Rose Kleidon, author
  • Home
  • Read
  • News
  • Reader Resources
    • 25 Ways to a Richer Life
    • Discussion Questions
    • Brötchen Recipe
    • Germans in America
    • For the Sauer Family
  • Reviews
  • Author
  • contact
  • Blog


The Immigrant Chronicles Blog
almost anything about pre-modern life  

Horsepower, Original and Impressive

6/29/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
​
In 1837, Will drags Niklas out to see the new railroad between New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain, where Ardennes horses are pulling the railroad cars. By that time, there was a steam engine, but horses were used whenever the engine broke down.
​   Niklas recognizes the horse breed because he was in Napoleon’s cavalry, which owed its return from Moscow to Ardennes. Only these powerful, hardy horses were able to survive the cold and privations to keep pulling supply wagons through axle-deep mud and snow on the long march across Russia.
   The Ardennes are the root of all heavy draft breeds existing today. They are a true cold-blooded horse, a direct descendant of the Solutrian horse that roamed the basins of the Rhone, Saone and Meuse during the Paleolithic period. They are relatively unchanged since the last Ice Age, 15,000 years ago.
   The Ardennes have been war and draft horses for at least 2,000 years. Julius Caesar declares in his commentaries (58-48 BC) that "the horses of the second Belgium" are "rustic, hard and tireless" and he recommended their use "in heavy cavalry work."
   In the thousand years of Middle Ages, knights found the sturdy, compact, good-tempered Ardennes strong and tireless chargers, easily able to carry the weight of men in full armor into battle. In 1096 Geoffrey of Boullion, a nobleman from a region in the heart of the now-Belgian Ardennes Forest, rode off on crusade on his Ardennes stallion. 
    (Warren, of Akron, Ohio, made an excellent point in his comment on the original 2016 posting: "Very interesting. Some people think big draft horses are always slow-moving, but that's not true. They were magnificent war horses." Thanks, Warren!)

0 Comments

Captured and Enslaved

8/19/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
The slaver Wildfire was intercepted off Cuba by the American Navy in 1860, freeing 519 starving survivors. It was well-documented by Harper’s Weekly, which published this engraving from a daguerreotype. Many countries south of the U.S. banned slavery before our Civil War, notably Mexico, 1810, although slave trade went on in Cuba until 1886 and in Brazil until 1888.  
My novel, 1836, has a lot to say about slavery, as it happens to be set in the year when slave traffic in the U.S. peaked. One of the awful details about that traffic is in the last paragraph of this post, along with a clue about why I am posting about this subject today. 
     By 1836, almost all of the U.S. slave traffic was internal, since the importation of slaves into the U.S. had been banned by Congress under Thomas Jefferson in 1808, and declared punishable by death in 1820. Smuggling continued, especially in New Orleans, where the pirate Lafitte brothers built a slave-smuggling empire with the help of the city and the notoriously corrupt New Orleans Customs House. 
   The last documented slave ship to bring slaves into the U.S. landed in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in 1859, just two years before the Civil War, but others may have eluded detection.
     In the early 1800s, most of the demand was moving south and west, to new cotton, sugar and rice plantations, breaking up families by selling off children as young as five. Eight, the age my grandson turns today, was considered optimum. In 1836, more than 120,000 slaves from Virginia alone were "sold down the river" into the Deep South. 
1 Comment

    Rose Kleidon

    Never quit asking "Why?" This motto works out well for a researcher. 

    Archives

    June 2022
    July 2018
    August 2017
    August 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016

    Categories

    All
    19th C Childhood
    Contributors
    Disease
    Enlightenment
    Heritage Farm Animals
    Heritage Vegetables
    Irish Immigration
    Languages
    New Orleans
    Paris
    Slavery
    Voltaire

    RSS Feed

Website by Kleidon & Associates
  • Home
  • Read
  • News
  • Reader Resources
    • 25 Ways to a Richer Life
    • Discussion Questions
    • Brötchen Recipe
    • Germans in America
    • For the Sauer Family
  • Reviews
  • Author
  • contact
  • Blog