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This Week in History: Jefferson weighs in on rebellion, Sherman burns Columbia, site of Fort Ross chosen

Lake County News - 1/29/2017

Supports of Shays Rebellion taking down a tax collector. Public domain image.

Provocative statements from Thomas Jefferson, total war in South Carolina and Russians in California. This week in history certainly was a busy one.

Jan. 30, 1787

"I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," Thomas Jefferson wrote on this day in 1787.

It might not seem like such a controversial opinion coming from the very man who penned America's Declaration of Independence, but Jefferson wasn't referring to America's rebellion against England, a conflict that had ended some five years previous.

Rather, Jefferson was referring to the armed uprising of Revolutionary War veterans in Massachusetts against the very government they had fought to put into power.

The rebellion is known in the history books as Shays's Rebellion ? the first internal armed conflict in America's history.

Revolutions are a tricky business. The hardest part isn't actually gaining success at the onset, but keeping it long-term.

History has shown that the very same forces that make for successful revolutions often give birth to their eventual failure.

You see, violence begets violence. Revolutionaries, once they have achieved their purported victory, are often all too eager to take to the sword once more at the first sign of things going awry. The bloody history of revolutions in 19th-century France is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

When discontented farmers in Massachusetts, frustrated at the high debt and inadequate response from the new government, took up their arms once more, America looked to once more prove this theory.

The governor of the state, James Bowdoin, mercilessly squashed the rebellion before it could take off.

Although the rebellion failed, it did succeed in highlighting the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation and spurred America's leaders to convene the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.

The result of this convention was the creation of the U.S.Constitution and the selection of George Washington as president.

Perhaps Jefferson's opinion isn't so far-fetched after all. Rebellions, like storms, have the potential to sweep away clutter and reveal the state of affairs as they really are.

The ruins of Columbia, South Carolina, after it was burned by General William Tecumseh Sherman on February 1, 1865. Photo by George N. Barnard.

Feb. 1, 1865

Today, Americans have the mistaken belief that Abraham Lincoln was universally well-liked among the Unionists during the Civil War. In actuality, nearly the opposite was true.

From the very beginning and growing louder as the years dragged on, there was a growing group of dissidents in the north ? and out west in California ? who charged Lincoln with unconstitutional acts of tyranny.

After three years of war, most in the country had had enough. Especially following his publication of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, Lincoln was widely criticized for redirecting the focus of the war away from simple unity in the nation and towards a goal many white Republicans and especially northern Democrats didn't think pressing: the abolition of slavery.

As the war dragged on into 1864 Lincoln's tactics turned towards winning the war through brute force of numbers and the Union casualties started to mount.

For every fresh casualty the voice of his opponents grew louder. Residents here in Lake County ? a county full of southern sympathizers and emigrants from Missouri ? added their voices to the growing numbers of dissidents.

It is remarkable that Lincoln won reelection in 1864, but he did not do it with the help of Lake County voters, who voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, George McClellan.

With an eye to finally ending the bloody conflict, Lincoln authorized his most controversial tactic to date: total war.

Total war, or a scorched-earth policy, involves the targeting of combatants and noncombatants alike in a campaign to obliterate the will and means of an enemy to continue the fight.

Lincoln's weapon of choice was Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose bloody march through Georgia in the winter of 1864 gutted the morale and military capability of that state.

Following this raid, Sherman marched through South Carolina and on this day in 1865 burned the city of Columbia, the state capitol and a city with no military importance whatsoever. The Army of Northern Virginia surrendered three months later.

Alexandr Andreyevich Baranov, manager-in-chief of the Russian-America Co. Public domain image.

Feb. 2, 1811

On this day in 1811, a man by the name of Ivan Alexandrovich Kuskov, acting as an agent of the Russian-American Co., selected the site for a new outpost along the coast of what would become Sonoma County. Today we know the outpost by its English name: Fort Ross.

The Russians had been active along the Pacific coast of North America for some time, even before the establishment of the Russian-American Co., or RAC, in 1799.

The RAC was a trading company, with outposts in Alaska, Hawaii and soon California. As fur trappers, the RAC was especially interested in sea otters, although their trappers would eventually bring in beaver, elk and other hides from inland animals.

Like other joint-stock companies (e.g. Dutch East India Co., Hudson's Bay Co., etc.), the RAC had rights to things well beyond fur-trading.

The company was given mineral rights, the right to establish colonies in unoccupied territories and to explore unchartered regions.

The czar's family and other nobles held stock interests in the company, which had quickly become the "right arm" of the Russian Empire's eastern expansion.

Around the turn of the century, that expansion set its sights on the coast of California, or New Albion as the Russians referred to it.

After an exploratory mission along the coast in 1803 that took them as far south as Baja California, the Russians recognized the potential value of maintaining a foothold on the coast.

Sea otters lived in abundance and the various bays, inlets and outcroppings up and down the coast looked like encouraging ports.

They would have to act quickly, though, since by 1803 the Spanish had already crept up the coast in a line of Missions that stretched from the extreme south of the coast to the bay of what would become San Francisco.

Recognizing the need to get that toehold, Alexandr Andreyevich Baranov, manager-in-chief of the RAC, sent Kuskov on an exploratory mission that eventually resulted in the founding of Fort Ross.

The completion of the stockade of the new outpost in 1812 set the stage for over two decades of Russian occupation in California.

Antone Pierucci is curator of the Lake County Museums in Lake County, Calif.