1832
1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840
The (First) Reform Act that passes the House of Lords June 4 enfranchises Britain's upper middle class, doubling the number of eligible voters to 1 million after the worst crisis in the nation's political life since 1688. Prime Minister Charles Grey, 2nd earl Grey, has persuaded William IV to threaten the creation of new peers if landowners in the House of Lords continued to reject the reform bill as they did last year. Pocket boroughs (controlled by single individuals or families) and rotten boroughs (election districts with the same voting power as other districts but with far fewer inhabitants) are abolished, seats are redistributed to create constituencies in the new towns, and mill owners in the Midlands are enabled to agitate more effectively for removal of high tariffs on foodstuffs from abroad (see Ricardo, 1817; Wellington, 1828; Cobden, 1838). Henry "Orator" Hunt has spoken out in the House of Commons to oppose the Reform Bill because it does not grant universal suffrage to all males who have paid taxes, some radicals have argued that he should support any effort to extend the franchise, working-class Britons are disappointed to find that the Reform Act has not given them voting rights (see Poor Law, 1834; Second Reform Act, 1867).
Piedmontese authorities learn in March of plans for a June uprising planned by the Young Italy (Giovine Italia) society started last year by patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, 26, who leads an Italian unification movement. The rising is aborted (see 1834).
Austria's Prince Metternich aborts a German unification movement in July after a gathering of 25,000 at the Hambach Festival in May has toasted France's marquis de Lafayette, now 74, demanded a German republic, and threatened armed revolt. The Six Articles adopted by the German Confederation June 28 at Metternich's insistence impose on every German sovereign the duty of rejecting petitions of his estates that would impair his sovereignty. The Six Articles repudiate the right of estates to refuse supplies as a means of securing constitutional changes, and beginning in July all public meetings are forbidden, edicts against universities renewed, and suspicious political characters placed under surveillance.
Greece becomes a monarchy with the 17-year-old Roman Catholic son of Bavaria's Ludwig I as king (see 1831). Otto I begins a despotic reign that will continue until he is deposed in 1862 (see 1841).
An Egyptian army under the command of the viceroy Muhammad Ali's son (or adopted son) Ibrahim, now 43, marches through Palestine, defeats an Ottoman army at Homs, forces the Bailan Pass, crosses the Taurus River, and gains a final victory December 21 at the Battle of Konya (see 1833).
The aging Algerian resistance leader Mahieddin has his 24-year-old son Abdul-qadir (Abdelkadar) elected in his place in November to harass French occupation forces (see 1830). The young man has gained a reputation for piety and military prowess (see Desmichels Treaty, 1834).
Vietnamese military strategist and government official Le Van Duyet dies at Saigon July 30 at age 69, having served since 1820 as governor of Gia Dinh province.
The "spoils system" in U.S. politics gets its name January 21 in a Senate speech by Sen. William Learned Marcy, 46 (N.Y.), who says that he can see "nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils." Politicians will continue for decades to name cronies to government jobs and dispense favors that will enrich their friends (see Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, 1883).
Revolutionary War heroine Mary L. H. "Molly Pitcher" McCauley dies at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, January 22 at age 77.
The Battle of Velasco that ends June 26 has lasted several days and brought the first bloodshed between Texan colonists and Mexicans (see 1831). The Texans have tried to transport a cannon for possible use against the Mexicans at nearby Anahuac, the Mexicans have run out of ammunition, and the Texans have won the day under the command of Kentucky-born farmer-surveyor Henry Smith, 44, but he has sustained severe wounds, eight to 10 Texans have been killed, and 11 others wounded. The Mexican commander Domingo de Ugartechea has lost five killed and about 15 wounded. George Fisher has begun publishing the liberal newspaper Mercurio del Puerto de Matamoros, and a meeting convenes to address the rising tensions between Mexicans and Texans (see 1833).
Vice President John C. Calhoun's Fort Hill letter of August 28 to the governor of South Carolina gives a closely reasoned classic exposition of Calhoun's theory of state sovereignty (the Doctrine of Concurrent Majority).
The Democratic-Republican Party that has elected every U.S. president since Thomas Jefferson renames itself the Democratic Party. It holds its first national convention at Baltimore in late May and establishes the two-thirds majority requirement for nomination that will be followed by all future Democratic presidential conventions; Andrew Jackson is reelected to a second term with 219 electoral votes against 49 for Henry Clay, 18 for others.
Former U.S. senator Charles Carroll of Carrollton dies at Baltimore November 14 at age 95. The Maryland Federalist was the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and has been its sole surviving signatory.
South Carolina legislators hold a state convention November 19 to protest the 1828 Tariff of Abominations and a new tariff law. The Ordinance of Nullification passed by the convention November 24 follows the principles of John C. Calhoun in calling the tariff acts "null, void, and no law" in South Carolina. President Jackson blasts the "nullifiers" in a proclamation issued December 10. Vice President Calhoun was replaced on the November ballot by Martin Van Buren, and he resigns the vice presidency December 28 to take the Senate seat of Robert Y. Hayne, who has withdrawn from the Senate to make way for Calhoun and been elected governor of South Carolina.
Abolitionists at Boston form the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
The Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, is founded by free women of color who include Mary A. and Dorothy C. Battys, Charlotte Bell, and Eleanor C. Harvey.
The U.S. Government has exclusive authority over tribal Indians and their lands within any state, the Supreme Court rules March 3 in Worcester v. Georgia (see 1831; "Trail of Tears," 1838).
The Creek sign a treaty March 24 ceding their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States.
The Seminole in Florida cede their lands to the United States May 9 in a treaty signed by 15 chiefs who agree to move west of the Mississippi (see 1818; 1834).
Chief Black Hawk in the state of Illinois leads his Sac tribespeople back from west of the Mississippi, retakes a village, and begins a 4-month Black Hawk War that ends only when Illinois militiamen under the command of North Carolina-born officer Henry Atkinson, 50, massacre Black Hawk's warriors August 2 at Bad Axe River in Wisconsin Territory (see 1823). Black Hawk surrenders after taking refuge with the Winnebagoes (see 1838). Sac and Fox tribesmen agree to remain west of the Mississippi in a treaty signed September 21.
The Chicasaw cede their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States October 14.
A 3-year expedition to explore the Rocky Mountains begins May 1 as French-born U.S. Army captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, 36, leaves Fort Osage on the Missouri River with a wagon train bound for the Columbia River. Bonneville has obtained financial backing at New York and taken a leave of absence to lead the expedition, whose real intent is to enter the fur trade. His party of more than 100 men includes trapper-guide Joseph Reddeford Walker, now 34, of Independence, Missouri.
Parliament appoints a royal commission to investigate Britain's Poor Law, which costs the nation £7 million per year, or 10 shillings per capita (see 1834; Malthus, 1826).
Economist-philosopher Jeremy Bentham dies at London June 6 at age 84.
British authorities arrest Irish landowner Feargus O'Connor, 36, for participating in an anti-tithe movement but do not press charges. O'Connor inherited an estate in County Cork at age 24, voters in that county elect him to Parliament in the general election later in the year (Irish Radicals leader Daniel O'Connor also wins a seat after advocating repeal of the Act of Union, abolition of tithes, universal suffrage, and the secret ballot); O'Connor will soon try to replace O'Connell as leader of the Radicals, the two will become bitter enemies, and Parliament will unseat O'Connor in 1835 for failing to meet property qualifications (see 1839).
Jardine, Matheson & Company is formally registered July 1 by former East India Company merchant ship's surgeon William Jardine and his Scottish-born aristocratic junior partner James Matheson, 36, who 9 years ago purchased the 18-gun brig Curlew, renamed her the Jamesina, and has been using her to run opium from India into China (see 1820; Russell & Co., 1830). Now 48, the Scottish-born Jardine is known to the Chinese as "Iron-Headed Old Rat" because he refused to run from a beating at the gates of Guangzhou (Canton), where he tried to present a petitition. Moralists raise objections to the opium trade, but the British have been expanding poppy cultivation in India, and a new report states that "the monopoly of opium in Bengal supplies the Government with a revenue amounting in sterling money to £981,293 per annum . . . it does not appear advisable to abandon so important a source of revenue." Jardine will say in his company bulletin The Opium Circular, "If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to become profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and for us." One sixth of British India's gross national product comes from opium exports, and those exports will reach 30,000 chests per year by 1835 (see politics, 1839).
The Tariff Act passed by Congress July 14 reduces some of the duties in the 1828 Tariff of Abominations but retains the principle of protectionism, infuriating Southerners (see 1833).
President Jackson vetoes a bill to recharter the corrupt Second Bank of the United States in a July speech written by journalist Amos Kendall, 42, a Massachusetts-born member of the president's "Kitchen Cabinet." The bank's profits go to foreigners and "a few hundred of our own citizens, chiefly of the richest class," says Jackson, but Daniel Webster replies that Jackson's message "wantonly attacks whole classes of the people, for the purpose of turning against them the prejudices and the resentments of other classes" (see censure, 1834).
New York-born G. G. & S. Howland Company clerk Moses Taylor, 26, quits his job with the South Street shipping firm that he joined at age 15, marries Catherine A. Wilson, and goes into business for himself, having amassed $15,000 in capital. He contracts with Cuban planters for the sale of their sugar and soon has a business so prosperous that it will continue to do well even after a fire in December 1835 destroys his South Street offices and nearly all his earthly possessions.
The first steamboat on Lake Michigan reaches Fort Dearborn (see 1818; weekly service, 1834).
A canal is completed to connect Cleveland with the Ohio River at Portsmouth (see Cleaveland, 1796).
Construction begins in Indiana on the 459-mile Wabash Canal that will be completed in 1855, connecting the Ohio River with Lake Erie at Toledo.
Sweden's Gota Canal opens to connect the North Sea with the Baltic.
French shipbuilder Pierre Louis Frédéric Sauvage, 47, patents a screw propeller for ships but others will appropriate his design (see Ressel, Wilson, 1827).
The Ann McKim built at Baltimore for merchant Isaac McKim is the first true clipper ship (see 1790, 1816). Designed for the China trade, the 143-foot 493-ton craft has yachtlike lines and three raking square-rigged masts (see 1845).
The Seaboard Air Line Railroad has its beginnings in the Portsmouth & Roanoke Railroad chartered March 8. Construction will begin in 1833 and be completed late in 1836 between Portsmouth, Virginia, and Weldon, North Carolina.
The Erie Railroad is chartered April 24 under the name New York and Erie Railroad Company by a special act of the New York State legislature. Legislators from counties bordering on the 7-year-old Erie Canal have opposed building a railroad south of that canal; they have approved the charter measure only on terms requiring that the railroad not connect with any out-of-state road (it is to run from the small town of Piermont on the west bank of the Hudson to the small town of Dunkirk on the shore of Lake Erie), that it raise $10 million, and that it not organize on a formal basis until half its stock is subscribed to (see 1851).
The Baltimore & Ohio awards the $4,000 that it offered 2 years ago to York, Pennsylvania, watchmaker Phineas Davis, who built the three-and-a-half ton locomotive York with Israel Gartner in 1829 and demonstrates July 30 that it can pull up to 15 tons at 15 miles per hour. Produced in a foundry at the corner of King and Newberry streets, the York has been hauled to Baltimore in a wagon. It pulls two small carriages, but it proves unsuited, as does another locomotive tried in September. Baltimore engineer Ross Winans has patented railroad wheel bearings and experimented with flanged wheels. The B&O will hire him as assistant engineer of machinery, but it will have to use horses for motive power until August 1834, thereby incurring heavy expense. The B&O will not reach Wheeling on the Ohio River until 1854, but it will eventually pay off handsomely for its investors.
Pennsylvania-born engineer J. (John) Edgar Thomson, 24, returns from a trip to Europe, where he has studied fledgling railroads and engineering practice in Britain and on the Continent. Largely self-educated with help from his engineer father, he has been in charge of a Camden & Amboy Railroad engineering division and gains appointment as chief engineer of the newly-chartered Georgia Railroad (see 1845).
The New York and Harlem Railroad goes into service November 14. The two horse-drawn cars of New York City's first street railway travel up and down the Bowery between Prince and 14th Streets on tracks slotted deep into the pavement. Built by coachmaker John Stephenson for John Mason, the horsecars that supplant Abraham Bower's 5-year-old "accommodation" have a capacity of 40 passengers each, attain speeds of 12 miles per hour, run every 15 minutes, and charge a 25¢ fare (see 1834).
A modern sewing machine devised by New York inventor Walter Hunt, 36, has a needle with an eye in its point that pushes thread through cloth to interlock with a second thread carried by a shuttle. Hunt does not obtain a patent, and when he suggests in 1838 that his daughter Caroline, then 15, go into business making corsets with his machine, she will protest that it would put needy seamstresses out of work (see Thimmonier, 1829; Howe, 1843; Hunt's safety pin, 1849).
U.S. interests erect a plant for producing seamed steel tubing like that devised 8 years ago in Britain for transmitting gas.
Amateur opticist Joseph Jackson Lister is elected to the Royal Society, having discovered a way to improve microscopes by combining lenses to enhance image resolution by eliminating certain chromatic and spherical aberrations (see 1830). Now 46, Lister has been grinding his own lenses since 1830 and teaching his techniques to optical instrument makers at London; he will use his new lenses in 1834 to make the first determination of the true form of red corpuscles in mammalian blood, and his son will be the founder of antiseptic surgery (see medicine, 1865).
Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus by Lancashire-born anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen, 28, advances the science of comparative anatomy (and Owen's reputation).
Physician and amateur paleontologist Gideon A. Mantell gives the name Hylaeosaurus to a newly-discovered skeleton found in the Weald of southern England (see 1825). The fossil remains will later prove to be those of an armored dinosaur that roamed the region in prehistoric times (see 1834; Owen, 1841).
Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion dies at Paris March 4 at age 41; anatomist G. L. C. F. Dagobert, Baron Cuvier, at Paris May 13 at age 62, having founded the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology and developed principles of classification based on internal structure rather than outward appearance.
Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, 29, confirms the non-Euclidean geometry ideas of Nikolai Lobachevski (see 1830). His father, Farkas, has tried without success to prove Euclid's parallel postulate, which has puzzled mathematicians for 2,000 years, and young János at age 17 concluded that a proof was probably impossible. He sent his father the draft of an "Appendix Explaining the Absolutely True Science of Space" ("Appendix Scientiam Spatii Absolute Veram Exhibens") at age 20. It was a complete and consistent system of non-Euclidean geomotry, and the essay is now appended to his father's new work, "An Attempt to Introduce Studious Youth to the Elements of Pure Mathematics" ("Tentamen Juventutem Studiosam in Elementa Matheseos Purae Introducendi"), but other mathematicans fail to notice the younger Bolayai's work.
Mathematician Evariste Galois is killed in a duel at Paris May 31 at age 20, having seen work by the late Niels Henrik Abel and written a scientific last testament proposing a group theory that solves many questions in higher algebra, including the impossibility of trisecting the angle and squaring the circle; physicist Sadi Carnot dies of cholera at his native Paris August 24 at age 36, having founded the science of thermodynamics; physicist-mathematician Sir John Leslie dies at Coates in his native Scotland November 3 at age 66.
The cholera epidemic that spread through Russia in 1830 reaches Scotland. Scottish physician Thomas Latta at Leith injects saline solution to save the life of a cholera patient and pioneers a new treatment. The epidemic appears at New York in June, causes 4,000 deaths by October, and spreads south and west.
Parliament passes an anatomy act, ending the need of body snatching for medical research (see 1829).
English physician Thomas Hodgkin, 34, at Guy's Hospital, London, gives the first description of a malignant disease that he describes as a disorder of the "absorbent glands and spleen." Marked by sarcoma of the lymph nodes, Hodgkin's disease will be found to have a fatality rate of about 75 percent within 5 years of onset, but many victims will live 10 years and more.
Surgeon-pathologist Baron Guillaume Dupuytren, now 54, describes a procedure for alleviating what will be called "Dupuytren's contracture"—a permanent retraction of one or more fingers caused by fibrosis of deep tissues in the palm.
French chemist Pierre Jean Robiquet, 52, derives codeine from morphine, producing a narcotic analgesic that is only 0.5 percent opium as compared to 10 percent in morphine (see morphine, 1806; heroin, 1898; Demerol, 1939).
The enzyme diastase is separated from barley—the first enzyme to be isolated (see Payen and Persoz, 1833).
Boston Lying-In Hospital is founded by local physicians who include Newport, Rhode Island-born obstetrician Walter Channing, 48, who in 1815 became Harvard's first professor of obstetrics; he is a brother of clergyman William Ellery Channing (see ether, 1847).
Russian forces kill the Sufi leader Ghazi Muhammad, who has fought alongside the Persians against Russian control of Dagestan (see 1828). The Sufi elect Gamzai Bek to succeed Ghazi Muhammad as the mystical brotherhood's second imam (political-religious leader) (but see 1834).
Roman Catholic missionaries in Vietnam come under stronger pressure from the emperor Minh Mang following the death in late July of Le Van Duyet, who has refused to apply the emperor's orders against them, writing to him, "We still have between our teeth the rice which the missionaries gave us when we were starving." Minh Mang orders Le Van Duyet's grave to be desecrated and a plaque placed over what is left bearing the inscription, "Here lies the eunuch who resisted the law." He has missionaries banished, imprisoned, and even killed.
Clergyman-educator Andrew Bell dies at Cheltenham, England, January 27 at age 78, leaving a substantial endowment for Scottish educational programs.
England's University of Durham is founded under that name with one college (see 1657). Parliament has enacted legislation to provide funding for the college, Royal College will be added in 1837, and as Britain's third-oldest institution of higher learning (and the only one other than Oxford and Cambridge to have a collegiate structure), it will grow to be one of the United Kingdom's research universities.
Yale's secret Skull and Bones society has its beginnings in the Eulogian Club founded in December by senior William Russell and some classmates who are upset by changes in the election process of the Phi Beta Kappa society founded in 1776. A U.S. chapter of a German student organization, the club takes its name from that of the Greek goddess of eloquence, adopts the number 322 because the eloquent orator Demosthenes died in 322 B.C., and fastens a skull and crossbones to the door of the chapel where it holds its meetings. New members receive secret names by which fellow "Bonesmen" recognize them, undergraduate Daniel Coit Gilman will incorporate the society as the Russell Trust Association in 1856, when it will move into quarters (the Inner Temple) in New Haven's High Street. Members will make a fetish of never mentioning the society's name, nonmembers will be called "barbarians," other secret societies will spring up, but more than 90 percent of Yale undergraduates will never belong to any of them.
New York University art professor Samuel F. B. Morse begins development of a battery-powered electromagnetic telegraph that will speed communication (see 1827; Henry, 1831). Morse was painting at Rome last year when the revolution in the Papal States forced him to leave, and news of Michael Faraday's electromagnet made the idea of a telegraph based on electromagnetism a topic of conversation aboard the ship Sully on his return voyage. Morse's fellow passengers included Plymouth, Massachusetts-born Harvard Medical School graduate Charles T. (Thomas) Jackson, now 27, who will later claim that it was he who came up with idea of using electromagnetics for communication; neither man is familiar with the paper published last year by physicist Joseph Henry, but Morse will consult with his Millbury, Massachusetts-born colleague Leonard D. Gale, now 32, and as a chemistry professor Gale will use his knowledge of Henry's findings to help him show Morse how to boost the strength of the signal he sends over a wire and use a relay system to transmit signals over long distances; by 1835 Morse will have a working model (see 1837; Gauss, Weber, 1834).
Nonfiction: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined by English jurist John Austin, 42, who advocates a definition of law as a species of command and tries to distinguish positive law from morality; My Prisons (Le mie prigioni) by Italian playwright-patriot Silvio Pellico, now 43, whose memoirs of his sufferings as a political prisoner inspire widespread sympathy for the Italian nationalist movement (the Risorgimento); Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope, who says of her subject, "I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions" (she came to America in 1827 and spent 3 years collecting material for her book; see 1827). Now 52, she has left the father of her son Anthony and his two older brothers but will return to them.
Fiction: Indiana and Valentine by 28-year-old French novelist George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dudevant). A great granddaughter of the late Marshal de Saxe, she inherited her family's estate at Nohant, at 18 married a retired army officer to whom she has borne two children, but has lived independently at Paris for the past year, collaborating under the pen name Jules Sand with author Jules Sandeau, 21, on pieces for Le Figaro and shocking Paris by going about in trousers.
Poetry: Faust (second part) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Poet George Crabbe dies at Trowbridge, Wiltshire, February 3 at age 77; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at Weimar March 22 at age 82; poet-novelist Sir Walter Scott at his feudal estate, Abbotsford, September 21 at age 61, having worked himself to death in his efforts to clear debts; Philip Freneau dies in poverty near Freehold, New Jersey, December 19 at age 80.
Painting: Waterloo Bridge from Whitehall Stairs and The Grove (or Admiral's House) at Hampstead by John Constable; Moroccan Military Exercises and A Moorish Couple on Their Terrace by Eugène Delacroix; Louis-François Bertin by Jean Ingres; Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins by Thomas Sully.
French caricaturist Honoré Daumier, 23, portrays Louis Philippe as Gargantua gorging himself on the earnings of the working class and spitting them back into the arms of the ruling elite; after a few more such cartoons the king has him arrested and sentenced to 6 months in prison. A staffman for the periodical La Caricature, Daumier will later join the Charivari and combine caricatures of the bourgeoisie with serious painting.
Theater: The Hunchback by Irish playwright (James) Sheridan Knowles, 48, a cousin of the late Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 4/5 at London's Royal Theatre in Covent Garden, with Knowles as the hunchback and wife Fanny (Frances Anne) Kemble, 23, as his daughter Julia. The theater managed by Fanny's father, Charles, now 57, is saved from bankruptcy by the successful play that opens at two New York theaters June 18; The Factory Lad by English melodramatist John Walker 10/15 at London's Surrey Theatre.
Ballet: La Sylphide 3/12 at the Théâtre de l'Academie Royale de Musique, Paris, with Stockholm-born Italian ballerina Marie Taglioni, 27, who made her debut 10 years ago at Vienna, wears a diaphanous dress with fitted bodice bell-like skirt that foreshadows the tutu, is one of the first women to dance on the points of her toes, and astonishes audiences with her arabesques and other floating leaps; choreography by her father, Filippo Taglioni, now 54, music by French composer Jean Scheitzhoeffer (see 1836).
Opera: Ugo, Conte di Parigi 3/13 at Milan's Teatra alla Scala, with Giulia Grisi (in the role of Adelina) and Giuditta Pasta, music by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti, 33. Unable to break a contract she made as a minor, Grisi leaves for Paris, where she makes her debut in October in the title role of Rossini's Semiramide; L'Elisir d'Amore 5/12 at Milan's Teatro alla Scala, with music by Donizetti. The libretto, based on a French comedy, introduces the comic figure Mr. Dulcamara.
Spanish composer-tenor Manuel del Popolo García dies at Paris June 2 at age 57, having written more than 90 operas.
First performances: Overture to The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave) by Felix Mendelssohn 5/14 at London's Covent Garden Theatre; Symphony No. 5 in D minor (Reformation) by Mendelssohn 11/15 at Berlin's Singakademie.
Hymn: "Rock of Ages" by Utica, New York, composer Thomas Hastings, 47, with words from the 1776 verses by the late Augustus Toplady.
Patriotic song: "America" with lyrics by Boston Baptist minister Samuel Francis Smith, 23, who has written it in half an hour to the English tune "God Save the King." Schoolchildren at Boston's Park Street Church sing "America" July 4.
Stage musical: The blackface song-and-dance act Jim Crow wins 20 encores at the City Theater on Jefferson Street in Louisville, Kentucky. New York-born carpenter Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, 24, has seen an elderly, deformed slave named Jim Crow perform a little jump while working in a livery stable near the theater, and he reproduces the man's hop and song: "Wheelabout, turn about,/ Do jes so;/ An' every time I wheel about/ I jump Jim Crow." He brings the act to New York, pioneering the blackface minstrel show (see human rights [Jim Crow law], 1875; Emmett's Virginia Minstrels, 1843).
The first Sinhalese cricket club is organized by British colonials at Colombo, Ceylon.
Paris police dismiss detective Eugène François Vidocq from his job as chief of the Brigade de la sûreté on grounds that he organized a bank robbery (see 1827). Vidocq has patented a non-falsifiable paper developed by two chemists whom he employed as a means of catching counterfeiters; jealous of his success and resentful of his flamboyant lifestyle, police suggest that he pulled the bank job to encourage sales of his patented paper. Vidoq opens the world's first private detective agency, staffing it with former convicts, but the police ransack his offices, take his name from the door, arrest him, and hold him for 9 months awaiting trial on a trumped-up charge. Convicted and sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment, he will be exonerated by an appeals court after supporters rally to his defense (see 1843; Pinkerton, 1850).
The U.S. Army abolishes its daily liquor ration.
U.S. coffee imports reach 35 million pounds despite high duties, up from nearly 12 million pounds in 1821, as opposition to consumption of alcohol gains momentum (see 1844; tariff act, 1833).
A second Delmonico's Restaurant opens at 494 Pearl Street to augment the one at 23 and 25 William Street, New York (see 1827). John and Peter Delmonico (they have anglicized their names) bring over their nephew Lorenzo to help them in their enterprise (see menus, 1836).
An Enquiry into the Principles of Population by English scholar Thomas Rowe Edmonds, 29, says, "Amongst the great body of the people at the present moment, sexual intercourse is the only gratification, and thus, by a most unfortunate concurrence of adverse circumstances, population goes on augmenting at a period when it ought to be restrained. To better the conditions of the labouring classes, that is, to place more food and comforts before them, however paradoxical it may appear, is the wisest mode to check redundancy . . . When [the Irish] are better fed they will have other enjoyments at command than sexual intercourse, and their numbers, therefore, will not increase in the same proportion as at present." "Fruits of Philosophy" by Cambridge, Massachusetts, physician Charles Knowlton, 32, is a Malthusian pamphlet advocating contraception. Its author claims to have pioneered vaginal douching with a syringe "to destroy the fecundating property of the sperm by chemical agents"; he says douching with solutions of alum, sulfate of zinc, saleratus, vinegar, or liquid chloride is harmless, cheap, will not cause sterility, does not impede coitus, and keeps control of conception in the hands of women, but he stresses the need for an acidic or restringent agent in the douche solution, not just cold water. Although his work has been published anonymously, Knowlton is prosecuted for obscenity, fined at Taunton, convicted a second time at Cambridge, and imprisoned for 3 months (a second edition will be published under his name next year and a trial at Greenfield will end in acquittal). Douches will soon be readily available at pharmacies and apothecary shops and sold by respectable mail-order houses, purportedly for hygienic use; not for well over a century will scientists learn that sperm can sometimes move in less than 10 seconds from the vaginal canal into the cervix, where douching is of no avail (see Bradlaugh, Besant, 1877).
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