Slavery and indentured servitude were major components of the early American economy. Enslaved workers performed most of the manual and domestic labor on the large plantations owned by several presidents and their colonial ancestors, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. While enslaved workers were primarily African and Native Americans, indentured servants in the late 1600s to early 1700s were usually impoverished white men of English descent who resorted to selling themselves into servitude in exchange for room and board, and sometimes wages. Relatively few African Americans in late 18th-century America became indentured servants. By the time of the American Revolution, the practice of indentured servitude had declined in favor of using “cheaper” enslaved Africans.
Connecticut became the last state in the the union (which consisted of 48 states at the time) to ratify the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights — 150 years after the list of amendments were first proposed.
Why the delay? It certainly wasn’t because Connecticans didn’t place a high value on securing individual rights — on the contrary, Connecticut’s colonial government had codified one of the earliest set of individual rights in American history in 1650, which included protections against murder, slander, forgery, and theft.
In fact, the Connecticut General Assembly had actually voted in favor of ratifying the ten amendments back in 1789, but a procedural inconsistency between the upper and lower houses of the state legislature had prevented the vote from becoming official. Thankfully, the General Assembly’s technical error didn’t jeopardize the adoption of the Bill of Rights. According to the Constitution, 3/4 of the states had to approve of the amendments in order for them to become law, and that threshold had already been met by the time Connecticut would have registered its formal approval.
On April 19, 1939, as the nation celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Connecticut followed the example of Massachusetts and Georgia (the only two other states who had failed to officially ratify the Bill of Rights in the 18th century) and held a symbolic vote to ratify the amendments. Both houses of the General Assembly unanimously approved the measure, and thus Connecticut became the last state in the union to ratify the U.S. Bill of Rights — today in Connecticut history.
As the major Allied offensive masterminded by Robert Nivelle was failing miserably on the Western Front, British forces in Palestine make their second attempt to capture the city of Gaza from the Ottoman army on April 17, 1917.
In the wake of the failed British assault on Gaza of March 26, 1917, Sir Archibald Murray, commander of British forces in the region, misrepresented the battle as a clear Allied victory, claiming Turkish losses to be triple what they actually were; in truth, at 2,400 they were significantly lower than the British total of 4,000. This led London’s War Office to believe their troops were on the verge of a significant breakthrough in Palestine and to order Murray to renew the attack immediately.
Though the previous assault had caught the Turks by surprise, the second one did not: the German general in charge of the troops at Gaza, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, was by now well aware of British intentions. By the time the British launched their second round of attacks on April 17, the Turks had accordingly strengthened their defenses and extended their forces along the road from Gaza to the nearby town of Beersheba.
Still, as in the First Battle of Gaza, British soldiers outnumbered Turkish troops by a ratio of two to one. Moreover, the British employed eight heavy Mark-1 tanks and 4,000 gas shells (used for the first time on the Palestine front) to ensure victory. The tanks proved unsuitable for the hot, dry desert conditions; however, three of them were captured by Turkish forces, which again put up a blisteringly effective defense despite their inferior numbers. After three days and heavy losses—the British casualty figure, of 6,444 men, was three times that of the Turks—Murray’s subordinate commander, Sir Charles Dobell, was forced to call off the British attacks, ending the Second Battle of Gaza with the city still firmly in Turkish control.
As a result of this second failure to capture Gaza, the Allies called in reinforcements, including Italian and French troops, which arrived from Europe in time to join the third and final Battle of Gaza that fall. Under the new regional command of Sir Edmund Allenby, the Allies finally broke through and gained control of Gaza in November 1917, leaving them free to move ahead toward Palestine’s capital city, Jerusalem, which fell into Allied hands on December 9.
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