June 7

Richard Henry Lee (right) was a Virginian and the sixth president of the Continental Congress. On the 7th in 1776, he presented to the second Continental Congress a resolution, which has come to be known as the Lee Resolution. The resolution read in part “Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances. That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.” When the resolution was put to a vote 12 of the 13 colonies voted to approve it. The single exception was New York, which chose to abstain. And some people wonder where New Yorkers get their contentious and disagreeable natures.

John Adams’s view of the work of the congress was that “I believe that if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.”

June 6

Claude Jean Allouez was born in Saint-Didier-en-Velay, France on the 6th in 1622. He would become a Jesuit missionary. From 1667 to 1669 his work took him to what is now Wisconsin where he ministered to the Potawatomi (Keepers of the fire) and Mesquakie (The people of the Red Earth) Indians. On the death of Father Jacques Marquette (pictured below) in 1675, Allouez was ordered by his superiors to continue Marquette’s work with the Indians. He did so until his own death on August 28, 1689.

June 5

On the 5th in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly began its serialization in the newspaper the National Era. It would take ten months to complete the run, at which time it was published in book form. In the first year, the book would sell over 300,000 copies in the United States and more than tens times that number internationally.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 moved Stowe (pictured left) to write the anti-slavery novel.
Contemporaries of Stowe felt that she had created the main character in her book by reading the work of Josiah Henson (pictured right), a freed slave from Maryland living in Canada who published his memoirs of life in slavery, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself in 1849.
By 1854, Stowe could be proud that her book had been translated into 60 different languages, including Yiddish.

June 4

In 1917 on the 4th the first Pulitzer Prizes[i] were awarded and three women, Laura Elizabeth Richards[ii], Maude H. Elliot[iii], and Florence Hall, won a Pulitzer for their biography of Julia Ward Howe.
[i] At the same awards ceremony, Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand won the first Pulitzer for history for his book With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert Bayard Swope won the award for Journalism for his work in the New York World. Swope is believed to be the first journalist to use the term cold war.
[ii] In addition to being Richards’ mother and the subject an award-winning book, Julia Ward Howe also wrote the words to popular song The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
[iii] Laura Richards was her sister.

June 3

On the 3rd in 1800, John Adams, the first vice-president and the second president of the United States, became the first American president to occupy the White House. Following as he did George Washington, he had an extremely tough act to follow. Nevertheless, the cream always rises to the top and as Benjamin Franklin noted of Adams, “he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise man but sometimes, in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Three out of four ain’t bad though and I just wish our contemporary leaders scored as well in the measure of a man.

In his youth, Adams turned to politics after watching James Otis, Jr. argue a case against an English law authorizing warrantless searches, in a Massachusetts court. Shortly before Otis died, on May 23, 1783, he had said to his sister “I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning." He was shortly thereafter struck and killed by a bolt of lightening as he stood in the doorway of a friend’s house.

June 2

H. L. Mencken (left), the sage of Baltimore, observed that democracy is the theory that “the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard”. John Randolph (right), a senator from Virginia, who was born on the 2nd in 1773, also distilled the role of democracy into a nice little sound bite when he said, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality.”
Randolph was a slave owner. In his will, dated 1819, he included a provision that his slaves were to be freed. In a codicil added in 1821, he bequeathed the money necessary for the freed slaves to relocate to Ohio. A number of his former slaves resettled in Shelby County, Ohio. Randolph also observed, “We all know our duty better than we discharge it.”

June 1

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, was born in England on the 1st in 1563. He was a diplomat and minister to Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. He had a rather striking appearance. Whenever you are involved in public service, you have to expect that not everyone is going to like you. Cecil’s contemporaries described him as being “a slight, crooked, hump-backed young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard, and large, pathetic, greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinets, and with a manner almost ingenuous, as compared to the massive dissimulation with which it was to be contrasted, and with what was, in aftertimes, to constitute a portion of his own character" Even his own boss, the Queen, often referred to him as “my elf” and “my pygmy”. He dealt with the attitude of his adversaries as best he could but I am certain did not particularly care for Elizabeth’s comments. And I’ll bet that he was never asked what bridge he lived under, like someone I know.
It was widely believed by his contemporaries, that Robert was the prime mover behind the Gunpowder Plot, in which Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament on the notorious Fifth of November in 1605.