Elektratig

Defiling Gore About the Altars

2012-01-21T13:52:00.000-05:00

On the other hand, Prof. MacMullen points out that visitors to temple precincts in the Roman empire were apt to encounter less pleasing sights and smells:

[Christians] pointed with elaborate repugnance to "the pollution around the idols, the disgusting smell and smoke of sacrifices, the defiling gore about the altars and the taint of blood from the offerings. Did they overstate the case? It was a pagan who described "the priest himself [who] stands there all bloody and like an ogre carves and pulls out entrails and extracts the heart and pours the blood about the altar." It is clear that the great bulk of meat . . . eaten in the ancient world had been butchered in temple precincts, most of which, ill-supplied with water, could not be swashed down easily, accumulated ugly piles of offal in corners, and supported not only flies but stray mongrels as well.

The Christian criticism quoted by Prof. MacMullen is from the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgos (the Wonderworker) by Gregory of Nyssa. The "pagan" quoted is the satirist Lucian's De sacrificiis.

"Send a good taste to the good gods!"

2012-01-21T10:41:00.000-05:00

In Paganism in the Roman Empire, RamsayMacMullen reminds us that a visitor to even a modest temple in the Roman empire experienced aprofusion of sensory delights, beginning with the brightly – wemight say garishly – painted temple itself: statues, offerings,presents, signs and inscriptions left by worshipers to thank the godand proclaim his or her deeds and exploits; dancers, singers, orators andtour guides (official and unofficial).

The visitor entering the sacredprecinct would also encounter a list of rules giving “notice ofwhat was expected”:

[Y]ou were to present yourself suitablyclothed, uncontaminated by recent childbirth, by sexual intercoursewith woman or dog, by sight or touch of a corpse, or by consumingpork or garlic or milk; you were to offer specified animals insacrifice to specified deities, or not animals but wine only, orincense only; and at particular shrines you were to respect localconditions, not lighting a fire near the walls, nor poaching sacredfish or cutting trees in the sacred grove. Directions might be givenon the whole range of daily service . . .. And the text might bevery long – 190 lines, at the shrine of Demeter and Kore in Andania– or very short. At Athens, “by oracle from Hygieia andAsclepius: the celestial serpent of the gods [directs the setting upof?] these statues, where should be offered sacrifices unmixed withwine, on the 5^th and 10^th of the month at noon. Send a good taste to the good gods!”

Dog? Yikes!

The Storm of War

2012-01-11T19:17:00.002-05:00

I have read a number of one-volume histories of World War II, and I had sworn them off, but this video interview of the author sorely tempts me to add Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War to the list. Thirty-eight minutes, but well worth your time.

Published!

2012-01-08T04:46:00.000-05:00

Last May I ventured down to Longview, Texas for a wedding. After some excellent barbecue at Carter's Bar-B-Que, I drove over to the Gregg County Courthouse and took some photos of the monument to the Confederate soldier standing on the front lawn.

Flash forward to later last year, when I received an email requesting permission to use one of the photos on the cover of the December 2011 issue of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine. The issue is now out, and the result is shown above.

Quiz

2011-12-22T20:22:00.000-05:00

Haven't done a quiz in a long while. Here's one that will outrage you.

What famous enlightenment figure is guilty of the following quote. Remember, he (or she) said it, I didn't:

What age or period of life is the most addicted to superstition? The weakest and most timid. What sex? The same answer must be given. “The leaders and examples of every kind of superstition”, says Strabo, “are the women. These excite the men to devotion and supplications, and the observance of religious days. It is rare to meet with one that lives apart from the females, and yet is addicted to such practices."

The Pit of Resurrection

2011-12-18T12:25:00.000-05:00

Virtually nothing is known ofCelsus, a late second centuryGreek philosopher, other than the fact that in the 170s AD he wrote amajor work, called the TrueDiscourse, devoted to debunking Christianity. Ironically, the textis preserved and known to us only because some eighty years later theearly Church Father Origen wrote amassive reply to Celsus, in eight volumes, in which Origen quotedfrom Celsus's arguments at length before refuting them.

Surprisingly, the brief Wikipediaarticle on Celsus does not quote his most well known bit ofinvective, which displays an acid wit. I therefore thought I'd shareit with you. Origen quotes it in Chapter 34 ofBook 6 ofhis response, Contra Celsum:

Everywhere in their [the Christians']writings, mention is made of the tree of life, and a resurrection ofthe flesh by means of the “tree,” because, I imagine, theirteacher was nailed to a cross, and was a carpenter by trade; so thatif he had chanced to have been cast from a precipice, or thrust intoa pit, or suffocated by hanging, or had been a leather-cutter, orstone-mason, or worker in iron, there would have been a precipice oflife beyond the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope ofimmortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a sacredleather! Now what old woman would not be ashamed to utter such thingsin a whisper, even when making stories to lull an infant to sleep?

Pliny the Younger

2011-12-17T05:56:00.002-05:00

In his delightful book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Robert Louis Wilken does a wonderful job teasing out all sorts of information about Roman habits and attitudes - how a social club worked, for example, or the difference in Roman eyes between a "superstition" and a "religion." But I particularly enjoyed his portrait of the diligent and dutiful aristocrat Pliny the Younger, who famously encountered Christians while serving as governor of Bithynia and Pontus in 112 AD and corresponded with the Emperor Trajan about what to do with them.

Like most upper class Romans, Pliny wore his ambition on his sleeve. But at the same time his frankness on the subject conveys an almost child-like innocence rather than arrogant grasping. I just loved his straightforward admission in a letter to his friend, the historian Tacitus, of his desire to be mentioned at least in one of Tacitus's works:

I believe that your histories will be immortal, a prophecy that will surely prove correct. That is why, I frankly admit, I am anxious to appear in them.

How Did Christianity Grow Before the Edict of Milan?

2011-12-04T16:14:00.000-05:00

The best guess seems to be that,immediately before the emperorsConstantine andLicinius issued theEdict of Milan in 313 AD,about 5 percent to 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empirewas Christian. Although these percentages may seen low, theytranslate to millions of converts. Assuming a total population ofabout 55 million in the Roman Empire at the time, the number ofChristians would have been somewhere between 2.75 million and 5.5million.

And yet, as Ramsay MacMullen notes inChristianizingthe Roman Empire A.D. 100-400, a profound mystery remains as to howChristianity had acquired so many converts. “After New Testament timesand before Constantine,” there is almost no evidence of “openadvertising” of Christianity, and much evidence that Christianswere urged to lay low and to associate only with other Christians,both to avoid being identified in the event of persecution and inorder to avoid the impure practices of the pagans.

How exactly, then, Prof. MacMullen wonders, didChristianity generate those millions of followers in the years before toleration? He suggests ananswer by trying to “imagine in some detail a scene that conflictswith no point of the little that is known about conversion in thesecond and third centuries.”

I would choose the room of some sickperson: there, a servant talking to a mistress, or one spouse toanother, saying, perhaps: “Unquestionably they can help, if youbelieve. And I know, I have seen, I have heard, they have related tome, they have books, they have a special person, a sort of officer. It is true. Besides and anyway, if you don't believe, then you aredoomed when a certain time comes, so say the prophecies; whereas, ifyou do, then they can help even in great sickness. I know people whohave seen or who have spoken with others who have seen. And healingis even the least that they tell. Theirs is truly a Godall-powerful. He has worked a hundred wonders.” So a priest issent for, or an exorcist; illness is healed; the household after thatcounts as Christian; it is baptized; and through instruction it comesto accept the first consequences: that all other cults are false andwicked, all seeming gods, the same.

Mohammed

2011-11-15T20:50:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted a picture of whats-his-name.

Jacob Broom, Man of Mystery

2011-11-15T16:44:00.001-05:00

Did you know that Jacob Broom of Delaware is the only signer of the Constitution of whom there is no extant picture of? I didn't, until I read Richard Brookhiser's post at The Corner. It is for this reason that only the top of Broom's (alleged) head appears in Howard Chandler Christy's Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States (1940):

Poor Mr. Broom (or a very small part thereof) may be found by consulting the key below.

Diocletian's Great Persecution: A Modern Parable

2011-11-13T19:06:00.000-05:00

What separates a good biography from an excellent one, I think, is the author's ability to explicate the problems encountered by the subject. Only in this way is it possible to appreciate the subject's reactions and responses to them.

Stephen Williams is such an author. In his excellent and highly recommended Diocletian and the Roman Recovery he does a superb job of explaining the myriad issues facing the Roman Empire at the time of Diocletian's accession to the throne - military defense and rampant inflation to name just two.

Williams's discussion of Roman religion, the rise of Christianity during the Third Century and the problems it presented to traditionalists such as Diocletian is as fine as any I have read. Although Williams carefully lays out the many challenges that Christianity presented, I was particularly struck by his use of a "modern parable" to illustrate the "remorseless argument" that ultimately led Diocletian to sign off on the Great Persecution of Christians beginning in February 303:

A small state, brave and resourceful, is permanently surrounded by powerful enemies who threaten to destroy it. By great efforts it had success in repelling them again and again. But its government soberly realizes that, in the long run, it can only be sure of surviving if it retains the friendship (and ultimate protection) of a certain Superpower. Should this be forfeit, no amount of bravery can guarantee it against being eventually engulfed. But in this state is a noisy radical minority violently opposed to the Superpower, whose activities threaten the vital relationship. The government tries to persuade them to keep their views to themselves and show at least outward respect for the Superpower, for the sake of their country's safety. But the radicals utterly refuse such a compromise, and their movement is growing in numbers. Finally, the government's supporters urge that it has no option but to suppress this movement before irreparable damage is done.

"In this parable," Williams concludes, "the small state is Rome, the Superpower is Jupiter and the gods, and the radical minority, the Christians. It was this remorseless argument . . . that shifted Diocletian."

Gimme That Wine (Fourth Century Edition)

2011-11-12T14:07:00.000-05:00

In the year 301, the Roman emperor Diocletian attempted to curb rampant price inflation by issuing his famous Edict on Prices, which set maximum prices for a long list of goods and services. The Edict proved to be a dead letter almost from the moment of issuance, but it has been a godsend for historians by "providing a mine of economic [and social] information . . . giving a picture of trades and their relative pay and status, the varieties of goods on the market and their places of origin, types of dress, culinary tastes, and techniques of manufacture."

According to Stephen Williams, the Edict suggests that modern days oenophiles would be sorely disappointed were they to travel back in time to the early Fourth Century. There were different kinds of wine, some of which were sold at a premium. But, whether because the art of aging wine was largely lost (there is evidence that Romans in the late Republic and earlier Empire drank and appreciated older vintages), or Fourth Century Romans just didn't care, little if any wine was cellared; anything more than a year old sold at a discount!

Almost the only significant price difference in wine seems to be between the plain (rustici) and the rest. Tiburtine, Falernian, Sabine, Picene and others are all 30 denarii a pint, with reductions for wine a year old, confirming that storage and maturation had not yet been generally mastered.

And for you beer lovers, sorry, no fancy IPAs, stouts, or designer beers for you. Only "[t]hree kinds of beers are mentioned, Celtic, Pannonian and Egyptian, the latter an inferior brew at only two denarii.

Diocletian's Horse

2011-11-12T08:48:00.000-05:00

John Malalas, a Sixth Century chronicler from Antioch, is apparently the sole source for the story of how Diocletian's horse saved the residents of Alexandria from mass slaughter.

As you may know, the great Roman emperor Diocletian restored the Roman Empire after the Crisis of the Third Century almost destroyed it the mid-Third Century. He was acclaimed emperor by the eastern army in late 384 and ruled (first alone, then later with other members of the Tetrarchy until his retirement in 305.

Early in the year 297, the Roman province of Egypt exploded in revolt. Although the revolt may have been triggered by fears of anticipated tax increases following the announcement of a new census, there was reason to believe that it was coordinated by or with the Sassanid (Persian) Empire, Rome's dangerous enemy to the east. In 296 a powerful Sassanid army under its expansionist king Narses had invaded into the areas of modern day Turkey and Syria. In early 297 – just about the time of the Egyptian uprising – the Persian army defeated a Roman army led by Diocletian's colleague Galerius near Carrhae (where the Persians had annihilated a Roman army under Crassus 350 years earlier). The revolt appeared to be part of a treasonous conspiracy to aid the Persians by opening a second front requiring the diversion of Roman troops. (The fact that Manicheans were believed to have spearheaded this fifth column may have contributed to the later decision to persecute the similar-looking Christian sect.)

Leaving Galerius and the bulk of the army to deal with the Sassanids, Diocletian rushed with a detachment of troops to Egypt in the spring of 297 to stamp out the rebellion. He ultimately did so, but it was not a walk in the park for the entire province was in revolt. While largely reducing other areas and towns to submission by the end of 297, during the late summer or early fall Diocletian laid siege to Alexandria. With almost one million residents, second in size only to the city of Rome itself, the provincial capital was well prepared. The city stubbornly resisted for eight months, reportedly falling only in the spring of 298.

The ends of sieges in the ancient world were rarely pretty affairs. From Troy on, the rule of thumb was that, if the besieged city did not capitulate early on, when the end came all of the inhabitants were killed or enslaved. Consistent with this tradition, and convinced that the revolt represented a treasonous conspiracy with Rome's mortal enemy to destroy the empire, when Alexandria fell Diocletian issued orders that so much blood should be shed that his horse might go knee-deep in it.

Now, however, the gods intervened to save the Alexandrians. As Diocletian approached the city gate his steed stumbled over a corpse, falling to its knees, which were stained red with the gore. Recognizing the omen, Diocletian ordered that the slaughter be stopped, no doubt to the great disappointment of his men.

In the ensuing celebrations the grateful Alexandrians displayed a sardonic sense of humor. They are said to have erected a bronze statue of Diocletian's horse in the city in honor of their savior.

St. Cuthbert and the Otters

2011-11-01T04:58:00.000-04:00

The Venerable Bede relates this wonderful story in his Life of St. Cuthbert:

Now one night, a brother of the monastery, seeing [Cuthbert] go out alone, followed him privately to see what he should do. When [Cuthbert] left the monastery, he went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reached his neck and arms, spent the night in praising God.

When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two quadrupeds, called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with their hair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element. Cuthbert himself returned home in time to join in the accustomed hymns with the other brethren.

The illustration is modern, but too perfect not to use.

Bundle Up . . .

2011-10-22T07:47:00.001-04:00

. . . Fall's coming.

Frank Zappa Friday

2011-10-21T21:22:00.000-04:00

How about two versions of "How Could I Be Such A Fool?"

First from Freak Out:

And then the Ruben and the Jets variation:

Don't Forget to Convert Your Historical Dates

2011-10-05T06:04:00.000-04:00

Are you worried about observing your favorite historical anniversaries on the correct date? The internet has the answer.

Let's say that you're obsessed with the Roman emperor Valens and want to celebrate or mourn his catastrophic defeat and death at the Battle of Adrianople on August 9, 378 AD. But wait! Something's bugging you. August 9, 378 was the date of the battle according to the calendar of the time - the Julian Calendar. To properly observe the event, you realize, you need to figure out what that date translates to on the Gregorian Calendar we now use.

It turns out there are multiple calendar converters on the web that will accomplish the task in just a few seconds. Here's one of many that I found, which appears no better or worse than many others. It turns out that Thursday August 9, 378 (Julian Calendar) would have been August 10 on the Gregorian Calendar.

"What's for dinner, Hun?"

2011-10-02T19:03:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in the last post, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus claimed that the Huns partially cooked their meat by warming it between their thighs and the backs of their horses:

[T]heir way of life is so rough that have no use for fire or seasoned food, but live on roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal, which they warm a little by placing it between their thighs and the backs of their horses.

To my surprise, in The End of Empire: Attila the Hun & the Fall of Rome, Christopher Kelly asserts that there may be a germ of truth to Ammianus's assertion:

Hans Schiltberger, a fourteenth-century mercenary and adventurer from Bavaria, claimed to have observed that among the Tatars, nomadic neighbors of the Mongols who captured Kiev in 1240, horsemen preparing to travel long distances placed raw meat under their saddles. "I have also seen that when the Tatars are on a long journey they take a piece of raw meat, cut it into slices, place it under the saddle, ride on it, and eat it when they are hungry. They salt it first and claim that it will not spoil because it is dried by the warmth of the horse and becomes tender under the saddle from riding, after the moisture has gone out of it." Tenderized raw meat seems to have been something of a steppe signature dish.

Of Mice and Huns

2011-10-01T08:09:00.002-04:00

Found on a classroom floor at a university that shall remain nameless:

History 385/Mathematics 385

History of Mathematics and Science in the Ancient World
Professor Elektratig
Final Exam

This examination consists of two question, requiring both mathematical calculations and an essay discussing the historical reasoning behind those calculations.

1. In Book XXXI of his Res Gestae, Ammianus Marcellinus described the Huns as wearing "garments made of the skins of field-mice." Calculate the number of such skins it would take to clothe the average Hun warrior, using both Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometry. Explain the reasoning behind your calculations, including considerations such as (a) the size of the average Hun warrior (taking into account Ammianus's description of the Huns as "of great size, and bow-legged, so that you might fancy them two-legged beasts"), and (b) the types of garments that you believe the average Hun warrior wore, such as tunics, hats, leggings or trousers, shoes, etc., and which of those garments you believe would have been fashioned from the skins of field mice rather than from some other material. If you conclude Ammianus correctly described the Huns as covering their "shaggy legs" "with the skins of kids" rather than with the skins of field-mice, calculate the number of kids required.

2. Ammianus also observed that the Huns did not cook their meat using fire, but rather warmed "the half-raw flesh of any animal" "by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses." Calculate the amount of riding time necessary to adequately warm to "half-raw" the flesh of a chicken, a boar, a stag, a bear and a trout. Explain the bases of your calculations, including the effect on warming time of (a) the speed and gait of the horse, (b) the amount of flesh being warmed, (c) the season, and (d) whether the warrior was wearing leggings, the material of the leggings, and, if leggings were worn, whether the half-raw flesh was placed inside or outside the leggings

The exam will last one hour.

Valens Says, ""Julian, Are You Friggin' Nuts?"

2011-09-28T20:54:00.001-04:00

What a fantastically ironic (indirect) quote, delivered by the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in 361 A.D., as per Ammianus Marcellinus:

While [Julian] was so arranging these matters, tolerating no slackness in action, his intimates tried to persuade him to attack the neighbouring Goths, who were often deceitful and treacherous; but he replied that he was looking for a better enemy; that for the Goths the Galatian [slave] traders were enough, by whom they were offered for sale everywhere without distinction of rank.

Seventeen years later, at the terrible Battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D., those Goths would destroy the cream of the Roman Eastern army and kill its leader, the Emperor Valens.

Hat tip to Michael Kulikowski, whose wonderfully opinionated yet balanced and transparent book Rome's Gothic Wars is highly recommended.

Counting Holiness

2011-09-22T04:52:00.000-04:00

A society prepared to vest fellow humans with such powers was ever vigilant. Men watched each other closely for those signs of intimacy with the supernatural that would validate their claim. Holiness itself might be quantifiable. Symeon Stylites, we are told, touched his toes 1,244 times in bowing before God from the top of his column. The true horror of this story lies not in the exertions of the saint, but in the layman who stood there counting.

Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity.

Wolfen in the Streets of the Roman Empire

2011-09-21T17:14:00.000-04:00

In The Making of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown startled me with this:

The towns of the Mediterranean were small towns. For all their isolation from the way of life of the villagers, they were fragile excrescences in a spreading countryside. As in medieval Italy, "Everywhere the country thrust its tendrils into the town." Not every tendril was innocent: wild animals drifted into the towns of North Africa, making their lairs in the basements and eating the citizens.

Needless to say, I had to check out where the wild animals eating the citizens came from. An accompanying footnote cites to Tertullian's Ad Martyras (c. 197 AD):

How often have wild beasts, both in their own woods and in the middle of cities, having escaped from their dens, devoured men!

I, of course, immediately thought of Wolfen.

"Sarapion the Loincloth" and the Naked Pious Virgin

2011-09-14T06:18:00.001-04:00

So there I was, innocently reading Averil Cameron's The Later Roman Empire, when I ran into this description of “Sarapion the loincloth”, an Egyptian Christian ascetic from the late Third or Fourth Century:

[A] certain “Sarapion the loincloth”, an Egyptian by birth who wore only a loincloth, sold himself as a servant to some Greek actors, whom he converted, and travelled to Greece, where he begged for money from some “philosophers” in Athens, converted a Manichaean at Sparta, and then went to Rome, where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade a pious virgin to walk naked through the city to prove that she really was as dead to the world, as she claimed.

Now an ancient Egyptian monk named “Sarapion the loincloth” trying to talk a “pious virgin” out of her clothes is not something you hear about every day, so I decided that further investigation was warranted.The story was cited as coming from the Lausiac History, described in Wikipedia as “a seminal work archiving the Desert Fathers (early Christian monks who lived in the Egyptian desert) written in 419-420 by Palladius of Galatia, at the request of Lausus, chamberlain at the court of the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II.“ I therefore grabbed my handy copy of the Lausiac History off the nightstand (that's where you keep yours, isn't it?) and flipped to Chapter 37, which catalogs the exploits of “Sarapion the Sindonite”, so named because “apart from a sindon (loincloth) he never wore clothes.”

So having come to Rome he [Sarapion] inquired who was a great ascetic in the city, man or woman. Among others he met also a certain Domninus, a disciple of Origen, whose bed healed sick persons after his death. So he met him and was benefited, for he was a man of refined manners and liberal education, and learning from him what other ascetics there were, male or female, he was told of a certain virgin who cultivated solitude and would meet no one.

And having learned where she lived he went off and said to the old woman who attended her: "Tell the virgin, 'I must meet you, for God has sent me.' " So after waiting two or three days at last he met her, and said to her: "Why do you remain stationary?" She said to him: "I do not remain stationary, I am on a journey." He said to her: "Where are you journeying?" Said she to him: "To God." He said to her: "Are you alive or dead?" She said to him: "I trust in God that I am dead, for no one who lives to the flesh shall make that journey." He said to her: "Then do what I do, that you may convince me that you are dead." She said to him: "Order me possible things, and I will do them."

He answered her: "All things are possible to a dead person except impiety." Then he said to her: "Go out and appear in public." She answered him: "This is the twenty-fifth year that has passed without my appearing in public. And why should I appear?" "If you are dead to the world," said he to her, "and the world to you, it is all the same to you whether you appear or appear not. So appear in public." She did so, and after she had appeared outside and gone as far as a church, he said to her in the church: "Now then, if you wish to convince me that you are dead and no longer live pleasing men, do what I do and I shall know that you are dead."

"Follow my example and take off all your clothes, put them on your shoulders, go through the middle of the city with me leading the way in this fashion." She said to him: "I should scandalize many by the unseemliness of the thing and they would be able to say, 'She is mad and possessed by a demon.'" He answered her: "What does it concern you if they say, 'She is mad and possessed by a demon?' For you are dead to them." Then she said to him: "If you want anything else I will do it; for I do not profess to have reached this stage."

Then he said to her: "See then, no longer be proud of yourself as more pious than all others and dead to the world, for I am more dead than you and show by my act that I am dead to the world; for impassively and without shame I do this thing." Then having left her in humility and broken her pride, he departed.

Unfortunately I could find no image of Sarapion the Loincloth. The image at the top is of the most famous Desert Father, Anthony the Great.

Never Forget

2011-09-11T04:55:00.000-04:00

Never forget the evil. And never forget who your enemies are.

Eusebius Transforms the Church

2011-09-04T14:59:00.000-04:00

In the year 168 AD, the pagan anti-Christian philosopher Celsus quipped that "If all men wanted to be Christians, the Christians would no longer want them." Within 150 years, Christianity was on its way to becoming the dominant religion in the great cities of the Mediterranean.

What accounts for the dramatic expansion of the Christians during the Third Century? Peter Brown posits that the most important factor was a fundamental rethinking by Christian leaders such as of Christianity's relationship to the Roman state and Roman society. They "found that they could identify themselves with the culture, outlook and needs of the average well-to-do civilian." Leaders such as Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 - c. 254) and Eusebius, bishop of Caesaria, thus transformed Christianity from "a sect ranged against or to one side of Roman civilization" to "a church prepared to absorb a whole society."

This is probably the most important aggiornamento in the history of the Church; it was certainly the most decisive single event in the culture of the third century. For the conversion of a Roman emperor to Christianity, Constantine in 312, might not have happened - or, if it had, it would have taken on a totally different meaning - if it had not been preceded, for two generations, by the conversion of Christianity to the culture and ideals of the Roman world.

The Roman World Merges Into the Medieval

2011-09-02T02:05:00.000-04:00

I ran across a picture of the above sculpture yesterday in Peter Brown's so-far excellent The World of Late Antiquity and was stunned.

When do you think the sculpture was made? 800 AD? 1000 AD?

In fact the sculpture is of the Emperor Diocletian and the three other members of the Tetrarchy - circa 300 AD.

Prof. Brown notes that "This simplified, military group was so medieval in tone that the individuals were long mistaken for Christian crusaders, and even worshipped as statues of Saint George!"

This is what a Roman bust of Diocletian should look like - except that it was created in the 17th Century:

I could go on about how this symbolizes perfectly the impossibility of identifying a specific date on which late Roman civilization transformed into the medieval world, but I'll spare you.

The Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson

2011-08-31T18:34:00.000-04:00

Over at his Jacksonian America: Society, Personality and Politics blog, historyprof Mark Cheathem has a review of a book entitled A Being So Gentle: The Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson. I haven't read the book and can't comment on its substantive merit. But my first thought was that the cover is, as they say, from hunger. My suggestion for the cover of the second edition is above.

Alexander Stephens Predicts Civil War, July 3, 1850

2011-08-30T17:49:00.001-04:00

I suspect that many or most who deplore the Compromise of 1850 assume that it wasn't necessary - the South would have rolled over anyway. It's impossible, of course, to prove (or disprove) the consequences of contingent scenarios that never came to be. But the angry words of Alexander H. Stephens certainly suggest that, had the compromise failed, and had shooting broken out between Texas and the United States over the Texas-New Mexico border in late 1850 or 1851, the Civil War would likely have started out ten years early.

After the Compromise was brokered, Stephens became its champion. He helped lead the campaign in support of the Compromise in his native Georgia, decisively rallying public opinion behind the Compromise and away from secession in late 1850 and 1851.

But at the beginning of July 1950, Stephens was both angry and frantic. Having heard that President Zachary Taylor supported the immediate admission of New Mexico as a state, Stephens then received news that the president and his cabinet "had supported using the army if necessary to oppose Texas forces in New Mexico." On July 3, 1850, Stephens, already "smoldering", read an editorial in the National Intelligencer that appeared to confirm the report: the Whiggish newspaper urged that "If Texas advanced on Santa Fe . . . it would be the 'duty' of the army to defend it."

Stephens promptly sat down and wrote to the paper a reply (published by the Intelligencer on July 4)that both expressed his fear that this course would lead to general civil war and made clear that even moderates like Stephens would regard war as justified. Thomas E. Schott summarizes Stephens's letter in Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (from which the other quotes in this post are likewise taken):

Convinced beyond doubt that Taylor would use force to carry out his policy, Stephens sat down at his desk in the House and wrote a blistering reply to the editors. "The first Federal gun that shall be fired against the people of Texas, without the authority of law, will be the signal for the freemen from Delaware to to the Rio Grande to rally to the rescue." Whatever doubts there might be about the Texas boundary, "nothing can be clearer than that it is not a question to be decided by the army." In case of conflict, the Texas cause would be the cause of the entire south.

Here's a thought exercise. Imagine you're a northern politician in mid-1850. You detest the Slave Power, slavery and the proposed Fugitive Slave Act in particular. Do you hold your nose and support the proposed compromise because you fear civil war? Or, if you decide to oppose the compromise, do you do so because (a) you're confident the South will cave, or (b) war or no war, it's about time someone stood up to these people?

About the illustration, entitled Congressional Scales, A True Balance (1850):

A satire on President Zachary Taylor's attempts to balance Southern and Northern interests on the question of slavery in 1850. Taylor stands atop a pair of scales, with a weight in each hand; the weight on the left reads "Wilmot Proviso" and the one on the right "Southern Rights." Below, the scales are evenly balanced, with several members of Congress, including Henry Clay in the tray on the left, and others, among them Lewis Cass and John Calhoun, on the right. Taylor says, "Who said I would not make a "NO PARTY" President? I defy you to show any party action here." One legislator on the left sings, "How much do you weigh? Eight dollars a day. Whack fol de rol!" Another states, "My patience is as inexhaustible as the public treasury." A congressman on the right says, "We can wait as long as they can." On the ground, at right, John Bull observes, "That's like what we calls in old Hingland, a glass of 'alf and 'alf."

Alternative History

2011-08-27T08:16:00.002-04:00

This Etsy page features wonderful prints of American historical themes and figures . . . slightly altered. The one above is my favorite because it includes Millard. The one below is for you Abe lovers!

Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer.

Publius Valerius Publicola and the Federalist Papers

2011-08-24T21:21:00.002-04:00

You probably know that Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius." Publius was a common Roman name, and I always assumed that the Federalist authors used it generically, to invoke the aura of the Roman republic, not to refer to a specific person.

But today I heard that the Federalist authors did mean to summon up the image of a particular Roman. A quick check of the Wikipedia entry for the Federalist Papers corroborates that at least one academic has asserted that Hamilton decided to use the name "in honor of" a specific Roman: Publius Valerius Publicola.

Hamilton chose "Publius" as the pseudonym under which the series would be written. While many other pieces representing both sides of the constitutional debate were written under Roman names, Albert Furtwangler contends that "'Publius' was a cut above 'Caesar' or 'Brutus' or even 'Cato.' Publius Valerius was not a late defender of the republic but one of its founders. His more famous name, Publicola, meant 'friend of the people.'" It was not the first time Hamilton had used this pseudonym: in 1778, he had applied it to three letters attacking Samuel Chase.

Publicola, a legendary figure from the dawn of the Roman republic, helped drive out the last of the kings and later sponsored a law that permitted the murder of anyone who tried to become king. Here's Plutarch:

But although in these particulars [Publicola] showed himself a popular and moderate lawgiver, in the case of an immoderate offence he made the penalty severe. For he enacted a law by which any one who sought to make himself tyrant might be slain without trial, and the slayer should be free from blood-guiltiness if he produced proofs of the crime. For although it is impossible for one who attempts so great a task to escape all notice, it is not impossible for him to do so long enough to make himself too powerful to be brought to trial, which trial his very crime precludes. He therefore gave any one who was able to do so the privilege of anticipating the culprit's trial.

But, if the story is true, I can't help wondering whether Hamilton settled on the name because he enjoyed the delicious irony that the most famous tale about Publicola revealed the inherently irrational nature of an insufficiently controlled populace.

As the story goes, having established his devotion to republicanism beyond any possible doubt, Publicola built a house on a height above Rome called the "Velia". The Roman public promptly drew the bizarre conclusion that Publicola was going to use the house as base from which to establish himself as king. Here's Livy:

After the battle had gone in this way [a battle in which Publicola had led a Roman army which defeated an Etruscan attempt to reinstate the last king], so great a panic seized Tarquin and the Etruscans that the two armies of Veii and Tarquinii, on the approach of night, despairing of success, left the field and departed for their homes. . . .

At all events the Romans left the field as victors; the Etruscans regarded themselves as vanquished, for when daylight appeared not a single enemy was in sight. P. Valerius [Publicola], the consul, collected the spoils and returned in triumph to Rome. He celebrated his colleague's obsequies with all the pomp possible in those days, but far greater honour was done to the dead by the universal mourning, which was rendered specially noteworthy by the fact that the matrons were a whole year in mourning for him, because he had been such a determined avenger of violated chastity.

After this the surviving consul, who had been in such favour with the multitude, found himself - such is its fickleness - not only unpopular but an object of suspicion, and that of a very grave character. It was rumoured that he was aiming at monarchy, for he had held no election to fill [Lucius Junius] Brutus' place [Brutus had been killed in the battle], and he was building a house on the top of the Velia, an impregnable fortress was being constructed on that high and strong position.

The consul felt hurt at finding these rumours so widely believed, and summoned the people to an assembly. As he entered the "fasces" were lowered, to the great delight of the multitude, who understood that it was to them that they were lowered as an open avowal that the dignity and might of the people were greater than those of the consul. Then, after securing silence, he began to eulogise the good fortune of his colleague [Brutus] who had met his death, as a liberator of his country, possessing the highest honour it could bestow, fighting for the commonwealth, whilst his glory was as yet undimmed by jealousy and distrust. Whereas he himself had outlived his glory and fallen on days of suspicion and opprobrium; from being a liberator of his country he had sunk to the level of the Aquilii and Vitellii.

"Will you," he cried, "never deem any man's merit so assured that it cannot be tainted by suspicion? Am I, the most determined foe to kings, to dread the suspicion of desiring to be one myself? Even if I were dwelling in the Citadel on the Capitol, am I to believe it possible that I should be feared by my fellow-citizens? Does my reputation amongst you hang on so slight a thread? Does your confidence rest upon such a weak foundation that it is of greater moment where I am than who I am? The house of Publius Valerius shall be no check upon your freedom, your Velia shall be safe. I will not only move my house to level ground, but I will move it to the bottom of the hill that you may dwell above the citizen whom you suspect. Let those dwell on the Velia who are regarded as truer friends of liberty than Publius Valerius."

All the materials were forthwith carried below the Velia and his house was built at the very bottom of the hill where now stands the temple of Vica Pota.

And here's Plutarch:

But that which the rather displeased and offended the people in Valerius was this. Brutus, whom they regarded as the father of their liberties, would not consent to rule alone, but once and again chose a colleague to rule with him. "But this Valerius," they said, "in concentrating all power upon himself, is not a successor to the consulate of Brutus, to which he has no right, but to the tyranny of Tarquin. Yet why should he extol Brutus in words, while in deeds he imitates Tarquin, descending to the forum alone, escorted by all the rods and axes together, from a house no less stately than the royal house which he demolished?"

For, as a matter of fact, Valerius was living in a very splendid house on the so‑called Velia. It hung high over the forum, commanded a view of all that passed there, and was surrounded by steeps and hard to get at, so that when he came down from it the spectacle was a lofty one, and the pomp of his procession worthy of a king.

Accordingly, Valerius showed what a good thing it is for men in power and high station to have ears which are open to frankness and truth instead of flattery. For when he heard from his friends, who spared him no detail, that he was thought by the multitude to be transgressing, he was not obstinate nor exasperated, but quickly got together a large force of workmen, and while it was still night tore the house down, and razed it all to the ground.

In the morning, therefore, the Romans saw what had happened, and came flocking together. They were moved to love and admiration by the man's magnanimity, but were distressed for the house, and mourned for its stately beauty, as if it had been human, now that envy had unjustly compassed its destruction. They were also distressed for their ruler, who, like a homeless man, was now sharing the homes of others. For Valerius was received into the houses of his friends until the people gave him a site and built him a house, of more modest dimensions than the one he had lived in before, where now stands the temple of Vica Pota, so‑called.

Wishing now to make not only himself but also the government, instead of formidable, submissive and agreeable to the multitude, he removed the axes from the lictors' rods, and when he came into the assembly, inclined and lowered the rods themselves to the people, emphasizing the majesty of the democracy. This custom the consuls observe to this day. And before the multitude were aware of it, he had succeeded, not by humbling himself, as they thought, but by checking and removing their envious feelings through such moderation on his part, in adding to his real influence over them just as much as he had seemed to take away from his authority, and the people submitted to him with pleasure and bore his yoke willingly.

They therefore called him Publicola, a name which signifies people-cherisher. This name prevailed over the older names which he had borne, and it is the name which I shall use for him in the remainder of this Life.

Charles Sumner Receives a Stroke of Good Luck

2011-08-20T10:21:00.003-04:00

Ironically, the caning that Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner received from South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks on May 22, 1856 may well have been the best stroke of good luck that Sumner ever received, rescuing his senatorial career and ultimately transforming him into one of the most powerful men in the country.

Sumner was first elected to the United States Senate by the Massachusetts legislature in 1851 as the result of an unstable and transitory coalition between Democrats and Free Soilers. No party at the time had a majority in the state. At the beginning of 1851, Massachusetts Free Soilers - heretofore primarily a group with more connections to the Whigs than to the Democrats in Massachusetts - struck a deal with the Democrats:

With Free Soil backing, the Democrats would elect their candidate for governor, George S. Boutwell, the lieutenant governor, the speaker and other officers of the [state] House of Representatives, a majority of the governor's counsel; in addition they would receive the short-term United States senatorship, the few remaining weeks of [Daniel] Webster's term which [Robert C.] Winthrop was filling.

The quid pro quo included the other Senate seat, which would go to Sumner:

The Free Soilers would get the presidency of the state senate, the remaining members of the governor's council, and the six-year United States senatorship, commencing March 4 [1851]. On January 7 [1851], a Free Soil caucus, by a vote of eighty-four to one, nominated Sumner senator, and the following day the Democrats, with only six dissenting votes, accepted him.

But even with this deal, Sumner's election was a close-run thing. In the legislative voting, a large majority of the Whigs unenthusiastically but steadfastly supported Winthrop. More important, a faction within the Democratic Party, led by Caleb Cushing and former governor Marcus Morton, "objected to sending 'a red-hot Abolitionist, . . . like a firebrand, for six years, into the senate chamber of the United States.'" Although Sumner was tantalizingly close, he was a few votes short.

The legislature remained deadlocked for over three and a half months (from early January to late April 1851). Ultimately, Sumner was elected "with a majority of precisely one" vote:

On April 24 [1851] the legislature reassembled in an atmosphere of great tension. On the twenty-fifth ballot there were again two more votes than there were representatives present [there had been prior irregularities]. After much wrangling, the house adopted a Whig proposal that on future ballots each member must cast his vote in a sealed envelope, so that it would be impossible for these extra ballots to be slipped in. Shortly after noon, the twenty-sixth ballot was taken. This time Sumner received 193 of the 385 votes cast, a majority of precisely one, and was declared elected.

Having been elected by a paper-thin majority, Sumner soon saw the coalition that elected him fall apart, for both internal and external reasons. In the 1852 and 1853 elections, the coalition was defeated by the Whigs, the second "time so decisively that the plan for Free Soil-Democratic fusion in Massachusetts was finally abandoned." The Whigs, in charge of the state government, elected Edward Everett to the other senate seat.

Then in 1854 the Know-Nothing tidal wave hit Massachusetts. Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers and the new Anti-Nebraska proto-party alike were swept away in the deluge. The Know-Nothings emerged with the governorship, an overwhelming majority in the state legislature, and the U.S. Senate seat not held by Sumner:

[Former Conscience Whig and Free Soiler Henry] Wilson . . . had thrown his strength behind Henry J. Gardner, the Know-nothing candidate for governor. In return he secured a pledge that, if successful, the Know-nothings would elect him to the Senate as Sumner's colleague. Gardner received an unprecedented majority of nearly 33,000 votes, and the new legislature consisted of one Whig, one Democrat, one Republican - and 377 Know-nothings.

Although the Know-Nothing tide ebbed somewhat in 1855, the Know-Nothings remained firmly in charge of the state. "In 1855, as in the previous year, the new [Republican] party made a poor showing in the polls, and Gardner, combining nativism and Whiggery, was re-elected."

In short, by the end of 1855 - and the Congressional session beginning December 1855 was the last in which Sumner had a chance to make an impact before he would be up for reelection in early 1857 - Sumner's political base had disappeared. For all the latent anti-slavery sentiment in Massachusetts, the old coalition had fallen apart and there was no sign that the new anti-Nebraska coalition would gel anytime soon. Many former Whigs detested him and Democrats felt no loyalty for him. Governor Gardner was eying the Senate seat and "plot[ting] to stage a premature election of [Sumner's] successor." Sumner looked like a political goner.

"Providentially, a burning issue came to hand" that saved Sumner from likely defeat. At the beginning of January 1856 Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave Sumner the opening to deliver his The Crime Against Kansas speech on May 19 and 20, 1856. Two days later, on Thursday May 22, 1856, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks administered his famous caning of Sumner - and created a "senator for life":

Sumner's friends used Massachusetts indignation over the assault to bolster his shaky political prospects. The news of the attack reached Boston just in time to give Sumner's supporters a face-saving victory over Governor Gardner, who was trying to emasculate the personal liberty law Sumner had helped draft. By astute management Republicans forced through the legislature resolutions not merely condemning Brooks's actions, but endorsing "Mr. Sumner's manliness and courage in his earnest and fearless declaration of free principles, and his defence of human rights and free territory." [Future wartime Republican governor] John A. Andrew almost gave the game away when he blurted out at the Faneuil Hall rally that in order to secure "liberty of speech - nay, liberty itself," Sumner must be re-elected, for Republicans were unobtrusively working toward precisely that end. "Providence itself seems to be on the side of the republican party," [Sumner's estranged former law partner George S.] Hilliard lamented. "Sumner is not merely their champion but their martyr, and his election for the next six years is now certain." A New Yorker, more prescient, declared that Sumner "is made by this act, senator for life."

After that, Sumner's reelection was almost a foregone conclusion. When the new state legislature met in January 1857,

the Republicans in the [state] House of Representatives forced a vote on January 9, even before Governor Gardner [who had once again been reeelected] could send in his inaugural message, which they feared might contain distracting proposals. Out of the 345 votes cast, Sumner received all but twelve. Four days later, against protests over their unseemly haste, Republicans in the [state] Senate adopted a rule for viva-voce voting on the senatorial election, and, as public opinion could thus be brought to bear upon each member, Sumner received the unanimous vote of the upper house.

In his book Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (from which all quotes in this post are taken), Prof. David Herbert Donald sums up Sumner's stroke of good luck:

Candidate of a minority party, [Sumner] was first chosen to the Senate through the devious workings of a political coalition. At nearly any point during his first five years in office, had he been up for re-election, he would almost certainly have been defeated. Then Preston Brooks's attack gave him his second term in the Senate and thereby assured him seniority and prestige within the Republican party. Never chosen by direct popular vote for any office, Sumner, by 1861, nevertheless had become one of the most powerful men in the United States.

Seward, You Weeny!

2011-08-10T06:43:00.000-04:00

Think the word "weeny" is of recent vintage? Think again. Amanda Foreman records its use by none other than Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the summer of 1861, referring to Secretary of State William H. Seward, whom Sumner detested. On July 3, 1861 The Times correspondent William Howard Russell

bumped into [Sumner] on the street [in Washington] and had to stand for an hour in the blistering heat while Sumner gleefully enlarged on "the dirty little mountebankism of my weeny friend in office."

So, was Sumner calling Seward a dick? Alas, probably not. A quick search around the internets suggests that the words "weeny" and "weenie" are of different origin. Weeny, an adjective, is a diminutive of "wee", small, and apparently dates to at least the late Eighteenth Century. Think "teeny-weeny." Weenie, a noun, apparently derives from wiener and is of later origin. Perhaps by association with weeny (I'm guessing here), "weenie" acquired a connotation of smallness (a weeny weenie, as it were) and thus the meaning of nerd.

About the illustration, entitled I'm Not to Blame for Being White, Sir! (1862):

Massachusetts senator and prominent antislavery advocate Charles Sumner is attacked here. The artist questions his sincerity as a humanitarian as he shows him dispensing a few coins to a black child on the street, while ignoring the appeal of a ragged white urchin. The scene is witnessed by two stylishly dressed young women. Though unsigned, the print has the relatively skillful draftsmanship and atmospheric quality found in the works of Boston lithographer Fabronius. See, for instance, that artist's "The Mower" (no. 1863-14). "The Secession Bubble" (no. 1862-12) also appears to be by Fabronius. Weitenkampf gives the 1862 date and publisher's imprint.

The Owl of Minerva Flies Only at Dusk

2011-08-08T17:58:00.001-04:00

Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Preface to Philosophy of Right.

Everything in the universe is, is, is made of one element,
which is a note, a single note.
Atoms are really vibrations, you know.
With your extensions of the BIG NOTE, everything's one note.
Everything, even the ponies.
The note, however, is the ultimate power,
but see the pigs don't know that,
the ponies don't know that.

Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy.

Huh?

Elektratig.

William Seward's Irrepressible Conflict

2011-08-02T21:23:00.006-04:00

A while ago, I puzzled over What the Hell Happened to William Seward? How was it, I wondered, that the north's leading radical anti-slavery Whig during the 1850s - the guy whom the Republicans failed to nominate in 1860 because they perceived him as too radical, versus the more "moderate" Lincoln - became such a wimp during the secession crisis, frantically seeking to appease the south to the point that he had to mislead the president in the process?

What I discovered, to my surprise, was that Seward displayed many signs of moderation during the 1850s. In fact, it seemed that his "radical" reputation was based largely, and perhaps exclusively, on two speeches - one might say on two phrases: his "higher law than the Constitution" speech of 1850, and his "irrepressible conflict" speech of 1858.

In her wonderful (thus far) A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, Amanda Foreman reaches a similar, but more pointed conclusion about Seward: he was a moderate with a radical veneer who, during the late 1850s, spent years positioning himself "as the moderate alternative to Charles Sumner."

Ironically, she maintains, Seward inadvertently sabotaged those efforts, and his bid for the presidency in 1860, with his October 1858 "irrepressible conflict" speech. Although the phrase was not all that different from Lincoln's "house divided" language, Seward's speech was perceived as more divisive. "Whereas Lincoln sounded as though he were giving a warning, Seward seemed to be laying down a challenge." The damage to Seward's image was immediate and lasting:

Seward later claimed that "irrepressible" was not the same as "unavoidable," but the damage could not be undone. The press dubbed him "Irrepressible Conflict Seward," fostering the sense that he was a divisive rather than a unifying figure and voiding three years of careful positioning by Seward to be perceived as the moderate alternative to Charles Sumner.

On the advice of his friend and manager, Thurlow Weed, Seward traveled to Britain in the Spring of 1859 "in the hope that the public would forget the unfortunate phrase" before the 1860 election season.

Alas, it was not to be. When Seward returned to the United States on December 28, 1859, southern hysteria following the John Brown raid was at its peak, and southerners repeatedly pilloried Seward as an instigator. In the Senate, James Murray Mason of Virginia, whose seat was next to Seward's,

harangued [Seward] for being the moral, though not actual, instigator of the action. Again and again, Seward's unfortunate phrase "irrepressible conflict" was hurled back in his face. Democratic newspapers denounced his as the "arch agitator who is responsible for this insurrection." One Virginia newspaper even went so far as to put a price of $100,000 on his head; the governor of Virginia urged the South to demand Seward's exclusion from the presidency.

About the illustration, entitled "The Irrepressible Conflict" or the Republican Barge in Danger (1860):

The cartoon reflects the considerable bitterness among New York Republicans at the party's surprising failure to nominate New York senator William H. Seward for president at its May 1860 national convention. The print was probably issued soon after the convention's nomination of Abraham Lincoln. The "Republican Barge" tosses on a stormy sea, precariously close to a rocky shore, with Lincoln (far left) at the rudder. "I'll take the helm. I've steered a "flat" boat before," says Lincoln. Also in the barge are (left to right) "Tribune" editor and powerful Lincoln supporter Horace Greeley, Missourian Edward Bates, an unidentified man, and former Washington "Globe" editor and influential Jacksonian Democrat Francis Preston Blair. The three men together heave Seward overboard. Greeley says, "Over you go Billy! Between you and I there is an "Irrepressible Conflict." Bates encourages him, "Over with him Horace never mind his kicking!" while Blair says, "He can't withstand my muscle for I once moved the Globe." The idea of an "irrepressible conflict" between slaveholding and free interests in the Union was taken from Seward's famous 1858 Rochester speech against slavery. The term became a catchphrase for radical antislavery factions in the North. Seward protests, "Dont throw "me" overboard, I built this boat, and I alone can save it." Further right are three unidentified men, two of whom are speaking. One cries, "I'm afraid this boat will sink." The other remarks, "If it had only been built in two sections instead of one we might be saved." A black wearing "Discord's Patent Life Preserver" notes, "If de boat and all hands sink, dis Nigger sure to swim, Yah! Yah!" In the bow sits New York "Courier" editor James Watson Webb, who warns, "Breakers ahead!!" Watching anxiously from the shore is Brother Jonathan, clad in striped trousers, coat with tails, and a tall hat. He admonishes the boat's crew, "You wont save your crazy old craft by throwing your pilot overboard; better heave that tarnal Nigger out."

William Seward's April Fools Memo: The Prequel

2011-07-31T21:45:00.002-04:00

As you may know, in his somewhat wacky April 1, 1861 "April Fools Memorandum", entitled Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration, Secretary of State William H. Seward recommended to President Abraham Lincoln, among other things, that the United States declare war on Spain and France:

I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once.

I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention.

And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France,

Would convene Congress and declare war against them.

In her beautifully written book, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, Amanda Foreman provides evidence that Seward had been contemplating the possibility of war as a means of diverting secession for almost two months before he delivered his memorandum to Lincoln. On the morning of February 3, 1861, "Seward paid a surprise call on Lord Lyons," the British envoy to the United States in Washington. In a confidential memorandum to his government, Lord Lyons reported that, during the meeting, Seward indicated that a foreign war would not displease him. Lyons reported that

Seward also repeated to him a recent conversation with the minister from Bremen (one of the smaller states of the German Confederation), "no doubt for my instruction." The hapless diplomat had complained about the Republican Party's election promise to place tariffs on foreign imports, saying that such a move would turn Europe against America at the moment when she most needed friends. Seward claimed to have replied that nothing would give him more pleasure, since he would then have the perfect excuse for an international quarrel, "and South Carolina and the seceding states would soon join in."

Resolution VI of The Virginia Plan

2011-07-31T15:55:00.002-04:00

Lawprof Kurt T. Lash has written some great articles on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, among other things. A new article is always a treat. I haven't read it yet, but I see via Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog that the good professor has a new article up at SSRN: "Resolution VI": The Virginia Plan and Authority to Resolve "Collective Action Problems" Under Article I, Section 8. The abstract is as follows:

In the past few years, a number of influential constitutional scholars such as Jack Balkin, Robert Cooter, Andrew Koppelman, Neil Siegel and others have called for doing away with the traditional principle of judicially limited enumerated power and replacing it with the principle declared in Resolution VI of the Virginia Plan originally introduced in the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. According to Resolution VI, federal power should be construed to reach all matters involving the “general interests of the Union,” those “to which the “states separately are incompetent” and those affecting national “harmony.” Resolution VI advocates maintain that, under this principle, Congress has power to regulate all collective action problems of national importance. In support of their claim, Resolution VI advocates argue that the members of the Philadelphia Convention adopted Resolution VI and sent the same to the Committee of Detail with the expectation that the resulting text would be based on this overriding principle of national power, and that they accepted the text of Article I, Section 8 as the enactment of Resolution VI. These scholars also claim (or rely on the claim) that Philadelphia Convention member James Wilson publicly declared during the ratification debates that the framers based Article I, Section 8 on the principle of Resolution VI.

A close reading of the historical sources, however, shows that the framers did not view Article I, Section 8 as having operationalized the general principle of Resolution VI and allowing federal action in all cases in which the “states separately are incompetent.” In fact, they expressly stated otherwise. Even more importantly, it turns out that there is no historical evidence that Resolution VI played any role whatsoever during the ratification debates. Claims to the contrary are based on an error of historical fact.

For those who are not familiar with it, the full text of Resolution VI, as reprinted in Farrand's Records, provided as follows:

6. Resolved that each branch ought to possess the right of originating Acts; that the National Legislature ought to be impowered to enjoy the Legislative Rights vested in Congress by the Confederation & moreover to legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent, or in all which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation; to negative all laws passed by the several States, contravening in the opinion of the National Legislature the articles of Union; and to call forth the force of the Union agst. any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duties under the articles thereof.

Prof. Solum awards the article his "Download of the Week" prize and opines, "Highly recommended. Download it while its hot!" I've already done so.

Henry Clay and the First Bank: The Cow and the Turkey

2011-07-27T12:56:00.002-04:00

In the early 1820s William Harris Crawford of Georgia would become a conservative, almost winning the presidency in 1824. But all that lay in the future. In February 1811, he was a staunch defender of the First Bank of the United States in the Senate, "deliver[ing] a brilliant speech is support of the bank, which even [Nathaniel] Macon called 'a better argument in favor of it on constitutional ground than ever has been made. . . .'"

In his February 15, 1811 Senate speech opposing the extension of the First Bank's charter, Henry Clay, having disposed of William Branch Giles, next turned to Sen. Crawford's complaint, as paraphrased by Clay, "that this has been made a party question." In fact, Clay pointed out, the original bank bill, passed in 1791, "was one of the causes of the political divisions of this country" and had spurred the formation of the Jeffersonian Republicans. It was Crawford, not opponents of the bank, who was playing politics and abandoning the Republican party:

And if, on this occasion, my worthy friend from Georgia has gone over over into the camp of the enemy, is it kind in him to look back upon his former friends, and rebuke them for the fidelity with which they adhere to their old principles?

Taking advantage of the fact that Crawford and other proponents had cited different provisions of the Constitution as the source of Congress's power to create the bank, Clay mocked their attempts to locate "some congenial spot" in which to locate "[t]his vagrant power":

This vagrant power to erect a bank, after having wandered throughout the whole Constitution in quest of some congenial spot whereupon to fasten, has been at length located by the gentleman from Georgia on that provision, which authorizes Congress to lay and collect taxes, &c. In 1791, the power is referred to one part of the instrument; in 1811, to another. Sometimes it is alleged to be deducible from the power to regulate commerce. Hard pressed here, it disappears, and shows itself under the grant to coin money.

Clay's arguments had to this point been largely playful. But now he became more serious. The Constitution granted Congress limited and defined powers. "The power to charter companies is not specified in the grant." And while the Necessary and Proper Clause may effectively grant implied powers, those powers "must be necessary, and obviously flow from the enumerated power with which it is allied."

What is the nature of this Government? It is emphatically federal, vested with an aggregate of specified powers for general purposes, conceded by existing sovereignties, who have themselves retained what is not so conceded. It is said that there are cases in which it must act on implied powers. This is not controverted, but the implications must be necessary, and obviously flow from the enumerated power with which it is allied.

Emphasizing the fearsome powers of corporations, Clay denied that the power to charter companies could be created by mere implication:

The power to charter companies is not specified in the grant, and I contend is of a nature not transferable by mere implication. It is one of the most exalted attributes of sovereignty. In the exercise of this gigantic power we have seen an East India Company created, which has carried dismay, desolation, and death throughout one of the largest portions of the habitable world. A company which is, in itself, a sovereignty - which has subverted empires and set up new dynasties - and has not only made war, but war against its legitimate sovereign!

Examples of implied powers cited by supporters - such as "the power 'to make rules and regulations for the government of the land and naval forces,' which, it is said, is incidental to the power to raise armies and provide a navy" - only proved Clay's point, for they demonstrated "[h]ow extremely cautious the Convention were to leave as little as possible to implication."

In all cases where incidental powers are acted upon, the principal and incidental ought to be congenial with each other, and partake of a common nature. The incidental power ought to be strictly subordinate and limited to the end proposed to be attained by the specified power. In other words, under the name of accomplishing one object which is specified, the power implied ought not to be made to embrace other objects, which are not specified in the Constitution.

Applying these principals might permit the creation of a bank of limited powers. But the First Bank had, and was proposed to have, powers that extended far beyond any enumerated end:

If then you could establish a bank to collect and distribute the revenue, it ought to be expressly restricted to the purpose of such collection and distribution. It is a mockery, worse than usurpation, to establish it for a lawful object, and then extend it to other objects which are not lawful. In deducing the power to create corporations, such as I have described it, from the power to collect taxes, the relation and condition of principal and incident are prostrated and destroyed. The accessory is exalted above the principal. As well might it be said that the great luminary of day is an accessory, a sattelite [sic] to the humblest star that twinkles forth its feeble light in the firmament of the heavens!

In order to illustrate his point Clay resorted to an analogy. I'm not sure it works, but who can resist a story about a cow and a turkey?

Like the Virginia justice, you tell the man, whose turkey had been stolen, that your book of precedents furnishes no form for his case, but then you will grant him a precept to search for a cow, and when looking for that he may possibly find his turkey! You say to this corporation, we cannot authorize you to discount - to emit paper - to regulate commerce, &c. No! Our book has no precedents of that kind. But then we can authorize you to collect the revenue, and, while occupied with that, you may do whatever else you please!

About the illustration, entitled A Foot-Race (1824):

A figurative portrayal of the presidential race of 1824. A crowd of cheering citizens watch as candidates (left to right) John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson stride toward the finish. Henry Clay has dropped from the race and stands, hand on head, on the far right saying, "D--n it I cant save my distance--so I may as well "draw up."" He is consoled by a man in riding clothes, "Well dont distress yourself--there'll be some scrubbing by & by & then you'll have a chance." Assorted comments come from the crowd, reflecting various sectional and partisan views. A Westerner with stovepipe hat and powder horn: "Hurra for our Jacks-"son."" Former President John Adams: "Hurra for our son "Jack."" Two men in coachmen's livery: "That inne-track fellow [Crawford] goes so well; that I think he must have got the better of the bots [boss?]." and "Like enough; but betwixt you & I--I dont think he'll ever get the better of the "Quinsy."" A ragged Irishman: "Blast my eyes if I dont "venter" a "small" horn of rotgut on that "bald filly" in the middle [Adams]." A Frenchman: "Ah hah! Mon's Neddy I tink dat kick on de "back of you side" is worse den have no dinner de fourt of july." In the left background is a platform and an inaugural scene, the "Presidential Chair" with a purse "

Henry Clay and the First Bank: "A most unjustifiable law"

2011-07-26T07:32:00.002-04:00

Early in his national career, Henry Clay opposed the extension of the charter of the First Bank of the United States. In his book The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson, Norman K. Risjord has characterized Clay's principal speech in opposition to the BUS as "probably the ablest exposition of Republican doctrine on the subject since [James] Madison's war on the bank in 1791." That prompted me to find the speech in the Annals of Congress, and I thought I'd share some highlights here.

Clay first came to Washington to serve brief stints as United States Senator from Kentucky in 1806-07 and 1810-11. It was during his second term that the Senate took up the question whether the Bank of the United States should be extended. The BUS had originally been chartered by the First Congress in 1791 for a period of twenty years, and the charter was scheduled to expire in 1811.

On Friday February 15, 1811, Henry Clay took the Senate floor to oppose extension of the charter. In light of Clay's later advocacy of his American System - based on the three pillars of a national bank, a high, protective tariff, and federal funding of internal improvements - young Senator Clay's denunciation of the First Bank proved to be a supreme irony, which his political opponents ever used against him.

But in February 1811 Clay declared that he had, after much deliberation, concluded that he had no choice but to oppose the charter extension bill as "a most unjustifiable law." Clay maintained that he had initially decided not to speak against the bill. The original Bank bill had been passed after the founders themselves had thoroughly explored the arguments pro and con. What more could Clay add?

As the subject, at the memorable period when the charter was granted, called forth the best talents of the nation- as it has, on various occasions, undergone the most thorough investigation, and as we can hardly expect that it is susceptible of receiving any further elucidation, it was to have been hoped that we should have been spared an useless debate. This was the more desirable because there are, I conceive, much superior claims upon us for every hour of the small portion of the session yet remaining to us.

But the arguments advanced in favor of charter extension, Clay explained, demanded refutation:

Under the operation of these motives, I had resolved to give a silent vote, until I felt myself bound, by the defying manner of the arguments advanced in support of the renewal, to obey the paramount duties I owe my country and its constitution; to make one effort, however feeble, to avert the passage of what appears to me a most unjustifiable law.

With this preamble, Clay rounded on one of the orators whose "defying manner" of argument had apparently stirred Clay - Senator William Branch Giles of Virginia. Sen. Giles, generally an advocate of an energetic federal government, had argued that the federal government nonetheless lacked the power to establish a bank, resulting in (in the words of John Randolph of Roanoke) "the most unintelligible speech on the subject of the Bank of the U.S. I ever heard." Clay played on these contradictions:

After my honorable friend from Virginia (Mr. GILES) had instructed and amused us with the very able and ingenious argument which he delivered on yesterday, I should have still forborne to trespass on the Senate, but for the extraordinary character of his speech. He discussed both sides of the question, with great ability and eloquence, and certainly demonstrated to the satisfaction of all who heard him, both that it was Constitutional and unconstitutional, highly proper and improper to prolong the charter of the bank.

Clay then illustrated Sen. Giles's oratorical success by relating a no doubt apocryphal story about Patrick Henry:

The honorable gentleman appeared to me in the predicament in which the celebrated orator of Virginia, Patrick Henry, is said to have been once placed. Engaged in a most extensive and lucrative practice of the law, he mistook in one instance the side of the cause on which he was retained, and addressed the court and jury in a very splendid and convincing speech in behalf of his antagonist.

His distracted client came up to him whilst he was progressing, and interrupting him, bitterly exclaimed, "you have undone me! "you have ruined me!"

"Never mind, give yourself no concern," said the adroit advocate; and turning to the court and jury, continued his argument by observing, "May it please your honors, and you, gentleman of the jury, I have been stating to you what I presume my adversary may urge on his side. I will now show you how fallacious his reasoning and groundless his pretensions are."

The skilled orator proceeded, satisfactorily refuted every argument he had advanced, and gained his cause! A success with which I trust the exertion of my honorable friend will on this occasion be crowned.

"In every tax, your object should be revenue"

2011-07-22T06:37:00.001-04:00

In The Old Republicans, Norman K. Risjord cites a speech delivered by Virginia Rep. Alexander Smyth on Thursday January 30, 1823 as "the first time it was openly asserted on the House floor" "that the protective tariff was unconstitutional." Rep. "Smyth maintained that the power to lay and collect taxes was for purposes of revenue only; Congress had no power to protect domestic manufactures":

Sir, I consider the committee who brought in this bill as an unconstitutional committee. Show me your authority to encourage domestic manufactures. You have nothing to do with manufactures but to pass a law for giving up runaway apprentices; and nothing to do with agriculture, but to pass a law for giving up runaway slaves.

You have power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." The power granted to you is a power to raise revenue for the purpose of executing your granted powers; not a power to impose taxes to diminish the revenue, thereby to encourage and protect domestic manufactures. If you levy taxes for any other purpose but to raise revenue bona fide, you abuse your power.

You have a choice of subjects of taxation, but, in every tax, your object should be revenue. If, by the imposition of the duties necessary to the raising an adequate revenue, manufactures are encouraged, it is a beneficial consequence. The Convention who former the Constitution, have never mentioned the subject of manufactures; yet, they had under consideration a proposition to give the General Government a controlling power over manufactures, which they appear to have rejected. [Here Mr. S. read some passages from the Journal of the Convention to show that such a proposition was, with others, referred to a committee; that several of the other propositions, which were referred with it, were inserted in the Constitution; but this was omitted.]

"The first defense of slavery as a positive good ever to be heard on the floor of Congress"

2011-07-19T06:07:00.002-04:00

In The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson, Norman K. Risjord identifies an argument by North Carolina Senator Nathaniel Macon, made on Thursday January 20, 1820, during the Missouri debates, as “the first defense of slavery as a positive good ever to be heard on the floor of Congress”:

It is a fact, that the people who move from the non-slaveholding to the slaveholding States, when they become slaveholders by purchase or marriage, expect more labor from them than those do who are brought up among them.

To the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Burrill) I tender my hearty thanks, for his liberal and true statement of the treatment of slaves in the Southern States. His observations leave but little for me to add, which is this, that the slaves gained as much by independence as the free. The old ones are better taken care of than any poor in the world, and treated with decent respect by all their white acquaintances. I sincerely wish that he, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania, (Mr. Roberts,) would go home with me, or some other Southern member, and witness the meeting between the slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and the hearty shaking of hands. . . .

The owner can make more free in conversation with his slave, and be more easy in his company, than the rich man, where there is no slave, with the white hireling who drives his carriage. He has no expectation that the slave will, for that free and easy conversation, expect to call him fellow-citizen, or act improperly.

Some Recommended History Podcasts

2011-07-18T12:50:00.003-04:00

I commute most days, and most of my time in the car is spent listening to – you guessed it! – history podcasts. I therefore thought I'd regale you with brief descriptions of some of my favorites. The list is in roughly chronological order. All of the selections are available at iTunes, either as podcasts or in the iTunes U section.

I've probably praised Yale history prof Donald Kagan's course on ancient Greek history before – I'm too lazy to check. Very briefly, Don Kagan (I'm always tempted to use a Marlon Brando-in-the-Godfather rasp and inflection) is one of the great figures in the ancient history field. His four volume work on the Peloponnesian War remains, almost forty years after its publication, the outstanding work on the subject. His lecturing skills have been highly regarded since at least the mid-1970s, when students packed his introduction to ancient Greek history course despite its esoteric subject matter, rigorous grading and Prof. Kagan's notorious status as a despised conservative on a campus that regarded Bobby Seale as a moderate. We are now blessed to have that course available. Take advantage.

Mike Duncan is no Don Kagan. Nonetheless, I've enjoyed – and continue to enjoy – his History of Rome podcasts a great deal. He's over 150 installments now, covering roughly 1.000 years from the appearance of a bunch of huts on the banks of the Tiber to the latter part of the empire (the western empire, at any rate) in the years following the death of Constantine. If you know little about Roman history, you'll learn a good deal. If you know your stuff, it's fun and relaxing, sort of like visiting with an old friend. My only warning is that some of the pronunciations will make you cringe.

Yale prof Keith E. Wrightson speaks with a delightful and mellifluous British accent – which is appropriate, I suppose, for a course on Early Modern England, i.e., basically the Tudors and the Stuarts, from roughly 1500 through 1700. Prof. Wrightson is so smooth that it can be a bit off-putting: one senses that every comma and pause is scripted. But he knows his material inside and out. Although the course includes much of the standard political history, where the good professor really shines, I think, is on the social and economic side. Although Prof. Wrightson repeatedly apologizes for those lectures (students must complain about economic history in particular in their reviews), he conveys a wonderful sense of the transformation of the country and much of its populace from an essentially medieval and local society to an increasingly urbanized and proto-industrial one with extensive regional and national ties.

I thank God that I did not take Stanford history prof Jack Rakove's course on colonial and revolutionary America as an undergraduate. Without background, I would have had no idea what he was talking about. The man is the exact opposite of the well-modulated Prof. Wrightson – he's manic. But it's the mania of a man whose ideas are so plentiful that they just come pouring out in a flood of words. Prof. Rakove is one of the leading scholars on the period of the early Republic and James Madison. My suggestion is that you first read Prof. Rakove's fine Original Meanings, which will give you an anchorage that will allow you to appreciate the torrent as it rushes by. Two subsidiary complaints. The course was recorded during the 2008 election season, and Prof. Rakove does not hesitate to display his adoration of the Big O. Second, there a few annoying comments about the Second Amendment, which he believes, for reasons that elude me, does not support an individual right to bear arms (I've read the brief he submitted to the Supremes and find it totally unconvincing). Prof. Rakove is living proof, I guess, that modern liberal ideology can trump the common sense of even an otherwise learned man.

Yale prof Joanne B. Freeman has a silly laugh, but that's what makes her great. Silly as it is, her laugh embodies and conveys the love for her subject in her course on the American Revolution. Prof. Freeman excels at humanizing the Founders – even the dour Thomas Jefferson – and at bringing home, for example, the communications and world-view gap (my phrase) between the colonists and the British, and explaining the unexpected shock and wrench that the colonists felt when they belatedly discovered that their love of their mother country and its institutions had led them revolt against it.

I think I've complained before that Yale prof David Blight sounds like Garrison Keillor (has no one else recognized this?). I also think, to be frank, that Prof. Blight can sometimes sound like a pompous ass. But if you can get past those two points (which I did), it's hard to ignore one of the leading authorities on the Civil War era. It's been a while since I've heard his course on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, so I'm a little light on details, but as I recall you get a good, well-told survey of all the basics from about the Wilmot Proviso with a heavy dose, as you might expect, of memory, race, and the like.

I've placed Dan Carlin and his Hardcore History last only because Dan's podcast is unclassifiable. Dan's topics range from ancient Mesopotamia to Word War II. Or he can come up with quirky and fascinating subjects that range across history – Is slavery a baseline human condition? Until recently was the model for child rearing a form of child abuse? Dan's stentorian and melodramatic delivery seems to elicit mixed reviews, but I enjoy it as part of the overall over-the-top package that Dan is clearly trying to deliver. Over-the-top or not, the drama of Dan's episodes – whether it's Tiberius Gracchus being beaten to death or the slaughter of the Stalingrad campaign – can't be beat. My advice is to try out an episode. Don't like it? Fine. But if you like it you'll probably be hooked and have hours of listening pleasure ahead. Dan takes his older podcasts out of free access as he releases new ones, so I suggest downloading the older shows now; you can delete them if you don't like them.

I find my podcasts by browsing around iTunes and the internet. If anyone has other suggestions, I'd be glad to take them.

Treat this Whip-Syllabub of a Post as a Perfect Nihility

2011-07-13T19:49:00.002-04:00

In the course of reading Pauline Maier's excellent Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, I've run across some fun words I'm determined to work into conversations, as well as a nice little story.

Our first word is "nihility", which I particularly like as a former Classics major. The quotes are from a letter by none other than George Washington to John Jay, dated August 15, 1786, discussing the powerlessness of the Confederation Congress:

Requisitions [by the Confedration Congress for funds] were "a perfect nihility," he [Washington] wrote Jay in August 1786, and "if you tell the [state] Legislatures they have violated the treaty of peace [with Great Britain] and invaded the prerogatives of the confederacy they will laugh in your face. What then is to be done?"

Our second item is "whip-syllabub", as used by Rep. Aedanus Burke of South Carolina exactly three years later, on August 15, 1789, to describe the proposed amendments to the Constitution then being considered by the House of Representatives:

In the course of those extended debates [in the House during August 1789], critics insisted that the proposed amendments would never satisfy their constituents. Rather than "those solid and substantial amendments which the people expect," Aedanus Burke sad, the select committee's proposals were "whip-syllabub," an eighteenth-century dessert that was "frothy and full of wind, formed only to please the palate," not the stomach; or "like a tub thrown out to a whale" by sailors to divert it from attacking their ship.

And, finally, we have Amos Singletary, who provides not a word, but a witty repartee. Mr. Singletary, "a onetime gristmill owner" from Sutton, Massachusetts, served as a delegate to the January 1788 Massachusetts ratification convention, where he proved to be (in the phrase of a newspaper report) "as remarkable for his taciturnity, as his zeal for religion," hemming and wiping his brow before he explained his objections to "this here self same constitution."

But I digress. The story I meant to relate involving Mr. Singletary concerns "a story about him from a period long before 1788, when the town [of Sutton] was shaken by a religious revival."

A local manufacturer of hoes "being under concern of mind" caught sight of Singletary, who was a justice of the peace and an "earnest Christian," and called out to him: "O Squire! O Squire! What shall I do to be saved?" Singletary had scarcely brought his horse to a stop when he answered: "Put more steel in your hoes."

Amos Singletary "died in 1806, in his mid-eighties."

"The Goviner of the universe"

2011-07-06T20:59:00.001-04:00

I've been reading Pauline Maier's fine Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 slowly and savoring it. I've also been reading it mostly backwards. I started at the beginning, but then skipped forward to New York, followed by Virginia, back to Pennsylvania, then forward to Connecticut and Massachusetts, which is where I am now.

Don't know what to make of this, however. Prof. Maier reports that the Massachusetts town of Ashfield, considering back in 1776 the form of government that the state should adopt, came up with a somewhat "unconventional" answer:

Massachusetts townsmen also had a proven capacity to think in unconventional ways. In 1776, for example, the people of Ashfield in western Massachusetts said they wanted no "Goviner but the Goviner of the universe and under him a States Ginaral to Consult with the wrest of the united States for the Good of the whole" . . ..

The lesson that Prof. Maier draws is that not all people in western Massachusetts - the neighborhood of Daniel Shays' Rebellion - were "die hard localists. Some, at least, had a powerful sense of national identity."

California and the Missouri Compromise Line

2011-07-06T06:09:00.002-04:00

In the late 1840s, during the lead-up to the Compromise of 1850, some federal legislators argued that the prospective state of California should be divided in half and ultimately be admitted as two states. These were southerners, of course, who were proposing that the Missouri Compromise line be extended to the Pacific. The northern portion would be admitted as a free state; slavery would be permitted in the south.

It was not to be, because most northerners, and some southerners (including Louisiana slaveholder Zachary Taylor), objected, for a variety of reasons, and most of us would say that the good guys won that fight. But Lawprof Ilya Somin's recent post at Volokh makes me wonder: would we all not have been better off, at least in the long run, if proponents of the extension of the Missouri Compromise line had succeeded?

Dusk Descends

2011-06-29T22:32:00.000-04:00

Hummingbird

2011-06-26T04:38:00.002-04:00

We put up a hummingbird feeder the other week, and voila! Not flashy by tropical standards, but in northern New Jersey you take what you can get. Click to enlarge.

Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, and the Constitutionality of Secession

2011-06-25T19:17:00.001-04:00

The proposition that a state could ratify the Constitution, subject to the right to withdraw from the Union if desired amendments were not ratified thereafter, would seem to be fundamentally inconsistent with the idea that single-state secession was not permitted.

At least two leading Virginians did not, it seems, grasp this contradiction. Both Richard Henry Lee and George Wythe proposed such a device in order to gain ratification of the Constitution with amendments.

Richard Henry Lee was not a delegate to the Virginia Convention. His proposition came as private advice to anti-federalist delegate George Mason. Recognizing that requiring amendments before ratification would delay enactment of the Constitution at best, and perhaps torpedo it altogether, in early May 1788 Lee

counseled Mason to watch carefully so “the foes of union, order, and good government” did not “prevent our acceptance of the good part of the plan proposed.” After extensive reflection, he proposed that Virginia should ratify the Constitution but demand “such amendments as can be agreed upon” as statements of “their undoubted rights and liberties which they mean not to part with.” The amendments would be proposed and adopted using the procedures under Article V. However, if the amendments still had not been enacted two years after the new government began, Virginia would “be considered as disengaged from this ratification.”

Lee intended and assumed that his proposal would help get the Constitution ratified and that the “friends” of the Constitution (except perhaps those who were dead set against any amendments) would see it as such and favor his scheme:

That “friendly and reasonable” method, Lee said, would allow the new Congress to amend the Constitution “without risking the convulsion of new conventions,” gratify critics of the Constitution and also those Federalists who thought amendments were needed, harmonize the undetermined stated, and quiet the “formidable minorities” in states that had already ratified. Lee recommended his plan for Mason's “serious and patriotic attention.”

Toward the end of the next month, on Tuesday June 24, 1788, George Wythe – 62 years of age, Thomas Jefferson's early mentor (and later Henry Clay's), and one of the leading lawyers and jurists in the state – moved that the Virginia convention, sitting as Committee of the Whole, recommend that the Constitution be adopted. Wythe, too, seems not to have understood that an individual state could never withdraw from the Constitution once ratified, for his motion included a provision for post-adoption withdrawal:

Wythe then moved his main resolution: that, in the opinion of the committee of the whole, the Constitution should be ratified, and that the convention should recommend amendments to the first federal Congress. He perhaps asked that another committee draw up those amendments. According to Patrick Henry, the text of Wythe's motion, - which [David] Robertson did not include in his Debates [and Other Proceedings of the Convention of Virginia] – also said that Virginia's ratification would “cease to be obligatory” if the amendments the convention proposed were not enacted. If so, his motion had some similarity to what Richard Henry Lee had recommended to Mason in early May.

The next day, Wednesday June 25, 1788 – 223 years ago today – the Virginia convention voted to reject Patrick Henry's competing motion that the Constitution not be ratified before proposed amendments were presented to the other states. “It lost be eight votes: 80 delegates voted for it, 88 against. That was the critical vote.” “[B]etween two and three o'clock in the afternoon, the convention turned to the main question, Wythe's resolution that the Constitution 'be ratified.' It passed by ten votes, 89 for and 79 against.”

All quotes are from Pauline Maier's excellent Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.

Dragonfly

2011-05-30T07:11:00.000-04:00

Click to enlarge.

Brigadier General John Gregg, CSA

2011-05-25T22:07:00.002-04:00

Mrs. Elektratig and I were in Longview, Texas over last weekend for a wedding. Longview, it turns out, is in Gregg County, named for John Gregg, a member of the Texas secession convention, a Confederate congressman, and a Confederate officer who fought in both the western and eastern theaters. He ultimately rose to the rank of Brigadier General and was killed in action outside Richmond in 1864. I noticed that there was a memorial to him in town, and we made a visit.

As a northerner who doesn't get south alot (they don't let me out much), I still find it weird that there are public memorials to secessionists and Confederates. I therefore thought I'd document our visit and the memorial with some pictures, which I've posted at Flickr. A few of them are also included in this post.

The memorial, which is outside the Gregg County court house, included two inscribed markers. The first, commemorating the Texas secession convention, read as follows:

Texas Secession Convention.

This meeting, which had John Gregg as a key member, was extra-legal governing body of delegates from over Texas. Held January – March 1861. Drew up secession ordinance – ratified by 3 to 1 popular vote. Selected delegates to convention of southern states in Montgomery, Ala. Declared office of anti-secessionist governor Sam Houston vacant, putting in Lt. Governor Edward Clark. Ratified C.S.A. Constitution. Raised troops to seize U.S. property, getting $3,000,000 worth by surrender. Placed troops at outposts to protect frontier.

The second memorialized Gen. Gregg:

General John Gregg 1828 – 1864.

Born Alabama. Came to Texas 1854. Judge, Confederate congressman. Organized 7th Texas infantry as Colonel 1861. Captured at Fort Donelson, Tenn. 1862. Promoted Brigadier General after exchange. Commanded brigade Vicksburg campaign 1863. Severely wounded Battle of Chickamauga Oct. 1863. Returning to action 1864 led Hood's Texas Brigade in heavy fighting in Virginia. Killed in action at Richmond, Oct. 7, 1864. A memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy erected by the State of Texas.

Sunset

2011-05-08T08:38:00.003-04:00

The days are getting longer. Sleep well.

The Return of Mollie Moo

2011-05-08T06:24:00.003-04:00

Every spring farmer Harry brings three or four cows from his farm down the road to our paddock. Molly Moo, the grande dame of Harry's Herd, is inevitably among them. Mollie's getting up there in years, but she's as irascible as ever.

Mollie and two of farmer Harry's "little girls" arrived last weekend, a little earlier than usual. Mistress Karen says that's because Mollie was bullying all the calves and Farmer Harry had to get her away from them.

Click on any photo to enlarge alot.

Willie the Pimp

2011-05-05T20:46:00.000-04:00

When Hot Rats came out I was, I think, in tenth grade. Peaches was a great song, but the cut that I really loved was Willie the Pimp. Enjoy.

Sallie, Dignified and Undignified

2011-05-01T22:27:00.000-04:00

Click to enlarge.

Spring Has Sprung, Part II

2011-05-01T21:26:00.000-04:00

A little cooler on Sunday, but a beautiful weekend overall. Photos are of a friend's garden here in northwest New Jersey. Click to enlarge. The originals are at Flickr.

Spring is Sprung

2011-05-01T06:19:00.001-04:00

Playing with my fisheye yesterday, at last a glorious spring day here in northwest New Jersey. Click to enlarge.

Town Line, NY Really Did Secede from the Union in 1861

2011-05-01T05:59:00.002-04:00

Several years ago I posted an entry referring to a report that, at the outset of the Civil War, the town of Town Line, New York, located in Erie County near Buffalo, had seceded from the Union: Did Town Line, NY Really Secede from the Union in 1861? In the post I questioned whether the report could possibly be true.

Correspondent Jeff Cooke has helpfully pointed me to a recent article in the Buffalo History Gazette that appears to confirm the truth of the report: Hamlet of Town Line "Heads South" in 1861: Nearby Hamlet Left Union in Civil War Days. According to the article, in late 1861 or early 1862 the eligible voters of the town voted by a count of 80 to 45 to secede from the Union. The reasons the town did so seem to be lost to history:

Why Town Line left the Union is a mystery. It's [sic] residents at that time were sons and daughters of pioneers who came from Vermont or Germany. Such ancestry would almost guarantee an abhorrence of slavery, but Town Line then was a Democratic stronghold. There was little economic reason for such sympathy, for Town Line residents were either farmers or woodsmen.

Town Line remained out of the Union, according to the article, for eighty-five years. On January 24, 1946 town residents decided to rejoin the Union by a vote of 90 to 23.

The picture, taken from the article, purports to show the "Old School house, now a Blacksmith shop, where Town Line voted for the Stars and Bars of the South."

Cut Off the Head and Save the Blood

2011-04-30T07:42:00.003-04:00

I missed Easter dinner at my sister's this year, so I've asked her to make this mouth-watering turtle stew recipe for me the next time I come over. It's from Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Puff-Pastes, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake. Adapted to This Country, and All Grades of Life (1796). Do you think she'll mind?

Fill a boiler or kettle, with a quantity of water sufficient to scald the callapach and callapee, the fins, &c. and about 9 o'clock hang up your turtle by the hind fins, cut of [sic] the head and save the blood, take a sharp pointed knife and separate the callapach from the callapee, or the back from the belly part, down to the shoulders, so as to come at the entrails which take out, and clean them, as you would those of any other animal, and throw them into a tub of clean water, taking great care not to break the gall, but to cut it off from the liver and throw it away, then separate each distinctly and put the guts into another vessel, open them with a small pen-knife end to end, wash them clean, and draw them through a woolen cloth, in warm water, to clear away the slime and then put them in clean cold water till they are used with the other part of the entrails, which must be cut up small to be mixed in the baking dishes with the meat; this done, separate the back and belly pieces, entirely cutting away the fore fins by the upper joint, which scald; peal off the loose skin and cut them into small pieces, laying them by themselves, either in another vessel, or on the table, ready to be seasoned; then cut off the meat from the belly part, and clean the back from the lungs, kidneys, &c. and that meat cut into pieces as small as a walnut, laying it likewise by itself; after this you are to scald the back, and belly pieces, pulling off the shell from the back, and the yellow skin from the belly, when all will be white and clean, and with the kitchen cleaver cut those up likewise into pieces about the bigness or breadth of a card; put those pieces into clean cold water, wash them and place them in a heap on the table, so that each part may lay by itself; the meat being thus prepared and laid separate for seasoning; mix two third parts of salt or rather more, and one third part of cayenne pepper, black pepper, and a nutmeg, and mace pounded fine, and mixt all together; the quantity, to be proportioned to the size of the turtle, so that in each dish there may be about three spoonfuls of seasoning to every twelve pound of meat; your meat being thus seasoned, get some sweet herbs, such as thyme, savory, &c. let them be dryed an rub'd fine, and having provided some deep dishes to bake it in, which should be of the common brown ware, put in the coarsest part of the meat, put a quarter pound of butter at the bottom of each dish, and then put some of each of the several parcels of meat, so that the dishes may be all alike and have equal portions of the different parts of the turtle, and between each laying of meat strew a little of the mixture of sweet herbs, fill your dishes within an inch and an half, or two inches of the top; boil the blood of the turtle, and put into it, then lay on forced meat balls made of veal, highly seasoned with the same seasoning as the turtle; put in each dish a gill of Madeira wine, and as much water as it will conveniently hold, then break over it five or six eggs to keep the meat from scorching at the top, and over that shake a handful of shread parsley, to make it look green, when done put your dishes into an oven made hot enough to bake bread, and in an hour and half, or two hours (according to the size of the dishes) it will be sufficiently done.

H/T J.L. Bell of Boston 1775.

Millard, Dissed Again

2011-04-24T19:34:00.004-04:00

Uh oh, the upcoming Paul Finkelman biography of Millard Fillmore looks like it's going to be a simplistic hatchet job. Amazon has posted an excerpt from the beginning of the book, and it's full of nonsense and snide innuendo. Let's start with this; my comments are in brackets:

Millard Fillmore, who became president after Taylor's death, was inexperienced and virtually unknown when he was nominated for vice president at the 1848 Whig convention. [Uh, he served four terms in Congress, rising to become Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; alot more experience that a certain Mr. Lincoln later had.] He was born in poverty in central New York, poorly schooled as a child, and largely self-educated after that. [Notice the snarky "poorly schooled". Again one might say the same about Lincoln.] He achieved a comfortable middle-class status and struggled to fit in with men who were better educated, culturally more sophisticated, and more socially adept than he. [More snarkiness. Millard didn't raise himself up by his bootstraps to better himself and achieve success. His goal, apparently, was to become a self-satisfied bourgeois fat-cat - if he weren't such a socially inept dolt. Imagine Abe being described this way.] Moving to Buffalo, he practiced law and entered politics at age twenty-eight, serving three terms in the state legislature and later four terms in Congress. He was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of New York in 1844, but in 1847 he was elected state comptroller - an important but hardly a major office. [What happened to the Ways and Means Committee? And what state-wide office did Abe hold?] A year later, this obscure politician was nominated to run for vice president alongside General Taylor. [So obscure he was nominated more or less by acclamation after his name was suggested.]

Pathetic rubbish.

The Moon Times Five

2011-04-15T20:47:00.000-04:00

Just playin'. Click on any photo to enlarge.

Sailors and Cats

2011-04-15T05:46:00.001-04:00

The U.S. Naval Institute has posted some delightful pictures, dating from the 1880s to the 1950s, of Cats in the Sea Services. The photo at the top is accompanied by the following caption:

"Accepting her fate as an orphan of war, 'Miss Hap' a two-week old Korean kitten chows down on canned milk, piped to her by medicine dropper with the help of Marine Sergeant Frank Praytor ... The Marine adopted the kitten after its mother was killed by a mortar barrage near Bunker Hill. The name, Miss Hap, Sergeant Praytor explained, was given to the kitten 'because she was born at the wrong place at the wrong time'." Korea, ca 1953

After the Rain

2011-04-13T21:05:00.001-04:00

We had a cold, miserable rain most of the day here in western New Jersey, but shortly before dusk the rain slackened to a mist. Spring is coming.

Click to enlarge.

Barnum in the Pulpit

2011-04-12T17:52:00.002-04:00

While his sister Harriet sunned herself in Florida after the War, brother and preacher Henry Ward Beecher remained in Brooklyn. But as David Goldfield explains in America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, Henry, too, "backed off from crusades after the war."

He had always interspersed his sermons with secular humor, and some critics complained he was Barnum in the pulpit. After the war, his sermons at Plymouth Church dwelt on topics such as civic duty, child rearing, and voting rights. It was nondenominational entertainment, punctuated by such aphorisms as "The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom" and "The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't." Fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman stated flatly, "It was only fair to say to Beecher that he was not a minister." Showmanship and fortune-cookie advice overtook theology, and most northerners welcomed the transition.

About the illustration, entitled Celebrities of the great trial "Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher" (c. 1875):

Head-and-shoulders portrait of Chief Justice Joseph Neilson surrounded by head-and-shoulders portraits of 17 people, including S.D. Morris, Theodore Tilton, Francis D. Moulton, and Henry Ward Beecher.

Harriet Beecher Stowe in Disney World

2011-04-12T07:41:00.003-04:00

David Goldfield's America Aflame: How The Civil War Created a Nation comes into its own when he arrives at the end of the Civil War. He does an excellent job painting the dizzying array of technical, business and cultural developments and distractions that led northerners, always thinly committed to anti-slavery, so quickly to turn away from the War, the south and the problems of the freedmen.

Goldfield employs Harriet Beecher Stowe as a symbol of the transformation:

She moved to Florida. Stowe came to teach former slaves to read and write and stayed to promote Florida real estate. She coauthored a book with her sister Catharine, The American Woman's Home (1869), which served as the middle-class bible for home design through World War I.

Harriet began the book even before the end of the War, correctly sensing correctly that the war-weary public would prefer to read about home decoration. "Her first essay on the subject, 'Ravages of a Carpet,' appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1864."

Applauding William Lloyd Garrison's decision to withdraw from the American Anti-Slavery Society shortly after the War, Harriet concluded that the end of slavery was enough. Harriet was in Disney World:

Florida's exotic environment captivated Stowe. When she arrived on the banks of the St. Johns River in north Florida in February 1867, the orange blossoms were in bloom. She immediately "stripped off the woolen garments of my winter captivity, put on a thin dress white skirt . . . & sat down to enjoy the view of the river & the soft summer air." At this desk, Stowe wrote a breezy account of her early experiences in Florida, Palmetto Leaves (1873), describing her work with the freedmen, but mostly promoting Florida tourism and offering advice on growing citrus trees.

Judicial Review at the Constitutional Convention

2011-04-10T17:14:00.003-04:00

In his podcast course on Colonial and Revolutionary America, Stanford history prof Jack Rakove criticizes those lawprofs who, he says, characterize the doctrine of judicial review as springing forth fully formed out of nothing from the pen of Chief Justice John Marshall, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

The doctrine, Rakove concedes, was not systematically developed at the time of the Philadelphia Convention. But the idea, he contends, was in the air and common currency among the delegates.

Without citing a particular speech, Rakove refers to arguments by delegate Elbridge Gerry criticizing James Madison's proposed council of revision. I tracked down one of Gerry's statements to which Rakove presumably refers, and I thought I'd go over it with you.

The Resolutions laid out by Edmund Randolph (almost universally believed to have been prepared by Madison) at the outset of the Convention included an Eighth Resolution by which a “Council of revision”, composed of both “the Executive” and “a convenient number of the National Judiciary”, would “ examine every act of the National Legislature before it shall operate”:

8. Resd. that the Executive and a convenient number of the National Judiciary, ought to compose a Council of revision with authority to examine every act of the National Legislature before it shall operate, & every act of a particular Legislature before a Negative thereon shall be final; and that the dissent of the said Council shall amount to a rejection, unless the Act of the National Legislature be again passed, or that of a particular Legislature be again negatived by ----- of the members of each branch.

The Convention, sitting as a Committee of the Whole, held an initial discussion concerning “Proposition 8th” on Monday June 4, 1787. Elbridge Gerry promptly objected to it. Among other things, Gerry suggested that the federal judiciary did not need to review laws in advance because it would have an opportunity to review them, and if necessary to set them aside as unconstitutional, after the fact (emphasis added):

First Clause of Proposition 8th. relating to a Council of Revision taken into consideration.

Mr. GERRY doubts whether the Judiciary ought to form a part of it, as they will have a sufficient check agst. encroachments on their own department by their exposition of the laws, which involved a power of deciding on their Constitutionality. In some States the Judges had actually set aside laws as being agst. the Constitution. This was done too with general approbation. It was quite foreign from the nature of ye. office to make them judges of the policy of public measures. He moves to postpone the clause in order to propose "that the National Executive shall have a right to negative any Legislative act which shall not be afterwards passed by -------- parts of each branch of the national Legislature."

Rufus King of Massachusetts then jumped in in support of Gerry, amplifying a conclusion perhaps implicit in Gerry's remarks. Because federal judges would be evaluating laws after the fact, approving them in advance would compromise their judicial role:

Mr. KING seconds the motion, observing that the Judges ought to be able to expound the law as it should come before them, free from the bias of having participated in its formation.

The Battle Over the Soul

2011-04-07T18:40:00.001-04:00

Last night I attended a screening of The Battle Over the Soul at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street in Manhattan. The Battle for the Soul is a remarkable and moving film documenting the astonishing exploits of a handful of young Israeli soldiers who held off virtually the entire Syrian army for the better part of three days at the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, almost certainly preventing the annihilation of the Jewish state, and exploring the effects that those few hours had on those young men's lives. Saving Private Ryan has nothing on this film.

Dan Almagor, one of those then young men, the driving force behind the film, and the host of the screening, is a an exemplar of the best that humanity has to offer and deserves your support.

The Hampton Roads Peace Conference

2011-04-06T22:55:00.001-04:00

At the beginning of February 1865, President Abraham Lincoln met with old friend, former fellow Whig, and then Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens of Georgia at a “peace conference” on board the River Queen at Hampton Roads, near Fort Monroe, Virginia. (Other attendees were Secretary of State William H. Seward with Lincoln and former United States Supreme Court Associate Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama and former United States Representative and Senator and Confederate Secretary of State and Senator Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia representing the Confederacy.) In America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield recounts the beginning of the Hampton Roads meeting:

The following morning, February 3, Stephens boarded the president’s steamer and greeted Lincoln warmly. Stephens seemed rather frailer than the last time the two former Whigs met, nearly seven years earlier. The Confederate vice president wore a thick gray overcoat that descended to his ankles and threatened to swallow him. He had always looked cadaverous, but the coat made his appearance even more ghostly. A Union soldier guarding the gathering exclaimed, “My God! He’s dead now, but he don’t know it.” Stephens doffed his overcoat, and Lincoln chuckled, “Never have I seen so small a nubbin come out of so much husk.” The atmosphere immediately relaxed, and the two men chatted amiably about the old days before settling down to business.

But that is amusing prelude. What I really wanted to focus on was Lincoln’s remarkable advice to Stephens concerning the Thirteenth Amendment, which had passed the House of Representatives just three days earlier, on January 31, 1865. Stephens’ home state of Georgia, Lincoln suggested, should ratify the amendment prospectively, “so as to take effect, say, in five years”.

During the conference, Seward told the southern representatives of the recent passage of the amendment, and “Lincoln saw that the announcement rattled the [southern] commissioners perhaps more than any other disclosure that day.” He therefore “offered some advice to Stephens”:

“If I were in Georgia, I would go home and get the governor of the state to call the legislature together . . . and ratify this constitutional amendment prospectively, so as to take effect, say, in five years. Such a ratification would be valid in my opinion.” That way, Lincoln explained, southerners “will avoid, as far as possible, the evils of immediate emancipation. Lincoln, according to Stephens, pledged “to remunerate the southern people for their slaves,” on the grounds that both North and South were responsible for slavery.

William C. Harris's article on the meeting, The Hampton Roads Peace Conference: A Final Test of Lincoln's Presidential Leadership, provides additional context:

Later, when the issue of emancipation was again raised, the president gave a lengthy explanation of his own antislavery history, beginning with his opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories and repeating his reasons for acting against the institution during the war. The president concluded his account, as Stephens later wrote, by maintaining that he had always favored emancipation but not immediate emancipation, even by the states, because of the "many evils attending" it. The Confederate vice president also wrote that Lincoln then declared that if he were Stephens, he would go home to Georgia, "get the Governor of the State to call the Legislature together, and get them to recall all the State troops from the war; elect Senators and Members to Congress, and ratify the Constitutional Amendment prospectively, so as to take effect—say in five years." "Such a ratification," the president allegedly said, "would be valid in my opinion." Lincoln went on to say, again according to Stephens, "that whatever may have been the views of your people before the war, they must be convinced now, that Slavery is doomed. It cannot last long in any event, and the best course, it seems to me, for your public men to pursue, would be to adopt such a policy as will avoid, as far as possible, the evils of immediate emancipation."

Harris expresses substantial doubt as to whether Lincoln in fact endorsed “prospective” ratification, both because the endorsement would have been inconsistent with other statements the president had made and because another participant, Campbell, did not mention the statement in his account of the meeting.

I am not so sure. Stephens published his account in 1868, only three years after the event. While it is possible that Stephens's memory was faulty, his recollection of the meeting and Lincoln's comments seems to have been quite distinct. The other statements that Stephens attributes to Lincoln (concerning his history of opposition to immediate emancipation and his belief that the north as well as the south was responsible for slavery and that southerners should be compensated for the loss of their slaves) are entirely consistent with Lincoln's known history. And there is no apparent motive for Stephens to have lied about this otherwise trivial detail of the conversation.

Moreover, as Harris himself admits in another context, Lincoln was clearly concerned at the meeting to convey the impression “that he did not seek a social revolution in the postwar South”:

One of the Confederate commissioners then mentioned "the evils of immediate emancipation," specifically, as Stephens later wrote, the hardships that many blacks "who were unable to support themselves" would face in freedom. The president "fully admitted" that the sudden end of slavery might produce severe dislocations, but, instead of elaborating on the point and describing his expectations for the former slaves, he illustrated his view with a rather crude anecdote. Drawing upon his reservoir of rural Midwestern stories, Lincoln told of an Illinois farmer who informed a neighbor that he had discovered a way to save time and labor in feeding his hogs. "What is it"? asked the neighbor. "Why, it is," said the farmer, "to plant plenty of potatoes, and when they are mature, without either digging or housing them, turn the hogs in the field and let them get their own food as they want it." "But," the neighbor inquired, "how will they do when the winter comes and the ground is hard frozen"? "Well," replied the farmer, "let 'em root."

This anecdote, which appears in both Stephens' and Campbell's accounts and which Lincoln later repeated to his portraitist, reveals a harsh side to Lincoln, perhaps caused by his desire to reassure the Confederates that he did not seek a social revolution in the postwar South. The story also belies Lincoln's earlier expressions of sympathy for black refugees from slavery and his approval, one month after the Hampton Roads Conference, of the Freedman's Bureau bill providing temporary aid for the former slaves (and white refugees) in their adjustment to freedom.

Indeed, earlier in the meeting, when Seward first mentioned the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln raised no objection to Seward's incredible suggestion that the confederate states should rejoin the Union in order to defeat the amendment:

At this point, Seward produced a copy of the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which had not been seen by the commissioners. He declared that if the South abandoned the struggle, the amendment probably would fail to receive the necessary approval of three-fourths of the states for ratification. Seward inferred [sic, should be “implied”], according to Stephens's account of the conference, that if the Southern states quickly rejoined the Union, they could assist in voting down the amendment.

I find Lincoln's statement on prospective ratification, if true, fascinating for at least two, maybe three reasons. First, there is the abstract legal question. I suppose it is possible for a proposed constitutional amendment to provide by its terms that, upon ratification, it will not go into effect until some time thereafter. But can a state ratify “prospectively”, in the sense described by Lincoln, an amendment that contains no such limitation? And what if an amendment were ratified by three-quarters of the states, but one-third of those votes in favor included “prospective” provisos specifying various different periods (e.g., one year, three years, five years, ten years) before the amendment would become effective? Whose period, if any, would control? Or could opponents maintain that a state’s ratification subject to such a proviso was no ratification at all, much as Federalists argued in 1788 that conditional state ratification of the Constitution would be equivalent to rejection?

Second, the incident is remarkable because it suggests that Lincoln was prepared to send the slaves and freedmen back into captivity, at least for a period. Lincoln no doubt understood that the Emancipation Proclamation, as an exercise of war powers, would lapse following the cessation of hostilities. And what if southern states then began demanding the return of slaves who had fled to Union lines and thence to northern states under the Fugitive Slave Clause? The mind reels.

Finally, one wonders what light this incident sheds on the hypothetical actions of a Reconstruction Abe. Lincoln defenders generally sheepishly admit that his actions and words before his death indicated that he was planning a relatively quick and gentle (and Andrew Johnson-like) Reconstruction, but tend to emphasize the president’s flexibility and capacity for growth, leading them to claim that southern intransigence would have quickly moved him toward a firmer and more “radical” policy. Ironically, Harris in his article provides a perfect illustration of this mode of thought. After recounting Lincoln's “harsh” Illinois farmer story (described above), Harris immediately proceeds to suggest that he would have changed his mind. I provide the complete paragraph for context (emphasis added):

This anecdote, which appears in both Stephens' and Campbell's accounts and which Lincoln later repeated to his portraitist, reveals a harsh side to Lincoln, perhaps caused by his desire to reassure the Confederates that he did not seek a social revolution in the postwar South. The story also belies Lincoln's earlier expressions of sympathy for black refugees from slavery and his approval, one month after the Hampton Roads Conference, of the Freedman's Bureau bill providing temporary aid for the former slaves (and white refugees) in their adjustment to freedom. Still, Lincoln, like most Americans at the time, optimistically expected emancipation itself to be "the king's cure" for blacks in the South. Lincoln believed that a free person, now including blacks, should be able to make his way in America through his own ability and effort without the assistance of the state. Though he had admitted the difficulties of the white and black races living together in freedom (his earlier support for black colonization reflected this concern), the president envisioned a limited role for the federal government in protecting and aiding blacks after the war. Had he lived to witness the postwar threat to black freedom, Lincoln might have changed his mind regarding federal responsibility for black liberty.

Abe might have arrived at a more radical position on Reconstruction. But the fact remains that if, two months before his death, Abe was prepared to send the slaves back into slavery, he sure had a long way to go before he got there.

Sir Billy and His Filly

2011-04-03T10:09:00.001-04:00

I've been listening intermittently in the car to Stanford historian Jack Rakove's Colonial and Revolutionary History podcast course. The good professor has referred several times to a bit of doggerel concerning Sir William Howe's liaison while in New York with Elizabeth Loring, the wife of a loyalist by the name of Joshua Loring, suggesting that Sir Billy's extramarital bliss accounted for his slow departure from New York to Philadelphia in 1777.

An internet search turned up a couple of fragments that are, indeed, quite amusing:

Sir William, he, snug as a flea,

Lay all this time a-snoring;

Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm

In bed with Mrs. ------.

And:

Awake, arouse, Sir Billy,

There's forage in the plain.

Ah, leave your little Filly,

And open the campaign.

In his lectures, Prof. Rakove suggests that Sir William ultimately decamped for Pennsylvania rather than venture up the Hudson because he misunderstood the penultimate line to be "Ah, leave for Philly".

A Thought on Nullification and Secession

2011-04-03T06:12:00.002-04:00

A recent post by history prof Mark R. Cheathem, Nullification, the South, and Historiography, prompted a thought.

It's unfortunate that the doctrines of nullification and secession became entangled with and identified with the defense of slavery. Substantively the doctrines are neither good nor evil. They could be used just as well in support of an end that most of us would consider admirable – to block, for example, a Sedition Act, or federal regulations requiring you to eat a serving of broccoli each day.

This does not mean that the doctrines are clearly correct either. But the unique historical identification of the doctrines with slavery skews all discussions about them and makes it extremely difficult to exchange views about their merits without the discussion promptly descending into accusations and finger-pointing.

"[T]o call it murder would be to defame all ordinary murderers"

2011-04-02T17:53:00.001-04:00

Following up on my last post on the 1818 military trial and execution of Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot, I thought I'd see what Andy Jackson's partisans might have to say in Old Hickory's defense. To do this, I consulted two sources that might be expected to give Andy Jackson the benefit of the doubt: Volume 2 of James Parton's Life of Andrew Jackson and Volume 1 of Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson.

Parton's verdict on the incident is harsh. The execution of Arbuthnot – whom both Parton and Remini portray as less culpable, and probably entirely innocent – was an “unmitigated atrocity.” Nor did Ambrister's conduct warrant summary execution:

Such was the tragedy enacted at St. Mark's [in Spanish Florida], in the year of our Lord 1818. Who can characterize it aright? The execution of Arbuthnot, apart from all the extenuating circumstances, was an act of such complicated and unmitigated atrocity, that to call it murder would be to defame all ordinary murderers. He was put to death for acts every one of which was innocent, and some of which were eminently praiseworthy. Even Ambrister's fault was one which General Jackson himself would have been certain to commit in the same circumstances. He sent a party to “oppose” the invasion of the province; and even his seizure of Arbuthnot's schooner seems to have been done to provide his followers with the means of defense. Arbuthnot was convicted upon the evidence of men who had the strongest interest in his conviction. And who presided over the court? Was it not the men whose treatment of the Fowltown warriors, first arrogant and then precipitant, was the direct cause of the war and all its horrors? [The First Seminole War had begun when, on November 21, 1817, 250 troops sent by General Edmund P. Gaines under the command of Col. David E. Twiggs burned down the Seminole village of Fowltown, located just north of the Florida border on land claimed by the United States under the Treaty of Fort Jackson, and drove off the inhabitants. Nine days later, on November 30, 1817, the Seminoles took revenge by ambushing a boat on the Apalachicola River and killing 46 of 51 people on board – 36 soldiers, six women and four children. The same Gen. Gaines who had ordered the Fowltown expedition later served as President of the fourteen-officer military tribunal that convicted and sentenced Arbuthnot and Ambrister.]

Having accused Jackson of presiding over an “atrocity,” however, Parton then oddly lets Old Hickory off the hook, characterizing him as “perhaps, the least blameworthy” of the participants:

Of all the men concerned in this tragedy, General Jackson was, perhaps, the least blameworthy. We can survey the transaction in its completeness, but he could not. He carried out of the war of 1812 the bitterest recollections of [British Major Edward] Nicols [or Nicolls] and [British Marine Captain George] Woodbine, who had given protection, succor, and honor to the fugitive Creeks. A train of circumstances led him to the conclusion that Arbuthnot and Ambrister [who were also British subjects] were still doing in Florida the work that Nichols and Woodbine had begun in 1814. He expressly says, in one of his dispatches, that, at the beginning of his operations, he was “strongly impressed with the belief that this Indian war had been excited by some unprincipled foreign agents,” and that the Seminoles were too weak in numbers to have undertaken the war, unless they had received assurances of foreign support. Woodbine had actually been in Florida the summer before, brought thither by Arbuthnot. To the “machinations” of these men General Jackson attributed the massacre of Lieutenant Scott [the November 30, 1817 massacre on the Apalachicola River mentioned above, during which, according to Parton, “[m]en, women and children were involved in one horrible massacre, or spared for more horrible torture. The children were taken by the heels and their brains dashed out against the sides of the boat.”], and considered them equally guilty. They were at length in his power, and he then selected fourteen of his officers to examine the evidence against them. After three days' investigation those officers brought in a verdict that accorded exactly with his own previous convictions, as well as with the representation of . . . others who surrounded his person and had an interest in confirming his impressions.

Nonetheless, Parton warns in conclusion, “This is not a justification; for it is not permitted to a man to make mistakes which involve the lives of human beings.”

Remini likewise delivers a discordant verdict. While seemingly condemning Jackson's actions he simultaneous explains and excuses them:

Whether the executions of Arbuthnot and Ambrister were necessary or justified may be questioned. The war with the Indians was over and the trials could have been delayed until Jackson had consulted with his superiors in Washington. But Jackson was not a merciful man in these circumstances, nor was it his style to defer to Washington for decisions. He could have delayed the execution of the sentences; he certainly stood on shaky legal ground in decreeing that a person forfeits his nationality and becomes an outlaw by warring against another nation [Jackson maintained that Arbuthnot and Ambrister were no longer British citizens or subjects but international outlaws]. But this was the early nineteenth century, along a frontier where the Indian menace kept settlers in a perpetual state of alarm and apprehension. Jackson had no patience with those who trifled with this fear. To him, Arbuthnot and Ambrister were guilty of inexcusable crimes and their punishment was obligatory under frontier law and conditions. “The proceedings of the Court martial in this case,” he reported to [Secretary of War John C.] Calhoun, “with the volume of corruption, and barbarity at which the heart sickens and in which in this enlightened age it ought not scarcely to be believed that a christian nation would have participated and yet the British government is involved in the agency.” He hoped that the execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister would “convince the Government of Great Britain as well as her subjects that certain, if slow retribution awaits those unchristian wretches who by false promises delude and excite a [sic] Indian tribe to all the horrid deeds of savage war.”

About the illustration at the top of the post, entitled The Little Magician Invoked (1844):

Martin Van Buren, known as "the Little Magician" for his remarkable political agility, summons spirits to divine the Democratic or "Loco Foco" prospects for election in 1844. He sits in an astrological circle, conjuring up three imps in the smoke of his pipe, and addresses them: Spirits white and Gray appear! appear! / my call attend! my power revere! / Their destiny the Locos ask / Apply ye to the mighty Task! First spirit: Loco-Focos! desperate Chaps. / Make your speech & draw your Caps! / You've had your day--you've had free scope / And hanged yourselves with your own rope! Second spirit: When Arnold rises form the Tomb / To receive a Traitors doom! / When Yankee Children bear his name / And all are proud of Arnolds Fame! / Then Tyler shall his honors share, / And keep the Presidential chair! Third spirit: When the stars fall from above. / When the Globe shall cease to move, / When flowers grow amid the snow / And Lions fear the timid Roe. / When Lawyers shall refuse a feel / And misers pray for poverty /Till then, you'll find that many folk, / Will never vote for Master Polk! / Till then, they'd swing upon the Gallows / Before they'd vote for Master Dallas! Democratic nominees James K. Polk, wearing the striped trousers associated with the Loco Foco or radical wing of the Democratic party, and George M. Dallas stand at right. Visibly awed, Polk says, "By Heavens! these words remind me of the dream I had when I first heard of my nomination!" Dallas, fleeing to the right, asserts, "I'll get out of this scrape as quick as possible Texas wont save us!" On the left Andrew Jackson brandishes his cane and threatens, "By the Eternal! you old Hags! if I get hold of you, I'll hang you all up under the 7th section as I did Arbuthnot and Ambisiserter!" Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister (not "Ambister") were two Englishmen hung by Jackson during the Florida campaign in 1818, for aiding the Seminole Indians in their fight against the general's militia. The act was one which Jackson's political foes invoked throughout his career as evidence of his brutality.

Andy Jackson In the News!

2011-04-02T07:59:00.002-04:00

At Concurring Opinions, Seton Hall lawprof Jonathan Hafetz notes that Andrew Jackson's 1818 executions of Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot during the First Seminole War have become a hot news item.

Apparently the Justice Department, seeking to defend military commissions, cited Jackson's actions as precedent. In the process, DOJ likened the Seminoles to al Qaeda and seemingly endorsed Jackson's actions:

In a recent brief to the Court of Military Commissions Review (CMCR), the Pentagon cited an 1818 military commission convened by General Andrew Jackson to execute two British men, Robert Ambrister and Alexander George Arbuthnot, for assisting the Seminole Indians after U.S. forces had invaded then-Spanish Florida to prevent black slaves from escaping. The prosecution’s brief elaborated: “Not only was the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day al Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U.S. targets itself violate the customs and usages of war. Because Ambrister and Arbuthnot aided the Seminoles both to carry on an unlawful belligerency and to violate the laws of war, their conduct was wrongful and punishable.” (emphasis added).

Prof Hafetz condemns the argument as "[b]ad lawyering", "[o]ffensive" and "[r]evealing":

The Ambrister- Arbuthnot commission may be historical evidence, but it’s not legal precedent and it’s very poor evidence. That commission was never considered or validated by any court. Jackson, meanwhile, was almost censured by Congress and the decision was castigated, including by the House Committee on Military Affairs. William Winthrop, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has called “the Blackstone of Military Law” and repeatedly cited in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and other opinions, later described Jackson’s order to execute Ambrister (after the commission had sentenced him to corporal punishment) as “wholly arbitrary and illegal.” (Winthrop also remarked that if an officer had ordered the execution as Jackson had, he “would now be indictable for murder.”). If one were defending the commissions, this is historical evidence you’d normally want to bury, not showcase.

OK, you Andy Jackson scholars, have at it!

Yorktown

2011-03-26T10:01:00.002-04:00

I was down on the Peninsula for a few days last week with Mrs. E. and her mother (who's from the Auld Sod, in case you can't tell). We saw the Shirley Plantation and Sherwood Forest, John Tyler's estate, but the highlight of the trip was definitely the Yorktown Battlefield. Because Yorktown was a siege, the battlefield is relatively confined and easily comprehended. We had a wonderful Ranger who did a superb job explaining the sequence of events, the art of siege warfare at the time, the weaponry, etc. Clearly ex-military, she explained why the allies had to storm and seize Redoubts 9 and 10 by placing our group in a line and discussing the potentially catastrophic effects of enfilading fire.

The movie, which we saw at the beginning, was informative. The driving tour CD was reasonably priced - about $5.00 - and took us out to the successive allied lines, the redoubts, the surrender field, and back to the allied line of approach and staging areas.

If you're in the area, don't miss the Yorktown Battlefield. Highly recommended.

Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery

2011-03-24T03:42:00.002-04:00

You're aware, no doubt, that Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling book in America, other than the Bible, during the Nineteenth Century. But what work held that honor before Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel displaced it during the 1850s?

The surprising answer, according to David Goldfield's America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, is a book entitled Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, purportedly written by one Maria Monk and originally published in 1836:

Maria Monk's problem was . . . [that] she was pregnant in an era when unwed motherhood was decidedly unfashionable. The solution: write a book,a strategy concocted by a team of prominent evangelists and abolitionists, including Theodore Dwight . . ..

Awful Disclosures, true to its title, chronicled the debauched life of nuns and priests in a Montreal convent. Mother Superior parceled out nuns to priests and issued orders for the murder of their babies. Licentious priests roamed the halls, feasting on young virgins at will. "Often they were in our beds before us." Maria wrote. Especially fascinating for readers were the detailed descriptions of the convent's Gothic rituals. The ceremony marking Maria's entrance into the novitiate required her to lie down in a coffin, after which three priests ravished her (accounting for her pregnancy). Mother Superior forced her to reveal her most secret thoughts and desires to priests in the confessional. Maria concludes her story with a tour of the convent for the reader, probing the secret recesses and passageways down into a subbasement where she discovers an enormous lime pit employed to devour the bodies of the murdered infants.

Now, the idea of exploring early 19th Century porn naturally aroused my interest, and sure enough I found a copy at Google Books (above, I've linked to a second edition, also published in 1836). Alas, the porn is pretty thin gruel, so vague as to deprive the passages of titillatory (I made that word up myself!) character (some paragraph breaks added):

Nothing important occurred until late in the afternoon, when, as I was sitting in the communityroom, Father Dufresne called me out, saying he wished to speak with me. I feared what was his intention; but I dared not disobey. In a private apartment, he treated me in a brutal manner; and from two other priests, I afterward received similar usage that evening. Father Dufresne afterward appeared again; and I was compelled to remain in company with him until morning.

* * *

Some of the priests from the Seminary were in the nunnery every day and night, and often several at a time. I have seen nearly all of them at different times, though there are about one hundred and fifty in the district of Montreal. There was a difference in their conduct; though I believe every one of them was guilty of licentiousness; while not one did I ever see who maintained a character any way becoming the profession of a priest. Some were gross and degraded in a degree which few of my readers can ever have imagined; and I should be unwilling to offend the eye, and corrupt the heart of any one, by an account of their words and actions.

Few imaginations can conceive deeds so abominable as they practised, and often required of some of the poor women, under the fear of severe punishments, and even of death. I do not hesitate to say with the strongest confidence, that although some of the nuns became lost to every sentiment of virtue and honour, especially one from the Congregational Nunnery whom I have before mentioned, Saint Patrick, the greater part of them loathed the practices to which they were compelled to submit by the Superior and priests, who kept them under so dreadful a bondage.

When the topic turns from sex to infanticide, however, the book becomes far more specific and lurid:

It will be recollected, that I was informed immediately after receiving the veil, that infants were occasionally murdered in the Convent. I was one day in the nuns' private sick-room, when I had an opportunity, unsought for, of witnessing deeds of such a nature.

It was, perhaps, a month after the death of Saint Francis. Two little twin babes, the children of Sainte Catharine, were brought to a priest, who was in the room, for baptism. I was present while the ceremony was performed, with the Superior and several of the old nuns, whose names I never knew, they being called Ma tante, Aunt."

The priests took turns in attending to confession and catechism in the Convent, usually three months at a time, though sometimes longer periods. The priest then on duty was Father Larkin. He is a good-looking European, and has a brother who is a professor in the college. He baptized, and then put oil upon the heads of the infants, as is the custom after baptism.

They were then taken, one after another, by one of the old nuns, in the presence of us all. She pressed her hand upon the mouth and nose of the first, so tight that it could not breathe, and in a few minutes, when the hand was removed, it was dead. She then took the other, and treated it in the same way. No sound was heard, and both the children were corpses.

The greatest indifference was shown by all present during this operation; for all, as I well knew, were long accustomed to such scenes. The little bodies were then taken into the cellar, thrown into the pit I have mentioned, and covered with a quantity of lime.

I afterward saw another new-born infant treated in the same manner, in the same place: but the actors in the scene I choose not to name, nor the circumstances, as every thing connected with it is of a peculiarly trying and painful nature to my own feelings.

If you want a book featuring murderous monks, debauched nuns and violated virgins, complete with special guest appearance by Satan himself, I'd recommend instead Matthew Gregory Lewis's 1796 novel The Monk. I won't tell you that I pulled out my copy and confirmed that I bought it almost forty years ago.

Testing Bullet Proof Glass in 1952

2011-03-15T01:43:00.000-04:00

This can't be for real . . . can it?

H/T theblogprof.

George Washington and the Hippopotamus

2011-03-07T21:23:00.001-05:00

Having previously reported on George Washington's dentures, I have no idea whether the following is true (emphasis added):

By 1789 [George Washington] was using false teeth, and he lost his last tooth in 1795. At first these substitutes were very badly fitted, and when Stuart painted his famous picture he tried to remedy the malformation they gave the mouth by padding under the lips with cotton. The result was to make bad worse, and to give, in that otherwise fine portrait, a feature at once poor and unlike Washington, and for this reason alone the Sharpless miniature, which in all else approximates so closely to Stuart's masterpiece, is preferable. In 1796 Washington was furnished with two sets of "sea-horse" (i.e., hippopotamus) ivory teeth, and they were so much better fitted that the distortion of the mouth ceased to be noticeable.

H/T Lawprof Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Ice Crystals

2011-02-27T21:12:00.000-05:00

The Snow Cat Sleeps

2011-02-27T21:02:00.000-05:00

Salome and Ariadne Sense that Spring Is Nigh

2011-02-27T19:53:00.000-05:00

Buffon's Beasts and Jefferson's Moose

2011-02-21T07:30:00.003-05:00

Via Boingboing, I found this wonderful entry at BiblioOdyssey featuring illustrations from "a 1753 work called 'Collection des Animaux Quadrupèdes' which forms part of an enormous 36-volume series ('Histoire Naturelle') issued over a forty year period by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon."

The name "Buffon" was familiar, and sure enough upon checking I confirmed that it was Buffon who had claimed that something about North America produced small, weak and degenerate plants and animals - including human animals. At American Scientist Keith Thomson describes Buffon's assertions:

Buffon was not the first to assert American degeneracy, and this idea was not based on natural history alone: Politics also played a part. Buffon's immediate source was a book by a Spanish naval officer, Don Antonio d'Ulloa (Relación histórica del viaje hecho de orden de su Majestad a la América Meridional, 1748). d'Ulloa's thesis was that the human condition in the Americas was degenerate as a result of a long history of colonialism, slavery, exploitation of natural resources and subjugation of the native peoples. To d'Ulloa, it was natural that America lacked the large mammals of the Old World and was rife with noxious insects and poisonous reptiles.

Buffon, focusing on North America, developed d'Ulloa's observations into a complex theory in which climate played a central role. In his ninth volume, published in 1761, Buffon compared mammalian species and noted examples in which the same species lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He claimed the New-World versions were always smaller and weaker. European livestock exported to America were always stunted. Species indigenous to the New World were always smaller than comparable species in the Old World (the largest American mammal was the tapir, nowhere near the size of an elephant). Of American Indians, he wrote, "the organs of generation (of the savage) are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female. Though nimbler than the European, his strength is not so great. His sensations are less acute; and yet he is more timid and cowardly." And so on.

All of which roused a perturbed Thomas Jefferson to refute Buffon's claims by, among other thing, arranging to have the carcass of a moose shipped to Paris:

When he arrived [in Paris], Jefferson sent Buffon a copy of [his] Notes [on the State of Virginia] and the skin of a large panther, and was subsequently invited to dine with Buffon at the Jardin du Roi, Paris's magnificent botanical garden. Of that meeting Jefferson later wrote, "in my conversations with the Count de Buffon . . . I find him absolutely unacquainted with our Elk and our deer. He has hitherto believed that our deer never had horns more than a foot long." So Jefferson decided to show him a full-grown American moose. He wrote to General John Sullivan, president (governor) of New Hampshire, for help in getting a large specimen, instructing him that the bones of the head and legs should be left in the skin so that it could be mounted in a life-like manner. Eventually a "seven-foot tall" moose was collected in Vermont and shipped to Paris.

Many years later, Daniel Webster told the story that Jefferson had had the moose set up in the hall of his apartment and invited Buffon to see it. Confronted with that stark refutation of his earlier thesis, Buffon was said to have exclaimed, "I should have consulted you, Monsieur, before I published my book on natural history, and then I should have been sure of my facts." It would be nice if this story were true. In fact, Buffon, by this time old and sick, was away from Paris when the moose arrived in October 1787. Jefferson sent it to Buffon's long time associate, zoologist Louis-Jean-Marie D'Aubenton, for the great man to see when he returned. Although most of the hair had fallen off the hide, the antlers sent by Sullivan were from a smaller animal and the whole carcass was probably rancid, Jefferson was "in hopes that Monsieur de Buffon will be able to have it stuffed, and placed on his legs in the King's Cabinet."

The illustration at the top is courtesy of peacay's Flickr photostream.

Addendum: If you're looking for more detail, try Keith S. Thompson's longer paper, Jefferson, Buffon, and the European View of America.

A Real Lincoln Quote?

2011-02-20T18:02:00.002-05:00

At her site, Wisconsin lawprof and blogger Ann Althouse spots a pro-union protest sign that purports to quote the Great Emancipator: "All that serves labor serves the nation. All that harms it is TREASON! — Abraham Lincoln."

OK, you Lincoln scholars, fire up your engines. Is the quote real or bogus?

A Sequence of Lines Traced By 500 Individuals

2011-02-19T08:27:00.001-05:00

A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from clement valla on Vimeo.

Really enjoyed this. H/T Boing Boing.

Did Southerners Cite Aristotle?

2011-02-19T02:55:00.003-05:00

Southerners in the antebellum period famously invoked the Bible to justify the institution of slavery. One would think that they would also have cited Aristotle, who concluded in Book 1 of the Politics that slavery could be "advantageous and just":

But we must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is by nature of this character, and whether it is advantageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether on the contrary all slavery is against nature. And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically. Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.

And yet, I have never run across a single instance in which a southerner cited or quoted Aristotle in support of the peculiar institution. Have you?

Russell McClintock on "Seward's Folly"

2011-02-15T06:12:00.002-05:00

I rarely have anything good to say, here or anywhere else, about the New York Times, but it's been doing a nice job with its Disunion series, which "follows the Civil War as it unfolded." I believe I've read just about every piece, and they've been of uniformly high quality.

I mention this now to highlight one of the most recent articles, Seward's Folly, tracking the back-room maneuverings of that most enigmatic of figures, New York Senator and incoming Secretary of State William Henry Seward. The piece is written by Russell McClintock, the author of a fine book on the North during the secession crisis, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession. If the Disunion series or other sites that have sprung up to follow the Secession Winter 150 years after the fact, such as The Long Recall, have piqued your interest in this fascinating period, Dr. McClintock's book would be an excellent starting point.

The hanging nature of the piece suggests that Dr. McClintock will be contributing more articles on Seward's machinations to the Disunion series. If so, I look forward to them. For a prequel, I invite you to try my What the Hell Happened to William Seward?

About the illustration, entitled Letting the Cat Out of the Bag! (1860):

A figurative portrayal of the rift within the Republican party resulting from the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1860. Here New York senator and would-be nominee William H. Seward watches as the radical antislavery senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner releases a snarling cat, the "Spirit of Discord," from a "Republican Bag." The cat bolts toward New York "Tribune" editor Horace Greeley and Lincoln, who wields a rail in his defense. Greeley exclaims, "What are you doing Sumner! you'll spoil all! she aint to be let out until after Lincoln is elected,--" Lincoln, also alarmed, rejoins, "Oh Sumner! this is too bad!--I thought we had her safely bagged at Chicago [i.e., the Republican national convention at Chicago], now there will be the old scratch to pay, unless I can drive her back again with my rail!" Sumner replies, "It's no use talking Gentlemen, I was'nt mentioned at Chicago, and now I'm going to do something desperate, I can't afford to have my head broken and be kept corked up four years for nothing!" The mention of his broken head refers to the widely publicized 1856 beating inflicted on Sumner by South Carolina congressman Preston S. Brooks. (See "Arguments of the Chivalry," no. 1856-1.) Seward warns, "Gentlemen be cautious you don't know how to manage that animal as well as I did, and Im afraid that some of you will get "scratched." Henry J. Raymond, editor of the "New York Times," stands in background shouting, "Scat!--scat!--back with her, or our fat will all be in the fire."

"Whereas, I Love You"

2011-02-14T03:24:00.001-05:00

William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress includes a nice collection of quotes about John Caldwell Calhoun. The Harriet Martineau quote is well known - in fact I've cited it before - but the others may be less familiar:

Calhoun was a major figure not only in South Carolina but in national politics as well. The modern historian David Potter has called him "the most majestic champion of error since Milton's Satan." The English reformer Harriet Martineau, who became acquainted with him on her visit to the United States in 1835, wrote - a famous quotation - that Calhoun was "a cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and could be extinguished." James Henry Hammond, who hoped to be the Calhoun of his generation, said in Charleston on the occasion of Calhoun's death in 1850 that "Mr. Calhoun had no youth, to our knowledge. He sprang into the arena like Minerva from the head of Jove, fully grown and clothed in armor: a man every inch himself, and able to contend with any other man."

Hammond's eulogy, claiming almost every virtue for his subject, did twice concede that Calhoun had no wit or humor. The historian Merrill Peterson, writing in the late twentieth century, said of Calhoun: "Intensely serious and severe, he could never write a love poem, though he often tried, it was later said, because every line began with 'whereas.'"

Crazy Still

2011-02-13T20:44:00.001-05:00

Be my Valentine?

The Poughkeepsie Convention: Irrelevant But Important

2011-02-13T18:59:00.001-05:00

On balance, I think single-state secession is probably unconstitutional. And yet the thing continues to nag at me.

The Constitution nowhere says, in so many words, that once you're in, you're in forever. Yes, that conclusion can be teased from - implied from - various provisions. But, assuming the Constitution is forever, isn't that fact almost certainly the single most important reality of the document? Shouldn't readers and prospective voters have been placed on explicit notice, if that was the intent? It all feels a little, how should I put this, sleazy, sort of like the bait-and-switch tactics that might be employed by a used car salesman.

Likewise, you'd think that, if you were a delegate at one of the state ratification conventions in 1787-1788, the single most important question on your mind would be, Hey, is this thing forever? And if people understood that it was forever, don't you think that opponents, at least, would be shouting that fact from the rooftops? "Don't think that, if you ratify, you can ever get out! You and your children and your children's children will be bound unto the last generation!"

And yet the record is strangely silent. To the best of my knowledge, not a single Anti-Federalist intoned such warnings. And likewise, no Federalist, to the best of my knowledge, asserted that ratification was an unalterable act, with one exception, at the end of the New York Convention, after ten states had already ratified the Constitution - and when it was too late.

All of this leads me to infer that one of two conclusions must apply: either everyone understood that ratification was forever - it wasn't necessary for opponents to make the argument, everyone already knew it - or no one (or virtually no one, and virtually wasn't talking) did.

***

In one sense, the closing weeks of the convention called to decide whether New York would ratify the United States Constitution are irrelevant. On June 24 and July 2, 1788, news had arrived in Poughkeepsie, where the delegates were assembled, that New Hampshire and Virginia had ratified the document – the ninth and tenth states to do so.

Article VII provided that “[t]he Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.” By its terms, the document, and the new government it created, would go into effect whether New York ratified it or not.

At the same time, both opponents and proponents of the Constitution at the Convention recognized that New York's decision was fundamentally important. Both pros and antis recognized that New York, as an emerging commercial powerhouse occupying a crucial swath of land that divided the New England states from their more southerly brethren, potentially held the key to whether the new government would, as a practical matter, succeed. In the words of Yale Lawprof Akhil Amar,

Then, New Hampshire and Virginia voted their approval – enough to put the document in operation, but only among the states that ratified it. At this point, all eyes turned to Poughkeepsie, where New York's ratifying convention was being held and where the Constitution's anti-Federalist opponents initially held a commanding lead. Without the acquiescence of New York – with its critical harbors, rivers and landmass – could the Philadelphia blueprint really work as planned?

The closing weeks of the Poughkeepsie Convention – roughly July 14, 1788 through July 26, 1788, when the Constitution was approved by a razor-thin margin – are also inherently dramatic. The positions taken and arguments advanced shed light, I think, on what both advocates and opponents understood the nature of the proposed new government to be.

I have been over some of this ground before. But having now laid my hands on Volume XXIII of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, covering ratification by New York from July 14, 1788, I propose to take a new look at some of the key events in those closing weeks. In particular, I hope to examine what those events suggest about the most important constitutional issue of the nation's first seventy-five years: the propriety of single-state secession. In a nutshell, did the members of the Poughkeepsie Convention – and by implication the members of other conventions that had already approved the Constitution – understand that ratification was a permanent and un-recallable act (except, perhaps, through the amendment procedures of Article V)?

Learned commentators - including the aforesaid Prof. Amar - have argued that the debates in the Poughkeepsie Convention's closing days demonstrate that it was generally understood that the Constitution, once ratified, was (in the words of James Madison) "in toto and for ever." I, too, took this to be the case. But upon continued reflection I think the evidence is far more ambiguous. Indeed, I believe a powerful case can be made that, until the very end at least, no one - proponents or objectors - understood this to be so. And this suggests that those who had voted on the Constitution at earlier conventions - those of the ten states that had already ratified the document - didn't understand it either.

***

As of mid-July 1788, the pro and anti forces at the Poughkeepsie Convention were locked in a desperate struggle. The antis, headed by John Lansing and Melancton Smith, had arrived at the convention on June 17, 1788 with a large majority. The news from New Hampshire and Virginia had weakened their resolve somewhat, but they fought on and appeared to continue to hold the upper hand. On July 14, only the impassioned pleas of the leaders of the pro-Constitution forces, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton (“the american Cicero”, in the words of David S. Bogart, who witnessed Hamilton's performance that day), persuaded the convention, sitting in Committee of the Whole, to adjourn for the day before taking a key vote that Federalists knew would go against them.

The positions of the parties as of mid-July boiled down to whether ratification should be conditional or not. The antis no longer advocated outright rejection. Instead, they argued that the Constitution should be ratified, but only on condition that the document be amended in a number of respects. On July 11, and again on July 15, Melancton Smith had introduced the resolution that served as the focal point of the battle.

Smith's resolution was a complex and subtle piece of work, which I will examine in my next post on the subject.

"A significant portion of this nationalist movement may instead be the result of a biased amendment procedure"

2011-02-13T05:24:00.001-05:00

Lawprof and blogger Michael B. Rappaport has an interesting new article out: Reforming Article V: The Problems Created by the National Convention Amendment Method and How to Fix Them. Here's the abstract:

The amendment provisions of the United States Constitution have a serious defect. Although some commentators claim that the supermajority rules in these provisions are too strict, that is by no means clear. Rather, the clear defect in the amendment provisions is that the only effective way they provide of amending the Constitution requires Congress’s approval and therefore Congress enjoys a veto over all amendments. While the Constitution does formally allow the state legislatures to seek to amend the Constitution through a national convention, that amendment method is broken. Not only has the national convention method never been used to pass an amendment or even to call a convention, the state legislatures are unlikely to ever use this method, because of the state legislatures’ fear of a runaway convention that might seek to enact constitutional amendments that they strongly dislike.

This congressional veto over amendments has significant normative implications. It suggests that the Constitution cannot be amended in a way that will constrain congressional power. It also makes it unlikely that the Constitution can be amended to limit the federal government or to expand state authority, because Congress is unlikely to support these changes. While it has often been assumed that the increased nationalism of the Constitution and government over the course of American history reflects changes in technology and values, a significant portion of this nationalist movement may instead be the result of a biased amendment procedure.

In addition to exploring the normative implications of the broken amendment procedure, the article also proposes a new amendment method. Under this state drafting procedure, an amendment would be enacted when it was approved by two thirds of the state legislatures and was ratified by three quarters of the states through either state conventions or ballot measures. Finally, the article argues that this reform of the amendment procedure could actually be passed under the national convention method and proposes a strategy for enacting it.

Don't take my word for it. The article is Lawrence Solum's Download of the Week.

I was looking for an appropriate illustration and noticed that Wikipedia has this series of, I guess they're sort of flow charts, purporting to illustrate the various "plans" presented during the Philadelphia Convention. They look cool, although I don't have any idea what they mean. The one at the top illustrates the Virginia Plan.

"Mr. Wilberforce, make we free!"

2011-02-02T19:14:00.002-05:00

Back when I was in high school, I was a big fan of Matthew G. Lewis's 1796 Gothic novel The Monk:

"The Monk" is Matthew Gregory Lewis's 1796 novel which is the tale of a monk who is tempted by carnal desire and led down a ruinous path of ungodliness. Ambrosio, a pious, well-respected monk in Spain, is lustfully tempted by his pupil, Matilda, a woman who has disguised herself as a monk. Having satisfied himself with her, he is overcome with carnal desire for the innocent Antonia. With the help of Matilda, who is actually Satan in disguise, Ambrosio seduces Antonia, a seduction that would ultimately lead to his downfall. Recognized as one of the first novels of the gothic genre, "The Monk" is a classic tale of the tragic ruin that may befall one tempted by desire.

I was therefore surprised and delighted to see "Monk" Lewis turn up in 1816 Jamaica as a witness to the connection between abolitionist agitation and slave revolt in the Caribbean. The following is from Edward Bartlett Rugemer's The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War:

But the planters had a point [that abolitionist agitation was responsible for slave rebellions]. In 1816 the absentee planter and gothic novelist "Monk" Lewis traveled to Jamaica to visit the sugar plantation he had recently inherited. In the journal he kept during his travels, published in 1834, Lewis recorded the following song, which an overseer had found upon the mysterious "King of the Eboes," who was arrested for plotting a rebellion.

"Oh me good friend, Mr. Wilberforce, make we free!
God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye!
God Almighty make we free!
Buckra in this country no make we free!
What negro for to do? What negro for to do?
Take force with force! Take force with force!"

Oysters?

2011-02-02T17:38:00.000-05:00

Early on in Edward Bartlett Rugemer's very-good-so-far The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War I encountered the following startling item:

The sloop Mary Ann, for example, owned by the Browns of Providence, Rhode Island, sailed to Surinam in 1766 with a cargo that included tobacco, candles, staves, hoops, bricks, horses, pigs, onions, axes, empty hogsheads, barrels of pork and beef, ship bread, flour, butter, oars, tar, and oysters. Such a cargo would have taken months to assemble . . ..

Oysters? After a couple of weeks to a couple of months on the dock, then, say, a month at sea? I think I'll pass.

Lego Lincoln

2011-01-29T15:02:00.002-05:00

Knowing how many of you are huge fans of Abe, I wanted to alert you that you can now obtain your very own portrait of the Great Emancipator made from Lego, courtesy of artist Nathan Sawaya.

No word on when the Millard Fillmore edition will be available.

H/T Jonah Goldberg at The Corner and WebUrbanist.

Chief Justice Spencer Roane?

2011-01-29T07:58:00.001-05:00

As a fan of counterfactuals, I was intrigued when I saw a post at Concurring Opinions highlighting a "What If" constitutional law symposium scheduled to be held in the Spring.

Having reviewed the list of topics, however, I'm disappointed. I was really hoping for "What If Spencer Roane Had Become Chief Justice in 1801".

It's Icicle Season

2011-01-28T22:51:00.000-05:00

Stay warm.

Verse of the Day

2011-01-22T18:16:00.000-05:00

My daddy told me to marry

But not for love or riches

To marry a gal about six foot tall

So she can wear the britches

Fields Ward and the Grayson County Railsplitters, "Ain't That Trouble In Mind" (1929).

Salmon P. Chase, Nullifier

2011-01-17T13:45:00.002-05:00

In his fine Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial, Steven Lubet describes Salmon Portland Chase's brush with nullification.

On Monday September 13, 1858, slave catchers seized a runaway slave by the name of John Price near Oberlin, Ohio and conducted him to the nearby town of Wellington, whence they planned to take a train to Columbus. Unbeknownst to them, Oberlin opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 learned of the event and followed them. The slave catchers found themselves besieged in a Wellington hotel by a mixed-race crowd of 300 to 500 people demanding Price's release. In brief, members of the crowd stormed the hotel and transferred Price to a carriage. Price ultimately escaped to Canada.

On December 6, 1858, a federal grand jury in Cleveland indicted thirty-seven men for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Two of the defendants were tried and convicted in April and May 1859. A number of others were remanded to custody pending their trials.

In mid-May, however, the convicted defendants' attorneys filed a petition for habeas corpus with the Ohio Supreme Court, which scheduled argument for May 25, 1859.

Supporters of the defendants held a massive rally in Cleveland on May 24. By some estimates, as many as twelve thousand people attended. Although he had long been a leader in the anti-slavery movement, Governor Salmon P. Chase had not spoken out in connection with this or several previous incidents involving the Fugitive Slave Act and was not scheduled to attend. But perhaps because his earlier silences had been the subject of criticism he made an unexpected appearance.

Following other speakers who had vowed to resist the Fugitive Slave Act with force if necessary, Chase tried to walk a fine line between denouncing the law and advocating extra-legal measures. But in the end Chase "took a step toward the abyss":

If the process for the release of any prisoner should issue from Courts of the State [of Ohio], he was free to say that so long as Ohio was a Sovereign State, that process should be executed.

"'When the time came,' [Chase] said, 'and his duty was plain, he, as Governor of Ohio, would meet it as a man.'" In short, Chase had vowed to defy the federal government if necessary. "The Oberlin rescuers were still in jail and Governor Chase had all but promised to deploy the state militia on their behalf."

Luckily for Chase, the Ohio Supreme Court rescued him from his reckless commitment. By a 3 to 2 vote the Court denied the habeas petition. Although an abolitionist and a Republican, Chief Justice Joseph Rockwell Swan concluded that he was "bound by my official oath to sustain the supremacy of the constitution and the law:'THE PRISONER MUST BE REMANDED.'"