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Few expected Britain to take this lying down. The risk of war sent the American stock market into a dive. Government bonds found no buyers. News from Britain confirmed fears of an ugly confrontation. The British expressed outrage at Wilkes’s “impressment” of Mason and Slidell. The Union Jack had been flouted. The jingo press clamored for war. Prime Minister Palmerston told his cabinet: “You may stand for this but damned if I will.”26 The cabinet voted to send Washington an ultimatum demanding an apology and release of the Confederate diplomats. Britain ordered troops to Canada and strengthened the western Atlantic fleet. War seemed imminent. Although the Anglophobe press in America professed to welcome this prospect, cooler heads recognized the wisdom of Lincoln’s reported words: “One war at a time.” The Union army’s capacity to carry on even that one war was threatened by an aspect of the Trent crisis unknown to the public and rarely mentioned by historians. In 1861, British India was the Union’s source of saltpeter, the principal ingredient of gunpowder. The war had drawn down saltpeter stockpiles to the danger point. In the fall of 1861 Seward sent a member of the du Pont company to England on a secret mission to buy all available supplies of saltpeter there and on the way from India. The agent did so, and was loading five ships with 2,300 tons of the mineral when news of the Trent reached London. The government clamped an embargo on all shipments to the United States until the crisis was resolved. No settlement, no saltpeter.27 This issue among others was very much on Lincoln’s and Seward’s minds during the tense weeks of December 1861. The problem was how to defuse the crisis without the humiliation of bowing to an ultimatum.
The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom
James M. McPherson
And they were so wrong. My philosophy as a baseball operator could not be more simple. It is to create the greatest enjoyment for the greatest number of people. Not by detracting from the ball game but by adding a few moments of fairly simple pleasure. My intention was always to draw people to the park and make baseball fans out of them.
Veeck--as in Wreck
Bill Veeck, Ed Linn
Profitability: Golden Geese Over 50 Years The first step to identifying really valuable companies is to find ones with superior profits. If you screened for a selection of especially lucrative businesses, how long did the golden goose keep laying, and does the answer vary by industry? The Dimson studies haven’t yet touched on these questions. Most widely available commercial databases get really spotty beyond twenty-five years of history. Using a Moody’s Handbook from 1965, which had full reports on 1,000 companies, I excluded banks and insurance companies. Then I picked out the ninety companies with operating profit margins of 20 percent or better in 1964. They were not democratically distributed across industries. There were fourteen railroads, a dozen pharmaceuticals, and many consumer products and mining companies. From each of thirty-two industries, I selected one representative company by using an unscientific combination of largest sales, largest market value, and highest profit margin. The retailing, trucking, steel, auto, semiconductor, and unbranded food industries lacked any companies with 20 percent profit margins. Jumping ahead half a century to 2014, the advantage of these companies had narrowed, but their profits were still superior to the reported S&P 500 average of 10.5 percent.
Big Money Thinks Small
Joel Tillinghast
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