1. American women were not new the publishing or authoring books in the mid 19th Century.
2. The transportation debates were just as heated over the early canal systems in the 1790s.
3. The Louisiana Purchase and the military conquest of the Florida territory were heavily debated through the papers.
4. I see nothing modernistic about John Brown's attempt to cause a slave insurrection in 1859. In 1741 Charleston, S.C., a crazed religious zealot, Hugh Bryan, who in a religious trance, preached to a gathering of slaves that a spirit revealed to him that in April of 1742 a successful slave insurrection would be "the destruction of Charles Town...executed by Negroes with fire and sword." Bryan even publicized this vision to the white population to show the results of their sins. He even tryed to part the ocean with a wand, so he could have his slaves follow him back to Africa. He was arrested.
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David Upton