Alone with a Mob at Little Rock Tin Pan Alley’s Songsmiths Virginia Fights Brown v. Board Freeing Slaves Stolen at Sea
Sisterhood at Lexington How women nurtured the American Revolution
April 2022 HISTORYNET.com
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PHOTO CREDIT
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APRIL 2022
22
FEATURES 22 Sisterhood at Lexington
The April 1775 uprising was as rooted in the town’s kitchens and parlors as on the village green. By Mary Fuhrer
30 Alone
At 15, Elizabeth Eckford.took the longest, hardest walk of her young life simply trying to start high school. By Dennis Goodwin
40 Alley Cats
For American tunesmiths of a certain age, West 28th Street in Manhattan shone as brightly as Broadway. By Raanan Geberer
50 Poison Pill
Prince Edward County, Virginia, embodied that state’s “massive resistance” response to school integration. By Daniel B. Moskowitz
58 Hunting Antelope
When the United States outlawed international trade in slaves, slave traders answered with malign innovation. By Daniel Laliberte
30
DEPARTMENTS 6
Mosaic
History in today’s headlines
12 Contributors 14 American Schemers
Writer Ned Buntline never let the facts get in the way of a ripping good yarn.
16 Cameo
Sam Hill—no, not that one—was a friend-making, road-building fellow.
PHOTO CREDIT
50 ON THE COVER: The women and girls of Lexington, Massachusetts, were partners in rebellion with the men and boys who lined up against the Redcoats.
20 SCOTUS 101
In Charles River Bridge, justices found the public weal to trump contracts.
66 Reviews 72 An American Place
14
The Buntline saga should have ended early but daring Ned had the wit to act like one of his fictional characters.
Fairfield, Pennsylvania’s Mansion House 1757 harkens to early times. CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF THE U.S. COAST GUARD; GRANGER, NYC; COURTESY OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY; BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WILD WEST; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; COVER: NIDAY PICTURE LIBRARY/ ALAMY STOCK, PHOTO/COVER ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER
APRIL 2022
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American History ONLINE
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Visit Historynet.com/AmericanHistory and search our archive for great stories like these:
APRIL 2022 VOL. 57, NO. 1
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A medico at the ethical margins was JFK's go-to healer. bit.ly/3mPWYiY
Suicide Pact
Signing the Declaration of Independence was tantamount to proposing selfdestruction. bit.ly/3qGSMmZ
Where Washington Spent His Youth
The setting that nurtured the boy who became America's indispensable man. bit.ly/3sToqR1
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In November 2021, President Joe Biden announced establishment of a 10-mile buffer barring oil and gas drilling leases around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico. The 20-year ban, long sought by indigenous tribes, buys time for studies documenting the ancestral Puebloan site as a cultural resource. Historically, the 53-square-mile canyon area, named a National Park in 1907, once included many roads and trade routes and has long been regarded as a vast ceremonial center for ancient residents. Other features include 25 multi-roomed “great houses” and structures with astronomical alignments. A recent interdisciplinary
study argues that Chaco Canyon was inhabited, and that a transition from a foraging way of life to a settled agricultural mode cleared forests and caused unsustainable erosion. This report cites thinning of woodlands overlapping with the emergence of farming of corn, beans, and squash. Some woodlands survived; residents protected piñon trees as a valuable source of nuts and depleted stands of juniper used for fuel. Over the span of a millennium, the authors say, the impacts of human habitation combined to render an arid region even drier and less productive, finally becoming uninhabitable around 1250 CE.
MANFRED GOTTSCHALK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Chaco Canyon Catches a Break
Puebloan Pueblo Structures at Chaco Canyon leap into view in an aerial photo of the abandoned settlement.
6 AMERICAN HISTORY
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SMITHSONIAN LIBRARIES; METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; JOEL CARILLET/GETTY IMAGES
by Sarah Richardson
Sophonisba Angusciola Peale Sellers
American portraitist/naturalist/impresario Charles Willson Peale had 10 children, many named for artistic or cultural figures such as Rembrandt and Titian. Daughter Sophonisba Angusciola—whose namesake was a female painter active during the Italian Renaissance—had more going for her than an unusual moniker. An American Philosophical Society profile online credits her as the country’s first female ornithologist. She helped prepare labels in her father’s museum, using the Latin-based Linnaean nomenclature. Her scientific activities after her marriage to Coleman Sellers in 1805 are not recorded but are referred to in her will. She was also a talented quilter, as shown in an image of a quilt dated 1850. amphilsoc.org/blog/ sophonisba-angusciola-peale-sellers-scientist-and-artist
First U.S. Female Ornithologist
Picturing America Three historic photo collections of and by Americans recently came into the public eye. An assortment of 27 daguerreotypes by American inventor Henry Fitz was bought by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, for $300,000. One item in that batch is a profile of Henry Fitz, Jr., in 1840, thought to be one of the earliest such. The Danziger Gallery in New York City announced a show of works by pioneering photographer Lora Webb Nichols, who documented boomtown Wyoming in the early 20th century. African American photographer James Van Der Zee’s images of his community in Harlem, acquired from his widow, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Van Der Zee acquisition is the Met’s third photo collection, joining bodies of work by Walker Evans and Diane Arbus.
James Van Der Zee, self-portrait, 1918
SMITHSONIAN LIBRARIES; METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; JOEL CARILLET/GETTY IMAGES
MANFRED GOTTSCHALK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Recasting Robert E. Lee A bronze of Robert E. Lee emplaced in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1924 and the focus of a violent August 2017 White nationalist rally there will be melted, cast into ingots, and made into a public art project. The statue has been removed and its plinth demolished. The Charlottesville town council had several offers for the imposing 1,100-lb. statue but went with a proposal called “Swords into Plowshares.” Submitted by the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, an institution in Charlottesville, the project intends to “transform a national symbol of white supremacy into a new work of art that will reflect racial justice and inclusion.” Specifics will emerge from six months of community engagement. APRIL 2022 7
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Clotilda Context An exhibit at the History Museum of Mobile covers the slave ship in detail.
Site studies of Clotilda, an illegal slave-trade schooner sunk in 1859 or 1860 in Alabama’s Mobile River and discovered there in 2019, showed the vessel and remnants of cargo to be nearly whole. Clotilda is the most intact slaving vessel ever found, preserved because it lies in fresh water, not at sea, repository of most similar hulks. The Clotilda discovery prompted a wave of interest in Africatown, Alabama, a community south of Mobile whose residents descend from 32 Clotilda survivors. Last June, at the request of Africatown mayor Sandy Stimpson, descendants of Timothy Meaher, the White businessman who financed the Clotilda voyage, sold a property the family owned in Africatown to Clotilda descendants to house a food bank and redevelopment corporation, the Associated Press reported. The $50,000 price was far below the market value of $300,000. The Meahers are major Mobile area landowners.
See Cahokia Then
Cahokia, the prehistoric town situated across the Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis, Missouri, was one of the first urban centers in the Americas, covering about six square miles and home to perhaps 20,000 residents and some 120 pyramidlike mounds. A new app, Cahokia AR Tour, lets users of Apple mobile devices visiting the state historic site in Illinois imagine Cahokia in its heyday, left, when ceremonial platforms, some still present as mounds, dotted the vicinity. Cahokia began to coalesce around 900 CE, but within 500 years had been deserted. Little about the sprawling agrarian society whose members built the place is understood, and the causes of its abandonment remain unknown. Last April Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth introduced legislation to elevate Cahokia from a National Historic Landmark to a National Park.
CARMEN K. SISSON/CLOUDYBRIGHT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; CAHOKIA MOUNDS MUSEUM SOCIETY
Clearly Clotilda
8 AMERICAN HISTORY
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All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, Tiya Alicia Miles’s 2021 National Book Award winner, was inspired by a cloth sack, right, donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture with the story of an enslaved mother who created it for a daughter being sold away from her. The sack’s contents included pecans, a luxury item of the time. A talented enslaved gardener gets credit for having created a commercially productive variety of pecan. In its natural state the pecan, a native American species, is unreliable at harvest time. Historical records show that in the early 1840s Antoine, 38 and otherwise unidentified, was a gifted “Creole Negro” gardener enslaved at Oak Alley Plantation in New Orleans. A neighboring planter enlisted Antoine to graft shoots from a particularly fine pecan tree onto other pecans. Antoine succeeded in grafting more than 100 trees, the first documented variety of commercial pecan tree.
Pecan Tribute
£264,000 (around $358,525 in today’s value)
An old and extremely rare New England shilling, discovered in a candy tin in an English study, recently sold in London at Morton and Eden for £264,000. Dating from 1652, the coin belonged to a money system established for settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. About 40 examples are known to exist. Wentworth Beaumont of England’s Tyne Valley surmised that one of his forebears brought the shilling to England. One of them, William Wentworth, arrived in the Massachusetts colony in 1636. The coin bears the Roman numeral XII, representing 12 pence, which equals a shilling.
Nez Perce Payback The Ohio Historical Connection has paid back the Nez Perce of the Pacific Northwest $608,100 the tribe was charged to keep control of some 20 items collected in the 19th century by missionary Henry Spalding and loaned to the tribe more than a century later. The New York Times reported that the items came to Oberlin College. In the 1970s Oberlin donated them to the Ohio Historical Society, which never displayed them. Learning of the collection’s existence in the 1970s, the tribe was granted the loan of the lot, which includes items like the Nez Perce moccasins below, for 20 years. In 1996, the society said the tribe could keep the collection—for a price. The tribe paid. In November 2021 the Ohio society reimbursed the Nez Perce in full, noting that if the society possessed the collection today, it would freely return it to the Nez Perce. The Spalding-Allen Collection is now known as the Wetxuuwíitin Collection. In Nez Perce, that word means “returned home after a period of captivity.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE; NEZ PEARCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK; MORTIN AND EDEN
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Kudos—and Complaint
Moskowitz
Fuhrer
Laliberte
Geberer
Goodwin
Social historian Mary Fuhrer (“Sisterhood at Lexington,” p. 22) writes primarily about community life in the early years of the republic. Her article “Half in Love with Death,” about the cultural aspects of consumption, appeared in the April 2021 issue. She is the author of Crisis of Community (UNC Press, 2014). She lives in Acton, Massachusetts. Frequent contributor Raanan Geberer has written about interurban rail, Americans who flew for the air arm of the early Israeli Defense Force, and his native New York’s Dutch heritage, among other topics. In “Alley Cats” (p. 40) he chronicles a Manhattan locale known for its tunefulness. Dennis Goodwin has been writing about history since “cutting and pasting” meant actual cutting and actual pasting. His work has run in Wild West, True West, and Nostalgia Digest. “Alone” (p. 30) marks his first appearance here. He and his wife live in Snellville, Georgia. Daniel Laliberte (“Hunting Antelope,” p. 58) retired as a Captain from the U.S. Coast Guard after more than 30 years as an Intelligence Officer, Maritime Law Enforcement Officer, Operations Officer, and Cutterman. His articles have appeared in American History, Nautical Research Journal, Naval History, Sea History, and USNI Proceedings. Daniel B. Moskowitz (“Poison Pill,” p. 50), whose most recent feature concerned the work of the artist Winfred Rembert, also writes the “SCOTUS 101” column and reviews books.
Re: the February 2022 issue—I really enjoyed “Standing in the Shadows,” “Hanging Offense,” and “Slavery at Sea.” I plan to read most if not all of the books reviewed. Alas, the design for Richard Brookhiser’s “Capital Connections” seemed to go beyond impugning political ineptitude to treat the military, specifically the U.S. Marine Corps, unfairly. Any Marine knows the art of Colonel Charles Waterhouse USMC (Ret). Waterhouse depicts only Marines in “Final Stand at Bladensburg,” which illustrated the piece. I wish your caption had given that title rather than suggest it was “In Their Dreams.” In his column Mr. Brookhiser writes of “13 American troops” killed at Kabul. Could he not have said the dead were 11 Marines, a Navy corpsman, and a soldier? Regarding the fight at Bladensburg, he refers to “500 American sailors” holding their ground when Commodore Joshua Barney, ordered by superiors to support Winder at the last minute, was leading 400 sailors and 114 Marines. Of Barney’s force, British General Robert Ross remarked that they “have given us our only real fighting.” Writers should take care when portraying poor political decisions and bad military tactics to be clear about where the main fault lies. When either occur, only one group ends up being actual casualties. J.H. Thompson, USMC (Ret) Ogden, Utah The editor regrets his failure to identify Colonel Waterhouse’s painting. Correction: President William McKinley (“Final Frames,” February 2022) was shot on a Friday, not a Thursday.
12 AMERICAN HISTORY
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AMERICAN SCHEMERS
Tall Tale Teller Feller hauled Buntline out, and hanged him from a storefront awning. But somebody cut the rope and cops hauled Buntline back to confinement. Newspapers reported that Buntline died that night. They were wrong. He lived another four decades, during which he published a scandal-sheet newspaper, blackmailed brothel owners, led an anti-immigrant movement, incited two riots, spent a year in prison, married six women, and wrote more than 300 pulp adventure novels. Born Edward Zane Carroll Judson in 1823, he ran away at 12 from his Philadelphia home and stowed away on a ship. He spent seven years at sea, first on merchant vessels sailing the Caribbean, then as a U.S. Navy midshipman. He began writing seafaring adventure stories and sold several under the pen name “Ned Buntline,” the latter word a nautical term referring
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HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS
King of Content Buntline never let the truth get in the way of telling a ripping good story, as when he made a dimenovel hero of his pal William Cody.
Ned Buntline is the only American novelist who was lynched by an angry mob and lived to tell the tale, although he much preferred telling fictitious tales that made him seem heroic. In 1846, Buntline, 23, was in Nashville, Tennessee, trying to raise money for his magazine, Ned Buntline’s Own, and romancing a local teenager. Her husband, Robert Porterfield, took umbrage and fired a pistol at Buntline. Porterfield missed, fired again, missed again. Buntline shot back, killing Porterfield. When the publisher was arraigned, a mob of Porterfield’s friends invaded the courtroom, shooting. A bullet pierced Buntline’s chest. He fled the courthouse into a nearby hotel, the horde in pursuit. Cornered on the third floor, Buntline leaped out a window. Police picked the stunned, bleeding writer off the ground and carried him to jail. Porterfield’s pals broke into the hoosegow,
MCCRACKEN RESEARCH LIBRARY AT THE BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST (2)
BY PETER CARLSON
HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS
MCCRACKEN RESEARCH LIBRARY AT THE BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST (2)
AMERICAN SCHEMERS to a rope securing a furled sail. After leaving the Navy in 1842, Buntline edited literary magazines in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati but they went belly up. His mission to Nashville to raise seed money for another magazine got him shot, lynched, and jailed until he convinced a grand jury he’d shot Porterfield in self-defense and was freed. He moved to Manhattan and began turning out pot-boiling yarns for pulp magazines. In 1848, he published Mysteries and Miseries of New York, a novel set in that city’s underworld of whorehouses and gambling dens. Mysteries and Miseries sold 100,000 copies and spawned several sequels. Now famous, the author started a weekly, Ned Buntline’s Own, vowing to crusade against prostitution and gambling. He kept that promise, sort of. He exposed brothels and gambling dens, revealing their locations and sometimes naming their owners—unless they paid him off, in which case the info stayed on the down low. From brothels he was willing to accept payoffs in cash or in kind. Thus, Ned Buntline’s Own served three purposes: it exposed vice, informed readers where to find vice, and served as a lucrative blackmail ing tool. But it also created enemies. “You dirty, mean, sneaking, paltry son of a bitch,” madam Kate Hastings yelled at Buntline as he was strolling a Manhattan street in 1849. “How dare you publish me in your paper!” Hastings uncoiled a horsewhip and thrashed her tormenter about the head and shoulders. He squealed to police, who arrested the brothel owner. When the case came to trial, Hastings showed the judge a blackmail letter from Buntline, and got herself sprung. Rival newspapers reported the episode with palpable glee. Meanwhile, Buntline wed a British immigrant named Annie Bennett and moved into his spouse’s prosperous parents’ home. His immigrant in-laws’ hospitality didn’t keep Buntline from attacking immigrants, particularly British immigrants, in his newspaper. In 1849, he incited a mob to attack the Astor Place Opera House to protest British actor William Macready’s appearance there in Macbeth. The melee killed 21 people. Arrested for inciting it, Buntline drew a year behind bars, during which his wife divorced him, citing his drunkenness and infidelity. Released in 1850, he was greeted by a mob of supporters and a band playing “Hail to the Chief.” He quickly wrote a novel, The Convict’s Return, or Innocence
Vindicated, then embarked on a lecture tour, sometimes orating on “Americanism,” sometimes touting temperance. Whatever the topic, Buntline seldom failed to fortify himself with plenty of pre-lecture grog. He settled briefly in St. Louis, Missouri, where authorities arrested him in 1852 for inciting a riot against German immigrants. When that trial ended in a hung jury, Buntline jumped bail and fled before he could be retried. He spent the next decade campaigning for the anti-immigrant American Party, writing countless adventure stories and marrying a steady succession of young women. At least once, he failed to divorce one wife before marrying the next and was arrested for bigamy. In 1862, at age 39, Buntline joined the Union army. He served in Virginia but saw little action. On a furlough in 1863, he traveled to Manhattan to visit his pregnant fifth wife Kate and their daughter. While there, he hooked up with third wife Lovanche, and promptly remarried her. Realizing that Ned, who had overstayed his leave, was already wed, Loyanche exposed him as a deserter, landing him in the guardhouse. But she visited him in stir, bringing him paper, which he filled with stories that she sold to the New York Weekly. Honorably discharged as a private in 1864, Buntline, claiming to have made colonel, wrote Life in the Buffalo in Winter Saddle or The Cavalry Scout, a Buntline’s look in maturity was wildly exaggerated account of his presaged in an 1872 photograph, wartime adventures. opposite, of him, Bill Cody, and On the lecture circuit again in “Texas Jack” Omohundro. 1869, Buntline was in Nebraska when he met a real cavalry scout—William Cody, 23. The two rode and hunted together and Buntline rushed out several dime novels about the man he dubbed “Buffalo Bill.” The books made Cody famous, so Buntline wrote a play, “Scouts of the Plains,” starring himself and Cody and some ersatz Indians. Critics mocked the production—“…so wonderfully bad it was almost good,” said the New York Herald—but “Scouts” drew crowds and launched Cody’s career as a showman. For the next 15 years, Buntline lived in upstate New York with his sixth and final wife, churning out dozens of dime novels. He worked fast. “I once wrote a book of 610 pages in 62 hours,” he bragged. His oeuvre, mostly adventure yarns aimed at boys, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made him rich. Every Fourth of July, the “Ten Cent Millionaire” treated his Stamford, New York, neighbors to a dazzling fireworks display. He also entertained folks in local bars with dubious stories of his adventures. Sometimes he’d bare the scar on his chest from that 1846 Nashville courtroom fracas, then tell listeners he’d gotten it battling pirates or Indians or Confederates. When Ned Buntline died in 1886, at age 63, the New York Mercury called him “the most sensational, and in some respects, the most thoroughly ‘American’ American of his time.” H APRIL 2022 15
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Road Warriors Samuel Lancaster, Sam Hill, J.C. Potter, and Amos Benson on the Columbia River Highway, circa 1915.
Famous in his time, Sam Hill of the Pacific Northwest is perhaps remarkably distinguished for his present-day obscurity. The Sam Hill in question is not the Sam Hill referenced in “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” That honor has been attributed to a slate of Sam Hills, none of whom is this Sam Hill. The formerly notable Sam Hill was a visionary businessman, arguably manic, who over a 50-year career worked for gas and phone companies and coal mines and had a hand in the expansion of the Great Northern railroad into the West. Marrying the daughter of railroad boss J.J. Hill (no relation) in 1888 didn’t hurt Sam Hill’s prospects. But later in life Hill became more enamored of two things: the rugged splendor of the Pacific Northwest and the creation of paved roads that would allow travelers—and businesspeople—to enjoy and exploit that splendor. “Good roads are more than my hobby,” he said. “They are my religion.” Born in 1857 into a prosperous Quaker family living near Henderson, North Carolina, Hill was the fourth child of a multifaceted business leader and Underground Railroad collaborator. The family moved to Minneapolis in 1865. Upon graduating from Haverford College in 1878, Hill spent time at Harvard collecting another B.A., a law degree, and more friends and connections than good grades. He didn’t need As. He had a bottomless interest in expanding his horizon—and others’ horizons, as well. Over his lifetime, he became fluent in four languages and
BY SARAH RICHARDSON
traveled to Europe and Asia so often that in a single year he might make two trips to Japan, a journey then easier than one into the interior of the United States, which lacked a national road system. In fact, a 1907 road trip on Alpine highways and along Germany’s Rhine River provided Hill with a vision he wrestled into reality: the Columbia River Scenic Highway, which snaked along towering buttes and waterfalls, rising and falling in gentle loops that allowed vehicles of the day, which didn’t top 12 miles per hour, to navigate the inclines. The highway, merely one of Hill’s Northwestern legacies, was by far the most impressive, stretching 74 miles at its completion in 1922. Traveling that part of the Columbia River’s bank had been so difficult that immigrants on the Oregon Trail often hopped into boats for the last leg down the Columbia. Leaving his father-in-law’s employ and moving to Seattle in 1902, Hill spent years promoting this area as
COLLECTION OF MARYHILL MUSEUM OF ART
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Washington and British Columbia in 1921. The other, a more startling structure, replicated Stonehenge and was completed in 1930 about three miles from Hill’s Maryhill mansion. At the time England’s Neolithic monument was believed to have been a site of human sacrifice, a view archaeologists came to discredit. Today the sculpture is the scene of many selfies and the occasional marriage ceremony. The Maryhill mansion’s fate posed a lingering challenge. A friend, American dance innovator Loie Fuller—whom Hill had met while assisting with hunger relief in Belgium during the war—suggested he open the mansion as a museum and that he do so while Queen Marie was touring the United States in 1926. On November 3, the Romanian monarch, a friend of Hill’s since 1893, arrived with her entourage at the ramshackle, empty manse, to find a throng of press, Portlanders, and 400 schoolchildren, as well as local Yakama chief Alex Saluskin and his wife, whom the monarch had invited. In her dedication, Marie of Romania gamely predicted glory for the unlikely institution, and donated 50 boxes of Romanian textiles, statuary, and furniture for a collection still on display at the facility. The unusually eclectic museum also displays portraits of Loie Fuller and numerous drawings and sculptures by Auguste Rodin. These figures were but a few of the friends Hill collected, apparently even having made the acquaintance of Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce, who long inhabited the region before being defeated by the U.S. Army. Curators have augmented Hill’s personal array of Native American basketry with indigenous artifacts from across North America. Hill loved life and work, any work. “If you saw him in his broad-brimmed gray hat with a red bandanna around his neck, wearing his well-worn corduroys, stopping his auto to shovel a sharp-cornered rock out of the road, you would think he was a road supervisor,” wrote Portland journalist Fred Lockley. Hill also loved recognition. “Did you ever stop to think how large a debt of gratitude Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller owe me?” Hill said. “I have had a great deal to do with making them two of the richest men in the United States. Unless we had good roads, Henry Ford wouldn’t have been able to sell millions of his cars. Without Henry Ford’s cars, John D. Rockefeller wouldn’t sell quite so much gasoline.” H
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a locale for roads and settlements. He first pitched the idea of establishing a farming community, Maryhill, named for his wife, on the northern side of the river in the state of Washington, building experimental roads along the bluffs as examples of paving and geometry. Though a big wheel in Seattle Hill could not convince Washington bureaucrats that his road ideas were practical. He found allies among officials in Portland eager to counter the rising economic power of Seattle and San Francisco. They thought showcasing the magnificent Columbia Gorge could only be a good thing. After a lavish overture by Hill, the Oregonians left Maryhill in 1913 vowing to construct the highway. The next year, Hill began building a fortress-like three-story Beaux Arts concrete mansion at Maryhill. But farmers were wary. Good roads might as easily pass them by as offer a reliable route to market. They saw Hill as a city guy with suspect motives. Despite the opposition, the business leaders had their way, particularly when local timber magnate Simon Benson offered $10,000 to back the project, softening the argument of wasted tax dollars. Over three years, workers—including Italian masons Hill hired away from a site in Massachusetts—excavated roadbeds and assembled guardrails, creating a texture to contrast with the somber evergreen backdrop. Key to the execution was road engineer Samuel Lancaster, who in 1904 had made his name on a much-acclaimed macadam road in Jackson, Tennessee. Scenic overlooks let travelers marvel at the vast river and snowy ridges. If crews could build a highway in terrain as impassable and steep as the Columbia Gorge, they could do so anywhere. To illustrate this technological mastery, the opening featured an encounter between a faux indigenous leader, “Chief Multnomah” and a figure repMagnetic Presence resenting White colonizers, with the Hill’s personality attracted a “chief” retreating into the forest. wide range of acquaintances Car culture was getting rolling: In and friends, from European 1915, the state of Oregon tallied fewer monarchs to Indian chiefs. than 12,000 registered vehicles. By 1922, Multnomah County, home to Portland, counted 37,717 registrations. While the Columbia River Scenic Highway was a smashing success, Hill’s colony at Maryhill never took off. Set on the riverbank between the damp forests of the Cascade Mountains and the eastern desert— between “rain and sunshine,” as Hill put it—the parcel was too dry for agriculture and in winter was blasted by winds ripping through the gorge. Hill’s mansion remained only a shell—a good analogy for his marriage. Mary Hill, a Minneapolis native and a Catholic, never took to the Northwest—nor her husband, perhaps—enough to live there permanently. She remained in the Twin Cities, and their two children divided their time between the parents. Hill had liaisons and children with other women, but never divorced, likely due to Mary Hill’s faith. Hill poured his tremendous energy into more lasting endeavors. Holding to Quakerism’s pacifist ideals, he created two memorials to the dead of the Great War. One was the Peace Arch, erected on the border between 18 AMERICAN HISTORY
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TODAY IN HISTORY MAY 1, 1931 THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING OFFICIALLY OPENS. IN ITS FIRST YEAR ONLY 23% OF THE AVAILABLE SPACE WAS SOLD. THE LACK OF TENANTS LED NEW YORKERS TO DISMISS THE BUILDING AS THE “EMPTY STATE BUILDING.” IN YEAR ONE THE OBSERVATION DECK HAULED IN APPROXIMATELY $2 MILLION IN REVENUE, EQUAL TO WHAT ITS OWNERS COLLECTED IN RENT. THE BUILDING FIRST TURNED A PROFIT IN THE 1950s. For more, visit
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SCOTUS 101 Spanning the Decades Every June 17, Bostonians packed the Warren Bridge, here in 1843, to get to Bunker Hill to fete that 1775 victory over British forces.
TROUBLED BRIDGE OVER WATER In February 1837, the U.S. Supreme Court, voting 5-2, rejected a claim by owners of a toll bridge in Boston that the Massachusetts legislature had acted unconstitutionally in authorizing construction of a second, competing bridge. The ruling meant little to Bostonians. The second span, the Warren Bridge, connecting their city with the Charlestown neighborhood, then a separate village just across the Charles River, had long been completed. Warren Bridge tolls had so quickly paid off the initial investors that crossings had become free. But the high court’s ruling profoundly affected commercial life in the United States, marking a turning point in the way that government controlled business, encouraged investment in new technology, and, more basically, defined its own legitimate purposes. The decision, handed down just 18 days before President Andrew Jackson’s second term ended, was the ultimate victory of
Jackson’s populist approach over the more conservative view of government fostered by the Founding Fathers, who tended to defer to the sanctity of business contracts. Rather than adhere to legal technicalities, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in Charles River Bridge, government had as its core purpose the enactment of policies benefiting the entire populace. Charlestown had been settled by some 100 Puritans in 1639, a year before Boston was founded. The settlements obviously needed to trade with one another, and in 1650 the colonial Massachusetts government awarded Harvard College—in need of a reliable funding source—the right to operate a ferry service between the communities. During the ensuing 100-plus years, rising traffic in goods and passengers made clear a ferry was not the most efficient way across the Charles. From the state John Hancock and 83 other investors obtained a charter to build a bridge and, for 40
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CHARLES RIVER BRIDGE V. WARREN BRIDGE 36 US 420 (1837) THE WELFARE OF THE PUBLIC CAN TRUMP PRIVATE CONTRACTS.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
SCOTUS 101 years, to charge tolls for using it. The 1,500foot Charles River Bridge opened in 1786, putting Harvard’s ferry service out of business. In compensation, the bridge owners agreed to pay the school £200 a year for 70 years. The Charles River Bridge was a great success, quickly repaying and rewarding investors, who continued to levy tolls that residents on either bank castigated ever more vigorously as unconscionably high. State politicians were responsive, and in 1828 chartered another company to build and operate a second bridge between Boston and Charlestown. The Warren Bridge was to begin only 300 feet upstream from the Charlestown end of the existing bridge and end 800 feet from its Boston terminus. The charter called for the new bridge to end all toll collecting once investors had recouped and earned a fair profit. Charles River Bridge investors cried foul. They asked the courts to enjoin the competing project, insisting that their charter conferred an implicit monopoly and that the permit issued Isaac Warren and partners violated the “contracts clause” of the U.S. Constitution. That provision, in Section 10 of Article One, says no state may pass any law “impairing the obligation of contracts.” The early 19th-century court under Chief Justice John Marshall put great importance on that provision and gave it an expansive reach. The contracts clause had been central to the very first case in which the Justices voided a state law as unconstitutional. In 1795, Georgia sold a parcel now comprising the states of Alabama and Mississippi to four development companies for $500,000. It came to light that many legislators who voted for the sale had side deals to share in profits the speculators stood to reap reselling the land. Voters quickly threw out those lawmakers, and within the year a new legislature revoked the sale. By then innocent buyers had bought many plots. Those buyers challenged the revocation statute in court and won. The underlying corruption “must deeply be deplored,” Marshall wrote in the 5-1 decision, but the original sale constituted a contract, and that was sacrosanct. No later state legislation could nullify it. The Justices reiterated in subsequent cases that a contract could not be broken. The famous Dartmouth College case went even further: a state could not even amend a contract. Dartmouth had originated under a royal
charter that after independence became an agreement with the state of New Hampshire. The legislature in 1816 passed measures making the college a university and enlarging its board. Marshall, in the opinion negating those changes, admitted that when writing the contracts clause the framers had not had such situations in mind but he nonetheless held that the changes impaired a contract, rendering them invalid. All this suggested that when in March 1831 five days of oral arguments in the case began before the Supreme Court, the owners of the Charles River Bridge stood a good chance of succeeding on their claim that a competing bridge violated their contract, and so was unconstitutional. Except some Justices were not sure and others were off riding circuit, leaving no majority to decide the case. The matter moldered until it was reargued—this time over six days—in 1837. By then the issue of whether to build the Warren Bridge was moot, but the older span’s owners still were hoping to receive damages for the loss of their monopoly. But Marshall and an ally of his had died; another Justice in his camp had resigned. Jackson appointed all three successors, meaning that of the seven-member court five were his choices. Over dissent by the two senior Justices, the Jackson five found the charter for the Warren Bridge valid. As this quintet interpreted the rights assigned the Charles River Bridge investors, there was no promise of a monopoly on spans over the Charles connecting the towns. But Taney’s opinion went much further. “While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights,” he wrote, “and that the happiness and wellbeing of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation.” “Taney’s law was flexible, pragmatic, and instrumental,” historian Kent Newmyer of the University of Connecticut wrote, “simultaneously accommodating the dynamic capital and state-based legislative democracy ushered in by the Jacksonians.” That view of government and its power to align business oversight to suit changing conditions bespoke a deep awareness of technology’s march and fear that hewing to government promises of yesteryear would let established businesses stymie new developments. The first American railroad—the Baltimore & Ohio—had been chartered just 10 years earlier; the Ohio & Erie Canal went in just four years before. Taney warned that a decision empowering the Charles River Bridge owners to foreclose competition would give holders of turnpike charters standing to attack rivals. In this scenario, “the millions of property which have been invested in railroads and canals ... will be put in jeopardy,” Taney wrote. “We shall be thrown back to the improvements of the last century.” The contracts clause—enshrining past promises—was no longer to be central to resolving economic disputes. “The clear message from the Charles River Bridge case was that the Supreme Court supported business competition as essential for economic development,” Ohio State University historian Deborah A. Ballam wrote. H
Taney feared a ruling in favor of the Charles River Bridge’s owners would unleash myriad suits aiming to squelch competition.
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Sisterhood at Lexington
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The epochal events of April 19, 1775, were a long time gestating By Mary Fuhrer
I
n the wee hours of April 19, 1775, long before dawn’s first glimmer, Jonathan Harrington of Lexington, Massachusetts, woke suddenly at his mother’s insistence. “Jonathan, Jonathan,” Abigail Harrington cried, rousting her 16-year-old. “The reg’lars are coming and something must be done!” “I dressed quickly, slung my light gun over my shoulder, took my fife from a chair, and hurried to the parade near the meeting house, where about 50 men had gathered,” the grown Jonathan said years later. “Others were arriving every minute.” Decades on, famous as the last survivor of the American Revolution’s opening battle, Jonathan Harrington often heard requests to recount the day’s events. What he recalled was his impassioned mother, urging her husband and first-born son to battle. To his dying day Harrington praised his mother as “one of the most patriotic women who ever lived.” The resolution and bravery the Lexington militia showed on the town green that morning against veteran units of the world’s most powerful army are well enshrined. But Jonathan Harrington had in mind something more: the role of Lexington’s women. Long before sending their men into combat that April 19, the town’s wives and sisters and mothers had been protesting actively against Crown infringements on colonial rights.
PHOTO CREDIT
PHOTO CREDIT
By 18th-century norms, proper female behavior excluded political engagement. Society considered it unnatural for a woman to speak or to act in public; rather, she was to sequester herself in the domestic sphere. Yet women in Lexington embraced and acted on the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty—for much of that rhetoric was aimed directly at them. For 10 years before war broke out, Lexington’s women had been hearing exhortations to apply their domestic skills to political protest and resistance. In the name of tradition, they were being urged to rebel. And they answered that call in the affirmative. Their main inciter was the town’s popular and influential Whig minister. Jonas Clarke shared the providential Puritan view
Giving as Good as They Got A thematically appropriate if historiographically questionable rendering portrays the Battle of Lexington. APRIL 2022 23
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To Clarke and other Whigs, there was a clear mandate: households must consume less and produce more. This was women’s work. Gathering the necessities of “going to housekeeping” and supplementing those basics
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that everything in life had a divine cause and meaning. As political unrest was mushrooming in the 1760s, Clarke preached of what he saw as discontent’s root cause: congregants’ greed and acquisitiveness, which base characteristics he saw bringing on the yoke of imperial slavery, as in biblical times. To redeem themselves and their political liberty, Clarke said, the faithful had to act to preserve their sacred and civic welfare. In this endeavor, as “Handmaids of the Lord,” women had a direct role, Clarke declared. Clarke preached against excessive fondness for worldly goods—the getting and flaunting of imported attire and furnishings. This was woman’s realm. In his sermon “The Best Art of Dress,” the cleric inveighed against a rising fad for finery—“the great degeneracy of the present times,” he called it. “People are much for the fashion, and young people for those ornaments which they think are beautiful and excellent,” Clarke railed. “And they are apt to set much by them, and value themselves highly upon them, when obtain’d.” Clarke chivvied townsfolk to abandon “vanities and temptations” and to eschew “fashionable dress” for the “white robes of righteousness.” By substituting home-made goods for
Only a generation separated women who made do with hand-medowns from women who could boast of setting an enviably elegant table.
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Home Defense A romanticized image suggests women wielded guns but such was not the case.
imported finery women could demonstrate piety—and become potent political actors. By the mid-1760s, women’s domestic economy stood at the center of a political maelstrom. As Britain was trying to finance the French and Indian War by taxing imports to the colonies, American Whigs smelled a rat: an unconstitutional effort to refill the empire’s depleted coffers by impoverishing colonials. Many Whigs suspected a parliamentary conspiracy to tax the colonies into debt peonage. Lexington residents were articulating this fear as early as 1765 in response to the Stamp Act. In town meeting they complained of the act as “... a yoke too heavy for us to bear.... [I]t will quickly drain the Country of the little cash remaining in it, strip multitudes of their property, and reduce them to poverty in a short time ... [O]f natural and freeborn subjects we shall become the most abject slaves.” Clarke had reason to fear overspending and debt to British creditors. As Lexington matured into its third settled generation, townsfolk were buying more and producing less. Between 1740 and 1770, the value of luxury goods purchased in Lexington rose by a factor of 10. In the 1750s, Dr. Robert Fiske’s wife, Betty, had set her table with pewter, earthenware, and old knives and forks; a generation later, her son’s wife, Hepzibah, could boast of owning china, silver spoons, brass candlesticks, a coffee pot, and tinware. Similar creature comforts graced neighboring households. When Lydia Mulliken’s husband, Nathaniel, died in 1768, his estate included a “bewfat”—also known as a buffet or sideboard—for displaying fine china; a portrait; a desk; cases of drawers; mirrors; a tea table; items of pewter and brass; and glassware. These all signified genteel taste. But they came from abroad, bought with cash. Whig fears arose from economic reality: by mid-century, more Lexington farmers had gone in debt, and more were losing farms to creditors. Rising indebtedness reflected a demographic crisis of limits: after multiple generations of sons settling nearby, Lexington fathers were running out of land to hand down. By mid-century, many had borrowed to finance their sons’ settlement elsewhere. New taxes further stoked anxiety. People complained that greedy rulers were making off with the fruits of the people’s labor; that such policies would impoverish them; that poverty would beget foreclosures, in which corrupt and tyrannical British lords seized their land. As Britain had done to the Irish, colonials would be returned to feudalism, with great lords taking over the countryside and independent farmers reduced to tenancy or serfdom.
usual number of spinning wheels during the boycott years. On August 31, 1769, according to the Boston Gazette, Lexington hosted a “spinning party.” Very early in the morning, the young Ladies of this town, to the number of 45, assembled at the house of Mr. Daniel Harrington, with their Spinning Wheels, where they spent the day in the most pleasing satisfaction: and at night presented Mrs. Harrington with the spinning of 602 knots of linen and 346 knots of cotton. If any should be inclin’d to treat such assemblies or the publication of them in a contemptuous sneer as thinking them quite ludicrous, such persons would do well first to consider what would become of one of our (so much boasted) manufactures, on which we pretend the welfare our country is so much depending, if those of the fair sex should refuse to “lay their hands to the spindle” or be unwilling to “hold the distaff.” Prov. 31:19. Agitation over boycotted goods and “home manufactures” cooled in the early 1770s. Then Parliament brewed a fresh pot of tempest with the 1773 Tea Act, a piece of legislation that was intended to promote sale of imported tea at bargain prices—and to tax those purchases. Boston’s Whig leaders feared this ploy would beget a monopoly on trade and a new form of unconsented taxation. Calls arose for a tea boycott. For women, this was a Biblically hard teaching. Tea drinking, with its
Boston, behold the pretty Spinners here, And see how gay the pretty Sparks appear: See Rich and Poor all turn the Spinning Wheel, All who Compassion for their Country feel, All who do love to see Industry live, And see Frugality in Boston thrive. The women of Lexington were not to be outdone. In previous decades, they generally had ceased spinning and weaving yarn in favor of imported fabric; now they needed to revive the ancient craft. Lexington’s wheelwright, militia captain John Parker, filled orders for 10 times the
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with domestic comforts were the tasks of a young woman before marriage, and her business after. It was to women, then, that Rev. Clarke was addressing his ominous warning: consumption constituted a vanity that would lead—in both biblical and Whiggish rhetoric—to enslavement, figurative and literal. In 1767, the year that Parliament passed the Townshend Duties, taxing a much wider array of goods, a cry went up to boycott taxed imports and fill the resulting household gaps with homemade goods. “If this savings is not made, Interest must rise,” Boston almanac writer Nathaniel Ames warned. “Mortgages cannot be cleared, Land will fall, or be possessed by Foreigners...” Were households to replace imports with homemade goods, “a whole Province will be saved from Slavery.” Women’s domestic economy would determine which eventuality was to be. In 1768, Lexington town meeting adopted measures “to promote frugality and economy”—a campaign dictated by men but implemented by women. Letters in the Boston Gazette appealed directly to women. “Ladies, . . .I am convinced that at this present it is. . .in your Power, to effect more in favour of your Country, than an Army of an Hundred Thousand Men ...” a correspondent importuned. In 1768-69, politically minded women organized public “spinning bees.” In large groups, working outside sunrise to sunset, they spun yarn to show patriotism. To be seen in public in the act of spinning became a political act much celebrated in the press. One Boston 1769 broadside honored the women warriors at the wheel:
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We’ll Meet Again A militiaman busses his wife before running to the scene of the fighting on April 19, 1775.
In late November 1773 ships arrived in Boston harbor bearing the contested tea. Lexington citizens gathered immediately in town meeting and voted to oppose “the landing, receiving, buying or selling, or even Using any of the Teas.” Moreover, they unanimously declared, they would treat “with Neglect and Contempt” and would look upon “as an Enemy to this Town and to this Country” any person who did purchase or consume any tea. Gathering their household stocks of tea, townspeople paraded to the common and committed all to a giant bonfire. Men may have resolved to destroy the tea; however, that staple was under their wives’ control, part of the stores to which mistresses held the key. Lexington’s women had to consent to the seizure and immolation of their tea. And they did.
The Good China Tea bowl, coffee cup, and saucer produced by Royal Worcester circa 1760. Whig papers lauded Lexington’s united front. A letter to the Massachusetts Spy declared, “The patriotic conduct of the town of Lexington is a matter truly worthy the notice and imitation of every town in the province, whose members are well-wishers to the cause of liberty.” Three days after Lexington townsfolk publicly burned their tea, a group of men in Boston destroyed the noxious import in what is remembered as the “Boston Tea Party.” Parliament was not amused. In spring 1774, London retaliated by
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“Farewell the Tea-board with your gaudy attire, Ye cups and ye saucers that I did admire; To my cream pot and tongs I now bid adieu, That pleasure’s all fled that I once found in you. . . No more shall my teapot so generous be In filling the cups with this pernicious tea, For I’ll fill it with water and drink out the same, Before I’ll lose LIBERTY that dearest name. . .”
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rituals and equipage, anchored notions of female respectability and refinement. In Lexington homes, among the most common luxuries was the tea service, with its china cups and saucers, silver pots, and trappings of presentation and service. One Lexington historian noted that in local memory, “the greatest luxury of women was their tea, their greatest dissipation to make calls in the afternoon and have a dish of tea and to gossip over it.” Newspapers printed a lady’s lament at putting aside this ritual:
imposing the punitive Intolerable Acts: closing the Port of Boston, quartering British soldiers in private homes, stripping Massachusetts of self-government, and banning town meetings. Afire with resistance, many municipalities signed covenants pledging a complete boycott of imported British goods—and woe betide those who did not comply. Reverend Clarke’s diary reported that his town met and pledged not to purchase English goods. It is not known if Lexington women signed this covenant, though women elsewhere famously did, to ridicule by British cartoonists who caricatured ladies’ participation in politics. But Clarke found the matter deeply serious. He preached that the colonies’ “troubles” were partly the fault of their inhabitants’ worldly and covetous behavior. “When a generation forsak[es] the Lord God of their fathers and serve[s] other Gods, alas. . .they are delivered. . .under the hands of the Spoilers to be spoiled. Yea, . . .from being a free and independent People, [they] are brought under the yoke of oppression. . .” With matters aboil in autumn 1774, town representatives met in an extra-legal convention held at Concord and adopted radical and treasonous measures. The convention advised each town to raise money, men, arms, and ammunition for defense. Lexington complied. Residents reorganized their militia, which started drilling regularly to “ensure military Discipline, and to put themselves in a position of defense against their enemies.” Enlarging the town’s stocks of gunpowder, balls, and flint and purchasing bayonets for training soldiers, along with a pair of drums “for the Use of the Military,” Lexingtonians voted to bring two cannon from Watertown “and mount them at the Town charge.”
Seeking Solidarity An insurrectionist broadside urges men and women to refrain from buying British.
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For Home and Hearth A militiaman prepares to leave his household to trade volleys with Redcoats at Lexington.
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When the alarm bell rang shortly after 1 a.m. on April 19, 1775, the women of Lexington saw their men off to battle, then undertook their own defensive maneuvers. Each attended to her traditional duties: to protect and care for children, household goods, and neighbors. Women hastily secured their most valuable household possessions and, if their residences were in the path of battle, hustled offspring to safety. Captain Parker’s wife, Lydia, “took all the valuables and hid them in a hollow trunk of a tree standing some distance from the house,” then posted her 14-year-old son on the nearest hill as a look-out. Widow Lydia Mulliken and her teenage daughters, who lived along the main road, hurriedly concealed what they could of the family’s silver and other valuables in a wall near their clock shop, then fled to distant safety. Young Mary Sanderson also lived on the main road, with her husband, her infant, and a four-year-old girl she was caring for. The couple gathered the children and, “taking such articles as they could hurriedly collect and carry in their arms, by the light of a lantern,” made their way to her father’s remote home, whereupon Mary’s husband took his leave. At their house, on the main road, Deacon Joseph Loring’s daughters scurried to hide the communion silver in a brush heap out back, then made tracks. Once Abigail Harrington had sent her husband and son to the confrontation, she took her younger children “down a lane back of the house across a meadow to the old place on Smock farm.” For some, flight was particularly difficult: four women were still in childbed, having recently given birth, and three were within a few weeks of delivering. At the Clarke parsonage, the parson and Dolly Quincy—John Hancock’s fiancée and at the time a guest of the Clarkes—hurriedly hid “money, watches, and anything [sic] down the potatoes and up Garrett.” Meanwhile, mother Lucy Clarke bundled her children into a wagon headed out of range. These women sought, as was their custom, the company of their sisters and female neighbors, gathering together for mutual support. Francis Brown’s widow recalled that the day of the fight her house, somewhat off the main road, was “full of women and children weeping. They hid their silver and mirrors and many other things in Russell’s swamp beyond Munroe’s brook.” Their terror was heightened by rumors that freedom-seeking bondsmen were to rise and murder defenseless noncombatants. Some women experienced the fight at close quarters. Daniel Harrington’s wife, Anna, did not have time to flee her house, which was on the common, as her husband and father mustered. She was on hand as her
father fell in battle, died, and was brought to her house, where his corpse was laid out. Next door, Ruth Harrington, her young son with her, watched the battle, saw her husband fall, and, legend holds, watched helplessly as he crawled to his front stoop to die in her arms. If the morning of April 19 had been full of fear and flight for Lexington’s women, the afternoon was full of horror and fury. In the early morning, with her three small children, Anna Munroe had stayed in her husband’s tavern on the main road. But that afternoon, as harried Redcoats were retreating under fire toward Boston, peril came her way. From her windows she could see Regulars rapidly advancing on her home. Gathering the family silver and her children, she fled out the tavern’s back door. Daughter Anna, nearly five years old, recounted the story of that flight to her grandchildren. Anna said she “...could remember seeing the men in red coats coming toward the house and how frightened her mother was when they ran from the house. . .one of the soldiers started to fire on her, but an officer knocked his arm up and said, ‘Do not fire on a woman.’” Later, Anna would recite, her mother used to take her on her lap and say, ‘This is my little girl that I was so afraid the Red coats would get.’” As the Regulars were making their way east through Lexington, they took out their frustration on abandoned homesteads. The rampant destruction of their household goods was calamitous for women, a loss of all they had produced, acquired, and stewarded, and one that they Dorothy Quincy Hancock
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making their way east through lexington, the british troopers took out their frustration on abandoned homesteads and property.
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The men did not act alone. Women’s hand in stoking the fires of martial resistance was noted by a Loyalist: “The Americans would certainly have abandoned the cause long ago and bowed to the yoke, but that a certain epidemical kind of phrenzy runs through our fair country women, which outdoes all the pretended patriotic virtue of the more robustic males. These little mischief making devils have entered into an almost unanimous association that any man who shall basely and cowardly give up the public cause of freedom, shall from that moment be discarded [from] their assemblies, and no future contrition shall be able to atone for the crime. This has had a wonderful effect, and not a little served to increase the provincial forces.”
depredations, “she was greatly exasperated, declaring she would not return home from her father’s house to harbor and take care of the British soldier.” When she did return, her state of rage so terrified the wounded man that he feared to eat food she served him until someone had tasted it, in case she had poisoned his portion. “When over 100 years of age, Mrs. Sanderson described with minuteness many articles of her wardrobe and household goods that were destroyed or missing, rarely failing to mention the cow, and that it was a part of her marriage portion.” Her gravestone reads, “A witness of the first revolutionary conflict, she recounted its trying scenes to the last.” The women, as well as the men, long remembered the 19th of April ’75, and all that had prefaced it, for they, too, had played their part with religious and civic zeal. Lexington’s women had agreed that “something must be done,” and urged their men into battle. Theirs was, as historian Linda Kerber points out, a distinctively female patriotism. They had been mobilized by intertwined sacred and civic claims on their sex, and their commitment became part of the town’s energizing moral resources. These women sent their men to war as a “surrogate enlistment in a society in which women did not fight.” But they went further. They reimagined their traditional duties to join in that fight. H
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Mentions in Dispatches Above, The Massachusetts Gazette Extraordinary, 24 December 1767; right, verse from page 3 of The Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser, 16 November 1767 catalogued and remembered. Lydia Mulliken, whose house and clock shop across from Munroe’s Tavern were burned to the ground, lost everything except silver serving pieces hidden in the wall behind her home. Rebecca Mulliken, 13, particularly mourned the fate of “a pocket which with great pride she had embroidered with crewels,” and of whose loss she often spoke with regret in later years. The women of Deacon Loring’s family lost everything, including all that the daughters had accumulated to present as marriage portions through extra labor at tailoring and teaching. Mrs. Muzzy returned to her home to find that British soldiers had broken her mirror and valuable crockery, shot up a wall, and left the floor striped with blood. When Anna Munroe returned to her tavern, she found the soldiers had piled her furniture, including a mahogany table that had been part of her wedding furniture, and set a fire meant to burn the house down. Next to the Munroe Tavern stood the humble little residence of Samuel and Mary Sanderson. When Samuel returned, he observed “. . .his house sacked, many articles destroyed, and their cow, a part of Mrs. Sanderson’s marriage portion or dower, killed, and a wounded British soldier quartered upon them.” When Mary Sanderson heard of the APRIL 2022 29
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Elizabeth Eckford and the battle of Central High By Dennis Goodwin
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Alone
Linked by History A scowling Hazel Bryan barks racist invective at Elizabeth Eckford as she attempts to start school at Central High on September 4, 1957.
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T
oo excited to sleep—come morning she would be starting high school, and under very dramatic conditions—Elizabeth Eckford, 15, spent the night of September 3, 1957, preparing for her first day of classes at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Like her mother and sisters, Elizabeth was an expert seamstress. Once again, she ironed the pleated white skirt she had made, taking care to touch up the navy blue and white gingham trim she had added when she ran short on white fabric. With
bobby socks and white buck loafers, her outfit would present the ideal look. She was a little nervous; last evening on television, the Eckfords had watched Governor Orval Faubus announce that to protect everyone involved and to “preserve the peace,” he was activating the state’s National Guard units and stationing them at Central. In the morning, as usual, Birdie Eckford inspected her children, making sure all six had notebooks, sharpened pencils, and lunch money. Then, also as usual, she read to them from the Bible, this day choosing a particular passage—the 27th APRIL 2022 31
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Psalm—and giving those words heightened elizabeth emphasis. “The Lord is my light and my salvaknew the tion,” Mrs. Eckford read. “Whom shall I fear?” As Birdie was reading, husband Oscar nerroute to vously paced the room, chomping on an unlit central by cigar. A night-shift maintenance worker at the heart; she’d Missouri Pacific Railroad station, he should passed the have been asleep, but he too was wound up. Saying goodbye to her parents and siblings, and school with a swirl of her skirt Elizabeth walked out the countless door. She knew the route to Central by times on her front heart; she had passed the school countless times way to her on her way to her grandfather’s grocery store. grandfather’s years before, the U. S. Supreme Court had grocery store. Three ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Some
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Girding for Conflict Above, Elizabeth and mother Birdie Eckford watch TV at home the evening of Elizabeth’s ordeal in Little Rock. Clockwise from left rear, the volunteers recruited to desegregate Central High: Jefferson Thomas, Melba Pattillo, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed.
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states of the former Confederacy, like Virginia, vowed to respond to the federal mandate to integrate with “massive resistance” (see p. 50). Less so Arkansas. In 1955, Little Rock School District Superintendent Virgil Blossom proposed to integrate Central High—gradually. During the summer of 1957, working with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates, the city school board sought young Black volunteers for that momentous action Of Little Rock’s 3,665 secondary school pupils, 750 attended the two facilities allocated for Black students, Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School. In 1955, Dunbar High had transformed into a junior high and Horace Mann opened as the new senior high for African American students. White students were free to attend Central High, Hall High, or Little Rock Technical High. As a first step, administrators reviewed student records at Dunbar and Horace Mann. Based on grades, attendance, and emotional maturity, Bates and board members chose and interviewed several hundred prospects. From among 200-some volunteers, the adults narrowed the ranks to
Wearing sunglasses against the bright morning, Elizabeth took a city bus to 12th and Park Streets, two blocks from the front entrance to Central. Just before 8 a.m., she walked south on Park toward the school. She heard crowd noises that became a roar. Armed soldiers were lining the periphery of the school grounds. Up ahead, students were passing through the military picket line. “I saw the Guard break ranks as the students approached the sidewalks,” she later recalled. She walked to the point where she thought Guardsmen were letting students through. When she stepped toward the school doorway, however, two soldiers suddenly closed ranks, obstructing her path. Believing she had picked the wrong entry point, Elizabeth walked further down the line to another sidewalk. As she again tried to enter the school, Guardsmen crossed their rifles. Still supposing she simply had not found the right spot, she continued to a walkway near the school’s main entrance. Across Park Street from the National Guard line a mob of angry White protesters was milling. Finally, Elizabeth understood what the soldiers had been trying to convey. Again blocking her path, men with guns solemnly shunted her toward the mob. “It was only then that I realized that they were barring me,” she said later.
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17. When organizers explained that, owing to the fraught situation, that participants would not be able to engage in extracurricular activities; that community backlash could get their folks fired, and that the effort to integrate Central could get violent, the list dwindled to ten: Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Jane Hill, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls. Like her nine schoolmates, Elizabeth Eckford was not particularly political. She just wanted to attend a modern, well-funded high school. On September 3, Bates gathered the stalwarts at her home in Little Rock. The next day volunteers were to meet again at her house, ride together to Central, and, accompanied by Black and White clerics from local churches, walk into the high school at about 8:30, she explained. After the teens left and Bates was rushing about, it dawned on her that she had counted only nine volunteers. No one had contacted the Eckfords, who had no phone. Bates made a mental note to get with Elizabeth and her parents later that day, but in all the tumult the NAACP leader forgot.
Working Together Warily NAACP activist Daisy Bates, above, and Little Rock public school superintendent Virgil T. Blossom collaborated well in advance of the turbulence in an attempt to desegregate the city’s schools without tumult.
“They’re coming!” a voice shouted. “The niggers are coming!” Elizabeth’s knees began to tremble. “Don’t let her in!” someone else shouted. As she stepped into Park Street, hundreds of angry Whites fell in behind her. Reporters and news photographers were walking backwards in front of Elizabeth and the mob, taking notes and pictures. Intending to reach the bus stop at 16th and Park, Elizabeth strode briskly. Her parents had taught her to look to adults for help, so she scanned the crowd for a visage that showed a trace of empathy, focusing on an older white woman. “It seemed like a kind APRIL 2022 33
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Federal-State Standoff Clockwise from top, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus with sympathetic headlines; a Faubus campaign engineered an audience with President Dwight Eisenhower, who spoke with the state leader in Newport, Rhode Island.
Daisy Bates heard about Elizabeth’s predicament on her car radio and sped to Central. She didn’t arrive in time to help, but Grace Lorch happened onto the fracas in time to intervene. Lorch, 50, a prominent White figure in the local civil rights movement, had just dropped her daughter at a junior high near Central. Aware of that morning’s action, Lorch drove by to see how it was progressing. When she saw the protesters, she parked and ran to the scene. Charging into the crowd to get to Elizabeth’s side, Lorch called out the mob. “She’s scared!” Lorch shouted. “She’s just a little girl! “Six months from now, you’ll be ashamed of what you’re doing.” Across Park Street stood Ponder’s Drug Store, whose soda fountain was a popular Central High hangout. With Elizabeth in tow, Lorch strode toward the pharmacy, intending to use the phone there to call a taxi. Protesters surged at them, spouting slurs. The staff had locked the store doors.
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face, but when I looked again, she spat on me,” Elizabeth recalled. “Safety, to me, meant getting to that bus stop.” The Arkansas Democrat had assigned photographer Ira “Will” Counts, 26, to cover the desegregation of Central High. As he was documenting the chaos, Counts noticed directly behind Elizabeth a hysterical White girl spewing hateful language. He framed Elizabeth in the foreground, slightly blurred, with her snarling tormentor in focus. “I just hoped I had enough film,” Counts later said. As the White teenager was screeching “Go back to Africa!” Counts squeezed the shutter, counterposing Hazel Bryan’s unhinged ferocity and Elizabeth Eckford’s despondent composure. Reaching the bus stop, Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bench there and stared downward. She tried without success to shut out her surroundings. “I could hear individual voices, but I was not conscious of numbers,” she said. “I was conscious of being alone.” Screeches of “Go back to the jungle!” and “Drag her to a tree and lynch her!” bombarded Elizabeth. Reporters circled her, forming a protective ring. Benjamin Fine of The New York Times sat on the bench and put an arm around her. He lifted her chin and whispered, “Don’t let them see you cry.” The sight of a White man comforting a Black girl further inflamed the mob.
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following her child’s ordeal on the radio. She and Elizabeth embraced without speaking. As planned, the other student volunteers had arrived around 8:30 that morning at the corner of Park and 13th, accompanied by the ministers. They, too, walked a gantlet of abuse to the Central High doors, where the Guard unit’s commander declared that at Governor Faubus’s order the students could not enter the building. Later that day, at Daisy Bates’s house, the NAACP chief met Elizabeth for the first time, Elizabeth glaring at the older woman with what Bates described as “cold hatred in her eyes.” “Why did you forget me?” the 15-year-old demanded. Bates apologized profusely. For two weeks, the volunteers stayed out of school as NAACP leaders and their lawyers went to court; when volunteer Jane Hill’s father’s boss threatened to fire him, her parents pulled her out of the project. On September 14, President Dwight D. Eisenhower summoned Faubus to
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“Won’t somebody please call a taxi?” Grace Lorch pleaded. No one did, but a northbound bus arrived on Park Street and the driver opened its doors. Lorch helped her companion board and sat with her. Lorch asked the girl her name; Elizabeth, in deep shock, did not respond. After a few stops, Grace asked if she would be all right. The girl said yes, so Lorch disembarked to catch a southbound bus and retrieve her car. Elizabeth later admitted to being relieved when her rescuer left, since she knew that many in Little Rock thought Grace and husband Lee Lorch to be left-leaning activists, perhaps even communists. Birdie Eckford taught laundry technique at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro on Markham Street. Elizabeth got off the bus there. “There are times when you just know you need your mama,” she said later. She hurried downstairs through soapy, bleach-tinged clouds of steam to find her mother peering out a window through moist eyes. Birdie had been
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At Central high school, the national guard unit’s commander declared that at the order of governor faubus the volunteers could not enter the building.
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Snapshots of a Losing Cause Clockwise from above, segregationist demonstrators crowd the entrance to Central High School; civil rights organizer Daisy Bates watches the Little Rock Nine board vehicles protected by the National Guard; Guardsmen escort the volunteers on their final steps to the embattled school.
Newport, Rhode Island, for a brief meeting at which Faubus assured the president he would allow the Black students to enroll. Then, withdrawing the National Guard and leaving security to the Little Rock police, the governor complained that the federal government was pressuring him to integrate his state’s high schools. Daisy Bates began planning a second attempt to enroll the remaining student volunteers. She started calling parents. The Eckfords now had a telephone at their home. To Bates’s great surprise and relief, Elizabeth and her parents agreed, albeit reluctantly, to stick by the effort. The promise of a superior education trumped fear. On the morning of September 23, escorted by Little Rock police, state troopers, and four Black journalists, the volunteers entered Central High School through a side door. Another mob, 1,000 strong, had gathered at the main entrance. Protesters raced to the side door and attacked Black newsmen. Through the morning, the mob showed no signs of relent. Before noon police officers ushered the volunteers out through the same side door and rushed them to safety in official vehicles. That evening, President Eisenhower issued a proclamation ordering opponents of integration to “cease and desist.” The next day, by telegram, Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann begged Eisenhower to send Army troops to his city. An unenthusiastic Eisenhower realized Faubus had APRIL 2022 37
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Unmistakable Message At a mock lynching in Little Rock on October 3, 1957, a White youth punches an effigy of a Black man hanging from a tree.
She overdosed on sleeping pills—the first of several suicide attempts. Chronically blue, she nonetheless graduated from Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, with a B.A. in history. She moved home to Little Rock. She enlisted in the U.S. Army. She lived in Indiana, Georgia, Washington, and Alabama. In May 1974, Elizabeth Eckford, 32, returned to Little Rock to stay. “Other places, for me, weren’t any better,” she said. “They were just different places.” She became a recluse, rarely leaving the house other than to shop and do laundry. For hours she lay in bed facing the wall. Therapy and medication lifted her spirits a bit, but it took an unexpected meeting to dispel the fog enveloping her. After repeated coaxing, Elizabeth agreed to attend the 40th anniversary of the Nine’s enrollment in 1997. Will Counts, who had photographed Elizabeth and Hazel Bryan in September 1957, was encouraged by a historian friend to try to bring the women together for another picture as part of the commemoration. Hazel Bryan Massery, who had stayed close to Little Rock, had come to regret her actions at Central High as a 15-year-old. She claimed to have “amnesia” regarding that behavior but acknowledged its caustic effects. She volunteered with young Black mothers and counseled minority students. When Counts invited Massery to pose for a photo marking the anniversary, she enthusiastically agreed. So did Elizabeth Eckford.
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A hard core of racist schoolmates numbering 150 to 175 spent the rest of the 1957-58 school year tormenting the volunteers. White girls scattered broken glass in the showers as Black classmates washed up after gym class. A favorite form of physical insult was stepping on Black students’ heels. A student hurled sharpened pencils at Elizabeth. An assailant threw acid in the eyes of volunteer Melba Pattillo, saved from blindness because a Guardsman rushed her to a sink and rinsed away the acid. None of the nine shrank from the test. Birdie Eckford lost her job; Jane Hill’s dad lost his. Little Rock shut down its schools 1958-59. The Eckfords managed to hire a tutor, but Elizabeth came up several credits shy of a diploma. She completed high school by moving to St. Louis, Missouri. She sank into a withering depression.
Elizabeth moved back to Little Rock and became a recluse, rarely leaving the house other than to shop and do laundry.
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backed him into a political corner. The president federalized the Arkansas National Guard and approved deployment to Little Rock of 1,000 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. On September 25, 1957, covered live by network television, the nine Black students, surrounded by soldiers, climbed the front steps at Central High on what proved the easiest part of their mission.
Where They Have to Let You In Above, Elizabeth and Hazel at their former high school in 1997. Below, Elizabeth at home.
AP PHOTO/WILL COUNTS; LAWRENCE SCHILLER/GETTY IMAGES
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Will Counts drove Hazel to Elizabeth’s house, where the women cordially greeted one another. Hazel apologized repeatedly. The two discovered they shared a love of flowers. Hazel said she hoped to have a chance to step out of one picture and into another. Counts drove them to Central High where he photographed them side by side smiling. The portrait ran on page 1 of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and later, combined with Counts’s 1957 photo, as a popular poster entitled “Reconciliation.” For several years, the pair spent time together taking in flower shows, shopping, and meeting for lunch. They made public joint appearances. Elizabeth put depression further behind and became a teacher. Eventually it came to light that Hazel had remained friends with White students who had abused the Black volunteers. Elizabeth broke off contact.
Elizabeth Eckford continued to speak with schoolchildren, though sometimes the encounters left her overcome by emotion. While talking to a student group in a restaurant outside Little Rock, she suddenly bolted. “I’m sorry,” the group leader explained. “She’s having an episode.” She kept up her public appearances but set limits: no crowding, no hugging, no loud noises. In April 2007, during an annual Sojourn to the Past tour, Elizabeth found herself scheduled to speak at Central High. The Sojourn program, begun in 1999 by California history teacher Jeff Steinberg, annually takes a group of Black and White students on a week-long bus tour through the South to visit civil rights landmarks and hear from veterans of the struggle. On the way to Little Rock from Memphis, Tennessee, chaperones told the students of Elizabeth’s stipulation about the ban on loud noises. As an alternative, Steinberg showed the group the American Sign Language gesture for cheering. When Elizabeth walked onstage at Central, the children rose, lifted their arms, and waved their hands in a standing ovation. Nearly 50 years after her harrowing walk into unwanted immortality, Elizabeth Eckford again was in the midst of raised hands—not ending in fists or raised middle fingers but conveying silent appreciation for her achievement and strength of character. H
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40 AMERICAN HISTORY
Alley Cats Where the makers of the American songbook cut their tuneful teeth By Raanan Geberer
O
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ne day in 1903, Monroe Rosenfeld paid a visit to the block of Manhattan’s West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Rosenfeld, a songwriter and journalist, had come to that neighborhood to call on fellow tunesmith Harry Von Tilzer, one of the day’s best-known songwriters. Von Tilzer kept an office in that locale, and for good reason. On every building along 28th Street signs advertised the music publishers operating within: M. Witmark and Sons, Shapiro-Remick, T.B. Harms, Leo Feist, and others. Through open windows along West 28th blared a cacophony of pianos being pounded in a raucous range of keys and states of tune. Entering Von Tilzer’s office, Rosenfeld greeted his pal. “It sounds like a bunch of tin cans,” Rosenfeld cracked. “Well,” Von Tilzer replied, “I guess this must be Tin Pan Alley.” Several versions of this anecdote exist, and both Rosenfeld and Von Tilzer took credit for the nickname thereafter associated with that stretch of West 28th Street. Gotham newspaper legend holds that Rosenfeld, who wrote for the New York World, had a column called “Tin Pan Alley,” but no supporting evidence has ever surfaced. Nevertheless, in the tradition of stories too good to check, the phrase “Tin Pan Alley” caught on, first referring to the street along which Von Tilzer and rivals toiled and eventually as a synonym for the popular music industry that sprouted in New York around 1890 and blossomed in the first few decades of the 20th century. Tin Pan Alley came into being to serve a market for sheet music, sales of which were indicators of songs’ popularity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, recorded music existed, Musical Mixing Bowl first on carnauba wax-coated tubes, then on fragile lacquer disks, but playback equipBy 1905, when this photo was ment was costly. However, Americans were crazy for pianos, and the music they made, this stretch of West played and listened to on pianos at home, in church, in saloons, and onstage at vaude28th Street in Manhattan ville houses and music halls came packaged on paper printed with a number’s key, was dense with tunesmiths chords, and, if there were lyrics, words. Tin Pan Alley’s songwriters, song pluggers, and and rife with dealmaking. song publishers made their living making music make money, and besides creating a vast body of unforgettable tunes they established what became the American recording industry. America has always had popular songwriters–in the mid-1800s Stephen Foster had fans humming and singing tunes like “Oh, Susanna,” “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” among more than 200 others that he wrote. In Foster’s heyday, the music industry was a scattershot proposition, dominated by hymns and light, classically inflected numbers. Publishers were often music store owners or local printers who distributed sheet music and instrumental instruction books as a sideline, according to Tin Pan Alley by David A. Jansen. APRIL 2022 41
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Ragtime, which was named for its “ragged” syncopated style, evolved in the late 19th century in Midwestern saloons, dance halls, and brothels.
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Along with the publishers came a new generation of songwriters: young, ambitious men, often the sons of immigrants, who hired on at a salary to churn out songs of all sorts, from tragedies like Von Tilzer’s “A Bird in a Gilded rags, including “The Entertainer.” In 1907, Joplin Cage” to celebrations of transportation, as in Gus relocated to New York City, where he tried withEdwards’s “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” and the out success to get his ragtime opera, “Treemoniregional nostalgia of Lewis Muir’s and Wolfe Gilsha,” produced. He reportedly suspected Irving bert’s “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” to novelty Berlin of having lifted the opening musical tunes that mocked Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. A vogue for “coon songs” in the minphrase of his hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” strel style began to wither around 1905, when from “Treemonisha,” which Joplin had dropped African American songwriters and performers at Berlin’s publisher. Berlin denied this. Joplin denounced them, but it persisted into the `30s. died in 1917. In 1921 Joplin inheritor Eubie Blake Black composers introduced novel musical made a notable transition from that form to early forms. Starting in 1909, many set up shop in the jazz and show tunes. With partner Noble Sissle, new Gaiety Building in Midtown. The first of Blake produced and wrote the songs to “Shuffle these genres was ragtime, so called for its “ragAlong,” the first Black musical on Broadway. ged” syncopated style. Ragtime took form in the As Scott Joplin was popularizing ragtime, W. late 1800s in Midwestern saloons, dance halls, C. Handy was pumping up enthusiasm for the and brothels. In 1899, Scott Joplin, a music blues. Handy, a middle-class Black cornetist and teacher, pianist, and composer, walked into bandleader, had grown up having to hide his interest in music from strict music retailer and publisher John Stark’s store in parents. He persisted and became a professional musician. In 1903 he was Sedalia, Missouri. Joplin presented Stark with traveling through Mississippi with an orchestra whose métier was waltzes, “Maple Leaf Rag,” which began a nationwide marches, light classics, and ragtime, when he heard a guitarist sliding a craze. Pianists competed in ragtime “cutting” knife blade across his instrument’s strings, playing “the weirdest music I contests, and the music inspired dance steps. had ever heard.” Handy was hearing Delta folk blues, whose flatted thirds Stark publicized Joplin as “king of the ragtime and sevenths were what sounded “weird” to Handy’s formally oriented ear. writers” and published more of the composer’s Two years later, when Handy and his band were taking a break while
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Mass production of pianos changed the market. Following the Civil War, piano sales boomed to as many as 25,000 instruments yearly. Sitting in the parlor with relatives and friends listening to and singing along to the tinkling 88s became a popular middle-class amusement. Often pianists required notation to play songs new to them. Sheet music answered that need. Publication in 1892 of the sheet music to “After the Ball” by Milwaukeean Charles K. Harris set off a trend. Harris’s song tells a story as old as time of heartbreak and loss. “After the Ball” sold two million copies of sheet music its first year at around 50 cents per copy, and by the end of the 1890s had sold five million copies. Suddenly, music was a business, and everybody wanted in. Entrepreneurs migrated from other sectors. Max Dreyfus, head of the T.B. Harms organization, started out selling picture frames. Edward B. Marks was a notions salesman. Leo Feist sold corsets. Once established in the trade of making musical tastes, these businessmen strove to give Americans what they wanted to hear, sometimes missing the mark. In 1922, neophyte songsmith Richard Rodgers visited Dreyfus to pitch material. “There is nothing of value here,” Dreyfus told the young man. “I don’t hear any music.” Three years later, after Rodgers had written the scores of several Broadway musicals, Dreyfus invited him back and offered Rodgers a contract, Ben Yagoda wrote in American Heritage.
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Gus Edwards
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Eubie Blake
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The Top Forty Before There Was a Top Forty...or Even Radio The original gauge for songs’ popularity was the figure for sales of a given number’s sheet music. To catch the eye of an amateur or professional musician shopping for new material to play at home or onstage, publishers relied on illustrations.
playing another Mississippi town, a raggedy string band took the stage and, playing blues, got more applause than Handy’s more genteel ensemble. This convinced Handy that the blues had commercial prospects. In 1912 he sold “Memphis Blues,” titled for his adopted hometown, to a local publisher. In 1914, his new Handy and Pace firm published his “St. Louis Blues.” Handy moved to New York in 1917 and published anthologies of traditional blues and spirituals. He called himself “the Father of the Blues.” Immigrant and first-generation Jews were prominent along Tin Pan Alley at a time when anti-Semitism was open and pervasive. Hotels barred Jews, help-wanted ads specified “Christians only,” and colleges maintained quotas for Jewish students. Escaping the ghetto meant becoming as “American” as possible, and entertainment was less hidebound than other trades. Many composers of the era were Jewish—Harris, Von Tilzer, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen—as were lyricists like Gus Kahn, “Yip” Harburg, Irving Caesar, and Lorenz Hart. In the time-honored tradition, names changed: Von Tilzer was once Aaron
Jerome Kern Gumbinsky, George Gershwin was once Jacob Gershowitz, Harold Arlen was Hyman Arluck, Irving Berlin had been Israel Beilin. In The Jazz Singer, the first full-length sound film, Jakie Rabinowitz, played by Al Jolson, rebels against his father, an Orthodox cantor, by becoming the title character, Jack Robin. Realworld variations on this fictional conflict played out in many Jewish households. Grinding out songs on salary was mainly a trade pursued by working-class Jews, most of whom, unlike an earlier wave of Landsmen departing German-speaking regions, had immigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe. When Jerome Kern, whose father was a successful German-Jewish businessman in New York City, saw that plugging songs was getting him nowhere, he sailed to London, insinuated himself into that city’s West End musical theater scene, and used the resulting contacts to return stateside and succeed as a Broadway tunesmith. Berlin, raised in a basement apartment on the Lower East Side, did not seek such options. Some songwriters became publishers. When Von Tilzer’s melodramatic ballad “My Old New Hampshire Home” became a hit in 1898 but only earned him $15, he joined an existing publishing house as a partner. In 1902 he founded Harry Von Tilzer Music. He and other Tin Pan Alley denizens relied on song pluggers who used any means necessary to publicize songs. Biographer James Kaplan recounts how in 1902 young Israel Beilin went to work for Von Tilzer. The tyro’s
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George Gershwin
immigrant and firstgeneration jews were prominent on Tin Pan alley at a time when antisemitism was rampant in america.
Ira and George Gershwin
Playing the All-American Name Game Like many contemporaries, the Gershowitz brothers adopted a less exotic surname. APRIL 2022 45
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tin pan alley had its first superstar in george M. Cohan—actor, vaudevillian, songwriter, playwright, and producer of his own shows on Broadway.
George M. Cohan
Tin Pan Alley proved replicable. Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1986, June Sawyers explained how the Windy City’s Tin Pan Alley, which dated to the latter 1800s, counted about 50 music publishers in its 1920s heyday. Most had offices downtown, within two blocks of Randolph Street between State and Clark Streets, near today’s Nederlander Theater. Hits originating there included “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “When You’re Smiling,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and Fred Fisher’s “Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town.” But the real action was in Manhattan, prompting publishers from Chicago and other cities to establish branch offices in New York City. Tin Pan Alley produced superstars. The first was George M. Cohan— vaudevillian, songwriter, playwright, actor, and producer of Broadway musicals in which he starred. Cohan came from a tradition of Irish-American musical comedy dating to the 1870s, when Ed Harrigan and Tony Hart in their “Mulligan Guards” comedies lampooned working-class neighborhood militias. As a youth touring with his family’s act, the Four Cohans, George M. Cohan caught the songwriting bug. In George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway, John McCabe tells how the novice songsmith pitched a sheaf of songs at Witmark. The publisher bought only “Why Did Nellie Leave Her Home?” Eyeballing the resulting Witmark sheet music, Cohan discovered that all that remained of his composition was the title. But after his first hit show, 1904’s “Little Johnny Jones,” publishers left Cohan and his compositions alone. He went on to write more than 300 songs and to produce and star in more than 30 musicals, composing patriotic show-bizzy numbers like “You’re a Grand Old Flag,”“Over There,” “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” In 1914, Cohan helped found the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which protects members’ musical copyrights. Another Tin Pan Alley graduate turned superstar was Irving Berlin. At 15, leaving song plugging behind, Izzy Beilin took a job as a singing waiter at the Pelham Café, a Chinatown dive catering to underworld characters
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versions from the original rolls are a revelation. Eubie Blake’s rolls offer a master class in playing ragtime and early jazz. Sheet music covers promoted their content. Early covers had minimal decoration, but by the 1910s covers were multicolored and illustrated, whether with an image of the songwriter or a performer associated with the number, such as Sophie Tucker or Jolson, a scene reflecting the tune’s content, or, especially for novelty numbers, a cartoon.
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assignment was to frequent music halls where performers were singing Von Tilzer songs; at the end of his employer’s numbers, he was to jump up and applaud loudly. More refined methods of promotion emerged. Novice songwriter Jerome Kern hired on at Wanamaker’s department store to play a piano positioned on the establishment’s sales floor as a way to encourage sheet music purchases. Kern went on to hawk sheet music to stores up and down the Hudson Valley, eventually going on to great success as a tunesmith. Gershwin quit high school in 1913 to flog songs for potential customers at Remick Music. Vaudeville was another medium of song promotion. Vaudeville theaters booked varied acts— jugglers, comedians, musicians, singers—that toured regionally and nationally. When troupes played New York, the performers often made the rounds of publishers hunting for new tunes to freshen their acts. In making a reputation for themselves as comedic singers in 1912, the four Marx brothers, raised in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, paid $27 for “Peasie Weasie,” a tune whose lyrics never came out quite the same when the head Marx, Julius, known as Groucho, sang them. Some vaudeville impresarios wrote songs that they assigned to players in stage companies they ran. Gus Edwards, who wrote “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “School Days,” and others, had a “kid act” starring him as an exasperated teacher coping with a clownish class of rising performers such as George Jessel, Phil Silvers, and Eddie Cantor. Young Julius Marx also apprenticed under Edwards. Another song-selling tool was the player piano, akin to the familiar parlor instrument but able to reproduce music automatically. Powered by foot-pumped treadles, player pianos used piano rolls, continuous sheets of heavy paper perforated to cause the keys to strike chords and notes. Mass-marketed starting in the 1890s and improving steadily in quality into the 1910s, player pianos were immensely popular. A musician made a piano roll by playing a number as a perforating tool replicated the music on a master sheet used to produce copies. A buyer fitted the roll into the player piano and pumped the treadle. This action moved the roll along and pushed air through its holes, working the piano’s keys. Many songwriters embraced piano rolls not only as a record of their musicianship but as a remunerative sideline. Gershwin’s piano rolls illustrate his breathtaking technique and harmonics; CDs and streamed
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and tourists, and took up piano. In 1907, besides changing his name to Irving Berlin, he sold his first song, “Marie From Sunny Italy,” which he co-wrote with the Pelham Cafe’s house pianist. In 1908, Waterson and Snyder hired Berlin as a staff lyricist. Biographer Kaplan sketches the scene. Dressed in suit and tie and using a fountain pen, Berlin drafted and crafted lyrics for tunes co-owner Ted Snyder and others created. Berlin found inspiration everywhere. When fellow lyricist George Whiting said he could go to the theater that night because his wife had gone to the country, Berlin exclaimed, “That would be a good title for a song!” The two turned Whiting’s remark into “My Wife’s Gone to the Country! Hurrah! Hurrah!” Soon, although he could not read music, Berlin was writing melodies. When an idea struck, he’d bang out a rudimentary version on a piano at Waterson and Snyder; amid the chaos, a sharp-eared “musical secretary” would transcribe his plunking into musical notation. Of his 1911 breakthrough hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Berlin said, “I wrote the whole thing in 18 minutes, surrounded on all sides by roaring pianos and roaring vaudeville actors.” After “Alexander,” Berlin continued his streak, forming his own publishing company. Enlisting in the U.S. Army as a sergeant during World War
Tunesmith in Khaki During World War I, Irving Berlin applied his skills to patriotic shows and musical themes. APRIL 2022 47
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I, he wrote an all-doughboy revue, “Yip Yip Yaphank.” In 1921, Berlin and Sam Harris, Cohan’s former partner, opened the Music Box Theater on 45th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, annually staging “Music Box Revues.” In 1925, the theater started presenting other productions, musical and theatrical. When Hollywood movies entered the age of sound, Berlin segued into soundtracks. His best remembered
Rodgers and Hart
Not a few songwriters made the jump from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway, but Gershwin bounded from Tin Pan Alley to the concert hall. Classically trained, he had moved in 1918 from song plugging to composing and writing songs on salary at T.B. Harms for $35 a week. In 1920 Gershwin had his first major success with “Swanee.” His co-writer, young lyricist Irving Caesar, formerly Isidor Kaiser, knew singer Al Jolson, whose recording of “Swanee” made it a hit. That year, Gershwin began to contribute to the annual “George White’s Scandals” revues. For the 1922 “Scandals,” he worked with Paul Whiteman, the decade’s most popular bandleader, who played a watered-down version of jazz. Whiteman repeatedly asked Gershwin to compose a “jazz concerto,” and Gershwin finally did. The result, “Rhapsody in Blue,” premiered in February 1924 at Aeolian Hall on West 42nd Street with the Whiteman orchestra accompanying Gershwin on piano. He continued to straddle classical and popular music. He wrote the tone poem “An American in Paris,” and composed the opera “Porgy and Bess.” At the same time, with brother Ira as lyricist, Gershwin was writing songs for Broadway and Hollywood that have never gone out of fashion: “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” and many more. Given popular song’s ever-changing nature, Tin Pan Alley evolved. The first shift began to be evident around 1910, when music publishers started abandoning 28th Street for the theater district. Besides reflecting the obvious link between songwriting and musical theater, gravitating to the commercial district around 42nd and Broadway was practical. Midtown’s newer buildings offered successful publishers who had expanded their staffs beyond songwriters and pluggers to include sales teams, orchestration departments, and support personnel space for all those people. A much more significant change took place after World War I, as commercial radio arrived and recording technology matured. Lacquer 78 rpm discs had been the standard in recording since 1910—they held more music and were easier to store than cylinders. Broadcasting, introduced in 1920, at first put a dent in record sales. Radio stations invited singers and musicians to their studios to play on the air and, beginning with New York’s WHN in 1924, aired broadcasts of popular bands live from ballrooms, nightclubs, and theaters. Introduction in 1925 of electrical recording improved records’ sound quality, reviving sales. Radio and records complemented each other—a fan hearing an artist perform a song on the air could race to the record shop for a copy. Sitting around the parlor piano listening to some uncle warble along while
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Patriotic Performances Sergeant Berlin’s flag-waving postwar production became popular with theatergoers.
tunes—“Always,” “God Bless America,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “White Christmas”—mostly date to his interwar and World War II periods.
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
midtown had more space for bigger publishing staffs that now included sales teams, orchestration departments, and support personnel for all hands.
in 1931, which publishers shared with talent agencies, entertainment lawyers, arrangers, and others. In 1939, after a dispute over fees ASCAP charged radio stations for playing songs it controlled, broadcasters formed their own publishing umbrella, Broadcast Music Inc. ASCAP had most of the major publishing firms and songwriters, so BMI sought artists in jazz, “hillbilly” and “race” music, and Latin. In tandem with small independent record companies, BMI-affiliated firms were instrumental in the post-World War II growth of country-and-western and rhythm-and-blues.
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Thomas“Fats” Waller playing “Mother Machree” became passé. By 1925 record sales outpaced purchases of sheet music and by 1927 had climbed from 1909’s 30 million sales to 140 million. Throughout the ’20s, the masters—Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers and Hart—continued to write great songs. Jazz greats like Thomas “Fats” Waller wrote masterpieces in their idiom. Singer-pianist Waller, who used humor to put his songs over, copyrighted more than 400 numbers and reputedly sold the rights to others for the cash. But the ‘20s also saw a trend of snappy, frothy songs like “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, and “Crazy Rhythm,” by Irving Caesar, Joseph Meyer, and Roger Kahn. Tin Pan Alley’s glow began to fade when the movies went from silent to sound. Film studios started acquiring music publishers, as in 1929, when Warner Brothers bought M. Witmark, Remick Music, and T.B. Harms, a step toward the establishment of Warner Bros. Records. As corporate units, music publishers went from promoting songs to the public to negotiating with songwriters, documenting and paying royalties, touting tunes to radio station programmers, and licensing their use in commercials and other contexts. The sheet music business withered. Aspiring tunesmiths still were working out tunes on pianos, but now their ambition was not to rack up sheet music sales at Wanamaker’s but to get a Russ Columbo or a Bing Crosby or a Rudy Vallee to put out a 78 featuring a song of theirs. The new era brought a new music publishing hub: the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, opened
In the early 1950s, a few years before rock ‘n’ roll broke out, Brooklyn high schooler Neil Sedaka was writing songs with classmate Howard Greenfield. Sedaka came into contact with a veteran lyricist who had made his name in Tin Pan Alley. In his book Always Magic in the Air, Ken Emerson describes how Sedaka’s Spanish teacher, hearing of his musical avocation, pushed the youth to contact her brother, Irving Caesar. Besides “Swanee,” Caesar, now in his fifties, had written the lyrics for Vincent Youmans’s 1924 hit “Tea for Two.” In 1935, child star Shirley Temple sang Caesar’s “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” in her movie Curly Top, and in 1956 Louis Prima had scored a hit with Caesar’s 1929 composition “Just a Gigolo.” Caesar, who had helped found the Songwriters Guild of America, was still plugging away. “I met Caesar many times,” said Sedaka, who had his own first big hit in 1959 with “Oh, Carol,” and, as a solo artist and in collaborations with Greenfield at the Brill Building and elsewhere, became a stalwart of the pop music scene. “We never wrote together, but he liked my voice,” Sedaka said of Caesar, “and I sang on many of his demo records.” H
Neil Sedaka
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School’s Out Robert R. Moton High, in Farmville, Virginia, presented a forlorn appearance in 1962-63.
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Virginia has been a long time recovering from its embrace of massive resistance to desegregating its schools By Daniel B. Moskowitz
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ong before they became a nation, Britain’s North American colonies recognized the core need for an educated populace and society’s obligation to provide that education. In 1635 Virginia opened the first free taxpayer-supported public school. During the 1640s, the governing body of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered every town in the colony’s jurisdiction of 50 or more residents to hire a schoolmaster to teach at least the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. By the time the colonies declared independence, the idea that public education was a central responsibility of local governments was embedded in the American psyche. Literacy and numeracy were tools basic to the task of fulfilling the promise that all had a right to pursue happiness. Given the importance of public education in a democratic society, it was particularly startling in the late 1950s to see officials in a number of states advocating completely shutting down their public schools; even more startling, a handful of systems actually did so. To facilitate so drastic a step, state legislatures deliberately rescinded longstanding statutes requiring local governments to provide public schools. The powers that be in those states held that more important than educating the public was the need to prevent integration of White and Negro children—an integration that had been mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Most communities in the 11 Southern states spent years vigorously fighting that mandate, and when forced to integrate responded so grudgingly that a mix of racially divided housing patterns, legal and bureaucratic hurdles, violence, and intimidation either kept most Blacks out of supposedly integrated schools or sent Whites fleeing public schools for segregated private alternatives. As late as the 1968-69 school year, only 32 percent of African American public-school students in the Southern states were in schools with White classmates. But at least those public schools were open. Nowhere was the extreme measure of combating integration by entirely shutting down public education as pervasive—and as persistent—as in Virginia. In that state’s Prince Edward County, schools closed for a full five years. White students received pared-down schooling at supposedly private academies that actually ran on tax dollars. Some Black families endured great hardships to send their children to schools elsewhere. But a good half of the Negro children in Prince Edward County during those years simply went untaught. Richard Vaughn, for instance, was in fourth grade in 1959 when the schools closed. He went to work picking tobacco for $15 a week. When the schools reopened in September 1964, administrators put Vaughn into the eighth grade. He wasn’t ready for eighth-grade work and dropped out after a year, never obtaining a reliable grasp of reading or writing. In 2004 Richard Vaughn was living in Prince Edward County and had a five-year-old daughter going to public school. In issuing the 1954 Brown ruling, the justices openly recognized that finding racial segregation in education to be inherently unconstitutional necessitated a profound restructuring of public school systems across much of the country. The normal process in litigation is that when judges find a practice unconstitutional, they order that it be stopped immediately. But the high court’s members realized that school integration would cause APRIL 2022 51
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“Massive resistance,” U.S. Senator Harry Byrd said, would show the rest of the country that the south would not accept racial integration.
In September 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers to Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure admission of nine Black students to Central High School over Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s opposition (see p. 30). Eisenhower’s action clearly signaled to opponents of integration that theirs was a lost cause. But, as Virginia lawyer Ira M. Lechner put it, “the political climate in Virginia was not ready for a rational approach.” In 1957 Virginia Attorney General Lindsay Separate and Unequal Before the shutdown, tudents attend a 9thgrade English class at R.R. Moton High School. 52 AMERICAN HISTORY
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resistance to this order, I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.” Byrd scorned the leeway the Court had suggested in Brown II. In early 1956 he drafted a “Southern Manifesto on Integration” in which he claimed the justices had overstepped their authority and were threatening the region’s “habits, traditions, and way of life.” He managed to get his manifesto signed by 101 members of Congress—all but 27 of those from the 11 states that had made up the Confederacy. Other Southern politicians may have opposed integration as staunchly as Byrd, but none had at his disposal as powerful a political machine as Byrd’s. As governor and then senator, he had built a network of reliable acolytes in nearly every county office in the state’s rural areas, and rural Democrats controlled the legislature and top jobs in state government. The first step in massive resistance—taken even before the Supreme Court had issued integration guidelines in Brown II—was for Byrd minion and Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley to name a Commission on Public Education to outline a plan to guide the state’s backlash against the federal government. That all-White, all-male body recommended: • The governor be empowered to close schools in any district. • The legislature pass a law authorizing local school boards to assign individual pupils to particular schools. • The state provide tuition payments to parents opting to enroll children in all-White private schools. Commission members realized that those moves might not be enough to keep successful legal challenges from forcing racial integration of public schools. To remedy that, the commission added an even more explosive recommendation; namely, that the state move to repeal the provision in its constitution requiring a system of free public education. Repeal would clear the way to close schools if no more avenues to fight integration remained. The legislature went even further, in late 1956 denying state financial aid to any system with racially integrated schools.
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such upheaval that ordering segregation to end immediately would be unwise. The year after the first Brown decision, the court issued a blueprint for implementation known as Brown II. This declaration recognized that segregation took so many forms that no single rule for desegregation would be feasible. Brown II said that while school integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed,” local judges in weighing proposals to abandon racially separate school systems and fashioning desegregation orders should take into consideration local conditions. Jurists did not need to demand immediate total integration but only that school boards be seen as making “a prompt and reasonable start” in that direction. When Brown was handed down, some 4,500 school districts in the 17 Southern and border states enrolled pupils of both races. A small but not insignificant number of previously segregated districts in those states recognized Brown to be the law of the land. In the 1955-56 school year, Negroes and Whites were admitted to the same schools in 570 districts. But in most states that had organized themselves into the Confederacy, the idea of integrated schools met widespread intransigence. Taking a leadership role, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (D-Virginia) turned that opposition into an organized movement. Almost immediately after Chief Justice Earl Warren had announced the initial Brown decision, Byrd declared, “If we can organize the Southern states for massive
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Senator Harry Byrd
Almond successfully ran for governor on a platform with a simple plank on integration: “Never.” Taking office in January 1958, Almond focused on school systems under court orders to integrate. That September he directed local officials in three jurisdictions to ignore the federal mandates and shutter their schools. Almond’s demand covered six schools in Norfolk, the high schools in Warren County in the Shenandoah Valley, and a high school and elementary schools in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. Warren County and Charlottesville managed to tap philanthropies for enough money to keep teaching in donated spaces in churches. But charity provided only partial help in Norfolk, where some 3,000 kids simply went unschooled that year. Courts were having none of it. Three judges sitting at U.S. District Court to hear a constitutional argument ruled in James v. Almond that Virginia “cannot act through one of its officers to close one or more public schools in the state solely by reason of assignment, or enrollment or presence in, that public school of children of different races...The equal protection afforded to all citizens and taxpayers is lacking in such a situation.” And the Virginia Supreme Court in Harrison v. Day held that the state constitution did not allow state officials to take over educational activities from local school boards. Both came January 19, 1959—Robert E. Lee’s birthday and a holiday across the South. Compliance was to begin the next month. But the most egregious example of abandoning public education was just beginning. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, in that state’s southern tier, halfway between the Atlantic Ocean and West Virginia, the county board within two months of the Brown decision had passed a resolution stating that the board was “unalterably opposed to the operation of non-segregated schools.” That stark intransigence was manifest in the five-year shutdown of public schools that began in the county in September 1959.
that the southern states had had good reason to secede. General Lee spent the night of April 8, 1865, in Farmville, the county seat, before crossing into adjacent Appomattox County to surrender to Union troops, bringing the Civil War to an end. Prince Edward County had been at the center of the school desegregation battle since well before the Brown decision. The county’s Blackonly Robert Russa Moton High was so deficient in staff, materials, and educational quality that in May 1951 the NAACP sued in federal court, claiming Moton students were being denied the equal protection of the law guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. In March 1952, under the legal procedure then in place, a three-judge District Court panel ruled against the NAACP, which appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Around the country other legal challenges to the constitutionality of racial segregation per se— regardless of the quality of Black schools—were being brought. The Justices consolidated five
Virginia Attorney General Lindsay Almond
Prince Edward County had a special place in the memories of those who clung to the belief Pondering a Path of Resistance Southern governors meet in Richmond to discuss how to block racial integration in public schools. From left rear J.P. Coleman of Mississippi; Marvin Griffin of Georgia; George Bell Timmerman, Jr. of South Carolina; and Thomas B. Stanley of Virginia. APRIL 2022 53
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Brown v. Board and a Byproduct of Backlash Outside the U.S. Supreme Court, Nettie Hunt and daughter Nickie commemorate the historic decision headlined by a Washington, DC, daily. Below, Mrs. Althea Jones and pupils in a one-room schoolhouse improvised by Black residents of Prince Edward County, Virginia.
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Edward public schools were roughly divided 50-50 between White and Negro children. There were 13 schools for Negroes and seven for Whites. Litigation to merge those two systems stretched on until May 1959, when the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond told U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Hutcheson to order desegregation to begin. Rather than do so, Hutcheson retired, forcing the Court of Appeals to issue the order. The school board stood ready to take the ultimate action against segregation. The board had switched from annual appropriations to month-by-month funding—finally making it easy to evade integration by stopping school appropriations. The entire system closed down. “In many
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cases that had arrived at the high court. Arguments in the five were heard together, and a single decision was issued in May 1954. In an effort to make the point that the ruling was not an anti-South decision, the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was listed first. That is the way the decision covering all five cases, including the one from Prince Edward County, is known. Because the Supreme Court did not order that the school systems involved in the five cases immediately end segregation, Prince Edward officials used every device to avoid compliance until, in 1959, they had run out of ways to delay integration and closed down the public school system. The approximately 3,200 pupils in Prince
Defending the Status Quo Farmville, Virginia’s Prince Edward Academy, left, came to be a symbol of the “massive resistance” undertaken by the state of Virginia to federal orders to desegregate its public schools; right, White students in Farmville board county schoolbuses.
White Prince Edward County didn’t want to keep its children uneducated. County figures set
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ways, Prince Edward County was the last stand of ‘massive resistance’ in the state of Virginia,” says historian Larissa Smith Fergeson of Longwood University in Farmville. Policymakers in Prince Edward County opposed—perhaps feared—the social upheavals that would result from Black and White children getting to know each other as classmates. In addition, many truly believed that federal courts involving themselves in local decisions seriously upended the proper balance of constitutional power. But the most outspoken local White foe of massive resistance—C. G. Gordon Moss, chairman of Longwood University’s history department—insisted the county’s power structure also had an economic motive: depriving local Blacks of, or shortchanging them on, education made them more pliable workers.
White families could afford to pay tuition because the county gave financial aid in the form of grants and property tax credits for supporting the academy.
up a foundation to fund the ostensibly private Prince Edward Academy, which, since it was not an arm of government, was not bound by the 14th Amendment requirement to provide equal access to all. Technically, the academy charged a $240 annual tuition; White families could afford that because Prince Edward spun up a skein of financial aid, including tuition grants to parents and credits reducing property taxes by 25 percent for residents donating to the academy. The private classes took place in tiny classrooms in church basements and private clubs, with no cafeterias or playgrounds and few extracurriculars. This arrangement became a model for defiance across the Deep South. Those Black families that were able to do so put together patchwork schemes to school their children. Black churches raised money so some students close to graduation could attend a high school program at historically Black Kittrell College in the North Carolina town of the same name. County resident Elsie Lancaster sent her daughter to live with an aunt in Massachusetts. The Reginald White family sent all five children to Baltimore, Maryland, to attend the Catholic St. Edward’s School while living with relatives— two sisters with grandparents, two sisters with an aunt and uncle, and a brother with another aunt and uncle. The arrangement made the children so unhappy that after two years the Whites rented a house in Cumberland County just north of Prince Edward; every morning the children were driven to Cumberland, which had not closed its schools, to wait at the empty dwelling for the school bus. Dorothy Holcomb’s parents Pushing Back A 1960 rally in Richmond, Virginia, protested the policy of closing the state’s public schools. APRIL 2022 55
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The U.S. Supreme Court shot down the entire school-closing scheme in May 1964. In Griffin v. School Board, the justices affirmed that the Prince Edward public schools had been shuttered “only for the constitutionally impermissible reasons of race” and that the closing violated the constitutional rights of all school-age children in the county, regardless of race, because they were being treated differently from students in Virginia who were enjoying the option of attending public school. The justices told the District Court to go ahead and order not only that the county stop reimbursing White families for private school tuition but also resume Fighting the Power Above, a July 1963 protest in Farmville. Right, a delegation from Prince Edward County marched in Washington, DC, that August.
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used the same ploy, renting a run-down house in Appomattox County and driving her daughter there each morning to catch the bus. Others took even more drastic actions. The American Friends Service Committee found families in other locales willing to take in Black children from Prince Edwards and send them to local schools. That program enrolled 47 older children. But some 700 Black children—about half of those who had been enrolled in the Prince Edward County segregated schools—went without formal education for the full five years.
funding the county school system—even if that meant ordering the authorities to impose a tax in order to raise the money. Jill Ogline Titus, a historian at Gettysburg College, calls that ruling “the most important school desegregation case since Brown.” The justices made eminently clear that they had run out of patience waiting for recalcitrant Southern school districts to integrate. Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion, harkening to the integration mandate in Brown II and declaring, “There has been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed in enforcing the constitutional rights which we held in Brown.” The Court followed Griffin with a string of other rulings—all the way to 1971—striking down state “freedom of choice” schemes and other devices patently designed to keep Blacks and Whites from attending classes together. Prince Edward County reopened its public schools in the fall of 1964. Prince Edward Academy kept operating as a Whites-only alternative, not dropping its segregationist policy until 1986. Most White students in the county continued to attend the segregated academy; the reopened and technically integrated Prince Edward public schools enrolled approximately 1,500 Black students and only eight Whites. And those schools were woefully short of resources, meaning that many of those students who stuck it out received grossly inadequate educations. Billy Eanes, for instance, missed four years of school. He achieved success as a restaurateur but 40 years after his high school graduation said, “I can’t spell...When you put a pencil in my hand, I’m a loser.” Prince Edward Academy also shortchanged its students—and not every White family in the county had recourse to its classrooms. There was no school bus transport for children living outside Farmville. John Hines, from the hamlet of Rice, stopped attending the academy after seventh grade; one sibling never went beyond fifth grade, and two others left school after third grade. And even in Farmville some families stopped sending their offspring to the segregated academy when the courts deep-sixed county tuition grants. Just after the schools reopened, Robert Kennedy, who had recently
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There haD been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed in enforcing the rights upheld in Brown, wrote Justice Hugo Black.
resigned his cabinet post as U.S. Attorney General, wrote, “At least one generation of children in Prince Edward County will always carry the scars of the conflict that closed their schools.” Prince Edward had to adjust to a less well-educated populace. Even 50 years after the shutdown era, the county’s illiteracy rate was 16 percent—33 percent above the statewide rate. Churches fashioned their services around choral responses rather than readings from the Bible. Employers avoided hiring processes requiring written applications. By far, the “massive resistance” policy did not represent all Virginians’ views. As early as 1954,
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Justice Hugo Black
Virginia Governor A. Linwood Holton, Jr.
reporter James Rorty was writing in Commentary magazine that “if they were permitted to do so, most of the counties and cities of the Old Dominion could and would begin desegregating their schools tomorrow, although without enthusiasm.” For instance, almost immediately after the High Court’s decision, integration went forward without any tumult in Catholic schools in Arlington, a part of northern Virginia that until 1846 had been part of Washington, DC. Arlington’s elected public school board announced in January 1956 that it would follow suit, but the state legislature dismantled the school board, assigning that body’s duties to the anti-integration County Board. In late 1958, more than two dozen top businessmen from around the state held a dinner meeting with Almond at the Rotunda Club in Richmond, organized by attorney and Richmond School Board Chairman Lewis F. Powell, who in 1972 became an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The CEOs told Almond in no uncertain terms that massive resistance was hurting the state’s economy; to avoid Virginia’s toxic atmosphere, corporations were building facilities in North Carolina, they said. In 1966, Governor Mills Goodwin ushered through the state Education Department guidelines declaring that all public schools in the state must be open to children of all races. But in many counties that dictate made little practical difference. By then 27 “private” schools around Virginia were operating on the Prince Edward Academy model and were the choice of most White families. It took another election cycle for Virginia to face the reality of a society moving toward racial integration. In 1970, A. Linwood Holton Jr., who had run as a foe of the entire massive resistance approach, was elected governor of Virginia—the first Republican to claim that post since 1869. At the beginning of the next school year, Holton enrolled his four children in the Richmond public schools, whose enrollment was overwhelmingly African American. (Daughter Anne married Tim Kaine and became first lady of Virginia in 2006, when her husband became governor; after he became a U.S. senator, she was named Virginia Secretary of Education.) In the long run, Virginia came to realize that opponents of closing schools had been right, both morally and in terms of what massive resistance wrought on the state’s image and economy. When the state constitution was revised in 1971, the update included one of the nation’s strongest public education provisions, mandating that Virginia “shall provide for a system of free public elementary and secondary schools for all children of school age throughout the Commonwealth, and shall seek to ensure that an educational program of high quality is established and continually maintained.” Prince Edward County was significantly longer in acknowledging its wrongdoing and beginning to make amends. The local newspaper, the Farmville Herald, once an ardent supporter of the school closing policy, in 1990 formally conceded that that policy had been wrong. In 1998, Moton High, the school where black student protests against subpar resources had led to the historic Supreme Court desegregation decision, was saved from demolition and repurposed as the Center for the Study of Civil Rights in Education and a museum featuring artifacts of the struggle. In 2004, in a ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, students who had been unable to finish high school because of the shutdown were given honorary diplomas. And in 2008 the county board of supervisors passed a resolution expressing “sorrow” at the county government’s 1959 action. The board ordered a “light of reconciliation” installed inside the courthouse bell tower. H APRIL 2022 57
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Hunting Antelope
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Going in Harm’s Way U.S. revenue cutter Eagle, a classic example of this type of coastal patrol vessel.
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Sold into slavery, plundered by pirates, rescued by a revenue cutter By Daniel Laliberte
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n March 23, 1820, off Africa’s western coast, Captain Vicente de Llovio of Spanish merchant brig Antelope uneasily watched an unfamiliar vessel enter the Bay of Cabinda. Antelope had been anchored for two weeks in the bay, where the Congo River meets the Atlantic Ocean. De Llovio and his 24-man crew had been sharing the anchorage with an unnamed Portuguese vessel. Both crews had come to trade with a figure the Europeans knew as the Prince of Cabinda. The prince was a mambouk, or local representative of the king of Ngoyo, ruler of an area north of the Congo River. Business had been going smoothly but now here came trouble. A large ship, also a brig but rigged unusually, with square sails on the foremast and only gaff-rigged—that is, in the shape of a triangle truncated at the top—fore-and-aft sails on the mainmast, a configuration sailors called “hermaphrodite”—was coming at Antelope. In his dealings with the prince, de Llovio had been exchanging European trade goods for captive Africans. Whether taken prisoner during tribal wars common in the Congo watershed, kidnapped by brigands, or convicted of criminal or civil infractions, the bartered unfortunates were destined for Havana, Cuba, and its slave markets. That the newcomer was flying a Spanish flag did not reduce de Llovio’s apprehension, confirmed when at the interloper’s rails appeared several dozen musketeers. Gunners were running out the hermaphrodite brig’s cannons. Hands took down Spain’s flag and raised the ensign of the Republic of Banda Oriental. Now known as Uruguay, Banda Oriental then was a Portuguese colony in South America in revolt against the mother country and also at war with Spain. Though a merchantman, Antelope, in acknowledgment of seagoing reality, mounted on its sides four 8-lb. muzzle-loading cannons to discourage unwanted company. The oncoming vessel, which reflagging instantly identified as either pirate or privateer—the latter an armed ship empowered by letter of marque to harry the issuing nation’s enemies—was keeping just out of range. Had de Llovio had his crew rig a spring line Antelope could have rotated at anchor and brought its own guns to bear. He had not rigged a spring line, however. His men looked to be outnumbered two to one. With only 12 muskets and 12 cutlasses in his ship’s armory, resistance was futile. The raider came to rest at Antelope’s forward bow, poised for the approaching vessel’s gunners to rake its target along nearly its entire length with no chance of fire being returned. Captain de Llovio surrendered. A boarding party swarmed over the bow rail, quickly and bloodlessly herding Antelope’s crew below decks to join the Africans confined there. Boatmen from the hermaphrodite quickly subdued the Portuguese ship. In minutes, Captain Simon Metcalf and the crew of Arraganta—who enjoyed the status of privateersmen, since Metcalf held a letter of marque from Bandas Oriental authorizing him to plunder Spanish and Portuguese ships—had captured two prizes. Besides the ships and their material goods, the booty included nearly 300 kidnapped Africans who had now gone from being Spanish chattel to commodities highly valued in the illegal American slave trade. Arraganta originally had been named Baltimore, after the Maryland port at which the ship had been built. Metcalf and his 36-man crew were Americans, save for two Britons and a Spaniard. On three previous privateering runs, they had captured four Spanish ships, taking more than 1,100 Africans whom Metcalf sold on the illicit market in the United States for kidnapped Blacks. That very busy market owed its existence to an 1808 federal ban on importing slaves to the United States, which had pushed the smuggler’s selling price of a robust young African man to $800. Treatment of “recaptured” Africans, as they were called, was much more severe than penalties imposed on convicted smugglers. When smugglers were seized, almost inevitably in the South, whichever state the smuggler had landed in had jurisdiction over the liberated Africans. Pending adjudication, they could be sold into slavery, with the state getting the proceeds, or “bonded out” to planters obligated to provide for their welfare in exchange for their labor. If found not to have been previously enslaved, recaptured Africans were to be declared free persons and returned to Africa. During court proceedings, however, most disappeared, with planters claiming they had run off or APRIL 2022 59
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Privateer Arraganta had begun this cruise sailing from Baltimore under the name Colombia, flying the flag of Venezuela; that colony also had broken away from Spain and was issuing letters of marque. According to Metcalf, the mission was to hover in the Straits of Florida waiting for a Spanish prize. Soon after weighing anchor, though, Metcalf announced a change in plan. Arraganta was going to head for Africa, there to hijack Spanish and Portuguese slave ships laden with human cargo worth fortunes. Many on the crew chafed at this change of terms. They had signed on to attack Spanish merchant shipping in the Caribbean as part of Venezuela’s war of independence, not to raid slave ships off Africa. Plundering Spanish shipping under a letter of marque from a would-be rebel republic was one thing but hauling kidnapped Africans into bondage was another. An American serving aboard a foreign privateer was violating the Neutrality Law and technically committing piracy, letter of marque or no. But the crime, if prosecuted, was treated most often as a misdemeanor. Unless the target had been an American vessel or the case included a wanton
SOME CREWS LEARNING OF A SLAVE SHIP’S TRUE NATURE DESERTED AND UNDERTOOK TO SABOTAGE THE ENTERPRISE BY ALERTING THE AUTHORITIES TO THE SHIP’S PURPOSE.
murder, jury nullification—that is, when jurors in effect dismiss a charge—was the order of the day. However, stealing slaves was participating in the slave trade, which had little public support outside the South. Additionally, the Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy, as amended May 15, 1820, declared any American vessel or any American serving aboard any vessel that transported kidnapped Africans to be a pirate. A conviction for piracy was punishable by hanging. To foreclose such an indictment, some privateering Americans, like Metcalf’s first lieutenant John Smith, renounced their American citizenship. And in many instances crew members, upon learning the true nature of a slaving cruise, deserted and tried to sabotage the effort by informing authorities. Crews sometimes even mutinied rather than engage in slaving. Ships’ masters often had to threaten force to keep malcontents under control.
The United States had outlawed the foreign slave trade on January 1, 1808, but slavery remained the keystone of the Southern economy, and in that agrarian region demand persisted for enslaved workers, satisfied by outlaw traders. Patrolling for slavers, U.S. Navy vessels and Revenue Marine cutters caught and captured many smugglers of humans, but without reducing the practice. In the 12 years since 1808, more than 10,000 African captives had been bought or bartered on that continent’s west coast and sneaked onto the American mainland. Operating near slave-state ports such as New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah, and having the support of local smuggling organizations, smugglers brokered deals between transatlantic mariners and illegal buyers. A primary method was to forge documents misrepresenting kidnapped Africans as having been enslaved legally in the United States and claiming to be moving them from shore to a buyer’s location elsewhere.
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died of disease. A planter in this situation forfeited the bond he had posted, but the profit on a surreptitiously sold slave more than made up for that business expense. However, the case of the Africans seized from Antelope proved to be a turning point in deciding the fate of Africans recaptured at sea.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: COAST GUARD HERITAGE ASSET COLLECTION #2012.027.003; ZURT SWIMMER/ALAMY STCOK PHOTO
Exemplar A British hermaphrodite brig of the same type as the American-built privateer Arraganta.
Cutter in Pursuit U.S. revenue cutter Vigilant chasing, firing upon, and subduing a renegade vessel. able to keep Antelope intact and afloat, and even rescue some members of the crew and captives from Arraganta. Styling himself captain of a privateer in his own right, Smith forged paperwork identifying the stolen ship Antelope as General Ramirez. He stopped at the first viable market for his illicit cargo: the Dutch colony of Suriname. The Netherlands, like the United States, had banned the slave trade, but not slavery itself. Planters in Suriname were willing to flout the importation
Confined Below Decks Contemporary diagrams show how cramped conditions were aboard slave ships.
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Outlaw slaving dangled enormous potential profits. A 300-person shipload could bring $120,000—today about $2.5 million. Half went to the vessel’s owner; crewmen shared the rest. Monthly wages aboard ship in 1820 ranged from $60 for a captain to the lowliest seaman’s $10. Metcalf stood to pull down $60,000; an ordinary seaman, more than $3,000. From an opportunistic perspective, official penalties for the crime of attempted smuggling of slaves were light. When a captured slave-smuggling ship was confiscated, its owners, if they could be identified and arraigned, were fined $20,000 apiece. Each crewman was fined not less than $1,000—but to keep their identities secret owners often paid penalties anonymously. Transporting kidnapped Africans prior to May 15, 1820, was legally not piracy but simply smuggling. Now that slave trading had been deemed piracy, and public opinion was strongly against enslaving previously free Africans, many mariners did not want to roll the dice to see if jurors trying them would find them not guilty by jury nullification. Metcalf always seemed to get away clean and to make his accomplices rich. Earlier that March, a few hundred miles north of the Bay of Cabinda, Metcalf had been attacking two Portuguese schooners loaded with slaves when Royal Navy sloop Myrmidon, patrolling for slavers—Britain had abolished slavery in 1807—interceded. Hauled into Freetown, Sierra Leone, under suspicion of piracy, Metcalf showed his letter of marque. Myrmidon’s captain chose not to risk a potentially costly court battle trying to disprove the validity of Metcalf’s commission. Ordered out of the area, Metcalf turned south. Once beyond British reach, he plundered another Spanish ship and hijacked 25 kidnapped Africans from the illegal slave ship Exchange, operating out of Bristol, Rhode Island. After seizing Antelope at Cabinda, Metcalf handed the ship over to a prize crew led by first lieutenant John Smith, and put the subjugated vessels’ crews ashore. The privateers stowed the captive Africans, along with plunder from the second Portuguese ship moored in the bay, aboard Antelope, then burned the Portuguese vessel. Metcalf headed his little squadron to sea to continue his depredations along the coast. Arraganta soon had taken three more Portuguese schooners, whose plunder topped off the flotilla’s holds. It was time to head west to cash in. The Atlantic passage went smoothly for the ships, but, as usual for such voyages, around 20 percent of the confined Africans died en route, their corpses tossed overboard. Off Brazil a gale caught the heavily laden ships. Arraganta went down with Metcalf and many hands and captives. Through superior seamanship and by jettisoning his four guns, Smith was
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Until 1818, Smith’s next logical course would have been north for Amelia Island, Florida, near the mouth of the Saint Mary’s River, the line of demarcation between Spanish-held Florida and the state of Georgia. Amelia Island was rife with smugglers and pirates, who were at least tolerated and at worst abetted by local merchants and residents. Frustrated at smugglers sneaking goods from Amelia into the vicinity of St. Mary’s, Georgia, the local U.S. customs agent had complained to the secretary of the Treasury, prompting an invasion and garrisoning of the island with troops at the town of Fernandina, reinforced by a U.S. Revenue Marine cutter across the river at St. Mary’s. As a result, Smith’s only option was to land his illegal cargo a bit farther south, at the mouth of the Saint John’s River. From there, smugglers in league with the Creek Nation—many members of that indigenous tribe owned slaves—could ferry the captives into Georgia. However, Smith’s vessel and its shenanigans had not gone unreported. Word of the pirate brig’s predations reached Captain John Jackson aboard the revenue cutter Dallas at Saint Mary’s. Barely a year earlier, Jackson had captured American schooner Hampton at the Saint John’s River.
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prohibition, as long as risk of apprehension was low. Smith had to break off negotiations when disaffected crewmen deserted and informed the authorities. Smith took Antelope—now renamed General Ramirez—north to the Caribbean, stopping at Dutch holding Saint Maarten and then Saint Barthelemy, owned by France, which had banned slavery in 1794. He found no buyers but at Saint Barthelemy sought out a mysterious fellow named Mason, thought by some crewmen to be Arraganta’s owner. In return for cash, Smith received from Mason supplies and the promise of more, along with replacements for his jettisoned guns. These transfers were to take place near Hole-in-the-Wall, a landmark at the east entrance of the Providence Channel through the Bahamas, almost 1,000 miles northwest. The privateers were nearly a week reaching Hole-in-the-Wall. Arriving low on provisions
and water, Smith gained cannons, ammunition, and other supplies promised by Mason. He next set a course for Saint Augustine, Florida, a voyage of 400 miles, where he was refused supplies, even after offering for ransom the governor’s son, whom Smith had taken hostage after spotting the young man aboard a ship at Hole-in-the-Wall.
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Where the Action Was A vintage map shows the Florida/Georgia coastal area where the chase took place.
Hampton already had offloaded 92 Africans who had disappeared into captivity, but physical evidence aboard the schooner and testimony from disgruntled crewmen supported forfeiture of Hampton for “being configured for slaving.” This time Jackson meant to save kidnapped Africans from enslavement. Jackson sailed downriver from St. Mary’s to Fernandina to augment his crew with 12 soldiers from the Army garrison, bringing his complement to about 27, in line with the number of pirates he anticipated aboard his
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Chained on Deck Some slavers so overcrowded their ships that captives made the voyage in fetters on deck.
target. Reaching the open sea at about 4 p.m. Thursday, June 29, 1820, Jackson kept the Dallas well offshore and bearing south, probably on the assumption that the pirate vessel’s crew, trying to avoid detection, would be doing the same. Jackson’s hunch paid off. At daylight, a lookout sighted Smith’s ship ahead and bearing south-southeast, about 20 degrees off the cutter’s starboard bow. As Jackson ordered “all sail” to intercept, Smith’s disguised Antelope juked northeast, veering straight for the mouth of the Saint John’s. Smith likely was running for Spanish waters; reaching them would put his vessel out of American reach. He ran in vain. Dallas was a topsail schooner, a design with a lean hull and an impressive spread of sail, meant to run with the fastest vessels afloat. In the service of speed Dallas’s only armament was a 6-pound smoothbore cannon mounted on a pivot slightly forward of amidships. Jackson ordered his troops Privateer A barque-rigged example of a privateer sailed out of New Orleans carrying 16 guns. APRIL 2022 63
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The cutter’s officers found 280 Africans chained below deck. During the “middle passage,” as the voyage between Africa and a plantation was known, 70 more had died. The boarding party found “seaman’s protection papers” identifying
Next Stop, Monrovia The capital of Liberia was a frequent destination of vessels bringing repatriated Africans.
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to conceal themselves and be ready for a fight. Just before 2 p.m., with Dallas rapidly gaining, Smith began to clear his deck for action. Within half an hour, the cutter had gained the “weather gauge”—the tactically advantageous position upwind of another vessel. Both crews ran out their guns. Rising from concealment, Jackson’s soldiers lined the rail, muskets at the ready. Smith ordered his men to fire; the gunners, pushed to mutiny by their dislike for dealing in slaves, refused to obey. Smith hove to.
Smith as an American citizen. Many of the “deceived” crewmen readily admitted to being American and were more than willing to share the details of their vessel’s activities. With more than enough probable cause, Jackson seized Smith’s ship and arrested its officers and crew. At Saint Mary’s, he left the seized brig and surviving Africans in the charge of 1st Lieutenant William Askwith and six men and continued on aboard Dallas to Savannah, Georgia, to arraign the 28 prisoners and seek guidance on the rescued Africans’ status. The piracy case against John Smith should have been easy to prove. However, Smith’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had renounced his American citizenship in order to serve the cause of Banda Oriental’s independence. While the letter of marque Smith presented for the General Ramirez might be fraudulent, since Smith believed it was authentic and piracy was a crime requiring intent, the jury could not convict him, the attorney claimed. The prosecution barely contested these assertions and presented little evidence of its own. Upon being acquitted Smith had the audacity to sue for ownership of the recaptured Africans. However, U.S. Attorney Richard Wyly Habersham likely had a larger strategy. Had Smith been found to be a pirate, international law demanded that the Africans be returned to their Spanish and Portuguese claimants. Habersham could assert that as a legal privateer Smith, upon capturing
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Carried into Bondage Captives bound for the New World depart an African setting, mourned by those left behind.
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U.S. Attorney General Richard Wyly Habersham Africans at sea, had gained ownership, which he then forfeited by trying to smuggle them into the United States. The result should have been immediate freedom for all the captives. However, the Africans Metcalf had taken from Spanish and Portuguese vessels were subject to claims from supposed foreign owners. A court had to address such claims before it could free recaptured Africans. Only a group of 25 who had been seized from an American vessel, Exchange, of whom 18 had survived to reach Savannah, came under no ownership claims. The court ruled that the 18 qualified for immediate release. They were transported to Liberia, an area in West Africa that Blacks repatriated from the United States recently had begun settling with the assistance of the American Colonization Society and the U.S. government. The remainder of the Africans aboard Antelope faced seven years of servitude as claims to their ownership by Spain and
in the end, of 157 SURVIVING unfortunates HELD ABOARD Antelope, 120 WERE repatriatED to liberia; 37 OTHERS WERE HANDED OVER TO CLAIMANTS FROM SPAIN.
Chief Justice John Marshall
Portugal crawled toward the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall. Of 157 survivors, 37 were delivered to Spanish claimants, while Portugal’s claim on the remainder was completely discounted for lack of any individual owners; 120 were sent to Liberia. Although only slightly less than half of those that Dallas rescued survived to recover their freedom, this episode demonstrated a new American resolve to stop the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. Now persons bound for bondage but recaptured and able to prove they had not previously been enslaved were to be freed. In 1839 Africans aboard Spanish slaver La Amistad, bound for the United States, rebelled at sea and commandeered that schooner. U.S. Navy brig Washington intercepted Amistad and brought the ship to New London, Connecticut, occasioning a landmark legal case. Ruling in 1841 in U.S. v. The Amistad, the Supreme Court declared that any African entering the country was free unless a claimant could prove that that person previously had been enslaved under another nation’s laws— reversing the burden of proof in use since the Antelope incident. The last slave ship known to land Africans in the United States was the schooner Clotilda, lately the subject of headlines (see p. 8). The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery on New Year’s Day 1865. H
Seizing Control An 1839 revolt by kidnapped Africans aboard La Amistad led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling. APRIL 2022 65
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Ever Oversold An illustration from an 1891 book presents the seizure of the Boone and Galloway girls in highly melodramatic terms.
the British, and nature itself.” On July 14, 1776, Jemima, 13, and two other girls were rowing near Fort Boone, named for her near-legendary father, when Shawnee and Cherokee braves seized the trio. The Indians likely meant to use their captives as trading chips with the British or the settlers. But the raid backfired. A great woodsman, Daniel led a team that rescued the girls unharmed—a feat facilitated by the captives’ cleverly marked traces. Taking becomes far more interesting after the rescue: Daniel’s capture by Shawnee braves in 1778; his adoption by Blackfish, a chief of that tribe; his escape, aided by his adoptive Indian mother; the Indian siege of Fort Boone; Daniel’s court-martial for treason, contrived by jealous enemies. He defended himself and was not only acquitted but promoted from captain to major in the militia. The author errs by not recounting Daniel’s
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The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap that Shaped America By Matthew Pearl Harper, 2021; $27.99
The title oversells, but don’t be put off by that. Matters involving Jemima Boone’s kidnapping are but a fraction of this book, and nothing in Taking persuaded me that that abduction shaped America. Even so, the book absorbingly chronicles the roil of events and individuals along the American frontier during the Revolution, particularly its protagonist, the remarkable Daniel Boone (1734-1820), explorer, settler, archetype—and Jemima’s father. The setting is what eventually became the state of Kentucky. The time is the late 1770s. The era and locale featured atrocities, betrayal, espionage, and pitched battles, but also heroism, decency, dignity, even wisdom. American settlers were fighting the British for independence. Indian tribes were not only fighting for their long-held land but for their survival. As author Pearl observes with some understatement, “The frontier remained in limbo, caught in a struggle among Indians, settlers,
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FRONTIER DRAMATICS
early life. What of his boyhood and early manhood? How did he acquire those phenomenal wilderness skills? Why, unlike so many settlers, did he respect Indians? Pearl, however, does engagingly depict the ruthless realpolitik practiced by British, settlers, and indigenes. And he understands his story’s import. “Blackfish proposed a true revolution. . .to turn the
frontier into an integrated, shared space,” he writes. “Evidence suggests elements of this appealed to Boone, too. Instead, the Kentucky settlements became. . .a testing ground of an American doctrine of expansion by force. . .” —Howard Schneider has reviewed books for Military History, Aviation History, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
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Delightfully Deadpan Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton was not only an agile and hilarious giant of silent movie comedy, but one whose grasp of what could be accomplished with cameras and editing equipment transformed the nickelodeon’s merely moving pictures into a series of 20-minute comedies that still amaze and delight. When talkies arrived, Keaton’s fame plateaued, but he never stopped working. From 1900 as the 5-year-old linchpin of his family’s top-billed vaudeville act until his death in 1966, Buster Keaton was always providing laughs. Slate film critic Dana Stevens has shaped a quarter of a century’s worth of legwork into Camera Man. Researching prodigiously, locating shorts thought lost, and reading tons of reviews and profiles, she has developed a genuine feel for what made Keaton distinctive and funny. Describing her subject’s innovations and pratfalls, Stevens explains how his “whole comic persona sprang from a kind of sublime passivity.” And she makes clear Keaton’s place in history as “a living bridge between live entertainment of the nineteenth century and the mass-produced technology of the twentieth.” But Stevens dilutes the value of that research with pervasive speculation on what “might” have happened when she finds no evidence. And she shows scant interest in the work outside of film that sustained Keaton for decades. For instance, she mentions that he toured in road shows of Broadway comedies but cites not one play or role. Most bothersome, she constantly roams byways, a tic that stalls the Keaton narrative and leaves readers confused about just where in that story we are. But Camera Man’s weakness is also a strength. Extraneous material tangles Keaton’s tale but also provides a sort of plum pudding filled with interesting arcana. Keaton breakfasts at a Child’s restaurant; Stevens devotes three pages to the chain, the first to use woman servers. Keaton does a movie scene in blackface; Stevens cuts to a chapter about Bert Williams, the Black humorist and Ziegfeld Follies star. Keaton misses out on a role in the 1931 Grand Hotel; Stevens spends eight pages on that film, including such tidbits as stars Greta Garbo and John Barrymore not having an affair during the shoot. A reader’s tolerance for Stevens’s approach will depend on the degree of pleasure those plums provide. —SCOTUS 101 columnist Daniel B. Moskowitz laughed joyously at the Keaton two-reelers that he streamed to prepare for writing this review.
Camera Man by Dana Stevens Atria, 2022; $28
Peak Keaton The hyphenate star composed and posed for a characteristic still while making his 1928 comedy The Cameraman. APRIL 2022 67
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Anti-War Warrior General Smedley Butler addresses a protest in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 9, 1935
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Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire By Jonathan M. Katz St. Martin’s, 2022; $29.99
A disturbing but illuminating account of American imperialism in the first decades of the 20th century, Gangsters covers military actions in nine countries with special attention to the career of highly decorated Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940). Each chapter focuses on a particular American intervention in such widely scattered locations as the Philippines, Cuba, China, Haiti, and Panama. Addressing each episode, Katz presents the greater politico-historical context, the Marines’ participation, including Butler’s own role, and a current-day look back based on Katz’s first-hand observations of long-term effects, local memories, and lingering attitudes toward Americans. Katz documents effectively how these campaigns sought to support American companies and banks, with little regard for the local populace whose lives and communities those interventions disrupted and often destroyed. At home the party line was that these actions expressed benevolent support for democracy and assistance in development for peoples unready for self-governance. Perhaps with the exception of Cuba, most Americans know far less of these imperialist undertakings than do those whose countries were in the line of American fire. To underpin his narrative, Katz uses a wide variety of solid secondary sources and archival documents, listed in an extensive selected bibliography and notes. To understand what Butler did and how he thought, the author arranged access to correspondence, writings, and photos of Butler and family. Katz shows Butler’s thinking as it evolves from that of a naïve young underage Marine at Guantánamo Bay to his late-life questioning of anti-democratic actions he helped carry out. As Butler wrote in a 1935 article in Common Sense, “I spent most of my life
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Uncle Slam Wants You
being a high-class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street, and the bankers. . . . I was a racketeer for capitalism.” Katz unspools a gripping account of the “small wars” that America engaged in during the century of very large wars. Gangsters is not a happy read but its content and insights will
appeal to many readers. Those who reflexively support the American interventions or see them as necessary evils will disagree with Katz’s overall arguments, but nonetheless will find his book well worth reading and contemplating. —Barbara Finlay is a long-time contributor to American History.
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redcoats Rethunk
“The scum of the earth.” Samuel Adams might have called British regulars that. Exasperatedly watching Redcoats pause to plunder a defeated enemy’s debris, the Duke of Wellington definitely did. Unlike Adams, Wellington knew better when in a calmer frame of mind. With the Royal Navy handling the island nation’s defense, King George III’s Britain opted for a small, all-volunteer land force. Recruiters were expected to enlist serious professionals, not cannon fodder or criminals on the run. Magistrates had to certify enlistment as voluntary. Army life had real attractions for the working class. Employment was assured and, more importantly, so were pensions for those who lived long enough to retire, whether owing to age or disability. Skilled tradesman taking the King’s shilling could often make money on the side. There was even an outside chance of becoming an officer and attaining “gentlemanly” status. Enlistees tended to have other options as trained workers, or at least as unskilled laborers. Such men weren’t mercenary. In the years of tension preceding the Revolutionary War colonists frequently offered regulars land, money, and other incentives to desert. Few considered accepting. Some feared punishment. Many had other mature, considered reasons. Men who were neither unthinking minions nor automatons took seriously their oaths of enlistment and expressions of patriotic loyalty. And Redcoats saw the Patriot movement at its worst—the chaos and mob violence that leaders like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin eschewed. Naturally some unsavory characters did enlist, their misdeeds broadcast for ages. But interestingly any one soldier was as likely to be a victim of thuggery as a perpetrator of the same. Irish civilians often deliberately crippled occupying soldiers for life. Some American colonists looked “humane” only in comparison. The one offense widespread among soldiers was boosting property to compensate for the privations of campaign life. Campaigns were also the arena in which Redcoats excelled—and not just at conventional warfare. While colonists became proficient in the close order formations needed to win major battles, King George’s regulars adapted proficiently to the open order tactics that day to day operations in American forests demanded. Many factors contributed to Britain’s defeat—geography, inferior commanders, French participation in the war. Volunteers shows that ordinary Redcoats’ dedication and performance was not among them. —James Baresel is a freelance writer in Annandale, Virginia.
Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution By Don N. Hagist Westholme, 2020; $34.
Standing Tall Regulars like this member of the 29th Regiment of Foot circa 1770 acquitted themselves better than is supposed. APRIL 2022 69
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song to woody
“Intimacy” seems an odd way for a biographer to label the lens through which he views his subject. But by drilling deeply into Guthrie’s writings, Haverford College Professor Gustavus Stadler shows how powerfully intimacy shaped this iconic folksinger’s art and politics. Intimacy was everything for him. The intimacy of tenderness and trauma made life heaven and hell. It was how the body felt when struck by disease and violence, the feelings that shut down an emotionally abused soul and gave rise to an unearned inner conviction of worthlessness. Most of all, intimacy was about transcendence. Connection was Guthrie’s balm for the harm he and people like him endured. He grew up amid violence in Oklahoma. His earliest memories of his father, a political operative and suspected Klan member, were of him bruised and bloody from brawling. Huntington’s Chorea, a genetic disease, tormented his mother, sending Nora Belle Guthrie into terrifying spasms and episodes of public weeping. “Us kids would stand around the house lost in silence, not saying a word for hours, and ashamed, somehow, to go out down the street and play with the kids, and wanting to stay there and see how long her spell would last, and if we could help her,” Guthrie recalled in his book Bound for Glory. Spells aside, Nora taught Woody, whom she called her “worried little man,” how singing could soothe troubled minds. When the boy was six, sister Clara, 14, argued with Nora. The clash ended with Clara Woody Guthrie: in flames; she died from the burns. One An Intimate Life account has her setting herself afire to scare By Gustavus Stadler her mother. Woody was 14 when his mother Beacon, 2020; $26.95 may have flung a kerosene lantern at his
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Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie
sleeping father, setting Charlie’s torso ablaze. Trauma Woody endured as a boy and later witnessed among Oklahoma migrants imbued him with a desire to understand and ease the feelings of people like those scraping by in the Depression. He found joy in connection through singing and writing, seeing his art as a healing force. He was “not just an expert at creative expression, but…a caretaker, a healer, and an organizer,” Stadler writes. A love affair with Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia exposed him to women who battered their bodies in the service of dance, out of painful discipline creating beauty. He exulted in erasing boundaries between himself and a dedicated group of people out to do good, whether dancers or workingmen. He developed a reverence for collective action. Capitalism was how the system isolated people, he said: “The best part about the union hall is that it teaches you how to be free to talk and think and to hear that you are some good to somebody, some use, some help to the people of the world. A sweetheart can help to tell you this. A fellow union member can too.” Any reckoning of Guthrie as nurturer involves an inventory of the damage he himself did. His relationship with Mazia ended her marriage and his own to first wife Mary. After marrying and having children with Marjorie he cheated on her, too. He grew distant from her and their kids, including son Arlo. Struggling with alcoholism and Huntington’s, he struck his wife and children. His marriage to Marjorie ended in divorce. Although beautiful at times Stadler’s prose is hard going. More general biographies examine Guthrie’s politics, musical career, and his deep affection for family. Stadler’s focus on intimacy highlights how honest, fearless, generous, and unceasingly creative Guthrie was as an artist. He never shed his anger and alienation but, trapped in that cauldron, he forged an incredible sweetness of spirit. Whose songs better than his summon Americans’ connection to land and people? Who better expresses tenderness for the dispossessed and so strengthens our common humanity? When Guthrie sings Hobo’s Lullaby, all of us humans are along for the ride: “Now don’t you worry ‘bout tomorrow/Let tomorrow come and go/Tonight you’re in a nice warm boxcar/ Safe from all that wind and snow.” —John Reichard writes in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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PIN-UPS FOR VETS Supporting Hospitalized Veterans & Deployed Troops Since 2006
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…in Fairfield, Pennsylvania, had its origins in a grant of 247 acres Declaration of Independence signer Charles Carroll of Carrollton made in 1755 to John Miller. By the 1760s Miller had begun building what became a stately 3-1/2-story stone dwelling known as “the Mansion House.” Miller’s son converted the family home into a tavern that has operated ever since, in frontier days a stagecoach stop and later an Underground Railroad station. Fairfield was in Maryland until the Mason-Dixon line relocated the town in Pennsylvania. Thaddeus Stevens used the inn as a headquarters as he was trying without success to get a rail line going nearby. After the Battle of Gettysburg, the inn’s owner dunned the Confederate States of America for $278 to cover liquor taken by Robert E. Lee’s invading troops. The three-story Gothic porch arrived in Victorian days. Owners Cindy and George Keeney (mansionhouse1757.com) offer a first-rate farm-to-table restaurant as well as a snuggery called Squire Miller’s Tavern and three each of cozy rooms and suites named for such American figures as Patrick Henry, Harriet Tubman—and Mamie Eisenhower, a longtime lunch-hour customer who with husband and former president Dwight had retired to a spread up the road.— Michael Dolan
Imposing That triple-stacked set of porches came later but the original stone dwelling contributes to the Mansion House 1757’s atmosphere.
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Mansion House 1757…
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COLUMBUS AND CAONABó 1493-1498 Retold
A historical novel depicting Columbus’s invasion of “Española” and the bitter resistance mounted by its Taíno peoples, led by the chieftain Caonabó. “…powerful…brims with striking historical detail…Rowen weaves bravery and treachery and pits truth against myth in this sweeping tour de force.”—booklife “…a feat of meticulous research, beautiful writing, and great imagination.” —ANDRÉS RESÉNDEZ,
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
“…a deep journey that humanizes our ancestors and treats us as equals rather than passive victims. The dialogue between the Caciques and Spaniards is intelligent, meaningful, and extremely believable.” —KACIKE JORGE BARACUTEI ESTEVEZ,
Higuayagua Taíno of the Caribbean
“…succeeds on two levels, as all the best historical fiction…meticulous research and deft phrasing…a great story...” —MATTHEW RESTALL, When Montezuma Met Cortés “…an impressive work of scholarship.” —Kirkus Reviews
ANDREW ROWEN www.andrewrowen.com
Available in hardcover, paperback and ebook
ALL PERSONS PRESS
New York, New York
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