Stonewall Jackson’s Faith Speaks to Christians Today

I have happily returned to reading Robertson’s biography of Thomas Jonathan Jackson. Because the writing is good, and based on both first hand accounts, private letters and contemporary reports, I feel I almost know the man. And I admire him. We need people like him in our country today, those who are public servants in the best sense: committed to fulfilling public and private duty. But more than that, I admire him as a Christian, a man who struggled to know and do God’s will.

The following section from the book occurs shortly after the Harper’s Ferry incident and the ensuing anxiety about sucession.

From the book:

“For Jackson, Lincoln’s election meant that, barring divine intervention, the days of the Union were numbered. Now was the time for serious discussion and mediation. He joined with eleven other Lexington gentlemen in issuing a call for a town meeting to consider the state of the Union. ‘By expression of our opinion,’ the group stated, residents could band together and ‘contribute our mite [sic] to arrest, if possible, the impending calamity–and if that is impossible, then to consult together as to what is the safest course for us to pursue in the event of a dissolution of the Federal government.’ Several gatherings took place, and a number of study committees came into being. Each produced much rhetoric but little resolution. As meetings became more inflammatory, Jackson’s support dwindled. He soon stopped attending the sessions.

Within a few days, Jackson relaxed. He had decided, as was his custom, to put his trust in God. Deacon Jackson would await further developments. Meanwhile, and as a deacon, Jackson had the responsibility for securing accommodations for visiting Presbyterian clergy. Jackson usually found it expedient to extend to such guests the hospitality of his own home.

The Reverend J. B. Ramsey of Lynchburg was at that time staying with the Jacksons. One morning the family had just risen from family prayers. Ramsey expressed lamentations over the state of the country. Jackson listened patiently, then gave the preacher a mini-sermon. “Why should Christians be disturbed about the dissolution of the Union? It can come only by God’s permission, and will only be permitted if for His people’s good; for does He not say, ‘All things work together for good to them that love God?’ I cannot see how we should be distressed about such things, whatever be their consequences.”

Americans in Paris

At the insistence of a friend, I have been reading a David McCullough book The Greater Journey, Americans in Paris (2011). It did not sound interesting to me but I was hooked by the time I had read the first page. Here it is:

They spoke of it then as the dream of a lifetime, and for many, for all the difficulties and setbacks encountered, it was to be one of the best times ever. They were the first wave of talented, aspiring Americans bound for Paris in what, by the 1830s, had become steadily increasing numbers. They were not embarking in any diplomatic or official capacity–not as had, say, Benjamin Franklin or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, in earlier days. Neither were they in the employ of a manufacturer or mercantile concern. Only one, a young writer, appears to have been in anybody’s pay, and in his case it was a stipend from a New York newspaper. They did not see themselves as refugees or self-imposed exiles from an unacceptable homeland. Nor should they be pictured as traveling for pleasure only, or in expectation of making some sort of social splash abroad. They had other purposes–quite specific, serious pursuits in nearly every case. Their hopes were high. They were ambitious to excel in work that mattered greatly to them, and they saw time in Paris, the experience of Paris, as essential to achieving that dream–though, to be sure, as James Fenimore Cooper observed when giving his reasons for needing time in Paris, there was always the possibility of “a little pleasure concealed in the bottom the cup.”

The book proper contains about 450 pages. It is not historical fiction, although it reads like a good novel, full of accounts of intertwined lives of historical figures and events that are recognizable to anyone who knows much 19th century American history and art. ( I discovered I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did). What makes the book most interesting is the conversations and thoughts of those individuals based on their own writing and journals. There are almost 60 pages of source notes.

It was fun for me to get an inside glimpse of so many people I learned about in school, and artists whose work I have seen and admired in person. Here is a partial list of the people included: James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse (did you know he aspired to be a portrait painter?), Charles Sumner, Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winslow Homer, P.T. Barnum (and Tom Thumb), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

The person who made the most impression on me was someone I did not know, Elihu Benjamin Washburne, who had been appointed as minister to France by President Ulysses S. Grant. Washburne served heroically during the Franco-Prussian War, chosing to stay and help in spite of being given permission to return home. He commitedly kept a daily diary of the entire war, a valuable document today.

So, I enthusiastically recommend this book.

Remembering Lincoln

I’ve not seen this statue of my favorite United States president, but I enjoyed reading about how it came about. French’s dedication comments from that day, only three years after Lincoln’s death, share not only some of Lincoln’s accomplishments but also provide a glimpse into his character and humanity. The article is linked below and well worth reading. Here is the introduction to French’s remarks:

“Of all the Lincoln likenesses in Washington, D.C., this statue probably ranks among the least known. On April 15, 1868, the third anniversary of the president’s death, it became the city’s first statue dedicated in his honor. It was erected outside City Hall, now the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Designed by Lot Flannery and hailed as an accurate depiction, it eventually fell out of favor and was removed in 1919; only after a public outcry was it restored in 1923.

On dedication day a crowd estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 pressed near the statue, filling the streets, gazing from roofs and windows, even clinging to treetops. Flags hung at half-staff, guns boomed on the half hour, and public buildings and schools stood closed. Prominent guests gathered on a wooden platform but members of Congress were conspicuously absent; they were preoccupied with impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson, who unveiled the statue.

The ceremonies included prayer, music, a Masonic dedication, a formal address, poetry, and the sculptor’s introduction. The speaker, Benjamin B. French, knew the president well because he served as his Commissioner of Public Buildings. Before delivering his speech he stood in the mud and drizzling rain for half an hour while the Masonic ceremonies proceeded.

French’s remarks retain their interest today mainly because of his striking first-hand impressions of Lincoln. He drew upon his now-famous journal when recalling events such as Lincoln’s first inauguration and the Gettysburg Address. He also quoted from a newspaper article he wrote describing the president’s death and funeral services. A Washington printer, McGill A. Witherow, published the statue dedication speech in booklet form during 1868. The text below appeared in the April 15, 1868, Washington Evening Star.”

Toward the end of French’s speech:

And now, my fellow citizens, we have erected, as I believe the first public statue to the memory of that President, who, more than any other since Washington lived and ever will live in the hearts of the loyal people. Here, where he won from all who knew him — and who is there who did not know him — golden opinions; here, where in the midst of his friends, while enjoying a brief respite from the cares and perplexities of his exalted but laborious station, he was struck down in death, by the hand of the foul and cowardly assassin, have we this day placed upon its pedestal the plain unassuming, but almost speaking semblance, of that plain unassuming, but noble and godlike specimen of human nature. [Applause.]

We have erected it where the earliest kiss of rosy day, as she approaches from the East, may fall upon it, and where the last gleam of evening’s mellow light may salute it as the twilight darkens into night. Here it stands, as it were, in the plaza of the city; and here it will stand, we hope, to be seen by generations long hence to come. [Cries of “It will.”]

Let the fathers of the city, in times of trouble, gather around it, and acquire inspiration by calling to mind the firmness, patience, fidelity, zeal, and nobleness of character of him whom it represents. Let the generations of young men gather around it, and recall, as their example and their guide, the virtue, sobriety, modesty, and uprightness of life and purpose of that great man. And let us all bear in mind and ever profit by the remembrance how Abraham Lincoln placed all his trust in God, and implored His blessing upon every act of his exemplary life!

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/french.htm

 

 

 

What Can Be Expected of Us

More from Vaclav Havel’s book, Disturbing the Peace:

I’m not one of those who somehow got mental stuck in that week of occupation and have then spent the rest of their lives reminiscing about what it was like.  And I have no intention of romanticizing that period either.  I only think that, taken all together, it made for a unique phenomenon which to this day, as far as I know, has never been analyzed in any depth sociologically, philosophically, psychologically, or politically.  But some things were so obvious you could understand them immediately, without any scientific analysis.  For example, that society is a very mysterious animal with many faces and hidden potentialities, and that it’s extremely short-sighted to believe that the face society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true face.  None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the populations, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events, both visible and invisible.  Who would have believed–at a time when the Noventny regime was corroding away because the entire nation was behaving like Svejks–that half a year later the same society would display a genuine civic-mindedness, and that a year later this recently apathetic, skeptical, and demoralized society would stand up with such courage and intelligence to a foreign power!  And who would have suspected that, after scarcely a year had gone by, this same society would, as swiftly as the wind blows, lapse back into a state of demoralization far deeper than its original one!  After all these experiences, one must be very careful about coming to any conclusions about the way we are, or what can be expected of us.

Soberness and Balance

I am enjoying the chapter, “Facing the Establishment”, in Vaclav Havel’s book Disturbing the Peace. Written in an interview format, he answers some questions about his activities during, and his reflections of the period surrounding the Prague Spring.

Haval took part in a lot of debates in universities and faculties: “I took part in meetings, I wrote declarations, and I felt I had to be involved in all of this…I stressed, perhaps somewhat more energetically than others, that every concession gives rise to further concessions, that we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, that we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept. I struggled, as was my habit, against all kinds of illusions and every form of self-deception. However influenced I might have been by that agitated period, I tried to achieve a soberness and a balance. In the spirit of the old Tvar approach–although with obvious differences, for this was a different level of activity, after all-I opposed to every grandiose but vague demand the need simply to remain steadfast to the end in matters that were smaller, perhaps, but more concrete.”

I think he understands human nature very well:

At one large meeting of the central committees of all the artistic unions, a well-known actor….made a dramatic appeal for the establishment of a national tribunal to try Indra, Bilak, and other traitors of the nation. Hysterical nonsense. I got up immediately and replied that, instead of suggesting something that no one could ever hope to carry off, it would be better to attempt sticking by the solidarity agreement that every cultural worker had signed (and which was shortly after that betrayed by most of them).  I said it was a thousand times more valuable to insist, regardless of the consequences, on something more modest but realistic, than to pacify one’s conscience by firing off loudmouthed proposals that evaporate forever the moment they’re made and therefore commit no one to do anything about them.  Histrionic emotions expressed through proposals like that are extremely unreliable: they may be grand today, but the resignation felt tomorrow can be equally as great…Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words

A new Michael Pack documentary on Justice Thomas is being shown in select theaters.

……[T]he film connects Justice Thomas’s roots in a time and place when black Americans were denied the dignity of equal treatment under the law with his eventual embrace of a natural rights and natural law philosophy that he adopted in part through the influence of John Marini and Ken Masugi. Both worked for Justice Thomas in the eighties and are now senior fellows at the Claremont Institute. During most cuts in the film, an image of the Declaration’s lines about all men being created equal runs across the screen.

To Mr. Pack’s credit, however, the movie never descends into a con law lecture. It’s an opportunity to hear the story of an amazing but winding journey from the standpoint of Justice Thomas and, to a lesser extent, his wife Virginia. Mr. Pack recorded thirty hours of interviews, including some recordings of Justice Thomas reading the most beautiful passages from his memoir. Laced through the movie are scenes of a small boat seen from above navigating the maze-like wetlands around Pin Point, Georgia, the site of the Justice’s earliest memories. The movie’s original score by Charlie Barnett is beautiful and often plaintive.

With his brother and their somewhat erratic mother, Justice Thomas spent his first few years in Pin Point, where the poverty experienced by his Gullah family and neighbors was livable and off-set by the tight-knit community. His father abandoned the family when he was two, and his mother was able to survive for a while on hard work. When she moved Clarence and his brother to Savannah after a fire destroyed their home, they found the urban poverty much more unbearable. Justice Thomas recalls the sewage from tenement toilets being flushed out into the yards. Archival photos of the city show the boards that denizens would position from the street to their porches to avoid walking through the waste.

When young Clarence was seven, his mother asked her own parents, Myers and Christine Anderson, to take in her two young boys. While Christine was a comforting figure, Myers was nearly illiterate, but a fiercely independent thinker whose memorization of swaths of the Bible had led him to be a Republican and also convert to Catholicism in the late 1940s. This unbending disciplinarian believed that the curse of the fall relating to working by the sweat of one’s brow was best embraced as a reality. He greeted the boys with a warning: “The damn vacation is over.” It was not an act… more.

From the Pin Point Heritage Museum, Savannah, Georgia:

 

Pin Point from Moon River Bridge 2005

Reading a Book

Over the years I have acquired a small library of books that interest me.  Some I’ve read, many I have re-read,  but there are too many I have not read at all.  So I am going to try to not buy [too many] any books for a while and read some that I already have.

I thought about finishing up all the books I have started and not finished first, especially Ron Chernow’s Grant, and Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend by Robertson.  But then I spied a book I gave Dad a couple of years ago.  I doubt he was able to read it, but I think I will read it now.  Compared to the books I just mentioned it is a short story, so I should be able to get one book read in no time.  I hope it is as interesting as I think it will be.  The book:

Reading Sudden Sea

I am reading R. A. Scotti’s Sudden Sea: The Great  Hurricane of 1938, lent to me by a friend. It reads like a mystery and I am enjoying it. An early chapter, “A Perfect Day” describes Westerly, Rhode Island,  and a little of its history and local flavor. I have lived in or near Westerly at various times in my life…about 20 years total, so lot of the history, topography and culture is familiar to me, but I was surprised to read this:

The first of Westerly’s natural assets is bluish granite, considered by many to have the finest texture in the world.  (I knew that much).  In the nineteenth century when the Smith Granite Company, Westerly’s first and largest quarry, was buzzing, skilled stonecutters from northern Italy were imported to carve Civil War monuments and gravestones.  Eighty percent of the memorials for both Yankee and Confederate soldiers are built of Westerly blue granite, and the masons who carved them established the roots of an Italian community that remains strong to this day.

The author is so engaging that I was almost unaware that she was slowly explaining weather patterns and how and why hurricanes form.  And sometimes she throws in a little philosophy.  For instance:

The official gauge of a hurricane’s destructive force is the Saffir-Simpson Damage Potential Scale.  Storms are measured according to sustained wind speed, storm surge height, and barometric pressure and classified on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being “catastrophic.”  Only one Category 5 storm had ever reached the continental United States–Labor Day 1935.  The Labor Day hurricane had been a tightly coiled tropical cyclone–small, swift, and singularly nasty.  The Hurricane of 1938 was shaping up to be a big, sprawling mother storm–some five hundred miles in diameter, as big as the state of Ohio.

       Although Galileo proved long ago that man is not the center of the universe, we  tend to take weather personally.  If it rains, it is raining on our parade.  If it shines, it is shining for our benefit.  Most days we go along blithely unconcerned that directly over our heads is a vast, never static sea of gases that we can’t control and only partially understand.  That gaseous ocean is immense and mysterious, yet we largely ignore it until weather as formidable as an extreme hurricane strikes and we face a force infinitely mightier and more savage than ourselves.

It is a fascinating read.

Vladimir Bukovsky: A Dissadent’s Dissadent

The June 3, 2019 edition of the magazine National Review is all “Against Socialism.”  Jay Nordlinger has an article in it, “Bukovsky’s Judgment”  about Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident, and the book he wrote, Judgement in Moscow.  It is fascinating to me.

Nordlinger:

    All Soviet dissidents are legendary, to one degree or another.  Vladimir Bukovsky is especially so.  He is held in awe by people whom the rest of us hold in awe.  I’m speaking of his fellow dissidents.  He is a dissident’s dissident, so to speak.

    A book of his, which originally appeared in 1995, is now being published in English for the first time.  On his back patio, amid chirping birds, I talk with him about this and many other subjects.

    Bukovsky was born in 1942 and quickly opposed the system: the system into which he had been born.  He was kicked out of Moscow State University when he was 19.  He had criticized the Komsomol, the Young Communist League.

    “Do you think you were just born this way?” I ask him.  Born to take risks, born to land in trouble? “Yeah,” says Bukovsky.  “There’s nothing you can do about it.  I would feel uncomfortable if I tried to hide what I believe.  It’s against my nature.”

…..He spent twelve years in the Gulag: prisons, labor camps, and sadistic psychiatric hospitals.  I ask, “Did you ever think you would not survive?” “Oh, yeah,” he answers.  “It was the dominant idea…..most of my friends were killed.”

Bukovsky was released in 1976, exchanged at the Zurich airport for Luis Corvalan, the head of the Chilean Communist Party.

…But for now: What about this book, newly in English?

    Go back to 1991—when the new Russian president, Yeltsin, banned the Soviet Communist Party.  The Party sued, and Yeltsin’s government asked Bukovsky to serve as an expert witness at trial.  He agreed, on one condition: that he would have access to the archives—the archives of the Central Committee, the beating, black heart of the Party.  He got it.

    Off he went to Russia, armed with a laptop, a scanner, and other equipment.  By day he combed through the archives, finding eye-popping material, and by night he copied this material, surreptitiously.  He knew he had to work fast.  He figured the archives would not be open for long, to him or anybody else.  “I had a very limited window,” he says today.

    The trial turned out to be a dud, not a Nuremberg-like reckoning, which Bukovsky and many others had hoped for.  But Bukovsky had the documents in the West….He put them in a book, along with his comments on them.  He called the book “Judgment in Moscow.”…Its subtitle is “Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity.”

I will read the book.  Most likely I will buy it.

A Migrant Group of Sabbatarians

 

 

I have a wonderful book of piano solos which are simplified versions of classic hymns and music.  I just played through “The Palms” which I used to love hearing (and singing) at Easter time in the Ashaway, RI church where I spent most of my growing up years.  Thinking about the choir there, I remembered Mr. Crandall who sang with us in the earlier years.  I think he was Dr. Albert Crandall, but I am not sure.  So I looked him up on-line.  Nothing looked related to him so I added “Seventh Day Baptist” and up popped a nice article mentioning Crandalls, some of whom I am pretty sure were his relatives.  So, especially for my Seventh Day Baptist family and friends, here is a link to the brief article in a 2011 American Ancestors magazine. From the beginning of it:

Do you have relatives from Salem, West Virginia? What about Janesville, Wisconsin; Denver, Colorado; Piscataway, New Jersey; Berlin or Alfred, New York; or Woodbridgetown, Pennsylvania? These disparate places were all home to migrant groups of Sabbatarians, or Seventh Day Baptists (hereafter SDB), many of whom can be traced back to Rhode Island families of the late seventeenth century.This article will briefly summarize the history of Seventh Day Baptists in the United States, explain how they differed from other religious groups, and describe the relevant genealogical records.

My own family has ties to Salem, West Virginia, and all the way back to those early Seventh Day Baptists in America.