Black History Month began Sunday, February 1, and will end Sunday, March 1. At least three events occurred on February 11, 1861, that deserve our attention during Black History Month.

     On that day, the U.S. House of Representatives received a formal written notification from South Carolina’s four Representatives, that informed House members that on December 20, 1860, officials in South Carolina had voted to secede from the United States of America.

     On that same day, the House’s members passed a resolution that read, “That neither Congress, the People, nor the Governments of the Non-slaveholding States have the constitutional right to legislate upon or interfere with slavery in any of the Slaveholding States of the Union.” 

     The resolution passed 161 yea’s, and no nay’s.

     On that same day, in Illinois, President-elect Abraham Lincoln departed from Springfield, on a journey by train to Washington D.C., and to the White House.

     The three events inter-connect. South Carolina chose to secede from the Union because Lincoln, a Republican—one who stood firm against the expansion of slavery into the western territories—had won the Presidential election held on November 6, 1860.

     Members of the House passed its resolution in a frantic attempt to appease southern states, who feared Lincoln and the future of slavery under a Republican administration.

     Southerners understood that the vast amount of each of their states’ wealth originated from slave labor. They could not imagine a future without slavery.

     That House Resolution was already too late. By February 11, seven states had seceded from the Union: South Carolina, in December 1860; Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, in January 1861; and Texas, on February 1, 1861.

     There were an additional eight slave-holding states, and the fear throughout Washington D. C. was that all eight too would secede. 

     Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington D.C. on the morning of February 23. Days later, on March 4, 1861, Lincoln took the oath of office. In his Inaugural Address, Lincoln tried to soothe the southern states. He said,

     “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.

     “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.         

     “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

     Despite Lincoln’s calming words, four more southern states seceded from the Union: Virginia, in April; Arkansas and North Carolina, in May; and Tennessee, in June, a total of eleven states.

     The United States had split into two countries, two governments, two presidents.

     One glimmer of hope: four slave-holding states, those just south of the Mason-Dixon line, remained in the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

     Historians now consider the southern states’ secession a colossal mistake. Around 300,000 Southern white men were killed during the Civil War, a war that crushed the South’s economy and abolished slavery. Plus, the Southern states lost their votes in Congress, and it was treason.  

     The war commenced April 12, 1861, when Southern troops fired on Fort Sumter, in Charleston’s harbor. February 11, 1861, a day of missed opportunity to defer a Civil War.

William Franklin was born in Philadelphia in 1730. His father was Benjamin Franklin. His mother was unknown. Ben brought William, his illegitimate son, into his home, that same year.

     Ben and his common-law wife, Deborah Reed, agreed to raise William together.

     On June 10, 1752, when William was twenty-one, Ben conducted his experiment with a kite, a key, and a lightning bolt, near their home in Philadelphia.

     In 1757, Ben and William sailed to London. Ben remained there for the next sixteen years. 

     In 1759, William began to study law at the Inns of the Court in the Middle Temple in London. In 1760, he too acknowledged an illegitimate son, named William Temple Franklin. His mother also was unknown. William placed Temple Franklin into foster care.

     In 1762, Ben secured a position for William as royal governor of New Jersey. William sailed back to America, but Ben remained in London. Father and son wrote letters back and forth.

     Ben worked to keep the thirteen colonies and England’s King and Parliament united, but he saw the corruption of the English government, and he idealized Americans. 

     William though saw British law as supreme, and obedience to King as a path to prosperity.

     After the Boston Tea Party, on December 16, 1773, William wrote to Ben and said, “Nothing can make the Bostonians acknowledge the right of the Parliament to tax them. To do justice, the Bostonians must pay for the tons of tea that have been destroyed.”

     Ben replied back to William, “The British have extorted many thousands of pounds from America unconstitutionally and with an armed force. Of this money, they ought to make restitution. But you are a thorough courtier, and you see everything with government eyes.”

     In the spring of 1775, Ben gave up negotiating with the British, and sailed back to America, eager to work for independence. He took with him his grandson, Temple, then fifteen years old. 

     One day, William, the son, visited Benjamin, the father, and there William met Temple, his son and Ben’s grandson. 

     Ben urged his son William to join the Patriot cause for independence, but William refused, thinking a reconciliation with King still possible. “They argued all night. At another meeting, neighbors heard them shouting. They went their separate ways.”

     William was the last colonial governor of New Jersey, forced out in 1776, when colonial militiamen placed him under arrest. The new state congress of New Jersey took William into custody, and officials incarcerated him in Connecticut for two years for spying on the Patriots. 

     He then was held in solitary confinement at Litchfield, Connecticut for eight months.

     When released, William fled to New York City, where he set up a spy network, and coordinated the Associated Loyalists, a military unit that attacked Patriots in secret.

     In 1782, after Washington defeated Cornwallis at Yorktown, William fled to England.

     On August 16, 1784, Ben wrote to William and said, “Nothing has ever hurt me so much, as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son, and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me.”

     William met Ben for the last time in 1785, in England. That day Ben insisted that William sign deeds to transfer ownership of his property in America to Temple, the son and grandson.

     In his will, Benjamin left little to William, and said, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate [than that] he endeavored to deprive me of.”

     The American Revolution divided families. “That’s what happens when a real civil war happens in a country.”

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts, 320 years ago.

     In recent days, I discovered Ken Burns’s two episodes on Benjamin Franklin that aired in April 2022 on PBS. The second part is more interesting, his efforts during the Revolution.

     Franklin was in London, when the Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. It was he, a well-known American, who received a public berating from England’s Solicitor General January of 1774, in the Privy Council.

     His feelings hurt, Franklin sailed back to Pennsylvania, convinced that independence was a better choice. He arrived home in May 1775, a month after the battles at Lexington and Concord, a month before the horrific battle at Bunker Hill. 

     Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the 2nd Continental Congress. He was the old man there, 69-years old. He stayed quiet, appeared to sleep often, but was keen for independence.

     In late April of 1776, Franklin, with two other delegates, traveled to Montreal, in Canada, to convince the Canadians to join the 13 colonies. The Canadians refused. Loyalists they were.

     Franklin returned with a hat composed of fur, skinned from a marten. 

      That summer, Franklin served on a committee to write a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, then 33-years-old, wrote it, but Franklin edited it.

     Instead of, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” Franklin urged for a more philosophical meaning, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Jefferson agreed.

     On September 11, 1776, Franklin and John Adams met with British Admiral Richard Howe on Staten Island to discuss peace, but Howe refused to admit that the colonists had a new nation.

     In October 1776, Franklin sailed from Philadelphia, with two grandsons, 16-year-old Temple Franklin, and 7-year-old Benny Bache. The USS “Reprisal” arrived in France in December 1776. A month later Franklin turned 71.

     Franklin wore his marten fur hat to hide unsightly scabs atop his bald head due to weeks of a poor diet aboard the “Reprisal.” The French people considered Franklin’s hat rustic and quaint. 

     Franklin’s duty: to convince French officials to sign an alliance with the colonies and to support the Americans with arms.

     He was the one American whom the French people knew, because of his experiment with a kite in a lighting storm. Many wanted to see this famous American. He was harassed day and night at his room in the Hotel de Valentinois in Passy, a suburb within Paris.

     He played chess. He flirted with beautiful French ladies. He met King Louis XVI.

     After Franklin received the good news that American forces had defeated General Burgoyne at the battle at Saratoga, in New York, in 1777, he and French officials signed two alliances.

     The French government spent some 1.3 billion livres on the colonists’ war with England.

     With French naval support in the Chesapeake Bay, and with French soldiers and cannons, the combined American and French armies forced British general Lord Cornwallis to surrender his army at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. The brutal and bloody war was over.

     If not for Franklin’s diplomatic skill in France, Washington may not have won the war.

     Two years later, on September 3, 1783, Benjamin Franklin signed the Paris Peace Treaty with English officials. By it, England’s government recognized America’s independence.

     Franklin sailed back to Philadelphia in the summer of 1785. Two years later, Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the Constitutional Convention. When asked if America now had a republic or a monarchy, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

     A Poor Richard quote: “either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing about.” Franklin did both. He passed away on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four.

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, at the age of 42, in his Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. His heart gave out after years of obesity and prescription drugs. 

     His long-time talent agent and promoter, cigar-chomping Colonel Tom Parker, lived for another twenty years, passing away on January 21, 1997, at the age of 87, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

     Together they accomplished a lot: 31 movies between 1956 and 1969, countless albums, numerous performances, an immense amount of income. Elvis said this of Parker, “I don’t think I would have ever been huge if it wasn’t for him. He’s a brilliant man.” That was most likely true.

     Parker said this of Elvis, “It’s unexplainable. They say anybody else could have done it. Perhaps. So, I was to be the one who was with him. He did his part. I did mine, and we were lucky with great talent, and we had a great show and a lot of fun.”

     Colonel Tom Parker made Elvis Presley King of Rock and Roll.

     After Elvis passed on, Parker worked the estate, collecting his cut on all memorabilia and record sales, while his father, Vernon Presley, was the estate’s actual executor. 

     Vernon died in 1979, but he named Priscilla, Elvis’s ex-wife, and Lisa Marie, Elvis’s daughter, then 9 years old, as co-executors. At once, Priscilla learned the estate was nearing bankruptcy due in part to Elvis’s lavish spending, and the fees paid to Tom Parker. 

     In 1981, it fell to Judge Joseph Evans of Shelby County Probate Court, in Memphis, to sort out the claims against Elvis’s estate. He appointed an attorney named Blanchard E. Tual to serve as Lisa Marie’s guardian ad litem and to investigate Tom Parker’s role in the estate.

     After four months, Tual presented a 300-page report to the court. He found that Parker had charged Elvis and then his estate 50% of all income, since January 2, 1967.

     Tual said that this arrangement was “excessive, imprudent, unfair to the estate, and beyond all reasonable bounds of industry standards,” that Parker was “self-dealing and overreaching.” 

     Also, Tual found that Parker had set up side deals that cheated Elvis out of millions.

     He found that on March 1, 1973, Parker had contracted with RCA to buy Elvis’s music catalog, in essence forfeiting all his rights to further royalties on the pre-1973 music sales.

     RCA agreed to pay the following amounts. “To Elvis: $2,800,000; to Parker: $2,600,000,” for a total of $5,400,000. In hindsight, that music catalog was worth far more than that.

     Tual found that Elvis missed out on millions he could have earned if Tom Parker would have allowed him to perform in foreign countries. Tom Parker was born in the Netherlands, came to the U.S. in 1929, illegally, and had never obtained a U.S. passport. He dared not cross the border.

     Tual found Elvis was often “without the benefit of independent counsel or business advice.”

     Tual recommended, and Judge Joseph Evans agreed, that Priscilla should fire Tom Parker and bring suit against him for “fraud and mismanagement.” The case was settled out of court in 1983. 

     RCA agreed to pay Parker $2 million for his “collection of master recordings, memorabilia, video-taped concerts, and film rights.” RCA also agreed to pay Elvis’s estate $110,000 per year for a decade to settle RCA’s claims on Presley’s earnings. 

     On June 7, 1982, Priscilla opened up Graceland for tours, a wise move, instead of selling the mansion. Elvis Presley Enterprises is now solvent and earns in excess of $10 million each year.

     If he had lived, Elvis would celebrate his 91st birthday in a few days, on January 8.

Two movies were released this past November, “Frankenstein” on the 7th, and “Hamnet” on the 26th. Both were based, in part, on well-known fictional works from previous centuries, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus,” and William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

     Mary Shelley, girlfriend, lover, and future wife of the poet Percy Shelley, began writing her Gothic horror novel, “Frankenstein,” in the summer of 1816, when just 18.

      The English poet Lord Byron had suggested that she, and Percy Shelley, and a group of like-minded literary artists should each try to write a ghost story that summer while the writers enjoyed the rainy, cool summer days near Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

     In mid-June, Mary’s imagination kept her awake. She wondered, “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated. Galvanism had given token of such things.” 

     She later wrote, “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

     Mary Shelley finished her fictional tale of Victor Frankenstein—a surgeon, and his recreated  being built from a body—in 1817, when she turned 20. The novel was published in 1818, in three volumes, but without Mary’s name listed as author. It was “an overwhelming success.”

     Guillermo del Toro, a filmmaker, author, and artist from Mexico, has filmed the latest of untold numbers of film adaptations. Del Toro is drawn to monsters, Gothic stories, and horror.

     Del Toro says, “There is a difference between eye candy and eye protein. Eye candy is just pretty, but eye protein is telling a story, and it is pretty.”

     Maggie O’Farrell is a writer from Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. The copper-colored hair, blue eyes, and fair skin indicate Irish ancestry.

     In 2020, Maggie published “Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague,” during the covid pandemic, to universal acclaim. The “New York Times Book Review” named it one of the five best works of fiction that year, and O’Farrell won the U.K.’s “Women’s Prize for Fiction” that year.

     Historians acknowledge that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in November 1582, when he was 18, and she 26. Six months later, in May 1583, Anne gave birth to Susanna.

     Then, in February of 1585, Anne gave birth to twins: a second daughter named Judith, and a son Hamnet. William relocated to London, where he luxuriated in a phenomenal success as a poet, playwright, and actor at the Globe Theater.

     Anne remained at home in Stratford-on-the Avon, carrying on with the duties of raising three children alone. In August of 1596, William and Anne suffered a “devastating loss” when Hamnet died at age 11, perhaps due to the bubonic plague, although the exact cause is not known.

     Maggie O’Farrell reimagines life in Anne’s home without husband or father. Maggie never mentions William’s first or last name. She gives Anne the name of “Agnes,” pronounced “ann-yes,” a close variation, and she points out that Hamnet was sometimes spelled as Hamlet.

     Maggie builds her story around the grief that the couple endured, due to Hamnet’s passing.

     She shows how William channelled his grief in his best tragic play, “Hamlet,” about a Danish prince who buries his father, the king, because the prince’s uncle murdered Hamlet’s father.

     Chloé Zhao directed the movie, “Hamnet.” Critics give it either four or five stars, calling it “stunning,” “a masterpiece.” Some critics suggest the film may win Best Picture award.

     Take your pick, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” or Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” a dose of eye protein either way.