ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1806

July 19, Saturday: Alexander Dallas Bache was born in , the son of the journalist , Jr. and Sophia Burrell Dallas (he was thus a great-grandson of ).

Josiah Gregg was born in Overton Country, Tennessee (when he was 6 his family would trek to Missouri; he would suffer all his life from TB).

IT WAS JUST A COUPLE OF BABIES. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE

1807

February 10, Tuesday: The US Congress authorized a survey of the nation’s coasts and harbors: “An Act to Provide for Surveying the Coasts of the United States.” READ THE FULL TEXT

Theodore Sedgwick Fay was born in New-York, a son of the attorney Joseph Dewey Fay (1779-1825). Like his father, who had studied law in the office of Alexander Hamilton, would study for the law, although he would never practice, going instead into the field of diplomacy.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3 day 10 of 2 M / Our friend Asa Russel of New Bedford called at the shop this afternoon, with whom I had much conversation on a subject which has deeply affected the minds of many & caused the Land to mourn for the wound which Zion has felt from the fall of a late dignified Servant Asa spoke feelingly on the subject & hoped it might be a warning to those who think they stand to take heed lest they fall. ——————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1825

Alexander Dallas Bache graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point. During the following year he would function there as an assistant professor.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE

1826

Lieutenant Alexander Dallas Bache of the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers would be engaged for a few years in the erection of coastal fortifications including in Newport, Rhode Island).

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1827

Lieutenant Alexander Dallas Bache of the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers was nominated for the position of Professor of and Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1828

Alexander Dallas Bache began to occupy the position of Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, long term.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE

1829

June 1, Monday: Alexander Dallas Bache resigned from the US Army.

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was riding his horse (horse name not of record) in a review with a huge wind-catching Grenadier hat on his head, when a sudden gust knocked our guy right off said mount.

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

Wow, talk about embarrassed! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

Alexander Dallas Bache would be in Europe for several years on behalf of the trustees of the College and Asylum for Orphans in Philadelphia, examining European systems of education and preparing a report and recommendations (this college and asylum for orphaned white boys would rename itself, in 1848, in recognition of the support of Stephen Girard, as ). The Girard College, when finished, will be a most splendid building. It is, however, as they have now planned it, incorrect, according to the rules of architecture, in the number of columns on the sides in proportion to those in front. This is a great pity; perhaps the plan will be re-considered, as there is plenty of time to correct it, as well as money to defray the extra expense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Alexander Dallas Bache would be serving for a period of years as the 1st president of Central High School of Philadelphia (one of the oldest public high schools in the US). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

Upon the death of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, Alexander Dallas Bache was made superintendent of the United States coast survey. Henry Thoreau would have on his shelves a collection of the annual reports of the United States Coast Survey under Bache. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey issued a SKETCHES volume in conjunction with its coast survey for this year. Henry Thoreau would have a copy of this volume in his personal library. (I am unable to offer any advice as to where such a publication might now be viewed, except that an obvious place to start would be http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/023.html.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

February 26, Saturday: In the midst of a storm of controversy, the Board of Overseers of the Corporation promoted George Phillips Bond to fill his father’s shoes as Director of the Harvard Observatory, and appointed him to

be the Phillips Professor of Astronomy. The nominee of the “Lazzaroni,” a pressure group in science which has been sarcastically referred to as “the sacred brotherhood,” had been not Bond but , the Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at Harvard College.1 THE SCIENCE OF 1859 ASTRONOMY

In the evening William John Broderip FRS was writing “On the Shark” for Fraser’s Magazine and broke off in the middle of a sentence.

1.The core group of the “Lazzaroni” consisted of Professors Louis Agassiz and Benjamin Peirce of Harvard, and Professor Benjamin Athorp Gould (1824-1896) of Dudley Observatory in Albany NY, plus Alexander Dallas Bache of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Washington DC. According to Edward Lurie, Agassiz’s biographer (LOUIS AGASSIZ. Chicago IL: U of Chicago P, 1960), what they were trying to do was “control the institutional forms of science in America.” The core agenda of this group was to set itself astride all channels of funding in such a manner as to take charge of what research was feasible and important and who could be relied upon to dependably perform this research. They were playing hardball: their machinations included spreading invidious and false whispers about the accuracy of the observations of the Bonds, wherever possible boycotting their membership in scientific bodies, wherever possible alleging the priority of the discoveries of others, and by the back door seizing control of government funding. For one instance, the cheap secret processes of the creation of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. The prime offense committed at the Harvard Observatory, which so enraged the “sacred brotherhood,” seem to have consisted in the fact that since these astronomers were working to all intents and purposes for free, by financing themselves out of the cash drawer of the timekeeper manufacturing firm of William Bond & Son in Boston, therefore, practically, they had unwittingly placed themselves outside the ordinary spheres of influence of these conspirators and were in a position to treat most of their machination with Christian condescension, as if they amounted to nothing more than “water off a duck’s back.” The machinations of this group had at one point come close to destroying the Dudley Observatory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

F.A.P. Barnard accepted an invitation from Alexander Dallas Bache to accompany a total eclipse expedition to Labrador. Upon his return, while in Newport, Rhode Island, he would find that he had been elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

Summer: The slaves of Washington DC were freed by Act of Congress (not by the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, which declared in its fine print that it had nothing whatever to do with them) with full “compensation” being awarded to their owners.2

When, during the Civil War, the federal government voted in this manner to purchase all the slaves of all the approximately 900 slavemasters residing in the nation’s capital, and issue emancipation papers to these former slaves — do you suppose that to have been merely benevolence mingled with fear? Or do you suppose that it was not only benevolence mingled with fear, but also pork-barrel politics as usual? Is there a remote possibility that such compensations issued during the Civil War to the slavemasters of the Washington DC area, “purchasing” from them their slaves and “manumitting” those slaves without following mandated procedures for providing such freed individuals with any mode of independent subsistence, amounted in actuality to some sort of payola scheme for the white federal executives and white federal legislators and white federal judiciary? It has occurred to me that such white officials of the federal government would have been among the primary beneficiaries of this government funding arrangement, and that among the beneficiaries, they were the ones who held all the political influence, influence over such decisionmaking. Is this thought, that payment represented a way for them to dip into the war-tax coffers and take themselves out a handful or two, a Vulgar Marxist thought? Or, was this money intended to neutralize these officials, to get them to stand aside while the martial law pronunciation known as the Emancipation Proclamation was later implemented? Do you suppose that these folks could have moved all their slaves from their homes in other states into the DC area, in order to dispose of them for compensation and thus ensure that they themselves would not be financially impacted 2. In “It’s a Family Affair” in Larry Hudson, ed., WORKING TOWARD FREEDOM (1994), Mary Beth Corrigan has pointed out that generally, when free black Americans in border states owned slaves, it was as a step toward freeing a relative of theirs. For instance, during the 1850s, approximately 10% of the slaves who had been freed by manumissions in deeds (by way of contrast with manumission in wills) had been freed by a member of their own family who had specifically purchased them in order to free them. Of approximately 900 former slavemasters who in 1862 petitioned the US Congress for compensation upon the manumission of their Washington DC slaves, about a dozen were free black Americans. All but one of these had merely “owned” members of their own families — for instance a man “owning” his wife or his children. Such cases may have been created by the fact that getting a certificate of manumission was expensive: the government was charging $50 for each such pieces of paper. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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by any later freedom scheme that might be imposed by the federal government?

President Lincoln attempted to make a covenant with God and asked for a sign. If God would allow him to win the battle at Antietam, he pledged, he would understand this to be an instruction to free the slaves of America.

When the news of the success of this battle arrived in Washington DC, the president initiated the process which would lead to the Emancipation Proclamation, a proclamation that all the slaves whom he lacked the power to free, became free, while all the slaves whom he possessed the power to free, remained slaves. (Isn’t that nice? He wasn’t just setting out to fool all the people all the time — as part of this he was going to play a sleight-of- hand trick on God! “Oh Jeez,” God is going to say, “I just didn’t notice that the Prez only freed the ones he couldn’t free! Hey, they got me again!”)

With black Americans being enlisted in the US Army, most black physicians who enlisted were assigned to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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work in hospitals in Washington DC. This included Dr. James McCune Smith of New-York.

F.A.P. Barnard went to Washington DC and was given direction of the map and chart department of the coast Survey under Alexander Dallas Bache. This included the preparation and publication of war maps. While thus engaged he would publish a “Letter to the President of the United States by a Refugee” in which he would denounce slavery, the “giant conspiracy” of southern leaders to leave the Union, and the northern Copperheads who favored the South. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE

1867

February 17, Sunday: Waldo Emerson was stranded in Port Byron for a few days due to a Mississippi flood.

Alexander Dallas Bache died at Newport, Rhode Island (he had for some period been incapacitated). His grave is in the in Washington DC, graced by a monument by .

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

Alexander Dallas Bache “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 17, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.