After the whole brouhaha over Barack Obama‘s support for gay marriage and Newsweek‘s declaration that he is our first “gay” president, the historian James Loewen reminds us of James Buchanan. The dude was straight-up gay without even trying very hard to hide it! For instance, on May 13, 1844, the future president wrote a letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt describing his social life after the departure for Europe of his great love, Senator William Rufus King:
I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.
Imagine if the news media got hold of such a letter today!
Anyway, I don’t spent too much of my time contemplating presidential sexuality (honest!) but today I did happen to wonder about Buchanan after reading about his early romance with Anne C. Coleman, daughter of a Pennsylvania millionaire. Buchanan, then twenty-eight, courted her during the summer of 1819, but they quarreled and she broke things off. Soon after she died suddenly, possibly of suicide. “I have lost the only earthly object of my affections,” Buchanan wrote, “without whom life now presents to me a dreary blank. My prospects are all cut off, and I feel that my happiness will be buried with her in the grave.”
The book I was consulting, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents by William A. DeGregorio (updated 1997), mentions not a thing about Buchanan being gay, and not being a Buchanan scholar, I thought, “Hey, maybe he was just bummed about his girlfriend’s suicide. After all, her father blamed Buchanan and wouldn’t even allow him to attend the funeral. I would probably remain a bachelor my whole life, too.”
No! says Loewen. The truth is right there in that letter, if you’ll only just believe it. Which some people don’t, apparently.
Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall storyline is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the nineteenth century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.
Thomas Jefferson loved music—it “is the favorite passion of my soul,” he wrote—but according to Bonnie Gordon, “little attention has been paid to what he heard and how he processed those sounds.” A professor of music at the University of Virginia (and, no small thing, a fellow violist), Gordon helped to organize a conference here, Soundscapes of Jefferson’s America, that happened in March. Wait, in March? How did we miss this?!
Well, we did. But now Gordon’s piece in Slate tells us that Jefferson’s world was a noisy one: “The sounds of cicadas, thunder, speech, bells, and horse hooves animated early America. Music resounded in taverns, parlors, political rallies, official celebrations, and dances.” He didn’t have headphones to block stuff out, of course, but he did know enough to put the slave quarters and workspaces down the hill, thus minimizing the chatter and even the singing. While Jefferson wrote that his enslaved Africans were “more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time,” their compositions were obviously inferior. Humorously, Gordon offers up this couplet from Jefferson’s own music collection:
When first I saw Betty and made my complaint
I whined like a fool and she sighed like a Saint
Jefferson’s skill on the violin, meanwhile, is likely a myth. Or so claims Gordon. I’m not sure I can agree. My feeling is that if Blythe Danner says it, it must be true.
Whatever the case, Gordon, in using Jefferson as her hook, gives short shrift in her piece to just how fundamentally different early Virginians relationship to sound was from our own. For more on that, I recommend How Early America Sounded (2003) by Richard Cullen Rath. I reviewed the book a number of years ago for the Christian Science Monitor, and what struck me was how sound—not sight, as today—ruled the lives of early Americans. The sound of bells, for instance, helped to regulate the size of towns; to live outside earshot was to live dangerously outside the government’s protection. And it was thunder, which is to say sound, that killed, not lightning.
At the storm’s onset Strachey remarked that “the wind singing and whistling most unusually” had caused the Sea Venture ”to cast off our pinnace,” which was in tow. One ship was thus lost even before the hurricane had descended in earnest. “A dreadful storm and hideous” immediately ensued, “swelling and roaring as if it were by fits.” Immediately, the sound of the storm made communications onboard impossible. The “clamours” of women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomfort” and the prayers and shouts of the more seasoned crew were all “drowned in the winds and the winds in thunder.” There was “nothing heard that could give comfort.”
With this in mind, one is tempted to revisit that couplet Gordon quoted, the one about Betty and “my complaint.” “It might make a UVA frat boy blush,” Gordon writes, but isn’t it also interesting that rather than ask us to picture the dirty deed, the writer instead insists that we hear it?
IMAGE:Wreck of Sea Venture by W. H. Harrington, 1981 (Bermuda National Trust and Bermuda Maritime Museum)
On this day in 1843 Sallie Anne Corbell was born in Nansemond County, the eldest of nine children and the only one of them to grow up and marry George E. Pickett. It was marriage number two for George, who out West had hooked up with a Haida Indian and even produced a son. But Sallie stole his heart. Heck, she stole everybody’s heart, or so she’d have you believe. After the war, she changed her name to LaSalle and fashioned herself the “Child-bride of the Confederacy.”*
According to our entry, “She subtracted years from her age (sometimes five, sometimes even more) and told stories from the perspective of a child, smoothing the complexities of the antebellum South and slavery into a self-justifying myth soaked in the ‘fragrance of the snowy magnolias.’” She also wrote a book called Pickett and His Men (1913), and it’s only mildly surprising that she likely made most of it up.
By my lights, though, her best book is Kunnoo Sperits and Others, published in 1900 and claiming to offer a “phonetically genuine” guide to African American speech. For instance, here Mrs. General Pickett demonstrates how an African servant “preached the gospel of contentment”: “You ‘bleeged ter be satusfied wid w’at you’s got. Nobody hain’t got ebbyt’ing in dis worl’.”
Which is true, and why the Lost Cause tells us the slaves were so danged faithful. This was especially so with mammies. Listening to her own rendering of phonetically genuine speech transformed the former Miss Corbell into “a child again, looking up into the dear dusky face of that beloved black mammy, listening with my unhurt, unclouded faith to the folklore of her speculative midnight race, as she solved in her own random, shadowy way the dim mysteries of creation …”
It almost goes without saying that this made our author famous. Help! Somebody should make a movie!
* That honor might better be reserved for Helen Longstreet, but who am I to judge?
A version of this post was originally published on May 16, 2011.
ADDITIONALLY: Here is a program to one of Mrs. General Pickett’s lectures.
IMAGE: “‘Twuz a long time ago“ from Kunnoo Sperits and Others by LaSalle Corbell Pickett (1900)
A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown’s Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery–the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.
These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.
Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly‘s course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.
The Richmond Examiner is always a good read. As our entry on Civil War newspapers explains, it was the go-to organ of dissent in the Confederate capital, with editor John M. Daniel‘s criticism of Jefferson Davis becoming more intense and more personal as the war dragged on and defeat loomed. So above is the top of the front page for this day in 1863; you can read the whole four-page issue here[pdf]. What was going on in Richmond?
“Baron Wardener,” a “titled Dutchman” captured by John S. Mosby and imprisoned for a time at Libby, “has returned to the North on parole, and ventilated his Teutonic spleen by the publication of some of the most barefaced and monstrous lies in regard to the management of the prison and its officers,” including the claim that he was fed “flesh of defunct mules“!
The new Confederate national flag “was again displayed from the capitol yesterday, and met the approving gaze of thousands.” This was the Second National Flag, described here.
On the very day that Stonewall Jackson was buried in Lexington, the Examiner scolded Richmonders who attended a recital dedicated to the late general. “The production was in rhyming verse, occupied about ten minutes in its delivery, and was excellent in sentiment,” the editors wrote; “but we thought the boisterous applause that greeted some of its most solemn passages, ill-times and out of place. Will theatre audiences never learn discretion?“
Casualties (above and beyond Jackson) were still being tallied after the bloody Battle of Chancellorsville, fought a week or two earlier, with the paper noting that the Richmond Zouaves, Company E, Forty-fourth Virginia Regiment, commanded by the future playwright, Captain Edward M. Alfriend, lost about half its men.
Just about a month and a half previously, the Bread Riot had turned the city on its head, and much of the Examiner‘s front page is given over to reports from various prosecutions of the rioters. Mary Duke is a typical case. Charged with rioting, the accused appeared before the judge “a finely dressed woman of forty, with a quantity of rouge on her face.” A citizen named George Watt was the first to testify:
Saw the accused in the riot at P. K. White’s, on Main street; when the crowd went round to Sweitzer’s, on Franklin street, I followed them; saw the woman crowd round Mr. Sweitzer’s door; saw a chuckle headed irishwoman assail the door with an axe; I rushed forward and seized the axe; three or four men then seized me; the accused was in the crowd pushing back the persons who were attempting to put down the riot; saw a navy revolver and leveled it at the gentlemen who were endeavoring to quell the riot; in the confusion some one got the pistol from her; after I had extricated myself from the crowd, the accused came to me and demanded her pistol …
Long story short, he said she could pick it up at his store next week. On her behalf, a man name Lampkin picked it up, claiming that the pistol was his and he had only loaned it to Mrs. Duke, whose name some claimed to be Lucy, not Mary. Whatever the case, the jury found Mrs. Duke guilty as charged and fined her $100 and sentenced her to six months in prison.
On this day 150 years ago, Union general Benjamin Franklin Butler, the military governor of New Orleans, issued his notorious General Orders No. 28, or what became known as the “woman order.” It declared that any woman who treated a Union soldier disrespectfully—spitting was the preferred method that spring—would be treated by the law as if she were a prostitute. “The edict,” writes the historian Chester G. Hearn, “was a little out of character for Butler, whose reverence for women was well established and untarnished by any hint of personal scandal. The general, however, had a short temper, and this trait, combined with his penchant for stimulating controversy, often dominated his actions.”
So true. And even though the order was not meant to suggest that the women literally were prostitutes, only that they be subject to equivalent penalties before the law, and only after they had done something so unladylike as to spit on a soldier, word of General Orders No. 28 “hit the streets of New Orleans like a giant keg of gunpowder.” Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, whose very name seemed a defense of courtly manners, was shocked … SHOCKED!
MEN OF THE SOUTH: Shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters, and our sisters be thus outraged by the ruffianly soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat at their pleasure the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse, friends, and drive back from our soil those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.
Butler, meanwhile, could just as easily offend those on his own side. Exempli gratia: two years later, President Lincoln was preparing for a touch reelection fight by looking for a new running mate. He sent Simon Cameron to chat with Butler, who, for all his failings as a general, had always been an able politician, at least in Massachusetts. Butler, however, valued his military prowess more highly than others and told the president’s emissary: “I would not quit the field to be Vice-President, even with himself [Lincoln] as President, unless he will give me … [assurances] that he will die or resign within three months after his inauguration.”
Butler, I believe, meant this as a joke. But it probably wasn’t all that funny then, and it’s a hell of a lot less funny now, and that’s even considering Alan Alda‘s fatuously delivered maxim in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): “Comedy is tragedy plus time!”
Cavalier Diner by Ralph W. Holsinger (undated). The Corner, University Avenue, Charlottesville. The image has been reversed. Notice, too, the two men unobtrusively reading the newspaper. And could that be Holsinger himself in the mirror behind the counter? (Holsinger Studio Collection, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia)
This interactive battles and casualties map of the Civil War was created by the Washington Post. That’s a screen shot above; you’ll have to go to the site to play with it. The Post explains its features:
Press the play button below to watch the war unfold over time. Drag the scrubber or click on the months and years to change the date range. Roll over the circles for more information on each battle. Casualties are defined as killed, wounded, missing and captured.
File this under … what? The odd twists and turns of history and politics? Whatever the case, it begins (for me) with a column just published by the British-born writer John Derbyshire. Recently fired from the National Review for writing a column (for another publication) in which he urged his own children to avoid black people, Derbyshire has reappeared, this time arguing on behalf of the much-maligned phrase “White Supremacist”:
Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.
As the National Review editor might put it: Needless to say, no one at Encyclopedia Virginia shares this view of history. What interested me, though, is that Derbyshire published his thoughts on a website called VDARE.com, whose logo looks like this:
The name, you might have guessed, refers to Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born in North America. Born on August 18, 1587, at Roanoke, she was the granddaughter of John White, the colony’s governor. Little Virginia disappeared along with the rest of the so-called Lost Colonists, including her parents, although some writers have claimed over the years that she reappeared as a white doe—hence the graphic element in VDARE’s logo.
In The White Doe: the Fate of Virginia Dare; an Indian Legend (1901), the Virginia-born writer Sallie Southall Cotten offers up this version of the story: After Dare rejects the advances of an Indian witch doctor, he turns her into a white doe. Her true love, an Indian hunter named Okisko, tracks her down and shoots her with a silver arrow. She magically transforms into a woman, only to die in his arms. Cotten tells all of this in verse, although she helpfully provides a critical explanation at the beginning. Apparently, Virginia’s blood ”melted from the silver arrow into the water of [a] spring.” This made the water disappear, except that there then sprouted the seedling of a Scuppernong tree, which grew into a beautiful retreat where Okisko could go and
cherish thoughts of his lost love, Virginia Dare, and marvel on the wonders of her death. Then it came to pass that when the fruit came upon this vine, lo! it was purple in hue instead of white like the other grapes, and yielded a red juice. Full of superstition, and still credulous of marvels, O-kis-ko imagined the change to be due to the magic arrow buried at its root. He gathered the grapes and pressed the juice from them and lo! it was red—it was the semblance of blood, Virginia Dare’s blood, absorbed from the water …
Just in case you missed it: the water turned to wine! And Virginia Dare is Jesus!
So what does any of this have to do with a website interested in publishing apologies for white supremacy? VDARE’s founder, Peter Brimelow, explains his reasoning here, and the best I can make out is that he sees Dare as symbolic of the vanishing white person in America. “It’s the immigration, stupid!” is a battle cry on this site, which advocates that American borders be “sealed,” illegal aliens “expelled,” and “alien enclaves … assimilated.”
But what was Virginia Dare if not an immigrant, an intruder, an “illegal”? Brimelow acknowledges this (sort of); yet, he can’t quite unravel the irony. Says Derbyshire: “I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group”—except maybe at Roanoke. But who wants to say that on a site called VDARE?
IMAGES:The White Doe by Sallie Southall Cotten (1901); Virginia Dareby Munroe Bell (2012)
From “Rewriting American History,” an article by Frances FitzGerald published in the New Yorker on February 26, 1979:
History textbooks for elementary and secondary schools are not like other kinds of histories. They serve a different function, and they have their own traditions, which continue independent of academic history writing. In the first place, they are essentially nationalistic histories. The first American-history text was written after the American Revolution, and because of it; and most texts are still accounts of the nation-state. In the second place, they are written not to explore but to instruct—to tell children what their elders want them to know about their country. This information is not necessarily what anyone considers the truth of things. Like time capsules, the texts contain the truths selected for posterity.
On this day in 1861, J. E. B. Stuart resigned from the United States Army, and whoever accepted it—Winfield Scott, maybe—most likely clenched his teeth and muttered, “All the best.” No so with Samuel Barron, a Hampton native who was a U.S. Navy midshipman at two years old (that’s not a typo), who reported for active duty at six, and who sailed aboard the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet before he was eleven. Salt water sluiced through this guy’s veins, and at the start of the Civil War the Navy needed as many like him as it could get. So when Barron decided to offer himself to the Confederacy, instead, Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, snorted with rage. Rather than accept Barron’s resignation, he straight-up fired him.
Poor manners, perhaps, but Barron now lives on in a Tumblr! (Let’s see your Tumblr, Mr. Secretary.) The Civil World was created by Friend of the Encyclopedia Henry A. Wiencek, a graduate student at the University of Texas–Austin. Wiencek is interested in the global implications of the war, and because Barron and others like him spent a good chunk of time in London and Paris, shuffling papers and dealing with politics—well, he gives Wiencek the opportunity to explore “the ways in which they challenged, contradicted or transcended the boundaries of their national identity.”
IMAGES:Samuel Barron (Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library); CSS Stonewall at Ferrol, Spain, March 1865. Barron served on the ship as a lieutenant. (U.S. Naval Historical Center)
BackStory with the American History Guys—our sister program at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities—hits the airwaves today as a weekly radio broadcast. This week’s episode, “Born in the USA,” is a fascinating one, dealing with the history of birth, personhood, citizenship, and, as it happens, naming. One of the “Guys” interviews Laura Wattenberg, the creator of The Baby Name Wizard, a website that tracks the popularity of names, and that informs memy name, Brendan, derives from the surname Branton. In Old English that translates to “dweller near the brushwood hill,” while the Irish-Gaelic actually means “prince”—which, let’s face it, probably makes more sense. Wattenberg makes the point, though, that naming is all about the parents’ hopes and dreams for you, so it’s funny that my parents named me after a writer who drank himself to death. I sometimes half-joke that they also named me after Saint Brendan, hoping I might just split the difference.
On this day in 1868, the Petersburg Index reprinted a speech delivered by Robert E. Withers upon his acceptance of the Conservative Party nomination for governor. In his remarks, Colonel Withers, a Lynchburg newspaper editor, suggested that worse than the “utter horror” of the late war would be the adoption of a new state constitution—”this miserable patch-work which degrades the name of Constitution—as proposed by the Republicans. He ended thusly:
My proudest duty will be to bear into the thickest of the fight that glorious old motto, “Sic semper tyrannis”—our guiding star in the past against defeat and dishonor—now trampled under foot, yet still dear to every Virginia heart. [Applause.] I accept it with the hope of again raising from the dust and planting on the capitol that hallowed banner by defeating the miserable, and audacious, and detestable specimen of the handiwork of carpet-baggers and negroes. [Applause.]
That was on page 1 of the Index. On page 2 was a note endorsing Union general Winfield Scott Hancock for president. While the editors do not note that Hancock was named for a Virginian, they do acknowledge that some might wonder how southern Conservatives like themselves could promote the cause of a former enemy:
People of small souls and prejudiced minds seem to find it impossible to account for that feeling, so common to brave and generous natures, of admiration for, and confidence in, a gallant opponent. It seems also very hard for Republican writers to believe that the South is anxious to bury dead issues, if allowed to do so, and anxious also to fraternize politically with those men who desire to use peace for the literal accomplishments of those ends which the United States Government proclaimed as its object upon declaration of, and repeatedly reaffirmed during the prosecution of, hostilities, viz: the restoration of the Union under the Constitution.
Of course, only a small soul would find a contradiction in editors who denounce miserable, audacious, detestable northerners and “negroes,” while also complaining that everyone thinks they hold a grudge. And Hancock, well, he was a special case. Only a few months previously he had released General Orders No. 40, which supported President Andrew Johnson‘s “can’t-everyone-just-get-along?” approach to Reconstruction and went against one what one scholar describes as “the whole philosophy of the reconstruction acts passed by Congress.”
Such was the nature of Hancock’s ambition. He became the Democrats’ nominee a few elections later, in 1880, but lost in a squeaker to James A. Garfield.
ELSEWHERE: To witness an analysis of Hancock’s military prowess, at Gettysburg and elsewhere, in addition to a discussion of why Hollywood can’t get his height correct, go here.
IMAGES: The Petersburg Index front-page banner, “The Speech of Col. Withers,” and “General Hancock for the Presidency,” all from May 11, 1868; and Winfield Scott Hancock (Library of Congress)
From a profile of George C. Marshall by A. J. Liebling that appeared in the New Yorker on October 26, 1940 [emphasis and links added]:
George Marshall was just a fair student—he stood fifteenth in his class when he was graduated—and his V. M.I. legend has been complicated by the fact that he had a namesake in his class who stood No. 1. The namesake, St. Julien Marshall, was only a substitute end on the football team, however, while the future Chief of Staff was what is called by sportswriters a tower of strength in the line. His teammates considered this particularly remarkable because he did not go out for the team until his senior year, after he had already won his place as ranking officer of the Cadet Corps. The military part of college life always came first with him. It took him only a few weeks to learn everything then known about tackle play—the captain of that 1900 team, a Mr. Roller, says that “George always was a strategist”—and after that he outplayed his opponent on every eleven V.M.I. met. His team defeated Washington and Lee and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and tied the University of Virginia, which was a much larger school. Marshall weighed only a hundred and sixty-five pounds, but all his classmates agree that he played rings around a gigantic Virginia tackle named Lloyd, in V.M.I. retrospect perhaps the largest man ever to play football. Marshall’s prestige at V.M.I. was a result of character rather than brilliance; pierced by the bayonet, he seemed to pride himself on building an Indian indifference to pain. Once he inveigled a roommate, a Mr. Leonard Nicholson, who is now publisher of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, to take a thirty-mile hike with him on Jefferson Davis’s birthday, which was a full holiday at V.M.I. After they had started out, Nicholson learned that Marshall intended to march the thirty miles at a parade-ground pace and without stopping. Marshall did.
The Confederate dream has lived on at V.M.I., and the tradition has always been strong. The whole corps of cadets fought as a unit in the Civil War battle of Newmarket, in Virginia, and twenty per cent of them were killed or wounded. The General, in fact, was the only cadet graduated in his year who came from above the Mason and Dixon line. He was, perhaps for that reason, especially impressed by legends of the war. He used to hike over old battlefields near the school and memorize the positions occupied by units of both armies, a habit which became so strong that years afterward, when he was an instructor at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was sometimes assigned to come East with parties of officers and take them over the ground covered by the Federal Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, conducting a sort of ambulant seminar on the War Between the States. Even now, when General Marshall is motoring through Virginia, he sometimes has the car stopped while he explains to a companion how A. P. Hill’s corps came out of the woods past a crossroads store and fell upon the hapless flank of some Northern general who had forgotten to post pickets.
IMAGES:George C. Marshall, Virginia Military Institute, Class of 1901 (Virginia Historical Society); University of Virginia Football Gameby Rufus. W. Holsinger (Holsinger Studio Collection, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia). The information about this particular Holsinger print suggests that it was taken on September 17, 1910, in a game against V.M.I.; however, the College Football Reference suggests that in 1910, the Cavaliers played the cadets on October 29, winning 28–0.
On this day 150 years ago, the Confederates intentionally destroyed their famed ironclad, the CSS Virginia. Better blown up than captured, they figured.
One year to the day after Stonewall Jackson died, J. E. B. Stuart charged his men at the Battle of Yellow Tavern and was mortally wounded. For the record, it was raining hard that day, although you’ll see no hint of it in the artwork associated with the battle. Added incentive to click on that last link: you can read the story of two gallants, Stuart and Colonel Henry Clay Pate, who had not spoken for months prior to the fight but who made up in the face of flying bullets, only to … well, read it yourself.
Finally, on an extra-Virginia note: on this day in 1812, the prime minister of Great Britain, Mr. Spencer Perceval, was gunned down in the House of Commons. Unlike us Americans, the Brits have no tradition of murdering their leaders; Perceval is it. The only one. The Public Domain Reviewtells the story:
As Mr. Perceval entered the lobby a number of people were gathered around in conversation as was the usual practice. Most turned to look at him as he came through the doorway. No-one noticed as the quiet man stood up from beside the fire place, removing a pistol from his inner pocket as he did so. Neither did anyone notice as the man walked calmly towards the Prime Minister. When he was close enough, without saying a word, the man fired his pistol directly at Mr. Perceval’s chest. The Prime Minister staggered forward before falling to the ground, calling out as he did so words that witnesses later recalled in different ways as: “I am murdered!” or ‘Murder, Murder’ or ‘Oh God!’ or ‘Oh my God!’
The assassin, it turns out, was a Liverpool businessman named John Bellingham who had recently done time in a Russian debtors’ prison and didn’t feel that his own government had done much on his behalf. Funny how the shooting of Mr. Perceval didn’t persuade them otherwise.
IMAGE: Mr Perceval Assassinated by Ballingham, artist unknown (Norris Museum)
The Public Domain Review is a very cool site devoted to art that has outlasted its copyright. And up there now is “Painting the New World” by Benjamin Breen, a look at the paintings of John White, who is better known as governor of the Lost Colony at Roanoke. Breen writes that White’s account of his return to Roanoke “evokes the haunted landscape of a ghost story, and its eerie details have made it part of American folklore ever since.” In effect, though, White’s paintings—made on his first trip to the Outer Banks, in 1585, and soon to become iconic representations of native life in North America—accomplished the same thing. They evoke the landscape and customs of people whose way of life was about to largely disappear. That his paintings are often so beautiful and full of joy makes them all the more bittersweet.
IMAGES:The wyfe of an Herowan of Secotan and a fire ceremony, both by John White
During the summer of 1925, the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, made the teaching of evolution in public schools a hot-button issue across the South. But if your knowledge of these events, like mine, is mostly limited to Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind (1960), then you might be surprised to know that the Ku Klux Klan had a voice in this argument—at least in Virginia. Here’s a brief news story that appeared in the New York Times on August 13, 1925:
Other groups joining the Klan included the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, founded in Philadelphia in 1843 and open to “native-born white Americans who professed belief in a supreme being, supported the separation of church and state, and were not engaged in the liquor trade.” The Daughters of America first formed in 1881 as an auxiliary to the JOUAM and was concerned with, among other things, immigration.
Also represented on the Richmond committee were the Sons and Daughters of America. While the group’s name dates back to the American Revolution, it’s hard to know who, exactly, these folks were, but a group of the same name today argues on behalf of “‘small government,’ and that each individual state should have the right to govern itself, according to how it sees fit, not someone in Washington, D.C., who hasn’t a clue as to the needs/wants of a state’s people, or worse, one who just doesn’t care.” Interestingly, there is also a Sons and Daughters of America operating, since 2003, as a semi-secret club at the University of Virginia. Spending their time making lists of “tyrants” and “rebels,” its members are secret until Final Exercises, when they wear tricorn hats instead of mortarboards. Presumably they learn about evolution while on grounds. The Patriotic Order Sons of America, meanwhile, was founded in 1847 by Dr. Reynell Coates of Philadelphia to, in part, defend the public schools. From what is not specified, but in the Virginia instance, it appears to be from Charles Darwin.
Whatever they believe, or from whatever they are protecting us, they are “Patriots all!” That was the somewhat sarcastic assessment, on September 5, 1925, of the editors of The Guardian, a weekly paper published by the Catholic Diocese of Arkansas.
One not well informed about the strength of undercurrents in the United Sates would be inclined to thin[k] on reading the above impressive roster of organizations supporting the proposed Virginia statute that the movement which put itself in the limelight at Dayton was gaining in momentum and power. The fact, however, is otherwise. In nearly all sections of the country the forces of intolerance are being defeated at the polls and are being disintegrated.
The Catholic Church, it turns out, has continued to favor the teaching of evolution in its schools, at least according to a statement made, in 2005, by Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo of Richmond, chair of the Committee on Science and Human Values of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In the meantime, the Patriotic Welfare Committee concerned itself with hating Catholics almost as much as it did evolutionary science. In that same year of 1925, they put together a petition of 200 signatures opposing a planned monument in Richmond to Christopher Columbus. A member of the Klan hailed his organization’s victory as also being “a great defeat for the Vatican.” The monument, he said, “was part of the conspiracy to establish Roman Catholicism as a dominant factor in the civic and political life of Richmond.”
On this page, by the way, you’ll find the first page of a report, written by a University of Virginia history professor who attended the Scopes trial. The rest is in the university’s special collections.
Stonewall Jackson Cafe by Ralph W. Holsinger (undated; ca. 1927). Although the image is undated (and the located noted only as “Lexington?”), the poster in the bottom left corner of the window provides a clue. It advertises a traveling show, Love-in-a-Mist, starring Madge Kennedy and Sidney Blackmer, which will appear on Friday, January 7. That puts the year as 1927, and sure enough, Love-in-a-Mist played Spartanburg, South Carolina, a few weeks later, as this review suggests. Other things that happened on Friday, January 7, 1927:
The first transatlantic telephone call was made between New York and London;
Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, filed his first patent; and
The Harlem Globetrotters played their first game.
As for whether the cafe was in Lexington, and aside from the obvious Lexington-Jackson connection, this ad card notes that the Lexington cafe specialized in Virginia ham, which, judging by the meat window there, seems likely for this place, too. Look inside and you’ll notice the ghost of a woman (she moved while the camera shutters were open) and a Confederate battle flag with an image of Stonewall Jackson below. (Holsinger Studio Collection, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia)
On this day in 1863, Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson died after being wounded by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville. After losing his left arm, he was moved to an office building at the Chandler house near Guinea Station (above). At first it seemed the general might recover, but then he died of pneumonia, his passing becoming one of the great set pieces in Confederate mythology. If you can stand it, here’s the scene from Gods and Generals (2003).
Speaking of Armed Services Editions, they figure in this great little scene from the World War II movie The Big Red One, directed by Samuel Fuller and starring the great Lee Marvin, Mark “Skywalker” Hamill, and Robert “Revenge of the Nerds” Carradine. The film is a semi-autobiographical account of Fuller’s own experiences in the war. He claimed to have enlisted so as to write a great novel, and here Carradine (playing the Fuller character) notices one of his buddies reading The Dark Deadline, a book that he himself has published. And you’ll notice that Fuller cares enough about the details here to make that book an Armed Services Edition. Here’s the full scene (with commentary from film critic Richard Schickel).
IMAGE: A scene from The Big Red One, dir. Samuel Fuller (1980)
Our associate editor, Caitlin Newman, has recently published an excellent article on Armed Services Editions during World War II—pocket-sized paperbacks published by the military in partnership with New York publishers and distributed to GIs and sailors across the world. These books, as the article says, provided “a few square inches of home.”
The concept of issuing pocket-sized books to the military didn’t come to the government immediately, nor was the idea of sending books to those overseas new. Book drives for the military had occurred regularly at libraries across the country during World War I. But after the outbreak of World War II, Americans began raiding their personal libraries for books to send to troops overseas with a vigor that far outstripped their previous efforts—motivated this time by nearly a decade of exposure to news stories about Nazi book bans and photographs of towering infernos built to consume “un-German” tomes. The first Nazi book burnings, organized across 34 college towns by the German Students Association on May 10, 1933, reduced some 25,000 books to ash; by 1938, the Nazi government had outright banned 18 categories of books—4,175 titles in all—and the works of 565 authors, many of them Jewish. Now that the United States was officially at war, what better way to strike back at the enemy than by allowing soldiers to read exactly what they wished? Books were no longer simple diversions for fighting men—they had become totems signifying what those men were fighting for.
IMAGE: The Armed Services Edition of The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
What if I wrote a whole entire book blog post on the way that nineteenth and early twentieth century American and Virginia history textbooks used art to enhance their narratives? The first step, I suppose, would be to find a load of such textbooks and troll for pictures. (Thank you, Google Books.) Then I should probably identify some images that occur time and time again—e.g., Pocahontas saving John Smith—and then dump them all in one place. Right?
First, though, it might prove useful to identify a few renditions of said scene that exist outside of textbooks and therefore provide some much-needed context—a sample, so to speak, of the cultural air that the textbook art directors were breathing at the time. This will give me something to compare all these images to. Oh, and as I know that you prefer fancy words, let’s call these “first pictures” archetypes.
Archetype #1:Smith Rescued by Pocahontas (above, courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society). This hand-colored engraving was first published in 1870 and it’s quite interesting to see how mountainous Tidewater Virginia was in the 1600s, and how gilded everything was, and how many horses the Indians owned. The women, including Pocahontas, are scandalously nude from the waist up, and that leather-booted, gray-skinned Indian is in the process of swinging his sword or club or whatever it is. This imbues the image with movement and tension. Ironically, its title then removes some of that movement and tension by placing the action in the passive tense. Rather than have Pocahontas act, Smith is acted upon. Okay, moving on.
Archetype #2:King Powhatan commands C:Smith to be slayne (above top, courtesy of the Library of Virginia). This page is torn (not literally) from Smith’s history of Virginia, first published in 1624, and you’ll immediately notice how, in John Smith’s time, basic graphical perspective was as yet unknown in the art world; either that, or Powhatan was truly a giant among men, his minions toga-wearing Greeks, and his warriors devilish little creatures, made all the more so by the crackling presence of that roaring fire back there. (To go with Powhatan’s power, the caption to this image is not passive at all: he commands! Pocahontas begs!)
You’ll also note that this idea of putting the action inside instead of outside may have begun with Smith’s Map of Virginia, published in 1612. It included a likeness of Powhatan similar to this one and based on John White‘s watercolor of an ossuary temple (immediately above, left)—you’ll see that the general shape and construction of the building is the same. And there to the right of all those dead bodies (click to enlarge) sits a little man-looking thing, or what folks believe to be an idol. Several years later the engraver Theodor de Bry took that particular idol and gave him his very own frame (immediately above, center). Now put the two together—the building and the idol—and you have the image of Powhatan from White’s map (immediately above, right). Powhatan, in other words, isn’t a real dude so much as he’s a graphical Frankenstein, the product of many parts, none of them alive! Okay, now rejigger this to fit your Pocahontas storyline, and you’ve got, as we have seen, Archetype #2.
Archetype #3: Events of Indian History (above, courtesy of the Library of Virginia). I don’t have a date here (this site seems to suggest it’s 1841), but we’re definitely back outside, although minus much in the way of geographical specificity. Pocahontas is showing skin again (contra Archetype #2) and the Indians, if not exactly donning authentic garb, are at least not made to resemble a) TV Western Indians (Archetype #1); or b) the spawn of hell (#2 again). Smith is clean-shaven (Mahone without the pompadour?) and his garb looks, to my untrained sartorial eye, to be at least a hundred years too mature. In addition to what by now is the standard dude (in a leopard print!) bearing down with a club, we also have a man (in a nightgown?) who appears to be holding up his hand to put a halt to the execution. Is this Powhatan? Hard to tell. Notice the house in the background; it doesn’t conform to how the Indians lived (cf these structures), but it’s not quite a teepee, either, so it’s a start. And notice the people there next to it, watching. They are in all three images. Are they us? Confused, apprehensive, appalled, and ultimately grateful?
Okay, so here we go. Will these textbook images play off the standards set by these archetypes? Will they tell us something new? Will we laugh, will we cry? Will it be better than Cats?
Image #1:Captain Smith Rescued by Pocahontas(above), from Makers of Virginia History by J. A. C. Chandler (1904). (We’ve encountered the “mercurial and dynamic” Master Chandler before.) Off the top of my head: we’re inside (a cave?), but we can see the outside, making this—wait for it—a liminal space. We are between life and death, English and native, man and woman, father and daughter. Also, warmth and cold. I mean, doesn’t it look like winter out there? And as it happens, Pocahontas supposedly saved Smith in December, so it stands to figure that it would look cold, unlike in Archetypes #1 and 3. (I have complained previously about artists who ignore the weather.) I’m assuming that’s Powhatan carrying the big club, and he appears to be dressed much the same as in Archetype #2 (and the map image on which it’s based): the headdress, the necklace. But notice here that the action in the image is not the wielding of that club but the reaching out of his hand. It’s almost tender, as is the way Pocahontas’s arm wraps around Smith’s head. The violence in this image is so completely ratcheted down that the Indians seem almost … nice.
Image #2:Untitled (above), from First Lessons in United States History by Edward Channing (1903). Well, we’ve obviously seen this one before: it’s Archetype #2. There are some minor changes: Captain Smith is no longer indicated with the letters “C.S.” and I would wager that the face of the club-wielding Indian immediately opposite Pocahontas has been touched up so that he no longer looks so devilish. Powhatan’s face, too, is less menacing here. Otherwise, it’s the same, and I’m still left to wonder about this image’s composition. I mean, go to the center of the frame and what do you find? Nothing! The fire seems to be the dominant image (December! Hell!), while the guy in the toga at the bottom right strikes me as next most prominent figure. But who is he? He doesn’t even look like an Indian! Perhaps he is actually a classical god or goddess (Themis?) just as all those people seem to be in an amphitheater. It’s as if this whole narrative were being staged for our entertainment. Perhaps Smith was hinting at something! One last thing about the composition: notice how relatively small, insignificant, and un-feminine Pocahontas is.
Image #3: Pocahontas rescuing Captain Smith (above), from Pictorial History of the United States by John Frost (1841). First thing I notice about this image? How few people are in it. There are exactly five people and two teepees. The other thing I notice? This is the only image (so far) where Pocahontas is not actually touching Captain Smith. She is saving him, but via her rhetoric and not her body. True, she is given a feminine body here (unlike in the image above), but she is actually presented doing what is traditionally a man’s job: talking, arguing, making a case. Anyway, this picture feels stripped down to me and made me wonder about what precise components are needed for each image to make the narrative work. Looking at the Execution of St. Paul by Tinoretto(immediately above, left), it seems clear that the components number three: 1) executioner; 2) victim; and 3) angel. InTimothy’s Stoning, which dramatizes the martyrdom of Saint Timothy (immediately above, right), those three elements remain: 1) executioner, with stone; 2) victim, in halo; and 3) angel, here the white-robed man. He carries no stone and, with a clenched fist, may represent something less than all-encompassing mercy, but he’ll do. (See the dude embracing Lady Jane Grey here for an equivalent.) So what’s odd about this picture is that we’ve got the executioner (what a puny hatchet he has!), the victim, and the angel (Pocahontas—or is it Powhatan?). So who’s this other guy? I’m assuming Powhatan is the one with the power and so the one staying the execution, but then why is Pocahontas actually pleading to someone else? One final note: one thing that links all three of these images is that the victim is on the right side of the frame, which ii medieval times was the holy side. God forbid we be gauche! (Notice that in this painting, the saint is on the right, the secular authority on the left.) Which makes the center-positioned Pocahontas—wait for it—liminal!
Image #5: Pocahontas Saving Smith (above), from Lee’s Advanced School History of the United States by Susan Pendleton Lee (1896). The author here is the daughter of William Nelson Pendleton, Robert E. Lee‘s chief of artillery and his post-war minister. Beyond that, though, I’m at a loss. What’s interesting here? And how does Pocahontas expect to save Smith from behind? See Image #1 for how it’s done, and if not that, then Image #3 for a more lawyerly approach.
Image #6: Pocahontas saving the life of Smith (above), from The Early History of the Southern States: Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. Illustrated by Tales, Sketches, Anecdotes, and Adventures by Lambert Lilly (1832). Hmmm, black … white. Not exactly subtle here. The position of the club-wielding man and the one with his hand out is remarkably similar to Archetype #3. And Pocahontas seems to be wearing non-native dress, doesn’t she? Such visual cues remind you that Pocahontas is special. She’s not really an Indian, but something better—hence the so-called Pocahontas clause of the Racial Integrity Laws of the 1920s. It allowed the marriage of whites with anyone having less than one-sixteenth Indian blood. In other words, you could be FFV and claim Pocahontas as a descendent, while still not worrying about being … colored. Because Pocahontas was not really an Indian.
Image #9: Pocahontas saving Captain Smith (above), from Elementary History of the United States: with Numerous Illustrations and Maps by G. P. Quackenbos (1870). One thought: this guy could bat in the Major Leagues. Another thought: Powhatan (the one with the ultimate authority) seems to be the scowling Indian to the far left (gauche!), at least judging by the way the man to his left looks up to him, literally and figuratively. But Pocahontas is not appealing to him, but to the Indian with the bat. This is also the case in Archetype #3 and Images #6 and 7—which is to say, the minority of instances. Generally, she either appeals to Powhatan or not at all. What does that mean? I don’t know; you tell me!
Image #10: Rescue of Captain John Smith (above), from History of Virginia: A Brief Text Book for Schools by Royall Bascom Smithey, Professor of Mathematics, Randolph-Macon College (1898). Professor Smithey, who lived from 1851 until 1925, taught math, but this hardly stopped him from publishing in the field of history and from giving us an image of Smith and Pocahontas that is, I dare say, sui generis. One could write an entire dissertation just on the hair in these images, and, in particular, the various ways in which the warriors’ hair is portrayed. Margaret Holmes Williamson (now Huber, and an EV contributor) could tell you that mohawks are not at all correct! The dudes should be wearing their hair shaved on one side (like priests) and long on the other (like women). Liminality, man. And what on earth is going on with all the women on top of Smith? Which one is Pocahontas? And why is there suddenly more than one? And why is that dude on the left (gauche!) smoking?
So this, dear Art History Dissertation Committee, is my full-length dissertation self-indulgently long blog post. What’s my takeaway, you ask? I wonder if it wouldn’t just make more sense to ask students to draw this stuff for themselves.
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