Q. David Bowers
Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became one of the great abolitionists of the era, began publication of the North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper, in Rochester, New York. Douglass was a popular speaker, especially in New York and New England, and crowds gathered to hear him. Meanwhile, slavery was more entrenched than ever in the South.
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was published and would make a deep imprint on the fortunes of mankind and of the world, particularly Asia and Europe. In Britain, an economic depression took place, causing provincial banks to fail, and even straining the Bank of England.
New York City had 16 daily newspapers, some in foreign languages. The United States issued adhesive postage stamps for the first time. Denominations of 5¢ and 10¢ were printed by private banknote companies under contract to the government.
In California at New Helvetia (Sacramento), John Sutter managed a vast empire of cattle-raising, lumbering, and other enterprises, using Sutter's Fort as a trading post and gathering spot. All was relatively peaceful in his expansive commune. Toward the end of the year he contemplated building a lumber mill on the American River, in a far outpost of his land, and before long he would send John Marshall and others to erect such a facility. Little did he know that because of this, America would never be the same: in January 1848 Marshall found gold.
The American Medical Association was founded in Philadelphia, but it did not gain effectiveness until later in the century. (Medicine itself suffered from a great credibility gap until about World War II.) In 1847, in many areas a license was not needed to practice medicine or even to perform surgery. There was no regulation of drugs and other potions, and patent medicine vendors tried to outdo each other with increasingly preposterous claims. Years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "if the entire materia medica were dumped into the ocean, so much the better for mankind, and so much the worse for the fish."
Bathing was not popular. Virtually no homes had bath-tubs or showers, and some suggested that wearing flannel clothes throughout the winter, without bathing, was best for one's health. The Water Cure was being practiced by some physicians and . others who dared to be different, and who claimed that bathing and the application of water by different methods and at different temperatures was a cure for nearly every ailment. Thomsonian, homeopathic, and other branches of medicine were embraced by still other physicians. Great is the power of the placebo effect!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's bittersweet, epic poem, "Evangeline," was published to wide acclaim. So were Jane Eyre, a novel by Charlotte Bronte, and Wuthering Heights, by her sister Emily Jane.
Following yet another failure of the Irish potato crop, more than 200,000 inhabitants of the Emerald Isle left for foreign lands, including America, paying about $15 to $25 per person, basic fare, plus food. Thousands of people from the Netherlands likewise came to America, and settled mainly in the Midwest.