Forkland by Wilbur Hazlegrove

Forkland Wilbur Lee Hazlegrove

Special Thanks My special thanks to: Barbara Dickinson and Margaret Grayson, who read pieces of my melange in 2009 and encouraged me to continue; Nancy McDaniel, who suggested without success that it be separated into its essential ingredients of essays, anecdotes and histories; Anna and Tommy Lawson, she, for encouraging the thought that my work was valuable as history and he for the politeness of elevating my bombast to stylish arabesque; Linda Dane, who proofed the text; Kossen Gregory and Earle Martin, who continued the encouragement; and Jack Gwaltney, who led me to see myself and others more clearly as evolved animals rather than children of God; and my children, Sarah Perkins and William Sydnor Hazlegrove for contemporary photography, design and layout of the work. To match images to text is a daunting exercise. I am most grateful to Lucy, the love of my life and wife of 62 years, for letting me stir my own pot and stew in it.

Table of Contents Introduction Part I

The Henderson-Perkins Families of Cumberland County

1. The Hendersons 1

3. The Neighborhood 7

2. The Perkinses 5

4. Virginia Tobacco 10

5. The Church of England 18

6. Even Chance and Equal Value 22

Indians 22

Africans 26

English 24 Women 28

7. Mr. McClellan 30

9. The Cumberland Light Dragoons 33

8. God and Honor 31

Part III

A Twentieth Century Retrospective

The memoir of Wilbur L. Hazlegrove

Childhood 79

The University 86

10. The Professions 37

12. Reconstruction 46

11. Close Questions 38 13. Joseph and Maria 54

Part II

Biography of William Perkins Hazlegrove 57

Woodberry 83

Faith and Honor 90 Love and Law 91 The Marines 93

Home Again 96

The New Society 96 Gentle People 97

A New Equation 100 Older Brothers 102

Contemporaries 109 Jews 110

Marriage at Midlife and Beyond 115

The Passion of Christ 118 The Practice 123

Northport Point 124

In the Gloaming 147

Jack and Jane and the Origin of Ethic 153

Appendix I

I History of Grace Church at Ca Ira W. P. Hazlegrove 1940

Appendix II:

Family Historical and

Genealogical Resources

Map I: U.S Corps of Engineers map dated 1866 showing route of Leeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s retreat and surrender at Appomattox (red dotted line). Forkland is marked with green circle.

Dr. Robert Henderson Plate 1

Introduction

Forkland (cover plate) was built during the revolution, so oral history holds, as a tavern in south Cumberland County, Virginia, at Angola, where a branch of the Richmond west stage route that paralleled the Appomattox to Farmville again branched westward to regain the main road at Raines Tavern and pass through Appomattox Court House to Lynchburg on the James. It was in this small, rustic dwelling that my father, William Perkins Hazlegrove, and his mother, Maria Sydnor Perkins, were born and raised. It was to this dwelling that Maria’s mother, Anne Jane Henderson Perkins, brought her ﬁrstborn, George, in 1848, and here birthed nine more children by her husband, William Allen Perkins, six of whom survived infancy, married, and had issue. The couple were obliged for this habitation to Anne Jane’s father, Dr. Robert Henderson (Plate1) of Northﬁeld plantation, nine miles north on the Buckingham Road (Plate 2). He purchased Forkland with 570 acres that ran to the Appomattox and gave the use of it to

Northfield during the Depression. Plate 2

her for life.1 For most of us, Cumberland County and Angola might as well be sited on the dark side of the moon. But the affection of Southern historians profitably to wallow in every crater of a war we lost has returned these places to the closing scenes of the Confederacy. The principal map that prefaces this work (Map I) was exultantly published in 1866 by the U.S. Corps of Engineers to trace Lee’s retreat and surrender at Appomattox. Forkland is pinpointed. Forkland would become Angola on maps of the century that followed, but in April of 1865 the view from a few miles south was of High Bridge, which offered the double perspective of the death throes of the Army of Northern Virginia and the adolescence of steam locomotion in Virginia. The South Side Railroad bridged the Appomattox in 1852 with a trestle that stretched 120 feet above the river for a length of 2400 feet. It was then heralded as among the engineering wonders of the world. Dr. Henderson first shipped tobacco on the South Side in 1860. But nearly a century would pass after Anne Jane’s arrival before steam-generated electric power came to Forkland to slowly erode the manorial regime of Virginia (dark fired) tobacco plantation with Negro labor that endured until the early years of the new millennium. Forkland saw so little change from secession through the Great Depression that if William Allen had dropped in to greet my father or brothers returning from the great wars, he would have found the place much as he had left it. The twin tobacco barns seen in Plate 3 had long been in place when Aaron Hubbard, a remnant servant who seemingly came to Forkland out of the Old Testament, greeted William Allen and Anne Jane when they came down from Northfield. My father held in great affection his five aunts and uncle and their children. Accordingly, life with him necessarily required patient indulgence of his devotions to this patch of Perkinses. He would rattle them off, beginning with George (born 1846) the oldest and only son, who married Eliza Norris Watson, and continue in order of age, recounting that Louisa Henderson (1848) married Hugh Johnson, Eliza Richardson (1849) married Dr. Charles Richard Palmore, Mary Ann (1851) married Hillery Goode Richardson, Martha (1856) married John Blackwell Bland, and that Maria Sydnor (1857) married Joseph

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Twin tobacco barns Plate 3

Henderson family cemetary . Plate 4

Winston Hazlegrove. My grandmother Maria married comparatively late at age 34 and died comparatively young at age 53. My father was the youngest of his generation, and I am the youngest of mine, now numbering to only an handful. As time passed, I grew as wary of posing questions to father concerning the Perkinses as one might forebode in deposing a hypochondriac about his health. He kept Dr. Henderson’s picture in our living room, and a casual glance in that direction alone was sufficient to evoke his recitatives. Perhaps less out of interest in these people than to gain surcease from his embroideries, I asked him to write it down. But he never did. He was project oriented and not moved to write or correspond for exposition or to chat. Besides, he was a poor speller and hopelessly dependent on Pauline Whorley, his legal secretary since age eighteen and forever after. In her maturity, she disfavored the appearance that father’s clients or partners might be impressed to underwrite his histories. But several of father’s projects escaped Pauline’s oversight. First, the Henderson family cemetery at Northfield was of great interest to him and his cousins, especially William Perkins and Edward Henderson Richardson. In 1957, a trust was created and funded by members of the family for its preservation and upkeep.2 The picture seen at Plate 4 was taken in 2005 after extensive repairs and landscaping completed in 1997 in connection with the construction of a grand mansion cored on the footprint of Northfield, which burned in the 1960s.3 The principal modification of the grave site was an increase in the elevation of ground level around the perimeter of the wall, which now overburdens the footings and guttering. It is said that the design was of Irish origin, following that of the low countries here where interment frequently is set above ground level, and easily exceeds the finest private cemeteries of the county.

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Secondly, father wrote a history of Grace Episcopal Church at Ca Ira (Plate 5), privately printed under date of August 1940.4 The church was organized in 1840, and construction completed around 1843.5 It is one of several original buildings remaining in this community, a shipping point for Virginia tobacco. It was there inspected and warehoused during the Colonial and Antebellum periods and boated down the Willis River to the James. William Allen’s third oldest daughter, Eliza Richardson, and her husband, Dr. Charles Richard Palmore, made their home in or near the village and are buried in the church graveyard. William Allen’s involvement with its founding, as well as his courtship with Anne Jane, derived from his return from Richmond to Hickory Hill, just up Willis River from Ca Ira, following his father George’s death in 1834. William Allen and Anne Jane persisted in attending services there or, with the Hendersons, at St. James, Cartersville, following relocation to Forkland nine miles south. I doubt that father would have been so attentive to the shrines of his mother’s people had he not become reinvested in Forkland itself. It was purchased by his father, Joseph Winston, from Maria and her Perkins siblings following Anne Jane’s death in 1894. Following Maria’s death in 1911, Joseph remarried with

Grace Episcopal Church at Ca Ira Plate 5

Ellen Ligon and three children were born of this marriage: Joseph Anderson, David George, and Mary Woodfin. These children and my father inherited Forkland on the death of their father in 1935. Forkland continued as an ancestral home of the Perkinses and commenced as one of the Hazlegroves. Soon after, father purchased 450 acres of the lands of Thomas Scott, which adjoin Forkland on the north and run from the Stoney Point Road to the Appomattox. In 1950, he built a home on the property that he used and enjoyed with my mother, Jennie Ellen Stouffer, and visiting friends and relatives. Thereafter, he added 200 acres adjoining on the north owned by Rueben Adelman, acquired by him also from successors to Thomas Scott, including the Scott home. I was given these properties by my father at or prior to his death in 1979. Joseph Anderson Hazlegrove, born October 9, 1916, a 1938 graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, returned to operate Forkland as a dark fired tobacco plantation and, later, as a dairy farm until his death on February 8, 2005. Uncle Joe bought out his siblings’ interest in Forkland and acquired adjoining and close-by lands, to which I have contributed the use of my holdings to continue a family enterprise now grown to several thousand acres under the leadership of the third generation of Joseph Hazlegroves. Their admirable histories unfold.6 I have been a part of Forkland since I became old enough to remember. Its every hill and crease and those of neighboring lands is vividly recorded in memory from foot hunting quail for over half of the twentieth century. It is a fact that I flushed a covey of birds out of the ruins of The Hermitage and chased singles over the Nathan Womack gravesite at Hickory Hall. But who now should care to know about these people or where they were seated, or whether I exploited the covey rise with the success suggested by my grandfather’s retort to the inevitable question put by one of the neighbors from whom he had strayed apart in the hunt:

Joseph Anderson Hazlegrove

Joe, d’yah get any? Plague, you heard me shoot!

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Map II Map of the neighborhood

Were I to map out the neighborhood, like that of a Parisian gourmand, it would prefer to show where birds and better restaurants are to be found. The one I have elected to provide, however, is from a 1889 survey. Map II shows the location of homesites near Forkland mentioned in the text. In 2005, my daughter, Sarah Perkins, who has extensively photographed Forkland and its people, busied herself with the memorabilia of ancestors that had come to me from my father, principally consisting of the portraiture commissioned by Dr. Henderson and the Civil War correspondence exchanged between Anne Jane and William Allen during a yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s service at Ashland and on the Peninsula with the 3rd Virginia Calvary. She urged me to do something with it but, I saw no reason to do so. The descendants of the six Perkins children have left no blazing comet tails across Virginia skies, and their genealogy has been meticulously mapped and published.7 Some years ago, I loaned my genealogy of our patriarch, Nicholas Perkins, to my distant cousin and contemporary, William Stebbins Hubard. He returned it with a letter diagramming our degree of kin-

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;iv â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

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Ann Jane Perkins Plate 6

ship, together with a typewritten copy of the post-war memoirs of Robert T. Hubard, who served with the Cumberland Troop throughout the conﬂict. I was surprised to receive at Christmas 2006 the gift of a hard-back edition of these recollections, edited by Thomas P. Nanzig.8 Hubard respected William Allen’s captaincy of the Cumberland Troop but I had no interest in joining its campaigns or reenacting its engagements. I grudgingly began to read the correspondence exchanged between my great grandparents during the Civil War and to examine the cache of maps, orders, photographs, and reports that father had gathered and preserved while serving with the A.E.F. in the Meuse Argonne. It settled in my thoughts that we were woven into the rich tapestry of Virginia history, albeit more in background than gilt, and that Robert Henderson, William Allen Perkins, his son George, my grandfather, father, uncle Joe, and I, as men are measured, were among the brightest and best of our generations and that it could do no harm to share with those who might care to read me what we and the times of our lives were like. This is what I here intend to do. It is a melange of histories (personal and otherwise), essays, and anecdotes that may offer nothing more than the amusement of dated mind sets and how some of us recorded thought. In 2005, I began to research and write about the Henderson and Perkins families and became enthralled by the woman whose portrait is seen at Plate 6. She was found in the garret at Forkland, scrolled and dirt daubed, and restored and framed by Young’s in Richmond during the war at the direction of my mother. Father quartered her in our home in Roanoke and I have found a place for her in our homes since 1967. Father could not say who she was, choosing to refer to her as “Aunt Sarah,” and I was content for years to neglect the question who this sternly devout, severely featured, but delicately handed matriarch might be. My God, if she were differently costumed, one might more easily see her as awaiting execution at the Tower of London for religious error during the Reformation or sentencing me to gibbet and ravens for a similar offense than as the wife of a Virginia planter raising children in a tavern serving the Lynchburg stage. I deduce that she is Anne Jane Perkins. There is no known photograph of her, and who but she would have felt at liberty to sentence a portrait undoubtedly commissioned by her father to the oblivion of the attic? While in Williamsburg consorting with my wife, Lucy, and the Colonial Dames in 2007 in celebration of the quadricentennial of Jamestown, I spoke with Barbara Luck, Curator, Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, to ask her help in identifying the artist who authored Aunt Sarah’s portrait. I sent her a photograph of it, which she soon wrote to say was fabulous. I met at Forkland with her, Shelly Svoboda, her colleague; and Susan Shames, Decorative Arts Librarian, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, to examine it and other portraits commissioned by Dr. Henderson. Susan Shames was involved in the consultation because she has studied and collected the work of Samuel Taylor. He was a Virginia itinerant portrait painter working in the area, identiﬁed as the likely author of the portrait by Barbara Luck before we met and the consensus choice afterward made by them. It may be that I reckon the sitter to be Anne Jane and that the ladies from Williamsburg attribute the portrait to Samuel Taylor for want of other credible suspects, but there she is: an artifact. Whence and by whom she came is not relevant to this essay, only that I would not have undertaken it but for her. Nor would I have done so without the encouragement of notable women and men who have read pieces of what I have written.

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Susan Shames brought with her to Forkland and left with me a weighty three-ring binder containing an abundance of recorded information concerning the Hendersons, Perkins, and Hazlegroves, some of which I had not seen. This was a meticulous and painstaking contribution to what I had undertaken, of which she knew nothing. On her departure, I gave her the text of what I had so far written, which then ran to 50 pages, and asked her, if she should choose to read it, to tell me if she thought it might entertain an audience beyond the family. She wrote to say she was glued to every page. As time passed, I added and tinkered with text and asked friends and strangers to tell me what to do with it. They liked different parts for different reasons in varying degrees and encouraged me to think in terms of private publication, since my melange disrespects the recipes for the ingredients of books written to sell. Jack Gwaltney, a friend from childhood, suggested several options, one of which was to “Put it away in a safe place where someone in the future will discover and publish it,” to which he added: “While your language is stilted, this is the Wilbur that your friends know and which has a unique charm. I hope you will not alter it or make the book more fashionable and politically correct (although more saleable).” What luck! The rush of science and technology permits me to put my histories safely away in cyberspace and let only those I choose discover them. Where could I hope to gain at no cost but the asking the applause of those I treasure most and license to shape a favorable review? What’s to lose if the covey rise leaves only harmless holes poked in the sky?

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Dr. Henderson and Martha Eliza Plate 7

Louisa Henderson and Anne Jane Plate 8

Martha Eliza Page Plate 9

Alexander Trent Page Plate 10

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Part I

The Henderson & Perkins Families of Cumberland County A 19th Century Portrait

The Hendersons

Dr. Robert Henderson was born in the town of Sligo, Ireland, August 10, 1795, and

followed in death on April 4, 1845. The posthumous portraits of the couple at Plates 9

came to this country in 1816. He died February 14, 1862, at Northﬁeld. This much of

and 10 are by an unknown painter, probably a studio artist in Richmond. The couple’s

him is graven in stone.

surviving daughter, Martha, was raised by the Hendersons at Northﬁeld. She married

His photograph at Plate 1 portrays a handsome gentleman about whom much has been

Captain W. D. Stuart and had two sons by him, Charles and Douglas.

lost to unrecorded memory, both before and after he made his way to Cumberland

It is sad that Martha was given so few years to live. Her posthumous portrait hints at

County in 1820. On March 30 of that year, he married Louisa Brackett, born Decem-

a less inhibited spirit than seen in the portrait of her sister, Mary Frances, and in the

ber 2, 1802, to Ludwell and Ann Cox Brackett in Amelia County. The marriage was

letters of Anne Jane. The portrait of her husband Alex images a handsome gentleman;

celebrated in Cumberland, this with the consent of the bride’s mother. Louisa had not

together the couple seem uncommonly vibrant. Martha studied the guitar and seems

come of age.

more curious and inventive than her catalogue of pressed ﬂowers suggests. She kept a book containing a composition of letters addressed to a nameless friend who presses to

The couple ﬁrst lived at Brook Hill plantation. Brook Hill is located on the north side

tap her superior knowledge of such subjects as the strata of Roman civilization and the

of the bend of the Appomatox, near Sunnyside. It was a property of 715 acres pur-

history of the formation of each of the original colonies. This appears to have been no

chased by Louisa’s father, Ludwell Brackett, in 1806. Within six months of his mar-

more than a fanciful format, an invention employed to accomplish history assignments

riage, Dr. Henderson commenced the acquisition of the Brackett family interests in

given by her tutor. But most of the pages of her book have been torn out, leaving room

Brook Hill as well as adjoining lands. The holding grew to some eleven hundred acres

to suppose that she may have written a romance or some number of poems thought too

at his death in 1862.9 Northﬁeld is located on the Buckingham Road (Route 13) sev-

intimate to share with others.

eral miles east of Cumberland Courthouse. It had been assembled by purchases made by Dr. Henderson commencing no earlier than 182510 to a holding of some thirteen

The youngest daughter, Mary Frances, was named for Dr. Henderson’s sister, who

hundred acres by the time of his death.

had found her way from Ireland to Toronto with her husband. Mary Frances married their son, Edward Henderson Rutherford, her ﬁrst cousin, born also in Ireland. Mary

Three daughters were born of the Henderson-Brackett union: Martha Eliza, born Feb-

Frances died March 31, 1846, in her twenty-second year. Her posthumous portrait at

ruary 5, 1821; Anne Jane, born January 21, 1823; and Mary Frances, born

Plate 11 is signed by Henry J. Brown, who was born in Cumberland County and was

June 24, 1824.

working in central Virginia at the time of her death. It was rendered from a daguerreotype, as noted by the artist. Two children were born of this marriage, Robert Henderson

In 1823, Dr. Henderson commissioned James McGibbon, an itinerant portrait painter who was working in Lynchburg and Richmond at the time, to paint companion, double portraits of himself and Martha Eliza (Plate 7) and of his wife, Louisa, holding baby

Rutherford, who was raised by the Hendersons at Northﬁeld with cousin Martha Page, and Mary, who remained with her father in Canada and died at the age of seventeen. Both died without issue.

Anne Jane (Plate 8).

Mary’s marriage to his nephew was bitterly opposed by Dr. Henderson, not only

Martha Eliza married Alexander Trent Page, also of Cumberland County. She died February 16, 1842, of complications associated with the birth of her child. Her husband

because of close kinship but also because he despised the man. Consent was given

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on condition that the couple remain in Virginia, but the promise was no sooner made than broken. Dr. Henderson dutifully retrieved her remains for burial at Northfield. Their son, Robert H. Rutherford, born December 11, 1844, would join the Cumberland Troop when he became of age in 1862. Anne Jane Henderson married William Allen Perkins on January 8, 1846. He was born in Richmond January 8, 1817, and died at Forkland July 18, 1889. That Dr. Henderson commissioned the portraiture of his family with at least four painters-three of whom were itinerant in Virginia during the second quarter of the century, each sufficiently skilled and productive to have been collected and studied, reveals a tasteful facet of his character. Another may be added. He was a devout Anglican, worshipping at St. James, Cartersville. He saw to the construction of the family cemetery at Northfield around 1840. It would receive the remains of Martha and Alex Page, its first occupants. All of the men and women whose images are reproduced above are buried here, together with young Robert Rutherford and four of the children of Anne Jane and William Allen Perkins who died in infancy. Tobacco has a voracious appetite for soil nutrients, and not a few of our forebears who first settled in the neighborhood were moved to do so, not in quest of commanding views for mansions grandly named, but to gain new ground and abundant natural resources toward the westward frontier that promised life styles above the subsistence level through plantation of tobacco for cash or barter. With the passage of time, populations increased and came to include trades and skills that collected into communities at points Mary Frances Henderson Plate 11

along the tributaries of the James and the principal overland routes. Northfield is not proximate to the Appomatox, and probably was sited by Dr. Henderson to bring him closer to a source of patients gathered at Effingham (Cumberland Courthouse) and along the Buckingham road. The photograph of Northfield at Plate 2 was taken in 1936 in connection with the Works Progress Administration Virginia survey of historical homes. The report of the survey, now in the collection of the Library of Virginia, relies on John Springer Gray for an anecdotal history of Northfield, although his residency was a half century removed from 1882, the date the property came into the ownership of the informant’s forebears, and further still from Dr. Henderson’s death in 1862. Gray sets 1817 as the date Northfield was built and offers Dr. Henderson to memory as a colorful eccentric: When Dr. Henderson came here from Ireland, of course, he had no doctor’s practice. So he rode through the village several times a day at break neck speed. Finally, people began to comment on what a busy doctor he was and drew the conclusion that he must be a good one. Before long he had worked up a good practice and before he died he had made a big success in his profession. If Northfield was built in 1817, Dr. Henderson did not commission it. He first appears on the land records of the county in February 1820, a month prior to marriage, as tenant in a lease with Thomas Hobson, who owned property near the courthouse. Hobson had been engaged by the county to take care of it. There is no clear evidence that Dr. Henderson did not build Northfield, but its construction could not have proceeded on owned land under recorded deed prior to 1825 and, more probably, not until after 1832. The image of Northfield and the report on the floor plan and interiors by the surveyor agree with what I saw as a young man before it burned. As we see, the exterior is plain and not clearly indebted to either

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Georgian or Federalist style. The Adamesque interiors, especially the ornamental plaster ceiling designs, were striking. I have often wondered how the skills were assembled to execute its construction and whether the design was drawn from plan books available to Dr. Henderson and his builder, perhaps by Asher Benjamin, or the product of a commissioned architect. Regardless, Northfield does not come across as a home whose construction depended on the success of the marketing strategy ascribed to Dr. Henderson. The photograph of Northfield during the Great Depression only hints at the formal gardens that once must have surrounded the home and its dependancies and enhanced their setting. Dr. Henderson reached the age of sixty-five in 1860 and then was numbered among the wealthiest men of the county. Northfield alone stood at $125,000. Forkland came to $40,000, and adding Brook Hill may well have put the value of these holdings above $200,000. It is regrettable that what has come to hand concerning him does not include a single writing penned by him, save a memorandum of his stay in Dublin. The same is true concerning his wife, Louisa, with the exception of her memorandum book in which she recorded her name and birthday, that of her husband and children and eighteen slaves and their children, partially reproduced at Plate 12. He is better understood in his maturity than his youth. Louisa is neglected throughout. The two of them were simply taken for granted by their children and grandchildren old enough to know them, and among them, only Eliza Palmore seems reliable: I spent a great deal of my time at Northfield when I was a child, and though Grandpa died when I was in my 13th year, yet he was an ideal man in my estimation and I saw no fault in him. He was genial, whole souled, hospitable, kind and thoughtful, and sang old Irish melodies. Although his monument recites that he was born in Sligo in 1795 and came here in August 1816, why he came, what he did with himself between arrival and marriage in 1820, how he met his seventeen-year-old bride from Amelia, why he chose to settle in Cumberland, and from what background he derived, are questions the answers to which mostly must rest in speculation, an indulgence not altogether eschewed by those who reflected upon him. Eliza Norris Watson, wife of George Perkins, wrote of her husband’s grandfather: Robert Henderson was of Scotch & Irish descent, and belonged to the Protestant Irish element, was born at Sligo, Ireland, educated at Edinburgh, practiced his profession at the Charity Clinics of London to which he was admitted through the influence of his father’ friend--Lord Palmerston. Eliza’s daughter, Anne Henderson Maury, penned the following on the reverse side of the ubiquitous photograph of Dr. Henderson: He was at the age of twenty a surgeon in the British Army under the Duke of Wellington, and fought in the Battle of Waterloo. He was a graduate of Dublin University, and his diploma from that institution was in the possession of Dr. Edward Richardson, formerly a member of the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, and a great grandson of Dr. Robert Henderson.

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Louisa Henderson Memorandum book. Plate 12

But what came to Dr. Richardson11 and is now in the ownership of his son, Dr. Edward Henderson Richardson Jr., are three certificates or diplomas issued under seal during the period 1815-16, respectively, by the Apothecaries Hall Dublin, which opines that Robert Henderson is qualified to become apprentice to the business of an apothecary; by the Master and Resident Assistant to the Hospital for the relief of poor lying in women, Great Britain Street, Dublin, which advises that Robert is qualified to practice midwifery as a branch of the medical profession; and by three individuals attesting to Robert’s attendance on the medical and surgical practice of the Charitable Infirmary, Jervis Street, and the clinical lectures there delivered during a term of five months. Dr. Henderson’s memorandum book covering his stay in Dublin to November 9. 1814, containing lecture notes, recipes, and treatments of various ailments, has been reunited with the certificates, provoking Dr. Richardson to observe: It’s interesting that Robert was fully trained at age twenty-one. I’m glad he didn’t have to operate on me! The Richardsons were highly regarded, if not legendary, at Johns Hopkins, but there, the method of teaching students under apprenticeship in a clinical setting paralleled the Dublin model for Robert Henderson’s training. We must, I think, understand the ideology of the aristocracy of Virginia then obtaining to measure behavior during any period of its history. The General Assembly first adopted legislation governing the licensure of physicians January 1, 1885,12 and was careful to enjoin the Board of Medical Examiners properly to respect the philosophical aspects of medical practice: Provided however, no candidate shall be rejected upon his examination on account of his adherence to any particular school of medicine or system of practice, nor on account of his views as to the method of treatment and cure of diseases During the Colonial period, those who held themselves out as surgeons, apothecaries, and practitioners Plate 12 continued

of physic were reined in, not by any legal standard measuring minimum qualiﬁcations for those who purported to serve in these callings, but by laws requiring them to attend to their patients, disclose the true composition of their medicines, and adhere to a fee schedule for house calls and broken bones. The sole, but essentially academic concession to professionalism was to allow a doctor to double the fee for house calls if he had “studied phisic in any university, and taken any degree therein.”13 Dr. Henderson’s training may well have been superior to that of the Richardsons if measured against the standards of the time. In any event, we are given a whole- souled gentleman of admirable dimensions whose fortunes turned to dust within months of secession and whose life ended before the ﬁrst anniversary of the Confederacy.

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The Perkinses

William Allen Perkins Plate 13

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The photograph of William Allen Perkins at Plate 13 hung for years at the courthouse at Cumberland where he served as county judge or magistrate during Reconstruction. Before the war and after defeat, he was highly regarded in the neighborhood as a Christian gentleman whose tolerance well qualiﬁed him to lead and judge its people. The precocious Dr. Richardson says this of him in his memoirs: My own recollections of Granpa Perkins are particularly vivid inasmuch as during the summer of 1884 at the age of six years while my mother was ill in a Richmond, Virginia, hospital, I spent over four months at Forkland with my grandparents and their only remaining daughter, Aunt Maria. He was perhaps a little over six feet tall, with a lean, muscular body, erect carriage, large wellformed head, thinning gray hair with a becoming gray mustache and beard, high forehead, with a kindly but uncommonly intellectual and judicial countenance, and a quiet, digniﬁed bearing that gave him a notably distinguished appearance. By many friends he was thought to resemble General Robert E. Lee. He was a man of uncompromising honesty who adhered strictly to the highest moral, ethical and religious codes. William Allen never was licensed to practice law, although there was no reason why he could not have pursued the calling had it interested him to do so. It did not affect his eligibility to serve as judge of the County Court during Reconstruction. Indeed, he was well suited. His father, George Perkins is of some moment to us. He was born February 27, 1776, in Buckingham County, and died September 30, 1834, a resident of Richmond. At age forty, he married Eliza Sydnor Richardson (Plate 14), born June 28, 1797, Hanover County, died November 4, 1862, Buckingham County. The couple were married March 6, 1816, she at age nineteen. Their oldest son, William Allen, and his siblings, Anna Maria, who married Lewis Warrington Cabell; Eliza George, who married William Andrew Horseley; and Edmond Taylor, who married Mary Elizabeth Addison, are a part of the portrait. I shall dwell on some of them and introduce their forebears and closer but more distant cousins as text and topic allow. For now, William Allen is offered as a devout, disciplined aristocrat, well married to a lady of equal dimensions. Anne Jane’s sampler, dated 1831 at age nine, exhibited her needlework as well as her command of arabic and roman numerals, script and block lettering. It features this:

Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand

As the ﬁrst effort of this infant’s hand

And while her ﬁngers o’er the canvass move

Engage her tender heart to seek thy love.

George Perkins and Eliza Richardson Perkins Plate 14

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The Neighborhood

Forkland Today Plate 15

–7 –

Forkland during Depression Plate 16

As seen on Map I, the principal road connecting Cumberland Courthouse with Richmond east during the Antebellum Period was called the Buckingham Road and generally followed what is now designated as Routes 13 and 60 to the village of that name, through the coal mines located around Midlothian and on to Manchester, a shipping point for coal and tobacco below the falls on the south side of the James River, where it was bridged at Mayo’s and, later, 9th Street across to Richmond proper. Northﬁeld fronted on the Buckingham Road. West of the courthouse, the Buckingham Road continued toward Ca Ira, but forked. The south branch swung along what is now designated as Route 45 or the Cumberland Road, past McRae’s, Langhorn’s Tavern, and Brown’s Store to Raines Tavern, then along the Lynchburg Road, through Shepherds, New Store, and Appomatox Courthouse, located on what is now designated as Route 24. This was the route of Lee’s retreat out of Farmville. East of Northﬁeld, near Brook Hill, the Buckingham Road branches southwesterly west of Sunnyside and parallels the Appomatox to a point north of Stoney Point Mills in the road now bearing that name, which connects Cumberland Courthouse to the north with Forkland (Angola) to the south, where it again branches, with one branch ( River Road) following the ridge and course of the Appomatox past High Bridge to Farmville and the other ( John Randolf or Guinea Road) bearing west to Raines Tavern

–8 –

and the Lynchburg Road. The route followed by the Perkinses to Grace Church, Ca Ira,

What we see and learn of Northﬁeld and Forkland should bridle the common imagi-

was ﬁrst to McRae’s, by either of two roads, and then over what is now designated as

nation that the plantation of tobacco was highly proﬁtable and quickly led to the broad

the Vogel Road. These roads bore no signiﬁcant amount of commercial trafﬁc, except in

accumulation of unfathomable wealth. The added supposition that such enrichment

the stretch between Midlothian and Manchester, where it was overburdened with wag-

was drawn entirely from the sweat and blood of slaves consumed in the enterprise

on trains of coal. They followed ridge lines where possible and were maintained under

underlies a new-found guilt.16 The pedigreed poor and rich alike remain impassioned

the jurisdiction of the county courts.

to identify themselves with illustrious ancestors who held rank in the Revolution or Confederacy, whose wealth and station then was measured by the number of slaves they

The Appomattox and its tributaries served both as highways of commerce and the

kept. Southern Shintoism has thus enabled layered distortions of wealth and slavery in

source of power for milling. These highways were the sole economic means of trans-

Virginia that are as essential to the entertainment value of modern histories as sex is to

porting tobacco to points of export on the James and a primary means of returning

contemporary novels. 17 Twixt Rebel Yell and Uncle Tom lies a rich vein of literary ore

domestic and imported goods in shallow-draft river boats or bateaux to landings along

as yet unmined.18

the tributaries. In our neighborhood, Ca Ira on the Willis River and Stoney Point Mills on the Appomattox served with Ligontown and Jamestown, and intermediate

Douglas Freeman offered an unleavened perspective:

landings down stream of Farmville, perhaps including Forkland, as points of origin and

The rural life of Tidewater is more clearly divided in economic status. A

return in the shuttle of casked tobacco and goods to and from the deeper waters of the James. This remained the way of commerce until the age of steam.14

few families have contrived for 200 years to hold to baronial estates, though

Forkland and West Hill (Map II) survive in the immediate neighborhood as notable

often, Virginians who have grown rich in the North or Virginia women who

homes. Each of them has undergone signiﬁcant changes over the past several centuries.

have married men of fortune, come back to reestablish the old plantation life.

Forkland today, shown in transition at Plate 15, while architecturally unpretentious,

Some of them succeed in making the river estates more beautiful than in the

appears stately in comparison with the earlier picture at the cover plate. Dr. Edward

eighteenth century, but the difference between the ﬁne appearance of these

Henderson Richardson made as much of Forkland as honest recollection of his summer

properties and the dilapidation of smaller holdings nearby is the difference

there in 1884 would countenance:

between income spent on the farm and money derived from farming. There

sometimes making themselves slaves of their homes and their gardens. More

probably is not a single great plantation in eastern Virginia that can be called

The home consisted of a rustic, frame dwelling with side expanse of gable

self sustaining otherwise than by sentimental, rather than by actuarial book-

roof pierced by dormer windows, a large covered front porch enclosed by a

keeping.(Footnote 19)

lattice over which rambled a decorative and fragrant ﬂowering vine; a spacious lawn shaded by giant oaks and adorned by numerous ﬂower-beds bor-

It should occur to us that Dr. Henderson and those who built and owned the planta-

dered with hedges of English box or colorful shrubs and traversed by winding

tion homes of the tobacco coast did not come here broke and that they never would

walks; a back yard of generous size bordered at a convenient distance from

have considered such adventure but for the availability of servants to sustain them and

the dwelling, by a group of buildings consisting of a deeply excavated and

their properties. An understanding of the social structure of Virginia at the outbreak of

covered ice-house, storehouse, kitchen, servants’ cabin and chicken-house.

the war suggests that we regard both the role of tobacco and Anglicanism in its forma-

There was also a fertile vegetable garden of ample dimension with a variety

tion. Further, the status and entitlements of the members of this society were governed

of grape arbors adjacent to which was a well cultivated peach, apple and pear

by the common and statutory law of England. We should understand the outlines of

orchard. Conveniently located, too, were the nearby stable and barns for feed

this jurisprudence if we are to appreciate this enduring colonial legacy.

storage, housing farm implements and a repair shop. Such was Forkland, situated at the intersection of two highways both of which traversed a goodly portion of its thousand acres or more of its fertile acres. Its gracious hospitality was a perennial source of delight to a large coterie of friends while, during the summer months, it was headquarters to a continuous house-party composed of frequently changing groups of gay and rollicking grandchildren, whose memories of those happy days will always remain among those most cherished.15

–9 –

Virginia Tobacco

Emma Watson and Mini Brooks

–10 –

The several adventures in founding English settlements in Virginia would have come

the Spanish leaf, which he called Aronoko or Oronoko, added, perhaps, another strain

to naught but for the providence of a tempest. The Jamestown expedition was launched

called “sweet scented” 20 and, in league with his indian wife, Pocahontas, promoted and

by a company of London entrepreneurs or adventurers under charter granted them by

gained acceptance of these varieties in England. He gave the colony what it desperately

James I bearing date of April 10, 1606 (a second group from Plymouth was also enabled

needed: a commodity that annually could be produced in volume with unskilled labor

but did not organize). The enlisted planters, men and boys, were mostly indentured to

and cheaply processed for barter export to England for consumption or resale on the

the company and embarked in three ships dispatched to Virginia. Those of them who

Continent. The plantation of tobacco both brought relief to the colony and ruin to the

survived the passage, slightly more than a hundred souls, erected a fort at Jamestown

entrepreneurs with astonishing haste. The capital investment and lead times required for

in May of 1607. While their charter proclaimed a mission of the enterprise to be the

other commodities alone was sufﬁcient to doom the enterprise.

conversion of the heathen, it was gold and silver that was sought, and it must have been

The governing council of the London Company, in its visionary instructions to Gov-

their aim to control the sources of precious metals and share it when it was borne home

ernor Wyth, imagined a colonial enterprise that would, above all, yield gold and silver,

by servants of the company. But there was no gold, and the settlers who survived the

but likewise produce silk, wine, dimensioned lumber, glass, iron, copper, and grain. They

voyage were greatly diminished by starvation, disease, Indian attacks, general incompetence to deal with their harsh, unforeseen environment, and an indisposition to toil.

enjoined the settlers” to put prentices to trades and not let them forsake their trades for

In May of 1609, King James granted a second and supplementary charter to an enlarged

addictive one at that, they who would labor in the vineyards planted tobacco:

planting tobacco or any such useless commodity.”21 But with a cash crop at hand, and an

corporate body called The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the

With respect to the planting of vines, they have great hope, that it will

City of London for the First Colony of Virginia. This group came to be known as the

prove a beneﬁcial commodity; but the vignerors sent here either did not

London Company or Virginia Company and sponsored with renewed vigor an expedi-

understand the business, or concealed their skill; for they spent their time

tion of nine ships, which sailed for Virginia in 1609, carrying some ﬁve hundred souls.

to little purpose.22

Aboard the flagship, Sea Venture, was George Somers, admiral, Thomas Gates, later to become Governor, and John Rolfe. The fleet was broken apart by storm and the flagship was set upon the reefs of Bermuda to avoid foundering. The ship’s company gained the shore and sojourned on the island for the better part of a year while two smaller ships were put together from the derelict to continue the voyage to Virginia. Spain had captured the European market for tobacco and supplied this market from its dominions in South and Central America and the South Caribbean. They were a century ahead of the bumbling English in the exploitation and colonization of the New World and are credited with working to death native populations, infecting them with diseases from which they were not immune and replacing these ravaged populations with African slaves to produce what they needed or wanted at home and racial amalgams abroad whose tribal antecedents cannot now be easily identified. The sobering statistic is that the total export traffic in African slaves came to some ten million by 1860, only five per cent of which were shipped directly to the English colonies. Our guilt seems founded on the reciprocal. When the castaways resumed their voyage, John Rolfe is thought to have taken with

What may be taken from this is the serious miscalculation of utopian visionaries that the rabble of England would amend themselves and join welcoming Indians to settle the new land and thrive under the gentle governance of England. The biblical injunction that man shall live by the sweat of his brow applied with unrelenting severity. In the stone-age setting of Powhatan’s confederation, a man’s worth was measured precisely by what he could accomplish with his hands. Those who eked out survival were not at leisure further to accumulate wealth for themselves or the London entrepreneurs, and most were disposed to drink up their crop in trade for liquor offered by profiteering ship captains or were mercilessly exploited by resident officers of the London Company and, later, those appointed or favored by the Crown, under whom they labored as tenants or servants whose indentures had been bought or stolen. The failure of the London Company properly to support and provision the settlers brought the venture to an end. The Crown took over in 1624, some five years after a general assembly was first convened. 23At the end of the early boom period in tobacco, the English colonial scheme became less distinguishable from that of Spain.

him the seed from a strain of tobacco that may have come from the Orinoco River basin of Venezuela. As fate would have it, Rolfe and colleagues found that the settlement at Jamestown had dwindled to near extinction. Plan was made to return to England about the same time a supply ﬂeet arrived from England. The incoming ships intercepted some sixty remnant planters remaining out of a colony that had numbered to some ﬁve hundred a year before. They were persuaded to remain. Rolfe experimented with

By 1617, the settlement shipped twenty thousand pounds of tobacco to England. A year later, trafﬁc doubled and reached the staggering total of 1.5 million pounds by 1640. This was facilitated by population growth along the lower James and the attraction to the colony of increasing numbers of English settlers with diverse skills, whose

–11 –

passage was encouraged by granting head rights of fifty acres of land to those who came or to those who sponsored their passage.24 This is the manner in which the patriarch, Nicholas Perkins, settled in Bermuda Hundred and became a freeholder around 1640. He and his son Nicholas were illiterate, but they appear to have been blessed with a desire to work and save, which set them apart from most of those about them. John Rolfe’s tobacco, which came to be known as Virginia tobacco or, more recently in our neighborhood, as dark-fired tobacco, is the same variety of the weed that was and continued to be planted at Forkland during and from the Colonial Period into the third millennium. At the time Virginia auction sales were discontinued in 2005, Old Virginia and Lizard Tail Orinoco remained as popular strains. At that date, statewide production, which had risen to staggering amounts, had fallen below the export level of 1640. What had taken its place were the lighter leaf tobaccos that were blended to make cigarettes25 and the availability of low-cost quality leaf from foreign plantation required to meet world demand for pipe, cigar, snuff, and chewing tobacco. But for government volume control and price subsidization, plantation of tobacco would have long gone the way of the beaver trade in Wyoming. This was particularly true of dark-fired plantation. It was, with the possible exception of broad leaf and shade tobacco grown under light canopies in the Connecticut River Valley to produce cigar filler, binder and wrapper, the most labor intensive of all plantation tobaccos. This we may surmise both from the barns at Forkland and from the mouths of those who planted. My grandfather Joseph had the gift of simple philosophies and my father the good sense to record and embrace them. He had fallen asleep studying by the fire at Forkland and was awakened by his father with this advice: Son, you’d better study your books. You’ll never feed that belly of yours with your hands. In 1900, Maria and Joseph were interviewed by the Farmville Herald. Maria was proudly in possession of the portraiture of Dr. Henderson, a pair of pitchers by Ridgeway and Son, and a ponderous veneered mahogany side-board that had come from her parents. But the point of the story was Joseph’s success as a planter, who by hard work had bought out his wife’s family and prospered in tobacco. Joseph added a note of reality. He said that eight acres was about all the tobacco that the place could support, this at a time when field labor was abundant and cost no more than it had prior to emancipation. In the spring, a plant bed for seed no coarser than dust, saved from a plant let go the preceding summer, Emma Watson and Minni Brooks 1998

was fashioned out of the fecund side of a wooded area. It was cleared and defined by a rectangle of felled logs enclosing leaf mold, which was raked off to expose new ground for seeding free of competing weeds. Later on, the seedling plants or slips were pulled, batched, pouched in guano bags and taken to the field or tobacco lot where they were transplanted with a fid about four feet on centers in a hill or ridge formed by reverse or contrary plowing in six-foot rows. During the growing season, the weed, if left to its nature, would succor, spindle, and seed out at a height of six or more feet and dissipate the nourishment of the soil into smallish leaves called lugs or seconds. What was sought was conformity to a standard that slowly evolved from first recognition of tobacco as a

–12 –

staple commodity26 and was set by law under the Inspection Act of 1748.27 Each plant was stripped of its succors, lest it branch into several stems, and topped by pinching the stem bud to the purpose of encouraging a limited number of larger leaves of more uniform dimension. The integrity of the leaf itself was equally important. Huge green caterpillars munched leaves and morphed into exotic moths. Hail, windstorm, searing sun, and a variety of blights and wilts afflicted the plants. Weeds needed to be chopped, such fertilizers as were available applied, and prayer for good season offered. The remarkable characteristic of the weed was its perseverance. During periods of drought, we would share my uncle’s concern that the crop would come to nothing but then witness the miracle of a late summer rain and a cast of nitrate of soda produce a dark green quilt of breast high tobacco, tumescent, tacky, and mysteriously pungent. And then the hard work began. Unlike the cigarette tobaccos, dark fired was not harvested as the lower leaves matured and yellowed but all at once. It was cut green with a hooked knife on an upward bias from near the ground and left in the row to fall. It was then notched near the root end, fitted to riven sticks that were bridged on field racks or scaffolds and, after further wilting, waggoned to the barn. Each barn was constructed with poles spaced about five feet apart that traversed the interior space The size or capacity of the barn was defined by the number of its “rooms” or tiers, which were vertically spaced to hang the plants without overlapping or dropping too close to ground level. The earthen floor was pitted to accommodate green hardwood fires that were controlled to smolder, smoke and dehydrate the leaves and stems to pre-

Door to Twin Barn

vent rot while preserving their capillary systems. The art of curing was to bleed into the leaf the rich russet coloration from which it derived its name. In late autumn, when atmospheric conditions became moist, the tobacco would “come in order.” In this pliant state, but not otherwise, it could be taken down and made ready for shipment. Through the antebellum period, tobacco, with and without stem, was prized or pressed into hogsheads prior to or following inspection, and was warehoused and loaded on river boats to deep river ports. After the age of steam, tobacco was stripped of its stems, bundled and wrapped at the butt ends with a smaller “lug” leaf to produce a “hand,” and was packed away moist to await transport to one or another of the auction markets. There it was sampled and displayed in strip baskets, sold at public cry, and thereafter prized, warehoused, and shipped for export or domestic consumption. Those alone who dwell in inexplicable nescience can imagine great profit from the plantation of Virginia tobacco. It was, at best, an integral component of subsistence, often comfortable for the planter, his wife, and small children, and less so for the complex of skills and labors-free, bound and enslaved-that grew and harvested it. It was never expected that Northfield or Forkland would shelter and provision the families of the children of the Hendersons or Perkinses or that the families of Negro servants would be turned out sick, lame, or too old to work. Throughout most of the twentieth century, those servants who chose to stay at Forkland were sustained by an ever-increasing stake in the tobacco crop until the point was reached where the cost of the crop measurably exceeded their share of the sale. These manorial collections of humanity were wed in tacit recognition of common purpose and fortune. They took on distinctive identities. The graceful and perceptive blacks with the Doctors Blanton and Henderson were unmistakably a part of West Hill and Northfield. Itinerant white men were seldom a factor in the equation.

–13 –

Main tobacco barn

J.A. Hazlegrove 1998

–14 –

North in Albemarle County, Thomas Jefferson planted tobacco with slave labor in the lower reaches of Monticello close by the Rivanna. He died broke and his magnificent essay in architecture and gracious living would have fallen to ruin had not Uriah Levy bought it for $2,700 in 1836. Was this amazing man’s unfathomable tobacco wealth squandered on French clocks and Parisian trifles? If not planters, who were made wealthy by tobacco? The answer is not difficult. In the early days of the tobacco trade, the resident adventurers and king’s men profited from trading plundered corn for tobacco and exploiting the labor force. There was no domestic market of consequence and, as time passed, the matter of converting leaf to coin or credit was fraught with risk for the larger planters. In the first place there was no specie to speak of in circulation, nor were there banks of deposit or emission (issue) of paper money operating within the colony until well after the revolution.28 Crop and transfer notes for warehoused tobacco served as its surrogate, but these instruments had no currency beyond the county (and adjacent county) of issue other than as evidence of ownership. The trade value of tobacco fluctuated with demand and supply. The exportation of tobacco to the ports of the Realm mainly was on consignment, which simply meant that in the custom of merchants, the consignee assumed no risk of loss in transit and the factor assured no outcome of sale. Accountability arose on posting receipt of the proceeds of sale as a credit to the planter’s account with the factor, expressed in pounds sterling. Much was spilt twixt the cup and the lip. River boat and ship captains and crews as well as warehouse inspectors and stevedores helped themselves under pretext of fate or misadventure, and English factors and merchants were uniquely positioned to advantage themselves at the expense of the planter by numberless devices. Since there was no settlement in hard money, the factor served both as agent for sale and for the purchase and shipment of goods against the planter’s credit, which might take a year or more to establish and confirm. This conflicted interest often led to advances in excess of the planter’s expected credit or future crop in the form of interest-bearing loans and to financial ruin, numbering Byrds and Lees as well. English merchants ran small loan and mail order businesses with no oversight or accountability. It was a regime of indirect barter nominated in sterling an ocean away and was protected by the Navigation Act, which restricted commerce to English shipping.

Unloading tobacco from barn

As time passed and the tobacco trade and colonial populations increased, heads of families of Englishmen residing there and/or in the colony, as it pleased them so to do, exploited the opportunity to redirect wealth to the plantation of lands purchased from or patented for allegiances to the Crown and to emulate the merchant function of English factors. They bought up tobacco from lesser plantations, which was added to their own. A few built merchant fleets to ship it overseas and some exchanged tobacco for English goods that they removed to and warehoused and traded in the colony. They were able to displace English factors, control supply, price and costs, achieve economies of scale, and move toward establishing private credit facilities based on multiple commodities that traded in recognized markets where none theretofore had existed in the colony. While they were no more closely aligned with the rank and file of colonists than kings themselves, the descendants of a dozen or more interrelated planter families would move the colony toward economic self-sufficiency and favorable export of a greater range of goods and join lesser Virginians to become the spirit and brains of the Revolution.

–15 –

It is in this milieu that we find George Perkins prospering, not as a planter but, first, as a Deputy Sheriff of Buckingham County and, next, as a tobacconist in Richmond. To whatever extent his father, William, and his forbears, Constantine and Nicholas, were advanced by planting tobacco, George and his progeny embraced Joseph Hazlegrove’s earthy aphorism and never thereafter sought to feed their bellies entirely with their hands. Virginia adopted or was otherwise subject to the English writ system29 that had evolved by royal edict and at common law. A fee schedule developed for these writs payable by litigants as compensation to the clerks of court and sheriffs for issuing and executing them. While these fees comfortably may have supported George, his move to Richmond following marriage more likely was to pursue opportunities that his marriage opened. He became a resident of the city, living next door, it is said, to the impressive home of John Allan, a wealthy Scottish tobacco merchant and de facto stepfather of Edgar Allan Poe. He formed a partnership under the style of Perkins and Harris, which engaged in trading tobacco as principal and agent and servicing planters with what was needed to grow and market it and other crops in a steady march toward a diverse economy envisioned by the adventurers of the London Company two centuries before. The indices of his success, either or both in trade and marriage, are that he acquired and owned at his death Hickory Hill, a home and land near Ca Ira, perhaps retained ownership of his ancestral properties in Buckingham, and saw to the education of his youngest son, Edmund Taylor, at the theological seminary at Alexandria, a first for this line of Perkinses. Further testimony is offered by his granddaughter, Eliza Palmore (William Allen’s daughter): Tobacco bills of sale for Dr. Henderson Richmond (top 1861 bottom 1860)

(Grandmother Eliza) was sort of a high ﬂier, entertained a great deal, went to fashionable springs and resorts and so on until she managed to get matters pretty well involved and they sold out, she living afterward with her children.

–16 –

–17 –

The Church Of England

–18 –

What distinguished the Virginia colony from subsequent New England settlements

under the Act of Toleration of 1689 was not manifest in the Virginia colony until quite

was that the Church of England, with a well-developed hierarchy and canonical struc-

late in the period.31

ture inherited from the Church of Rome, shared its episcopal polity with the Crown,

The head right system survived the demise of the London Company and facilitated

whereas the northern colonies were formed by dissenting Anglicans who had split

the establishment in the colony of a growing population of free land owners, many

off from the mother church (Pilgrims) or discarded its ornamentation (Puritans) and been given places of their own under royal charters. These separatists or dissidents were congregations of literate families who sought freedom to pursue and self-govern their

of whom augmented their holdings by purchase of land patented to others or directly from the Crown (treasury rights) or by sponsoring the immigration of others, who became indentured to them as servants. Thus the colony in the 17th century came to

peculiar religious practices and beliefs. They were a world apart from the early Virginia settlers, described by Edmund S. Morgan as the scruff and scum of England.30

be composed of landowners, resident representatives of the London Company or the

Not only was the Church of England in the Virginia colony inseparable from the

ture or covenant, their servitude was implied in law: four years for those above twenty

crown, it functioned unaffected by the deadly politics and doctrinal disputes that roiled

years of age; ﬁve years for those above twelve; and seven years for those under twelve.32

Crown, and their indentured servants. Where servants were imported without inden-

an ocean away. New settlers were required to take the Oath of Supremacy at Point

Care of the poor and orphaned was the principal ministry of the Church militant, and

Comfort as a condition to debarking at Jamestown. The oath swore allegiance to the

the several parishes of the colonial Church were its provisioners. Unfortunately, masters

king of England as the supreme governor of the realm and its dominions “as well as

and servants alike were captive to the sins of the ﬂesh, and the servants harbored slight

in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things and causes, as temporal.” Those who refused to

reverence for the institution of property or the obligations of their indentures. It helped

take the oath were ordered to be jailed. The ministers of the Church were required to

not at all that the English criminal justice system periodically dumped a fresh supply of

conform to its canons. The Book of Common Prayer assured that the ofﬁces and rites of

illiterate miscreants into their midst under sentence of transportation.

its liturgy precisely were observed, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion set forth its incontrovertible dogma. The entire regime was sustained by tithes of tobacco.

To press them up, every pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness was viewed as compromising the bargain value of their labors. They were forbidden to marry without the express

Since the colonists were none other than members of the Church, it made little

permission of their masters, lest the value of their servitude be diminished by their

difference whether their governance was regarded as secular or profane or that they governed themselves or were governed as a theocracy or monarchy. Indeed, the Church in Virginia, at least on paper, endured pristine during a period of English history when

caring for the offspring of adultery and fornication if it could be reassigned to one or

attempts to recover an absolute monarchy from a Puritan parliament and reunite the

the other of the participants. Where the Church raised them up, they became inden-

ofﬁces and practices of the Church at home with those ordained for the Virginia colo-

tured to and a property of its parishes. Masters were indemniﬁed against loss of service

ny.

by adding a year or more time lost from child bearing to the term of servitude.33

There was this vital exception: The episcopal polity of the Church of England, which carried over from the Roman Catholic Church following the Reformation, empowered the clerical hierarchy to appoint, transfer, and remove its members. Once inducted, a

The colonial mission of bringing native Americans (inﬁdels) into the body of Christ was abandoned in favor of annihilation and remnant sequestration. In its place, an agenda of Christian enslavement was adopted and vigorously pursued to carve out a

parish rector gained tenure and security against dismissal by the laity. But in practice,

manageable and obedient work force. If these regimes were but founded in the anteced-

the Church of England neglected the Virginia colony. The landed wardens and vestries

ents of mosaic law and adopted for survival and coexistence, we might judge them less

of many of the parishes ﬁlled the void, this with the support or acquiescence of the

harshly in light of history and necessity. But their inhumanity was profound, as we now

king’s governors and council. Such priests as made their way to the colony were sometimes hired with no assurance that they would be continued beyond their limited terms, and many were paid whatever the vestries allowed them. No bishop of the Church of England ever set foot in the Virginia colony during the Colonial Period. Notwithstanding, the Virginia Church operated under the aegis of the aristocracy in strict observance tants tolerated by charter in the New England colonies and countenanced in England

of their masters, lest they deprive them of their due. Those who coveted them were punished for not returning them to their masters. The parishes never covered the cost of

Charles I and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, lost their heads in failed

of the rituals and dogma of the Church of England. Sectarian diversity among Protes-

allegiance to their families. They were not permitted to stray away from the plantations

measure it. In 1699, during the reign of Lord William, the General Assembly enacted laws to the effect that if any person denied the “being of God or the holy Trinity or shall assert or maintain that there are more Gods than one, or shall deny the christian religion to be true, or the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of divine authority”

–19 –

and convicted on indictment by the general court on the oaths of two or more credible

The ancestors of whom I write accepted it that God should harden the heart of

witnesses, such person, for the ﬁrst offense, was barred from holding public or ecclesi-

Pharaoh only to drown his pursuing armies in the closing waters of the Red Sea and

astical ofﬁce and, for the second offense, forever lose access to the courts of the colony

were accustomed to the text of Mozart’s Requiem:

and the right to receive property by gift or inheritance, as well as suffer imprisonment

The day of wrath, that day of grief shall change the world

for a term of three years.34

to glowing ash, as David and the Sybyl tell.

The romantic depiction of colonial Virginia as the birth place of republican government

How great a quaking shall there be when on that day the

in America is betrayed by English suppression of the liberties of self-determination and

judge shall come, to weigh man’s deeds in each detail.

privacy of thought. There could be no meaningful consideration of the practice of ethic until chattel slavery gradually displaced indentured servitude, independent self-gov-

Jesus was seen by them as an advocate to gain pardon from God’s strict judgement at

ernance was won from the Crown and expression of religious diversity came to be

the last and a savior who again might return to join them here or welcome them to

protected here as free speech and right of practice following the disestablishment and

Jerusalem The Golden.

abolition of the Church of England.

Brahms composed his joyful and uplifting transition toward Christ the God of love in

The resurrection of Anglicanism by the Virginia aristocracy following the Revolution

Ein Deutches Requiem in 1865:

was a natural continuation of their role as freeholders and parish wardens in the local governance of the colony. Reformation under the convention of The Protestant Epis-

Now therefore be patient, oh my brethren unto the coming of Christ. See how the

copal Church in the United States began in 1789 but was mistrusted if not detested

husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for

because of its long afﬁliation with the Crown and Church of England and the resulting

it, until he receives the early rain and the latter rain. So be you patient. Albeit the

prosperity of its members, no few of whom were involved in the reformation of the

Lord’s word endureth for evermore. The redeemed of the Lord shall return again,

nation and its several states as constitutional republics.

and come rejoicing unto Zion; gladness, joy everlasting, joy upon their heads shall be; joy and gladness, these shall be their portion, and sighing shall ﬂee from them.

Grace Church, Ca Ira, was founded by this aristocracy to revive and preserve the rich liturgy and pageantry of Anglicanism. It was one of many similar expressions of separation made throughout the Commonwealth in the late antebellum period. We would greatly err, however, to suppose that the Episcopal Church in Virginia, any

It was not until the early post-World War II period that Haim Cohn, a Jewish jurist and scholar, offered a beautifully simple description of the Pharisees and their new resurrection theology, relying on Josephus:

more than the Roman Church, of which the Church of England was long a part,

They were pious and believed that a merciful God would requite all good and

would come quickly under the aegis of prelates who were ethically conscious of the

righteous men in a better world to come for the misery suffered on earth.35

lowly poor, meek, and leper lonely remembered in the Beatitudes as most loved by Jesus Son of God. Found within the pages of the Perkins’ family bible is a fragment of Maria Perkins’ catechism:

Q. What is sin?

A. It is the breaking of God’s law.

Q. In what state is man born?

A. In sin.

Q. What does sin deserve?

A. The wrath and curse of God here and hereafter.

Perhaps for the ﬁrst time since man developed systems for recording thought in the languages of Hellas, Rome, and the Middle East were the poor, enslaved, and oppressed recognized in the Gospels as within the special favor of God. Throughout prior history and, indeed, most of what followed, they were part of a mindless mass that went unrecognized as human beings.

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Alter in the church at Ca Ira

Bake sale at the Ca Ira Episcopal Church . Father is to the far left wearing a bow tie.

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;21 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

Even Chance and Equal Value Indians

Christofer Newport’s ﬁrst encounter with the Chesapeakes at Cape Henry in 1607 was hostile. The intruders were driven back to their boats by members of one of as many as 30 tribes of woodland Indians distributed throughout Virginia. The southern neck, which lay between the York and the James from the Chesapeake Bay west to the falls at Richmond, was home to many of them. These tribes shared the Algonquian language and were a part of a primitive empire or confederacy under the rule of Chief Powhatan. Their population is variously estimated at eight to fourteen thousand, depending upon tribes included and range selected. The per-capita density was as low as one to a square mile. What we know about them comes from a handful of literate colonists, principally Captains John Smith and George Percy, whose ﬁrst hand accounts have been preserved. We therefore see them through a glass in which is more clearly framed the image of our brutish ancestors.

Collection of arrow heads from Forkland Plate 17

At the outset of the current interglacial period of global warming, the ice cap had crept to a line somewhat north of Virginia. As it receded, the forebears of the Pamunkey or Powhatan groups, perhaps migrating east out of Asia in pursuit of elk and caribou, crossed the Bering Strait and found their way into North America some ten millennia ago. In Virginia, as elsewhere, they multiplied and subdivided into mutually exclusive foraging ranges or territories. The factors limiting subsistence and density were the available food supply and the tools to capture, kill, and cultivate it. I have a cigar box filled with projectile points collected at Forkland during the course of a century. Most of the collection was shaped from cloudy white quartz and only a few were found unbroken. A selection is shown at Plate 17. Whether their crudity derives from the difficulty of the material or the craft of the makers, they do not favorably compare with those rendered from brownish chert attributed to the mound Indians of Georgia or the black, shark-tooth shaped points recovered in the Jamestown excavations, which are said to have been struck from stone not found in eastern Virginia. These Jamestown points appear to have been created for trade and collection as art rather than for killing. They are about all that is left of these stone-age natives. The tribes within the Powhatan confederacy were neither accumulative of anything we would treat as valuable nor differentiated in their habitations or personal appointments. Their collectibles were copper, conch beads, and points. They painted, tattooed, and perforated their bodies; partly shaved their heads to taste; and clothed themselves in skins and feathers. Their dwellings were flimsy sapling frames covered with hides or bark. Interior furnishings were limited. Smoke from fires for heat and cooking were vented through the roof. To see one was to see them all.

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To discern a gentleman among underlings was beyond the class-sensitive historiographers’ powers of observation. Hunting, fishing, fowling, and gathering fruit, berries, and roots were activities that oriented to the seasonal habits or nature of what was hunted or gathered. Plantation of corn, beans, and squash seems to have been their single condescension to the cultivation of a vegetative food supply. Corn or maize was a critical component of the winter diet. The domestication of animals for food or burden had not evolved. Nor was it necessary. Indians girded trees to open forests and used fire both to create and maintain favorable habitat for animals and plants required to sustain them and to channel game for killing. It was highly efficient when compared with the labor-intensive demands of animal and crop husbandry that had evolved in other cultures. The dry land and the sea and all things over which man held dominion belonged to everyone and to no one. The social structure of the Powhatan constituency was not obviously stratified or exploitative, but was polygamous. Women were assigned or assumed the greater part of the work-load. Men were mostly idle outside of hunting, fishing, and tool making. Their most important responsibility was the preparation and protection of tribal foraging ranges from encroachment and loss. The conflict inevitably expected from male competition for females seems to have been abated either by a subdued libido, such as attributed to ancient Greeks, or the acceptance of Chief Powhatan and the werowances of constituent tribes as divinely entitled to a larger share of women. Helen Roundtree relates that Powhatan sired children by young women selected from tribes under his aegis and kept them to raise. What tribute was paid to him seems to have been repaid by gifts of cast off women. Powhatan and his tribal chiefs gathered around them priests and conjurers who purported to intercede with their deities and were consulted on stratagems and possible outcomes. An afterlife was envisioned, at least for the rulers and priests. It had the great advantage of circularity. Life after death was again interrupted by death but resumed with rebirth. Warfare within the confederacy and with neighboring tribes seems to have been confined or controlled by Powhatan. I wonder, as I do throughout my histories, how he came to reign over these tribes. Did his mother teach him or feed him something different from the rest? A comfortable cultivation that exceeded “many places that would be counted very civill” preceded the arrival of the English. No more than a day of woman’s work was required to plant an annual ration of corn. Bringing home game from field and stream was more sport than toil for men at leisure. In the recorded history of mankind, where might be found the equal of the dignity, independence, and freedom of the eastern Virginia Indians? Newport, Smith, Percy, and comrades entered the Garden of Eden and there made haste to destroy in less than two decades what nature had wrought over ten thousand years. In the year that followed the starving winter of 1609-10, in which cannibalism surfaced among the settlers, some sought to save themselves by taking up with the Indians. George Percy led raids to recover and torture the deserters and punish the Indians for harboring them. Villages were destroyed and inhabitants massacred. A tribal queen with children was captured and taken aboard. The crew murmured against sparing them. The

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children were thrown into the river and their brains blown out. On discussing the matter with the Governor, no good reason could be advanced to spare the mother. She was dispatched with the sword. Among the settlers, a rather simple procedure was adopted to suppress the theft of precious food. For stealing three pints of meal, one convict’s protruded tongue was pierced with a bodkin and his hands tied behind him to a tree, there to slowly perish. The portrait of the Powhatans, in which the painter is more clearly struck than the sitters, lets us interpret the rendering of each at the remove of four centuries. Who among us would not retch to witness these inhumanities? The Bishop of London, in whose see the colonial church operated in Virginia, could have ventured to see the portrait as it was given form, his hand upon the shoulder of the painter. If he were sickened by an account of it, he appears to have kept it on his stomach.

English

The inhabitants of the British Isles are a confusion of tribes and tongues resulting from migration, incursion, and plunder. If these tribes ever had subsisted in a balanced system such as that enjoyed by the Jamestown Indians, it had been lost in prehistory to overpopulation of foraging areas and consequent predation of the indigenous food supply to practical extinction. The animal paintings in the caves at Lascaux in the Dordogne and many other sites in Europe chronicle the terminal phase of human subsistence from hunting throughout most of the continents of the known world thousands of years before the English abruptly ended it in Virginia. The early histories of Greece, Rome, and the Middle East conﬁrm that civilization was preceded by the development of agricultural practices involving the domestication of animals and cultivation of crops, and that these practices heavily depended on manual labor, much less on ox and ass. Indeed, the social surplus of leisure and accumulation was rooted in the exploitation of this resource, whether rendered up as tribute, rents, food, or service. The ruling priests of the theocratic Sumerian city states were sustained by the enslavement of a large part of their populations. Greece and Rome counted a third or more of their populations as slaves. Migration in pursuit of forage had given way to conquests of plunder and enslavement. It became the principal means of improving the standard of living for the strong and their intercessors with the divine. William of Normandy launched the last of the conquering invasions of England in 1066, a conquest that heralded the commencement of the medieval period and shaped the character and language of the people of England. Preceding was the intrusion of Celtic Bretons and the immigration of Angles and Saxons in the wake of Roman retrenchment. The Conqueror’s less remote ancestors were Norsemen who had followed up several of many incursions with the settlement of Normandy and managed to maintain it against the Carolingian tribes. Their Danish kin had plundered Ireland and the British Isles and staked out claims along their coasts and rivers but seldom followed raiding with broad, enduring settlement and assimilation as in Normandy. The predatory characteristics of the Normans did not suit them well for long-term proprietorship and cultivation of land.

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The pyramidal hierarchy of continental and Saxon feudalism that developed during the Dark Ages was based on monarchal ownership of land won at war. Much of it was redistributed as spoil to those who had joined the fight to win it and was meted out on oath of fealty and homage to the king. These vassals ruled over manorial estates as tenants-in-chief and, in turn, retained armed men, knights and housecarls, for its defense as well as the defense of the realm at the call of the king. Collected at the base of the pyramid were the enslaved who passed with the demesne. The manpower of the peonage was critical to provisioning the social superstructure of the manor, which included a middle tier of men and women who were not enslaved but hardly free. It was not an inconsiderable social benefit to be given a place to live and a plot to plant and reap under the protection of barons and knights whose fortunes ebbed and flowed with the outcome of never-ending war. The systemic instability of these regimes stemmed from the fact that warrior knights were poorly paid and under employed in defense of the estates of barons who engaged them to gain brief respite, preference of women, and accumulation from crops and cattle. Continental primogeniture essentially controlled royal succession as well as the inheritance of land. Knights and second sons had no prospect peaceably to come into its ownership as king or lord. But in England, a baronage or better was a battle away and kingdoms were at risk on either side of the channel to the ambitions of sons and brothers and many another cousin who could manage the price of a horse, sword, lance, mace, and suit of mail. England was ripe for picking, and the restlessness of William and his barons fit precisely with papal aspirations to secure England for Rome. William’s strategy was not to displace the English by massive invasion but to surgically remove King Harold, thane and housecarl, and staff the Saxon feudal hierarchy with French-speaking Normans. To put a face on a high-stakes Viking raid, William sent a ligation to Pope Alexander II in Rome who blessed the enterprise in the name of Christ and consecrated the banner of St. Peter as the Conqueror’s battle ensign. The onward Christian soldier had patched together a claim to the throne through his cousin Emma, brood mare for Saxon and Danish kings, and a supposed concession of the crown from the recently elected Harold himself. With the righteousness of his cause convincingly contrived, William enlisted the support of Norman barons and assembled an army of horse and foot numbering to some seven thousand and won the day at Hastings against Harold, weakened by defeat of a Danish assault north of London, which included his brother. The Anglo Saxon nobility that survived the slaughter became exile or disappeared into the ranks of the nondescript. Those who passed as chattels with the Saxon estates hardly noticed that they now belonged to those who spoke a language they could not understand. French became the language of the court. The substantial Saxon contribution to our evolving language includes a string of earthy but expressive four-letter words and Chauser’s indelicate economies of metaphor. The King James version of the Bible came fifteen centuries after the Pharisees wrote the Gospels in Greek. Theologians still prefer that language to avoid distortion from translation to others bereft of words that capture the thought. Vocabulary, I think, continues as an evolutionary marker of universal application to measure intellect. In Anglo Saxon England, the Venerable Bede may alone have learned Greek and consulted texts in that language.

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Most of us pose ourselves away from what we do not want to be. If as Englishmen we look beneath the cosmetic enhancements of our lightly haired outer skins into the subcutaneous animal that stubbornly dwells within, we may reason that those who stayed at home and ventured here in 1607 had shed hardly more of our former selves than a bunch of fur. We are genetically separated from the great apes by but a hair’s breadth but condescend to treat them as almost human rather than ourselves as almost always members of the band, ugly armed with bearded axe and halberd. Englishmen are not an endearing glot of people.

Africans

When the White Lion, a Dutch man-of-war, dumped its unwanted cargo of 20 Negroes at Jamestown in August of 1619, their status was largely defined by what they were not. They were not baptized Christians, they were not from the realm of England, and they were not literate. If they were capable of communicating their thoughts through speech, they spoke in a tongue that may have been shared among them but was not understood by those around them. It is said that they were traded for food with the governor, from which we may assume they came into the ownership of the London Company in the default status of implied indenture. Other than that, they had no status among the colonists, whose numbers had been reduced to less than a thousand, most of whom were similarly bound. The first volume of Hening’s Statutes covers the period from around 1619, when representatives of freeholders first met in assembly, to 1660, the end of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Slavery is not an indexed subject of this volume, but at page 146 appears a judgement of the Governor and Council, which was invested with judicial power in the colony: September 17th, 1630. Hugh Davis is to be soundly whipped, before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath day. Given authenticity as an undistorted fact of utterance, we may-indeed, must-deduce that Hugh Davis had copulated with an animal, perhaps one of his own gender. He had offended the caveat at Leviticus 18:23: Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith. . . . At the date of judgement, the General Assembly had not yet enacted laws that treated adultery or fornication as a civil or criminal offense or addressed the matter of compensation for its adverse impact on the value of indentured service. The ruling punished for an offense against God and by implication held that the Negro was not human and, thus, incapable of shame or complicity. It was a paradoxical revelation of the inhumanity of man presuming in the name of God to judge other humans to be beasts of the fields. But at the time of utterance, it would not have claimed a quillet’s jot in the ledger of inhumanities. It is in the nature of religions that what God requires of mortals must be guessed by mortals and ever so important that God’s punishment for error come from Him alone, now or hereafter. This is the wisdom of Madison and Jefferson.

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In truth, we are separated from the animals by our capacity to think and thus to compare, establish reference, build language on metaphor, and ultimately construct writing systems to record thought. If we examine its earliest expressions, we learn that the Greeks sensed the octave and its constituent modes and harmonies upon which the great themes of western music are constructed. We also learn that five hundred years before the birth of the Christian Era, the new commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” was phrased by Confucius in the negative: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you. So, our awareness of beauty and the opportunity for goodness predated our capacity to tell about it. Somewhere along the span of time, most of us left Sub-Saharan Africa, walking upright and hairless, and lost pigment. If we accept that it took four billion years to get to that point of evolution, it is astounding that we leapt forward so rapidly since thought was first recorded only fifty-five hundred years ago and that growth of ethical consciousness remains animal bound. For those left behind in black Africa, time moved slowly. They emerged, segregated into tribes and nations of tribes with a multiplicity of tongues and dialects that foreclosed development of a vehicle for broad communication and, obviously, a system or systems for the recordation of shared thought. We have come to measure intelligence by testing for literacy in the writing system of our native tongue. Black Africans have not fared well in their origins and had not much advanced themselves in Virginia at the commencement of the Civil War. Speaking for a majority of the Supreme Court of the United Stated in Dred Scott, Justice Taney ruled in 1857 that standing to sue was open to examination by the Court at any stage of the proceedings and that Scott, an illiterate Virginia slave, was not a “citizen of a state” within the meaning of the Constitution and could not maintain his suit to gain his freedom by reason of temporary residence in a free state. The framers of the Constitution, as Taney opined, considered Negroes so far inferior to whites that they were accorded no social or political rights that required their respect. The Court also observed, perhaps gratuitously, that slaves were personal property, ownership of which was not lost because they accompanied their owners into states where the institution of slavery had not been established or had been disestablished. The decision of the Court was not novel. In the ancient world, slavery was a common condition. The Ten Commandments specifically recognized it as such and directed the Israelites not to covet the slaves of others. Much of their dispersal came from their own enslavement and deportation. Slaves were a component of an overwhelming mass of souls and bodies who dwelled beneath recognition at the feet of Mayan stelae and in the friezes of conquering cultures.

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Women

The women with whom the Perkinses married or of whom they were born were not obviously of the ilk of those shipped over in numbers, culled from the streets of London in 1619 and sold dockside for tobacco.36 They came later, either in waves of humanity from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the western realms of the Continent, or by adventure with second sons and others good for their passage here. The universal faculty of language that all humans are said to share, regardless of their adopted or native tongues, was fully evolved in many of these women. They easily came by literacy but suppressed the fruits of this intelligence and its limitless possibilities in dexterous undertakings in and about the home, which men comfortably confused with their divine assignment here on earth. But the status of women under the common law of England remained unchanged for almost four centuries in Virginia and was greatly beneath that of their husbands as well as free and emancipated male African servants, with whom some may have first arrived. There was manifest bias in English law against the descent of land to other than males and a preference for first-born males at that. While patrilineal primogeniture did not become or long linger as the law of Virginia, the institution of marriage in Virginia effectively divested women of property rights during marriage or coverture. It was reasoned that the union merged the identity of the wife as property owner into that of her husband. In consequence, a femme covert was deemed not to own land or other property nor to remain empowered to enter into binding contracts during marriage. But she was protected by the legal obligation of her husband for support and maintenance and against disinheritance. She was granted dower (a life interest in one third of the husband’s lands) and a determinable part of his personal property, regardless of attempted disinheritance. Following full articulation of the laws of slavery, slaves were treated as chattels real and widows came by ownership or the use of some of them for life, as in the case of land, or outright. Thus, we find Louisa Henderson listing the ages and names of slaves in her memorandum book and Elizabeth Perkins, widow of Colonel William Perkins and mother of George, disposing of slaves and household furnishing by her testament. These properties and whatever else was given them by their Will of Elizabeth Perkins 1839

husbands was their entire stock of worldly goods. It may be a source of embarrassment to modern women that their matriarchs should be doing so, but they had little else they might really call their own.37 During the colonial period and well beyond, women were excluded from the electorate for the House of Burgesses and General Assembly. Only freeholders were given the right to vote. While it might be supposed that the disability of women to vote arose out of marriage, the General Assembly denied them, notwithstanding that they were femmes sole. They could no more vote than slaves could become free Christians through baptism in the faith. Although Virginia adopted the Married Women’s Property Act in 1887, which removed the property limitations mentioned above, women were not enfranchised until the 19th Amendment was adopted in 1920. They were not accepted at the College of William and Mary, second oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, until 1920, and were shunned for liberal education at the University of Virginia, capstone of

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Virginia public education, until a decade or more passed after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation of free public school students in Virginia. Within a matter of but a few years, women emerged from restraints and exclusions familiar to Athenians that were in place when mankind became manifestly intelligent. What was suspected all along was confirmed: They were carriers of the latent germ of literacy which passed unnoticed to their offspring and was nourished through home and neighborhood tutoring to mark them for inclusion in colonial and antebellum societies whose inner circles were enlightened in the humanities. That our grand dames, few of whom were finished out in private schools before the conflict, dwelled comfortably in this assurance there can be no doubt. Anne Jane was given Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book, published in 1844. It contained 61 engravings of significant people, places and scenes, including a painting of Sarah Stickney Ellis, author of The Women Of England, by whom the book is presented and to whom a number of related poems are attributed. Sarah Ellis was the quintessential Victorian feminist. She outwardly subscribed to the subordinate role of women in English societies but wrote extensively on a second sphere in which the domesticity of English women positioned them to take upon themselves and imbue their children with the highest standards of moral conduct and purpose. She started a school at Rawdon House to train young women in the detail of what was required and expected of them in these important roles. Though it was intended for women, not ladies, had she attended there, Anne Jane surely would have been turned out summa cum laude. A silent virtue marks thy way; A pure unsullied light Sheds o’er the path its peaceful ray, And leads thy steps aright. Two generations removed and a century apart, Natalie Blanton of West Hill, would press this theme: In the Afternoon It sometimes seems a sadness we should die Before achieving the goal we longed to win. Imagine singing with notes so pure and high The world would stop to listen, crowding in! Or painting dreams the world would work and pray To make come true; or dancing with a flight Of winged feet, fast and free though made of clay, That proved the mind can lift the body’s weight . . . I have only sung a tired child to sleep, And drawn a picture of a man on small Boys’ hearts. To make them laugh instead of weep I have cut a Caper for the old, the ill. And yet . . . When all is done and I have died, I shall, because of love, rest satisfied.

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Mr. McClellan

If literacy outlined the boundaries of society, the humanities were its core. This is seen generally in antebellum Cumberland County and at Forkland in particular. The census of 1860 bolted brazenly through the door of every habitation in the county to tell us the names, ages, gender, breed, and occupation of all who lived there and an appraisal of the value of the land and personal property found there. It is a printout of the social register of the neighborhood in the prelude to madness - a doomsday book. At Forkland, Henry Brainerd McClellan is listed as a nineteen-year-old resident teacher of the six older Perkins children, whose ages ranged from fifteen to four. He was among a dozen or more male and female tutors living in the homes of the county and his services were lent also to close neighbors, certainly including the Blantons of West Hill.38 Just what encouraged “Mr. McClellan,” as unerringly he was called, to come to Virginia and find his way to Forkland would require a speculation no less bereft of fact or reason than a calculation of Dr. Henderson’s adventure here from Sligo in 1816. He was raised in Philadelphia and was graduated from Williams College. It was said of him that he trained for the ministry but was persuaded to defer because of his extreme youth and pause awhile as a tutor. A reason for his coming to the neighborhood may lie with the Blantons. Dr. Phillip S. Blanton (1824-1862) was graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in 1849 at the head of his class. After a year as a tutor in mathematics while he studied medicine with Dr. John Peter Mattaeur39 at Worsham,40 he and his brother James went for the best medical training of the day at the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia. There the brothers studied with Doctors Mitchell, Meigs, Pancoast and others with whom they remained correspondent. Henry’s father, D. Samuel McClellan, founded the college in 1824 on land given by his maternal grandfather, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely. William Allen’s early, homesick letters to Anne Jane from training camp at Ashland evoke the image of his children making their proud speeches to Mr. McClellan, from which we may assume that their instruction built on literacy and proceeded along classical lines, which doted on rhetoric and composition. But tutelage of the children was soon returned to Anne Jane. Mr. McClellan made off to join the Cumberland Troop in mid June of 1861 and, within less than two years time, rose to the rank of major. He served at the end as Adjutant General of the Calvary Corps. After Appomattox, he returned to Cumberland and remained a while with his wife, Catherine Macon Matthews, a sister of George H. Matthews, Jr., who was elected captain of the Cumberland Troop in spring of 1862, following the death of James Isbell, but was mortally wounded at Mitchell’s Shop in August following. Major McClellan moved his family to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1870, where he became associated with the Sayre Female Institute and authored The Life and Times of Major General J. E. B. Stuart. His daughter, Anne Hollaway,41 also of Lexington, wrote to the president of Williams College in the spring of 1949 to offer a signed copy of the biography of Stuart to the college library and received his response in which he professed knowledge of the work but ignorance of the Major’s status as an alumnus. His polite but guarded acceptance of an extra edition to the one on hand suggests that he was confounded that the Major could have served the Confederacy while four of his siblings and his first cousin, General George B. McClellan, were so clearly aligned with the Union. And so also was the neighborhood. Dr. Henderson himself was outspoken against his continued residence in the home of an officer in Magruder’s command whose single responsibility was to become and remain informed about what cousin George was up to.

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William Allen did not dissuade Mr. McClellan from joining the Troop. As a cavalryman he would be seen, neither as a spy nor a demurring candidate for the diaconate, but heartily engaged in a conﬂict ever nearer to fratricide than the hand wringing Edmund Taylor Perkins might imagine. The suspicions of the neighborhood were thus allayed, and General Lee would cite him for steadfast service. It is romantic to suppose that Mr. McClellan was moved to bear arms against his people after careful consideration of the outrageous injustice of their cause. But he was in thrall to a more insistent mistress. He ends a letter to Anne Jane: “I must close as I have another letter to write (can you guess to whom?) and my candle is short.” Mr. McClellan was in love.

God and Honor

The College of William and Mary, chartered in 1693, was formed to train ministers of the Christian faith, further to enable them in their ministries with classical educations that eventually widened to include the disciplines we now have come to catalog selectively as liberal arts. Early students at William and Mary were required to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Christian Faith as a condition to admission. As much of colonial legislation as was devoted to tobacco as its source of support dealt also with the church in its dual role of local governance and Christian discipline. In 1770, William and Mary awarded gold medals to the best of its white male students in natural philosophy and the classics and set the course it ever thereafter would follow. In the antebellum period, William and Mary and Hampden-Sydney, formed in 1775 by Presbyterians, were joined by the University of Virginia in moving toward academic excellence and away from the single purpose of preparing men for the priesthood. Indeed, it was Jefferson’s great contribution to the Commonwealth and the nation to get God out of government and not encourage Him to come to the academic village in Charlottesville. Scholars formed faculties at these and other institutions to create missions and processes of selection, exclusion, and valuation of students and colleagues. A secular elitism evolved: A viri eruditissimi that became disassociated from, if not dismissive of, its religious origins and intolerant of emerging disciplines that smacked of craft, artisanship and apprenticing. At the outbreak of the Civil War, and for the century to follow, the broader realm of society numbered only those who professed to be men of God. It was anomalous even to suggest that a man might become a gentleman and be thus included if he was not accredited as a Christian. Indeed, some of our founding patriots could not imagine the formation of governments deprived of an established religion. Darwin had just stepped in to unsettle faith, and the question remained tabled whether He keeping watch over the Army of the Potomac blessed also the arms of the 3rd Virginia. Honor and other words that have evolved as metaphor to describe the appearance of traits that sum to goodness are difﬁcult to deﬁne with precision because they are lodged in mind space as ideals that vary with people, place, and time. But in antebellum Virginia, a code of conduct among those who professed to be gentlemen had reached a high ratio of recognition and acceptance. Lying, cheating, and stealing were against categorical

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imperatives that were severe in the extreme. The later spectacle of a cadet drummed out of the Corps at the Virginia Military Institute may now offend the senses of those who regard youth as deserving second chances, but it was and mostly remains a societal rather than an institutional decision to cast out the dishonorable from those who would be called gentlemen. Expulsion continues to be the judgement of peers, not presidents or pedagogues. But the leveling sweep of egalitarianism has dismounted the peerage, and we have become pedestrian. College affiliation has emerged to define the realm of the new society but it remains gravely in doubt whether it will only reward scholarship honestly won. Gentility, like honor, shifts also in meaning with time and place42. Shelby Foote drew a distinction between planters and farmers without instructing how we should know the difference. The clear implication was that if you had to ask, you were a farmer. But no one seriously misunderstood Lee’s rule that every student at the university that would bear his name must be a gentleman. It was, indeed, the studied effort of some great men to acquire and practice the facilities of graciousness, the sham of others to trade on its appearances, and the calling of a few to purvey the protocols of self-improvement.43 We now have too few gentlemen left to shape our high ideals and none at all to ruin. In many ways, aristocracy was a projection of chivalry in antebellum Virginia. Both drew on the strength and swiftness of horses to elevate the men who bridled and mounted them to commanding and noble appearance above lesser men about them. Jackson on Little Sorrel united man and horse in a symbol of might and righteous resolve. Lee at Appomatox, unhorsed and disarmed, dignified defeat. Empty saddles still mourn the loss of noble lives and mark a separation from their strength. Many of our metaphors of noble bearing and purpose derive from the Latin root caballus. But managing the dominant component of the image often revealed the complexity of both man and beast. Dr. Richardson recalled three episodes of runaway horses, the last of which bears repeating: It occurred when I was home from college on Christmas vacation. At this time I was a wiry, strong and agile young chap with plenty of experience in horseback riding. My brother Bill owned a spirited buggy and saddle horse which he purchased after the animal had received some training as a race horse with the result that he possessed an uncommonly tough mouth. Bill said the horse needed exercise and asked me to use him freely on my brief stay at home. On a clear December afternoon when the air was crisp and cold, I decided to rideout to Lone Oak to visit Aunt Eliza. The horse had been standing in his stable for a few days and was eager to go, so that he covered the distance at a fairly fast pace and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the going. Upon arrival, I hitched him to a rail fence and had a delightful visit with Aunt Eliza. When I went out to mount he had gotten cold and had become restless, which fact Aunt Eliza observed and warned me to be careful. Immediately after I released the tie rein he reared and jerked his head back in an effort to get away, but I held on firmly and in additio grasped his bridle at the bit and pulled him down. I then pointed his head into the angle of the zig zag fence which made it necessary for him to whirl around before he could begin to run. This maneuver permitted me to rein him up tight and to mount while he was turning. He then went full speed across an open field, into a side road and on to the main highway, and I made no effort to check him. After running approximately one mile he reached the foot of a long hill and slackened his pace a bit, but now it was my turn and I gave him the whip at intervals until he reached the summit of the hill. He

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was now breathing hard, covered with a white lather and obviously had enough. Upon arriving back home, Bill asked: “What have you been doing with my horse?” My reply was: “Giving him exercise as you suggested Old Boy!” I had again escaped injury for the third time on a runaway horse, but my feeling honestly was one of exultation over having mastered this spirited animal.44 Dr. Henderson spoke also to the relationship of man and horse, but more succinctly than his hopelessly Victorian descendant. When asked why he chose to walk his horse across bridges, he quipped that “smart men are scarce in this country.”

The Cumberland Light Dragoons

The trappings of wealth and appearances of honor and valor were gathered in the romance of the Cumberland Light Dragoons, one of some number of voluntary units that had come together in the counties and cities of the Commonwealth well before the clouds of war had formed. The Cumberland Troop, as it was sometimes called, was a fraternity of equestrians that organized in 1856 for no greater purpose than dressage and ceremony. While selection for membership was not well defined, its officers were elected by a majority of those who had joined, any one or more of whom might become its captain or withdraw at will. The absurdity of forming a cavalry corps out of scattered equestrian drill teams dedicated to ceremony and display was equalled only by the embarrassing decision of the founders of the Cumberland Troop to adopt and operate under the regulations of the U.S. Army. The dress and field uniforms of the elegant Dragoons were cut from Yankee blue.45 Plagued with a genetic omission of discipline and structure, beset with an uncommon amount of posturing among men easily insulted and quick to anger over points of honor in quest of leadership, and utterly without training or experience in the skills of war, the troop assembled at Cumberland Courthouse in May of 1861. On the 14th, cheered by friends and families, the troop mounted and departed east on the Buckingham Road toward the fair grounds at Ashland, stopping first to dine with Dr. Henderson at Northfield where it was left in memory a glittering image of the very best of the neighborhood in the full swell of pride: This was a splendid troop of horse about seventy strong, of excellent material and officers as follows: Captain Henry Johnson, 1st Lieutenant, Thomas Willson, 2nd Lieutenant William A. Perkins, and 2nd Lieutenant Benjamin Allen, all of Cumberland County.46 Dr. Henderson could see more clearly than his ebullient guests what surely must lie east on the Buckingham Road. Whether and to what extent his medical practice ever had contributed much to his life style, it was no longer available to him. The reality was that he had redeployed inherited wealth in land and servants for the production of what was required to sustain them and something extra from export tobacco,

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field crops, and medicine to cover the greater cost of gracious living. But the blockade of Atlantic ports alone was sufficient to besiege and quickly reduce this way of life to subsistence and barter. It was simply a matter of time before two great principles of war would combine to crush the Confederacy: interdiction and mass. Within weeks of the farewell, coffee would no longer come to table, nor tobacco leave the barn. By Christmas, hard money would disappear and Confederate notes lose half their value in a steady decline to naught. But if the prospects of the looming conflict burdened his thoughts, his disconsolation did not surface to diminish his hospitality to his guests. The call to arms was in response to the clear threat of Federal usurpation of the indisputable right of the citizens of each of the several states of the union to form and maintain sovereign governance over their status, rights, privileges, and other affairs. The abolition of slavery threatened to rob Virginians of the fruits of the Revolution and deprive its citizens of property without just compensation guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. This was so clearly the case that no right- thinking Virginian could find profit from the Revolution or reason to continue the federation. The institution of slavery had fully evolved during the colonial period. Abolition was not addressed in the constitutions of the Commonwealth or the nation. It was time for Dr. Henderson to take leave. He could take nothing with him, and there was faint expectation that either of his teenage male grandchildren were capable of managing his properties or would become interested in doing so. Young George was back and forth between Forkland and Ashland before his father returned home and followed Robert Rutherford into the Cumberland Troop as soon as he became of age. His letters home in 1865 indicate that he was detached to provide courier service in the twilight of the Confederacy. Within months of Appomatox, he would become a student at the University and remain in Charlottesville to enter on the practice of law, perhaps with his father-in-law, Egbert Reid Watson. But for William Allen, there was no one in the family to see to Dr. Henderson or his three plantations. Captain Henry Robert Johnson, born November 2, 1827, was educated at Hampden-Sydney, graduating with the class of 1848. His son, William Ichabod, widowed, would marry Jesse Blanton of West Hill, and his younger brother, Hugh, born in 1832, also with the Troop, would become son-in-law to William Allen by marriage to his daughter Louisa in 1873. They would live at the Hermitage overlooking the Appomatox from a bluff just north of the Scott line, a mile or so east of Forkland (Map II). Captain Johnson was eminently qualified to lead the Troop. He was handsome, modestly wealthy, and well educated. He kept fine horses, claimed seven generations of Virginia forebears out of Scotland from the turn of the 18th century, and was obviously popular among the Dragoons. But his popularity rested too much on camaraderie and disaffection for structure among the rollicking thoroughbreds of his troop, and it soon became apparent from William Allen’s late-May and early-August letters home from Ashland and Cockletown that Captain Johnson was physically and constitutionally unable to handle the demands of training camp (“poor fellow has been sick and unable to go into the field but once I think since being here”), much less the rigors of campaigning and combat command. The later letter recorded “a great want

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of discipline in our troops” and expressed the hope that Johnson, who had returned home and there remained indisposed, might resume command and be “pressed up to exercise proper vigilance and discipline.” But he was not up to it. Robert Hubard dismissed him in his memoirs, notwithstanding that both he and his brother Hugh were symptomatic of malaria: In the month of August we moved to the Adams farm, about seven miles south of Bethel. Here our captain,who had declared in his speech at Cumberland Court House that we would “either return as conquerors or never return atall” found his health growing so extremely delicate that he could not discharge his duties to his satisfaction, resigned and went home.47 William Allen was elected captain. This provoked the resignation of Lieutenant Willson for hurt feelings and brought in James D. Isbell and Dr. Charles R. Palmore as Lieutenants, with Benjamin Allen continuing as 2d Lieutenant. Isbell was a good fit for William Allen. They were close neighbors and close friends. He writes of him from Cockletown after fishing with him off Ship’s Point: “James Isbell and myself are very much together being the same age and having more congeniality of feeling than with younger men. I find him a very pleasant companion. Camp life brings out many virtues, as well as many foibles and vices. We shall all return home with a very different estimate of each other than from that we left with.” Isbell obviously beckoned the troop’s call to William Allen to accept an unsolicited captaincy, an invitation that Robert Hubard devoutly wished but never received. The nub of it was that he joined a Cumberland fraternity that never quite counted him as one of their own. There was no reason for William Allen to suspect that he was closely related to some of the Hubards anymore than he might point to J. E. B. Stuart as more distant kin.48 The Isbells, a name no longer found in Cumberland, were prominent and apparently resident at and before the Revolution, here and elsewhere. Colonel James Isbell is listed as a patient by Dr. Henderson during the period 1837 to 1857. His namesake, James D. Isbell was fated! He sickened in early July of 1862 and died in early August, perhaps from a similar affliction that sent Hubard home until mid-September. If Hubard gave the troop a belated voice, Charles Palmore imprinted it with reckless charm. He was its offhand cavalier. His family owned and operated the mill and store at Stoney Point and was counted among the Holmans, Trents, and Rives as millers and merchants of the neighborhood. With whom he studied to become a surgeon is not known. In 3rd Virginia Cavalry Nanzig relates the circumstances of his first capture as resulting from summary review and rejection of his surgical credentials by the command of the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry at Hartwood Church when dispatched by Fitz Lee, with accompanying note, to care for confederate wounded. What looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, and swam like a duck had a much greater chance of being a duck than a doctor. But either he pulled it off or was retrieved by exchange after a sojourn of three weeks with the Yankees, during which he was reunited with the emancipated Effart Jenkins, officers’ mess cook, who had been bagged and again impressed to a similar purpose by the officers of the Pennsylvanians. He may have been related to Dr. Henderson’s black houseman, Henry Jenkins.

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Palmore was himself wounded at Mitchell’s Shop and may have attended to his dying comrade, Captain George Matthews, who, at Wickham’s exhortation, drove a diminished squadron headlong into a superior force with complete understanding that survival was not within rational expectation. The highest accolade in the annals of combat is reserved to those who commit themselves to near certain death in obedience to orders. They are no less honored who are offered up in senseless sacrifice. But Palmore somehow survived, only to be captured again near Front Royal. He spent the last nine months of the conflict as a prisoner. His marriage to Eliza on May 14, 1873, closely followed that of her sister, Louisa, with Hugh Johnson. During the antebellum period, the landed gentry remained insistent upon distinguishing and separating themselves through self-improvement. Everything we learn about them confirms their passion to rise above and be set apart from lesser people, in consequence of which the constituency of this society easily was shamed by personal or family dishonor, real or perceived, and were prompt to vindicate themselves against false witness and, in some cases, punctured appearances. In Virginia, the utterance of insulting words could not fetch a farthing in a court of law but might well dispatch the author to the next realm with a pistol ball if thought an equal, or gain a painful thrashing if the insult issued from some cheeky underling. The Commonwealth’s interest in consensual homicide among dueling peers was indifferent. Under clear principles of common law, an action for personal injury could not be assigned and therefore followed the loser to the grave. Within the 3rd Virginia lost elections might easily bloom into ugly confrontations. At home, the marital relationship imposed lop sided obligations of fidelity upon women whose identities had been merged into that of their husbands. To suppress dueling, the General Assembly adopted legislation in 1810 to substitute an action for insulting words that eventually evolved into an action for slander (but required no publication) and also experimented with statutory actions for the recovery of damages against those outside the marriage who sought to alienate affections or bring the marriage to an end. Adultery was a crime that could be counted on to provoke violent retaliation. Pleasant Richard Hazlegrove, named for his grandfather, made the 1860 census as a landowner of some means and served also with the Cumberland Troop throughout the conflict. He was Joseph’s uncle and a nephew of William R. Hazlegrove. The probable myth concerning William is that he suggested to a riverboat captain who doted upon his wife that if he did not desist in his affection, he would shoot him dead. The captain didn’t and William did, whereupon he sat his horse and rode into east Tennessee where the only law was pretty much what was right. In fact, William sired a great cloud of people in Tennessee, but whether by his Virginia wife alone or with others is not known. Surrender at Appomatox unsettled the societal consensus for these codes of conduct and the means by which they were enforced. The law of self-redress may now no longer be collected under such a heading.

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The Professions

Unlike the practice of medicine, the legal profession was recognized and limited much earlier in England as well as here. By statute of 1642, only those who were licensed or permitted by the court in which they sought to plead or practice were allowed to do so and, only then, at the fees prescribed.49 In 1680, licensure was transferred to the governor.50 In 1732, the earlier statutes regulating the practice of law were refined and greatly expanded. Licensure was granted by the Governor and Council on petition of the candidate after examination by a board of men learned in the law appointed to pass on the fitness of the applicant. Those so licensed were required to subscribe to an oath that embodied the rubrics of modern codes of professional conduct.51 As in the case of medicine, fitness to practice law was achieved through apprenticeship and somewhat measured by the stature of the tutors with whom one studied. But because the study of law was very much tied to the examination of the opinions of English and early American jurists, which shaped the common law of Virginia, it was most important to have access to a library where these precedents and other texts were available. Books were repositories of human knowledge; those who owned or had the use of them were greatly advantaged. Jefferson probably studied with George Wythe as much to gain access to the library at Williamsburg as to share his learning. Waller Henings, in turn, relied on Jefferson’s collection of the acts of the General Assembly to give us sequential snapshots of what concerned our forebears during each session of the General Assembly throughout the colonial period, a priceless journal. It is remarkable that in medicine and law, Dr. John Peter Mettauer, at Worsham, and Creed Taylor, at Needham, just south of Raines Tavern, gained regional recognition for apprenticing young doctors and lawyers in these professions. Taylor’s moot court competitions emulated the clinical settings in which doctors were trained.52 But Creed Taylor’s “law school” was neither accredited nor degree conferring. Its students were a collective of men who studied law under a man of considerable reputation, one who trained and might sponsor them for licensure and admission to the bar of the courts of the Commonwealth and other states. This also was true at Harvard, William and Mary, and the University. Such students of the law were not required to have first attended or graduated from a college or university or to conform their studies of the law to a prescribed curriculum to become candidates for licensure or admission, and this remains the case today. Thus, young George Perkins and his cousin, William Merry Perkins from Buckingham, were together at the University studying Latin, French, natural philosophy, composing plays, writing poetry, and reading law from 1865 to 1869. In a note to his bride-to-be dated June 29, 1869, George tells her that his name has appeared on the “law list and that he is through.” This probably meant that he had successfully completed his course of studies and/or had been examined and approved to receive a Doctor of Laws degree.53 What must be kept in mind concerning the practice of law in Virginia from Jamestown through the Great Depression is that it was an integral part of the administration of justice under the governance of a plantation aristocracy. The Commonwealth regulated the fees of attorneys as in the public interest and

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the English writ system and associated principles of common law conﬁned areas of practice to crimes and misdemeanors, land, testaments, and related civil actions in contract and tort in an uninsured setting in which loss of life from wrongful death went uncompensated and solicited representations and contingent fee arrangements were punishable as champerty and barratry. If William Allen was even handed in his role as magistrate, he was not even tempered. He fell out with his neighbor, Tom Scott (Map II), over a boundary line, as Englishmen are wont to do. The detail of the negotiations did not seep into family lore, but William Allen caused his servants to dig a trench of considerable dimension, the remnants of which remain obvious today, with advice to Scott that all cattle on the Forkland side would remain or come into the ownership of the Perkinses.

Close Questions

The dust had hardly settled on the Buckingham Road then was begun a constant exchange of letters between William Allen, from camp or the Peninsula, and Anne Jane from Forkland. His penmanship, when given leisure, is exemplary and easily read, as is that of son George. His style was formal and humorless, his affection for his wife and family deep and genuine, and his faith profound. Anne Jane’s handwriting is sometimes difficult and her style chaperoned. They were never other than husband and wife to the other, although their children’s names sometimes were affectionately contracted. Anne Jane’s circumstances were difficult. Forkland is quite small, measuring about thirty-five feet deep and forty across, with two bedrooms with hearths on the upper level and four rooms with hearths below, including a salon, dining room, and bedrooms or pantries. There was no internal plumbing. The kitchen was in a separate dependency that served the servant quarters as well. Water was drawn from a dug well. Her seventh child, Fannie Archer, was born October 31, 1859. She was in confinement, expecting the birth of William Allen ( “Little Willie”) in early September. Her mother was remote at Northfield and was there fully occupied with two grandchildren and a husband in decline. Mr. McClellan had been shoehorned into this setting and was the only adult around, except for the overseer, Mr. Cochran, whose actual place of residence was across the road and probably was shared by the family of the wheelwright, Mr. Taylor. Young George dutifully reports that the servants are not misbehaving but they, too, are remote and nameless, although William Allen always sends to them his love and gratitude for their goodness. Their amenities seem hardly less than those of the Perkins. William Allen writes from Ashland under date of May 27: My dear wife, It is now about the hour in the evening at which when at home I have usually been down in the plantation and returned to the house to be with you all. There are special hours of the day at which owing to home habits you are all brought up vividly before me-the time for morning and evening prayer, meal times specially about 1 o’clock when I have been in the habit of moving from room to room and seen your clear form flitting about, busily preparing treats and delicacies for your family-and Sundays I see you with our dear children around you hearing them read and

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explaining to them God’s holy word and leading them in the paths of righteousness-On Friday evenings the children and Mr. McClellan come up before me, delivering their speeches and poetry . . . I shall today read the 80th psalm in the morning, in the evening the 4th of Romans-and one chapter each day. Their entire correspondence is suffused with unaffected acceptance and reliance on the true word and abiding grace of God. No hope is held or fear expressed that ventures to be met or calmed save by prayer and supplication. It all but smothers sister Martha Eliza’s frivolous verse, which is penciled on the backing of her field book in which are entered in precise script the common names, genus, species, class and order of surrounding flora, specimens of some of which are pressed within its pages: What is life and all its pride If love and flirting be denied? Mr. McClellan’s June departure left Anne Jane alone. She dutifully accepted without comment William Allen’s June 24 letter from Ashland. . . . The arrival of Edmund’s family (William Allen’s brother) will add a good deal to our expenses but my darling it is our duty to submit to that expense and I know that you will do it cheerfully. They will not consume much more than Mr. McClellan and myself would do if at home. I should not attempt any luxuries on account of their being with me, but just live as if they were a part of our regular family. I have directed Burton and Greenhow to send whatever you write for-coffee has gotten to 30 cents a pound. I should therefore use that sparingly and rather more tea, as that has not risen so much. You fortunately have lambs enough and if necessary have the calf from the most indifferent cow put where it will fatten and kill it. . . . Dr. Edmund Taylor Perkins’s life also was greatly complicated by the war. He had taken a church in Wheeling, which would soon join other parts of western Virginia to remain with the Union. He writes Eliza, his mother, May 3, 1861, to say: I write this to simply say that I have concluded to leave here with my family on Wednesday next for brother’s and will probably reach there by train on the 11th from Richmond. . . The city is still quiet but not as much so as a few days since. We are under Republican rule and though I try to confine myself to my own peculiar duties, it is very uncomfortable for me. Most of my congregation are loyal to Virginia. Our convention has moved too fast I think, in joining the Southern Confederacy before the ordinance of succession was submitted to the people. I am sure that dear Anna Maria and Lewis (Cabell) have been called upon to give up Fred (who joined the Troop); but I suppose it is right. May God protect and keep him and all our dear ones engaged in this fratricidal war. Oh how dreadful it is to think that Americans should still hate each other.

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Edmund sojourned with the Cabells and Horseleys in Buckingham and Nelson Counties and at Forkland and Northfield well into the fall. His wife Mary and their children remained behind at Forkland and Northfield after Edmund left to serve as chaplain at large for the Confederacy. It is clear that he and his family largely were dependent on their kindnesses. A close question came up. Anne Jane wrote to reveal the sad news about Mr. Taylor. He had got drunk and then went over to Amelia and got hold of more “new whiskey,” which sent him into madness. Mr. Cochran, the overseer, fetched Dr. John Miller, who was at Forkland on house call, and the two were joined by Edmund. They remained with him “until he had fallen asleep from the spirits the doctor gave him, and from which sleep he only awoke in another world. His last intelligible words were curses and his future is terrible to think of.” Her letter closes on the note that she is “hesitant to invite Mrs. Taylor to remain as it may conflict with retaining another to run the shop.” The family saw God quite clearly as concerned with what went on with us on earth and as influential in working out righteous outcomes. He seemed to abide just above them, with their names upon His lips and their special concerns within His heart. There was a Hell for the likes of Mr. Taylor and an inconvenient question what to do about Mr. Taylor’s wife. Edmund had no answer to this or the broader questions that split the state and divided the nation. His succession was societal, not apostolic. The brotherhood he saw threatened by fratricide was the one to which he was born and clung, though less intimate than that of Mr. McClellan. If the institution of slavery disturbed him, it seems never to have provoked him to lift his pen against it. This close question was followed by another. William Allen shared the view that the Cumberland Troop was involved in the righteous defense of the Commonwealth as a sovereign state of the Confederacy. Once it was established that Virginia vigorously would defend itself, it was reasoned that the Union would retrace and respect its decision to secede. Firm resolve would avoid great loss of blood and prompt action would quickly bring the conflict to an honorable abatement. No great thought seems to have been given to how long this might take, but certainly a year was a long horizon. And this was the length of service that William Allen believed the Troop had offered and was bound to give.54 Short of that, he reserved judgement of those officers and men who left or never volunteered to join: I wish, my darling wife, that I could think it consistent with the calls of duty to get home- but though the sacrifice is great in every way, yet I cannot think but I, as well as every other man in the country who is able, is called upon now to come forward in defense of our liberties and rights. I do not mean to censure any one who has not come, for each must decide for himself. (Dr.) John Miller, poor fellow, goes back with a sad heart, for he seeks no excuse to get off and would be glad to stay and do his duty but he is physically unable . . . He is a noble fellow.55 But this sentiment was expressed only two weeks into training at Ashland. As spring lengthened into summer, the decision to join or remain with the Troop was seen to continue as a matter of personal choice with both officers and men. But there was now less certainty about it. The “glorious” victory at first Manassas, “with which it . . . pleased God to bless our arms,”could not be followed up or, as hoped, made

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the basis of peace. Time lines were extended and this did not bode well for the Confederacy. It became clear that the Confederacy neither intended nor could soon mount a conquering counter- offensive. It could not clear its ports or borders. This seeped into William Allen’s perspective. Applications for leave required approval by Company Officers and final approval by Headquarters in Richmond on recommendations of the Post Commander. It did not sit well with the rank and file, any one of whom might succeed to a captaincy, that officers might effectively prefer themselves over their men. William Allen was most sensitive to such appearances, as well as to the need to promptly form and train a disciplined cavalry. Courts martial apparently were convened to punish infractions of military law. But the jurisdiction of these courts and the power of officers to command was of questionable application to this splendid troop. It was not formed as an arm of sovereignty, but had evolved as an expression of patriotism and steadfast purpose from a society of wealthy men on horseback, all dressed up in Yankee blue. It is not clear what service was tendered by the Troop to the governor of Virginia or just what was expected or required by the Confederacy. Incumbent officers were not commissioned but elected. Men had joined but then enlisted for a term of one year. Perhaps there was something more to it, but if this were so, no one seemed aware of its detail. It was all thrown together in haste and passion. This worked not for but against William Allen. His expectations of himself easily exceeded those of the society to which he belonged. His demeanor seems minted from Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son and his character constructed by Shakespeare out of the better parts of humorless protagonists. His flaw was rooted in indecision. He sorted out but could not prioritize those duties owed his wife and broader family and those thought due to the people of Virginia. He weighed the accumulating evidence of neglect against a call to protect and preserve a way of life abruptly bankrupted and greatly diminished but could do no more than take final judgement under advisement:

My Darling Wife

Camp Hood, September 2, 1861

Your dear letter reached me on Thursday night and I intended to have written you the next day but had to go on vidette and did not get back until Saturday evening so that today’s mail is the ﬁrst since. Mr. Crowder will get the letter to you as early as the mail.56 I had become anxious to hear from you before getting your letter for I know how lonely and sad you felt with so many leaving you at once and to me the days seem doubly long since my little visit home and I do so long to be with you all. A day or two after getting back I thought seriously of resigning my commission and quitting and told the Troop I should have it to do, but they made so much complaint about it and urged such reasons against it that I was compelled to give it up for the present. On the same day I mentioned it they prepared a petition to me asking me not to resign and brought it to me signed by every member of the Troop who was in camp, many of them also told me that if I left, they would also and urged that it would be doing them an injustice if I left. I found that I could not quit with propriety, and that if I left my motives would probably be misconstrued, so I yielded to them for the present though circumstances may arise which will yet lead me to it. Since I returned, we have done nothing except vidette duty and an hour’s drilling each day. The rest of the time we have lounged about the camp in idleness. I doubt we shall have any ﬁghting here of any consequence.

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Letter From W.A. Perkins Camp Hood September 2,1861

In hearing of the picket there is a residence that is not only occupied by the family but has been made a place of refuge by several ladies fromHampton. They spend every evening until a late hour of the night in singing and playing upon an accordion, the only musical instrument they were able to bring with them from Hampton. Though the house is more than a half mile from the picket yet in the still clear night, such as last Friday, we would not only distinctly hear the voices but a great many of the words of the songs. Several of the ladies were members of the choir in Hampton and have ﬁne voices. They carried my thoughts home to my own dear children singing together around the piano and far back into the past to the days of my own dear wife’s girlhood when herself and her sisters constituted a family choir in their own home and also into the future, with the longing desire for peace restored and home pleasures again enjoyed. *** Captain Johnson has been sick again for the past week with chills and fever. It is impossible for him to stand the service. On yesterday I went up to Yorktown to get leave from General Magruder for him to go to Richmond for his resignation. I procured the leave and he will go in the morning. He has not been out of bed for several days. We regret losing him very much yet under the circumstance he is right in resigning. No one ought to place any unkind construction on his resignation for he has fairly made three efforts to remain with us and failed from physical inability. I know not who will be elected in his place, probably myself. certainly myself but for the fact that I have told them all that circumstances may arise under which it will be my duty to resign. I do not know what will be done with the cavalry this winter but think they will be sent home to winter. They cannot be kept here without enormous expense and many of the horses would be killed by exposure. *** God grant that this iniquitous war may soon close and let us all go to our homes. . *** Your devoted husband Wm. A. Perkins A month earlier, Anne Jane had unexpectedly received a letter from William Allen that had been included with others brought up from the Peninsula by Dr. James Blanton for delivery in the neighborhood. She was perplexed by the ease with which the cavalrymen travelled to and fro. “I thought that Dr. Blanton had gone down to join your Company again. How does it happen that he does not? I do not believe there is one in the neighborhood except Mr. Johnson but who would be improved by it. Dr. Miller, I understand, thinks he is doing his country as much good by practicing on the families of the soldiers gratuitously as if he were in service. I feel so fretted I sometimes think I will never send for him again but I cannot well help myself.” It did not lift her prayer to have her husband home to rail against those who, for one reason or another, decided to return or not leave. She dismissed her husband’s earlier assessment of Dr. Miller as a “noble fellow,” but would soon recant and blame her errancy on a visitation from the Devil. As for Dr. James

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Blanton, he was not as indifferent or disaffected to the cause as she supposed. He ran but was not elected an officer of the troop and turned his professional skills to his family. Mr. McClellan’s November 19 letter to Anne Jane from Nash’s Farm gives the detail: *** Dr. James Blanton will also carry Leigh Blanton home. The circumstances of his being wounded are very provoking and distressing. While he and Tom French were acting as videttes of a party of cavalry, they approached a regiment of Georgia infantry, a part of Cob’s Legion, who were lying in ambush. They mistaking them for the enemy, without stopping to listen to their explanations, fired upon them. Leigh was shot twice in his right leg, and the balls riddled his clothes, saddle and blankets. French escaped unharmed. In the confusion, they mistook their own Major, shot him dead, killed the horse of their Lieutenant Colonel, and wounded one of their own Captains in the hand. James’ brother, Phillip, who lived at West Hill and elected to stay there, died 1862 of an infection suffered from performing an autopsy with a cut on his hand. The Blantons did not go uncounted or unscathed. Anne Jane’s August confinement preceding her ninth birthing exposed her vulnerability and led to elevated anxiety, which certainly accounted for her lashing out at the doctors Blanton and Miller. But the birth of William Allen on September 9, 1861, which coincided with his father’s elevation to the captaincy of the Troop, is never mentioned in the correspondence. It was another among endless episodes of mammalian reproduction that began with mating and ended in the delivery of offspring: raw functions of the body the intimation of which were not considered within the tolerance of cultured correspondence or conversation. The children of God derived differently from the beasts of the field. Anne Jane had learned of Leigh Blanton’s wounds before Mr. McClellan’s letter reached her and had come to the conclusion that news of the Troop’s early casualty so close to home was better kept from the children. There was a flurry of correspondence during the days preceding, and Anne Jane’s letters became less anxious. She had received a secret from William Allen that quieted her. He may have told her that he intended to leave the Troop and come home. This is its clear implication, but only three of his letters have come to hand from September through April of 1862. It had quietly settled upon him that the cavalry had become an obsolete instrument of war. His ceremonial saber, which would find its way to the Daughters of the Confederacy, was only slightly less threatening than his side arms, a pair of small revolvers. They were beautifully blued but muzzle loaded and smooth bored to receive a lead ball. The cylinders were nippled to receive percussion caps detonated by thumb cocked hammer. Such weaponry was ceremonial and supplemented with a more formidable Colt six-shooter, all of which was less a menace to the enemy than to the cavalryman and his horse. When the squadron was dispatched to the Peninsula, most of the Troop were furnished carbines. But the weapon of choice for some cavalrymen became the sawed-off double- barreled shotgun that received buckshot and could be pointed rather than aimed from horseback with lethal effect at short range. It emulated the dragoon or fire-breathing musket from which this branch of cavalry derived its name. The rapid development of weapons with rifled bores and cartridges that encased shot, charge and primer greatly

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improved range and accuracy and exponentially increased fire-power. The addition of light artillery that quickly could be deployed spelled the end to cavalry as an effective resource against defended positions. Men on horses were good for getting killed by friendly fire, reconnaissance, and marauding at the rear and flanks to disrupt supply and defensive support where surprise and shock still held some advantage. This assessment was shared by Rufus Barringer, a Carolinian whose name and family are lovingly familiar to many Virginians: A mounted charge was immediately ordered which led through a long lane up to the Yankee camp. In an instant, the artillery and infantry of the enemy opened upon our devoted heads, all huddled in the lane where orders and maneuvers were alike impossible. At the first round, sixty three of the 9th North Carolinians were put hors de combat, and the whole command was forced to retire in utter confusion. . . . This disaster served as a wholesome lesson in making mounted charges.57 The 3rd Virginia was only witness to the gruesome slaughter of Gettysburg. “During this great battle the cavalry of each army seemed to act on the defensive and guard its flank.”58 William Allen’s hope and reasoned expectation that the Troop would be sent home for the winter, though given serious consideration, did not materialize. But hibernation on the Peninsula gave further opportunity for reflection. While on leave at Forkland into late January, William Allen received Lieutenant Isbell’s January 21 letter, which reminded him that the company payroll had been in arrears since September and that Mr. McClellan had been dispatched to do so but failed to find missing arms of the Troop. Isbell was despondent, and his weary assessment of the situation must have corroborated William Allen’s conviction that the war could not be won and, if he was wrong, that it would not be won by the cavalry. This view, if not broadly published, was widely shared among those precisely aware of the immutable principles of war. In late May of 1863, General Lee responded to a letter from his older brother, Carter, lamenting the death of Jackson.59 “Any victory would be dear to us at such a price. Still, I am grateful to Almighty God for having given us such a man whose example has left us and whose spirit I trust will be diffused over the whole Confederacy and will raise in the army many to supply his place. Who can fill it, I do not know.” The enemy “has forever become so numerous in comparison with ourselves that he seems able to go anywhere. In the last battle, he exceeded us by three to one. An excess of over one hundred thousand men is fearful odds. . . . You can judge therefore of the prospect of disposing of Hooker’s army as you suggest. . . . Give much love to Sis Suzy - tell her she must give me her pious prayers and the prayers of her household. But for a merciful God we could do nothing. He is our only assurance of victory. Think of the hosts against us-their numerous appointments and vast equipment in every conceivable way. But for his being on our side, we must have failed in every battle. But as long as he is for us I fear no odds against us.” On January 31, 1862, William Allen wrote home from a Richmond hotel. The purpose of his busy day in Richmond is not disclosed, but it is clear that he has not made his way back to Yorktown and that he is not anxious to do so in the bleak mid-winter. You know not my precious wife how my heart yearns for home and how long and sad the time will be for me in camp. It seems to me that the middle of May is a long ways off in the future.

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Dr. Henderson had continued to decline. He had become grumpy and difficult by early winter. He died suddenly on February 14, 1862, from “a third stroke of apoplexy attributed to worries over the war.” Edmund Taylor wrote Anne Jane on the 22nd: My dear sister, I have just been startled by reading in the paper an announcement of your father’s death. I hasten to assure you of my earnest sympathy for you in your trying bereavement. I know that the shock was a severe one to you and your loss is great- even that of a devoted parent. But at the same time, I am glad you have the christian consolation in the highest measure and can now rejoice in the full assurance that your dear father is among the saints in heaven. This assurance is doubly comforting now when you think of the troubles which we all experienced, which so greatly tried his soul and from which he is now removed to that world of peace where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest; where “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.” Such is the inheritance of all who belong to Jesus and for many years past, my dear sister, your father full well knew of the things which were of God. He hath time now to see God, to be with him and to be like him. Oh, sorrow not for him; while you mourn that he hath been taken away from you, rejoice in the thought that he hath gone before you into glory and bless Jesus for the rich inheritance which he hath purchased for us with his blood. But sister Nannie you know where to look for comfort under this trial. I refer to the Great Physician who can heal all our sorrows and assuage all our grief. May God of his infinite mercy bless this dispensation to you and yours. *** On February 27, William Allen again wrote from Richmond in route to Yorktown. He has learned that leaves and extensions of leaves now must be granted by the commanding general of the cavalry corps rather than the War Department of the Confederacy and tells Anne Jane that he plans to submit his resignation when he arrives in Yorktown the following day. What action might be taken is left in doubt, as rumors are flying concerning a Yankee offensive on the Peninsula. He ends telling her that he has purchased some of the mourning goods for her and her mother but has not yet found a suitable monument for Dr. Henderson. There is “little marble in the yards.” Anne Jane’s last letter to William Allen is dated March 2, 1862, the same day she received his above. Her anxiety over his intended resignation has heightened: “Nothing but one rumor after another has reached us since you left, my precious husband, . . . I hear it is everywhere reported that all are to be drafted from sixteen to sixty and ordered directly into service. Also that in consequence of the existing state of affairs you cannot possibly get your resignation accepted, that Magruder intends attempting taking Newport-News and today I heard they are fighting down there. I can stand all darling until they tell me your resignation will not be accepted, then in spite of every effort, against every prayer I put up to the throne of grace, faith will yield to despondency and I do get so very miserable.” She provides William Allen the news of the neighborhood, none of it good, and speaks to the well-being of children at Northfield and home: “After I left home today, mother sent for Dr. Miller to come see them.

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He thinks they possibly have Scarlet Fever, but if so, in a very mild form. I don’t think they have anything more than very violent sore throats, and the fever I think is caused by the irritation in the throat.” Fannie Archer, youngest daughter, died a week following in her third year. Little Willie followed on the 18th of the same month in his ﬁrst year on earth. William Allen last wrote from Richmond on April 27, 1862. He has came there with son George in the company of Mrs. Isbell, she to see her husband encamped to the east. His purpose is to see to the settlement of some of Dr. Henderson’s affairs and not to return to the Troop, concerning which his letter bears no news. The inscription on Dr. Henderson’s stone has been completed and he closes with love to the little ones. God had stepped away from his pen.

Robert Rutherford joined the Troop in early November of 1862, the month within which Eliza Perkins died, but died of the dropsy several months later. He and a tenth, unnamed baby of William Allen and Anne Jane, born in 1868, were laid to rest at the cemetery at Northﬁeld to await Louisa Henderson, William Allen, and Anne Jane as its ﬁnal occupants. Young George’s service with the Troop at the close was the family’s remaining link with the war. Anne Jane’s fear that William Allen’s resignation would not be accepted was stilled. It was made effective May 12, 1862, at the approximate expiration of a year’s service on the recited grounds of family hardship, although somewhat under a cloud.60

Reconstruction

Life continued with little change at Forkland following William Allen’s return. The neighborhood above High Bridge and the Southside Railroad were of no strategic importance at the close of the war, and its mills and homes were not torched or destroyed, nor were its people murdered or abused. The newly emancipated did not rise up against the Perkins or other families of the neighborhood, and if they left to pursue a better life elsewhere, it was probably the next farm over. What dictated their selection for enslavement was their tolerance of domestication, a docile predisposition to subserve. Tobacco plantation could not have succeeded if those impressed to produce it could not be made to work unless beaten or would rise up to dominate and forcibly overthrow their masters if once unchained. The wealth and age of Dr. Henderson should have put him at great risk of reprisal by his servants, but he had more to fear from the caprice of his horse than from his slaves. Nor was his daughter, Anne Jane, anxious about herself alone in the midst of them. They could have eliminated her and the little ones in the twinkling of an eye if they were so disposed. This remains the case today. In bold contrast, if anyone had suggested that the Irish be gathered up and impressed to produce tobacco, rice, and cotton in the English colonies, he would have been regarded as quite mad. Hadrian would have laughed. Every effort made by English monarchs to quiet these rebellious people throughout recorded history failed. There is little doubt but that Dr. Henderson’s ancestors derived wealth from resident or absentee ownership of land wrested from Celts and purchased from or assigned to them for allegiance to the Crown.

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In the wake of Irish famines, the question of what to do about this teeming mass of Christian refuse washed ashore seemed overarching and hopelessly insoluble. By 1860, the population of New York City had grown to 835,000. Irish Catholics made up as much as a third of it. Blacks numbered to 12,500, less than a third of Irish who had perished in transit during the preceding decade. The great fear of Protestants was that America would be immersed in the flotsam of Irish Catholicism and again brought under papal rule. Those who advocated abolition on moral grounds easily assumed that slaves, once unfettered, would soon better themselves as free and equal members of the populace. What life they might lead and where it might be lived was given much less thought than bringing about freedom for them to choose. Harriet Beecher Stowe tabled these questions by transporting the extended Harris family to Liberia. The irony of the Civil War is that Stowe’s fiction encouraged Lincoln to overrule Dred Scott, repeal the Fifth Amendment, set the Negro free with no place to go, and witness if not orchestrate the butchery of upwards of a million Protestants, while leaving her father, Lyman, free to reduce the Roman Catholics to ruin. The controlling limitation on the lives of most Virginians was poverty. No one had any money. No one would come by much of it for another century, and little of that from planting tobacco. During the Colonial Period, tobacco, as we have seen, served as the basis of the Virginia monetary system. Crop and transfer notes locally circulated as paper money and was valued against sterling. Following the revolution, the Constitution empowered Congress to set and define the nation’s currency. The Mint Act of 1792 established the dollar as the standard measure of money. It was denominated in gold for whole dollars and silver for per centum fractions of the dollar according to weight and fineness. Pennies were of copper. The shared characteristics of tobacco and specie were that each was tangible and commonly regarded as valuable. Warehoused tobacco and banked specie generated a receipt that entitled the bearer or depositor to repossess an equivalent amount of the commodity on presentment. These receipt notes were thus distinguished from debt notes, which evidenced a promise to deliver later rather than now. Coin in circulation was a fraction of the specie in the vaults of banks. Vaulted specie was a fraction of bank loans, interest from which was vital to cost coverage and profitability. The nation’s money supply was relatively static. It grew from its conversion from mined gold and silver and fluctuated with inflow and outflow from settlement of surplus or deficit foreign trade accounts. Thus, the Antebellum monetary system, based on precious metals, severely limited the expansion of credit. This limitation exposed banks to the risk that depositors might at any time and for any number of reasons become fearful that their deposits were insecure and might be suspended or frozen. This risk was inherent in the basic theory of fractional reserve banking, for in truth no bank that loaned out any considerable amount of its depositors’ money could return it without calling in some portion of its loans. Such fears, real or imagined, sometimes led to bank failure.

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It is probable that Dr. Henderson and William Allen banked at the Bank of Virginia,61 chartered in 1804 with its principal office in Richmond and branches elsewhere in the state. Prior to 1851, when independent banks were first authorized in Virginia, there was first only the Bank of Virginia, which served as the prototype for four or five other banks subsequently chartered to operate as mother banks with branches throughout the state. These banks were quasi-agencies of the Commonwealth but admitted private investment. They were modeled after Scottish banks, which were required to organize with heavy capitalizations and to operate through branches to maximize redeployment of deposits and minimize the risk of runs against their individual branches. Virginia banks enjoyed a fine reputation for sound capitalization and conservative practices. On the eve of war, the nation’s banks had fully recovered from the financial crisis of 1857, brought on by an over-extension of bank credit from independent banks of other states invested in land and other speculations. Indeed, the first nine months of 1860 proved to be the most prosperous in the nation’s history to that date. The southern economies were the principal beneficiaries. Tobacco, rice, and cotton exports, coupled with diminished imports, increased the gold supply of Virginia banks to unprecedented levels. But this happy state of affairs was short lived. The national elections resulted in the presidency of Lincoln and the identification of slavery as the nation’s most divisive issue. This turn of affairs threw commercial and financial relations between North and South into great uncertainty and mistrust. Virginia banks, which worked with correspondent banks in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other commercial centers, became fearful that northern correspondent banks would siphon off their gold supply. Their deposits with these correspondents were withdrawn, and Virginia banks became the first of the southern banks to suspend specie payment to their depositors on November 20, 1860. The decision of Virginia to secede from the national monetary regime preceded its decision to secede from the Union by six months. As the war progressed, specie on deposit with Virginia banks was replaced with worthless confederate notes. In March of 1865, the General Assembly passed an act that withdrew $300,000 of gold and silver from its banks to finance the Army of Northern Virginia. When Richmond was evacuated, bank specie was transferred to Washington, Georgia, where it was stolen. $110,000 recovered was appropriated by the Yankees. At surrender, Virginia banking had collapsed and its entire stock of money had vanished. Coin was so rare that the treasury’d quake If a dollar should drop in the till62 Anne Holloway’s letter to Douglas Freeman continues: There is something else for which I hope you will find a place in Battle Abbey.My Grandfather, George Hancock Matthews, was for forty years the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Cumberland County, Virginia. He lived at Edgehill, near Ca Ira. The old mill there was on his property. When the War Between the States was imminent, my grandfather used all the influence he possessed to keep Virginia in the Union. When Virginia seceded, he quite simply and in a wholly matter of fact way sold all of his list of securities and put the money in Confederate Bonds.

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I was born in his house in September 1864. My grandfather died in December 1865. When the baby granddaughter was able to “take notice”, he threaded his last silver coins-there are three of them-on a piece of red tape and kept them in his pocket for her to play with. When he was dying he said to my mother: “keep these for the child-they are all I have to give her.” It seems to me that these coins, in their humble way, are a part of the history of Virginia and the Confederacy.63 It is now difficult to grasp that during the 19th century money was struck from gold and silver and physically passed from hand to hand and place to place. If you did not have any or did not hold a good receipt or promise from someone who did, you were dead broke. Until the war was ended, ports opened and ocean traffic resumed Virginia planters could not again assuage the nicotine addiction of western Europeans and recommence exchanging tobacco for money. For want of cash export crops, capital invested in land, fixtures, and labor bore no return and lost all commercial value. Louisa Henderson’s memorandum book in which she once listed the names and birth years of some eighteen slaves and the births of their children, now recorded a steady accretion in Christian responsibility. When she and Dr. Henderson bade farewell to the Cumberland Troop, they bade farewell also to the value and merchantability of their servants, which went to zero four years before emancipation divested them of ownership of those within their care and on whom they remained greatly dependent for their own. Reconstruction, however painless it may have been at Forkland, served to expose the fragility and essential irrelevance of the Anglican aristocracy. The status quo ante could not be regained because emancipation and abrupt loss of wealth had flattened the verticality of class structure, leaving classicism quaintly idiosyncratic and noblesse oblige with empty pockets. William Allen continued easily in his role as planter and pursued it with efficiency. His tenure as the judge of the County Court provided financial comfort to his family and the assurance that it would remain at the pinnacle of neighborhood society. Maria, (Plate 17), remained unmarried as the sole resident child. She required little for herself and increasingly assumed the responsibilities of the household from her mother, who was afflicted with progressive arthritis. She would become a source of comfort and support for her parents as they drifted into old age and would remain steadfast in the Anglican tradition of the aristocracy. I have in hand only two letters written during Reconstruction, both from Anne Jane to Maria during the late summer of 1882. She had left to visit aunt Eliza Horsely at New Market, and her mother lets us share in the daily routines at Forkland with which the two women were intimate. Forkland had remained perforce largely self-sufficient. To tobacco and grain, William Allen had added grapes, principally Clintons, which were sold to others or made into wine and/or distilled to brandy for personal consumption or sale. These crops were produced in sufficient abundance that they might be sold or traded for the things that could not be made or produced at Forkland, but were only three among an array of products and processes that undergirded subsistence and a genteel life style beyond. The Perkinses

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were not in the least disposed to abandon this way of life, although loss of wealth curtailed the indulgences Dr. Henderson once had funded. William Allen retained those required to maintain it without much involving himself or the women of the family in the physical labor needed to see it done. Oversight of the production and preservation of food was the primary responsibility of William Allen and male servants. Food preparation increasingly became the responsibility of Maria but mostly was carried out by black women whose innate skills were not noticeably diminished by Mr. McClellan’s failure to introduce them to sums, penmanship, Sir Walter Scott, or the rhetoric of the treasonous Alcibiades. Behind the manse a large garden and orchard was sited from which was produced all manner of good things to eat in due season. Naming the varieties of fruits and vegetables grown at Forkland during the 19th century is made speculative by intense interest among us all to increase quality and yield of older strains through selection and crossing. Certainly, the Seckel pear was grown for eating, ripe off the tree, and a much larger fruit, tough and ﬁbrous, could be made into preserves or used prior to rotting to fell a mule. Peaches and plums of unknown ancestry abounded. Summer apples were grown. In the fall, Winesaps and another, which Anne Jane called a Riesling, would ripen. Clinton, Concord and Norton grapes were grown for wine and table. In the garden there were peas, onions, carrots, radishes, and beets for spring; beans, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, gourds, cantaloupe, and watermelon for summer; and cabbage, turnips, and salad greens for fall. Several vegetables not easily found today likely were grown in the garden at Forkland; cymlin (also cymbling or cymling) squash, light green and in the scolloped shape of closed cymbals; and salsify, a root that tastes like oysters or the hearts of artichokes when prepared. Anne Jane’s letters concerning corn are revealing: Yesterday the hands hauled up more young corn stalks on which your father is feeding horses, hogs and everything and as they pull the corn from the stalks they bring me such as will do to put up for winter. I believe that I wrote you last week that I had nearly ﬁlled the little jar in which we put it up before and this morning mother boiled a good deal in my large brass kettle on the stove while Veeny was cooking breakfast. So we spread it on a sheet upstairs until tomorrow when I will cut it off and pack it away. This helps me a great deal, as Veeny makes the other so smutty which she boiled in the kitchen I had to give a good deal of it to the hogs. But I am very much afraid that most of the corn is too hard. I know so little of how to attend to such matters, I hate to have to decide about it. I do not mind the work or the trouble. But the responsibility I cannot abide. So hereafter you must let me attend more to these things myself and then I can learn. It was probably intended to render the corn more amenable to parching. The episode reveals, however, that sweet corn, shucked and boiled on the cob within minutes of harvest, was an indelible taste sensation saved for frivolous descendants, that the wood stove had replaced open-hearth cooking and probably been brought within the manse, and that Anne Jane’s strengths lay elsewhere. Had their roles reversed, what would Veeny have done with her?

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Watermelon served as the primary source of involuntary reparation for involuntary servitude. Veeny is disclosed as a house servant who helps about the kitchen at Forkland. She has earned Anne Jane’s terse evaluation as “trifling”. It is she “and her night visitors” who have relieved the plantation of the task of gathering fall apples and as well have threatened to bear off the remnant watermelons before Maria returns home. Anne Jane is concerned that the reparation will leave them without so much as seed for next year’s installment. Oh foolish woman of little faith, be not anxious. Behold the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. The Perkines were reliant on corn and wheat, and its production and storage was given first priority. Other foods were preserved by dehydration, storage below ground in root cellars, brining, salting, and sugaring. The arrival of the stove at Forkland by 1882 presaged home canning, using the glass canning jars first made by the Ball brothers about the time of Anne Jane’s letters to Maria. But it is more probable that glass for canning as well as wine bottling was uncommon during the lives of the Perkines. The Ridgeway pitchers at Northfield and clay flasks at Forkland suggest that glass was limited to tableware. Refrigeration was limited to spring and well water and the storage of winter ice in a straw-lined pit enclosed within a structure to secure the contents. The ice house at Forkland was close by a spring-fed ice pond, located down-gradient from the overseer’s quarters. Surface contamination and straw insulation in the undrained ice pit combined with raw milk to create significant health risks. The servants were largely spared the risk of bad ice used to chill tea and water as well as diseases associated with raw milk, which was generally skimmed or churned. My father’s reminiscence was that he and members of his mother’s generation starved on skim milk and sought protection from the vapors by depending a bag of asafetida on a string necklace, while black children thrived on corn bread and pot liquor. Advent was the high season of the year. Tobacco was taken down, stripped, tied, and sold. And as Christmas approached, lengthening periods of cold weather predictably shortened the lives of hogs. The enduring ritual of rendering and processing them into good things to eat was devoutly observed throughout the plantation. The carcass, like Gaul, was roughly divided into three parts, one to cure and set aside, another to lard our innards, and the last presently to feed us. A goodly portion of the hog was made up of cuts to be cured and their preparation controlled the rendering process. After the hog had been killed, drawn, and eviscerated, it was necessary to remove the bristles from the hams, shoulders, shanks, jowls, and sides, so as to leave a smooth hide to protect the vital underlying fat and inhibit infestation by the skipper fly, whose larvae might ruin the meat. The method followed at Forkland during the depression was to encase a wooden trough in sheet steel, partially filled with water and stones to stabilize water temperature, and set it over a pit fire. The hog was hoisted into the trough to soak while sharpened hilling hoes were used to scrape the hide free of bristles. It was the art of older black men to test the water with leathery hands and announce in utterances and gesticulations beyond the understanding of white men that it was ready to receive the hog. If the water was too hot, the carcass would cook and spoil the hide and meat for curing. If the water was under-heated, the bristles would not soften to permit a clean shave. The black men worked intuitively within close tolerances.

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The carcass was butchered and the parts to be cured were packed in salt, salt peter, and, possibly, sugar to influence the color and sweetness of the meat. The fresh meat absorbed and became suffused with salt over a period of weeks, which preserved it. The dry salt method of curing was completed by stringing the hocks of hams, rubbing them with borax, and hanging the pieces over a smoldering hardwood pit fire to anneal the hides and protect them against infestation. The meat might remain hanging in the smokehouse after curing was complete or taken to hang in the cellar, where cooler temperatures benefited the aging process, which was abetted by a greater depth of fat than seen in leaner hams from eastern Virginia. Forkland hams reached their peak of taste and texture between three and four years. The risk of over-aging was dehydration, the results of which may be seen at Luxor. The hog’s greatest contribution to life at Forkland was its fat. It was rendered as lard by dicing and boiling fatty parts in a cast iron caldron set over a fire. As the grease was poured off to congeal and be set aside, the cracklings, a flotsam of yellow crisps, were skimmed off and saved as treats or for cornbread. Grease from frying cured meat served also as lard’s salted cousin. A by-product was soap. Wood ashes were blended with lye and grit. It was cast in a wheel and sliced into dirty yellow wedges. Lard was an essential ingredient of corn bread, soda biscuits, and leavened wheat bread. Salad and collard greens, string and pole beans, field peas, and other vegetables boiled without the company of a piece of cured meat or its drippings was simply not fit to eat. My grandfather would as soon let the sunshine in his mouth as to feed on unlarded beans, not brought to perfection with sliced raw onions anointed with vinegar. Soda biscuits were the creation of succeeding generations of black women, most of whom were illiterate. The optimal product was a thin, smooth-skinned biscuit that browned on the top and split evenly into halves. All attempts to construct a recipe from which such a thing might be fashioned by the hands of white folk was destined to fail. It was all done by pinch and feel and rose above our understanding, thus assuring our continuing dependency on them for good things to eat from what had been gathered into barns. The third part of Gaul was fresh meat. Its delectability increased as the site of the cut neared the chine, thus giving rise to the expression “Eating high on the hog.” My personal recollection from the late years of the depression is not reliable as to the amount of fresh meat that was saved as such from the carcass, but the Hebrews did not outlaw its consumption as unclean without good reason: The supposition is that as much as could not be cured, saved as sausage, pickled or potted, was apportioned, quickly cooked and gladly eaten. It was a joyous feast of communion. The highly educated continue to insist that but for suppression and discrimination, the descendants of slaves would equally perform. But most have not. Rather, they have exploited their own highly evolved domains and left it to the cabin class to dote on the corrupted Greeks of antiquity to express the ideals to which they hopelessly aspire. Blacks have met and surpassed the Greco-Roman ideal of perfect form and beauty. Their athleticism excels that of all others. They have given us a lard-based style of cooking, the rhythms and modes that underlie our popular music, and the voices and instrumentalists to elevate music to new levels. They have offered us the grace to live in the present and a clear image of what it’s like to enjoy it. Most of all, over the course of four centuries, they have genetically contributed through their descendants a disposition toward patience and good manners, the essential ingredient of an ethos of gentility.

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Joseph and Maria

Maria Sydnor Perkins Plate 17

Joseph Winston Hazlegrove Plate 18

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Joe Hazlegrove (Plate 18), came to Forkland as overseer in his mid twenties, some sev-

Forkland continued as the gathering point of the Perkins progeny through the turn of

eral years before William Allen’s death in July of 1889. He was a godsend to them all.

the century. Maria succeeded Anne Jane as undisputed queen over these convocations until she succumbed to the debilitation of paralysis agitans (Parkinson’s) and became

William Allen had not been reappointed to the Court after six years of service and had

hopelessly invalid for much of the decade preceding her death in 1911. She presided

turned old and helpless. Anne Jane was invalid, crippled, and stooped by progressive

over croquet on the front lawn, authors and whist on the front porch. It was there that

arthritis. Maria, always a frail child, was challenged by the responsibilities of caring for

she served surviving watermelon, chilled in the ice house, probably with instruction to

them and running the household. That she found on her door step someone to love her

share it with Yellow Jackets seated on the stone bench beneath the majestic white oak

and manage the plantation was great good fortune.

that dated to the reign of Elizabeth I. She endeared herself to them by insisting that she be called by her given name rather than Mrs. Hazlegrove, as was the expectation of

Joe came from more humble circumstances than those in which Maria formerly had

her mother.

found herself, but her lot as a farmer’s wife favorably compared with her prospects as the aging, maiden daughter of a planter whose estate principally consisted of the death beneﬁt from an Equitable life insurance policy that provided Anne Jane with a legacy of less than $500 net of his debts.

man of great energy and determination, happy to be on the front end of 59 crops of to-

was given grudgingly. Hams and tobacco continued to be cured for sentimental reasons long after it became unproﬁtable to remain engaged. The black people of Forkland simply grew too old and too few to further enable the addiction of the Perkinses and

bacco and possessed of a self-effacing sense of humor that called up colloquial imagery

Hazlegroves to grow tobacco and serve up carved ham. Neither is now tolerated by

to disarm vanity. He had come by literacy much later than his tutored Maria, largely on

their descendants.

his own.

Desalination of the ham requires the better part of a week of soaking, simmering. and

He was no fool. He may well have been the most successful and inﬂuential man in

wrestling with what may weigh in at thirty pounds. If it is ﬂensed, glazed, scored, and

Cumberland County during the ﬁrst third of the 20th century. He served on its board

cloved for presentation on a platter let go to the garret with the copper boiler some

of supervisors and as a member of its school board, and was prominently connected

years ago, another day or so may be required. Once got to table, carving the meat into

with locating John Randolf High School in the neighborhood. He served for years as

edible portions requires the application of basic skills that may leave the carver little

a director of the Southside Tobacco Growers Association and The Planters Bank of

time to do anything else if there are any number of people at table. It is essential to

Farmville, chartered in 1867. His stock position in the Bank, perhaps passed and added to that of his son Joe, who followed him on the board, came to about a million dollars at the turn of the next century.

carve cross grain or perpendicular to the bone and to render thin slices. Irma Rombauer deﬁned eternity as a ham with two people to eat it. The practice at Forkland was not to remove the protection of hide and fat and to keep the ham cool

Simplicity was worn comfortably by Joe throughout his life. His son, Joseph Anderson,

and moist. But under the best of circumstances, the ham will dry, cast off corruption,

remembered him most warmly for his respect and empathy for the steady stream of hungry souls that drifted along the roads of the county before and during the early years broadened to universality.

an International Harvester Farmall H, arrived at Forkland in 1938. The revolutionary changes that followed slowly displaced the manorial regime at Forkland. But ground

Joe’s goodness was not complicated by poses. He was what he was, and that was a young

of the Great Depression. The close question of what to do about Mr. Taylor’s wife had

Electric service was not extended to the neighborhood until 1942. The ﬁrst tractor,

and achieve immortality if not reprocessed. Most of us now hope to die, if at all, remotely of nothing serious and follow any disappointment with a million-dollar lawsuit. Chances are that our grandchildren would be frightened by the sight of a ham and their parents threatened with child abuse if they let them eat any of one.

My most vivid recollection of him is sitting on his knee at the dinner table at Forkland, gazing in awe at his careful endowment of a split biscuit with an incredible spate of food, precariously poised and deftly guided into his mustachioed, napkin-patted maw. What an incredible feat! He was lean, as was his son, each with the metabolism of humming birds. Father was described in his prime as walking away from downing a prodigious column of wafﬂes rattling like an empty wagon on a rutted road.

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William Perkins Hazlegrove and father, Joseph Winston Hazlegrove Plate 19

Part II

A Biography of William Perkins Hazlegrove It was into this lingering remnant of Anglican aristocracy that my father (Plate 19) was

Father continued at the Farmville High School and, on the recommendation of its

born on May 16, 1892. Maria named him for her side of the union. Joe’s namesake, a

principal, Mr. Corson, entered Hampden Sydney College at age sixteen. He was

later son and daughter, twins, died in infancy and are buried at Forkland.

graduated with twenty-two other men in the Class of 1912, earning double bachelor degrees in each of the arts and sciences, a remarkable accomplishment for a boy who

Maria was Christened at Grace Church, Ca Ira, but the church fell into disuse during

graduated at an age when most of his colleagues were sophomores. He was undecided

and after the war. Whether the Perkinses or Maria attended services or there presented

about his future. On certiﬁcation of his qualiﬁcations to teach physics and math and

father for baptism is not known but doubted.

the high recommendation of the president of the faculty, he taught for a year, decided against science and entered the law school of The University of Virginia, graduating

Joe became a deacon in the Guinea Presbyterian Church, founded in 1824 and located

with the Law Class of 1916. (Plate 20) He was an outstanding student. He served on

about a mile west of Forkland. It has served for many years as an afﬁliate of the Cum-

the editorial staff of The Virginia Law Register, and was a member of the Order of the

berland Presbyterian Church, founded in 1754 and located on the ridge of Route 45,

Coif, the Raven Society, and Phi Beta Kappa.

several miles northeast of Farmville. Whether he was brought up as a Presbyterian or sought or by second marriage was brought into Calvinism is not known. Perhaps Maria herself, with Perkins in tow, was swept up in its convenience.

domly about and one that fell my father’s way was the discipline and determination to distinguish himself in the humanities, sciences and the law, where the degree of sepa-

The Perkins Bible became the repository of an assortment of newspaper clippings, a recipe of Anne Jane for peach leaf tea, a Catechism,64 and father’s letters to Santa, dutifully published in The Farmville Herald as the one sure means of communicating one’s wishes from Forkland. Angola, Va. Dear Santa clause; This is my ﬁrst letter to you. I am four years old and I have been bad sometimes but will be good for three years now if the girls don’t bother me too much. I wish you would bring me a hatchet, a pistol, a big cocoa-nut, and a great big Pine-apple, and some nuts, and bring Mother some cream candy so I can get some of hers. Your little friend. W. P. Hazlegrove. Father became literate under the tutoring of Maria and of neighbors at a one-room schoolhouse north on the Stoney Point Road. He pointed it out to me as a boy on trips from Forkland to Richmond. It no longer exists. As time passed, the walk got a little longer and the snow a little deeper. These hard times, however, required no embellishment.

Genius happens and is not taught. Other characteristics seem also to be sprinkled ran-

ration was precisely measured, ranked, and universally admired. Whether his appetite for scholarship was born of a body that bore no resemblance to that of an athlete or was whetted by the desire to regain a position once held by the Perkinses that only money could reconﬁrm, his years at Hampden Sydney and the University were not those of a young man of graceful assurances at leisure. He was neither a genius nor a workaholic but certainly a scholar and perhaps a prudish one at that. Occasionally, he would broaden the “a,” as his mother was wont to do. He shared two recollections of his student days. At Hampden Sydney, he had a credit balance of seven cents in his student petty cash account. As graduation and departure approached, the bursar, a cripple, reminded him to drop by and withdraw it before he left. He carelessly failed to do so and was deeply embarrassed when on the evening before his departure, the bursar struggled across campus to pay him against his receipt. At Charlottesville, he somehow became involved in a gymnastic competition that selected the winner as the one requiring the least time to complete designated laps on a course of rings set at intervals and suspended by straps from the ceiling. Father was unable to complete a single lap but asked a return match with the man who easily won and laughed at him. Father devoted his full attention to beating the hell out of him when next they met.

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Father came to Roanoke in 1916 and entered the practice of law with Abram P. Staples and C. Francis Cocke. For years, I thought that he had taken rooms at 1008 Henry Street, the Queen Anne style Victorian home of my grandparents, Webster Gregory and Virginia Lee Franklin Stouffer, and there met mother. But he roomed several blocks away on Maple, and the twain, if introduced, remained apart. On April 6, 1917, Congress overwhelmingly endorsed President Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany, made four days earlier. Once Wilson’s timidity was resolved, the response was immediate, clearly idealistic, as has been the case in most wars since, and as passionate as ever before seen in America. This time, there were no proxies or buy outs of service that minimized the Revolution and the Civil War. It would not become a rich man’s war and a poor man’s ﬁght. Both Father and Francis Cocke took leave of the practice to join the fray. Father found his way to Camp Lee in August. He was commissioned Second Lieutenant of Field Artillery in the National Army effective September 15, 1917, and was assigned to the Headquarters Troop of the 80th (Blue Ridge) Division, which had formed out of men selected from the Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania drafts. Headquarters Troop and the 318th Infantry Regiment embarked at Hoboken on May 17, 1918, and debarked at Brest on May 21. These units joined other elements of the Division, trained with the British during the summer and moved to Chatillon Sur Seine in preparation for the Meuse Argonne offensive. The Division was in reserve during the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient but was in the line in each of the three phases of the attack during the period September 26 through the armistice November 11, 1918. Father was assigned responsibility for manning and operating the forward observation posts of the Division and, thus, supplying information vital to the command concerning the emplacement and deployment of the Germans within its sector, as well as the situation with advancing elements of the Division. He was Father student at the University of Virginia. Plate 20

required to advance with the leading edge of the attacks and move to high ground to be of service as the eyes of the Division Command Post and this exposed him to uncommon risks. This was the first war in which senior officers at the division level and above did not have surveillance of their commands in battle. Putting their eyes out was a first order of business. The offensive was the terminal campaign of the war but the first in which the American Expeditionary Force operated under its own command. General John J. Pershing was its Commander-in-Chief. His armies had swelled within a year’s time from a token force to 1.3 million officers and men, and they continued to come. This was the factor that controlled the outcome of the conflict, although poorly trained and equipped. The German defensive positions in the Meuse Argonne were formidable, particularly in the III Corps sector, where major lines of resistance in the Hindenburg complex swung southeast along the ridges of the western front and utilized the commanding promontory of Montfaucon. It was from this advantage that the German Crown Prince observed the horrors of Verdun. The sector was quilted with hills and ridges, some forested with entangling thickets, drained by numerous streams and served by poor roads through narrow passes. The sector was grudgingly conceded by the retreating Germans, pretty much on their terms. But for pressure of the coordinated offensive of the allies along the entire front and the necessity to shorten it, the AEF would have been consumed.

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The Division moved into staging areas that shifted from Ippecourt, Osches, Lemmes, and Limpire in preparation for the initial phase of the offensive, which launched at dawn on September 26 from a departure line south of and parallel with the Vosge River that joins the Meuse above Verdun. The Division was the middle element of the III Army Corps, with the 33rd Division on the right, ﬂanked by the Meuse, and the 4th Division on the left, ﬂanked by the 79th division of the American V Corp. The direction of the attack was north, passing through Mort-Homme and just east of Montfaucon. The objective was a line east of Mountfaucon at Cuisy to the Muese at Consenvoye, passing through lines of resistance

known to the Germans as the Haupt and Hagen Stellungs.65 The objective was secured by the end of the month. Father received the following Division citation for his contribution to the success of the ﬁrst phase of the offensive: Lieutenant William P. Hazlegrove, Headquarters Troop. 80th Division, and a party consisting of 1st. Sergeant M. L. Turner, Headquarters Troop; Sergeant J. W. Angle, Corporal H. G. Peters; Privates E. P. Henger, R. W. Von Nieda and J. S. Hogue, Company B 305th Field Signal Battalion, who, as a forward O. P. detachment, without food and with great fatigue and especial devotion to duty, established and maintained continuous communication with the Division, whereby most valuable information of the enemy was secured in the operations in the Dannevoux Sector, commencing September 26, 1918. The second phase of the offensive sought to penetrate the third defensive system, known as the Etzel Stellung, an element in the Kriemehelde Stellung, and to confront the Gizelher Stellung, north of which the vital rail linkage running through Sedan would be exposed. The assault faced heavy resistance. Ca-

Trenches

sualties tripled over the first phase count. During the week commencing October 4, the Division front was advanced less than five miles to north of the road connecting Romagne (the site of the magnificent American cemetery) with Cunel and Brieulles, on the Meuse. Father was not in the line but given rest near Triaucourt, south of Verdun. It is here that he wrote home on the 14th of October: Dear Dad, Tonight I am no longer in a wet dugout nor in a slimy trench. There are no shells whining over nor cracking under your feet, neither can one hear the machine gun bullets skipping about in the grass like insects. This is behind me for a time at least and tho I would be glad to go again and be glad in the going, anyone who says such sounds are music to him is either a damn liar or a damn fool and the chances are that he is a little bit of both. At present, Throckmorton66 and I are back in a nice, clean, comfortable French home in a lovely quaint old French village in a beautiful country. The room has some perfectly marvelous mirrors in it and above all a real bed, with pillows, sheets, counterpane and all. Outside it is damp and chilly, with no sunshine for four days and either rain or mist night and day. . . . Man is a wonderful thing and the more I see the more I believe that it takes something terrible like this too bring out the very best that is in him. I have seen great strong robust men with muscles of iron, the physique of an ox, and a jaw like a steel trap whom one would think would go thru hell, break down and whimper like a baby, absolutely devoid of that indiscernible something which makes a man go on. Perhaps their fear is no greater than that of the others

–59 –

Father with Pipe in his mounth

but one does and the other does not. And then I have seen the other kind whom one would think had not the guts to kill a flea go right on and never turn a hair. Ah! It’s the heart of the man. I believe they both felt fear yet it affects them different, one it paralyses and the other didn’t know what it was and hence he says “I was not afraid.” It makes one wonder what it is that God has put into man to make him suffer and offer his life for a principle and do it gladly. I saw men fight for four days and nights with no sleep and very little food and water and never complain once or stop smiling. It is wonderful to see such for it lifts one out of himself and brings him face to face with the greatest thing in the world-the spirit of man that nothing can conquer. *** The other day when I returned a bit tired after four days and nights without sleep and more lice and fleas than are comfortable, the General (Adelbert Cronkhite) called me in as I was and thanked me for the little job that I had done, as I have never been thanked for anything in my life, and I like a fool stood there and cried. I never was so helpless in my life for I hadn’t done much and hadn’t been touched and yet I couldn’t help crying to save my life. The other night in a little town there was a very pretty American actress who is going around France entertaining the men. She sang, played and danced for us and it was beautiful. I am sure that I have never enjoyed anything as much. To come fresh from the scene of death and bursting shells and have an American girl play and sing for you is worth living for. And yet, when she played the violin, it was awful. It seemed that in that music I could hear the canon’s roar, the groans of wounded and dying men and all the sounds of battle. And then I could hear all the sounds of happiness and peace and comfort and how was it possible not to think of those who had offered their lives that such happiness Captain William Perkins Hazlegrove Plate 21

might belong to the world . . . and would no more hear such music. . . . From your loving son, Perkins In preparation for the third phase, again a part of the general attack by the First Army and the allied forces, the Blue Ridge Division was reassigned to I Corps and staged in the Argonne near Neufour. The Division objective was to breach the rearward line of resistance that had formed along the road from St. Juvin to St. George. The 78th, 77th, and 80th Divisions were in the line from left to right. The attack commenced at dawn on the 1st of November. The 319th Infantry of the 80th Division penetrated the resistance and advanced rapidly. But the 320th Infantry stalled as did the other divisions of the Corps until a ﬂanking attack by the 319th relieved the situation. During the week that followed, the Germans covered their retreat with random concentrations of machine gun and artillery ﬁre, which halted some units and exposed others that had moved forward. Such was the case north of the Thibaudine Farm where father was isolated overlooking the village of Yonc.

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The Grand March down the Camps Elysees, Paris Plate 22

In the aftermath of the conflict, Father was again recognized. He was cited by Pershing for exceptional and distinguished gallantry at St. Juvin in the November initiative, promulgated March 27, 1919. This was followed by a recommendation for the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry at Thibaudine Farm, made by W. H. Waldron. Chief of Staff, and endorsed by S. D. Sturgis, Major-General Commanding. This decoration was awarded in 1931. The most coveted award of all came as an entry in the Officer’s Record Book, submitted by W. H. Waldron, Chief of Staff: Captain Hazlegrove was on duty through out the first and third phases of the battle of the Meuse- Argonne, September 26. November 6, 1918, as the officer in charge of the Division forward O. P. This was the most hazardous duty that an officer can be called upon to perform. The value of Captain Hazlegrove’s service to the country cannot be stated in mere words. In my opinion, there is no officer in the service that has rendered more valuable service. He was conspicuously under shell, rifle and machine gun fire out with the front lines of the Division, and on at least one occasion he was far in advance of the front lines, maintaining observation post and sending in messages upon which decisions could be based. Some years ago, we visited our daughter, Sarah Perkins, then living in Paris, and there found ourselves on the museum level of the Arc de Triomphe, which then was featuring the grand armies that victoriously had marched the Champs Elysees through its arch at the Etoile. My eyes focused on a photograph of General Pershing leading the American Army, not on him but his aide or guide-on, one right and three back, who bore such a close resemblance to my father that I choked with emotion Plate 22.67

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When we returned to France in the spring of 2005, I had sifted through and studied the contents of a trunk ﬁlled with maps, orders, histories, operation reports, and a cache of images taken after the armistice by aerial photographers with whom father had linked.68 The maps of Corps sectors of the Meuse Ar-

gonne preserved by my father allowed me to track him through each phase of the offensive, referring only to current road maps for route numbers. So little had changed in the maps and villages of the area of the offensive that I felt as if I had come upon a Hollywood set that had been built to original speciﬁcations but abandoned to await the reprise of a drama whose producers instead chose to stage on the beaches of Normandy. The extras hired to people the villages had been let go and time stood still. A deserted Catholic church stared vacantly from a village hill side at the Ossuary and Trench of the Bayonets across the Meuse. But on the west side, the only reminders in the willow green of spring that a great battle had been waged here was an occasional roadside German or French cemetery, the obelisk at Montfaucon, and the American cemetery at Romagne. But there were no visitors at these monuments such as thronged the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach to mourn the deaths of fathers and older brothers. The Thibaudine Farm lies just south of the village of Yonc and quite close to the Meuse and Sedan to the Father at Dannevoux Plate 23

north. We stopped there and I walked out on the nose of a ridge to the approximate position of father’s vantage point. It is shown on one of his maps as the final point of advance. Sarah spoke with Monsieur Cahart, the proprietor of the property. He said that it had come into the family in 1789, probably as a result of the confiscation and sale of the vast holdings of the Roman Catholic Church, which was sacked and disestablished during the revolution. It had long operated as a monastery under the monk Thibau. Monsieur Cahart was aware that his property was within the sphere of the battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War but had no knowledge that World War I had come to an end just beyond where his grandson was fattening beef cattle for market and my father had called in artillery on the devoted heads of the Germans. Among the numerous photographs taken of the Meuse Argonne in the winter of 1919, the one at Plate 23 caught my particular attention. It shows father standing behind a 380-mm shell weighing almost a ton. It was of the sort that was lobbed into the defensive forts and entrenchments on the heights overlooking Verdun on the east side of the Meuse by rail- borne siege guns, one of which was dismantled and abandoned at Dannevoux, a village in the 80th Division sector north of Le Mort Homme, a hill that rose over three hundred feet above sea level. The shell bears the chalked inscription of “Bertha,” a technical misnomer. Bertha was the thick-waisted Krupp heiress for whom the 420-mm German howitzer was named “Big Bertha” by the English, a limited number of which were first used as a secret weapon to neutralize the Belgium fortifications in 1914 and later redeployed at Verdun in a failed attempt to penetrate and

Father third from the left posing with fellow officers next to a canon.

destroy the submerged fortiﬁcations of the French and reduce men to bloody paste. I think Father saw the missile as an artifact of another war that symbolized the mutuality of madness in the massive destruction of men and materiel in the Battle of Verdun, a killing frenzy that resumed in Feb-

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ruary of 1916 after the armies of the combatants went under ground in 1914 after a half million soldiers had been killed or wounded in their initial major engagement in the First Battle of the Marne. The Battle of Verdun was an ill-conceived initiative of the German high command aimed at attriting the French with its vastly superior weaponry, particularly heavy artillery. It endured for ten months and was principally confined to a sliver of Lorraine on the east side of the Meuse that measured some 15 miles along the river to a depth of slightly more than 5 miles, the boundaries of which vacillated with the ebb and flow of the carnage. The capture rather than siege of Verdun seeped into the German initiative as a strategic objective, and its accomplishment depended on curing the tactical flaw of omitting an attack on the citadel from the west side of the Meuse, where French artillery registered flanking fire on the Germans across the river, exacting a heavy toll. Assault replaced siege and turned the tide of attrition fatally against the Germans within the confines of strategically irrelevant Alsace Lorraine, most of which had been bitterly contested over the centuries as if it were the source spring of the tribes from which each the

Father is seated in the middle surrounded by children.

Prussians and French derived. On the west side, Le Mort Homme stood in the path of the German assault. It could not be taken and held without commanding Cote 304, its westerly twin five miles southeast of German occupied Montfaucon. When this was accomplished at hideous expense in early May of 1916, the Germans advanced the front a few miles farther south but gave back most of what it had taken on the east side of the Meuse. The battle ended in a stalemate in the fall of that year. Over a quarter million men were counted as dead or missing out of total casualties nearing three-quarters of a million, all for a couple of hills and forts. Allister Horne observed in The Price of Glory that it was the longest and deadliest battle per square yard in history. Ironically, the 80th Division filtered through and around Cote 304 and Le Mort Homme two years later to achieve its sector objective in four days at a cost 6 officers and 117 men, dead or missing. One cannot read of the Marne, Verdun, and the Somme and reason that God had anything to do with what went on there or anywhere else on earth before or after. Horne quotes French soldier Raymond Jubert’s answer to a question posed to himself on his miraculous return from Le Mort Homme: Is not one’s first act to kneel down and thank God? No. One relieves oneself. Our histories are principally those of war, which I suggest simply play out variations on the central theme of survival through protection of tribal foraging areas or encroachment and plunder of those of other bands. It is what we do as animals, which human intellect cannot explain. It is the grim business of reducing competitors in the food chain. Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees of Gombe provide a better answer than meticulous historians of war who dwell at length on onsets, outcomes, and the strength and deficits of kings and generals asleep in the ground. They would do as well if they left it to Goodall to write them and name the leaders for her apes. Was Figan the equal of Foch and Goblin the better of Falkenhayn? What dwells beyond human understanding resides in faith or instinct. I accept the latter as governing our days on earth.

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Photo of photographers

After retracing the three phases of the Meuse Argonne, father and Bob Throckmorton frolicked in Paris and Nice together through spring and experienced the euphoria of survival. He writes his father from aboard ship on May 24, 1919, on his way home: God only knows why I am writing or what I will say but somehow I must express my feelings and there is no one who seems sufﬁciently near what I do to lend an ear. A year ago today I was on the great Leviathan on my way to the mighty unknown - to France and to battle. Then little was said and we had all the fun we could, dancing with the Army nurses aboard, looking for subs and dreaming of home and wondering about the future. I wonder how many of us really expected ever to come back to America? Personally, I did not expect to return but still the thought of death did not trouble me, life was sweet and I had nothing to trouble me but why should not my life be taken that others might live in peace? And now a year later, I am on my way home, sound and in perfect health. I have done my bit, been recommended twice for decorations by the Chief of Staff, cited once in general orders for gallantry in action, promoted twice in ﬁve months, seen the war, fought, suffered from cold and hunger, seen men die and tasted life in battle, in Paris, in Nice. A loving father awaits me at home, a woman there loves me and lives only for my return. I have a profession awaiting my labor and friends and relatives ambitious for my future and yet I have Father as young attorney.

failed because I am not happy. Not only not happy, I am miserable. Miserable because everything is set for me to become a “good citizen” and I don’t want to do this. Man’s only object in life is to be happy and is he fair to himself if he allows others to so influence his life that he fails to get all the joy possible in passing? The thought of going back to one place and working makes me absolutely miserable. It is not the work, for I love work. But it is the staying in one place - nothing new. I am restless. I want to see the world, to see new scenes, to know different people, to live. And if this would give me more pleasure than being a successful lawyer and good citizen, why shouldn’t I? My friends and relatives will say he is a failure and amounted to nothing and perhaps they are right but if I have obtained pleasure, have I not succeeded in life? It is wonderful this morning. The glorious sunshine and the sea as calm as a pond and the most wonderful colors as the green and the blue and the white foam intermingle as the ship breaks through the water. And then gaze over the edge of the world where the sky and the water meet what is beyond? It is too big for words and yet the bigness does not scare me but only makes me feel how little I know and makes me long to see more, to live more. Yes, I have discovered that there is something else besides America. I am a brother to the hobo. I have just tasted life, known fear, seen death and felt the touch of love. Love of woman and love of life. And what can I do? I don’t want to stay in the army. My pride and previous mode of living will not allow me to be an ordinary hobo and then, too, this would not satisfy me. I only know one thing. I crave action and if I do settle down to work at home, it will be hell at first. Should I spend my youth preparing for old age and then find that I have lost the capacity to enjoy the fruit of my toil - unable to live, or should I live now while I have the ability and let the future

Mother Plate 24

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look out for itself - “Some seek the glories of this world. Some sigh for the prophets’ paradise to come. Oh take the cash and let the credit go. Take heed the rumble of the distant drum.” I know I should not feel this way but how can I help it. If I could talk to someone who could understand it would help but there is no one. The people at home will not understand - they can’t for they have not lived my life. I think I should live one day at a time and decide all this later. I should not plan but live. This must be all disconnected but so am I and it is time for lunch. Following his return, Father lingered briefly at Forkland, which was fast filling with the children of his father’s second marriage. He visited with the Richardsons in Farmville and other kin in the neighborhood, and, still in uniform, made his way back to Roanoke to arrange a resumption of his practice with Francis Cocke. Father’s letter from aboard ship found its way into his father’s lock box and then into father’s chest of drawers, where it was preserved unread. That he might list to vagabondage was a secret that required no keeping. Had he sworn to it, no one would have believed him. The woman who “ lived only for his return” was not my mother (Plate 24). She had survived the influenza and was living with her older sister, Marion Meyers, in Berryville while completing training at the Winchester Memorial Hospital Training School for Nurses. She received certification as a registered nurse on June 30, 1920, and returned home to nurse at either or both Dr. Trout’s Jefferson Hospital and Dr. Sparrell Gale’s Lewis Gale Hospital. She had collected a handsome Army officer named Philip Williams when father come into her life. The more reliable source held that Phillip was to greater advantage than father’s matronly Philadelphia love interest. He took leave of her. Mother dispatched the foil. The two were married January 26, 1921, at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Dr. Karl Block officiating. Frank Waters Rogers served as best man. He also was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Law School of the University of Virginia (he would later serve as Rector of its Board of Visitors) and was recently returned from the war. He and his bride to be, Ann Newton Jett, a daughter of Bishop Robert C. Jett, would remain close friends of my parents for life, although the men generally were seen as competitors. These men were Anglicans head to toe. Frank Rogers survived and memorialized my father with a gift to St. John’s of an old edition of The Book of Common Prayer. While each professed to embrace the exciting opportunities that change might offer, neither rightly could be understood to welcome its occurrence during their lifetime. Each regarded subsequent redactions of Anglican liturgy as vinyl siding on a great edifice of the English language. Those who trifled with it or favored bringing it into more common understanding were dismissed. The aristocracy that founded Grace Church, Ca Ira, and revived Anglicanism in its several parishes throughout the Commonwealth during the antebellum period founded, as well, St. John’s in 1831. Its founding families included Wattses, Tayloes, Breckinridges, Langhornes, Peytons, and others, some of whom were major landowners, kept slaves, and served in the Confederacy if not also the Continental Army. The church at Elm and Jefferson, Roanoke, completed in 1892, features a stained glass window over the altar, “The Tomb After the Resurrection,” (Plate 25) given in memory of General Edward Watt’s

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Mother Plate 24

daughter, Letitia, by her husband, Dr. Francis Sorrell, a romantic figure who also served as an officer in the Confederacy. Today, on a given Sunday at St. John’s, a squadron of the 3rd Virginia Cavalry, made out of the Mecklenburg, Charles City, and Cumberland Troops, are represented by communicants directly descended from their captains.69 Anglicanism in Virginia could not have risen from the ashes of the Revolution or been sustained through Reconstruction and the Great Depression but for the patronage and unquestioned patriotism of such men as these. Father prospered in the practice of law, as one might expect of a young man with his credentials. He came to be professionally involved in the affairs of Junius Blair Fishburn, who came out of Franklin County during Reconstruction to make a fortune in real estate, banking, and multimedia news publication with less formal education than fell my father’s way through high school. He was an amazing man whose patronage of my father alone was sufficient to establish a significant practice. Early on, Father met up with Franklin Moore, whose wife, Mary, was the daughter of Edward and Mimi Stone, she being a sister of J. B. Fishburn. Franklin’s people came from Alabama ( his father, James W. Moore, was one of the oldest surviving Confederate soldiers at his death in 1951 at age 99). The two men became the closest of friends. Each heeded the rumble of the distant drum and went hunting for quail and fishing for trout. Best of all, they took me with them. They used field-grade, side-by-side double guns made by Parker Brothers, for which they were fitted at Nelson Hardware, where they were purchased together. The stock and frame of these guns received a 16-gauge set of 26-inch, open-bored upland game barrels as well as a 20-gauge set of 30-inch, full choke barrels for duck and dove. Later, they bought 12-gauge, light-framed Parker guns with two sets of barrels. Their fishing rods were made by Sorrell Window. The Tomb After the Resurrection Plate 25

Kent, Station Master for the Virginian in Vinton. They were works of art. Bamboo strips were shaped, tapered, fitted together, glued, wrapped and lacquered to form an hexagonal, two-piece, light-weight rod of less than 10 feet in length that could be handled in the small, arcaded streams of western Virginia. In Giles County, they fished Little Stoney, below the cascades, and pan fried native Speckled (Brook) trout over a creek-side fire. These fish were found in the spring-fed rills that ran out of the mountains around. They grew no larger than six inches in these restrictive tributaries of the larger streams below. Above the cascades and beneath Mountain Lake, White Pine Lodge was kept by the Hoges and Reynolds for fishing and hunting. It was set in a magnificent stand of white pine that filled the basin above the gorge. It was spectacular. In Craig County, Meadow Creek flowed northeast through Sinking Creek valley east of the divide to Craig Creek and the James. Father and Franklin organized the Southwest Sportsmen to lease the stream, which was mainly fed by a bold spring or underground stream that surfaced at the site of the state trout hatchery. It is a small but wonderful limestone stream that supports reproduction of Rainbow. It runs through a stretch of meadow before entering a gorge and cascading through the gap of Sinking and John’s Creek Mountains. The ritual was to mix a drink of Jack Daniel’s with spring water at dusk and share a picnic at the cutout above Newcastle. We overlooked the sprinkled lights of the town below into

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the purpling Alleghenies that stretched and folded into subtle changes along the line of the sky. These streams and their settings must have satisfied father’s quest to see new and ever-changing features of nature - all so close to home. Quail hunting is a mysterious affliction. Under the best of circumstances, we could not long feed ourselves, much less our families, on a bird that weighs from five to less than seven ounces. Nor are they a delicacy. Their white meat tends to dry and toughen if not smothered, and father would bet real money that you couldn’t stand to eat one every day for a week. In the best of times, it required one’s industry for an entire day to present a couple of pounds of bloody, lead-invested meat and feathers to the kitchen for summary rejection under the implied terms of modern marriage and the silent, tearful gaze of young girl children. Treating the affliction involves speculative therapies bought at great expense. Somewhere along the path of evolution, our noses runted. We lost the scent of women and a whole lot more besides. To put birds on the table requires the aid and assistance of a dog. Not any dog will do. There are only two breeds worthy of mention: English pointers and setters. The pointers are uncouth and cat-like. They tolerate but are not otherwise drawn into affectionate relationships with people. If you are nice to them and offer them the comforts of your home, they will raise their leg to your favorite wing chair while you scratch behind their ears. The setters are the royals. Once trained, you may keep them with you in their old age and enjoy their friendship and company. But you cannot first make them house pets and expect to train them up to hunt. Nor should you expect to find them in the yard when you come home from work. They have not lost the scent of women and are not prone to fritter away their youth. They also heed the distant drum. Pointers and setters are not breeds whose working characteristics are equal and uniformly shared. Only Harriet Stowe could imagine such homogeneity. What is cherished is a dog that hunts and ranges within sight and hearing, has retained the instinct to slow and stop when the scent of birds overwhelms him, will remain on point until you can come up to him and flush the birds, and then lead you to the recovery of the dead and wounded. Added refinements are honoring another dog’s point, remaining steady to wing and shot, and retrieving the dead bird to hand. Few dogs have it in them to accomplish all these things. And if you have had a hand in training a dog to handle some of the basics some of the time, you will be truly blessed with an experience that precious few have ever known. They will be remembered as among the best of friends: those who silently suffer your flaws and keep your company in the hope that you will desist in the further amendment of theirs. I am not sure that Father or Franklin were other than sometimes blessed. Neither long kept dogs around the house and were reliant on others to train and keep them. I can see them now, screaming at dogs who ran in straight lines and switching those who, with malice aforethought, ran up birds at a safe distance from the guns or ate one out of reach.

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Harriet French Turner painting. Plate 26

They hunted the Scruggs area of Franklin County from the Depression through and after the war. It was inhabited by paled-out Anglo Saxons, some living in one-room log cabins. They eked out a living from burned-out tobacco lots set in micaceous clays that pitched toward and reddened the Blackwater. The terrain was hilled and gullied. Open land was confined to small acreages of tobacco, corn, and hay. They were rimmed with cut over hardwoods and patches of Virginia pine, whose exposed roots clung desperately to the sterile embankments of the roads and washes. The whole area seemed to serve no greater purpose than to hold the earth together. The naïve painting by Harriet French Turner (Plate 26) brings it up in my mind. But there was lespedeza and quail were the beneficiaries of the protection offered their distant cousins, the chicken. Most farmers raised them for meat and eggs and those who did killed the aerial and ground predators that munched on them. All hawks bigger than a kestrel were loathed as “chicken” hawks and every fox and egg sucking varmint had a price on its head, either as bounty or for its hide. My earliest recollection of hunting birds is following Father and Franklin into a covey rise in early morning, with the sun quartering into us. The birds exploded off the roost, which fatally delayed their departure for several seconds, and a good part of them leveled and flew straight away off the sun. Both of them were snap shooters and neither was disposed to extend to the other such courtesies as confining his field of fire to his side of the rise or waiting for the other to shoot first. They took the rise within twenty yards. The barrage produced a hat full of feathers that filtered down through the morning sun. Thus exposed, the affliction incubated and then surfaced pleasantly to plague me for the rest of the life of my legs. During and after the war, the hunt moved to the Santee Basin of South Carolina. Before the age of steam, the Santee was within the Longleaf Pine ecosystem that measured to some ninety million acres and stretched from tidewater Virginia, where ship stores and timbers shared with tobacco to sustain the colonial enterprise, through the low countries of the southeast to east Texas. Longleaf is a magnificent tree. Its grass stage is prolonged, its chemistry highly resinous, and its life span may measure to five hundred years. It was valuable as a source of turpentine, pitch and close-grained heart wood that is resistant to rot and stronger by weight than steel in some applications. After decimating the magnificent eastern white pine forestation of New England west, we set about to reduce the Longleaf resource to practical extinction. What took its place were opportunistic slash and loblolly pines that volunteered in the cutover and open savannas of the southeast, and it is into this setting that father and Franklin ventured in search of quail. It would become and remain a near perfect world for them and such of those as therein sought to abbreviate their span of eighteen months for more than four decades. Securing a place to day hunt during the depression was a manageable undertaking that could be funded at modest cost, and certainly this was the case in Franklin County. But the Santee was a more expensive therapy, and Franklin found a way to make it affordable. He and father had reorganized and added equity capital to the Walker Machine and Foundry Corporation, which reoriented its business of foundering soil pipe and miscellaneous castings toward the manufacture of cast iron brake and driver shoes for the region’s steam railroads. Some of the men who ran these railroads came from backgrounds that included

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hunting, and Franklin created the opportunity for them and their lieutenants to hunt with him in the Santee and enter their names in the order book for brake shoes. Before the war, Franklin had met and hunted out of Kingstree, South Carolina, with Tom and Bobby Gamble. They, in turn, had introduced him to James Geddings, who was acclaimed in Fortune Magazine as a bootlegger of legendary dimensions in South Carolina but now operated a store and gas pump several miles from the Seaboard Coast Line crossing at Gourdin. Next to the store was the house place of James’s wife, Caroline, which stood vacant. The Gambles were put on the payroll to guide the hunts and James was engaged to lease the territory, lace the open woods with bicolor lespideza, keep dogs, provision the kitchen, and sometimes guide. Caroline’s house was made the clubhouse and John and Ida Jenkins were hired to prepare lunch and dinner for the hunters. The setup paled in comparison to the Edwardian scale of south Georgia plantation hunting but endured as an ever-changing convocation of unforgettable people commonly bound in trivial pursuit. The picture at Plate 27 was taken soon after the end of the war. Father is seen on the left with a cigarette jutting out from under a mustache cleverly calculated to match his ship- board persona as a worthless bum. We tried for years to get him rid of it and when he ﬁnally did and asked us whether we noticed anything different about him, our best guess was that he had bought a new tie. Next to him is Dr. Pepper (Bill) Davis. He came to Roanoke out of west Texas with little education, but he got up early and went to bed late and soon out-sold Coca Cola in the Roanoke market. One thing led to another and everything was proﬁtable. At one time, he took a turn at oil and gas. One of my contemporaries in the brokerage business asked Bill’s advice on a Texas drilling venture. After burdening Bill with the glowing details of the offering prospective, Bill gave him this answer: Son, if it’s as good as they say it is, the deal would never got out of Texas.

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Kingstree hunt Plate 27

Holding the other end of the string of quail is Carl Tabor, one of the senior officers of the Norfolk and Western. The thought amuses me what might be said in answer to the question, say that of a visiting Asian dignitary, what dangled from the string and why these men had gathered so proudly to pose and sport their dogs. Only if he were told that they were birds whose entrails were formulated into a powerful aphrodisiac of priceless value could the scene make any sense to him. In the middle of the picture, Franklin is seen holding the great dog Boopus, a diminutive setter bitch, that Franklin adored with all his heart and soul. She was quick and wide and literally surfed over the broom sage near the horizon line. She was belled and had the habit of lying down on point, which basically meant that you needed Man O’ War to hunt her and a metal detector to find her. To his left is Ab Boxley, whose father, W. W. Boxley, was a railroad contractor who succeeded in developing limestone and granite quarries along rights of way, first mined for ballast, and was really part of another hunt. Bobby Gamble stands next to him and returned from the Second Army after the war to run the liquor stores of Kingstree and the hunt. All liquor consumed at Caroline’s was purchased from Bobby or brother Tom. Franklin worked on Pinch Bottle, but the premium scotch was Thorns and the preferred menu was smoked ham hocks, boiled with field peas, collard greens, and corn bread. Bobby would carefully separate, set aside, and discard the streaks of lean meat from the collars of blubber, which he dearly loved, and would set up the meal with straight shots of Thorns. Father, who drank bourbon and ate fried quail legs as hors d’oeuvres, asked him why he drank it straight. Without hesitation, Bobby said he choked Brother Perk Plate 28

it down because he couldn’t stand the taste of it. Off season, he ran a poker game at his house, which was finally interrupted by the sheriff. He lost his liquor license, which was picked up by his nephew, Fred, and the operation continued without interruption. Bobby put us out and picked us up and was always where he said he would be when he said he would be there. We knew that hog fat and Thorns was a fool-proof preventative against lingering dementia, and Fred told us that he knew he was dead when he failed to open the store one morning. J. T. Hopkins is shown with the pointers. He backed into keeping and training dogs while operating Barne’s Drug Store at the corner of Salem and Jefferson. He never worked a dog that was more than a season or so shy of brilliance if less than fifteen years of age. On the far end of the group is father’s oldest son, my brother Perk (Plate 28). He left the University to join the United States Army Air Force and flew P-47s in the Italian campaign during the war. He returned, with Air and Soldier’s Medals, to finish law school, pass the bar and marry a Sweet Briar girl from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Sally Watson Anderson. He lost his life retraining for the Korean conflict in August of 1952 at age 29. He packed more fun into his meagre allotment than a dozen or more could rake up in the fullness of life. He was another in the nation’s heritage of citizen soldiers who made straight for the fray. What cause so grave now could summons a clarion’s call to arms? Sadly, the hunt came to an end several decades ago, within a decade following father’s death in 1979.

Tarpin fishiing Plate 29

What caused the southeastern wild bird population to decline precipitously since the eighties to a small fraction of what it once was may offer an explanation of why it may have grown to such levels before the

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decline. Predation, food, and habitat are the known limiting factors that control populations and aerial predation is the primary cause of mortality in existing populations. Elimination of predators by farmers and hunters before the war was superseded by the introduction of DDT during and after the war to control the mosquito and associated diseases. This pesticide is linked to a precipitate decline in hawks that include quail in their diets. These predators soon made their way onto the list of endangered species where they remain. But quail enjoyed an unprecedented period of protection for several decades after the product was banned in 1972. Land as a capital asset for the production of timber became almost worthless throughout the southeast after the Longleaf ecosystem was ravaged. In the Santee, the slash and loblolly intrusion into the cut over and abandoned open land was random and sparse. Growth rates to saw timber, while much higher than long leaf, were slow and it was not within the life expectancy of most land-owners to harvest a mature crop. There was, therefore, no economic incentive to increase density by hand planting. It was in these extensive, lightly timbered areas that James Geddings planted bicolor lespedeza and natives, both black and white, clung to the ritual of burning them at the end of winter, thus producing new growth and insect life vital to the summer diet of quail. It was a perfect world. Before the war, it was discovered that white paper and news-print could be pulped from young pine under existing technology and that slash and loblolly could be genetically altered or selected to produce saw timber in less than half a century. If densely planted and patterned, such plantations could be twice thinned and pulped for paper as it matured to saw timber. The subsidization of pine plantation and development of

L.Franklin Moore and Perk Hazlegrove Venice 1937 Plate 30

machinery required to harvest it with minimum labor brought the world of quail to an end. But it restored the value of unimproved land as a capital asset throughout the southeast and in Cumberland and Amelia counties as well. Those who recognized this and could afford to be patient were rewarded. There was more to it than trout and quail. There were duck and geese on the Eastern Shore and Mattamuskeet, sora rail in the marshes of the Chickahominy, sail and tarpon off south Florida (Plate 29), brook trout in the lakes of the Laurentides. There were trips that returned him to the Meuse Argonne (Plate 30) to England and the Continent (Plate 31), Russia, the foot of Popocatepetl, the Chicago and New York World’s Fair, the Trust Territories of the south Paciﬁc with Admiral Boscoe Wright, and sojourns at Forkland. He played left-handed golf and recreational poker with friends seen at Plate 30. The Little Scorpions, as they called themselves, cut the pot to throw an annual party to include their wives (Plate 32) and these affairs evolved into a dinner dance society that continues on. (Plate 33) For years, father was thought to have chaired a committee responsible for the selection of members but no one seemed to know who served on the committee or when it met. Father joined the congregation of St John’s Episcopal Church when he ﬁrst came to Roanoke before the war. He returned, comfortably to rejoin a society that would set the style and direction of the leadership of the community for years to come. Both of his senior law partners attended St. John’s and both left the practice in due course. Abram Penn Staples entered politics as a member of the General Assembly and was later elected Attorney General and Governor of the Commonwealth. Charles Francis Cocke, whose people Mother, Mary and Franklin Moore, Father Plate 31

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founded Hollins College and provided the early leadership of the City of Roanoke, he became increasingly involved with J. B. Fishburn’s bank and left after the war to become president of The First National Exchange Bank of Roanoke. He served as the Chancellor of the diocese. He matched parish lines with county boundaries and joined father in dwelling on the shrines of Anglicanism. Abram Staple’s daughter, Jean Showalter, became the second of women to be elected to the vestry and one of the important historiographers of St. John’s. She catalogued and indexed its many ﬁxed and portable memorials. Father was formidable. He was at ease with the humanities and the basic sciences of the day. He was an outstanding student of the law. And he was a decorated citizen soldier whose love of country was beyond question. He was all that William Allen ever hoped to be. While inﬂuential, he was never attracted to politics or public service, other than as an active advocate of free public education. I never sensed that he had a vision for the Commonwealth or the nation, much less the patience and indirection to pursue it. He Left: Bob Churchill, Pete Jamison, Franklin Moore, Lev Powell; right: Clem Johnston, Jim Izard, Joe Walton, Perk Hazlegrove (Hugh Hagan, and June Fishburn, standing) Plate 32

was comfortable with the autocracy of Harry Byrd and deeply regretted having once voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. He was intolerant of mediocrity, dismissive of dishonesty and false appearance, and bluntly judgmental of those whom he regarded as deceptive or simply did not like. He could not have graduated from Hampden Sydney without meeting its requirements in the classics and acquitting himself as a student of the Bible. He excelled as an orator and employed this skill to rivet the patriarchs of Genesis in the minds of succeeding generations of high school students who attended his classes at St. John’s. He held spell- bound at Eastertide succeeding congregations at St. John’s and Second Presbyterian, and other groups and denominations of the area with his dynamic reenactment of the trial of Jesus from a legal prospective. The popularity of these orations was such that some were recorded and privately published in text by friends. One of his high school students, Thomas C. Fisher, praised father as chairman of the Roanoke City School Board during the depression and teacher of the Bible during and after the war. He taught the Bible as history. With imagination and devotion, he brought to realism and to life

Annie Rogers, Mother, Evelyn Shackelford (James), Frank Rogers, Father. Taken the evening of Frank and Annie Rogers 50th wedding anniversary at The Homestead. Hot Springs, Vriginia.

the vague and legendary people of the Bible. His favorite Old Testament person was Jacob . . . But the greatest moment for us all was his story of the trial of Jesus from a legal standpoint. *** Mr. Hazlegrove has served his church, his community and his nation, all with equal distinction. In our modern age, he is an example of Christian discipleship at its ﬁnest.70 His image as a Christian disciple is interesting. And when his alma mater, Hampden Sydney, conferred a doctor of laws degree on him in 1973, he was touted as a boy taken from the country who exploited the perception that he remained a country boy by luring adversaries into the belief that they were advantaged from dealing with a simple rustic, only to discover too late that they had stepped into the steel trap of his mind.

Mother, Mary Moore and Evelyn Shackleford

Elizabeth Parrot Carroll and Mother.

I knew no such man as this as my father. His fascination with Jacob had less to do with bringing him to life as one of the vague and legendary patriarchs of the Old Testament than to celebrate him as prom-

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Left: W.P (Perk)Hazlegrove, Margaret Izard, Bob Nelson, Joe Walton, Peg Nelson, Lev Powell, Natalie Small, Franklin Moore, (back center) Jennie Hazlegrove, Clem Johnston

Right: Katie Fishburn, Jim Izard,Mary Moore, Hugh Hagan, Nancy Walton, Sydney Small, Barbara Hagan, June Fishburn, Ludie Johnston. Plate 33

Right: Jennie Hazlegrove, Franklin Moore, Natalie Small, Lev Powell, Barbara Hagan, Joe Walton, Bob Nelson, Margaret Izard, Perk Hazlegrove Plate 33

Left: Clem Johnston, Katie Fishburn, Jim Izard, Mary Moore, Hugh Hagan, Nancy Walton, Sydney Small, Barbara Hagan, June Fishburn, Ludie Johnston

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;73 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

inently included in an original self-portrait of a family of unmitigated crooks who had come to believe that God had covenanted to prosper them throughout all generations. That the ancient Jews said it of themselves that he should be called Israel who, after exchanging a mess of porridge for the birthright of his hungry older twin, the rough and hairy Esau, conspired with his mother Rebecca to steal from the lips of his aging, sightless father, Isaac, the blessing promised Esau, by tricking Isaac with lies and lamb’s wool, found no place of repose in father’s code of honor. Jacob, uncle Laban, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel strove one with another to expose the weakness of their close kin by outwitting them with deceits. The disfavored Esau was dismissed because he married outside the family and fathered a line of Idumean Jews, prominently including the Herod family, who were loathed equally with those from Samaria. As time passed, the Israelites, descendants of Shem, son of Noah, found precious few fellow Semites with whom they could abide in their quest for separation and purity. Father was no less discerning among the Jews than the Jews were among themselves. While there were hardly more of them in Cumberland county than blacks in the Book of Genesis, he dealt with them under the presumption, perhaps conclusive, that they were as they had once said of themselves. I sometimes wonder whether the two of us thought locks were invented to keep Jews alone from stealing but never whether what came their way by artifice forever has been wrested from them by force. Indeed, I can name no family of man that has contributed more to our evolution as human beings but been prospered less throughout all generations. Jehovah welched on the deal. The so-called trial of Jesus long has been a subject of interest to students of Mosaic and Roman law. But for several decades following World War II, the trial resurfaced as a compelling subject for intense analysis by Christian members of the American bench and bar as well as those who taught in the law schools of the nation. Father was among some number of lawyers in the area who were involved from time to time in the reprise, and William T. Muse, Dean of the T. C. Williams School of Law, University of Richmond, lent added weight to the discourse in a scholarly address to the annual Pastors Council held at the University in 1956. Dean Muse’s dissertation followed a typical pattern. He raised and considered errors committed under Hebrew and Roman law as if an appeal had been perfected to a court of higher authority to review the Gospels as a record of the proceedings before the Sanhedrin and Pilate below. Authentication of the Gospels as a narrative history or record of the events culminating in the crucifixion led Muse to note a concession made among most scholars: There is not a line of authentic history71 in the literature of the world, sacred or secular, dealing originally or authoritatively with the facts and circumstances of the trial and crucifixion of Christ, except the Gospels. Muse followed a familiar path in proof of the truth of the factual content of the Gospels by offering that they were written independently at different times by disciples and others who were with Jesus or by others who had learned and recorded what such witnesses had seen and heard. Thus, synopsis principally serves to corroborate and verify the narrative of the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

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Father’s approach diverged somewhat from that of Dean Muse. Father made clear the fact that the Great Sanhedrin functioned as the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the Hebrew theocracy. He reverenced the Sanhedrin as mankind’s greatest accomplishment in the meticulous protection of the rights of the accused in the arrest, indictment and trial of capitol cases over which it reserved exclusive jurisdiction, but pointed out that its high priesthood now served as political appointees of Rome and had become corrupt. Caiaphas and his father-in-law, Annas, both Sadducees, were personalized into more familiar roles as money changers and purveyors of sacrifices who hated Jesus both because he had exposed their subversion of the rituals of the temple to their several profitable enterprises and because Jesus plainly had outwitted them. Muse, on the other hand, elevated the arrest and enforced confrontations with the high priests to the level of an hastily convened trial of Jesus before the partially assembled Sanhedrin setting as a court of justice, thus hypothesizing a multitude of errors for scholarly review on appeal. Notwithstanding the sincerity with which the regularity of the trial of Jesus was addressed or the scholarship and prominence of those who chose to revisit it, the underlying drift of these essays was the reproach, indeed, republication of the ancient indictment of the Jews for killing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It seems never to have concerned any of them that if Jesus had been acquitted, there would have been no tale to tell, and that if we pay close attention to the tale, no trial took place. Jewish rabbinical reaction to Muse’s address was immediate and blunt. Rabbi Jacob Milgrom gained publication in the Richmond Times Dispatch of a rebuttal in which he rebuked Muse for postulating that the Great Sanhedrin had sentenced Jesus to death on trumped-up charges when he was fully informed that Rome had revoked the power of the Sanhedrin to sentence death on conviction and surely understood from the Gospels that crucifixion was a Roman punishment ordered by Pontius Pilate, Roman Procurator of Judea, and executed by Roman soldiers: Dr. Muse has added to an untruth, unequalled in all recorded history by the hatred, prejudice and persecution it has caused. Father had no way of knowing that the wild bird populations in the Southeast would begin to dwindle within a decade of his death, any more than he could sense that the mainline denominations of the Christian faith in America, Anglicans and Calvinists, had peaked and would begin to shrink away ere he was done smiting the patriarchs and high priests with staves riven from the honor codes of the Antebellum South. Father was not obviously devout and never sought to instruct me, the most compliant of his children, on matters of a religious nature or reveal the dimensions of his beliefs. Clearly, he did not attribute his survival of the war or its outcome to divine oversight or intervention, and I rather suspect that his faith closely matched that of his first cousin, Ann Henderson Perkins Maury, daughter of uncle George Perkins of Charlottesville. Her daughter Lydia Lowndes Maury Skeels said this of her: Both our parents were religious, having a strong belief in God, but their concepts of deity were very different, I think. Mamma’s was that of a universal conscience and will, whose principles

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had been expressed in the life and teachings of Jesus. She was a faithful attendant at church- - for inspiration from those principles presented in the sermons, Bible readings, prayers and hymns. But church rituals were not particularly significant in her estimation and though we were all baptized, Jesse and Liz didn’t want to be confirmed and so- -as she hadn’t pressed the point- -never were. And when reciting the creed in church, Mama omitted statements she didn’t believe in- -and kept her conscience free of man-made convictions about unimportant details of ancient historical thought, she said. She took communion seldom, and in remembrance that Jesus had died for love of God and mankind, not as his body and blood; which to her was most unesthetic- -even revolting- -idea she couldn’t stomach. The symbols were of shared nourishment for spiritual grace in her faith, I believe, and not to have their meaning lost by constant repetitious indulgence. Ann’s discrete selection of those articles of faith that comfortably she could accept and the decision of most of her children not to confirm or renew their belief in any of them may be typical among the families of the six children of William Allen and Anne Jane Perkins. Certainly, it is among mine. It is doubtful that any of my grandchildren will become communicant at any church. But for the fact that at age sixty I rejoined the choir at St John’s after retiring as a soprano in 1945 and was encouraged by some to believe that my utterances seemed to sound a lot like singing, and for the glitter of Anglican ornamentation, the brightness of its hymnody, the beauty of its liturgy, the comfort of the Victorian ambience of St. John’s, a shrine where friends and the memory of loved ones lost abound, and a golf game that declined in obedience to its own peculiar mortality table, I would be seen only at funerals. Unlike Mother, Father did not slip into the twilight of old age but died suddenly at night of nothing serious, perhaps with the thought of having me take him to the office the following morning where he demanded to be briefed on everything that was going on, provided it could be compressed into a one-minute outline of the high points. He mellowed but remained alert, unabridged, indiscreetly observant, and critical of change. On the way up on the elevator, the secretaries would ask him how he was feeling, to which he invariably replied: Very poorly, thank God He engaged Lillian Mitchell, a registered nurse, to help with Mother but borrowed her to chauffeur him about the town and country in a hideous lime green Cadillac that went nicely with his mustache. One or another of his friends, most frequently Bob Thomas, would accompany them on trips to see some new piece of the earth. On one occasion during the Age of Aquarius, as they were returning home through South Roanoke, a pedestrian came into father’s view. He blurted out with passionate conviction that she was the ugliest goddamned red headed woman he’d ever laid eyes on. Bob Thomas rejoined:

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Perk, she’s your grandson.

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Bossom Buddies. From left: Me, Fred Hamlin,Dick Cocke, John Shugg, Jack Gwaltney

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Part III

A Twentieth-Century Retrospective Childhood

I was born September 2, 1929, and brought home to a Dutch Colonial built in 1928 at 314 Wycliffe Avenue, South Roanoke. This remained our home until Mother died, hopelessly demented, following a slow decline that began some years before Father died July 2, 1979. She was lovely and digniﬁed to the last. Ignoring my arrival, perhaps despising my intrusion, were my older brothers, William Perkins Jr., born March 1, 1923, and Joseph Winston II, born April 25, 1925. They were a handful and Mother and I were thankful for the arrival of Aunt Fannie (Plate 34). She was a dark black woman, redolent of fat back and salad greens, who made clucking sounds of disapproval or resignation as she shufﬂed about in obedience to Mother’s recollection of my imperative: “Nook, Nannie, Nook.” Later there was Clay Palmer, who tended the furnace and helped in the yard. He was never without a carefully cut plug of Brown Mule tucked in his cheek. His teeth were stained and worn and the edges of his broad, contented smile glistened with the leakage of ambeer. As an only child, Father came to believe he could alter the outcomes of his older sons by administering swift corporeal punishment for sundry errors, a stressful exercise that failed, I was a ready source of detail concerning all matters to which I was privy. I was a double agent who emerged from the warmth of moth-

Aunt Fannie and me. Plate 34

er’s bed gladly to serve as lookout for such enterprise as damming the basement garage to impound an incredible head of water intended for release on innocent villagers huddled in the valley below. When the plot was uncovered, I slithered out of the conspiracy to provide witness to their transgressions. When I was about seven, I was taken to visit Perk at Camp Powhatan. He was an ascending scout in St. John’s Troop 17, on his way to Eagle. The swimming hole at camp was formed by damming up a spring-fed mountain stream and brother Perk hinted at the fate of spies by dunking me in its icy waters. The surviving vestige of earthly form was a skinny, quivering cage over which stretched a thin parchment devoid of subcutaneous fat, nourished by a capillary system that had nothing to offer blackened lips and cyan cheeks that contained so much as a whiff of oxygen. Becoming a scout thereafter was never considered. But a career change was indicated. Espionage was too risky. I joined St. John’s all-male choir and remained a second soprano for upwards of eight years. In 1937, each of us was given a silver, latin cross that depended on a silk ribbon. The ribbon annually was changed to another primary color to index lengthening tenure. Each month, we each received a small manilla envelope containing coin. We were paid ﬁve cents for rehearsals, ten cents for Sundays, and ﬁfteen cents for Christmas and Easter.

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Saint John’s choir

Donald McKibben was the choir master. In those days, the Viennese Boy’s Choir expressed the ideal and was much talked about by my parents and their friends. Master McKibben aspired to go there. But the indigenous resource was raw and obviously transient. There was no easy way to impose the discipline and structure required to fashion a Viennese choral instrument out of the scruff of little animals. We took hikes, played basketball in the coal-coated basement gym, blew spit balls through paper ﬂutes or launched them across the chancel from slingshots made from paper clips and rubber bands, communicated in sign language, parked gum on the underside of choir stalls, tilted from time to time to critical angles, and frequently were immobilized from infectious laughter. I have no recollection of receiving instruction in voice mechanics or musical notation. Hymn tunes and anthems were simply absorbed at differential rates. The adult men were tolerant, including basso John Williamson, whose whispered triple pianissimo alone was sufﬁcient to turn alee the Spanish Armada. And there were older women who fastened our starched collars, lest we stain them with moistened grime, tied our ample bows, straightened our cottas, tried valiantly to marshall tussets of unruly hair, and saw to it that steaming plates of scrambled eggs with biscuits and bacon presaged an Easter sunrise that pierced the timeless Sorrell window again to validate the Resurrection. Portrait of Dadeen Virginia Lee Franklin Stouffer. Plate 35

Years later, I asked one of the Armistead sisters, Mary Bland or Ann, each a part of the iconography of St. John’s, when it was decreed that the all-male format should give way to mixed voices, for I had left and remained away for over a decade. She said: “Honey, you don’t understand. The choir was always mixed before you came along, but the women got to fighting over the solo spots and McKibben cast them out.” When the Devil was thrown out of heaven, he landed softly in the choir loft and quietly processed with arduous voices claiming them as his very own. Throughout the Episcopacy the eviscerated bodies of choir directors and organists stagger off without a mark left on their bodies. I never doubted it in myself or others with whom I later sang in chorus that each of us was moved to do so out of vanity and in search of praise and separation. But there were those occasions when I joined hundreds of voices, tightly locked in the ecstasy of tertial harmony in the performance of some major work with the Symphony, that we briefly glimpsed our humanity before retreating into the meanness of our little lives. Oddly, I wondered whether the feet of our brilliant young Scottish conductor, David Stewart Wiley, were cloven. During the war, I knitted Afghan squares for Britain, made model war planes from white pine blanks for use in training pilots and artillery observers to identify friendly and enemy aircraft, collected bosom buddies at Crystal Spring school and hitched myself to a wheel plow that I pulled and Father pushed to furrow for planting a Victory Garden on the shale-laced slope of our adjoining vacant lot. Late one afternoon in August, I picked a ripened Mortgage Lifter from its vine, dusted it off and ate it hot, right on the spot. Later, after Father had finished his topped off mint julep and let me finish the sugary dregs, we picked Golden Bantam, shucked it in the row, and straightway put it in the pot to boil for less than a minute. The taste of these has not been since experienced and never will. Living next door on Wycliffe were my close maternal cousins, the Bears. Joe Bear owned and successful-

Daddah. Webster Gregory Stouffer. Plate 36

ly operated the Double Envelope Company and married Jean McClure Franklin, a daughter of Milton Clay Franklin, mother’s maternal uncle and brother to twin sisters--Virginia Lee, my grandmother, and

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Emma, who married Clarence Beckley. Jean died quite young, leaving two sons to raise, Joe and Clay, whose ages matched with those of my brothers Perk and Joe. Clay Franklin came indirectly to Roanoke out of Bedford County where his father, John T. Franklin, was involved in some unknown aspect of the shoe business. Clay made a go of it selling general insurance but branched into building apartments and homes. He owned the Franklin Apartments at the corner of Jefferson and Mountain Avenue and the Jefferson Apartments across the street. He is credited with building the first eight houses on Henry Street around the turn of the century, two of which were home to my grandmother (Plate 35) and her sister. Dadeen’s was a Victorian structure in the Queen Anne style. Plate 38. It boasted a turret and patterned slate roof and was fitted with gas lights. It adjoined lots at the corner of Highland owned by the Fishburn sisters, Evelyn and Louise, which they gave to the Diocese for construction of Evans House. Uncle Wilbur (Plate 37) , lived there with his mother during a long bachelorhood. He rose from police court reporter to become editor of the Fishburn newspapers; kept a snub-nose silver revolver in his desk drawer to protect against those not set free by truth; married Anne Cannon, daughter of Cabarras County textile magnate, Joseph F. Cannon, he for the first and she for the sixth time,72 and announced the

imminence of every frequent visit with Mother by whistling scraps of tunes no one had ever heard. The home was subsequently acquired by the Diocese and served as its library until scheduled to be razed in the expansion of Evans House. But the neighborhood rose up against. It was moved at great expense to the corner of Albemarle, where it now rests uncomfortably on uneven ground. Mother sometimes left me with Dadeen for the day. I remember that the house seemed always speckled in ﬂy ash and that Mrs. W. P. Huff sometimes visited, leaving her uniformed black chauffeur to await her

Uncle Wilbur Stouffer dressed in gaucho costume. Plate 37

departure in a gleaming Cadillac of the same color. My single recollection of my grandfather, Daddah (Plate 36), is watching him hatchet the head off a chicken. He came from a host of Pennsylvania Dutch who collected around Hagerstown and Gettysburg. During the war, Mother politely referred to them as Swiss-German and once showed me a genealogy that fared no better with Father against the Perkinses than one presented to him by a descendant of Pleasant Hazlegrove from Bolivar, Tennessee. Daddah was visionary, sold pianos and worked at Clarence Beckley’s auto repair garage. He was unable to attend mother’s wedding, I think because of liquor. His addiction afflicted all of his children in varying degrees. He died an inmate of Southwestern State Hospital at Staunton. I count foremost among my blessings a disposition to get slightly drunk just once a day and the discipline ever to see it done by early evening. Joe Bear established a privet hedge on the side lot line of our vacant lot that grew over time to wall off his side porch. It was further secluded by green canvas awnings that extended to the hedge. There in cool shadow late Sunday summer mornings Joe greeted friends of several persuasions who chose dusk over outer darkness and blinding light. By the time Father and I returned from St. John’s, the rise and fall of laughter confirmed that near noon drinking had brought them into perfect accord on the issues of the day. Some had gathered early. Others dropped by after church. All had somehow separated briefly from their

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Henry Street home Plate 38

wives. Why such unbounded joy in this shaded grove when the widowed rector, Alfred Berkley, could not help but close every sermon with convulsive sobs? How strange that these men sheltered choir boys from bad habits dearly loved until we like them were left with much to do and little time to see it done. The Franklins entered and exited the Wycliffe stage throughout my childhood. Mother’s niece, Jane Meyers, lived with us for several years while her mother Marion was in residence at the Catawba Tuberculosis Sanitorium and her father, Dr. Walter Meyers, worked off a debt to the Commonwealth that involved untaxed liquor. Jane was a lovely short-term older sister. Clay Franklin’s other daughter, Elizabeth Ellen (Siddie), married Charles Talbott Young, a proper gentleman from a fine Richmond family whose law practice was in taxes and estates. Their children Talbott and Elizabeth (Chip) were slightly older and sometimes came from Richmond to visit the Bears. On one such occasion, Clay Franklin arrived curb-side in his magnificent Packard automobile and, with top down, gathered us into its opulence. A thermometer encased in a lens rimmed in nickel was fitted to the radiator cap to enable the operator to maintain surveillance of engine temperature. A surfeit of chromed accessories bore further witness to the owner’s ascent to wealth and prominence. The three-digit license plate duplicated his prestigious street address, 922 Orchard Hill. We motored through the neighborhood and I waved with royal reserve to the numerous McGeorges and lesser folk who lined our way, my filthy unshod feet resting comfortably on carpeting beneath. Young Clay Bear was charismatic and excelled in competitive athletics. He was quarterback of the

Joseph Winston Hazlegrove Plate 39

Jefferson High School Magicians, a semi-pro baseball player, and ﬁne golfer. He furthered the success of the Double Envelope Company and matched up with brother Perk on many levels. His older brother Joe Bear was cut from different cloth and became an indifferent doctor. He eventually found his practice limited to the employees of the family business, where he joined the Sublett shareholders to remove Clay as president and sell the business. Clay’s lifestyle, which easily peaked above that of my great uncle, Clay Franklin, was lost to liquor. My brother Joe (Plate 39) had a rough time of it. It was his lot to be imprinted with his mother’s sweetness but none of his father’s nature to dominate. He never seriously engaged in sports, nor did scholarship awaken from literacy. He left Hampden-Sydney soon after arrival. Father could never understand him. He enlisted in the navy. Plate 40 shows him with brother Perk, taken in Italy after the victory in 1945. He went west to study photography in California, and there met Joann Loventhal, a graduate of the University of Arizona (Plate 41&41a). They were married in 1951 in an Episcopal church near Sherman Oaks, where her parents, Roscoe and Birdie Loventhal, raised her in a small but beautifully landscaped home on a hill Soon after the last of three children were born, William Perkins II, Richard Byron, and Jennie Lee, Joe was afﬂicted with Multiple Sclerosis, which steadily progressed to his death in 1995 at age sixty. I have no doubt that Joann’s loving care of him added a decade to his life. Her involvement at St. John’s, her care of my mother in her senility and her aging parents, who came to Roanoke to be with her, earned her recognition among friends and family as Saint Joann. Mother’s management style was quite different from Father’s. I convened the young men’s auxiliary of the

Perk and Joe Plate 40

Little Scorpions in our basement, where poker was played and cigarettes smoked. She suddenly appeared

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to provide ash trays and silently withdrew, as if London trained to serve royalty. And she remained composed when a police ofﬁcer appeared at her door with me in tow to observe that my driving skills were unremarkable, even for a child of thirteen. My colleagues in the choir exited croaking into adolescence and I, suspended in perpetual pre-pubescence, took early retirement. After a spate of junior high school, I was offered to Woodberry Forest School in the summer of 1945 with modest expectations built upon an impeccable record of academic delinquencies.

Woodberry

J. Carter Walker was in the twilight of his career as headmaster of Woodberry when he agreed with Father to have me as a fall student if I could demonstrate that summer that the venture would not be a waste of time and money. I am sure that father tendered me at the suggestion of his law partner, George Scott Shackelford, himself a student from Orange County whose ancestors included Thomas Jefferson. It is probable that George Scott spoke with Carter Walker concerning my father, that he might ﬁnd common background and purpose in taking me on. Woodberry Forest, William Madison’s home by Jefferson, at its outset and in 1945, was no more than what Captain Robert Springﬁeld Walker and William Allen Perkins had sought to achieve among their children and those of neighbors during Reconstruction

Joe’s wedding day in California 1951. Plate 41

through family and private tutoring. Literacy, honor, and a sense of noble purpose was the goal. The side benefit was preparation for college for sons who might there exploit whatever they might imagine for themselves. There was less emphasis on grades than functional literacy, composure, and social identification. But honor was another subject. A passing grade was never less than a perfect score. Less than honest was slightly crooked. Woodberry remains for me a small island to which I must betimes repair to regain the comfort of knowing that honor still has a home from which to venture and return. I survived the summer and came to Woodberry in September. Jack Gwaltney, my childhood friend from Roanoke, came also, and we found friends for life, mostly with the middle tier, beneath the flash and ease of the varsity players who reigned in leadership and above the shy, talented, pitiful souls who sought to meld with the herd but were mercilessly horned away from its flanks. I credit the Walkers and their teachers with my salvation. Their expectations were well defined and the resulting conventions easily understood and evenly applied. Within this framework, we were left free to sort ourselves out. No one among the teachers or the taught escaped caricature. A finger grew from every forehead. I was exposed to the composite ideology of these men, both here and at the law school of the University. It became and long remained an elective resource to which my thinking and behavior was referenced. Carter Walker has been eulogized by many. My paean is an account of him as a first-year student. I then roomed with Nick Wilson in A dorm of the Walker Building, built in 1899. Our room was at the end of a long hallway that was entered left through swinging doors from the main lobby, which was located on the second level and entered through a pedimented portico at the head a staircase that rose from the

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Joann at our wedding reception. Plate 41a

traffic circle below. Right of the lobby were the administrative offices, the infirmary, and, I believe, a suite of rooms that Mr. Walker continued to occupy following the death of his wife in 1947. B and C dorms were located on the third and fourth levels above. The Walker Building housed a large part of the student body and was a tinder box. I was awakened from a deep sleep by the raucous sound of smoke alarms and had wandered partly down the smoky hallway with others to find its source when Carter Walker, clad in a vertical-striped bath robe, pijamas, and slippers, burst through the swinging doors, tripped on the brass stripping that bordered the waxed and polished tan linoleum runner and skidded on his belly to rest beneath our feet. He lay there for a moment, an old man with thinning hair in steel-rimmed glasses bereft of peripheral vision and practically blind. He was terrified, not for his own well-being but for that of the children within his charge. When he hurled himself into what could have been an inferno about which he could do nothing, he confirmed himself as a man of great courage entitled to enduring admiration and respect. Luckily, a waste basket fire in the room of a senior student was all it was. In those days, chapel attendance was mandatory, and I became a member of its choir. I lingered in treble Model airplane Plate 42

registration and was joined by Charlie Menefee, my roommate and closest friend for life, as well as Frank Maloney, a year behind us. Frank would become a fine tennis player and prominent Richmond attorney, but offered no hint of these dimensions in 1946. He was hard of hearing and this affliction was manifest in his manner of speech, which was tied and unfamiliar. His parents addressed this deficit by endowing him with a golden trumpet, that he might intone and hear the sounds of music. He blasted blaring pitches that did not relate to one another. We wished that he did not own the trumpet and, fervently, that he would not try to play it. Our masters had more than one thing to do. Vernon Purdue-Davis, a delicate man, tried to teach us Latin. On the side, he was master of the chapel choir and was exposed to me both as a laboring student and a voice edging on transition. Prior to the war, Nylon had been invented. Its commercial applications grew rapidly to include men’s shirting. It was easy to wash and relatively free of wrinkles when hung to dry. Its principal deficiencies were that it was translucent and neither breathed nor absorbed moisture. Vernon owned such a garment. It had been sold to him as a white dress shirt. The dress code was coat and tie for boys and masters, but nothing was said concerning under-shirting; Vernon chose to go without. During rehearsals for the Christmas program, Vernon shed his coat, but never the tie, the better to conduct the ensemble in a vain attempt to coax an agreeable sound out of us. As his arms flailed about him, I became obsessed with the steady condensation of moisture emanating from tufted armpits that gathered, beaded and ran within the encapsulation in various tributaries southward to the belt line. I shrugged off the notion that enduring childhood was tragic. Christmas was upon us. Frank Maloney was with us, trumpet gratefully cased. Virginia Snead, secretary to the headmaster, brooded over us in her second calling as choir mother. We were a darling clutch of lads, worthy of great expectation. The first piece was Angels from the Realms of Glory to Regent Square, ambitiously selected to showcase our

Thistledown Plate 43

talent for a cappella renderings. Vernon conﬁdently launched into an unrehearsed improvisation on the hymn tune, toward the end of which Frank

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Pole vaulting at Woodberry Plate 44

Maloney pierced the festive ambience, shouting “sleperds o’re the ﬁelds. . . .” His decision to commence somewhat ahead of schedule with the second verse at a pitch not recognized in Western music froze us like deer in the headlights. The intro was repeated and then again until Vernon, now distraught, exhorted us in a thin, plaintiff whine to “sing goddammit,” which caused us hesitantly to venture in, singly and in pairs, as if responding to an invitation to bathe from the shower maids of Auswitzch. We returned eventually, with heads bowed, to the vesting room, where mother Snead wept among the surplus vestments. I withdrew from the choir to await further developments. I soon managed to understand that my progress as a student was to be measured by my success at writing answers to written questions and that I might prosper if I could familiarize myself with patterns of expectation that might crop up in the questions. This may be what is called “learning to study.” After struggling with Latin, Spanish and French came easy. I came away with straight As at the University, quite capable of reading newspapers but never able to converse in either language because it could not be objectively tested. I had learned to study but not the languages. Pardone suh! d’you speak English?

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I lacked the imagination for creativity and was craft bound to the designs of others. My model airplanes, one with a six-foot wing span and powered by an Ohlsson engine, were a crowning achievement (Plate 42). Half my class crossed the Rivana to retrieve the wreckage when the timer stuck, and the plane circled to a dot in the sky on a full tank of fuel before drifting west and settling in the woods. I apprenticed under Colonel Rogers to convert an 8mm. German Mauser to a sporting rifle. He was a master of this craft and his conversions, using highly figured caucasian walnut, were exemplary. I was proud of my work and was grateful to learn inletting, checkering, bluing, shaping, and design from a man to whom few of us could easily relate. But the sailboat that Jack Gwaltney, Dick Cocke, and I built was another matter (Plate 43). It intended to conform to the specifications of a New England class boat, a Barnegat Bay Sneak Box. But I got the plans from Popular Mechanics and was well along into construction when it dawned on us that we were building a shallow draft duck blind, one that could be poled or sailed down-wind into the marsh. Design improvisations left us still with a boat that would not point but blew about like thistledown wheresoever the wind listeth. The first sure sign of an awakening intelligence could be seen in my decision to abandon the agony of running the half mile in spring track under the exhortation of Leonard Dick to “keep those legs pumping” through the finish line. With encouragement from George Brassfield, I picked up a wrapped bamboo pole and began to study the quickly accomplished routine of running less than an hundred feet and swinging myself into, under, or over the bar to land in a sawdust pile beyond (Plate 44). Actually, I got pretty good at it and felt less embarrassed serving as head cheerleader with a “W” on my sweater. I gathered traction toward the end and graduated with 53 boys on the occasion of the retirement of Carter Walker and two of his brothers, Joe and John, each with a half century or more of faithful service fashioning children of the South into young men who would soon find an incredible world turning in their finger tips.

The University

Some of us went to Charlottesville. I have no recollection of any act on my part to become a student at the University. Other than deciding with friends that we wished to go there, an election duly noted in Woodberry’s 1948 yearbook the Fir Tree, my mind is blank. If it were more complicated than someone on staff sending a transcript and request for admission on recommendation, I think I would remember. I doubt that my experience in 1948 was any different from that of boys who were fed into the Ivy League from Eastern preparatory schools. The war had not ended the Great Depression. Harvard and the rest remained dependent on Boston Brahmins and the Eastern Establishment to underwrite both the cost of operating the Ivy League and the prep school network that fed it with their children, many of whom, such as I, were dependent on the patronage of fathers to put us through. A meritocratic admissions policy at these preparatory schools or the University was not an option. In the approximate words of Louis Auchincloss, the great unpublished glory of these feeder schools was to turn out second-rate students from the entering rank below. Why not? The freedom to associate and form societies embraces the right to perpetuate them through the process of selection. Thus, the Cumberland Light Dragoons. Thus,

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Harvard. That the Dragoons lost relevance as a weapon of war and collection of gentlemen on horses and Harvard as a seminary simply measures the ebb and flow of societies. At Woodberry, tobacco, textiles, and furniture sustained the process of finishing out the children and grandchildren of a mix of landed but mostly self-made men. In 1948, older men of my generation, including my brother Perk, had returned from the war, lightened with the euphoria of survival and hellbent to live lives deferred by service and forever lost to many another. Those of them who had not wed mixed with those of us who funneled in from private schools across the nation and the public schools of Virginia. It was a time like no other. The fraternities collected these returning citizen soldiers into societies seriously dedicated to having fun. They thrived autonomously within an enclave of the academic village, through which passage was made to the women’s colleges north and west. On arrival, I took advanced standing tests that essentially eliminated the courses required of me as an entering student and placed me in my second year of the curriculum. I exercised the option to treat my first year in the law school as my fourth year in the college and passed the bar after my second year of law. I lettered in sports ( 12.5’ vault on bamboo), made the editorial staff of the Law Review, the Raven Society, and ODK, which took in only several other men from the college in the spring tap of 1951. Whereas Father was more at ease with scholarship, I was elected president of the Inter-Fraternity Council and marched with Eli Banana to the beat of its drum. This, then, was our heritage in my time: A sense of honor, the easy style of cavaliers, ladies kept secure and mysterious in nearby cloisters, and amateur athletics adjunctive to learning. It seemed natural that Rufus Barkley, a classmate from Episcopal High School, was quarterback of the football team and that my vaulting coach, Captain Norton Pritchard, a biology teacher, served extra-curricula as the University’s athletic director. Our culture was the creation of preceding generations seen in shadows on the Lawn, supercharged with returning patriots, not the conceit of pedagogues. In Corks and Curls, who could circle Carl Smith from Wise in a 1951 photo of the football team or Frank Batten from the Beach, grouped on the steps of the DKE house, as destined to succeed, much less share hundreds of millions of dollars of their accumulations with the University? No one I knew spoiled the moment by having a job in mind. That was not what liberal arts then was all about. Colgate Darden came to Charlottesville in 1947 to succeed John Lloyd Newcomb as president of the University. He had served as Democratic Governor of Virginia for a term ending in 1946 and as Chancellor of William and Mary for the year that followed. The University faculty did not regard him as one of their own. In prospectus, his decision to disallow as undemocratic student residency in the fraternities and sororities at William and Mary unsettled Virginia students and alumni. He left off short of a similar policy at the University, perhaps out of fear for his life from returning veterans who had little tolerance for the Quonset huts of Copely Hill or being told where or how to live their precious lives, but did prohibit my class and those that followed from joining the outrageous party until our second year. By the time of my presidency of the IFC, the student body was less swollen with returning soldiers and more amenable to learning than was the case when Colgate Darden arrived. But it remained colorful. My

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fraternity brother, Homer Lenoir Ferguson III, returned from spring vacation in Bermuda to join others in a visit to Sweetbriar, from which he removed and drove drunkenly on the wrong side of the road through the town of Lovingston, as was the fashion in the British crown colony. He had no chance of making it through and responded to the arresting patrolman’s request to demonstrate sobriety by lurching out of the driver’s seat and throwing up on his shoes. He was jailed. The resources available to spring him were insufficient, and when help came from Charlottesville, he had sobered, become petulant, and reluctantly left jail. Homer was known to the brotherhood as ”Batman” because of his inverted life style of living on the other side of midnight and sleeping the day away. He was frail and had lost a kidney to childhood disease. He was named for his grandfather, who ran the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company and was one of the most influential industrialists in Virginia when the Batman and Colgate converged on Charlottesville. When news of the mutant’s indiscretion reached the president, I was summoned to visit at his office on East Lawn. He was greatly troubled by Homer’s misbehavior, so blatantly antithetical to his presidential agenda, but realized that there was nothing either of us could do about the matter. He used the occasion to share with me his vision of “tapping the great brawn and sinew” of the Commonwealth to realize Jefferson’s dream to set the University as the capstone of Virginia public education. Obviously, neither the Batman nor anyone else inhabitant of Madison Lane was within the class of which he spoke, and I thought it had no greater chance of success than Homer’s run through Lovingston. Colgate would soon see the Byrd organization, to which his was beholden, discredited in its massive resistance to desegregating Virginia’s public schools. It would be difficult, indeed, to find anyone in academia to espouse such a contrarian notion. It is amusing now to reflect on the narrowness of Colgate’s vision of providing higher education to a mass of all white males never seriously considered for promotion above the working class throughout most of the Colonial Period or on my own ardor to preserve and protect from the insidious encroachments of Colgate’s administration the “inalienable right” of the fraternal orders to dwell sociably in civil disobedience. St. Anthony Hall and its next door neighbor, the Phi Kap house, collected the children of Richmond’s first families, most of whom had been prepared at Woodberry or one or the other of St. Christopher’s and the Episcopal High School, all with common purpose of literacy, honor, and separation. Their world was flat. The edge of it was just west of Lynchburg, to which Route 11 had been gerrymandered to include Hollins. Most of those now living and passed I count as priceless friends. They had their peculiarities. Few of them wished to be introduced to those not already known to them, and they seemed genetically imprinted to venture no further from Mecca than could be retraced before night befell them. Included among them were Churchill Gibson and Taylor Scott, roommates, and Charlie Sheerin. All made straightway to the Virginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria. I’m not sure that this ever happened before or could happen again. The Virginia aristocracy and Episcopacy then remained conglomerate. In early spring of 1951, Bill Preston, who, with his father before him, served as house men for succeeding generations at the Hall, approached me:

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Missah Hazlegrove, wonder whether you’d ass missah Gibson and missah Scott whether I could git their sheets to wash. Don’t they have a change? No suh, When’s the last time they got washed? There ain’t been no last time and they’s blackin up. The children of God derive differently from the beasts of the field. The University of Virginia currently tells those interested in becoming students that: We don’t have a minimum GPA. We don’t have a minimum SAT score. Admission deans read holistically, considering student backgrounds, curricula, involvement in school and community, and ability for self expression. We expect students to earn distinguished grades in the most rigorous courses available in their schools. Applicants are further advised that racial, ethnic, and “first generation” student status are considered very important to favorable consideration for admission, thus alerting applicants that brighter students may be displaced by under-represented socioeconomic classes to achieve greater equity in the distribution of enrollment. The University’s undergraduate mission and selection criteria are largely borrowed from the Ivy League, with which it now is closely aligned. While nominally a public university, privatization through heavy endowment (recently accumulated to $5 billion) has combined with a surge in applications (largely driven by governmental subsidies) to enable its faculty to operate independently and thus empower its deans of admission effectively to set and accomplish its mission, which is to assemble a “desirable” student - a composite of those likely to “succeed” in life - from select body parts without suggesting that a liberal arts education is relevant to the mission, or that a degree earned at Virginia will economically advantage the recipient over graduates from other schools or what more will be taught than already learned to earn admission. The touted benefit is an enlightened and fulfilling experience that will bond them with classmates and those who have gone before--the promise of a rich culture of diversity and mostly forgotten lore. In brief, the University’s College of Arts and Sciences now seems less involved in teaching than selecting students to become members of the new and largely self perpetuating society of academics of whom it may be said that such success as may come their way was founded at Virginia. In my quest to simplify my waning days on earth, I should not complicate it by debunking a system inaccessible to me today. I am forever grateful that Carter Walker took the chance to tutor me into literacy and that I need not credit or damn academics with what I’ve done or failed to do with it. Who on earth could have sorted through the viscera of Carl Smith, Frank Batten, or any of us to foretell outcomes? Was my great uncle, George Perkins, dean of the Albemarle Bar, less well prepared by Major McClellan to study law than my father or me? It disturbs me that academics largely define the gene pool of right-thinking people in the new society.

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Faith and Honor

Unlike others, I came by disbelief without discomfit. Perhaps my case is better put as one of unbelief. I was never religious, never prayerfully devout. William Alexander Percy, an older member of my father’s generation, published his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee, in 1941, a year before his death. I was given a copy to read by my fraternity brother, D. French Slaughter, who had survived Normandy and would become a member of the General Assembly and later Congress. Reading it was one of the best things I did during six years at the University. Percy was the son of Leroy, a planter in the delta of the Mississippi who practiced law in Greenville and was elected by the legislature to serve briefly in the Senate. Young Percy was variously tutored as a child, educated at Sewanee, and graduated from the Harvard Law School. He was a compassionate patron of the Southern Negro; a passionate idealist for the preservation of democracy against German aggression, first as a part of the Belgium relief effort and next as a decorated officer in the Meuse Argonne; and a gentleman of the first magnitude. He was a poet, and his memoirs are rich and tender in their treatment of the unique relationship of planters and servants in a setting reminiscent of Forkland, where the dregs of white men had not encroached to unbalance the equation and terrify us all. Percy’s childhood exposure to Catholicism at the Sisters of Mercy under the aegis of Sister Evangelist led to an intolerable religious fervor. He confessed daily, sometimes fasted, and envisioned himself as a priest, all to the consternation of his mother, she herself having been raised a Catholic. But at Sewanee, he decided that he must be honest if it killed him and abandoned his faith. He describes the discomfit of his struggle in terms of physical pain: To be at once intellectually honest and religious is a rack on which many have perished and on which I writhed dumbly. . . . If you die, you die a natural death; if you live, you learn pity and the strength of silence. Charlie Sheerin became headmaster at Woodberry but was, perhaps, too much the scholarly chaplain and too less an athlete and disciplinarian to meet undefined expectations. Feelings were hurt. All three are dead and their widows have obliged their requests that they be remembered for their respect for the dignity of their fellow man and their active involvement with the civil rights movement. Were they stretched by the tug of intellectual honesty against faith? I hope not. Charlie is mentioned as ranked a notch above him at seminary by John Shelby Spong, retired bishop of New Jersey and a productive writer. Spong so precisely states the case for subsuming Christianity in universal humanism that he has become the silent companion and conscience of millions who have removed or never came to church. I would be hard pressed to find a clearer spokesman for my agnosticism, a more accomplished surgeon in the removal of the myth-based credos of Christian faith, or a man I found easier to dismiss as dishonorable for renewing his vows to become bishop though he believed none of them and for selling his egregious apostasy by appearing on the dust jacket of his books in clerical collar and indigo sheen to suggest his personal courage in coming out of the closet of his disbelief to publish his petulant dismissal of those who clung to faith as enemies of the truth. But for collar and indigo, his manuscripts would have gained no greater currency with his publishers than if I had submitted them as my own.

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I was not spared the pain of honor, only the demands of a faith not held. Whether the afﬂiction came upon me as a disease of the blood or was imprinted, perhaps as witness to my father’s baleful, gimlet eye that pierced the souls of my miscreant older brothers to deduce a mute confession corroborated by nothing more than a slight shift of feet, I was hopelessly and forever bound to tell the truth, not to obscure a lie by silence, and not to pose one way and think another. Out of the murk of memory, a single act of dishonesty looms vivid. I joined my childhood friends to commandeer from the inventory of W.T. Grant hand tools required to build our sailboat. I lifted a wood ﬁle, a half-round mill bastard to be exact, and lurched about for years like Raskolnikov, dry mouthed and guilt ridden. That I was not caught and revealed to my father as a common thief was as close as I came to offering thankful prayer for divine intervention. I must add that Spong’s apostasy haunted me for years, for I, too, easily let it be imagined that I was a man of faith when I held none.

Love and Law

Lucy on the S.S.Waterman. Plate 45

In the fall of 1951, Frank Waters Rogers, Jr., and his twin, Robert Jett Rogers, joined me from Princeton University to study law with the class of 1954. Each was called Bo-Bob to overcome the difﬁculty of distinguishing them in their childhood. In the winter of 1952, big Frank proposed to Father that we should be ﬁnished out with a summer tour of Europe and England, where close kin for them remained. We took a train to New York and found our way to the pier at Hoboken where student passage to Rotterdam with the Holland American Line had been booked on the SS Waterman, a converted troop transport Liberty Ship. I was in a queue to embark, dressed in seersucker and bow tie, when my gaze lifted above a quilt of Syracuse sweat-shirts to behold at a distance a young woman wearing a salt and pepper silk suit and stockings waiting to board. I fell in love with the sight of her. It was as if I were Isaac come in the place of his father’s servant. There was no touch, no smell, no spoken word. Just the sight of her. Rebecca at the well. Lucy on the quay (Plate 45). After we had put to sea, I passed her and a curly blond companion, sitting propped against a bulkhead

Lucy and I on board ship

taking in the sun. I was blessed with just enough sense to see where it would get me if I presented myself as Wilbur Lee Hazlegrove from Roanoke, Virginia, and with enough heifer dust in my nose to circle around the superstructure and whisper audibly to the blond in passing that her friend looked meaner than a snake. Whether this inanity advanced my cause I cannot say. Soon after, I saw them in the salon where ten- cents Heineken was served at room temperature and as much as a week was left in a nine-day passage. I knelt beside her to apologize and was not cast away. After each of us overcame the shock of our ﬁrst names (I had only known a pointer bitch by that name), I gathered hope that I could be something she just might be looking for. Lucy Levis and Marion Streett were of a party of four from St. Louis on a guided tour. Our schedule was ﬂexible, and we adapted it to join them at the Hotel Britannica and Beau Site at Menton, on the French-Italian Riviera. Later, I saw her for an evening in Paris. Bob Rogers andI on board the S.S. Waterman

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The return was magical. In New York, we met at the Biltmore to make plans and say goodbye. I visited her in St. Louis over Thanksgiving, and she came to Charlottesville during winter. We met during spring break in Fort Lauderdale, staying with her aunt Marjorie and visiting with her grandmother, Bessie Dunn. I had extruded one hundred sixty-ﬁve pounds to a six feet two length of linguine but Bessie beheld me on the beach, not as a praying mantis but a Greek god! We engaged to marry in early summer (Plate 46) and were wed September 11, 1953, at St. Michael’s and St. George’s, where Karl Block had served when Lucy was a girl and then moved on to become Bishop of California. The reception was held at the mansion of her grandfather, Robert Harry Levis, sited on the bluffs of the Mississippi above Alton, Illinois. I had taken the bar exam in June and learned that I had passed before we married. After a wedding trip to Sea Island, we returned to Charlotteville and lived in John Minor’s guest cottage off Hydraulic Road. I had the world on a string - sitting on a rainbow. Lucy drove me to classes at Clark Hall in a Ford Sunliner convertible given by her father as a wedding present. John Cameron Swazey and Paul Harvey came to us in transit over the car radio. Our assets were augmented by Watson, a standard poodle given us by Perk’s widow, Sallie, and the inheritance of a collection of yellow brindle cats that we named with help from T. S. Eliot. They nested Engaged St. Louis Plate 46

in the tattered box springs that underlay the marital bed from which they emerged in the dead of night to sometimes awaken me, kneading my supine breast and peering into my eyes to assure me that I was marked forever as their own. Toward Christmas, the suspicion grew that either or both of us were infertile. After Easter, conception became unavoidable. I graduated from law school in June of 1954. I have no recollection of ever having made a conscious, much less deliberate, decision to study or practice law. Rather, it seemed to have come by default. I found it comfortable to ﬂoat into what I thought was expected of me, but I must excuse Father from having a heavy hand in it. He neither pressed nor discouraged me, other than to say that I seemed to have a mind for it. Along the way, I over read Scott Fitzgerald and Ayn Rand and entertained the notion that Bob Taft was a communist. At the end, I’m not sure but that I simply wasted six years at the University for lack of imagination to form an expectancy beyond the conventions of the ﬂattened world of Madison Lane--beyond the hide of the herd. But it was a wonderful life and only in old age, when it became too late to do anything about it, that I think back and feebly imagine that I could have done something really worthwhile had I a dream to follow and my vision not been barreled with honor. I remain at a loss to say what that dream might have been. It was not as if I had peaked and returned to Scott Stadium to sing the “Good Old Song” on the down-hill side of the best I could ever hope to be, pink skinned from cigarette smoke and noon-day drinking, with an Eli button in my lapel. These former things had long since passed away. As time passed, returning became infrequent. There was no reason to

The good dog Watson.

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seek what there could not be found. This malaise I think must come from my disassociation from those F. D. G. Ribble, Dean of the Law School, described as “right thinking people.” The difﬁculty is that those I thought were right thinking either do not think that way any more or never did or that what I thought was right thinking now seems dated, conventional, visceral and vacant. Disclosing the particulars of a fortunate but indifferent life over the run of remaining pages invites the question why I do so. I am bereft of social solutions and beset with gloomy prospects for my state and nation. A post war picture taken at the request of my wife for the beneﬁt of progeny by a privileged, octogenarian agnostic inclined toward communism but in search of applause is my best answer. I never liked a book I thought was written to sell, which explains why I am so narrowly read, for the rest isn’t worth reading. If I have a knack, it lies in the revelation of our absurdities by poking fun mostly at myself. Humor is to do no great harm on earth, whether or not it sells.

The Marines

At age eighteen, I registered for the draft. Had I completed college before enlisting, I would have gone in during the second half of 1952 and probably missed combat in Korea. As it was, I was deferred through law school and applied for Naval Intelligence in advance of graduation. But my application had not been acted on, and I did not want to be drafted into the army and wrestle with the complexities of becoming an officer in another branch of the service. When approval came, it reached me at Quantico, several weeks into my enlistment as private first class in the officer candidate program of the Marine Corps Reserve ( Active Duty). Lucy, pregnant with Cary, had left to summer with her mother at Northport Point, Michigan. The program was divided into two phases, the first of which was aimed at culling out those who held no promise as officers. It was a boot camp of sorts. My company was under the charge of Sergeant Deweise, a combat veteran of Korea, whose responsibility was to discipline us to obey orders without questioning authority or rationale. This involved reducing us to automatons whose mechanical performance of senseless assignments never met expectations. No physical punishment was involved. Only shame. We were told that if we passed inspection, we would earn day leave to go into Washington. But we were never worthy. Some deficiency kept us unblessed, scrubbing freshly scrubbed web gear, polishing polished brass, and scouring brand-new ash cans through the weekends. Most of us easily grasped the regime and floated above its harassments. But there were a few fragile souls who assumed personal blame for not passing inspections never intended to succeed. One Saturday afternoon, I encountered a candidate of Spanish extraction in the head. He had unscrewed the brass drain plates of the urinals and was absorbed in polishing both the exposed and reverse sides in an act of abject contrition. My God, he would have groomed the napes of gargoyles had they been available to the purpose. Soon, he was gone. And there was candidate Bethards, who was reputed to hold a master’s degree in mathematics from M. I. T. Every morning after personal inspection and before breakfast, an officer candidate was selected at

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Graduation from the training batallion

random to drill a company of troop. We formed up at parade rest behind the barracks. The drill was to march us in a column of threes to the parade ground and back again to the point of beginning. This, of course, involved a series of commands, most of which were executed precisely in four beat march time, and began with calling the troop to attention out of parade rest. Matters went badly from the start. His off-hand selection cast him into a catatonic trance. He stood before us as if clogged with a chunk of steak and when he regained voice, his staccato commands were blurted out in duple, a harmless error where the echoed command did not involve a change in the direction of march. But two right turns followed by two more right turns threatened to swallow our tail or plunge us into the Potomac. He was incapable of tempo, cadence or calling for execution on the beat. Everything about him reminded me that white men should never try to sing black men’s music. As we snaked toward the street intervening the drill field, the poor bastard failed to put out road guards to protect his troop from nonexistent traffic, an unpardonable omission that removed all doubt that ever we would be blessed with weekend liberty. Those who survived were commissioned in the fall. We were relocated to Camp Upshur, across Route 1 to the west, for officer training. Notwithstanding that Lucy and I were living in Fredericksburg with our first born, Cary Middleton (delivered by Dr. Godinez at the Naval Hospital at Quantico on January 24, 1955), I was assigned top bunk in one of the Quonset huts that served as barracks for the training battalion. My nominal bunk mate below was a short Irishman. I marveled that this stumpy, ruddy complected dust ball had made it through. He was an icon of disarray. His uniform was wilted, trousers unbloused, and boots unbuffed. Other than to see him at muster every day, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I had no idea from whence he came or whither he went when we dispersed to various duty stations following graduation in spring. Years later, I began to receive scribbled comments in the margin of form letters from the University of Virginia thanking me for year-end gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences. Then one day I got a call from a man named Kelly asking familiarly if he might visit at my office. I invited him to do so without a clue as to who he was but certain that he was looking for money. When he came, he quickly coaxed from me a recollection of him as my dust ball bunk mate from Camp Upshur, a revelation I concealed. He was Hugh Patrick Kelly. He had been elected Dean of the College and, later, became Provost. We were his guests at dinner at the president’s house on Carr’s Hill soon after I retrieved him to memory. I later visited him at the University Hospital shortly before he died at age sixty. He had let his prostate get away from him. He was, I think, a native of Boston and a graduate of Harvard. After his tour of duty, he had earned masters and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of California and recognition for his research in atomic physics. In my defense, there was no reason for me to have remembered him. We had come to Upshur out of different companies and shared few experiences at Quantico. But I remain fascinated with his texture and dimension. What made him distinguishable? Obviously, nothing caught my eye. How did he learn to marshall the egregious egos and mold the interdisciplinary agendas of a herd of academics to continue and enlarge the prestige of the College’s faculty? My experience as counsel to several of the presidents of Hollins College led me to regard his accomplishment as miraculous. A junction of energy, capacity, and vision seems to occur in some few of us at some point in our lives, but it is to imagine a vain thing to say that it was taught or learned. I graduated second officer in the training battalion and was told that I would have led the closing parade

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but for the fact that every marine is first a rifleman and I had dropped from Expert to Marksman on final qualification, either because someone messed up my sights or I failed to adjust to the cloudy conditions that affect the sight plane. I suppose that most of the men with whom I trained had been deferred to complete college or graduate degree programs and that few, if any of us, would have enlisted but for the obligation to serve; so it could not be said of us that we gathered in patriotic response to a call to arms, as was the case with the Cumberland Troop and with my father and brothers in the great wars. Notwithstanding my attempt to stay out of harm’s way in Naval Intelligence, which may have ranked just above fleeing to Canada as an expression of patriotism, most of us felt a sense of pride in becoming junior officers in the nation’s elite, rapid response ground force. I came away from the experience with the perspective of a junior officer of what combat might be like. While broader outcomes depended on achieving superior mass, firepower and logistical support for the infantry in its mission to conquer the enemy, it seemed to me that where these advantages had not been clearly established, the outcome of battle heavily favored the defense and ultimately rested on the heroism of individuals in close quarters with the foe at critical junctures of time and circumstance. I suppose that every one of the men with whom I trained wondered, as I did, how he would acquit himself in mortal combat and mentally graded and ranked our fellow officers according to our expectations of them under fire. Critical to success and survival of men under command is the courage of company and platoon leaders to maintain command presence and direction among them. But courage in combat, which Father, Percy, and countless others exhibited, differs from heroism. Both of these men had joined in the passionate belief that our nation was charged with the moral obligation to preserve the right of democratic self- determination against German imperialism. But beyond their own willingness to sacrifice their lives in this cause and endure great hardship, neither one of them could explain why some were brave and others craven, except that it had nothing to do with physical strength or appearance. Our animal instinct to flee and hide is so strong that when a hero arises in our midst to do the unthinkable, we really have no means of understanding who he might be or why he acted so. It seems as if the hero reacts spontaneously to some temporary impulse or glandular surge that he can neither understand nor explain. The Spaniard or Bethards could well have been our best bet to become one. But who could say? As for me, I’m sure my glandular ductwork has been blocked from birth. I spent most of my time in service with the Headquarters Company of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, defending men on trial before General Courts Martial. Most of the cases were desertion and repeated absence offenses that were proved on service record entries and only required deliberation on punishment, so there was an abundance of leisure time spent playing chess with the prosecuting attorney, Bob Stranahan, a Princeton-Harvard law graduate with whom I had trained at Upshur and formed a close friendship. Leisure time also put me into several golf games with Lt. Douglas Jacobson, a Medal of Honor winner at Iwo Jima. He was a living legend. His citation discloses some sixteen Japanese defensive positions at or near the summit of Hill 362, which he is credited with neutralizing, any one of which would have earned him recognition as a hero and in combination exceeded all belief that he should have attempted what he

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Lucy and Cary 1956

accomplished, much less survived. He was a very nice man who, like Hugh Kelly, rose above suspicion as a Marine. However, I sense that Jacobson had no prospect of advancement as an ofﬁcer and little promise as a prosperous civilian. It is a credit to the Corps that it made a place for one of its greatest heroes and never again asked of him as much or more than he had given.

Home Again

I returned with Lucy to Roanoke in the fall of 1957, fully assured and nicely credentialed, with Cary Middleton in hand and Ellen Page, born March 30, 1956, on the hip. We added Sarah Perkins on August 3, 1958, and William Sydnor on March 13, 1960. At age 28, I continued as an inconsequential participant in the unfolding events of the last half of the 20th century. Our ascent to unimaginable wealth and leisure and decline into tasteless excess and loss of purpose during the post-war period well may be recorded in history as our nation’s Golden Age. Those of my generation now look back on it in awe and utter disbelief.

The New Society

This new age might as well begin with the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. We had reached the point where the Bill of Rights no longer could be read to tolerate segregated public facilities and services, including state and local schools. The case broadly succeeded because it was seen as made on behalf of a long neglected minority seeking what was hoped for them through emancipation and promised during Reconstruction and because continued opposition lacked the conviction of intellectual integrity. All men could not be created equal under law and not be counted as among men in its observance. The supposition of biological inferiority, which undergirded Dred Scott, could no longer serve as justiﬁcation for denying equal access and even chance. Equality under law necessarily supposes dissimilarity in fact. The appeal in Brown was masterfully orchestrated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to gain reversal by the Supreme Court of its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the conviction of Homer Plessy, an octoroon (one-eighth Negro), for seating himself in the white rather than colored car of a Louisiana intrastate railroad. The majority there held that the objective of the Fourteenth Amendment was to require absolute equality of the races in the eyes of the law, but “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” This, I think, was and remains the perspective of right-thinking people in the social context. To disarm Brown as aimed at ending racial discrimination in the South, class actions were commenced in multiple states, including Kansas and Delaware, where separate grade schools were permitted or required by law. Further, suits were commenced in localities where separate but otherwise equal facilities and instruction was conceded, this to require the Court to decide, up or down, whether separate but equal schools satisﬁed the requirements of the Constitution. Lastly, grade school children were selected as

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plaintiffs to measure the Fourteenth Amendment against a homogenous class of innocents whose aptitudes were untested and presumed equal. The resulting decision to repeal Plessy was remarkable, not because of uncommon brevity or unanimity (the Great Sanhedrin would have set it aside as collusive), but because the Court, but for Stare decisis, could have ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to no other purpose than to require equal access and enjoyment of public facilities and services and left it to Congress to see it done. Instead, the Court premised its decision on the thought that no child could reasonably be expected to succeed in life if denied the opportunity of an education and chose to adopt the reasoning of social psychologists accepted by one of the courts below: Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation therefore has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the beneﬁts they would receive in a racially integrated school system. Constitutional protection of Negro school children against feelings of inferiority necessarily required the Court to accept as fact the presumption of psychologists of equal competence among children of whatever race or background--a judgement that reached far beyond the ideal of equal opportunity and even chance. The Taney court in Dred Scott judicially noticed that Negroes were so far inferior to whites as to drop them beneath the rank of citizens, but the Brown court did not stoop to dignify the decision by even mentioning it. Notwithstanding that this leap forward was highly subjective and hopelessly fraught, the question that wants an answer is: What took place during the preceding century that emboldened the Court judicially to legislate and enforce the racial integration of the public schools of every municipality in the nation? I’m not sure I have an answer.

Gentle People

Enabling Brown, ﬁrst and foremost, was the portrayal of black citizens as paciﬁstic but politely impatient with second-hand treatment accorded them in respect of the use and enjoyment of public facilities and

services. This was not a plain mantle selected by the NAACP to cloak the breastplates of warriors.73 If I have offered anything of value in preceding pages, it is the indisposition of Negroes to murder planters who owned them or harm the wealthy white people who later hired and patronized them. Aggressive behavior has never worked to their advantage. A remarkable feature of these relationships is that for centuries, mothers have entrusted their precious babies to the nursing care of black women, perhaps with indictment not to kiss them, but in complete conﬁdence that they will not be harmed and with full understanding that their nannies are quite capable of laying open the throats of black men who cross them.

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One summer at Forkland, late in the depression, I took on Walter Ross as a playmate. He was the youngest child of Peter and Anna, who lived in the overseer’s house close by the ice house. Walter and I wound up in one of the ancient tobacco barns that uncle Joe and older colored men were making ready in late August. It occurred to uncle Joe to stage a fight between us, I think to no other purpose than to assure himself that black men are no match for us. Poor Walter stood facing me with a glob of snot hanging from one nostril and a dusty nap of infested hair crowning his hard head. His black skin shaded into hues of caramel around his hardened hands and feet. My personal hygiene was hardly better. I later pulled a wood tick from my stringy, dirt-blond hair that I had unwittingly nourished to the size of my thumb. Gratefully, Walter exhibited the politeness of whimpering just at the right time. No scuffle ensued. Some summers later, Solomon Brooks, the youngest of that family, joined Walter as members of my crew for the construction of a bridge of my design over a creek in the road that served the flats along the Appomattox. All went well. Not long after, Solomon murdered Walter over a woman and spent most of his life in the penitentiary. There was a line of separation that forbade us to disrespect them in their homes and gatherings and them to sit at table with us. A closeness sometimes developed that now is difficult to understand or explain. Lee is seen as a junior officer dragging with him on his early assignments Nat, his sister’s slave, too old to work but no one else to keep him. Henry Langhorne amply was rewarded under the will of Colonel William Watts, brother of Letitia Sorrell, for fetching him home to Oaklands from a Confederate field hospital where he lay ill and near death. And William Percy admitted his enthrallment to Ford, who wrecked his automobiles and abused his patronage beyond all understanding--and yet he kept him close. My family, as well, has been blessed with Pernella Chubb, whose children have been recognized with Keys Joseph Brooks Plate 47

to the City for their valuable contributions to the community. She helped us raise our babies and make our homes comfortable. Philip Claytor now does for us what we can no longer do for ourselves. He has taken us to keep for reasons that have nothing to do with what we pay him. At Forkland today, these relationships continue and remain mysterious. Joseph Brooks Plate 47 is a powerful but joyous black man. He is illiterate and has trouble with numbers. I doubt that he is entrusted with the operation of major pieces of machinery. He worked in tobacco and now with milk cows. He and his brother, Richard, are the only remaining resident male members of the Brooks, Booker, and Ross families that lived on the place in my lifetime. Joseph and Richard have borne the bodies of my uncles, Joe and David, to their graves at Guinea Presbyterian, and we have congregated at Midway Baptist Church to bury their people with whom we journeyed. Among those who have passed was Mike Brooks, so darkly complectioned that his teeth appeared to have been plucked, bleached in the sun and returned to their seats to blind us with his smile. He was given to witness and preaching and when he passed and was laid open at Midway, the women attending opened a Bible on his chest which he surveyed through thin, goldrimed spectacles, though he could not read a word of it. Would that I had been so blessed.

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Emma Plate 48 is the widow of Teeny Watson, who brought her to Forkland when they were young. They took over Allen Booker’s house after his family died or moved away. Emma took Lena Brooks’s place helping out in the kitchen when I brought friends down to shoot doves. She is literate, intelligent. disciplined and accomplished in making thin soda biscuits and lard cooking. But she was troubled with Teeny, who was intelligent but claimed by liquor. When he died, I made the easy decision to tell Emma, who had nowhere to go, that she could have the house (along with about ten grand of subsequent improvements) as long as I owned the land and quieted the collection agency that hounded her for Teeny’s medical bills (about three grand of judgments against her as surviving spouse) by offering fifty cents on the dollar. I was comforted to hear the strident female voice from the agency reject my offer and unwittingly join me in good works (Emma’s personal possessions were homesteaded and her modest income from nursing at a Cumberland retirement home exempt from garnishment). Among my oldest surrogate brothers was Temple Moore, who flew the Hump with Chenault in Burma and wound up in Roanoke with General Motors and later in automotive replacement glass, with great success. He grew a garden and loved good cooking. I had him down to Forkland to hunt where Emma fed him a chine roast that I retrieved from the freezer, a cut not now seen in commerce. He was fascinated by the presentation and devoted his full attention to tracking down a butcher to supply him. He asked me for Emma’s recipe and I, amused, told him to call her. From time to time during the rest of his life, Temple relished endlessly repeating Emma’s advice: “ I jus cook it ‘til its done.” Emma is an ascending matriarch at Midway. She keeps my soul and summons my patronage at will. She has begun to spend her own money on her house. Not long ago, she called to make sure that it was allright to do this and I asked her why she bothered to ask. She said that a man told her to be careful about spending money on a house she didn’t own but she told him that I “was not that kinda man.” I asked who he was but she wouldn’t say. How easily she shapes me to her specifications. These precious relationships, formed years ago and continued in both agrarian and urban settings, now seem more romantic than real. They are antiquities as rare as chestnut logged tobacco barns. Few of us have tenant houses to spare and there are few of them whom we would welcome in, among whom few would care to come. Their charm is a lien against our patronage but obscures a nature not to look beyond tomorrow and to father but not to parent in the males. At Forkland, Richard Brooks’s daughter recently gave birth to twins by one man and a third child by another quickly followed. It is a scene in a serial of hopelessness that premiered in prehistory and plays out across all ethnicities in variations on a common theme of overpopulation and nature’s cruel responses. Emmanuel Kolini, Bishop of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, passively witnessed tribal conflict that consumed the lives of eight hundred thousand Tutsis and Hutus but consecrates American bishops in a crusade to eliminate homosexuality within the Anglican Communion as an elective sin under Leviticus, on a quibble of which the Anglican Communion was formed out of the lust of Henry VIII.

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Emma Watson Plate 48

A New Equation

My romance with graceful black people does not imagine for them broader horizons than those with whom I share a common heritage. I therefore think that an evolution of decency among Caucasian stock has linked with patience to enable Brown. I look for markers. First, Negro lynchings in the South came to an end before Brown was decided. This could not have happened had not decent people regained the reins of state and local governments from the hands of white trash and black incompetents and restored the rule of law out of the chaos of Reconstruction. Defeat of the Klan, William Percy’s proudest achievement in the Delta, and restoration of ethic was thus enabled. Second, neither the execution of Charles I, who thought himself a king by divine right, nor the American Revolution much disturbed the feudalistic, male-oriented system of land tenure that survived in Virginia. What forever changed the social equation in Virginia and the nation were the Reconstruction Amendments that dictated universal male suffrage and enabled liberalism to be practiced and applied during and High Bridge

following the Great Depression. The suffrage amendments were unprecedented as an enduring franchise of citizenship. It was antithetical to the colonial and antebellum experience in Virginia and was adopted here, not by free choice but to regain statehood from her status as a military district in which Virginians associated with the rebellion were disenfranchised. The agrarian aristocracy of antebellum Virginia was thus brought within a broader demos that was empowered to redeﬁne the opportunities and entitlements of citizenship. The Nineteenth Amendment and the subsequent repeal of the poll tax broadened the suffrage to universality. Third, Virginia and much of the nation evolved from an agrarian regime heavily dependent on human labor into an urbanized industrial economy heavily dependent on machines. In 1860, Dr. Robert Henderson received a statement of account from his Richmond factor covering the sale of some sixteen hogshead of tobacco. Deducted from the settlement was drayage to Farmville and freight to market on the Southside Railroad, which steamed across High Bridge a few miles south of Forkland. Steam locomotion revolutionized the long-haul transportation of people and products. But when fossil fuels converted water to steam and steam to electricity and electricity to illumination and motive power, the Western world was catapulted into an age beyond the imagination of the ancestors of whom I write. My father, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1972, recounted the accomplishments of science during his time on earth. Included were the invention or development and broadening use of wired and wireless audio-visual communications; oil-powered motor vehicles and aircraft that rained down nuclear warheads on Japan and rocket powered spacecraft that landed men on the moon; digital computers and a litany of electronic tools and appliances at once increased productivity and shrunk away what was required of our hands to sustain us. Exponential expansion of knowledge and tool making enabled a greater part of the demos to enjoy a greater part of the commonwealth. This, then, is an answer to what enabled Brown. We were set at greater leisure to be nicer to one another--to practice ethic. There are two important chapters of American political history and its industrial revolution that enabled Brown and, indeed, shaped the Golden Age. First, the Sixteenth Amendment, adopted in 1913,

A view from the tracks on High Bridge

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empowered Congress to impose a tax on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration. The language of the amendment would make little sense today to those who have no understanding of the constraint on the power of Congress to tax imposed by the Supreme Court of the United States by its 1895 construction of the Constitution in Pollock v. Farmers Loan. There, the Court held that a tax on “gains, profits and incomes” was, in substance, a direct tax on land and personal property from which such gains derived and, therefore, fell within the Constitutional requirement that it be apportioned according to the census of and collected and remitted by each of the states. The dissent urged both that a tax on income fell within the category of indirect or transactional taxation in respect of which the Constitution only required geographical uniformity and that the majority had effectively foreclosed federal taxation of the profits of the nation’s wealthy individuals and their various enterprises. The Sixteenth Amendment specifically repealed Pollock. Federal income taxation, in one form or another, now has all but replaced historical sources of revenue to the federal budget. The Sixteenth Amendment outranks all others in its importance to the supremacy of the federal government and the redistribution of the American commonwealth. Had its role been limited by what the Constitution probably intended to allow from taxing the people and Congress and the courts not exploited the interstate commerce clause beyond all reason, the Civil War would have served as prologue to continuing sectional strife and conflict. The nation cannot endure as a confederation of wholly sovereign states, nor can it long survive state and municipal constitutional restraints against underwriting the cost of federal supremacy. Secondly, two acts of the General Assembly mark Virginia’s initial steps toward recognizing the value of lives. In 1870, coincidental with the Reconstruction Amendments and readmission to the Union,Virginia, perhaps as a protection against the abuse of the emancipated, enacted a wrongful death statute, which overturned the common law. The statute mirrored Lord Campbell’s Act, which recognized the economic value of English lives lost as a result of wrongful conduct and protected dependents out of the awards. Under the Code of Virginia of 1950, the award was increased but capped at $15,000. Today, the value of lives is infinite though precisely measurable. More important, Virginia, following similar legislation extant in Europe, adopted workmen’s compensation legislation in 1918 that required employers to compensate in stipulated amounts for lives lost and injuries suffered by employees during the course of employment, notwithstanding that the employee was at fault. It birthed the persuasive and now pervasive myth that the benefit is paid by the business or its owners when, in fact, it is passed to the consumers of its products and services, as are all taxes and other costs of doing profitable business. The rationale of workmen’s compensation legislation joined progressive income taxation and universal suffrage to drive the politics of liberalism. By this I mean the process by which governments decide differentially to adjust the shares of the commonwealth the constituencies of the demos shall receive. This, then, was the white man’s horizon within which the black man’s perspective was referenced. The Warren Court’s construction of the Reconstruction Amendments in Brown necessarily assumed that Negro children were not inferior to other children but were their equals; this reasoning soon gained broad acceptance as the premise of socio-economic egalitarianism: All people are equally competent and entitled and infinitely valuable.

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Older Brothers

These pieces were in place when older men of my generation returned from the war with a broader vision of Virginia’s destiny than locking down its public school system to spite its essential mission to educate our children of whatever color or creed. In 1954, however, it remained gravely in doubt whether racial integration of Virginia’s public schools would be accepted by the General Assembly as a rule of law. In April of 1959, after five years of failed attempts to overturn or limit the decision in Brown, the Senate of Virginia passed by a single vote a bill cleared by the House of Delegates that committed the state to enable the limited integration of its schools. It quieted the massive resistance rhetoric of Harry Byrd and his lieutenants and relieved a political crisis that approached the gravity of the secession question addressed and tragically resolved a century before. Quite by chance and after the fact, I came into the friendship of two men whose dispassionate statesmanship led to the formulation and hairbreadth passage of the least of what the brightest legal minds in Virginia thought must be enacted to avoid armed enforcement. They served as members of a 40-man commission of the General Assembly appointed by Governor J. Lindsey Almond and chaired by Mosby Perrow, Jr., of Lynchburg. The first of these men was Kossen Gregory, seven years my senior, who became and remains the closest of my surrogate older brothers. He and his wife Sarah were close friends of Toy and Hunter Savage from Norfolk. These men were approximate class mates at the law school of the University and served identical terms in the House of Delegates for a decade commencing in 1953. In early 1994, the Gregorys and Savages invited us to join them and two other couples, Lee and George Cockran from Staunton, and Doris and Sonny McNeal from Norfolk, in renting a grand estate in Tuscany at which we pleasured ourselves for several weeks that summer. By then, Toy had emerged as dean of the Norfolk Bar and assumed responsibility for selecting the venue. He was not prone to camping. Kossen delighted in working out the details. The trip proved to be such a pleasant experience that we next ventured to Provence and, last, to West Sussex, England, in 2002. George Cockran, then, was the second member of the Perrow Commission, without whose reasoned advocacy for the resolution of the crisis the Commonwealth would have been humiliated. He was 17 years my senior. His wife, Lee, was daughter to Harry and Marion Stuart, friends of my parents from Elk Garden. Beyond knowing who they were, I was unacquainted with them. George was elected to the House of Delegates in 1948 and served until 1966. After two years in the Senate, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeals and retired on his 75th birthday in 1987. As a justice, his sociability was necessarily limited. A noble characteristic shared by Kossen, George and Toy was that they ran for election to the House of Delegates to advance the interests of the Commonwealth in the post-war period and not to launch a career in politics. None of them had it in mind to treat public office as a destination but as an obligation to follow up service to the nation at war with service to the state in peace. While no one in the leadership of the Commonwealth accepted the decision in Brown, a growing number of the members of the General Assembly could no longer tolerate the rigid conservatism of the Byrd Machine. Kossen was proudly involved with the defeat of Byrd’s proposal to rebate the general fund surplus by reducing taxes rather

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than reinvesting it in infrastructure. It rested on the shoulders of this faction to deal with the intractability of Byrd and his lieutenants on integration. Of course, our excursions to Europe and visitations in Virginia were essentially social and centered more on bridge, ﬂowers, gardens, single malt scotch, and olive oil than what took place in the General Assembly half-a-century before. In England, George, at ninety, served as our meticulous diarist and I as our designated driver to negotiate our side trips on the wrong side of the road. We are seen at Plate 49. George ranked foremost among Virginia statesmen in the 20th century. He resided at Stuart House, Staunton, home of the patriarch, Archibald Stuart, from whom both he and wife Lee, as well as General J. E. B. Stuart, are descended. One might hope that a man of his dimensions would reveal himself in correspondence or memoir, but George spent two decades of his active maturity on the Supreme Court and some number of years of his retirement on the work of the Court, which offered meagre fare to share with others. But he did have a desire to memorialize his involvement with the Perrow Commission and, in consultation with Kossen, committed his reﬂections to writing in August of 2005 under the title: Virginia Facing Reality: The 1959 Perrow Commission. I was given a copy that year but whether it was lodged other than with The Historical Society of Augusta County is not known. I never read it until the summer of 2012 and see it now as preserving a clear image of the turmoil of ending segregated use of public facilities and a failed adventure in judicial activism. If we measured the advance of Brown, what would it be other than broadening acceptance of the quickened pace of assimilation?

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Lucy and me with the Cochrans in England Plate 49

When Perk was killed retraining as a ﬁghter pilot during the Korean War in 1952, I lost an older brother whom I had only begun to know during the few years we shared in Charlottesville when I came from Woodberry in 1948 and he returned from the war to ﬁnish law school and marry (Plate 50) Losing him may offer an explanation of why I sought the company of older men but hardly a reason for so many of them to include me as an important person in their lives. Some of these friendships grew out of our close friendship with Kossen and Sarah, who introduced us to Toy and Hunter, Dr. Charles L. (Buck) and Josephine Crockett (Plate 51) and Paul and Rodie Funkhouser. The Funkhousers took us in when Paul returned home from Richmond in the mid 50s to understudy Stuart Saunders and launch a career in railroading from the law department of the N&W. Cousin Elizabeth Perkins Varner 74 and her husband John (Cacti) were within this circle, along with Beirne B. Carter and Elizabeth Reed, his younger wife. Beirne came to Roanoke from Richmond after his father split the Virginia Caterpillar distributorship between his sons. All of these men were my brother Perk’s contemporaries. Paul and Rodie were bright and beautiful people and few, if any, of their friends labored under the belief that he had returned to settle sedately into the practice of railroad law with uncle Lucian Cocke or Jack Fishwick. Sure enough, when Stuart Saunders, who had orchestrated the then-pending consolidation of Perk and Sallie’s wedding Plate 50

the Virginian and Nickel Plate railroads with the N&W, left for Philadelphia to become president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1963, Paul and Rhodie left with him. Elizabeth Carter involved the Varners and us in hosting a farewell house party for the Funkhousers at Royal Orchard, the medieval castle built in 1911 by Frederic William Scott, Elizabeth’s grandfather, on the eastern slope of Afton Mountain (Plate 52) It was an incredible statement, earning its name as a source of Albemarle Pippins cherished by Queen Victoria. The castle was a massive structure that offered the contradiction of tapestried walls and armor within the hold, into the protection of which swimmers and tennis players might withdraw, leaving the Pierce-Arrow without as a trophy of siege. The perception of friends of the Funkhousers was that Stuart Saunders, who derived from a Bedford clan of brilliant odd balls, was undernourished with social grace, a deﬁciency beyond the remedial skills of his

Kossen Gregory, Buck Crocket and me NPP

lovely wife, Dorothy Davidson, and thus traded a brighter future for Paul for a marketable persona for himself. In an unaccustomed moment of creativity, I saw to it that Stuart’s image peered from the visor of every suit of armor and gazed up from the depths of every toilet bowl at Royal Orchard. And when I returned grace at the banquet of gathered friends, I was careful not to omit to pray that the hope of the poor at Swannanoa, James H. Dooley’s outlandish marble palace, built down ridge from Royal Orchard in 1912, be not taken away. The photographs at Plate 52 record an important moment in the lives of this circle of friends. Paul, now dead with the majority of the group, weathered the debacle of the PennCentral merger, perhaps brought on by Stuart’s lack of people skills, and rose to run the CSX, an astonishing accomplishment for our putative pimp. James Malo White added me as a friend and beneﬁciary of the many kindnesses of Gordon Willis, who ﬂew me back and forth to Augusta National at the invitation of Blake Clark, the Gulf Stream Club, and

Plate 51 Lucy, Me, Hunter, and Toy Savage, Sarah and Kossen Gregory NPP

the Country Club of Florida. Other friendships arose from practicing law with William A. Dickinson, the

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Group at Royal Orchards 1963 Front row from left: Luke Waldrop, Ham Waldrop, Jo Crocket, Chiswell Perkins, Bill Bullington. | Second row from left: Wilbur Hazlegrove, Cynthia Stuart, Wisey Bullington,C. Gamble, Sarah Gregory, Zan Stuart,

Lucy Hazlegrove Third row from left: Harry Gamble, Kossen Gregory, Elizabeth Carter, Blake Clark, Nancy Clark, Paul Funkhauser | Back row from left: Beirne Carter, Buck Crocket, Betsy Varner, Cappi Perkins, Cacti Varner

Royal Orchards Plate 52

Rodie and Paul Funkhauser

Elizabeth Carter

Betsy Varner and Sarah Gregory

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;105 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

Stuart Saunders photo in armor.

Me holding a rabbit in a Christening gown

Kingstree Hunt – From Left: Al Buckley, Bill Geddings, Me, Landon Buchanan, Shanon Hardwick, Bobby Gamble Plate 53

personification of a right-thinking gentleman in the waning days of judicial conservatism, and somehow falling in with a wonderful assortment of men who played good golf and tennis, foot hunted quail, grouse and turkey, and shared with me the joys of the earth to which my father and Franklin Moore introduced me as a child. Albert Buckley, Landon Buchanan, and Shannon Hardwick were foremost among them (Plate 53). All of them were seven to twelve years my senior and veterans of the great war. We die, I think, only when the last of those who knew and loved us also passes on. I owe it to them to keep them alive a little longer. Al Buckley grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, where his father, a postman, took him hunting during the depression. He graduated from the University of Texas and flew over fifty missions in light bombers out of England before returning to work for one of the Texas interstate pipeline companies. Jack Parrot hired him in 1950 to manage the operation of the Roanoke Gas Company, which converted from a small, manufactured coal gas utility to a natural gas distributor when the Atlantic Seaboard Corporation completed construction of its pipeline through Gala, just north of Roanoke, to supplement service to the Washington D.C. market. I became professionally involved with Roanoke Gas in the early sixties and discovered that Al hunted birds and played fine golf. He became president of the company and I its general counsel. We remained the closest of friends for the rest of his life. We owned and field broke lemon colored setters, most of which were given us by Al’s oldest son, Al, Jr., who became wealthy building and syndicating commercial real estate (He reinvested a hunk of it buying a half interest in 3,000 acres north of Nashville exclusively dedicated to maintaining habitat for wild and released quail). When my close friend and fraternity brother from Lawrenceville, Bill Meredith, left to open the Raleigh office of J. C. Wheat, Al Buckley and I paired off to hunt quail but were sometimes joined by Bill and others at Forkland and the Santee.

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Bill and Bert were litter mates. When they were near grown puppies, we let them out in a patch of feed and lespedeza at Forkland known to hold a covey, and they busted them up within thirty feet of the car. We banged away and were lucky to find the dead birds. The dogs had disappeared. After yelling and walking about to find them, we reluctantly returned to the car, which we had left with the trunk lid up. There they were, shoulder to shoulder, statuesque in ivory, gazing out at us in wonder. The epiphany of Bill that allowed me to let my raw left hand drop the lead and join my right arm to shoot the covey rise was his sudden decision to hold steady on point. It remains engraved in my mind. Bert came to point and back quite easily and was handsomely conformed in comparison with his litter mate, whose pointed nose and gangling legs were an embarrassment to the breed. But Bill found all the birds and this is the point of my tale. Landon Buchanan was raised on a farm near Fort Chiswell, graduated from the University, crewed in heavy bombers and wound up in Roanoke as an agent for Massachusetts Life Insurance Company. He fell behind his aggressive competition, for he was incapable of selling life insurance, only suggesting it to those who might think to place an order with him. He had wonderful hands that precisely followed the direction of his eyes. After winning the Virginia State Amateur tennis doubles championship, he took up golf and won the Virginia Seniors championship on the Cascades course at Hot Springs against men who could out drive him by sixty yards but lose this advantage on and around the greens. He was deadly with a shotgun and preferred grouse over quail. You rarely got more than a flash of feathers and half a shot. Over good dogs, he and I killed 125 quail in the Santee over two and a half days at the end of the season before the hawks returned. Landon introduced me to Shannon Hardwick, a tall, rawboned Scot who was raised in the Maggie Valley. When I met him, Shannon, Gene Shuff, Moose Matthews and others had built a log cabin on the side of Johns Creek Mountain on land he had somehow saved from inclusion in the Jefferson National Forest. His friends were deer hunters, but Shannon set his sights on turkey. Shannon’s father worked for the Kerr family, which truck farmed in Florida as a side line to the glass container business, and Shannon grew into a minor league baseball pitcher before returning to Giles County to sell cars in Pearisburg and, later, real estate in Blacksburg. He knew the area as well as I knew the Forkland neighborhood, and I partnered with him and others to buy a part of the division of Kentland, across the New River from the arsenal, where duck and quail were plentiful. What an incredibly rich experience it was to have him as an older brother. Two stories about him before I met him are worth repeating, both involving golf at Hot Springs. He was qualifying to play in the Virginia State Amateur in a foursome that included John Battle, a charming man whose father partnered with William Alan Perkins to practice law in Charlottesville. The group behind, which included a man Shannon did not like, kept driving into them in spite of several high pitched protests from Shannon’s group. Shannon patiently stood aside while the offending group putted out the 18th hole, following which Shannon sunk the man into his shadow with a single stroke and left him there without uttering a word. Shannon had revived the right of self-redress for the instruction of a prominent representative of the Albemarle-Richmond bar intimately acquainted with the more genteel and profitable model for dispute resolution.

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In a lighter moment, Shannon was near the tail end of a long list of men seeking to qualify for the State Amateur. Among the early starters was a no-name contender who had butchered the three par 15th hole and launched his ball in disgust toward the Cascades stream some distance away. It fell somewhat short of the mark. The 15th green is sited just below the club house and a patio intervenes, where scores were recorded and golfers paused or gathered at the end of the round. It occurred to an early ﬁnisher seated on the patio that proﬁt might be gained from taking bets from a steady stream of golfers on throwing a golf ball from the patio across the Cascades stream. A lively trade had quickly built when Jimmy Watts, the quintessential Harvard Man and former State Amateur champion who then resided at Poplar Forrest, arrived to buy up the concession when his throw fell short of the creek. Watts had commandeered a card table and a cigar box to hold the cash with no measurable risk of spillage when Shannon came on scene. When acquainted with the terms of the wager, Shannon mentally measured the distance and asked how much he could bet. Whether because of failure to run a background

From left front row: Bolling Izard (with trophy), Bob Goldsmith, Lavoe Houck, Marilyn Boardman, Jessi Holton, Mary Lee Ward Roaring Gap Plate 54 Second row from left: Jack Richardson(kneeling) Janie Meredith (head truned) Lilian Richardson, Bill Houck, Isabel Goldsmith, John Boardman, Ann Martin (standing) Back row from left standing: Bill Meredith, Barbara Hamill, Tommy Ward, Bill Noftsinger, Margaret Ann Noftsinger, Gene Hawthorne, Lucy and Wilbur, Van Holton, Bud Martin.

check or because of the historical success of the enterprise, Watts welcomed a bet of Shannon’s choice. Shannon asked how much was in the cigar box and placed a bet comfortably above what was on the table. The ball was still rising when it cleared the creek. Watts learned the name of a stranger and of a place he’d never been--the Maggie Valley. Landon spent his last years afﬂicted with Parkinson’s. Near the end, I drove to Blacksburg to pick up his brother Bill, who taught math at Tech, and Shannon, to attend a party at the Roanoker Restaurant put together by Landon as a last farewell. On the return, we drove up the north fork of the Roanoke River. As

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we passed under a ridge to our left, Shannon pointed to where he had shot a turkey. I casually asked how many he thought he’d killed. It’s not a guess, he said. “Eighty-seven to be exact.” His principal accessory to this prodigious accomplishment was a brutish mongrel, seemingly extracted from elkhounds and wort hogs, that gave cry only when he had put to wing a gang of turkeys that Shannon called into range late in the day or following morning. Hunting small game with dogs was their deﬁning passion--golf an intense summer interlude. It was the highlight of the Golden Age.

Contemporaries

Friends my age bonded playing golf and gin rummy at home and away. Our wives were mostly left at home to take care of themselves and dependent children for most of the day or weekend. 75 The group shown with wives in Plate 54 convened for long weekends in early spring at Pinehurst to start the season and after Labor Day at Roaring Gap to end it. The group varied between three and four foursomes, which was about all the vacated Lodge at Roaring Gap (where the staff of the Greystone Inn was housed through Labor day) would hold. We never named ourselves and are seen as we were four decades ago. I won the purse several times and am sure that most of us looking back would quickly say that these outings were the best times of our lives. Our fissures had not yet opened to expose structural flaws. The group has dwindled and become fragile in obedience to mortality and morbidity. Missing from the scene is Judy Hawthorne, Tom Hamill, and Sashy Izard, who took the picture but died of a massive heart attack within a few days after we returned home to Roanoke in 1971. These three and nine more now are dead at this writing. This small universe of souls offered nothing to claim a footnote to history or warp the curve of mortality. A few made a lot of money and a few went broke; some smoked and/ or drank themselves to death; and several couples divorced. All had problems, great and small, with themselves, their spouses, and their children. The survivors, mid octogenarians, now more plainly see that we are given no enduring place on earth and that our remaining days may not abrupt by luck of unexpected departures but more or less miserably continue beyond the life of our brains. But the recollection of Tommy Ward still causes us to laugh to tears. Chivas Regal awakened in him the funniest man I have ever known, the continued consumption of which led him to hallucinate the end of civilization by overwhelming hordes of Chinese before slipping into a tranquil stupor, sometimes accompanied by leakage about the mouth of Maalox, which he liberally chased back and forth with scotch. He founded the Lipper Dipper Club that met at the spring under the seventh green at Roaring Gap to reward the stillest and the quietest of its members with the occurrence of some undefined but breathtaking revelation. He was possessed of the rare talent of beating the bones (playing the spoons), which he learned from a man in Rock Hill who was maddened by the addiction. I played a tenor banjo at these gatherings and Tommy’s standing request was that I accompany him in playing “Under the Double Eagle,” an Austrian military march no one knew. But strumming chords got him going on his routine, which was fascinating. He came perilously close to becoming a drunk and flushing his medical practice down the toilet. But he didn’t.

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Tommy Ward regarding the Nymphettes. Plate 55

He hosted a golf weekend at his family’s cottage on the Grand Strand at North Myrtle Beach for some number of years, to which wives were not (really not!) invited. The picture at Plate 55 shows Tommy in surveillance of nymphettes playing volleyball on the strand, with a pint of liquor stuffed in his bathing suit. This image of Dr. T. S. R. Ward is an exposition of humor that absolutely requires us to laugh at ourselves if ever we dare to think we should be taken seriously. Tommy’s parents forbade him to swim or go to the movies on Sunday. The Mulligans in Richmond was a large group, built around a core of fraternity brothers and graduates of the University. We played select courses in and out of Virginia once a year. Like Father’s Scorpions, our wives were invited to join us at an annual party held at the Country Club of Virginia. Playing golf with them was an annual reunion that assured a gathering of friends I liked to be with that no longer could be found in Charlottesville and excused me from going there. My golf game was episodic. But I won the Mulligans trophy once and came close a couple of times.

Jews The confining fiscal conservatism of Virginia under Byrd was manifest in its fractionate banking system in place during and after the war. Virginia had switched from the antebellum format of large, centralized mother banks with statewide branches to a proliferation of small, locally owned independent banks that were bottled up in the cites and counties of their principal offices and hemmed in by depression-generated legislation that foreclosed investment banking and curtailed leveraging credit through individual and aggregate reserve and liquidity restrictions. Byrd’s pay-as-you-go fiscal policy translated into a conservative commercial banking practice of lending on demand only to those who really didn’t need to borrow. My generation and several of those that preceded had grown up poor. Mine did not come home from the war content to stay that way. A first order of business was to develop a source of debt and investment capital that could sustain land development, the ultimate asset that underlies our monetary system; fuel growth in the sciences and technology, the sine qua non of cultural advance; and undergird exponential expansion through the multiplying effect of credit and deferred settlement, the unpardonable abuse of which contributed to bring the Golden Age to its end. While Virginia soon began to relax restraints on bank consolidation, function, and branching, moving Virginia beyond its agrarian heritage and the nation from where we were at the end of the war to where we went by the end of the millennium, required the industry and genius of Jews. It was just that simple. It has been that simple in the Christian era for every Western culture worth a page in history. Brown led to an unexpected alliance. While Jews in America were closely allied with blacks on civil rights and shared with them a peaceable disposition toward the persons of others, they were devoutly dedicated to maintaining their cultural margins, that they might prosper wherever they wandered, and were thus aligned with the upper end of Gentiles in their quest for separation and self-improvement through literacy and education. Obtaining the best education for one’s children that parents can afford remains above reproach on racial grounds and impervious to the ambiguities of egalitarianism. Summa cum laude is narrowly

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defined and class ranking precisely discriminatory. Thus, Jews and Gentiles alike found themselves wed in common purpose –a consensus that shaped the new society. This tacit alliance progressively generated unimaginable pools of wealth throughout the last quarter of the century. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose from 759 in 1980 to 11,722 in 2000, the NASDAQ from 200 to 5,000 during the same period. In 2007, the rate of charitable giving and accumulation in America was estimated at $300 billion annual. However this amount is calculated, it serves both as an index of our burgeoning prosperity and as confirmation of a social consensus among the wealthy to consign a significant part of it to the support and endowment of the nation’s educational and cultural infrastructure. The amount given was thirty times Virginia’s budgeted annual individual income tax receipts for the 2008-10 biennium and came to over 27% of $1.1 trillion annual federal individual income tax revenue. It approximately equaled total federal income taxes reported by 132 million Americans, all but about 7 million of the nation’s top income earners. Our Golden Age would pass as tarnished brass if the wealthy contributed no more than what was required of them in taxes. Herein lies an inconvenient truth: The nation’s press cannot separate wealth from greed and therefore is unable to speak of taxes and philanthropy at the same time; nor can it find a statesman among the wealthy, for they are conclusively presumed to first serve their own self-interests. The continued vilification of industrious men who have come by wealth has effectively deprived the country of leadership at all levels of government, a national disgrace confirmed by audio-visual exposure of the constituency and posturing of congressional investigative panels in hearing. The evidence supports the belief that Jewish Americans, who number themselves at less than 2% of the population, are responsible for a large part of wealth thus redeployed. This disposition to share and give back to the communities in which they have prospered became a defining social phenomenon of the last half century. Jews broke the fateful pattern of accumulating and secreting wealth into familial networks where it earned both interest and the loathing of Gentiles from whom it was gathered. Father’s description of great wealth as being “richer than a dead Jew” as well as stereotypical attributions of fawning obsequiousness lost relevance as metaphor. Rabbi Milgrom’s rebuke of Dean Muse was an important marker of the transition. At the time, it required courage to insist that Jews be recognized as members of American communities rather than members of Jewish communities of America. Assimilation, which plainly predates recorded history, proceeded painfully throughout the Old Testament. Who is a Jew was again examined and defined in the Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany in 1935 and earnestly debated in the state of Israel. It accelerated in the post-war period. Perhaps as many as one half of those considered to be Jewish by those who now purport to be Jews are intermarrying with Gentiles. Not only have those who are called Jews begun to share their wealth in support of cultures that best define what it means to be human, a growing part of them also share or tolerate a reformed theology--a light to lighten the Gentiles--that implicitly admits a universal presence rather than a tribal deity, a subsuming ethos rather than the divisive imperatives of Leviticus, a new commandment that first issued from the wisdom of Confucius rather than the lips of Jesus. Had cousin Ann Perkins Maury dwelt on the question how much of the Nicene Creed one might disavow and remain a Christian, she might well have answered that the baby Jesus got thrown out with the bath water and

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that unwittingly she had become a closet Jew. In truth, the resurrection theology of the Gospels remains as the doctrinal divide but has not survived as a substantive distinction, and this may explain why main line Christian denominations and orthodox Judaism coincidentally began to decline with the wild bird population following Brown. Many of those at the upper end of my generation, both Jew and Gentile, embrace evolution, reject the resurrection of the dead as against science and the hope of many to end in dreamless sleep, and continue to mate with those to whom we are attracted regardless of disparate ancestries and deities. Miscegenation, as we must understand from the Pentateuch, was a two-way street sometime painful to walk for Jew and Gentile, particularly in the early post-war period. When I returned from Europe in August of 1952, I shed tears with Mother at home and went off to grieve the loss of Perk with Father at his office. I told them that I had fallen in love with a girl from St. Louis I had met on board ship. Father’s, brows lifted another notch when I told him her name was Lucy Levis. I was and remain a perfect vessel for the attitudes and many of the perceptions of my ancestors. They were the right thinking people in my life, and it was not difficult for me to capture his thought that sponsorship of my summer abroad would prove a poor investment indeed if it earned a Jewess from the midwest as an addition to the family. But it never occurred to me that I had fallen in love with Rebecca on the quay and had I first beheld her cradling a menorah in her arms, I’m not sure I would have noticed or cared. As it was, Lucy’s grandmother, Bessie Cary Dunn, had carefully traced herself into the Colonial Dames from two lines of colonial notables and her daughter, Lola, had seen to it that the children joined her at St. Michael’s and St. George’s, a block or so away from their home in Clayton. Lucy’s grandfather, Robert Harry Levis, was a standout among a group of literate but otherwise uneducated siblings some of whom worked for their father, Edward, who founded the Illinois Glass Company to produce molded glass bottles blown by German artisans in Alton, Illinois. The company became a major American manufacturer of glass containers following acquisition of the technology for continuous bottle molding machines and the formation of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Two of Lucy’s friends and bridesmaids, Frances Thomas and Marion Streett, advanced the sometimes painful point. Frannie’s father, Charles Allen Thomas, bore certain similarities with mine. He was born on a farm in Kentucky and was home tutored by his mother and grandmother following the death of his father, a minister, when he was an infant. He went to Transylvania College, Lexington, at age sixteen and later to MIT, where he was educated in the sciences. His research in chemistry, which dwarfed Father’s accomplishments in law, included participation in the Manhattan Project and the creation and production of useful products of great commercial value at the time-- notably the anti-knock additive, tetraethyl lead-most of which have been discredited as toxic in our quest to eliminate death as a consequence of birth. As his career as head of Monsanto wound down, he chose to express himself by assembling some 15,000 acres of pasture land and slash pine savanna near Leary, Georgia, for no graver purpose than to encourage the propagation of wild quail to hunt. At Magnolia Plantation, he bent his genius toward sustaining his Edwardian affliction with the plantation of pecan trees and peanuts, and I had the privilege of hunting with him on more than several occasions at the invitation of Frannie and her husband, Ted Martin, the best of

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mid-life friends, and enjoying the unpublished dimensions of a man few others were

sonal exemption. In their remembrances of him, these children left little doubt of their

privileged to measure. I doubt that the hunt actuarially was sustained by crops from

preference for their Jewish ancestry over their maternal connection with the St. Louis

the ﬁeld but never whether the enterprise made less than perfect good sense among

Country Club and the Davis Cup.

men I reverenced most. If it were a rich man’s boast rather than a whim, I would never have met him. He was right thinking.

Charlie and Marion moved to Washington where he headquartered his ﬁlm produc-

Frannie’s mother, Margaret, was one of some number of children born to Harold E.

family and other democratic politicians and then more broadly into documentary ﬁlms

and Katherine Houk Talbott, a multi-talented and largely successful family from Day-

some of which dealt partly in collage with the dignity and depth of the human spirit.

ton, Ohio. Margaret’s sister, Katherine, married Alfred W. Jones, whose Dayton cousin,

Four of his ﬁlms received Oscars out of ten nominated for Academy awards.

tion company and became successful, ﬁrst promoting the campaigns of the Kennedy

Howard Cofﬁn, redeployed wealth derived from engineering elements of America’s

We last visited with Marion in the fall of 2002 to celebrate Charlie’s life. He had died

automotive industry toward the purchase and early development of several of the barrier islands of Georgia. In 1928, Jones was entrusted with the management and further development of these properties, which became known as Sea Island. It was and long

of pancreatic cancer while struggling to complete Berga, Soldiers of Another War. Charlie had been assigned to the 106th (Golden Lion) Division but had been left state side with a foot infection and missed the Battle of the Bulge, in which his division

remained one the most exclusive resorts in America. Samuel Gompers stood a better

was decimated by the German counter-offensive. Of a large number captured by the

chance of joining John Galt beyond the utopian veil of Atlas Shrugged than registering at the Cloister.

Germans, some three hundred prisoners singled out as Jewish were segregated into the

Frannie ventured to California to paint and explore a means of livelihood. She met

Convention. Many of them perished from mistreatment.

concentration camp at Berga where they were enslaved in contravention of the Geneva

a Jewish boy and became interested enough to invite him to visit in St Louis. The

It is convenient to treat the ﬁlm as a subplot of the Holocaust, as its title suggests, and

detail of the encounter with Margaret has been blurred by the passage of time, but the

I have no reason to suppose that he intended other than a variation on this theme.

operative facts of Frannie’s recollection are that the suitor abruptly disappeared on her

I place myself among the least of those who understand his art but foremost in the

mother’s suggestion to him that his mother would never accept Frannie as a mem-

conﬁdence that it was neither taught nor learned at Colorado State or the University

ber of his family if they wed and, as an aside to Frannie, that Sea Island would never

of Iowa. Perhaps the poignancy of Berga derives as much from Charlie’s narrow escape

accept him as a member of hers.

from extinction by Teutonic cousins as his embarrassing luck as a Jew.

Charlie Guggenheim fell in love with Marion Streett, the soft spoken, curly blond

He enjoyed the friendship and society of some of the brightest stars to appear in the

intermediary in my ship board romance with Lucy and godmother of our daughter,

skies of America’s Golden Age. I now look back on Charlie’s memorial service, which

Cary. Charlie was raised in Cincinnati, where his father and grandfather prospered

was held in a synagog where a rabbi spoke beautifully of Charlie but not as a Jew, with

retailing furniture. He spent a year studying agriculture at Colorado State College

the thought that we had moved toward and closer to an ethos of humanism and away

of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts. He was drafted in 1943 and spent three years

from the tribal mythologies and imperatives of the Old and New Testaments. But was

in the army. After discharge, he earned a BA degree at the University of Iowa where

this thought not generally shared by descendants of Abraham Mendelssohn and other

his curriculum included contemporary European history and rhetorical criticism. He

Jewish reformists who, during a century of toleration, witnessed the death of 12,000

came to St. Louis in 1952 with one of the nation’s pioneer public educational televi-

Jewish soldiers in German uniform killed in action in World War I?

sion stations where he created content but was ﬁred two years later over a programing dispute with his boss. In the post-war period it was still considered proper to ask the father for his daughter’s hand in marriage, but Charlie’s application was so hopelessly bereft, he could have submitted it as a scion of Peter Stuyvesant with no greater expectation of its approval. Nor was it forthcoming. Douglas Streett, though he would separate from his marriage with Anne Davis, remained unreconciled to the marriage of their daughter for most of his life. His grandchildren attributed his opposition to their father’s Jewish ancestry but forgave him for it as a dated prejudice from which Charlie patiently earned a per-

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Plate 56

Marriage at Midlife and Beyond

The picture of Lucy and me at Plate 56 shows us leaving church as husband and wife. It was published in Town and Country, which then featured society news and gossip for high-end consumption. Probably, it was submitted by the wedding photographer but why it was published is a speculation. Perhaps it was accepted by the magazine as a comfortable variation on the more familiar theme of Eastern Establishment social proclamations. Lucy was finished out at The Masters School, Dobbs Ferry, New York, and Bennett Junior College, Millbrook, New York, where higher studies in the liberal arts and equine and country club sports were offered (along with something called “domestic science”), and was studying art at Washington University, St. Louis, when we married. That she immediately derived from midwest ancestry was therefore forgivable. And while I was irrelevant, the University has sometimes served as a destination for the sons of foreign dignitaries and my brotherhood in the bonds of St. Anthony Hall made coverage of our wedding less an aberration than an editorial condescension to a broadened register of the right sort of people--those more likely to buy the magazine. I suppose that St. Louis high society was more carefully controlled and clearly defined than any of those of the Eastern Establishment when we married. The Veiled Prophet served as the undisclosed principal of a semi-secret society of men who annually sponsored both a parade and ball, which culminated in the revisitation of the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan to his adopted city to crown the Queen of Love and Beauty. She was secretly selected from an Honor Court of five debutantes, who in turn were chosen from among a larger class of young ladies receiving invitations to attend the ball. Lucy and all five of her bridesmaids from St. Louis (Plate 57) were presented at Veiled Prophet balls during the period 1949 to 1952. This male-dominated pageant then defined the role of young women in high society and may have reached the limit of public tolerance of the fairy tale depiction of the city’s elite during these years. These pageants were neither beauty contests open to public participation nor exposures of women who had reached the age of child bearing to men of the tribe. Rather, they were self-serving affirmations of acceptance into this society of the parents of showcased daughters. This was made clear by Margaret Thomas to her daughter, Frannie, who had received an invitation to the Honor Court from which the queen would be selected. She told her father that she did not want to leave college to attend the court of the Veiled Prophet and was succinctly told by her mother that the pageant was less about her than him. She returned home to study Art at Washington University. Soon after, the Ball was moved from city-owned Kiel Auditorium to the privacy of Chase Park Plaza’s Khorassan Ballroom. The sphere of women in Lucy’s time was in transition from that of their mothers, which was generally confined to home making and child rearing in variant styles and settings. After our marriage it rapidly enlarged to include higher educational and career opportunities equal to those available to men. Only Marion Streett among Lucy’s bridesmaids graduated from a four-year college, and she was considered something of a maverick at the time. Lucy and the rest were quite comfortable at the court of the Veiled Prophet and the Globe-Democrat’s announcement of our engagement finished out her social credentials with the advice that she had been “introduced to her mother’s friends at tea” and “to the debutante set at a buffet supper at the Bellerive Country Club during the holidays” of 1950.

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We returned from honeymoon at Sea Island to Charlottesville via Forkland and introduced ourselves to independent living. We drank martinis, dined on a can of Spam and soda crackers, made love, and drove to the University the following day. After settling into our cottage and the law school, I picked up John Paine at the Beta House, where I found him napping on a bed without sheets, wearing tennis sneakers without socks. We went crow hunting and killed over thirty birds. John’s shotgun looked like a piece of smithery from the village forge but his crow call was a gem. He hocked rather than blew into it, which anguished the simulated guttural whine of a crow in distress and called into range frenzied brethren of the flock to chase away the hawk or owl they surely thought had caused the uproar, a few diving down within fifteen feet of the top of his head. I followed the crow hunt with a gift of a recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado to Lucy in remembrance of her twenty-second birthday but in satisfaction of an obvious desire to buy it for myself. These required an adjustment of comportment and expectations. Lucy is neither athletic nor competitive. But for her artistic talent and babies, cats, and dogs to care for, which sustained and constrained her to midlife, she might have bolted and run a quarter-century before. The difficulty of our marriage was that it began so soon. All four of our children were born within a span of five years and Cary, the oldest, graduated from Hollins when Lucy was four months shy of her forty-fifth birthday. She had done all that could be expected of her with half a life to live and no agenda for living it. She ventured to Hollins in 1977 to resume studies in studio art, gaining credit for her work at WashingPlate 57

ton University, and elected courses in music, English and feminist literature, earning a B.A. degree and a 4.0 grade average in 1979. At Hollins she became intoxicated from imbibing a witch’s brew of male malevolence but modulated to a bra-wearing liberal Democrat. The suddenness with which she rejected the conservative Republican ideology of her people and turned the Veiled Proﬁt into a leering satyr was stunning. Her emancipation and decision to live separate and apart was painful. Where love is joined or lost is where bliss and pain is found that only humans measure to unimaginable peaks and unbearable valleys. She traded in and out of our home and marriage and continued her venture at the Rhode Island School of Design where she joined our daughter Page, a graduate of Connecticut College. The two of them roomed and graduated together, Lucy with honors in painting and Page in glass. She returned to Hollins for graduate work and earned her masters degree. We reassembled our marriage with parts somewhat different from those seen in the original package, notably including a set of pinned-back ears for a husband who thought her graduation convocation at RISD was a ﬂag stomping communist youth rally. At my 65th Woodberry Forrest reunion dinner, I was seated next to Alice Jane Fiveash, my classmate’s wife. Their marriage has endured. We had not seen them for years, and she asked me how I had met Lucy.

Lucy and Page’s graduation from RISD 1987

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My love story provoked her approximately to say: My son told me that he thought he might be in love. I yelled at him, “Son, falling in love is not something You think about. If you do, it hasn’t happened.” Our conversation rhetorically continued: Did we live happily ever after? Only if you think we married late this morning. Could you get along without her? Maybe for an afternoon.

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The Passion of Christ

I look back on my early involvement at St. John’s with some embarrassment. I was thinking one way and permitting myself to be seen another to no greater purpose than to color my curriculum vitae as a man of God. This remained an expectation of my generation, and I’m sure I did not travel alone. But I took it to a higher level and got myself in a bind. I first got involved with the annual canvass to raise money with which to run the parish. This remains a perfectly acceptable practice for pagans, for the devout seem not to have much to give, and the church has never required donors to renew their vows as a condition to accepting their pledges. I made a tightly worded appeal from the lectern that caught the ear of Stuart Saunders, the first of the lawyer presidents of the N&W. He wrote a note praising my message, and I soon found myself on the rector’s short list for election to the vestry. Dick Beasley had come to St. John’s in 1946 after Churchhill Gibson had declined and served brilliantly for twenty-two years during the Episcopacy’s finest hour. He was charismatic, a skilled preacher and unremarkable pastor. As is often the case with strong leaders, he effectively influenced the constituency of governance and was probably responsible for my election to the all-male vestry of twelve. William Marmion succeeded Henry Phillips as bishop in 1954. In 1957, the Phillips Conference Center at Hemlock Haven, near Marion, was established, and Bishop Marmion soon proposed that the facility be used for racially unrestricted youth conferences, which meant that the children of the diocese’s 125 black communicants might mix with the children of 9,700 white communicants at the center. This was a social experiment that was thought to require approval by a majority vote of both the lay and clerical orders of the diocese and precipitated an acrimonious standoff. My election to the vestry came in its later stages. I have no recollection that the merits of racial mixing at the diocesan level was discussed during meetings of the vestry. But I vividly recall both that I attended meetings of older men of the diocese unanimously opposed to the bishop’s initiative and that Dick Beasley sponsored vestry appointment of Ben Parrot, a pillar of the parish, as lay delegate to a forthcoming convention of the Council of the diocese, who seemed aligned with the clergy. I orchestrated the nomination and appointment of Gordon Willis, a delegate clearly opposed to the experiment. I shall never forget Dick Beasley’s shocked expression when the vote was announced. He had got caught meddling in the affairs of the laity, and I had got caught in a pose his prior meddling had enabled. Bishop Marmion’s initiative failed. In 1962 a triple track protocol was approved that separated children by sex into three age groups and allowed racial mixing only in each of the six same-sex subgroups, only one of which was allowed to convene at a time. It was subsequently reconfirmed among adult congregations that black communicants generally preferred to remain separate and that white communicants greatly enjoyed eroding the Episcopacy with division over its liturgy, hymnody, and the constituency of the clergy. Hemlock Haven was soon abandoned and sold in 1985.

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John Spong made his way out of Carolina to St. John’s Lynchburg, where he came under the guarded aegis of Frank Rogers’s oldest child, Bunny Vaden, and the formidable conservatism of descendants of Carter Glass, whose daughter, Augusta, shared with Lelia Throckmorton undemanding service as one of my Godmothers, then on to St Paul’s, the cathedral of the Confederacy in Richmond, where my fraternity brothers mostly headed up the laity. Spong’s transition was discomforted by his appointment by Bishop Marmion to represent the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia at the General Convention of the Episcopacy held in South Bend in 1969. There, militant blacks wrested microphones away from speakers and took over the deliberations of the convention to demand reparations for Anglican involvement in the enslavement of negroes. Spong based his pastoral ministry at St. Paul’s on obtaining confession and compensation from his congregation for the abuse of black people. Interestingly, he lamented that no one of Marmion’s courage could be found among Richmond clergy to support his cause. I do not know how much, if any, Spong raised among friends and fraternity brothers to repay black people for treating them poorly. Most regard Richmond society as a party in progress seen by outsiders with faces pressed against the window panes. My guess is that Spong’s impact on these people endured no longer than frosted breath upon the glass. My next error was to lecture on the trial of Jesus. My personal experience with the Gospels came in stages following the death of my father. I had in hand most of the resources that he had saved regarding the trial. I studied them and, for the first time in my life, carefully examined the Gospels in preparation for my own adventure into the Passion of Christ, this at the invitation of those at St. John’s responsible for fleshing out the adult education schedule. It was a mistake. I followed the path of others that the Gospels are the sole source of narrative history of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, the verification of which entirely depends on the essential agreement of three of the Gospel accounts. But I came upon and was shaken by a passage peculiar to Matthew 27:19: When he (Pilate) was set down on the judgement seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man; for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. Suddenly, the precarious scaffolding upon which verification had been constructed collapsed. How could Matthew have become privy to the trepidation of Pilot’s wife, if, indeed, he had one, when Pilate himself, if there was such a man, supposedly knew nothing of Jesus before he was brought before him to be sentenced to crucifixion? What reason could be assigned for gratuitous publication of such an omen by Pilate to a maddened crowd of detested priests and elders screaming for crucifixion who, if not barred by the Romans, did not dare to enter the Pretorium where Jesus was examined apart “lest they be defiled”( John 18:28)? Dean Muse and the rest had simply missed the point. Had Jesus, the son of man, been acquitted, Christianity could not have survived its birth in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, son of God. The passage is a theatrical aside employed to advance the plot line of a new theology from its nativity in Bethlehem to ascension after death on the cross at Golgotha. Jesus is divinely aware of what will happen and how it will be accomplished, even to the detail of his betrayal and denial by Judas and Peter, functional

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members of a cast whose roles were scripted and outlined to them in advance of their inexorable performance. Indeed, Jesus previews his sacrifice and resurrection as soon as he gathers together the disciples who will follow him, leaving what preceded and followed his brief reappearance among them as a timelessly beautiful expression of a new theology that promises life after death and depends not on synoptic verification but divine revelation and faith in God, now the loving father. Needless to say, I was not prepared to frame an appeal for the purpose of assessing error in a trial that never happened and ended in the crucifixion of a miracle worker of infinite goodness unknown beyond the Gospels. Whereas cousin Ann was selective, I could find nothing but myth from which to choose. I had caught myself up in the pose of a Christian disciple sharing his uncommon knowledge of the law with an audience, including Bishop William Marmion, that had every reason to suppose that I was what I purported to be. While I have come to believe that there is no one in Christendom who now fully accepts the credos of faith that have come down to us from the Council of Nicaea, there was no room in my conscience to rationalize a historical Jesus to no purpose other than to gain applause from entertaining an audience with abuses of due process that were essential to his deification. I managed to muddle through by avoiding the trial and dwelling on the compelling logic of Hebrew law and practice before the Sanhedrin. For example, witnesses were not sworn to tell the truth, for oaths could not make liars tell the truth nor honest men more truthful. The penalty for perjury was the sentence sought by the false accuser. Unanimous verdicts were voided as collusive, this for the reason that Jews knew it of themselves that complete agreement on anything was beyond their experience and mistrusted themselves whenever it appeared to happen. The Bishop warmly thanked me for my presentation. I decided that I should not again pose as accepting the Gospels as containing more real history than was convenient to the myth. I could not let it go at that. What truth lay hidden behind the new theology of the Gospels? I revisited the question years later. If what was recorded as said is read, it is learned that the Jews responsible for the content of the Old Testament did not believe in life after death. The patriarchs wither, die, and are buried to be gathered unto their people at Hebron. But toward the end of the 1st century, it is clear that among the Jews, some believed in a resurrection of mortals. Flavius Josephus, the Hebrew historian of the period, tells us that those who so believed were from among the Pharisees, a group that broadly included the intelligentsia as well as the narrow-minded clerics who dwelt on every jot and tittle of the law as necessary to purity and God’s favor. The Sadducees, the priestly aristocracy, rejected the notion, as we learn from the synoptic Gospels, wherein they say there is no resurrection and seek to trap Jesus with the question: Who among the seven predeceasing men who married the same woman will become her husband when she comes herself to heaven? Jesus tells them that they err, for those in heaven neither marry or are given in marriage but are “as the angels of God.” It is appealing to suppose that the entrenched aristocracy and the wild-eyed liberals found among the Sadduccees and Pharisees in Jerusalem would come to debate the novel belief of an after-life before the Great Sanhedrin, either as a new theology or its suppression as blasphemy. But Herod the Idumean, who

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had become king of the Jews in 37 B.C. by sufferance of Rome, slaughtered more than half the Sanhedrin early in his reign to get a grip on the quarrelsome Jews of the temple city and thereafter denied the Pharisees any participation in politics or government to keep the two sects from murderous conflict that had raged since the Jews briefly gained independence under Judas Maccabaeus in 147 B.C. At the time the Gospels are thought to have been written, if not decades before, the Great Sanhedrin had ceased to function and perished forever with the destruction of the temple and the annihilation of the Jews in Judea that commenced in 66 A.D. The theocratic structure of the Hebrew Commonwealth had vanished and the locus of those who believed in the resurrection, per force, was elsewhere among the diaspora. Chances are that Josephus learned of their beliefs in Alexandria in the delta of the Nile. The highly evolved and remarkable faculty of Jews to master the languages and writing systems of the cultures into which they wander or where they are exiled and enslaved, adding to one or more variations of their own, is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in that city, founded by the Macedonian conqueror more than three centuries before the Christian Era. It was the cultural epicenter of the known world. Its library was the collection point for its literature, totaling to some 900,000 scrolls by one account, all translated to Greek to gain admission. Gathered here also were the scholars and thinkers of the times, including a large population of the Jewish diaspora, who perhaps enjoyed, if only briefly, a more liberal franchise for free expression than elsewhere ever experienced. If not a resident during his early years, Josephus was a visitor there. A speculation that Josephus had seen and read some or all of the Canonical Gospels in present format seems unwarranted. Josephus does not link Jesus to the resurrection theology, and had he read or otherwise learned that Jesus brought again to life the ruler’s daughter or Lazarus, one would think that his histories would have treated no other subject. The Jews of the diaspora do not appear to have encountered Jesus as a historical figure and, of course, never accepted his divinity or life after death for mortals in their liturgy. The gospels, which are what those in charge at Nicaea chose from among other texts for Christians to accept, appeal to me more as an obscured polemic against the hated Sadducees than historical narrative. Did not Caiaphas kill God the Son? But so much for superior intellect. Christians butchered Jews for killing the Christ the Jewish intelligentsia offered as the path to their eternal salvation. I retreat to firmer footing.

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Front row from left: Me, Joe Howell, Mary Lou Getty, Kossen Gregory, Toy Savage, Justin Moore | Second row from left: Sarah Gregory, Jeanette Moore, Bud Getty Thrid row, Lucy and Tommy Watkins | Top of stairs: Hunter Savage, Jean Watkins, Lady in green unkown. Plate 59

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The Practice

In my time, no lawyer not then in jail was allowed to pass to the next realm other than as a “prominent” member of the bar. It was the custom to spread the local bar association’s memorial resolution in the order book of the cognizant circuit court, and that of my great uncle, George Perkins (Plate 58), was masterfully accomplished. He was greatly respected as a gentleman and practitioner in Charlottesville. I remember visiting his son, William Alan Perkins, at his offices on lawyers row in the court quadrangle of Charlottesville. He was wearing a dark grey cardigan sweater and smoking a pipe and was then practicing with John Battle and Hippo Minor. I made friends with his son, William, whom I mostly saw at Bar meetings at Hot Springs and White Sulphur until he nearly killed himself on a motorcycle. More distant cousin Chiswell Dabney Perkins called Wild Willie a damned fool. Their first wives were twins. George Perkins and I shared several accomplishments. Each of us rose to the presidency of our local bar associations. He was also memorialized as having a fine voice, which I suppose was mainly heard at the Presbyterian church in Charlottesville, where his marriage took him.76 I’m fairly certain that on paper I looked as good as my great uncle. Most, if not all, professional societies are founded by the self-appointed with the superficial mission of recognizing and promoting excellence in some specialty of the practice but are better understood as aimed at admirable levitation. I’d lie if I said I was above it all. I was ambitious. I was elected a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers as well as the Virginia Law Foundation, which formed in 1984. I was inducted in 1986 when the fellowship of the Foundation probably totaled to less than forty men. As I cleared the age of sixty, I matured into the conviction that my fee scale tagged me as a thief. I saw a chance to quit and took it. I’ve never looked back. I am proud of the fact that I appeared to perform at levels acknowledged to be well above common expectation, both as a trial and office lawyer, but most grateful that inheritances on both sides of our marriage, a couple of good investments, and a burgeoning Dow left me free to unwind uncomfortable poses and insist on honor to protect the accumulation, including what I felt I’d stolen. Someone once said that silence is the great art of conversation. I have the unearned gift of speaking in sentences and a soft but confident Southside elocution. If I deliver myself on matters of no importance, it sometimes leads elderly ladies from the North to place me on Lee’s staff and others to imagine that I must have been an accomplished member of the bar. I easily number lawyers among the finest men in Virginia. A group of them is seen at Plate 59. Most of them, however, are ever mindful of the courtesies due to that small cadre of the profession who bring lawsuits. While some are openly scornful of reckless actions against their clients, they, and a host of others, are silently grateful, lest we perish. Thus, the Grand Conspiracy, in which colleagues in the legislature uncap awards and create new disputes for adjudication by courts that allow expensive sagas to commence and indefinitely continue. Infinitely valuable lives, insoluble controversies, immortality in pristine environments and quarrelsome academics prone to legislate from the bench is the product of the coalition. The decision in Brown was a jewel in its crown. My profession has nurtured a perfect democracy and grown rich from exploiting its essential dysfunction. We can no longer form a working consensus for leadership.

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George Perkins Plate 58

Northport Point

Having rationalized autobiography as social commentary, I cannot neglect Northport Point. I have returned each year for over fifty years and there spent upwards of three months of every summer of the last two decades. In the scheme of this society, I would have remained on probation but for the fact that Lucy’s mother, pre-certified by the Alexanders, Funstens, and Hamiltons from St. Louis, brought her children here during and after the war, almost two decades before I first arrived in 1959. Some years ago, I became fascinated with the history of the place and spent hours pouring over resources relating to its quaint governance and labyrinthine infrastructure. Lucy and I are now mingled with the menagerie of its curiously delightful and often peculiar fauna. The exotic collection has dwindled. Many of our generation and most of those preceding now are dead, either full or half. What I offer here is the perspective of an outsider looking in and the affectionate but irreverent reflections of an insider not sure he ever belonged. Lower Michigan is shaped like a left-hand boxing glove. It is flawed on the upper left by the fissure of Grand Traverse Bay, which opens on Lake Michigan at the lighthouse at the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula on the west and Charlevoix on the east. Traverse City is at the south end of the bay and Old Mission Peninsula separates it, east and west, for about half its length. Northport Point lies just a few miles south of the lighthouse and roughly takes the shape of a heavy hafted hand sickle, the neck of which narrows (a carrying point for the Ottawas) to connect with the shallow blade of a peninsula that juts southeasterly into the bay for the length of a mile (Plate 60) . In 1899, Orin Ward partnered with George Winans to purchase the blade, neck and shoulders of the handle, a part of the Gill farm. In 1900, they built a twelve-room hotel on the narrows, which they named Cedar Lodge, and a dock to make the resort accessible. They subdivided the blade and shoulders into building lots, each of which fronts about 66 feet on the bay or the harbor protecting the village of Northport, four miles west across the water. In 1906, the developers purchased another 77 acres of the Gill farm. This tract forms the better part of the handle; its shore was subdivided into lots that front Northport Harbor on the south and face toward Lake Michigan on the north. In the same year, Henry Hall subdivided a part of his adjoining lands and tacked on another half mile of Northport Harbor shore lots to those added by Ward and Winans. Hall’s lots were not then considered to be a part of Northport Point, though all were served by the shore road from the village, the single means of ingress and egress to and from what Ward and Winans had wrought. Many of those who first found their way here as guests of the hotel were struck by the beauty of the setting and some returned to buy lots and build modest summer cottages on them. A society formed during the first two decades of the century, principally out of English and German Protestants from the midwest. The Wards, Schaffs, and Heidrichs are notable among them because their descendants to the sixth generation have returned to summer here in numbers.

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Plate 60

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In its origins, one does not get the sense that the Point was a destination of the wealthy. Rather, it was a modest gathering of the diaspora of Cedar Lodge, which boasted more savants than servants and was perhaps less blessed with the amenities of the age than those who gathered south at Omena or across the bay at Charlevoix, Petosky, Harbor Springs, and Mackinac. An early patriarch was Dr. David Schaff, who taught church history at what would become the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, an afﬁliate of the Presbyterian Church. There he taught and wrote extensively and saw to the completion of a catalogue of world religions begun by his father, Philip Schaff, a Swiss-born but German educated theologian of world renown in the late 19th century. Dr. David Schaff was joined early on by Bishop Edward Atwill, Episcopal diocese of Kansas City; Professor F. Louis Stuart, a Latin scholar and teacher at the University of Chicago; and Dean Peter Lutkin, Atwill Chapel Plate 61

head of Northwestern’s school of music. Dean Lutkin’s singular contribution to memorable choral music is The Lord Bless You and Keep You, with seven fold amen. Thus, the society that formed was heavily weighted with devout academics and their influence is seen in the construction of a lovely, wayside log chapel in 1911 at the top of the interior ridge of the peninsula on land given by Ward (Plate 61). It was built by local artisans under the direction of theologians and was funded by cottage owners who named it the Atwill Memorial Chapel in memory of the Bishop who was joined in death by his wife before or soon after its completion. With the exception of replacing the privy with a vesting room and toilet and admitting only enough power to operate the organ and pinpoint-light the lecterns, the chapel has remained unchanged throughout its history. A Methodist Sunday school hymnal edited by Dean Lutkin in 1911 has remained in use and the closing hymn, “I Feel The Winds of God Today” is the only one allowed. It is tempting to poke fun at these memorials of our intolerance of change but the Protestant community has remained steadfast in their meticulous preservation. During the prewar period, life was comparatively primitive. Electric power, even for lighting, did not come until the mid teens. County roads were hardly more than Indian trails and traveling here was mostly by boat from Traverse City or across the harbor from Northport after rail and passenger service was extended by the Traverse City Leelanau & Manistique Railroad to the village in the early years of the century. Residential water service was a byproduct of Ward’s wells and a water tower on high ground near the chapel to enable indoor plumbing at Cedar Lodge, an amenity for which he charged cottagers to share. Internal plumbing displaced the privy over time but introduced the requirement to treat human waste early on. Colonel Galbraith, a patriarch of the prewar and early post war period, envisioned collecting raw sewerage and piping it into the bay 300 feet off the south end of the peninsula. The dream was a century ahead of the reality of collective treatment and each inhabitant was expected to take care of his own business during the interim. Fortunately, the septic tank had been invented and came into general use several decades before the Point was developed. Its valuable office is the elimination of pathogens found in human waste if retained in the tank for at least a day to permit anaerobic decomposition and clarification of the effluent. Prior to WWII, the effluent was piped off the tanks, probably into French drains

Drawing of Atwill Chapel by Lucy

where aerobic biodegradation ﬁxed nitrogen and separated potassium and phosphorus. Seasonal demand on these systems was quite modest. A hot bath remained a luxury and the nutrient content of a cottager’s summer excreta (odorless we may assume!) measured to less than a carton of Miracle-Gro.

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Change was in the air. By 1909, Cedar Lodge had been expanded to fifty rooms and its dining room enlarged to offer fine cuisine to as many as 150 diners (Plate 62). To this in time was added a post office and Kehl’s dock store, where hotel guests debarked. The prewar secular era of hymns and prayer, sailing, tennis, and lemonade crept toward the profane. The Northport Point Golf and Country Club was formed in 1913 as an unincorporated share association. The interior of the 1906 addition, where fruit trees and the potato patch of Ole Frederickson were located, was fashioned into a nine-hole golf course under lease from the developers. The Club bought up Ole’s lease and hired him to manage the course. Work gangs of cottage owners (“Rock Bees”) used rakes and hoes to grub out glacial debris and level terrain to a quilted, teeth-chattering canopy when traversed in the age of golf carts. While membership in the Club was essential to inclusion, the prominence of gentlemen was measured by the boats they sailed rather than the horses they kept. They proudly named them as we did our homes in Virginia, whether they leaked or not. Orin Ward was an enthusiastic sportsman but keenly interested in the commercial potential of Cedar Lodge as a resort hotel and the further development of the golf course as a complementary amenity. There were only so many lots to sell and storm clouds had begun to gather concerning his possible development of the interior of the peninsula into additional residential lots. In August of 1915, fifteen gentlemen met to plan the formation of The Northport Point Cottage Owners Association, which was chartered the following year as a non-stock membership corporation to represent the interest of cottagers and assume the principal responsibilities of the developers, using an assignment from them of the maintenance fees due from cottagers under deed. The mysterious process of forming a society and sorting out its hierarchy proceeded apace. Prior to the armistice, George Eastman had developed a dry plate emulsion that was progressed to capture and preserve images on film. He made a fortune mass producing the cameras and film that enable home photography and the motion picture industry. A piece of it found its way to his favorite niece, Ellen, who married George Dryden. The couple arrived from Chicago with their daughter, Ellen, in 1919. In Northport Point, a collection of the remembrances of many of its inhabitants, privately published in 1970, its author, Augusta Stuart, George Winan’s niece, captured the moment: With the Dryden advent, the simple life vanished and elegance became the vogue; crown roasts, filet mignon, exquisite napery, china and glass graced the parties, until the next generation, with its numerous progeny, restored the casserole and Hamburg to its own. The gayest party of all was on the sixth of July, George Dryden’s birthday, with handsomely gowned women, many guests from a distance, scintillating toasts and outstanding gifts-mountain high. The spectacularly beautiful garden planted on the waters edge gave every one its beauty. * * * No important decision for years was made without his approval. But she who set the standard was Mrs. Ada Rose Northcott, whose husband and his brothers served as Lieutenant Governors of Illinois, Colorado, and West Virginia. Ada Rose offered a beach-side garden that was out-shown only by the Dryden’s and was very much involved with the people and beautification of the place. In memoriam, her daughter commissioned the construction of winged pillars of stone on either side of the access road at the division line of the Point and Hall’s subdivision and remaining lands.

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Ceadar Lodge Plate 62

The massive Northcott gates (Plate 63) were made from heavy timbers and were designed to swing from their pillars on wrought iron strap hinges inward from their aprons, suggesting, nevertheless, to those who might come upon them that they had arrived at a very private place chosen for others. Today, they serve as an historical marker that delineated Northport Point in the Roaring Twenties. Societal separation was afoot within the gates. Oligarchs melded with the devout on the west bank, which came to be known as the “paunch and pince-nez side” and, later, “the gold coast.“ The younger country club set settled on the east shore or “gin and sin side.” The nettling question remained whether neighbors residing just outside the gates on lots in the Hall addition should be counted among the chosen. Evolution quickened after the armistice. What had been accomplished before the war was to ﬁt nine holes into about 50 acres under lease from Ward and Winans. What cottagers wanted was to enlarge and reconﬁgure the course, become the owners, and crown it with a club house. In 1919, the Northport Point Golf and Country Club was reorganized as a stock corporation under charter issued the following year. The name was changed to the Northport Point Golf Club, which purchased the golf course from the developers for $17,000. They shrewdly reserved playing privileges for hotel guests and required abatement Northcott Gates: Plate 63

of the injunction suit against further development of the interior of the peninsula and payment of dues by Ward on unsold lots and Cedar Lodge. To this was added by 1922 the Ole Frederickson homestead (.75 acre), which was moved closer to the main road to form the core of the administrator’s residence; a parcel from the Castles (.75 acre); and 14.50 acres from Henry Hall. This permitted the Club to reconﬁgure the golf course by adding a part or all of three holes, bounded on the south by the access road, on the west by a road that branched abruptly north to the lighthouse and on the north by a private road to the Castle-Sisson compound, some sixteen acres that notched the handle and adjoined Ward and Winan’s lake side subdivision. The juncture is at the lake-side green of the three par seventh hole of the golf course, which offers an unforgettable view of the lake and east shore beyond (Plate 64). It was plain to see that the golf course had expanded the land of the chosen several hundred yards beyond the Northcott gates, leaving those tracing lineage through the Hall subdivision twixt and between. Indeed, Protestants comfortably tucked within the gates dubbed it “purgatory,” a place inhabited by suffering Catholic sinners seeking to pass within. In 1939, Edward Ball, a devout Roman, settled his family in pur-

The Seventh tee Plate 64 by Sally Stanley

gatory. Oral history holds that the Balls bore the principal cost of erecting stately stone pillars on either side of the access road at the boundary of the golf course that announced to all their arrival at Northport Point. The Balls were gathered in and set an enduring precedent that forbade labeling physical enhancements with the names of those who gave or were remembered. With the range of this society essentially settled and delineated anew, the privacy of seclusion remained the unmet goal. It would become an obsession. The Point never pretended to be more than a summer place. For the most part, cottages were modestly sized to ﬁt their narrow lots and only several were winterized and centrally heated. Many of them were so poorly built that one settler observed that “you could throw a cat through most of them.“ There were July people and August people and within this dichotomy, those who owned and those who rented their cottages. Most of them went back to where they belonged soon after labor day. A private well is still required for those who tarry into winter, for water service is suspended before the frost.

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Throughout the Depression and the first several decades of the post-war period, money was scarce. But the continued influx of old money and the growing prosperity of older generations and their sons and daughters measurably increased wealth. To Eastman Kodak, Brown Shoe, and the cordage, land, bank, and railroad interests of the Heidrichs were added Fleischmann’s Yeast, Diamond Match, General Motors, Firestone, Gillete, Armco Steel, Owens-Illinois, Quaker Oats, Procter and Gamble, Kellogg’s, Bobbs Merrill, Leo Burnette, J. Walter Thompson, Baker Furniture, a mix of mid-west banks and profitable smaller businesses, including Bunn-O-Matic Corporation and Rike’s Department Stores, and a sprinkle of lawyers and judges. Accumulation of wealth began to accelerate in the 80s but did not trace to tasteless exhibition. The chosen were not tasteless people. They owned almost all of the lots, save those held by Ward around the south tip of the peninsula, and were neither loath to part with them nor to add to the inventory of larger homes built with cedar logs by Leander Peck and Ole Frederickson from plans scribbled on the back of envelopes or commissioned to Harry McNamee and others by Dryden, Davis, Baker, and others. That the unwashed and unwanted might storm the gates and come among them required unbounded imagination. Nevertheless, most of them devoutly wished they could shut and bolt them anytime they pleased. Obstructing privatization were Cedar Lodge and the Club. Guests and non-resident members entered and left over the roads that passed through the gates and branched and looped to serve the peninsula and the shore lots around the golf course. Adding to the frustration of cottagers were the conflicted interests of Ward and Winans. While little was expected of them, less was offered. Boardwalks and roads77 were neglected, hotel guests crowded the golf course, and neither Ward nor Winans, each of whom built handsome cottages at the top of the neck and north shoulder of the handle, made much of a contribution toward improving and maintaining the infrastructure. To address these and other issues, cottagers formed the Association, which has quaintly operated as a quasi- municipal corporation under the charter of a fraternal order for nearly a century. Because membership is by invitation only, there is no requirement to join and no obligation to remain a member if admitted. While assessments in excess of $200 annual or $400 over a three-year period must be approved by cottage and lot owners, voting separately by class, any member may withdraw at any time and leave the cost burden of the municipality for the remainder to bear. Election to membership in the Club entitles one to enjoy the privileges of golf, tennis and other of its social and recreational facilities. It glued them tightly together for over a century. Election to membership in the Association confers nothing save the privilege of paying an initiation fee, now grown to $50,000, and annual dues with after-tax dollars to privately comfort members of the Club with core municipal services. The structure of governance inexplicably endures as anomaly in the age of egalitarianism. As a first order of privatization, the Association set about to acquire the share interest in the Club and coalesce the memberships. The broader membership of the Club rendered it an imperfect vehicle to accomplish this goal; Cedar Lodge was a clear obstruction. While the Association operated the Club as a subsidiary for years, it was not until the shares of Gaius Perkins were acquired well into the post-war period that the Club became its wholly owned affiliate. This seminal event, however, roughly coincided with federal court decisions that prohibited discrimination in the admission to country clubs formed by developers to provide golf and tennis to promote the sale of homes in the resort.

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The Drydens’ garden

The hierarchy of Point society reacted to the threat of unwanted impregnation by transferring the assets of the Club to a new corporation (The Northport Point Club) whose membership remained the same and approximately merged it with that of the Association. As an added prophylactic, the new club and the Association each adopted or continued bylaws that required separate election on application and informed those who sought to join that acceptance by one did not assure admission to the other. Leaving nothing to chance, the Association assumed to itself out of thin air an option of ﬁrst refusal to purchase or lease the land of each of its members at the purchase price or rent offered by a third party. Rules were published requiring members to notify the Association of intended sales and leases and disclose the pedigree of the aspirants. The Association was never empowered to buy off undesirables, but I ﬁnd no instance of an attempt on its part to do so. Unacceptable behavior on the part of individuals has been otherwise addressed. Rentals, if Lelananu Golf Club Plate 65

they ever served to pierce the veil, exposed the aspiring family to prospective rejection, then and now, on the polite suggestion that its members would be more comfortable summering elsewhere. In further pursuit of perfect privacy, bright lawyers and inﬂuential judges in the hierarchy bent to the task of privatizing the roads within the outer gates. When this was accomplished, with reservation of the right of ingress and egress to cottage owners and hotel guests, a check point was established between the Ball and Northcott gates to turn away those who had no business here. Construction was banned during the summer season, commercial trafﬁc discouraged and speed bumps spaced along the roads and streets. There remained only the removal of Cedar Lodge to drop the veil.

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In 1935, Cedar Lodge was leased to Albert Wrisley (who bought it in 1953) and Ward was left in the ambiguous position of a cottage owner as well as the proprietor of an inventory of lots around the tip of the peninsula and its interior, save the Chapel glebe, and at the Northcott gate. An old wound festered from Ward’s refusal to pay dues (he never did, although his widow graciously joined the Association near the end of her hundred summers on earth to the polite applause of its members) and was reopened by his threat to redivide the interior of the blade into building lots. That he might make of our sylvan park an enclave for alien scruff shattered the prospect of perfect peace. While Cedar Lodge guests were a source of revenue to the Club throughout the depression and war, Ward is thought to have sought to protect against curtailing guest privileges by developing a nine hole course on land purchased from Hall west of the Club’s boundary, operating it as the Leelanau Golf Club (Plate 65). The venture did not succeed and seems to have ended before Cedar Lodge was sold to Wrisley in 1953. George Dryden and associates came to the rescue. In 1938 he created a trust that bought the interior of the blade, which was given to the Chapel, and Ward’s inventory of unsold lots on the peninsula. The Association subsequently bought these lots, which were resold at modest profit to a select number of its trustees, including its president, who justified the transaction as necessary to restore the balance sheet after first advising the membership that all would be given the chance to bid on them if offered for sale. While clearly improper, it did not affect the constituency of the society, only the holdings of its members. It amounted to hardly more than a self-imposed moratorium that combined with adverse geology to curb further development well into the last decade of the second millennium. The second great patron of the Point was David Rike, who succeeded in growing the family dry goods business into a profitable chain of department stores headquartered in Dayton. He purchased George Winans’s cottage, where his family summered, and was as deeply committed to preserving the beauty and privacy of the Point as its most zealous residents, although his separation from his marriage with Kitty made his summer sojourns less frequent. Albert Wrisley was joined by his son in addressing the question what might be done with Cedar Lodge. The options were severely limited by the age and design of the structure. It would not bear the load of remodeling to offer rooms with baths. The cost of replacing it with a modern hotel, set in a residential subdivision whose inhabitants wished to have for themselves the hotel’s principal attraction, a nine hole golf course hardly more challenging than croquette, led the Wrisleys to sell Cedar Lodge to Rike in 1959. He had it burned to the ground (Plate 66) and gave the land to the Chapel, which dedicated it to the use of the community as Rike Park. It was sold some years later to the Association. Transfusing the society with fresh blood, the important office in which Cedar Lodge once served, was forever staunched. The land of the chosen trades among the chosen. It is not commercially marketable. Those who come here are selected and pre-certified. Gratefully, a few slip through. Baker Furniture was founded by Hollis Baker’s father who made fine furniture. Hollis prospered the business and it enabled him to design, build, and furnish the Point’s most attractive, upscale homes during and after the war. He seemed more interested in building than living in his handsome homes and quickly tired of them. He owned a beach front lot just north of Cedar Lodge, once owned by Arthur Hiemenz, one of the Point’s earliest settlers. Baker planned yet another home. Out of respect for his wife’s pub-

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The Burning of Cedar Lodge Plate 66

lished aversion to home cooking and consequent interest in taking her meals at the Lodge or having them brought over to her, the plans did not include a kitchen. When the Lodge was burned, the Bakers had no further interest in the lot. On the encouragement of friends, Lola Levis bought it for $15,000 before the Lodge’s ashes and her husband’s funeral meats had cooled. Middleton Levis was his wife’s senior by sixteen years and spent most of his last decade on earth at home in bed. Understandably, he had no interest in owning resort property but did not deny Lola and her children vacations at the Point and elsewhere, sometimes joining them. He died in early January of 1959, the year I made my ﬁrst appearance and the Lodge was burned. Over the winter and spring, Lola built her cottage (Plate 67).

The Cottage Plate 67

Her project was unstudied and the results fell well below what could have been expected of the tasteful Bakers. I must say in her defense that over the course of half a century I have never seen a single creation or alteration that did not offend the senses of those who shared their thoughts. But, in a word, Lola’s essay was awful. She engaged National Homes to fit together two of its prefabricated, single-level models that were set on a monolithic concrete slab and clad in soft aluminum, vertically ribbed in board and batten style. All casings and sliding doors and windows were also made of bright, shiny aluminum. The only threat to life everlasting in the benign ambiance of northern Michigan was the asphalt shingle roof. The floor plan was T shaped. Five bedrooms and three baths on either side of a narrow hall way were enclosed in the transept, which was gabled at the beach and driveway ends. The stem was entered from the driveway side through a narrow arcade and hallway into a long, low-ceilinged room that combined a living and dining area. It was given a wet bar and opened into an uncomfortably small, enclosed porch on the beach-side left and, on the beach-side right, onto a bow-walled concrete patio through sliding doors that look into the bay across a deep, sand-leveled lawn retained by a tumbled stone wall. The kitchen entered the dining area opposite the porch and fed into the north end of the home, which enclosed two bedrooms with adjoining bath to quarter the beloved family servants, Larnie and Minnie, both black, as well as the laundry area, storage space, and yet another bath room. The long room and vestibule were paneled in quarter-inch, random-width, grooved white oak plywood that matched up flush with spring-loaded cabinet doors to produce an attractive, uninterrupted wall plane, save for shelved passthroughs on either side of the kitchen door to permit buffet service. Notwithstanding this advance toward casual dining, Lola insisted on a foot switch under the head of the dining table and another on the wall of the sitting area to summons Larnie for service from the kitchen, no more than ten feet away. A thick, shaggy green carpet that reminded one of boiled broccoli dreadlocks required artful footwork to ring the bell. Lola abandoned it in favor of a tinkling hand bell. Lola’s tin can soon settled into its landscape, which was bordered on three sides by cedar hedges and copses. The cottage was approached from the street through a break in the hedge that opened on a generous, graveled court. The aluminum, one-car garage was tucked in the northwest corner and hidden from view. Lola added a tasteful three-bay shed and a fenced, covered walk to the laundry-kitchen entrance that defined the court and softened the appearance of the place. Little more was done to it, inside or out, for two decades.

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Lola’s hasty decision to build was preceded by the sale of the marital home at 9 Wydown Terrace and was followed in rapid succession by the lease and purchase of an apartment and town house in St. Louis and Clayton. It was a manifestation of bipolarity that plagued her for years and influenced her moving about in Florida to be with her mother and sisters and finally to settle down in The Seabrook, a retirement community at Hilton Head, South Carolina. She attended Indiana University for several years78 and was trained in voice at the New England Conservatory. She was very good at needle work and bridge. I liked being with her (Plate 68) and did not share Lucy’s resentment that her mother had turned her over to a Irish nanny and house servants to be raised. Lola, like Mrs. Baker, had no interest in food preparation and somehow managed to avoid it growing up by trading off other chores with her siblings. It was a blessing that Middleton Levis retained four servants to comfort them, a modest crew compared to a retinue of nineteen in the service of his father, Robert Harry Levis. Most of my first two decades at the Point involved two-week family visits with Lola in summer. Early trips were made in a Ford station wagon, custom painted battleship grey and trimmed in red to Lucy’s specifications, with as many as four children, the youngest of which, William Sydnor, was born only three months after our oldest, Cary Middleton, celebrated her fifth birthday. Only recently has she forgiven us for birthing siblings who crowded her out of the cradle too soon.. The trip involved driving over 800 miles without air conditioning, baby seats or safety belts before construction of the interstate highway system had earnestly begun. The contents of the inevitable diaper pail was redolent of ammonia and took on the hue of burnished gold as our adventure lengthened. It took two days to get there and two days to get over getting there. The return was equally exhausting. The single amenity was an AM radio and the principal convenience was traveling through the Appalachian Plateau on the West Virginia Turnpike, which, like a Gregorian chant, began and ended nowhere. It was in the encapsulation of this closely controlled biosphere that Lucy and I summered with children and friends. If its inhabitants are studied as a group over the course of a century, it generally may be seen that its profane patriarchs sought to define themselves by fencing out those they wished not to be or become, only to learn at the end of a century that their studied effort had succeeded only in fencing in a greater part of them than ever they would care to admit. In this context, the society of Lucy’s generation largely formed out of the children of cottage owners, most of whom were sufficiently wealthy to own a summer place and a family automobile to get them here. Their children were mostly prepared and privately educated in the East, accepted without reservation the conservative political orientation of their fathers, comfortably affiliated with the main-line Protestant denominations or the Catholic church, and were generally but modestly successful in business. A handful, including Phil Schaff and John Kinsella, made it to the top on their own. They married young and the women were not expected to share in the production of income. Divorce and separation were modest, and I have no reason to think that extra-marital sex varied from one generation to the the next. For most of the Golden Age, Lucy’s generation lived during the restoration period of “the Hamburg and casserole.” They were raised during the Depression, and some of their fathers had been broken by it. The incredible revaluation of wealth came only as they aged into twilight.

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Sitting beside Lola at the piano. Plate 68

The society of this generation was given shape by Fred Herendeen’s production of the “Follies” during the summers of 1945-47 (Plate 69). Herendeen had become a cottage owner during the war, perhaps on the endorsement of the Chicago element of the gold coast. The family business was milling, and Herendeen apparently was enabled to come here either by selling enriched ﬂour as a miller or marketing enriched bread as an ad executive. Interestingly, he arrived after ending a decade of indifferent involvement as a lyricist and librettist on and off Broadway. He contributed this talent and great energy to write the lyrics and book for productions of the Follies that required the dedication of parents to stage and direct and the willingness and enthusiasm of late teenagers and young adults returning from service to crew and perform. The rationale was to keep grown children, including his own, involved and out of trouble. The Follies were a howling success on involvement; whether they displaced much trouble remains a speculation. “We Point With Pride” and “The Point of View,” the Follies of 1946-7, was a deﬁning episode in the lives of Lucy’s generation, not because of the music, which borrowed from show and pop tunes of the day, or the lyrics, which accentuated Herendeen’s addiction to internal rhyming but dealt lightly with social issues The Follies. To the far right Jack Ball and Fred Herendeen Plate 69

of no interest beyond the gates, or because of its appeal as entertainment. One to two-day runs were set on the twenty foot stage of the clubhouse, which rose three steps above the ballroom floor where an audience of 150 might sit or stand. The Follies was an internal affair that was professionally produced by Herendeen; professionally supported by his friend, George Sontag, pianist with Orrin Tucker’s big time dance band (Plate 70); and, most importantly, professionally photographed. Images of the cast in scenes from the Follies serve as an archival resource available to a significant minority of surviving cottage owners, now octogenarians but still the core of our society, to see the way they were a very long time ago--singing, dancing and play acting, which was an expectation of their Eastern educational experience (Plate 71). Our visits coincided with or overlapped those of Lucy’s sister, Nancy, and her husband, Philip Williams, and their four children. Sharing the ownership and occupancy of resort property is intolerable. For some female siblings, sharing the planet is an excruciating experience. So long as Lola owned the cottage and we visited at her expense, all went well. And when Lola tired of the responsibility of the cottage, luck was on our side. She gave each Nancy and Lucy a one-third interest and kept a third, thinking son Tom might later take it. But he opted for a gift of real estate in downtown Alton. Lola gave her remaining third equally to Nancy and Lucy. Nancy bought the Heimenz cottage next door and annexed a new and larger cottage on the adjoining lot that came with it. Lucy and I bought her out, leaving us free to pour considerable sums of money into enlarging the enclosed porch and terrace, modernizing the kitchen, replacing concrete with stone, aluminum with wood, rotten wood with new wood, and decorating the interior to Lucy’s aesthetic. I fought her every inch of the way. I linked up with George Budke, Lingy Harrison, and David Peck to play golf all morning and return to the Ward cottage, which George rented, where we played Jarts ( played with finned darts pitched at a plastic ring laid flat on the lawn under horseshoe rules) and drank vodka until mid-afternoon. None of us

George Sontag at the piano, Lola Levis -top right Plate 70

were worth shooting for the rest of the day. How our marriages survived remains a mystery. Only David and I survive.

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Janey Schaff (Odell)

Nancy Levis Williams

ess ipn h iS ist Kr

Mol ly H arris on

r Mary Ann Shae ffe

bs Bob Bill

Dit to G ross

Chuck Schaff

Albert Wrisley

lexan der

Virginia Devilbis

Bob A

Sue Frenzel

es Jon d Te

Bl im po

Du b

Joyce Moynihan

Susie Minor

s ros B n

An Marty Underwood Lucy Levis

Lamarr Harper Ann Herendeen

Julie Otter Helen Rike

Jogie Frenzle Myra Jo McCleary Play acting in the Follies Plate 71

Lingy was the closest of friends. He always took a shortcut through the wooded elbow of the eighth hole (a par five that Budke double-eagled) to retrieve the errant shots of the careless rich. Lingy dropped dead on a deer stand in Leelanau County. I never play the hole without hoping and half expecting that he will suddenly emerge and rejoin us. Later, there were Al Wrisley, Bobby Alexander, Phil Goodspeed, and Dale Sisson. Dr. Wrisley (doctoral degree in management systems) carried the medical charts of the foursome around in his head and shared with me the dire prognoses of Bobby and Dale in whispered asides. He seldom addressed his ball on the first tee without sharing the latest chapter in the saga of his own decline, which resonated with my easy contemplation of my own demise only in those rare and fleeting moments when I thought I’d never die. And, so, we managed to preempt any attempt by our friends to explain dangling tubes and extensive pur-

Janey Schaff (Odell), Lucy Levis (Hazlegrove), Nancy Levis (Williams)

ple splotching. I played golf frequently with the older generation, including John Blakey. Lola introduced me to John in the 60s, and I shall never forget the sight of him when I ﬁrst played with him. His jet black hair, marcelled by nature, capped a head that wanted a better nose to think him handsome; these features contrasted with a pink cashmere sweater that no man I knew had ever worn. His golf bag was a leather quiver in late-stage dry rot that sheathed a clutch of unmatched irons, a hickory shafted putter and an exotic state-of-the-art driver. He was of medium height and delicate build. But he was a student of the game and played it well because he understood the physics of the swing and the importance of elevating the hands toward the vertical in the back swing. For some unknown reason, he chose to name me Whistling Bird.

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From left to right: Ginny Conklin(Rike,Peck), Joyce Moynihan, Molly Maish(Harrison),Jogie Frenzle,Ann Herendeen,Gingy Allen,Helen Rike(Noble) Ann Bross Snyder, Lamar Harper

John married Betsy Verity, a granddaughter of the founder of Armco Steel, Middletown, Ohio, and sister of Jean, who married Moe Woodhull, a Yale Whiffenpoof. Their brother Bill served as Secretary of Commerce under Eisenhower but settled in Beaufort, South Carolina, leaving Betsy and Jean with the Grouse House at the Point, which their father bought after the war. Beautiful people and lovely ladies. Betsy is the reigning grand dame of the Point and Jean is its passionate conservationist and liberal. They overlap for less than a week. My favorite perspective is the late afternoon view from our terrace across the sandy beach and into the lagoon of the bay, formed by the Stony Point reef and the peninsula. The sun is at my back and brightens everything in view. Forty years ago, the Blakeys, Woodhulls and guests were mis en scene, moving slowly about in their pontoon boat with its fringed canopy. In the dead calm of the end of day, the ebb and flow of cocktail conversation added lyrics to the impressionistic inversion of images below their water lines. It was quite romantic. Moe died young and John followed later on. The derelict of the pontoon boat lay abandoned on our beach for several seasons to remind me of the way they were. After John’s death, I told Betsy how much his friendship meant to me. She told me that John kept a picture of us on his bedside table. In recent years, the view from the terrace in late afternoons is really what keeps me coming back. It is a still life of sailboats at their moorings--a collection of primary colors arranged in patterns that never seem to change. Their owners are mostly too old to sail them any more and I am sure that those who have passed have made provision in their wills not to remove them from the exhibition during my lifetime. I hope that Lucy will find me there, slumped in dreamless sleep after adding another ounce or so to my second bourbon. Within the older generation of men, a subset began to lunch together during the late 70s in the village of Northport at the Settling Inn after nine holes of a Thursday morning ritual only the resident professional could bring himself to describe as “golf.” The village attraction was a heavy-breasted waitress who leaned over to address their difficulties with a menu each could chant by rote--standard diner fare inevitably followed with cherry pie a la mode. Why is it that so many men who have made their mark on the world dedicate their lives in retirement to lowering their handicaps or posting scores below their age in affirmation of their manhood only to regress, shuffle aimlessly along endless fairways, and ultimately reveal themselves as possessed of hardly a penis and no balls at all? Did Jesus raise the stinking Lazarus from death to hone his game in everlasting life on earth? The charter group probably numbered to no more than an handful that soon included Stanley Shipnes, whose lovely wife, Mary Ellen McNamee, lent her considerable artistic talent as a painter and watercolorist to first produce a screen for the mens’ locker room showing a golfer dribbling his fumet on the course and next to paint what was to become the official seal of the LOMs (Lecherous Old Men) showing a bare-breasted mermaid in the center. But what began as a joke became a selective fraternity that black balled other old golfers they did not like, including several of the presidents of the Club and Association. These were men of my father’s generation who sought separation and dominance and could be brutal in their denigration of the disfavored of their own kind. It was and remains beyond racism. Jews and blacks lived on another planet.

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Reid Bartlett, who prospered with Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, was taken into the LOMs just shy of his 70th birthday and became its secretary, historiographer, and chief of protocol, positions he held for over two decades. He carried the constitution and bylaws in his head and amended them as the occasion required. Father would have found commonality. It had been established that only male members of the Club who were or would become 70 years of age during the year were eligible to become members that summer. I was taken in during the summer of 1999, forty years after first arriving. Golf carts had become common place and some of the older LOMs displayed flags bearing the official Shipnes seal from fiberglass masts that rose from the rear of their carts. Reid encouraged me to buy the initiate’s membership kit, which included the flag as well as the official seal embossed on a cloth patch that could be temporarily pasted on one’s blazer for appropriate identification at cocktail parties on and off the Point. I tucked it away in my sock drawer in the hope that it might become quite valuable if kept in its original packaging. Lucy’s generation at the Point was trained in golf and tennis and to swim and sail. A large number of them returned to visit their parents and took over the family cottages when they died or grew too old or sick to return. Our generation owns a large minority of the cottages; the generational gap is well defined. In 2008, it was reckoned offhand that the LOMs would succumb to the ravages of aging and become unable to convene a foursome for Thursday morning golf by the time possible replacements became eligible for induction. Opposition to change posed riveting questions. One Thursday morning in the third millennium, a gentleman named Al appeared among us to play. He was the house guest of Sally Hedges, widow. This, alone, was an advanced social arrangement that would have earned Sally a scarlet letter in an earlier context but was of little concern to the Lecherous Old Men. What mattered to Reid, chief of protocol, was that Sally’s beloved husband, Fed, had perished prior to his 70th birthday and never been considered for induction. While it was permissible for an LOM to invite a guest to play under Reid’s construction of the bylaws, there was no room to rightly reason that forward thinking widows were licensed to add golfing with the LOMs to their arsenal of artifices to gain a latelife consort. Who could say where such loose practices might lead? Indeed, we were soon to learn. When I was tapped, it had become the custom for one of its members to host a gathering at his cottage to relieve the strain of intense competition with beverages and hors d’oeuvres, announce the winner, see to it that each had covered his ante of 50 cents (a wager that shared the immutability of the Methodist Sunday School Hymnal), and take care of such business as might be introduced before departing for lunch in the village. As time passed, it became increasingly clear that men my age and older, however well they once may have played the game, could hardly make it out of assisted living to the pre-lunch gatherings, much less the first tee. The emphasis shifted from golf to surviving to attend the annual banquet where those who had perished since last we met claimed lengthening periods of silent remembrance and attending widows of deceased members out-numbered active golfers two-to-one. It was a pleasant social evolution plagued by the details of convention. Whereas consensus was quickly reached to lower the age of admission to get a couple of foursomes on the course, the vital structure and mission of this society was threatened by a lapsus that passed unnoticed by the chief of protocol.

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The L.O.M’s Plate 72

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Earle Martin, widower, had remarried with Kristi Shipnes following the death of her second husband, Bito Cassin. Kristi is a notable woman. She grew up in Houston where her father, a Williams graduate from Illinois, rose to top management of Sears Roebuck. Kristi became a lifelong friend of Jane Slack. Lucy and I are doubly connected with Kristi. Earle had served as an Episcopal priest before retiring into counseling in Houston and has written several books on autism, based on his devoted experience with his afflicted grandchild. He was inducted into the LOMs without conducting a background check, which would have revealed that he had never taken up the game. No one seemed to notice or care and were most grateful that he hosted a pre-lunch gathering that was enriched by Kristi’s Houston hors d’oeuvres. When Shirley MacDonald died suddenly of a stroke, Allen Macdonald, widower, was considered for membership, although he had not been seen on the golf course for the better part of the century. It would have been more difficult to find his enemies than a kilo of heroine at the Point’s post office. Among his friends was Reid Bartlett, chief of protocol, who now looked back on his 90th birthday and inwardly to conclude that the core mission of the LOMs was nine holes of old men’s golf on Thursday mornings. If this mission were compromised or abandoned, would the distinction of this society not rest entirely upon the ample breasts of young women in admiration of which men are universally undistinguishable and raise the further question to observers of our biosphere of what on earth these deviate old men were up to, putting around in golf carts flying teated ensigns? The eligibility question was of such importance that it was noticed for consideration at the Thursday after-golf gathering and was fully attended. Some of the overflow were sunning themselves on Dale Sisson’s patio, a scene reminiscent of the afternoon exhibition of the impaired inpatients of l’hospital de Invalides in Paris. Inside, Bill Bobbs, a remarried widower, had invited Allen to attend a prior pre-lunch gathering and posed the questions whether Allen might be invited to come again and whether other non-golfing guests of proper maturity should be allowed at our gatherings. Reid drew to his side William Wick, a Harvard lawyer and parliamentarian who had grown up at the Point, and cut to the chase. It was their considered opinion that the LOMs were a society of elderly golfers and that none other than they should be admitted as members or invited to join us as guests. Hard cases make bad law. Earle Martin had become an LOM. Should we condescend to account for him only as currently wed to Kristi, daughter of a founding member and widow of an LOM, thus entitling her to the benefit of a tradition that allowed widows to attend the annual banquet, and demean Earle to the role of escort? Motions were made, amended, substituted, and withdrawn and it soon became unclear whether the question was the reformation of the LOMs as a society of elderly gentlemen, a few of whom played golf on Thursday mornings, or the augmentation of a few old men who played golf on Thursday mornings by an auxiliary of elderly gentlemen who did not. The motion carried. But tardy arrivals and the addition of few patio invalids brought on a second ballot that went against the motion, although it was plain to see that no one seemed to have the question clearly in mind or how it was resolved. Most of us were relieved to find Allen among us when next we met and thrilled by the incisive mandate of Frederick von Stade, Head Letch emeritus, to elevate Earle to the chaplaincy of the LOMs. The evolved and reconstructed LOMs are seen at Plate 72.

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With utopia unveiled, we see what commanded the rapt attention of a our generation in the twilight comfort of a combined net worth that must have topped $500 million when the Dow peaked. Of possible interest to those who study human behavior was the reappearance on the practice tee of Jack Ball, one of the most talented and humorous men on earth, in reaction, perchance, to a rumor I authored that Reid had read the by-laws to require that a member otherwise fit must play at least once each triennium to avoid expulsion and the decision of one 67 year old, Terry Terhune, who had never played much golf, to rejoin the Club, possibly to establish basic eligibility for early acceptance. The evolution of the conventions of our society continues. Several years ago, Jim Lienhouts, a grandson of Orin Ward, proposed to dedicate a modest family trust fund to which he had become entitled to the construction and gift to the Club of a pavilion, where tennis players might lounge, in memory of his parents. Modestly labeling the structure as a Lienhouts memorial, as he requested, offended the rule of anonymity established in funding the outer gates. Everyone knows what may not be acknowledged. The proposal was politely considered but rejected. Perhaps an inscription on the head of a finishing nail would have carried the day! When, during the Lienhouts deliberations, someone in its governance asked how the Club had come to countenance mounting a bronze plaque upon a large stone, set on the lakeside apron of the seventh green, memorializing Vance Braxton for dedicating body and soul to the beautification of our golf course, the stone was abruptly borne away in the bucket of a front-end loader by executive order of its president. Scattering the bones of this once-reverenced canon was not well received. On further reflection, Braxton’s stone was returned to a new setting under the embankment of the green and rotated in shadow to face a foreign shore from the edge of the lake. Later, it was turned to look homeward. The intricacies of the structure and governance of our society hold me in no greater fascination than the summer workings of our church militant. Atwill Memorial Chapel enables observations from a different vantage point of the summer behavior of wealthy Protestants in a never changing setting over the course of a century. In 1911, it was decided that the chapel should not affiliate with any denomination but be opened to all who might care to worship there. In a different context, the decision might have been more carefully considered and closely argued, but since it involved only two months in summer and was made by resident Anglican and Presbyterian theologians, it was easily resolved to split the season between them. For as long as I can remember, an Episcopal priest has conducted services at the chapel during the month of July. A Presbyterian minister follows in August but must deal with the 1979 revision of the Book of Common Prayer of The Episcopal Church, which somehow slipped in beside the Methodist Sunday School Hymnal. We may be sure that these founding Protestant theologians never intended the chapel to become a place of worship for papists, but this was never threatened. Apostolic Succession and the resultant requirement that Mass be celebrated by a Catholic priest in the sanctity of a Catholic church separated the significant Catholic population of the Point on Sunday mornings. Most of the stained glass windows at St. Gertrude’s, Northport, were given by or in memory of them. Interestingly, St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in recent years has been allowed to hold services at St. Gertrude’s, followed closely on the heels of departing heretics by the 11 o’clock Mass. Except for several hours on summer Sundays, the religious persuasions of the chosen are of little concern to anyone and doctrinal distinctions have continued to blur. We have wrung out the wrath of God and made

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him to love us all, equally and without reserve. Christ emptied hell when he redeemed the righteous years ago, and Christendom now seems divided into but two factions: the religious and the spiritual. And so, Atwill serves as a comfortable collection point, mostly for the survivors of Lucy’s generation. Older men still wear coats and ties and most of us come to spend an hour or so together, not so much for the amendment of our souls but to enjoy the gift of music received from the artists at Interlochen, especially flute and harp; the homilies of Pittman McGehee and Bill Evertsburg, friends we’ve known and loved for years; and juice, cookies and coffee in the shaded sunlight of the side yard, ringed by the columbarium wall which holds the ashes of friends and loved ones who have gone before. If our grandchildren come with us, it will likely be an experience unique to their summer visits here; and if some of them are missing a grandfather, he may be traced to Barb’s Bakery and then to St. Gertrude’s. The temporal affairs of Atwill are the responsibility of its board of trustees. While men traditionally have served as chairmen, the work of the chapel is clearly within the sphere of women. They find no comfort in change. Some years ago, it became apparent that the barked log lectern-posts and sections of the altar rail had rotted and needed to be replaced. Experts were engaged to find in nature the perfect match for each of the rotten members. The practiced eye can see no difference in the new and the old. The bill came to five times what it cost to build the chapel. Molly Harrison proposed that the chapel provide a labyrinth for its members. In the 90s, there was a revival of their popularity in Christian churches, and Molly thought we should have one too. I thought of them as mazes-perplexing puzzles to solve. But Molly and others saw them differently. Walking the labyrinth, according to one passionate advocate, promised a transformational experience: ”Your life is a sacred journey. And it is about change, growth, discovery, movement, continually expanding your vision of what is possible.…” Good lord deliver us from heresy and the abomination of our first and great commandment. Error so grave might lead to another: Lighting the chapel! The parking lot for the chapel is in front, across the cross-over road. It was here that Molly first proposed to site the labyrinth, but it had no chance. At the far end of the lot, an alley-way through the woods leads to a little-known glen. It is here that Molly next hoped to gain a consensus of women to place the labyrinth. But it had no chance. Some cottage owners had become accustomed to stashing their Boston Whalers and other small craft in the glen during winter. Here the women met on common ground. A decree was posted on the clubhouse bulletin board advising that if all boats were not removed by a date certain, those remaining would be hauled away and sold to recover the cost of removal. In August of 2011, David Gardner, president of Atwill Memorial Chapel, announced that in celebration of its centennial, Atwill 100 Campaign had been launched to add $1 million to its investment portfolio of $360,000. The rationale is to assure permanent financial support for a chapel that forever will serve as the touchstone and anchor of “ a vital community where folks truly care about one another in a way that is rare and very special.” When the campaign was announced, $430,000 had been pledged by trustees and others, leaving $570,000 to gather over the next three years. Anniversary Vespers were celebrated on July and August, 2012, as announced on placards posted about within the gates.

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The average annual cash expense of operating the chapel and manse for the three years preceding came to $65,000. To this was added $7,000 average annual outreach. If the campaign succeeds, investment income at 5.5% annual alone will cover the actual cost of what the chapel does. The Atwill 100 Campaign is a snapshot of the mind set of wealthy people summering in the security and seclusion of their gates. If we measure the vitality of the chosen by what the chapel plans to do with its hoard of cash beyond the gates, it adds to selfish adulation. I’m sure that we shall not all see it that way. But I rather wish we would save out the restricted endowment and give the rest away. Bake sales and Fourth-of-July picnic profits sum to unbecoming tokenism but should combine with plate collections and non.deductible contributions to sustain our lovely summer Sunday morning gatherings. Jack Oliver, a sportsman and naturalist who took me fishing in my early years at the Point, attributed the formation of our beautiful setting to the happenstance of glacial encroachment and retreat over the course of time. The grind of glaciers has left the Point with sand, a surfeit of beautiful boulders and rounded stones with infinite variations of tint and texture, sedimentary fossils of corral that we call Petoskey Stones, and tightly compacted clays that lay just beneath a thin skin of top soil. A good rain causes the golf course to quickly pond and gradually seep and migrate. Out of the adverse substrate of our edenic enclave, dystopia grew. It may be traced to the electric storage hot water-heater. A Westinghouse model was advertised in a Florida newspaper in December of 1935. A. O. Smith followed with one of its own in 1939 and introduced the first glass-lined storage tank in 1953. At the Point, during and before the war, household water was mostly heated over an oil burner, which is said to have been improperly vented into the chimney flue of the Bobbs cottage, causing it to burn to the ground in the summer of 1946. When Lola built her cottage in 1960, it was equipped with a 200-gallon electric hot water-heater and a Culligan system to purge and soften our well water to serve five full baths. Soon to follow were automatic clothes, dish washing, and drying machines. Pre-war Michigan building codes governing on-site septic systems forbade residential construction at sites where the projected output of household effluent exceeded the absorbency of their soils. While little new construction took place at the Point until late in the century, some of the prewar cottages were enlarged and most of them were remodeled to add baths and modernize their kitchens and laundries, in consequence of which surges of mostly hot soapy water could not be absorbed by the indigenous clays underlying the available drainage area of the lots. In its mildest manifestation, hydraulic failure is a socially unacceptable event: A fetid swamp of grey-water on one’s premises; it spawns a crisis of terror among civilized people when a flush overflows the toilet bowl. Toward the end of the century, hydraulic failure became commonplace. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the land of the chosen in its natural state was and would remain virtually uninhabitable under applicable sanitary codes. Of course, the environmentally correct thing to do would have been to clear the Point of human habitation and return it to nature. Building codes tend to over-design and repress innovation and exception. The Leelanau County code, however, was modified in the last decade of the century to permit the use of large, subterranean holding

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tanks at sites that otherwise could not be built on. The amendment coincided with a burgeoning Dow and the ballooning real estate bubble. Vacant lots at the Point that once were thought worthless were revalued towards a $1 million in the space of a decade. At these prices, no one who owned or bought them appears to have been dissuaded from building stately homes on them by the added cost of a thirty to sixty-thousand gallon subterranean holding tank that might see one through the better part of the season before its septage was shipped to and spread on area cherry orchards in 3,000 gallon tankers at $300 or more per load. It was in this setting that we celebrated our centennial of a Hundred Summers in 1999. The gala was highlighted by gathering the chosen in formal attire to quaff champagne and dine with wine on high cuisine in candle light within a beautifully appointed, snow white tent that was set on the velvet green of the Club’s practice range. It was spectacular. Unfortunately, the tent was set nearly atop the outlet pipe of the Club’s antique septic tank at its junction with a stretch of Orangeburg pipe laid in a French drain that elbowed off to closely parallel the storm drain, which emptied into the bay at the children’s beach (assuring us of front-page coverage if it sickened any of them). Sod thinly carpets the underlying marl, and the coincidence of a recent rain, continued operation of the Club’s irrigation system, and the throughput of organic waste from the Pointer, the Club’s restaurant operation, caused the sod to blister, heave, and belch the fetid breath of the failed system into the encapsulation of the tent. Gaiety was contrived. Some of the elderly found escape difficult from seating that punctured the sod and became implanted in the fen. The centennial embarrassment imperiled its citadel--what Mary Castle (Cloris Leachman’s sister) irreverently referred to as “Le Club.” It was unthinkable that the Club might no longer offer lunch on the porch or lavatories at the center of our gatherings. It became imperative that we keep it going. But the off-hand opinion was that even if a code compliant system for the Pointer could be built, the cost would be astronomical. The charter of the Club required equal cost distribution among its members. This had recently become the method of cost recovery adopted by the Association for municipal costs, replacing the practice of setting Association dues as a ratio of ad valorem real estate taxes assessed by the county. Dr. Albert Wrisley was moved to observe that we had adopted a socialist regime governed by inhabitant capitalists. Suddenly, the failure of our septic systems had become a community problem which, when added to the problem of the Club, headed us toward a very expensive solution. In the immediate aftermath, the Club closed the kitchen, imported picnic box lunches for purchase at the Pointer, and rented a PortaPotty to substitute for the closed restroom facilities of one of the nation’s most exclusive country clubs. Our society had convicted itself precisely of the same misconduct its members had perpetuated since installing electric hot water storage heaters in the early post-war period. Slapstick followed farce. One of the matrons of our society was deeply offended by the sight of the PortaPotty, which had been set close by to serve the clubhouse and passing golfers. She called the administrative offices of the county to have the wart removed. As luck would have it, she appears to have been referred to an official with the health department having responsibility for enforcing sanitary regulations

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applicable on restaurants rather than septic systems. On arrival, he saw at a glance that placement of the fiberglass outhouse was in violation of the spacing requirement of the ordinance dealing with privies and ordered that it be removed at once. It was not within the scope of his office to inquire why the outhouse had come to be there and left abruptly. Frederick von Stade, former president of the Association and uncle to opera star, Frederica, suffered a rude interruption of his occupancy of the PortaPotty and narrowly escaped serious injury when he tumbled out just before the cabinet was fork-lifted aboard a truck that sped away with it. A bullet had been dodged. Bay Pumping was called in and the Pointer reopened. The whole of society resumed an uneasy life of common sin. The nostalgia of simpler days endured. The men’s room of the clubhouse has but a single urinal that remained out of order for two years. Its lighting is controlled by a timer to save electricity. The very rich are not like you and me. Our biosphere had reached that point in the Golden Age when nature conservancies, climate change, animal rights, and obsession with health and the environment afflicted us with profound guilt for messing up the good earth. There was a clear consensus not to let that happen here and a persistent fervor to hide what happened here in the silence of privacy. This is seen in a quiet celebration of our centennial. We chose to commemorate it by accepting young Sabin (Robbie) Robbins’ offer to supplement the Rike-Stewart 1970 inventory of people and families with A Hundred Summers, an “affectionate history” of the Point by the son of an attractive family that first arrived from Cincinnati in 1935. Robbie’s essay, while mildly autobiographical, was quite well done. By his own admission, it was aimed at entertaining a larger audience than dwelled within the gates. Mary Wydman, president, and I and others then serving as trustees of the Association reached the decision to limit private publication of his histories comfortably to fill only the orders of our members. If Robbie, a 1952 shipmate of ours on the S.S. Waterman, ever returned to the Point during the new millennium, I was never there to see him. The two of us shared the thought of selling inconsequential lives as entertainment. I voted against publishing our silliness beyond the gates years before dabbling in my own. And so, to the half measure of our $500,000 water works that never worked was added a $5.5 million half measure to treat our sewage (including going underground with power lines and building out our water distribution system). This came to about $45,000 net of tax to each member of the Association, to which was added another $9,000 to install a new septic tank and hook it to the effluent collection loop that piped it to biodegradation pods in our buffer zone. Since the system, which was placed in service in 2004, cannot be used if power is lost at the cottage, another $2 to 15 thousand investment in standby generation is indicated. In 2006, Leelanau County commenced construction of a $23 million full-service sewage collection and treatment facility, which heavily relied on governmental grants and credit. The area served includes the properties of Association members located just outside the Association’s outer gates. Landowners were assessed $10,100 per lot if within the service area and a hook up charge of $5,850, initially payable in installments amortized over twenty years until this option expired in November of 2010.

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If we became careless with the sudden accretion of unearned wealth, most of us were proud of our acuity in tax avoidance and some hired the smartest lawyers and accountants to protect their estates and income from unduly augmenting the commonwealth. It is not essential to their selection that they be revered for conforming their behavior to the highest standards of their professions. Indeed, I find it to be true among most of my friends that we are meticulously honest with one another but seldom personalize our relationship with governments. Slighting on taxes, like speeding, does not implicate a point of honor. When I hear someone refer to “my tax man” as “one sharp cookie,” I sense he expects no less of him than that he bless with text and sober brow cheating the hell out of Uncle Sam. At the Point and elsewhere during the 80s, our generation became wealthy enough to invest in tax and estate planning (the Dow closed above 1100 for the first time in 1983). The focus for some at the Point was removing the family cottage from the taxable estate by giving it equally to children before death. Thus, the problems of joint ownership of recreational property among siblings were perpetuated. Indeed, it spawned a lively practice to deal with these problems through formation of limited liability companies to assign cost responsibility and provide for buy outs of raging children. Where parents reserved the right of occupancy for a term of years, it sometimes combined with second marriages to furnish the plot lines of horror stories. During the 80s, the federal scheme was to allow a person a lifetime exemption of a part of his estate from taxation at death. This exempt amount increased from $161,000 in 1980 to $600,000 in 1987, where it remained through 1997. It increased slowly to $675,000 in 2001. The top tax rate was 55% of the value of the excess estate--a huge hunk. The annual exemption increased from $3,000 to $10,000 in 1981, and the marital deduction of up to one-half of one’s estate given to his spouse became unlimited after 1981. Currently, the exemption is $5 million, the tax rate is 35% and the annual exemption is $13,000. Most of this may go away in 2013, but I doubt that it will. The working parameter of exempting from taxation $1.35 million of the combined marital estate and taxing the excess at 55% is a world apart from exempting $10 million and taxing the excess at 35%. It made sense to give the family cottage to children if to pass it to them by will would likely claim over half its value in taxes. Deferral of income taxation until their children got around to selling it, paying a lesser tax of as much as 28% (now 15%) on the difference between the donor’s cost basis, which travelled with the gift, and the sales price, was the better choice. It makes no sense, however, to give the cottage to children if it will not be taxed if left to them by will, in which case the value of the estate, including the cottage, may be stepped up to fair market value, thus reducing the taxable gain on resale. Who among the smart cookies in 1997 could imagine that there would be no estate tax to avoid, only a deferred income tax on sale by the children we paid our tax men dearly to cunningly enlarge. Other blood disorders threaten to erupt in sores. In 1994, the people of Michigan adopted a constitutional amendment that forbade counties to annually increase the state equalized assessed value of residential real estate for the preceding year (one-half of fair market value), more than the lesser of 5% or the rate of inflation. So, Lucy started off paying taxes on a valuation of around $150,000, which has triggered forward to more than $220,000 today. The equalized market value, however, marched forward as the real estate boom unfolded and is now at about $500,000. The kicker is that if Lucy transfers title to the cottage by sale or gift, the transferee must pay taxes on the equalized market value, or about 1.5 times more than she now pays.

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This will add significantly to the comparative cost of owning the cottage over time unless the transfer was made before or soon after the amendment. But not to worry. The Uniform Trust Code now lets one hide from public scrutiny the terms of trusts and testaments, and we’ll find sober brows enough to unwind our solemn errors. The other disorder is hardly more than a mild rash we’ve been scratching for a century. Our obsession with privacy and exclusivity has come at ever-increasing cost of ownership and occupancy. It could prevent the formation of a new society and, possibly, the implosion of what is left of the older ones. But given that our societal wickets serve as a formidable restraint on the alienation of our properties, has it not always been the case that most of our children cannot afford to own them and only a few of those who can really want to? Do I rightly see an accumulating inventory of cottages looking for someone to buy or rent them and a growing disposition to more narrowly define the right kind of people to take them over? Is it not a fossil of elitism found embedded in the sediment of a thickening strata of egalitarianism? Probably so, but what of it? If I don’t like spending a significant part of our income every summer to struggle up to hear or say nothing new, what marvelous matters await revelation in Roanoke? And how much more would Lucy’s cottage be worth if she could sell it as she pleased or our silly forms of government be reshaped to my specifications? Why should I fret when I never thought Lola’s tin can was worth a fourth of what it might fetch from a founding family’s descendant, thinned to the seventh generation and out of sorts with siblings? The amenities of living here in summer are considerable. First. Lola’s cottage does not challenge me with steps and the concrete slab upon which it rests, although it sweats, acts to keep floor surfaces below 70 degrees and cool the interior. Secondly, several years ago, I felt so bad I called the office of Dr. Michael Ziter, who runs a clinic in Northport. His nurse answered and I told her that I was sick and wanted to see the doctor and become his patient, as I had never seen him. She asked me if I had a date in mind and I said as soon as possible, hoping that this could somehow fall within a cheerful calculation of my life expectancy. Her response was: He can’t possibly see you until this afternoon unless you live close by and can come right away. Thirdly, Pittman McGehee accepted the position of priest in charge of the Atwill Memorial Chapel for the month of July soon after he withdrew as Dean of Christ Episcopal Cathedral in Houston years ago to become a Jungian analyst and, later, an author and lecturer. He trained at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria and, I think, treats the summer congregation of friends at the Point as a comfortable revisitation of ministry among people who have whittled away the Creator God. He has mastered Jack Benny’s straightfaced timing to punch up his homilies, and we are grateful for our friendship with him and his wife Bobby. Lucy has carved in a driftwood shingle that hangs from the eave of the patio behind my back at eventide this simple statement, which Pittman may have borrowed from Julian of Norwich to use in terminal conversations with Debbie Bunn Alley, Walayla, queen of the fairies, before cancer had its way with her: All will be well

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In The Gloaming

In 2005, Lee and George Cochran invited us to join them for a long weekend at White Sulphur with the Gregorys and Savages as guests in a structure their sons had built or purchased. It was located in a subdivision of the prominent knoll behind the Greenbriar Hotel that looks down on the casino below. The floor plan places two bedrooms on each side that open on a lounge or gathering area, a part of which is dedicated to a raised dining area that is served by a kitchenette located to the right of the entrance. The building seems to have been designed graciously to house a foursome of golfers who must surely find their way to the hotel or casino for serious fare. The gathering was a reunion of sorts, except that Toy had remarried with Rodie Funkhouser following our trip to England. Paul had gone down with Alzheimer’s after retiring as CEO of CSX, which owned the Greenbriar. Toy, Rhodie, George and I played golf on the Snead Course, a part of the Greenbriar Sporting Club, a complex of resort homes, condominiums, shops, and clubhouse that had suddenly sprung up east of White Sulphur. We dined at the sumptuous clubhouse one evening. The following morning, Lee conscripted (a better verb than “arranged to have” to describe her deservedly regal modus operandi) a nice young man in the employment of the developer to guide us on a tour of a subdivision of the mountainous terrain north of the hotel, then in the early stages of development. We gained the top after a long, winding ascent over dusty graveled roads and were greeted there by marketing signage that announced that we had arrived at the site of the members’ clubhouse and conference center, which looked down on nothing more remarkable than the roof of the distant Greenbriar, spattered with mechanical equipment. The terrain was so severe that a turkey would labor to cross on foot. I looked across a crease at a thirty-foot sheet of concrete required to fashion a level lot off the spine of a ridge to accommodate a mansion awaiting construction. It appeared to me that the contractor half-heartedly had tried to bury an aircraft carrier across the slope. I asked our tour guide what was asked for the lots staked out about us and he pointed to one close by that was listed at a million. In an aside to Kossen, I exclaimed: This is immoral! Some years before, Kossen and I took a turn at Naples, Florida, where friends from Roanoke and Northport Point were wintering. I had never been to the west coast of Florida and had a far different expectation than what we experienced. Kossen, sight unseen, had rented a vintage three-bedroom townhouse just north of Old Naples that miraculously had escaped tear down and had invited the Savages to join us to partly compensate for many past kindnesses. On arrival, I found that the owner suffered the affliction of my ancestors and had given the house a name. “Casa del Mar” was inscribed on glazed tile set in stucco to the right of the front door. The aesthetic rose comfortably above white-washed tractor tires enclosing purple petunias but would hardly blush at plastic pink flamingos set at random about the lawn.

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Actually, the place was just right for the four of us, but the “guest room” was barely large enough to house abutting single beds and shared a bath. Lucy and I used it as a closet and dressing area. The urgency of my suggestion to Kossen immediately to disinvite the Savages, she the queen mother of the garden clubs of Virginia and he accustomed to the amenities of the Gulf Stream Club, compared with the plaintiff whine of Vernon-Perdue Davis. Some days into our vacation, the four of us shipped out of Tin City, the flea market of Naples, on a tour boat that skirted Port Royal, fashioned over time out of marshland into peninsulas that branched off a spit of land that jutted into Naples Bay. It was the late depression dream of John Glen Sample, the king of soap opera, to gather the right sort of people into a harmonious community. No one bought or built against his wishes. In 1951, a lot could be found for $7,500 in a development that would grow to some six hundred lots upon many of which multi-million-dollar mansions were sited during the Golden Age. The tour guide was a gossipy but knowledgeable man who shared with us a brief history of Port Royal and biographical sketches of some of the owners of these splendid mansions as we reverently passed them. Over the course of an hour, no human being came into view. It seemed as if all human life on the finger peninsulas had been extinguished. Only an iron post, cast and painted in the image of a blackface jockey, beckoned us with outstretched arm from the manicured lawn of a grand estate to relinquish the reins of our horses and tarry there. Of course, there were inhabitants. Next Sunday, we attended services at Trinity-by-the- Cove, a lovely Episcopal church built in Port Royal in 1953, whose small congregation had been unsettled by the abrupt departure of one of the ladies of the flock with the priest in hand. His pastoral ministries, perhaps at her urging, had broadened to include adultery with spreading the Good News of the Gospels. In the winter of 2010, Lucy and I revisited Sea Island as weekend guests of Frannie Martin, whose aunt, Katherine Talbott, was wife to A. W. (Bill) Jones, the gentleman responsible for developing Sea Island into one of the nation’s most prestigious resorts. We dined with Kappy, their notable daughter, and her husband, Paul O’Conner, and visited the Brunswick art studio of Jim Jones, whose brother, A. W. Jones III, then served as president of the Sea Island Company. Frannie had been given the use of their first home at Sea Island, vacated on completion of another on the beach, by John Dunham and his wife, Jane Beadles, a younger and vibrant couple who had met and adopted Frannie on a previous visit. We were beneficiaries of this guardianship and had met and greatly enjoyed them as guests at Magnolia the year before. Sea Island had greatly changed since we registered as the 9,998th honeymoon couple in mid-September of 1953. The old Cloister had been razed and a much larger facility, offering some one hundred fifty rooms and suites but retaining the Mediterranean style of the original, had taken its place. During the period 1998 through 2007, golf courses, spas, a movie theater, swimming pools, restaurants, wine cellars, equestrian facilities, and ocean suites were added at a cost of some $350 million according to the New York Times. In retrospect, the scope and timing of these improvements seemed excessive, unfortunate and ill advised.

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January is not a good month in the northern hemisphere and surely not at Sea Island. The mansions seen block after block along the Ocean Road that parallels the sea for seven or more miles seemed mostly dark and vacant, more to be seen than lived in--statements of wealth rather than exhibits of eclectic shelter. John and Jane had us to dinner in the Five Star Georgian Room of the Cloister, where only one other group was seated. After drinks were ordered and food selected, I was startled by the lockstep approach of a single file of five waiters, each bearing aloft a large plate. They ceremoniously circled the table and simultaneously set before us a yoke-stuffed half of a quail egg, with a dab of something orange on the side, perhaps a thank you note to Frannie. The absurdity of the presentation could have been matched only by an offering of poached hummingbird’s tongue under glass. My reaction had nothing to do with our hosts. Whereas I had built a duck blind that wouldn’t sail, John, an Air Force Academy graduate, was still flying one of several airplanes he had built himself. Jane was neither affected nor driven, just smart and lovable. They, as I, were mise en scene in a production we hesitantly applauded from the boxes because it reached beyond our understanding.

I footnote the late stages of the Golden Age with two anecdotes. Lucy and I had been hunting at Magnolia and arrived in Naples a day in advance of our rental of Casa del Mar in 1999. We took a hotel room close to the center of town. I was resting on the bed, watching the ticker tape on television when I suddenly recalled that son Bill had suggested some weeks before that I keep an eye on my position in Perkin-Elmer, which made analytical and diagnostic equipment. I think he must have said something about its spin-off, Celera Genomics, whose principal wizard boasted that his research staff would complete mapping the human genome years ahead of the federally sponsored program at a fraction of the cost. My holdings, inherited from uncle Wilbur and largely attributable to either or both Joseph F. Cannon and Smith Reynolds, was so small that I took no account of it. Indeed, I had no recollection of what I owned and was only dimly aware that it might include shares in Celera. I watched amazed as Perkin-Elmer crossed the tape in early afternoon up sharply from the opening. I called the man in charge of my custodial account at First Union and asked him what my position was in Perkin-Elmer and whether I owned any Celera. He told me about Perkin-Elmer but couldn’t say about Celera. I told him to look harder, and he found it. I knew enough about my seventy year old genome and the value of intellectual property destined for the public domain to sell out of both stocks at the market. I was one lucky fool to come out of a long weekend shooting birds about $140,000 richer than a few months before and some $130,000 richer than if I had taken care of business and got the hell out when my son told me to pay attention. When I got back to Roanoke, the bubble had burst. What madness! I had cashed out paper stocks I hardly knew I owned for more than what I had paid to build a five bedroom Mid-Georgian Colonial home, architecturally designed and constructed of the finest materials by the best craftsmen in Roanoke in 1965. I cannot help but now reflect upon Anne Holloway’s inventory of her grandfather’s financial assets as consisting of but three silver coins only a century before. Later at Delray, Toy and Hunter Savage took us to lunch at the Beach Club, where I saw a few friends from Richmond and Northport Point. Afterward, we drove north to sightsee, passing a trailer court sited on land worth lord knows what that had turned itself into a municipality, and came upon a palace in the late stages of construction. It appeared to command well over a hundred yards of beach frontage. The

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structure, which included a sixteen-bay garage, indoor swimming pool and movie theatre, was featured in the Miami Herald. The builder was quoted as saying that he expected to have it sold before completion for his asking of $37 million. The reporter asked another developer to comment. He opined that as a rule of thumb, most area builders regarded speculative construction priced to sell above $20 million as somewhat above their risk tolerance! In 2008, 64,000 families residing here and in Europe were estimated to have a net worth in excess of $30 million. Only 967,000 American taxpayers reported cash income of $500,000 or more that year, an amount sufﬁcient to cover interest at 6% on a loan of $8. 3 million. Tu secanda marmora locus sub ipsum funus; et supulchri immemor, struis domos. This is an observation of Horace that Fielding read to say: You provide the noblest materials for building, when a pickaxe and a spade are only necessary; and build houses of ﬁve hundred by a hundred feet, forgetting that of six by two.

How did these glittering days gather so slowly during the quarter century after Brown and then rush madly out of control into the gloaming? Was the psychology different from that made manifest in the medieval Tuscan village of San Gimignano, where wealthy merchants strove with one another to erect seventy-two stone towers that served only as useless monuments of their power and prestige? The study of human behavior should be pursued upon the hypothesis that we are ninety-nine percent sure to be examining the behavior of the great apes and their antecedents. What was going on at the Greenbriar, Port Royal, and Sea Island (and at an endless list of lesser venues) is better understood as expressions of our instinctive animal urge to dominate and attract by display. Their bars and restaurants are aptly described as the watering holes of the migrant rich. The architecture of the Globe, Blackfriars, and early English theatre was dictated by the quest to proﬁt from displaying the wealthy above and about the stage, seating their footmen cheap in the upper balconies, and selling out the rest of the house by appealing to the emotions of critics and students in the pit. Selling displays of wealth for proﬁt became the business model for resort and recreational land development. We littered the earth with the towers of San Gimignano, many of them hocked to the hilt, while soliciting their owners to construct habitats for the impoverished. If we can overcome the nausea of Versailles, surely we can stomach the tinsel and glitter of the Golden Age in twilight. In truth, I never saw the immorality of it until I stood on the mountain at White Sulphur--never measured it by comparing the utilization ratio of rooms in Port Royal with the slums of Calcutta. No great harm has come of reinvesting wealth in its symbols, for it provides a livelihood for those who create and maintain them. Monticello was partly accomplished with slave labor. The morality of such involuntary servitude yet may be compared with the slums of Calcutta or the tribes of Rwanda. The twenty Negroes sold for food at Jamestown could as well have been dumped overboard from the White Lion.

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The mischief came from leveraging greed and appearances with other people’s money. This was the subject of intense scrutiny in 1910 at the Jekll Island Club, formed in 1886 by a group of men who accounted for one-sixth or more of the world’s then known wealth. Its membership was limited to one hundred of the finest. Jekll Island lies just south and in plain view of Sea Island. It was here that Senator Nelson Aldrich secretly convened the titans of American industry and finance to address an impending financial collapse that threatened to result from a predatory attack against those who had sold shares of United Copper Company they did not own on the speculation they would profit by covering delivery out of shares purchased later at a lower price. The attack was aimed at ruining the short sellers by purchasing or controlling more of the outstanding shares of United Copper than was required by the quarry to cover, thus positioning the predators to name their price. To corner the market, the predators availed themselves of large amounts of credit from banks under their influence or control. When the corner failed, the predators defaulted and the lending banks also failed because what was owed to panicked depositors had been gambled away.

If Lincoln rationalized the abolition of slavery as required to assure every man the fruit of his labor, his bread yet must be earned in the sweat of his face. The medium of exchange for fruit and bread, mostly tobacco nominated in sterling in colonial Virginia, became gold and silver--hard money--following the Revolution. For those who had banked it with the Knickerbocker Trust Company in 1907, the consequence of its failure was hardly different than if the inspector at the public tobacco warehouse at Ca Ira had embezzled Dr. Henderson’s tobacco. Panic is our animal response to threat and this was precisely the trouble these wealthy men met to deal with, whether the depositories were fully (Ca Ira) or fractionally (Knickerbocker) reserved. Out of their deliberations emerged the Federal Reserve Act, which created a central bank that oversaw twelve regional private banks, each owned by national banks operating within the region. The legislation was primarily aimed at providing national and state member banks with a central source of credit--a bank of last resort--that could furnish necessary liquidity to calm the hysteria of depositors and thus avoid destructive runs against them, the systemic risk of borrowing short and lending long. It could not be expected of these men that they would also fix a larger problem: Their colleagues continued to leverage their speculations with credit provided by depositors. Some were successful, and others were not. When these men met in 1910, the Dow was less than 60. In 1929, it peaked at 380, a level not seen again until after the decision in Brown. The purchasing power of the dollar had declined to 53 cents over two decades. The margin requirement for broker loans was 10%. What spooked the stock market to crash perhaps is less important than its consequences. It could have been a margin call against a high roller or a rumor set afoot that stampeded depositors, closed the banks, wiped away wealth, violently contracted the money supply, muted the production of goods, and idled a large part of the work force. Bright minds still strive to serve up winning answers. The Mint Act of 1873, which created the nation’s money or medium of exchange by coining gold and silver, could not long remain as the quantification of supply in a large and growing nation. And it didn’t. When I was four years old, the Franklin Roosevelt administration confiscated what it had minted into money a century before in exchange for paper dollars. Most of the gold had found its way into the treasury and regional

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banks of the federal reserve system through national banks formed under the National Bank Act of 1863 to finance the suppression of the Confederacy. It sold the switch by “insuring” through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that banks of deposit, failed or solvent, would deliver them on demand and stashed the gold at Fort Knox and elsewhere. Of course, the federal government can no more make good on its promise to deliver paper dollars in exchange for all deposits than it could redeem them in gold awhile back. Where would it get the dollars other than by counterfeiting or the gold? But saying so served its purpose. It was a remarkable exercise in social psychology--a magnificent fraud that succeeded as monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and depression legislation and regulations served to address three other problems identified as causes of the Great Depression. First, retail or commercial banks were prohibited from engaging in investment banking--investing deposits or capital in corporate securities. Second, it limited loans to any one borrower and restricted loans to its officers and directors or to anyone for reinvestment in corporate securities. Lastly, it raised the margin on broker loans. These initiatives staunched the practice of gambling with other people’s money but not the instinct to dominate and break the bank at Monte Carlo. The effort to rearm consumers with money to spend during the depression included the formation of the Federal National Mortgage Association in 1938 to purchase and securitize mortgages to replenish bank credit for further long-term home loans. This initiative was followed by the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which provided free educational benefits under the GI Bill of Rights as well as low interest, zero down payment, long-term mortgage credit guaranteed by the Veterans Administration. The 30-year fixed rate equal payment mortgage loan became a popular vehicle for home purchases and encouraged consumers to buy now rather than save for future purchases of homes, the rationale of thrift and saving and loan associations, and the antithesis of measuring price equilibrium in cash markets. The price of homes and durables became less important than the amount of the monthly installment and led increasingly to loans by manufacturers to purchasers of what was required to sell their products. The consumer no longer met the definition of a “ purchaser, willing and able, but not required to buy” as the textbook determinant of market value and price restraint. The egalitarian concept of equal opportunity regardless of social circumstance morphed into images of equally valuable lives, then into equally competent and trainable minds and then into equally entitled borrowers, notwithstanding that they had no work, education, money or the prospect of any. It is beyond belief that Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act and enjoined the same agencies of government charged with the responsibility of protecting the public against loss of bank deposited wealth to require lending institutions in their charge to lend to those who could not pay and to prosecute those who discriminated in the sale of homes and mortgages by favoring those who could. When I became professionally involved in the merger and acquisition initiatives of The First National Exchange Bank of Roanoke, this after state-wide branching by merger and the formation of bank holding companies was allowed in the 60s, the objective was to increase the profit potential by expanding the deposit base and achieving economies of scale. But banking remained conservative. Real estate loans were a function of and limited by savings or time deposits and unsecured consumer credit was largely left to pawn shops and small loan companies. Edward Ould, president, anguished over whether stockholders would resist an annual salary of $50,000.

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By the turn of the century, all of the lessons learned from the fanancial panic of 1907 and the Great Depression had been forgotten and the controlling legislation essentially repealed. The difficulty is not found so much in bankrupting those who could not pay but the profligacy of the federal government in borrowing more than it can recover from taxation to increase the standard of living for Main Street Americans. The federal government has exploited the power of income taxation to shift the burden of government to the wealthy (47% of individuals filing income tax returns pay no taxes) and to recover from corporate America half to all of the growing costs of our great social and environment initiatives under the pervasive myth that these charges will be absorbed by shareholders as a cost of doing business and not redistributed and recovered out of revenues from the sale of goods and services. We have lately come to understand that we cannot continue to do this without dislocating the American industrial complex and devaluing our currency.

But it was a hell of a ride while it lasted, and I need to look no farther than Forkland and my own childhood to understand that the mess we have made hardly threatens to plunge us into the worst of times. Perhaps I should rethink whether the Golden Age continues, at least for the wealthy.The three decades between the decline of the wild bird population and the correction of the stock market may be better understood as a manic aberration under which I ﬂourished. Its brevity may only claim a footnote: a brief episode of incredible good luck.

Jack and Jane and the Origin of Ethic

Not so many years ago, Jack and Tay Gwaltney invited Dick and Susan Cocke and us and to spend the week-end at Labrador Springs, their country estate north of Free Union, Albemarle County, Virginia. The graveled driveway entered off Wesley Chapel Road through a creosoted board fence that did not enclose. It penetrated a quarter mile, passed left across a dam that impounded a sizable lake that intervened the highway and the home and circled the front of it. The home was roofed in copper and clapboarded in colonial style, offering the tasteful appearance of a one floor plan at the entrance but containing two levels fully revealed at the foot of the lake-side slope. Dogs were comfortably quartered in a matching dependency on the right. Jack and Dick and I were the closest of childhood friends, and this friendship continued through college, with Dick joining us out of Episcopal High School and me at the Hall. Jack joined the outrageous Betas. In 1952, Jack continued at the Medical School, Dick went into the Air Force but returned to earn a law degree. We went our separate ways, with little contact for most of the Golden Age. I kept up enough to know the outlines of their lives. Dick lost his wife, Dallas, to cancer and left no great swarth across the fields of our profession, having limited his practice to real estate and office law.

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Jack had returned to the Medical School after a tour in the Army and was involved in research related to the common cold. He rose to become head of the Division of Epidemiology and Virology. His curriculum vitae is prestigious and his bibliography lists over 230 publications in which he participated or wrote. As a pastime, he took to training Labrador retrievers for campaigning. Soon after we arrived, Jack took us and some number of frozen duck to the edge of the lake and ran one of his favored dogs through what I supposed to be a field trial drill or competition, although I am confident that he entertained us with an abridged version. It began with the dog heeled at his side and progressed through three phases: The first a single retrieval of a duck thrown into the pond to the crack of a blank pistol shot; the second, a simulated double, with separate retrievals that required the dog to mark and recall the location of the second bird felled; and last a simulated cripple, where the bird was not seen down by the dog but was guided by whistle and hand signals by the hunter who had spotted him down hundreds of yards away. I have never attended a field trial involving bird dogs, much less retrievers and was amazed that Jack could work his dog through these elements using such limited means of communication. The layout of his gracious estate speaks of his priorities and his epitaph might well proclaim, not that he solved the mysteries of the common cold but that his retrievers qualified a half dozen times or more for the Nationals. Our next visit with him and Tay was by invitation to celebrate the centennial of the Raven Society, founded, I trust, on the poem and not the poet in 1904 to gather the “best men” in the various departments of the University in recognition of academic excellence and extracurricula achievement. After drinks at Alumni Hall among a society that had suddenly come to display the colorful plumage of a considerable number of more enchanting birds, now gaining purchase upon Poe’s bust of Pallas, we crossed University Avenue to a seated dinner at the Memorial Gymnasium at which a century of accomplishments were noted and awards announced. Jack and I reminisced about honor, the rush of change, and how women, long kept at home, had so quickly smartened abroad. The following morning, he made me a gift of his “Dog Book,” Training and Campaigning Retrievers--The Principles and Practice and his “Non-Dog Book,” Human Intellect and the Origin of Ethic, both self-published. The Dog Book has won wide acclaim from a narrow audience. The latter work, according to the author, has been received indifferently. But Jack’s essay on ethic gripped me tightly on many levels and greatly influenced how I here present my ancestors and myself. The Dog Book is a close examination by a research scientist of a huge, affable, and affectionate animal, genetically disposed to fetch and retrieve. Based on his knowledge of and long experience with Labrador retrievers, Jack offers the means and methods by which their disposition may be perfected within the limitations of their nature. The Non-Dog Book deals with man as an animal but separates us from our closest kin--the great apes-by a unique trait: Our capacity to form and practice an ideal of respect for our fellow man that bids us fairly and honestly to deal with him and his possessions. Jack chooses to call this ideal “Ethic” and its practice the observance of the “Golden Rule” or the New Commandment Jesus gave to his disciples.

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Medical and scientific research requires adherence to the highest standards of honesty and truth telling. This is our shared heritage from Woodberry and the University and the discipline that has ruled Jack’s professional conduct throughout an enviable career. Inevitably, Jack must derive from the beasts of the field and not the hand of God. Indeed, the creation myth is The Myth that he sees as holding us in the bondage of shame and tribalism and I and others see as lining the pockets of counsellors often hired to undo the damage it has wrought. While Jack regards himself as a Christian, I think he means to say that he is guided by Christian principles and is quick to point out that the Golden Rule was expressed in the negative and attributed to Confucius 500 years before the Christian era. As one may rightly suppose of a self published scientist, Jack’s books are less to sell than impersonally to impart. Their entertainment value hovers just above zero. Jack credits the Reverend Jane Sigloh for giving of her intellect to improve his Non-Dog Book. Jane is not just a curious interloper in Jack’s essays but a close friend of ours and those we love. She came to Roanoke from Houston as a late teenager with her parents, Tom and Kate Slack, on his retirement as counsel to Trans World Airlines. Tom provided the leadership to found Northcross School as a country day school in the aftermath of Brown. In Houston, Jane was close friends with Kristi Shipness, who is among our close summer friends at Northport Point. Jane frequently joins us there. Tommy Engleby grew up on Mudlick Road, just west of where Jack’s mother, Mary Smothers, had built. Tommy was marked with a physiognomy that encouraged Jack and others to call him Louie, a rough hewn, drinking, smoking, stubbled-face slouch of a man in scolloped undershirt that appeared in a vintage cartoon over the caption: “Louie you’re a goddamn jewel” Jane fell in love with him, lost him to cancer, remarried, became a priest, and came with a book of her own--Like Trees Walking. It deals with the second half of ladies’ lives. Jane is a notable woman. Some time ago, I told her I liked Jack’s book. She said it didn’t say anything new. I said it seemed new to me. Indeed, I here acknowledge that I have mostly hidden it in quail feathers. She later learned that I was writing. She told me that it was important to ﬁnd, create, or invent something in my subject that is arresting--something that will reach out and grab the reader. I’m only sure that if I succeed, it will not be because of something taught or learned, anymore than Charlie Guggenheim’s Oscars came from an Iowa course in rhetorical criticism, whatever that may involve. But I’d be lying if I said I write only to share knowledge and not to earn applause. If Jack too much narrows Ethic to honesty as a beast of the ﬁeld and Jane too much broadens it to love as a child of God, Henry Fielding found each of them hoping too high in his comedy, Tom Jones, published in 1749. If not relevant, it is interesting that the text I have in hand is that of William Allen Perkins, Hickory Hill, published in two volumes by Carey, Lea & Blanchard, Philadelphia, in 1834.

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The condition of these volumes suggest that they went unread, an assumption that comports with Anne Jane’s Victorian orientation. Jack’s Non-Dog Book focuses on “lost purse” experiments conducted by social psychologists, in which a wallet containing money and owner identification is posed as lost. People either ignore it or pick it up. Twenty percent of those who pick it up keep it for themselves. Jack suggests three explanations of this example of “unethical behavior.” First, some of us have not evolved to where we have a conscience that dictates ethical behavior, a theory that is linked to the chemistry of our DNA. Second, all of us are programmed to have a conscience, but some of us cannot or choose not to activate it. Third, conscience has a supernatural origin and is not subject to scientific verification. Jack wonders whether there is evidence to suggest that animals are capable of Ethic. He surmises that if it could be tested with a study group of chimpanzees observed sequentially to come upon a morsel of food known by each to have been dropped unintentionally by one of the band, none would return it to the careless chimp. If this hypothesis is accepted, Jack’s animal within is an unconscionable thief not yet evolved into a human being and Jane’s human being without seems unable to repress the animal within. Whether we go with Darwin or Genesis, most are agreed that it is in our nature to survive and perpetuate and that these primal instincts predictably dominate our efforts to repress them as unethical, immoral, or illegal. In Tom Jones, Henry Fielding’s treatment of these hardwired instincts from the perspective both of a gentleman of noble birth, well trained in the classics, and a London magistrate keenly aware of his own profligacy and the Hogarthian panorama of the city that he judged, advances two important themes. First, we are thieves by nature, an instinct sometimes repressed by fear or prior accumulation. Second, unblessed sex has nothing to do with goodness; copulation, whether blessed or not, is not an expression of love. These themes play out in parallel. Indeed, no others are seriously pursued, save that the second is offered under the central theme of universal pose and hypocrisy concerning the appetite we share in common with the animals. The comedic appeal of the work, which is said to have birthed the modern English novel, lies in the helpless self-deception of his characters concerning human sexuality, not so much that some cannot command the passion to mate but, in the case of women, that they at all are possessed of the urge. Adultery, he adds, does not correlate with the quality of clothing feverishly cast aside to mate. Victor Hugo linked theft to survival and Nathaniel Hawthorn linked adultery to Darwinian selection to sentence police inspector Javert and the Reverend Dimmesdale to death by suicide and torment because neither could reconcile the deontological imperatives of mosaic law with the conduct these primal instincts permit or demand of us. Tom Jones bawdily presaged the humanistic themes of Les Miserables and The Scarlet Letter. The story begins with the return of Squire Allworthy to his manorial estate after a lengthy sojourn in London. On arrival, he finds a newborn baby on his bed. Neither his maiden sister Bridget, who lives with him, nor the housemaid, Mrs. Wilkins, can account for the foundling. The women, after discoursing on the proper disposition of bastards, yield to Squire Allworthy’s decision to raise the child as his own, giving

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him his own first name, Tom. The squire, however, acquiesces in the common wisdom of the community that imputes motherhood to Jenny Jones, servant to a Mrs. Partridge. Her husband, a school master, grievously has erred by gratuitously teaching Jenny Latin at home. Indeed, Squire Allworthy, acting magisterially on a false charge brought by Mrs. Partridge, rules Mr. Partridge to be the father of Tom Jones, obiter dictum, on the uncorroborated testimony of his irate wife, Jenny Jones, having departed the bailiwick and made herself unavailable to shed light upon the matter. Mrs. Partridge soon passes and her husband moves away, finding peace at last, leaving squire Allworthy under modest suspicion. Squire Western, widower, is lord of the adjoining manorial estate. He is unrefined, loving his cup and the hunt, horses, and dogs. His rusticity burdens the license of Fielding’s craft to name him father of Sophia, a perfection of beauty, charm, and virtue, a rare amalgam of the finest traits of womanhood. Tom Jones, as well, is invested with a handsome figure and all of the marks of goodness; a foundling, nevertheless. Miss Bridget soon comes within the affection of Captain Blifil on the introduction of his brother, a friend of the squire. The captain is less interested in Bridget than her expectancy in the squire’s immense estate, but they are soon married and a son is born, perchance a month premature. For the proper education and discipline of Tom and the younger Master Blifil, the squire retains Thwackum, a man of the cloth, and Square, a philosopher, who reside at the manor. These gentlemen incline more toward the compliant and pedigreed Blifil, who shows early signs of favoring his father, whose marriage soon cloaks in somber formality a profound hatred and unspeakable loathing between the parties. However, the captain’s designs are interrupted by his untimely demise. As Tom, Sophia, and Master Blifils advance toward adulthood, increments of nobility are added to the character of Tom, most of which involve acts of loyalty and generosity to Black George, Squire Allworthy’s gamekeeper, and of chivalry to fair Sophia. At age eighteen, she is saved by Tom from injury during the hunt from a rampant horse. Tom, however, suffers a broken arm in the rescue and Squire Western insists that Tom convalesce at his estate. Notwithstanding that Tom has fully and frequently shared the bodily charms of Molly, Black George’s daughter, and she with him the news that she is pregnant, a condition known to Sophia and all the world, she and Tom fall hopelessly in love. Their romance is platonic. Squire Western enjoyed no greater success in his marriage than the Blifils had in theirs. Never having loved himself, he cannot understand why Sophia cannot marry a man she detests. He concludes to birth a dynasty by breeding her to Master Blifils, the apparent heir of Squire Allworthy’s estate, to accomplish a merger of these considerable properties, a goal that Master Blifils has, indeed, already set for himself. Squire Allworthy is stricken with an illness from which he is not expected to recover and publishes his will, which leaves his estate to Blifils, save an annual stipend to Tom of 500l and smaller gifts to others. While in his throes, the squire appoints Blifils to receive a message from an insistent visitor, which Blifils sadly relates informs only of the death of his mother.

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The squire miraculously recovers but Tom alone is made joyful. He celebrates the squire’s redux with wine and a chance reprise with Molly, a reunion forbidden Tom by the squire in granting Molly’s reprieve from Bridewell. The two are seen in the meadow sinking out of sight by Blifils and the Reverend Thwackum on a walk. They share the scene with the squire, who summons Tom to forever banish him. He hands him an envelope and dismisses him to make his way elsewhere in the world. Tom wanders aimlessly into the surrounds of the estate and lays himself down to anguish over his exile by a man he loves, blaming himself for inconstancy. He returns to pack his things and leave but cannot find his wallet, containing the unopened envelope. Sophia learns from her handmaid, Mrs. Honour, that Squire Allworthy has turned Tom out in the world, penniless. She makes a purse of some 16 guineas out of all she claims as personal wealth and directs Mrs. Honour to see it given to Tom. The maid commissions Black George to find and deliver it to him. She then plans and executes her escape with Mrs. Honour on the eve of her nuptials. Her destination is London and the seclusion of the home of a distant cousin, Lady Ballaston, a middle-aged socialite. In route, Sophia loses her purse, which contains a bank note for 100l given in contemplation of marriage by her father just prior to her flight. Fielding fully understood that he could not hope to sell his romance to English readers, ever sensitive to class distinction, by mating a pedestaled princess to an exiled, if personable pauper whose suspected parentage did not rise above a servant girl and a Latin hack. Master Blifils delivered only half the message from the insistent visitor: Tom is Bridget Allworthy’s son by a generously gifted but short lived gentleman who summered with the squire, teaching his sister the piano. Fielding conceals the nobility of his wholesome bastard and the depravity of his half brother until all is gathered and happily resolved at the end. Tom journeys into exile with meager resources. Black George has come upon Tom’s lost wallet by chance. He quickly measures the value of its contents, an unopened envelope enclosing a bank note for 500l, against the risk of detection and keeps it for himself, joining Tom in futile search as an expression of his deep appreciation for Tom’s past loyalty and generosity to him and his hard pressed family. With Sophia’s purse of 16 guineas in hand, Black George sets out for the ale house where Tom has stopped. In route, the thought occurs to him to add this to his trove. But his conscience starts at this ingratitude. Avarice reminds him that his conscience should have considered its prior acquiescence and accuses him of downright hypocrisy to now affect any qualms about such a trifle. The debate continues: Conscience, like a good lawyer, attempted to distinguish between an absolute breach of trust, as here where the goods were delivered, and a bear concealment of what was found, as in the former case. Avarice presently treated this with ridicule, called it a distinction without a difference and absolutely insisted, that when once all pretensions of honor and virtue were given up in any one instance, that there was no precedent to resorting to them upon a second occasion. In short, Conscience had certainly been defeated in the argument, had not Fear stepped in to her assistance, and very strenuously urged that the real distinction between the two actions did not lie in the different degrees of honor, but of safety; for that the secreting of the 500l was a matter of very little hazard; whereas the detaining the sixteen guineas was liable to the utmost danger of discovery.

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By this friendly aid of Fear, Conscience obtained a complete victory in the mind of Black George, and, after making him a few compliments on his honesty, forced him to deliver the money to Jones. What is imputed to Black George is, of course, Fielding’s own discourse on honor, which he finds to be commonly abandoned if the gain is seen as outweighing the risk of detection. Jack Gwaltney might say that Black George had not evolved to have a conscience or that what conscience he had was underdeveloped or not put to use because of his low estate. Poverty surely correlates with disrespect for the institution of property. But I mistrust Jack’s use of the lost purse experiments as an index of evolution. There are more serious crimes to serve as markers than keeping lost valuables and the experiments really examine the minds of conscious people rather than the ethics of those we expect will cheat as a matter of course. Like sex, honor has little to do with the cost of our wardrobes. A large number of graduate students enrolled in Duke University’s Fugua School of Business Administration were found to have cheated on an important examination. One academic asked to comment on the scandal summed up by observing that an MBA degree is worth $100,000 starting salary in the job market and those who cheated simply balanced the low risk of detection against the benefit. Cheating in some form is documented as the majority choice in some graduate degree programs, where both the degree and class standing are quite valuable. Tournament bridge is the passion of the finest intellects of the world. Those who rise to the top are ranked and revered by those who play the game. Not a penny of prize money is awarded tournament winners and yet some number of the world’s finest teams and players have been found to have systematically cheated. Honor, like the liberal arts, may amount to hardly more than an indulgence of wealth. A rubric has found its way into the vernacular: They don’t gitcha for doing it, They gitcha for gittin caught doing it! Early in exile Tom happens upon a quaint barber, who both butchers hair and Latin. He is none other than Mr. Partridge, who disavows that he is Tom’s father and joins him as his squire. As they approach the inn at Upton, Partridge proceeds alone, and Tom rescues a woman from rape and murder by a soldier. She is Mrs. Walters, who goes as the wife of the captain of the soldier’s troop. In the fray, she has been stripped to the waist and arrives disheveled at the inn. A separate room is let to her under protest, where Tom is served supper. After sating an enormous appetite, Mrs. Walters establishes eye contact, and Tom’s chamber is left vacant to satisfy another. Unknown to Tom and Partridge, Mrs. Walters is none other than Jenny Jones, whose prior involvement with Tom only was to assist Bridget in birthing the foundling and seeing him placed in the squire’s bed. Sophia arrives at the inn, and Mrs. Honour informs her that her beloved is also there from what she has learned from the kitchen. Overjoyed, Sophia directs her to invite Tom to come to her, but this is met with difficulty. Partridge and the rest of the kitchen are fully aware that Tom is indisposed. Sophia rushes tearfully away in the dawn.

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Tom suffers greatly that he cannot command his passions and sets out with Partridge to find her. They meet a beggar in the road, and Tom gives him a shilling of his diminishing resources. The beggar is encouraged by Tom’s kindness to expose Sophia’s lost purse to sale. Tom sees that it is hers by the name inscribed within and that it contains a piece of paper, which falls to the ground. Tom exclaims that it is a bank note for 100l. Fielding vouches aside that “a jew would jump at it for five shillings off ” the face amount and reveals to the reader that the beggar cannot read. Although he hears that the piece of paper is valuable, it is unclear whether he understands the value of 100l. So, the case presented is one where Tom has the clear advantage of superior intelligence and where Sophia’s purse contains a valuable note payable to bearer that may not belong to her but certainly not to Tom. Tom settles the matter for a guinea, which clearly exceeds the value of the purse and any such amount of treasure the beggar ever before has seen, for which he thanks Tom profusely. The three set out to return to where the purse was found so that Tom may follow Sophia’s flight. As they walk, the beggar has second thoughts on whether he sold too cheaply and asks for half the value of the note. Tom’s thoughts are to get the purse and note to Sophia and save his romance by admirable honesty. His impure thought to advance his cause and purchase it for a pittance from the ignorant bearer having the better right to it raises points of honor. But it is no more than that. Partridge places the beggar’s name and address in the purse, so that Sophia may see fit to reward him. The episode ends with the beggar cursing Tom and his parents. Had they “sent me to a charity-school to learn to write and read and cast accounts, I should have known the value of these matters as well as other people.” The strong take from the weak The smart from the strong Of course, Fielding could not end the matter with a joyful reunion of the lovers at the home of Lady Ballaston. They do by chance meet there, where Tom has come, not to deliver the purse but to service the predatory appetite of Lady Ballaston, who has rented Tom’s wholesome body while secluding that of Sophia, without the knowledge of either woman that the other has ever laid eyes on him. But all is made well and the couple are wed and live happily ever after. Children of God and beasts of the field are unique. We are set apart by subtle shades and nuance. If Jack reflected on the matter, I suppose he could fill a book with how each of his retrievers compared with the others and the points lost that cost a national championship. He did not come to our 60th reunion at Woodberry because he was running his dogs in a competition he entered in hopes of winning by eliminating the flaws that detracted from the idealization of their perfect nature. I later asked him how they fared. Not so well, he told me. “There’s just so much they have to learn and do.“ I said, “Jack, they’re just like people.” He answered, “Wilbur we’re just like them.”

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1 Deed dated September 8, 1848, from William B. and Eliza Crowder, recorded in deed book 26 at page 599, for $4500 cash. The deed describes the dwelling as “The Tavern” located on an inclusive parcel of 5 acres formerly owned by Louis Isbell. 2 The trust declaration, dated April 1, 1957, is recorded in deed book 98 at page 151. Wilbur L Hazlegrove continues as an original trustee, and his daughter, Sarah Perkins, and son, William Sydnor, were appointed by recorded instrument dated April 1, 2005, to replace their uncle, Joseph Winston Hazlegrove II, deceased, and William Allan Perkins, incapacitated. 3 Northfield, with 500 acres by plat, was sold out of chancery (Stuart v. Perkins) to Andrew Gray in 1882 (deed book 32 at page 477) and remained the home of that family, some members of which are thought to live now in Richmond, until 1938. It was purchased by Joan Nold Midyette by deed recorded in 1941 in deed book 77 at page 117. Joan’s husband, John, apparently lived there separate and apart and managed to burn the place down after a spirited poker game in the “early 60s” . Garry H. Ellerman, an engineer by profession and former resident of New Jersey, purchased the ruins and 133 acres in 1972 (deed book 120 at page 35). He proudly planned a restoration and consulted with father concerning the original structure. He elected to erect a modular structure upon the footprint and chose to clad it in vinyl and front it with a two-story gallery, sustained by thin pipe columns ornamented with screwed-on aluminum capitals. He planned the restoration of Dr. Henderson’s office but sold out without reserving security to a purchaser who planned a retirement community but ran out of cash. After the law’s delay, the property was sold to Levy Farms, Inc., in 1990 (deed book 177 at page 640). The home now at the site was built by Sidney Levy and wife, using Ellerman’s modular core, and was subsequently sold to James Obi, a Nigerian, and then again to the Northfield Foundation, with 49 acres, for a planned home for women with unplanned pregnancies and eating disorders. 4 Reproduced at Appendix 1. 5 Articles on Ca Ira and Grace Church written by Pattie A. Booker appear in the Cumberland County, Virginia, Historical Bulletin, August 1990. 6 The Hazlegrove family and Forkland are treated in Cumberland County Virginia and Its People, Cumberland County Historical Society, 3rd Ed. 1994, beginning at page 129 and 35, respectively. Known as the Tavern, it is thought

to have been built during the Revolution to cater to travelers on the Richmond to Lynchburg stage. 7 These resources are cited in Appendix 2. 8 The Civil War Memoirs of a Virginia Calvaryman, Copyright 2007, University of Alabama Press. 9 By 1806 deed recorded in deed book 10 at page 47, Ludwell Brackett and his brother, Thomas, acquired Brook Hill. In October of 1810, Ludwell purchased his brother’s interest by deed recorded in deed book 11 at page 362. Ludwell died at his seat in Amelia County on November 30, 1815, at age 53. His death notice describes him as holding the rank of captain, perhaps with the volunteer militia of the county. By his will, also recorded in Cumberland County, he left his wife, Ann Elizabeth Cox, a life estate in his Amelia residence holding, presumably along the Appomatox in the vicinity of a length of the river known and shown on maps as “Brackett’s Bends,” and gave Brook Hill equally to his children, numbering to ten, including Louisa as the youngest. Ludwell’s widow, Ann, by deed dated September 15, 1816, recorded in deed book 14 at page 129, exchanged her interest in the Amelia properties for a life interest in Brook Hill, which Dr. Henderson purchased for $7,500 cash (including crops, stock and four slaves) by deed dated October 4, 1827, recorded in deed book 18 at page 475. 10 The first acquisitions made by Dr. Henderson of land clearly forming a part of the Northfield tract were by deeds dated July 20 and 21, 1832, from Thomas Dowdy and wife (208 acres) and John M. Hudgins and wife (480 acres), recorded in deed book 21 at pages 2 and 4. Each of these deeds describe the parcels as partly bounded by the lands of James Isbell. An earlier deed dated September 1, 1825, recorded in deed book 18 at page 56, conveys 351 acres from James Lipscomb said to adjoin the lands of Colonel Isbell and this may be a part of Northfield rather than the Brook Hill accretion. 11 Dr. Richardson himself failed to examine the certificates, which he had carefully preserved, preferring to present him as educated at Edinburgh. 12 Acts of the General Assembly 1885 C 474, p.542. 13 4 Henings 509 (1736). 14 Steam locomotion was first introduced to the neigborhood by the Richmond and Danville and

Southside Railroads around 1850. High Bridge, built by the Southside in 1853, was heralded as the engineering marvel of the age. It spanned the Appomatox a length of 2400 feet 120 feet above the river. But there was no railroad of convenience to Forkland and none to Northfield until construction in 1890 of the Farmville and Powhatan, which ran parallel with the Buckingham Road. 15 Dr. Richardson published his memoirs under title A Doctor Remembers. The above is quoted from manuscript that my father edited. 16 The immorality of the institution of slavery, which evolved in the acts of the General Assembly during the period from 1667 to the revolution, has become of late the particular anquish of Anglican priests; it is fitting that they now should suffer so. The first charter of the London Company made clear the will of the Crown that “the true word of God and Christian faith be preached, planted, and used, not only within every of the said colonies, and plantations, but alsoe as much as they may amongst the savage people which doe or shall adjoine unto them... according to doctrine, rights and religion now professed and established within our realme of England, and that they shall not suffer any person...to withdraw...from their due allegiance, unto us . . . as their immediate sovereign under God.…” 1 Henings 69. But whereas English freeholders and servants could not disavow the Christian faith or allegiance to the Church of England, it soon became apparent to the Church and its several parishes that the cost of pastoral care and charites to parishioners profitably could not be borne if provided to native americans, negroes and mulattoes. Rather than fulfill its mission to convert the savages to Christ, those imported into the colony who were not free and Christian in their native countries were deemed to be slaves and remained so notwithstanding that they or their children became Christians by baptism following their arrival or birth. 6 Henings 356 (1753);2 Henings 260 (1667). Indeed, slaves set free other than for meritorious services and by license of the Governor and Council could be sold at public auction to continuing servitude by the Church Wardens of the parish where the slave resided. 6 Henings 112 (1748). The source of racial discrimination in colonial Virginia lies with the Crown and the clerical side of Anglicanism, which closed its heart and soul to Christ’s new commandment to protect its pocketbook. 17 E.g., Deans, The River Where America Began, A Journey Along the James, Bowman and Littlefield 2007: “(T)ens of thousands of enslaved people were brought from Africa to Virginia’s tobacco coast where their unrequited

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labors and the work of the generations they bore carved plantations of unfathomable wealth out of the land.” A map of these plantations and an account of tobacco as the source of their immense value seems to have escaped recorded history. 18 Mead, The DoughBoys, The Overlook Press (2000) p. ix: “The huge book-publishing industry which has grown up around the US Civil War probably generates annual revenues bigger than those of some of the world’s smaller nations.” 19 The Spirit of Virginia 20 Sweet scented appears to have come from a select number of plantations and was popular with English consumers but not in the growing continental market. It eventually lost its separate identity. Virginia tobacco was probably air cured during the early colonial period and different soil conditions and methods of curing resulted in different textures and colorations, ranging from bright to dark. 21 1 Hening’s 115 22 1 Henings 135 23 An ordinance of the London Company issued July24, 1621, established a council of state and general assembly. 1 Henings 110. 24 During the early Colonial period, settlers who did not pay their way here were either expressly indentured to a master (under two party agreements authenticated by matching the indentations or indentures of the counterparts of the terms of service) or impliedly bound for a term of four years for those above sixteen years of age or to age twenty- one if the terms of service were not in writing. No distinction was made by reason of age, race or gender. 1 Henings 441 (1657-8). Exception was made for Irish servants brought in after 1653, in which case they were bound for six years or until age twenty-four. Idem. 411 (1653-4) ( repealed 1657-8). Servants were protected by law from inadequate provisioning during ship’s passage and against mistreatment by their masters. But a signiﬁcant societal problem arose following the introduction of women and African servants beginning in 1619. Some ninety women were sent over by the London Company in that year and they were taken up by whomever paid their passage for service or marriage. Some of these and those that followed bore children by their masters and other servants or freemen, including blacks, and the offspring became the charges of the Church. Various remedies were ordained, including extentions of servitude, whippings and

ﬁnes to reimburse the Church for the care of bastard and orphaned children. Severe penalties were imposed for the concealment of pregnancies and infanticide of bastards.

judicial expansion of the power of courts and, in retrospect, staunched the penchant of modern jurists to enact by rule what defaulting legislatures fail to make into law.

25 In 1837, bright tobacco was discovered by a slave named Stephen, headman for Abisha Slade in Caswell County, North Carolina, who inadvertently used charred wood to ﬁre tobacco grown on poor soil to produce a bright yellow cast to the leaf. Blending this tobacco with burley and asian strains and the invention of a machine to roll cigarettes made fortunes for the families that manufactured and sold them and governments that taxed them in the 20th century.

30 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

26 No sooner had Rolfe saved the colony but that King Charles and the Church exploited its staple. In 1628, the General Assembly ﬁrmly but politely advised the king that from all appearance he had monopolized the tobacco trade and proposed to contract with him for all of the colony’s tobacco at 3 shilling a pound to a minimum of 500,000 weight and to discontinue purchases of Spanish leaf, in consideration of which quality was proffered on inspection and assured by reducing leaf from 25-30 to 12 to the plant and reducing plantation to 4.5 feet apart. 1 Henings 134. 27 6 Henings 154 (1748). This was a comprehensive statute that not only provided for quality assurance through public warehousing and inspection but the standardization of weights and measures. Most importantly, it provided for the issuance of receipts for quality tobacco in the form of crop notes to the planter ( for casked tobacco) and transfer notes to bearer (for loose or bundled tobacco to be prized and casked). These notes were made legal tender for the payment of debts public and private and shared with (indeed, displaced) specie as the basis of the colonial monetary system. As in the case of the Crown’s tobacco monopoly, the Crown’s mercantile interests were further protected by trading English goods for tobacco and suppressing colonial manufacture of such goods. The coin of the realm was kept at home and iron smelting and mongering discouraged. 28 The Bank of England, formed in 1694, was a bank of deposit but not of issue. The Bank of Virginia was formed in 1807 with branching power and was a bank of limited issue, modeled after the Scottish banks, which were required to maintain large reserves of specie against bank notes and deposits. 29 The form of the writ circumscribed the cause of action and remedy and required the plaintiff strictly to ﬁt his grievance to the form. It bridled

31 Edward L. Bond, Damed Souls In A Tobacco Colony (Mercer University Press 2000).

A. Perkins … she was able to teach the younger children when the need arose. She read Sir Walter Scott’s novels every year, so it is said, and Charles Reade, Thomas Moore and Bullﬁnch. She sewed and embroidered beautifully, and the work, sold in Richmond by her cousin, Mattie Bolling, was at one time the farm’s cash crop.” (p. 13). Jessie married William Ichabod Johnson, a son of Henry Robert Johnson, ﬁrst captain of the Cumberland Troop, whose brother, Hugh, married William Allen’s daughter, Louisa. 39 Dr. Mettauer was an 1809 graduate of Hampden-Sydney, studied medicine at the University of Pensylvania and returned to Prince Edward County to become recognized as an eminent surgeon of national demension. A sketch of his life appears in Hampden-Sydney’s 1912 Kaleidoscope, authored by Dr. George Ben Johnston of Richmond.

32 1 Henings 257 33 See, e.g., 1 Henings, Servants. 34 2 Henings 168. This act, which permitted timely recantation, was carried forward in varient form to the Revolution. 35 Cohn was born 1911 in Germany and was educated in the classics and Semetic languages at the Univesity in Munich. He went to Jerusalem in 1930 to take up Ribbinical studies and returned to Germany to study law in 1933. He rose to become a justice of the Supreme Court of Israel in 1960 and thereafter served as a representative on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. In 1967, he authored The Trial and Death of Jesus, from which the quoted passage is taken, for which the Antiquities of Josephus is cited. 18.1.3. As in Milgrom’s rebuke of Muse, Cohn was not willing to dismiss Jesus as a historical ﬁgure, but defended the Jews by attempting to save him by whitewashing his pretense of being the son of God. 36 Nicholas Perkins apparently owned property in England where he is thought to have owned property that was reserved to his widow Mary following her remarriage. She is thought to have come to Virginia with him and to have returned to England and returned again here, with or without him. Hall, pp 1-3. 37 My father quipped that women had cast off all such oppressions and now come to own 90% of the wealth of the country by reason of their control of the whole of which the lesser part was come by. 38 In June, 1964, Natalie McFaden Blanton (1895-!987) wrote a 67-page remembrance of West Hill and its people for the beneﬁt of the descendants of her marriage with Dr. Wyndham Bolling Blanton. By all accounts, she was among those matriarchs from whom all Virginians devoutly would wish to derive. Natalie describes her husband’s aunt Jessie Blanton: “Jessie was studious and handsome. Educated at a private school at Forkland, the home of Judge William

40 Worsham, a small village, was the county seat of Prine Edward until 1871, and was located on route 15, south of Farmville nearby Hampden-Sydney. 41 Anne Holladay shared correspondence with my father and Douglas Freeman, then editor of The Richmond News Leader. In a letter dated April 24, 1949, she implores Dr. Freeman to see to the acceptance by Battle Abbey of her father’s book on Stuart and three coins left by her granndfather, George H. Matthews, Esq., these in addition to much of Major McClellan’s correspondence and other papers previously given. 42 The 3rd Virginia Cavalry counted 5 “gentlemen” as included in the total of 422 men whose occupations were recorded. They were men who were not occupied with discernible work. Captain John Smith scorned them as indolent. The Athenians priased men of noble bearing but warned against them when hungry.

dust or merge with the stable siding. I elected the hard pan and came away badly bruised but with a complete understanding that the horse’s superior strength made me servant to his caprice and that I should not offend the comfort of his food and shelter. I count foremost among my many blessings that I ripened comfortably after my parents were blessed by Henry Ford’s genius. 45 “We had very showy uniforms, silver mounted helmets,with long ﬂowing horse hair, dark blue-cloth frock coats with two rows of silver buttons, elaborate trimmings of white cord across the breast and between the buttons and silver mounted epaulets on the shoulders and dark blue pants with white cord on the outside seam.We were armed with splendid sabers and Navy six shooters. Our undress suit consisted of dark blue cap, blouse and pants of the same color.” Danzig, p. 9. 46 Danzig, p. 9. 47 Danzig, p. 13. 48 William Allen was ﬁrst cousin to Sally Perkins Moseley, William Stebbins Hubard’s ancestor, and fourth cousin to Stuart’s mother, Elizabeth Pannill Stuart. 49 1 Henings 275 (1642-3). 50 2 Henings 478 ( 1680). 51 4 Henings 357 (1732). 52 Cumberland County Viginia and its People, p. 37; Cumberland County Historical Society Bulletin, Vol.1, No.1, p. 24 (1984).

43 James I. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson’s Book of Maxims Cumberland House Publishing, 2005).

53 Licensure to practice then was granted by any two judges chosen under the Constitution of Virginia on certiﬁcation by the court where the candidate had resided for the preceeding year that he was a person of honest demeanor. 1863-4 Acts, c. 6, p 13.

44 Dr. Richardson’s ﬁrst experience with a runaway horse was at Forkland, returning with a bag of sugar from the Palmore’s store at Stony Point Mill when a thunderstorm broke upon him. The risk was that the mare would bolt through the stable door and greatly injure him if he failed to jettison the sugar and jump. Fortunately, my grandmother Maria had anticipated the risk and seen to it that the door was closed. I had an identical experience returning from the Appomatox, where land was being cleared, bare back on Bob. My step grandmother Ellen shrieked as I ﬂew past and saw the stable door left open. The choice was whether to bite the

54 An interesting document appears among the Perkins papers, perhaps because of William Allen’s succession to the captaincy of the Troop. It is in the nature of a requisition for $39.70 back pay in the case of Dr. John Miller ,wherein it is certiﬁed that “as a surgeon who was enlisted by Captain H. R. Johnson on the 14th of May, 1861, to serve one year and is now entitled to discharge by reason of physical disability,” Dr. Miller is entitled to pay for the period of sevice to date of discharge, which was granted at Camp Ashland. Further, James Isbell reported to William Allen by letter dated January 21, 1862, that a part of the payroll for the Troop had been

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diverted to pay infantry companies for re-enlisting for an extended tour of duty. Nathan Womack’s medical discharge recites his enlistment for a year’s service. 55 William Allen’s May 31, 1861, letter home from Ashland. 56 Most letters were hand delivered by the “politeness” of neighbors, cavalrymen, and others trading back and forth between home and Ashland or the Peninsula to avoid cost and delay of the mail and invaribly were opened with an acknowledgement of receipt of a prior letter and advice of routing the response. 57 Nanzig, p 18. 58 Nanzig, p 100. 59 Lee’s letter, Dated may 24, 1863, was copied and distributed at a bridge game in late February 2008 by William B. Hopkins, a descendant of Carter Lee, with the advice that it had been saved out from the materials made available to Douglas Freeman years ago and had not been seen outside the family since it was written. 60 The grounds were ”wife and 8 children left with no support on death of my father.”.The death of Dr. Henderson and not George Perkins, who died in 1834, occasioned the resignation. It was common practice at the time to refer to one’s inlaws as father, mother, sister, and brother, and this was the manner of address followed by the family. Henry VIII’s marriage annulment rested upon the quible in Leviticus that the papal dispensation to marry Catherine, his brother’s widow, was void by reason of her afﬁnity as his sister.

creation of Maria, for it was found in her bible, and approximates the stern pronouncements of the Westminister and Puritan confessions. 65 These lines of resistance are taken from a 1918 German sector map, which may show seperately named components of one or more of the major defensive systems named for mythical Teutonic characters, some of which appeared in Wagnerian opera, Giselher, Kriemhilde, Brunhilde. Some historians place the ﬁrst and second phases of the offensive in the Kreimhilde Stellung. 66 Robert Throckmorton was then Captain of the Headquarters Troop. He and my father were close friends after the armistice and following their return to Virginia. He ran Virginia Electric Power Company’s Tidewater operations and, with his wife, Lelia, became my Godparents. 67 The Grand March was enacted in July of 1919, some months following father’s return home. 68 Father prepared a log that listed photographs by number and provided the coordinates, a brief discription of the place or subject, and its signiﬁcance to each phase of the offensive. With log and sector map in hand, one may follow the photographer on a tour through each of the three phases of the offensive in which the Blue Ridge Division was engaged only three to four months following the armistice.

and the division was relieved on assessment that black men under black field officers could not be formed into an effective fighting unit. Percy, who was in charge of training them, reached the same conclusion but marveled at their impressive performance in the victory parade up Fifth Avenue. Pershing would not permit them to march the Champ Elysees. 74 Cousin Betsy (Elizabeth Langhorne Perkins) was named for her grandmother, Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne, one of five sisters, including Nancy, who married Waldorf Astor, and Irene, who modeled for her husband, Charles Dana Gibson, an illustrator, and became the Gibson Girl. Grandmother Elizabeth was the daughter of Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Anne Witcher Keen, whose mother was Mary Ann Perkins of the Pittsylvania line of Perkins, and married Thomas Moncure Perkins, a member of the Buckingham line of Perkins. 75 The Mulligans in Richmond was a large group, built around a core of fraternity brothers and graduates of the University. Playing with them was an annual reunion that assured a gathering of friends I liked to be with that no longer could be found in Charlottesville. Like father ’s Scorpions, our wives were invited to join us at an annual party at the CCVA.

71 The passage at 8 Jewish Antiquities 3 attributed to the contemporary Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, which treats Jesus as the Christ and describes his miraculous ministry and cruciﬁxion, has generally been discredited as originally included by the author’s history.

76 Several years ago, we, with Kossen and Sarah Gregory, were guests of Toy Savage, widower, and new wife Rhodie, widow of Paul Funkhouser and godmother to our son William. Toy, a Babptist, and Rhodie, an Episcopalian, took us to a large Presbyterian church in Delray, nice appointed with a costly semi-professional choir. It happened that an Anglican hymn was selected with which I was lovingly familiar that made no attempt to vault above middle C and I blasted away at it, proudly rolling “Rs” and sticking “Ts”. When we were done, the lady in front of me turned and exclaimed ”what a voice.”I was brieﬂy bathed in visceral warmth, enamored of a voice I once taped and wished never to hear again. I apologized for possibly annointing her beautifully coiffured head with spittle and she assured me that it would have come as an undeserved gift. Like a fool, I tried to sight read the next tune and lost her devotion.

63 Freeman referred her to the Virginia Historical Society, which had succeeded Battle Abbey as a repository of Civil War materials.

72 Anne pedeceased Wilbur, leaving her condiderable estate to him, rather than to Anne, her only child by Smith Reynolds, proclaimed by Winston Salem newspapers as the richest baby on earth.

64 The Catechism is not in the handwriting of William Allen or Anne Jane nor does it conform to the Catechisms of the several editions of the Book of Common Prayer prior or subsequent to 1789. Apparently, it was a

77 Roads were privatized in 1917 by the newly formed Association for the express beneﬁt of cottage and lot owners, their tenants and guests, and have been since paved and maintained by the Association.

73 In the Meuse Argonne, the 368th regiment of the 92nd division, made up of Negro conscripts, alone was commited to the front. Its men showed no disposition to engage and kill

78 Bessie Dunn could not afford to see Lola or sister Dorothy through graduation.

61 William Allen maintained a Richmond bank account, and the correspondence indicates that Dr, Henderson’s affairs were conducted out of Richmond. Transfer of funds from English or Scottish banks probably was by bills of exchange. 62 Lines from a poem written on the back of a Confederate banknote held by young George Perkins.

69 Thomas F. Goode (Sarah Massie Gregory); Robert Douthat ( Wade and James Douthat); William Allen Perkins (W. L. Hazlegrove). 70 Fisher’s tribute was published in the Roanoke Times and Frank Rogers sent him a clipping with note attached: “ Such a pity that such well deserved talents are so rare.”

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Apendix II

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Apendix II Among resources touching on the Perkins Family of Forkland, the following bear special recognition: First, William Kearney Hall compiled a genealogy entitled “Descendants of Nickolas Perkins of Virginia,” published in limited edition by Edward Brothers of Ann Arbor, Michigan, under 1957 copyright; Second, a delightful treatment of her four grandparents, including George Perkins, son of William Allen Perkins, by Lydia Loundes Maury Skeels, a granddaughter of George. This work, entitled “One American Family,” was privately Published in two volumes. Volume II, in two parts, was printed at Storrs Connecticut by Parousia Press in a limited edition of 100 copies under 1987 copyright. Its importance lies in its thorough biographical and autobiographical treatment of members of the Perkins and other families by a thoroughly modern woman. Her related research and correspondence was given by her to the University of Virginia Library (Accession 10492-C) as was the memorabilia of the Perkins of Forkland, given to the Library by J. W. Hazlegrove in February, 1933. Third, Dr. Edward Henderson Richardson treats his grandfather, William Allen Perkins, and his family in his memoir, A Doctor Remembers, Vantage Press 1959. These three publication were available on the internet at this writing.

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