Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for July 31 2026

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

                                                            Walking the Walk 

The National March into Maquette Park Saturday, August 1, 9am-1pm at Chicago's Marquett Park. "In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago Freedom Movement marched into Marquette Park to confront entrenched segregation, redlining, and organized racial violence. Sixty years later, communities across the country face renewed attacks on voting rights and access to the ballot, expanding systems of criminalization and detention, and deepening economic inequality.

This national gathering connects the unfinished work of 1966 to the defining moral challenges of this moment. Faith leaders, civic leaders, organizers, artists, young people, and communities from across the country will march for free and fair elections, freedom for immigrant and marginalized communities, and a future rooted in dignity, justice, and shared humanity."

Led locally by IMAN in partnership with 60+ community-rooted organizations, including the Rainbow Push Coalition, The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Side With Love, and the Unitarian Universalist Advocacy Network of Illinois (UUANI), and Sponsored nationally by Powered By Faith,  The National March into Marquette Park

Planet Palooza is an outdoor event aimed at ways to “Make our planet a better place to live” now in its 4th year on Woodstock Square on Sunday, August 16 from 11 am to 3 pm. It will highlight and showcase McHenry County Non-Profit Groups and Organizations that address environmental issues, groups that advocate for diversity and equality, veterans, groups that combat hunger, homelessness, domestic violence, addiction, human trafficking, suicide, gun violence, as well as those groups who provide other essential services to our growing and diverse communities will all be exhibiting. Featuring information and outreach booths and table, entertainment, family activities, and food trucks. Hosted by Together We Stand McHenry County and the McHenry County College Sustainability Center. Visit the website at https://togetherwestandmchenrycounty.org/Planet-Palooza/

Compassion for Campers

Our distributions are usually held on the first and third Fridays of the month from 10 am to 2 pm at the new McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) at the McHenry County Mental Health Board offices, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake.    Due to a Mental Health Board event the MCHC will be closed on August 7.  The following C4C distribution will be Friday, August 21.  If and only if C4C receives enough urgent monetary support, we may be able to schedule a special distribution during that long gap between service.

With at least a temporary home base, C4C can resume accepting donations of supplies including clean used sleeping bags and tents in their bags or cases, tarps and other basic camping gear, rain gear, and especially mosquito and tick repellents and sunscreen.  Contact Sue Rekenthaler at tomatos@mc.net or Patrick Murfin at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net for more information.

Financial support is critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support. Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

U.S. Patent No. 1 Answered a Humdrum Need

Samuel Hopkin's patent with the original signatures.  The date and number in the top right of the page were added after the Patent Act of 1836.

On July 31, 1790 President George Washington affixed his signature to a document granting the first United States Patent.  It was the culmination of a process that began when Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, himself an inventor with more than a passing interest in innovation, carefully reviewed the application.  When he concluded that the submission was both original and useful he signed the document and passed it on to Secretary of War Henry Knox who also approved it and then sent it to Attorney General Edmund Randolph.  Only when the last was finished with it did it land on Washington’s desk.

It was a cumbersome procedure entailing most of the Executive Branch of the still new Federal Government.  It was an improvisation by Jefferson who for some reason left out his rival for Washington’s favor, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton despite the New Yorker’s avowed interest in encouraging American industry.  Chances are very good that the snub was not accidental.

President George Washington and his Cabinet--Secretary of War Henry Knox, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph.  All but Hamilton were involved in the review of the first patent.

Jefferson had to ad lib a review process because when Congress authorized the government to issue patents it neglected to say how it should be done.  The act simply authorized the government to carry out the powers described in Article 1. Section 8 of the Constitution:

Congress shall have the power...to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

The first person to take advantage of the new law was Samuel Hopkins, a Philadelphia inventor who petitioned for a patent on an improvement “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.”  As inventions go, it was pretty mundane, but potash, which was derived from the ash residue of vegetable matter, usually wood, and was used in the making of soap and candles.   Both of those necessities had usually been made at home in the Colonial Era.  Hopkins hoped his process would encourage their manufacture in small scale craft shops for local sale.  So, it perfectly fit Jefferson’s key criterion—usefulness.

Samuel Hopkins was granted the first Patent for his new process of making potash. 

Hopkins was so excited about the prospects for his process that the very next year he was also granted the first patent from the Parliament of Lower Canada in 1791, and issued by the Governor General in Council Angus MacDonnel at Quebec City.

The approval process was repeated two more times that year for a new candle-making process and Oliver Evans’s flour-milling machinery.  The following year the trickle of applications became a rushing steam as innovative and ambitious dreamers submitted their ideas for a $4 fee—a cost that although not insignificant, could be raised by most.   Whatever his own interest in examining the models and drawings, the workload was overwhelming the Cabinet and the President’s attention.

Jefferson substantially streamlined the process.  He handed over initial review to a State Department Clerk who would make a recommendation which he would approve and send on to the President for a final signature.  In practice the final two steps began to simply rubber stamp the Clerk’s determination.

This process continued into Jefferson’s own Presidency.   At his urging Congress created Patent Office with its own staff of clerks.  More than 10,000 patents were issued before 1836 when a fire destroyed all of the records.  That fire spurred Congress to enact the Patent Act of 1836 which authorized the hiring of professional patent examiners in addition to the clerks.  It also authorized new patent documents to be issued in all cases where the patent could be confirmed by other records such as copies held by the recipient.  2,845 patents were restored and issued a number beginning with an X.  That included Hopkins’ first patent.  The rest of the missing patents were voided.

A number of well-known personages worked as political appointees in the Patent Office including Civil War nurse Clara Barton.

To date there are more than six million patents that have been issued to Americans and other nationals by the U.S. Patent system.  Since 1975 patents have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a part of the Department of Commerce.

By the way, a copy of Hopkins’ patent with the original signatures still exists and is held by the Chicago Historical Society. 

When Ike Went Where the Founders Would Not

 

President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation making "In God We Trust" the official National Motto.  He surrounded himself with clergy making sure to include a Muslim, a Rabbi, and Buddhist but significantly none of the Catholic prelates who had been the motto's driving force.  The non-observant casually religious President was clearly uneasy over the implications of what he was doing.

The crest of Cold War and Anti-Communist hysteria may have passed by July 30, 1956, but there was still plenty of residual energy.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, signed a bill that designated the words “In God We Trust” as the official Motto of the United States.  

The year before Congress acted to require that the phrase be put on all coins and bills. 

Of course, the U.S. had a de facto motto which had long been included on coins and currency—E Pluribus Unum, usually translated “out of many, one.”  That phrase was approved in 1792 for the Great Seal of the United States.  It did not satisfy fervid religionists. 

Indeed. the Great Seal itself, which was filled with Masonic and Deist symbolism without a hint Christian piety, had been a bone of contention since the first struggles over the proper role of religion in the Republic.  The largely Deist founders purposefully omitted any reference to God in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was silent on the subject except to prohibit Congress from the establishment of any religion or interfering with the religious observances of its citizens.  Practical men with a knowledge of history, they were concerned lest a favored religion or a defined heresy create civil discord and perhaps civil war.  

The Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum was on the ribbon in the national eagle's beak on the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States and was long considered the de facto motto of the United States.

Washington and Jefferson occasionally invoked a vague Deity, most often referred to Providence, Nature’s God, or sometimes the God of Creation, all common Deist constructions for an original moving force of the Universe.  They avoided terms like the Lord God which invoked the patriarchal deity of the Old Testament and never invoked Jesus Christ.  

John Adams, a true product of the Puritan tradition as it evolved eventually into Unitarianism, firmly believed that organized religion was necessary to constrain the “passions” of an innately sinful humanity.  Moreover, he was politically indebted for the support of the Black Legion—the clergy of the New England Standing Order—against “atheistic” Jeffersonian Republicanism.  Yet even he resisted considerable pressure to inject explicitly Christian prayer, practice, and symbolism into official use.

A complex battle between the evolving movements of Evangelical Protestantism and republican secularism see-sawed back and forth for the first decades of the nation’s existence.  Some compromises were unofficially reached, but on the whole, the government remained resolutely secular, and even Presidents were not expected to make personal religious declarations. 

During the crisis of the Civil War, however, President Abraham Lincoln needed the fervent support of the Protestant clergy, particularly its avidly abolitionist voices.  Not a personally “saved” Christian, and deeply influenced by the Founder’s secular Deism, Lincoln non-the-less was a student of the Bible as literature and was adept at echoing its cadences and invoking powerful Biblical language in his speeches.  But he was always being pressed by the clergy to make more overt religious statements.  

Secretary of the Treasury Samuel Chase put in God We Trust on a Civil War era 2 cent piece.

It was in this context that Lincoln called for national days of fasting and Thanksgiving.  He also undoubtedly approved when his Treasury Secretary, the devout Salmon P. Chase, first directed the Mint to inscribe the words “In God We Trust” on a two-cent coin issued in 1864.  The approbation of the preachers far outweighed the slight protests of Freethinkers.  Nonetheless, the idiom "not worth two cents" entered the language as a subtle protest to the inscription.

Over the next decades most—but not all—coins added the phrase as they were re-designed. 

Government issued Greenback currency, however, contained no religious declaration, just a practical promise to pay the bearer in specie upon demand. 

And so, the situation stayed until the dawn of the Cold War.  Then Catholics, who had long been reluctant to join with Protestants in any religious demands on the government because they assumed, quite rightly, that the Protestants would insist on narrow language that excluded Catholic practice, became particularly alarmed at the rise of “atheistic Communism” and the suppression of Catholic worship in the new Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe.  Leading anti-Communist Prelates launched a campaign to require “In God We Trust” on currency as well as all coins and to make it an official motto. 

Federal authorities, who were eager to use those same Bishops to influence the heavily Catholic industrial working class against “Communist infiltration” of the labor movement, were more than glad to add religious arrows to their crusade against Reds. 

When leading Protestant Evangelicals fell into line, the movement in Congress became irresistible even for those who were squeamish.  What Congressman wanted to be painted as voting against God? 

Controversy over the motto and its use on currency and coins has never gone away.  Church and state separation advocates, civil libertarians, and increasingly vocal atheist activists have repeatedly challenged the motto and its use on coins and currency in court.  And just as routinely have lost. 

In the case of Aronow v. United States in 1970, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, “It is quite obvious that the national motto and the slogan on coinage and currency ‘In God We Trust’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion. Its use is of patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise.”  The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.  In another case The Supreme Court upheld the motto in because it has “lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.”  

Increasingly vocal and organized atheists have become the leading voice for protesting In God We Trust but their atheism may have entrenched support among the MAGA crowd and Christian Denomonists.

With public support of continued use of the motto on coins and currency standing at 90% in a 2003 Gallup Poll it does not appear that the phrase will be going away any time soon.

Defeat Snatched From the Jaws of Victory--the Waste of United States Colored Troops in the Crater

  

This Battle of the Crater souvenir post card was sold for decades around the Virginia battlefield.  For all I know glossy print versions may still be available.  Like many depictions of the battle, it showed a valiant Confederate charge into the Yanks trapped in the crater.  It also minimizes the number of Black troops--only two are identifiable in this picture--despite the fact that they suffered virtual annihilation.  How history gets both the valiant Lost Cause veneer and is whitewashed. 

File this one in the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley department.  The plan was brilliant.  Its execution nearly perfect down to the last detail.  The result exactly as desired, until mere mortal men marched into the breach.

By the summer of 1864 the grim carnage of the American Civil War had ground to a stalemate.  Since Gettysburg a year earlier Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his legendary Army of Northern Virginia had been hard pressed by vastly superior Union forces of the Army of the Potomac under the command of Major General George Meade directly and personally supervised by Commanding General Ulysses S Grant. 

Once famous for his audacious and aggressive maneuvers, Lee was forced to defend the Confederate capitol of Richmond.  He erected impressive earthen work fortifications in a wide ring around the city.  The old man was proving to be just as adept at what would be the future in the Industrial Age—trench warfare. 

 

Lee dug in to defend his capitol. A war of maneuver settled into siege, stalemate, and trench warfare.  The breastworks of the Confederate Fort Mahone on the Petersburg line.

The key to Richmond was at the rail hub of Petersburg through which the city and the army could remain supplied with food, supplies, and munitions.  Grant called it the “backdoor to Richmond” and proceeded to lay siege to the city and its fortifications.

The armies faced each other along a 20 mile front from the old Cold Harbor battlefield near Richmond to areas south of Petersburg.  An attempt to take the town by assault ended in failure on June 15.  Since then, the two armies pounded each other with artillery, peppered the opposing lines with deadly fire from sharp shooters and snipers, and delicately probed each other’s lines with reconnaissance patrols.  Both commanding generals were frustrated.

 

                                Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry had an idea and commanded the perfect troops to make it happen. 

It took a mining engineer to come up with a solution to Grant’s problem—Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants, commanding the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s IX Corps.  His proposal was simple on paper—dig a long mineshaft from the Union siege trenches then under Confederate outer defenses until below the major fortification at the center of the Rebel lines, Elliott’s Salient.  Sappers would then plant and set off a huge explosive mine which would blow the fort away and open a breach through which Union forces could pour, smashing the Confederate I Corps and rolling up Petersburg before Lee could muster his forces from elsewhere along the lines.

Burnside was a once promising commander nursing a badly bruised reputation.  His indecision as Army of the Potomac commander at Fredericksburg in December of 1862 threw away the best chance for a quick end to the war and led to one of the bloodiest defeats the Army was ever handed.  Busted back to a Corps commander, his lack of aggressiveness at Spotsylvania Court House earlier that year aggravated Grant.  Burnside was determined to prove that he was imaginative and aggressive.  He quickly gave the go-ahead to Pleasant’s plan.  Up the chain of command Meade and Grant also signed off on it but were not very convinced it would work.  Neither lent much logistical support to the effort.

 

A successful and proven Division commander, Major General Ambrose Burnside had been elevated to quickly to command of the Army of the Potomac after Lincoln finally got fed up with George McClellan.  His indecision at Fredericksburg led to one of the Army's worst defeats.  Demoted to a Corps commander, he was blamed for over caution at Spotsylvania Court House.  Now he was an officer desperate to salvage his reputation. 

Pleasants’ own troops, tough coal miners from the fields of western Pennsylvania, were just the men for the job.  They were maybe the only men in the Union army who would not consider the task drudgery.  In fact, for them digging in the soft Virginia soil must have seemed like a cakewalk.

Digging began in June and proceeded quickly.  The men had to scrounge lumber to shore up the tunnel and for the ingenious ventilation system which sucked fresh air from the narrow mine entrance all the way to the face of the digging via a wooden duct.  Fetid air at the end was heated by a constantly burning pit fire and vented out drawing the fresh air to fill the vacuum.  This system avoided the use of multiple air vents which could have been observed.

The miners dug by hand and removed the soil in wooden soap and ammunition boxes drawn by rope along a crude wooden plank rail. On July 17 the shaft reached under Elliott’s Salient at a depth of about fifty feet.  A perpendicular gallery about 75 feet long extended in both directions.

All of this had been accomplished un-detected by the enemy.  Confederate intelligence reported rumors of the mine to Lee about two weeks after construction began.  He didn’t believe it.  Finally, after receiving new report, he began desultory anti-mine efforts which failed to find or detect the shaft.

Confederate General John Pegram in charge of the artillery in the sector took the rumors more seriously, however, and on his own authority as a precaution had trenches and gun emplacements built to the rear of the Salient as a secondary line of defense.

Meade and Grant finally decided to go all in on the plan.  The gallery underneath the Confederate position was filled with 8,000 pounds of gunpowder in 320 kegs.  The main chamber was extended to 20 feet below the fort and was packed shut with 11 feet of earth in the side galleries and 32 feet of packed earth in the main gallery to prevent the explosion blasting out the mouth of the mine.

 

The miners' handiwork--the Union tunnel with the point of detonation of tons of explosive under the Confederate strong point. 

On July 27 Grant sent Major Generals Winfield Scott Hancock and Phil Sheridan on a combined infantry/cavalry attack along the James River southwest of Richmond and miles from the Petersburg front.  In what became known as the First Battle of Deep Bottom or New Market Road the forces were repelled in two sharp days of skirmishing around Fussell’s Mill and Bailey’s Creek.  Although Grant held out some hope that Hancock’s infantry could punch a hole in the defenses to allow Sheridan’s cavalry to pour into Richmond or failing that ride around the city severing rail connections, he was not entirely disappointed when the attacks were repulsed.   They succeeded in causing Lee to send troops from Petersburg to re-enforce the line along the James.

Grant turned his personal attention to the well-developed plans for the Petersburg mine attack. 

Weeks earlier at an officer’s call Burnside had acceded to the plea of former New York City dance master Brigadier General Edward Ferrero to use his division of United States Colored Troops (USCT) as the leading assault unit.  Burnside, who originally had other plans, agreed.  The division was fresh, well equipped, and most importantly at full strength, 4,200 men—a rarity when veteran units were often whittled away to half their original size or less through combat loss, disease, and desertion.  The division was given a rarity for the Civil War—two full weeks of specialized training and instructions for this mission.  After the mine went off, they were to move ahead in the confusion of the enemy and secure the crest of the crater on either side to allow the rest of the Corps to pass along the rim or through the crater itself. 

When Meade reviewed the plans, he fretted that the unit which Burnside considered fresh was simply green and therefore unreliable in combat, especially in a critical role.  He also worried that if the Colored Troops failed, they would discourage commanders from accepting and fighting alongside others.  Although Colored Troops had proved themselves in other theaters, they were new to the elite Army of the Potomac.  Grant agreed and ordered Burnside to revise the order of battle less than 24 hours before the attack.

At another officer’s call Burnside conducted a lottery among his three white divisions to select the lead.  Brigadier General James F. Ledlie of the 1st Division won the draw.  The Colored Division would join the two others in the second wave of the attack.

Ledlie returned to his unit but never issued the special instructions for taking the flanking rim first.  The men were told only that they would have the honor of leading a full-frontal assault.

 

Brevet Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, a famed New York dancing master in civilian life and a veteran of several campaigns, commanded the division of U.S. Colored Troops at Petersburg. 

Meanwhile, Col. Pleasants was deep underground personally supervising the final placement of the explosives and making sure the earthen plugs in the tunnel were strong.

The mine was supposed to be detonated at 3:30 in the morning of June 30.  But the Army provided inferior fuses.  Two attempts to light it failed.  Finally, two volunteers crawled into the mine, found where the fuse had burned out had broken, and spliced a fresh fuse on the end.  It was after dawn when the mine finally blew up at 4:30, with enough light for Confederate pickets to recognize that there were large Union forces inside their lines.

The explosion itself went off flawlessly.  And impressively.  The fortifications of Elliott’s Salient were blown sky high killing most of the garrison.  The Confederate line was thrown into the anticipated confusion and panic.

Ledlie’s men at first seemed as stunned by the spectacle as the enemy.  They paused to take in the scene and had to be prodded forward by their officers and sergeants.  Ledlie himself was nowhere to be found.  He was well to the rear, completely out of line of sight of the battle in a bombproof bunker with Ferrero of the Colored Division.  Passing a bottle between them the two officers were getting quietly drunk.

 

The untrained and leaderless men of the 1st Division charged into the crater  instead of taking the rim as planned.  They were trapped.  The Turkey shoot commenced. 

When the 1st Division reached the crater instead of securing the rim, they charged directly into the pit.  At the bottom they stopped to gape at the destruction.  The delays allowed time for Brig. Gen. William Mahone to cobble together a Confederate force to rush to plug the breech.  Rebs quickly occupied the vacant rim and commenced a turkey shoot of the defenseless men in the crater.  Troops madly tried to scramble up the sides, but found the dirt gave way under them.  They were trapped.

But they were not to be alone.  Burnside, refusing to be charged once again with indecision and lack of aggression, ordered the Colored Division forward to reinforce the trapped 1st.  Denied the rim, they followed into the crater.  Their appearance enraged the Confederates who intensified fire, including round after round of intense artillery fire.

 

 Burnside ordered the Colored Division forward to reinforce the 1st.  They also pushed into the Crater and were trapped.  They were singled out by enraged Confederates and were nearly annihilated.  No prisoners were taken from them.  

The turkey shoot continued for more than two hours.  At one point some supporting troops did manage to flank the crater and advance inside the Confederate line taking trenches in brutal hand-to-hand combat. But there were not enough of them, and they could not be reinforced.  After holding out for a short while they were cleaned out of the trenches by a counterattack.

As the battle wound down, Confederate troops summarily executed Black soldiers trying to surrender.  Fearing retaliation by the Rebels, some White Union troops bayonetted the Blacks as well.  The Colored Division was virtually wiped out as an effective unit.

In all Union forces suffered 3,798 casualties including 504 killed, 1,881 wounded, and 1,413 missing or captured.  The Confederates lost 1,491—361 killed, 727 wounded, and 403 missing or captured.

 

The Crater after the battle. 

Probably the best chance of the year at an early end to the war was thrown away.  Grant reported to Army Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck, “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war…Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

The finger pointing and blaming began immediately.  A Court of Inquiry pinned the rap on Burnside, who was relieved of command and never entrusted with another.  His reputation was ruined beyond repair.  All of his division commanders were censured, especially Ledlie and Ferrero.

One of the few to come out of the affair with an enhanced reputation was Pleasants, whose troops were not engaged in the actual fighting that day.  He was rewarded for his plan and execution with a brevet to Brigadier General.

At war’s end in 1865 the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War opened an inquiry into the debacle.  Pleasants testified that if Burnside had been allowed to retain his original order of Battle, that the operation would have been a success.  Grant concurred.  He wrote to the Commission:

General Burnside wanted to put his colored division in front, and I believe if he had done so it would have been a success. Still I agreed with General Meade as to his objections to that plan. General Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front (we had only one division) and it should prove a failure, it would then be said and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front.

In the end, the commission agreed, laying the blame at Meade’s feet and exonerating Burnside.  Little good did that do for the general’s already destroyed reputation.

On the Confederate side Mahone was hailed a hero and became one of Lee’s most trusted division commanders in the last year of the war.

 

Far from the battle site where they were slaughtered the 28th Regiment U.S. Colored Troops are commemorated by a marker in Indianapolis, the city where the regiment was raised.

The Siege of Petersburg ground on for months more into a new year.  Union successes elsewhere, especially William Tecumseh Sherman’s operations in the Deep South, were sealing the fate of the Confederacy.  After Grant’s bloody Wilderness Campaign offensive, Lee was finally forced out of his trenches.  Richmond fell.  Lee surrendered.  The South was defeated.

But had the operation at the Crater gone as planned, maybe a million lives might have been saved.