Quotes from Edwin G. Burrows

On New Year's Eve 1777, after performing in a play entitled The Devil to Pay in the West Indies, a party of drunken officers—one dressed up like Old Nick himself, complete with horns and tail—disrupted services at the John Street Methodist Church. Nor was that the worst of it. "I could narrate many and very frightful occurrences of theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers which their love of drink excited," said one dismayed German officer.

KENNEL, YE SONS OF BITCHES!

beaver testicles, rubbed on the forehead or dried and dissolved in water, made an effective antidote to drowsiness and idiocy.

even reluctant curiosity would give way to habit, and habit to dependency.

Charleston's postmaster had asked New York City's postmaster, Samuel Gouveneur, to extract antislavery tracts from his southbound mail. Gouveneur agreed and informed the postmaster general that he planned to deny postal access to Tappan and his colleagues. The issue went up to Andrew Jackson, who informally authorized Gouveneur's embargo on "offensive papers" and explicitly denounced the AASS in his Annual Message. For the moment, the abolitionists were stymied.

This is not to say that history repeats itself. Time is not a carousel on which we might, next time around, snatch the brass ring by being better prepared. Rather we see the past as flowing powerfully through the present and think that charting historical currents can enhance our ability to navigate them.

It was becoming somewhat more difficult, too, to open a "public house" or tavern for the sale of liquor. Municipal authorities now requested applicants for a license to present a certificate attesting they were "of good life & Conversation and fitt to keep such a house.

State Senator Kemble made a speech opposing any enlargement of the NY&H's capital. When the news of impending scarcity hit Wall Street, the price of Harlem stock rose. At the top of the market, Kemble's broker sold short. Kemble then pushed a bill through the legislature enlarging Harlem's capital, and the price plummeted. As these were early days, and such behavior was still considered inappropriate, Kemble was expelled from the Senate.