Dates in Books

"The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled," wrote John Adams on June 3, 1776, "that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America."

Although Abe received only about twelve months of formal schooling – actually odd weeks scattered over several winters – he was able to read and write.

A week later the wood was being cut and sawn again, this time for her coffin.

In 1816 his parents, Thomas and Nancy, took their family north across the Ohio river, partly to get secure title to leave but also to escape from slave society – Thomas belonging to a strict Baptist sect that abhorred slavery. The land that Thomas acquired in Indiana was virgin forest. That winter Abe, aged seven, spent most of the time, axe in hand, helping clear the trees so they could plant corn the following spring.

In 1837, soon after arriving in Illinois, he decided to experiment with a highly polished steel blade for a plough. This proved superior both in cutting the sod and in scouring itself of clay. Initially John Deere made only a few ploughs a year but, by the end of the 1840s, he had moved his base to Moline, Illinois, where the neighboring Mississippi provided water power and easy transportation.

By the 1830s the big migration into the Midwest emanated not from the South but from New England, where some areas had been exhausted by a couple of centuries of cultivation.

In Whitman's expanding, exploding imagination,

Morris Birkbeck, an English traveler in Pennsylvania in 1816, witnessed people at the start of their great trek: "Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track towards the Ohio, of family groups behind us and before us."

In 1820 about 125,000 Indians had lived east of the Mississippi. By the mid-1840s there were only 30,000 – mostly in remote reservations around the Great Lakes.

Their journey to the new Indian territory west of the Mississippi took nearly six months.

Over the next couple of years the Choctaws and the Creeks followed suit, though only after bitter internal arguments. At the other extreme, the Seminoles in Florida resorted to arms. It took the U.S. army six years, 1,500 American dead, and $20 million to break their resistance.

The religious revivals of the 1820s inspired a crusade to bring Christ to the heathen, not only in far-flung parts of the world but also among the American Indians.

There was also a marked sectional division between the frontier states of the South and West, where Indian warfare had been a fact of life since the 1750s, and the North and East, where the Indian was a remote, even pathetic figure – familiar only in romanticized form via novels such as James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 best-seller, The Last of the Mohicans.

I to my littler mercer's Finch, and did here baiser su moher, a belle femme, he writes of kissing his tailor's wife on 2 June 1668. Later the same day he goes to see another married woman, Mrs Bagwell:

On June 1, 1785, John Adams presented his credentials at St. James's Palace as the first U.S. ambassador to Britain.

On June 1, 1812, after months of debate, President Madison sent a message to Congress condemning British depredations on the high seas.

31 May. – This morning when I woke up I thought I would provide myself with some paper and envelopes from my bag and keep them in my pocket, so that I might write in case I should get an opportunity; but again a surprise, again a shock!