A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year Part 25

[Sidenote: May riots of Paris]

[Sidenote: Fieschi's infernal machine]

[Sidenote: Second campaign in Algiers]

In France, too, notwithstanding political disturbances, fine arts and letters flourished. New creations appeared from the pens of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, De Vigny and Alfred De Musset. Theophile Gautier brought out his masterpiece "Mademoiselle de Maupin." Among the musicians at Paris, Meyerbeer, Auber, Berlioz, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Spontini, and Schapa were at the height of their activity. Politically it was a year of disturbances for France. The opening of the State trial of last year's conspirators before the Chamber of Peers was followed by diatribes in the press. The liberties of the press were further restricted. Riots again broke out in May. After all, but one man was condemned to death. Most of those who were implicated were sentenced to transportation. New laws for the repression of sedition were proposed by the Cabinet. Then it was that the first serious attempt was made on the life of Louis Philippe. Already seven projects of a.s.sa.s.sination had been discovered and frustrated, when a grand review of the National Guards, on July 28, gave an opportunity for a telling stroke. At the moment when the royal procession arrived on the Boulevard Temple, an infernal machine was set off by a Corsican named Fieschi. The King was saved only by the fact that he had bent down from his horse to receive a pet.i.tion when the machine was discharged. Among those that were struck down were the Dukes of Orleans and Broglie, Marshal Mortier, General Verigny, and Captain Vilate. The perpetrators of the crime were put to death. In French foreign affairs a renewed uprising of Arab tribes under Abd-el-Kader necessitated another military campaign in Algeria.

In Greece, King Otto, having come of age on June 1, dissolved the Bavarian regency and a.s.sumed his full royal powers at Athens. His reign, lacking though it was in national spirit or sympathies, a.s.sured to Greece an era of undisturbed peace and tranquillity.

[Sidenote: Seminole War]

Toward the close of the year, the American Government's attempt to remove the Seminole Indians from their hunting grounds in Florida resulted in a sanguinary Indian war. Micanopy the Seminole Sachem and Osceola were the Indian leaders. Osceola opened hostilities with a master stroke. On December 28, he surprised General Wiley Thompson at Fort King. Thompson had wantonly laid Osceola in chains some time before. Now Osceola scalped his enemy with his own hands. On the same day, Major Dade, leading a relief expedition from Tampa Bay, was ambushed and overwhelmed near Wahoo Swamp.

Only four of his men escaped death. Within forty-eight hours, on the last day of the year, General Clinch, commanding the troops in Florida, won a b.l.o.o.d.y fight on the banks of the Big Withlacoochee.

1836

[Sidenote: Withlacoochee]

[Sidenote: Creek Indians subdued]

[Sidenote: Fight in Wahoo's swamp]

Throughout this year the Seminole War in Florida dragged on. Gaines's command was a.s.sailed by the Indians near the old battleground of the Withlacoochee on February 27. In May, the Creeks aided the Seminoles in Florida, by attacking the white settlers within their domain. Success made them bold, and they attacked mail carriers, stages, river barges and outlying settlements in Georgia and Alabama, until thousands of white people were fleeing for their lives from the savages. General Scott was now in chief command in the South, and he prosecuted the war with vigor. The Creeks were finally subdued, and during the summer several thousand of them were forcibly removed to their designated homes beyond the Mississippi.

Governor Call of Georgia marched against the Seminoles with some two thousand men in October. A detachment of five hundred of these had a severe contest (November 21) with the Indians at Wahoo swamp, near the scene of Dade's ma.s.sacre. As in so many other engagements with the Seminoles in their swampy fastnesses, both sides claimed the victory.

[Sidenote: Diet of Pressburg]

[Sidenote: Magyar demands]

[Sidenote: Kossuth]

[Sidenote: Scechenyi]

[Sidenote: Transylvanian Diet]

[Sidenote: Vesselenyi]

In Europe, early during 1836, the conclusions reached by the long-sitting Diet of Hungary opened the eyes of the new Emperor of Austria and of Metternich to the changed spirit within their own dominions. For many years during the long period when the government did not dare to convoke the Diet, the Hungarians in their county a.s.semblies had opposed a steady resistance to the usurpations of the crown. These county a.s.semblies, rejoicing as they did in the right of free discussion, and the appointment of local officials, were one of the hardiest relics of home rule existing anywhere in Europe, comparable only to the democratic government of the Swiss cantons and to the old English town meetings reconst.i.tuted in New England. By banis.h.i.+ng political discussion from the Diet to the county sessions, Metternich only intensified the provincial spirit of opposition which he thought to quell. When the Hungarian Diet rea.s.sembled at Pressburg at last, the new spirit showed itself in the demand of the Magyars for the subst.i.tution of their own language, in all public debates, for the older customary Latin. The government speakers, who attempted to address the deputies in Latin, were howled down by the Magyars. When the government forbade the publication of all Magyar speeches, Kossuth, one of the youngest of the deputies, circulated them in ma.n.u.script. After the dissolution of the Diet, in summer, he was punished for this act of defiance by a three years' imprisonment. The foremost leader of the Hungarian Liberals at this time was Count Scechenyi, a Magyar magnate of note. He it was that opened the Danube to steam navigation by the destruction of the rocks at Orsova, known as the Iron Grates, and to him, too, Hungary owes the bridge over the Danube that unites its double capital of Budapesth and Ofen. Of the Hungarian n.o.blemen he was one of the few who recognized the injustice of the anomalous inst.i.tution which restricted Parliamentary representation to the n.o.blemen, and absolved them at the same time from taxation. The new liberal spirit thus manifested was turned into revolutionary channels by Metternich himself. The dissolution of the Hungarian Diet and the subsequent imprisonment of deputies whose persons should have been inviolable aroused bad blood among the Magyars. This was made worse by the peremptory dissolution of the Transylvanian Diet, where the Magyar element likewise predominated. The leader of the Transylvanian opposition, Count Vesselenyi, a magnate in Hungary, betook himself to his own county session and there inveighed against the government. He was arrested and brought to trial before an Austrian court on charges of high treason. His plea of privilege was supported by the Hungarian county sessions as involving one of their oldest established rights. In the face of this agitation Count Vesselenyi was convicted and sentenced to exile.

Henceforth opposition to the government and hostility to all things Austrian were synonymous with patriotism in Hungary.

[Sidenote: Poland restive]

The discontent in Hungary and the Slav provinces of Austria was fomented by a keen sympathy with the misfortunes of Poland groaning under the yoke of Russia. Notwithstanding Austria's official conference with Russia, Polish refugees were received with open arms in Galicia, Bohemia and Hungary.

[Sidenote: The great Boer trek]

[Sidenote: Piet Retief]

[Sidenote: Zulu treachery]

[Sidenote: Ma.s.sacre of Weenen]

In various other parts of the world the spirit of revolution would not be quelled. More Dutch settlers in South Africa sought relief from British interference with their customs and the inst.i.tution of slavery by emigrating into the virgin veldt lying to the north of their former settlements. It was in vain that the British authorities of Cape Colony tried to stop this "great trek." Rather than submit to British domination, the Boers preferred to renew the inevitable struggle with the wild beasts and the savages of the African wilderness. While one part of the emigrant body remained in the Transvaal and Northern Free State, the foretrekkers pa.s.sed over the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Piet Retief. The land of Natal was at that time practically unpopulated.

Chaka and his warriors had swept the country clean of its native inhabitants, so Dingaan considered it within his sphere of influence. The Boers accordingly made overtures to Dingaan, Chaka's successor, who resided at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, a hundred miles distant in Zululand, for the right to trek into this country. This was granted after the Boers had undertaken to restore some cattle of the Zulus stolen by the Basutos. A thousand prairie wagons containing Boer families trekked over the Drakensberg into Natal, and scattered over the unpeopled country along the banks of the Upper Tugela and Mooi Rivers. Piet Retief, with sixty-five followers, went to visit Dingaan in his kraal. They were made welcome. A solemn treaty of peace and friends.h.i.+p was drawn up by one Owens, an English missionary with the Zulus. During a feast, the Boers, disarmed and wholly unprepared for an attack, were suddenly seized and ma.s.sacred to a man. Then the Zulus, numbering some ten thousand warriors, swept out into the veldt to attack the Boer settlements. Near Colenso, at a spot called Weenen (weeping), in remembrance of the tragedy there enacted, the Zulus overwhelmed the largest of the Boer laagers, and slaughtered all its inmates--41 men, 56 women, 185 children and 250 Kaffir slaves. In spite of this and other battles the Boers held their ground.

[Sidenote: South Australia settled]

[Sidenote: British seize Aden]

The Englishmen likewise extended their colonial conquests. The unsettled Bushland of South Australia was colonized by Captain Hindmarsh and his followers. They founded the city of Adelaide, named after the consort of William IV. A wrecked British s.h.i.+p having been plundered by Arabs, the Sultan of Aden, under a threat of British retaliation, was made to cede Aden to Great Britain. New claims for territory were preferred by Great Britain against the Republic of Honduras, in Central America.

[Sidenote: Mexican independence acknowledged]

[Sidenote: Defence of the Alamo]

[Sidenote: Joaquin Miller's lines]

The neighboring republic of Mexico, under the dictators.h.i.+p of Santa Anna, at last succeeded in having its independence formally acknowledged by Spain. On March 6, Santa Anna, having raised a new force of 8,000 men, marched on Fort Alamo, which had been left in charge of a small garrison of Americans under Colonel Jim Bowie. All night they fought. Every man fell at his post but seven, and these were killed while asking quarter. Here died David Crockett, the famous American frontiersman, whose exploits had made him so popular in Tennessee, that, though unable to read, he was thrice elected to Congress. Joaquin Miller, the American poet, based on this encounter his stirring ballad on "The Defence of the Alamo":

Santa Anna came storming, as a storm might come; There was rumble of cannon; there was rattle of blade; There was cavalry, infantry, bugle and drum,-- Full seven thousand, in pomp and parade, The chivalry, flower of Mexico; And a gaunt two hundred in the Alamo!

[Sidenote: Battle of San Jacinto]

On April 21 was fought the decisive battle of San Jacinto, in which Santa Anna with 1500 men was defeated by 800 Texans under Sam Houston. On the next day General Santa Anna was captured. He was compelled to acknowledge the independence of Texas, but the people of Mexico refused to ratify his act. Nonetheless serious hostilities against the Texans were abandoned.

[Sidenote: Peru and Bolivia joined]

The abolition of slavery in Bolivia gave a new impetus to the government of that republic. President Santa Cruz of Bolivia felt encouraged by this to attempt to carry out his pet project of the amalgamation of Peru with Bolivia. A prolonged guerilla war was the result.

[Sidenote: Spanish rule in Cuba and Philippines]

[Sidenote: Civil war in the Peninsula]

[Sidenote: Portuguese slave trade abolished]

The example of these movements in Central and South America encouraged the revolutionists of Cuba to keep up their struggle against the rule of Spain.

Unfortunately for them, the apparent weakness of the Spanish const.i.tutional government at Madrid did not extend to the more distant possessions of Spain. The only result of the rising of Manuel Quesada was that Cuba was deprived of her representation in the Spanish Cortes. In the Philippine Islands, Spanish rule was extended to the Island of Sulu. On the Peninsula, on the other hand, matters went from bad to worse. The Carlist war continued unabated. On May 5, General Evans, commanding the const.i.tutional troops and foreign volunteers, won a victory over the Carlists at Vigo, but within a few months he was himself defeated at San Sebastian. On Christmas Day, another crus.h.i.+ng defeat was inflicted on the Const.i.tutionalists by the Carlist leader Espertero at Bilboa. In Portugal the marriage of Princess Maria II. to Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was followed by fresh disorders. Revolution broke out at Lisbon, on August 9, and could be subdued only by the re-establishment of the Const.i.tution of 1832. On November 8 came another popular rising. It was a sign of the times and of a more liberal turn of affairs at Lisbon that one of the first measures of the new government was a total abolition of Portuguese slave trading.

[Sidenote: British reforms]

[Sidenote: Charles d.i.c.kens]

[Sidenote: "Pickwick Papers"]

[Sidenote: Marryat]