Tag Archives: murder mysteries

More about voting -elections 1796-1800

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote ascribed to writer and philosopher George Santayana. Variations have been popularized by different speakers.

Well, whoever created this saying was right.

I thought of this as I did research for my next book (after Death in the Great Dismal) which is tentatively titled Murder on Principle. I happened to come across a number of interesting factoids about the election in 1800; a contest between John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (This was the fourth election but since George Washington basically ran unopposed in the first two, in actual fact it was the second contest.) 

When George Washington had opted not to run again for a third term, both 

Adams and Jefferson ran to replace him. Adams won, narrowly, in this third election. Since there were no parties, the candidate with the next highest number of votes became the vice president. So, while Adams became the President, Thomas Jefferson became his vice-president. (The chasm between the beliefs of these two men was deep; Think Trump as President and Hillary Clinton as his vice-president.) The two men faced off in the following election cycle -1800 – causing a constitutional crisis. To solve it, Adams ran as a Federalist and Jefferson as a Republican.

The Federalists were more akin to our current Republican party while Jefferson was like our modern day Democrats. (Just to illustrate the difference between them, Jefferson worried that without term limits the President could serve for a lifetime. Adams thought that was a fine idea.) 

The Electoral College had been already formed. (I leave the discussion to whether it is still needed now to another day.) Jefferson and Adams won an equal number of votes, a result that threw the election into the hands of the House.

For people who believe our current politics are nasty, here are a few examples of what was happening then.

Alexander Hamilton claimed that if Adams was reelected, Virginians (like Jefferson) would resort to physical force to keep the Federalists out of office. Further, he tried to persuade John Jay to change the rules so that the legislature would not be able to choose the Jefferson electoral delegates, saying that it would ‘prevent an atheist in Religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay refused.

Adams, furthermore, as one of his last acts, chose John Marshall as Chief Justice, thereby giving control of the courts to the Federalists.

Jefferson, meanwhile, believed that Adams and the Federalists would seek to change the laws so that a President could serve for life.

Sound familiar?

Voting -in 1800

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Some fun facts about 1800 election

The voters did not elect the president. They chose instead their representatives for the House. This caused a problem (more than one IMHO). If Congress chose the President, that violated the principle of separation of powers. So how to do it?

The Electoral College was set up to address this; the voters elected the delegates who chose the President. (Sounds unnecessarily complicated to me.) Each delegate had two votes, one for President, and one for VP. (In the previous election, Adams won the Presidency and Jefferson the vice-presidency so the top officials were of different parties. (And the men disliked each other and disagreed on almost every point. Imagine if this were Trump and Hillary Clinton?) If the delegates had chosen to use their votes for Burr, instead of becoming Jefferson’s VP he would have become president. He was pressured to remove his name in the event he received more votes; he declined to do so.

The candidates themselves did not campaign. The supporters did the campaigning, and the newspapers were every bit as passionate in declaring for their favored candidate as they are now.

Fun fact: the meeting they held to decide this was called a caucus. This is an Algonquian word meaning advisor.

The polls that our current candidates live and die on had a totally different meaning back then.

Since poll meant the top of a head, polling meant counting heads.

Maryland was the first state to require voting on paper (in 1799).

Ballots meant tossing a ball into a box, usually a pea, a pebble, or commonly, a bullet. It was not secret at all.

Out of a total U.S. population of 5.23 million, only 600,000 were eligible to vote. Only in Maryland could a black man vote and then only until 1802 when the law was changed. Only in New Jersey could a white woman vote, and that was changed in 1807. Generally speaking, the only citizens who could vote were white landowning males.

Finally, the House was set up in such a way that the number of representatives is based on population. (That is one reason why a census is taken every ten years.) But the southern states had large populations of slaves, which skewed the number, especially since the enslaved people could not vote. So it was decided that each enslaved person should count as three fifths of a white person. (The law caused a lot of resentment in the North since a state like Virginia, that had a lot of slaves, had much more political power based on a non-voting population.)

It just boggles the imagination.

Goodreads Giveaway

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A Circle of Dead Girls was just formally released on March 3rd. (I say formally because Amazon had it in mid-February.)

Death in the Great Dismal will come out October 7.

These titles are eight and nine, respectively.

Since it has been many years since the publication of the first three in the Will Rees saga, (and also because with people kept at home because of the corona virus – COVID-19, they have more time to read) I am offering a Goodreads giveaway of A Simple Murder:

Yes, I will be giving away three books to three lucky winners. Go to Goodreads to sign on.

More about the Tarot

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Why did I include the Tarot in A Circle of Dead Girls? The short answer is I wanted to be able to comment on the action and on Rees’s investigation in an oblique way. Although Bambola is the character who believes in the cards, she also does not listen to what they are saying to her. And Rees, although he is skeptical of anything that is not concrete, is surprised by the accuracy of some of the readings.

Do I believe? Well, I have friends who do. The readings they have done for me have sometimes been surprisingly accurate. So how does one align something that purports to foretell the future with the practicalities of the here and now?

I believe that some people are unusually intuitive. We all use non-verbal clues to understand another person’s distress, anger or joy. Some of us are amazingly good at that. I suspect that the cards allow this intuitive reader to focus and, in doing so, really hone in on the person sitting on the other side of the table and understand far more about them than they might consciously.

One further note about the tarot my mystery. Bambola associates justice with Rees. I would postulate that most of the protagonists in mystery novels have that passion. They don’t give up even when threatened with death. And a good thing for those of us who love reading mystery novels.

The Tarot – and Will Rees

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In A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees meets a character who uses tarot cards for divination.

I’ve gotten a couple of questions about whether Tarot cards were even around then. Weren’t they all the rage in the sixties?

The cards were actually popularized (for the first time!) in the 1400s and were used as, well, playing cards. There were four suits. The ‘trump’ cards were added later. It is thought that tarot cards came from Egypt.

From the deck I used.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the tarot cards were being used for divination. The first deck specifically created for divination was produced in 1789. There have been successive waves of interest since then and yes, the late sixties saw saw a surge.

So it is perfectly possible that Rees would have seen a deck of tarot cards, especially from someone of Italian extraction.

Why did I choose to use the tarot and the more occult use of tarot? Will Rees, after all, is a character with his feet firmly rooted in the practical. Did I include a supernatural element to this mystery? After all, Rees is astonished by the accuracy of some of Bambola’s readings. Although I left the door open for that interpretation, I chose that mechanism to show something of Bambola’s character. She believes in the readings but ignores what they say to her.

The Feral Chicken

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In the interests of accuracy, I research many many things for inclusion into my books. I’ve dyed with indigo, for example . (And what an adventure that was; it smells like rancid pee.) I’ve gone interesting places, such as Salem (for Death in Salem) and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia (for Death in the Great Dismal).

And I try different recipes and eat things I might not otherwise eat, such as a Shaker pie made of heavily sugared sliced fresh lemons (so sour it could not be eaten) or ployes (a kind of pancake made from buckwheat and not bad.)

My latest experiment – a free range chicken. My husband and I belong to a CSA. They have a chicken share but this offering was not from the share. It was a hen past her egg laying days. So, in the spirit of adventure – and tasting a chicken as our ancestors might have, I took a chicken.

I was warned to stew it gently which I did. I have tasted venison that was more flavorful and tenderer than this chicken. In addition, the chicken was so small it would not have fed a hungry man. The drumsticks had about an oz of meat on them. If this was an example of the chickens available back then, it is no wonder the early colonists relied on hunting.

Talk at East Fishkill Library and More

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I had a great time speaking at East Fishkill Public Library. I wish I had taken pictures.

My event at the Goshen Public Library has been rescheduled for May 9.

My talk at the Turning Page has been arranged for March 7. Looking forward to both.

Circus Acrobats

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Acrobats are another piece of the circus story that has a long history. The first known depictions of acrobats jugglers appeared about 5000 years ago, in Egypt, in the early dynastic period (3000 B.C.). The Egyptians developed a strong tradition of these arts and later taught them to the Greeks. They in turn taught the arts to the Romans.

The Romans spread them throughout their Empire via itinerant troupes of performers.

Acrobatics rose independently in China.

Although the earliest performances had religious overtones, the entertainers soon realized the audiences enjoyed the performances as entertainment. This created tension with the religious powers, culminating in the Middle Ages who accused the performers of being in league with the devil. During the Reformation in England during the 1660s, all such forms of frivolity was forbidden.

Diabetes circa 1800

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As Rees investigates murders, he invariably meets people who are ill. Illness and death was a constant companion. Illnesses: measles, mumps, diphtheria carried off infants and children; about one in five. Tuberculosis was epidemic. Women succumbed to childbirth. Simple accidents caused death, if not by the accident itself by sepsis.

Diseases we think of as modern, such as cancer or diabetes were present but not identified by name.

How do we know diabetes existed. About 3000 years ago the Egyptians described an illness with excessive thirst, urination and weight loss, the symptoms of Type I diabetes. In India they discovered they could use ants to detect the disease because the ants were drawn to the sweetness. And the Greeks called the disease diabetes mellitus ; diabetes for siphon or pass through and mellitus for sweet.

Early treatments included a diet of whole grains, milk and starchy foods, rancid animal meat, veal and mutton, green vegetables. Other treatments recommended exercising, reducing stress, wearing flannel – seriously. As one might expect, the true causes of Diabetes and possible treatments were not identified until modern times. In 1889, Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that removing the pancreas from dogs led them to develop diabetes. In 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer named the missing chemical, without which the body could not survive, insulin. That means island because the cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas produce it.

The first human subject took an insulin injection in 1922. So, although this illness has been with us a long time, its identification and the treatment is recent.

Why am I so interested in diabetes? Read Simply Dead and find out.

Lumbering in Maine

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Simply Dead is set against the mountains and the lumbering industry in Maine.

In the spring, logging camps were set up in the woods and the massive trees were cut down with nothing more than human sweat and axes. Lumber was important for building, yes, but this was also the era of sailing ships and tall masts were a requirement.

The loggers would ‘drive’ the logs down one of the many rivers to Falmouth. The men would ‘roll’ the logs down the rivers by standing on them. I describe this more fully in my book. The lumber drive would end in Falmouth with a celebration. (I’ll bet. Talk about dangerous work!)

Paul Bunyan and his blue ox are part of the American myth and he is based on the real lumber men. In Bangor there is a statue of Paul Bunyan.

Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor, Maine.JPG

Demonstrations of log rolling are a feature of some of the Maine shows.