, we are told, in order to avoid presenting a single point that hostile forces might attack.

So along with Boston, these settlements were Cambridge, Roxbury, Dorchester, Watertown, Medford, and Charlestown.

This map was the illustration that appeared opposite the title page of William Wood’s book from that time entitled: “New Englands Prospect” and called “A true, lively and experimentall description of that part of America commonly called New England; discovering the state of that Countrie, both as it stands to our new-come English Planters; and to the old native inhabitants. Laying down which that which might enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling reader, or benefit the future voyager.”

This selection from William Wood’s book was of a map showing the plantations along Massachusetts Bay, and the word or name Sagamore is showing in several places.

The word “Sagamore” or “Sachem” apparently denoted a leader of the Algonquin-speaking peoples.

I just want to say that it is extremely difficult to find information about who the Algonquin people really are because the visuals we see are typically like this.

Here is an historic photograph that I came across of the Algonquin Narragansett people of Rhode Island, circa 1925.

We are told that in its early months, the new colony struggled, losing around 200 people to various diseases.

Winthrop worked alongside the laborers and servants in the work of the colony, setting an example for the other colonists to do all the work that needed to be done on the “plantation.”

Interesting to see the word “plantation” used so much even from the very beginnings of the New World.

In the history of colonialism, plantation was a form of colonization where settlers would establish a permanent or semi-permanent settlement in a new region.

Looks like the colonizers were literally “planting” themselves in a new place.

Not only were settlements and settlers being planted in a new region from somewhere else, this plantation system of the colonizers quickly laid the foundation for slavery on large farms owned by “planters” where cash crop goods were produced.

The word plantation first started appearing in the late 1500s to describe the process of colonization, like the Plantations of Ireland in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, during which time we are told the English Crown confiscated land from Irish Catholics and redistributed the land to Protestant settlers from Great Britain…

…creating all kinds of long-term problems.

The British Plantations of Ireland replaced the Irish language, law and customs with those of the British, created sectarian hatred between Protestants and Catholics, and Northern Ireland is still part of Britain to this day.

Back to John Winthrop.

This plaque memorializes John Winthrop’s first house in Boston, said to have been built nearby.

The marker was placed on the old Boston Stock Exchange Building, located at 53 State Street, by the City of Boston in 1930.

The old Boston Stock Exchange Building was said to have been built between 1889 and 1891 from designs by the architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns, and one of the largest office buildings in America back in the day, and in its hey-day housed banks, corporations, safe-deposit vaults, lawyers, and businessmen.

Governor Winthrop was also granted an estate on the southern bank of the Mystic River in Somerville, Massachusetts, by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in September of 1631 that he called “Ten Hills Farm.”

It was so-named for what were called “ten small knolls” on the property, which included orchards and meadows for grazing cattle.

Ten Hills Farm was inherited by his son, John Winthrop, Jr, in 1649, who was the Governor of the Connecticut Colony between 1659 and 1676.

Today Ten Hills is a neighborhood of Somerville.

On the other side of the Mystic River from Ten Hills Farm was a shipyard owned in absentia by Mathew Cradock, one of the original principal investors of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and it was there that one of the colony’s first ships was said to have been built, the 30-ton “Blessing of the Bay,” and first launched on July 4th of 1631.

It was operated by John Winthrop as a trading and packet ship up and down the coast of New England, but only for a short time as the ship “disappeared from view,” possibly wrecked on the capes in 1633 on a voyage to Virginia with a load of fish and furs.

Winthrop was a big regional landowner.

He also owned the land that became the town of Billerica…

…Governor’s Island in Boston Harbor…

…and Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

Winthrop spent a lot of time writing, including his “The History of New England: 1630 – 1649,” also known as “The Journal of John Winthrop,” which was apparently not published until the late 18th-century.

John Winthrop died of natural causes in March of 1649 and was buried in the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, the oldest cemetery in Boston and a site on the Freedom Trail.

The Freedom Trail is a 2.5-mile, or 4-kilometer, -long path through Boston with sixteen locations significant to the history of the United States that was established in 1951.

I am going to end this post here, and in the next part of this series will be look at the representatives in the National Statuary Hall of the states of Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Missouri.