tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25791998279835758552024-03-13T00:51:51.464-04:00In ProgressNotes, queries, and musings about research. Formerly "Frederick Douglass: In Progress," formerly "Frederick Douglass's Women." Currently working on an introduction to Sally Hemings for undergraduates.Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.comBlogger207125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-72177402433651805942020-09-22T10:27:00.004-04:002020-09-22T10:27:37.752-04:00Marshall Center Webinar on Frederick Douglass, Sept. 24-25, 2020<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPGyFzB6SBk8VX_bfudoQNa-iYrjXRMqI0tJOj5SNXkssN7sHwC_3kAPEvOqJ0Aabc0_Dnnyvv3c1vsT2CG49pdmNF9XUTIjPymkwejdTb5_qGKoGR8AEVv-xj9qTLU7rVHMO4Y8EAgtpR/s1028/FDWebinarJepsonCenter.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="938" data-original-width="1028" height="365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPGyFzB6SBk8VX_bfudoQNa-iYrjXRMqI0tJOj5SNXkssN7sHwC_3kAPEvOqJ0Aabc0_Dnnyvv3c1vsT2CG49pdmNF9XUTIjPymkwejdTb5_qGKoGR8AEVv-xj9qTLU7rVHMO4Y8EAgtpR/w400-h365/FDWebinarJepsonCenter.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><br />This Thursday and Friday, September 24-25, 2020, the <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/index.html" target="_blank">Marshall Center </a>in the <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/">Jepson School of Leadership Studies</a> at the <a href="https://www.richmond.edu/" target="_blank">University of Richmond</a> will host a <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/douglass-schedule.html" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass Webinar</a>. This was originally scheduled as a conference last spring, but the pandemic caused a change of time and venue. That allows more people to attend.</p><p>The webinar begins on Friday night at 7pm with the keynote by the fantastic <a href="https://history.yale.edu/people/david-blight" target="_blank">David Blight</a>, who will speak on his book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Frederick-Douglass-David-W-Blight/dp/1416590315" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom</a></i>. Questions from the audience can be submitted in the chat section in writing, as tends to be the case with webinars. </p><p>Thursday morning, at 11 am, begins with the panel "Frederick Douglass's America," followed by a lunch break. Then, at 1 pm, "Statesmanship in Douglass's Life and Thought," and, at 2:30 pm, "The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass." </p><p>After a thirty minute break, Blight returns with Edward Ayers to conclude with closing remarks and dialogue. </p><p>Each panel on Friday has three speakers, and questions can be submitted in the chat section in writing. David Blight and I are the historians amid political scientists, and I really still haven't figured out how to speak to political scientists. I always feel a little silly telling my stories while they are up there making big idea arguments, although I know that my stories are neither silly nor little and actually contain big ideas. So much so that fifteen minutes cannot contain them all and another fifty minutes ends up on the cutting-room floor.</p><p>I do know, after working on a bibliography for Oxford University Press, that the political scientists are doing some great work integrating Douglass's early abolition with his later political positions. The usual narrative describes him as having become conservative or falling away from his radicalism during his later decades, but they show a consistency of principles and ideology across his work. The really good political scientists work in that area where philosophy and politics overlap, where we lay people usually find the philosophes of the Enlightenment, which moves into the questions and problems of putting ideology into action. I usually think of it as a spectrum of ideology, activism, and operational politics -- that is, from your ideals on one hand and how to get things done on the other. </p><p>Anyway, the program is here: <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/douglass-schedule.html">https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/douglass-schedule.html</a></p><p>The registration form is here: <a href="https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07eh9z9lse8a29f176&oseq=&c=&ch=">https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07eh9z9lse8a29f176&oseq=&c=&ch=</a></p><p>More on the Marshall Center Lecture Series here, with links to the registration form and webinar on the page, in case the above links don't work: <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/lecture-series.html">https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/lecture-series.html</a></p>Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-72260951332383941772020-09-13T10:50:00.006-04:002020-09-13T10:54:39.373-04:00Park, Teaching, Research, etc.<p> This semester started well. The preparation, on the other hand, became an ever-moving nightmare of rearrangement of planning, each part of which required ten steps, each step of which required....well, you get the picture. Rearrangement wasn't just a matter of saying, "ok, we won't do this, we'll do that." Rearrangement was a matter of saying, "ok, we won't do this. We have to tear it all down and rebuild something new that will have to be torn down again when they change the plans yet again." My end result, which differs from other schools, has me in the classroom one out of every four meetings with my students. Each meeting is with only half of the enrolled class at at time, every other week. Since they have 100/200 level classes on one rotation, and 300/400 level classes on another, and I teach two 100 and one 300 level courses, I'm on campus every week. I can't think about the schedule too hard or I get confused. I just have to roll with it.</p><p>This is the current state of educating students.</p><p>So, that ate into a lot of Hemings time. Then, the research trips planned with NEH grants kept getting pushed back because of library closures and travel restrictions until, now, maybe, if lucky, might take place over Christmas, Spring Break, and next May. Might. Maybe. If lucky. All of which pushes the deadline for finishing the book back. Fortunately much of the book requires contextual reading or is online. Maybe this pandemic will lead to more funding for digitization projects, if it doesn't lead to the collapse of libraries, archives, and schools entirely.</p><p>This is the current state of research. </p><p>Last night, however, I had an interesting insight into one adaptation of theater for the immediate future. <a href="https://uschs.org/" target="_blank">The Capitol Historical Society</a> broadcast a reading of Jean Parvin Bordewich's play <i><a href="https://uschs.org/news-releases/live-virtual-dinner-theater/" target="_blank">Now's The Time</a></i>, about the ratification of the 14th Amendment. She focused on conversations among Thaddeus Stevens, William Fessenden, Lydia Smith, and George T. Downing, the latter being an ingenious inclusion since he joined Frederick Douglass in agitating to Andrew Johnson for black male voting rights and ran the restaurant at the capitol, which made his meetings with Stevens and Fessenden natural within the action of the play. Listening, and to some extent watching, the reading of the play seemed somewhat akin to listening to a radio play. </p><p>Later this month, the <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/lecture-series.html" target="_blank">Marshall Center</a> at the <a href="https://jepson.richmond.edu/" target="_blank">Jepson School of Leadership Studies</a> at <a href="https://www.richmond.edu/" target="_blank">University of Richmond</a> in Virginia will be doing roughly the same thing with a <a href="https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07eh9z9lse8a29f176&oseq=&c=&ch=" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass Conference</a> (or "webinar"). David Blight will speak on the evening of September 24, 2020, and others (including myself) throughout the day on September 25, 2020. The conference was originally scheduled last spring, right as the pandemic hit. So, they postponed their plans them moved them online. Normally, I loathe Zoom, but this will be much different from holding a meeting or a class. It might be more like that play.</p><p>Alas, during that spring conference, I had hoped to spend the weekend in Richmond to see an exhibit on Sally Hemings at the African American museum there, then drive up to Charlottesville. That seems like years ago!</p><p>Meanwhile, down in Maryland, the governor appears to have taken up the movement for Frederick Douglass Freedom Day (I know I have an old <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2017/09/my-free-life-began-on-third-of.html" target="_blank">post </a>about that on this blog <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2018/09/frederick-douglass-freedom-day-what-was.html" target="_blank">somewhere</a>) by naming September "<a href="https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/gov-hogan-declares-september-as-international-underground-railroad-month" target="_blank">International Underground Railroad Month.</a>" Massachusetts and New York should get on that, too. Then, on the Eastern Shore, a <a href="http://www.wboc.com/story/42580084/new-outdoor-frederick-douglass-exhibit-unveiled" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass Park has opened on Tuckahoe Creek</a>, with wayside markers telling the story of his and of Anna Murray's youth there. This is quite a far cry from when I first visited there back -- oh, goodness, when was it? -- back in the early 2000s when all that I could find was an odd marker and a pamphlet for a self-guided driving tour, so I used Dickson Preston's <i>Young Frederick Douglass</i> and Douglass's own <i>Narrative of the Life</i> to flesh it all out. </p><p>That, at least, is a better current state of something.</p><p><br /></p>Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-32395908315462925982020-08-15T16:35:00.000-04:002020-08-15T16:35:11.017-04:00Frederick Douglass Airport Soon<p> My goodness, time flies. These days, as the semester approaches, and the college administration sends e-mail that update e-mails to which half of the recipients have hit reply-all to ask the same question asked in half of the previous reply-all (replies-all?), and everything having to go online or hybrid with the reasonable expectation of going online, and -- oh, just thinking it is exhausting. So, with all of that, Sally Hemings has had to fight for attention. </p><p>My last post dealt with Beverly Hemings flying a balloon, an image that continues with me as one of peace and hope for some reason. Indeed, that night, when I returned to finish reading <i>Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings</i>, Stephen O'Connor used that very same incident as one of the final scenes. He almost matched my own imagination, possibly because we both constructed it from Annette Gordon-Reed's research in <i>The Hemingses of Monticello.</i></p><p>Because all roads lead to Frederick Douglass here, the news in Douglassness this week reported that the <a href="https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2020/08/12/rochester-ny-airport-renamed-frederick-douglass/3353030001/" target="_blank">Rochester city airport will soon carry his name</a>. The <a href="https://www.change.org/p/monroe-county-executive-adam-bello-frederick-douglass-int-l-aiport-rochester-ny" target="_blank">petition </a>had been going around earlier this summer, and I confess to having added my name. Still, I seldom expect much to happen as a result of anything these days, such is my Gen X fatalism, cynicism, and pessimism. What a joy to be wrong! </p><p>That's the upside of being fatalistic, cynical, and pessimistic. You are seldom disappointed, and occasionally surprised. </p><p>Douglass did not live long enough for air flight, but his curiosity about new inventions like the camera and the phonograph, as well as his poetic sensibilities, makes me think that flight might have attracted him enough to try it at least once. </p><p>Many years ago, I had a pilot friend who would take pretty much anyone willing on flights as he earned hours for his liscence. We flew over to Easton's airfield -- I think it was Easton -- had lunch in the diner at the airport, and flew back. </p><p>The flight plan was hilarious because we had to chart a route that skirted around St. Michaels. You see, different areas, especially around D.C., have cones of airspace restrictions above them for a variety of reasons. St. Michaels had a short cone, but high enough to force Cessnas flying into the nearest airfield to plot a roundabout course in order to avoid it. Why? Because Donald Rumsfeld owned property in the area. Edward Covey's old property, if I remember correctly. Make of that what you will.</p><p>That's not the point of the story here. </p><p>On our return journey, I had my face pressed against the window looking down thinking vague thoughts about Douglass having lived down there and wondering who all owns the properties now, and wishing I had thought to bring a map, when the landscape suddenly seemed familiar. I realized that we flew right over Wye House, the plantation where Douglass lived as a little boy and that he described in his autobiographies. </p><p>What would he have thought of that view? What would he have thought of sitting in a machine that allowed him that view? Now he has an airport named for him. </p><p>I'd like to think that would make travel easier for him if he was alive today, but he was a big man and would not fit very comfortably in seats these days. What do you think would be his opinion of Zoom?</p><p><br /></p>Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-79837117952355841972020-08-03T14:34:00.001-04:002020-08-08T13:14:47.126-04:00Beverly Hemings, the Balloon ManToo much has interfered with my musings here. I started chapter 1 in earnest. I had a birthday, which I always believe should be celebrated over a week, at least. Then there was, for lack of better term, just plain bullshit. If you are alive you know what I'm talking about because you probably have your own brand that interferes with doing anything worth doing, generally kills your joy, and then leaves you with a whole mess of catching up to do.<div><br /></div><div>Chapter One is doing fine, in spite of the bullshit. My birthday brought an interesting present from my husband, the Eminent Historian, in the form of the novel <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-Dreams-Sally-Hemings/dp/0143128892" target="_blank">Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings</a>, </i>by Stephen O'Connor, that deserves its own posts. The rest is still in clean-up mode. As that continues, here is a short, sweet image.</div><div><br /></div><div>In <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-Sally-Hemings-Controversy/dp/0813918332" target="_blank">Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy</a></i>, Annette Gordon-Reed points out a passage about Beverly Hemings in <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b534612&view=2up&seq=10" target="_blank">Isaac Granger Jefferson's memoir.</a> Beverly was the oldest child of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson to survive to adulthood. <a href="https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/isaac-granger-jefferson" target="_blank">Isaac Jefferson </a>had been an enslaved artisan at Monticello, a tin and blacksmith, and one of the many children of Ursula and Great George Granger, who were one of the other extended and respected families there. His recollections were recorded in at his home in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1842 (right about the time that Frederick Douglass first began speaking as an abolitionist in New England, if we keep All Road Lead to Frederick Douglass going). </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqci_2QV5ZJ1kkwbKCERaI15RDQgmuUoPG8mTvRY5ltkmYg7UERHDgFEwFuD0CU5WJFfCfn0-B0Z9pnyDr-6fjU0oj7ZiR8rhiqeF_jYLd6BiMAik5Q4zsq2-iijk-ln5sxRXXe0y1KXpy/s243/Isaac_Jefferson.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="243" data-original-width="200" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqci_2QV5ZJ1kkwbKCERaI15RDQgmuUoPG8mTvRY5ltkmYg7UERHDgFEwFuD0CU5WJFfCfn0-B0Z9pnyDr-6fjU0oj7ZiR8rhiqeF_jYLd6BiMAik5Q4zsq2-iijk-ln5sxRXXe0y1KXpy/w128-h155/Isaac_Jefferson.jpg" width="128" /></a></div>Isaac Jefferson told the interviewer about the Hemingses at the beginning of Chapter 2, and mentioned that "Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up -- the balloon that Beverly sent off." </div><div><br /></div><div>That is such an interesting detail, and Gordon-Reed investigated it (which is one of the reasons that I love that book so much). She noted that Beverly had departed Monticello in 1821 and, according to Madison, passed over the color line. Madison himself was free by the terms of Jefferson's will in 1826, but his mother died in 1835, so he took his family to Ohio in 1836. With that window, she went searching for any evidence of a balloon ascension in Petersburg. She found it in the July 1, 1834, issue of the <i>Petersburg Constellation. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I wanted to see it for myself -- not because I disbelieved, but because I just wanted to see, in the same way nerdy way that you want to see historic sites or the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. None of the databases to which I have access have the <i>Constellation.* </i>One, however, did have a Salem, Massachusetts, that mentioned the notice. For what reason, I have no idea, and that may be a story for someone to investigate, too. Whatever the reason, here it is:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioETiBrj3cMBKGbClLNKxDlOYtFfYjQ3VmuDPQxWVlf-ey3N_qdqaHsHALHc7cnYC3e3Cjp4b04mJo7dOCBv0niPStYxAvmdTmmz7BHh_T9bj50089qrrra5laICLlhWM8ffAv4oF6gxaF/s962/BeverleysBalloonmaybe1835.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="962" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioETiBrj3cMBKGbClLNKxDlOYtFfYjQ3VmuDPQxWVlf-ey3N_qdqaHsHALHc7cnYC3e3Cjp4b04mJo7dOCBv0niPStYxAvmdTmmz7BHh_T9bj50089qrrra5laICLlhWM8ffAv4oF6gxaF/w320-h103/BeverleysBalloonmaybe1835.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>"The Petersburg Constellation gives notice that a balloon man is about to visit that place, and the editor says he <i>augurs </i>a hearty welcome to him. The editor may put up his instrument, for these itinerant skylarkers are <i>bore </i>enough <i>of themselves.</i>"</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Well, someone's grouchy pants were on a little tight in the editorial office that day!</div><div><br /></div><div>Gordon-Reed found that the balloon ascended from Poplar Lawn, a park with a large field bordered by Jefferson Avenue. Is that not poetic? Although this particular notice may not have definitely been the one that Isaac Jefferson mentioned, Isaac Jefferson had connected Beverley Hemings to an interest in balloons, one that Gordon-Reed pointed out paralleled his father's interest in Paris half-a-century earlier. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sally Hemings was in Paris, too. Madison's memoirs suggest that she told them of her time there. How could she not? Well, I'm sure there are reasons, but imagine her putting her children to bed and telling them stories. What better stories than of a city across an ocean? Of a contraption full of air that lifted a man in a basket into the sky? What a feeling of freedom to be lifted above the earth and to see the world from the perspective of a bird.</div><div><br /></div><div>That puts me in mind of Douglass, who at the moment that Beverly's balloon may have been ascending, stood on the shores of the Chesapeake watching the sails of ships pass by, wondering why he, too, could not sail as free as them. </div><div><br /></div><div>Beverly as the oldest, did not have other siblings' experience before him from which he could follow. He had only his mother's trust in his father to reassure him that his freedom would come. I can see an image of flight appealing to someone in that position. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then, he just disappeared from the record. What became of him and his ballooning? Maybe someone will fall down that rabbit hole of research and find out.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRyAXK8rdKoDh3UqJqMYHjSt_vPSbtOwY0TVQxQUZN9U2AlR85cHVUpmgRU6Al3NVEd3DcqtJCPuP-aVQIZ0dggZU3Ntrg6k2kfMqNNH8jbc1K-58KiQC5Uzlzqe5pvzigjjooJoh1SpKr/s1024/1024px-Montgolfier_brothers_flight.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="998" data-original-width="1024" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRyAXK8rdKoDh3UqJqMYHjSt_vPSbtOwY0TVQxQUZN9U2AlR85cHVUpmgRU6Al3NVEd3DcqtJCPuP-aVQIZ0dggZU3Ntrg6k2kfMqNNH8jbc1K-58KiQC5Uzlzqe5pvzigjjooJoh1SpKr/w262-h255/1024px-Montgolfier_brothers_flight.jpg" width="262" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>---------------------------</div><p style="text-align: left;"><font size="2">*Little known fact: we who toil away as "lesser" schools such as non-elite liberal arts colleges, directional universities, urban universities, two-year colleges, and so forth, work with obstacles that people at major universities do not when we research our books because our libraries are not as flush with funding nor deemed as central to our missions as at flagship state, elite private, and ivy or ivy-adjacent places. When we put out books or articles, we've done so with more teaching and more effort in obtaining the tools we need.</font></p>Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-8113225304529541402020-07-21T13:33:00.000-04:002020-07-21T13:33:20.940-04:00What To Call "It"? part 1The popular image of the Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson -- what to call it? -- has come from the Merchant-Ivory film <i>Jefferson in Paris </i>and from a 1979 novel, <i>Sally Hemings, </i>by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Aside from the ghastly casting of Nick Nolte as Jefferson, the film has quite a number of problems that deserve another post. The film argues that Hemings and Jefferson bonded over their Virginia origins, fell in love, she got pregnant, and her brother James forced Jefferson's hand in offering freedom to their children (and I can't remember if she was included in the deal) and James. The novel, while more successful and convincing in its depiction by allowing readers to see events through Hemings' eyes and hear her thought, also portrays a relationship based in consent and attraction, something akin to a marriage.<br />
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I'm too lazy to look up the source right now, so I'll find it later, but at Monticello they found that many people who knew about Hemings, knew about her from these artistic sources and thus believed that this -- what to call it? -- was a love story. That love story lies at one end of the spectrum of popular takes, and one that some of the descendants choose to believe.<br />
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At the other end, which any cruise through the internet will show you, lies a version that posits Jefferson as a rapist in the worst sense of the word. He's predatory, grooming his victim, assaulting her serially over decades, and, of course, keeping she and their children in bondage.<br />
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Madison Hemings, the most direct source, has a more subtle take, but we shall return to him. Right now, I want to focus on the overall methodological problem of approaching this issue.<br />
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One of the most difficult things to manage in writing about Hemings, and indeed all of the women in her family, concerns the -- well, right there, what word to use? What is neutral? What accurately describes the interaction in the absence of the participant's own descriptions? Jefferson, unlike that walking erection William Byrd III, did not even leave his own accounts from which we could extrapolate his -- again, what to call her? Victim, partner, seed-recipient?<br />
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This problem has two parts. The first you see above in the lack of first-person testimony. The second lies in our, present-day perceptions of sexual exploitation and eighteenth-century perceptions, complicated by the differences among legal and popular definitions. By our popular definition, if a woman cannot refuse sex without reprisal then the act is rape. Indeed, we teach our incoming freshman about enthusiastic affirmation of consent. The absence of "no" is not enough. They should also offer and receive an enthusiastic "yes."<br />
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What people, especially young people today, forget is that even this is new to popular perceptions. So much so that the same young people who sit in these Relationship 101 sessions who enthusiastically agree that, yes, yes, an enthusiastic yes is necessary and anything else is rape, will also drift into "well, what was she wearing" and "well, you can see she was kinda asking for it" when the discussion turns to particular cases. They have picked this up somewhere. Rape culture roots are wide and deep.<br />
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Just as looking toward the past with the rosy lenses of nostalgia comes easily to some people, so too does condemning the past for not being as enlightened as we think our time is. In fact, it is much much easier. That's where the difficult work of history comes in. You have to understand your subjects within the context of their own time, which means moving into a foreign territory, releasing what you think you know about almost everything, and then realizing you still haven't released enough. You then have to piece together their time and translate it to your audience in our time; and often you are trying to modulate the subtleties of historical inquiry, the unsubtle politics of today, and the gaps between academic knowledge and public knowledge -- and within every single one of those categories.<br />
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Does that mean becoming an apologist for abominable institutions or actions because "that was just their time"? That's the tricky bit for which the short answer is "no." For some things like, for instance, coming across the term "negro" or "colored" used to describe African Americans in the past, the answer can be "yes," because that was the agreed-upon term by the people that it describe at the time, although that is now no longer the case. <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_stordeur_pryor_why_it_s_so_hard_to_talk_about_the_n_word?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare" target="_blank">More tricky will be terms that are now and always were perjorative</a>. Even then, debates exist as to whether white people especially should ever use such words even when quoting historical documents. (For the record, as a white southern woman, my position is that word has no business coming out of my mouth under any circumstances.)<br />
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As a historian, your job is to understand and explain, not excuse or condemn. One of my friends in graduate school always said, "let them condemn themselves." They usually do. My husband, the eminent historian, says roughly the same thing, "judge them by the standards of their own times." Quite often, if we are talking about our national history, the things we condemn today evolved from institutions already in place then, and the principles that we use to condemn evolved from principle articulated then. Saying "well, that's just the way things were," should not mean "so that settles it." "That's the way things were," should lead to "and that's a problem because...." or "why were they that way?" The continuation of "that's the way things were" leads you deeper into the time, into the superstructure, the skeleton of the past, of our society -- or whatever society you study.<br />
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With Jefferson, letting him condemn himself by the standards of his own time in regard to slavery is like shooting fish in a barrel. It's far too easy. People get caught up in the contradictions of his position on freedom and his ownership on slavery, but I don't think it is a contradiction for him. At least, I think he had the mind to create an argument about race to ensure that it did not become a contradiction in his own head. If you situate him among other writers of his time, he comes out pretty racist, even when the less racist seem pretty racist by our own standards. All to justify his ownership of slaves that support his very expensive tastes and very extensive debts.<br />
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There are a lot of different avenues to consider in getting at this question, but one has to do with rape. So, I decided to take the same approach as with race and slavery, and the first thing to find out would be eighteenth-century standards and definitions. <a href="https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5301" target="_blank">Sharon Block</a> wrote an excellent book, <i><a href="https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15796.html" target="_blank">Rape and Sexual Power in Early America</a></i>, covering 1700 to 1820. Perfect! Indeed, she engages with the problem of 21st century sensibilities trying to understand 18th century crimes without apology or absolution.<br />
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But, I've once again taken rather a long time to get to this point. I'll explain what Block says next and how it helps to understand but not excuse Jefferson, and perhaps Wayles and Hemings, toward the Hemings women they -- what to call it?<br />
<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-88465433208369745392020-07-19T16:05:00.002-04:002020-07-19T16:05:40.374-04:00History, Art, Nostalgia: A Rambling Post Good lord! Finally got to Douglass's appearance in <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Good-Lord-Bird-James-McBride/dp/1594632782" target="_blank">Good Lord Bird</a></i> and it is so over the top that you can't even call it parody. He's just a whole other person. Short, "stout," a bigamist, a drunk, bloviating, and a child-molester. This is the exact opposite of Douglass.<br />
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I'm now a bit intrigued about the choice of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daveed_Diggs" target="_blank">Daveed Diggs</a> as the actor to play the <a href="https://youtu.be/H-Tm63y-S4s" target="_blank">miniseries </a>vision of Douglass, given that his most famous role to date has been Lafayette/<a href="https://youtu.be/_yV6bLE4oJ0" target="_blank">Jefferson </a>in <i><a href="https://youtu.be/DSCKfXpAGHc" target="_blank">Hamilton</a></i>, another feat of casting in which the historical person did not really resemble the character on stage. When that happens, both the characterization and the casting, you have to ask about the intent. The message of Lafayette/Jefferson was much clearer than what may be going on in the miniseries -- or yet even book -- of <i>Good Lord Bird. Hamilton</i>'s whole spirit reminded the audience of the freshness and energy of these figures during their own time, but the black Jefferson also constantly reminded the audience that people who looked like the actor playing the character Jefferson were in fact owned by the historical person Jefferson.<br />
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No one is going to actually think that Jefferson was black (although who knows with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette" target="_blank">Lafayette</a>, his visage being less ubiquitous in U.S. visual culture.) What about Douglass? Douglass's face should be well-known, aside from the <a href="https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2018/12/16/thieves-attempt-steal-40-pound-frederick-douglass-statute/2330354002/" target="_blank">drunken Rochester fools</a> who attempted to steal his statue in December 2018. His life, particularly his personal life, less so. Already, if the internet is any indication, a good chunk of the population is ready to believe that he was a womanizer. Now, will they believe that he was married to two women at the same time? Will that somehow become "fact" the way the fake quote about him being "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?ei=26AUX6DxJ5W5tQaajYKgCw&q=%22I+am+married+to+an+old+black+log%22&oq=%22I+am+married+to+an+old+black+log%22&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKABMgUIIRCrAjIFCCEQqwIyBQghEKsCOgQIABBHUON0WKqOAWDSkAFoAHABeACAAZkBiAH4AZIBAzEuMZgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjgyv6biNrqAhWVXM0KHZqGALQQ4dUDCAw&uact=5" target="_blank">married to an old black log</a>," used as an epitaph to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Douglass-Women-Jewell-Parker-Rhodes/dp/0743410106" target="_blank">Jewell Parker Rhodes's dreadful novel </a><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Douglass-Women-Jewell-Parker-Rhodes/dp/0743410106" target="_blank">Douglass's Women</a>, </i>has? Or will the casting of Diggs suggest to the audience that something is upside down here?<br />
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This is the reason that I decided to read the novel, of course. Visual media has power that the written word, especially non-fiction, does not. I'm not at all versed in the reasons, but it has something to do with the combination of narrative and images that impress themselves on the mind and memory in such a way as to override other methods of learning and knowing. Whatever the physiological explanation, the quandary here lies in the artist's responsibility toward representing history and real human lives in the past.<br />
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Artists have license for interpretation that allow them to do whatever they would like; but we historians have to deal with the fallout. Take, for instance, criticism leveled at historian Kate Clifford Larson for the black slavecatcher in the film <i><a href="https://youtu.be/GqoEs4cG6Uw" target="_blank">Harriet</a>. </i>Larson wrote <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bound-Promised-Land-Portrait-American/dp/0345456289" target="_blank">a biography of Tubman</a>, which did not include such a figure, and served as a consultant, which is a paid gig and to whom the creative minds have no real accountability. While black slavecatchers existed, they were something like less than 1% of the overall numbers of slavecatchers, so the artistic choice to have this character cast as a black man distorted a historical fact that was not even in either Larson's biography of Tubman or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Harriet-Tubman-Freedom-Catherine-Clinton/dp/0316155942" target="_blank">Catherine Clinton's</a>.<br />
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But, I realize that I'm picking on black art here, which puts me in sort of a dictatorial position -- the white arbiter of accuracy in African American art and history. That's not my place. My place is as a student-- a white student -- trying to learn and either understand or accept even if I don't understand.<br />
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What were the reasons a black author or a black screenplay writer and black director make these choices? I'll have to think on that more with<i> Good Lord Bird</i> as I finish it.<br />
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With <i>Tubman, </i>when I heard that the screenplay originated in the 1990s, it made me think of the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lynch_speech" target="_blank">Willie Lynch Letter</a>" that was an early version of an internet meme. For those unfamiliar, this document purported to be a speech given by a slaveholder in colonial Virginia offering methods of dividing and conquering their enslaved population. These methods all reflected divisions within the African American community in the 1990s. This was, of course, <a href="https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2004/may.htm" target="_blank">not an actual historical document</a>, but rather a call to overcome those divisions, grounded in white supremacist institutions, and unite in the present. So, taking this into consideration, this screenplay seemed to be for a black audience with that same message in mind; and, if you look at the characters, William Still, the composite played by the ever wonderful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelle_Mon%C3%A1e" target="_blank">Janelle Monae</a>, Harriet herself, this is a film that tries to be by and for African Americans. The role the slavecatcher plays, then, is the sell-out, the one who betrays his own people for his own gain. In the end, he serves as a lesson that, under white supremacy, those sell-outs are more disposable than Tubman.<br />
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But that wasn't conveyed in the visual argument on the screen. So, more harm done than good. I fear that for Douglass in <i>Good Lord Bird</i>. McBride may be arguing that Douglass, for all of his fame, was all noise and bluster, ultimately impotent, when put next to a man of action like John Brown, "<a href="https://youtu.be/H-Tm63y-S4s?t=63" target="_blank">nutty as squirrel turd</a>" though Brown may be. (Now that I think about it, the continued mention of 20 kids does suggest "potency" of another kind, too.)<br />
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White art in this realm has done more insidious work. <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)" target="_blank">Gone With the Wind</a>, </i>for instance, has a strong hold on imaginations about the Old South as something "beautiful and elegant." Even my students who probably couldn't pick any of the actors out of a line up, and who have never even seen a poster for the film, still have a familiarity with some of its imagery through its ubiquity.<br />
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One of the problems in white art about history has to do with romanticism and nostalgia -- which is the subject of the book after the Hemings book. <i>Gone With the Wind</i>'s power for its white audiences lay in its romanticism and nostalgia for a time and place scrubbed of its reality, as written by a woman who had not lived through it so much as heard her Mee Maw's stories about them, all washed away by that awful "woah." Book and film could end with a hopeful "tomorrow is another day" note because Mitchell wrote from a period in which she could look back and know that it all ended happily ever after for the Scarlett class. For Mammy's class? Not so much; but you don't have to encounter that because Mammy is loyal and happy in this world controlled by Mitchell and then by the filmmakers (although not in Hattie McDaniel's subtle expressions), all in the same dazzling Technicolor that brought audiences Dorothy's ruby shoes.<br />
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My particular interest has to do with <i>Little House on the Prairie</i>. I was a huge fan of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie_(TV_series)" target="_blank">t.v. series</a> from its pilot, which aired when I was in first grade, which led to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie" target="_blank">books</a>, which led to my interest in history and writing, which set me on this road. I'm less interested in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder" target="_blank">Laura Ingalls Wilder</a> herself than in the stories and their life. Her experience factors into my interest, naturally, but the way the stories themselves have their own life from her <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Girl-Laura-Ingalls-Wilder/dp/0984504176" target="_blank">memoir that was not published until recently</a>, to the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1773099715"></span>children's books<span id="goog_1773099716"></span></a>, to her daughter's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hurricane-Roar-Rose-Wilder-1985-09-03/dp/B01FJ09DAS/ref=pd_lpo_14_t_0/132-2796811-0666429?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01FJ09DAS&pd_rd_r=ef54035c-8190-4eae-8201-6076bae5ca4a&pd_rd_w=I0dH0&pd_rd_wg=2vQGt&pf_rd_p=7b36d496-f366-4631-94d3-61b87b52511b&pf_rd_r=Z5RV2H8Z0235ZMXBNXQY&psc=1&refRID=Z5RV2H8Z0235ZMXBNXQY" target="_blank">pillaging them for her own novels</a>, to the <a href="http://littlehouseontheprairie.com/historic-locations-and-museum-sites/" target="_blank">public history/literary </a>pilgrimage sites, to the t.v. show, to the scholarship, to the fandom.<br />
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As surprisingly grim as those stories actually are -- the first chapter of the first book involves slaughtering a pig, and <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Winter_(novel)" target="_blank">The Long Winter</a></i> sees an entire town on the verge of freezing to death -- the word constantly used in relation to them is "cosy." The t.v. show, too, embraces melodrama and even horror with plagues and children's deaths and rape and abortion and kidnapping and on and on. Yet, it too has the sense that everything will work out in the end.<br />
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The nostalgia for a "simpler" time seems almost a contradiction in the face of this litany of horror from both stories and t.v. shows, and yet the term "simpler" refers to the bonds of family and a clear sense of right and wrong that exist in the <i>Little House </i>universe. In the t.v. universe, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Landon" target="_blank">Michael Landon</a>'s Charles "Pa" Ingalls is always right. He is the moral True North. For most of the series, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1773099739"></span>Harriet Oleson<span id="goog_1773099740"></span></a> acts as the repository for all vile behavior and ideas. In the book universe, the threats are always external: nature and the distant government (which obscures the role of Big Business).<br />
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The books' action is also set in a vacant landscape, stripped of all but its material historical context. Manifest Destiny, now with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902710?seq=1" target="_blank">Manifest Domesticity</a>, appears as a force of good, stripped of its human cost and set at a remove from most humans, but certainly far from most people who look differently from the Ingallses. In the t.v. universe, watched in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests, during the racial clashes of bussing and integration, the American Indian Movement, the feminist movement, and long tail of everything we consider to be "the Sixties," controls what of that it allows into that world and what it deems acceptable of those cataclysmic changes.<br />
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The control of conflict, really, is where the nostalgia comes in. Viewers and readers can consume these stories of moral certainty and without the disrupting ambiguities that contemporary life brings. By way of another example, think of the t.v. show <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_Years" target="_blank"><i>The </i><i>Wonder Years</i></a>, set in the white suburbs experiencing the encroaching anxieties of the 1960s, viewers in the late 1980s and early 1990s could revisit that time safe in the comfort of knowing that everything turned out ok for their demographic, there in the Reagan/Bush Era.<br />
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For <i>Little House</i>, the nostalgia has a double layer. The first lies in the stories -- whether t.v. or book -- themselves and the second lies in the memory of uncritical childhood reading and viewing, either as a family, with a beloved family member, or as part of a favorite school lesson, or with a group of friends, or as an escape to a more certain, loving world than the one the reader/viewer lived in.<br />
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So, really, with this project I'm trying to get at the problem of nostalgia, which is adjacent to heritage, both of which crop up in artistic expression, and all of their relationships to history. How do they use history? How do they differ from history? How do they impede or aid the study of history? Just as importantly, I'm interested in nostalgia as a feature of white expressions of history. After all, the t.v. show of <i>Little House</i> liked to include aspects of African American and Native American history, but without the full conflict and disruption that came from encountering that history outside of the control of white paternalism.<br />
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Well, this was a ramble that I did not intend to wander down when I started simply to mention Douglass's appearance in <i>Good Lord Bird</i>. The subject should have been dealing with sexual coercion and exploitation in the eighteenth century. That has been a difficult subject to read about because it has reminded me of far too many men in the late 20th and 21st century. But, more on that later.Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-68209873758916098172020-07-14T13:22:00.001-04:002020-07-14T13:22:27.714-04:00Elizabeth's Mother, part 4: Never Knowing<a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2020/07/elizabeths-mother-part-3-our-knowing-so.html" target="_blank">My hypothesis about Elizabeth's mother</a> is that she died without ever having made a mark on a contemporary record. This is not a provable hypothesis, so it might not even merit the term "hypothesis." Yet, it should still be among the potentialities that outline the space in the past that she occupied. <br />
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Let's start with Elizabeth's birth in 1735. <a href="https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slave-memoirs-oral-histories/recollections-of-madison-hemings/" target="_blank">Madison indicates </a>that Elizabeth was born in Virginia, therefore her mother was in Virginia in 1735. Where was she nine month earlier?<br />
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If her mother was Parthenia or Sarah, as listed in the 1733 and 1746 Eppes documents, then she was right there in Virginia. If you put that together with Madison's story about bringing her into the house when Hemings planned to kidnap Elizabeth, then she was working in the fields at Bermuda Hundred or one of the other Eppes plantations.<br />
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Except none of those pieces fit together very well. (Not that they <i>have </i>to, given that we could use so many more pieces; but still...) When planters bequeathed property to their heirs, the slaves working that property went along in the bargain. The slaves that they bequeathed to their daughters, the ones usually named in wills, tended to be those who labored in the house, those who did the "women's work" to allow the daughters to be "ladies." Named in both the 1733 will and the 1746 marriage settlement, neither Sarah nor Parthenia worked in the fields, whereas Madison's account would have Elizabeth's mother in the fields in 1733. Also, Elizabeth seems to have no siblings associated with her. That doesn't mean she did not have any brothers or sisters, but no one has that clear connection to her.<br />
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Let's go about this puzzle another way. Where was Elizabeth's mother nine months before Elizabeth's birth? Wherever the father was, of course. Since Captain Hemings claimed paternity, then where was he? To answer that question, we need to know something about him.<br />
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Madison conveyed four relevant pieces of information about Hemings: his name, his occupation, his nationality, and that his ship went back and forth between Virginia and England. In other words, the Hemings family seems to have taken care to preserve a fact that their forefather did not captain a slaving vessel from Africa. If he did not captain a slaving vessel, then he did not impregnate (that's the most neutral language I could settle on) Elizabeth's mother before she arrived if she came directly from Africa.<br />
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Of course, that brings us to her manner of arrival. Elizabeth's mother could have come to Virginia in one of three ways, all three of which took her from Africa through the hell of the Middle Passage. The first brought her directly to Virginia, the second to Virginia after ports-of-call and transfers in the Caribbean, and the third as part of a mixed cargo on a vessel not specific to the slave trade. The <a href="https://www.slavevoyages.org/" target="_blank">Transatlantic Slave Trade Database</a> has two transatlantic voyages for 1734 and two for 1735, and three voyages from the Caribbean in 1734 and two in 1735 as arriving in the Upper James River. Maybe Elizabeth's mother arrived on one of them. None of them, by the way, had a captain named Hemings nor phonetically similar to Hemings. That doesn't rule out the possibility that Hemings was another crew member, misremembered as a captain.<br />
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Once she had arrived at, let's say, <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2020/07/madison-hemings-sucn-is-story-that.html" target="_blank">Bermuda Hundred</a>, then she waited in a sort of quarantine. <a href="https://history.jhu.edu/directory/philip-morgan/" target="_blank">Philip Morgan </a>did a lot of number crunching -- <a href="https://eh.net/encyclopedia/cliometrics/" target="_blank">Cliometrics </a>they called it, back in the day -- for his massive <i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1999570827"></span>Slave Counterpoint<span id="goog_1999570828"></span></a></i> and the little data that he found for Virginia in the 1730s on this showed that the quarantine lasted for 8 to 15 days. This was during the peak of the trade for Virginia, and the peak of the peak occurred right there in Bermuda Hundred as the planters in the Piedmont demanded more and more laboring bodies from Africa, while those in the Chesapeake had an enslaved population that reproduced itself (although not quite to the point where they wanted to offload them in numbers to meet the demand elsewhere, as would begin happening in 50 years time).<br />
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So, consider this very contingent scenario: If Elizabeth's mother arrived in Bermuda Hundred on a boat not captained by Hemings, and if she then went to field work, then the only chance that they had for contact and conception (again, the most neutral way to configure what happened between them to create Elizabeth Hemings) would have been there during her quarantine while she was confined in a port city.<br />
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Frankly, this scenario gives me a very bad feeling about Elizabeth's conception, not made any better by Madison's account in which Hemings seems to have cast off any concern about Elizabeth's mother thereafter, not offering to purchase her freedom and trying to separate her from her daughter. No, I don't trust him at all. The reality for her situation favors an interpretation of rape, even if it does not exclude a range of other possibilities.<br />
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Enter yet another contingency. Here we have Elizabeth's mother having undergone one of the most dehumanizing experiences in human history, her body violated, broken, malnourished, and barely able to hang on to its own life, much less grow another. Although not as grim as a century earlier, the first year for most new arrivals in Virginia remained deadly, more so for Africans. I'm trying to find mortality rates for the area in which she lived to have an accurate picture, but what I have found is that there was a reason that the enslaved population did not replace itself beyond more men arriving than women. Add on top of that the fact that pregnancy tended to inflate the mortality rates of most women and the odds were pretty steep for a young, African woman surviving long past the birth of her first child if that birth took place in the first year after arrival.<br />
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This is one possible fate of Elizabeth's mother: A weakened body, pregnant, hard physical labor, all in a seasoning year, death in childbirth. Elizabeth's mother may not have been brought to the Big House. Only Elizabeth the baby may have been carried there to be cared for by one of the enslaved women, such as Parthenia or Sarah, who served as an adopted mother. That may account for how little survived about this "full blooded African" woman in America, including her name. She did not live long enough to tell her child, so the other women told Elizabeth what they knew, and she told her daughter, who told her children, one of whom told a reporter, who printed it up for us.<br />
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But, of course, this is just one possible scenario pieced together from a number of contingencies and contextual information. Shift one piece and, like a kaleidoscope, the whole thing changes. The most painful thing is in that cliche, "we will never know." Yet, I find value and importance in trying because the search for this one woman's experience forces me -- and by extension anyone else who tries, such as the readers of the chapter and their teachers who will lead discussions -- to step into that world and ask questions about it, sometimes very practical questions, and try to understand it.<br />
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I won't know exactly what came to pass in Elizabeth's mother's life, how she went from her own mother's arms somewhere in the continent of Africa to some now-lost grave in Virginia, but in considering all of the different contingencies, I think about the lives of women who did experience this one or that one. Those women did not even have the record of being the "full blooded African" in a memoir, but they existed and became part of this -- our, black and white and all -- collective history.<br />
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So, the never knowing, it's like the destination that you never reach on a trip where the journey becomes just as important.Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-66153928991869950632020-07-13T15:03:00.002-04:002020-07-13T15:06:37.491-04:00Elizabeth's Mother, part 3: Our Knowing So FarThere comes a time in research when writing must commence in order to know what you do and do not know. Otherwise, you -- and by "you" I mean "I" -- will end up lost in the rabbit hole. My rule for knowing that point has arrived follows that of an archeologist with whom I once did a field school: stop digging when you stop finding anything. I've also adapted that to say that you should stop digging when you keep finding the same things and they are all citing one another. Then, when you start writing, you can begin to ask new questions that push you to look elsewhere.<br />
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This is what I keep telling my students: research papers are an organic art. I can't give them a step-by-step checklist or flow chart because the process is rather loopy -- literally if you are trying to draw it out -- but you do sometimes have to just start writing and get into that flow in order to move in a generally forward direction. "Yes, it's a lot of work," I warn them. "So pick a topic that you care about -- or at least won't absolutely hate within two minutes." I actually have had one or two students thrilled to realize that this thing they like to read about just for fun could actually be a subject for serious study.<br />
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But, I digress...<br />
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This blog accomplishes some of that writing to know what I know; but now I'm also realizing that I have to start an actual chapter. Elizabeth's mother will forever remain a mystery, at least for the purposes of my book, which is supposed to be a synthesis anyway. In the word of <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1156398/" target="_blank">Zombieland</a></i>'s Tallahassee, "<a href="https://youtu.be/WozhVt8HCFY" target="_blank">time to nut up or shut up</a>." Or perhaps to paraphrase <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/" target="_blank"><i>Shawshank Redemption'</i>s</a> Red, "<a href="https://youtu.be/JSDj7zqQAtA" target="_blank">get busy writin', or get busy dying</a>." Or even Yoda, "<a href="https://youtu.be/BQ4yd2W50No" target="_blank">do or do not. There is no try</a>."<br />
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So, what do we have on Elizabeth's mother?<br />
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First, Madison's account and two of the points he establishes with her in his family history. She provides a connection to African and explains the reason that the Hemings family held the positions that they did in the plantation house rather than in the fields. I'm going to also eventually add another post about the third thing that Madison establishes with his great-grandmother, which is the history of racial mixing in his family.<br />
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Second, Madison's account is the only known, direct record of a Elizabeth's mother, a women who was "a full-blooded African, possibly a native of that country." Everything else must be surmised.<br />
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Third, what can be surmised? Well, this will be one of the sections of the chapter that deals with context and method rather than narrative.<br />
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Already, I have blogged about a couple of possibilities about her life. First, that John Wayles was probably not her master when she gave birth to her daughter in 1735 (a date listed in Thomas Jefferson's <i>Farm Book</i>). I also blogged that Francis Eppes IV owned Elizabeth and, therefore, her mother. Yet -- and here is the example of writing to know what you know -- I'm adding notes into my timeline and realizing that Eppes IV died in 1734. This makes me wonder who oversaw his estate and family and the inheritance of his daughters.<br />
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Was Elizabeth's mother a final purchase before Francis IV died? Or did someone else purchase her? Maybe Francis Eppes V who died in 1737? Or perhaps the widow Eppes, Sara? They would be the most likely to be in charge of things. Or perhaps Martha Eppes, who later married Wayles, was responsible, since Elizabeth ended up with her? She was an Eppes twice over because she was first married to Llewlyn Eppes (a cousin?), who might also factor into this.<br />
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Could Wayles, in fact, have been her master as Madison said? Probably not. Annette Gordon-Reed describes the earliest record of his arrival in Virginia as possibly being 1738, and while that could be inaccurate, his appearance in other records begins in the 1740s. Either way, Elizabeth already toddled about in the world by then.<br />
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Dang it! This is going to require some more digging, and probably in places to which I do not have access because of the pandemic. I'll get back to you on that. Suffice to say, that I now know what I don't know there...<br />
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Anyway, back to the original train of thought.<br />
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Let's suppose that Elizabeth's mother came into the Eppes's possession rather than Wayles's. Francis Eppes IV had a plantation at Bermuda Hundred, next to the Upper James River port, Bermuda Hundred, which Francis Eppes V inherited and on which widow Sara Eppes lived. Therefore, Elizabeth's mother had just as much or greater chance of arriving in the colony there as at Williamsburg, where Madison had placed the action of her life in Virginia.<br />
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Annette Gordon-Reed tried to pinpoint Elizabeth's mother in the records of Eppes IV's enslaved women, with the two pertinent documents being Eppes IV's will, drawn up in 1733, and the settlement of his daughter Martha when she married Wayles in 1746. She noted the names Parthenia and Sarah, two names that also appear either in their full or diminutive form in later Hemings generations. Both names appear in the 1733 and the 1746 documents, with the 1746 document also mentioning by name two new children, Betty and Ben.<br />
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Assuming that Betty is our Elizabeth Hemings, daughter of an African woman and Captain Hemings and mother of Sally Hemings, then one of the adult women in the earlier document was likely to be that African mother. The early pages of Jefferson's <i>Farm Book</i>, in which he lists the names of people whom he received through the inheritance of his wife, yet another Martha, no Parthenia or Thenia appears, but Sal does. Sal also receives a notation of having died in 1781.<br />
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That scenario, which is quite plausible, has Parthenia or Sarah arriving in or before 1733, then getting pregnant late in 1734 or 1735, and giving birth to a baby girl named Elizabeth in 1735. Elizabeth survives to be named in the 1746 document. Yet, 1733 and 1746 are separated by 13 years. Think of how many things change in that period of time, how much can slip through the cracks between the documents. I have another idea about what happened.<br />
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You know, how about if I leave my own added hypothesis about what happened for tomorrow? This post may take you a few minutes to read, but realizing what I don't know, and trying to find it to include -- and not finding much of it -- has taken a few hours that has made me want to dig in more.<br />
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On a different subject, I think I see what McBride is doing in <i>Good Lord Bird</i>. Onion just might be a type of trickster in the way Huck Finn was a trickster. He has to be wily just to get through some absurd yet deadly situations on one piece. I'm not sure how to describe his point of view, but it isn't quite marginal because he's near the center of major events. At the same time, "swept up in" those events seems an apt description.Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-31304794756871644112020-07-11T08:00:00.000-04:002020-07-11T08:00:00.312-04:00This Week in Douglassness: 10 July 2020***<a href="https://clements.umich.edu/rochester-ladies-anti-slavery-society-papers-transcriptions/" target="_blank">Rochester Ladies' Antislavery Society Papers</a> now <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rochester/" target="_blank">digitized and searchable</a> from the William Clements Library at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. This collection helped me so much! You see Julia Griffiths as an abolitionist, and a bit of a pain in the butt, but still, someone working with a set of women who were just as committed to ending slavery, but not really committed to being under the umbrella of the American Antislavery Society. You see the Douglass family all through their account books, allowing you to surmise their work at the newspaper office and its position as a headquarters for receiving the people headed for Canada. You can read the letters of Julia Wilbur as she roams the freedpeople's camps of Alexandria with Harriet Jacobs at her side. When I researched in them, I'd sit there, completely absorbed, skipping the afternoon tea the library held because I wanted to know what happened next. Now they are available to all researchers with an internet connection.<br />
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***Frederick Douglass (and Booker T. Washington) descendant and founder of the Frederick Douglass Initiatives Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/history/what-it-took-to-recreate-a-portrait-of-frede/?fbclid=IwAR2Vhzp4wG3El01cDiZqYtKRAl6lnP55bUAR2JNxd4TqzcSHHV__flq4sGg" target="_blank">sits for a recreation of his forefather's portrait</a>. Wow! That first shot of him in full make-up is astounding! </div>
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The Morris/Douglass portrait was part of <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/american-descendants-180975155/" target="_blank">artist Drew Gardiner's project </a>to recreate old photos with the descendants of their subjects. A Hemings-Jefferson descendant, Shannon LaNier sat for a Jefferson portrait, echoing but not precisely recreating his ancestor. The result has a different sort of power.: </div>
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***Because racist is as racist does, someone decided that <a href="https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2020/07/05/frederick-douglass-statue-rochester-ny-removed-defaced-anniversary-july-4th-speech/5380432002/" target="_blank">attacking one of the statues of Frederick Douglass in Rochester was a good way to celebrate the Fourth of July</a>, thus proving Douglass's proposition in his Fifth of July speech and the message of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last time, the vandals turned out to be a couple of drunk and ignorant college d00dz ("drunk and ignorant" is a bad combination). This time, we await an arrest, but I will not be surprised if a Confederate flag and a MAGA hat are involved somewhere, along with a cry of "there is no racism, it's a liberal media lie." </div>
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***This past Tuesday, readers of <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/06/frederick-douglass-first-wife-anna-murray-made-his-work-possible/5382922002/" target="_blank">USAToday could learn about Anna Douglass</a> as they enjoyed their Continental breakfasts and coffee at hotel and motels across the nation. Good work, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/staff/2646700001/ndea-yancey-bragg/" target="_blank">N'dea Yancey-Bragg</a>! (Oh, and look who actually answered her e-mail and phone in a timely manner to provide some information for the article.)<br />
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<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-89929069118772066622020-07-08T08:00:00.000-04:002020-07-08T09:14:00.935-04:00Elizabeth's Mother, part 2: Why the Big House?The <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2020/07/elizabeths-mother-part-1-african.html" target="_blank">last post focused on the function that Africa served</a> in <a href="https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slave-memoirs-oral-histories/recollections-of-madison-hemings/" target="_blank">Madison Hemings's account </a>of his great-grandmother. This is, of course, all in addition to the data that he intends to convey. As mentioned in an <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2020/07/madison-hemings-sucn-is-story-that.html" target="_blank">earlier post,</a> family stories both offer information as it is remembered, but also remember certain parts in certain ways in order to convey what the tellers have thought important. There is a good book on the subject called <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Sheep-Kissing-Cousins-Stories/dp/076580588X" target="_blank">Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins</a></i> that has helped me a lot in the past not only in understanding family stories of my subjects but my own family stories, as well. (After all, in the end, aren't they all of the same big piece of human behavior -- but that's another story for another time and another blog.)<br />
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Africa was actually a part of the function that Elizabeth's mother served in the overall story of the Hemings family, given that so little information about her as a person survived since the events Madison described. She connected the family to the continent and to a racial mixing central to American history (also a subject to return to later). Another function that she serves in Madison's telling explains Elizabeth Hemings's placement in the plantation house rather than in the fields, and by extension the place of her children and grandchildren in the more privileged positions in the plantation hierarchy.<br />
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Why would being in the Big House matter? In the Hemings's case, being part of the plantation household rather than in the fields put Elizabeth in the way of John Wayles, her daughter Sally in the way of Thomas Jefferson, their children in skilled positions, and Sally's children on the path to freedom, a good living, and with the option of passing. The shift was no small matter, especially in retrospect.<br />
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Still, why would this be a question? After all, some people worked in the house and some in the fields, and women would more likely end up in a kitchen or cleaning to free up the O!-so-delicate white mistress from the kind of labor that field work then housework required. Make no mistake, pre-industrial housework was <i>labor</i>. (Spend a summer doing kitchen demonstrations as a museum interpreter and you will find out soon enough that women who did the cooking and cleaning in the days of cast iron and scrub brushes probably had muscular arms.) This wouldn't be such an oddity of a story by 1873 that it would bear mentioning, would it?<br />
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Except perhaps that wasn't the question Madison was asked. Although he seems to start as if he were asked about the Hemings name, he continues as if in a set narrative as "it comes down to me." The parts dealing with Elizabeth and her mother moving into the planation household could be an answer to a question asked much much earlier, maybe posed by a Hemings child, "mama, why are we up here and those people down there?" Or a white one that went something like, "why do you have such a dark face working in your house, Mrs. Eppes?" Or, "Why do you have one of <i>them</i> in you home, Mrs. Eppes? Aren't you afraid? They are practically savage!" Something obnoxious like that. Something that would explain the reasons a woman relatively fresh from the Middle Passage would be working in the plantation household when, although fewer in number, a creole woman might be preferred for her lighter skin, her command of English, her cultural familiarity, and a whole host of other prejudices.<br />
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The face of the answer would explain the situation for white people. "Oh, you had to protect your investment from unscrupulous quarters," they might nod. "We understand." For the Hemingses, the explanation told of freedom thwarted. Wayles in Madison's account, but most likely Eppes in fact, moved Elizabeth and her mother into the plantation house because Captain Hemings intended to steal Elizabeth out of slavery.<br />
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What a sea captain might have to do with a mixed race child, even his own, is a whole other question. Who was going to take care of her on the voyage over? Who was going to take care of her in England, or wherever it was that he planned to take her? If there was a wife who would be mother, how was she going to feel about an illegitimate brown child of her husband? Or was he going to make up another story? Did he care nothing for Elizabeth's mother's feelings in this? Or did she support the idea of her baby getting out of slavery? Did he promise that the baby would live a better life? In other words, what the hell was he thinking or doing? There's a lot that will never be answered even if his name surfaces in some ship log or bill of lading buried somewhere in Kew.<br />
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But I digress....<br />
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For the Hemingses, in this story they have a white forefather who not only acknowledged his paternity of a brown daughter, but recognized her humanity enough to want her to be free. The man who claimed her as property, a thing, wanted to keep her as a science experiment. What -- not who -- would she become? His best expectations about her father or his worst expectations about her mother? He brought them both closer, into his residence for surveillance, really. First to keep the captain from spiriting at least one of them to freedom. Then, after the disappearance of the captain, to observe the development of Elizabeth. Later, he took her as his "concubine."<br />
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Here, also, we encounter two ambivalences about white fathers from Madison. Captain Hemings with his disappearance or abandonment; and Wayles, who became Madison's grandfather, but one for whom he expresses little admiration or connection. Wayles would not allow the baby to become free, raised her, then fathered her children whom he held as slaves. Although Wayles, in fact, did not come into possession of Elizabeth until she was eleven, and he did not take her as his concubine until she was in her late twenties, our twenty-first century sensibilities squirm at this early intimacy and sense of grooming. I can almost hear at least one reader thinking "what a freak!" and certainly such a thing would not be outside the perversities of slavery. Madison most likely thought of it all as part of the grand exploitation of his family.<br />
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What of Elizabeth in this story? She would have been the one who told her daughter Sally who told her son Madison who told the reporter who published this genealogy for us. Did she grow up learning that she could have been free? What did she think of that? Did she contemplate a different life that could have been? Did she think such wishes or daydreams foolish? Did she decide to put another scheme in place, teaching her children something about race and freedom? Did she play a long game of getting out? Or did she decide to make what she had work the best it could? We will return to her.<br />
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Once again a wish for <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vkm52/episodes/player" target="_blank">Hilary Mantel's</a> gifts.<br />
<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-15713126384655571772020-07-07T15:01:00.001-04:002020-07-07T15:01:38.938-04:00Elizabeth's Mother, part 1: An African Ancestry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Aside</i></b>: I started reading<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Good-Lord-Bird-James-McBride/dp/1594632782" target="_blank">The Good Lord Bird</a></i> the other night. Dang it! I'm enjoying it. Granted, whatever messed-up version of Douglass he has in store has not yet made his entrance; but I have no horse in the John Brown race and I'm loving this off-kilter, supremely over-confident character. Also, the opening that tells you right off that the whole novel comes from not one but two wholly unreliable narrators is stroke of historical narrative genius that may pave the way to forgiveness for and Douglass transgressions. "May," mind you, not "will." The table of contents promises a late chapter titled "Annie." Every since I read <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tie-That-Bound-Us-Abolitionism/dp/0801451612" target="_blank">Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz's<i> Ties that Bound Us</i></a>, (well worth your time regardless of Stack) about women in the world of John Brown, I thought young Annie Brown might make a great subject for a YA novel. So, that's something to look forward to.<br />
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<b><i>Now on to our main topic: </i></b>Elizabeth Hemings's mother was, <a href="https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slave-memoirs-oral-histories/recollections-of-madison-hemings/" target="_blank">according to Madison Hemings</a>, "a full-blooded African, and possibly a native of that country." In Madison's telling, she gave birth to her daughter and moved into the plantation household under her master's orders when Captain Hemings planned to kidnap the baby. That's really all Madison relayed about her. No name, no background, no story of what became of her, not even an indication that the Captain planned to purchase or to kidnap her along with her daughter. Indeed, quite the contrary since Madison mentioned "parting mother and child" in describing the proposed sale of Elizabeth and only the kidnapping of "the child," a plan thwarted by the "leaky fellow servants of the mother." Madison keeps mother and daughter separate through this section of his history.<br />
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Considering all of this, what function does she serve in his account? For this post, I will focus on this:<br />
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Elizabeth's mother establishes an African ancestry, which appears important to Madison. He was the only one of the children of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings to claim that ancestry and trace the family's arrival from two continents. By the twentieth century, even his brother Eston's descendants conspired to hide its African origins even as they claimed their Jefferson lineage. Here is an interview with one of those descendants, <a href="https://www.monticello.org/getting-word/people/julia-jefferson-westerinen" target="_blank">Julia Jefferson Westerinen,</a> explaining how her black ancestry was hidden from her as she was growing up. (Part of the "<a href="https://www.monticello.org/getting-word" target="_blank">Getting Word</a>" oral history project at Monticello.):<br />
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I also think that remembering Elizabeth's mother as "of that country" Africa* serves another purpose here. "Country" suggests a nationality or nationalism that informed western political movements at the time Madison relayed his family history in 1873. Think of the unification of Germany and Italy, or of the later patriotism of the U.S.'s Spanish-American War, or of the long-term causes of World War I. Whether he was conscious of this or whether this is my latter day historian's interpretation alone, Madison participates in a type of Afrocentric thinking here that emerged from the creation of an African-American consciousness.<br />
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Remember that the institution of slavery created race in the United States, sorting people into "white" and "black" and negotiating those who were neither into conditional membership in one or the other. This had little relationship to the history Africa suffered at that particular moment in time, which is a whole other chapter in our Western Civilization textbook, but that part doesn't figure into the Hemings story here. The part that does figure into the story is that Madison sees himself as both a product of that fusion of people from African who did not share a common identity while also projecting it both back into his great-grandmother's origins and across the ocean. His great-grandmother came from a country of dark-skinned people just as his grandfather, "John Wayles, a Welchman,"came from Wales or Captain Hemings came from England, places of light-skinned people.<br />
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Given the ambivalences that he expresses throughout his narrative, I wonder about his sense of place, nationalism, or patriotism in the United States. I wonder also what he is saying about race here. Is he saying that it is all the same, that Wales, England, Africa, they are all countries or nations equally? He, the descendant of both, should be equal? He, a descendant of Africa, does not appear to be so? He connects Jefferson to Africa implicitly as he tells this story, and he seems to have mixed feelings about Jefferson (a topic for another time).<br />
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Whatever textual reading you make of this, Africa ultimately exists long ago and far away in Madison's story. So much so that, but for his story it could have disappeared from his family altogether.<br />
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In<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lose-Your-Mother-Journey-Atlantic/dp/0374531153" target="_blank">Lose Your Mother</a></i>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saidiya_Hartman" target="_blank">Saidiya Hartman</a> describes an undershrub favored by slave traders as a drug for their captives:<br />
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<i>Manta uwa</i> made you forget your kin, lose sight of your country, and cease to think of freedom. It expunged all memories of a natal land, and it robbed the slave of spiritual protection. Ignorant of her lineage, to whom could the slave appeal? No longer able to recall the shrines or sacred groves or water deities or ancestor spirits or fetishes that could exact revenge on her behalf, she was defenseless. No longer anyone's child, the slave had no choice but to bear the visible marks of servitude and accept a new identity in the household of the owner. (p. 157)</blockquote>
The name of that shrub,<i> manta uwa</i>, "means 'forget mother' in Hausa." Hartman tries to find her mother, or rather, many mothers, in the course of her book, moving backward along a route similar to one that Elizabeth's mother likely took toward Virginia. So little of Elizabeth's mother's story, of her self, survived that journey, down to today. Whatever was shed of her story between the people who remembered the living woman and Madison's knowledge, Madison seems to make sure to retain what remained. She left a trace.<br />
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* No, students in my world civilizations classes, Africa is NOT a country and do not use Madison as an excuse for saying so or I will send you to Prof. Odhiambo and she will set you straight in ways that you will not soon forget. Although, you may learn quite a bit in the process.Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-65486567882297920352020-07-06T08:30:00.000-04:002020-07-06T08:30:17.834-04:00Another Douglass Post: BambarraI just can't quit you, Douglass!<br />
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Alas, one may move on to other projects, but when you spend a considerable amount of time with a person, in their lives and up in their business, they stay with you. Also, when you roam around the same time periods, wanting to know something about that world, questions about their lives crop up when you ask questions about the lives in the new project.<br />
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Seriously, being a historian is all about asking questions that are usually answered with more questions.<br />
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One big question has to do with Anna Douglass's parents. <br />
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Just an aside, I've noticed a tendency on the internet these days to not only call her Anna Murray Douglass, but to hyphenate her last name to Anna Murray-Douglass. If you do that, realize that she never went by either as far as the documents suggest. She was "Mrs. Douglass." Just like Mary Todd Lincoln never went by that name, as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Lincoln-Life-Catherine-Clinton/dp/0060760419" target="_blank">Catherine Clinton pointed out</a>. Hyphenation is a product of the late-twentieth century feminist movement. "<a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.02007/?st=slideshow" target="_blank">Anna Murray Douglass" was Rosetta Douglass Sprague's designation </a>at a time when some women did include their maiden names in their full name, as Rosetta did, to honor their own lineage. Everywhere else, she was "Mrs. Douglass" or "Anna Douglass." There once was a time that wives took that as almost a professional title that they had earned because being "Mrs. Husband's Name" was a job.<br />
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One thing that I've noticed in this heritage-history debate and in trying to understand the lives of otherwise silent women in the past, is that the craft of history involves the effort to understand individuals in their time, place, and circumstances while the work of heritage preservation has more to do with the present and the employment of the past to serve a purpose in the present. History turns heroes into humans, heritage turns humans into heroes.<br />
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But I digress...<br />
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Anna Douglass's father was Bambarra Murray of Caroline County, Maryland, and that was about all that Rosetta Douglass Sprague knew about him. When researching her family back about a decade ago now, his named sounded African and I soon learned that Bambarra was actually a group of people. Of course, given the lack of curiosity of slave traders beyond any information that would help them make a better profit and prevent uprisings, designations of people, including classification of them as "tribes," let to a gigantic mess of assigned ethnicities and affiliations. Perhaps at some point, Bambarra, his father, or his grandfather, had either been called a Bambarra so often as to have that become his name, or maybe in the retelling "he was a Bambarra named Murray" became "he was Bambarra Murray," or maybe he was named Bambarra as a tribute to his or an ancestor's origins. Indeed, now that I'm thinking about it, my assumption was always that this ancestor was a male.<br />
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In any case, in investigating him, I confess to rather giving up the ghost early. I had classified him as a contemporary of Harriet Bailey, maybe slightly older, putting his birth in the 1780s or 1790s. The transatlantic slave trade had pretty much ended in Maryland by that time. Not only did Congress suspend it during the War for Independence, but the Chesapeake states actually supported its permanent end because their enslaved population had grown of its own accord. You can see that in the large, extended Bailey family (subject of <a href="https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/Departments/English/People/Faculty/EzraGreenspan" target="_blank">Ezra Greenspan's</a> current research for what will probably be a brilliant book) at this point in its history. If Bambarra were born in the time I estimated, then he could not possibly have been African unless he came through the Caribbean, and even then the trade was a bit iffy because of the blockades and fighting that resulted from the American war, the French Revolution, the British fighting with the French, the Haitian Revolution and everyone else piling on. Long story short, I came to the conclusion that Bambarra, however far removed from Africa, more likely hailed from right there in Maryland.<br />
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I moved on with my research.<br />
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Then Elizabeth Hemings's mother and the way her great-grandson told their story began to fascinate me in the sort of way that makes me wish I had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Mantel" target="_blank">Hilary Mantel's</a> skills. In researching her, I once again came across the word Bambarra, and once again thought about Bambarra Murray the person.<br />
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The Bambarra people lived on the upper Senegal River, spoke Malinke, and traded with the French, which meant that they were also traded by the French. According to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Many-Thousands-Gone-Centuries-Slavery/dp/0674002113" target="_blank">Ira Berlin in <i>Many Thousands Gone</i></a>, they had a reputation for warring against Muslims and the Mandika. If you remember <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots_(1977_miniseries)" target="_blank">Roots</a>,</i> Kunta Kinte identified himself as Mandika from the village of Juffure. The miniseries gives the impression of a tiny, isolated town, but <a href="https://www.amazon.com/World-Very-Small-Place-Africa/dp/0765624842" target="_blank">Don Wright's work on the Gambia</a> will tell you that it actually was a major trading post on the mainland from the English fort. There they traded in captives who became slaves bound for the Americas.<br />
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In other words, whoever the real Kunta Kinte was, his family would have traded in Anna Murray's ancestors, who would just as easily have traded in Kunta Kinte's family. After all, Berlin wrote that the Bambarras' martial prowess had such renown that their name became synonymous with black soldiers on both sides of the trade, both captor and captive. Neither the Kunta Kinte side nor Bambarra Murray side would have considered one another as "African" in the sense of a common, homogenous identity, either. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/books/review/Schmidt.t.html" target="_blank">Saidya Hartman put it in <i>Lose Your Mother</i></a>, "They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships....In order to betray your race, you had first to imagine yourself as one." That imagining began in the hold of a slave ship.<br />
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As I started to retrace Annette Gordon-Reed's steps -- not because I doubt her but because you must in order to see what other historians have seen and to see if you see something yourself -- I looked into the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. (That's when I started putting pieces together on my "Upper James River" and "Bermuda Hundred" puzzle.) Now, I'm sure I played with this in my research before, but obviously didn't really know what to do with it, or tried to do the wrong thing with it. I'm learning that different centuries also require different strategies for research and different ways of thinking in ways that I can't articulate at the moment. In any case, I approach it as if the eighteenth century were the nineteenth century, just earlier, rather than something different entirely. Now, I approached it as the eighteenth century, which made a difference. Again, I don't quite know why. Also, I think they changed some of their interface and search capabilities in the meantime, but I could be wrong.<br />
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Anyway.....<br />
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Putting in a search that narrowed the landing place to Maryland both for the Transatlantic and the Intracoastal trade, I found voyages that landed at Oxford as late as 1773.<br />
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We have a 1773 voyage from Saint-Louis to an unspecified Maryland port, voyages in 1772 and 1771 from Saint-Louis to Oxford, a 1770 voyage from Gambia to an unspecified port in Maryland and another from Saint-Louis to Oxford.<br />
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Oxford? That's awfully familiar. As in Talbot County familiar. The red thingy marks Oxford on the map below. St. Michael's, where Douglass lived for a short time as a teenager, lies to the northwest, Easton, where he was held in jail and where there where the slave trader Austin Woolfolk bought and sold people bound for the Mississippi cotton fields lied to the northeast. Tuckahoe Creek where Douglass spent his first four or five years is marked further northwest, and Denton on the other creek further to the east. (Down at the bottom, just above the Google insignia, you'll find Cambridge, Harriet Tubman territory.) Given Oxford's proximity to Denton, the place named by Sprague as her mother's birthplace in her , and the access by water, that seems a more likely entry point for African captives, especially so late in the business, than Annapolis, which lies much further north on the Chesapeake.<br />
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Also, these voyages gathered their captives in Saint-Louis and the Gambia. Both places traded in Bambarra people. Saint-Louis is marked with the red thingy on the coast of Senegal on the map below, and the Gambia is further along the coast to the south, a tiny finger of a country reaching inland. The Bambarra peoples lived kind of in the middle there, on and past the border of Senegal, to the best of my knowledge (which I will admit has significant limits on this topic.)<br />
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Then, I thought, "I'm a bonehead!" I had placed Bambarra in Harriet Bailey's generation, her contemporary. Yet, not only was Anna older than Douglass, she was the eighth child of her parents. Bambarra might more likely have been the contemporary of Betsey Bailey, Douglass's grandmother, who was born in 1774 (a year after Sally Hemings, by the way). Men can have children for much longer than women, too. So, he could have arrived as a child, as Denmark Vesey had, on one of these voyages? Or could his father or mother have arrived?<br />
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One thing seems sadly certain, what every Bambarra knew of Africa, either directly or through a parent or grandparent, almost none of it seems to have made its way to his most famous son-in-law whose curiosity about Africa, especially later in life, would have made him want to know.<br />
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The same thing seems to have happened with Elizabeth Hemings' mother. What she knew of Africa, even her own name and the name given to her in Virginia, disappeared.<br />
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I wonder if, for some of the people who survived, the remembering hurt too much. To retell would be to relive, and living the first time was far too much.<br />
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This also makes me think of the point of Saidya Hartman's book. We white Americans like to relish in our ancestry in Europe, even if Europeans laugh at us for thinking that Ireland is all shanties and Gaelteach, or Scotland is all kilts and "Skye Boat Song," or Germany is dirndls and Oktoberfest, or Italy is pasta and wine. Even if we find out that the reality isn't the imagined land, we can still rest in the sense of coming back to a place that our ancestors build and we call home. Black people cannot. Hartman contemplates that loss of that imagined land, but also the sense that, although your people built the United States, you are still made unwelcome. Somewhere in there is a reason that Bambarra's, whichever one came from Africa, and Elizabeth Heming's mother's stories slipped away.<br />
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This also seems to be part of the equation for Sally Hemings in thinking of her children's future. Home, or homelessness? She had to be mercenary about it, in some sense, don't you think? For Douglass, the theme song in my head was "Motherless Child."<br />
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For Elizabeth's mother and for Bambarra, it is the Ladysmith Black Mambazo parts of "Homeless."<br />
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<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-49964318790965317052020-07-05T13:39:00.001-04:002020-07-05T13:39:31.428-04:00Fifth of July DouglassnessFirst up, <a href="https://nyti.ms/2CXJeyD" target="_blank">Dr. Walter O. Evans of Savannah, Georgia, has donated his Frederick Douglass collection to the Beinecke Library at Yale University</a>, for which we can all thank David Blight, who facilitated the gift. This collection has -- jeez, I lost count but -- many scrapbooks that include so many clippings and family information about Douglass for the later years of his life. The charming, insightful, heartrending letters from Lewis Douglass to his fiancée, later wife, Amelia Loguen form part of this collection as well. If you want a sense of its richness, you can take a look at the shockingly reasonably priced, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/If-Survive-Frederick-Douglass-Collection/dp/1474429289" target="_blank">If I Survive</a>," which reproduces and transcribes the documents, but not the scrapbooks.<br />
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While research at the Beinecke won't be the same as sitting in the dining room of his beautiful Savannah townhome and talking of your research with him at the end of the day over a glass of wine, all while surrounded by the art of such luminaries as Jacob Lawrence and Edmonia Lewis, it will do. Certainly more people will have access, with less intrusion upon Dr. Evans and his wife. Much gratitude to him, David Blight, and everyone involved in this deal. My condolences to the other repositories that wanted the collection.<br />
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(Oh, and when you read the article, click on some of the links. That's the closest that me or my work will ever get to being in the<i> New York Times</i>, and I'll take it! Thank you to Dr. Evans, David, or the reporter, whoever took notice. Score for us Nobodies from Nowhere teaching at Places You Never Heard Of! My gratitude to Evans, Blight, and Stan Deaton of the Georgia Historical Society, who provided the introduction to Dr. Evans and access to the collection ten -- jeez! Has it been ten? -- years ago. All three were important parts of the final project.)<br />
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Second fall more under Six Degrees of Frederick Douglass. Thanks to my husband's daughter's Disney Plus account, we were<i> finally</i> able to see<i> Hamilton</i>. We actually had the opportunity when the tickets were expensive, but not prohibitively so, and before it hit big. (I thought I would just be another<i> <a href="http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_b/BloodyBloodyAJ.html" target="_blank">Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson</a></i> -- who knew!) We chose instead to see a play downtown based on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marcus-Rediker/dp/0143114255/ref=sr_1_2?crid=72GJ9UZ7E28&dchild=1&keywords=rediker+slave+ship&qid=1593969569&s=books&sprefix=rediker+slave%2Cstripbooks%2C173&sr=1-2" target="_blank">Marcus Rediker's<i> Slave Ship</i></a>. Four tickets for it cost as much as one for<i> Hamilton,</i> at the time. The paly was intense, and we sat practically on the stage in the front row; but good thing we don't invest in the stock market.<br />
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Anyway,<i> Hamilton</i> is a brilliant piece of musical theater. It's only flaws have to do with its <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Hamilton-Ron-Chernow/dp/0143034758" target="_blank">source material</a> and Lin Manuel Miranda's emphases that downplay the historical Hamilton's considerable warts (owned slaves, anti-immigrant despite his own background, elitism, monarchical tendencies, even the crack of dawn not save around him....). Still, I'd wholly recommend just for the genius of the lyrical and musical motifs alone, and the color blind casting never lets you forget that the men portrayed as fighting for freedom did not really mean freedom for the people who are right now playing them.<br />
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The Frederick Douglass part?<br />
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Can we all pause for a moment and praise the brilliant talent that is Leslie Odom Jr.? What a Triple Threat! He played Aaron Burr (sir). Where have you also seen him? Playing <a href="https://freedomcenter.org/content/william-still" target="_blank">William Still</a> in the film <i><a href="https://youtu.be/GqoEs4cG6Uw" target="_blank">Harriet</a></i>. You don't have to go too far to connect Still and Douglass, of course.<br />
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Even better: the actor playing the Lafayette/Jefferson role, Daveed Diggs, the one with the fabulous hair who rivets attention in every scene?:<br />
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He will play Frederick Douglass in the Showtime series<i> The Good Lord Bird</i>, this September.<br />
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You see him at the one minute mark. How many actors can say that they played both Thomas Jefferson<i> and</i> Frederick Douglass?<br />
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The series looks intriguing, but I confess to having passed on the book for a variety of reasons. The long one involves my three stacks method that has developed from having reading as a integral part of my job and as a hobby. Stack One includes all books for research. Actually, Stack One is more like a fort made out of books. Books for class or for prize committees make up Stack Two, which is more like a complex. Some overlap occurs between One and Two, but the majority of classes that I teach are world civilizations and therefore fall very far outside Stack One.<br />
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Then, Stack Three, fun books. Fiction, preferably with no relation to work. I won't even pretend to be literary or intellectual here. That's the rest of the day. I love me some historical fiction, but it absolutely CANNOT be about the antebellum U.S. unless aliens or time travelers appear or something occurs that places the story into the realm of magical realism or fantasy or science fiction. I get too picky. So,<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Underground-Railroad-Novel-Colson-Whitehead/dp/0345804325/ref=sr_1_2?crid=MAHS8DZE4IBS&dchild=1&keywords=underground+railroad+colson+whitehead&qid=1593969066&s=books&sprefix=Undergrou%2Cstripbooks%2C191&sr=1-2" target="_blank">Underground Railroad</a></i> by Colson Whitehead, yes.<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Wings-Sue-Monk-Kidd/dp/0143121707/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1YET9J2OOG912&dchild=1&keywords=invention+of+wings&qid=1593969029&s=books&sprefix=Invention+of+win%2Cdigital-text%2C172&sr=1-2" target="_blank">Invention of Wings</a> </i>by Sue Monk Kidd, no. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kindred-Octavia-Butler/dp/0807083690/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Kindred&qid=1593968927&s=books&sr=1-2" target="_blank">Octavia Butler</a>, yes. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001IGQLEO?ie=UTF8&field-author=Jennifer+Chiaverini&text=Jennifer+Chiaverini&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&ref_=ast_slp_cp" target="_blank">Jennifer Chiaverini</a>, no. I just know too much about the era and become far too critical. <br />
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So,<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Good-Lord-Bird-James-McBride/dp/1594632782" target="_blank">Good Lord Bird</a></i> by James McBride would not have been on my list for that reason. Then, my husband read it out of curiosity. We have oddly different places where we forgive artistic license. He said, "absolutely not!" to<i> Underground Railroad</i> when he heard that it involved an actual railroad underground. I said, "this could be interesting," and was wholly rewarded.<i> Good Lord Bird</i> sounded interesting to him, but his tales of a fat, drunk, womanizing Douglass, not made any better by interviews with the author? Well, them's fightin' words! Also, life's too short and there are too many other books to waste time on something that will piss me off when I just want to escape.<br />
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Still, Daveed Diggs as Douglass, and the clips of him in this trailer. Also, Ethan Hawke not annoying me. Now, they have my interest. Dammit. I'm going to have to read the book. Of course, we don't have Showtime, so it will be next year or the year after before I see the series. Kind of like being the last historian in my field to see<i> Hamilton.</i><br />
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Saving the best for last, young descendants of Frederick Douglass read his "What to the American Slave is Your Fourth of July," delivered in Rochester, at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society, on the Fifth of July 1852.<br />
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Beautiful!Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-74370495198432718902020-07-03T14:40:00.002-04:002020-07-03T14:46:25.951-04:00Madison Hemings: "Sucn is the story that comes down to me"As I said last time, in my research I have developed an affection and respect for Madison Hemings. Yes, I know we are supposed to be objective and all, but we are all human and when another human speaks across time, we respond to that. His descendant, Shay Banks-Young explains better these reasons in her interview for <a href="https://www.monticello.org/" target="_blank">Monticello's</a> "<a href="https://www.monticello.org/getting-word" target="_blank">Getting Word</a>" project here:<br />
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Banks-Young says it. Madison was the man who made sure that his parentage and the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson entered the record, and he was the only one of their four children who survived to adulthood to stay on the African American side of the color line. I use "African American" deliberately here.<br />
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So let's start at the beginning for this post<a href="https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slave-memoirs-oral-histories/recollections-of-madison-hemings/" target="_blank">. He told what he knew in an interview to the<i> Pike County Republican</i> (Ohio) in 1873</a>. In<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-Sally-Hemings-Controversy/dp/0813918332/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2/140-4876180-4307466?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0813918332&pd_rd_r=0781deb1-43d8-44ec-9f37-cde2fcca575e&pd_rd_w=z83QJ&pd_rd_wg=RMYy4&pf_rd_p=4e3f7fc3-00c8-46a6-a4db-8457e6319578&pf_rd_r=CKBWDJ5HYTN2M8X14RWR&psc=1&refRID=CKBWDJ5HYTN2M8X14RWR" target="_blank">Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy</a></i>, Annette Gordon-Reed traced the connection between the reporter who interviewed Madison (I don't mean to be disrespectful here, but a lot of Hemingses are going to enter the story, so using their first names will maintain clarity) and the census taker back in 1870 who noted "this man is the son of Thomas Jefferson."<br />
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Pretty cool, eh? 1870, understand, was long after the whole Callender controversy that sprung the Hemings-Jefferson story on the public had passed out of living memory, merely a footnote of a Federalist smear campaign in Jefferson biographies, and after it had been a tool of abolitionist propaganda in the antebellum era.<br />
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For your 6 Degrees of Frederick Douglass: The most significant example of the latter being William Wells Brown's<i> <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2046/pg2046-images.html" target="_blank">Clotel; or, the President's Daughter</a></i>. William Wells Brown knew Frederick Douglass, and once Rosetta was mistaken for Brown's wayward daughter.<br />
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Back to Madison Hemings. From the way he begins his account, the reporter seems to have asked him about the origin of his last name. The whole first paragraph then goes on to tell the audience "the story that comes down to me." Hemings -- no first name -- captained a ship that sailed between Virginia and England. He fathered Madison's grandmother, Elizabeth, with Madison's great-grandmother, "a full-blooded African, possibly a native of that country." The Captain was not the African's master, but he wanted to purchase his daughter from their master. The master would not sell. The Captain planned to kidnap her. Other enslaved people told the master, who moved mother and child into the house. The Captain then set off, disappearing from the colony and the known record -- although he may appear as a needle in some haystack of ship's logs or customs records somewhere in England. He is not, I can tell you, in the <a href="https://slavevoyages.org/" target="_blank">Transatlantic Slave Trade Database</a>. The reason that the master would not sell Elizabeth, depsite the Captain offering what Madison described as "an extraordinarily high price"? He wanted to observe the ways a mixed race child would develop. Essentially, she was a science experiment to him.<br />
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So much in this one paragraph! Where to begin? First of all, the way people tell their family histories emphasizes the points that they consider important, and sheds the details that they consider less important. Sometimes, the vagaries of memory lose or change details, which itself can indicate emphases. Madison, in 1873, tells of events that his mother Sally remembered from what her mother Elizabeth remembered. Given that Elizabeth was an infant when these incidents happened, then she was told these events herself. The action of this part of the Hemingses' history took place just after 1735, the year Elizabeth was born. So, we have a 138 years gap. That's not to cast doubt on the story. That's to express amazement that the story lasted so long and to help explain the emphases and any details that don't bear out in the record.<br />
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For instance, Madison names the master as Wayles, who he says was Welsh, and he places much of the action in Williamsburg. In<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hemingses-Monticello-American-Family/dp/0393337766" target="_blank">The Hemingses of Monticello</a></i>, Annette Gordon-Reed, who was the first person (perhaps the only person) to deeply investigate the Hemings ancestry, found that Wayles did not claim Elizabeth Hemings until she was eleven and came to his estate as part of his wife Martha Eppes's dowry. Until then, Francis Eppes III owned her and, therefore, her African mother.<br />
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Gordon-Reed also surmised that Elizabeth's African mother may have been named -- by Eppes, of course, not her own mother back in Africa -- Parthenia or Sarah. No knowing for sure, she admitted, even less sure than most educated guesses, but still a better idea of what might be in that blank space in our knowing that the African woman occupies.<br />
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The Eppeses had a plantation at Bermuda Hundred. Maybe you've never heard of it, or it echoes as something you think you should have heard of somewhere. That was my feeling, anyway, <a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Bermuda_Hundred_During_the_Colonial_Period" target="_blank">so I looked it up</a>. Bermuda Hundred was a town located far upriver from Jamestown, much closer to Richmond. Madison kept calling Williamsburg the port. Williamsburg itself had a port at the time, but it lay on the York River. In its earlier history, Bermuda Hundred served as the site of John Rolfe's experimentations in tobacco, his life with Pocahontas, and his death around the time that his uncle-in-law Opechancanough led a war against English settlement. Later, General U.S. Grant could see is location from his headquarters across the river in the war to end slavery. Today, few people know about it and think primarily of Jamestown or Williamsburg when thinking of colonial Virginia.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3xv5R-OGCS_Mj74LwRzWgUVmLHGs8GSVLWx09EgkcA0uQ1pw7nJLnFeLALUliDvGVOT4ST2XdPVjVrLY6q_HZs7zk0yinL2atkEaBhO1-p_JxHaysca41rdzfoEQqOuwtQghxIUDLZOqt/s1600/BermudaHundredMap.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="917" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3xv5R-OGCS_Mj74LwRzWgUVmLHGs8GSVLWx09EgkcA0uQ1pw7nJLnFeLALUliDvGVOT4ST2XdPVjVrLY6q_HZs7zk0yinL2atkEaBhO1-p_JxHaysca41rdzfoEQqOuwtQghxIUDLZOqt/s640/BermudaHundredMap.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evr5090mets.xml</td></tr>
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In the 1730s, however, Bermuda Hundred served as the main port on the Upper James River for the exchange of tobacco and slaves for the plantations in the Piedmont of Virginia. Plantations like Tuckahoe and Shadwell and the Forest and Guinea (later Hors du Monde) and Eppington and Monticello -- all associated with Thomas Jefferson and his extended family. That Transatlantic Slave Trade Database shows voyages directly from Africa beginning in the 1730s and escalating in the 1760s, some with a hundred or more captives on board (and more at the bottom of the ocean).<br />
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If Elizabeth's mother came directly from African, which<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Many-Thousands-Gone-Centuries-Slavery/dp/0674002113/ref=sr_1_1?crid=TP5QUCG0F0ZP&dchild=1&keywords=many+thousands+gone+ira+berlin&qid=1593801917&s=books&sprefix=Many+thousans+%2Cstripbooks%2C172&sr=1-1" target="_blank"> Ira Berlin says</a> a majority of enslaved people did in the Piedmont in the 1730, she could just as likely arrived at Bermuda Hundred as the Williamsburg port. More, perhaps, since the Eppeses' plantations lay next door and further away from Williamsburg. By the time, Madison or his mother would be telling the history, however, Bermuda Hundred would not sound right to them because the port had declined and disappeared.<br />
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I'm caught in trivialities, here. Madison's story raises some unanswerable questions. First of all, the African who became Elizabeth Hemings's mother, the importance of her appearance, and the cipher of her seeming dismissal. Second, the "amalgamation" experiment conducted by Wayles in this telling and the way it seems so, well, Jeffersonian. Also, the way that Wayles seems cold and calculating, with Madison expressing little connection to him as a grandfather other than as a matter of ancestry, less than to the Captain. So, I think I'll stop here and cover these in separate posts. <br />
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<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-59216387323214388872020-07-02T11:29:00.002-04:002020-07-02T11:29:52.633-04:00New ProjectIt's been a while, hasn't it? But, then, it usually is, once the serious writing for<i> Women in the World of Frederick Douglass</i> got underway, and then the book was published, and then the talks. I had two other ideas for books, one of which overwhelmed the other. Then, my dad died, which kind of blew a hole in my world and I lost interest in everything. That became a whole other story; and just as I was finding my balance, other things came up like teaching online, and pay cuts, and schools closing, and no retirement, and layoffs, and this ongoing disaster from which the world may not recover for decades, if ever.<br />
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Meanwhile, in the midst of that dark winter in which I felt nothing but loss, the marvelous Carol Berkin, who edits the series<i> Lives of American Women</i> found herself without an author for a book. Would I be interested? I had to think about it because, boy, it was tempting, but, boy, was I not sure that I could do it. Still, I told my mom about. The topic is one that interests her. Indeed, she was way ahead of the curve on the subject when I was not, back in the 1980s and early 1990s. (People can grow! Indeed, she showed me that, too.) My mom's response? "Do it!!!!!" Already, my mind had taken off in arranging the proposal, and her nudge -- the idea that I would do it for her -- pushed me into saying "yes."<br />
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The contract was offered to me on my birthday last year. Then the NEH awarded the project a research grant, which will be wonderful to use if the research facilities that I need to visit open again -- ever.<br />
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In addition to my mom, I have another audience in mind. The semester before Carol contacted me, I had spoken of the subject at some length to my U.S. History survey class, one in which half of the students were women, only two of whom were white. All of them wanted more. When I directed them to the key books, they took a look at the length and said, "is there anything shorter?" They only have so much time, they weren't sure if they wanted that much of a commitment. I get that. I thought, "someone needs to write a short introductory book on this woman." One that piques the readers' curiosity and directs them toward the longer, deeper work. Who knew it would be me?<br />
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So, this book will be for those women in my class and for my mom. They are my audience.<br />
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Who is the woman? Sally Hemings.<br />
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Yes! I am off of my rocker thinking I can do this! As one person, who is a Jefferson scholar, said, "why would you waste your time on a subject on which everything has been said?"<br />
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Well, I don't really have anything new to say at this point that will change the face of the scholarship. This is going to be synthetic and brief. This is for undergraduates and, again, people not sure if they are ready for the commitment of all of the other work on Hemings -- my particular favorite being<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hemingses-Monticello-American-Family/dp/0393337766" target="_blank">The Hemingses of Monticello</a></i>. (I cannot love that book hard enough! Annette Gordon-Reed shows her work. Every time I have a question -- boom!-- she answers it in the next paragraph or on the next page.) <br />
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I also want to introduce this beginner audience to the craft of historians, and I want to use her life as a way to address the big events and changes happening in her time, some which she witnessed and some which affected her indirectly. This book should be one that a teacher can assign to a survey just like the one almost every college student must take, and cover a period of time from a different perspective than the Great White Menz.<br />
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As I research this book this summer, thinking in particular about the thorny issues of Hemings' race and perceptions of what happened between herself and Jefferson, I watch Black Lives Matter overwhelm the news and force deep questions about the origins and depth of American racism into the streets in a way surpassing any other up to this point. Intersectional, interracial, intergender, inter-everything! Finally, Confederate statues that should have never been raised, topple! It is all exciting and frightening and necessary and a long long long time coming.<br />
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How does Hemings fit into this, not as a heroine, but as a woman with very limited power trying to get her family, her children, over to freedom and a better life? I know right where Jefferson fits. Yes, he was a slaveholder, but more than that. The better angels of his logic knew that slavery was unjust. At the same time, emancipation would cost him quite a bit, not the least of which was his lovely, luxurious life pursuing every curiosity. He is white people: "I'm for something just until it costs me something, and then I rationalize the reasons that 'too far' is the point where it costs me something." That is the question so many of we white people must ask.<br />
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Hemings's story is not a flip side of that precisely. Hers is more complicated because she sits on a line between slavery and freedom, black and white, exploitation and agency. She offered her children some interesting choices, too. In those choices, race become the dominant issue beyond freedom and slavery. The problem lies in that they had to make a choice and -- here's my 6 Degrees of Frederick Douglass -- one that Douglass addressed toward the end of his life with his interest in "amalgamation."<br />
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The guy I love most, I think, in this story, is Madison Hemings, the son who chose blackness while all of his siblings chose whiteness. He's the one who gave the world the "African" who was his great-grandmother, and the one sentence from the mouth of Elizabeth Hemings who was his grandmother, and witnessed the story of Sally Hemings his mother and Thomas Jefferson his father. I'm curious about Eston, and the way that his paternity and, more importantly, his maternity, passed through his descendants (Monticello has oral histories that I have yet to explore); but Madison, he seems to know who he was and perhaps he should be the next post.<br />
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<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-12972033868692078152019-07-30T08:23:00.002-04:002019-07-30T08:32:27.716-04:00Chittenango Landing Canal Boat MuseumAfter a lovely weekend in New York City talking to teachers about Douglass and women and the Civil War, and then a beautiful wedding of a former student in Washingtonville, I'm back home and preparing for this Thursday's talk.<br />
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If you are in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chittenango,_New_York" target="_blank">Chittenango</a>, birthplace of<i> Wizard of Oz</i> author of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Frank_Baum" target="_blank">L Frank Baum</a> who was also son-in-law of suffragist <a href="https://matildajoslyngage.org/about-matilda-joslyn-gage" target="_blank">Matilda Joslyn Gage</a>, who lived in my neighborhood, drop on by. My talk will be at the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum on the old Erie Canal at 7:00 pm. A $5.00 donation is suggested for non-members of the museum. The subject will be "<a href="https://chittenangolanding.org/events-at-the-landing/2019/8/1/frederick-douglass-womans-rights-man-woman-suffrage-series" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass, Woman's Rights Man</a>" and is part of their Woman Suffrage series. For more information on the <a href="https://chittenangolanding.org/events-at-the-landing/2019/8/1/frederick-douglass-womans-rights-man-woman-suffrage-series" target="_blank">talk</a> and the museum, visit <a href="https://chittenangolanding.org/" target="_blank">their website</a>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For more information on "Frederick Douglass, Woman's Rights Man: Woman Suffrage Series" <a href="https://chittenangolanding.org/events-at-the-landing/2019/8/1/frederick-douglass-womans-rights-man-woman-suffrage-series" target="_blank">click here</a>.</td></tr>
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Oh, and contract for<i> Sally Hemings: Given Her Time</i> signed with a deadline of September 2021 (gulp!). Expect to be able to assign it to classes the following year. She may start encroaching on this blog, which would probably require renaming the whole thing. We'll see how that goes.Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-3618267169159303062019-07-22T11:17:00.004-04:002019-07-22T11:18:51.300-04:00Magic!Y'all! Look what happened!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii4WMzLhA52dGQsW9QT9gxVR6VBS11ORpjURnj0E82K0OEYhNqTtjvM5thCvyhU96q46vnz6tKJTOXhUIdk00LdYwwNjff6vgI-6vFenVBBJnhb-wyXMIYi0q47IDsCXjzkpnkQHR30M7P/s1600/LMMirandaLetter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1237" data-original-width="1600" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii4WMzLhA52dGQsW9QT9gxVR6VBS11ORpjURnj0E82K0OEYhNqTtjvM5thCvyhU96q46vnz6tKJTOXhUIdk00LdYwwNjff6vgI-6vFenVBBJnhb-wyXMIYi0q47IDsCXjzkpnkQHR30M7P/s400/LMMirandaLetter.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">
Henry --</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Thank you kindly for your sweet and</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
thoughtful gift. Your support of </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
"Hamilton" means the world. I look </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
forward to dive into Mr. Fought's</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
"Women in the World of Frederick</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Douglass." Here's wishing you all</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
the best.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Siempre, </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Lin-M----</div>
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<br />
Henry McCartney of the <a href="http://www.fomh.org/" target="_blank">Friends of Mt. Hope Cemetery</a> and a fan of Douglass and the women in his life brought his book club to Syracuse so we could discuss<i> Women in the World of Frederick Douglass</i> last spring. We had such a wonderful evening chatting about Frederick and Anna and Helen and all of the others. Everyone thought the book would make a great movie or even a musical like<i> Hamilton.</i> So Henry decided to send a volume to Lin-Manuel Miranda. I mean, what the heck! That was one of the coolest things anyone has ever done for it.<br />
<br />
Low and behold, Miranda wrote a thank you note back. Sure, he gets a million fan letters a minute, probably. Sure, an assistant probably composed it. Sure, my gender was switched. Still: Lin-Manuel Miranda has a copy of my book!<br />
<br />
Not that him having it is any more important than when a teacher or someone at a talk or someone chatting with me learns about it and runs into the bookstore to buy it or someone contacts me because they came across a blog post in a bit of serendipity. Those are all equally fantastic in their own ways. They make the book something beyond me. I loved researching it, writing it, having it published, being recognized as having written it, being an expert on it, and all of that. Still, when someone comes to you and says that the book spoke to them and that they appreciated a particular point that it made or a depiction of a person (Anna has become quite beloved), then a circle has closed. Some final missing touch has brought the whole endeavor into a life of its own, like fairy dust. Magic!<br />
<br />
There is another type of magic, too, like this weekend at the<a href="http://www.shear.org/" target="_blank"> Society for Historians of the Early American Republic</a> meeting (start putting together panel proposals for <a href="http://www.shear.org/annual-meeting/" target="_blank">next year</a> -- CFP up soon!). I was just <a href="http://www.shear.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019SHEARConferenceProgramJuly16_2019.pdf" target="_blank">chair of a panel of some fabulous young scholars on abolition</a>, not presenting a paper, and I was on a committee to award the Mary Kelley Book Prize (the same one that I won last year), which went to Nora Doyle's incredible <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469637198/maternal-bodies/" target="_blank"><i>Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America</i></a>, her first book. Nancy Hewitt, by the way, won the biography prize for her much anticipated and worth-the-wait<a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469640327/radical-friend/" target="_blank"> <i>Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds</i></a>. I was also catching up with two old friends whom I hadn't seen in ages. Conferences can be like that. Being, now, at a point in my career where I'm helping to award prizes to scholars earlier in their careers and presiding over their panels, and seeing the thoughtful and creative directions their thinking has taken the study of this period makes me realize that there are many parts to this circle, and many circles.<br />
<br />
I also had a couple of encounters with people whose work has influenced my own and they said that<i> Women in the World of Frederick Douglass</i> gave them a new and different insight into Douglass, that it changed the way they thought about him. Again, that's another circle closed in another arena. More, powerful magic!<br />
<br />
Knowing that Lin-Manuel Miranda or <a href="https://twitter.com/JoyceCarolOates/status/954805338691153920" target="_blank">Joyce Carol Oates</a> or old school, Second Wave feminist <a href="https://www.robinmorgan.net/blog/womens-suffrages-part-2/" target="_blank">Robin Morgan</a> or some other celebrity has read -- or is at least aware of -- my book is rather fun and sparkly. Still, whoever put the book into their hands, like Henry, they are part of creating that magic, or making the book into a Real Live Person. You see, they aren't just doing something for me -- I'm happy, don't get me wrong there! -- but they see something in the book, in the ideas and the story about Douglass and especially about the women, and they want to pass it along to others.<br />
<br />
They want their students to know about it, and they want someone who has access to a larger audience to know about it. That's the way knowledge spreads and the public becomes educated. That's really the whole point, isn't it? To create a virtuous, thinking citizenry fighting the forces of ignorance. That's the reason people write books or create art or teach in whatever sphere or engage in these regenerative act: to slake their curiosity and help others satisfy their and know more in the process about the world and the way it works.<br />
<br />
The feedback lets you know that you aren't just <a href="http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=856" target="_blank">sounding your barbaric yawp into the wilderness</a>.<br />
<br />
Back to Lin-Manuel Miranda. This missive to Henry and from Henry to me came at an auspicious moment: my birthday, which is tomorrow. Also for my birthday, an impending book contract for a classroom-use volume on the life and historiography of -- get this! -- Sally Hemings. I write this not as an expert on Hemings or Jefferson. That title I leave to the formidable Annette Gordon-Reed, to whom I bow down, and others such as John Kukla, Virgina Scharff, Cynthia Kierner, Catherine Kerrison, and Andew Burstein, among so many others. Instead, I write this as a teacher, introducing Hemings and the arguments surrounding her life and times to my students. It will be a short book of maybe two hundred pages text, and is exactly the type of book I wished that I had last fall when talking about this subject to my students who wanted to read about Hemings but took one look a the length of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hemingses-Monticello-American-Family/dp/0393337766" target="_blank">Hemingses of Monticello</a></i> and said, "is there anything shorter?" (They would have LOVED<i> Hemingses of Monticello</i>, by the way; but still, you have to compete for their time.)<br />
<br />
So, in closing, let's bring these two research projects together with this little musical jam that perhaps comes close to a hip-hop musical of Douglass: Epic Rap Battles of History, Thomas Jefferson vs Frederick Douglass.:<br />
<br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O-ZblMfZpuw" width="560"></iframe>Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-12684193419101074892019-07-16T16:34:00.001-04:002019-07-16T16:36:26.619-04:00WWFDD?Douglass had been taken from his parents. His ancestors had been herded into cages, so was he. He and Anna Douglass broke the law to find a better life for themselves and their children. They defied the law to help people seek asylum in Canade. He searched for asylum himself. His family had been in the United States, then the British North American colony of Maryland, since the 1730s at least. Yet, in 1858, the Supreme Court ruled that he and his entire family were not Americans nor should they be. Whole organizations were devoted to deporting people like him to Africa. When the Constitution granted him citizenship and seemed to protect his right to vote -- it couldn't bar him from voting because of his color or his previous condition of servitude, to be specific -- the federal government did nothing to stop states from finding their ways around the intent of those amendments. He and Helen Douglass had become aware of convict lease by the end of his life. Ida B. Wells made sure they knew of the malpractice of the law-enforcement system against black men in the South.<br />
<br />
His was a tune that many people would like to say sounds old-timey, nothing to do with today.<br />
<br />
People have plenty of opinions about Douglass and today's politics, not all of them good and quite a number of them would not even qualify as "half-baked." (Reason number 5088 that I'm not on Twitter.) The problem with discussing Douglass and politics is that many people like to use him to advance their own agenda. Kind of like the Bible or the Constitution, depending on what passages you pull out, you can draft Douglass into any camp that you want.<br />
<br />
Words and ideologies have contexts and a person's can change over the course of a lifetime. Not only that, but a person who is radical on one issue can be conservative on another. Douglass, for instance, was very much a radical anti-racist as an abolitionist while at the same time engaged in the politics of respectability, which you can't really classify as conservative or liberal according to our understanding of the terms today. Quite often he played with the contradictions.<br />
<br />
Still, some things seem pretty clear. If you admire Frederick Douglass and what he did, but think that holding asylum-seekers in pens, separating them from their children, and telling naturalized or native-born women of color who, not incidentally, are representing their constituencies in Congress to leave the country is all fine, you might want to reexamine your reasons. Douglass isn't here to weigh in, but his life certainly gives us an idea.<br />
<br />
<br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-84438458045225308222019-07-16T10:35:00.002-04:002019-07-16T11:16:46.415-04:00Monday, 31 January [1887]: The National Archaelogical Museum of NaplesAfter an uneventful if mysteriously "strange sermon at the U.P. Church, on the greatness of man" on Sunday, the Douglasses met again with Eleanor Lewis and set off for the Museo Nazionale, now called the <a href="https://www.museoarcheologiconapoli.it/it/" target="_blank">Museo Archeologico Nazionale</a> or National Archaeological Museum. Then, as now, this is<i> the</i> museum to visit while in Naples, akin to the Uffizi in Florence; and the Baedeker of 1880 that the Douglasses carried with them referred to it as "<a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=118" target="_blank">The Museum" and gave a room-by-room description along with a map</a>. Today, as then, Sundays are free. (Be aware of this that most museums in Italy are free on Sundays.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGdiM7TO1-rzVx5ixCkZcx5mmsmzdZruCOLYZju6cbHrgkP2oD9X_7m4wwE5VpdLys5jgeWxQe1u75TlfbOyQKusfKqdrf9Caq7ci21XdLNzUuX7UPqJdRgXpdNh9ORN_UDrDfcLnjnKG3/s1600/ArchealogicalMuseumNaples1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="696" data-original-width="422" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGdiM7TO1-rzVx5ixCkZcx5mmsmzdZruCOLYZju6cbHrgkP2oD9X_7m4wwE5VpdLys5jgeWxQe1u75TlfbOyQKusfKqdrf9Caq7ci21XdLNzUuX7UPqJdRgXpdNh9ORN_UDrDfcLnjnKG3/s400/ArchealogicalMuseumNaples1.JPG" width="242" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdte5u5pZ-zhqXNO2_iExrbL93wVnTRqE5-usL6cGG7XUBK0LVsHm67YM97uRZQHPvzTI6wTlNB5dr7zXY5EIlzshzyyRkO6XAvBiss1romnqASXkRFlHGaIr9vuTlTWqdcvhn0xHjCGM/s1600/ArchealogicalMuseumNaples2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: right; color: #0066cc; float: right; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="422" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdte5u5pZ-zhqXNO2_iExrbL93wVnTRqE5-usL6cGG7XUBK0LVsHm67YM97uRZQHPvzTI6wTlNB5dr7zXY5EIlzshzyyRkO6XAvBiss1romnqASXkRFlHGaIr9vuTlTWqdcvhn0xHjCGM/s400/ArchealogicalMuseumNaples2.JPG" width="243" /></a></div>
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While the museum has many exhibits, the main draw is and was the thing that Douglass mentioned: "A birds eye view of pictures, statuary and many objects of interest, taken from the ruins of Pompei and Herculanium."<br />
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The birds-eye view was actually a model, made in the 1850s, of the archeological digs as they stood at that time. The meticulous care with which the model-makers reproduced the mosaics and, more importantly, the frescoes on the walls, have served as some of the only records of those images because years -- centuries, now -- of exposure have caused them to deteriorate. Burial preserved the site, excavation restarted the processes of age.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGnr1YU6Wjs7t9RBdNjrtbcPfPQ-q0yUyWHsAv6FZVfeCmLRvG8miqhy-nDoc8QxtCZ22iH1yCulIJwup8YsL9ERuJuOSS1o1hpkYYW9H9x67jCO7uLnF3zQjw4PMU66-YNRpeSfjHxDTO/s1600/IMG_4360.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGnr1YU6Wjs7t9RBdNjrtbcPfPQ-q0yUyWHsAv6FZVfeCmLRvG8miqhy-nDoc8QxtCZ22iH1yCulIJwup8YsL9ERuJuOSS1o1hpkYYW9H9x67jCO7uLnF3zQjw4PMU66-YNRpeSfjHxDTO/s320/IMG_4360.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxetShnn3EdGoCCVn0hSlNpvJ8b1HlhN0wzxPV63vDAnXg3iFjo-lngyfYcw5l3vts31VdmQ0DFG0xDZuwRVHQDd_caM-73bGuEGuJgysKRZLM_dhALLsoJg0U1lKae4S8OLrQRHPyLmHT/s1600/IMG_4361.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxetShnn3EdGoCCVn0hSlNpvJ8b1HlhN0wzxPV63vDAnXg3iFjo-lngyfYcw5l3vts31VdmQ0DFG0xDZuwRVHQDd_caM-73bGuEGuJgysKRZLM_dhALLsoJg0U1lKae4S8OLrQRHPyLmHT/s320/IMG_4361.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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Because of those processes, most of the artifacts and art were removed from the sites of the two cities and into this museum. (There's a longer history to that, but you can refer to Mary Beard's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674029763/ref=x_gr_w_bb_sout?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_bb_sout-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674029763&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2" target="_blank">engaging work</a> for more on the subject.) "The perfection of some of these in form and color and utility was remarkable considering their antiquity," Douglass commented in his diary. "In some respects they transcended modern art."<br />
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He was not wrong. I'm not sure what pieces he may have seen, but here are some samples.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgerk_PGrvutL5Q2426G5X2_GJlB3oD2l29CwgrULpWMXlIPeRkVMU67jiPUhyuK4uetC82LpRr28WotenToemnTIpBic6FQ3pYzqusCfnK-clLVHYq4fQ1O0HTbcySJZIlLIyUsEqX4NCP/s1600/IMG_4368.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgerk_PGrvutL5Q2426G5X2_GJlB3oD2l29CwgrULpWMXlIPeRkVMU67jiPUhyuK4uetC82LpRr28WotenToemnTIpBic6FQ3pYzqusCfnK-clLVHYq4fQ1O0HTbcySJZIlLIyUsEqX4NCP/s320/IMG_4368.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The expression on the donkey's face!</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg07Qdd7cZTD7PERC0qhB1iEjcI33XtEIKTz6_ragLlrYnHOsmFwp5XWgSW6_VW81TH_1u-JESQOOPtkLKI3ojoe1OFdQ_M16hFbfvQP8GLQwBb9jwHmCZ9xCX_U7zKQSBA8qFf487cAT9i/s1600/IMG_4369.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg07Qdd7cZTD7PERC0qhB1iEjcI33XtEIKTz6_ragLlrYnHOsmFwp5XWgSW6_VW81TH_1u-JESQOOPtkLKI3ojoe1OFdQ_M16hFbfvQP8GLQwBb9jwHmCZ9xCX_U7zKQSBA8qFf487cAT9i/s320/IMG_4369.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
Evidence of writing. </div>
<div>
Also, note the head scarf, continuing Douglass's observations from the train.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBvUnshozcYdkVfIF5iv1_kqsXwqNS_VfJhBip862ge2sLeUPoSy2MMorD250iv1gJZWvKp8_NBGwaiTYjTEfixAr0Qg9MzzKRcoAPbo1J026TDpz4TThmFO8LPfWFzCmti6hdxZJsE9hX/s1600/IMG_4372.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBvUnshozcYdkVfIF5iv1_kqsXwqNS_VfJhBip862ge2sLeUPoSy2MMorD250iv1gJZWvKp8_NBGwaiTYjTEfixAr0Qg9MzzKRcoAPbo1J026TDpz4TThmFO8LPfWFzCmti6hdxZJsE9hX/s320/IMG_4372.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is a famous picture, so seeing it is like seeing a celebrity. More than that, taken with the image above, you get a sense of the range of phenotypes, or skin color and hair textures -- the markers of what we call "race" today -- that existed in the Roman Empire. This piqued Douglass's curiosity as he travelled southward through Europe.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZGpOKl3pvoc6PnDHM27D44UjqZid6jeSZM4J0BrbVo1fJ2viqgLVuLhcSTSrD8649OZrKMY_-xxlxoCVRK-5yGzb7hvPRDcC0wJGstopU7kllhtcHTwM-fUlywZaMnu-Cim3hDXNgEx3F/s1600/IMG_4377.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZGpOKl3pvoc6PnDHM27D44UjqZid6jeSZM4J0BrbVo1fJ2viqgLVuLhcSTSrD8649OZrKMY_-xxlxoCVRK-5yGzb7hvPRDcC0wJGstopU7kllhtcHTwM-fUlywZaMnu-Cim3hDXNgEx3F/s320/IMG_4377.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Medusa.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRogsfOaIK_bTBSDTEP944XrHvKZUrhm_Ef8lsd8M56IBsDogqgJ4-NsaXwGNJsdAAHdZxrdxqvZirIKrMvOztH-0AO7x5xvn5DON7dz3A_S8mdmlfNqDpoQbzTjN9sjakLjdajesap8Eo/s1600/IMG_4400.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRogsfOaIK_bTBSDTEP944XrHvKZUrhm_Ef8lsd8M56IBsDogqgJ4-NsaXwGNJsdAAHdZxrdxqvZirIKrMvOztH-0AO7x5xvn5DON7dz3A_S8mdmlfNqDpoQbzTjN9sjakLjdajesap8Eo/s320/IMG_4400.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A miniature skeleton.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_kCFmXdwac8s8MmWmIFxwnTmzd5aW2Xot02j-k-c1T83QgQ4GxdvVCkdk2tjdbE0Ia4TCcqxcQPNjHuEtaTteXQzA7_sPVDPeVp4vf_GEzA8JOKjqEMnX6YYLJRtX8u63ya_JlyIu26JP/s1600/IMG_4401.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_kCFmXdwac8s8MmWmIFxwnTmzd5aW2Xot02j-k-c1T83QgQ4GxdvVCkdk2tjdbE0Ia4TCcqxcQPNjHuEtaTteXQzA7_sPVDPeVp4vf_GEzA8JOKjqEMnX6YYLJRtX8u63ya_JlyIu26JP/s320/IMG_4401.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A miniature Isis Fortuna</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHRQkNpSn0HtLY8EBRUAJatpOHsB4ap2oBQ6oyF3eei7UB0x8DgjtYrGJccG75JDPuHN13YsZ7vgaL7c8u1cOATtt5DzokoudV6w3FoT1lW3FYvYpgLCT98pELrxtM5gz79t8APg4v-_cd/s1600/IMG_4441.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHRQkNpSn0HtLY8EBRUAJatpOHsB4ap2oBQ6oyF3eei7UB0x8DgjtYrGJccG75JDPuHN13YsZ7vgaL7c8u1cOATtt5DzokoudV6w3FoT1lW3FYvYpgLCT98pELrxtM5gz79t8APg4v-_cd/s320/IMG_4441.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A massive Hercules. The copy in the background is modern, as in the past decade. An artist did this big performance thing in which he made replicas of various artifacts from Pompeii and blew them up with various colored gunpowder at the Pompeii amphitheater. He had some blah-blah-blah-dialogue-with-the-past artist statement, but, really, I think he just wanted to blow shit up.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGDQBamDGm_RNEc4U_JzvJU7WEM4rfK8yGOzyAS8U4jV6s8qeYlVe8ScTxzc0bk0P36jMN01Wol-w5yD9rz-_8YRMzp_JuiuHs0-DexYFfb9D_HjtFqFy9ps2pdgtGh-wPkerE7HFhKsAH/s1600/IMG_4402.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGDQBamDGm_RNEc4U_JzvJU7WEM4rfK8yGOzyAS8U4jV6s8qeYlVe8ScTxzc0bk0P36jMN01Wol-w5yD9rz-_8YRMzp_JuiuHs0-DexYFfb9D_HjtFqFy9ps2pdgtGh-wPkerE7HFhKsAH/s320/IMG_4402.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A sample of a glass bottle still containing the remnants of oil.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8BNEZnWGwPFllp65NYM6PSHWIoU-mGpEv_PBLU-CZclN6zYX9bntBkpjZQ1-oZ5ebyBMjdkd-Dwo6jv7qhZAlyriTkkO0O1Vng8FZg1i4d3Fp1SJL0f1H_oIlcAulkvFDdOkIVk1zJGFc/s1600/IMG_4405.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8BNEZnWGwPFllp65NYM6PSHWIoU-mGpEv_PBLU-CZclN6zYX9bntBkpjZQ1-oZ5ebyBMjdkd-Dwo6jv7qhZAlyriTkkO0O1Vng8FZg1i4d3Fp1SJL0f1H_oIlcAulkvFDdOkIVk1zJGFc/s320/IMG_4405.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A sample of a glass bottle melted by Vesuvius's heat.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHvTruGRX3OW2E8C4ESuWlqDbAHCJLcv4d1aldtvT2MDnpdOMO4Zka5GfBkgHoBsl392GJAWR7pkFL_Iq2sSDJkqJItP8pi6WB6ZQ3C1x-TiVk1oOJYS-eECSh4llG05ffUj8oqQ1jz6M2/s1600/IMG_4440.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHvTruGRX3OW2E8C4ESuWlqDbAHCJLcv4d1aldtvT2MDnpdOMO4Zka5GfBkgHoBsl392GJAWR7pkFL_Iq2sSDJkqJItP8pi6WB6ZQ3C1x-TiVk1oOJYS-eECSh4llG05ffUj8oqQ1jz6M2/s320/IMG_4440.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Medusa.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIULrBqda0SyOdNc_Pe1Hum8N77eNrcKJdcOY7tt7geSjeMMNBkWe8yyUOlTlprnvhAze7Y3-6x8SgsroVKyWT95LXhm3sTEVAiyOux4_nbStz5H3JFrPAkJ5_pGDqfFC_FUDyzxNrrfaZ/s1600/IMG_4418.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIULrBqda0SyOdNc_Pe1Hum8N77eNrcKJdcOY7tt7geSjeMMNBkWe8yyUOlTlprnvhAze7Y3-6x8SgsroVKyWT95LXhm3sTEVAiyOux4_nbStz5H3JFrPAkJ5_pGDqfFC_FUDyzxNrrfaZ/s320/IMG_4418.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Another celebrity siting. This is in every World Civilizations textbook I've seen. It is a mosaic that covered a floor in a Pompeiian villa and supposedly depicts Alexander the Great defeating the Persian king Darius.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYLSLIjwV7SPHElK2ZNB5iIh1dbYCWgzmGLn8i8od7F8J7e_vGWhtb92HTNZ81t0w2HAFAnLNwCRCK1VFtYJfiSpXrb82RQtj2xQ4pmSEsr9fATvDyLFdD-NCvW-MkEN9F5sMjS-sfUg88/s1600/IMG_4422.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYLSLIjwV7SPHElK2ZNB5iIh1dbYCWgzmGLn8i8od7F8J7e_vGWhtb92HTNZ81t0w2HAFAnLNwCRCK1VFtYJfiSpXrb82RQtj2xQ4pmSEsr9fATvDyLFdD-NCvW-MkEN9F5sMjS-sfUg88/s320/IMG_4422.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Darius in mosaic.The detail and expression are amazing, rendered in tiny flecks of stone.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCTKxmuzoGzBQozpIrWt1UcEA2-KJLQUKktK8ZRMFCNZIomLLn84k4rN9j1-0dpZNBN22JWZ3DzNq0C6i6Y-Bz63g60STRKd0nBisGiYOS0QKG_LhCShrDZigfDhrMcCYuIfHLvkR2CLvw/s1600/IMG_4426.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCTKxmuzoGzBQozpIrWt1UcEA2-KJLQUKktK8ZRMFCNZIomLLn84k4rN9j1-0dpZNBN22JWZ3DzNq0C6i6Y-Bz63g60STRKd0nBisGiYOS0QKG_LhCShrDZigfDhrMcCYuIfHLvkR2CLvw/s320/IMG_4426.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alexander the Great in mosaic. Even the horse has an expression.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjClr2jIbZ-QuGw8gOqGIM0nVoKocj_78ydhqrMqOhLe-wdvn3lAZIFW3GNhqau7_hnAe6C1QC6VTLOra3gvGVIaVCqR05Df38rXaHUi_-5k7-VxAsnrbjMt79SCVvfvfrQZ752s0UAlJs3/s1600/IMG_4416.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjClr2jIbZ-QuGw8gOqGIM0nVoKocj_78ydhqrMqOhLe-wdvn3lAZIFW3GNhqau7_hnAe6C1QC6VTLOra3gvGVIaVCqR05Df38rXaHUi_-5k7-VxAsnrbjMt79SCVvfvfrQZ752s0UAlJs3/s320/IMG_4416.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">More reminders of mortality.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpLeioAx-MQsHXkWa_HcsfoWKeqkocS9VwblOlbVa9BW3QpEtdI_wCdjOfogGsdnjo_BMBfufh1eIzjVMlaaDEaOB4K4Fu5EQzkhtqaptfoSgewYPJs3s8VRuyPXapNIkMBS3-8LScitDP/s1600/IMG_4427.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpLeioAx-MQsHXkWa_HcsfoWKeqkocS9VwblOlbVa9BW3QpEtdI_wCdjOfogGsdnjo_BMBfufh1eIzjVMlaaDEaOB4K4Fu5EQzkhtqaptfoSgewYPJs3s8VRuyPXapNIkMBS3-8LScitDP/s320/IMG_4427.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Medusa.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9_0vkYoaBoV2qGa_ZU6lUpz3S3Z29mfkWdA6OXSarGC-nrJnatLLUxuVb2t6e6vFp8LllTgSSN3AsESbunpDqq-ll1_kl6QRKUoUQxEE8ZYWNOlAZKbPCXBx15bE8Q8AKn6iZMVCClP09/s1600/IMG_4415.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9_0vkYoaBoV2qGa_ZU6lUpz3S3Z29mfkWdA6OXSarGC-nrJnatLLUxuVb2t6e6vFp8LllTgSSN3AsESbunpDqq-ll1_kl6QRKUoUQxEE8ZYWNOlAZKbPCXBx15bE8Q8AKn6iZMVCClP09/s320/IMG_4415.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the base of a mosaic column. Those are actual shells.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN6PalpDsoeSdRBftAd1JWqS3JcACso8bXfuQZNpF6bhroB33HznFrwM-Unu63eX5nZdi58wATglY9RzDXrB4TAd_ocSzXiRHN4EAwGxdTe5J11AG9ec7jW2dCsRB8HVESWFucLfFZ-YOh/s1600/IMG_4414.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN6PalpDsoeSdRBftAd1JWqS3JcACso8bXfuQZNpF6bhroB33HznFrwM-Unu63eX5nZdi58wATglY9RzDXrB4TAd_ocSzXiRHN4EAwGxdTe5J11AG9ec7jW2dCsRB8HVESWFucLfFZ-YOh/s320/IMG_4414.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail on a column.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There was one room that Douglass probably did not visit, and they did have it in those days because the Baedeker mentions it. You see, the Romans were earthy people, not as uptight about sexuality or nudity as later generations, and certainly not as constricted as those in the nineteenth century. The were, after all, people who considered enormous male genitalia to be good luck symbols. The founders of the museum in the eighteenth century already began to realize that certain people, especially ladies, did not have the sensibility for some of the artifacts. So, they took the most obvious ones and put them in a "Secret Room" or "Reserved Cabinet," "<i>Raccolta Pornografica</i>" in Italian, according to Baedeker, "to which men only are admitted." The Baedeker describes it as containing "mural and other paintings not adapted for public exhibition, and numerous bronzes, some of them of considerable artistic merit." (That sounds very much like the descriptions of<i> Playboy</i> that praise it for the articles.) They let women in these days and, let me tell you, the Romans were all about the dick. It was quite tedious.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4xzHL7hTC8NNKEaMYzgMsS1YIyDdJGaHyzGG6GTL5sYHw9jDwOITC0YA0OaxYgjxfVZip6f1BIhjsOTpp9VBrinYHzmLd966OZA8pXf3RA3xmskpQLYdlbA1SihJq7NTg7h02w1aMdlMU/s1600/IMG_4430.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4xzHL7hTC8NNKEaMYzgMsS1YIyDdJGaHyzGG6GTL5sYHw9jDwOITC0YA0OaxYgjxfVZip6f1BIhjsOTpp9VBrinYHzmLd966OZA8pXf3RA3xmskpQLYdlbA1SihJq7NTg7h02w1aMdlMU/s320/IMG_4430.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The room is now called the Secret Room, "Gabinetto Segretto." </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4kq6HQGb7xlKqLioqN_D3jl3y-qRSVjRo5M4sXHX9qzCjgcTR7C0Z7hfV9rE4KYhsWvsKiRdimpzJIGbMcIlx7ywikmTN16IB4eFr8OVpzih5aJiRE5NarBhBMedkzBA_A2RcghhpnyQc/s1600/IMG_4432.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4kq6HQGb7xlKqLioqN_D3jl3y-qRSVjRo5M4sXHX9qzCjgcTR7C0Z7hfV9rE4KYhsWvsKiRdimpzJIGbMcIlx7ywikmTN16IB4eFr8OVpzih5aJiRE5NarBhBMedkzBA_A2RcghhpnyQc/s320/IMG_4432.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The equivalent of lawn ornaments.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRsmuzjwoqtgImX6-duunqRoq4v3F0tosDGKjK_GNPVKLVKZANOMpA5H04a4hpNe_YjjbHzfohywjYO6pnE3IlBgTpWuDO6YY-Nu0aVoZTgwKOb5WACn0QiuZRSaYIqVNcRBeayArbu_VG/s1600/IMG_4434.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRsmuzjwoqtgImX6-duunqRoq4v3F0tosDGKjK_GNPVKLVKZANOMpA5H04a4hpNe_YjjbHzfohywjYO6pnE3IlBgTpWuDO6YY-Nu0aVoZTgwKOb5WACn0QiuZRSaYIqVNcRBeayArbu_VG/s320/IMG_4434.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This was carved into the side of a building. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Today, the room lies beyond the mosaics, near the one depicting Alexander and Darius. In the 1880s, according to the Baedeker, this room lay next to one in which gold and silver object, including jewelry, and cameos were on display. That is, things that ladies would have liked to have seen.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"></span>Douglass was there with ladies and he himself was no libertine, especially given his reaction to meeting Victoria Woodhull a couple of months later when they returned to Rome. He and they probably averted their eyes from this <i>Racolta.</i><br />
<i></i><br />
As for the rest of the collections, he concluded, "The musium is something to be seen not once but many times in order to comprehend its many attractions[.]" Certainly going to it before and after seeing the two sites would make the visit deeper and richer than a Sunday afternoon.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Sources:</span></div>
<ul style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Karl Baedeker Firm. <i><a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=1" target="_blank">Italy. Handbook for Travelers, Third Part: Southern Italy and Sicily</a></i> (7th, ed.; London: Dulac and Co, 1880).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Frederick Douglass, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/" target="_blank">Travel Diary</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
</ul>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-60184436842064982072019-06-29T09:04:00.002-04:002019-06-29T09:24:04.205-04:00[Saturday] 29 January [1887]: San Martino<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Whatever the morning was like, Frederick "<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/" target="_blank">Spent the fore noon in writing</a>." Clearly, he was not writing diary entries but more likely letters. He would make note of the recipient of letters, but usually when writing to family. Other sources indicate that he corresponded with more people than he noted in his journal.<br />
<br />
Later, he and Helen met with "Mrs Davis of Ind."<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/scholarly-edition-of-the-grand-tour-diaries-of-frederick-douglass-and-helen-pitts-douglass/oclc/56676659" target="_blank"> Mark Emerson, intrepid editor of the Douglasses' travel diaries</a> in the days before digitization, tracked down Mrs. Davis, discovering that she was <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=D2ErAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA340&lpg=PA340&dq=Clarkson+Davis+Spiceland+academy&source=bl&ots=AXzM5_rwbf&sig=ACfU3U2of0xJamXDDUVZwkt_37b6mts2iQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjSuNikzY7jAhUMXM0KHQg0BMMQ6AEwCHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Clarkson%20Davis%20Spiceland%20academy&f=false" target="_blank">Hannah Ellen Brown Davis</a> of Spiceland, Indiana, where she and her now-departed husband Clarkson (who had died in 1883), had run an <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=wW0bBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=Clarkson+Davis+Spiceland+academy&source=bl&ots=FhOx1J_UZL&sig=ACfU3U0Y7CEMxvbhqqueHJ_o8shUx8rY4A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjSuNikzY7jAhUMXM0KHQg0BMMQ6AEwBnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Clarkson%20Davis%20Spiceland%20academy&f=false" target="_blank">academy</a>.<br />
<br />
This "amiable lady," a teacher, raised in the Society of Friends but, according <a href="http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC0875&chunk.id=d1e153&toc.id=d1e153&brand=ia-books;query=#docView" target="_blank">to her memorial</a>, possessing "that catholicity in religion which belongs to real culture wherever it is found," and a lover of literature probably got along quite well with the Douglasses. He certainly impressed her. In the s<a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.08001/?sp=1&st=slideshow#slide-62" target="_blank">ingle letter from her to him in the Library of Congress, a Christmas 1889 wish to him while he served in Haiti</a>, she addressed him as "Reverend dear friend," and wrote, "with your weight of cares and perplexities, my thought has often gone in sympathy to you. To how few has it been given to serve their race and nation so long and so worthily. May God's grace return you to your country, your family and friends in safety." But, before that, after the Douglasses departed from Naples headed to Egypt, she composed a poem, "<a href="http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC0875&chunk.id=d1e153&toc.id=d1e153&brand=ia-books;query=#docView" target="_blank">To Frederick Douglass, On His Seventieth Birthday, While in Egypt</a>.":<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOIbOJeKklqdW3OLJiCTqeFkpaqVysrm9efFZwwTASa4pXUnJHotr5oL2CbDwLDWuRurudftLDN7cJRjshXGNW4MEfHIEhyfP4Ieqp3rpE2AtPMMDwKic5iJAJNHREQC6w4eaZGKPJ6bOV/s1600/HannahEDavis-PoemtoFD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="975" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOIbOJeKklqdW3OLJiCTqeFkpaqVysrm9efFZwwTASa4pXUnJHotr5oL2CbDwLDWuRurudftLDN7cJRjshXGNW4MEfHIEhyfP4Ieqp3rpE2AtPMMDwKic5iJAJNHREQC6w4eaZGKPJ6bOV/s640/HannahEDavis-PoemtoFD.jpg" width="392" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
"<a href="http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC0875&chunk.id=d1e153&toc.id=d1e153&brand=ia-books;query=#docView" target="_blank">To Frederick Douglass, on his seventieth birthday, while in Egypt</a>,"</div>
<div>
by Hannah E. Davis</div>
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</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1U9uuU1HyU3u_Ek6XSN9qVy1YIegGR-8upXBC9v9Whkds_dig14qQdZbgkxB3641J1UDB23lNB5R1Ni8eP7Eixj8uUZEywdbfgbD2jNcZ6KZWmoLL7_3OEYC9ht7ANsP6DNvPrPk1m4_l/s1600/HannahEDavis.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="368" data-original-width="288" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1U9uuU1HyU3u_Ek6XSN9qVy1YIegGR-8upXBC9v9Whkds_dig14qQdZbgkxB3641J1UDB23lNB5R1Ni8eP7Eixj8uUZEywdbfgbD2jNcZ6KZWmoLL7_3OEYC9ht7ANsP6DNvPrPk1m4_l/s320/HannahEDavis.JPG" width="250" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=wW0bBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=Clarkson+Davis+Spiceland+academy&source=bl&ots=FhOx1J_UZL&sig=ACfU3U0Y7CEMxvbhqqueHJ_o8shUx8rY4A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjSuNikzY7jAhUMXM0KHQg0BMMQ6AEwBnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Clarkson%20Davis%20Spiceland%20academy&f=false" target="_blank">Hannah Ellen Brown Davis</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<u><span style="color: #000120;"></span></u><br />
<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Spiceland,+IN+47385/@39.9241234,-85.7110366,10.3z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x886ad277b6442fcf:0x7a5a38c663069afb!8m2!3d39.838379!4d-85.4388608" target="_blank">Spiceland</a> lies just outside of Indianapolis, eastward and not far south off of I-70. I lived not far from it for a few weeks, in an extended-stay hotel, when I first moved there back in 2001 to begin work at the Douglass Papers project; but, that is a whole other story -- a few other stories, as a matter of fact. Spiceland also lies not too very far from Pendleton, as well. In his younger days, Douglass had suffered a beating there that had resulted in a broken hand that ached him for the rest of his life.<br />
<br />
But, I digress.<br />
<br />
Davis joined Frederick and Helen a they went up to another of the highest points in Naples to see "San Martino, a convent of the Capuchin Monks, the largest convent of the kind in the world." He goes on to explain to his diary that, " It is however no longer a living convent. It has been taken possession of by the Government, and its fine halls are now a musium full of paintings and many other interesting works of Art. The church in this old convent is one of the most costly in Europe."<br />
<br />
We ourselves saved this for the last day, or last half-day, since we would return to Rome that afternoon and nothing about it in the guide books promised anything that we were dying to see. After all, we were using Naples more as a base to see things around Naples. We had walked up toward Capodimonte on our first day -- not to see Capodimonte but to see the San Gennaro catacombs, which Douglass did not see, or did not write about seeing, but were quite worth a look and which tourist could go visit in those days. We chose to take a cab up to the museum on the day that we visited it, which was a last minute thing and involved changing train tickets and all sorts of boring logistical stuff that has nothing to do with Douglass. I'll just sum up that the cab ride was more fun than a roller coaster.<br />
<br />
Anyway, the point here is that, the hill up to Capodimonte rose at less of a grade than the hill up to San Martino, and our fifty-to-sixty year old twenty-first century selves only wanted to make it once.. San Martino looked more like you needed a grappling hook to ascend. To give you an idea in medieval and Renaissance military terms, which Douglass does not mention, but just above the former monastery rises Castle Sant' Elmo. This is from inside its walls:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjfyk5FI7feBnaR-otlXKeAlkVR-G9a22ev-5L7SwTl6JmqbYYVTH_ptbllJVV7gxpzHjmdHbmWM2YcX1rW3InIoEtYRJt7GjTEjg8MsU_AjPtiVTg6A4CjUu9UPBHr8Uyqck398gHWVrc/s1600/IMG_5139.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjfyk5FI7feBnaR-otlXKeAlkVR-G9a22ev-5L7SwTl6JmqbYYVTH_ptbllJVV7gxpzHjmdHbmWM2YcX1rW3InIoEtYRJt7GjTEjg8MsU_AjPtiVTg6A4CjUu9UPBHr8Uyqck398gHWVrc/s320/IMG_5139.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
This is what it looks like from Capodimonte. (The weather in this picture, by the way, was a bit more typical of what we experienced in Italy this time around -- about half the time we were there. To think a heat wave hit the next month.):<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGOuFiV2EbLL1A5EDfaiCs8c5DHqPupqStZBuBLnJh-HP8cEkzhr1lW310Co1-EGZ8Kn52BwrIgjVoX_Im1FKS0NSYmlYzm1DHSkWp8eGKbculJl0-tgRnPG6Yo58Tg-WPv-GwDhqzIMkb/s1600/IMG_4274.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGOuFiV2EbLL1A5EDfaiCs8c5DHqPupqStZBuBLnJh-HP8cEkzhr1lW310Co1-EGZ8Kn52BwrIgjVoX_Im1FKS0NSYmlYzm1DHSkWp8eGKbculJl0-tgRnPG6Yo58Tg-WPv-GwDhqzIMkb/s320/IMG_4274.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
<br />
Short on time and unwilling to climb the what-must-have-been-five-gazillion steps to get to the top of the hill, we just took one of the several funiculars. I thought it would be more exciting than it was and have views. No, it was just a train, going up a hill, but keeping your seat level, and with the usual views of graffitied walls and overgrown weeds.<br />
<br />
How did Douglass and his party get up? Well, according to the <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=148" target="_blank">Baedeker guide</a>, they could walk up a zigzag road or hire a donkey to an omnibus station. Then, they could ride the bus up an old military road that wound around the mountain. At various points, it seems, they could hop off and take smaller roads or steps the rest of the way up, or they could just take a carriage the whole way.<br />
<br />
Frederick, Helen, and Davis went in to see the museum. My companion and I just sat outside, deciding that the price of admission was probably not worth our time. Although the Baedeker insisted that San Martio "<a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=150" target="_blank">is not less remarkable for the beauty of its situation and its views, than for the great value of tis contents</a>," in our different centuries, arriving in our different ways, Douglass, me, and my companion all came to the same conclusion: "I have seen so much of these religious paintings, that I was less interested in what I found here than in the fine view of the city and harbor."<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCjScP6f6Db39xeasUzRMmDC5aWLR4RqiMpmXVGB4gby1q26LZuu156DvEOqdtLzxqKzZaoz0X_qNA2jFbLV_Wniwd48EyoqxtJ1ZWOCQBFZITcDJsBcjYK-TjV0X-ksq0aQuXLnb7kin7/s1600/IMG_5140.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCjScP6f6Db39xeasUzRMmDC5aWLR4RqiMpmXVGB4gby1q26LZuu156DvEOqdtLzxqKzZaoz0X_qNA2jFbLV_Wniwd48EyoqxtJ1ZWOCQBFZITcDJsBcjYK-TjV0X-ksq0aQuXLnb7kin7/s320/IMG_5140.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
We probably could have seen more had we gone in, but we enjoyed this well enough, and had to be on our way in any case (especially after I took up some time in a cameo shop where the proprietor, charming at first, ended up demonstrating that #MeToo has not reached this corner of Naples).<br />
<br />
Whatever Douglass did the next day was either so much fun or far too boring to record. All he wrote was "Heard a strange sermon at the U.P. Church on the greatness of man." That alone leaves so many questions that he never did answer.<br />
<br />
--------------------------------------------<br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sources:</span></i><br />
<ul style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,&quot; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0.5em; orphans: 2; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 2.5em; padding-right: 2.5em; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Karl Baedeker Firm. <i><a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=1" style="color: #993300; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Italy. Handbook for Travelers, Third Part: Southern Italy and Sicily</a></i> (7th, ed.; London: Dulac and Co, 1880).</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Frederick Douglass, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/" style="color: #660000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Travel Diary</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Mark G. Emerson, "<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/scholarly-edition-of-the-grand-tour-diaries-of-frederick-douglass-and-helen-pitts-douglass/oclc/56676659" style="color: #993300; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Scholarly edition of the grand tour diaries of Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts Douglass</a>" (Master's Thesis, Indiana University, 2003). </span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Others as linked.</span></li>
</ul>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-82520135604644449872019-06-28T10:46:00.000-04:002019-06-29T09:07:22.052-04:00Summer Touring Schedule (such as it is)The book tour, such as it is, continues. Now is the season of summer schools and institutes, which are always fantastic no matter how you participate in them.<br />
<br />
Last week, the lovely and brilliant <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Douglas-R.-Egerton/e/B001IYVGX2%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share" target="_blank">Douglas Egerton</a> and I drove down to <a href="https://www.lawrenceville.org/" target="_blank">Lawrenceville Academy</a> in Princeton, New Jersey, to speak to historian <a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-1924-5.html" target="_blank">Erik Chaput</a>'s summer school class on Frederick Douglass. The class is on Frederick Douglass, that is. Doug spoke about black abolition and I used Anna Murray to guide them through methods of research and ways to alert themselves to questions that they should be asking when they confront different types of information in documents. I had a great time, and I hope that they did, too. I forgot that they were high school seniors because they acted and thought like college seniors.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrtIjmJ06Yiqk4FfNlYhMg3gx9s4wfoerJsF5bNkwJGy_TnNr8Gfs8_d_LCg4dfu_wNdd4grZYb0f_sHA13TbAwnoAjG7gcNEJfWMyHAhKtCLmPhiZoijh0usuPtv8KZbyTZjdlXmPimgE/s1600/LawrencevilleGroup.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrtIjmJ06Yiqk4FfNlYhMg3gx9s4wfoerJsF5bNkwJGy_TnNr8Gfs8_d_LCg4dfu_wNdd4grZYb0f_sHA13TbAwnoAjG7gcNEJfWMyHAhKtCLmPhiZoijh0usuPtv8KZbyTZjdlXmPimgE/s320/LawrencevilleGroup.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
<i>Only the book in the center is mine. </i></div>
<div>
<i>The rest are only a fraction of Doug's output.</i></div>
<div>
<i>Erik took the picture.</i></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i></i><br />
Next up will be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Russell_Gao_Hodges" target="_blank">Graham Hodges'</a> NEH Seminar for teachers on <a href="https://www.neh.gov/programinstitutefellowship/abolitionism-and-underground-railroad" target="_blank">Abolition and the Underground Railroad</a> at Colgate University, followed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Berkin" target="_blank">Carol Berkin</a>'s on <a href="https://www.neh.gov/programinstitutefellowship/american-women-revolutionary-and-civil-wars" target="_blank">American Women at War</a> in New York City, then on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to chair a panel on abolition at the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic's annual meeting, followed by the Chittenango Boat Landing at the beginning of August. That last one is open to the public.<br />
<br />
Fall will take this show overseas again, this time to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_upon_Tyne" target="_blank">Newcastle-upon-Tyne</a> for <a href="https://www.ncl.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Newcastle University</a>'s INSIGHTS series of lectures (<a href="https://www.ncl.ac.uk/media/wwwnclacuk/universityevents/files/INSIGHTS%20Public%20Lectures%20February%20-%20May%202019%20(updated).pdf" target="_blank">this is last year's program</a>). Newcastle was the home of the Richardsons, who began the campaign to purchase Douglass's freedom and provide the seed money for the<i> North Star</i>. Guess what my talk will be about?<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, (among other things like two book proposals, one submitted) I'm writing an essay for an anthology,<i> Frederick Douglass in Context</i>, edited by <a href="https://www.parisnanterre.fr/m-michael-roy--716448.kjsp" target="_blank">Michael Roy</a>, who was part of <a href="https://redehja.hypotheses.org/831" target="_blank">that conference in Paris last year</a>. My essay is about Douglass and family, and I don't want to retread what I have already said nor do I want to tread on what I know of <a href="https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/Departments/English/People/DeptDirectory/Ezra_Greenspan" target="_blank">Ezra Greenspan</a>'s upcoming work (as if I could ever be as good!). Looking back on something that you've gone over a million times to see something new can be a challenge because you have to step away from your own patterns and ruts of thinking when you sometimes aren't even aware that you have them. I also have a problem figuring out when I'm saying something original because I'm too aware of where I picked up so many ideas and then I've lived with my own configuration of them for so long. Knowing what you have can sometimes be a different thing from stepping back and re-asking, "what do I have?"<br />
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Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-51387818753540236012019-06-17T07:30:00.000-04:002019-06-17T07:30:04.447-04:00[Friday,] 28 January [1887]: To the Bourbon PalaceOn their first full day in Naples, the Douglasses joined a group that included <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelia_Sarah_Gates" target="_blank">Adelia Gates</a>, a <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175035244089&view=2up&seq=4" target="_blank">well-travelled</a> botanical artist, which was a common field for women artists in those days, her niece <a href="https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_217469" target="_blank">Eleanor Lewis</a>, who subsequently donated<a href="https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/adelia-gates-flower-painter-or-botanical-illustrator" target="_blank"> Gates's collection</a> to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and a Mr. and Mrs. Hipwell, whom <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/scholarly-edition-of-the-grand-tour-diaries-of-frederick-douglass-and-helen-pitts-douglass/oclc/56676659" target="_blank">Mark Emerson could not identify when he annotated Douglass's travel diary</a>. Helen and Eleanor Lewis had hit it off in Rome, and I confess that I misidentified her as Edmonia Lewis, the African-Chippewa-American artists living in Rome who met both of the Douglasses while they were there. Edmonia Lewis did loan Helen some books, but they did not go to the museums together.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.museocapodimonte.beniculturali.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Depliant-Capodimonte_EN-2.pdf" target="_blank">Capodimonti</a> is today, as then, a large park containing the former Bourbon Palace that serves as both a museum of the palace and of part of the Farnese collection housed in several places. At the top of one of the several hills that surround the Bay of Naples and make up the city, Douglass described Capodimonti as "a splendid place giving us a splendid view of the Bay, Vesuvius, Serento, Capri, and the surrounding country." From <a href="https://www.galleriatanca.com/sold-items/view-of-the-gulf-of-naples-taken-from-capodimonte" target="_blank">images</a> <a href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-john-robert-cozens-the-bay-of-naples-from-capodimonte-italy-google-137388149.html?pv=1&stamp=2&imageid=9BE90BF7-2B27-4026-86AE-F9CF47E5E623&p=399761&n=0&orientation=0&pn=3&searchtype=0&IsFromSearch=1&srch=foo%3dbar%26st%3d0%26pn%3d3%26ps%3d100%26sortby%3d2%26resultview%3dsortbyPopular%26npgs%3d0%26qt%3ditaly%2520naples%2520capodimonte%26qt_raw%3ditaly%2520naples%2520capodimonte%26lic%3d3%26mr%3d0%26pr%3d0%26ot%3d0%26creative%3d%26ag%3d0%26hc%3d0%26pc%3d%26blackwhite%3d%26cutout%3d%26tbar%3d1%26et%3d0x000000000000000000000%26vp%3d0%26loc%3d0%26imgt%3d0%26dtfr%3d%26dtto%3d%26size%3d0xFF%26archive%3d1%26groupid%3d%26pseudoid%3d%26a%3d%26cdid%3d%26cdsrt%3d%26name%3d%26qn%3d%26apalib%3d%26apalic%3d%26lightbox%3d%26gname%3d%26gtype%3d%26xstx%3d0%26simid%3d%26saveQry%3d%26editorial%3d1%26nu%3d%26t%3d%26edoptin%3d%26customgeoip%3d%26cap%3d1%26cbstore%3d1%26vd%3d0%26lb%3d%26fi%3d2%26edrf%3d%26ispremium%3d1%26flip%3d0%26pl%3d" target="_blank">that</a> I <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-four-views-of-naples-including-the-city-and-the-island-of-capri-seen-from-d15692" target="_blank">could</a> find online, that was probably true in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but less so today given the trees that have now grown along the perimeter. The best I could do (also given the weather on the day we visited -- we seemed to have brought the lingering drear of Syracuse, New York, to the Mediterranean with us) was from the second floor of the Palace. Yes, that is the ubiquitous Vesuvius there in the background. The ubiquitous Capri and Sorento were not visible on this day.:<br />
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Just as Douglass saw in his time, "The Palace is a plain stately building without,..." :<br />
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"….but very richly furnished and abounds with numerous works of Art, paintings and statuary." It looks a bit like Versailles in the parts meant to showcase the building as a palace, but not quite so glitzy. They also have an impressive display of armory. The paintings and statuary provided me with much material for a profane running commentary because, as Douglass said the next day when they went to visit a museum at San Martino, "I have seen so much of these religious paintings, that I was less interested in what I found here than in the fine view of the city and the harbor." Soooo many Virgins, and annunciations, and Jesus meeting John the Baptist, and nativities!<br />
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Two paintings did capture Douglass's attention. "A picture of the assassination of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Julius_Caesar" target="_blank">Julius Ceaser</a> was very striking," he commented. Alas, I looked and looked but failed to see it. Although the arrangement of the art followed nineteenth century conventions, covering every inch of very tall walls to the point that you could hardly tell what some of them depicted, this one is supposed to be massive and difficult to miss.<br />
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The other, "one of Michel Angelo, kissing the hand of his dead friend, Vitoria Colonna, fixed attention," certainly did. Hanging directly across from the entrance to the room, with the light of the woman's dress emerging from the dark canvas, the image pulls your attention toward it from several rooms away.<br />
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Michelangelo kissing Colonna's hand, clutching his male friend's hand feels so quiet and sad. More than that, this secular image of loss would affect a man who had so recently lost his own friend of two decades, his wife of forty-four years, and yearly learned of the death of yet another friend or family member. The <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/michelangelo-honoring-the-dead-body-of-vittoria-colonna-news-photo/164072648" target="_blank">painting itself was only seven years old itself</a> at the time that Douglass saw it, so would have been fresh and bright, and not mentioned in his Baedeker, as the painting of Ceasar's death was.<br />
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Adelia Gates was an interesting companion in this excursion. In her sixties, she was a couple of years younger than Frederick and had spent the Bleeding Kansas years in the state on the anti-slavery side. I wonder if she had some influence on the <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2019/06/8-capella-vecchio.html" target="_blank">topic of his speech to the Presbyterian Church</a>, given that Brown first rose to infamy at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottawatomie_massacre" target="_blank">Potawatomi</a>.<br />
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Later, when the Douglasses returned to Rome after their sojourn through Egypt, <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2017/06/following-helen-douglass-following.html" target="_blank">Helen described her visit to the Capitolini Museum</a> and Vatican<a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2017/06/following-helen-douglass-following_3.html" target="_blank"> in the company of Eleanor Lewis</a> (when I misidentified Eleanor as Edmonia). <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.06008/?sp=1&st=slideshow#slide-71" target="_blank">Adelia Gates was there, as well</a>. After Rome and Naples, Gates turned southward toward Algiers. She wanted to see Carthage, to see the Sahara, and to paint the flora of the oasis. Then, she, too, voyaged up the Nile and through the Holy Land. Gates's <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175035244089&view=2up&seq=1" target="_blank">biography</a> does not mention if Eleanor was in tow, although she seems to be up to this point. If Gates had already planned to cross the Mediterranean, I wonder if she influenced the Douglasses' decision to go south instead of turn back north as they travelled along the Amalfi coast. While in Rome, I wonder if the Douglasses gave them any travel advisories for Egypt. Either way, imagine what they may have spoken of in their discussions about Africa and what each thought of the origins and meanings of what they, in the nineteenth century, considered "civilization:" she the nice, white lady artist and he through a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness" target="_blank">double veil</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Sources:</span><br />
<ul style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Karl Baedeker Firm. <i><a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=1" target="_blank">Italy. Handbook for Travelers, Third Part: Southern Italy and Sicily</a></i> (7th, ed.; London: Dulac and Co, 1880).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Frederick Douglass, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/" target="_blank">Travel Diary</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.06008/?sp=1&st=slideshow#slide-71" target="_blank">Helen [Pitts] Douglass to Jennie Pitts, 25 April 1887, Rome, Italy</a>, General Correspondence, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mark G. Emerson, "<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/scholarly-edition-of-the-grand-tour-diaries-of-frederick-douglass-and-helen-pitts-douglass/oclc/56676659" target="_blank">Scholarly edition of the grand tour diaries of Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts Douglass</a>" (Master's Thesis, Indiana University, 2003). </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Adela E. Orpen,<i> The Chronicles of the Sid, or the Life and Travels of Adelia Gates</i> (New York: The Fleming H. Revell Co., [1893]).</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></li>
</ul>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-60710227628263761342019-06-15T19:47:00.001-04:002019-06-16T11:20:45.967-04:008 Capella Vecchio<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Once the Douglasses had arrived in Naples, where did they go for lodging? The Baedeker mentions several first and second class hotels, many in locations still considered choice along the waterfront, and pensiones for "<a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=80" target="_blank">a stay of from 3-4 days upward</a>." Frederick, however, had d<a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.06008/?st=slideshow#slide-11" target="_blank">irected his son Lewis to write to him care of Rev. J.C. Fletcher in Naples</a>. Fletcher was a minister at one of the few "English" and therefore Protestant churches in the city, Presbyterian in this case, located at 8 Cappella Vecchia 2, an address quite difficult to find today both on the tourist map and on my phone.</div>
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But I did it. Here is what Google Maps shows from my computer at home. I assure you this is not quite what it looked like on my phone. On my phone, only a street shaped a bit like a reverse L appeared. As on this picture, the scale is usually difficult to determine. The pin also did not show on my phone.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYiA3US3toRNaAvrbAD6iSZcpmguhx41VRK7EX6wdFjaVzAfyBtblII9YwCMTzuEt23svLJ_FWJQ9KecMmAuAPFC4AMXNaBL2JdHr1eN2bJ8sEeT_-eBc2f1fSXlkeL6ANEADNc4RtCNLH/s1600/CapellaVecchioNaples.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="970" data-original-width="986" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYiA3US3toRNaAvrbAD6iSZcpmguhx41VRK7EX6wdFjaVzAfyBtblII9YwCMTzuEt23svLJ_FWJQ9KecMmAuAPFC4AMXNaBL2JdHr1eN2bJ8sEeT_-eBc2f1fSXlkeL6ANEADNc4RtCNLH/s320/CapellaVecchioNaples.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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As it turned out, we spent a lot of time in that general area, since that is in the "historic" part of the town where most of the tourists go and has most of the restaurants. Some of the surrounding streets, especially those around that triangle shaped monument and angling toward the water have names you might recognize if you follow high fashion. </div>
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This, by the way, is the monument, The Monument to the Neapolitan Martyrs of the Risorgimento, which was there when the Douglasses were.:</div>
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The Cappella Vecchio would be on the other side of the buildings to the left. </div>
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By the way, those tents in the background there cover a lovely little bar. About the time most Americans or English think of eating dinner, most Italians settle in for a nice cappuccino or glass of wine and a little snack. They don't eat dinner until much much later, nine or ten o'clock. We noticed that in Spain and in Normandy, too, but that's another story.</div>
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Anyway, I mention the bar because we had already had a glass there on a couple of occasions when I went in search of Cappella Vecchia, expecting a big church or even a modest church or anything that might have once passed for a church, rectory, and school that had once served a modest-sized English-language community into the twentieth century. Turns out, we had passed Cappella Vecchia not only every time we went to that bar, but several other times as well. It just looked more like what we in America consider an alley. You have to adjust your eyes in medieval towns. </div>
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This was the entrance to the street. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE0uB4zObj3g185b1Wx0Q8jPZIiAnlcziWwYeWke6zDb9VJ2c5h2aSZhB9jqDrjhUxoT6LPBkDghqcHCqnOdvANgs5JRd-h0AAFtbOB3PB1kWZlF_T_aUFWPcAFJMosvt_tfcOQztGI9Qf/s1600/IMG_4513.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: left; color: #0066cc; float: left; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxJRpNGeYf7vJ11ExbK3mdvtz7FCZp9_rtTncO_miDNXie4VxBpDNvEbLwKlcrnyiltrudMb0GiP9s3naVD5cwCYs-FPFQJcrZ89IWl9E4CJQKRQLcbrbxknGGKwm3itRCOeYCg-EY9mFN/s1600/IMG_4493.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxJRpNGeYf7vJ11ExbK3mdvtz7FCZp9_rtTncO_miDNXie4VxBpDNvEbLwKlcrnyiltrudMb0GiP9s3naVD5cwCYs-FPFQJcrZ89IWl9E4CJQKRQLcbrbxknGGKwm3itRCOeYCg-EY9mFN/s320/IMG_4493.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Looking down the street. The garbage and graffiti is normal.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Q8zEGoreEm3ToUB1rAhDomsrW73SdpTM5WJhLBZdjcpaP7D-8pFh-ON2SOq3k0BXCVWffIk2eHmDfRnGgHbPpnXdkjse3JSa9iYycxjqZBNlqes7xB2MleoK4rUlVptlf5_R1jG2wtsS/s1600/IMG_4495.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Q8zEGoreEm3ToUB1rAhDomsrW73SdpTM5WJhLBZdjcpaP7D-8pFh-ON2SOq3k0BXCVWffIk2eHmDfRnGgHbPpnXdkjse3JSa9iYycxjqZBNlqes7xB2MleoK4rUlVptlf5_R1jG2wtsS/s320/IMG_4495.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
This is number 8, but who knows if it were number 8 when Douglass was there.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJe74VoW-z8x_9vtsFcvW7fKu1XswkWM-KQnKk44ytbFMfLDeyyvBOE52pptLV__ln42vDZLSr8MkLz16RFfxcQ-l4dXNu7vOwAJgb09WCEuLZBAj6JlrXTre0KmT-_Pphyphenhyphen7HpZDfrjSV1/s1600/IMG_4496.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJe74VoW-z8x_9vtsFcvW7fKu1XswkWM-KQnKk44ytbFMfLDeyyvBOE52pptLV__ln42vDZLSr8MkLz16RFfxcQ-l4dXNu7vOwAJgb09WCEuLZBAj6JlrXTre0KmT-_Pphyphenhyphen7HpZDfrjSV1/s320/IMG_4496.JPG" width="240" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFQr2d8WYgYmFXyOPkcntUfYDUK9LLdGup_n76g0-a1NWxzoQRMYV_Zk92DnCusXdmL1yx9iY5xBPTOSxZbgVISNCeeBgNkDlF1yzhPLJKegKYS-LuL9lOJ7uC9UePzamNeT6ODO6kf_Zy/s1600/IMG_4498.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFQr2d8WYgYmFXyOPkcntUfYDUK9LLdGup_n76g0-a1NWxzoQRMYV_Zk92DnCusXdmL1yx9iY5xBPTOSxZbgVISNCeeBgNkDlF1yzhPLJKegKYS-LuL9lOJ7uC9UePzamNeT6ODO6kf_Zy/s320/IMG_4498.JPG" style="cursor: move;" width="240" /></a></div>
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At the end of the street we came to this, a sort of courtyard to what looked like private homes and businesses.:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFQr2d8WYgYmFXyOPkcntUfYDUK9LLdGup_n76g0-a1NWxzoQRMYV_Zk92DnCusXdmL1yx9iY5xBPTOSxZbgVISNCeeBgNkDlF1yzhPLJKegKYS-LuL9lOJ7uC9UePzamNeT6ODO6kf_Zy/s1600/IMG_4498.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizHuOh35hZao0XnvvKyraWsqSqfYJSbtcDQMB5C3HSjWLXLTM8WmLclifP2NpJKSCmi7bQt6_Ah1Cs88K40dLP66M7rDt7xGfD8UREwiEUWgNUF2uc2RpJZzBtc3Di0LBCz1S5EqzCxfNi/s1600/IMG_4504.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizHuOh35hZao0XnvvKyraWsqSqfYJSbtcDQMB5C3HSjWLXLTM8WmLclifP2NpJKSCmi7bQt6_Ah1Cs88K40dLP66M7rDt7xGfD8UREwiEUWgNUF2uc2RpJZzBtc3Di0LBCz1S5EqzCxfNi/s320/IMG_4504.JPG" width="240" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFO5HyXd4t8HnPouV2LVTXenQRT8Gl9J0hh1wVA3ctAeRJ-OmWyiMJ37Mx-18eEWgrbH_8D3bYel1w-MGq-EwNT9gN2zQ0rwMTjc2dwSmmcAMFU9wR-HcsphjU4sbcxcNRsoe3fAqncSRa/s1600/IMG_4501.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFO5HyXd4t8HnPouV2LVTXenQRT8Gl9J0hh1wVA3ctAeRJ-OmWyiMJ37Mx-18eEWgrbH_8D3bYel1w-MGq-EwNT9gN2zQ0rwMTjc2dwSmmcAMFU9wR-HcsphjU4sbcxcNRsoe3fAqncSRa/s320/IMG_4501.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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Inside of the courtyard, to the right as you enter, I found this. Not necessarily a church.:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggxYFPIIKL1geFJxMpPbJYri9AAkl1Yleyug71B2tPcfbEQCIDfqeJ_4X9vJVK98ryJrFlC1e6_PBS6Z5qMEEKPAiOB8gWcGhvh8VYhDSVbmkMYfAxJwIHxcfpoKZOikZfqZUc3ngrPJIv/s1600/IMG_4499.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggxYFPIIKL1geFJxMpPbJYri9AAkl1Yleyug71B2tPcfbEQCIDfqeJ_4X9vJVK98ryJrFlC1e6_PBS6Z5qMEEKPAiOB8gWcGhvh8VYhDSVbmkMYfAxJwIHxcfpoKZOikZfqZUc3ngrPJIv/s320/IMG_4499.JPG" style="cursor: move;" width="240" /></a></div>
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Alas, this was just a bit of the graffiti in the archway to the courtyard and along the street. A faction seems to celebrate fascism with glorification of Mussolini and his ilk, including Trump in that set. I wondered if they were too young to have remembered what happened last time. Our guide in the Colosseum certainly had no love for the old guy, but that was Rome.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkbmWmBJINz_Yjn8YpiraeDKgqJ8qFIpll9N6b_gERqRkI86gY5gBKqLJBTqw5NIokQEptgqaG2F5DBXLMcZ9QmpKb6XDw3sMt_hY3xGOdQkoyooE_pI6x9UseKZNdcQgNpfRBJ3xWqtMl/s1600/IMG_4508.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkbmWmBJINz_Yjn8YpiraeDKgqJ8qFIpll9N6b_gERqRkI86gY5gBKqLJBTqw5NIokQEptgqaG2F5DBXLMcZ9QmpKb6XDw3sMt_hY3xGOdQkoyooE_pI6x9UseKZNdcQgNpfRBJ3xWqtMl/s320/IMG_4508.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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This was the view from the arch backdown the street, including the ubiquitous and deadly scooters and satellite dishes, neither of which were a site of Douglass's time, and laundry, which was..:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE0uB4zObj3g185b1Wx0Q8jPZIiAnlcziWwYeWke6zDb9VJ2c5h2aSZhB9jqDrjhUxoT6LPBkDghqcHCqnOdvANgs5JRd-h0AAFtbOB3PB1kWZlF_T_aUFWPcAFJMosvt_tfcOQztGI9Qf/s1600/IMG_4513.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfTNiSvWX9AjE1Fvu2hlYbZFadGbdRrcOslaeMAK6wxH9lOk4CY8eq2TGYW6py12wx0B2OuQl_0gcHg7qXma4SUI0FwyzEbhI-qc1TEMkafGtDe4YkUrgqzzgHKkD1Y42ok8N4rNVUHPAq/s1600/IMG_4506.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #0066cc; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfTNiSvWX9AjE1Fvu2hlYbZFadGbdRrcOslaeMAK6wxH9lOk4CY8eq2TGYW6py12wx0B2OuQl_0gcHg7qXma4SUI0FwyzEbhI-qc1TEMkafGtDe4YkUrgqzzgHKkD1Y42ok8N4rNVUHPAq/s320/IMG_4506.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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Back on the main street, looking down toward where the Douglasses would have stayed. That building in the foreground is clearly much more recent, so I wondered if the church stood there and was torn down since or perhaps became the victim of an Allied bomb. There is a parking garage just behind it, but the number 8 building, we could see thorough the grimy main floor door windows, seemed to have some construction going on inside. The floor and other architectural features were marble and the whole building seemed to have been adapted to multi-person housing. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv62yzkYQaJO_wRG0J51dVALVqVsLGGBamLWCxim1vWz70cCHdsaIvsNnOMwoBuaWhVq7qS6MEADs1-AZC50cfrNgte81u4xAP3WnSqaZb_Qaef-A8uuY6XH3BVdi2u-efp7XZWfPpdZ8r/s1600/IMG_4511.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv62yzkYQaJO_wRG0J51dVALVqVsLGGBamLWCxim1vWz70cCHdsaIvsNnOMwoBuaWhVq7qS6MEADs1-AZC50cfrNgte81u4xAP3WnSqaZb_Qaef-A8uuY6XH3BVdi2u-efp7XZWfPpdZ8r/s320/IMG_4511.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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Here is a bird's eye view courtesy of Google Maps:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixJzmWF3nNfSX5ygiSqQoTWgGPVvyp63SAPkqnhw6qmp1NiZsmlZt8sTVsqWLnDrM_F-H76T2KN8e7OVauQJpvIwyEIVNtS2FNEq5PPmkUWZ8Fvje6xcucUUNGvg7f-fz2g6JFawGjNe3-/s1600/CapellaVecchioBirdsEyeNaples.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="970" data-original-width="1245" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixJzmWF3nNfSX5ygiSqQoTWgGPVvyp63SAPkqnhw6qmp1NiZsmlZt8sTVsqWLnDrM_F-H76T2KN8e7OVauQJpvIwyEIVNtS2FNEq5PPmkUWZ8Fvje6xcucUUNGvg7f-fz2g6JFawGjNe3-/s320/CapellaVecchioBirdsEyeNaples.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Alas, the one close-to-contemporary map that I have found in my limited search in not sharp enough to tell much more, and it dates to 1912.</div>
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Staying with the Fletchers. whom he mentions several time in his diary, and among winter tourist and expatriates from England and the United States, shaped the Douglasses' visit and certainly led to Frederick being called upon to speak. <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.01001/?st=slideshow#slide-28" target="_blank">The head of the Presbyterian Church and Fletcher's co-worker if not boss, the Rev. Johnson Irvine, called upon Douglass to speak about John Brown on 1 February 1887</a>, which not one of the regular meetings of the church. The following Sunday, he attended the Methodist church in the city, which was not an English church but for Italian Methodists, and "<a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.01001/?st=slideshow#slide-30" target="_blank">was called upon for a few words at the close, which were interpreted by Mr. Jones</a>." Jones was the Rev. Thomas W. Jones, who headed the southern Methodist missionary district in Italy. Douglass had begun his spiritual life as a Methodist, so you can imagine he drew upon that in these "few words." </div>
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Douglass's speech, according to himself, went something like: "<a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.01001/?st=slideshow#slide-30" target="_blank">I congratulated the congregation that they had now the Liberty to worship outside the Romish Church, and said a few words of human Brotherhood</a>." He wasn't so much being explicitly anti-Catholic (which he, let's face it, was) as referring to the events of the previous two decades in Italy that had allowed for more religious freedom in Italy by breaking some of the Vatican's control over the newly unified nation. Jones interpreted what he said for the congregation. </div>
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Where this was, however, was difficult to determine, especially since I am well-versed in neither Methodist nor Naples history. The Baedker had no reference to a Methodist Church, but it did mention "<i>Italian Service of the Waldensian Church"</i> which was held on Sunday evenings in the Scotch church. I don't know exactly what all of that means, but some searching turned up that the Methodists worked with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians" target="_blank">Waldensians</a> in Italy and Presbyterians are of Scottish origin. </div>
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So, a wild-assed and semi-educated guess might have the Presbyterians, who had Sunday services at 11 am and 3pm, loaning their church building out to the Methodists and Waldensians for an evening service. The Waldensians also had another, presumably morning service, in their church in <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Montecalvario,+Naples,+Metropolitan+City+of+Naples,+Italy/@40.8513155,14.2474583,15.31z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x133b085bfa003531:0xa0db0d390bea867b!8m2!3d40.8471272!4d14.2468615" target="_blank">Montecalvario</a>, which is a neighborhood north of the Presbyterian Church and partly on a hillside.</div>
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Mark Emerson, who annotated <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/56676659" target="_blank">Douglass's travel diary for his master's thesis</a>, found it on a street called San Anna di Palazzo. I could not find that easily on my phone but have found it on my computer. I'm pretty sure we passed it once or twice.:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2zgwYoO66OPUIXdVBx111BUdYyP029z-hePQRWfkqm3_XYnRdYxJHLtrjLdys4kbrGuGmhzLpy3bMwgueaeNeSqfqNUQ9kkeaXg3XFty1wEf_mtGTII3BHWXLk3y6Gk5d8MAmagoYVW_f/s1600/2019-06-15.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2zgwYoO66OPUIXdVBx111BUdYyP029z-hePQRWfkqm3_XYnRdYxJHLtrjLdys4kbrGuGmhzLpy3bMwgueaeNeSqfqNUQ9kkeaXg3XFty1wEf_mtGTII3BHWXLk3y6Gk5d8MAmagoYVW_f/s400/2019-06-15.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Note its proximity to the Presbyterian church. In any case, at this point, not finding it on my phone, however, I had to make the determination if I was on a Douglass's trip or my own. I chose the latter. Sometimes you just have to live your own life.</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaYQBzgYxmcQ7qMLLr7phqvN4fRKBacxRbjkqnVgqBkq9sDCI5bVXEe1V6IULsveQUd8vuSJVlnPLPbfo639o9GigFsz8wBCEMrVzWKH1pkSaUlBceC2ZzOSwXgLJED2y4QLvObDA4IrtK/s1600/IMG_4511.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><u></u><u></u>------------------------------------<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Sources:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Karl Baedeker Firm. <i><a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t4hn0636t&view=2up&seq=1" target="_blank">Italy. Handbook for Travelers, Third Part: Southern Italy and Sicily</a></i> (7th, ed.; London: Dulac and Co, 1880).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.06008/?sp=1&st=slideshow#slide-10" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass to Lewis (and Amelia) Douglass, Rome, Italy, 24 January 1887</a>, General Correspondence, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Frederick Douglass, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/" target="_blank">Travel Diary</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
</ul>
Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-73148765147129451272019-06-11T08:46:00.000-04:002019-06-11T13:01:50.251-04:00Picture of "Mrs. Frederick Douglass, Jr." Back in 2011, when I was researching in the Walter O. Evans Collection in Savannah (no, all you reviewers and interviewers, David Blight was not the first nor only biographer to use that collection, as he himself would point out), I found this <a href="https://leighfought.blogspot.com/2011/05/day-four-may-25-2011-coolest-thing-i.html" target="_blank">piece of an extended Douglass family puzzle via Frederick Douglass, Jr.'s wife, Virginia L. Molyneaux Hewlett</a>.<br />
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I have a bit of a file on Virginia Hewlett Douglass, but not much of her ended up in the book because her circle of action did not overlap enough with the ones that drove the narrative in my story. She may end up figuring into Ezra Greenspan's study of the wider Douglass family -- at least I hope she does.<br />
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In this file, however, I don't have a picture of her and, in fact, don't think I had seen a picture of her, although I found one of her father and her brother as well as those of her husband. Then, this weekend,<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/these-personal-photo-albums-offer-rare-glimpse-bostons-black-society-during-civil-war-180972290/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR3tMiFYuhqOMsh9NADjyCQTTeug2NZEE-U9xElfzvKvWe-F6a8N2drFHfk" target="_blank"> a friend shared a story on Smithsonian.com about a photo album donated to the Boston Atheneum that had once belonged to Harriet Bell Hayden, wife of Lewis Hayden.</a><br />
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The Haydens, by the way, were some of the most interesting people of the nineteenth century. They should be up there with Harriet Tubman and Douglass himself. Their house on Beacon Hill has a landmark on it today, and is part of the National Parks walking tour. Here it is from a visit that I took with a Gilder Lehrman Teacher's Seminar, run by David Blight in 2017 (Yes, <i>THAT</i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416590315/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0" target="_blank">David Blight </a>-- he has been really cool, inviting me to speak to this seminar two years in a row and to go on this field trip. Alas, last summer the weather did not cooperate <i>and</i> I had a broken toe.):<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKx4_Y4TYJY-RPvqS-84bShzZpP__oTJ9ZvYMFf_Z05b0wYn8pHT205KCGWaexBhxPjM3ArK-FNLxXt2iVs87Q-KkzCPMURgrCD9T4GA8KfOSIHtGgY6F0NVLDSN-L2MhaJhTCQowB-hcC/s1600/IMG_6564.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKx4_Y4TYJY-RPvqS-84bShzZpP__oTJ9ZvYMFf_Z05b0wYn8pHT205KCGWaexBhxPjM3ArK-FNLxXt2iVs87Q-KkzCPMURgrCD9T4GA8KfOSIHtGgY6F0NVLDSN-L2MhaJhTCQowB-hcC/s320/IMG_6564.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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"Home of Lewis Hayden, 1811-1889</div>
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Fugitive Slave -- Leading Abolitionist</div>
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Prince Hall Mason -- Rescuer of Shadrach</div>
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Member of the General Court</div>
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Messenger to the Secretary of State</div>
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A Meeting Place of Abolitionists</div>
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and a Station on </div>
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the Underground Railroad</div>
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The Heritage Guild, Inc."</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDex5V0qGj3mjQVyj-TzSGmWVQdjYHmk5mfPtJ1eNZHkAHCzbmeH-0FfQTDQq1Sr1WfA9jZbEH6w_SU7SghEGBHFrKl0jVlf8p6hf-vq-jimgLGUvC6omeD4mnmHAZQ3XJ3Lcmcj128jWo/s1600/IMG_6565.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDex5V0qGj3mjQVyj-TzSGmWVQdjYHmk5mfPtJ1eNZHkAHCzbmeH-0FfQTDQq1Sr1WfA9jZbEH6w_SU7SghEGBHFrKl0jVlf8p6hf-vq-jimgLGUvC6omeD4mnmHAZQ3XJ3Lcmcj128jWo/s320/IMG_6565.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lewis Hayden House, Beacon Hill, Boston, 2017</i></td></tr>
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Harriet Bell Hayden's album is supposed to contain many photos of the Boston black community, and Virginia Hewlett's is just one of many. The label on the image says "Mrs. Frederick Douglass," but the handwriting matches that on other pages, which suggest that it is not an autograph and was likely added later. The style of clothing suggests that this was Miss Hewlett rather than Mrs. Douglass, Jr., or, if Mrs. Douglass, Jr., very newly so. </div>
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Here she is:</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwOJbQnVGOflNr7Wb2hbfBpQ2rQAmZNenFsmf68KucCLWC1vDp7BHtdNwO5KAn2TAStnRnML0Sm9FtPPbvJkWD6pyVKcjELttBxZcHLTpJWWozYVVJDdaGlIB8Iy0BsiIPtg0_l1wofyTV/s1600/VirginiaMolyneauxHewlettDouglass-BostonAtheneaum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwOJbQnVGOflNr7Wb2hbfBpQ2rQAmZNenFsmf68KucCLWC1vDp7BHtdNwO5KAn2TAStnRnML0Sm9FtPPbvJkWD6pyVKcjELttBxZcHLTpJWWozYVVJDdaGlIB8Iy0BsiIPtg0_l1wofyTV/s400/VirginiaMolyneauxHewlettDouglass-BostonAtheneaum.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/these-personal-photo-albums-offer-rare-glimpse-bostons-black-society-during-civil-war-180972290/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR3tMiFYuhqOMsh9NADjyCQTTeug2NZEE-U9xElfzvKvWe-F6a8N2drFHfk" target="_blank">Virginia L. Molyneaux Hewlett Douglass</a></i></td></tr>
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Note the detailing on her dress, the quality of the cloth, the boning in the bodice and gathering at the waist. So pretty! Then, her direct gaze at the camera. </div>
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Frederick Douglass, Jr., remembered seeing her first in 1864 when she, at the age of fifteen, read a poem of her own composition to the Massachusetts 5th Cavalry of which his brother, Charles Douglass, was a part. Frederick, Jr., seven years her senior, was himself a recruiter at the time. Years later, he transcribed her poem in a scrapbook now in the Walter O. Evans Collection (from which most of this information comes):</div>
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To the fifth Mass. Cavalry. Presented to the non commissioned officers at a Ball given by them March 29th 1864 at Dedham Mass. Miss Virginie L. Molyneaux Hewlett. </blockquote>
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Soldiers we have met together, </div>
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But soon we’ll part perhaps forever. </div>
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Though there may be sorrow in our hearts, </div>
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Though tears may fall from our eyes, </div>
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Still we feel, our loyal brothers </div>
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You are struggling for your right, </div>
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And you soon will win and keep it </div>
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By your bravery and might. </div>
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Brothers do ye feel afraid? </div>
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Would ye now give up the glory?</div>
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On, on, ye forever on, for God and victory </div>
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He has heard his people’s cry, </div>
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Has promised succor from on high. </div>
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There have many gone before you, </div>
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Many more are here to follow, </div>
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Forward, then, and let this be your cry, </div>
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‘Living we will be victorious,
Or dying our deaths shall be glorious.'</div>
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[I confess that it continues from there, but I only transcribed enough to get the jist.]</div>
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Here he is about the time that he might have met Virginia.:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjR7ihMjfWEhACoFCODbDgMz18xNovCbdhDbBT5YaLNRiAE4tRP_zy5ndrmK-dbqBJU_sTM5zmdkINcRdoO-vPzYqPaST047VAjq5VRpEmCOEcghP5O4g4jkwgakGY9nbXmODTu5v7Qnnh/s1600/FDjr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="625" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjR7ihMjfWEhACoFCODbDgMz18xNovCbdhDbBT5YaLNRiAE4tRP_zy5ndrmK-dbqBJU_sTM5zmdkINcRdoO-vPzYqPaST047VAjq5VRpEmCOEcghP5O4g4jkwgakGY9nbXmODTu5v7Qnnh/s320/FDjr.jpg" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Frederick Douglass, Jr.</i></td></tr>
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Handsome, no? I think this may have been taken at the same place where his brothers had their pictures taken in their uniforms; but that is a post for another time. For some reason, I love that all of the children have their mother's eyes, but you can see him setting his brow and expression like his father. </div>
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Anyway, to get on with the story.</div>
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Frederick, Jr., must have kept in touch because he escorted Virginia to a dance in 1868 upon her graduation from Cambridge high school. If only letters survived! The two married on 4 August 1869 at the home of he father in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One newspaper mistakenly reported that she was white. </div>
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By that time, with the war over, Frederick, Jr., had moved on from recruiting. After receiving a note threatening his life in D.C., he and his brother Lewis had journeyed out to Colorado and worked in silver mining, helped open a black school in Denver, and then Frederick, Jr., worked as Superintendent of Construction for the Union Pacific Railroad. Anyone who has seen the t.v. series<i> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_on_Wheels_(TV_series)" target="_blank">Hell on Wheels</a></i>, set at that very same time, in that very same place, about the construction of that very same railroad, might think Frederick, Jr., would have been an interesting addition to the show. Alas, that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(1989_film)" target="_blank">wouldn't be the first filmic omission</a> of the Douglass sons from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Gates-Regiments-Redeemed-America/dp/0465096646" target="_blank">historic events</a>. But, I digress. When Frederick, Jr., brought Virginia from Cambridge to his home in Hillsdale, D.C., he had been running a grocery store but also begun printing the<i> New National Era</i> and serving as a representative to several different black organizations. He went on to hold a whole host of other positions, but that's a topic for another time.</div>
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Virginia taught and then became principal of schools in D.C., commended for her work. He also credited her with the authorship of the Frederick Douglass chapter in William J. Simmons's<i> Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising</i>, an encyclopedia of great black men in American history, published in 1887. That would put her among the earliest of Douglass biographers, but more importantly (at least to me), she placed Anna Douglass at his side as a partner, making her the earliest of Anna's biographers and an early player in the public effort to ensure that Anna was not forgotten after Frederick had remarried.</div>
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Much of Virginia's professional work in education seems to have taken place before 1874, from her husband's reminiscences in the Evans Collection (that requires more research required than for this blog post -- which seems to have grown with my cup of coffee since I only intended to say "hey, look at this picture!"). He also suggests that she was, like many African American women, involved in charitable or mutual associations. During all of her work, seven children arrived. </div>
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The first two, Frederick Aaron and Virginia Anna, came in June 1870 and September 1871. Then a pause for three years until Lewis Emanuel arrived in December 1874. Then another pause until 1877 when Maud Ardelle arrived, followed the next year by Charles Paul. Another break until Gertrude Pearl's birth in 1883 and then Robert Smalls' birth in 1886. This Douglass family seems to have been attempting some type of birth control, erratic and semi-successful as it may seem. Still, they had a larger family than any of the other Douglasses, and it could have been larger. Consider Rosetta's pattern of having a child every two years between 1864 and 1877, or Charles and Mary Elizabeth's between 1867 and 1874, with a later child arriving in 1877. Perhaps Virginia had miscarriages during the breaks. </div>
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Or perhaps the illnesses and deaths that surrounded their household affected their family, too. Virginia Anna died before her first birthday in 1872. Lewis Emanuel followed in 1875, then Maud in 1877, at three months. Their eldest, Frederick Aaron, died in 1886. Gertrude Pearl went in the same wave of illness that took her two cousins with her within a week in November 1887. Her mother died at their home in 1878 and her brother, Emanuel, in 1888. He suffered from the typhoid that seemed to plague Hillsdale and which may have infected Virginia, as well (and raises questions about environmental racism in the area). The children were all buried in either <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graceland_Cemetery_(Washington,_D.C.)" target="_blank">Graceland</a> or Harmonial (possibly the Columbian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Harmony_Cemetery" target="_blank">Harmony</a> or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Harmony_Memorial_Park" target="_blank">National Harmony</a> -- that would require more research than this blog post) cemeteries in D.C.</div>
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Along the way, Virginia contracted that most Victorian of diseases, tuberculosis. In the early hours of 14 December 1889, she suffered a severe hemorrhage and died at home, only forty years old. Her husband noted in his scrapbook that "she was married 4 months and 10 days longer than she remained single." In what must have been words that he spoke at her funeral, he wrote "She was loving and loveable; she did her duty well. No man ever had a better wife and few have ever been honored by having one as good." He seemed never to have recovered from her loss, and their surviving children went to live with Rosetta. Then he followed his wife to his own death in July 1892. The couple were buried in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodlawn_Cemetery_(Washington,_D.C.)" target="_blank">Woodlawn Cemetery</a> in Washington, D.C.</div>
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But, I think I wandered far away from my point -- or wandered into it. Whatever. In any case, what we have here is a woman, Harriet Bell Hayden, who saved a picture of another woman, Virginia Douglass, who wrote a biographical piece (for which she did not receive credit) in which she memorialized the role of another woman, Anna Douglass; and that first woman, Hayden, also saved visual documentation of a whole community and the people whom they considered important. Women -- black women -- do the work of history here.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sources:</span></i><br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Donna Lorch, "<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/these-personal-photo-albums-offer-rare-glimpse-bostons-black-society-during-civil-war-180972290/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR3tMiFYuhqOMsh9NADjyCQTTeug2NZEE-U9xElfzvKvWe-F6a8N2drFHfk" target="_blank">These Photo Albums Offer a Rare Glimpse of Boston's 19th Century Black Community</a>,"<i> Smithsonian.com</i>, 29 May 2019. [Accessed 11 June 2019.]</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Scrapbooks in the Walter O. Evans Collection, Savannah, Georgia. (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/If-Survive-Frederick-Douglass-Collection/dp/1474429289" target="_blank">See also</a>.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Correspondence, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/?q=&fa=partof%3Afrederick+douglass+papers+at+the+library+of+congress%3A+addition" target="_blank">Addition I</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress..</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/?q=&fa=partof%3Afrederick+douglass+papers+at+the+library+of+congress%3A+general+correspondence" target="_blank">General Correspondence</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
</ol>
Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2579199827983575855.post-75070123086232298682019-06-10T07:00:00.000-04:002019-06-10T07:00:06.286-04:00Thursday, 27 January [1887], part 2: "Startled by a Wounderous Spectacle"The Douglasses, apparently, had been warned that "there was little to see in Naples," but then, does anyone go to Naples to see Naples initially? (Don't answer that.) Instead, they encountered one of the main draws their train approached the city when, Frederick wrote in his diary, "We were startled by a wonderous spectacle, one which almost paid us for our voyage across the Sea."<br />
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Even today, Mount Vesuvius remains, in Douglass's words, "a scene of startling sublimity," dominating every view of the bay.<br />
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To post a picture will not do the experience justice, a fact that I have learned even as I watch people walk into a scene such as the Sistine Chapel, or a stunning view of the Colosseum or Niagara Falls or the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles or whatever else. The picture will never capture that three and four dimensional sense of awe of being there. The act of snapping the photo is simply a futile attempt to do so. Yet, here I am, posting a photo to illustrate. I confess that none of these are of the train's approach because, much like Douglass, I found the mountain (which I have wanted to see since I was of an age to be counted in single digits) to have overwhelmed me, beyond the desire to photograph.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHjbQHogNYMMHuHP4_yx8IsDqfSIvcVoklzbjdnMI11AukhX3ObzLMTdHo7D8WmSKlJrmXuA1AkwwYn-4hE8ds7vKGdtNEVXt8sHapbdqrrd9fJ1jbOkrRp0vjYg7U_2n9pBq6T526B3oG/s1600/IMG_5037.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHjbQHogNYMMHuHP4_yx8IsDqfSIvcVoklzbjdnMI11AukhX3ObzLMTdHo7D8WmSKlJrmXuA1AkwwYn-4hE8ds7vKGdtNEVXt8sHapbdqrrd9fJ1jbOkrRp0vjYg7U_2n9pBq6T526B3oG/s320/IMG_5037.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSEVIWcwFRWyD7UdUdz5JH9mJLJ4YiIaxyEMLcr2CRDsLY9Iu_ZF1Mo7JMgXPimJgEYmTDUOXu_EHdfrW2_ZWoe624MLm6JQxU2-P3xbJl0zKJpb6uTHE77npe6i8IyM5f1ZMDewNcWuBt/s1600/IMG_5151.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSEVIWcwFRWyD7UdUdz5JH9mJLJ4YiIaxyEMLcr2CRDsLY9Iu_ZF1Mo7JMgXPimJgEYmTDUOXu_EHdfrW2_ZWoe624MLm6JQxU2-P3xbJl0zKJpb6uTHE77npe6i8IyM5f1ZMDewNcWuBt/s320/IMG_5151.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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When the Douglasses saw Vesuvius in January of 1887, they witnesses a mountain only relatively recently erupted. It had blown its top only fifteen years earlier in 1872. It would again, seventeen years on, in 1905. They witnessed the volcano midway between eruptions. This accounts for his descriptions, in his speech later that year,. of "a vast volume of vapear and smoke converted by brilliant sunbeams into snowy whiteness and grandly floating off over the blue Mediteranian [<i>sic</i>]" in his diary and, in his speech and autobiography, the added details that "the lurid light of red hot lava, have been rising thus from the open mount of [Mt. Vesuvius] this mountain, and its fires are still burning and its spoke and vapor are still ascending and no man can tell when they will cease, or when they will burst forth in [fires] burning floods [of lava]…."<br />
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Given his own interest in photography, he may have been interested to know that <a href="https://www.oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk/content/first-volcanic-eruption-be-photographed" target="_blank">the 1872 eruption was photographed</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF44gsdMMriTE_t779jZ8tTOBzqqHVcaJvHNJlbmrzikrXlBPzL1S10kL8wTRF3gleoeoXcfcQuepvKqtmBjNUZBOaAXydMzl6tGcnHWIR12ARjIc_LHijaq9uhF6613CliC4qunL637MP/s1600/Vesuvius1872.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="792" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF44gsdMMriTE_t779jZ8tTOBzqqHVcaJvHNJlbmrzikrXlBPzL1S10kL8wTRF3gleoeoXcfcQuepvKqtmBjNUZBOaAXydMzl6tGcnHWIR12ARjIc_LHijaq9uhF6613CliC4qunL637MP/s320/Vesuvius1872.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius" target="_blank">last big blast took place in 1944</a>, just after World War II. (My intrepid companion commented, "let that be a lesson to those who would follow fascists.") I myself also had to agree with Douglass, "It is a grand [sight to see] spectacle [of], this smoke and harmless vapor silently and peacefully rolling up the sky and moving off to sea, but [one must] we shudder at the thought of what may befall the populous towns and villages that still hover so daringly about [the base of the firey mountain] its base." It is still a sleeping dragon, and the population around it much larger than in his day. Even a small explosion could wreak such devastation.<br />
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<i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,&quot; font-size: 15.4px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Sources (in addition to links):</span></i><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,&quot; font-size: 15.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fce5cd; color: #222222; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,"Palatino Linotype",Palatino,serif; font-size: 110%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1.4; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
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<ol style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia,Utopia,&quot; font-size: 15.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Frederick Douglass, 27 January [1887], <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/" style="color: #660000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Travel Diary</a>, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Frederick Douglass, "<a href="https://frederickdouglass.infoset.io/islandora/object/islandora%3A3816#page/1/mode/1up" style="color: #660000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">My Foreign Travels, part 2</a>" 15 Dec 1887, in<i> Speeches</i>, ed. Blassingame, et al, (New Haven: Yale University Press, XXX), 5: 306-38.</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Frederick Douglass,<i> "</i><a href="https://frederickdouglass.infoset.io/islandora/object/islandora%3A4618" style="color: #660000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Chapter 9: Continuation of European Tour</a>," <i>Life and Times of Frederick Douglass</i>, ed. McKivigan, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, XXX), 412-35.</span></li>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Leigh Foughthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07102415523396384540noreply@blogger.com0