Let Us Have Peace

Grant House 1865

Chessie and Me (Linda Lautenschlager)

30 count Confederate Gray (Weeks Dye Works)

Needlepoint Silks

One of the things which I have always admired about women is their ability to express themselves in their needlework.  Quilts with names like broken dishes and wedding rings and mourning samplers.  It is pure coincidence, I am stitching this sampler in conjunction with the recent presidential election.

On a daily basis, I read something historical either current or past.  The presidential election of 2016 is one for the history books.  With the contentious campaign and results of 2016, I turned to my history books to see if there had been other presidential elections filled with all the mud slinging as the one of 2016.  Yes there was, the seventh president from the state of Tennessee.  One of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in history goes to Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams in 1828.  Andrew Jackson had a fierce temper.  He participated in a number of duels killing Charles Dickinson in one of his duels.  He had six men in his militia who were accused of desertion, executed.  He spent most of his life defending his wife, Rachel who was accused of being an adulteress and a bigamist.

After winning the 1828 election, Andrew Jackson and his supporters had one of the wildest inauguration parties in the White House.  The party was so rowdy and out of control,  Jackson left the White House through a window for his own protection.  The party goers destroyed furniture and china and left the White House after they were promised free liquor.

During his denture, Jackson accomplished the following:

• first and only president to pay off the entire national debt
• dismantled the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 on policy grounds
• faced down South Carolina during the Nullification Crises
• forefather of the modern Democratic Party

One of the darkest, saddest chapters in American history is the Trail of Tears.  President Jackson defied a Supreme Court ruling when he said:  Chief Justice John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.  Jackson was referring to the Indian removal (all Indians east of the Mississippi River would be relocated west of the Mississippi River).  The Indians were forcibly relocated and during the removal they suffered from exposure, disease and starvation and more than four thousand died before reaching their destination.

There have many dark and uncertain times for our country.  As citizens, we don't always agree.  Let us have Peace was the campaign slogan used by Ulysses S. Grant.  I will close this post with the words from our sixteenth president (Abraham Lincoln)  who also had a contentious campaign and presidency.  

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nations wounds, to do all which many achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.