Rivers are the theme of the October issue of Calliope and inside I have a couple of articles explaining the mechanics of waterwheels, dams, and locks. Very fortuitous, as this month my oldest is doing a school project on river basins. Synergy! Synchronicity! Or something.
In May 1779, two slaves named Prime and Prince dictated, or at least cowrote, a petition for emancipation, which was submitted to the Connecticut Assembly.
Your Honours who are nobly contending, in the Cause of Liberty, whose Conduct excites the Admiration, and Reverence, of all the great Empires of the World, will not resent our thus freely animadverting, on this detestable Practice; altho our Skins are different in Colour, from those who we serve, yet Reason & Revelation join to declare, that we are the Creatures of that God who made of one Blood, and Kindred, all the Nations of the Earth; we perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed, with the same Faculties, with our Masters, and there is nothing, that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us, and the more we Consider of this Matter, the more we are Convinced, of our Right (by the Law’s of Nature and by the whole Tenor, of the Christian Religion, so far as we have been taught) to be free.
The petition is as heartbreaking as it is poetic, and is worth reading in its entirety. Both the Lower and the Upper Houses rejected the petition; however, the following year, laws were passed freeing slaves younger than 7 (or born in the state after the law’s passage) when they reached 25, and prohibiting the sale of Connecticut slaves outside the state.
The petition was transcribed by Jonathan Sturges, a justice and judge of probate who was very active in Fairfield’s defense and management during the Revolution; later he was a member of the state delegation to the ratification of the Constitution and a member of the first U.S. Congress. And while there is suspicion about the true authorship of the petition, as historian Vincent Rosivach has pointed out, the language echoes that of other slave petitions of the period, such that the 1779 document is not likely the product of Sturges’s quill alone.
What’s more interesting is the petitioner Prime was owned by Samuel Sturges, Jonathan’s younger brother. This is a strange scenario, in which victory would have resulted in diminishing the estate of the proponent’s close family. Perhaps emancipation was never a goal of Jonathan’s and the action was simply a ploy to demonstrate the impossibility of abolition, to cool the tempers of disgruntled slaves before they boiled over — to obscure the obvious contradiction between freedom from king and parliament and bondage to Yankee fat cats. Hey, we tried. It didn’t happen. Now get back to work.
Or maybe that’s too cynical. I’ve read the Rosivach article, and if I recall correctly, his characterization of Samuel Sturges as “undistinguished” is verbatim. This is some minor ignorance on his part (in his defense, Rosivach probably referenced Donald Jacobus’s History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield, which lists only the public offices and military honors held by an individual, not the private accomplishments). Actually, Samuel Sturges was a prosperous businessman who co-owned “a suitable store for receiving goods & provisions” with Samuel Smedley along Black Rock Harbor. Smedley himself manumitted two slaves — York, and his son Boston (who may or may not have fallen under the 1780 freedom-at-25 law) — and left each of them money in his will. These actions, along with Jonathan’s penmanship and Samuel Sturges’s seeming acquiescence in Prime’s role, suggest some of Fairfield’s elite shared the sentiments expressed in the two men’s poignant request for liberty.
Black Static does something I’ve never seen a magazine do before: they post their latest story acceptances.
My gaslamp fantasy “Barbary” is scheduled to appear in the November issue. Very excited, too — it’s one of the best damn things I’ve ever written. I’m grateful to editor Andy Cox for allowing me the room to stretch my legs and go for a run.
More later when the issue’s out.
Via J.L. Bell’s Twitter feed come several reactions to Andrew Burnstein and Nancy Isenberg’s Salon essay wishing for “a restraining order on the big-budget popularizers of history (many of them trained in journalism)”:
We have to fight mediocrity as well as plagiarism – the two are more closely related than you realize. Journalists doing history tend to be superficial and formulaic. To the historian’s mind, they don’t care enough about accuracy.
I bet. Their argument is eyebrow-raising for its pettiness and cherry-picking. Civil War Memory has such a perfect response that I can only agree; and David Silbey succinctly lists the ad hominems and non sequiturs of Burnstein and Isenberg’s argument. They bean David McCullough’s John Adams — “There are far better books on Adams than McCullough’s” — but never cite a single defect, instead somehow illogically lumping him in with plagiarists. Is that because “[t]he public seems to like what is most easily digestible” in their history and in their Salon articles?
Gordon Wood commented on academic vs. journalist historians back in 2009:
Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history. Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end. … Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations.
This is an important distinction, and Wood is right that most academics don’t write narrative histories. I would agree with him further — except that even when academics do write narrative history, they’re still not very good.
Take William C. Davis’s The Pirates Laffite. Davis is a brilliant historian who has written the most authoritative account of the Laffite brothers ever put to paper, and will likely remain so for decades at least. It’s a narrative history, beginning with the earliest known information regarding the Laffites and continuing chronologically. The book is also barely readable. Davis swarms the reader with so much information that the story is buried beneath a landfill of data. The text isn’t broken up well, and every few pages I had to flip back to reread why we had gone on a tangent about some secondary or tertiary character and remind myself how he related to the Laffites. I wish Davis had abridged the book for general consumption, then kept the original manuscript as an e-pub available for hardcore Laffite scholars.
Overwhelming the reader is a flaw too. So yes, many academics have forgotten how to tell a story.
Academic historians aren’t bad people; as I’ve ranted before, what’s at issue is how they’ve sidelined themselves through their own homespun culture of (a) poor writing camouflaged as intellectualism; and (b) internecine feuding. I would also add that if Wood worries that “non-academic historians… unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive scholarship that exists,” it’s because so much of that scholarship is locked behind expensive journal subscriptions and exorbitant paywalls like Reed Elsevier — again, an unnecessary state of affairs resulting from academic culture — that academics themselves wouldn’t have access to if they weren’t academics.
Burnstein and Isenberg haven’t done their profession any favors with their imbecilic essay: it’s technocratic propaganda designed to exclude interlopers from cutting into their market share. But again, if academic historians aren’t popular in bookstores, they have only themselves to blame. Hobbled and handicapped, it’s up to the David McCulloughs of the world to take up their slack.
Today the Kuhl family persevered through gnarly traffic and inclement weather to attend Patriots training camp.
Here’s Tom Brady completing a pass to running back Danny Woodhead.
Brady handing off while Bill Belichick scrutinizes every motion.
Aaron Hernandez catching.
Quarterback Tom Brady.
The man you want in a pinch: kicker Stephen Gostkowski.
Third-string quarterback Ryan Mallett. According to Mrs. Kuhl, Hoyer will soon accept a starting job with another team, positioning Mallett to be our next starter once Brady retires in a few years. Time will tell.