A File in the Online Version of the Kouroo Contexture (Approximately 1% Has Been
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THOREAU’S CLASSMATE JOSEPH GALES SEATON For whatever this is worth, it has been alleged that the parents of Joseph Gales Seaton (William Winston Seaton and Sarah Weston Gales Seaton of Washington DC, intimate friends of Daniel Webster) early on emancipated their black slaves of their own volition and assisted as many as desired in colonizing themselves in Africa, in effect freeing a greater number of black Americans “than all of the Abolitionists of the North had ever done up to the time of the Emancipation Proclamation of the President.” It would of course be fascinating, here, to be able to compare actual numbers of human beings — but this source has not provided us with that sort of detail. Exactly how many slaves did these slavemasters manumit and when? Exactly how many of their manumitted slaves chose to go to Liberia, and how did their trans-Atlantic fares get paid, and what sort of life did these unwanted Americans then encounter in Liberia? HDT WHAT? INDEX JOSEPH GALES SEATON JOSEPH GALES SEATON 1857 February 9, Monday: Territorial Governor John White Geary requested military protection against the Kansas Territory’s gunslinging assassins. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION Joseph Gales Seaton, one of Henry Thoreau’s classmates at Harvard College, died in his parents’ home in Washington DC after a lingering illness (we do not know what that illness was, but the presumption for this period would have been that it was consumption, the final stage of tuberculosis). By this point the Gosse family had moved permanently from London to St Marychurch, Devon (Philip Henry Gosse refused to use the “St” and even gave his address as Torquay so as not to have anything to do with the “so-called Church of England”). He soon became the pastor and overseer of the Plymouth Brethren there, at first meeting above a stable but shortly, under Gosse’s preaching and peacemaking, in finer quarters — which he perhaps himself financed. Treatment with ointments had done nothing to stop Emily Bowes Gosse’s breast cancer. On this day the suffering wife and mother breathed her last, entrusting her husband with their child Edmund Gosse’s salvation. In the months following Emily’s death, the grieving husband would struggle diligently with a manuscript that he obviously was considering to be a great intellectual breakthrough. Gosse considered that he alone was able neatly to resolve the seeming contradiction between the age of the earth as revealed in Holy Scripture and the age of the earth as discovered by such contemporary geologists as Charles Lyell. The argument derived from HDT WHAT? INDEX JOSEPH GALES SEATON JOSEPH GALES SEATON the inherent nature of any instantaneous creation ex nihilo. In any such instantaneous creation, there would of necessity be the relicts of a previous existence that had actually not transpired. If mature trees were created in an instant, for instance, rather than slowly growing from seeds into saplings and in the successive seasons into mature trees, then their trunks would contain instantaneously produced tree rings, one ring for each year — and these were year rings marking years which actually had never transpired. “Omphalos” being Greek for “navel,” and the navel being the scar left by the falling off of the umbilical cord, Gosse was arguing that the first man, Adam, and the first woman, Eve, had had no natural need for navels. They had not been born of a mother, but instead, had been created by God! Nevertheless Adam and Eve were complete human beings, and a navel is part of a complete human being, and therefore God must have brought them into existence complete with navels just as He must have created trees with growth rings marking seasons that had in fact never existed. HDT WHAT? INDEX JOSEPH GALES SEATON JOSEPH GALES SEATON Gosse pointed out that the fossil record we discover encased in the rocks –even such fossils as coprolites– might also seem to be evidence of years that had never actually existed. To create the rocks of this planet Earth, God must have created it with such fossils already in position within them. The theorist’s friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, would comment that he had read “no other book which so staggered and puzzled” him — but that he was simply not prepared for the conceit that God had “written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind.” God the Liar? –Give us a break, it is Satan rather than God who is the father of all lies! Journalists would snigger at the idea that God had hidden fossils in the rocks, and point out that He 1 must have been tempting geologists to infidelity. OMPHALOS: AN ATTEMPT TO UNTIE THE GEOLOGICAL KNOT would sell so poorly that its publisher would rebind it under the new title CREATION “in case the obscure one had had an effect on sales,” before in 1859 giving up and disposing of most of the edition by selling it to a dealer in waste paper. THE GEOLOGICAL KNOT [THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 9th] February 12, Thursday: Croquefer, ou Le dernier des Paladins, an operetta by Jacques Offenbach to words of Jaime and Tréfeu, was performed for the initial time, by the Bouffes-Parisiens of Paris. Louis Moreau Gottschalk arrived in Havana from New-York aboard the steamer Quaker City, for a concert tour of Cuba. On page 3 of the Fayetteville Semi-Weekly Observer of Fayetteville, North Carolina appeared the following entry: DIED, On Monday last, in Washington city, at the residence of his father, after a lingering illness, GALES SEATON, in the 40th year of his age, son of W.W. Seaton, Esq. Joseph Gales Seaton was the son of William Winston Seaton (1785-1866) and Sarah Weston Gales Seaton (1790-1863). Surviving siblings were Josephine Seaton, Julia Winston Seaton Munroe, and Malcolm Seaton. The body would be placed in Plot R57/169 of the Congressional Cemetery of the District of Columbia. He had been a classmate of Henry Thoreau in 1837 at Harvard University. Feb. 12. 7.30 AM. — The caterpillar, which I placed last night on the snow beneath the thermometer, is frozen stiff again, this time not being curled up, the temperature being - 6° now. Yet, being placed on the mantelpiece, it thaws and begins to crawl in five or ten minutes, before the rear half of its body is limber. Perhaps they were revived last week, when the thermometer stood at 52 and 53. To Worcester. I observe that the Nashua in Lancaster has already fallen about three feet, as appears by the ice on the trees, walls, banks, etc., though the main stream of the Concord has not begun to fall at all. (It is hardly fallen perceptibly when I return on the 14th. Am not sure it has.) The former is apparently mostly open, the latter all closed. When I skated on the l l th I saw several pretty large open spaces on the meadow, notwithstanding that the boys had begun to skate on the meadow the 10th and it had been steadily growing colder, and the ice was on the 11th 1. If I myself were to do any sniggering in regard to this controversy, I would not be sniggering at Gosse (for he was merely the messenger who came to us pointing out some factoids that should always have been just obvious). I would be sniggering at the unworldly ignorance of the folks who had originally ginned up this origins story, or perhaps sniggering at the unworldly ignorance of the folks who had come to parse this origins story as involving literally only seven days of earth time — the folks who had brought us into such an absurd flight of fancy as “instantaneous creation.” HDT WHAT? INDEX JOSEPH GALES SEATON JOSEPH GALES SEATON from two and a half to three inches thick generally. These open spaces were evidently owing to the strong wind of the night before, and which was then blowing, but I neglected to observe what peculiarity there was in the locality. Perhaps it was very shallow with an uneven bottom. HDT WHAT? INDEX JOSEPH GALES SEATON JOSEPH GALES SEATON 1864 Isaac Flagg graduated from Harvard College as poet of his class. He edited THE HELLENIC ORATIONS OF 2 DEMOSTHENES (Boston). Joseph Palmer’s NECROLOGY OF A LUMNI OF HARVARD COLLEGE, 1851-52 TO 1862-63 (Boston: J. Wilson and son, 1864, 544 pages): 1837. — MANLIUS STIMSON CLARK died in Boston, 28 April, 1854, aged 36. He was son of Rev. Pitt Clark, of Norton (H.C. 1790), where he was born 17 October, 1816; was a highly respected lawyer in Boston. 1837. — GALES SEATON died in Washington, D.C., 9 February, 1857, aged 39. He was son of William W. Seaton, and was born in Washington, 27 July, 1817. He passed through his preparatory studies for admission into Harvard College under the instruction of the faculty of Georgetown College. On graduating, he selected the law as his profession; and repaired to the University of Virginia, where he prosecuted his legal studies with assiduity and success. He was admitted to the bar, but was not long in discovering that he had given his nights and his days to the study of that, as a science, which his mental habitudes and literary tastes rendered distasteful as a pursuit; and, abandoning the profession of the law, he became the proprietor and editor of the Raleigh (N.C.) “Register,” in which station he continued several years. He afterwards went to Europe, where he resided some time.