JAMES KENDALL HOSMER HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1635
In Concord, Samuel Swan rented the Wright Tavern to two bakers, Thomas Safford and Deacon Francis Jarvis.
According to the Deacon’s son Dr. Edward Jarvis’s TRADITIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1779-1878 (as edited by Sarah Chapin and published in 1993 by the U of Massachusetts P): In 1790 my father [Deacon Francis Jarvis] with Thomas Safford took the bake house which was in the building that was the Wright Tavern in the Revolutionary War, opposite the Middlesex House, adjoining the tavern. Soon Mr. Safford went to Lancaster, and my father carried on the business until 1824 and lived in the house until 1832. He then bought and removed to the farm, lately the property of Col. John Buttrick, and lived there until he died in 1840. The farm was occupied by my brother the late Capt. Francis Jarvis until his death in 1875. Since then it has been owned and occupied by his children, Joseph Derby and wife, and Cyrus H. Jarvis. From the early years of his residence in the town my father owned and cultivated lands sufficient for a small farm in the center of Concord until he went to the Buttrick farm. My mother was Millicent Hosmer, daughter of James H[osmer], granddaughter of Stephen and great-granddaughter of Stephen, who were the descendants of James [Hosmer], one of the first settlers in Concord in 1635. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1834
January 29, Wednesday: James Kendall Hosmer was born in Northfield, Massachusetts, a son of the Reverend George Washington Hosmer of Concord.
President Andrew Jackson instructed Secretary of War Lewis Cass to use troops to quell workers’ riots along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal — this would be the initial use of federal troops to quell labor conflicts.
The waters of the Thames River passing through London were so extraordinarily high that it was necessary to have watermen to convey Londoners from street to street.
Fellow student Augustus Goddard Peabody checked out for David Henry Thoreau, presumably from Harvard Library, GRECIAN ANTIQUITIES OR, AN ACCOUNT OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE OF THE GREEKS; RELATING HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER TO THEIR GOVERNMENT, LAWS, MAGISTRACY, JUDICIAL PROCEEDINGS, NAVAL AND MILITARY AFFAIRS, RELIGION, ORACLES, FESTIVALS, GAMES, EXERCISES, MARRIAGES, FUNERALS, DOMESTIC EMPLOYMENTS, ENTERTAINMENTS, FOOD, DRESS, MUSIC, PAINTING, PUBLIC BUILDINGS, HARBOURS, BATHS, &C. &C. CHIEFLY DESIGNED TO EXPLAIN WORDS IN THE GREEK CLASSICS, ACCORDING TO THE RITES AND CUſTOMS TO WHICH THEY REFER. TO WHICH IS ADDED, A CHRONOLOGY OF REMARKABLE EVENTS IN THE GRECIAN HISTORY, FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE KINGDOM OF ARGOS UNDER INACHUS, TO THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER. BY THE REV. THOMAS HARWOOD, LATE OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. (London: Printed for T. Cadell & W. Davies, in the Strand, 1801).
GRECIAN ANTIQUITIES
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 29 of 1 M / Moy [Monthly] Meeting held in Providence With the exception of a short testimny from H R - it was silent - both to me pretty good Meetings. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.
Rev. Prof. James K. Hosmer “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1841
February 9, Tuesday: Elizabeth Adelaide “Eliza” Cutter was born in Warren, Massachusetts (she would become the 1st wife of James Kendall Hosmer).
Clearly Henry Thoreau, in his reading of Ben Jonson, has gone through his “Cataline” and gotten into his “Epigrams”:
“Cato. Good Marcus Tullius (which is more than great), Thou hadst thy education with the gods.” JONSON. BEN JONSON’S CATALINE
Better be defamed than overpraised. Thou canst then justly praise thyself. What notoriety art thou that can be defamed? Who can be praised for what they are not deserve rather to be damned for what they are. It is hard to wear a dress that is too long and loose without stumbling.
“Whoe’er is raised, For wealth he has not, he is tax’d, not prais’d,” TO MY MUSE
says Jonson. If you mind the flatterer, you rob yourself and still cheat him. The fates never exaggerate; men pass for what they are. The state never fails to get a revenue out of you without a direct tax. Flattery would lay a direct tax. What I am praised for what I am not I put to the account of the gods. It needs a skillful eye to distinguish between their coin and my own. But however there can be no loss either way, for what meed I have earned is equally theirs. Let neither fame nor infamy hit you, but the one go as far beyond as the other falls behind. Let the one glance past you to the gods, and the other wallow where it was engendered. The home thrusts are at helmets upon blocks, and my worst foes but stab an armor through.
My life at this moment is like a summer morning when birds are singing. Yet that is false, for nature’s is an idle pleasure in comparison: my hour has a more solid serenity. I have been breaking silence these twenty three years and have hardly made a rent in it– Silence has no end, speech is but the beginning of it. My friend thinks I keep silence who am only choked with letting it out so fast. Does he forget that new mines of secresy are constantly opening in me?
If any scorn your love, let them see plainly that you serve not them but another. If these bars are up, go your way to other of God’s pastures, and browse there the while. When your host shuts his door on you he incloses you in the dwelling of nature. He thrusts you over the threshold of the world. My foes restore me to my friends.
I might say friendship had no ears as love has no eyes, for no word is evidence in its court. The least act fulfills more than all words profess. The most gracious speech is but partial kindness, but the least genuine deed takes the whole man. If we had waited till doomsday it could never have been uttered. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1851
Squire Samuel Hoar represented Harvard College before the Massachusetts Legislature, and was credited by President James Walker with having “saved it.”
When the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen resigned as professor of history at Harvard, Richard Hildreth applied for that post (his attacks on the “Cambridge party” probably had rendered this a hopeless pursuit; Harvard simply has never ever functioned, and presumably will never ever function, in any mode other than that of self-congratulation).
Late in this year, William Elliott’s son William Elliott, Jr. left Harvard.
James Kendall Hosmer matriculated at Harvard.
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
April 7, Monday: Jennie Persis Garland was born (she would become the 2d wife of James Kendall Hosmer).
Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “Read a part of [Arnold} Ruge’s volume “Die Academie” (1848) where the humanism of the neo-Hegelians in politics, religion, and literature is represented by correspondents or articles (Kuno Fischer, Kollach, etc). They recall the philosophist party of the last century, able to dissolve anything by reason and reasoning, but unable to construct anything; for construction rests upon feeling, instinct, and will. One finds them mistaking philosophic consciousness for realizing power, the redemption of the intelligence for the redemption of the heart, that is to say, the part for the whole. These papers make me understand the radical difference between morals and intellectualism. The writers of them wish to supplant religion by philosophy. Man is the principle of their religion, and intellect is the climax of man. Their religion, then, is the religion of intellect. There you have the two worlds: Christianity brings and preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, humanism by the emancipation of the mind. One attacks the heart, the other the brain. Both wish to enable man to reach his ideal. But the ideal differs, if not by its content, at least by the disposition of its content, by the predominance and sovereignty given to this for that inner power. For one, the mind is the organ of the soul; for the other, the soul is an inferior state of the mind; the one wishes to enlighten by making better, the other to make better by enlightening. It is the difference between Socrates and Jesus. The cardinal question is that of sin. The question of immanence or of dualism is secondary. The trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas, and spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish away, the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves? How can man be led to be truly man? Is the ultimate root of his being responsibility, yes or no? And is doing or knowing the right, acting or thinking, his ultimate end? If science does not produce love it is insufficient. Now all that science gives is the amor intellectualis of Spinoza, light without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissible and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all. Moral love places the center of the individual in the center of being. It has at least salvation in principle, the germ of eternal life. To love is virtually to know; to know is not virtually to love; there you have the relation of these two modes of man. The redemption wrought by science or by intellectual love is then inferior to the redemption wrought by will or by moral love. The first may free a man from himself, it may enfranchise him from egotism. The second drives the ego out of itself, makes it active and fruitful. The one is critical, purifying, negative; the other is vivifying, fertilizing, positive. Science, however spiritual and substantial it may be in itself, is still formal relatively to love. Moral force is then the vital point. And this force is only produced by moral force. Like alone acts upon like. Therefore do not amend by reasoning, but by example; approach feeling by feeling; do not hope to excite love except by love. Be what you wish others to become. Let yourself and not your words preach for HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER you. Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, can never replace religion; revolutionaries are not apostles, although the apostles may have been revolutionaries. To save from the outside to the inside — and by the outside I understand also the intelligence relatively to the will — is an error and danger. The negative part of the humanist’s work is good; it will strip Christianity of an outer shell, which has become superfluous; but Ruge and Feuerbach cannot save humanity. She must have her saints and her heroes to complete the work of her philosophers. Science is the power of man, and love his strength; man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart. Knowledge, love, power — there is the complete life.”
The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s first sermon as a Methodist circuit-rider.1 AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II
Herman Melville’s father-in-law Judge Lemuel Shaw refused to help save from slavery the teenage runaway Thomas Simms (Sims).
Soon Waldo Emerson sought consolation in his journal:
It is now as disgraceful to be a Bostonian as it was hitherto a credit.... I met an episcopal clergyman, & allusion being made to Mr Webster’s treachery, he replied “Why, do you know I think that the great action of his life?” I opened a paper today in which he pounds on the old strings in a letter to the Washington Birth Day feasters at N.Y. “Liberty! liberty!” Pho! Let Mr Webster for decency’s sake shut his lips once & forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.... What a moment was lost when Judge Lemuel Shaw declined to affirm the unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law!
RESISTING THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW A foot-note of the Report of the Senate of Massachusetts on the case would put the matter of responsibility most succinctly: It would have been impossible for the U.S. marshal thus successfully to have resisted the law of the State, without the assistance of the municipal authorities of Boston, and the countenance and support of a numerous, wealthy, and powerful body of citizens. It was in evidence that 1500 of the most wealthy and respectable citizens —merchants, bankers, and others— volunteered their services to aid the marshal on this occasion.... No watch was kept upon the doings of the marshal, and while the State officers slept, after the moon had gone down, in the darkest hour before daybreak, the accused was taken out
1. Conway’s journal for the critical years 1851, 1852, and 1853, never published, is now present on the internet in holograph image at http://deila.dickinson.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/ownwords&CISOPTR=23390 HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER of our jurisdiction by the armed police of the city of Boston.
Moloch in State Street, by John Greenleaf Whittier THE moon has set: while yet the dawn Breaks cold and gray, Between the midnight and the morn Bear off your prey! On, swift and still! the conscious street Is panged and stirred; Tread light! that fall of serried feet The dead have heard! The first drawn blood of Freedom’s veins Gushed where ye tread; Lo! through the dusk the martyr-stains Blush darkly red! Beneath the slowly waning stars And whitening day, What stern and awful presence bars That sacred way? What faces frown upon ye, dark With shame and pain? Come these from Plymouth’s Pilgrim bark? Is that young Vane? Who, dimly beckoning, speed ye on With mocking cheer? Lo! spectral Andros, Hutchinson, And Gage are here! For ready mart or favoring blast Through Moloch’s fire, Flesh of his flesh, unsparing, passed The Tyrian sire. Ye make that ancient sacrifice Of Man to Gain, Your traffic thrives, where freedom dies, Beneath the chain. Ye sow to-day; your harvest, scorn And hate, is near; How think ye freemen, mountain-born, The tale will hear? HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
Thank God! our mother State can yet Her fame retrieve; To you and to your children let The scandal cleave. Chain Hall and Pulpit, Court and Press, Make gods of gold; Let honor, truth, and manliness Like wares be sold. Your hoards are great, your walls are strong, But God is just; The gilded chambers built by wrong Invite the rust. What! know ye not the gains of Crime Are dust and dross; Its ventures on the waves of time Foredoomed to loss! And still the Pilgrim State remains What she hath been; Her inland hills, her seaward plains, Still nurture men! Nor wholly lost the fallen mart; Her olden blood Through many a free and generous heart Still pours its flood. That brave old blood, quick-flowing yet, Shall know no check, Till a free people’s foot is set On Slavery’s neck. Even now, the peal of bell and gun, And hills aflame, Tell of the first great triumph won In Freedom’s name. The long night dies: the welcome gray Of dawn we see; Speed up the heavens thy perfect day, God of the free!
Per the diary of Daniel Foster: April 7 Boston The courthouse is chained and every entrance is guarded by the police of this city. Courthouse is crowded today to see a new spectacle. A man is tried for claiming to be a man. God deliver us from this damning disgrace and overwhelm the oppressor and his counsel with confusion. It is now 12 o’clock and I am so excited by this affair that I cannot rest a moment.
circa April: When I read the account of the carrying back of the fugitive into slavery, which was read last sunday evening –and read also what was not read here that the man who made the prayer on the wharf was Daniel Foster of Concord I could not help feeling a slight degree of pride because of all the towns in the Commonwealth Concord was the only one distinctly named as being represented in that tea-party –and as she had a place in the first so would have a place in this the last & perhaps next most important chapter of the Hist of Mass. But my second feeling, –when I reflected how short a time that gentleman has resided in this town, – was one of doubt & shame –because the men of Concord in recent times have done nothing to entitle them to the honor of having their town named in such a connexion. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1855
James Kendall Hosmer graduated from Harvard College with the A.B. degree. He would venture on, to the study of theology.
A group of 150 Harvard alums who were capital fellas met at Boston’s Tremont House to establish the “Harvard Club” in order to celebrate themselves as capital fellas. To make of their new club a going concern they of course determined that they would establish the sort of membership committee which could exclude “bores,” and they proceeded to vote the sort of stiff membership fee which would be anticipated to discourage “country graduates.”2
2. They may or may not have meant Harvard alums such as Henry Thoreau, in the category “bores,” but the category “country graduates” was specifically aimed not only at those alums who had become impecunious rural parsons but also at alums such as he, living away from the centers of civilization and with no real situation or real prospect of preferment. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER The New-York Herald newspaper first referred to a menu item at the restaurant of Harvey D. Parker associated with the Parker House in beautiful downtown Boston, designated there as “Parker House Chocolate Cream Pie,” as “Boston Cream Pie.”3
This confection had been created by a French chef named Sanzian (his given name lost to history). At a time when one could hire a good Boston cook for $416 per year, M. Sanzian’s salary was $5,000.
A 16 inch by 13 inch map of Boston similar to that created by George W. Boynton was published in New-York by J.H. Colton. MAPS OF BOSTON
3. The Omni Parker House (current name of this establishment) now bakes about 25 of these layered yellow cakes with custard placed between the layers, covered with chocolate icing, per day. Although the Boston cream pie you now purchase in the supermarket runs to about 300 calories per slice, with about 10 grams of fat, the traditional heavyweight version produced there weighs in at up to 700 calories per slice, with up to 40 grams of fat — and even that would be a likely lightweight compared with what Chef Sanzian presumably had created for the hearty businessman’s downtown appetite as of this Year of our Lord 1855. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1859
George B. Emerson received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard College.
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
James Kendall Hosmer completed his Harvard studies in theology (he would in 1867 be granted the A.M. degree).
Petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania. This was, of course, a disaster for New Bedford, Massachusetts, and for oil magnates there such as Emerson’s in-law the whaleship owner Friend James Arnold. Petroleum would soon replace whale oil as the primary lighting fuel, setting in motion the irreversible decline of the whaling industry, there and elsewhere. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
“The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner — an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth.” — Philip Hoare, THE WHALE: IN SEARCH OF THE GIANTS OF THE SEA (NY: HarperCollins, March 2010) MOBY-DICK, THE OIL SPILL HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1860
James Kendall Hosmer became a pastor at the 1st Church, a Unitarian congregation of Deerfield, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1862
August 14, Thursday: James Kendall Hosmer enlisted for 9 months service as a private in the 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia), that was being mustered at Greenfield as Massachusetts’s response to President Lincoln’s declaration of a nationwide draft of 300,000 new soldiers (this had assigned a quota to Massachusetts to somehow come up with a total of 19,090 men). He would soon be made a corporal of Company D.
Of the total of 955 men who were mustered into that regiment of volunteers, 7 would be killed in action, 91 would die of wounds or disease (those included James Kendall Hosmer’s brother Edward Jarvis Hosmer), 3 would desert, and 17 would be discharged for disability.
The 33d Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment marched out of Camp Edwin M. Stanton in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, numbering 1,200 men. By boat and rail it would proceed to Washington DC. DANIEL FOSTER US CIVIL WAR
November 19, Wednesday: The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) was ordered from Massachusetts to New York, from whence they would be sent to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER December: When his brother Edward Jarvis Hosmer fell ill in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Corporal James Kendall Hosmer volunteered to tend him. Chaplain John Farwell Moors would observe that “J.K. is the manliest man there is in the regiment. He bears this trial nobly, says he should rather Ed had fallen in battle, but, seeing the lack of nurses, he shall volunteer for that service. He has nursed Ed very tenderly and skilfully.” US CIVIL WAR
When Robert Brownell became able to hobble about, he was medically discharged with a diagnosis of vulnus selopeticum. Despite the lasting effects of his wound he would find work in New-York as a carpenter, millwright, agent, and building custodian. On one occasion the word “segar” appears after his name, perhaps indicating that he was rolling cigars or selling tobacco or something like that. Kady Southwell Brownell was a custodian at the Morris-Jumel Mansion that had been General Washington’s New-York headquarters during the American Revolution, on a salary of $35 a month from the Park Service.
Then, Robert and Kady would reside in Rhode Island for a time, and then they would relocate to Bridgeport, Connecticut. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1863
January 24, Saturday: At the age of 61, Brigham Young fell in love and “got married with” Amelia Folsom, age 24.
Edward Jarvis Hosmer died at the age of 19 of illness in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A bronze marker would be created bearing the inscription “A soldier of the Union and of liberty, He gave his life to his country, at Baton Rouge, La. Jan 24, 1863 aged 19” in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery of Concord, Massachusetts. US CIVIL WAR
March: The Stevenson family of Edinburgh, on their 5-month tour of Europe with Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson and his nanny, passed from Montone in the south of France toward Genoa. They would proceed southward to Naples, then head north via Rome, Florence, and Venice to Innsbruck.
The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) was attached to the 2d Brigade, 4th Division, 19th Army Corps, Department of the Gulf. US CIVIL WAR
Dr. Martin Robison Delany’s son Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany and Frederick Douglass’s sons Lewis Henry Douglass, age 22, and Charles Remond Douglass, age 19, enlisted in the newly forming 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment.4
The 1st Conscription Act: Because of recruiting difficulties, an act was necessary in the North making all white men between the ages of 20 and 45 liable to be called for military service. Service could be avoided only by paying a fee or finding a substitute or persuading the recruiters that actually you were a colored man. The act was seen as unfair to the working-class whites, and as a result there would be Irish rioting in New- York. White Americans are white Americans wherever they are: similar conscription act in the South would provoke similar resentments.
4.The older son would become a sergeant major for the Union during the war but later, as a civilian, would be first refused admission to a printers’ union — and then he would be blacklisted because he was not a union man. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER April 14, Tuesday: William Bullock of Pittsburgh received a patent for a continuous roll printing press.
Horace Waters put out a hymnbook THE GOLDEN HARP containing 10 new songs by Stephen Collins Foster.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s wife Varina Davis returned to Richmond, Virginia.
The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) took part in the battle of Irish Bend / Nerson’s Woods / Franklin. US CIVIL WAR
April 17, Friday: The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) took part in the fighting at Bayou Vermillion. US CIVIL WAR
May 22, Friday: Publication of Louisa May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” in Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s Commonwealth (this would be completed in the issue of June 26th).5
Failure of the 2d Federal assault on Vicksburg, Mississippi. The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) engaged in the siege of Port Hudson.
The US Department of War created a Bureau of Colored Troops which authorized an infantry regiment composed of enlisted men of color commanded by white officers. US CIVIL WAR
June 20, Saturday-21, Sunday: There was fighting at LaFourche Crossing. US CIVIL WAR
The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) took part in the battle of Jackson Cross Roads.
5. In the same year this material would be put out as HOSPITAL SKETCHES, by the James Redpath publishing firm at 221 Washington Street in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER July: Waldo Emerson decided that war was one of his Good-Things-Leading-To-Human-Elevation:
I shall always respect War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the Vistas it opens of ... reconstructing and uplifting Society.
The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) was detached to return north because their 9 months of enlisted service was going to expire on August 14th.
The central building that had been created for the new University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee –the institute for Episcopal students– was destroyed by Federal troops.
US CIVIL WAR Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr. entered the corps of surgeons of volunteers and was placed in charge, successively, of the university hospital in New Orleans, and of the marine hospital in Mobile. (Hopefully, he would not murder any of the soldiers there in the course of medical experiments.)
When he would learn that his son Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany had been among the survivors of the frontal assault of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers upon Fort Wagner, Dr. Martin Robison Delany HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER would commit himself wholeheartedly to the cause of the war against the Southern states.
Frederick Douglass was assured personally by Secretary of War Stanton in Washington DC that in exchange for recruiting black Southerners as Union soldiers he would be receiving an officer’s commission. (—Q: Would Stanton keep his promise? —A: Stanton would be a white man.)
NO!
US CIVIL WAR
John Andrew, a Massachusetts lawyer and politician, offered the following words of encouragement to Robert HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER Gould Shaw, the white leader of the black recruits:
I know not, Mr. Commander, where in all human history to any given thousand men in arms there has been committed a work at once so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory, as the work committed to you.
Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM
The Tappanite-related American Peace Society itself acquiesced in the war. In doing so, it indulged in the sophistry of considering the war not to be a war in the usual international sense, but merely the attempt of a government to punish its own subjects for breaking the law. Indirectly the peace society ... supported the federal conscription law as necessary without indicating concern to secure exemption for conscientious objectors.... Among the Concord transcendentalists, Thoreau, who had once advocated going to prison to shame the state into giving up both war and slavery, in a sharp reversal now believed that suffering in this war was regenerating the nation. Similarly, the once anti-institutional, individualistic Waldo Emerson now argued that government must have dictatorial powers during wartime and that participation in war taught self-reliance — surely not the same kind of nonconformist self-reliance that he had once valued. To the disillusionment of Moncure Daniel Conway, one of Emerson’s individualistic, antiwar, antislavery disciples, Emerson even accepted an appointment as an official visitor at West Point.
Pencil sketch of Fort Ridgely in the summer of 1863 after the race war
August 14, Friday: The 52d Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry (Militia) “mustered out,” which is to say, was disbanded having completed its 9 months of committed service. Corporal James Kendall Hosmer would soon get married with Elizabeth Adelaide “Eliza” Cutter. US CIVIL WAR
October 15, Thursday: The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank for a 2d time in Charleston Harbor, this time drowning the inventor along with a 7-man crew. US CIVIL WAR
Recently discharged Union corporal James Kendall Hosmer got married with Elizabeth Adelaide “Eliza” Cutter of Deerfield, Massachusetts (she would bear him 4 children, Edward Stebbins Hosmer in 1866, Elliot Norton Hosmer in 1868 or 1869, Ernest Cutter Homer in 1870, and Josephine Hosmer in 1874) HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1864
When Confederate troops looted a store in Sandy Spring, Maryland; a posse of locals including local Friends set out in pursuit, engaged them near Rockville in a skirmish known as the Battle of Ricketts Run, killed their leader, and recovered the purloined goods. US CIVIL WAR THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
James Kendall Hosmer’s THE COLOR-GUARD; BEING A CORPORAL’S NOTES OF MILITARY SERVICE IN THE NINETEENTH ARMY CORPS (Boston, Walker, Wise, and Company; 245, Washington Street). Reading this, it is hard to imagine it as the product of a mere 9-month enlistment.
The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s article for The Atlantic Monthly “Benjamin Banneker, the Negro Astronomer” was republished as a pamphlet in England.6
In about this timeframe, the Reverend was also having published as a pamphlet in England another of his efforts, under the title “The Spiritual Serfdom of the Laity.”7
In about this timeframe the Reverend reminisced: It is quite different from any I have ever seen. So beautiful and cheerful was this Quaker neighborhood, with its bright homes, and fields filled with happy laborers, the only happy negroes I have anywhere known,8 that I always experienced an exhilaration in riding there, and have often gone several miles out of my way to go through it to my appointments. I could tell the very line on the ground where the ordinary Maryland ended and the Quaker region began. I found on further acquaintance that I was in a place where mental culture was general, where there was a good circulating library and excellent schools, and the interior life of Sandy Spring more attractive even than the exterior.9
6. Moncure Daniel Conway. BENJAMIN BANNEKER. THE NEGRO ASTRONOMER. Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly, by M.D. Conway. Pamphlet. London: Printed and Published for the Ladies London Emancipation Society by Emily Faithfull, Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty, Victoria Press. 1864. READ THE FULL TEXT
7. Moncure Daniel Conway. THE SPIRITUAL SERFDOM OF THE LAITY. BY M.D. CONWAY. Pamphlet. Published by Thomas Scott, Ramsgate. READ THE FULL TEXT
8. Josiah Henson would write about his experience with slavery in a memoir alleging that his life story had been a basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN in 1852, as the alleged inspiration for the character “Uncle Tom.” A slave cabin in which Henson is believed to have spent time still stands at the end of a driveway off Old Georgetown Road. 9. The Reverend Conway corresponded for decades with an elder of the Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting there, Friend William Henry Farquhar. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
In this crucial election held in the midst of war, the coining of the new term “miscegenation” (a combination of 2 Latin terms, miscere for mixing and genus for race) as the term of choice for the fertile fusion and merging of the human races, to replace or supplement the older term “amalgamation” which ambiguously also indicated the restoration of the federal union, became a central focus, largely as the result of a anonymous 72-page Fake News pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro perpetrated by the anti-abolitionists David G. Croley and George Wakeman in New-York City. The hoax was that while said pamphlet pretended to be an argument in favor of race mixture as our salvation, actually it was being offered in argument by a couple of white journalistic gents who were supposing race mixture to be the very worst thing which might ever happen to us as a nation:10 The Anthropological Society was incensed by an anonymous pamphlet published in London and New York in that year, entitled MISCEGENATION: THE THEORY OF THE BLENDING OF THE RACES APPLIED TO THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN AND NEGRO. It was with this book that the word “miscegenation” was first introduced, and the impact of this book can be measured from the fact that it caught on immediately. The authors began with a short definition of the term, as well as a cluster of other mostly nonce-words: miscegen, miscegenate, miscegenetic, melaleukation, melaleukon, melaleuketic (the last three terms, from the Greek melas (black) and leukos (white) leading to a further term melamigleukation, “the union of the races.” The strategy involved the production of a new word that would have the more specific meaning of actual racial mixture than the customary term “amalgamation,” which doubled as the term for the restoration of the Union. MISCEGENATION consisted of an audacious, cheeky attack on the thesis of the pro-slavery anthropologists Morton, Nott and Gliddon that claimed inevitable decline to be the effect of the mixing of the races. The authors invoke instead another common argument, to be cited by Darwin in THE DESCENT OF MAN, that a cross with “civilized races” makes “an aboriginal race” more fertile. In MISCEGENATION, the authors advance the proposition that miscegenation, far from producing degeneration as Gobineau and his American sympathizers had claimed, would have altogether beneficial effects, in this case by arresting the people of the United States from their alleged current decline, and increasing their fertility and vigour so as to form them into a new super- race: Whatever of power and vitality there is in the American race is derived, not from its Anglo-Saxon progenitors, but from all the different nationalities which go to make up this people. All that is needed to make it the finest race on earth is to engraft upon our stock the negro element which Providence has placed by our side on this continent.... We must become a yellow-skinned, black- haired people –in fine we must become Miscegens– if we would attain the fullest results of civilization (MISCEGENATION, pages 18, 28). Well, isn’t that something, as provocations go! And yet these anonymous New-York anti-abolitionist agents provocateur newsies weren’t far off their mark, for in fact there were persons in that period in whom such provocative thoughts would resonate. One person in whom they had encouraged provocative thoughts was the Reverend Conway, who would argue that “the mixture of the blacks and whites is good.” Well, that might be correct, but in that era it was definitely the wrong opinion to have if one desired to be of influence in that society. The Reverend would argue “I believe that such a combination would evolve a more complete character than the unmitigated Anglo-Saxon.” He would argue that rather than attempting to rear a new nationality, here 10. Young, Robert J.C. COLONIAL DESIRE: HYBRIDITY IN THEORY, CULTURE AND RACE. London: Routledge, 1995 (page 144). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER in America, “we have to rear a new race.”11 He would argue that “it is well to remember that Miscegenation is already the irreversible fact of Southern Society in every thing but the recognition of it,” that “the mixture of blood has been very extensive,” that “These Southerners have proved that the repulsion of the alliance of the two bloods extends only to so much of it as the parson and magistrate have anything to do with.” –But in the making of such impolitic arguments, in that period, he would be merely disenfranchising himself and his followers precisely as these anonymous New-York anti-abolitionist agents provocateur newsies desired that such persons disenfranchise themselves!
For the science of the day would not support this:
[see descriptive quotation]
11. By the sheerest coincidence the Reverend Conway had a relative down in Virginia who was doing precisely that. During the 1840s his uncle George Washington Conway had fallen in love with a neighbor’s slave, of mixed race, and gotten her pregnant. Then he had done the decent thing. Marry her? –No, that decent thing was quite impossible in Virginia, so he had done the next best, he had purchased her. They had simply matched the external pretense, the pretense of the law, that she was enslaved, with an internal pretense, the pretense of the heart, that she was enwifed. He had become de facto her loving husband. We don’t know much about this couple, for such people quickly became invisible in the Old South, but we do know that in 1852 they had been living on a small farm in the woods with an elderly black woman, and with their two mixed-race children. (Legally, the black woman, the mulatto woman, and the two mulatto children were all the slaves of G.W. Conway — but the only way we can distinguish this George Washington Conway in the records from which he is almost totally absent, as a white man, is that in these records, such as in the two censuses which were taken during his lifetime, he is listed under his full name within a context in which everyone around him has only a given name. Moncure would comment that “Even my father declares that he is the best-hearted of the family.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
The way in which [Robert Dale] Owen dwells on the physical details of the diseases of the Canadian refugees [in his 1864 treatise THE WRONG OF SLAVERY, THE RIGHT OF EMANCIPATION, AND THE FUTURE OF THE AFRICAN RACE IN THE UNITED STATES] is symptomatic of the phobia and fascination that the idea of miscegenation summons forth in the white imagination. As we have seen, 19th-Century scientists seemed particularly prone to such hostile obsessions and ambivalent fantasies. Take, for example, the reaction of the Swiss-American ethnologist, Louis Agassiz, Professor of Zoology at Harvard and contributor to TYPES OF MANKIND, when invited to comment to the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission on the prospect for emancipated slaves in the United States, with particular reference to the question of whether they would amalgamate with the whites, and whether the mulattos would be prolific in reproducing themselves or die out as Nott had claimed. Agassiz’s own theory of the geographical distribution of the races led him to argue that blacks and whites would segregate naturally, with the white going North and the Blacks south. The mulattos, weak and infertile, he claimed, would die out. Rehearsing the argument of Nott, Agassiz similarly finds himself not entirely convinced by his own scientific racial theory. He cannot bear from dwelling on the overriding nightmare of the possibility of amalgamation: The production of halfbreeds is as much a sin against purity of character.... Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings, I hold it to be a perversion of every natural sentiment.... No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of a higher civilization and a purer morality. ...Disgust always bears the imprint of desire: Agassiz goes on to suggest that the effect of such philandering with mixed-race servants is that the white Southern male increasingly acquires a taste for pure black women: “This blunts his better instincts in that direction and leads him gradually to seek more spicy partners, as I have heard the full blacks called by fast young men.” At this point Agassiz articulates the unspeakable, and opens up the basis of the necessity for why so much racial theory is based on the insistence on inalienable separation: not only the fear, and delicious fantasy, that the white woman really wants to proclaim “I love the black man,” but an avowal of the sexual desire of white men for black women. Once again, as in Gobineau, we find and ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racialism: a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion ... an ambivalence nicely illustrated in Agassiz’s [and Mrs. Louis Agassiz’s] own A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL [London: Trübner, 1868], where [Professor] Agassiz’s revulsion against “half-breed” mixed-race populations –“a mongrel crowd as repulsive as the mongrel dogs”– is matched by his wife’s fascination for the “fine-looking athletic negroes” from West Africa whom, she writes, she never tires of watching in the street and the market. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER As part of the propaganda that our civil war was not just a bloody mess but a noble cause –that it had moral purpose, that the North was standing on moral high ground– a number of photographs began to circulate, the intent of which was to demonstrate to all and sundry that slavery wasn’t merely something that happened only to Americans who were noticeably “of color,” but was something that might happen even to me and mine or even to you and yours:
(There’s no reason, of course, to suspect that this photograph has been in any way faked. There were in fact light-mulatto slaves in the American South, just as there were free light mulattoes in the American North, who looked just about as white as white gets — but who were still in the South being treated as “just another slave,” and were still in the North being treated as “just another nigger.” If, for instance, you ever get a chance to look at photographs of the “black” students being educated by Prudence Crandall in Connecticut –remember the fuss and feathers as local citizens threw rocks through the windows of her school and attempted to set it on HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER fire?– you will be hard put to make out that these young ladies were not perfectly white.) Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM
Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York HERALD made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others.… While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Parker Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned-abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as … freedom … be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long-time abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster –the speak- inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood-splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. … What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill.
FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1865
After the Civil War, Charles Wesley Slack would become an advocate of the radical Republican plan for Reconstruction.
Uriah Phillips Levy had in his will attempted to transform Monticello into a federal agricultural school for orphans of Navy warrant officers. The property had, however, been sold off by the Confederacy. With the defeat of the Confederacy, therefore, the property would be restored to the surviving members of the Levy family.
James Kendall Hosmer’s novel THE THINKING BAYONET. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1866
The Reverend George Washington Hosmer left his position as the minister of the Unitarian Church of Buffalo, New York to become President of Antioch College. He would be the 1st president of the college’s Unitarian period.
His son the Reverend James Kendall Hosmer was made a professor there. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1867
The Reverend Professor James Kendall Hosmer belatedly received the A.M. degree in theology from Harvard University.
Léopold Trouvelot, a Massachusetts researcher associated with Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard, was experimenting with various silk-producing moths including the “European” gypsy moth Porthetrea dispar or Lymantria dispar.12 The investigator reported that he had put five acres of woodland in Medford, Massachusetts within an 8-foot fence, and covered this area over with nets adequate to keep out all birds in order to experiment with these silk-producing moths.13 He was intending to breed a disease-resistant silkworm (and do good and do well). He would accidentally release a very small number of European gypsy moths into the vacant lot next door, which is to say, into the ecosystem. Oops.14
TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr. began to serve as an instructor in zoology and physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An avid collector, he would venture on collection expeditions to Brazil, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Iceland (he does not seem to have brought back with him anything quite as devastating as the gypsy moth). He would contribute over 1,000 articles, mostly on zoological and medical subjects, to APPLETON’S AMERICAN CYCLOPÆDIA. THE SCIENCE OF 1867
12. “Dispar” referred to the fact that the males and females are of different colors. 13. This risk was entirely unnecessary as it was run due to the fact that at that time the “European” gypsy moth (which actually had originated in Japan) was incorrectly being classified by entomologists and taxonomists as in the same genus with the silkworm Bombyx mori. No, it was all a stupid Harvard mistake, folks, and we’re sure embarrassed about that. 14. We may well note that there is no monument in Medford, Massachusetts to mark the “Forefathers Tree” in which the progenitors of the gypsy moths of America “stepped ashore” in 1867 or 1868 in this New World. Is this or is this not discrimination between one kind of intrusive, highly honored, and another kind, decidedly unwanted? –And why do we continue so gratuitously to insult Gypsies, after we have learned that it is so very wrong to insult Jews? HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1872
The Reverend George Washington Hosmer resigned as President of Antioch College. He would return to the ministry.
His son, Professor James Kendall Hosmer, likewise moved on, becoming the chair of English and German Literature at the University of Missouri. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1874
German Mennonites settling in Marion County brought Turkey hard red winter wheat to Kansas.
The United States Military Prison was established by Act of Congress at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Military prisoners would be used for the bulk of the construction, which would begin in 1875 and be completed in 1921. The facility would eventually be able to extend hospitality to up to 1,500 persons at a time.
By this point 22-year-old gunslinger from Texas John Wesley Hardin had 20 notches on his pistol handle, without much if any legal complication. However, this year he got a little cocky and killed a sheriff, Charles Webb.
Professor James Kendall Hosmer was elected to be a chair professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1877
Elizabeth Adelaide “Eliza” Cutter Hosmer, wife of the Reverend James Kendall Hosmer, died. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Missouri. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1878
November 27, Wednesday: The Reverend James Kendall Hosmer remarried, with Jenny Persis Garland (she would bear him 3 additional children, Ruth Hosmer in 1879, Herbert Garland Hosmer in 1881, and Meliscent Hosmer in 1884). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1879
James Kendall Hosmer’s A SHORT HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE (St. Louis). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1880
During this year James Kendall Hosmer made a few drawings of Thoreau’s monument at Walden Pond and of Walden Pond, that are stored in the Albert Edgar Lownes collection on Henry David Thoreau at the Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript collection (Box 4, Folder 7).
Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s JOUR À JOUR, POÉSIES INTIMES. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER Edwin Morton had his picture taken: HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1885
James Kendall Hosmer’s LIFE OF SAMUEL ADAMS (Boston: the “American Statesmen” series). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1886
James Kendall Hosmer’s STORY OF THE JEWS (New York: the “Story of the Nations” series). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1888
James Kendall Hosmer’s THE LIFE OF YOUNG SIR HENRY VANE, GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY AND LEADER OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT (Boston, New York: Harper).
YOUNG SIR HENRY VANE HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1890
James Kendall Hosmer’s A SHORT HISTORY OF ANGLO-SAXON FREEDOM. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1892
Professor James Kendall Hosmer was made Director of the Minneapolis Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1894
James Kendall Hosmer’s HOW THANKFUL WAS BEWITCHED (Putnam). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1897
Professor James Kendall Hosmer received the LL.D. degree in Literature from Washington University (Missouri). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1901
James Kendall Hosmer’s A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1902
James Kendall Hosmer’s A SHORT HISTORY OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE. During this year and the following one Hosmer would serve as President of the American Library Association, and be elected as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1907
The Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s THE TRAITOR. Racial conflict is an epic struggle with the future of civilization at stake. Maybe we can’t have human slavery anymore but American blacks cannot be allowed to be politically equal with American whites as that would lead to social equality, and social equality would lead to miscegenation, and miscegenation would lead to the destruction of the family, and the destruction of the family would lead to the destruction of civilized society. Everything we admire and respect would fall like a row of damn dominoes, you fools, yada yada yada. US CIVIL WAR
James Kendall Hosmer’s OUTCOME OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1863-1865 (New York, Harper).
Pages 73-74 of Volume I of Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer’s JAY COOKE: FINANCIER OF THE CIVIL WAR (New York: Burt Franklin) reported that according to Cooke, Francis J. Grund had in 1850 participated in insider trading in the debt certificates of Texas, and profited enormously: [Francis J.] Grund purchased, through [Clark’s banking house], large amounts of the various kinds of Texas debt certificates and bonds and many of the government officials of the time did likewise ... Some of this debt, owing to the peculiar conditions of issue, was paid in full; other portions were scaled down and a correct knowledge of what all this legislation was to be was always in the possession of Mr. Grund, and he and his friends availed themselves of it in making their investments. This arrangement failed at the first session and the bonds and scrip declined in value very rapidly; but at the next session of Congress the bill was passed and large sums were realized by those who were directly and indirectly interested in obtaining the legislation for final settlement. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1912
October 4, Friday: Max Reger’s Konzert im alten Stil op.123 was performed for the initial time, in Frankfurt-am-Main.
The US Marines fought at Coyotepe, Nicaragua.
James Kendall Hosmer, LLD’s THE LAST LEAF: OBSERVATIONS, DURING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS, OF MEN AND EVENTS IN AMERICA AND EUROPE, a book of reminiscences (NY and London: The Knickerbocker Press, G.P. Putnam’s Sons): Thoreau in those days was known in the town as an irregular, eccentric spirit, rather hopeless for any practical purpose. He could make a good lead-pencil but having mastered the art he dropped it, preferring to lead a vagabond life, loitering on the river and in the woods, rather to the disquietude of the community, though he had a comfortable home cared for by his good mother and sister. He housed himself in a wigwam at Walden Pond and was suspected of having started from the brands of his camp a forest fire which had spread far. This strange man, rumour said, had written a book no copy of which had ever been sold. It described a week on the Concord and Merrimac [sic] rivers. The edition fell dead from the press, and all the books, one thousand or more, he had collected in his mother’s house, a queer library of these unsold books which he used to exhibit to visitors laughing grimly over his unfortunate venture in the field of letters. My aunt sent me one day to carry a message to Mrs. Thoreau and my rap on her door was answered by no other man than this odd son who, on the threshold received my message. He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with far- away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps. Thinking of the forest fire I fancied he smelled of smoke and peered curiously up the staircase behind him hoping I might get a glimpse of that queer library all of one book duplicated one thousand times.
Hosmer, who had been born in Northfield, Massachusetts in 1834, was a son of the Unitarian Reverend George Washington Hosmer. We can gather from the above that at some point during his childhood, before he attended Harvard and became a minister, he had at least briefly visited Concord, boarding with relatives there. We can HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER also gather from the above that Henry Thoreau happened to be at home when he rapped upon the door of the Thoreau boardinghouse, that the author was casually dressed, and that he had gray eyes (for more information than that we should probably turn to other more informed sources). Having abandoned the ministry and spent some time in Germany during the 2d Reich (~1873), Hosmer had in 1890 and subsequently put out A SHORT HISTORY OF ANGLO-SAXON FREEDOM: THE POLITY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING RACE, OUTLINED IN ITS INCEPTION, DEVELOPMENT, DIFFUSION, AND PRESENT CONDITION, a racist nativist treatise according to which Anglo-Saxons originating in the lower north German plains are the only ones who can lay claims to decency and civilization. Not until we Anglo-Saxons control the world, dominating the Celtic Irish and the French Canadians and, shudder, all those colored people, can there arise a realm of eternal peace. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER (Well, but you probably suppose me to be exaggerating — to verify that hypothesis, click the link.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1913
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN MIND AND AMERICAN IDEALISM. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
James Kendall Hosmer’s THE APPEAL TO ARMS, 1861-1863 (New York, Harper).
H.G. Wells’s LITTLE WARS was the initial book to describe hobby war gaming done with miniatures. In such war games, Wells noticed, firearms tended to dominate the battlefield and tended to induce the players to focus on eliminating their opponent’s forces. To curtail these tendencies and render the gaming more sophisticated, Wells developed new rulebooks. Meanwhile, he was scribbling away at THE WORLD SET FREE, a novel in which he described aerial bombs made from isotopes of uranium (in 1934 a German-language translation of Wells’s THE WORLD SET FREE would induce Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to patent the idea of nuclear chain reactions).
Frederick Soddy announced discoveries concerning isotopes of radioactive elements (for this he would receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921, and have a crater named in his honor on the far side of the moon).15
In this year Neils Henrik David Bohr of Denmark was arriving at a concept of the atom in which its electrons were presumed to occupy stable quantized orbits with well-defined quantized energy. According to his new model, absorption and emission of light by an atom was occurring as a result of an electron vanishing from its given quantum orbit as it absorbed or emitted a photon and appearing, simultaneously, in another orbit involving a different quantum of energy. For the 1st time we had an explanation of our observation that atoms absorb and emit light at particular frequencies that are characteristic of that atom.
HISTORY OF OPTICS
We did not yet have any inkling that we would be able to shoot these atomic particles at each other. However, on a macro scale we were continuing to be inventive of new ways to kill people. For instance, in this year Isaac Newton Lewis, a retired Coast Defense artillery officer, began to manufacture a light machine-gun in Belgium. This would come to be known as the Lewis gun and would be probably the most effective such weapon in the World War I timeframe.
Arthur Holmes reasoned that the rate of breakdown of radioactive isotopes in igneous rocks might be used to determine when these rocks had originally solidified (an ability to determine the absolute ages of rocks would enable paleontologists to more accurately date their fossil finds). THE SCIENCE OF 1913
15. H.G. Wells would access Soddy’s isotope work for his 1914 THE WORLD SET FREE, also titled THE LAST WAR, a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which A-bombs dropped from airplanes make inevitable a world of peace (in WEALTH, VIRTUAL WEALTH AND DEBT Soddy would return the favor, praising this sci-fi scenario created by Wells). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER
1927
May 11, Wednesday: James Kendall Hosmer died at the age of 93.
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 2017. 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: January 17, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER 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.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER REV. PROF. JAMES K. HOSMER 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