Picking up a Topic Started 2 years ago--Hanging Tories

Here, with interpolations, is what I posted 2 years ago, 3 days after I stopped watching MSNBC and all other news stations. I have survived by being almost steadily in denial, even today, when we see that incendiary words from the President just possibly might have something to do with acts of violence. It has become clear to me, being so old that I remember when Evangelicals were Christian, that Evangelicals who support Trump now constitute a Hate Group. I am too old to do anything but look at the hatred of long-dead people. I am going to look at what aged survivors of the Revolution said in 1832 or thereafter about the times they whipped or hanged Tories and the circumstances under which they did so. I am using hundreds of pension applications in the great Will Graves and C Leon Harris SOUTHERN CAMPAIGNS database, perhaps the most ambitious, painstaking, and valuable database for study of the American Revolution.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Why go into denial when you can go deep into the past? WHAT WAS WRONG WITH HANGING TORIES?

The skeleton crew of surviving students of Hayford is finishing the 15th of 15 volumes of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE. So that's about over, and should be out in 2017. [IT IS OUT, LATE IN 2017.] I am working on the copy-edited manuscript of the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK. So that will be out in 2017. [IT WAS ALSO OUT LATE IN 2017. I did a little thing on Melville's reputation for a Cambridge U P book that should be out in 2017. [IT WAS OUT IN FEBRUARY 2018.] I have a piece on "North Carolina Women Who Talked Back to the Tories" which should come out this month, maybe before I turn 81, in the webzine JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. [IT CAME OUT LTE IN 2016, AND WAS REPRINTED IN THE 2018 HARDBACK VOLUME OF THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.] Yesterday I submitted another piece to the JAR on the Tory troops as sexual predators. [THIS ONE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE WEBZINE LATE IN 2016.] I have other pieces in mind including one with a title "What Was Wrong With Hanging Tories?"--because Benjamin Cleveland got in trouble for that, as did others over in Virginia. Do you begin to see how deeply in denial I intend to be for an indefinite period? It feels like home back here in the 1770s. Sometimes searching a given topic (not chosen to give this result) I get 25 hits which include 5 or 6 cousins or uncles. We belong in this country and maybe I understand why 85% of the descendants of these men voted the way they did. But why could you shoot a Tory and not hang his brother? That will take some more research.

   IN 2018, OTHER THINGS HAPPENED, UNPLANNED, THAT INTERFERED WITH MY WORK ON HANGING TORIES.  

On 7 April 2018, news that the French Ministry of Education has put the Second Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, eds. Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer, on the official program for the highly competitive external agrégation examination for 2019 and 2020. On 15 April 2018, more good news, the announcement that our edition of The Confidence-Man will also be on the program for the internal examination.

Moby-Dick ou le Cachalot, ed. Philippe Jaworski (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), with my "Herman Melville: Vie et Oeuvre, 1819-1891," 35-92. Published on 19 April 2018; my copy arrived 20 April 2018. So my chronology is in the standard French edition of Moby-Dick.

Participation in a section of Leviathan on the NN Edition. Sent in on 31 May 2018, “A Mandate Fulfilled (1965-2017): The Writings of Herman Melville.”

Starting in April 2018, I took on a big new job, probably my last job, writing notes for the Library of America volume on Herman Melville: The Collected  Poetry. I finished that in July and it is in the production line to be out in Melville's bi-centennial, 2019.

Current project: Ornery People: Who the Depression Okies Were. This will be a unique genealogical book because I bring to it all I have learned about historical research in a scholarly career spanning more than half a century. The idea behind it is that almost anyone whose family had been in eastern Oklahoma since the mid-19^th century can now, starting with the Internet, retrieve lost family stories and establish new historical memories in the context of successive episodes of American history. 

What I have done since July 2018, when I finished the Library of America volume, is research what became an article on my McGehee cousins and Cook cousins and the reckless lies and outright murder by a Freedmen's Bureau man--a shockingly example of my being forced by evidence to tell a politically incorrect bit of history. Then I have done the research, discovering unused documents (as usual) about the Great Hangings of Gainesville, Texas, in 1862, when my cousin Aaron Hill was one of the jurors. Now I am turning back to what was right and wrong about hanging Tories during the Revolution.

Many of my cousins will be in this article, as  by-standers or active rope-pullers. I hope to see it published in the webzine JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, perhaps even in 2018.