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Octavius Valentine Catto (February 22, 1839 – October 10, 1871) was a black educator, intellectual, and civil rights activist in Philadelphia. He became principal of male students at the Institute for Colored Youth, where he had also been educated. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, in a prominent mixed-race family, he moved north as a boy with his family. He became educated and served as a teacher. As a man, he also became known as a top cricket and baseball player in 19th-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Coverage of his murder appeared in the October 21, 1871 issue of The National Standard: A Women’s Suffrage and Temperance Journal

Ku-Klux in Philadelphia: Death of Octavius V. Catto

(The National Standard, October 21, 1871) The death of Octavius V. Catto, one of the victims of the disgraceful riot in Philadelphia on the 10th inst., (the day of the State election in Pennsylvania), is an illustration of the caste spirit not prevailing in our midst, as virulent, if not as potent, as the murderous hatred animating the Ku-Klux banditti of the South. In the city of the North, the classic birth-place of Independence, the city the home of so many philanthropies, and owning so many of the illustrious, the benevolent and loyal-hearted as her children, in open day, guiltless of any offence save that he was of a despised race, a colored man, there was assassinated a patriot, a scholar, a Christian gentleman, whose life, character, and rareness of ability would have adorned any race or time.

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(The Charleston Mercury) MOBILE, April 26, 1862  – A dispatch, just received from Jackson, Mississippi, says: ‘Thirteen of the enemy gunboats have anchored in the river opposite the city of New Orleans . A proposition made by the Confederates to evacuate the place is now pending. Various exciting rumors are afloat. The foregoing, however, is reliable. As telegraphic communication with New Orleans is closed, the above information must have been brought to Jackson by railroad.

Frank Leslie

Frank Leslie’s Weekly, later often known as Leslie’s Weekly, actually began life as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Founded in 1855 and continued until 1922, it was an American illustrated literary and news publication, and one of several started by publisher and illustrator Frank Leslie. John Y. Foster was the first editor of the Weekly, which came out on Tuesdays. While only 30 copies of the first edition were printed, by 1897 its circulation had grown to an estimated 65,000 copies.

These weekly papers were large quarto in size, about 12″ by 16″, and each consisted of sixteen pages to the issue. They followed a tested and proven formula of carefully combining elements of war, politics, art, science, travel and exploration, literature and the fine arts in each issue, enhanced with between 16 and 32 illustrations.

Throughout its decades of existence, Frank Leslie’s Weekly provided illustrations and reports — first with woodcuts and Daguerreotypes, later with more advanced forms of photography — of wars from John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry and the Civil War until the Spanish-American War and the First World War. It also gave extensive coverage to less martial events such as the Klondike gold rush of 1897, the laying of the 1858 Atlantic Cable and the San Francisco earthquake.

News Brevities (March 1870)

• CANADA has fifty-seven snow-shoe clubs.
• PINEAPPLE fritters are a Florida delicacy.
• BRAZILIAN troops draw rations of dog meat.
• CHRISTMAS has been made a legal holiday in Ohio.
• SPIRITUALISM is called “Spiritism” in Australia.
• MACON, GA., has an ox that weighs 4,545 pounds.
• OLLIVIER favors the abolition of capital punishment.
• PHILADELPHIA has executed but twenty-five criminals since 1789.
• CINCINNATI proposes to make itself a city of forty-two square miles.
• LONDON has its first street railway. The carriages are drawn by horses.
• MAINE has spent $21,000,000 for its six hundred and seventy-two miles of railroad.
• MR. BURLINGAME, the Boston “Post” says, leaves a memory to be crowned only with myrtle.
• MILWAUKEE is to have an Irish daily and weekly paper. The company has been chartered.
• THE Chinese in San Francisco held a jubilee on January 30, the first day of the Chinese new year.
• TWO HUNDRED of the gentlemen at a late Tuileries court ball are said to have worn hired court suits.
• A GOTTINGEN professor has discovered some very minute diamonds in a specimen of Oregon platinum.
• A LADY physician of Lafayette, Ind., is honest enough to return her professional income at $2,500.
• BOSTON shipowners are signing a petition asking Congress to abolish the laws allowing extra pay to seamen.
• THE number of skilled workmen out of employment in England is said to be between seventy and eighty thousand.
• A LOYAL undertaker of Calcutta hoisted a huge “Welcome” over his shop-door in honor of Prince Alfred’s coming.
• THE English soldier in India is to be allowed to wear a beard, but it must be cut periodically —that is, trimmed to a full point.
• THE Rev. Mrs. Phœbe A. Hannaford has received and accepted a call to the pastorship of a Universalist church in New Haven.
• THE Paris papers tell how an English lady was shown out of the Prefect’s ball because she brought her pet terrier in her handkerchief.
• THE Board of Immigration of Honolulu have sent an agent to China to promote the immigration of the Chinese to the Sandwich Islands.
• THE cost of telegraphic dispatches in Australia has been reduced to one shilling for twelve words, and one penny for every additional word.
• THE Rhode Island Democratlc State Convention is to be held in Providence, on Thursday, March 17, to nominate candidates for State officers.
• EASTERN Florida congratulates itself upon its vigor, life and spirit, indicated by its rapid growth, by its large immigration , and by the rapid increase in the value of real estate.
• THERE were several severe shocks of earthquake recently on the Island of Hawaii. The summit of the volcano Mauna Loa is shrouded in smoke, indicating that the fires in the crater are again active.
• THE bill endorsing the first mortgage bonds of the Mobile and Montgomery Railroad, to the amount of $2,500,000, has passed both houses of the Alabama Legislature by the constitutional majority.
• JOHN NEAL says that out of 544 cases brought before the Superior Court of Maine, in six terms, only ninety-nine went to a jury. That is, the people preferred the decision of a judge in 405 cases.
• THE Board of Supervisors for the County of Milwaukee, Wis., have tendered the new Court-House, to cost nearly $1,000,000, to the State for a Capitol, provided the Capital is moved to Milwaukee.
• ON the 22d of February, outrages were committed on Chinamen in San Francisco, which threatened to produce a riot; but a heavy rain and a strong force of police combined, dispersed the gathering crowds.
• THE Yale Navy have voted not to accept the proposition of Harvard to open the annual races to the whole university; therefore, only the academical department can be represented in the crews next summer.
• NAVAL honors were paid by the vessels of our squadron at Hong Kong, and by the foreign vessels present at the time, to the memory of the late Mr. Stanton, Franklin Pierce, and Rear-Admiral Stewart.
• EDWARD AND DANIEL AGNEW have been arrested in Reading, Penn., for bigamy. They have families in Philadelphia, but represented themselves in Reading as single men, and were recently married in that city.
• AT a meeting of the presidents of three of the freight lines leading from Louisville, the tariff was reduced from sixty to fifty cents on all fourth-class fast freight. They also adopted a resolution to adhere to these rates.
• THE Auburn “Advertiser” learns that the Auburn Theological Seminary is soon to have a library building, suited, in all respects, to its needs. The corner-stone of the Seminary was laid just fifty years ago next May.
• REAR-ADMIRAL ROWAN, in command of the Asiatic Squadron, informs the Navy Department that all is quiet on that station, with the exception of occasional piracies and the “murder of a missionary now and then” by the Chinese .
• THE Sacramento “Union” states that a set of railway speculators are proposing to the California Legislature to pass a law to enable them to fasten a bonded debt of $1,000,000 on the County of San Bernardino, when the whole taxable property of San Bernardino is $500,000.
• THE workingwomen of Boston, by a unanimous vote, have passed the subjoined resolution: “That we will not become parties to any attempted encroachments on the legitimate sphere of man’s duties, and therefore we respectfully, but firmly, remonstrate against legislation in favor of suffrage for women.”
• COL. BERNARD, with detachments of the First and Eighth U. S. Cavalry, had a series of running fights with the Indians in the Dragoon Mountain, in Arizona, on the 28th of January. Thirteen Indians were killed, and two were taken prisoners. The Indian camp and a large amount of material were destroyed.

CRUEL WORDS AS MUCH A GROUND
FOR DIVORCE AS PHYSICAL INJURIES.

Judge Sedgwick, of New York, has filed in a divorce suit an opinion that is novel as well as important to wives. Cruel and inhuman treatment forms one statutory cause for limited divorce, with alimony and care of children; but hitherto the current of opinion has been that this phrase signifies treatment of an exclusively physical nature.

The judge in referring to the allegations and evidence against the ill-treatment of the wife by the husband in Kennedy vs. Kennedy, said: “This constitutes cruel and inhuman treatment as meant by the statute, even if no bodily injury was done to her. There was sleeplessness and the consequences of nervous shock and derangement, which things are as definitely ‘bodily’ as the results of a blow, and last longer unless the blow is murderous. The plaintiff should have judgment for a separation.”

In this case the husband had employed his tongue as the sole weapon instead of his hand, a knife or stick.

The rapid advance in public sentiment is truly wonderful. What a change from the time a man might beat his wife with a club or whip her with a stick as big as his thumb, down to this decision which forbids abusive language toward her. Great pains were taken in olden time to save a man from his wife’s tongue, in case she felt like using that little instrument in retaliation. There were stocks and the ducking stool for scolding wives, little implements of wife subjugation brought along by our puritan fathers to keep in due subordination the puritan mothers.

All honor to Judge Sedgwick for his decision against a husband’s cruel words, from which many a woman suffers whose husband prides himself upon the kindness with which he treats her; killing kindness, for no more “cruel and inhuman treatment” is possible than the tongue can give. Words kill.

Source: National Citizen and Ballot Box, September 1878

This item appeared in the August 26, 1864 issue of The Charleston Mercury. This newspaper is part of our Civil War Collection, Part I: A Newspaper Perspective. A Newspaper Perspective contains major articles gleaned from over 2,500 issues of The New York Herald, The Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Enquirer, published between November 1, 1860 and April 15, 1865.

A correspondent of the Atlanta Confederacy says:

Andersonville was an interesting and novel spectacle to me. The Yankee prisoners within the stockade, about 30,000 in number, when closely viewed, resemble more in their motions a hive of bees seen through a glass opening that anything else I can think of. The area of the stockade is being rapidly increased by General Winder, who is evidently desirous of doing all in his power to make them comfortable.

Detailed plan of Andersonville Prison Camp, showing Sweetwater Lick to the north, and the Southwestern & Enfaula Railroad to the east. Shows the main forts, stockade and cemetery by Robert Knox Sneden (1832-1918).

They have thousands of little huts and tents, variously constructed, which seem to protect them from the scorching rays of the sun and the inclemency of the weather generally. Gen. W. informed me that very soon the lumber would be procurable to put up temporary shanties for their comfort.

A fine but small stream of water runs through the stockade, supplying them with water for bathing and other purposes. I saw hundreds of them bathing in this stream at once. Others, not engaged in bathing, were walking about among their fellows, each, in the language of the famous ballad of Young Tamerlane, ‘mother naked man.’ I learn that many of them have bartered away nearly all their clothing for tobacco. On the whole, their condition, bad as it is, and bad as it deserves to be, seemed better than could have been expected.

In spite, however, of every effort to treat them with humanity, their mortality is great, averaging about one hundred per day. About 2000 are in hospital. Over 36,000 have been received since the establishment of Andersonville as a military prison.

The prisoners are said to be very docile, but greatly exasperated at the Royal Ape (President Lincoln) for not exchanging them. They were greatly elated last evening at finding a paragraph in one of our newspapers stating that a general exchange of prisoners would soon be resumed.

The defences of Andersonville are admirably planned by the skillful veteran, General Winder. Formidable batteries of artillery bear directly on the prisoners, in the event of an emeute; and strong works, with artillery, defend the place against hostilities from without. A strong force of infantry is there also. Raiders would find themselves woefully mistaken if they were to attempt the liberation of the prisoners.’