Benga was an African pygmy who, in 1904, was brought to the United States from the Congo, where his family had been massacred and he had been captured by slave traders. An American missionary purchased Benga from the traders and exhibited him at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Benga went on to become a controversial exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, where he actually lived in the monkey cage. That’s where Hornaday’s connection comes in. It was her great-great-great uncle who ran the zoo at the time.

As for Benga and the zeitgeist, a character in the new Pitt-flick The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is modeled on him.

So what’s the Virginia connection, you ask? I was wondering the same thing as I read the Post piece, because I knew there was one. Benga’s name had come up more than once concerning an Encyclopedia Virginia article, but which one?

Ahhh. The Post comes through:

Reportedly, it didn’t take long for Temple to cancel the monkey house exhibit, his otherwise impenetrable shell of hubris, condescension and naivete unequal to the controversy that he had unleashed. Benga stayed at the zoo for several more days before he went to live in a home for African American orphans in Brooklyn, eventually settling in Lynchburg, Va., where he befriended the poet Anne Spencer. He died in 1916, after shooting himself in the heart.

Anne Spencer. Now I remember. When we added mention to Benga in that entry, there was some discussion. Was his connection to Spencer too marginal? Did we include too much information for a short article? Was our interest prurient? Did our language accurately express his situation—i.e., was he a pygmy or a “pygmy”? Was he “discovered” in Africa or “captured” or “kidnapped”?

In the end, I think we got it about right. And Benga’s story, controversial and sad, is clearly one worth exploring.

In his excellent introduction to The Life and Philosophy of George Tucker (a four-volume set you can have delivered by Christmas for a mere $840, not counting shipping), James Fieser makes mention of “A Letter from Hickory Cornhill,” a satirical poem published in the Richmond Enquirer on January 15, 1806. In it, Tucker, under the pseudonym Hickory Cornhill, criticizes women who gamble at Loo, a card game popular in Richmond at the time.

I know. Gasp! I can’t imagine such a thing. Women playing cards? I wonder how George Tucker would have reacted to my grandmother, who once kicked my cousin out of her (my grandmother’s) home for going out on her (my grandmother) in hearts. Is hearts even a game you can “go out” on? I don’t know. I never really caught the card bug myself. But the Richmond ladies did, so I looked up the poem.

Turns out that Tucker was not, in fact, assuming the pseudonym Hickory Cornhill, most excellent moniker that it is, but merely responding to said Cornhill.

The poem is titled, “An anfwer to Hickory Cornhill, Efq. from his friend in the Country.”

And it begins as such:

Dear Hickory, your letter came fafely to hand;
I am glad you have rhyme fo much at command;
But own that one half o’n't I can’t underfstand.
Such a ftory you tell me of playing at loo,
I fhould with from my heart that it all was not true;
But my friend is not like the vain fparks of the town,
Who fuppofe that with us any tale will go down:
As a plain hoeft farmer, you tongue and your pen
Will always tell truth about women or men—
I muft therefore believe you, yet thinking that the wave
Of the gentry in Richmond, are ftrange now-a-days;
That the Belles, fo gentle, fhould gamble for money!
But pray, let me afk you, what’s meant by the Poney?

Indeed. What IS meant by the Poney? We await the annotated version from Professor Fieser, but fear the cost.

Anyway, much more could be said about Tucker—that he published one of the first novels of the U.S. South, for instance, or that he authored the first biography of Jefferson. Or that, after boldly predicting that the United States would not experience a civil war, he was mortally injured by a falling cotton bale, passing away just two days before Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter.

Seriously. A falling cotton bale.

This is the sort of ending a novelist like Tucker might have appreciated.

The University of Virginia was then, as it has been since its foundation by Thomas Jefferson, a distinguished institution. It was founded by Jefferson in the hope that it would be the most liberal seat of learning in the world. Tommy Wilson disliked Jefferson intensely. The life and principles of Jefferson were not Presbyterian. So great was this dislike that while Wilson was at the university he never once visited Jefferson’s home, Monticello, although it stood nearby in all its beauty. He went to Jefferson’s university merely because at that time it had as good a law school as there was in the United States, and was not far from his father’s Manse. At once he found himself “most terribly bored by the noble study of law.” He joined a second-rate fraternity and made speeches in the debating societies. Throughout his residence at the University of Virginia, he was harassed by indigestion. It became so acute in December 1880 that he left the University without a degree.

Poor Dr. Freud seems genuinely appalled that the only reason someone might attend the University of Virginia is because its law school was among the best in the country. And then to join a second-rate fraternity!

Who had the worse tummy-ache, I wonder, biographer or subject?

IN ADDITION: Find Encyclopedia Virginia’s full entry on Woodrow Wilson here.

Some historians are particularly good at sketching characters. Case in point: David S. Reynolds, author of the just-released Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson. (Read a review.)

Here he distinguishes the two Virginians, Monroe and Madison:

Whereas Madison (the smallest president in American history) stood five feet five and weighed only a hundred pounds, Monroe was over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a massive frame. Monroe, who had frank gray-blue eyes, was plodding and pragmatic, as opposed to Madison, known for his rapid mind and wide-ranging intellect.

On Old Man Eloquent, John Quincy Adams, Reynolds defers to Emerson: “He is no literary old gentleman,” Emerson observed, “but a bruiser, & loves the mêlée. He is an old roué who cannot live on slops, but must have sulphuric acid in his tea.”

From a biographer of Andrew Jackson we get this: “He was imprisoned in his ignorance, and sometimes raged round his little, dim enclosure like a tiger in a den.”

Emerson again on the great Bay State orator Daniel Webster: He was “a great cannon loaded to the lips” whose words were “like blows of an axe” and “as real as a blast furnace.”

South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, meanwhile, was “the cast-iron man who looks as if he had never been born, and never could be extinguished.” (That’s according to Harriet Martineau.)

My favorite description, though, is of the U.S. senator from Virginia, John Randolph:

The cantankerous Randolph veered between brilliance and ridiculousness. Over six feet tall, with gangly arms and a small head, he typically wore an oversized coat that hung to the top of his white boots. He would stride into the Senate wearing spurs and carrying a horsewhip, trailed by a hunting hound who curled up under his desk. Part Native American (he claimed to be descended from Pocahontas) he was paradoxically both anglophile and pro-Southern. In a high squeaky voice, he delivered rambling speeches that sometimes lasted ten hours. Every fifteen minutes or so he paused to swig from a glass of malt liquor or a brandy-and-water concoction; he could go through several quarts in an afternoon. Well lubricated, he lambasted his enemies with abandon.

I’ll bet he did. The story of his duel with Henry Clay is one for the ages.

IMAGE: Click on the image above to see the gangly-armed Randolph.

According to Kent Gramm, the worst thing you can do is present war—in this instance, the Civil War—in terms that might make it attractive. (Or fun. Or honorable.) That would open you up to his accusation that you are living in a world of “fantasy, myth, and entertainment.”

According to Stephen Cushman, we have forgotten the “reality” of the Civil War to such a startling degree that we can happily read Killer Angels—about a battle that resulted in fifty thousand casualties—on the beach.

I put “reality” in quotes up there not because Cushman did, but because it’s not clear to me who decides what’s real. I’ve been editing an entry on the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. The memorial features statues of men wading ashore at Normandy and a facsimile beach littered with destroyed machinery. The artist, Jim Brothers, researched soldiers’ accounts and obsessed over the details: the wedding ring on a guy’s finger, the number of grenades visible on the sand.

The idea was to achieve a realistic sense of what it was like to be there. But what does that mean? I’ve said this before about reenacting: if there aren’t bullets flying, if people aren’t getting their heads blown off, how realistic can it be?

So I wonder if what’s at stake here is not whether we can approximate what it was like to land at Normandy. We can’t, obviously. Instead, what we’re doing with things like the D-Day Memorial is making an argument about what war means to us.

How do we remember war? With a long black wall or with a seven-foot statue of Dwight D. Eisenhower? And what does that mean?

Perhaps “realistic” representations will remind us of death, although a wall with names does that, too. So maybe the D-Day Memorial reminds us of the moment, which is a different thing. That emphasizes fear but also courage and honor, and also perhaps cowardice. Is cowardice accounted for? Probably not. Or what about the “insanity” of war, to borrow from E. B. Sledge, a Marine who fought in the South Pacific?

The problem is that as much as D-Day was a shared experience for the GIs, everyone lived it differently. There is the Band of Brothers version, where the distinctions between good and evil are generally pretty clear. Or there’s Sledge, where the distinctions are sludge. I favor Sledge, but that’s just me.

Last year I discussed this issue, in the context of World War I, with Edward G. Lengel, a University of Virginia professor and author of To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918. “Not having experienced the First World War, or combat in any form, I think it would be the height of arrogance for me to impose my views on the subject, or to decide which veterans’ accounts capture the true meaning of war,” he said.

Which is admirable. But it’s also a problem if you’re Jim Brothers and it’s your job to make those decisions.

Lengel continued:

Instead I try to approach each account with respect, allowing the veterans to tell the story themselves. That’s the answer, also, to your question on how I depict battle. Rather than pretend I was there—to paint a portrait, so to speak, of something I did not see or experience—I try to tell it in as raw a form as possible, as from the mouths of the soldiers themselves.

How do we remember war? Well, we—meaning me, probably you, certainly Jim Brothers—don’t. We weren’t there.

And yet, of course, every time we visit the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, we do.

Go figure.

IN ADDITION: Read my entire conversation with Lengel.

It’s unclear whether Gramm is the Civil War buff here, or whether he’s speaking only of other buffs. Either way, he’s suggesting that it’s complicated, this idea of marching vicariously with Lee’s Miserables. And so I’m reminded of a wonderful essay titled “Buff” and written by University of Virginia English professor Stephen Cushman. It appears in his also wonderful 1999 cultural history of the Battle of the Wilderness, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Cushman traces the origin of the word buff and how it means an enthusiast, someone who is knowledgeable and well-informed. He also points out, however, that to call someone “a Jesus buff” would not necessarily be a compliment. In other words, the word’s connotation carries with it the sense that this knowledge is “a little quirky, a harmless private hobby on the order of collecting bottle caps or matchbooks from around the world.”

Having already suggested that the word homefront makes no sense in the context of the Civil War (which is, perhaps, why the word didn’t actually exist then), Cushman goes on to make this interesting point:

Here then is the problem with buff. Its employment after 1960 to describe interest in the Civil War confirms that the boundary between war and peace within the United States feels so secure that people who want to can cross that boundary for their own amusement. In places and times where the boundary between war and peace feels insecure, interest in war is not a form of amusement. There were no Civil War buffs in Atlanta in 1865 [. . .] but a country in which there are two million copies of Killer Angels in print, a country in which supposedly nobody reads anymore, is a country that feels stable enough to entertain itself, while commuting to work or lounging at the beach or before turning out the light at night, with a story of a battle that involved over fifty thousand killed, wounded, and missing people.

There’s a certain edge of self-righteousness in Cushman’s tone here, and Gramm has it, too. He seems to say, I understand better than you, lowly buff, what it means for fifty thousand to have fallen at Gettysburg. And I can easily imagine certain people responding, as they have on this blog, by suggesting that buffs are interested not simply in “entertainment,” but in remembrance and commemoration. Of course, these folks are just as self-righteous in their own way. Having nominated themselves as the vehicles of such remembrance, they are asserting a special connection to the dead, one that certainly has religious overtones but is also personal. You attack them, buddy, and you’re attacking me!

Cushman doesn’t spell this out, but this is exactly what he seems to be responding to in the very next paragraph:

It is only in the safety of peace that people can have fun with war. When a man plasters his pickup truck with bumper stickers reading, “Happiness Is a Northbound Yankee,” “I had rather be dead than a Yankee,” “Keep the history, heritage and spirit of the south flying [with picture of the Confederate battle flag],” “Forget, Hell!” [. . .] he appears to be carrying out a kind of deep memorializing that keeps the war present in his mind and that of anyone who sees his truck. But in fact he’s having it both ways, since it is only because the war is so long gone and absent from most people’s awareness that he can afford to brandish these inflammatory slogans. He appears to urge remembrance, but he does so in terms that depend on forgetting. If the Yankees who have overrun his Southern home felt as ardently as he about keeping sectional tensions alive, he might think twice about the possible effects of those bumper stickers on his insurance premiums.

You think Cushman is full of it? I don’t think so, but there are assumptions underlying what both he and Gramm argue that perhaps need to be challenged. I have exactly the man to do it, so more on that to come.

PREVIOUSLY: In which John Quincy Adams looks forward to a “glorious” war

IN ADDITION: Two recent Virginia Vignettes have drawn on Cushman’s work: What Was the Wilderness? (Pt. 1) and What Was the Wilderness? (Pt. 2)

Even more prescient was Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, who in his diary pronounced slavery “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union” that would be eradicated only by “a dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union” followed by a reorganization of the nation “on the fundamental principle of emancipation.” Adams wrote prophetically, “A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding States, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result might be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent.” Though this war would be “calamitous and desolating,” Adams added, “I dare not say that it is not to be desired, since so glorious would be its final issue.”

The emphasis is mine. And it’s meant to suggest that, to some extent (Adams was more clear-eyed than many), this myth-making could be not only retrospective but prospective.

In the introduction to a recent book on Civil War combat, historian Kent Gramm opens with a surprising comment: “One of the most harmful consequences of the Civil War results from our very interest in the war, and our attraction to it.” As a Civil War buff, he explains, you can vicariously march with the indomitable veterans of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, you can learn from the men of the Army of the Potomac’s Iron Brigade what it means to be a hero, you can return in imagination to a moment when “the hopes of a nation are still young and still full, and a kind of clarity and innocence are still poised to win the future—and the smoke and noise and dirt of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have not yet swept in behind the buzzing machines of our age.”

“Who would not love such a war?” Gramm asks. But the war, he continues, “is a war of fantasy, myth, and entertainment,” not a war of carnage, horror, and desolation. “By replacing this actual Civil War with an imaginary and beautiful war,” he argues, “we misunderstand our own natures, and we allow ourselves to fall for what Wilfred Owen called ‘the old lie’: that it is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country. Falling for that old lie, we enter more easily into what should be entered into only as one would enter a corridor to hell: you go that way only because all the other ways are shut.”

The Ter-Centennial celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown Colony and was one in a series of world’s fairs held across the United States—Chicago in 1893, Buffalo in 1901, and St. Louis in 1904. The day after it ended, the New York Times called the Jamestown fair “the most colossal failure in the history of exhibitions,” its biggest problem being its huge debt. Ten months earlier, in February 1907, the U.S. House of Representatives had appropriated a million-dollar loan to the exposition, and now the organizers still owed $900,000.

But here’s where the antiwar business comes in. The Times reported that the debate in the House over the loan sparked “violent and vociferous opposition,” and then wrote about how Congressman Richard Bartholdt, of Missouri, “created amusement when he read the list of parades and sham battles, army reviews, &c.—and declared that the main purpose of the exposition seemed to be the glorification of war.”

The Times goes on to quote Bartholdt: “At Chicago and Buffalo,” he said, “we had the Midway Plaisance; at St. louis it was the Pike, and now at Jamestown it is to be the War Path.”

I thought that to be a good bit of wit until I realized that the exposition’s midway really was called the War Path!

And Bartholdt’s concern was hardly isolated. According to an article in the Times from the month before, members of the exposition’s own Board of Advisers were also rebelling against the hawkishness of Jamestown. In a written statement, these folks complained about “the diversion of the exposition to the service of militarism.”

That militarism eventually included demonstrations during the exposition by the U.S. Navy and navy warships from around the world. As they floated around the harbor at Hampton Roads, Navy planners took notice. Ten years later, the spot became the home of what is nowadays called Naval Station Norfolk.

Oh, the irony. Some may have thought it was bad politics, and the account books may have looked terrible, but for Virginia, the Jamestown Ter-Centennial turned out to be very good business indeed.