Willie Lynch: The Making of a Slave

Trying to clear off the corner of a desk that has become rather cluttered the last few days, I came across something a student gave me last week. He asked if I'd ever heard of Willie Lynch's speech. I said I hadn't, so he gave it to me, printed out from this website. (It's much easier to read, though, here or anywhere else you can find it.) I put it on the side of the desk, and before long it was covered and forgotten. I rediscovered it a few minutes ago.

The speech begins:

Gentlemen. I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies, where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves.

After the first sentence, I had my doubts. A quick Google search seems to confirm. Fake. Hoax.

I’m probably the last person in the world to see this, right?

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"They only call it class war ..."

I found this wonderful picture at a posting from gottlieb titled "All Revolution is Class War" over at Progressive Historians. I won't bother quoting or even describing the piece; if the guy holding the sign doesn't make you want to read it, you probably wouldn't enjoy it. (Come to think of it, that probably means you should read it. Just click above.)

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History Enthusiast takes on "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"

Kristen, over at The History Enthusiast, has a great post on "Decoding The Lost Tomb of Jesus." Good analysis, but I was especially interested in how she compared the names recorded in the tomb--

Jesus, son of Joseph
Maria
Matthew
Yose
Mariamne e Mara
Judah, son of Jesus

to the listings she found in an 1850 slave schedule from Missouri--

24-year old mulatto male
20-year old black male
18-year old black female
15-year old mulatto female
6-year old black female
3-year old black female

What are the familial conections? How can we be sure?

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"Southern Pasts": A new, must-read blog

I just came across a new (two week old) blog, Southern Pasts. The "sub-title," if that's the right word, is "The past is not dead," the first half of a famous line from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun; the conclusion, "it's not even past," proves that Faulkner was one of the greatest southern historians ever.

Southern Pasts is beautiful in both its layout and its writing. The author introduces it thusly:

The title of this blog, Southern Pasts, borrows from the titles of two books on the history of the South. The first is Fitzhugh Brundage’s recent monograph, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. The second is Melton McLaurin’s award-winning memoir, Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South.

Given its namesakes, this blog will address issues related to southern history and how people remember it, particularly with regard to race. I deliberately chose McLaurin’s plural “pasts” because I believe that the South is a region with a still largely segregated understanding of the past. In terms of historical memory in the South, there are often (as the cliche goes) two sides to every story.

One of my goals as a historian is to complicate (dare I say, integrate?) the “separate pasts” of the South, both black and white, and it is with this goal in mind that I began this blog.

I urge you to read it.

Best wishes, Southern Pasts!

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Getting LOST

Since I'm too worthless these days to post anything here, I'm passing along a link to LOST Magazine, described by the publisher as "an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things."

I haven't read much of it yet, but what I've seen is quite good.

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Land Travels: Camping, Caves, and Crazy Times

We are having a grand time trekking through the Eastern side of Australia. Billabong is safely docked in Mooloolaba and as of the 20th of February we have been putting on the kilometers in our rented “campette” campervan. As of today we have made it just past Sydney, less than 1,000 km if driven straight … however we have driven over 2,500km! We have explored the coast and the neighboring hinterlands; traveling flat coastal breath-taking views to mouth-gaping dramatic mountain roads. Australia is yet another beautiful country, and we are yet again thankful for the opportunity to be here.

One thing we have learned about the Australian’s is that they sure do know how to camp … and they don’t go skimpy! More than once on our cruising journey, I have found that I’ve had boat envy … sometimes a wee-bit jealous of the big, more luxurious boats (more properly called yachts). I still remember the day I stepped aboard a beautiful 70 foot sailboat and was handed a chilled glass of white wine in a REAL wine glass! I never thought such envious thoughts could be found in camping too. We look quite pathetic in our tiny ‘campette’ (basically a small van with a bed and camp-stove) when we pull into a campground and are surrounded by HUMONGOUS camping setups … some of these tents are bigger than the average home! We’ve even had more than one local comment on how small our little guy is! And so, as we drink our barely cool white wine from lovely blue plastic cups, I can’t help but stare longingly at the campsite next to us as they drink their fully chilled wine, in the protection of their net enclosed social area, in, of course, a real wine glass!!!

But of course for us life is grand, and even if we tend to be a bit envious here and there, there is no time to dwell on it as the sites are just to numerous and wonderful to care about how one got there to see them in the first place!

Our favorite Australian site to date is the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains National Park (just west of Sydney). Honestly, I can’t even begin to describe the wonder and amazement of this magical place. I never would’ve guessed that caves could be so interesting and beautiful. Both of us have tried to come up with expressions and descriptions, but it is useless … they were (are) just amazing and no words or photographs will ever do them justice!

Besides great hiking and walking, superb views and lookouts, and exploration of towns and cities, we have also experienced one of the highlights (according to Lonely Planet) of Sydney … the Mardi Gras. Now this isn’t to be compared to the New Orleans Mardi Gras … this is the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras and boy oh boy is it the most unique and, er’, interesting parade I’ve ever seen! We were lucky enough to be in Sydney for this great festivity, and even luckier to meet up with our friends on Island Sonata. There are some things that just can’t be written about this parade, less I’m kicked off this BLOG site for pornographic material!!! About half a million folks attended and it was quite a scene to take in, especially some of the ‘outfits’ or lack there of. If you can handle the crowds it’s something not to be missed should you be in town during the event.

Next up we’ll continue our travels south, to Melbourne, where we’ll board a plane to fly over to Tasmania, spending nine days on the island before returning to Sydney, and eventually Billabong back in Mooloolaba.

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Road Trip Brisbane to Sydney Photos

2/20/07 - 3/4/07

2/20 - 2/23:  Brisbane to Coff's Harbour

Mt Warning National Park, Tenterfield & Bald Rock NP, Washpool / Gibralter Range, Yamba, Coff's Harbour, Sawtell



2/23 - 2/27:  Dorrigo to Broken Bay

Dorrigo National Park, Nambucca Heads, Trial Bay / Southwest Rocks, Crowdy Bay, Port Stephens, New Castle, Pittwater/Broken Bay, Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park



2/28 - 3/01:  Blue Mountains

Wentworth Falls, Leura - Katoomba, Blackheath, Three Sister's, Jenolan Caves

3/2 - 3/4:  Sydney

Including the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

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Marian Sims and Reconstruction in S.C.

In response to a posting yesterday where I noted that I'm working on a conference paper and need to finish it during our spring break, a reader asks what the paper is about.

The paper is for the annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians and is titled, rather boringly, "Beyond Surrender: Marian Sims, Francis B. Simkins, and Revisionism in Reconstruction South Carolina."

Marian Sims (1899-1961) was a writer born in Dalton, Georgia. In the mid-1930s, Sims, who had been a school teacher (history and French) and copy writer for an advertising firm, began writing novels and short stories. Much of her fiction dealt ("with notable honesty and intelligence," according to a reviewer in the New York Times) with the lives of middle-class southerners facing such issues as divorce and small-town religious and moral bigotry.

In 1941, Sims turned her hand to historical fiction with Beyond Surrender, a novel of Reconstruction in South Carolina. In the book's acknowledgements, she thanked Francis Butler Simkins, who was the author (with Robert Woody) of one of the first of the so-called "revisionist" histories of Reconstruction (South Carolina during Reconstruction, [1932]).

Earlier historians (and people in general) had looked at Reconstruction as a dismal failure, where vindictive northern Radical Republicans imposed horrible "reforms" on the southern states. This interpretation features scalawags and carpetbaggers, uppity and incompetent blacks, and whites being humiliated and, in general, unfairly imposed upon. William Archibald Dunning and his students (the "Dunning school") at Columbia a century ago turned out a number of studies that "proved" this interpretation. (Perhaps the most popular "history" was Claude Bowers's The Tragic Era [1929]). Think of Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and you'll understand how widespread this view was.

Historian Francis B. Simkins was no Eric Foner, but his view of Reconstruction was quite different from Dunning's. In Simkins's view, not all Yankees were bad, not all southern whites were good, and the former slaves were treated with a sympathy that even W.E.B. DuBois pronounced "fair."

A reading of the Sims-Simkins correspondence and the two books (Sims's novel and Simkins's history) shows that Sims was heavily influenced by Simkins's work, producing what might well be the first "revisionist" fiction of the Reconstruction era, a much improved version (from a historical standpoint, anyway) of Margaret Mitchell's more famous novel.

Sims has been almost completely ignored by historians, and I think that's a shame, hence the paper.

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Who do people say I am?

This past week in my History of American Religion class, we discussed Patrick Allitt's "The American Christ," from American Heritage (Nov. 1988). It's a great article that makes several good points I want my students to learn. (At the end of the semester, they're going to read Stephen Prothero's American Jesus.)

Since Jesus was in the news last week, the timing worked out well.

A few years ago, I used Allitt's article as the basis for a column (I used to write a weekly column--or, as someone said, I wrote a column, weakly--for the local newspaper). Jesus himself provided the title (or the "headline," as the editor insisted on calling it): "Whom Do Men Say That I Am?" That's the King James Version. I wish now that I had used the more politically- and grammatically-correct New International Version: "Who do people say I am?" (Mark 8:27)

Anyway, here it is:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Several years ago, Patrick Allitt, a historian of American religion at Emory University, published an article called “The American Christ.” He showed how Americans in the last two centuries have interpreted Jesus--his life and his teachings--from their own perspectives. You might say that we have made Jesus in our own image.

In Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880), Jesus and the title character were strong and masculine. Wallace himself was a manly man, a major general in the Union army.

On the other hand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a woman. Her story of Jesus, titled Footsteps of the Master (1877), stressed the feminine side of Christ, calling him at one point a “loving, saintly mother.” Stowe noted that Jesus had more compassion for women than any other famous man in history.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps took things a bit further with her Story of Jesus Christ (1897). Jesus “boldly took the stand that men and women stood before God upon the same moral plane, and that they ought so to stand before human society.”

Whom do men say that I am: Charles Atlas or Phil Donahue?

Eugene Debs, labor leader and Socialist party presidential candidate, said that Jesus “organized a working class movement for no other reason than to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.”

Bruce Barton, an advertising executive in the 1920s, described Jesus as the founder of modern business principles, the world’s greatest salesman.

Jesus: labor leader or businessman?

Mary Austin’s biography of Jesus was titled A Small Town Man (1915). Big cities were wicked, but Jesus came from the small town of Nazareth. Fulton Oursler echoed this theme in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949). “Oh yes, Joseph knew that sophisticates in Jerusalem looked down on the countrified Nazarenes, yokels with a ridiculous northern accent,” Oursler wrote. “But Joseph, with all his fellow townsmen, felt that the people of Jerusalem were unnatural and overcivilized. Anyway, he was proud of his home town.”

In the 1960s, Karl Burke, a prison chaplain, thought young people raised in the inner city had trouble understanding the Bible’s language and identifying with its agricultural setting. So Burke, in God Is for Real, Man, rewrote a number of Bible stories from a more contemporary, urban perspective. “After Jesus busted outa the grave, He met two of his gang on the road. Man! Were they ever spooked and surprised. Thomas’s eyes almost bugged out when he saw Jesus.”

Jesus: country boy or urban dude?

Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896) told how citizens of a Midwestern town were suddenly made aware of the suffering in their midst. They became interested in a number of social reforms as they decided to live by the simple creed, “What Would Jesus Do?” One of the characters was a young woman from a prominent and well-off family who gave up everything to live with and help the poor. “It was not a new idea,” said Sheldon. “It was an idea started by Jesus Christ when he left His Father’s house and forsook the riches that were His in order to get nearer humanity.”

William Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago (1893) took a more moralistic stance. Stead had scandalized the city by publishing a list of the businessmen and local officials who visited the city’s prostitutes. Stead said in his novel that if Jesus came to Chicago, he would do the same thing.

Robert Ingersoll, the most famous atheist in the nation a hundred years ago, found much to admire in the life of Christ. “He was a reformer in his time,” Ingersoll said, noting that both he and Christ had worked to save the world from the tyranny of organized religion. “Had I lived at that time, I would have been his friend, and should he come again he will not find a better friend than I will be.”

Jesus: social reformer, scandal monger, friend of the atheist.

I was thinking of Allitt’s article this week, after I read about a new Catholic church in Los Angeles. The church, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, contains a large statue of the Virgin Mary, a Mary with definite Latino features. “I think she has to be one of us,” said the artist. The statue has raised a few eyebrows, but has apparently been accepted fairly well.

How do we see Mary? Lew Wallace said: “Her complexion was more pale than fair, the eyes blue and large, and shaded by drooping lips and long lashes; and, in harmony with all, a flood of golden hair.” Elizabeth Stuart Phelps described Mary as having “a fair complexion, blonde hair and bright hazel eyes. Here eyebrows were arched and dark, her lips ruddy.”

When I was a child, I had a book that told the life of Jesus, as illustrated by a number of artists through the ages. Jesus was always light skinned, sometimes even blond, often surrounded by Caucasian children, smiling brightly. According to Albert Cleage, in Black Messiah, “For nearly 500 years the illusion that Jesus was white dominated the world only because white Europeans dominated the earth.”

Jesus: white man, or person of color?

In the recent primary, one candidate criticized his opponent’s liberal religious views, especially his alleged tolerance of homosexuals. This candidate promised that, if he were elected, he would support Christian [i.e., anti-homosexual] principles.

We continue to create Jesus in our own image.

This piece was first published in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News in 2002. All literary references are from the Allitt article cited above.

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good stuff for the weekend

For your reading pleasure this weekend:

Dr. Homeslice has the 108th Carnival of Education.

The 55th Skeptics' Circle is up at Second Sight (with numerology!).

The 5th edition of the Georgia Carnival is at Got Bible?.

History Is Elementary is hosting the 49th History Carnival.

Everything Ed Darrell writes at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub is worth reading.

Me, I'm going to finish the above, watch Jesus Camp, and begin spring break week by finishing a conference paper. I hope.

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