- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
This Week in History: Constitutional amendments, flying dogs and witches
Constitutional amendments, flying dogs, and witches – the week of Jan. 8 to the 14 was quite a busy one in history.
Jan. 8, 1798
As school children, we were forced to memorize each constitutional amendment as part of our lessons on the founding fathers and the establishment of our country (I challenge each reader to name five of the now 27 amendments!).
Perhaps one of the least interesting – certainly least memorable – amendments was passed on this day in 1798.
The Eleventh Amendment established that excessive fines and bails were a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Yes, so unremarkable is this amendment that you did not realize until now that I just lied: the Eleventh Amendment had nothing at all to do with bail.
No, the Eleventh Amendment instead dealt with a seemingly more esoteric subject. The amendment declared that the federal government has no power to interfere in suits brought against a state by residents of another state.
However unmemorable it is to school kids today, the Eleventh Amendment was extremely important at the time.
For one thing, it was the first amendment added to the Constitution following the establishment of the first 10 as the “Bill of Rights.” That, in and of itself, is significant because up to that point the process of amending the Constitution was only theoretical – kind of like the rules of a board game, and like a board game (at least in my family) rules are sometimes “bent.”
The ratification of the amendment by the requisite number of states and its official addition to the Bill of Rights confirmed the up-to-then theoretical possibility of amending the Constitution. We haven’t looked back since.
The substance of the amendment essentially stated that states have sovereign immunity, meaning that a state cannot be sued by a private citizen without the consent of the state itself. Of course, as with anything legal, this short 43-word amendment now has four different interpretations (two of which are completely contradictory to each other).
Leave it to lawyers to complicate a single sentence.
Jan. 9, 1793
On this day in history George Washington sat among the spectators cluttering the muddy courtyard of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison as a mad Frenchman rose into the air in a balloon.
Mad, at least, is certainly what many of the spectators would have thought Jean Pierre Blanchard, who had advertised in a local newspaper that he would make the aeronautical attempt at 10 a.m. that morning.
Just a few years previous Blanchard had successfully flown across the English Channel in one of his hot air balloons. So by 1793, Blanchard had at least proven himself a lucky madman. Lucky and entrepreneurial. Rather than put on the show for free, Blanchard had charged $5 a ticket to gain admittance into the prison walls and bear witness to what would become the first manned flight in the history of North America.
Blanchard’s flight became not just the first manned flight, but also the first canined one as well when a well-wisher thrust a small black dog into Blanchard’s arms as he entered the basket of the balloon.
With a handshake from President Washington and a wave of his hat, Blanchard dropped ballast from the balloon and quickly rose into the chimney-smoke-filled sky of Philadelphia.
Forty-six minutes later he and his canine stowaway alighted on a plowed field near modern-day Woodbury, N.J. after a journey of about 15 miles.
Jan. 14, 1699
Early modern Europe was struck with an epidemic of witch-phobia that would eventually see tens of thousands of people executed for supposedly practicing the dark arts.
Most of these victims were women, who were thought to have made a deal with the Devil to learn these special powers.
In colonial America, the most famous case of witch hunts took place between 1692 and 1693 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony village of Salem.
Historians have since argued that the Salem Witch Trials were a result of an overly-strained community.
You see, starting in 1689 England declared war with France, a country whose colonial holdings were located in modern-day Nova Scotia, Quebec and parts of upstate New York. King William’s War, as it became known to the colonists, soon made its way to the colonies and ravaged the countryside, sending refugees to such villages as Salem, where they put a strain on the small community’s meager resources.
This strain, mixed with not a little amount of small-town intercommunal conflict, made for the perfect witch’s brew of paranoia.
By the winter of 1698-99, the community had sobered up and came to the realization that they had been overly enthusiastic in their trials.
On Jan. 14, 1699 the entire community of Salem fasted in repentance for their deeds. Too little too late for the 20 families who lost loved ones to the town’s fear and irrational hate.
Antone Pierucci is curator of the Lake County Museums in Lake County, Calif.