Congress, dominated by Radical Republicans, provided by law after the death of Abraham Lincoln that no vacancies on the Supreme Court during the administration of his successor, War Democrat Andrew Johnson, would be filled by the President, whom they distrusted. Once U.S. Grant became President in March 1869, Congress increased the size of the Court, as Railer13 noted, to its current nine.
Initially, the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln also planned on killing Vice President Andrew Johnson, among others. George Atzerodt, his supposed assassin, took up a post at a nearby hotel where he knew Johnson was staying and attempted to work up the courage to knock on his door and shoot him. But Atzerodt couldn’t do it. He went for a walk instead. After Lincoln’s death and a rash of arrests, he confessed his role in the crime and was hanged on July 7 of 1865. Johnson, now the president, signed an executive decision ordering his death.
On February 29, 1984, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced his retirement. When asked when he had decided, he said the previous evening, when he had taken a walk in the snow. ( There was actually a fierce blizzard the day before, and he had gone for a walk in the empty streets of Ottawa).
“A walk in the snow” has entered the Canadian lexicon to mean a decision point, often political.
Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau was a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis in the late 19th and early 20th century, after he, himself, developed the disease, but regained his health when he relocated to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. Trudeau founded the Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis, which evolved into the Trudeau Institute, a center for research on the human immune system.
Dr. Trudeau’s great-grandson, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, is the creator of the long-running comic strip Doonesbury.
The word ‘Adirondack’ may have originated as a derogatory term given to the Algonquin tribe by neighboring Mohawks, meaning “barkeaters.” The Algonquians did not practice agriculture and therefore sometimes had to eat tree bark to survive harsh winters.
Adirondack chairs, either of wood or plastic, sometimes in school colors, are becoming increasingly common on university and college campuses. In recent years I have seen them on the campuses of Oberlin College, Dickinson College and Northeastern University.
The Adirondack Mountains form a massif covering about 5,000 square miles in northeastern Upstate New York. Strictly speaking, neither the Adirondacks nor the Catskills and Poconos are part of the Appalachian Mountains, as they have much different origins. There are more than 200 lakes around the mountains, including Lake George, Lake Placid, and Lake Tear of the Clouds, which is the source of the Hudson River.
The Catskill Mountain 3500 Club is a “peakbagging” organization for hikers in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Those wishing to become members must climb all 35 Catskill High Peaks and, in a departure from the requirements of most other such clubs, climb Slide, Blackhead, Balsam and Panther mountains again in winter, which is defined by the Club’s by-laws as the period from December 21 to March 21. The Club also awards a separate patch for those who go on to climb all 35 peaks during winter. As of May 2020, there are 3,323 regular members and 1,335 winter members.
Over 8 million people have looked through the 12 inch Zeiss refractor telescope at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, more than any other telescope in the world. Griffith Observatory was constructed on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood in 1935 with a bequest from businessman and philanthropist Colonel Griffith J. Griffith. Griffith was convicted of shooting his wife in the face in 1903, for which he served two years in prison.
At 5,344 feet ASL, Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks region of the High Peaks Wilderness Area, is the highest point in the state of New York.
Robert Louis Stevenson spent five months at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, from November 1887 to April 1888, attracted by the reputation of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and his pioneering treatment of tuberculosis.
Stevenson died in Samoa 6 years later, age 44, from a stroke and not tuberculosis.
In 2009, the Government of Samoa changed from the British style of driving on the left side of the road and changed to driving on the right side of the road, to match the rest of the neighboring Pacific Islands. A two-day holiday was declared to ease traffic as people got used to the new rules. A three-day ban on alcohol sales was also introduced to deter accidents.”
The Gadsden Purchase of 1854 was one of the last major land acquisitions of the United States in the lower 48 states region. It acquired land in present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico by the Treaty of Mesilla.
Some key CONUS land acquisitions of the 19th century were:
1803 [828,000 square miles] Louisiana Purchase
1818 Land above the Louisiana Purchase
1819 Spanish Cession, the Adams–Onís Treaty (Florida)
1845 Texas Annexation
1845 Oregon Country; establishes the 49th parallel as the boundary between western Canada and the US, to the Pacific
1848 [529,000 square miles] Mexican Cession, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (southwestern CONUS)
1854 [29,670 square miles] Gadsden Purchase
1859 / 1871 the San Juan Islands – Pig War / Treaty of Washington
For the Gadsden Purchase, William Learned Marcy was the US Secretary of State, and Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, the highest point in New York, is named after him. Marcy had been the 11th Governor of New York, from 1833 – 1838. Marcy died in 1857 in Ballston Spa NY. He rests in the Albany Rural Cemetery.
Billings Learned Hand (1874-1961), born in Albany, was first a United States District Court Judge and later served on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for over forty years. His judicial opinions on a wide range of topics earned him respect from all sides of the political spectrum. He has perhaps been quoted more often by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States than any other lower-court judge
Judge Learned Hand (he did not typically use his given first name) was repeatedly urged upon President Franklin D. Roosevelt by prominent lawyers, including New Dealers, as an excellent pick for the U.S. Supreme Court, but FDR never appointed him for reasons that are not now entirely clear. FDR might have thought him too conservative, and perhaps was also resentful of all the times he’d been suggested.
The Franklin Mint was a private mint founded by Joseph Segel in 1964 in Wawa, Pennsylvania. The Mint sells coins, medals, jewelry, die-cast vehicles, dolls, sculpture and other collectibles. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Mint expanded operations to legal-tender coins, producing a combination of bullion and non-bullion proof and uncirculated coin sets of both small and large denominations for a number of countries, particularly Panama and various island states.
Comedian Pete Zedlacher hails from Wawa Ontario.
With a population of over 14 million, Ontario is by far the most populous of all provinces in Canada. Over 38% of the Canadian people reside in Ontario. Quebec, with over 8 million residents, is the second-most populous province, while British Columbia and Alberta both claim over 4 million residents.
The provincial coats of arms of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta all display either the Cross of St. George or the Union Jack, in honor of the British heritage of the early European settlers of those regions. The arms of Quebec, settled largely by French people, do not, although they do bear the golden lion of England.
Driving north through British Columbia takes you on the ALCAN highway. The highway is also called the Alaska highway. From Abbotsford in the south of British Columbia, it is 1,322 miles to the exit of the province and into Yukon Territory.