It used to be a joke that every Texan went broke in Tennessee before they came to Texas. I suspect my ancestors kinda went broke other places as well, but still, many Texans have a soft spot for Tennessee. T for Texas, T for Tennessee.
Tennessee looms unnaturally large in our collective history. Some random stuff:
The Trail of Tears.
Davy Crockett, Sam Houston
Martin Luther King’s assassination.
The Grand Ol’ Opry, Sun Records, Stax Records, Beale Street, Nashville.
Andrew Jackson.
Dolly Parton
The TVA.
Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Fort Donelson.
Nashville Cats.
Andrew Johnson.
The Smoky Mountains.
Al Gore.
The Scopes Trial.
Elvis.
You’d think with all that stuff going on, there would be good histories of Tennessee, but I haven’t found one. Stuff seems to be dated or episodic, as if the history itself is too big. There are lots of little histories, histories of Andrew Jackson or the Scopes Trial, or the battles of the War in the West, or individual biographies, or histories of East Tennessee, but nothing general seems satisfactory.
There are really three parts of Tennessee, represented by the three stars in the circle on the Tennessee flag, and maybe that’s the problem: the state’s schizophrenic. From the west, Memphis is that joke about Mississippi; what are Mississippi’s two largest cities? New Orleans and Memphis. It was the largest inland cotton market in the South. It’s on the Gulf Coastal Plain that runs from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River to Southern Illinois, as much the Delta as Arkansas or Mississippi are the Delta, flat, rich; the land of cotton.
Marion Post Walcott, May 1940, Cotton Carnival, Memphis Tennessee, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).
Even today here is no city more Southern than Memphis, population 651,073, with a metro population of 1,371,110. It seems everyone in Memphis is either white or black, without the polyglot of people and cultures that I’m used to. It’s a lovely city, with ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, good ribs, and a rich cultural history, but it’s also a damaged city. It never seems to have recovered from the murder of Martin Luther King. As of 2010, Memphis proper was 27.5% non-Hispanic white, 63.3% African-American, 6.5% Hispanic, 1.6% Asian. The metro population evens out a bit, with 45% non-hispanic white, and 47% black.
When I was in college I ate my first bagel in Memphis, on my way to backpack to Clingman’s Dome in the Smokies.
Memphis Minnie, 1930.
Central Tennessee is higher than West Tennessee (though not Klingman’s Dome), with the Highland Rim surrounding the Nashville Basin. Higher is a relative term. The Highland Rim is rarely much higher than 1,100 feet. It’s hill country, farm country, Nashville.
USGS, Nashville Basin, 1988.
Nashville, with a city population of 670,820 and a metro population of 1,959,495, is growing. One doesn’t go there any more just to make records. In some ways it is the reverse image of Memphis, thriving, maybe even modern, maybe even cosmopolitan. It’s 58.6% non-Hispanic white, 28.6% African American, and 3.5% Asian. 9% of the total population is Hispanic.
Daniel Schwein, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, licensed under Cretive Commons license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
Nashville is known principally for that pancake place over near Vanderbilt, the Pancake Pantry, and a pretentious but well-acted Robert Altman movie. Nothing else.
East Tennessee is defined by Appalachia, with the Blue Ridge on the border with North Carolina, the Ridge and Valley Appalachians to the west, and The Cumberland Plateau bordering middle Tennessee. By 1794, I had two ancestors, a Hatcher and a Crowson, in Wears Valley, near Sevierville and Pigeon Forge. There is still a Hatcher Mountain and a Crowson Cove in Wears Valley in the Ridge and Valley region, but my direct ancestor (and their descendent), William John Hatcher, was in Sullivan County, Missouri by 1850. In 1861, William John volunteered for the Missouri Infantry, on the side of the Union.
You’d think that would be odd, but Eastern Tennessee was a Union hotbed: there weren’t many slaves in those hills and hollers. Eastern Tennessee is still mostly white. Knoxville’s population is essentially 17% black and 83% white, with everybody else just a wee bit of lagniappe. Historically it was also poor, though it seems to be doing well enough now. This is Dolly Parton country. Maybe Dolly is a cousin.
Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, 1968. Pre-1978, no copyright mark.
In East Tennessee, Scott County seceded from the Confederacy and formed its own Free and Independent State of Scott, and didn’t officially rejoin Tennessee until 1986. Pater William John would have served the Union at Shiloh, Corinth, in the Atlanta Campaign, and in Sherman’s March to the Sea, on the opposite side of at least three other second great grandfathers, but as like as not on the same side as his Tennessee brothers and cousins. I’m glad my great-great grandfathers were not better shots. Weirdly, while I knew from my grandparents that a number of their grandparents fought for the Confederacy, I didn’t find out that William John fought for the Union until a couple of years ago. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe that was the sort of thing one kept to oneself in the post-Reconstruction South.
But things change. I’m proud of my Grandfather William John, and East Tennessee is no longer a hotbed of Northern sympathy. East Tennessee along with the rest of Tennessee voted 60% for President Trump in 2016, with only the two most populous counties, Davidson and Shelby, and a majority black county, Hayward, voting for Hillary Clinton.
Ali Zifan, Wikimedia Commons.
Which reminds me of why this came up in the first place. In two weeks we’re supposed to fish in far northeast Tennessee, for trout on the South Holston and Watauga Rivers. We’re driving. I picked it so that I could see Wears Valley, and Shiloh, and because we go from there to visit friends in North Carolina. It’ll be our first road trip, really our first trip of any kind, since the pandemic began. We’ll see if we actually go.
Aaron Arrowsmith and Samuel Lewis, Arrowsmith’s 1804 Map of Delaware, 1804.
Delaware has a population of less than 1 million people, but at only 1,982 square miles, it has 469 people per square mile. That’s a lot. It is the sixth densest state. Montana, which has a few more people, has only seven people per square mile. Standing in your mile of Delaware you can rub elbows with 462 people you’d never meet in Montana.
All of the states denser than Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland, are its neighbors. There are other states with more people, but crammed into that northeast corridor are the densest states with the most people and the least land per person. One doesn’t choose Delaware for a wilderness experience.
Delaware ranks 49th in total area–I suppose Rhode Island must be last. There are three counties in Delaware, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. That’s it. Its largest city, Wilmington, is in the far north, with over half the state’s population and a population density of 1,312 people per square mile. Blacks make up 23% of Delaware’s population, whites 69.5%, Asians 4.1%, and everybody else the rest. About 8% of the whites are Hispanic.
Delaware is not a poor state. Its median annual income per household ranks 17th, at $64,805. Wealth though is tied to race. In Wilmington the median annual white household income is $60,772. The black median annual household income is about $47,500.
From Wikimedia Commons, User Golbez, Map of the Slave States 1861.
On December 7, 1787, Delaware, then a slave state, was the first state to ratify the Constitution. In 1790 in Delaware there were 8,887 slaves, and 3,899 free blacks. The 1860 census listed only 1,798 slaves, of a total black population of 21,677, of a total Delaware population of 112,266. Delaware had not freed its slaves when the Civil War began, though attempts had been made in its legislature and there was a strong abolition movement in the state. Its slaves were finally freed when the 13th Amendment ending slavery was ratified in 1865, after the Civil War.
Gratuitous Photograph of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
How did slavery get to Delaware? The Dutch of course. Delaware was originally a Swedish colony, founded in 1636. Just think what we’d have gained if the Swedes had held on. We’d own Volvos. We’d have an excuse to post gratuitous photographs of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman. We’d all be tall and blonde. The Dutch (who still controlled New York) kicked out the Swedes in 1655. The Dutch thought African slavery was the very thing, and had already established slavery in what would be New York, which finally outlawed slavery in the 1820s.
The Dutch conquered the New World Swedes in 1655, and were in turn conquered by the English in 1664. There was some fussing over whether Delaware belonged to Lord Baltimore as part of Maryland, or the Duke of York who deeded it to William Penn, but ultimately it went to Penn. The Delawarians and the Pennsylvanians weren’t well-suited for a long-term relationship, and by 1701 Penn had agreed to a separation, though they continued to share a governor.
Contemporary Portrait, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr 1577-1618. Baron De La Warr was English, not Native American.
A good name like Delaware should be Native American, but no. The Delaware Native Americans were the Leni Lenape, part of the Algonquins, and were also located in New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. They apparently didn’t observe state lines. By 1670 the Lenape were mostly gone, absorbed, killed by disease or otherwise, or pushed west. The Tribes of the Delaware Nation are now in Oklahoma. There were also Nanticoke people, who either moved west with the Lenape or north to Canada, but some remained in Delaware, and settled near the Indian River. The Nanticoke Indian Association is recognized as a nonprofit corporation by the state, which likes nothing better than a good corporation.
The Delaware Tribe in Oklahoma sports the same name as the state, the river, and the bay, and all of ’em were named for the first governor of Virginia, Thomas West, the Third Baron De La Warr. Delaware Indians must possess a finely honed sense of irony.
Physically Delaware is flat, coastal, and temperate. It has about 45 inches of rain a year, with average temperatures ranging from 76 degrees in summer to 32 degrees in winter, with winter temperatures along the Atlantic Coast averaging 10 degrees warmer in winter and l0 degrees cooler in summer.
Delaware Geological Survey.
Delaware is the 6th flattest state, one flatter than Kansas. The highest point in the state, the Ebright Azimuth, is 447.85 feet above sea level, or at least it was before the seas started rising. I guess now either all things are relative or the point from which we measure sea level is underwater..
Delawarians tend to vote Democratic, it is Joe Biden’s state and both senators and its congresswoman are Democratic, but even in Delaware there is a rural/urban divide. In 2016 the more urban New Castle County voted for Clinton; the less populous southern counties voted for President Trump. Like I said, all things are relative. It’s not like Sussex County’s 165 people per square mile qualifies as ranch land.
We were going to lump our trip to Delaware together with our trip to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but getting ready we both read John McPhee’s The Founding Fish, which is McPhee’s paean to shad. Terry Peach at A Marblehead Flyfisher said that the shad most reliably run in the Brandywine River for the two weeks surrounding Mother’s Day, this year May 10, so now we’re going May 17. After all, who wouldn’t want to fish the Brandywine? Of course it doesn’t run through Hobbiton until somewhat further north than where we’re fishing. We’ll probably manage two breakfasts anyway.
Shad. If everything works we’re going to fish for shad.
We packed to skip the baggage claim in Chicago. We flew in early on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day looking for things we’d never seen.
The only specialized fishing gear we took were polarized lenses. Our guides, Midwest Waters Anglers, provided all the gear, and it was great gear.
What I lost, Where we didn’t go.
I lost my beloved Bonefish & Tarpon Trust Yeti thermos. I really liked that Thermos.
I wish we’d had time to go to Springfield for the Abraham Lincoln Museum. We could have easily spent more time in Chicago.
What we ate.
By some measures Houston is now the most ethnically diverse city in the US, but that’s somewhat disingenuous. It treats all white people as a lump, which is like treating all Asians and Asian Americans as a lump, or treating all Africans and African Americans as a lump. Chicago’s story is in part a story of 19th and 20th century first-generation Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Welsh, and Jewish immigrants, white immigration that wasn’t from England via New England–the immigrants in The Jungle are Lithuanian. In 2019 the nativist impulse is aimed at immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In 1850 it was the anti-Catholic No-Nothings opposed to Irish and German Catholic immigration. Things never change.
Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing, lithograph, 1854, Sarony & Co., lithographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. American political prints, 1766-1876. From Wikipedia. He looks a lot like Lord Byron.
As of 2010, Chicago is 31.7% non-Hispanic whites, 32.9% black or African American, 5.5% Asian, and 13.3% Hispanic, and 16.1% mixed or other, but there are lots of ethnic traditions not covered in those numbers. We wanted Chicago ethnic food, and got a list of restaurants from our friend Tom, who knows these things. He said that there were three great ethnic food cities in the US, New York, Chicago, and Houston, and that the hard part of the list for Chicago was coming up with stuff we didn’t have in Houston. It’s a great list, even if we only made it to three of the places. Some of Tom’s notes are included in quotes:
Min Hing Cuisine – “great dim sum for breakfast (6 kinds of shrimp dumplings is good enough for me).” We went there straight from the airport. Chinese are about 1.6% of Chicago’s population, and first got there before 1860 with the railroads. The population boomed in the 1950s and 60s.
Parachute – “fusion Korean American, in the best way.” This place has a Michelin star, and seems to be everyone’s favorite restaurant, Alinea be damned. Make reservations in advance. We didn’t make reservations, and getting in on a Saturday night without a reservation might be harder than catching steelhead. We didn’t catch any Illinois steelhead either.
Shokran – “Moroccan kebabs and salads, also tangines and couscous. Cash only. BYOB.”
Staropolska or Lutnia Polish – About 6.7% of Chicago is Polish, with Polish the third language, after English and Spanish. We ate at Staropolska, just around the corner from St. Hyacinth Basilica. The young blonde waitress with the Polish accent was proud that it was the oldest Polish restaurant in Chicago. It could use some freshening, but that might ruin the vibe, and the food was great and the service was great.
Staropolska, cabbage rolls and potato pancakes. That red sauce seemed to be heavily paprikad, and was outstanding.
Jibek Jolu – “dumplings and noodles . . . Uighur.”
Sayat-Nova – “Armenian. Typical middle eastern fare . . . ” It was also in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and we went on the Sunday night of a long weekend when there was still plenty of shopping to be done. After some terrified driving we found a parking garage ($26 for a bit more than an hour, and well worth it). Kris loved Sayat-Nova, and said I have to ask Tom for recommendations wherever we go. I wish Tom could have helped out in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Sayat-Nova. Lamb meatballs in yoghurt and mint sauce.
Little Bucharest Bistro – “quality Central European food, excellent service.” Romanian. We didn’t go, but the descriptions on the internet were great. It wasn’t far from Staropolska.
Birrieria Zaragoza – “fast casual Mexican all about goat.” The Mexican population is the fastest growing population in Chicago, so it made sense to include something, but it broke Tom’s rule, sort of. I don’t know of anyplace in Houston that specializes in goat.
The best thing about ethnic Chicago restaurants? Other than the food of course. I could wear my stylish fishing clothes, the ones designed by the fashion-forward stylists at Patagonia, to any of them, which I did.
If that wasn’t enough of a list, Tom provided a supplement: “Ghareeb Nawaz Indo-Pakistani. San Soo Gob San-Korean. Galit-Israeli-Middle Eastern. Kaboobi Persian Grill (North side – our favorite). Cabra Peruvian (Rooftop restaurant). If you have time for breakfast before you leave, make it to Dove’s Luncheonette….”.
Books, Movies, TV.
There are tons of movies from Chicago, and we watched The Blues Brothers, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables. Pretty good Chicago movies. We never watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I may be too old for it now.
Mostly I read about Lincoln. I wonder how he managed to govern so well without Tweets. This is a good time to ponder Lincoln, and there’s a ton of stuff out there. Sometimes we get better leaders than we deserve. Sometimes apparently we don’t.
I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Auggie March. I had tried to read Bellow before, but didn’t quite get it. This time was better. I tried to read The Jungle, but found it too painful. I listened to a lot of Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels, but never did figure out how to pronounce Warshawski’s name, which is a weak and obscure joke about the inevitable unlikable character trope in every novel. If they can’t pronounce her name, they’re almost certainly the villain. I listened to some Dresden File novels by Jim Butcher, but didn’t think they were nearly as amusing as when I’d listened to them years ago. Michael Harvey wrote some good Chicago mysteries, and I listened to those when I got tired of the others.
Donuts.
We picked up Polish pastries at Kurowski Sausage Shop, pretzel-like crescents lightly filled with an unidentifiable jam, but I was too intimidated to brave the meat case. On Sunday morning we made a quick drive to Oak Park for Donuts at Firecakes Donuts and a quick visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright studio. The donuts were just fine, and I wish we’d had time to look at the scattered Wright houses. Next time.
There are Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere in Chicago. Chicago should do better.
Playlist.
This was a long list, so it’ll be pretty general.
Chicago’s population is 32.9% non-Hispanic African or African American. The percentage of African American population in Houston, a Southern city with significant historic black communities, is only 22.9%. For the Houston metropolitan area, Houston plus the suburbs, the number drops slightly, to 21%, but for Chicago 32.9% plunges to 17% when you add in the suburbs.
The two cities are of roughly the same size, but their largest growth occurs about a century apart. The historic African American population in Houston has its origin in slavery, but much of the dispersion from the city into the suburbs occurred after the Civil Rights Movement, and Blacks apparently moved out to the suburbs in about the same numbers as they stayed in Houston. In Chicago, the boom in African American population occurred in the great migration, from 1910 to 1960, and plenty of movement to the suburbs occurred largely before the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks apparently stuck to (or were confined to) the City.
Why this is kicking off the music playlist may not be obvious, but there is a lot of great music out of Chicago’s African American community. There are three cities most responsible for the origination of jazz: New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. The earliest migration of the Blues was from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. This is Great Migration stuff, and stuff that shaped us profoundly.
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, 1925, Chicago
There’s another odd thing about Illinois music, there’s a surprising number of good folk/country/Americana musicians out of Illinois. Illinois is our second flattest state after Florida, tucked in as a drainage between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. It hides all that flatness with a combination of skyscrapers and trees. Anyway, all that flatness makes for great farmland, and except for Chicago, this is Midwest farm country. It’s no surprise that farm country makes for country music and Republican voters.
Jazz
I probably should have done better, but Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s first recordings are from Chicago. The singers Dee Alexander and Johnny Hartman, and Herbie Hancock.
Blues
Of course the Blues Brothers was set in Chicago. Where else would it be? All of these musicians were from, cycled through, wrote about, or sang about Chicago: Robert Johnson, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jimmy Rogers (no, not that Jimmie Rodgers), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter, Luther Allison, Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Son Seales, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Earl Hooker, Freddie King . . . Is Bo Diddley the Blues? We talked about going to a blues bar on Saturday, but we’re old, things start late, and fishing starts early. Next time.
Dovydenas, Jonas, Muddy Waters, Checkerboard Lounge, 423 E. 43rd St., Chicago; Chicago, Illinois, 1977, Library of Congress, Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection.
Folk/Country/Americana
John Prine, Allison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, Son Volt, Wilco, Steve Goodman.
Has there ever been a sadder song than Steve Goodman’s A Dying Fan’s Last Request? Not only was Goodman in fact dying, he was a Cub’s fan. There is nothing more pathetic than the Chicago Cubs, but it’s still one of the best baseball songs ever.
Scattered and Inconsisten Rock
In early adolescence, I thought Chicago was the greatest band ever. I liked the brass, I liked the politics, I liked the guitar. I hadn’t listened to them since. Color My World was probably the first song I learned to play on the guitar, though in my defense it was probably before it became the most important high school prom song ever written. I still think 25 or 6 to 4 was a pretty great song. Pretty good song. Ok, I still like it.
Reo Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins.
When Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville came out in the 90s it got great reviews and I bought a copy, probably without actually reading the reviews. We were on a family car trip and I started the CD in the car. Some song came on, Flower? Fuck and Run? Anyway, it was really not age appropriate, either for me or my children. This trip was probably the second time I’d listened to it. It’s pretty raw in a “I grew up in Chicago suburbs and graduated from Oberlin” sort of way. It may be age appropriate for my children now, but it’s still not age appropriate for me.
Random Stuff
Allister, Somewhere Down on Fullerton.
Mobstability, Crook County (Bond Crusher Mix).
Rhett Miller, The El.
The Lawrence Arms, A Guided Tour of Chicago.
Andrew Bird, Pulaski at Night. Good song.
Common, Chi-City.
Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town.
Graham Nash, Chicago/We Can Change the World.
Sufjan Stevens, Illinois.
Dan Fogalberg, Illinois.
Ben Folds, Effington.
Twista, Crook County.
Kanye West, Homecoming
Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, Lake Shore Drive
Jim Croce, Bad Bad Leroy Brown.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler, Symphony #9 in D. The Chicago Symphony Center Orchestra Hall is magnificent.
Guitar.
Didn’t take one. A guy in the airport told me that he always checked his guitar, and convinced me that I could do the same with a good enough case. Kris thought that was a great idea. Stuffing a guitar in the overhead is a pain. I got back to Houston and ordered a new case.
Porte Crayon (David Hunter Strother), En route for Harper’s Ferry, 1859, wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, Library of Congress.
The events that led up to the Civil War are a mess, which I guess is the way they should be, but their level of complication is greater than the level of my willingness to learn them. From the founding of the nation to the firing on Fort Sumner there’s all this complicated stuff that happened, dates, compromises, court decisions, slave revolts, expansions, and these then-famous people with now dimly remembered names like Taylor and Pierce and Webster and Calhoun and Clay. They made speeches and policy and enacted laws and whatnot, and all of what they did was overshadowed by the now inexplicable and then intransigent desire of Southerners to maintain a cruel and immoral institution. I have in the back of my mind the suspicion that notwithstanding the absence of any given incident, at the end of the day the War would have happened whatever came before, maybe sooner, maybe later, but the War was inevitable.
I’ve boiled the sequence of what happened down in my own pretty little head to a few things. It’s my litany, useful to me but simplified. In 1807, Congress, at the urging of President Jefferson, voted to ban the importation of new slaves. Congress, both North and South, voted for the ban. They believed that if they stopped African importation, slavery would collapse because it was economically unsustainable. Forty years later, that vote would have been impossible.
Samuel Morris, Eli Whitney, 1822, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery.
Two things intervened that would have made that vote impossible. The same year as the ban, Eli Whitney received a patent for a cotton gin, which made industrial agricultural cotton production profitable in the Deep South, Land of Cotton, not forgotten. Industrial agricultural production of cotton meant that slavery not only wouldn’t collapse, but that it was economically desirable, both for the Deep South, producing cotton, and the upper South, producing slaves through natural increase and selling them down South, and in Northern and European mills, weaving cotton. It is not an accident that for Jim in Huckleberry Finn, the threat of being sold down-river to New Orleans is both real and terrifying.
The second intervening event again involved Mr. Whitney. In 1801, Whitney demonstrated the value of interchangeable parts in firearm production, and after his death in 1825 his family fire arms company produced muskets with interchangeable parts. Interchangeable parts helped spur the North’s conversion from agriculture and artisan production to factory industry. Neither idea, the gin or the parts, was exactly new with Whitney, but there you are. In North America he gets the credit, and because of cotton and factories the North and South went different ways.
A new map of the United States. Upon which are delineated its vast works of internal communication, routes across the continent &c, 1852, Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., Library of Congress.
At the same time the economic engines were changing there was westward expansion. It’s hard now to imagine us as anything other than 50 states with amber waves of grain from sea to shining sea, but when Napoleon pawned off Louisiana in 1804, Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) weren’t yet states. Florida (1821) still belonged to the Spanish, or was it the English? In 1804 America the Beautiful was the original 13 Colonies, the Ohio Territory (1803), Kentucky (1791) and Tennessee (1796).
With the Louisiana Purchase things boomed. Texas was annexed in 1845 . The cession of Mexican lands after the Mexican-American War (which Northern progressives saw as a war of Southern aggression to expand slavery) added the Southwest, and treaties with England settled the northern boundary between the U.S. and Canada. Because of control of Congress, there was constant trauma over whether new territories would be slave or free.
Complicating the expansion there was the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Dred Scott held that regardless of where a black slave stood, North or South, state laws could not supersede the property rights of the slaveholder. The black man or woman was not a citizen but a slave, always, even in Ohio, even in Maine.
And there were the first battles, the first blood, in Kansas.
My father wasn’t a cussing man. At least around his family there was no profanity, no curses, but he did from time to time need an exclamation and his exclamation was usually John Brown! I suppose it was something he’d picked up in East Texas from his father, or his uncles, and we heard it so often that we never noticed it until my older sister married and her new husband made fun of it. It was fair game I guess, but still, it ruined John Brown!, and probably for that reason I never say it.
I guess because of my father’s mild expletive I always knew who John Brown was, or at least knew that he had led a raid on Harper’s Ferry to kick off the Civil War. I was fertile soil in college when I read Stephen Oates’ Brown biography, To Purge This Land with Blood. Still, it was a startling book. Brown was a violent zealot, the first modern terrorist. Brown was right, his opponents’ defense of slavery morally indefensible. Brown was charismatic, reasonably well educated, deeply religious, and a failure at most things he attempted. Oddly, he worked in a tannery with U.S. Grant’s father, and like Grant’s father for a time was a tanner. He farmed. He tried to broker wool. He was mad, or not, but certainly he was monomaniacally opposed to slavery. He believed in the equality of whites and blacks, and he believed that only blood could end slavery and bring about equality.
Photographs of John Brown, Wikimedia Commons.
He was a murderer in Kansas. He was a murderer in a good cause. He was a murderer.
One of the events that led to the War was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It probably seemed a good idea at the time: Congress couldn’t agree on whether Kansas and Nebraska should be slave or free, so they took themselves off the hook by letting Kansans decide for themselves. It turned out it wasn’t a good idea: It was a really bad idea. For some, pro-slavery and abolitionists both, it became a matter of missionary zeal to go to Kansas, and that was how John Brown got there. He went to fight a war. The pro-slave side struck first, by sending pro-slave Ruffians–that was the shorthand for white Southern Thugs—across the border from Missouri to steal the local elections and pack the Kansas legislature. There was a resident pro-free state majority, but the pro-slave interlopers, with the support of President Franklin Pierce and his territorial governor, controlled the polls.
On May 21, 1856, the pro-slavery sheriff of Douglas County, Kansas, and his 100-strong pro-slavery posse raided Lawrence, Kansas, an anti-slavery stronghold founded and supported with New England abolitionist money. Only one person died (and him part of the posse and by accident), but Sheriff Jones’s posse burnt the Free State Hotel, trashed the newspapers, looted the town, and took three prisoners. On May 24 Captain Brown, Old Brown as he was known (he was 56 which on the frontier was ancient), led a band that included four of his sons against pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in eastern Kansas, not far from where Kansas City stands today. Brown’s party hacked five pro-slavery settlers to death. It was an execution, like something a radical jihadist would film for distribution via the internet. Brown did not participate in the hacking, he left that for his sons and the rest of the party, but he did shoot one settler through the forehead to make certain he was dead. The Pottawatomie Massacre was in retaliation for the raid on Lawrence. None of the murdered men had been on the Lawrence raid.
John Steuart Curry, Tragic Prelude, 1937, egg tempera and oil mural, Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas.
Lawrence would be raided once again in 1863 by Quantrill’s raiders, a quasi-military group of Confederate-sympathizing calvary. The Quantrill raid was The culmination of the Kansas guerrilla warfare that began with John Brown’s raid on Potawattomie Creek. You may recall that the hero of True Grit, Deputy Marshall Rooster Cogburn, rode with Quantrill, as did Jesse James. More than 180 civilians were murdered in the raid.
When I was thinking about John Brown and Kansas I went through the 1859 Harper’s Weeklies published immediately after the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Harper’s Weekly was the most widely circulated magazine of its day, and on its back page included amusing cartoons. It was so influential that it is largely responsible for the American adoration of Santa Claus and Christmas. Abolitionists called it Harper’s Weakly.
In an October issue, about two weeks after John Brown’s raid, I found a cartoon of a well-dressed man and woman seated across from each other at a table in a bright and draperied room. “I say, Peg,” says the man, “just give me two or three of your Eyelashes to finish off this Black Palmer; there’s a good Girl!” I hope Peg gave him the eyelashes, and I hope he traveled to the Catskills and caught brookies with that very Black Palmer. Even in the middle of it boys would be boys, and I hope he survived the War. I hope that six years later at the end of the horror he and Peg sat once again across that lovely table in that lovely room, and he tied Black Palmers and dreamed of Catskill streams.
Mary Orvis Marbury, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, Plate A, 1892, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Ma. Fly 2 is the Soldier Palmer, which is a red version of the Hackle Palmer, which is black. Ms. Marbury (who dedicated the book to her father, C.F.) says that “‘palmer’ has, from this, come to be applied to all bodies of artificial flies made to resemble the hairy caterpillar.” The referenced “this” is the wandering, the palmering or pilgriming, of the caterpillar.
