GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY
VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED
IN THE
FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
SENATOR JAMES MURRAY MASON OF VIRGINIA HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1779
March: In a letter to George Mason in Virginia which he expected to be shown to Thomas Jefferson, General George Washington complained that during the present “critical period” while the new nation was “verging ... fast to destruction,” Jefferson was at home at Monticello indulging in mere “idleness and dissipation.” Nevertheless Jefferson would remain at home enjoying himself, contributing nothing whatever to the war effort until after the British were quite gone from this area of the country. Even while serving as Virginia’s governor, Jefferson would inevitably resist all pressure to utilize the state militia, saying that he preferred to hold such forces in readiness to suppress any black servile insurrection. The only positive action that Jefferson ever would take during the war was fleeing. This occurred on June 3, 1781, when General Cornwallis dispatched a cavalry party made up of 250 infantry and dragoons under the leadership of Colonel Banastre Tarleton, and the raiding party went out to the Monticello plantation house to apprehend Jefferson. On that day Jefferson, after burning some sensitive papers and sending his favorite servant Martin Hemings off to hide some valuable items, mounted his favorite horse Caractacus and made his getaway. (In this gentleman’s autobiography, there would of course be no mention of such a flight, presumably for the very same reason that there would of course be no mention of Sally or the rugrats.)
If Tom could get away with it...
Of course, Tom can be excused for being a draft-dodger (like William Jefferson Clinton), as he had in this year more important fish that he needed get fried: A Bill Concerning Slaves Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no persons shall, henceforth, be slaves within this commonwealth, except such as were so on the first day of this present session of Assembly, and the descendants of the females of them. Negroes and mulattoes which shall hereafter be brought into this commonwealth and kept therein one whole year, together, or so long at different times as shall amount to one year, shall be free. But if they shall not depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter they shall be out of the protection of the laws. Those which shall come into this commonwealth of their own accord shall be out of the protection of the laws; save only such as being seafaring persons and navigating vessels hither, shall not leave the same while here more than twenty four hours together. It shall not be lawful for any person to emancipate a slave but by deed executed, proved and recorded as is required by law in the case of a conveyance of goods and chattels, on consideration not deemed valuable in law, or by last will and testament, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
with the free consent of such slave, expressed in presence of the court of the county wherein he resides: And if such slave, so emancipated, shall not within one year thereafter, depart the commonwealth, he shall be out of the protection of the laws. All conditions, restrictions and limitations annexed to any act of emancipation shall be void from the time such emancipation is to take place. If any white woman shall have a child by a negro or mulatto, she and her child shall depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter. If they fail so to do, the woman shall be out of the protection of the laws, and the child shall be bound out by the Aldermen of the county, in like manner as poor orphans are by law directed to be, and within one year after its term of service expired shall depart the commonwealth, or on failure so to do, shall be out of the protection of the laws. Where any of the persons before described shall be disabled from departing the commonwealth by grievous sickness, the protection of the law shall be continued to him until such disability be removed: And if the county shall in the mean time, incur any expence in taking care of him, as of other county poor, the Aldermen shall be intitled to recover the same from his former master, if he had one, his heirs, executors and administrators. No negro or mulatto shall be a witness except in pleas of the commonwealth against negroes or mullatoes, or in civil pleas wherein negroes or mulattoes alone shall be parties. No slave shall go from the tenements of his master, or other person with whom he lives, without a pass, or some letter or token whereby it may appear that he is proceeding by authority from his master, employer, or overseer: If he does, it shall be lawful for any person to apprehend and carry him before a Justice of the Peace, to be by his order punished with stripes, or not, in his discretion. No slave shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another. Arms in possession of a slave contrary to this prohibition shall be forfeited to him who will seize them. Riots, Routs, unlawful assemblies, trespasses and seditious speeches by a negro or mullato shall be punished with stripes at the discretion of a Justice of the Peace; and he who will may apprehend and carry him before such Justice. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
A question has arisen as to what Tom meant, above, by the phrase “out of the protection of the laws.” When I opinioned that what it must have meant in practice on the ground was “may be killed without penalty,” a senior Jefferson scholar was just outraged. I was set straight in no uncertain terms. No, what it meant was, such a person “would not be entitled to receive any further Welfare payments.” Gosh, how could I have been so utterly wrong!
We notice above how the law that Tom wrote did not bear on his personal situation out at the Monticello plantation. He wrote that “If any white woman shall have a child by a negro or mulatto, she and her child shall depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter,” and that otherwise she would be placing herself “out of the protection of the laws” — meaning merely that such a miscegenator wouldn’t be entitled to Welfare or to Aid for Dependent Children, but he did not write that “If any white man [such as himself, for one fine example] shall have a child by a negro or mulatto [such as Tom’s slave girl Sally], he and his child [such as Thomas Jefferson Hemings] shall depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter,” and that otherwise he would be placing himself “out of the protection of the laws” — meaning merely that such a miscegenator wouldn’t be entitled to Welfare or to Aid for Dependent Children. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1798
November 3, Saturday: Wolf Tone surrendered to the British at Buncrana, County Donegal.
In the year of the XYZ Affair, so named after 3 anonymous French troublemakers, and of the consequent Alien and Sedition Acts, James Murray Mason was born.
During this year, also, the U.S. Marine Corps was beginning its policy of denying enlistment to non-whites, and Ludwig van Beethoven was beginning to be troubled by a ringing in his ears.
YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.
Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1818
After studying under a private tutor and graduating from an academy at Georgetown, District of Columbia, James Murray Mason had entered the University of Pennsylvania. In this year he graduated.
John Edwards Holbrook graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with the degree of MD. He would briefly practice as a physician in Boston, and then continue his medical education in London and Edinburgh. Edinburgh he would notice to be “inferior only to London.” While at Glasgow he would have “the satisfaction of hearing one of the most eloquent preachers of the age, Doctor Chalmers. His broad scotch dialect disappointed me in the commencement of his discourse ... but when he was fairly begun I was more directly sensible of the power of eloquence that ever was my lot to be before.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1820
In this year in which the Federalist Party dissolved and, no longer having any organized opposition, the Jefferson Democrats in consequence disbanded, James Murray Mason graduating from the Department of Law at the College of William and Mary and beginning the practice of law in Winchester, Virginia (he would spend much of his early life tending to his family and to his law practice). HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1826
The attorney at law James Mason was elected to represent Frederick County in the Virginia House of Delegates. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1827
That Virginia Delegate James Murray Mason would cling to the doctrine of states’ rights and a strict interpretation of the Constitution had already become evident, in the Giles resolutions, and would continue through the nullification crisis, the 1830s national bank crisis, and into Mason’s senatorial career. These were ideational weapons vital to the defense of the institution of human enslavement. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1830
In this period John Caldwell Calhoun was beginning to go ape in his devotion to strict interpretation of the Constitution. Virginia Delegate James Mason was being influenced by leading states’ rights advocates such as Calhoun, and Virginia’s Robert M.T. Hunter. How could they grow tobacco and make money, without slaves? –Certainly they themselves were not going to go out in the sun and do stoop labor! HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1837
James Mason of Virginia opposed new president Martin Van Buren’s attempt to deal with the financial panic of this year through formation of an independent treasury. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1847
James Mason was elected a Virginia representative to the US Senate.
Ella Hubard was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1848
February 2, Wednesday: The 1st shipload of Chinese arrived at San Francisco harbor.
A treaty between the United States of America and Mexico, termed a “treaty of peace, friendship, limits, and settlement,” was signed at Guadalupe-Hidalgo. READ THE FULL TEXT
General Stephen W. Kearny charged Alexander William Doniphan to write a code of civil laws to be used in the lands annexed from Mexico (this would be known as the “Kearny code”) in both English and Spanish.
A bill would be introduced into the House of Representatives on February 18, 1848 to authorize our nation to borrow $16,000,000 in order to complete its prosecution of the war, and it seeming an excellent investment, this would be approved in the US House of Representatives and then considered be the US Senate. The Treaty would, with the advice and consent of the US Senate, be ratified by our President on March 16, 1848. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Subsequent to its signature and ratification, further war measures would be considered and adopted by our federal congress. According to the Treaty, almost half the land area of Mejico was to be surrendering by that nation to the United States of America. That is to day that during this year in which the cornerstone was being laid for the Washington Monument, using slave labor of course, by a treaty made possible through hostile invasion and occupation of foreign territory, we were obtaining TX, CA, NM, AZ, NV, UT, and parts of CO and WY for our federal union at a compensation of merely $15,000,000. TEXAS
We note in passing that Senator James Mason was already deploying the US Constitution as a bulwark for the HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
practice of human enslavement.
Upon learning the terms imposed, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier would write the following:
THE CRISIS. ACROSS the Stony Mountains, o’er the desert’s drouth and sand, The circles of our empire touch the western ocean’s strand; From slumberous Timpanogos, to Gila, wild and free, Flowing down from Nuevo-Leon to California’s sea; And from the mountains of the east, to Santa Rosa’s shore, The eagles of Mexitli shall beat the air no more. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
O Vale of Rio Bravo! Let thy simple children weep; Close watch about their holy fire let maids of Pecos keep; Let Taos send her cry across Sierra Madre’s pines, And Santa Barbara toll her bells amidst her corn and vines; For lo! the pale land-seekers come, with eager eyes of gain, Wide scattering, like the bison herds on broad Salada’s plain. Let Sacramento’s herdsmen heed what sound the winds bring down Of footsteps on the crisping snow, from cold Nevada’s crown! Full hot and fast the Saxon rides, with rein of travel slack, And, bending o’er his saddle, leaves the sunrise at his back; By many a lonely river, and gorge of fir and pine, On many a wintry hill-top, his nightly camp-fires shine. O countrymen and brothers! that land of lake and plain, Of salt wastes alternating with valleys fat with grain; Of mountains white with winter, looking downward, cold, serene, On their feet with spring-vines tangled and lapped in softest green; Swift through whose black volcanic gates, o’er many a sunny vale, Wind-like the Arapahoe sweeps the bison’s dusty trail! Great spaces yet untravelled, great lakes whose mystic shores The Saxon rifle never heard, nor dip of Saxon oars; Great herds that wander all unwatched, wild steeds that none have tamed, Strange fish in unknown streams, and birds the Saxon never named; Deep mines, dark mountain crucibles, where Nature’s chemic powers Work out the Great Designer’s will; all these ye say are ours! Forever ours! for good or ill, on us the burden lies; God’s balance, watched by angels, is hung across the skies. Shall Justice, Truth, and Freedom turn the poised and trembling scale? Or shall the Evil triumph, and robber Wrong prevail? Shall the broad land o’er which our flag in starry splendor waves, Forego through us its freedom, and bear the tread of slaves? The day is breaking in the East of which the prophets told, And brightens up the sky of Time the Christian Age of Gold; Old Might to Right is yielding, battle blade to clerkly pen, Earth’s monarchs are her peoples, and her serfs stand up as men; The isles rejoice together, in a day are nations born, And the slave walks free in Tunis, and by Stamboul’s Golden Horn! Is this, O countrymen of mine! a day for us to sow The soil of new-gained empire with slavery’s seeds of woe? To feed with our fresh life-blood the Old World’s cast-off crime, Dropped, like some monstrous early birth, from the tired lap of Time? To run anew the evil race the old lost nations ran, And die like them of unbelief of God, and wrong of man? Great Heaven! Is this our mission? End in this the prayers and tears, The toil, the strife, the watchings of our younger, better years? Still as the Old World rolls in light, shall ours in shadow turn, A beamless Chaos, cursed of God, through outer darkness borne? Where the far nations looked for light, a blackness in the air? Where for words of hope they listened, the long wail of despair? The Crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands, With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt’s sands! This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin; This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin, HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal’s cloudy crown We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down! By all for which the martyrs bore their agony and shame; By all the warning words of truth with which the prophets came; By the Future which awaits us; by all the hopes which cast Their faint and trembling beams across the blackness of the Past; And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth’s freedom died, O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side. So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way; To wed Penobscot’s waters to San Francisco’s bay; To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain; And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train: The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea, And mountain unto mountain call, Praise God for we are free! WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1849
March 3, Saturday: The United States Department of the Interior was formed over the objection of Senator James Murray Mason.
March 4, Sunday: The Austrian Reichstag sitting at Kremsier (Kromeriz), Moravia was by imperial order dissolved. A new constitution for the Austrian Empire was sanctioned by the emperor, declaring it to be an indivisible monarchy with common administration. Istria was made a crown land.
Lewis Cass, defeated as the Democratic presidential candidate, returned to the US Senate.
President James Knox Polk’s term ended on this day and, since his Veep had already resigned and Zachary Taylor was refusing to take the oath of office on the Sabbath, technically the President of the United States of America was the President Pro Tem of the Senate. David Rice Atchison wisely slept late this day, then hung around in his Senate office chamber, taking a long nap there. (That’s greatly superior to the day that, Ronald Reagan having been capped, General Alexander Haig declared himself to be in command at the White House! The tombstone of this David Rice Atchison would read “President of the U.S. one day.” — The tombstone of this General Alexander Haig should already read “In command at the White House one day.”)
What the President-Elect did do on this day in Washington DC was turn out his war horse “Old Whitey” to pasture on the White House lawn. As soon as Monday arrived and he deigned to take the oath of office, he would be President of the United States of America and eat broccoli only if he wanted to, until July 9, 1850. Of course, with the change in the office of President of the United States from a Democrat a Whig, the jobs of all previous Democratic appointees, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne as the Surveyor of the Salem Custom House, became exceedingly insecure, for embroidered on the chest of Old Zach’s inauguration suit in red letters was the motto “to the victor belong the spoils”:1
[SEE NEXT SCREEN]
LA GUILLOTINE HEADCHOPPING
1. Never mind, for the friends of the Hawthornes, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, would take up a subscription for their support. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
THE SCARLET LETTER: A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship – to adopt the tone of “P.P.” — was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essential, in order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency –which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours– to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me –who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat– that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off. In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, l had been none of the warmest of partisans I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
The 10-line burweed beetle Leptinotarsa had transitioned from feeding only upon the intrusive Mexican burweed to feeding only upon garden potato plants. How about that?2
So concerned was Senator Samuel “Sam” Houston of Texas, an opponent of secession, about the coming strife between the northern states and the southern ones, that during his final months in the federal Senate he advocated that the United States of America establish a “protectorate” over Mexico and all of Central America — not so much for their benefit but because in his consideration such an agenda would constitute a way to bring needed unity to the United States of America. I love Texas too well to bring civil strife and bloodshed upon her.
2. A piece of its second pair of chromosomes had shifted. Whether this is what had enabled the abrupt change in diet is anybody’s guess. (NOTE: this has nothing whatever to do with the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852. It is a completely different problem of a completely separate era.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Senator James Murray Mason opposed him in this. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1851
February 19, Wednesday: Senator James Mason of Virginia called again for payment of Spain’s La Amistad claim. What’s white is right, so Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky of course proceeded to propose a Senate inquiry into the matter and his proposal was of course overwhelmingly approved.
[Of course, the schooner in question simply did not belong to Spain, or to any Spaniard or Spaniards. It being a prize vessel, it belonged only to the surviving 35 of the black privateers of the mutiny who had been sent back to Africa aboard the bark Gentleman, who had been sent home as mere charity wards with nobody ever thinking to return to them their conquest which they had won fair and square with their blood, sweat, and tears, admittedly worth $70,000. For sure, had it been 35 surviving free white privateers, they would not have been denied this booty which belonged to them, but because they were instead free blacks, it had never even occurred to any of the white players in this legal drama, such as the collective wit of the seven Supreme Court justices involved in puzzling out this puzzle, to give them their prize schooner back! One of the open issues of this drama, therefore, is: what actually had happened to the schooner La Amistad? Where had this valuable piece of property gone to? Which American white men had been allowed to profit from it? Our history books are, of course, silent — this being a question which it has never ever occurred to us to pose.]
The US Senate was taking a closer look at American involvement in the slave-trade. “A bill (Senate, No. 472) concerning the intercourse and trade of vessels of the United States with certain places on the eastern and western coasts of Africa, and for other purposes.” Read once. SENATE JOURNAL, 31st Congress, 2d session, pages 42, 45, 84, 94, 159, 193-4; CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 31st Congress, 2d session, pages 246-7.
[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 19th] HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
February 24, Monday: In a letter to Lysander Spooner, Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia argued that African slaves are “a form of property ... originating in Africa, and when brought into the colonies of North America simply recognized as property by the common law.”
[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 24th] HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1852
Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia called again for payment of Spain’s La Amistad claim.
[Of course, the schooner in question did not belong to Spain, or to any Spaniard or Spaniards. It was a prize vessel, and it belonged to the surviving 35 of the black privateers of the mutiny who had been sent back to Africa aboard the bark Gentleman, who had been sent home as mere charity wards with nobody ever thinking to return to them their conquest which they had won fair and square with their blood, sweat, and tears, admittedly worth $70,000. For sure, had it been 35 surviving free white privateers, they would not have been denied this booty which belonged to them, but because they were instead free blacks, it had never even occurred to any of the white players in this legal drama, such as the collective wit of the seven Supreme Court justices involved in puzzling out this puzzle, to give them their prize schooner back! One of the open issues of this drama, therefore, is: what actually had happened to the schooner La Amistad? Where had this valuable piece of property gone to? Which American white men had been allowed to profit from it? Our history books are, of course, silent — this being a question which it has never ever occurred to us to pose.] THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1854
June 2, “Bad Friday”: Louis D’Entremont Surette was born in Concord to Louis A. Surette and Frances Jane Shattuck Surette.
By 6AM, crowds were already beginning to accumulate outside the Boston courthouse.
At 7:30AM, to maintain order and to make some sort of gesture that this is after all America, a brace of horses dragged a cannon onto the square before the courthouse and a squad of US Marines trained its load of six pounds of grapeshot on the crowd.
At 8AM a martial law notice was posted, which someone read aloud to the crowd: TO THE CITIZENS OF BOSTON.
To secure order throughout the city this day, Major- General Edmands and the Chief of Police will make such disposition of the respective forces under their commands as will best promote that important object; and they are clothed with full discretionary power to sustain the laws of the land. All well-disposed citizens and other persons are urgently requested to leave those streets which it may be found necessary to clear temporarily, and under no circumstances to obstruct or HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
molest any officer, civil or military, in the lawful discharge of his duty. J.V.C. SMITH, Mayor. BOSTON, June 2, 1854. At 8:45AM the defendant’s attorney, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., entered the courtroom, and was startled to observe his client Anthony Burns attired in a stylish new suit.
At 9AM Judge of Probate Edward Greeley Loring entered the chamber, and the troops outside began to drive the citizenry out of the courthouse square. The Marines began ostentatiously to “train” by going through the motions of loading, firing, and reloading their cannon, while the police began to make arrests. Judge Loring, in regard to the objection that was being raised that his rôle as a Fugitive Slave Bill Commissioner of the United States of America was an unconstitutional one for judges to play, commented mildly that his duties as a Fugitive Slave Commissioner were “ministerial rather than judicial.”
Horace Mann, Sr. and E.G. Loring were old buddies from the Litchfield Law School. It had been just a brief period since Loring, who was an officer of Harvard College, had been rejected as a candidate for a law professorship because of his favoring the Fugitive Slave Law as written by James Murray Mason of Virginia.
To prove to the court what everyone knew to be the fact, the slavemaster and his attorney displayed to the judge a copy of the Revised Code of Virginia. “On the law and facts of the case, I consider the claimant entitled to the certificate from me which he claims.” Judge Loring then signed the certificate and outside upon a signal the bells of Boston’s churches began to toll. In response to the pealing of the bells, the townspeople began to hang black bunting, and women’s black shawls and mantles, out of their windows. The streets of Boston were being patrolled by the National Guard, and by US Army cavalry, and by marines, and by artillery brigades, totaling some 2,000 soldiers –President Pierce having ordered that no expense be spared– but no quantity of mere soldiering could force local citizens to raise their flags above half-mast or take down their drapings of black bunting.
At 2:30PM the procession of troops, each with pistol by his left hand and drawn cutlass in his right, began to move toward the waterfront and, eventually, the government revenue cutter Morris that was being kept at a safe distance in the harbor, out at the mooring at Minot’s Light. Burn was moved along quick-step by the troops “down that sworded street” from the Boston courthouse in the custody of US Marshall Asa O. Butman. The Marine Band attempted to incite the crowds of citizens lining the streets to riot by playing the tune “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” so that the army would have an opportunity to do what it does best, but could not get a firefight started. The colored man was heard to comment,
There was a lot of folks to see a colored man walk through the streets.
The New England Woman’s Rights Convention was getting little done, for the delegates were out on State Street watching the colored man in the new suit being marched past. William Lloyd Garrison and the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway watched together from the window of a law office (this would get Conway in big trouble in his home town in Virginia). On the way down to Dock T, it seems that by coincidence a druggist’s stockboy from Roxbury, William Ela, who had been sent into town that afternoon to procure a bottle of ink, was in the vicinity lugging his bottle — and the troops presumed that the bottle he was carrying contained HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
vitriol which he intended to hurl at them. The bottle of ink was smashed and the boy would be brain-damaged from being assaulted with the butts of muskets (later there would be a lawsuit for his maintenance: Ela v. J.V.C. Smith). The nervous troops also bayoneted a cart horse that happened to get in their way as Anthony Burns was being marched to the dock. There was a dock, and there was a street leading down to it; the cutter was at the end of the dock, and sometimes a cart driver does not mean to get in the way. What to do? Where a human being means nothing, what the hell is a horse supposed to mean? The white soldiers, having gotten all keyed up to bayonet citizens, of course bayoneted the horse. The driver of the cart was lucky they didn’t bayonet him as well.
At 3:20PM, after the troops had loaded their black captive and their brass cannon aboard the steamer John Taylor at Dock T, the steamer pulled away from the dock and began to make its way through the massed small craft in the harbor toward Minot’s Light, where the federal revenue cutter Morris was waiting.
That afternoon Henry Thoreau had taken his mother Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau and sister Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau in his boat up the Assabet River to Castilleja and Annursnack. They wouldn’t return until about 7 PM.
By 8:30PM, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. had finished writing out a version of the closing argument which he had offered, and had sent it off to the Boston Traveller to be published in their next edition. When he met Anson Burlingame, the 9PM omnibus to Cambridge having already departed, Burlingame offered to escort Dana home. As they walked together on Court Street, however, Dana was struck from behind. The lawyer’s glasses flew off and shattered. His eye was blackened and some of his teeth were chipped.3 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier would turn the Anthony Burns episode into one of his occasional poems, but –poetry to the contrary notwithstanding– the man of color’s wrists had not been in handcuffs as he had been quick-stepped “hand-cuffed down that sworded street” of sordid downtown Boston: The Rendition, by John Greenleaf Whittier. I HEARD the train’s shrill whistle call, I saw an earnest look beseech, And rather by that look than speech My neighbor told me all. And, as I thought of Liberty Marched handcuffed down that sworded street, The solid earth beneath my feet Reeled fluid as the sea. I felt a sense of bitter loss, — Shame, tearless grief, and stifling wrath, And loathing fear, as if my path A serpent stretched across. All love of home, all pride of place, All generous confidence and trust,
3. The men were later identified as Luigi Varelli and Henry Huxford, who had been serving that day as part of the marshal’s guard and who were celebrating their earnings at Allen’s Saloon when they recognized Richard Henry Dana, Jr. as he passed on the sidewalk. Anthony Burns would turn out to be the last escapee from slavery to be returned from Massachusetts. His owner would not, as was feared at the time, torture him to death. He would be kept in the traders’ jail in Richmond VA until sold to a white man from North Carolina. This man would then retail him to a Massachusetts minister at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore in February 1855 for the sum of $1,325.00. On March 7, 1855 Burns would be feted at Tremont Temple and handed manumission papers. He would attend the School of Divinity at Oberlin College and, bless him, he would become a minister of the gospel. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Sank smothering in that deep disgust And anguish of disgrace. Down on my native hills of June, And home’s green quiet, hiding all, Fell sudden darkness like the fall Of midnight upon noon! And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong, Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God The blasphemy of wrong.
“O Mother, from thy memories proud, Thy old renown, dear Commonwealth, Lend this dead air a breeze of health, And smite with stars this cloud. “Mother of Freedom, wise and brave, Rise awful in thy strength,” I said; Ah me! I spake but to the dead; I stood upon her grave!
June 2: ... I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves....
The following commentary on Thoreau’s journal entry for this day is from H. Daniel Peck’s THOREAU’S MORNING WORK: MEMORY AND PERCEPTION IN A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, THE JOURNAL, AND WALDEN (Yale UP, 1994): To “improve these seasons as much as a farmer his” is to cultivate them richly through perception and to fix them in enduring phenomenological categories. One of the most obvious signs of Thoreau’s ongoing revision of the traditional calendar in the Journal is his unceasing recording of first-observed appearances of seasonal phenomena. These observations cluster in the spring, when their myriad occurrences signify the vigorous rebirth of nature celebrated in the climatic chapter of WALDEN. Yet a close reading of the Journal reveals that Thoreau was closely attentive to “first facts” at all seasons. There are hundreds of such observations in the Journal, recorded at all times of the year and usually without commentary. In part, they are an expression of Thoreau’s deep preoccupation with origins. By searching the world for the first visible appearances of natural growth, he hopes to participate through observation in the creativity of nature — to be there at the moment of genesis. A passage from a Journal entry of June 2, 1854, expresses this desire poignantly: “I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves.” But as this example shows, the concept of beginning as it is usually expressed in the Journal is defined not by pure origination but by repetition. The necessary context for observing the “first” appearance of a seasonal phenomenon is the natural cycle; any “first” in nature is recognizable only HDT WHAT? INDEX
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because it has happened before. That is, Thoreau has already prepared, or recognized, a category for anticipating it; he is keyed for the observation of first facts. In the spring of 1860, we find him “on the alert for several days to hear the first birds” (March 9, 1860). Reporting the appearance of these “first birds” to his Journal is an act of confirmation as much as an act of origination; the beginning, in Thoreau, always pivots between memory and anticipation. As he puts it in a Journal entry of June 6, 1857, “Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting.” But even the most vigilant of nature’s observers cannot “be present at the birth of shadow,” and Thoreau is acutely aware of this, as he shows in an entry of March 17, 1857: “No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1857
June 26, Friday: The 2d day of the Spiritualist testing in Apartment Number 12 in the Albion building on Tremont Street in beautiful downtown Boston — and there were no better results than on the previous day.
In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln spoke against the Dred Scott decision.
This man had no rights that any white American was bound to respect. None at all. Nope.
The 1st edition of Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT was published in Baltimore, expanding upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and proclaiming also the pleasant conceit that Waldo Emerson, who had originally espoused this idea in the 1844 “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”, was America’s “most practical and profound metaphysician.” Hoo boy! What Helper was proposing amounted to a comprehensive racial boycott by all whites against all persons of color. These coloreds couldn’t help but be unfair low-price low-quality competition for decent, honest, clean white HDT WHAT? INDEX
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workingmen such as him. He proposed a total ostracization of any white man so unaware of the needs of white people as to utilize the labor of a nonwhite. No union with slaveholders! It would become a crime to so much as possess a copy of this racist book in the American South.
There was a blurb by Horace Greeley in the New-York Tribune and Weekly Tribune. When Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia read Helper’s statistical study, he considered that its intent was “to array man against man in our own States.” Helper’s attitude was plain. He minced no words. He recommended to all white Americans that for fundamental economic reasons an abolitionist is your “best and only true” friend. I will quote passim in the manner in which it is customary to quote from such a treatise on attitude as MEIN KAMPF, in illustration of the plainness of Helper’s message:4 You must either be for us or against us.... [The white masses
4. Anyone who desires to evaluate the accuracy and representativeness of the constructed paragraph of quotation is urged to consult the original, which is a quick and entertaining read if one pays attention to the textual paragraphs while ignoring the enormous quantities of utterly irrelevant and tendentious and pretentious statistical tabulation. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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are going to] have justice peaceably or by violence.... Do you aspire to become the victims of white nonslaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night?... [Slavery is] a perpetual license to murder.... In nine cases out of ten [slaves are] happy to cut their masters’ throats.
HINTON ROWAN HELPER
THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. —Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that of the victim. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, He hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our brave New World in the first place.5
The Democrats immediately attempted to neutralize Helper’s dangerous racist abolitionism by issuing Gilbert J. Beebe’s A REVIEW AND REFUTATION OF Hinton Rowan Helper’S “IMPENDING CRISIS”. They charged that their political opponents, the Republicans, were using this treatise as their “text-book.”
5. This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Hugh C. Bailey’s HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University of Alabama, 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
A crisis would break out in the discussions of this attitude about how to achieve progress, in December 1859 during the uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry by abolitionists.
Speaking of progress, in this year in England, Herbert Spencer’s article “Progress: its Law and Cause” began to apply his one big idea, a principle that he had derived from K.E. von Baer, that the biological development of an organism proceeds from a homogeneous state to a heterogeneous state, to the solar system, to animal species, to human society, to industry, to art, to language, to science, and to the kitchen sink. This ideology-driven infatuation eventually led to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley commenting about him that Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact.”
ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).
Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1858
The body of a nearly adult male gorilla arrived from Africa in England, preserved in spirits. (Previously, all that had been seen there had been a few skulls, and then one complete skeleton.)
Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia called again for payment of Spain’s La Amistad claim.
[Of course, the schooner in question did not belong to Spain, or to any Spaniard or Spaniards. It was a prize HDT WHAT? INDEX
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vessel, and it belonged to the surviving 35 of the black privateers of the mutiny who had been sent back to Africa aboard the bark Gentleman, who had been sent home as mere charity wards with nobody ever thinking to return to them their conquest which they had won fair and square with their blood, sweat, and tears, admittedly worth $70,000. For sure, had it been 35 surviving free white privateers, they would not have been denied this booty which belonged to them, but because they were instead free blacks, it had never even occurred to any of the white players in this legal drama, such as the collective wit of the seven Supreme Court justices involved in puzzling out this puzzle, to give them their prize schooner back! One of the open issues of this drama, therefore, is: what actually had happened to the schooner La Amistad? Where had this valuable piece of property gone to? Which American white men had been allowed to profit from it? Our history books are, of course, silent, this being a question which it has never ever occurred to us to pose.] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1859
February: During arguments for the annexation of Cuba, Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia called again for payment of Spain’s La Amistad claim.
[Of course, the schooner in question did not belong to Spain, or to any Spaniard or Spaniards. It was a prize vessel, and it belonged to the surviving 35 of the black privateers of the mutiny who had been sent back to Africa aboard the bark Gentleman, who had been sent home as mere charity wards with nobody ever thinking to return to them their conquest which they had won fair and square with their blood, sweat, and tears, admittedly worth $70,000. For sure, had it been 35 surviving free white privateers, they would not have been denied this booty which belonged to them, but because they were instead free blacks, it had never even occurred to any of the white players in this legal drama, such as the collective wit of the seven Supreme Court justices involved in puzzling out this puzzle, to give them their prize schooner back! One of the open issues of this drama, therefore, is: what actually had happened to the schooner La Amistad? Where had this valuable piece of property gone to? Which American white men had been allowed to profit from it? Our history books are, of course, silent, this being a question which it has never ever occurred to us to pose.] “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
October 16, Sunday, night: Senator James Murray Mason was enjoying the federal Congress being out of session, at home with his family in Winchester, Virginia. This town was 20 easy miles away from Harpers Ferry along the Baltimore & Ohio RR tracks. Senator Mason would arrive in Harpers Ferry soon after Captain John Brown’s surrender, and interrogate the wounded old man in the presence of his mortally wounded son and in the presence of officer-in-charge Robert E. Lee.
His idea of an investigation procedure was “Follow the money.” Mason would immediately begin to spread the necessary lie, that “not a man, black or white, joined them [emphasis his] after they came into Virginia, or gave them aid or assistance in any form.” The totality of the evidence he would be able to summon for the truth of this emphatic and utterly necessary assertion was that “The fact is undoubted.”6
Subsequent historians have of course dutifully followed his lead in copying from one textbook into the next textbook the assertion that no Virginia slaves had joined this sudden, unannounced, unexpected attempt at the creation of a servile insurrection. The thought has been just too utterly dangerous to contemplate — therefore the fact has had to correspond to the thought.
How to explain this? It is easily understood once one comes to recognize that the thing that really frosted sensible guys like Mason was not the prospect of race war, of a servile insurrection led by charismatics of the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, but the prospect of class war.7 This guy had read Hinton Rowan Helper’s book THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, and he knew very well who the real enemy was. The real enemy would be anyone who would use the race hatred of the poor whites of the South to set these poor whites against those rich whites of the South who were enjoying “ownership” over black Americans. Therefore the first question in the mind of a guy like Senator Mason would have been, not “Was Brown trying to key off a servile insurrection?” but a somewhat more complicated one, a question on the order of: “Was Brown’s servile insurrection intended to key off a genocide in which all these armed poor
6. Jean Libby
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whites who had been so carefully taught to hate the nigger, by the simple expedient of forming into mobs and suddenly slaughtering all the black property of the rich whites of the South, would be able at last to drag our proud and righteous slavemasters down into the gutter with them?”
7. Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing his slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
November 11, Friday: Using her middle name “Margaret,” the wife of Senator James Murray Mason sent an flaming letter of reproach to Lydia Maria Child: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Alto, King George’s Co., Va., Nov. 11th, 1859. Do you read your Bible, Mrs. Child? If you do, read there, “Woe unto you, hypocrites,” and take to yourself with two-fold damnation that terrible sentence; for, rest assured, in the day of judgment it shall be more tolerable for those thus scathed by the awful denunciation of the Son of God, than for you. You would soothe with sisterly and motherly care the hoary-headed murderer of Harpers Ferry! A man whose aim and intention was to incite the horrors of a servile war — to condemn women of your own race, ere death closed their eyes on their sufferings from violence and outrage, to see their husbands and fathers murdered, their children butchered, the ground strewed with the brains of their babes. The antecedents of Brown’s band proved them to have been the offscourings of the earth; and what would have been our fate had they found as many sympathizers in Virginia as they seem to have in Massachusetts? Now, compare yourself with those your “sympathy” would devote to such ruthless ruin, and say, on that “word of honor, which never has been broken,” would you stand by the bedside of an old negro, dying of a hopeless disease, to alleviate his sufferings as far as human aid could? Have you ever watched the last, lingering illness of a consumptive, to soothe, as far as in you lay, the inevitable fate? Do you soften the pangs of maternity in those around you by all the care and comfort you can give? Do you grieve with those near you, even though the sorrows resulted from their own misconduct? Did you ever sit up until the “wee hours” to complete a dress for a motherless child, that she might appear on Christmas day in a new one, along with her more fortunate companions? We do these and more for our servants, and why? Because we endeavor to do our duty in that state of life it has pleased God to place us. In his revealed word we read our duties to them —theirs to us are there also— “Not only to the good and gentle, but to the forward.” — (Peter 2: 18.) Go thou and do likewise, and keep away from Charlestown. If the stories read in the public prints be true, of the sufferings of the poor of the North, you need not go far for objects of charity. “Thou hypocrite! take first the beam out of thine own eye, then shalt thou see clearly to pull the mote out of thy neighbor’s.” But if, indeed, you do lack objects of sympathy near you, go to Jefferson county, to the family of George Turner, a noble, true-hearted man, whose devotion to his friend (Col. Washington) causing him to risk his life, was shot down like a dog. Or to that of old Beckham, whose grief at the murder of his negro subordinate made him needlessly expose himself to the aim of the assassin Brown. And when you can equal in deeds of love and charity to those around you, what is shown by nine-tenths of the Virginia plantations, then by your “sympathy” whet the knives for our throats, and kindle the torch that fires our homes. You reverence Brown for his clemency to his prisoners! Prisoners! and how taken? Unsuspecting workmen, going to their daily duties; unarmed gentlemen, taken from their beds at the dead hour of the night, by six men doubly and trebly armed. Suppose he had hurt a hair of their heads, do you suppose one of the band of desperadoes would have left the engine-house alive? And did he not know that his treatment of them was only hope of life then, or of clemency afterward? Of course he did. The United States troops could not have prevented him from being torn limb from limb. I will add, in conclusion, no Southerner ought, after your letter to Governor Wise and to Brown, to read a line of your composition, or to touch a magazine which bears your name in its lists of contributors; and in this we hope for the “sympathy,” at least of those at the North who deserve the name of woman.
M.J.C. MASON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December 5, Monday: In spite of the ban of March 19th, 1854, the Russian Musical Society gave its initial concert, in St. Petersburg (they avoided the ban largely by having friends in high places). Most of the music was conducted by Anton Rubinstein, who played the solo part in his own Piano Concerto no.3.
Senator Jefferson Davis arrived in Washington DC from Mississippi as the federal Congress convened.
When the 1st session of the new senate began, Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia, the senator who had written the Fugitive Slave Law, rose and announced that he was sponsoring a resolution to inquire into the gesture that had been made toward servile insurrection by the guerrillas of Captain John Brown in the shape of a raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.
HARPERS FERRY, FROM THE POTOMAC SIDE
HARPERS FERRY, FROM THE BLUE RIDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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He asserted that all he wanted was the facts. Where did the money for this come from? Had they received any of their aid and comfort out of collusion from officials of the federal government? He was willing to speculate that New England would be discovered by this Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry to have been behind this, and that its ideological foundation had been in Hinton Rowan Helper’s “vile, false, truthless” THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, an appeal to class warfare arraying the Southern poor white trash against the rich Southern slavemasters. Fortunately, Helper had failed, for the reason that, Mason suggested, the poor white trash of Virginia actually loved and admired their state in the same way that the black slaves of Virginia loved and admired their owners. The black slaves had proved this by not joining Brown, and the poor white trash had proved this by uniting under the leadership of Colonel Robert E. Lee to capture Brown.
The Senate unanimously approved Mason’s inquiry into the Secret “Six” conspiracy.
December 5: P.M.–Down Turnpike to Smith’s Hill. Rather hard walking in the snow. There is a slight mist in the air and accordingly some glaze on the twigs and leaves, and thus suddenly we have passed from Indian summer to winter. The perfect silence, as if the whispering and creaking earth were muffled (her axle), and the stillness (motionlessness) of the twigs and of the very weeds and withered grasses, as if they were sculptured out of marble, are striking. It is as if you had stepped from a withered garden into the yard of a sculptor or worker in marble, crowded with delicate works, rich and rare. I remark, half a mile off, a tall and slender pitch pine against the dull-gray mist, peculiarly monumental. I noticed also several small white oak trees full of leaves by the roadside, strangely interesting and beautiful. Their stiffened leaves were very long and deeply cut, and the lighter and glazed under sides being almost uniformly turned vertically toward the northwest, as a traveller turns his back to the storm, though enough of the redder and warmer sides were seen to contrast with them, it looked like an artificial tree hung with many-fingered gauntlets. Such was the disposition of the leaves, often nearly in the same plane, that it looked like a brown arbor-vitae. See four quails running across the Turnpike. How they must be affected by this change from warm weather and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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bare ground to cold and universal snow! Returning from the post-office at early candle-light, I noticed for the first time this season the peculiar effect of lights in offices and shops seen over the snowy streets, suggesting how withdrawn and inward the life in the former, how exposed and outward in the latter. His late career–these six weeks, I mean–has been meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing more miraculous in all history. Nothing could his enemies do but it redounded to his infinite advantage, the advantage of his cause. They did not hang him at once; they reserved him to preach to them. And here is another great blunder: they have not hung his four followers with him; that scene is still to come, and so his victory is prolonged. No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the Manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child between his prison and the gallows? The preachers, the Bible men, they who talk about principle and doing to others as you would that they should do unto you,–how could they fail to recognize him, by far the greatest preacher of them all, with the Bible on his lips, and in his acts, the embodiment of principle, who actually carried out the golden rule? All whose moral sense is aroused, who have a calling from on high to preach, have sided with him. It may prove the occasion, if it has not proved it already, of a new sect of Brownites being formed in our midst. I see now, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharp’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit,–the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit. He is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also. On the day of his translation, I heard, to be sure, that he was hung, but I did not know what that meant,–and I felt no sorrow on his account; but not for a day or two did I even hear that he was dead, and not after any number of days shall I believe it. Of all the men who are said to be my contemporaries, it seems to me that John Brown is the only one who has not died. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret only. John Brown has earned immortality. Men have been hung in the South before for attempting to rescue slaves, and the North was not much stirred by it. Whence, then, this wonderful difference? We were not so sure of their devotion to principle. We have made a subtle distinction, have forgotten human laws, and do homage to an idea. The North is suddenly all Transcendental. It goes behind the human law, it goes behind the apparent failure, and recognizes eternal justice and glory. It is more generous than the spirit which actuated our forefathers, for it is a revolution in behalf of another, and an oppressed, people. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
December 14, Wednesday: Democratic Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia became the chair of the senatorial investigatory Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry that he had sponsored, which was charged to look into the circumstances surrounding the raid made by the guerrillas of John Brown on the federal arsenal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi became its principal investigator.
A 3d Democrat, Indiana’s Senator Graham N. Fitch, would ensure that the Democrats always had the majority on this committee. Two Republicans were added, Wisconsin’s Senator James R. Doolittle and Vermont’s Senator Jacob Collamer, so that the committee would have a dominated minority. The committee would summon, in all, 32 witnesses in this investigation of the Secret “Six” conspiracy.
At the Concord Lyceum, Caroline H. Dall spoke on the topic “Lives of Noted Women,” focusing attention on woman’s claim to education as illustrated in the cases of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Margaret Fuller. Both Henry Thoreau and Waldo Emerson attended:8 Wednesday — Concord. Mass. Dec. 14. 1859. I took the Omnibus a little before 7 AM. & rode to the Fitchburg depot. At the Concord depot Mr Brown & his wife9 & Mr Surette10 met me. Mrs Brown kindly carried me to Mrs Alcott’s where I passed a pleasant morning, talking to her and the girls,11 and deciding which lecture I would read. After a vegetable dinner, I went back to Mrs Brown’s in her sleigh. The sewing circle took tea there, and having done the agreeable as well as I could, I dressed and was taken down to the Town Hall where I was to speak. A heavy snow storm had increased since morning to a drifting gale. The driving cold was so painful on my cheeks, that I was faint & dizzy with the reaction. Mr Brown, said, You need not expect anybody tonight — but there were about four hundred persons. Mr Reynolds12 who introduced me, Mr Alcott, Thoreau Frank Sanborn,13 Mrs Emerson & others, paid me compliments with that
8. Bronson Alcott would jot in his diary “Hear Mrs. Dall’s lecture. She gave us accounts of the principal incidents in the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Lady Morgan, Mrs. Jameson, Margaret Fuller & others. It was a well considered performance, and gave pleasure to our people generally.” 9. Simon Brown and Ann Brown, friends of Caroline H. Dall’s from her year in Washington and Georgetown. 10. Concord merchant and member of Corinthian Lodge of Masons of Concord, Louis A. Surette (1819-1897). 11. Abigail May Alcott, the future “Marmee” of Little Women, and her surviving three daughters, Anna Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Abby May Alcott. 12. Grindall Reynolds (1822-1894) was minister to the Unitarian Church in Concord, 1858-1894 (pastor emeritus after 1881) and secretary of the American Unitarian Association, 1881-1894. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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dignified reserve that such persons do. But Edith Emerson14 said a few words to Mrs Brown, worth them all. “I cannot often keep awake,” she said, “during the best lectures, but I heard every word of this, she was so earnest.”
December 14. At 2 P. M. begins to snow again. I walk to Walden. Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north, so that it is quite blinding to face, almost as much so as sand. It is cold also. It is drifting but not accumulating fast. I can see the woods about a quarter of a mile distant through it. That of the 11th was a still storm, of large flakes falling gently in the quiet air, like so many white feathers descending in different directions when seen against a wood- side,–the regular snow-storm such as is painted. A myriad falling flakes weaving a coarse garment by which the eye is amused. The snow was a little moist and the weather rather mild. Also I remember the perfectly crystalline or star snows, when each flake is a perfect six (?)-rayed wheel. This must be the chef-d’oeuvre of the Genius of the storm. Also there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot. This, I think, belongs to cold weather. Probably never have much of it. Also there is sleet, which is half snow, half rain. The Juncus tenuis, with its conspicuous acheniums, is very noticeable now, rising above the snow in the wood- paths, commonly aslant.
13. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. 14. Edith Emerson (1841-1929) married in 1865 William H. Forbes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December 16, Friday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the 2d volume of a 5-volume set prepared 1818-1821 (THEOPHRASTI ERESII QUAE SUPERSUNT OPERA: ET EXCERPTA LIBRORUM by Theophrastus of Eresus (circa 372-circa 287BCE), JOHANN GOTTLOB SCHNEIDER, HEINRICH FRIEDRICH LINK. Lipsiae: Sumtibus Frid. Christ. Guil. Vogelii) of .
THEOPHRASTUS
He also checked out the two volumes of Aristotle’s HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX D’ARISTOTE in Greek and in the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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French translation by M. Camus (Paris: Chez la veuve Desaint, 1783).
HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX I HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX II HDT WHAT? INDEX
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While at the Harvard Library, Thoreau read from but did not check out John Gerard’s 1597 botanical resource, THE HERBALL OR GENERALL HIſTORIE OF PLANTES: GREAT HERBALL OF 1597
INTERNET COMMENTARY
December 16, 1859: A.M.–To Cambridge, where I read in Gerard’s Herbal. [Vide extracts from preface made in October 1859.] His admirable though quaint descriptions are, to my mind, greatly superior to the modern more scientific ones. He describes not according to rule but to his natural delight in the plants. He brings them vividly before you, as one who has seen and delighted in them. It is almost as good as to see the plants themselves. It suggests that we cannot too often get rid of the barren assumption that is in our science. His leaves are leaves; his flowers, flowers; his fruit, fruit. They are green and colored and fragrant. It is a man’s BOTANY knowledge added to a child’s delight. Modern botanical descriptions approach ever nearer to the dryness of an algebraic formula, as if c + y were = to a love-letter. It is the keen joy and discrimination of the child who has just seen a flower for the first time and comes running in with it to its friends. How much better to describe your object in fresh English words rather than in these conventional Latinisms! He has really seen, and smelt, and tasted, and reports his sensations. Bought a book at Little & Brown’s, paying a nine-pence more on a volume than it was offered me for elsewhere. The customer thus pays for the more elegant style of the store. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry created by Democratic Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia held its first meeting in regard to the John Brown affair and its Secret “Six” conspiracy. The committee would be in existence for six months before delivering its final report and would summon, in all, 32 witnesses.
Edwin Coppoc and John E. Cook were hanged in Charlestown, Virginia.15 Edwin’s body would be buried in
15. I have been advised that according to THE QUAKERS OF IOWA by Louis Thomas Jones, a scholarly work published under the auspices of the State Historical Iowa at Iowa City, Iowa in 1914 (I haven’t myself actually seen this book), prior to their deaths the Coppoc brothers were disowned by the Red Cedar Monthly Meeting of Friends in the West Branch/Springdale area. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Winona after a funeral attended by the entire town. Later his body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio.
(Edwin had written from the prison to his adoptive mother, of a nonresistant-abolitionist Quaker farm family, that he was “sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Edwin’s brother Barclay Coppoc was still eluding capture.)
John E. Cook had made a full confession of his activities with the raiders and at the last moment had sought to save his neck by representing that he had been deceived through false promises, but this had not saved him, nor had the fact that his brother-in-law A.P. Willard was Governor of Indiana.
When it came the turn of John Anderson Copeland, Jr. to be hanged, too short a drop was used. He strangled slowly.
Just before being taken from his cell to the execution field that morning, he had completed a last letter to his family: Charlestown Jail, Va., Dec. 16, ‘59 Dear Father, Mother, Brothers Henry, William and Freddy, and Sisters Sarah and Mary: The last Sabbath with me on earth has passed away. The last Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday that I shall ever see on this earth have now passed by God’s glorious sun, which he has placed in the heavens to illuminate this earth- whose refulgent beams are watched for by this poor invalid, to enter & make as it were in heaven of the room in which he is confined- I have seen declining behind the western mountains for the last time. Last night for the last time, I beheld the soft bright moon as it rose, casting its mellow light into my felons cell, dissipating the darkness and filling it with that soft pleasant light which causes such thrills of joy to all those in like circumstance with myself. This morning for the last time, I beheld the glorious sun of yesterday rising in the far-off East, away off in the country where our Lord Jesus Christ first proclaimed salvation to man, and now as he rises higher and his HDT WHAT? INDEX
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bright light takes the place of the pale, soft moonlight, I will take my pen, for the last time, to write you who are bound to me by those strong ties (yea, the strongest that God ever instituted,) the ties of blood and relationship. I am well, both in body and in mind. And now, dear ones, if it were not that I know your hearts will be filled with sorrow at my fate, I could pass from this earth without a regret. Why should you sorrow? Why should your hearts be racked with grief? Have I not everything to gain and nothing to lose by the change? I fully believe that not only myself but also all three of my poor comrades who are to ascend the same scaffold- (a scaffold already made sacred to the cause of freedom, by the death of that great champion of human freedom, Capt. JOHN BROWN) are prepared to meet our God. I am only leaving a world filled with sorrow and woe to enter one in which there is but one lasting day of happiness and bliss. I feel that God in his mercy has spoken peace to my soul, and that all my numerous sins are now forgiven me. Dear parents, brothers and sisters, it is true that I am now in a few hours to start on a journey from which no traveler returns. Yes, long before this reaches you, I shall as I sincerely hope, have met our brother and sister who have for years been worshiping God around his throne — singing praises to him, and thanking him that he gave his Son to die that they might have eternal life. I pray daily and hourly that I may be fitted to have my home with them, and that you, one and all, may prepare your souls to meet your God, that so, in the end, though we meet no more on earth, we shall meet in Heaven, where we shall not be parted by the demands of the cruel and unjust monster Slavery. But think not that I am complaining, for I feel reconciled to meet my fate. I pray God that his will be done; not mine. Let me tell you that it is not the mere act of having to meet death, which I should regret, (if I should express regret I mean,) but that such an unjust institution should exist as the one which demands my life; and not my life only, but the lives of those to whom my life bears but the relative value of zero to the infinite. I beg of you one and all that you will not grieve about me, but that you will thank God that he spared me time to make my peace with Him. And now, dear ones, attach no blame to anyone for my coming here for not any person but myself is to blame. I have no antipathy against anyone, I have freed my mind of all hard feelings against every living being, and I ask all who have any thing against me to do the same. And now dear parents, Brothers and sisters, I must bid you to serve your God and meet me in heaven. I must with a few words, close my correspondence with those who are the most near and dear to me: but I hope, in the end, we may again commune, never to cease. Dear ones, he who writes this will, in a few hours, be in this world no longer. Yes, these fingers which hold the pen with which this is written will, before to-day’s sun has reached his meridian have laid it aside forever, and this poor soul have taken its flight to meet its God. And now dear ones I must bid HDT WHAT? INDEX
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you that last, long, sad farewell. Good-day, Father, Mother, Henry, William, and Freddy, Sarah and Mary, serve your God and meet me in heaven. Your Son and Brother to eternity, John A. Copeland. OBERLIN COLLEGE Is it that Aaron D. Stevens, and 10 of Captain Brown’s black supporters, having been duly found guilty of treason and murder by a jury of their white male peers, were hanged on this date?
Or is it that the other surrendered survivors of the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Shields Green, and Aaron D. Stevens, having been duly found guilty of treason and murder by a jury of their white male peers, were hanged on this date?16
A monument would be erected by the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio in honor of their three free citizens of color who had died in the raid or been hanged, Shields Green, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., and Lewis Sheridan Leary (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
December 17, Saturday: Oberlin College Professor James Monroe set off from Oberlin, Ohio to retrieve the corpse of John Anderson Copeland, Jr. from Virginia authorities.
Precious opportunity! Lydia Maria Child responded to the indignant letter she had received from the slaveholding wife of Senator James Murray Mason: Wayland, Mass., Dec. 17th, 1859.
Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Prolonged absence from home has prevented my answering your letter so soon as I intended. I have no disposition to retort upon you the “two-fold damnation” to which you consign me. On the Contrary, I sincerely wish you well, both in this world and the next. If the anathema proved a safety valve to your own boiling spirit, it did some good to you, while it fell harmless upon me. Fortunately for all of us, the Heavenly Father rules His universe by laws, which the passions or the prejudices of mortals have no power to change. As for John Brown, his reputation may be safety trusted to the impartial pen of History; and his motives will be righteously judged by Him who knoweth the secrets of all hearts. Men, however great they may be, are of small consequence in comparison with principles; and the principle for which John Brown died is the question issue between us. You refer me to the Bible, from which you quote the favorite text of slaveholders:— “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward.” — 1 PETER, 2:18.
Abolitionists also have favorite texts, to some of which I would
16. In THE CAPTURE AND EXECUTION OF JOHN BROWN: A TALE OF MARTYRDOM, BY ELIJAH AVEY, EYE WITNESS, WITH THIRTY ILLUSTRATIONS, dated 1906, we have on page 45 an assertion that the white men John E. Cook and Edwin Coppoc, and then the black men John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green, were hanged on December 16th, 1859. The reference says that, the gallows being not large enough, the 2 black men Copeland and Green were forced to stand and watch the 2 white men Cook and Coppoc being hanged before themselves ascending the scaffold. But I have from another reference this assertion that it was one surrendered surviving white man, Aaron D. Stevens, who was hanged on the 16th along with 10 black supporters of Captain John Brown, and that Cook actually would be among the last hanged. Which account would be correct — and why is there such a glaring discrepancy between these various accounts?
The book SECRET SIX treats each retreating admission of each of the co-conspirators in treason as if it were holy writ. No attempt has been made to discern, behind this haze of post-facto explanations and justifications, what the brags of these participants might have been had their plot been successful in initiating the race war they contemplated and had this race war been completed, as it would certainly have been completed, by a historic genocide against black Americans. (Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing their slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments.) Also, according to the endmatter, the SECRET SIX study had obtained its material on Frederick Douglass basically from McFeely’s FREDERICK DOUGLASS of 1991, and its material on Thoreau from Sanborn’s HENRY DAVI D THOREAU of 1917, neither of which were the last word on the subject when the book was prepared. In addition, this work provides no reference whatever for the Emerson life: evidently he was simply presumed not to be of even marginal pertinence. There is no consideration to be found anywhere in this volume of the comparison event: the other American struggle for freedom, the one which had taken place in Haiti under General Toussaint Louverture. For these reasons, the study is, fundamentally, incompetent. It is as if O.J. Simpson and his Dream Team had been allowed to control what would appear in our social history texts. Or, it is as if the White House staff had been allowed to define once and for all the extent of President Richard Milhouse Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, with, after their initial defensive testimony, after their establishment of the official consensus “truth,” all explanations accepted at their putative face value — with no further questioning tolerated. SECRET “SIX” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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call your attention:— “Remember those that are in bonds as bound with them.” — HEBREWS 13:3. “Hide the outcasts. Betray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee. Be thou a convert to them from the face of the spoiler.” — ISAIAH 16: 3, 4. “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee where it liketh him best. Thou shalt not oppress him.” — DEUTERONOMY 23: 15, 16. “Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.” — PROVERBS 29: 8,9. “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” — ISAIAH 58: 1. I would especially commend to slaveholders the following portions of that volume, wherein you say God has revealed the duty of masters:— “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” — COLOSSIANS 4:1.
“Neither be ye called masters; for one is your master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.” — MATTHEW 23: 8, 10.
“Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” — MATTHEW 7: 12. “Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?” — ISAIAH 58: 6.
“They have given a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.” — JOEL 3: 3.
“He that oppresseth the poor, reproacheth his Maker.” — PROVERBS 14: 31. “Rob not the poor, because he is poor; neither oppress the afflicted. For the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those who spoiled them.” — PROVERBS 22: 22, 23. “Woe unto him that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” — JEREMIAH 22: 13.
“Let him that stole, steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands.” — EPHESIANS 4: 28. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.” — ISAIAH 10: 1, 2. “If I did despise the cause of my man-servant or my maid-servant, when they contend with me, what then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer Him?” — JOB 31: 13, 14. “Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee; and darkness, that thou canst not see.” — JOB 22: 9, 10, 11.
“Behold, the hire of your laborers, who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourishes your hearts as in a day of slaughter; ye have condemned and killed the just.” — JAMES 5: 4.
If the appropriateness of these texts is not apparent, I will try to make it so, by evidence drawn entirely from Southern sources. The Abolitionists are not such an ignorant set of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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fanatics as you suppose. They know whereof they affirm. They are familiar with the laws of the Slave States, which are alone sufficient to inspire abhorrence in any humane heart or reflecting mind not perverted by the prejudices of education and custom. I might fill many letters with significant extracts from your statue-books; but I have space only to glance at a few, which indicate the leading features of the system you cherish so tenaciously. The universal rule of the slave State is, that “the child follows the condition of its mother.” This is an index to many things. Marriages between white and colored people are forbidden by law; yet a very large number of the slaves are brown or yellow. When Lafayette visited this country in his old age, he said he was very much struck by the great change in the colored population of Virginia; that in the time of the Revolution, nearly all the household slaves were black, but when he returned to America, he found very few of them black. The advertisements in Southern newspapers often describe runaway slaves that “pass themselves for white men.” Sometimes they are described as having straight, light hair blue eyes, and clear complexion.” This could not be, unless their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been white men. But as their mothers were slaves, the law pronounces them slaves, subject to be sold on the auction-block whenever the necessities or convenience of their masters or mistresses required it. The sale of one’s own children, brother, or sisters, has an ugly aspect to those who are unaccustomed to it; and, obviously, it cannot have a good moral influence, that law and custom should render licentiousness a profitable vice. Throughout the Slave States, the testimony of no colored person, bond or free, can be received against a white man. You have some laws, which, on the face of them, would seem to restrain inhuman men from murdering or mutilating slaves; but they are rendered nearly null by the law I have cited. Any drunken master, overseer, or patrol, may go into the negro cabins, and commit what outrages he pleases, with perfect impunity, if no white person is present who chooses to witness against him. North Carolina and Georgia leave a large loophole for escape, even if white persons present, when murder is committed. A law to punish persons for “maliciously killing a slave” has this remarkable qualification: “Always provided that this act shall not extend to any dying of moderate correction.” We at the North find it difficult to understand how moderate punishment can cause death. I have read several of your law books attentively, and I find no cases of punishment for the murder of a slave, except by fines paid to the owner, to indemnify him for the loss of his property: the same as if his horse or cow had been killed. In South Carolina Reports is a case where the State had indicated Guy Raines for the murder of slave Isaac. It was proved that William Gray, the owner of Isaac, had given him a thousand lashes. The poor creature made his escape, but was caught, and delivered to the custody of Raines, to be carried to the county HDT WHAT? INDEX
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jail. Because he refused to go, Raines gave him five hundred lashes, and he died soon after. The counsel for Raines proposed that he should be allowed to acquit himself by his own oath. The Court decided against it, because white witnesses had testified; but the Court of afterward decided he ought to have been exculpated by his own oath, and he was acquitted. Small indeed is the chance for justice to a slave, when his own color are not allowed to testify, if they see him maimed or his children murdered; when he has slaveholders for Judges and Jurors; when the murderer can exculpate himself by his own oath; and when the law provides that it is no murder to kill a slave by “moderate correction”! Your laws uniformly declare that “slave shall be deemed a chattel personal in the hands of his master, to all intents, constrictions, and purposes whatsoever.” This, of course, involves the right to sell his children, as if they were pigs; also, to take his wife from him “for any intent or purpose whatsoever.” Your laws also make it death for him to resist a white man, however brutally he may be treated, or however much his family may be outraged before his eyes. If he attempts to run away, your laws allow any man to shoot him. By your laws, all a slave’s earnings belong to his master. He can neither receive donations or transmit property. If his master allows him some hours to work for himself, and by great energy and perseverance he earns enough to buy his own bones and sinews, his master may make him pay two or three times over, and he has no redress. Three such cases have come within my knowledge. Even a written promise from his master has no legal value, because slave can make no contracts. Your laws also systematically aim at keeping the minds of the colored people in the most abject state of ignorance. If white people attempt to teach them to read or write, they are punished by imprisonment or fines; if they attempt to teach each other, they are punished with from twenty to thirty-nine lashes each. It cannot be said that the anti-slavery agitation produced such laws, for they date much further back; many of them when we were Provinces. They are the necessities of the system, which, being itself an outrage upon human nature, can be sustained only by perpetual outrages. The next reliable source of information is the advertisements in the Southern papers. In the North Carolina (Raleigh) Standard, Mr. Mieajah Ricks advertises, “Runaway, a negro woman and her two children. A few days before went off, I burned her with a hot iron on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.” in the Natchez Courier, Mr. J.P. Ashford advertises a runaway negro girl, with “a good many teeth missing, and the letter A branded on her cheek and forehead.” In the Lexington (Ky.) Observer, Mr. William Overstreet advertises a runaway negro with “his left eye out, scars from a dirk on his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.” I might quote from hundreds of such advertisements, offering rewards for HDT WHAT? INDEX
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runaways, “dead or alive,” and describing them with “ears cut off,” “jaws broken,” scarred by rifle-balls,” &c. Another source of information is afforded by your “Fugitives from Injustice,” with many of whom I have conversed freely. I have seen scars of the whip and marks of the branding-iron, and I have listened to their heart-breaking sobs, while they told of “piccaninnies” torn from their arms and sold. Another source of information is furnished by emancipated slaveholders Sarah Moore Grimké, daughter of the late Judge Grimké, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, testifies as follows: “As I left my native State on account of Slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar. But this cannot be. They come over my memory like gory sceptres, and implore me, with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Saviour, in the name of humanity, for the sake of the slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the Southern prison-house.” She proceeds to describe dreadful tragedies, the actors in which she says were “men and women of the families in South Carolina;” and that their cruelties did not, in the slightest degree, affect their standing in society. Her sister, Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, declared: “While I live, and Slavery lives, I must testify against it. Not merely for the sake of my poor brothers and sisters in bonds; for even were Slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my latest breath.” Among the horrible barbarities she enumerates is the case of a girl thirteen years old, who was flogged to death by her master. She says: “I asked a prominent lawyer, who belonged to one of the first families in the State, whether the murderer of this helpless child could not be indicted, and he coolly replied that the slave was Mr. ----’s property, and if he chose to suffer the loss, no one else had any thing to do with it.” She proceeds to say: “I felt there could be for me no rest in the midst of such outrages and pollutions. Yet I saw nothing of Slavery in its most vulgar and repulsive forms. I saw it in the city, among the fashionable and the honorable, where it was garnished by refinement and decked out for show. It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, but this is a cause worth dying for. I say so from what I have seen, and heard, and known, in a land of Slavery, whereon rest the darkness of Egypt and the sin of Sodom.” I once asked Miss Angelina if she thought Abolitionists exaggerated the horrors of Slavery. She replied, with earnest emphasis: “They cannot be exaggerated. It is impossible for imagination to go beyond the fact.” To a lady who observed that the time had not yet come for agitating the subject, she answered: “I apprehend if thou wert a slave, toiling in the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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fields of Carolina, thou wouldst think the time had fully come.” Mr. Thome, of Kentucky, in the course of his eloquent lectures on this subject, said: “I breathed my first breath in an atmosphere of Slavery. But though I am heir to a slave inheritance, I am bold to denounce the whole system as an outrage, a complication of crimes, and wrongs, and cruelties, that make angels weep.” Mr. Allen of Alabama, in a discussion with the students at Lane Theological Seminary in 1834, had told of a slave who was tied up and beaten all day, with a paddle full of holes. “At night, his flesh was literally pounded to a jelly. The punishment was inflicted within hearing of the Academy and the Public Green. But no one took any notice of it. No one thought any wrong was done. At our house, it is so common to hear screams from a neighboring plantation, that we think nothing of it. Lest any one should think that the slaves are generally well treated, and that the cases I have mentioned are exceptions, let me be distinctly understood that cruelty is the rule, and kindness is the exception.” In the same discussion, a student from Virginia, after relating cases of great cruelty, had related: “Such things are common all over Virginia; at least, so far as I am acquainted. But the planters generally avoid punishing their slaves before strangers.” Miss Mattie Griffith, of Kentucky, whose entire property consisted in slaves, emancipated them all. The noble-hearted girl wrote to me: “I shall go forth into the world penniless; but I shall work with a heart, and, best of all, I shall live with an easy conscience.” Previous to this generous resolution, she had never read any Abolition document, and entertained the common Southern prejudice against them. But her own observation so deeply impressed her with the enormities of Slavery, that she was impelled to publish a book, called “The Autobiography of a Female Slave.” I read it with thrilling interest; but some of the scenes made my nerves quiver so painfully, that told her I hoped they were too highly colored. She shook her head sadly, and replied: “I am sorry to say that every incident in the book has come within my own knowledge.” St. George Tucker, Judge and Professor of Law in Virginia, speaking of the legalized murder of runaways, said: “Such are the cruelties to which a state of Slavery gives birth — such the horrors to which the human mind is capable of being reconciled by its adoption.” Alluding to our struggle in ’76, he said: “While we proclaimed our resolution to live free or die, we imposed on our fellow-men, of different complexion, a Slavery ten thousand times worse than the utmost extremity of the oppressions of which we complained.” Governor Giles, in a Message to the Legislature of Virginia, referring to the custom of selling free colored people into Slavery, as a punishment for offences not capital, said: “Slavery must be admitted to be a punishment of the highest HDT WHAT? INDEX
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order; and, according to the just rule for the apportionment of punishment to crimes, it ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order. The most distressing reflection in the application of this punishment to female offenders, is that it extends to their offspring; and the innocent are thus punished with the guilty.” Yet one hundred and twenty thousand innocent babies in this country are annually subjected to a punishment which your Governor declared “ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order.” Jefferson said: “One day of American Slavery is worse than a thousand years of that which we rose in arms to oppose.” Alluding to insurrections, he said: “The Almighty has no attribute that can take side with us in such a contest.” John Randolph declared: “Every planter is a sentinel at his own door. Every Southern mother, when she hears an alarm of fire in the night, instinctively presses her infant closer to her bosom.” Looking at the system of slavery in the light of all this evidence, do you candidly think we deserve “two-fold damnation” for detesting it? Can you not believe that we may hate the system, and yet be truly your friends? I make allowance for the excited state of your mind, and for the prejudices induced by education. I so not care to change your opinion of me; but I so wish you could be persuaded to examine this subject dispassionately, for the sake of the prosperity of Virginia, and the welfare of unborn generations, both white and colored. For thirty years, Abolitionists have been trying to reason with slaveholders, through the press, and in the halls of Congress. Their efforts, though directed to the masters only, have been met with violence and abuse almost equal to that poured on head of John Brown. Yet surely we, as a portion of the Union, involved in the expense, the degeneracy, the danger, and the disgrace, of the iniquitous and fatal system, have a right to speak about it, and a right to be heard also. At the North, we willingly publish pro-slavery arguments, and ask only a fair field and no favor for the other side. But you will not even allow your own citizens a chance to examine this important subject. Your letter to me is published in Northern papers, as well as Southern; my reply will not be allowed to appear in any Southern paper. The despotic measures you take to silence investigation, and shut out the light from your own white population, prove how little reliance you have on the strength of your cause. In this enlightened age, all despotisms ought to come to an end by the agency of moral and rational means. But if they resist such agencies, it is in the order of Providence that they must come to an end by violence. History is full of such lessons. Would that the evil of prejudice could be removed from your eyes. If you would candidly examine the statements of Governor Hincks of the British West Indies, and of the Rev. Mr. Bleby, long time a Missionary in those Islands, both before and after emancipation, you could not fail to be convinced that Cash is a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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more powerful incentive to labor than the Lash, and far safer also. One fact in relation to those Islands is very significant. While the working people were slaves, it was always necessary to order out the military during the Christmas holidays; but since emancipation, not a soldier is to be seen. A hundred John Browns might land there, without exciting the slightest alarm. To the personal questions you ask me, I will reply in the name of all the women of New England. It would be extremely difficult to find any woman in our villages who does not sew for the poor, and watch with the sick, whenever occasion requires. We pay our domestic generous wages, with which they can purchase as many Christmas gown as they please; a process far better for their characters, as well as our own, than to receive their clothing as a charity, after being deprived of just payment for their labor. I have never known an instance where the “pangs of maternity” did not meet with requisite assistance; and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies. I readily believe what you state concerning the kindness of many Virginia matrons. It is creditable to their hearts: but after all, the best that can be done in that way is a poor equivalent for the perpetual wrong done to the slaves, and the terrible liabilities to which they are always subject. Kind masters and mistresses among you are merely lucky accidents. If any one chooses to be a brutal despot, your laws and customs give him complete power to do so. And the lot of those slaves who have the kindest masters is exceedingly precarious. In case of death, or pecuniary difficulties, or marriages in the family, they may at any time be suddenly transferred from protection and indulgence to personal degradation, or extreme severity; and if they should try to escape from such sufferings, any body is authorized to shoot them down like dogs. With regard to your declaration that “no Southerner ought henceforth to read a line of my composition,” I reply that I have great satisfaction in the consciousness of having nothing to loose in that quarter. Twenty-seven years ago, I published a book called “An Appeal in behalf of that class of Americans called Africans.” It influenced the minds of several young men, afterward conspicuous in public life, through whose agency the cause was better served than it could have been by me. From that time to this, I have labored too earnestly for the slave to be agreeable to slaveholders. Literary popularity was never a paramount object with me, even in my youth; and, now that I am old, I am utterly indifferent to it. But, if I cared for the exclusion you threaten I should at least have the consolation of being exiled with honorable company. Dr. Channing’s writings, mild and candid as they are, breathe what you would call arrant treason. William C. Bryant, in his capacity of editor, is openly on our side. The inspired muse of Whittier has incessantly sounded the trumpet for moral warfare with your iniquitous institution; and his stirring tones have been answered, more or HDT WHAT? INDEX
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less loudly, by Pierpont, Lowell, and Longfellow. Emerson, the Plato of America, leaves the scholastic seclusion he love so well, and disliking noise with all his poetic soul, bravely takes his stand among the trumpeters. George W. Curtis, the brilliant wealth of his talent on the altar of Freedom, and makes common cause with rough-shod reformers. The genius of Mrs. Stowe carried the outworks of your institution at one dash, and left the citadel open to besiegers, who are pouring in amain. In the church, on the ultra-liberal side, it is assailed by the powerful battering-ram of Theodore Parker’s eloquence. On the extreme orthodox side is set a huge fire, kindled by the burning words of Dr. [George Barrell?] Cheever. Between them is Henry Ward Beecher, sending a shower of keen arrows into your entrenchments; and with him ride a troop of sharp-shooters from all sects. If you turn to the literature of England or France, you will find your institution treated with as little favor. The fact is, the whole civilized world proclaims Slavery an outlaw, and the best intellect of the age is active in hunting it down. L. MARIA CHILD. THE TOUCHSTONE. BY WILLIAM ALLENGHAME. A man there came, whence none could tell, Bearing a touchstone in his hand, And tested all things in the land By its unerring spell. A thousand transformations rose, From fair to foul, from foul to fair; The golden crown he did not share, Nor scorn the beggar’s clothes. Of heirloom jewels, prized so much, Were many changed to chips and clods, And even statues of the gods Crumbled beneath its touch. Then angrily the people cried, “The loss outweighs the profit far, Our goods suffice us as they are, We will not have them tried.” But since they could not so avail To check his unrelenting quest, They seized him, saying, “Let him test How real is our jail.” But though they slew him with their swords, And in the fire the touchstone burned, Its doings could not be o’erturned, Its undoings restored. And when, to stop all future harm, They strewed his ashes to the breeze, They little guessed each grain of these Conveyed the perfect charm. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
After escaping from the raid on Harpers Ferry Barclay Coppoc appeared on this day at the family home in Cedar County, Iowa. A most unusual situation developed there: despite its Quaker status, during his presence the Coppoc house would be surrounded at night by men waiting in the dark with firearms, to protect him in his rest if the occasion arose, from capture by federal agents!
On March 6, 1857 Edwin Coppoc had been disowned by the Red Cedar Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in the West Branch/Springdale area. During April 1857 Barclay Coppoc had been disciplined by the Quakers for using profane language and for striking a man in anger. Several months after his return from Harpers Ferry, Barclay Coppoc would be disowned for absenting himself from meetings for worship and for bearing arms. The following is from chapters entitled “The Iowa Quakers and the Negroes” and “The Springdale Quakers and Old John Brown” in Louis Thomas Jones’s THE QUAKERS OF IOWA (Iowa City: Iowa State Historical Society, 1914, pages 195-7): Haggard and worn with his long flight, with a price upon his head, and hunted by an official with a requisition from Governor Wise of Virginia upon Governor Kirkwood of Iowa for his immediate rendition to justice, Barclay Coppoc reached his home in Iowa on December 17th [1859]. On the day before, his brother Edwin, loaded with chains and shackles, had yielded up his life upon a Virginia scaffold. Thus the mother’s parting prophecy had been fulfilled. [According to this source, when the two departed the mother had said to them: “When you get the halters around your necks, will you think of me?”] For the sake of accurate history, it now seems necessary to make plain the real relation which the much-eulogized Coppoc boys bore to the Society of Friends at the time of the events in question. Early in life both of the boys developed wayward tendencies, discomfiting to their mother and to the church. Edwin took to dancing, and though repeatedly dealt with in the “spirit of restoring love” by the Monthly Meeting, he spurned all advice, refused to “condemn his course,” and was in consequence duly disowned from membership in the Society on March 6, 1857. Barclay, also, about the same time gave the Springdale Friends grave concern. Fresh from the stirring scenes in Kansas, he had engaged in a fight soon after reaching home, and a month after his brother’s disownment the complaint was entered on the records of the Monthly Meeting that “Barclay Coppoc has used profane language, and struck a man in anger.” “Coppoc gave the proper satisfaction for this first offense. and the meeting “passed it by.” But immediately upon his return from Harpers Ferry his conduct called for new attention. With the officers close upon his heels Coppoc sought his home in Cedar County; and upon his arrival there a large number of the young men in the vicinity united as a military guard to prevent his capture, while he himself went heavily armed. His presence of course attracted wide attention, and the Overseers of the Preparative Meeting called upon him. Action was made to the [Red Cedar] Monthly Meeting that “Barclay Coppoc has neglected attendance at our religious meetings & is in the practice of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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bearing arms.” The usual care was extended to him, but with no avail. Two months later Barclay, like his brother, was formally disowned; and thus came to a close this interesting episode in the history of the Iowa Friends.
Shortly before Christmas: Having been excused from having to respond to the summons of the Special Investigatory Committee of the US Senate headed by Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia on the grounds of illness, Gerrit Smith was able to be released from the insane asylum in which he had found refuge:17 All the members of the Secret “Six”, Thomas Wentworth Higginson included, must have breathed a sigh of relief when Smith was finally not required to appear. Smith and the committee would not have been a good combination. Smith knew as much about John Brown’s plans as anyone. On his best day, without undue pressure, he was loudly self-righteous, hotheaded, unstable, and unpredictable. He could lose his demeanor quite easily. Cool heads, such as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and George Luther Stearns, would fare better and reveal less under the unimaginative questioning of the committee. Armed with what Smith might have given away, the committee’s questions for Howe and Stearns might have been that much more targeted.
17. Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the principal inquisitorial agent of this committee, was livid, since he was convinced with good reason that this rich man would have been the key to uncovering the extent of the treasonous Secret “Six” conspiracy to create race war in America. Very likely cooler heads in Washington were bearing in mind that they really didn’t want to find out the true extent of this conspiracy, since it was perfectly likely that any number of members of the federal government had been privy to it from its very inception. What was needed was the pretense of an investigation, with a likelihood of no great success. Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing his slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1860
January 11, Wednesday: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. sailed off across the Pacific Ocean, bound for the Orient.
AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: On the morning of the 11th January, 1860, I passed, for the eighth time, through the Golden Gate, on my way across the delightful Pacific to the Oriental world, with its civilization three thousand years older than that I was leaving behind. As the shores of California faded in the distance, and the summits of the Coast Range sank under the blue horizon, I bade farewell– yes, I do not doubt, forever– to those scenes which, however changed or unchanged, must always possess an ineffable interest for me. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Senator James Murray Mason’s committee to investigate the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry issued summonses for the Secret “Six” conspirators Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and Gerrit Smith. A summons for their co-conspirator George Luther Stearns was overlooked but would follow in due course. The committee would learn that Stearns and Dr. Howe, like Boston attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr., had fled to California, but eventually the Reverend Stearns would appear and testify that he believed John Brown to be the representative man of this century as George Washington had been of the previous one.
On this date Bronson Alcott made the following entry in his journal: Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Wasson, Sanborn, and Hawthorn, which comes to 7 persons. Opened once a week for conversations, without form, and from 7 to 10 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in the evening, at private houses. WALDO EMERSON HENRY THOREAU ELLERY CHANNING NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR JANUARY 11th]
February: In a course of lectures on the “Social Destiny of Man” delivered at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Dr. Albert T. Bledsoe, professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and a published proslavery ideologue, critiqued the excessive individualism of abolitionists as constituting a threat to the Union and projected that secession might be expected as the result of their efforts.
Iowa Representative Samuel Curtis introduced a bill that would pass the House of Representatives, to fund a Transcontinental Railway, but which could not be reconciled with its Senate version due to opposition from the southern states, such as by Senator James Murray Mason, that would insist on a more southerly route, one closer to the 42d parallel. (The Iowa representative would try again in 1861, and again fail due to Southern intransigence; however, once the southern politicians had abandoned their seats in the federal government, the House of Representatives would approve the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 on May 6th, 1862, the federal Senate would approve it on June 20th, 1862, and President Abraham Lincoln would sign it into law on July 1st, 1862.)
At about this time John Brown, Jr., James Redpath, Thaddeus Hyatt, and Lewis Hayden were being summoned before Senator James Murray Mason’s special investigatory committee of the US Senate to be interrogated about the details of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, and Brown, Jr., in hiding in Ohio, was refusing to respond. When the committee was made aware that they had summoned a person of color to incriminate himself before them, they backtracked and rescinded their warrant on Hayden,18 and warrants were made out only in the names of Brown, Jr., Redpath, and Hyatt. Of these, only Hyatt would actually come before the committee in chains, and he, upon refusing to testify, would be remanded to the District of Columbia’s prison.
John C. Rutherfoord, a legislator from Virginia, ventured to mention the explicit linkage which was being made between the Secret “Six” supporters of Northern white abolitionists such as John Brown and the
18. This would count as another of the many evidences that the business of the committee was the suppression of information as to the nature of the conspiracy, rather than any public disclosure of its real extent or purpose. Had they been intent on finding out anything, when they discovered that Hayden was a black man they would have had him tortured to death! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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supporters of Southern white abolitionist racists such as Hinton Rowan Helper, by referring to them in a pot category “admirers of Brown and endorsers of Helper.” The author of the incendiary THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, which offered a commonality of interest between the poor white man of the North and the poor white man of the South against the interests of the rich white man of the South with his substantial investment in his African chattels, was perhaps the most dangerous man, from their point of view, in our nation — more dangerous by far than any mere deluded idealist such as Brown could ever hope to become.
Helper had, of course, fled his native South to avoid assassination by indignant rich white men, seeking the shelter afforded by New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Henry Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” and “The Martyrdom of John Brown” were published in James Redpath, ed., ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY. Clearly, Henry was attempting to find some way to spin the treason situation by reconstructing Captain Brown as a sort of hero of civil disobedience along the lines of Sir Thomas More or Friend Mary Dyer: HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
As a person who reprocesses Thoreau materials, and as a Quaker adherent of the Peace Testimony, I am frequently asked how it is that I am able to pardon Henry for his defense of Brown. I've needed to give that issue long and hard thought, because I really do think of people such as Captain Brown, and Lord Protector Cromwell, as having been Al-Queda types, which is to say, pure and simple, that they had been terrorists. And nevertheless I really do look up to Henry David Thoreau, and admire his attitudes as well as his work product.
The answer I have found that satisfies me, lies in a careful consideration of the situation in which the white abolitionists found themselves after the raid on the federal arsenal. Proslavery Americans were of course in a fury, and were in the process of taking their vengeance upon the survivors of the action. It was a moment in which the entire American antislavery movement was at risk of being generally considered to be in disgrace – is this, this, what “being antislavery” amounts to? –Are these people willing to risk servile insurrection, and butchery? –Is an abolitionist the same as a fool? –Is an abolitionist the same as a terrorist? That 1859 situation cried out for spin control, which was, I suggest, what Thoreau, in his “A Plea for Captain Brown,” attempted to provide. His was a salvage operation, but it was not an attempt to salvage terrorism but an attempt to salvage an upright cause: it was a continuation of the righteous attempt to bring the peculiar institution of race slavery in the United States of America to its quietus.
After Captain John Brown had gone off on this raid of his, it hadn’t been a perfect situation — and, in an imperfect situation, none of the alternative attitudes which a concerned individual can embrace are going to be perfect ones. However, the most imperfect attitude of all would have been an attitude of surrender to the righteousness of proslavery — surrender to the righteousness of proslavery was the one thing that the abolitionists simply could not and would not and should not commit — and that was the condition under which our Henry stepped to the fore.
ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)
Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
February 16, Thursday: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” conspiracy was reported to Senator James Murray Mason’s special investigatory committee of the US Senate as a contumacious witness, and his arrest was voted.19
This is the day on which Luke Fisher Parsons would later choose to establish his claim, of being one of the earlier settlers at Salina, Kansas. Parsons continued in his diary: February 16, 1860: Left Chapman’s Creek and did not get any dinner. Crossed the Solomon at the mouth. Arrived at the mouth of the Saline just after dark. Mrs. Link’s cabin was in sight. Called, but could make no one hear. So I asked myself to stay all night. Stood up against a big cottonwood tree in the rain all night. I had a wet, cold and hungry time. February 17, 1860: When it got daylight, I went up the Saline and found a fallen tree and crossed over on it until I reached the branches which were near the bank. Saw that I would have to make a jump for the bank. Did not jump far enough so landed in the water up to my waist. My boots were full and I had to take them off and pour the water out. I then walked on to Salina. Mrs. Campbell gave me the first I had to eat since yesterday morning. February 18, 1860: Feet so sore and swollen that I could not get my boots on. Bought a pair of Indian moccasins. Went up south to raise log house for Alverson. Had pork and beans and corn bread and honey for dinner. February 19, 1860: Sunday. Had a Prayer Meeting here today. Attendance consisted of one woman and eleven men. Mr. H.L. Jones of Topeka arrived today. February 20, 1860: Stuck my stake on the prettiest prairie claim that I ever saw lying just north of town. Two of the boys went on a wolf hunt. H.H. Morrison shot two prairie chickens. February 21, 1860: Sim Garlitz and Morrison went up the Smoky about ten miles to make rails. Jones’s other two men came. Helped them across the ferry. (Where Iron Avenue bridge is now). February 22, 1860: Wind blew very hard last night. Snowing today, turning cold. The boys that are hunting and making rails will have a hard time. February 23, 1860: Put a foundation on my claim. Jim Muir and Joe Crowthers came home last night. Some talk about sheriff. Asked me if I would serve, if elected. February 24, 1860: I arrived here in Salina one week ago today. Jones shot a wild turkey. I saw a large white wolf and started after him, but he got away from me. Jones took a claim above here. There is only one woman on the town sight. (Mrs. Campbell).
19. Hearing of this, Sanborn would escape to safety in Canada by way of North Elba (also known as Timbukto, no longer in existence but was near Lake Placid), where he would remain until assured by Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar that the flap was over and that he was no longer in danger of arrest (Hoar would prove to be quite mistaken, of course). HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
February 25, 1860: James Muir and I rode up the Smoky eight or ten miles to see the boys who are making rails up there. They had just killed a turkey. February 26, 1860: There are several buffalo carcasses lying in town – two Indian graves. They strangled a pony over the grave of one. (this was an Indian custom). (These graves were located between Ash and Iron on Fifth Street.) February 27, 1860: Worked all day for David Phillips at carpentering. Jones laid foundation on claim for his father. February 28, 1860: My hands are very sore from hewing logs for two days. Jones and two of his men started for Topeka, expecting to be back in fourteen days. I subscribed for the “State Record” published in Topeka. February 29, 1860: This is the most western settlement on the Smoky. Talked of running a raft down to Kansas Falls. Can hear the wolves howl continually every night. March 1, 1860: Only on chisel in town. Saw some sand hill cranes. March 2, 1860: Thompson came for his cattle. This morning an old man crossed the Smoky, having spent most of the night on the other side. March 3, 1860: Gave Bob Crawford $1.00 to buy Osage Orange seed at Kansas City. James Muir is to raise them for half. March 5, 1860: A.C. Spillman and Joe Crowthers went up the Smoky after shingle blocks. March 7, 1860: Finished putting up studding and commenced making window frames for David Phillips. March 9, 1860: Got a tree to make a canoe. Had to stop to work for A.M. Campbell. March 10, 1860: Shaved shingles. David sowed some wheat. Thompson from the upper Saline was here and said they had killed over a hundred wolves. March 11, 1860: Sunday. Warm and pleasant. I am sitting on the bank of Dry Creek, looking at three large cranes or pelicans in a slough. March 12, 1860: David and Hugh Morrison went up on the Mulberry after house lumber. Alverson started upon an expedition west to be gone three weeks. Holtsman and Ed Johnson put foundation on lots. Mrs. Sharp was here on a visit. March 13, 1860: Finished shingling. Simeon Garlitz and I talk of building a carpenter shop in company. March 14, 1860: Hugh and David got home from Mulberry. Our principal diet is cornbread and buffalo meat. Mush and molasses for a change. March 15, 1860: Worked on carpenter shop. I offered James my HDT WHAT? INDEX
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watch for the bay mare. March 16, 1860: I went with two yoke of wild oxen up the Smoky after house timbers. The oxen ran away with me. Jones arrived here with his wife. Campbell moved into his new house. March 18, 1860: Spillman and I went over to the stone mound and saw the Indian graves. (Location of mound is now Fifth Street between Iron Avenue and Ash Street). March 20, 1860: Stuck the corner of the adz in my knee. I am afraid it will make it stiff. March 21, 1860: Did not work. My knee is very sore. March 22, 1860: Simeon and I went up the Smoky above Holtsman’s after board timber. On our way home we forded below town. Simeon had to get into the water to drive the oxen. March 23, 1860: Bob Crawford came home. Brought letters and papers. My trunk and tools came. March 24, 1860: Raised Sim’s house. March 25, 1860: Sunday. My knee does not feel as well as yesterday. Jones asked two of us boys to dinner. Jones says I have the prettiest claim in this valley. March 28, 1860: W.W. Morrison and son Andrew came. They have an ox that has the mad itch. Jones horse ran away with him and broke his wagon. March 29, 1860: I went up the river after shingles,and Morrison’s ox died. Mrs. Colonel Phillips and brother Maxwell came tonight. April 2, 1860: Raised Israel Markery’s house. All the boys have gone down the Saline to fish. David and Maxwell have gone upon the Mulberry. April 3, 1860: The boys returned from Mulberry and they had killed three geese and got some black walnut and shingle timber. Two Delaware Indians passed here on their way down the river. Have been trapping. April 4, 1860: We found two large wolves. I skinned them. Campbell caught a catfish. April 5, 1860: Finished Sim’s shop. Israel is very anxious that we should go to work for him. We set some shavings afire near the shop and came near burning it up. April 6, 1860: Started out on a buffalo hunt. Simeon and I from Holtsman’s. Saw some buffalo soon after we crossed the Mulberry, but did not stop. Found some about five miles east of Elkhorn. April 7, 1860: We camped on the Elkhorn. Buffalo in sight. I shot an antelope. April 8, 1860: Sunday. Left Elkhorn about sunrise for home. Saw several droves of buffalo, but could not get a shot. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
April 9, 1860: Working for Jones. He boards me. Mended the broken wagon. My knee is very sore. Got Topeka papers. April 11, 1860: People from several families from Georgia passed through here for Pikes Peak. We sold them some corn at thirty- five cents a bushel. Three families arrived here. They have some pretty good stock. April 13, 1860: Worked for David Phillips. Put on black walnut siding on his house. Some men came here hunting. They patronized the bachelor’s shack. (Where corner of 5th Street and Iron Ave. is now). April 14, 1860: Worked for Campbell. Robert and James had brothers come this evening. April 16, 1860: Jones’ uncle came from Council Grove. April 17, 1860: A. Ally came up. The boys started out on a buffalo hunt. April 18, 1860: Ed Johnston and Tom White went up the river after board timber. April 19, 1860: Some of the boys went to fix Gypsum Creek ford. April 21, 1860: Markery sold his house to Jones for $200.00. Today witnesses the advent of a young lady in our town – Miss Abby Wilcox. Jefferson, his father, mother and brother came and they report more families on the way. April 22, 1860: Sunday. Had a talk with Miss Abby. The boys have a fit of singing on tonight. April 23, 1860: I worked for Jones. The two Joneses started for Junction City. W.A. Phillips came tonight. I got a letter from Lizzie Lehman containing her brother’s miniature. It looks very much like him. Jones returned from Junction. A.A. Morrison arrived with his family. April 25, 1860: Worked for W.A. Phillips. Went with him about nine miles up Gypsum Creek to get studding. Camped there all night. Ph8illips hired Jim Muir at $18.00 a month. April 26, 1860: Afternoon Phillips took a load of studding home and is to come back and bring me some provisions. I am now sitting by a camp fire tired and hungry, waiting for my supper. April 27, 1860: David Phillips came and brought me some grub. April 28, 1860: Came home a little before night. Jones has begun digging a well. April 29, 1860: Sunday. Put on my best clothes as most of the boys have some new ones. Went to Meeting. Went to Jones’ in the evening. April 30, 1860: Working for Phillips. Phillips got corner posts. The boys planted corn. I loaned Abby “The Life of John Brown.” Jones hauled some stone to wall up his well. The women went with HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
him. May 1, 1860: Two preachers from Lawrence came today to organize a church – to create discord and trouble. After this one sect will be quarreling with the other.
Feb. 16. 2 P.M. — To Walden. A snow-storm, which began in the night,—and is now three or four inches deep. The ground, which was more than half bare before, is thus suddenly concealed, and the snow lodges on the trees and fences and sides of houses, and we have a perfect wintry scene again. We hear that it stormed at Philadelphia yesterday morning. As I [look] toward the woods beyond the poorhouse, I see how the trees, especially apple trees, are suddenly brought out relieved against the snow, black on white, every twig as distinct as if it were a pen-and-ink drawing the size of nature. The snow being spread for a background, while the storm still raging confines your view to near objects, each apple tree is distinctly outlined against it. Suddenly, too, where of late all was tawny-brown in pastures I see a soft snowy field with the pale-brown lecheas just peeping out of it. It is a moist and starry snow, lodging on trees,— leaf, bough, and trunk. The pines are well laden with it. How handsome, though wintry, the side of a high pine wood, well grayed with the snow that has lodged on it, and the smaller pitch pines converted into marble or alabaster with their lowered plumes like rams’ heads!
The character of the wood-paths is wholly changed by the new-fallen snow. Not only all tracks are concealed, but, the pines drooping over it and half concealing or filling it, it is merely a long chink or winding open space between the trees. This snow, as I have often noticed before, is composed of stars and other crystals with a very fine cotton intermixed. It lodges and rests softly on the horizontal limbs of oaks and pines. On the fruit and dry leafets (?) of the alders that slant over the pond it is in the form of little cones two inches high, making them snowball plants. So many little crystalline wheels packed in cotton. When we descend on to Goose Pond we find that the snow rests more thickly on the numerous zigzag and horizontal branches of the high blueberries that bend over it than on any deciduous shrub or tree, producing a very handsome snowy maze, and can thus distinguish this shrub, by the manner in which the snow lies on it, quite across the pond. It is remarkable also how very distinct and white every plane surface, as the rocks which lie here and there amid the blueberries or higher on the bank,—a place where no twig or weed rises to interrupt the pure white impression. In fact, this crystalline snow lies up so light and downy that it evidently admits more light than usual, and the surface is more white and glowing for it. It is semitransparent. This is especially the case with the snow lying upon rocks or musquash-houses, which is elevated and brought between you and the light. It is partially transparent, like alabaster. Also all the birds’ nests in the blueberry bushes are revealed, by the great snow-balls they hold. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
March 6, Tuesday: Senator James Murray Mason, chairman of the special Harpers Ferry / Secret “Six” committee, lost patience and had Thaddeus Hyatt arrested by the Senate Sergeant at Arms and brought before the body of the Senate. The Senate demanded to know why Hyatt had ignored the subpoena and whether Hyatt would now submit to the special committee.
Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke on slavery in New Haven, Connecticut. In the course of this speech, always eager to display his humble roots to the American voters, the tall candidate posed a rhetorical question “What is the true condition of the laborer?” which enabled him to indulge in this penchant: “When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.” Maybe he was merely someone else’s hired laborer “this year” but he could look forward to being his own boss “the next” and, eventually, due to our remarkable system of initiative, obtain persons of lesser initiative “to work for him.” This pyramid scheme the goal of which is alienating oneself from labor he presented as “the true system” for the generation of wealth. For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us - and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere - all of us wish this question settled - wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object.... If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought Slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? ABOLITIONISM
March 6. 3 P. M. 44°. Fair and springlike, i. e. rather still for March, with some raw wind. Pleasant in sun. Going by Messer’s, I hear the well-known note and see a flock of F. hyemalis flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground, by the roadside, showing their two white tail-feathers. They are more fearless than the song sparrow. These attract notice by their numbers and incessant twittering in a social manner. The linarias have been the most numerous birds the past winter. Mr. Stacy tells me that the flies buzzed about him as he was splitting wood in his yard to-day. I can scarcely see a heel of a snow-drift from my window. Jonas Melvin says he saw hundreds of “speckled” turtles out on the banks to-day in a voyage to Billerica for musquash. Also saw gulls. Sheldrakes and black ducks are the only ones he has seen this year. They are fishing on Flint’s Pond to-day, but find it hard to get on and off. C. hears the nuthatch. Jonas Melvin says that he shot a sheldrake in the river late last December. A still and mild moonlight night and people walking about the streets. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
April 3, Tuesday: Frederik van Eeden was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands.
Pony Express service began, crossing northeastern Kansas. Giddyup!
On assurances by Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar that the John Brown flap was over and that he was no longer in danger of arrest by Senator James Murray Mason’s special investigatory committee of the US Senate, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” conspiracy had returned to Concord, Massachusetts. Hoar proved to be quite mistaken as on this day US marshals appeared in Concord with a warrant for this conspirator’s arrest. As Sanborn would later recount the incident, a police sergeant who knew that he had come back home from exile in Canada took four men and went that night to his home in Concord:20
An attempt was made to drag me in irons from my house here to Washington. This was on the night of 3 April 1860. On the next day, having been released from these wretches by my neighbors who acted under the laws of Massachusetts as a sheriff’s posse to enforce a writ of habeas corpus issued by Judge Hoar, I appeared before the Supreme Court of this Commonwealth, and was declared at liberty to go where I pleased. I went home to my ordinary way of life, and was not further molested by Mason or Davis.
Senator James Mason would comment in regard to this altercation that Sanborn, already in handcuffs, had been rescued by “a tumultuous body of people, whom I call a mob.” Anna Maria Whiting in particular, bless her, got really physical during the struggle, fending off the deputies with a cane: Annie Whiting got into the kidnapper’s carriage so that they could not put Sanborn in. One grabbed her and said, Get out. I won’t, said Annie. I’ll tear your clothes. Tear away, they said. We’ll whip up the horses and make them run away if you don’t get out. So let them run to the devil, I won’t stir. She didn’t budge until it was all over. Sanborn’s schoolboys rushed about like heroes. After so long an interval, with no effort at arresting me, I had fairly concluded the Senate officials had given up their idea of taking me to Washington. This they would have done, had they been wise. But on the evening of April 3rd, after I had been out making calls in the village of Concord, and was sitting quietly in my study on the first floor, after nine o’clock, my door-bell rang. Julia had gone to bed. Sarah was in her room. Without anticipating any harm, I went down into the front hall in my robe and answered the bell. A young man presented himself, and handed me a note, which I stepped back to read by the light of the hall lamp. It said the bearer was a person deserving charity. When I looked up from reading the note, four men had entered my hall. One of them came forward and layed his hand on me, saying, I arrest you. I said, By what authority? If you have a warrant read it, for I will not go with you unless you show
20. This illustration “Arrest and Rescue of Frank B. Sanborn, Esq., at Concord, Massachusetts, on the Night of April 3, 1860” is courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
your warrant. He began to read the order of the Senate for my arrest. Sarah, who had feared, as I did not, what this visit meant, now rushed down the stairs, opened the other door of the hall, and began to cry out to the neighbors. Seeing they were likely to be interrupted in their mission, my five callers slipped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists and forced me from the house. I was young and strong and I resented this indignity. They had to lift me and carry me to the door, where my sister stood, screaming. I braced my feet against the doorposts and delayed them. I did the same at the posts of the veranda. The church bells were ringing a fire alarm, the people were gathering by tens. I braced my feet against the stone posts of the gateway, checking their progress once more. When the four rascals lifted me to insert me, feet foremost, in their covered hack, an anxious driver on the box, I braced myself against the sides of the carriage door and broke them in. They then realized it was my unfettered feet that made all this trouble, so one of the four grasped my feet and brought them together, so that I could no longer use them in resistance. They got me into the hack only as far as my knees, when my sister, darting forward, grasped the long beard of my footman and pulled with so much force he lost his grasp. My feet felt the ground again, outside the carriage. A great crowd had collected, among them Colonel Whiting and his daughter Annie. With his stout cane, the Colonel began to beat the horses. My bearers were left a rod or two behind the hack into which they had not been able to force me. Still they held me, hatless and in my evening slippers, in the street in front of my house. At that moment, my counsel, J.S. Keyes, appeared by my side, asking if I petitioned for a writ of Habeas Corpus. By all means, I told him. Keyes hurried over to Judge Hoar’s house. Hearing the tumult, and suspecting what it was, he had already begun filling out a writ of personal replevin. In less than ten minutes, the writ was in the hands of Concord’s deputy sheriff, John Moore, who made the formal demand on my captors to surrender their prisoner. Stupidly, they refused. So the sheriff called on the 150 men and women present to act as his posse comitatus, which some twenty of the men gladly did, and I was forcibly snatched from senatorial custody. At the same time, my Irish neighbors rushed upon them and forced them to take to their broken carriage, and make off toward Lexington, the way they had come. They were pursued by twenty or thirty of my townsmen, some of them as far as Lexington. I was committed to the custody of Captain George L. Prescott, and spent the night in his house, armed, for my better defense, with a six-shooter, which Mr. Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape and then chairman of the Selectmen, had insisted I should take. I slept peacefully all the rest of that night. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
After Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar had issued his writ and the marshals had gone away, arrangements were made for Sanborn to hide for the rest of the night with a pistol at Captain George L. Prescott’s home, while Henry Thoreau spent the rest of the night at Sanborn’s home so his sister Sarah E. Sanborn would not be alone.
Louisa May Alcott would record: “Sanborn was nearly kidnapped for being a friend of John Brown; but his sister rescued him when he was handcuffed, and the scamps drove off. A meeting and general flurry.”
Here is John Shepard Keyes’s account of the incident: Sanborn had I never doubted full knowledge of his plans, and Concord subscriptions had helped his cause without however knowing its purpose. So that when Mason of Virginia began in the U.S. Senate the investigation Sanborn was summoned to testify. He was afraid and unwilling to trust himself in Washington and refused to attend. He consulted with me, and I had a correspondence with Mason on the subject endeavoring to induce the comtee to take his deposition here. I think that was one object I had in going to Washington myself but do not recall any interview with Mason. At length the U.S. Marshal made the HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
attempt to take Sanborn and carry him off as a witness. I was sitting quietly in my house of a moonlight evening when Grace Mitchell one of Sanborns scholars came wildly rushing in with the news that they were carrying him off. I ran to his house next to the high school house to find him handcuffed in the carry all with the 3 depy marshals holding him, and an excited crowd of 30 men & women holding the horse and stopping the road in front. Sanborn terribly excited, and waving frantically his manacles and calling for help and rescue I enquired of the officers who recognized me their purpose and authority which they gave and then telling the crowd to detain them till I got back, rushed off to Judge Hoar’s house where I found him quietly smoking in his library to which the cries and shouts of the scene almost penetrated. I applied to him for a writ of Habeas Corpus for Sanborn and as soon as he understood the matter he granted it. I writing the petition therefore while he filled out the writ. Armed with this I hastened back to find the crowd swelled to a mob of hundreds, in which some Democrats had mingled trying to take the part of the officers, and getting roughly handled for so doing. Shouting for my old deputy Capt Moore, the crowd gave way he came forward served the writ by taking Sanborn from the wagon and releasing him from the officers and the handcuffs. They who were thoroughly alarmed for their safety, gladly drove off after hearing the writ saluted with a parting volley of stones & groans and when the town clerk had shoved the collector Col Holbrook into the gutter as the fit place for his pro slavery remarks, the women helped Sanborn to his house, the men walked off and when I got through a short consultation with him, and turned homeward Concord street were quiet and the excitement over save that Rufus Hosmer had fallen dead of heart disease in the tumult that had been going on there. My coolness and legal instinct alone prevented a dreadful row. Carleton & Freeman & Coolidge the officers were armed, and but for my prompt interference would have made sad work and a terrible result, instead of the quiet surrender I brought about by means of the writ. It was the best instance of presence of mind I can recall in my whole experience! Byron like, I woke the next morning to find the newspapers full of the encoutre and myself famous for my interposition. In the excited state of feeling over slavery and the John Brown invasion, it was almost a declaration of war. I appeared before the Supreme Court hastily collected in full bench with Gov. Andrew as senior counsel for Sanborn while the Marshal with the U.S. District Atty was on the other side. The Court House was crammed the excitement red hot, I suggested the point when the warrant was produced under which the officers were acting that as it was addressed only to the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, he could not deputize his authority to a bailiff for want of any such direction in the warrant and therefore the service by such bailiff was utterly void and nugatory, and cited the decision of our Supreme Court to that effect in the case of a writ directed to a sheriff and served HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
by a constable. Charley Woodbury the Dist Atty, replied. Andrew closed and the court after consultation sustained the point and discharged Sanborn. The crowd cheered Sanborn was the hero of the hour, and though for a month he had been hiding in Concord garrets and writing to me from Patinas, he must make the most of his notoriety by the aid of newspapers, interviews, and cards of thanks. I came home at night to find Concord stirred to its depths, with reporters and emissaries of all kinds, and more foolish stories in circulation of attacks, and captures, than could be imagined— The papers here and in N.Y. Washington were filled with it. Congress got excited, Mason threatened and it seemed as if war might actually begin. Sanborn was carefully guarded, and the story that the Marines were to be sent out in the night to take him, came so straight from Mrs Jackson who was connected with the Emerson & Bartlett family that videlles [?] were sent out mounted to watch and give the alarm. Altogether it was another 19th of April and I sat on horseback for hours on the Lincoln hill watching. I had the officers arrested brought to Concord tried before Ball Justice for assault & battery, & bound over to criminal term. Brought a suit for Sanborn in the Supreme Court for $10000 damages, and with the Atty. Gen appeared in the U.S. Court where the comtees case was carried by Woodbury & in short had lots of business growing out of the affair. The Legislature took it up, and Congress got excited over it, and it was a great row! Meantime politics must be attended to and I went to the State Convention at Worcester where I helped elect the Andrew ticket for delegates to Chicago, and was chosen the member of the State Convention from the Midx Senatorial District, also was chosen with Sweetzer at the District Convention in Concord a district delegate to Chicago after a hard fight, in which my friends rallied to pay me for my defeat as sheriff, and thus I was busy again in political HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
movements.
J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
June 15, Friday: Missouri state Governor Jackson, and other southern sympathizers, evacuated Jefferson City, the Missouri state capital.
The select investigatory committee of the Secret “Six” affair, chaired by Virginia Democratic Senator James Murray Mason submitted its final report to the US Senate, and this report was recorded in the Congressional Globe of the 36th Congress, 1st Session, Part IV, beginning on page 3,006. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Senators Mason, Jefferson Davis, and Graham N. Fitch, constituting the majority, reported that: “The invasion
(to call it so) by John Brown and his followers at Harpers Ferry was in no sense of that character. It was simply the act of lawless ruffians, under the sanction of no public or political authority distinguishable only from ordinary companies by the ulterior ends in contemplation by them, and by the fact that the money to maintain the expedition, and the large armament they brought with them, had been contributed and furnished by the citizens of other states of the union, under circumstances that must continue to jeopardy the safety and peace of the southern states, and against which congress has no power to legislate. If the several states, whether from motives of policy or a desire to preserve the peace of the union, if not from fraternal feeling, do not hold it incumbent on them, after the experience of the country, to guard in future by appropriate legislation against occurrences similar to the one here inquired into, the committee can find no guarantee elsewhere for the security of peace between the states of the union.”
The report may seem anticlimactic, if one presumes that the Senator had been intent on fixing the blame for an attempt to begin a servile insurrection. However, if one presumes instead that the agenda of the Senator had been to reassure himself that the John Brown raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry had been merely intended to key a futile servile insurrection, a race war between whites and non-whites which of course the whites would win in short order with minimal disruption (since they had an all-white federal army and all- white state militia units at their disposal, with artillery and training and funding), and that there had been no direct federal involvement, to reassure himself that the raid had not been intended to set off another class war of poor whites against rich whites, a repeat of the immensely dangerous Bacon’s Rebellion of the 17th Century, and that the federal government had not been an instigator of this — then the reassuring report of this Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry does not seem at all anticlimactic.21
This final report might as well have been exceedingly brief, “Don’t ask and we won’t have to know,” except that a report that was uncharacteristically brief might have aroused suspicion.22
21. Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing his slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
June 15. 2 P.M.—River four and one half above summer level. For some time I have not heard toads by day, [But rarely.] and not for a long time in numbers; yet they still ring at night. Perhaps it is entirely a matter of temperature,—that in June and maybe the latter half of May (?) they require the coolness of the evening to arouse them. The hylodes appear to have done. I paddle to Clamshell. Notice the down of the white willow near the bridge, twenty rods off, whitening Sassafras Shore for two or three rods like a dense white foam. It is all full of little seeds not sprouted, is as dense as fur, and has first blown fifteen rods overland. This is a late willow to ripen, but the black willow shows no down yet, as I notice. It is very conspicuously white along the shore, a foot or two wide,—a dense downy coat or fleece on the water. Has blown northeast. See froth about the base of some grass in a meadow. The large early wool-grass of the meadows will shed pollen in a day or two—can see stamens—on Hosmer’s Flat shore. This it is grows in circles. As I stood there I heard that peculiar hawk-like (for rhythm) but more resonant or clanging kind of scream which I may have heard before this year, plover-like, indefinitely far,—over the Clamshell plain. After proceeding half a dozen rods toward the hill, I heard the familiar willet note of the upland plover [Upland Sandpiper Bartramia longicauda] and, looking up, saw one standing erect—like a large tell-tale, or chicken with its head stretched up—on the rail fence. After a while it flew off southwest and low, then wheeled and went a little higher down the river. Of pigeon size, but quick quivering wings. Finally rose higher and flew more or less zigzag, as if uncertain where it would alight, and at last, when almost out of sight, it pitched down into a field near Cyrus Hubbard’s. It was the same note I heard so well on Cape Cod in July, ’55, and probably the same I heard in the Shawsheen valley, May 15, 1858. I suspect, then, that it breeds here. The button-bush is now fairly green.
The Carex stricta tufts are now as large as ever, and, the culms falling over, they are like great long-haired heads, now drooping around the great tussocks. I know of no other sedge that make so massive and conspicuous a tussock, yet with a slender leaf. This the one that reflects the peculiar glaucous sheen from its bent surfaces. The turtles are apparently now in the midst of their laying. I go looking for them, to see where they have left the water for this purpose. See a snapping turtle whose shell is about ten inches long making her hole on the top
22. The report as it exists seems, unlike the Warren Report, never to have raised anyone’s suspicions, despite the fact that it is inherently more dubious than any bullet theory the Warren Commission came up with in their foreordained determination to discover and proclaim that no foreign government had been involved in the assassination of JFK. Strange, huh? See Keith A. Sutherland’s “The Senate Investigates Harpers Ferry,” Prologue 8 (Winter 1996):192-207 and “Senate. Select Committee on the Harpers Ferry Invasion.” MASS VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: INVASION AT HARPERS FERRY (reprint NY: Arno Press, 1969). HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
of the sand-bank at the steam-mill site, within four rods of the road. She pauses warily at sound of my boat, but I should have mistaken her for a dark stone if she had [not] lifted her snout above her shell. I went to her as she lay and hissed by the hole at 4 P. M. It was about three and a half inches across, and not perpendicular but chiefly on one side; say five inches deep (as yet), and four plus inches wide beneath, but only about one inch of the bottom exposed when you looked straight down,—in short, like the common Emys picta’s hole. She had copiously wet the ground before or while digging, as the picta does. Saw two or three similar holes made by her afterward. There was her broad track (some ten inches wide) up the sandy or gravelly bank, and I saw where she had before dug, or begun to dig, within a rod of this, but had retreated to the river. I withdrew to the bridge to observe her (not having touched her), but she took the occasion to hasten to the river. A thunder-shower in the north goes down the Merrimack. We have had warmer weather for several days, say since 12th. A new season begun,—daily baths, thin coat, etc. [Heat probably about 85° at 2 P.M. Vide (below).] The bullfrogs now commonly trump at night, and the mosquitoes are now really troublesome. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
1861
August 24, Saturday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis wrote to Queen Victoria that he was appointing James Murray Mason as “special commissioner of the Confederate States to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” to be “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the Confederate States, to reside near the court of your Majesty” at a salary of $12,000 per year. (I don’t know whether this would have included expenses or whether Mason would have had an expense account to draw on over and above this enormous sum.)23
In Friend Daniel Ricketson’s journal for this date, we find:
Clear and fine. Our friend H.D. Thoreau who came on Monday P.M. left us by 7.10 A.M. train. Rode with him to Head River depot. The visit I trust has been agreeable to him as well as myself. His health is very poor, being afflicted with bronchitis, and the recovery of his health is I fear quite uncertain; still he has a good deal of toughness and great will, which are in his favor. It is my earnest desire that he may recover.
23. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
September 24, Tuesday: James Murray Mason and John Slidell proceeded to the port of Charleston, South Carolina in order to embark for England. US CIVIL WAR
Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution had stipulated that the writ of habeas corpus “shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” On this day President Lincoln suspended the writ in all areas under Federal control for the duration of the Southern insurrection.
Thaddeus Lowe was able to ascend in his balloon to more than 1,000 feet above Arlington, Virginia across the Potomac River from Washington DC, and telegraph positions of Confederate troops at Falls Church, Virginia more than three miles distant. Cannon were able to aim accurately at troops they could not see (every war they kill you a new way).
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, had made a journey to Germany ostensibly to observe some military maneuvers. Secretly, this trip was facilitating a chaperoned meeting between him and Princess Alexandra of Denmark which occurred on this day at Speyer. The meeting went well enough that wedding plans could advance. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
October 11, Friday midnight: The steamer Gordon departed in the rain and dark from Charleston harbor in order to slip Confederate emissaries James Murray Mason and John Slidell past the Union blockade and carry them to Havana, where they could board the regular, fast British mail packet ship heading across the Atlantic.
Arriving in Heidelberg, Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” jotted in his JOURNAL INTIME: “After eleven days journey, here I am under the roof of my friends, in their hospitable house on the banks of the Neckar, with its garden climbing up the side of the Heiligenberg.... Blazing sun; my room is flooded with light and warmth. Sitting opposite the Geisberg, I write to the murmur of the Neckar, which rolls its green waves, flecked with silver, exactly beneath the balcony on which my room opens. A great barge coming from Heilbron passes silently under my eyes, while the wheels of a cart which I cannot see are dimly heard on the road which skirts the river. Distant voices of children, of cocks, of chirping sparrows, the clock of the Church of the Holy Spirit, which chimes the hour, serve to gauge, without troubling, the general tranquility of the scene. One feels the hours gently slipping by, and time, instead of flying, seems to hover. A peace beyond words steals into my heart, an impression of morning grace, of fresh country poetry which brings back the sense of youth, and has the true German savor.... Two decked barges carrying red flags, each with a train of flat boats filled with coal, are going up the river and making their way under the arch of the great stone bridge. I stand at the window and see a whole perspective of boats sailing in both directions; the Neckar is as animated as the street of some great capital; and already on the slope of the wooded mountain, streaked by the smoke-wreaths of the town, the castle throws its shadow like a vast drapery, and traces the outlines of its battlements and turrets. Higher up, in front of me, rises the dark profile of the Molkenkur; higher still, in relief against the dazzling east, I can distinguish the misty forms of the two towers of the Kaiserstuhl HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
and the Trutzheinrich. But enough of landscape. My host, Dr. George Weber, tells me that his manual of history is translated into Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and French, and that of his great “Universal History” — three volumes are already published. What astonishing power of work, what prodigious tenacity, what solidity! O deutscher Fleiss!”
During this day Henry Thoreau had been in the process of writing from Concord to the Reverend James M. Stone,24 secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, about a request he had just received from the wealthy lead pipe manufacturer and clandestine supporter of John Brown’s mission, George Luther Stearns, to write upon the subject of emancipation. His health, he reported, was no longer up to such a task: Concord Oct 11th 1861 Mr James M. Stone, Dear Sir, I have just received a letter from Mr. Stearns, on the subject of emancipation, and would say, briefly, that I heartily sympathise with you in your enterprise, and hope that you may succeed; but, I am sorry to add, such is the state of my health, and has been for ten months past, preventing all literary employment, that I cannot promise you the least aid.
Yours respectfully
Henry D. Thoreau
{written upside down at the bottom of the page: H.D. Thoreau Oct. 11. 1861.}
24. Any relation to Lucy Stone? HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
Autograph Letter Signed; 2 pages; 20.2 centimeters; published in American Literature 51 (March 1979):98- 100 — see following screens for an image of the letter, which has been donated to Kent State University’s Special Collections & Archives by Charles Wesley Slack’s great-grandson Paul C. Kitchin: HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
October 16, Tuesday: Confederate emissaries James Murray Mason and John Slidell arrived at Havana.
Federal troops occupied Lexington, Missouri. US CIVIL WAR
Count N.P. Ignatyev, a Russian diplomat, persuaded the government of Peking to surrender to the combined British and French force that was besieging it.
October 16. P.M.– To White Pond and neighborhood. As a consequence of the different manner in which trees which have winged seeds and those which have not are planted,–the [FORMER] being blown together in one direction by the wind, the latter being dispersed irregularly by animals,–I observe that the former, as pines (which (the white) are said in the primitive wood to grow in communities), white birches, red maples, alders, etc., often grow in more or less regular rounded or oval or conical patches, as the seeds fell, while oaks, chestnuts, hickories, etc., simply form woods of greater or less extent whether by themselves or mixed; i. e., they do not naturally spring up in an oval form (or elliptical) unless they derive it from the pines under which they were planted. For example, take this young white pine wood half a dozen years old, which has sprung up in a pasture adjacent to a wood of oaks and pines mixed. It has the form of a broad crescent, or half-moon, with its diameter resting on the old wood near where a large white pine stood. It is true most such groves are early squared by our plows and fences, for we square these circles every day in our rude practice. And in the same manner often they fall in a sprout-land amid oaks, and I, looking from a hilltop, can distinguish in distant old woods still, of pine and oak mixed, these more exclusive and regular communities of pine, a dozen or more rods wide, while it is the oak commonly that fills up the irregular crevices, beside occupying extensive spaces itself. So it happens that, as the pines themselves and their fruit have a more regularly conical outline than deciduous trees, the groves they form also have. Our wood-lots, of course, have a history, and we may often recover it for a hundred years back, though we do not. A small pine lot may be a side of such an oval, or a half, or a square in the inside with all the curving sides cut off by fences. Yet if we attended more to the history of our lots we should manage them more wisely. Looking round, I observe at a distance an oak wood-lot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines about a rod and a half wide and twenty-five or thirty years old along its whole southern side, which is straight and thirty or forty rods long, and, next to it, an open field or pasture. It presents a very singular appearance, because the oak wood is broad and has no pines within it, while the narrow edging is perfectly straight and dense, and pure pine. It is the more remarkable at this season because the oak is all red and yellow and the pine all green. I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it. I find, as I expected, a fence separating the pines from the oaks, or that they belong to different owners. I also find, as I expected, that eighteen or twenty years ago a pitch pine wood had stood where the oaks are, and was then cut down, for there are their old stumps. But before they were cut, their seeds were blown into the neighbor’s field, and the little pines came up all along its edge, and they grew so thickly and so fast that that neighbor refrained at last from plowing them up or cutting them off, for just this rod and a half in width, where they were thickest, and moreover, though there are no sizable oaks mixed with these pines, the whole surface even of this narrow strip is as usual completely stocked with little seedling oaks less than a foot high. But I ask, if the neighbor so often lets this narrow edging grow up, why not often, by the same rule, let them spread over the whole of his field? When at length he sees how they have grown, does he not often regret that he did not do so? Or why be dependent, even to this extent, on these windfalls from our neighbors’ trees, or an accident? Why not control our own woods and destiny more? (This was north from the lane beyond Conant’s handsome wood.) There are many such problems in forest geometry to be solved. Again, I read still further back a more varied story. Take the line between Rice and Conant (?) or Garfield (?). Here is a green strip of dense pitch and white pine some thirty or forty rods long by four wide and thirty years old. On the east side is a large red and yellow [SIC] oak wood-lot, the nearest part of it some dozen or more years old, and on the west a strip three rods wide of little white and pitch pines four to ten feet high that have sprung up in the open land, and next to these is an open field occasionally cultivated. Given these facts, to find HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the wall. If you think a moment you will know with out my telling you that it is between the pine wood and
the oak. Some dozen or more years ago there was a large pine wood extending up to the wall on the west, and then an open field belonging, to another man. But, as before, the pine seed had blown over the wall and taken so well that for four rods in width it was suffered to grow, or rather may be said to have defended itself and crowded the farmer back (no thanks to him). But when, some fifteen years ago, the old pine wood was cut by its owner, the other was not ready to cut his younger one. This is now about thirty years old and for many years it has been endeavoring to spread into the open land by its side, as its parents did, but for a long time the proprietor, not taking the hint, blind to his own interests, plowed quite up to the edge of the wood, as I noticed,– and got a few beans for his pains. But the pines (which he did not plant) grew while he slept, and at length, one spring, he gave up the contest and concluded at last to plow only within three rods of the wood, the little pines were so thick and promising. He concluded not to cut his own fingers any more, i. e. not further than up to the last joint, and hence this second row of little pines. They would have covered the half or perhaps the whole of his barren field before this if he had let them. I examined these pine lots. The strip of little pines contained also a little white birch, much sweet-fern, and thin open sod, but scarcely one oak, and that very small. The strip of large pines contained countless oaks of various kinds,–white, red, black, and shrub oak,–which had come from the young oak lot, many little pines of both kinds, and little wild cherry,–white [SIC],–and some hazel and high blueberry. (It was rather elevated as well as dry soil.) I dug up some of the little oaks to see how old they were and how they had fared. The largest in the lot were about one foot high. First, a red or scarlet oak, apparently four years old. The acorn was about one inch below the surface of the pine leaves. It rose five inches above the leaves, and the root extended about one foot below the surface. It had died down once. The second was a black oak which rose six inches above the leaves (or eight, measured along the stem). It was apparently four years old. It was much branched, and its tops had been cut off by rabbits last year. The root ran straight down about one inch, then nearly horizontally five or six inches, and when I pulled it up it broke off where less than one eighth inch thick, at sixteen inches below the surface. This tree was one fourth of an inch in diameter at the surface and nearly three fourths of an inch in diameter at five inches below (along the root). At the same height above the surface it was hardly one fifth of an inch in diameter. The third was a white oak ten inches high, apparently seven years old. It also had been browsed by a rabbit and put out a new shoot accordingly. Two years’ growth was buried in the leaves. The root was very similar, both in direction and form, to the last, only not quite so thick. Fourth, a shrub oak also quite similar, though less thick still and with two or more shoots from one stock. In all these cases, or especially the first three [?], there was one main, and an unexpectedly great, fusiform root, altogether out of proportion to the top, you would say, tapering both ways, but of course largest and sharpest downward, with many fine stringy fibres extending on every side from it perhaps a foot. Just as a biennial plant devotes its energies the first year to producing a stock on which it can feed the next, so these little oaks in their HDT WHAT? INDEX
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earliest years are forming great fusiform vigorous roots on which they can draw when they are suddenly left to seek their fortunes in a sprout-land. Thus this double forest was advancing to conquer new (or old) land, sending forward their children on the wings of the wind, while already the oak seedlings from the oak wood behind had established themselves beneath the old pines ready to supplant them. The pines were the vanguard. They stood up to fire with their children before them, while the little oaks kneeled behind and between them. The pine is the pioneer, the oak the more permanent settler who lays out his improvements. Pines are by some considered lower in the scale of trees–in the order of development–than oaks. While the pines were blowing into the pasture from this narrow edging, the animals were planting the acorns under the pines. Even the small pine woods are thus perfectly equipped. There was even under these dark, dense pines, thirty years old, a pretty thick bed of blueberry and huckleberry bushes next the wall, ten feet wide, the relics of a still denser and higher one that grew there when it was an open field. The former had thus been driven back three times, first by the blueberry hedge, then by the pines of thirty years ago, and lastly by the young pines that sprang from them. Thus a wood-lot had been forced upon him, and yet perhaps he will talk of it as a creation of his own. I have come up here this afternoon to see ’s dense white pine lot beyond the pond, that was cut off last winter, to know how the little oaks look in it. To my surprise and chagrin, I find that the fellow who calls himself its owner has burned it all over and sowed winter-rye here. He, no doubt, means to let it grow up again in a year or two, but he thought it would be clear gain if he could extract a little rye from it in the meanwhile. What a fool! Here nature had got everything ready for this emergency, and kept them ready for many years,–oaks half a dozen years old or more, with fusiform roots full charged and tops already pointing skyward, only waiting to be touched off by the sun,–and he thought he knew better, and would get a little rye out of it first, which he could feel at once between his fingers, and so he burned it, and dragged his harrow over it. As if oaks would bide his time or come at his bidding. Or as if he preferred to have a pine or a birch wood here possibly half a century hence–for the land is “pine sick”–rather than an oak wood at once. So he trifles with nature. I am chagrined for him. That he should call himself an agriculturalist! He needs to have a guardian placed over him. A forest- warden should be appointed by the town. Overseers of poor husbandmen. He has got his dollars for the pine timber, and now he wishes to get his bushels of grain and finger the dollars that they will bring; and then, Nature, you may have your way again. Let us purchase a mass for his soul. A greediness that defeats its own ends. I examined a little lot of his about a dozen rods square just this side, cut off last winter, apparently two thirds white pine and one third white oak. Last year the white pine seed was very abundant, but there was little or no white oak seed. Accordingly I noticed twenty or more seedling white pines of this year on the barest spots, but not a single seedling oak. This suggests how much the species of the succeeding forest may depend on whether the trees were fertile the year before they were cut, or not. I see a very large white oak acorn which has a double meat with a skin between. There is a very young grub in it. They appear to be last year’s hemlock and larch cones that still hold on in great numbers! As time elapses, and the resources from which our forests have been supplied fail, we shall of necessity be more and more convinced of the significance of the seed. I see in a thick pitch pine wood half a dozen stout pine twigs five eighths of an inch thick that have been gnawed off with their plumes. Why? Hear the alder locust still. Robins apparently more numerous than a month ago. See grackles in cornfields in two places to-day. It chanced that here were two proprietors within half a mile who had done exactly the same, i. e., accepted part of a wood-lot that was forced on them, and I have no doubt that there are several more exactly similar cases within that half-mile diameter. The history of a wood-lot is often, if not commonly, here, a history of cross-purposes,–of steady and consistent endeavor on the part of Nature, of interference and blundering with a glimmering of intelligence at the eleventh hour on the part of the proprietor. The proprietor of wood-lots commonly treats Nature as an Irishman drives a horse,–by standing before him and beating him in the face all the way across a field. If I find any starved pasture in the midst of our woods,–and I remember many such, and they are the least valuable tracts we have,–I know that it has commonly had such a history as this wood-lot (above). It was burned over when cut, and perhaps cultivated a year or two, often because the owner thought it was what the soil needed in order that it might produce trees. In some cases there may be sense in such a course if he can afford to wait a century instead of a third of that time for a crop. It depends on what the trees are, the locality, etc. But commonly the owner who adopts this course makes a move in the dark and in ninety-nine cases in a hundred [INDECIPHERABLE WORD] his own fingers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The time will soon come, if it has not already, when we shall have to take special pains to secure and encourage the growth of white oaks, as we already must that of chestnut.s for the most part. These oaks will become so scattered that there will be not seed enough to seed the ground rapidly and completely. Horace Mann tells me that he found in the crop or inside of the stake-driver killed the other day one grasshopper, several thousand-legs one to one and a half inches long, and not much else. It commonly happens in settled countries like this that the new community of pines, sprung from seeds blown off from an older one, is very youthful compared with the trees it sprang from because many successive crops of trees or seeds have been plowed up or cut before the owner allowed Nature to take her course. Naturally the pines spread more steadily and with no such abrupt descents. In the wildwood at least there are commonly only fires and insects or blight, and not the axe and plow and the cattle, to interrupt the regular progress of things.
November 7, Thursday: There was fighting at Belmont.
Friend John Greenleaf Whittier of Amesbury, Massachusetts wrote to James M. Stone to inform him that he would be unable to attend a meeting. He criticized the present administration.
The British mail steamer Trent exited Havana harbor bound for Southampton, England, with Confederate emissaries James Murray Mason and John Slidell aboard. Unfortunately, during their dilatory 3-week layover in this Cuban port, US federal agents had learned of their plans and had dispatched the USS San Jacinto to intercept them on the high seas.
The crippled Senator Charles Sumner stopped by Concord and visited the Emerson home. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November 8, Friday: Charles Wilkes had been allowed to return to active duty during the period of civil war, despite his having been convicted by court-martial for excessive punishment of seamen. On this day his USS San Jacinto intercepted at sea in the West Indies the British mail-steamer Trent, bound from Havana to St. Thomas and then for Southampton, England, and he sent Lieutenant Donald M. Fairfax on board to bring off Confederate commissioners John Slidell and James Murray Mason, with their secretaries. The officials would be taken to Fort Warren in Boston harbor. This would cause him to be seen by many as a hero, and the Navy Department would award him an emphatic commendation, with the US Congress passing a resolution of thanks. However, this “Trent Affair” would cause much tension between the US and England. On the demand of the British government that Mason and Slidell should be given up, Secretary of State W.H. Seward would comply explaining in his despatch that, although the commissioners and their papers had been contraband of war, and although therefore Wilkes had acted properly in capturing them, what he should have done was take the Trent into port as a prize for adjudication. As he had neglected so to do, instead constituting himself as the judge in the matter, for the United States national government to approve of his act would be for it for the first time to sanction the “right of search,” a right which it had always previously refused to recognize. The prisoners would therefore be released.
With Britain threatening to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy, Wilkes would once again face court- martial, and would again be found guilty of having gone beyond his limits, and his promotions would be rescinded. This time they would dispose of him permanently, on the retired list. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November 15, Friday: For several days news of the forcible seizure of Confederate emissaries James Mason and John Slidell by Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto from the British mail packet RMS Trent a week earlier off Cuba, and their detention at Boston, had been being processed and reprocessed as sober minds considered its potential for defeat of the North in a war participated in by England. On this day the USS San Jacinto surrendered the two emissaries at Fortress Monroe, Virginia.
His Excellency the President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis having set this day apart for fasting, humiliation, and prayer, the Reverend Henry Holcombe Tucker delivered a sermon “God in the War” before the legislature of Georgia, in the capitol at Milledgeville.
US CIVIL WAR
Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. — PSALMS 46: 8-9.
Henry Thoreau made no journal entry on this day. He wrote to cousin-by-marriage George A. Thatcher in Bangor: Concord Nov 15th 1861 Dear Cousin, We are glad to hear that you are in the neighborhood, and shall be much disappointed if we do not see you & Caleb. Come up any day that is most convenient to you— Or, if you stay so long, perhaps you will spend Thanksgiving (the 21st) with us. Yrs, in haste. Henry D. Thoreau
Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal:
The news of last Wednesday morning (7th) was sublime, the pronunciation of the masses of America against Slavery. And now on Tuesday 14th I attended the dedication of the Zoological Museum at Cambridge, an auspicious & happy event, most honorable to Agassiz & to the State. On Wednesday 7th, we had Charles Sumner here at Concord & my house. Yesterday eve I attended at the Lyceum in the Town Hall the Exhibition of Stereoscopic views magnified on the wall, which seems to me the last & most important application of this wonderful art: for here was London, Paris, Switzerland, Spain, &, at last, Egypt, brought visibly & accurately to Concord, for authentic examination by women & children, who had never left their state. Cornelius Agrippa was fairly outdone. And the lovely manner in which one picture was changed for another beat the faculty of dreaming. Edward thought that “the thanks of the town should be presented to Mr [James??] Munroe, for carrying us to Europe, & bringing us home, without expense.” An odd incident of yesterday was that I received a letter or envelope mailed from Frazer, Pennsylvania enclosing no letter but a blank envelope containing a Ten dollar bank note.
BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.
November 17, Sunday: About noon, the British mail steamer Trent conveying Confederate diplomats James Murray Mason and John Slidell toward England and the court of Queen Victoria was being intercepted on the high seas by the USS San Jacinto, a federal ship which fired a couple of shots across its bow. The Confederate emissaries were being taking into custody.
Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November 24, Sunday: At Fort Warren on Georges IslandGEORGES ISLAND in Boston Harbor, Charles Francis
Adams, Sr. commented “I remember the last exhibition I saw Mason make of himself in the Senate Chamber, and I smacked my lips with joy.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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James Murray Mason was meanwhile, actually, in the highest of spirits, for he believed that if the Union could be persuaded to refuse to release him then England would in return promptly declare war and his diplomatic mission would prove to have been an instant and total success: “the war with England to follow such a refusal would speedily terminate the war with the South.” In preparation for such a war, the British government directed 8,000 troops toward Canada while expanding their fleet on the Atlantic Ocean. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1862
January 1, Wednesday, Election Day: Waldo Emerson lectured on war at Concord. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was in the audience and unsympathetically reported a “Furious wind.”
In Boston on this Election Day the Reverend William Rounseville Alger had the honor of delivering the day’s official sermon and chose the topic “Public morals, or, The true glory of a state.” (This would be printed in this year by the firm of W. White, printer to the state, as PUBLIC MORALS, OR, THE TRUE GLORY OF A STATE. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE EXECUTIVE AND LEGISLATIVE DEPARTMENTS OF THE GOVERNMENT OF MASSACHUSETTS, AT THE ANNUAL ELECTION, WEDNESDAY, JAN. 1, 1862. BY REV. WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.)
Out in Boston Harbor, a federal government that finally had seen the handwriting on the wall was wisely capitulating: A Department of State emissary was escorting Confederate diplomats James Murray Mason and John Slidell by tugboat through the heaving cold waves of the harbor to HMS Rinaldo, which would convey them to the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean on a somewhat delayed and circuitous voyage toward the court of Queen Victoria.
Bronson Alcott wrote about Henry Thoreau in his journal (JOURNALS. Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1938, page 343): To Thoreau, and spend the evening, sat to find him failing and feeble. He is talkative, however; is interested in books and men, in our civil troubles especially, and speaks impatiently of what he calls the temporizing policy of our rulers; blames the people too for their indifferency to the true issues of national honor and justice. Even Seward’s letter to Earl Grey respecting Mason’s and Liddell’s case, comforting as it is to the country and serving as a foil to any hostile designs of England for the time at least, excites his displeasure as seeming to be humiliating to us, and dishonorable. We talk of Pliny, whose books he is reading with delight. Also of Evelyn PLINY and the rural authors. If not a writer of verse, Thoreau is a poet in spirit, and has come as near to the writing of pastorals HDT WHAT? INDEX
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as any poet of his time. Were his days not numbered, and his adventures in the wild world once off his hands, then he might come to orchards and gardens, perhaps treat these in manner as masterly, uniting the spirit of naturalist and poet in his page. But the most he may hope for is to prepare his manuscripts for others’ editing, and take his leave of them and us. I fear he has not many months to abide here, and the spring’s summons must come for him soon to partake of “Syrian peace, immortal leisure.” Edward P. Brownson and Elizabeth Brownson wrote to James M. Stone suggesting a lecture date.25
George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890) wrote from New-York to _____, expressing a desire to arrange a lecture in Boston.
William Lloyd Garrison wrote from Boston to Charles Wesley Slack, agreeing to speak on the subject suggested.
James Henry Lane (1814-1866) sent a telegram from Washington DC to James M. Stone, declining invitation to speak in Boston.
James Henry Lane (1814-1866) wrote from Washington DC to James M. Stone, giving details of why he would be unable to speak in Boston as requested.
Benjamin Franklin Wade (1800-1878) wrote from Washington DC to James M. Stone, informing that he would be unable to lecture to the Emancipation League.
January 14, Tuesday: La Demoiselle de Nanterre, a vaudeville by Jacques Offenbach to words of Grangé and Lambert-Thiboust, was performed for the initial time, in the Palais-Royal, Paris.
Confederate diplomats James Murray Mason and John Slidell boarded the British mail steamer La Plata bound from the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean to Southampton.
January 29, Wednesday: Fritz (Frederick) Theodor Albert Delius was born in Bradford, England, 4th of 14 children born to Julius Friedrich Wilhelm Delius, a wool merchant, and Elise Krönig, a descendant of Swedish royalty.
Concurrenzen op.267, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal, Vienna.
Confederate diplomats James Murray Mason and John Slidell landed in England.
25. Stimpert, James. A GUIDE TO THE CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CHARLES WESLEY SLACK MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION: 1848-1885. Kent State University, Library, Special Collections HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1865
Henry Youle Hind’s A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF NEW BRUNSWICK, TOGETHER WITH A SPECIAL REPORT ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE “QUEBEC GROUP” IN THE PROVINCE (Fredericton, 1865).
Mary Ann Shadd Cary obtained a Canadian passport. The passport described her as 5'6" tall with a slight figure and a pug nose, with black hair and mulatto complexion (a white missionary once described her as of light HDT WHAT? INDEX
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complexion). The passport gave her age as 35 (actually, in this year she was 42).
In this year hundreds of Northern white women were going to the South to teach at Freedman Schools. FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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After the war James Murray Mason went with his family into self-exile in Canada. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1869
In this year in which the eastern and the western halves of our transcontinental railroad were being joined by the insertion of a golden spike at Ogden, Utah, former Virginia senator James Murray Mason was, due to ill health, returning home from his exile in Canada.
Henry Youle Hind’s REPORT ON THE WAVER L EY GOLD DISTRICT, WITH GEOLOGICAL MAPS AND SECTIONS / BY HENRY YOULE HIND. (Halifax, Nova Scotia: [s.n.]).
Reprint of the 1868 THE DOMINION OF CANADA; CONTAINING A HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE PRELIMINARIES AND ORGANIZATION OF CONFEDERATION... (Toronto: L. Stebbins). THE DOMINION OF CANADA HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1870
July 7, Thursday: The US Census taker for Falls Church Township, Fairfax County Virginia recorded at Series M593_1645 Part 1, Page 298B/299A, lines 36-40/1-5: James M. Mason (b. 1798 - 71 - in DC - Occ: Farmer - Property Value $9000 + $22000) married to Eliza (b. 1799 - 71 - in PA - Property Value $15000 + $5000). Children listed (born in VA) are: Virginia (dau b. 1834 - 36); and Eliza (dau b. 1837 - 33). Also listed are: Mary Agnes Bingle (b. 1849 - 21 - in Canada - Occ: Domestic Servant); Jane Patterson (b. 1838 - 32 - in Ireland - Occ: Seamstress); Hannah Someby (b. 1835 - 35 - in VA - Occ: Domestic Servant - BLACK); James Davis (b. 1856 - 14 - in VA - Occ: Domestic Servant - BLACK); James Dalglish (b. 1840 - 30 - in Scotland - Occ: Gardner); and Richard Sebastian (b. 1812 - 58 - in VA - Occ: Farm Hand). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1871
April 28, Friday: James Murray Mason died.
When a section of the Erie Canal’s banks collapsed at the Ox-Bow in Fairport, the barge Bonnie Bird was carried a mile away from the canal by the escaping waters (the crew, and a team of horses, were unhurt).
Richard Wagner read his installation thesis “On the Destiny of Opera” before the Berlin Royal Academy of Arts.
Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to be readily and directly conscious of the complications of one’s own organism and the play of its several parts. It seems to me that the sutures of my being are becoming just loose enough to allow me at once a clear perception of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own brittleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a perpetual astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only seeing the world which surrounds me, I analyze myself. Instead of being single, all of a piece, I become legion, multitude, a whirlwind — a very cosmos. Instead of living on the surface, I take possession of my inmost self, I apprehend myself, if not in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my groups of organs, almost my tissues, are concerned. In other words, the central monad isolates itself from all the subordinate monads, that it may consider them, and finds its harmony again in itself. Health is the perfect balance between our organism, with all its component parts, and the outer world; it serves us especially for acquiring a knowledge of that world. Organic disturbance obliges us to set up a fresh and more spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the soul. Thereupon our bodily constitution itself becomes the object of thought. It is no longer we, although it may belong to us; it is nothing more than the vessel in which we make the passage of life, a vessel of which we study the weak points and the structure without identifying it with our own individuality. Where is the ultimate residence of the self? In thought, or rather in consciousness. But below consciousness there is its germ, the punctum saliens of spontaneity; for consciousness is not primitive, it becomes. The question is, can the thinking monad return into its envelope, that is to say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the dark abyss of virtuality? I hope not. The kingdom passes; the king remains; or rather is it the royalty alone which subsists — that is to say, the idea — the personality begin in its turn merely the passing vesture of the permanent idea? Is Leibnitz or Hegel right? Is the individual immortal under the form of the spiritual body? Is he eternal under the form of the individual idea? Who saw most clearly, St. Paul or Plato? The theory of Leibnitz attracts me most because it opens to us an infinite of duration, of multitude, and evolution. For a monad, which is the virtual universe, a whole infinite of time is not too much to develop the infinite within it. Only one must admit exterior actions and influences which affect the evolution of the monad. Its independence must be a mobile and increasing quantity between zero and the infinite, without ever reaching either completeness or nullity, for the monad can be neither absolutely passive nor entirely free.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1998
Robert W. Young’s SENATOR JAMES MURRAY MASON: DEFENDER OF THE OLD SOUTH (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P). “Mason had a paternalistic relationship with the few slaves whom he owned, and he made the mistake of assuming that kindness and generosity were the norm for Southern slave owners.” “Critics may accuse him of seeking to perpetuate a society built upon oppression. But within his own frame of reference, Mason fought for freedom just as much as his 18th century predecessors had.”
My disappointment in this book has nothing whatever to do with benevolence of the above snippets. My disappointment has to do with the fact that the book focuses on the Trent controversy, rather than on the Harpers Ferry investigation. It has become clear to me over the years that Mason’s celebrated “investigation” into the funding for the Harpers Ferry raid had been a fraud that had been terminated as quickly and as cleanly as possible, with the Washington politicians doing everything possible to keep from being forced to hear what they could not afford to hear — that the raid on the federal arsenal had been an attempt either to A.) spark a genocide of Americans of color, which is to say, a replay of the northern race war known popularly as “King Phillip’s War” of 1676, with its overdetermined 10-to-1 outcome, or B.) recreate the conditions of what has come to be known popularly as “Bacon’s Rebellion” of 1676, which is to say, a southern class war between on the one hand an alliance of poor whites and blacks, and on the other hand the entitled slavemasters. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
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 2016. 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: November 16, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
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
RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR
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