1884 | Political Events
Political Events
Egypt's khedive Mohammed Tewfik gives former Sudanese governor Charles "Chinese" Gordon executive powers, and Gordon moves out to rescue Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan from al-Mahdi (see 1883). Now 51, Gordon is refused in his requests to London for Zobeir and Turkish troops. He nevertheless manages to rescue some 2,500 women, children, and wounded men from Khartoum but is hemmed in there by the Mahdi beginning March 12 (see 1885).
Chancellor Bismarck cables Cape Town April 24 that South-West Africa (Namibia) is a German colony. The German consul at Tunis proclaims a protectorate over the coast of Togoland July 5 and a protectorate over the Cameroons Coast a week later. German explorer Carl Peters, 27, founds the Society for German Colonization and journeys later in the year to East Africa's Usambara Mountains, where several tribal chiefs surrender their territories to him (see German East Africa Company, 1885).
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza returns to the Congo, founds a town that will be called Brazzaville, obtains official French financial backing, and begins to establish a colony three times the size of France that he will govern from 1886 to 1898 (see 1880; 1891).
France acquires Madagascar (see 1882), completes her conquest of the French Congo, and acquires Tonkin in southeast Asia (see 1882), but Premier Ferry is swept out of office in March in a burst of public outrage over the high cost of the hostilities in Tonkin. A new government headed by (Eugène-) Henri Brisson, 49, survives only until December 29 but Brisson will be premier once again in 1898.
Buganda's progressive but autocratic kabaka (ruler) Mutesa I (Mutea Walugembe Mukaabya) dies at Nabulgala in October at age 46 (approximate), having consolidated his East African kingdom, reformed its military system, expanded his fleet of war canoes on Lake Victoria, and welcomed Christian missionaries as a way to use European influence against what he has perceived as a threat from Egypt to the north. He is succeeded by Mwanga, who will reign until 1888 (and again from 1890 to 1897) but will soon become jealous of the Europeans' power and try to drive them out (see religion, 1885).
The Berlin West Africa Conference opens November 15 with delegates from 14 nations, including the United States, to decide questions related to Central Africa's Congo River basin. Portugal has proposed the conference as various European countries eye each other's colonial expansionism with growing apprehension (see 1885).
The Ilbert Bill enacted by the Indian Legislative Assembly January 25 allows Indian magistrates to preside over cases involving British subjects. First proposed last year and severely weakened by compromise (a British subject may demand a jury, half of whose members are Europeans), the measure creates a furor in Calcutta's business community, among Bengal indigo planters, and among other British colonials, exacerbating antagonisms between the raj and India's new westernized middle class. Former British governor-general of Canada Frederick Temple, earl of Dufferin, arrives at New Delhi as viceroy of India, succeeding G. F. S. Robinson, marquess of Ripon, whose reforms have antagonized the British community in the subcontinent (see Indian National Congress, 1885; Burma, 1886). Mansur Ali Khan Feradun Jah dies at Murshidabad November 5 at age 54; the last nabob of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, he retired in 1880.
French colonial authorities crown a 14-year-old nephew of the late emperor Tu Doc as emperor of Annam (later Vietnam) following the assassination or dethroning of some other qualified heirs. Ung Lich adopts the name Ham Nghi and will reign briefly under the regency of Nguyen van Tuong and Ton That Thuyet, who have conspired to make Ung Lich emperor as a means of undermining French control (see 1885).
Sino-French negotiations break down in August, a French fleet of eight warships and two torpedo boats opens fire August 22 on an 11-ship Chinese fleet at Fuzhou, all but two of the Chinese ships are of wood, and within an hour every one of them has been sunk or set afire after a skirmish that has left 521 Chinese dead or missing (French casualties total five dead). China declares war on France October 26 following French bombardment of Taiwan to punish the Chinese for not agreeing to France's protectorate of Indochina and refusal to pay indemnities (see 1885).
Pro-Japanese reformists in Korea attempt a coup d'état in December, but Chinese military forces in the country block the effort (see 1882), and although Korean trade with Japan in this decade will be far larger than Korean trade with China, the Chinese will strengthen their political influence and commercial privileges.
The War of the Pacific that began in 1879 between Chile and Peru ends April 4 with the Treaty of Valparaiso that deprives Bolivia of access to the sea (see 1883). Victorious Chile gained the Peruvian province of Tarapaca last year in the Treaty of Ancona and now gains nitrate-rich Bolivian territories (see Haber process, 1908; Grace, 1890).
Former Colombian president Rafael Nuñez wins election to a second 2-year term following a rebellion by Radicals and Liberals that has forced him to ally himself with the Conservatives (see 1880; constitution, 1886).
New York State assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt, 25, receives word at Albany February 13 that his wife, Alice Lee, 22, has been delivered of a baby girl in the family's town house at 6 West 57th Street, but a second telegram arrives within hours advising him that his mother is dying and Alice as well. Heavy fog slows his train back from Albany and by the time he reaches her side Alice is comatose with Bright's disease (chronic kidney failure); his mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, dies of pneumonia in the small hours of February 14 at age 48, and Alice dies in his arms at 2 o'clock that afternoon, leaving Roosevelt in despair. The Assembly votes to adjourn in an unprecedented show of respect. Roosevelt's baby daughter is given the name Alice Lee after her mother's funeral, but Roosevelt pays the infant little heed, plunging himself into a frenzy of political activity, shuttling back and forth between New York and Albany by night train, speaking out for his Reform Charter Bill, inspecting the city's infamous Ludlow Street Jail, interviewing witnesses who come before his City Affairs Committee, and making speeches.
Former Confederate secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin dies at Paris May 6 at age 72. He has enjoyed such outstanding success in his legal career that he has been able to afford a mansion in the French capital; former U.S. Supreme Court justice Noah Swayne dies at New York June 8 at age 79.
The Republican convention at Chicago nominates Maine-born former secretary of state James G. (Gillespie) Blaine, now 54. New York-born Washington, D.C., lawyer and orator Robert Green Ingersoll, now 51, called him a "plumed knight" in an eloquent address to the 1876 convention, Sen. Roscoe Conkling opposed his nomination then, but Blaine has won the support of Tammany Hall boss Thomas C. Platt over opposition from New York reformers. Blaine has a record of corruption, and Democrats chant, "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,/ The Continental liar from the state of Maine."
Wall Street lawyer and financier William C. Whitney, 43, outsmarts older politicians at the Democratic National Convention and secures the presidential nomination for Governor Grover Cleveland, now 47. The political slogan "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" defeats James G. Blaine and helps elect Grover Cleveland to the presidency in the first Democratic Party national victory since James Buchanan won in 1856. A Buffalo newspaper has run a story in July alleging that Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child 10 years ago, and it is true that as sheriff of Buffalo he met widow Maria Halpin (née Crofts), a woman 2 years his junior with two grown children, who worked in a fancy dress shop and was musical and fluent in French. She had had affairs with some other men, and while Cleveland has expressed doubts in private that he was the father he has nevertheless supported the child; preachers denounce him for being a bachelor and living in sin, but Democrats capture the crucial Catholic vote as a result of remarks made October 29 at the Fifth Avenue Hotel by local clergyman Samuel D. Burchard ("We are Republicans, and don't propose to have our party identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion"), New York City voters—many of them Irishmen—have taken exception, and they give Cleveland a narrow 1,149-vote edge in the state that gives him a plurality of 20,000 votes out of nearly 10 million total, 219 electoral votes to 189 for Blaine. When Republicans chant, "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" Democrats reply, "Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha." New York State's electoral votes provide the margin of victory (Cleveland also carries New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana plus the Solid South), and President Cleveland will make William C. Whitney his secretary of the navy.