The same year that has seen the end of the 150th anniversary commemorations of the American Civil War also, by historical coincidence, marks the beginning of the 250th anniversary commemorations of the American Revolution. Some might object to this, pointing out that the Revolutionary War began on April 19, 1775, which would suggest that the 250th anniversary is not until 2025. But the American Revolution was as much a political struggle as a military conflict and its beginnings stretch back long before the first actual shots were fired on Lexington Green.
It was on this date two-hundred-and-fifty years ago that the first embers of organized American resistance to British rule began to glow, when the Stamp Act Congress met in New York City on October 7, 1765.
The British Parliament in London had passed the Stamp Act in March of that year and it was due to take effect on November 1. It was a very simple piece of legislation, stipulating that all official papers had to have a governmental stamp on them; this stamp had to be paid for, which would generate revenue for the government. There had been almost no opposition to the legislation in Parliament and few seemed to think that the colonists in America would mind the tax very much. After all, the British government had just completed an enormous military effort in the New World that had driven the French off of the continent and thereby freed the colonists from the French threat.
The American reaction was swift and furious. Protests erupted in the streets across the colonies and stamp collectors were burned in effigy. Colonial legislatures passed resolutions against the act and created "committees of correspondence" to communicate with one another. In Massachusetts, enraged colonists even set fire to the mansion of the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchison, who barely escaped with his life. This ferocious response came as a complete shock to the British establishment, as it did to Benjamin Franklin, who was then living in London as a colonial agent for Pennsylvania.
In retrospect, we can see that the most important manifestation of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act was the convening of the Stamp Act Congress. The call for such a convention had come from the colony of Massachusetts, which thought a single coordinated response from all the British colonies in America would be more effective that a series of disjointed reactions. In the end, nine colonies sent representatives to New York City: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and South Carolina. The legislatures in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia were blocked by their respective governors from sending delegates, while New Hampshire just never got around to it.
Among the brilliant minds who composed the Stamp Act Congress was a man who are almost unknown to Americans today, yet fully deserve to be ranked among the august group we call "the Founding Fathers". There was James Otis, one of the most brilliant lawyers of Massachusetts, who had made a name for himself by arguing that it was unconstitutional for British authorities to use the writs of assistance used by British authorities to search private homes without warrants. He is widely credited with coining the phrase "no taxation without representation". Other attendees would go on to play important roles in the Revolution, such as Robert Livingston, Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean, and John Rutledge.
After a few weeks of debate and deliberations, the Stamp Act Congress issued the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which stated that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies directly as the colonies were not represented in Parliament. Only the colonial legislatures themselves could tax the colonies. This was the first substantive assertion that there should be no taxation without representation. At the same time, the Stamp Act Congress proclaimed a loyalty to the king, for they did not want to appear as potential rebels. The idea of American independence had not yet entered anyone's mind.
There is something that needs to be stressed about the events leading up to the American break with Britain. Before the political crisis leading up to the war, the American colonists were probably the freest and most lightly taxed people in the world. The Americans were not protesting the amount of tax they were being asked to pay; they were protesting the fact that they did not believe the British Parliament had the constitutional authority to tax them. The American Revolution had its root causes in constitutional questions, not economic ones.
There are legions of revisionist historians who are always eager to tear down great figures from the past and they have given the American Founding Fathers more than their fair share of attention. Efforts are often made to persuade us that the Founding Fathers were simply a bunch of wealthy white guys, and largely slave-owners to boot, who rebelled against the British because they feared losing their privileged social and economic positions. It's true that the Founding Fathers were generally members of the social elite, but to suppose that their motives were self-serving has little basis. If they had really been interested in holding onto their power, the best thing they could have done would have been to remain loyal to the British, as many other members of the colonial elite choose to do. By following the path they choose, they were committing treason and placing their lives in peril.
I am sad that this anniversary is passing with next to no commemoration. We, the Americans of the early 21st Century, owe a tremendous debt to the brave men who met in New York in 1765. They lit the fuse that would explode on Lexington Green a decade later and give birth to our nation, the United States of America.
Thanks, guys.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Sadness and Hope Along the Siege Lines of Vicksburg
After my visit to the battlefield at Raymond last Sunday, I headed straight to Vicksburg National Military Park, which is one of those American treasures in which we should all take pride. It was my third visit to the place. The first was when I was a boy, on one of those countless wonderful trips across the country on which my parents took me. The second was not that long ago, in July of 2012, but my wife and I had found out the day before that we were going to become parents and my mind was understandably distracted. Besides which, we only had a few hours. This time I was able to concentrate all my focus on drinking deep the story of the Siege of Vicksburg.
Among preserved historical sites associated with the American Civil War, Vicksburg ranks among the best. In many ways, it is exactly what a national battlefield should be. The eighteen-mile driving route is festooned with statues and memorials, many of them placed by the veterans themselves or by their families. The dramatic events of the siege - the May 19 assault on the Stockade Redan, the May 22 assault on the Great Redoubt, the June 25 detonation of the great mine underneath the Louisiana Redan - are all described in the posted markers very well, in such a way that one can glance at the ground and follow the events in one's mind with great ease. The museum at the visitor's center, while surprisingly small, is very well done and the introductory video is well-written and well-produced.
It being Labor Day weekend, the park was crowded. It gave me great pleasure to overhear parents tell their young children about the Civil War and to watch little ones play on the cannon. The knowledge of our nation's history is passed from one generation to the next, and we need preserved historical sites like Vicksburg to continue this process, generation after generation. On the other hand, it struck me as somewhat ludicrous to hear the laughter of little children as they scampered along trench lines where hundreds of men were slaughtered a century-and-a-half ago, torn apart by artillery fire, gunned down by rifles, or stabbed or slashed to death by bayonets, knives, or swords. Many of those killed in 1863 were, it pained me to recall, scarcely more than children themselves.
The entire battlefield is covered with thick trees, foliage, and underbrush. This was not at all what the ground looked like during the summer of 1863, when the trees had been completely cleared by the Confederates in order to provide clear fields of fire in front of their fortifications. As much as I love trees, I found myself wishing that the National Park Service would clear them away from Vicksburg so that the lines returned as much as possible to how they appeared during the siege itself.
One of the most amazing aspects of Vicksburg National Military Park are the state monuments. These stone memorials, some grand and some subtle, have been erected by the individual state governments, both North and South. The grandest by far is that of Illinois, which contributed more than 35,000 men to the Vicksburg campaign. It is a great granite temple, clearly modeled on the architecture of ancient Rome. Moreover, it is a physical manifestation of peace, whose enabling legislation specified that no warlike image be depicted upon it, set amid ground that once echoed with the thunder and scream of battle. Stepping inside it is a deeply humbling experience.
Not all the monuments, frankly, were to my liking. The Kansas Monument was sculpted in 1960 in what apparently passed for some nameless avant-garde style at that time. Now it simply looks silly among so many beautiful and more traditional sculptures. Whatever meaning it is supposed to have was wholly indecipherable to me. Like all modern art, it struck me as the Emperor's New Clothes. It was nothing that a moderately talented high schooler couldn't have produced in shop class.
As a Texan, I made a point to visit the Texas Memorial. A yucca plant is carefully cared for in the center of the monument, which I thought was a nice touch. The monument was built from the same Texas red granite as were the Civil War monuments to Texas soldier all over the rest of the country, from Gettysburg and Gaine's Mill to Shiloh and Bentonville, and many points in between. One wonders, given the political climate today, whether any more of these monuments will be erected.
Perhaps the saddest monument on the battlefield is that to the soldiers from Missouri. As a border state, it sent its sons to both sides. Forty-two units of Missourians took part in the siege, twenty-seven for the Union and fifteen for the Confederacy. Cockrell's Missouri Brigade was perhaps the finest fighting unit of the entire Confederate Army and they played a crucial role at Vicksburg. The grand monument rests near the Stockade Redan, where bitter fighting took place. Tragically, Union and Confederate Missourians found themselves facing one another, with friends and even family members forced into a situation in which they had little choice but to try to kill one another. There is a sad resignation to the monument, witness to a horrible tragedy that need never have happened.
I found a different feeling at the monument to Kentucky, which like Missouri was a bitterly divided border state. It is somewhat confusing, as there is a Kentucky monument which specifically honors the service of the Kentucky Confederates, yet the second Kentucky monument honors all the men of the state, no matter which side they fought for. It's also very different, in that it's spaced out over a considerable distance and farther away from the driving path than any other monument.
I almost missed it. By the time I got to the Kentucky Monument, it was late in the day, I was quite tired, and it had become very hot. Moreover, the sandwich I had eaten for lunch was not sitting well on my stomach. I almost made the decision to drive on, but eventually decided that the monument deserved my attention. I got out of my car and walked the few hundred yards down a path towards the monument. It was the best decision I made during my visit to Vicksburg.
Leading up to the monument are five sculptures of prominent Kentuckians who served as general officers during the Vicksburg Campaign. I was happily surprised to see a sculpture of John C. Breckinridge, the primary character of my novella Blessed are the Peacemakers and one of the main characters of my upcoming novel House of the Proud. He was not present at Vicksburg itself, but commanded a division in the army the Confederates attempted to raise in Jackson to raise the siege. Looking up at the man's face, complete with his famous whiskers, I found myself wondering whether he might be offended by my taking his person and throwing it into a fictional story. I was almost tempted to apologize.
The centerpiece of the Kentucky Monument, though, is a circular plaza encased within an angled wall. On the wall are lists of the Kentucky units, both Union and Confederate, that participated in the Vicksburg Campaign. Standing at the center of the circle are bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, both natives of Kentucky, the respective leaders of the two warring sides, seemingly engaged in an endless conversation. There was no one else around and I found myself strangely wanting to ask the two statues what on earth they could be talking about. They don't look happy to see one another, but neither do they appear angry or embittered. There are just two men, albeit two remarkable and strikingly complex men, representing different parts of America, staring level into one another eyes, talking the same talk we've been having with ourselves since 1776 and which we are still having with ourselves today.
Along the walls behind the two presidents are quotes from both men. The Lincoln quote is from the Second Inaugural Address and is familiar to every educated America: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
The words of Davis date from the 1880s, long after the war, and read as follows: "The past is dead; let it bury its dead. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling. Make your place in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished - a reunited country."
In this age of political correctness, when people who have no understanding of history seem determined to tear away historical markers and monuments to people about whom they know nothing, it seems to me that we can all learn some important lessons from the words of Lincoln and Davis. That, more than anything else, is what I took away from my trip to Vicksburg.
Among preserved historical sites associated with the American Civil War, Vicksburg ranks among the best. In many ways, it is exactly what a national battlefield should be. The eighteen-mile driving route is festooned with statues and memorials, many of them placed by the veterans themselves or by their families. The dramatic events of the siege - the May 19 assault on the Stockade Redan, the May 22 assault on the Great Redoubt, the June 25 detonation of the great mine underneath the Louisiana Redan - are all described in the posted markers very well, in such a way that one can glance at the ground and follow the events in one's mind with great ease. The museum at the visitor's center, while surprisingly small, is very well done and the introductory video is well-written and well-produced.
It being Labor Day weekend, the park was crowded. It gave me great pleasure to overhear parents tell their young children about the Civil War and to watch little ones play on the cannon. The knowledge of our nation's history is passed from one generation to the next, and we need preserved historical sites like Vicksburg to continue this process, generation after generation. On the other hand, it struck me as somewhat ludicrous to hear the laughter of little children as they scampered along trench lines where hundreds of men were slaughtered a century-and-a-half ago, torn apart by artillery fire, gunned down by rifles, or stabbed or slashed to death by bayonets, knives, or swords. Many of those killed in 1863 were, it pained me to recall, scarcely more than children themselves.
The entire battlefield is covered with thick trees, foliage, and underbrush. This was not at all what the ground looked like during the summer of 1863, when the trees had been completely cleared by the Confederates in order to provide clear fields of fire in front of their fortifications. As much as I love trees, I found myself wishing that the National Park Service would clear them away from Vicksburg so that the lines returned as much as possible to how they appeared during the siege itself.
One of the most amazing aspects of Vicksburg National Military Park are the state monuments. These stone memorials, some grand and some subtle, have been erected by the individual state governments, both North and South. The grandest by far is that of Illinois, which contributed more than 35,000 men to the Vicksburg campaign. It is a great granite temple, clearly modeled on the architecture of ancient Rome. Moreover, it is a physical manifestation of peace, whose enabling legislation specified that no warlike image be depicted upon it, set amid ground that once echoed with the thunder and scream of battle. Stepping inside it is a deeply humbling experience.
Not all the monuments, frankly, were to my liking. The Kansas Monument was sculpted in 1960 in what apparently passed for some nameless avant-garde style at that time. Now it simply looks silly among so many beautiful and more traditional sculptures. Whatever meaning it is supposed to have was wholly indecipherable to me. Like all modern art, it struck me as the Emperor's New Clothes. It was nothing that a moderately talented high schooler couldn't have produced in shop class.
I found a different feeling at the monument to Kentucky, which like Missouri was a bitterly divided border state. It is somewhat confusing, as there is a Kentucky monument which specifically honors the service of the Kentucky Confederates, yet the second Kentucky monument honors all the men of the state, no matter which side they fought for. It's also very different, in that it's spaced out over a considerable distance and farther away from the driving path than any other monument.
I almost missed it. By the time I got to the Kentucky Monument, it was late in the day, I was quite tired, and it had become very hot. Moreover, the sandwich I had eaten for lunch was not sitting well on my stomach. I almost made the decision to drive on, but eventually decided that the monument deserved my attention. I got out of my car and walked the few hundred yards down a path towards the monument. It was the best decision I made during my visit to Vicksburg.
Leading up to the monument are five sculptures of prominent Kentuckians who served as general officers during the Vicksburg Campaign. I was happily surprised to see a sculpture of John C. Breckinridge, the primary character of my novella Blessed are the Peacemakers and one of the main characters of my upcoming novel House of the Proud. He was not present at Vicksburg itself, but commanded a division in the army the Confederates attempted to raise in Jackson to raise the siege. Looking up at the man's face, complete with his famous whiskers, I found myself wondering whether he might be offended by my taking his person and throwing it into a fictional story. I was almost tempted to apologize.
The centerpiece of the Kentucky Monument, though, is a circular plaza encased within an angled wall. On the wall are lists of the Kentucky units, both Union and Confederate, that participated in the Vicksburg Campaign. Standing at the center of the circle are bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, both natives of Kentucky, the respective leaders of the two warring sides, seemingly engaged in an endless conversation. There was no one else around and I found myself strangely wanting to ask the two statues what on earth they could be talking about. They don't look happy to see one another, but neither do they appear angry or embittered. There are just two men, albeit two remarkable and strikingly complex men, representing different parts of America, staring level into one another eyes, talking the same talk we've been having with ourselves since 1776 and which we are still having with ourselves today.
The words of Davis date from the 1880s, long after the war, and read as follows: "The past is dead; let it bury its dead. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling. Make your place in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished - a reunited country."
In this age of political correctness, when people who have no understanding of history seem determined to tear away historical markers and monuments to people about whom they know nothing, it seems to me that we can all learn some important lessons from the words of Lincoln and Davis. That, more than anything else, is what I took away from my trip to Vicksburg.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
A Visit to the Raymond Battlefield
I'm in Vicksburg, Mississippi, one of the towns that has to be on the bucket list of anyone interested in the American Civil War. After all, the campaign that led to the fall of Vicksburg, thus securing Union control of the Mississippi River and splitting the Confederacy in two, was arguably the decisive campaign of the war. Much more than the Battle of Gettysburg, the Siege of Vicksburg ensured that the Confederacy would eventually go down to defeat. Thousands of Northerners died to capture Vicksburg, just as thousands of Southerners died trying to protect it.
The story of the Union conquest of Vicksburg is a long one. It started with the naval attack of Admiral David Farragut in May of 1862 and ended with the final surrender of Vicksburg to General Ulysses Grant in July of 1863. It's a dramatic tale that has it all: ferocious battles between ironclads, daring cavalry raids behind enemy lines, spies and double-agents, near-suicidal assaults against seemingly invincible fortresses, fierce internal dissensions among the general officers of both sides, terrified civilians unwillingly caught up in the maelstrom of war, and, of course, epic pitched battles. Honestly, if HBO wanted to do a Civil War mini-series, the campaign for Vicksburg would be a perfect subject.
One of the most interesting episodes in the long struggle for control of Vicksburg is the Battle of Raymond. On May 12, 1863, having finally succeeded in getting his army on the east bank of the Mississippi River below Vicksburg, General Grant was moving his troops rapidly northeastwards, leaving the confused and scattered Confederate forces unable to even find him. It was an early example of a style of warfare that, in the 20th Century, would come to be known as blitzkrieg. That morning, on a hilly field southwest of the small town of Raymond, a single Confederate brigade slammed into a Union force that, unbeknownst to them, was roughly three times their strength. The result was a confused and brutal day-long battle.
This battle is of particular interest to me because it involved the 7th Texas Infantry Regiment. Readers of my book Shattered Nation will know that this is the regiment to which my fictional character, James McFadden, belongs. The Battle of Raymond was a small engagement by Civil War standards, with five thousand Confederates fighting against twelve thousand Yankees; there were quite a few Civil War battles with ten times as many combatants. Yet it certainly was important to the men of the 7th Texas. Of the Texans, twenty-two were killed, sixty-six wounded, and seventy captured. The regiment would go on to fight in such brutal battles as Chickamauga, Atlanta, and Franklin, yet it never again suffered losses as severe as those it sustained on the field of Raymond.
Anyone expecting a big visitor's center with a well-produced introductory video at the battlefield is going to be disappointed. There is an information kiosk with a few useful maps, a paved circular walking trail, and several reproduction cannon to signify the positions of artillery batteries, but nothing as fancy as one finds at any of the battlefields preserved and interpreted by the National Park Service. Still, we are fortunate that there is any battlefield at Raymond at all, for would certainly have been lost to real estate development had it not been for the hard work and dedication of a group of local preservation activists calling themselves the Friends of Raymond. These people deserve the thanks of all lovers of history for saving the Raymond Battlefield from disappearing, as so many other historical sites have sadly done.
When I visited the battlefield this morning, it was very quiet and peaceful. It might have been hard to find, but I had received a helpful email from a member of the Friends of Raymond in response to an earlier request for help and so knew pretty much where to go. No one else was there and the battlefield was quiet and peaceful, quite in contrast to the violence and death that had shaken the same ground just over a century and a half before. Not all of the battlefield has yet been preserved, but the land across which the 7th Texas made its gallant and ill-fated charge can be followed almost exactly. A creek bed in which savage fighting took place appears almost unchanged from what it must have looked like during the battle. It was very easy to get a feel for the battle.
I was particularly interested in finding the monument to the Texas troops that I understood had been erected in recent years. Frustratingly, though, I could not find it and got back into my car with a sense of disappointment. I hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards back down the road, though, before I saw the monument on the other side of the road. I quickly pulled over and walked over to it. I was a little surprised to see that it is right next to someone's driveway and don't understand why they didn't put it on the battlefield itself. Alas, some questions have no answers. What matters is that it is a dignified and appropriate monument to the men of the 7th Texas Infantry.
I'd encourage anyone to visit the Raymond Battlefield. Yes, there's not much there. Yes, the engagement was minor compared to other, more famous battles. But it is part of a crucial story that helped decide the destiny of our nation and was a shining example of the courage and endurance that the men of the North and South displayed on countless similar battlefields throughout the war. They deserve to be remembered.
As for me, it was on to Vicksburg.
The story of the Union conquest of Vicksburg is a long one. It started with the naval attack of Admiral David Farragut in May of 1862 and ended with the final surrender of Vicksburg to General Ulysses Grant in July of 1863. It's a dramatic tale that has it all: ferocious battles between ironclads, daring cavalry raids behind enemy lines, spies and double-agents, near-suicidal assaults against seemingly invincible fortresses, fierce internal dissensions among the general officers of both sides, terrified civilians unwillingly caught up in the maelstrom of war, and, of course, epic pitched battles. Honestly, if HBO wanted to do a Civil War mini-series, the campaign for Vicksburg would be a perfect subject.
One of the most interesting episodes in the long struggle for control of Vicksburg is the Battle of Raymond. On May 12, 1863, having finally succeeded in getting his army on the east bank of the Mississippi River below Vicksburg, General Grant was moving his troops rapidly northeastwards, leaving the confused and scattered Confederate forces unable to even find him. It was an early example of a style of warfare that, in the 20th Century, would come to be known as blitzkrieg. That morning, on a hilly field southwest of the small town of Raymond, a single Confederate brigade slammed into a Union force that, unbeknownst to them, was roughly three times their strength. The result was a confused and brutal day-long battle.
This battle is of particular interest to me because it involved the 7th Texas Infantry Regiment. Readers of my book Shattered Nation will know that this is the regiment to which my fictional character, James McFadden, belongs. The Battle of Raymond was a small engagement by Civil War standards, with five thousand Confederates fighting against twelve thousand Yankees; there were quite a few Civil War battles with ten times as many combatants. Yet it certainly was important to the men of the 7th Texas. Of the Texans, twenty-two were killed, sixty-six wounded, and seventy captured. The regiment would go on to fight in such brutal battles as Chickamauga, Atlanta, and Franklin, yet it never again suffered losses as severe as those it sustained on the field of Raymond.
Anyone expecting a big visitor's center with a well-produced introductory video at the battlefield is going to be disappointed. There is an information kiosk with a few useful maps, a paved circular walking trail, and several reproduction cannon to signify the positions of artillery batteries, but nothing as fancy as one finds at any of the battlefields preserved and interpreted by the National Park Service. Still, we are fortunate that there is any battlefield at Raymond at all, for would certainly have been lost to real estate development had it not been for the hard work and dedication of a group of local preservation activists calling themselves the Friends of Raymond. These people deserve the thanks of all lovers of history for saving the Raymond Battlefield from disappearing, as so many other historical sites have sadly done.
When I visited the battlefield this morning, it was very quiet and peaceful. It might have been hard to find, but I had received a helpful email from a member of the Friends of Raymond in response to an earlier request for help and so knew pretty much where to go. No one else was there and the battlefield was quiet and peaceful, quite in contrast to the violence and death that had shaken the same ground just over a century and a half before. Not all of the battlefield has yet been preserved, but the land across which the 7th Texas made its gallant and ill-fated charge can be followed almost exactly. A creek bed in which savage fighting took place appears almost unchanged from what it must have looked like during the battle. It was very easy to get a feel for the battle.
I was particularly interested in finding the monument to the Texas troops that I understood had been erected in recent years. Frustratingly, though, I could not find it and got back into my car with a sense of disappointment. I hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards back down the road, though, before I saw the monument on the other side of the road. I quickly pulled over and walked over to it. I was a little surprised to see that it is right next to someone's driveway and don't understand why they didn't put it on the battlefield itself. Alas, some questions have no answers. What matters is that it is a dignified and appropriate monument to the men of the 7th Texas Infantry.
I'd encourage anyone to visit the Raymond Battlefield. Yes, there's not much there. Yes, the engagement was minor compared to other, more famous battles. But it is part of a crucial story that helped decide the destiny of our nation and was a shining example of the courage and endurance that the men of the North and South displayed on countless similar battlefields throughout the war. They deserve to be remembered.
As for me, it was on to Vicksburg.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Update on the Writing
It's been a long, hot, and dry summer in Central Texas. After our incredibly rainy May, I had hoped that this would be more mild than usual, but, alas, it was not to be. Granted, it hasn't been nearly as bad as the brutal scorcher of 2011, but now that we are approaching mid-August, with Fourth of July fireworks now a distant memory, I find myself longing for the crisp air of autumn. Much as I look forward to its end, though, I must say that it has been a good summer. I had a lovely trip out to the beaches of Florida with my wife and daughter, visiting with my parents. I've spent as much time as I can with my little girl, taking her for walks in the morning before the heat becomes too intense. My wife and I have had a few good date nights. I'm now beginning the traditional mourning period that every teacher in the country endures as mid-August approaches.
The defining characteristic of this summer has been the writing. My fingers have positively bled from all the writing I have been doing. I am very proud to say that there has not been a single day this summer when I have not written at least 1,000 words and most days have seen rather more than that. The record has been June 21, when I wrote 4,549 words in a single stretch. Anyone who thinks that's not an achievement ought to try it.
What am I writing, exactly? It's called House of the Proud and it's the sequel to Shattered Nation, the novel I published in the fall of 2013. Faithful readers will know that Shattered Nation explored the question of what might have happened if General Joseph Johnston had been kept in command of the Army of Tennessee in July of 1864, as opposed to being replaced, as he was historically, by General John Bell Hood.
(I published a short novella, Blessed are the Peacemakers, in the summer of 2014. It dealt with the counterfactual peace conference between the Union and the Confederacy and should be seen as a bridge between Shattered Nation and House of the Proud. I plan on writing novellas and perhaps collections of short stories set in the Shattered Nation universe between the writing of the major novels.)
House of the Proud takes place in 1867, three years after the events of Shattered Nation. The Confederacy is independent but unsettled, burdened with a crushing war debt and finding its political consensus in tatters as it approaches its first contested presidential election. More ominous than all this, however, is a slave rebellion in the lower Mississippi Valley, led by the mysterious figure known only as Saul. Meanwhile, a crisis sparked by the group of Irish nationalists called the Fenian Brotherhood threatens to cause a war between the United States and the British Empire.
The cast of characters is grand and sweeping. Charles Sumner, champion of abolitionism in the United States Senate, pursues his anti-slavery crusade in Washington. Robert Toombs, king of the Fire-Eaters, plots to bring about the downfall of his enemies and to solidify the South as an aristocratic slave-holding republic. Cavalry general John Hunt Morgan, once the darling of the Confederacy, finds himself matching wits with black insurgents in the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi. Judah Benjamin, the wry smile rarely leaving his face, schemes to set the Confederacy on the course he know it must take if it is to survive. In distant Europe, the wealthy and cultured John Slidell, the minister of the Confederacy to France, bends every effort to bring France into an alliance with his newborn nation. In Canada, British Lieutenant-Colonel Garnet Wolseley battles with Fenians and dreams of a great war with the United States in which he might earn immortal glory.
John C. Breckinridge, once Vice President of the United States, then a Southern general, and now the Confederate Secretary of War, weighs his duties in the Cabinet and his desire to retire from public life against intense pressure to seek the presidency. Charles Russell Lowell, brilliant scion of one of Boston's great abolitionist families, must make a decision that will not only put his own life at risk, but might transform the history of both the Union and the Confederacy. And then there is the enigmatic Saul, leader of the slave rebellion against the Confederacy, who is both more and less than what he appears to be.
Finally, readers will again find themselves in the company of James McFadden, late of the 7th Texas Infantry. Once a tormented soul, yearning for death on the battlefield, McFadden is now trying to live a simple life on the Texas frontier with his beloved wife Annie and his toddler son Thaddeus. Yet the peace he has found is imperiled by an enemy he could not had foreseen and more dangerous than any he has previously faced. Their conflict is tied to the larger forces threatening to tear their nation apart and in which he will play an unexpected role.
I'm rather proud of the story, but I certainly am not going to reveal the specifics of the plot to anyone as yet. You'll have to buy the book when it comes out. Still, I will share a few tidbits:
I wrote a large chunk of House of the Proud last summer, before hitting a heavy wall of writer's block in the fall. During the winter, I fell into alternate history writing projects having to do with either the late Roman Republic or the American Revolution. But since March of this year, however, I have been writing furiously on House of the Proud. Before the school year was over, I dragged myself out of bed at four thirty or five o'clock every morning and wrote for as long as possible before I needed to get ready to go to work. Once summer break began, I locked myself in the study whenever I could and have written as much as possible.
It is not easy to remain focused on a single literary project for such a long time, so I have occasionally given my brain a rest and done some preliminary work on other writing projects I intend to pursue when House of the Proud is finished. Some of these are other books of the Shattered Nations series. Two of them are set in 1864 and explore how the "point of divergence" in Shattered Nation impacted events in places other than Georgia, one taking place in and around Charleston Harbor and the other in the Shenandoah Valley. I have some ideas for titles, but don't want to say them now as they may change later. I've also done some initial work on a novel that will take place primarily in Texas in the late 1890s, one that takes place in the 1920s in the midst of a world war, and another that takes place in the 1960s and is essentially a spy novel. Outside of the Shattered Nation universe, I have started work on an interesting alternate history novel set during the American Revolution, with cryptography emerging as a central theme. I've also started to do some early work on an alternate history novel set during the late Roman Republic, which I personally feel is perhaps the most fascinating and enthralling dramas in all of human history.
But House of the Proud remains the priority. It's a big book and it's not finished. As of this afternoon, the manuscript is 230,000 words long. It still has long way to go, but at least it won't be the behemoth that Shattered Nation, at roughly 600,000 words, turned out to be. I have no doubt that the commencement of the school year will disrupt the writing process a bit, but I hope to keep it up until I complete the narrative. Then it will take a few months of editing, cover design, and so forth until it is ready for purchase.
I'll be sure to keep everyone informed. Rest assured, I'm working as fast as I can.
The defining characteristic of this summer has been the writing. My fingers have positively bled from all the writing I have been doing. I am very proud to say that there has not been a single day this summer when I have not written at least 1,000 words and most days have seen rather more than that. The record has been June 21, when I wrote 4,549 words in a single stretch. Anyone who thinks that's not an achievement ought to try it.
What am I writing, exactly? It's called House of the Proud and it's the sequel to Shattered Nation, the novel I published in the fall of 2013. Faithful readers will know that Shattered Nation explored the question of what might have happened if General Joseph Johnston had been kept in command of the Army of Tennessee in July of 1864, as opposed to being replaced, as he was historically, by General John Bell Hood.
(I published a short novella, Blessed are the Peacemakers, in the summer of 2014. It dealt with the counterfactual peace conference between the Union and the Confederacy and should be seen as a bridge between Shattered Nation and House of the Proud. I plan on writing novellas and perhaps collections of short stories set in the Shattered Nation universe between the writing of the major novels.)
House of the Proud takes place in 1867, three years after the events of Shattered Nation. The Confederacy is independent but unsettled, burdened with a crushing war debt and finding its political consensus in tatters as it approaches its first contested presidential election. More ominous than all this, however, is a slave rebellion in the lower Mississippi Valley, led by the mysterious figure known only as Saul. Meanwhile, a crisis sparked by the group of Irish nationalists called the Fenian Brotherhood threatens to cause a war between the United States and the British Empire.
The cast of characters is grand and sweeping. Charles Sumner, champion of abolitionism in the United States Senate, pursues his anti-slavery crusade in Washington. Robert Toombs, king of the Fire-Eaters, plots to bring about the downfall of his enemies and to solidify the South as an aristocratic slave-holding republic. Cavalry general John Hunt Morgan, once the darling of the Confederacy, finds himself matching wits with black insurgents in the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi. Judah Benjamin, the wry smile rarely leaving his face, schemes to set the Confederacy on the course he know it must take if it is to survive. In distant Europe, the wealthy and cultured John Slidell, the minister of the Confederacy to France, bends every effort to bring France into an alliance with his newborn nation. In Canada, British Lieutenant-Colonel Garnet Wolseley battles with Fenians and dreams of a great war with the United States in which he might earn immortal glory.
John C. Breckinridge, once Vice President of the United States, then a Southern general, and now the Confederate Secretary of War, weighs his duties in the Cabinet and his desire to retire from public life against intense pressure to seek the presidency. Charles Russell Lowell, brilliant scion of one of Boston's great abolitionist families, must make a decision that will not only put his own life at risk, but might transform the history of both the Union and the Confederacy. And then there is the enigmatic Saul, leader of the slave rebellion against the Confederacy, who is both more and less than what he appears to be.
Finally, readers will again find themselves in the company of James McFadden, late of the 7th Texas Infantry. Once a tormented soul, yearning for death on the battlefield, McFadden is now trying to live a simple life on the Texas frontier with his beloved wife Annie and his toddler son Thaddeus. Yet the peace he has found is imperiled by an enemy he could not had foreseen and more dangerous than any he has previously faced. Their conflict is tied to the larger forces threatening to tear their nation apart and in which he will play an unexpected role.
I'm rather proud of the story, but I certainly am not going to reveal the specifics of the plot to anyone as yet. You'll have to buy the book when it comes out. Still, I will share a few tidbits:
- Scenes take place in locations as varied as the Texas frontier, the border between Canada and the United States, Paris, London, Boston, New Orleans, Montgomery, and of course Richmond and Washington City.
- Historical figures who show up, but are not perspective characters, include Jefferson Davis, George McClellan, P.G.T. Beauregard, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Stephens, Redvers Buller, William Porcher Miles, William Seward, Louis Wigfall, Edwin Stanton, Benjamin Disraeli, Basil Duke, Napoleon III, John B. Gordon and a host of others.
- One of Britain's most storied infantry regiments, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, plays an interesting role. And no, I didn't misspell "Welsh" there.
- Although the story is set in 1867, an epilogue depicts a scene from 1907.
I wrote a large chunk of House of the Proud last summer, before hitting a heavy wall of writer's block in the fall. During the winter, I fell into alternate history writing projects having to do with either the late Roman Republic or the American Revolution. But since March of this year, however, I have been writing furiously on House of the Proud. Before the school year was over, I dragged myself out of bed at four thirty or five o'clock every morning and wrote for as long as possible before I needed to get ready to go to work. Once summer break began, I locked myself in the study whenever I could and have written as much as possible.
It is not easy to remain focused on a single literary project for such a long time, so I have occasionally given my brain a rest and done some preliminary work on other writing projects I intend to pursue when House of the Proud is finished. Some of these are other books of the Shattered Nations series. Two of them are set in 1864 and explore how the "point of divergence" in Shattered Nation impacted events in places other than Georgia, one taking place in and around Charleston Harbor and the other in the Shenandoah Valley. I have some ideas for titles, but don't want to say them now as they may change later. I've also done some initial work on a novel that will take place primarily in Texas in the late 1890s, one that takes place in the 1920s in the midst of a world war, and another that takes place in the 1960s and is essentially a spy novel. Outside of the Shattered Nation universe, I have started work on an interesting alternate history novel set during the American Revolution, with cryptography emerging as a central theme. I've also started to do some early work on an alternate history novel set during the late Roman Republic, which I personally feel is perhaps the most fascinating and enthralling dramas in all of human history.
But House of the Proud remains the priority. It's a big book and it's not finished. As of this afternoon, the manuscript is 230,000 words long. It still has long way to go, but at least it won't be the behemoth that Shattered Nation, at roughly 600,000 words, turned out to be. I have no doubt that the commencement of the school year will disrupt the writing process a bit, but I hope to keep it up until I complete the narrative. Then it will take a few months of editing, cover design, and so forth until it is ready for purchase.
I'll be sure to keep everyone informed. Rest assured, I'm working as fast as I can.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Thomas Jefferson Was a Hero, Not a Villain
On Wednesday night, the Connecticut state affiliate of the Democratic Party voted to remove Thomas Jefferson's name from its annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. This follows some suggestions in the media back in June, during the intense debate over public displays of the Confederate flag, that perhaps it might be time to "rethink" public monuments of Jefferson, even the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. The issue at hand, of course, is that Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner.
This is just a part of a trend that has been ongoing for several years. At a time when interest in America's Founding Fathers seems more intense than at any time during my life, Jefferson's popularity seems to have taken a nosedive. Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and even Madison seem to be in the ascendant, while Jefferson is now dismissed as a despicable hypocrite or, worse, ignored altogether. A few years ago, the Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its United States history standards so as to remove Jefferson from the list of important political philosophers that schoolchildren should learn about. Needless to say, if the Jefferson Memorial did not already exist, I highly doubt that a proposal to build one now would gain much traction.
This is to be truly lamented, because Thomas Jefferson is one of the greatest men who ever lived. The gifts he gave to both our country and the larger world are incalculable.
In dazzling prose that still shines brightly across the space of two centuries, Jefferson articulated better than anyone before or since the ideals on which America was founded and which should inspire America still. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If he had never done anything else then write these thirty-five words, Jefferson would still have been rendered immortal. They gloriously summarize the intellectual and moral awakening that took place during the Age of Enlightenment. They are the values upon which America was founded. In the two centuries since, they had rightfully been held up as the greatest statement of freedom and equality ever put on paper.
History has seen no greater champion of democracy than Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson's legacy to our country goes far beyond mere words, however. He was one of the most influential statesmen during the era that saw the birth of our nation. More than any other single individual, Jefferson can be considered the father of public education in America, on both a grade-school and university level. In partnership with his friend and ally James Madison, Jefferson secured religious freedom for Americans, for us no less than those in his own time, by establishing the separation of church and state. Jefferson also established the uniform system of weights and measures and established the parliamentary procedures that still largely govern the United States Senate. He rewrote the laws of Virginia to abolish primogeniture and reform the previously brutal laws of criminal punishment into something more humane and worked to ensure that British and Hessian prisoners-of-war were decently treated.
In the 1790s, the High Federalists led by Jefferson's arch-enemy Alexander Hamilton passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to try to silence their political opponents and raised a large army intended, at least in part, to intimidate the followers of Jefferson into obedience. Jefferson refused to be cowed and led his party to victory in the 1800 election, thereby saving the country at the moment when the American experiment in self-government faced perhaps its greatest peril.
As President, Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of our nation and ensuring that North America would never become part of the colonial empires of France, Britain, or Spain. The Lewis and Clark Expedition, the greatest exploratory venture of the United States before the launching of the space program, was Jefferson's brainchild. He pardoned everyone who had been convicted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. He balanced the budget every year of his term and never issued a single presidential veto. He established the United States Military Academy at West Point. During his administration, the Navy and Marine Corps fought and won the First Barbary War, defeating the North African pirates who had been capturing and enslaving American sailors and passengers on the high seas.
Even in his retirement, from 1809 until his death in 1826, Jefferson continued to work on behalf of his nation. He devoted his final years to establishing the University of Virginia, which became the model for all the public universities around the United States. Almost as an afterthought, he essentially created the Library of Congress, which is today one of the great libraries of the globe.
Jefferson's gifts to the nation are greater and more varied than any other single individual. Yet his accomplishments as a private man are no less impressive. In addition to being a statesmen, Jefferson was an inventor, a pioneer of archeology, a renowned architect, a linguist who could speak seven languages, an accomplished musician who played the violin, an astronomer, and a scientific gardener. He was the greatest wine connoisseur of the age and one of the greatest of all time. When John F. Kennedy addressed a White House gathering of all living American winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962, he said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Indeed, I often suspect that the true reason so many people are determined to belittle Jefferson in our time is that they simply resent the fact that they can never become as accomplished as he became.
Yes, it's true that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Indeed, at any given time during his life there were around two hundred slaves working his farms. Nobody denies that this was morally wrong, and neither did Jefferson himself. He was born into the slave system in 1743 and he was still enmeshed in it when he died in 1826. In one memorable phrase, Jefferson said that the institution of slave was like holding the wolf by the ears. As a member of a landowning Southern family in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Jefferson was trapped in slavery much as we are today trapped in the carbon-based economy. He did not like it but could never devise a way to get out of it.
Then you have the Sally Hemings controversy, but despite popular belief and what the "pro-paternity" advocates would have you believe, there is no conclusive evidence that Thomas Jefferson was the father of the children of Sally Hemings. The DNA test conducted in the late 1990s only proved that a member of the Jefferson family, not necessarily Thomas Jefferson himself, was the father of one of the Hemings children (Eston Hemings, to be exact). There are only two other pieces of evidence that have ever been presented. One is a scurrilous attack piece in an 1802 newspaper written by James Callender, a scandalmonger who personally hated Jefferson and was thoroughly despised throughout America as a liar, drunkard, and all-around reprobate. The other is an interview given to a Republican newspaper editor in 1872 by Madison Hemings, which has been found to be so full of errors and distortions that no stock can be put in it. Personally, I think it much more likely that Randolph Jefferson, the President's brother, was the father of Eston Hemings and that the others were fathered either by Randolph or one of the Carr nephews. Either possibility is perfectly consistent with the results of the DNA test and there is enormous circumstantial evidence to back them up as well. If you ask me, it is extremely unlikely that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children.
(It would take far too much time to fully explore the nitty-gritty details of why I reject the idea that Jefferson fathered the Hemings children. Readers who want a deeper explanation should read In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal, by William G. Hyland. Whatever you do, though, don't read the book on Jefferson by David Barton. Although he also doesn't accept the Jefferson-Hemings story, his books are not worth the paper they are printed on and pretty much everything else in his book on Jefferson is. . . well, never mind what it is.)
It's important to remember that though Jefferson owned slaves, he recognized that he should not own slaves. He would have been aghast if he could have seen his fellow Southerners such as John Calhoun decades later claiming that slavery was a "positive good", for he recognized all his life that it was an evil. Had he been able to destroy slavery, he would have, as the historical record proves. As a member of the Virginia state legislature, he pushed several plans for emancipation. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included a ringing denouncement of slavery and the slave trade and was distraught when the Continental Congress removed it. He was the crafter of the Northwest Ordinance, which forever banned slavery in the states north of the Ohio River. Had he had his way, slavery would have been banned completely from all the Western territories, but his proposal to implement that policy was defeated in 1784 by a single vote. In his innumerable letters, and in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson says again and again that he looks forward to the day that the scourge of slavery would be removed from America.
Others try to blacken Jefferson's name by calling him a racist, pointing out that his writings also state his belief that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and that the two races could not exist side-by-side in a free society (Jefferson advocated that freed slaves be removed to a separate colony). In doing this, Jefferson's detractors are committing the fallacy of historical anachronism. It simply makes no sense to subject a historical figure who lived two hundred years ago to modern standards of which he could have known nothing. Even the term "racist" would not make any sense to Jefferson, because virtually every white person in Jefferson's time and place could be classified as a racist if one uses the modern definition. For that matter, even later figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill could be as well. One can speculate on what we all do on a daily basis in the year 2015 which will be seen by future generations as morally repugnant.
To sum up, Thomas Jefferson was a hero, not a villain. He deserves to be celebrated, not condemned. He was one of the greatest men in American history and everyone reading this blog post owes him an enormous debt. If a wrecking ball crew ever arrives at the Jefferson Memorial, they will find me chained to its pillars and daring them to do their worst.
This is just a part of a trend that has been ongoing for several years. At a time when interest in America's Founding Fathers seems more intense than at any time during my life, Jefferson's popularity seems to have taken a nosedive. Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and even Madison seem to be in the ascendant, while Jefferson is now dismissed as a despicable hypocrite or, worse, ignored altogether. A few years ago, the Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its United States history standards so as to remove Jefferson from the list of important political philosophers that schoolchildren should learn about. Needless to say, if the Jefferson Memorial did not already exist, I highly doubt that a proposal to build one now would gain much traction.
This is to be truly lamented, because Thomas Jefferson is one of the greatest men who ever lived. The gifts he gave to both our country and the larger world are incalculable.
In dazzling prose that still shines brightly across the space of two centuries, Jefferson articulated better than anyone before or since the ideals on which America was founded and which should inspire America still. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If he had never done anything else then write these thirty-five words, Jefferson would still have been rendered immortal. They gloriously summarize the intellectual and moral awakening that took place during the Age of Enlightenment. They are the values upon which America was founded. In the two centuries since, they had rightfully been held up as the greatest statement of freedom and equality ever put on paper.
History has seen no greater champion of democracy than Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson's legacy to our country goes far beyond mere words, however. He was one of the most influential statesmen during the era that saw the birth of our nation. More than any other single individual, Jefferson can be considered the father of public education in America, on both a grade-school and university level. In partnership with his friend and ally James Madison, Jefferson secured religious freedom for Americans, for us no less than those in his own time, by establishing the separation of church and state. Jefferson also established the uniform system of weights and measures and established the parliamentary procedures that still largely govern the United States Senate. He rewrote the laws of Virginia to abolish primogeniture and reform the previously brutal laws of criminal punishment into something more humane and worked to ensure that British and Hessian prisoners-of-war were decently treated.
In the 1790s, the High Federalists led by Jefferson's arch-enemy Alexander Hamilton passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to try to silence their political opponents and raised a large army intended, at least in part, to intimidate the followers of Jefferson into obedience. Jefferson refused to be cowed and led his party to victory in the 1800 election, thereby saving the country at the moment when the American experiment in self-government faced perhaps its greatest peril.
As President, Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of our nation and ensuring that North America would never become part of the colonial empires of France, Britain, or Spain. The Lewis and Clark Expedition, the greatest exploratory venture of the United States before the launching of the space program, was Jefferson's brainchild. He pardoned everyone who had been convicted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. He balanced the budget every year of his term and never issued a single presidential veto. He established the United States Military Academy at West Point. During his administration, the Navy and Marine Corps fought and won the First Barbary War, defeating the North African pirates who had been capturing and enslaving American sailors and passengers on the high seas.
Even in his retirement, from 1809 until his death in 1826, Jefferson continued to work on behalf of his nation. He devoted his final years to establishing the University of Virginia, which became the model for all the public universities around the United States. Almost as an afterthought, he essentially created the Library of Congress, which is today one of the great libraries of the globe.
Jefferson's gifts to the nation are greater and more varied than any other single individual. Yet his accomplishments as a private man are no less impressive. In addition to being a statesmen, Jefferson was an inventor, a pioneer of archeology, a renowned architect, a linguist who could speak seven languages, an accomplished musician who played the violin, an astronomer, and a scientific gardener. He was the greatest wine connoisseur of the age and one of the greatest of all time. When John F. Kennedy addressed a White House gathering of all living American winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962, he said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Indeed, I often suspect that the true reason so many people are determined to belittle Jefferson in our time is that they simply resent the fact that they can never become as accomplished as he became.
Yes, it's true that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Indeed, at any given time during his life there were around two hundred slaves working his farms. Nobody denies that this was morally wrong, and neither did Jefferson himself. He was born into the slave system in 1743 and he was still enmeshed in it when he died in 1826. In one memorable phrase, Jefferson said that the institution of slave was like holding the wolf by the ears. As a member of a landowning Southern family in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Jefferson was trapped in slavery much as we are today trapped in the carbon-based economy. He did not like it but could never devise a way to get out of it.
Then you have the Sally Hemings controversy, but despite popular belief and what the "pro-paternity" advocates would have you believe, there is no conclusive evidence that Thomas Jefferson was the father of the children of Sally Hemings. The DNA test conducted in the late 1990s only proved that a member of the Jefferson family, not necessarily Thomas Jefferson himself, was the father of one of the Hemings children (Eston Hemings, to be exact). There are only two other pieces of evidence that have ever been presented. One is a scurrilous attack piece in an 1802 newspaper written by James Callender, a scandalmonger who personally hated Jefferson and was thoroughly despised throughout America as a liar, drunkard, and all-around reprobate. The other is an interview given to a Republican newspaper editor in 1872 by Madison Hemings, which has been found to be so full of errors and distortions that no stock can be put in it. Personally, I think it much more likely that Randolph Jefferson, the President's brother, was the father of Eston Hemings and that the others were fathered either by Randolph or one of the Carr nephews. Either possibility is perfectly consistent with the results of the DNA test and there is enormous circumstantial evidence to back them up as well. If you ask me, it is extremely unlikely that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children.
(It would take far too much time to fully explore the nitty-gritty details of why I reject the idea that Jefferson fathered the Hemings children. Readers who want a deeper explanation should read In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal, by William G. Hyland. Whatever you do, though, don't read the book on Jefferson by David Barton. Although he also doesn't accept the Jefferson-Hemings story, his books are not worth the paper they are printed on and pretty much everything else in his book on Jefferson is. . . well, never mind what it is.)
It's important to remember that though Jefferson owned slaves, he recognized that he should not own slaves. He would have been aghast if he could have seen his fellow Southerners such as John Calhoun decades later claiming that slavery was a "positive good", for he recognized all his life that it was an evil. Had he been able to destroy slavery, he would have, as the historical record proves. As a member of the Virginia state legislature, he pushed several plans for emancipation. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included a ringing denouncement of slavery and the slave trade and was distraught when the Continental Congress removed it. He was the crafter of the Northwest Ordinance, which forever banned slavery in the states north of the Ohio River. Had he had his way, slavery would have been banned completely from all the Western territories, but his proposal to implement that policy was defeated in 1784 by a single vote. In his innumerable letters, and in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson says again and again that he looks forward to the day that the scourge of slavery would be removed from America.
Others try to blacken Jefferson's name by calling him a racist, pointing out that his writings also state his belief that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and that the two races could not exist side-by-side in a free society (Jefferson advocated that freed slaves be removed to a separate colony). In doing this, Jefferson's detractors are committing the fallacy of historical anachronism. It simply makes no sense to subject a historical figure who lived two hundred years ago to modern standards of which he could have known nothing. Even the term "racist" would not make any sense to Jefferson, because virtually every white person in Jefferson's time and place could be classified as a racist if one uses the modern definition. For that matter, even later figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill could be as well. One can speculate on what we all do on a daily basis in the year 2015 which will be seen by future generations as morally repugnant.
To sum up, Thomas Jefferson was a hero, not a villain. He deserves to be celebrated, not condemned. He was one of the greatest men in American history and everyone reading this blog post owes him an enormous debt. If a wrecking ball crew ever arrives at the Jefferson Memorial, they will find me chained to its pillars and daring them to do their worst.
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Dreams Of New Horizons
My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.
That was how my third grade teacher, Ms. Griffin, taught me and my classmates to remember the order of the planets of the Solar System: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Learning about the planets, like learning about the dinosaurs, is one of those few things that almost everyone who has passed through the American education system can count on. As far back as I can remember, I knew that Mars is red, that Jupiter is the biggest, that Saturn has rings, that Mercury is the closest. . . and that Pluto is the farthest.
Amidst a strange and constantly changing world, the fact that there were nine planets, from Mercury out to Pluto, seemed like one of the few constants I could count on. As I got older, math class got harder, history class got more complicated, health class got more embarrassing. Even the world maps changed, with the big red bulk of the Soviet Union giving way to seemingly dozens of smaller bits of different colors that had unpronounceable names. But I could always count on those nine planets.
It's all different now, of course. When I graduated from high school in 1994, not a single planet outside our Solar System had yet been discovered. Since then, thousands of extra-solar have been found and more are being discovered with every passing day. Moreover, the scientists are telling us that Pluto isn't really a planet and that there are probably lots of other worlds like it orbiting in that hazy, dark realm out there on the fringes of our Solar System. All the planets I had learned about as an excited schoolboy, it turned out, were nothing special. And Pluto was the least special of them all.
Hogwash. On July 14, 2015, Pluto had its big moment in the limelight.
Years ago, I was one of thousands of people around the country who sent letters to our representatives in Congress imploring them to appropriate funds for NASA that would allow it to send a robotic spacecraft to explore Pluto. Partly as a result of the huge outpouring of civic activism, the funds were appropriated and, in early 2006, the New Horizons probe was launched. After a journey of more than nine years and more than three billion miles, it flew past Pluto two days ago. While doing so, the seven scientific instruments on the plucky little spacecraft gathered a treasure trove of data on Pluto, as well as its large moon Charon and its four smaller moons. This priceless data will rewrite the science textbooks on the Solar System and help us sharpen our understand of exactly how the Solar System was formed.
It will take more than a year for all the data collected to be downloaded from the New Horizon's onboard computer. Yet even in these early days, its discoveries are already opening new mysteries. It had always been assumed that Pluto and its large moon Charon were similar worlds, but they in fact seem to be very different from one another. It had always been assumed that the surface of Pluto would be extremely ancient and covered with impact craters, but the initial close-up images show very few impact craters, indicating that the planet's surface is geologically quite young. All of this is astonishing and will keep our scientists busy for a very, very long time.
It was very fitting that the spacecraft carried one ounce of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the Kansas farmboy-turned-astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. Now that the flyby of Pluto is completed, the New Horizons probe will hopefully be directed to use its remaining fuel to fly past one of the smaller of the "Kuiper Belt objects" that lies in its path. Then, it will sail on to wander the Milky Way Galaxy forever. This means that Tombaugh is the first human being whose remains are leaving the Solar System.
I'm a history geek first and foremost, but I have a lot of the space geek in me, too. I have been fascinated by space ever since my father took me out into the countryside in 1986 to look at Halley's Comet through our small family telescope. In the summer of 2000, as an eager history graduate student at what was then Southwest Texas State University, I was lucky enough to participate in the NASA Oral History Project, interviewing engineers throughout Central Texas who had worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. I now own a decent telescope and very much enjoy breaking it out in the back yard or taking it on camping trips.
If you ask me, anyone who reads about the Pluto flyby and isn't enthralled has to be a person utterly devoid of a soul. We live in an age of mediocrity, in a society more interested in banal and inane popular culture rather than spiritual uplift and intellectual achievement. This is dissolving our spirit like a steady dripping of acid. Yet occasionally something happens which goes a certain way towards restoring my faith. Seeing the ecstatic faces of the engineers and scientists in the control room of New Horizons when confirmation was received that the spacecraft had survived its encounter with Pluto was one of those moments.
Thank you and congratulations to the whole New Horizons team. And thank you and congratulations to that lonely little spacecraft out there on the edge of the Solar System. Godspeed and have many new adventures!
That was how my third grade teacher, Ms. Griffin, taught me and my classmates to remember the order of the planets of the Solar System: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Learning about the planets, like learning about the dinosaurs, is one of those few things that almost everyone who has passed through the American education system can count on. As far back as I can remember, I knew that Mars is red, that Jupiter is the biggest, that Saturn has rings, that Mercury is the closest. . . and that Pluto is the farthest.
Amidst a strange and constantly changing world, the fact that there were nine planets, from Mercury out to Pluto, seemed like one of the few constants I could count on. As I got older, math class got harder, history class got more complicated, health class got more embarrassing. Even the world maps changed, with the big red bulk of the Soviet Union giving way to seemingly dozens of smaller bits of different colors that had unpronounceable names. But I could always count on those nine planets.
It's all different now, of course. When I graduated from high school in 1994, not a single planet outside our Solar System had yet been discovered. Since then, thousands of extra-solar have been found and more are being discovered with every passing day. Moreover, the scientists are telling us that Pluto isn't really a planet and that there are probably lots of other worlds like it orbiting in that hazy, dark realm out there on the fringes of our Solar System. All the planets I had learned about as an excited schoolboy, it turned out, were nothing special. And Pluto was the least special of them all.
Hogwash. On July 14, 2015, Pluto had its big moment in the limelight.
Years ago, I was one of thousands of people around the country who sent letters to our representatives in Congress imploring them to appropriate funds for NASA that would allow it to send a robotic spacecraft to explore Pluto. Partly as a result of the huge outpouring of civic activism, the funds were appropriated and, in early 2006, the New Horizons probe was launched. After a journey of more than nine years and more than three billion miles, it flew past Pluto two days ago. While doing so, the seven scientific instruments on the plucky little spacecraft gathered a treasure trove of data on Pluto, as well as its large moon Charon and its four smaller moons. This priceless data will rewrite the science textbooks on the Solar System and help us sharpen our understand of exactly how the Solar System was formed.
It will take more than a year for all the data collected to be downloaded from the New Horizon's onboard computer. Yet even in these early days, its discoveries are already opening new mysteries. It had always been assumed that Pluto and its large moon Charon were similar worlds, but they in fact seem to be very different from one another. It had always been assumed that the surface of Pluto would be extremely ancient and covered with impact craters, but the initial close-up images show very few impact craters, indicating that the planet's surface is geologically quite young. All of this is astonishing and will keep our scientists busy for a very, very long time.
It was very fitting that the spacecraft carried one ounce of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the Kansas farmboy-turned-astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. Now that the flyby of Pluto is completed, the New Horizons probe will hopefully be directed to use its remaining fuel to fly past one of the smaller of the "Kuiper Belt objects" that lies in its path. Then, it will sail on to wander the Milky Way Galaxy forever. This means that Tombaugh is the first human being whose remains are leaving the Solar System.
I'm a history geek first and foremost, but I have a lot of the space geek in me, too. I have been fascinated by space ever since my father took me out into the countryside in 1986 to look at Halley's Comet through our small family telescope. In the summer of 2000, as an eager history graduate student at what was then Southwest Texas State University, I was lucky enough to participate in the NASA Oral History Project, interviewing engineers throughout Central Texas who had worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. I now own a decent telescope and very much enjoy breaking it out in the back yard or taking it on camping trips.
If you ask me, anyone who reads about the Pluto flyby and isn't enthralled has to be a person utterly devoid of a soul. We live in an age of mediocrity, in a society more interested in banal and inane popular culture rather than spiritual uplift and intellectual achievement. This is dissolving our spirit like a steady dripping of acid. Yet occasionally something happens which goes a certain way towards restoring my faith. Seeing the ecstatic faces of the engineers and scientists in the control room of New Horizons when confirmation was received that the spacecraft had survived its encounter with Pluto was one of those moments.
Thank you and congratulations to the whole New Horizons team. And thank you and congratulations to that lonely little spacecraft out there on the edge of the Solar System. Godspeed and have many new adventures!
Saturday, July 11, 2015
The Golden Age of Wine
It's easy to become disillusioned in this unsettled age of ours. One can turn on the TV and be flooded with stories of ISIS atrocities in the Middle East, of corporations exploiting people in pursuit of higher profits, of politicians bickering about the latest media-manufactured "controversy" or "crisis" rather than solving our nation's real problems, or whatever else. I don't really blame people who want to throw up their hands and conclude that the human race is a lost cause. But rather than dwelling on what's bad about the modern world, I think it's more healthy to turn one's attention to those aspects of the modern world which are pleasant and uplifting.
For me, one of these things is the undeniable fact that we live in the Golden Age of Wine.
Thomas Jefferson, in addition to being one of the great Founding Fathers and America's original Renaissance Man, was the greatest wine connoisseur of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. In his time, if he ordered a shipment of wine from a Bordeaux merchant, it might take as long as a year before it arrived, if it arrived at all. Today, one can go into just about any convenience store, in even the smallest town in America, and find a decent bottle of wine for less than $10. The art and science of winemaking has advanced over the last hundred years to such a wondrous state that it is almost impossible to make a bad bottle of wine. In fact, almost every bottle on the wine list of a nice restaurant is probably superior to the best wine that was ever enjoyed by Henry VIII or Louis XIV.
When I walk down the wine aisle of my local grocery store, I'm in a wine-lover's wonderland that Thomas Jefferson could only have dreamt of. The shelves are lined with wines from California, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and just about every other place that makes wine. For less than the average American's hourly wage, one can purchase a wonderful bottle of wine from almost anywhere in the world.
I love wine. As I often remind my wife, there are two things I cannot live without: books and wine. Mostly for my own edification, I earned my certification as a wine sommelier from the International Wine Guild a few years back. Knowing about the history of the various wine regions, the processes by which the different kinds of wine are made, and the fascinating blend of national rules and regulations governing winemaking vastly increases the pleasure one gets from sipping a glass of wine.
I can't say that I have an especially good pallet for wine. I was recently reminded of this in the most humiliating fashion at a family wine tasting organized by my father on Independence Day. It was a blind tasting, with the bottles concealed in velvet wine bags. The five bottles ranged in price from $8 to $85. Despite my much ballyhooed sommelier certification, I picked the $8 bottle as the best and ranked the $85 bottle dead last. Needless to say, the family had a good laugh at my expense. I have always envied those extraordinary people, like Thomas Jefferson, who can sip a bottle of wine and tell you exactly what vineyard it came from. Such people are very rare, though snobs pretending to be such people are annoyingly common.
(My wife would be angry with me if I neglected to mention that she ranked the most expensive wine first and the least expensive wine last. She has a better pallet than I do.)
Despite the embarrassment it entailed, my Independence Day wine experience is proof that one does not have to have a lot of money to enjoy wine. I have enjoyed many bottles of wine between $10 and $15 that I found vastly superior to much more expensive bottles. While I would be overjoyed beyond belief if a friend gifted me a 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild or a 1973 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon, one does not need a huge amount of money to obtain good wine in this day and age. This, too, would have delighted Jefferson, who wanted wine to be enjoyed by ordinary citizens rather than just a wealthy elite. As Benjamin Disraeli once said, "I rather like bad wine. One gets so bored with good wine."
One does not have to up-to-date on the latest wine fads to enjoy wine. In fact, wine faddists should generally be avoided. I always wince when I hear someone say that such-and-such wine "is big this year." Anyone saying something like this clearly doesn't know what they're talking about. Human beings have been making wine for 10,000 years; there's nothing faddish about it. One should drink whatever wine one likes, not whatever wine happens to be the most popular at any given moment.
Every time one opens a bottle of wine, no matter where one got it or how much it cost, one is opening a little piece of magic with its own special history and personality, a product of a unique combination of land, weather, climate, and the skills and techniques of the viticulturists and winemakers themselves.
There are wines for every occasion. On a hot summer day, there's nothing like a crisp, chilled glass of Portuguese vinho verde or New Zealand sauvignon blanc. On a cold winter night, there's nothing like a glass of Burgundy in one hand and a good book in the other, preferably in front of a roaring fire. If you're having pizza, open a Chianti. If you're having a steak, open a California cabernet sauvignon. Id you're having Indian food, a Syrah is always nice. But these are just my preferences. Since everyone's pallet is different, everyone will have different tastes. There's no such thing as a right and wrong answer and, in the Golden Age of Wine, we have a virtually infinite variety of choices.
As Ernest Hemingway said, "Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things in the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other sensory thing."
So if you feel discouraged by the state of the world, remind yourself that we live in the Golden Age of Wine and take some comfort from that. Then, go open a bottle and pour yourself a glass.
For me, one of these things is the undeniable fact that we live in the Golden Age of Wine.
Thomas Jefferson, in addition to being one of the great Founding Fathers and America's original Renaissance Man, was the greatest wine connoisseur of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. In his time, if he ordered a shipment of wine from a Bordeaux merchant, it might take as long as a year before it arrived, if it arrived at all. Today, one can go into just about any convenience store, in even the smallest town in America, and find a decent bottle of wine for less than $10. The art and science of winemaking has advanced over the last hundred years to such a wondrous state that it is almost impossible to make a bad bottle of wine. In fact, almost every bottle on the wine list of a nice restaurant is probably superior to the best wine that was ever enjoyed by Henry VIII or Louis XIV.
When I walk down the wine aisle of my local grocery store, I'm in a wine-lover's wonderland that Thomas Jefferson could only have dreamt of. The shelves are lined with wines from California, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and just about every other place that makes wine. For less than the average American's hourly wage, one can purchase a wonderful bottle of wine from almost anywhere in the world.
I love wine. As I often remind my wife, there are two things I cannot live without: books and wine. Mostly for my own edification, I earned my certification as a wine sommelier from the International Wine Guild a few years back. Knowing about the history of the various wine regions, the processes by which the different kinds of wine are made, and the fascinating blend of national rules and regulations governing winemaking vastly increases the pleasure one gets from sipping a glass of wine.
I can't say that I have an especially good pallet for wine. I was recently reminded of this in the most humiliating fashion at a family wine tasting organized by my father on Independence Day. It was a blind tasting, with the bottles concealed in velvet wine bags. The five bottles ranged in price from $8 to $85. Despite my much ballyhooed sommelier certification, I picked the $8 bottle as the best and ranked the $85 bottle dead last. Needless to say, the family had a good laugh at my expense. I have always envied those extraordinary people, like Thomas Jefferson, who can sip a bottle of wine and tell you exactly what vineyard it came from. Such people are very rare, though snobs pretending to be such people are annoyingly common.
(My wife would be angry with me if I neglected to mention that she ranked the most expensive wine first and the least expensive wine last. She has a better pallet than I do.)
Despite the embarrassment it entailed, my Independence Day wine experience is proof that one does not have to have a lot of money to enjoy wine. I have enjoyed many bottles of wine between $10 and $15 that I found vastly superior to much more expensive bottles. While I would be overjoyed beyond belief if a friend gifted me a 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild or a 1973 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon, one does not need a huge amount of money to obtain good wine in this day and age. This, too, would have delighted Jefferson, who wanted wine to be enjoyed by ordinary citizens rather than just a wealthy elite. As Benjamin Disraeli once said, "I rather like bad wine. One gets so bored with good wine."
One does not have to up-to-date on the latest wine fads to enjoy wine. In fact, wine faddists should generally be avoided. I always wince when I hear someone say that such-and-such wine "is big this year." Anyone saying something like this clearly doesn't know what they're talking about. Human beings have been making wine for 10,000 years; there's nothing faddish about it. One should drink whatever wine one likes, not whatever wine happens to be the most popular at any given moment.
Every time one opens a bottle of wine, no matter where one got it or how much it cost, one is opening a little piece of magic with its own special history and personality, a product of a unique combination of land, weather, climate, and the skills and techniques of the viticulturists and winemakers themselves.
There are wines for every occasion. On a hot summer day, there's nothing like a crisp, chilled glass of Portuguese vinho verde or New Zealand sauvignon blanc. On a cold winter night, there's nothing like a glass of Burgundy in one hand and a good book in the other, preferably in front of a roaring fire. If you're having pizza, open a Chianti. If you're having a steak, open a California cabernet sauvignon. Id you're having Indian food, a Syrah is always nice. But these are just my preferences. Since everyone's pallet is different, everyone will have different tastes. There's no such thing as a right and wrong answer and, in the Golden Age of Wine, we have a virtually infinite variety of choices.
As Ernest Hemingway said, "Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things in the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other sensory thing."
So if you feel discouraged by the state of the world, remind yourself that we live in the Golden Age of Wine and take some comfort from that. Then, go open a bottle and pour yourself a glass.
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