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From Melville scholar Hershel Walker in California:
"Anyone studying the contexts of “Tryon Resolves” has to spend days reading 18th and 19th and 20th century newspaper stories on the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. The removal of Governor Martin’s Cape Fear Mercury from the British archives on August 15, 1837, by Andrew Stevenson, the American Minister, and its subsequent disappearance! Peter Force’s discovery in 1839! George Bancroft’s new discovery in 1848! Big 1875 centennial articles in the New York Herald and the New York Tribune! The discovery in 1904 of Traugott Bagge’s contemporary diary, written in German! Anyone has to read dozens of articles and chapters of books celebrating or denouncing the “Mec Dec.” A hardnosed, sceptical Melville scholar, I accept that the declaration as produced in 1819 (or late 1818, it seems) was a reconstruction, not a piece of paper preserved from 1775. Nevertheless, I am convinced, not least by Bagge’s diary, that there was a Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. I believe the affidavits of the eye-witnesses which were mustered in the 1820s and 1830s. I do not believe that James Jack rode to Philadelphia carrying anything less than a Mecklenburg declaration of independence, and I see every reason to believe that the North Carolina delegates at the Continental Congress absolutely did not want it discussed openly for fear that timid delegates from other colonies would pack up and go home. Jack would not have lied in his affidavit. Really, would a kinsman of Joseph Jack, my Aunt Margaret Ewart’s husband, commit a historical fraud? Most of the eye-witnesses were upstanding Presbyterians—a fact that oddly has been used to suggest that they banded together in deceit. At work, still, is the prejudiced ignorance of historians of the Revolution who write as if everything happened in the mid-Atlantic and North. Representative is Gordon S. Wood, who in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992) makes breathtakingly ignorant comments on North Carolina, but only a few. “Tryon,” man or county, is not in his index. The North Carolina patriots of 1775 risked their fortunes and lives in support of their “Brethren near Boston” after news of April 19th reached them, whether or not it was the arrival of the news on May 19 that triggered the declaration. The political is the personal, or the personal the political? Does Wood’s being born in Concord, Massachusetts, suggest the possibility of a geographical disproportion in knowledge and compassion?"
"Anyone studying the contexts of “Tryon Resolves” has to spend days reading 18th and 19th and 20th century newspaper stories on the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. The removal of Governor Martin’s Cape Fear Mercury from the British archives on August 15, 1837, by Andrew Stevenson, the American Minister, and its subsequent disappearance! Peter Force’s discovery in 1839! George Bancroft’s new discovery in 1848! Big 1875 centennial articles in the New York Herald and the New York Tribune! The discovery in 1904 of Traugott Bagge’s contemporary diary, written in German! Anyone has to read dozens of articles and chapters of books celebrating or denouncing the “Mec Dec.” A hardnosed, sceptical Melville scholar, I accept that the declaration as produced in 1819 (or late 1818, it seems) was a reconstruction, not a piece of paper preserved from 1775. Nevertheless, I am convinced, not least by Bagge’s diary, that there was a Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. I believe the affidavits of the eye-witnesses which were mustered in the 1820s and 1830s. I do not believe that James Jack rode to Philadelphia carrying anything less than a Mecklenburg declaration of independence, and I see every reason to believe that the North Carolina delegates at the Continental Congress absolutely did not want it discussed openly for fear that timid delegates from other colonies would pack up and go home. Jack would not have lied in his affidavit. Really, would a kinsman of Joseph Jack, my Aunt Margaret Ewart’s husband, commit a historical fraud? Most of the eye-witnesses were upstanding Presbyterians—a fact that oddly has been used to suggest that they banded together in deceit. At work, still, is the prejudiced ignorance of historians of the Revolution who write as if everything happened in the mid-Atlantic and North. Representative is Gordon S. Wood, who in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992) makes breathtakingly ignorant comments on North Carolina, but only a few. “Tryon,” man or county, is not in his index. The North Carolina patriots of 1775 risked their fortunes and lives in support of their “Brethren near Boston” after news of April 19th reached them, whether or not it was the arrival of the news on May 19 that triggered the declaration. The political is the personal, or the personal the political? Does Wood’s being born in Concord, Massachusetts, suggest the possibility of a geographical disproportion in knowledge and compassion?"
ReplyDeleteFlawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction, and: Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story (review)
William C. Hamlin
From: MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 31, Number 4, Winter 1985
pp. 721-723 | 10.1353/mfs.0.1276
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
What prompted Professor Hershel Walker to write Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons was the misguided, naive, obstinate, inflexible, whimsical, willy-nilly, procrustian, or "adventitious" critical, creative, and editorial theories "which led to the habit of ignoring . . . biographical-textual evidence and its implications." In the course of his book, Parker works hard to define and demonstrate "a textual-aesthetic approach" to the study of American literature and has with good cause and solid evidence directed an ironic and occasionally devastating onslaught against "academic writing on American literature . . . with broad application to literary criticism