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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, OCT 16–22  
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_ Harpers Ferry, a Bridge Too Far (1859), Lynch Mob Gets Served
(1894), A Frame-Up Falls Apart 15 Years Too Late (1989), George
Washington’s Indigenous ‘Enemies’ (1779), Civil Servants In the
Crosshairs (2020), A Guilty Verdict Reversed by Trump (2014) _

Harpers Ferry as it looked in 1857,

 

_HARPERS FERRY, A BRIDGE TOO FAR_

165 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 16, 1859, the militant abolitionist John Brown
and 23 comrades launched an assault on the U.S. Army’s arsenal in
Harpers Ferry, a town on the Potomac River about 40 miles northwest of
Washington, D.C. 

Brown and his men conceived of the attack as the beginning of a war to
put an end to slavery in the U.S.; they hoped that Harpers Ferry would
be a base of operations from which they would march south, freeing as
many enslaved people as possible and recruiting some to join a growing
insurrectionary force.

The attack on the town was successful at first, but the attackers were
soon surrounded and outnumbered by militiamen and Marines.  Within 36
hours the attack was over; 11 of the attackers were killed, eight were
captured and five escaped. Brown and seven of his followers were
convicted of treason and executed. Their hope to spark an immediate
insurrection that would put an end to slavery in the U.S. was not
fulfilled, but the fighting at Harpers Ferry contributed to the
tension between the North and the South that resulted in the Civil
War, which began just 18 months later. 
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_A LYNCH MOB GETS SERVED_

130 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 17, 1894, in the town of Washington Court
House, Ohio, National Guard troops used deadly force to prevent a mob
from lynching an African-American prisoner who was awaiting transfer
to the state prison. 

The National Guard had been summoned by the county sheriff, who
realized his squad of deputies was too small to keep their prisoner
safe. The confrontation took place at a moment when vigilante justice
was on the minds of many Ohio residents, because during the previous
10 months two other African-American men had been kidnapped from legal
custody and lynched in the vicinity of Washington Court House. 

The Washington Court House shooting occurred after a standoff lasting
many hours between guardsmen and the mob. At first, the Guard had
taken positions outside the county courthouse, but the soldiers were
ordered inside when the crowd began to pelt them with rocks. As the
crowd continued to grow, the Guard commander announced in a voice that
all could hear that live ammunition would be used to prevent any
attempt to invade the courthouse. 

Nevertheless, the mob attacked the building’s wooden double door
with a battering ram.  When the door began to break open, the Guard
commander gave the order to fire through the doors.  The simultaneous
discharge of many rifles killed four attackers and wounded roughly 20
more. 

After the bloodshed, the mob quickly dispersed. 

The following day the prisoner was delivered to the state prison
without incident, but there was one further development; a Fayette
county grand jury indicted the on-scene National Guard commander for
manslaughter. At trial, the commander was acquitted.
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_A FRAME-UP FALLS APART, 15 YEARS TOO LATE_

35 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 19, 1989, a British court corrected a
miscarriage of justice that had resulted in the convictions of the
Guildford Four, three men and one woman who had spent more than 14
years in prison for crimes they did not commit.  When the court ruled
that the convictions had been improperly obtained, the four were
released and the charges against them dropped. 

The Four had been accused of being responsible for setting bombs that
exploded in two pubs in Guildford, England, as part of the Provisional
Irish Republican Army’s long campaign against the British Army. The
pubs, which were near an army base, were well known gathering places
for off-duty soldiers.  The bombs killed four soldiers and injured
more than 60.

An appeals court threw the convictions out when the defense proved
that the police had tortured the Four to obtain confessions and also
that the police were aware of evidence that specifically cleared the
Four of responsibility. 
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_GEORGE WASHINGTON’S INDIGENOUS ‘ENEMIES’ _

245 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 20, 1779, in the midst of the U.S. War of
Independence, George Washington, the revolutionary army’s
commander-in-chief (and future president), wrote about his
satisfaction with his army’s genocidal actions during the summer of
1779: “General [John] Sullivan has completed the entire destruction
of the country of the [Iroquois people in central New York]; driven
all the inhabitants, men women and children, out of it.”

Washington continued, “While the [Iroquois] were under this rod of
correction, the Mingo and Muncy tribes, living [in the vicinity of
what is now Pittsburgh] met with similar chastisement from Colonel
[Daniel] Brodhead, who with 600 men advanced upon them . . . and laid
waste their country. These unexpected and severe strokes has
disconcerted, humbled, and distressed the Indians exceedingly; and
will, I am persuaded, be productive of great good; as they are
undeniable proofs to them, that Great Britain cannot protect them, and
that it is in our power to chastise them, whenever their hostile
conduct deserves
it." [link removed]
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_CIVIL SERVANTS IN THE CROSS-HAIRS_

_FOUR YEARS AGO, _on Oct. 26, 2020, President Trump, who had less than
three months remaining in his term of office, signed Executive Order
13957. The order remained in effect until it was repealed by President
Biden in January 2021, but if Trump had been reelected and his order
had stayed on the books, the staff of the federal government’s
executive branch would be a very different set of men and women than
they are now.

The vast majority of workers in the executive branch have
considerable, but not unlimited, job security, because they can only
be dismissed in accordance with the rules of the federal civil
service. Those rules give federal civil servants specific rights to
appeal an attempt to fire them. Essentially, if a federal civil
servant is working competently and wants to keep their job, the rules
give that worker job security.

The Executive Order that Trump signed gave all executive branch
agencies the right to hire employees that had no civil service
protection. Anyone hired under the newly created civil service
Schedule F could be fired for any reason or no reason and would have
no appeal. Anyone hired under Schedule F could have been ordered to
sign an oath of loyalty to President Donald John Trump, or else. 

Would a newly elected President Trump issue a new, improved, version
of E.O. 13957? It’s a good bet that a majority of the federal
government’s 2.3 million workers are not eager to find out.
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_A GUILTY VERDICT REVERSED BY TRUMP_

10 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 22, 2014, a federal court jury in Washington,
D.C., convicted four former employees of Blackwater USA for crimes
during Nisour Square Massacre, in which 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians had
been machine-gunned to death in Baghdad in 2007. In so doing the jury
agreed with the prosecutors' contention that the shooting was a
criminal act, and not a battlefield encounter gone wrong. One of the
accused was convicted of first-degree murder and three were convicted
of voluntary and attempted manslaughter and criminal use of a machine
gun. 

On Dec. 22, 2020, President Trump granted all four men complete
pardons, resulting in strong objections from Iraq and from UN experts,
who said the pardons "violate U.S. obligations under international law
and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a
global level.” [link removed]
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For more People's History, go to 
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* John Brown
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* lynching
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* Trump and US Civil Servants; The Pendleton Act; The Deep State;
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* Iraq
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