"That truth should be silent I had almost forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been too long in Egypt.---------
Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5: "Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing."
THE MASTER OF THE RED BUCK AND THE BAY DOE, William Laurie Hill (Charlotte: Stone, 1913).
See my "Absolving David Fanning--From Dreck to Rumph," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 24 November 2015. I am happy that four days later on 28 November when the webzine announced the 10 most popular articles for the month this one scraped in at 10th place, the ballots stained with cranberry sauce and red-eye gravy!
Technically this is a "flip phone"--very inexpensive and very small, just right for taking to the beach. First what is left of a seal, looking NW toward Cayucos and the stretch of land gained for the State by Lyons and Gibson two decades ago.
The seal closer up.
Our house, in the middle. Under a lot of potential mud.
This illustration depicts David Fanning coercing Cornelius Tyson into a deal.
"A
Remarkable Horse Trade" from the book, "The Master of the Red Buck and
the Bay Doe", William Laurie Hill (Charlotte, NC: Stone Publishing Co,
1913).
I keep promising myself to write on how David
Fanning, the Tory guerrilla turned British colonel, became a psychotic
murderer off the battlefield in North Carolina in 1782. But was it late
1781? First, I have to try to settle tough questions. Did Fanning really
do no harm to any human being in South Carolina?[1] Did he really stage a dramatic public presentation of himself as backwoods Tory savior early in 1781?[2] Did he really learn of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown days before Gen. Griffith Rutherford learned of it?[3]
How did he deal, practically and emotionally, with being abandoned when
the British evacuated Wilmington, leaving him without ammunition, other
supplies, and what he had gloried in, praise?[4] How many people, men and women, did he slaughter in cold blood? We don’t know.
We are still hampered by the absence of wartime North Carolina
newspapers, diaries, and ordinary personal records and by flaws in
stories that circulated word of mouth before North Carolinians tried to
write their own histories, and even after histories were published.
Misunderstandings and legends are still being repeated. I’m ready to
believe the worst about Fanning, partly because my docket of Fanning’s
previously unknown murders keeps getting longer,[5] but in this air-clearing piece I cast doubt on his guilt or absolve him of three different murders or sets of murders.
In 1851 Fanning’s first victims (off the battlefield) were identified by Joseph Johnson:[6]
“His first marauding expedition is said to have been to Deep river; and
the earliest sufferers from his rapacity and violence, were Charles
Spearing, Captains Dreck and Dye.” Fanning “went to Spearing’s in the
night, shot him as he ran from the house, took his gun, scoured the
neighborhood, and returned to Rains’” (that is, he went back to John
Rains’s house on Brush Creek near where it flows into Deep River below
Fanning’s frequent base at Cox’s Mill in Randolph County). Former North
Carolina Gov. D. L. Swain had provided the text Johnson published, and
in 1853 he salvaged it to introduce a valuable paper left by Archibald
D. Murphey, the great researcher who died in 1832 before finishing his
history of North Carolina.[7]
Here Swain named the “earliest sufferers” as “Charles Shearing,
Captains Duck and Dye.” That is, he corrected “Spearing” and “Dreck” but
did not fix the problem with the syntax and the captains, whose fate
was left ambiguous.
The next year Eli W. Caruthers, using some of the late former
congressman Archibald McBryde’s notes (as Murphey had done), and
assuming that the sufferer “Charles Sherring” must have been an “active
and resolute Whig,” dated the attack on him to about the time of
Fanning’s raid on Pittsboro (that is, on the Chatham Court House, July
17, 1781). “Sherring” had hidden in a corn crib, Caruthers said.
Suspicious, searching in the dark, Fanning fired between the logs,
hitting Sherring’s “wind-pipe and the neck bone.” Somehow Sherring kept
silent despite his agony, then after Fanning left he rode eight miles to
get his wounds dressed by his friend Cornelius Tyson.[8] Fanning had not killed him, after all.
Three decades later John H. Wheeler revisited this story without
using Caruthers and without thanking Swain: “One of the earliest
sufferers was Charles Shearing, of Deep River, to whose house he
[Fanning] went at night, and shot him dead as he fled.”[9] On December 14, 1910 the Siler City Grit quoted Wheeler, without attribution. Ten days later the Greensboro Daily News challenged the quotation. The Daily News
had learned the facts of Shearing’s death eight years earlier from the
nonagenarian Methodist minister, Louis Phillips, whose family had lived
near Shearing on Deep River, just over Chatham County into Cumberland
(later Moore) County. Shearing had been “a notorious cattle thief” who
slaughtered his stolen cattle on a large boulder which, in 1910, was
still called “Shearing’s Rock.” Shearing had been outlawed, after the
war, and Ben Elkins and Louis Phillips, the father of the minister, were
sent to capture him. Shearing rushed toward Elkins “with upraised hoe,
declaring he would kill him,” and Elkins fired, “killing Shearing almost
instantly.”[10] After reading the Daily News, the Grit on January 11, 1911 printed Caruthers’s long account of Fanning’s attack on “Sherring.”
“Fanning
Loses the Bay Doe” from the book, “The Master of the Red Buck and the
Bay Doe”, William Laurie Hill (Charlotte, NC: Stone Publishing Co,
1913).
Andrea Quenette is an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas.
A white professor who used the n-word during a lecture about racism on
college campuses was placed on paid leave after her students filed a
complaint against her.
Andrea Quenette, an assistant professor of communication studies at the
University of Kansas, must stay off campus as the school investigates, she told the Lawrence Journal-World.
Her suspension came two days after five of her students demanded she be fired in an emotional open letter.
“I didn’t intend to offend anyone, I didn’t intend to hurt anyone. I
didn’t direct my words at any individual or group of people,” she told
the newspaper Friday.
Quenette’s controversial remarks came during a Nov. 12 class for
graduate students who teach undergraduate classes. The class met the day
after a contentious university-wide forum on race and discrimination,
which followed days of protests at the University of Missouri over concerns about the school’s handling of racial issues.
Diversity in the classroom was already on the syllabus, the 33-year-old
professor said, and one of her students asked how they could handle
racial problems in their own classrooms.
“As a white woman I just never have seen the racism,” Quenette told her
class, according to the open letter calling for her resignation. “It’s
not like I see ‘n----r spray painted on walls.”
Quenette said it was her way of acknowledging her own blind side.
Princeton Students Take Over President’s Office, Demand Erasure Of Woodrow Wilson 11/18/2015
Black
Lives Matter activists at Princeton University have taken over the
president’s office and say they won’t leave until the school acknowledges former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson as a racist and renames all buildings currently honoring him on campus.
Members
of a group calling themselves the Black Justice League walked out of
their classes late Wednesday morning and assembled at Nassau Hall, where
they were met by Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber. The
students presented a list of demands inspired by similar lists that have
been seen at Yale University, the University of Missouri, and
elsewhere.
“WE DEMAND the university administration publicly
acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson and how he impacted
campus policy and culture,” the students’ demands say. “We also demand
that steps be made to rename Wilson residential college, the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs, and any other
building named after him. Furthermore, we would like the mural of Wilson
to be removed from Wilcox Dining Hall.”
The students called
on Eisgruber to sign their list of demands, and said until he does so
they will occupy Nassau Hall, for days if needed.
“We want to
make this as awkward as possible for him,” one activist said, according
to The Tab, which has a writer liveblogging the protest. . . .
In addition to their Wilson-related demands, the occupying students also demand that “cultural competency training” be required of all faculty members, and
that the school require all students to take classes on the history of
“marginalized peoples.” The protesters note that mandatory cultural
competency training was voted down last spring because of fears the
requirement would trample free speech, but activists say that
explanation doesn’t fly and the school needs a “conversation” about the correct meaning of free speech.
“We
demand a public conversation,” the demand says, “on the true role of
freedom of speech and freedom of intellectual thought in a way that does
not reinforce anti-Blackness and xenophobia.”
Unlike
some other college presidents around the U.S., Eisgruber has been
willing to publicly reject some of the protesters demands out of hand.
The school simply isn’t going to eliminate its tributes to Wilson, he
said, barely an hour into the protest.
“I agree with you, Woodrow
Wilson was a racist,” he said. “In some people, you have good in great
measure and evil in great measure.”
Eisgruber did agree, though,
with adding courses on marginalized people to distribution requirements,
but he said he lacked the power to implement such a requirement.
According to The Tab, as Eisgruber spoke, there were outcries from the crowd.
“This
campus owes us everything,” said one student. “We owe white people
nothing. All of this is mine. My people built this place.”
In
response to Eisgruber’s rapid rejection of the first demand, students
for the time being say they will continue their occupation of
Eisgruber’s office.
This
is very distressing. I may lose two of the awards I was happiest about
all these years. In 1959 I quit a good lifetime job as telegrapher on
the Kansas City Southern Railroad in Port Arthur, Texas, in order to
take a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Northwestern University. Will that
become the Malcolm X Fellowship? Then in 1962 I was given a Woodrow
Wilson Dissertation Fellowship. Will that be erased altogether or will
it become the Bill Cosby Dissertation Fellowship? Will I get another
1800 dollars for the first one if it is renamed and a munificent 3990
for the second if it is renamed?
Reposting this because the news is that the Dixie Chicks will tour again. In a South which no longer glories in the Confederate flag, in a South which may not after all be solidly Republican, will they get a hearing? Will Apostolic Christian Republicans burn their records? Will any of the country singers speak out in support of them? Will Toby Keith finally apologize for his knee-jerk chauvinistic condemnation of them? Oh, who was the true patriot, Toby or Natalie? Toby, what have you learned in these long years?
Sunday, September 13, 2015
The Loving Afterlife of the Dixie Chicks
A few weeks ago I heard Ben Bullington for the First Time, heard "Country Music, I'm Talking to You."
Made him sick, it did, what Country Music did to the Dixie Chicks.
I just stopped listening after country fans turned on the Dixie Chicks.
I cannot even listen to that clever lyricist Toby Keith after he tried
to out Lee-Greenwood Lee Greenwood in Holy Patriotism, when the true
patriots were the Dixie Chicks. I understand the holy self-righteous
rage. I've been thinking about it in relation to the 18th century
Scotch-Irish anger and looking for living people who know how to
acknowledge the rage and leave it behind us.
Then just now reading Peter Heller's THE DOG STARS I got to "We loved
the Dixie Chicks who wouldn't." Supply the punctuation: "We loved the
Dixie Chicks. Who wouldn't?" This in a book published in 2012. I got up
and came down to tell Peter Heller how much I love him, backwards, from
The Painter to this one. And I find a slur against the Dixie Chicks.
Tyler Kee review 2014 of Peter Heller's THE DOG STARS evoked this snotty comment from Rlc2
rlc2 says:
Ok, update- first chapter done…
Just Wow. This guy can write- a dog guy, a gun guy, a blues guy, pilot- or so good a writer he is in the heads of them all…
Reminds me a little of the science fiction book “A Boy and His Dog” –
Only one tiny quibble- Dixie Chicks…really? …:)
Really, Rlc2, really. People I love love the Dixie Chicks. Brave Ben
Bullington loved them. Peter Heller loves them, to drop those 7 words
into his book. Tell you who would not love them: Kim Davis and her
present husband Joe. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Bobby Jindal. Jeb!Boy.
All the "Christians" filled with hatred and self-righteousness. Oh, what
has happened to us as a result of centuries of grievances and
bitterness and rage! How can we turn away from the taxation of the
Church of England and the greed of the landlords in Scotland and
Ireland? from the devastation of the Civil War? From religiosity and
chauvinism, hollow ignorant "patriotism" when Natalie, God help her, was
the true patrio
What
Happened When I Tried to Write a Book as Fast as Melville Wrote WHITE-JACKET
On a train out of Strasbourg for Luxembourg I plotted on a
manila envelope what I would do when I got home to Wilmington, DE. I had promised
to write a book on BILLY BUDD by September and had worked on the
Northwestern-Newberry MOBY-DICK instead. I knew Melville had written
WHITE-JACKET in 2 months, maximum, and wondered if later on he remembered much
about it. I decided as an experiment that I would write the BB book in what
time I had in July and all of August. But I had to go to New Orleans first, and
there I found a great cache of letters from Oakey Hall, in one of which he
casually announced that Melville had written WHITE-JACKET in a score of
sittings. I took that to mean that Melville worked for 20 days out of the 2
months--read sources and planned for a day or two and wrote like hell the third
day. Well, the weather did not cooperate. It got hot and we had no air
conditioning. For 19 days in a row [I am pretty sure it was 19] it was in the
mid 90s. People all over the East died. My computer got gummy.
I finished early and sent it off and the publisher (Bobbs
Merrill) refused it because it was too long. Northwestern took it as it was. A
lot of people liked it. Paul Seydor quotes it in his new book on PAT GARRETT
AND BILLY THE KID.
Mike—this is hard to read. I
wrote the book between 13 July and 24 August 1988. My computer really did stick
in the heat and humidity. And my test proved that in my case, at least, I would
not remember a word of what I wrote, whether Melville remembered anything about
WHITE-JACKET or not.
Found today in my copy of LITERARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES while working on the last Historical Note in the final volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE.
As I describe in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, I took the qualifying exam in the Spring of 1962, not the Fall, and as luck had it thereby became eligible, the same week, for a new WOODROW WILSON DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP.
The seal closer up.
Our house, in the middle. Under a lot of potential mud.
Mike Yoder/Lawrence Journal-World 
