The first English colony in New England was Plymouth. Plymouth and the so-called Pilgrims who founded it hold a special place in American lore – one that is often more legend than history. This essay will explore the events that led to the Mayflower’s voyage. Later essays will tackle more of the legend, dispel myths, and provide context for the WASP1WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” infestation of North America.
Countless books have examined the reasons for the Puritan migration to the New World. In a nutshell, the English monarchy and the Protestant Reformation were to blame. The bloody upheavals of the Reformation and the monarchy’s on-again, off-again relations with the Pope were a perfect storm. England herself suffered a crisis of faith for nearly two centuries.
In 1517, Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses officially started the Protestant Reformation. But less than 15 years later, the decision of King Henry VIII of England to climb aboard the separatist bandwagon was utterly unrelated to theology. He needed a male heir. To get one, he needed a different wife. When the Pope refused to grant him an annulment, Henry essentially deposed the Pope in England and declared himself head of the Church. He dissolved English monasteries and confiscated their wealth.
He removed most of the clergy from the House of Lords. He prosecuted people for treason if they refused to acknowledge the English monarch as the head of the Church of England. In the space of a few months, England was no longer Catholic. Henry divorced his wife and would marry five more times. (He divorced and beheaded his non-producing wives to speed up the process of begetting a legitimate male heir.)
Henry’s successor and only surviving son, Edward VI, died at 15. He had been England’s Protestant king for six years. Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, was the daughter of his Catholic first wife, Catherine of Aragon. When Mary assumed the throne, she immediately reversed her father’s Protestant policies. Queen “Bloody” Mary embarked on a purge of British subjects who refused to accept the Pope. For the five years of her reign, Mary lit bonfires under hundreds of recalcitrant, outspoken Protestants. The fiery persecutions stopped temporarily when Mary’s Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, ascended to the throne in 1658. But when Spain threatened to invade England, Elizabeth relit the fires. She burned Catholics instead.
The Puritans wanted no part of the official English Church any more than they wanted to return to Catholicism. Elizabeth’s government enacted laws that punished people for not attending or supporting the established Anglican Church. The government executed separatist leaders for sedition. Elizabeth’s successor, James IV and I of Scotland and England, continued these policies after assuming the English throne in 1603.
To quell dissent in some measure, James commissioned an English translation of the Bible. This translation served as the official book of the English Reformation. This edition of the Bible is famous, not because of the accuracy of its translation (spoiler: it isn’t accurate), but for its poetic use of language. The Authorized King James Version is still used everywhere in the English-speaking world more than 400 years later.
In 1606, James required people to take Oaths of Allegiance to deny the Pope’s authority over the British monarch. Before he inherited the English throne, King James wrote an infamous text on witches, stoking the fires around ever more stakes throughout Britain.2Demonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, 1597. Read more about the effects of this book and the witch fears of the time in “James VI and I: the king who hunted witches,” History Extra, website (https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/king-james-vi-i-hunted-witches-hunter-devilry-daemonologie/ : accessed 7 Jan 2024), 2013.
The Puritans strongly disapproved of the Church of England trading a pope for a monarch at its head. As they saw it, the Anglican Church was only a partial reformation of the problems with Catholicism. Anglican rituals reminded the Puritans entirely too much of the Catholic Church. The established Church of England, in their minds, had not purified itself of the taint of Catholic abuses. These Puritans advocated separation from the Church of England. They wanted a completely different ecclesiastical structure.
Some separatists wanted a church controlled by elders in a presbyteral polity. The presbyterian3Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination. structure was still hierarchical but gave power to the coalition of like-minded churches to choose the people in positions of authority. Other English separatists eschewed the notion of a church hierarchy altogether. They thought each congregation should govern itself autonomously. This congregational church polity was very popular among the most zealous separatists.
By 1607, a group of Puritans led by Rev. John Robinson had grown utterly frustrated. They chafed under the English government’s religious restrictions and decided to leave England for a place friendly to religious dissent. No English settlement had yet survived in America,4The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower. so the New World was not an option. The entire congregation moved to Leiden, Holland.
The separatists did not find their answer in Holland, though. After a decade in Leiden, the expatriated Puritan community was impoverished and saw their children becoming more Dutch than English. They wanted a place where they could be entirely English, thoroughly Puritan, and completely autonomous.
Emissaries approached the Virginia Company of London. By this point, the Virginia Company had collaborated with settlers to maintain a shaky English foothold in Jamestown. However, the separatists did not want to establish a settlement near the Anglicans in Virginia. They had fled Anglican oppression when they left England for Holland and were not eager to risk it again. Nor did they want to settle near the Dutch in New Netherlands. They already knew that the influence of more libertine Dutch culture frustrated their Puritan ideals, and they did not want to compound the problem by relocating to a Dutch-American colony. The emissaries finally obtained a land patent from the Virginia Company for land at the mouth of the Hudson River, south of the inland Dutch settlements at what is now Albany, New York.
After a series of misadventures, their ship, the Mayflower, left late in the season and arrived at Cape Cod in November 1620. The ship was considerably north of where it was supposed to be; the Virginia Company had no authority to grant land patents north of Long Island Sound. Nevertheless, the separatists decided to land. Before going ashore, they drafted an agreement for governing themselves. All 41 adult males aboard the ship signed the Mayflower Compact.
William Brewster, one of the Fennig family’s colonial ancestors, was the pastor and leader of the Mayflower Puritans. William Chilton, one of my ancestors, was alive at the signing of the Mayflower Compact but died before stepping onto land. Half of the Mayflower’s passengers would die the first winter in Massachusetts. They had arrived in November without food or shelter.
Plenty of good books about the fate of those initial settlers of the Plymouth Colony exist, so I will not cover the next ten years in detail. Suffice it to say that the legends taught in classrooms across this country are inaccurate, whitewashed accounts that ignore salient facts. The only religious freedom that concerned the Mayflower Puritans was their own; they came to establish a theocracy and quickly expelled religious dissenters. The Europeans brought immense suffering and oppression to the native population, which had already been devastated by European diseases before settlements on the mainland were successful. Between more disease and enslavement, the English quickly showed the pattern of colonial abuses that they practice even today.
The story of the peopling of North America did not start with the English. The Spanish began colonizing North America in the 16th century, but even they weren’t the first. Columbus did not “discover” an empty land devoid of civilization, governments, or a recognizable economy. English settlers did not have to hack their way through a wilderness to find arable land. Native Americans were not barbarous savages without laws, diplomacy, or philosophy.
We must understand the reason for European migration to the New World, but we must also understand what the Europeans found here and why to put our ancestral history into context.
Part 2: The Great Migration and Colonial Upheaval
Select Bibliography:
Bailyn, Bernard, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Loewen, James W., Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: Touchstone, 1995.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History, New York: Viking, 2003.
Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Mann, Charles C., 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, New York: Random House, 2011.
Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006.
Quinn, Arthur, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec, New York: Berkeley Books, 1994.
Rounding, Virginia, The Burning Time: Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and the Protestant Martyrs of London, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.
Footnotes
1
WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”
Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination.
4
The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower.
This is the true story of the greatest interspecies war in recorded history.
The setting is Western Australia, October 1932, so it’s mid-spring Down Under. Spring is migration season when waterfowl and songbirds fly overhead in murmurations and sharp V-formations. Australia also has a migratory bird that does not fly. Emus are large critters. When they migrate, the image that should come to your mind is the wildebeest of Africa, the caribou of the Arctic, or the bison formerly of North America. The 1932 spring migration was the invasion that started the Great Emu Wars.
A decade before, veterans of World War I had been given land in the Western Australia Outback as payment for their service. Western Australia had been threatening to secede for thirty years, and Parliament hoped that the new settlers would turn the tide. When the Depression hit, Parliament encouraged those new farmers to plant more wheat. An abundant wheat crop was growing just in time for migration season.
General Napoleon Bonaparte said, “An army marches on its stomach.” Migrating giant flightless birds discovered that wheat fields make excellent forage. They tore gaps in fences, gorged themselves on wheat, spoiled the crop with their big feet, and invited their allies, the rabbits, to run amok in the fields.
Emu
In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie The Birds, a character hears that birds have attacked a school and tried to kill children. Skeptical, she says, “Birds have been on this planet since Archaeopteryx, a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a… war against humanity?”
Emu Soldier
A single emu can strip a garden in a couple of hours. A handful of emus can devastate a wheatfield in half a day. Twenty thousand emus were making brisk business of acres and acres of farmland. These birds had declared war on humanity. Humanity had to defend itself.
Australian Defence Minister Sir George Pearce
At first, the farmers fired rifles to scare off the birds, but the sheer number of invaders overwhelmed them. They needed something more. So, they got an audience with the Australian Minister of Defense. They demanded machine guns like those they had used at Gallipoli and ammunition to repel the enemy incursion. And since Western Australia, where the mood favored secession, now asked for federal government help, help was politically expedient.
But the farmers were a dozen years rusty in deploying heavy weaponry. So, the Defense Minister sent highly-trained military personnel in troop transports to fight. Since this mission was as much a military action as a public relations opportunity – surely those grateful Western Australians would stop their silly secessionist talk now! – the Defense Minister also sent a cinematographer to record the whole thing. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
So, on the side of the humans: Major G.P.W. Meredith in command of the 7th Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery, two Lewis machine guns from World War I, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and two personnel carriers in the form of Model Ts.
Maj. Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith
On the enemy’s side: an unidentified emu general and his barefoot battalions. Sun Tzu said, “A good commander is unconcerned with fame.” I’m sure this is why we don’t know the name of the humble emu commander.
Unidentified Emu Commander
Because as we will see, the emus had studied Sun Tzu. The Australians had not.
Historian Barbara Tuchman said, “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.” The first miscalculation happened in late October when the humans delayed their participation in the war on account of rain. The sun finally came out on November 2nd; the two sides could play ball. But the birds were no longer clumped in large groups that were easy to find.
Sun Tzu said, “Allow the enemy to think you foolish because their arrogance will cost them the battle.” Being too foolish to come in from the rain, the emus had spread out over miles and miles of farmland while the humans stayed dry. The emus knew exactly what they were doing.
Eventually, someone spotted about 50 emus together. Farmers tried to herd them into an ambush, but the birds scattered. History must assume that the emu commander rallied his troops by reminding them of Sun Tzu’s famous advice: “Be extremely subtle, even formless.” The birds refused to stay in formation, and their tactics confounded the Aussies.
Emu Gunner
The strategy of the emus was simple. Having read Sun Tzu, they knew that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” So, they didn’t fight. They ran away.
Running emus are difficult to target. They’re big birds, sure, but they have tiny heads. Feathers make their bodies seem bigger than they actually are, and they run 30 miles an hour. Salvos from the Lewis guns missed every single one. By the end of the first day, the humans claimed to have killed a dozen birds. Witnesses were skeptical. The cinematographer had caught it all on film. Exhausted from their exertions, the 7th Artillery decided to take a day of rest.
Two days later, on November 4th, Major Meredith received intelligence that a thousand enemy combatants had assembled their forces at a dam. A gathering like this was tailor-made for the Lewis guns. This time, the weapons could surely subdue the enemy and compel a surrender. The humans set up a single Lewis gun and aimed carefully. Staccato fire leaped from the gun, which almost immediately jammed. By the time the soldiers unjammed it, the birds were long gone.
Model T Armored Personnel Carrier with Lewis Guns (actual photo)
Another human miscalculation was believing that a Model T’s top speed was 45 miles per hour. That top speed assumes paved roads. In the unpaved fields of the Outback, the Model T could barely reach 15 miles per hour, and emus are twice as fast. Only two Model Ts were in the fray. They couldn’t keep up, and the bumpy terrain made firing guns from them impossible.
Napoleon said, “You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” By November 6th, the fourth day of the campaign, apoplectic army observers noted that “each pack seems to have its own leader now—a big black-plumed bird which stands fully six feet high and keeps watch while his mates carry out their work of destruction, and warns them of our approach!”
On November 8th, after six days of battle without a confirmed kill, the Australian Parliament called for a cease-fire. It recalled the 7th Artillery, which had spent only a quarter of those 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Major Meredith reported that his troops had killed hundreds of birds, but the newspapers scoffed at that. The cinematographer had evidence. Word on the ground was that maybe 50 birds had been hit, and perhaps a dozen died.
Actual Newspaper Article
Western Australia was still desperate for relief. Four days after surrendering the battlefield, Parliament relented and sent Major Meredith and his Lewis guns to the Outback again.
Machiavelli said that when the enemy knows your plans, you must change those plans. Instead of one bullet for every two birds, the Aussies brought along half a million rounds this time and prepared for a pitched battle. But Sun Tzu said, “There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.” Some Australian evidently stumbled across a copy of the Art of War, read that passage, and recommended that the Great Emu War should end for the good of the country. The Australians surrendered the battlefield again less than a month later, on December 10th.
Ultimately, Major Meredith reported that the 7th Artillery had fired 9,860 of its half-million rounds and killed 986 emus – one bird for every ten bullets. His numbers could have been accurate. We know this ratio is possible because a farmer hit an emu with his truck a few days after the detente. The bird’s autopsy revealed nine bullets had been in its body for about two weeks before the truck killed it.
A few months after Australia declared the Great Emu War ended, Western Australia voted overwhelmingly to secede. Secession never happened, though – probably because the people were still too busy trying to fend off guerrilla attacks by emus. Despite pleas from farmers in 1934, 1943, and 1948, the government never sent more help.
As that same character in Hitchcock’s The Birds observed, “The very concept of war with birds is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn’t have a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?”
Eventually, farmers learned how to build emu-proof fences.
*This post was originally a presentation to the Æsthetic Club on 25 April 2023.
One of my favorite ancestors is Dr. Benjamin West (1730-1813) of Providence, Rhode Island.1Not to be confused by the famous English/American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), who was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1791. Their circles sometimes overlapped, and many genealogies conflate the two. That’s his marble bust at the top of the page. Brown University has it.2It was recently restored.
The 1822 obituary of my 5th great-grandmother, Mary “Polly” Smith West Pearce, referred to her father as “the eminent Dr. Benjamin West” of Providence. I had not known who her parents were before I found that obituary. What followed were several days of frantic discovery on my part, each one better than the last. The man was phenomenal, and I don’t understand why every generation after him hasn’t continued to hold him up as the pinnacle of the Enlightenment. (Actually, there are many males named “Benjamin West” in the Robinson branch of our family, so someone clearly remembered him. My line from him has been daughter-intensive for the last four generations, so I suppose there’s a reason for it to be missing.)
Benjamin West was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American equivalent of England’s Royal Society. Although he was a merchant for about 25 years, he earned great respect as a teacher and a university professor. He taught at Philadelphia’s eminent Protestant Episcopal Academy and at the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (now Brown University) in Providence. Brown University owns his portrait.3Dr. Benjamin West (1730-1813), Professor of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy, 1786-1799. Artist unknown; Watercolor silhouette, 3½” x 7½” from the portrait collection of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Gift of the family of Dr. West. Portrait 156, Brown Historical Property No. 1853, located in the John Hay library 122. From the Brown University website: “The painter of this miniature portrait is unknown … It was a family portrait during Benjamin West’s lifetime and after his death in 1813 it was prized by his descendants for generations until it was ultimately donated to Brown.” Portrait Collection, Office of the Curator, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, website (https://library.brown.edu/cds/portraits/display.php?idno=86). His life and work are fabulous examples of the Enlightenment in North America.
Benjamin West was born in March 1730 in Rehoboth, in Massachusetts Bay, one of the New England Colonies. His father was a farmer. When Benjamin was a young child, the family moved to Bristol. At the time, both Massachusetts and Rhode Island claimed jurisdiction over Bristol.
Benjamin was an autodidact. After a mere three months of formal education and without the means to buy books, Benjamin borrowed every book he could. His most significant benefactor during his childhood was a fiery Congregationalist minister in Bristol named John Burt.4Rev. John Burt died while fleeing the bombardment of Bristol by the British on 7 October 1775, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin West had known Rev. Burt well for thirty years at that point – from his childhood to his marriage to Elizabeth Smith. We can assume that the bombardment of his hometown and the death of his friend and mentor made the war personal for Benjamin West. See Wilfred Harold Monro, The History of Bristol, Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island: J.A. & R.A. Reid, 1880, 208, digital image, The Internet Archive (www.archive.org : accessed 6 Mar 2022); and “A Revolution is Brewing,” The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion Project, Linden Place newsletter, Bristol, Rhode Island: Linden Place (www.lindenplace.org : accessed 6 March 2022). Around the time of his 1753 marriage to Elizabeth Smith when he was 23, he moved to Providence, Rhode Island (population ~3,3005United States Bureau of the Census. A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth, 1790-1900, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. p. 162. The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/centuryofpopulat00unit/page/162/mode/2up). He lived most of the rest of his life in Providence.
By 1758, Benjamin found backers to help him open a dry goods store. A couple of years later, he opened the first bookstore ever to grace the commercial avenues of Providence, now paying for the books he wanted by selling them to other people. He published almanacs for Providence, Bristol, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, to supplement his income for nearly 40 years. His work in plotting and recording the transit of Venus across the sun in 1769 was recognized in 1770 when the College of Rhode Island, then newly established on College Hill in Providence, awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
During the Revolutionary War, he manufactured clothing for soldiers in the Continental Army while publishing his almanac and pursuing his scientific studies. The Royal Society of London published his paper on the transit of Venus and Mercury. In 1781, Benjamin West became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1786 began to teach mathematics and astronomy at the College of Rhode Island. In later years he added natural philosophy to the curriculum.
His friends were early backers of the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which later became Brown University. Providence was a small town in those days, so he naturally came into regular contact with the progenitors of the school: Stephen Hopkins (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), the famous four Brown brothers (Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses), Judge Daniel Jenckes, and others. He loved mathematics and astronomy and conferred with some genuinely great minds of his day. He tutored students privately throughout his life.
Benjamin West was a member of an active abolitionist group in Providence. This position pitted Benjamin against his friend John Brown, who actively engaged in the slave trade. Except for John, the Brown brothers’ thoughts on slavery shifted after a disastrous series of events on their slave ship Sally. Of 196 people purchased on its two-year voyage to Africa, only 87 survived to be sold as slaves in Antigua. The inhumanity of the Sally debacle especially shattered Moses Brown. He manumitted the people he had enslaved and became one of the most outspoken abolitionists of his time.
Purple prose and flowery metaphors abound in the contemporary biographical accounts, some written around the time of his death. They all reach one conclusion: Benjamin West was a genius who contributed considerably to science and mathematics. He was indeed a product of the Age of Enlightenment.
Astronomical Genius
An event in 1766 opened some gilded doors for him. A comet appeared in the constellation of Taurus on the evening of April 9. Being an excellent self-taught astronomer, Benjamin took careful measurements. He wrote a letter to a Boston astronomer named John Winthrop,6The Harvard President was a direct descendant of the John Winthrop whose 1630 fleet began the Great Migration. The earlier Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the persecutor of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. who was at Cambridge College (now known as Harvard University). He had never met or corresponded with Winthrop but was so excited about his observation he simply had to share it – and shared it with one of the foremost astronomers in North America.
Providence, April 10, 1766
Dear Sir:
For the improvement of science, I now acquaint you, that the last evening, I saw in the West, a comet, which I judged to be about the middle of the sign of Taurus; with about 7 degrees North latitude. It set half after 8 o’clock by my watch, and its amplitude was about 29 or 30 degrees. Nothing, Sir, could have induced me to this freedom of writing to you, but the love I have for the sciences; and I flatter myself that you will, on that account, the more readily overlook it.
I am, Sir, yours,
Benjamin West
This flowery language essentially says, “Sorry to bother you, but wow! I saw a comet last night!” He and Winthrop became great friends and continued to write to each other. For the rest of their lives, they would share observations about the night sky.
1769 Transit of the Planets
In 1716, building on the work of Johannes Kepler a century before, Edmund Halley figured out how to apply the theory of parallax to determine the distances between astronomical bodies. With both Mercury and Venus predicted to pass between Earth and the sun in 1769, astronomers worldwide were anxious to test the theory. Since this was the first opportunity to view the transits of both inner planets since Halley’s theory was published, everyone in the field of astronomy was excited. Captain Cook would observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti on his ill-fated circumnavigation. At the time of the last transit of Venus in 1761, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who had just finished their survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, had traveled to the Cape of Good Hope to observe it. These men used astronomy as an essential tool in their lives – navigating the oceans and surveying the land required precise measurements, and measurements started with the stars.
Telescope used by Benjamin West to observe the transits of Mercury and Venus in 1769, Brown University Collection. Photo credit: Brown University
There was no telescope in Providence in 1769. Benjamin West, Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Moses Brown were determined to see the phenomenon, though, so they managed to import a telescope from England at the incredible expense of 500 pounds. The men set up on the outskirts of Providence and watched the celestial event. Transit Street in Providence is named after the spot where they viewed the transit on June 3, 1769. There are photos of the telescope on the Brown University website – the school still has it and displays it.
As was his habit, Benjamin West made careful measurements of the transit.7See a list of Brown University’s observations of the transits of the planets at the Ladd Observatory. He published a tract (and dedicated it to his friend Stephen Hopkins) about the event.8See a copy of the 27-page tract on the Brown University website, complete with diagrams.
In July 1770, he and other astronomers observed the new;y-discovered Lexell’s Comet, which passed closer to earth than any known comet before or since. His observations contributed to a theory about the tails of comets. Because of his astronomy observations and publications, Benjamin West, a man with only three months of formal education, was awarded an honorary Master of Arts from Harvard on July 18, 1770. Here’s the text of the notification letter from his friend John Winthrop:
Cambridge, July 19, 1770
Sir —
I have the pleasure to acquaint you that the government of this college were pleased, yesterday, to confer upon you the Honorary degree of Master of Arts; upon which I sincerely congratulate you. I acknowledge the receipt of your favour, and shall be glad to compare any observations of the satellites.
Yours,
John Winthrop
Honors and degrees
Benjamin West primarily worked as a merchant during the 1760s and 1770s. When the Revolutionary War finally arrived, commerce dried up. He went to work manufacturing clothing for the American troops, but he continued his studies and correspondence with the other great minds and kept publishing his almanacs. In 1772, Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary degree for his work in astronomy. Then, in 1781, he was elected in the first class of honorees to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Some of his correspondence survives in the Academy’s archives. Two articles by Benjamin West appear in the Academy’s inaugural journal. First was the three-page article, “An Account of the Observations Made in Providence, in the State of Rhode-Island, of the Eclipse of the Sun, Which Happened the 23d Day of April, 1781.” He and Joseph Brown observed the eclipse together, and they would continue to share observations of the sky their entire lives.
Mathematics seems to have been Benjamin’s first love. In 1773 he wrote to a friend in Boston of a theorem he had developed to extract “the roots of odd powers” that was probably his most significant contribution to the field of mathematics. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a copy of his letter in its first journal. This article was entitled “On the Extraction of Roots.” It caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. He created theorems in quadratic equations to extract the third, fifth, and seventh roots of numbers. Some skeptics claimed his theorems were no different from those already in use; others praised their clarity and simplicity.
He didn’t stop at math and astronomical observations, though. One surviving biography explains a physics problem he cogitated upon for more than two years in conjunction with John Winthrop and a Mr. Oliver. It had to do with the properties of air in a copper tube that was then placed into an otherwise airless container. The qualities of invisible gases – basically, the scientific understanding of the very concept of the physical nature and properties of “air” – were in their infancy. Benjamin West speculated about the attractive and repulsive nature of the tiny particles that made up the matter of air and how they would behave under different conditions. (We now call these particles “molecules.”) Gravity, matter, magnetism, and ultimately the behavior of the tails of comets played into his understanding of the question.
Benjamin West’s mind was at the peak of its illuminating brilliance as the world around him heaved. His most important discoveries and writings happened as the American Revolution was about to explode. By the end of the Revolution, he had returned to academic pursuits. He tutored students in math and astronomy. In 1786, the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations offered him a full professorship.
For some reason, he did not begin teaching at the college for a couple of years. Leaving his wife and family in Providence, Benjamin West moved to Philadelphia temporarily to teach at the illustrious Protestant Episcopal Academy. While there, he solidified relationships with the influential minds of that city, including Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse. He assumed his post at Brown in 1788.
Benjamin West on the Committee for the Providence Library Providence Gazette, 29 March 1783
Brown University awarded Dr. West his first non-honorary degree, his Doctor of Laws, in 1792. He taught mathematics and astronomy there from 1788 until 1799. After leaving the university, he opened a navigation school and taught seafaring men astronomy. He clearly felt called to teach other people the wonders of the universe. I found an advertisement in the Providence Gazette published 29 March 1783 in which he and other influential men of Providence were reconstituting the local library and organizing its books.
The Almanacs and Revolution
Almanacs are annual publications that include helpful information on many practical subjects. People in farming, fishing, sailing, and other trades relied on their weather forecasts, high and low tides tables, ferry times, stagecoach times, and planting dates. Astronomical events like the phases of the moon and eclipses could be found within their pages, as could folklore, proverbs, poetry, essays, recipes, religious calendars, and more. The Franklin brothers (James and his apprentice Benjamin) were famous for their almanacs. Some of the most significant competitors to Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac were the New England almanacs published by Benjamin West.
One of Franklin’s chief rivals was Benjamin West, who published his almanacs in Boston … West usually used the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff,” a name famously used by Jonathan Swift several years earlier. “Abraham Weatherwise” was also a pseudonym [used by West], and likely used by a number of different almanac printers, and he “ushered in the healthiest and most interesting period of almanac making.”9“Eleven Early American Almanacs, 1733-1795, Including Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Improved, 1755,” Bauman’s Rare Books, citing Sagendorph, 116. This auction offering, for $15,000, includes two (and possibly five) of Benjamin West’s almanacs.
Benjamin West’s first almanac was published for 1763 on Providence’s first printing press by William Goddard. It was published continuously for 118 years – continued under the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff” and with various titles until 1881. “From 1763 to 1781, Benjamin West was the author, with the exception of the year 1769 when “Abraham Weatherwise” took his place. From 1781 to 1881 “Isaac Bickerstaff” was given as the author, except in 1833, when the name of R. T. Paine appeared on the title page.”10Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23.
John Carter published the almanacs from 1770-1814.11Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23. John Carter was the father-in-law of Nicholas Brown, Jr., after whom Brown University was named. Nicholas’s uncle Joseph had secured the telescope to observe the transits of Mercury and Venus and observed them with Benjamin West in 1769.12Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 24. The two men engaged in a conflict over publication rights in 1766. Carter continued publishing (and complaining when others published the same almanac, apparently with West’s consent). Around 1781 the men resolved their conflict. Their relationship continued for the rest of Benajmin West’s life.13Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), pp. 25-26.
Benjamin West’s New England Almanack for 1775. Note the pro-liberty poem on the cover.
Benjamin West did not limit his almanacs to dry data and noncontroversial proverbs. Almanacs during the Revolution and the period leading up to it often included political essays and even propaganda. Since nearly every literate household owned and used almanacs regularly, the political leanings of the publishers and almanac writers influenced the sentiments of the people reading the almanacs. When George III ascended the throne in 1762, Benjamin West’s almanac praised him.14Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 372 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614. However, the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 changed everything, and, as it turned out, Benjamin West did not hesitate to share his passionate political opinions. He was one of the “notable patriots” publishing popular almanacs throughout this period.15 Marion Barber Stowell, “Revolutionary Almanac-Makers: Trumpeters of Sedition.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 41–61, 42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302752.
Benjamin West, mathematician and Brown University professor, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. From 1763 through 1781 he published almanacs in Providence, Rhode Island. That West calculated the almanacs does not necessarily mean that he wrote the contents. The printers often hired a calculator, whose name, if it were prestigious, was given to the almanac. Frequently the printer himself furnished the additional text. For 1766 in “A Short View of the present State of the American Colonies, from Canada to the utmost Verge of His Majesty’s Dominions,” the author clearly states that his description of the general despair in English America is to propagandize: “such being the deplorable Situation of this Country, once renown’d for Freedom, it is hoped a Review thereof will excite such a universal Spirit of Patriotism in every Inhabitant, that our Liberty and Property may be yet rescued from the Jaws of Destruction.”16ibid, p. 45. The article’s author notes that “The West almanac for 1766 was printed by Sarah Goddard and her son, William. On 21 Sept. 1765 William Goddard published his sensational Constitutional Courant, a patriotic polemic for the Whig cause.” That being said, Benjamin West’s own strongly Whig sentiments are not lost to history.
His 1767 almanac contained an essay protesting strongly against the Stamp Act and is credited with being one of six critically important almanac-based essays on the topic.17Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 374 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614.
His 1775 almanac contained “A brief view of the present controversy between Great Britain and America, with some observations thereon.” It filled three pages of the 25-page almanac. Benjamin West’s friend and mentor, Rev. John Burt, would die on October 7, 1775, during the British bombardment of Bristol.
Rev. John Burt was the fifth pastor of the Congregational Church in Bristol, R.I. He assumed his duties on 13 May 1741. He died at the age of 50, on 7 October 1775,18Find a Grave memorial # 13165832 for John Burt, at the Congregational Churchyard cemetery in Bristol, R.I. (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13165832). as the British bombarded the town in the first year of the Revolution.19During the Revolutionary War, the British Royal Navy bombarded Bristol twice. On October 7, 1775, a group of ships led by Captain Wallace and HMS Rose sailed into town and demanded provisions. When refused, Wallace shelled the town, causing much damage. The attack was stopped when Lieutenant-Governor William Bradford rowed out to Rose to negotiate a cease-fire. Bristol and the neighboring town of Warren, RI, suffered a second attack by the British on 25 May 1778, when 500 British and Hessian troops marched through the main street (now called Hope Street (RI Route 114)) and burned 30 barracks and houses, taking some prisoners to Newport.
Rev. Burt was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. After the French and Indian War of the 1750s-1760s, Burt was adamantly anti-Catholic and anti-French.19John F. Quinn, “From Dangerous Threat to “Illustrious Ally : Changing Perceptions of Catholics in Eighteenth Century Newport,” Rhode Island History, 2017, 75:56,60, accessed 6 Mar 2022. At the time of the 1790 census, only 3,211 lived in Bristol county, a little less than half of which lived in the town of Bristol.
It takes little imagination to believe that Rev. Burt’s death during the shelling of Bristol by the British inspired Benjamin West to take action on the American side, even if he had not been inclined that way before. However, Benjamin West’s published almanacs make clear that his sentiments lay strongly with the American cause long before the first official shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
Benjamin West’s Family
Since I discovered him as Mary Smith West’s father, the rest of Benjamin’s family has been a brick wall for me. “Brick walls” in genealogy research refer to those ancestors whose origins and relations are shrouded in seemingly impenetrable mystery. Of course, I may have gotten so wrapped up in researching the man that I haven’t put enough energy into the rest of the family!
Most secondary sources list Benjamin’s father as a farmer named John and his wife as Elizabeth Smith. A couple of these sources say Ben’s grandfather was an immigrant to America, but his name is not given. Several sources claim he had eight children and was survived by three of them, but as of March 2022, I have found names for only four or five: Elizabeth, Nancy (Anne?), Benjamin, Mary “Polly” Smith, and Joseph.20Rhode Island Census, 1774, p. 53, Record for Benjamin West in Providence, Rhode Island. Ancestry, website (www. ancestry.com : accessed 6 Mar 2022). In his household, there were two white males over the age of 16, one white male under the age of 16, two white females over 16, and three white females under 16. Assuming he and his wife are two of the people over 16, this report allows for two sons and four daughters in the household. Two others may have died young, been living elsewhere, or not yet born. Where his wife’s maiden surname is mentioned, it is given as Smith. His birthplace is given as Rehoboth, Massachusetts, or Bristol, Rhode Island. In 1730 Bristol was claimed by Massachusetts as part of the original Plymouth colony. It became part of Rhode Island in 1746, when the border between Rhode Island and Plymouth colonies was finally settled. Bristol was where King Philip’s War had started in 1675, and served as the primary base of operations for Metacomet, or King Philip. If Benjamin’s family was in the area at the time, they would have endured the first (and worst) of the wars between Native Americans and European colonists. The town was started in 1680, after the war.
Many online trees confuse and conflate Benjamin West the astronomer with another Benjamin West born in Rhode Island around 1730. The other Benjamin West (c. 1730-1782) was the son of William West (1681-aft 1742) of Kingstown, Rhode Island. William was the son of Susannah Soule (c. 1642-c. 1684) and Francis West (c1632 in England – 1696 in Kingstown). Susannah was the daughter of Mayflower passenger George Soule (c1601 in Holland – c. 1680 in Duxbury, Plymouth Colony). The descendant of George Soule is said to have been born in North Kingstown or Newport, Rhode Island, around 1730. He is said to have lived in Farmington, Connecticut, and died in Rensselaer, New York in 1782. The “Silver Books” of the Mayflower Society list the 1753 marriage record of Benjamin West and Elizabeth Smith as belonging to George Soule’s descendant, not to the astronomer. Since the astronomer was from Bristol, and the Soule descendant was from Kingstown, it seems more likely that the attribution of the marriage record to the Soule descendant is incorrect.
There is a marriage record for Benjamin West and “Mrs. Elizabeth Smith” in Bristol, County, Rhode Island, on 7 June 1753.21James N. Arnold, Rhode Island Vital Extracts, 1636-1850, Vol. 6: Bristol County, pp. 50, and citing Bristol Marriage Record Book 1:125. Providence, Rhode Island: Narragansett Publishing Company, 1891-1912.Rev. John Burt performed the marriage ceremony. Based on the title she was given in the marriage record, she may have been married to a man named Smith prior to marrying Benjamin West. However, no other records in Bristol show a man named Smith marrying a woman named Elizabeth in the 10 years prior to this. It is possible that she married elsewhere. It is also possible that “Mrs.” was simply an abbreviation for “mistress” and did not denote her previous marital status.
In 1767, Benjamin West was a commissioner for the insolvent estate of Joseph Smith, deceased, of North Providence (Pawtucket). He valued the estate and filed papers confirming the portion that should be allowed to Joseph Smith’s widow, Marcy or Mercy Smith.22 “Probate files, early to 1885 (Pawtucket, R.I.),” Pawtucket (Rhode Island). Court of Probate. Probate files, 1, 5-85, Estate of Joseph Smith (1768), images 363-373 of 1199, FHL Film 2364533. FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 6 March 2022) Joseph may have been a brother or another relative of Benjamin’s wife.
Elizabeth Smith West may have been a daughter of Anne Arnold, the widow of Benjamin Smith who married Stephen Hopkins in 1755. Hopkins was a signer of the Declaration and a colonial governor of Rhode Island, among his many other accomplishments, and was known to be a close friend of Benjamin West.
Benjamin’s wife Elizabeth died in 1810 in Providence. When Benjamin died in 1813, the probate court appointed two administrators: his daughter Elizabeth, who apparently never married, and his son-in-law Gabriel Allen, who was married to Benjamin’s daughter Nancy. Nancy was a nickname for Anne, so her name appears as both in records. It appears that Joseph, Elizabeth, and my 5th great-grandmother, Mary “Polly” Smith West Pearce, were the children who survived him.
In the first Decennial Census of the United States in 1790, Benjamin West lived next door to his son-in-law, Oliver Pearce. Oliver was married to Benjamin’s daughter Mary Smith West, who was called Polly. They were my 5th great-grandparents. In 1800, the Pearces had moved, but Gabriel Allen, who married Ben’s daughter Nancy (or Anne), lived next door. In Ben’s home were four white adults: a man and a woman over 45 and a man and a woman between the ages of 26-44. The younger couple may have been one of their children and a spouse or possibly two adult unmarried children.
Oliver Pearce and Polly West moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, sometime between 1793 and 1807. By 1800, Oliver’s brother Nathan was already living in Fayetteville, North Carolina with another adult male and two enslaved people.
A man named Benjamin West died in Providence in 1801 and may have been Benjamin and Elizabeth’s son. One of Benjamin’s sons also may have been named Joseph. Joseph West, a Revolutionary War veteran from Rhode Island, married Violetta Howard of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died there in 1840. I’ve gone a bit back and forth as to whether he’s the right Joseph Smith, and have found nothing definitive to connect him to the astronomer despite the repeated insistence of quite a few unsourced online trees.
More information is out there, but not accessible to me online. Brown University’s John Hay Library has in its special collections letters from Benjamin and Joseph West to Dr. Solomon Drowne23in the Drowne Family Papers (MS Drowne). The Rhode Island Historical Society has documents in its special collections relating to Benjamin West’s mercantile business and a narrative of his 1769 observations of the transits.24Benjamin West Papers, MSS 794. There are references to him in the papers of Moses Brown at the same repository.25MSS 313. Letters from Benjamin West to one of his granddaughters, Cecilia Pearce Newby (a daughter of my 5th great-grandmother), are in the special collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the papers of her husband, Larkin Newby.26Larkin Newby Papers, 1796-1884. Collection Number: 03247.
Bibliography:
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Website (amacad.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Arnold, James N. Rhode Island Vital Extracts, 1636-1850, Vol. 6: Bristol County, p. 50, citing Bristol Marriage Record Book 1:125. Providence, Rhode Island: Narragansett Publishing Company, 1891-1912. (FamilySearch.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard Press, 1967, 50th Anniversary Edition, 2017.
“Biography of Benjamin West, L.L.D. A.A.S.: Professor of Mathematicks, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in Rhode Island College – and Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, &c.”, The Rhode Island Literary Repository, Vol I, No. 7 (October 1814): 137-160 (337-360). Google Books (books.google.com : accessed 6 March 2022).
Bliss, Leonard. The History of Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts: Comprising a history of the present towns of Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Pawtucket, from their settlement to the present time; together with sketches of Attleborough, Cumberland, and a part of Swansey and Barrington, to the time that they were severally separated from the original town. (Boston: Otis, Broaders, and Company, 1836). The Internet Archive (archive.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Brown University. Portrait Collection, Office of the University Curator, Providence, Rhode Island. Website (https://library.brown.edu : accessed 6 March 2022).
Find A Grave. Website, database with images (findagrave.com : accessed 6 March 2022).
Hall, Louise. “Family Records: Newby Bible”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 122 (Apr 1968): 125-128, 125. American Ancestors (americanancestors.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Newmann’s Ltd. Website (newmansltd.com : accessed 6 March 2022)
Pease, John Chauncey, and John Milton Niles. A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode-Island, (Hartford: William S. Marsh, 1819), 331-333. Biographical entry for Dr. Benjamin West. (Google Books : accessed 6 March 2022.)
The Providence Gazette, various issues, 1763-1802.
Quinn, John F. “From Dangerous Threat to “Illustrious Ally : Changing Perceptions of Catholics in Eighteenth Century Newport,” Rhode Island History Journal, 75:56, 60 (2017). Rhode Island Historical Society (www.rihs.org : accessed 5 Mar 2022.
Raymond, Allan R. “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777.” The New England Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1978): 370–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/364614.
“A Revolution is Brewing,” The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion Project, Linden Place newsletter, Bristol, Rhode Island: Linden Place (lindenplace.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Rhode Island Historical Society Library. Benjamin West Papers. 121 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906.
Spencer, Mark G. Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, Entry for Benjamin West (1730-1813). London: Bloomsbury (2015). pp. 1096-1097.
Stowell, Marion Barber. “Revolutionary Almanac-Makers: Trumpeters of Sedition.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 41–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302752.
United States Bureau of the Census. A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth, 1790-1900, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. p. 162. The Internet Archive (archive.org : Accessed 6 March 2022).
Wikipedia. (wikipedia.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
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An earlier version of this post originally appeared on Aramink.com.
Footnotes
1
Not to be confused by the famous English/American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), who was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1791. Their circles sometimes overlapped, and many genealogies conflate the two.
Dr. Benjamin West (1730-1813), Professor of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy, 1786-1799. Artist unknown; Watercolor silhouette, 3½” x 7½” from the portrait collection of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Gift of the family of Dr. West. Portrait 156, Brown Historical Property No. 1853, located in the John Hay library 122. From the Brown University website: “The painter of this miniature portrait is unknown … It was a family portrait during Benjamin West’s lifetime and after his death in 1813 it was prized by his descendants for generations until it was ultimately donated to Brown.” Portrait Collection, Office of the Curator, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, website (https://library.brown.edu/cds/portraits/display.php?idno=86).
4
Rev. John Burt died while fleeing the bombardment of Bristol by the British on 7 October 1775, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin West had known Rev. Burt well for thirty years at that point – from his childhood to his marriage to Elizabeth Smith. We can assume that the bombardment of his hometown and the death of his friend and mentor made the war personal for Benjamin West. See Wilfred Harold Monro, The History of Bristol, Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island: J.A. & R.A. Reid, 1880, 208, digital image, The Internet Archive (www.archive.org : accessed 6 Mar 2022); and “A Revolution is Brewing,” The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion Project, Linden Place newsletter, Bristol, Rhode Island: Linden Place (www.lindenplace.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
5
United States Bureau of the Census. A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth, 1790-1900, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. p. 162. The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/centuryofpopulat00unit/page/162/mode/2up
6
The Harvard President was a direct descendant of the John Winthrop whose 1630 fleet began the Great Migration. The earlier Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the persecutor of Anne Marbury Hutchinson.
“Eleven Early American Almanacs, 1733-1795, Including Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Improved, 1755,” Bauman’s Rare Books, citing Sagendorph, 116. This auction offering, for $15,000, includes two (and possibly five) of Benjamin West’s almanacs.
10
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23.
11
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23.
12
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 24.
13
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), pp. 25-26.
14
Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 372 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614.
15
Marion Barber Stowell, “Revolutionary Almanac-Makers: Trumpeters of Sedition.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 41–61, 42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302752.
16
ibid, p. 45. The article’s author notes that “The West almanac for 1766 was printed by Sarah Goddard and her son, William. On 21 Sept. 1765 William Goddard published his sensational Constitutional Courant, a patriotic polemic for the Whig cause.” That being said, Benjamin West’s own strongly Whig sentiments are not lost to history.
17
Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 374 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614.
18
Find a Grave memorial # 13165832 for John Burt, at the Congregational Churchyard cemetery in Bristol, R.I. (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13165832).
19
During the Revolutionary War, the British Royal Navy bombarded Bristol twice. On October 7, 1775, a group of ships led by Captain Wallace and HMS Rose sailed into town and demanded provisions. When refused, Wallace shelled the town, causing much damage. The attack was stopped when Lieutenant-Governor William Bradford rowed out to Rose to negotiate a cease-fire. Bristol and the neighboring town of Warren, RI, suffered a second attack by the British on 25 May 1778, when 500 British and Hessian troops marched through the main street (now called Hope Street (RI Route 114)) and burned 30 barracks and houses, taking some prisoners to Newport.
Rev. Burt was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. After the French and Indian War of the 1750s-1760s, Burt was adamantly anti-Catholic and anti-French.19John F. Quinn, “From Dangerous Threat to “Illustrious Ally : Changing Perceptions of Catholics in Eighteenth Century Newport,” Rhode Island History, 2017, 75:56,60, accessed 6 Mar 2022.
20
Rhode Island Census, 1774, p. 53, Record for Benjamin West in Providence, Rhode Island. Ancestry, website (www. ancestry.com : accessed 6 Mar 2022). In his household, there were two white males over the age of 16, one white male under the age of 16, two white females over 16, and three white females under 16. Assuming he and his wife are two of the people over 16, this report allows for two sons and four daughters in the household. Two others may have died young, been living elsewhere, or not yet born.
21
James N. Arnold, Rhode Island Vital Extracts, 1636-1850, Vol. 6: Bristol County, pp. 50, and citing Bristol Marriage Record Book 1:125. Providence, Rhode Island: Narragansett Publishing Company, 1891-1912.
22
“Probate files, early to 1885 (Pawtucket, R.I.),” Pawtucket (Rhode Island). Court of Probate. Probate files, 1, 5-85, Estate of Joseph Smith (1768), images 363-373 of 1199, FHL Film 2364533. FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 6 March 2022)
A few years ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to come into possession of a letter written by my 5th great grandfather, Paris Jenckes Tillinghast (1757-1822), to “Messers Brown & Ives.” The letter was written 20 February 1809, postmarked the next day, received 4 March 1809 in Providence, and answered on 7 April 1809.
This letter was so full of family connections that I nearly hyperventilated when I saw it on eBay. I lost the auction but persuaded the winner to rehome the letter. Fortunately, he was also interested in family history and understood my excitement.
Fayetteville Febry 20th 1809
Messrs Brown & Ives
Gentlemen
This will make you acquainted that I have drawn on you for $200 in favr Mr Sebastian Staiert of this place payl in N York which I have no doubt will be duly honord & meet with your approbation. I have purchased since my last to you 10 Hnd Tobacco & hope to make out the 45 Hnd in time for the Augus return & not exceed $3 Hn. The planters are now asking more on acct the rumour of the (??a garlemesd??) to be intendd to be repeald that Horrible Law. Cotton is now current at $12½ Cash. I was in hopes to [ge]t hold of some at your limits. But it was improbable as the holders all expect the Odious Law is to be repeald by 4th March. I hope your Mr Ives will have arrd to his Family eer this comes to Hand in good health. I should have been very Happy indeed to have seen him at Fayetl & would chearfully given him my best bed & table. I think he must have had a pleasant jaunt & seen something new among the Demots at Congress. I anticipate the Hope that they the Demos will not Dare to involve their Country in a War with GB to make Free Ships Free Goods for that’s the Bone of all the Quarrel at last I think. Please to inform me your opinion respecting the price of cotton with you & in Boston I shall have a Debt due in Boston next month & wish to know If cotton will do the honors and I have pickd up some few Bales for this purpose. I will do all I can to hand you your pay as fast as I can possible get hold of anything But would (empower?) for your Interest. O Pearce Daughter Eliza intends to take a Husband on Thursday Evening next a Dr Robinson of this town to be Happy man. A good Demo he suits OP well. He is Nephew to the Senator from Vermont now in Senate US. I wish them all the happiness they can desire &tc. I can’t help telling you Mrs Huske had a fine Boy 31st Janry She & child finely. My best wishes for your & family Happiness
& Remain yours Respectfully
Paris J Tillinghast
Nicholas Brown and his brother-in-law, Thomas Poynton Ives, owned an international trading company called Brown & Ives. It was the successor to a series of companies owned by various members of the Brown family for three generations. Thomas Ives was apprenticed to a previous iteration of the Browns’ company, became a partner, and ultimately became family when he married Nicholas Brown’s only sister, Hope.
Nicholas and Hope inherited the shipping business of their father and three uncles, the famous four Brown brothers of Providence, Rhode Island. Their father and uncles had focused on conventional goods, but a significant portion of their fortune came from the transatlantic slave trade. The Brown family – especially Nicholas – donated a lot of money to Rhode Island College, so the school renamed itself Brown University in the family’s honor. (You may have heard about Brown University’s examination of its part in the slave trade a few years ago.) Hope Hall at Brown University is named for Hope Brown Ives, the sister and wife of the men addressed in this letter. Nicholas and Hope were the only surviving children of Nicholas Brown, Sr., and his wife, Rhoda Jenckes.
Nicholas and Hope’s maternal ancestors also made a significant mark in early New England. Their maternal grandfather, Daniel Jenckes, was a prominent judge, politician, and landowner. The first patent in North America was granted to Daniel’s great-grandfather. His grandfather founded Pawtucket. His paternal uncle, Joseph Jenckes, was a prominent Rhode Island politician and colonial governor of Rhode Island. Governor Jenckes also married a Brown: Nicholas’s great-aunt Martha.
The author of this letter to Nicholas Brown and Thomas Ives was my 5th great-grandfather, Paris Jenckes Tillinghast. His mother, Joanna, was Rhoda Jenckes Brown’s sister. He was also a grandson of Judge Daniel Jenckes. Therefore, Paris was writing to his first cousins.
Paris’s letter first addresses business. In 1804, Paris had emigrated to North Carolina from Rhode Island with his wife’s brother, Oliver Pearce. (Oliver was married to Mary Smith West, a daughter of the astronomer and polymath Dr. Benjamin West of Providence.) The “Horrible Law” and “Odious Law” that Paris is so upset about in the letter is likely the controversial Embargo Act of 1807, which made international trade illegal. The Act intended to stop privateer attacks on American merchant marines and prevent Americans from being impressed by the British to fight against France, but it nearly devastated the American economy. Since Brown & Ives, like other Brown family entities before them, were engaged in international trade, the Embargo Act nearly crippled them. As Paris anticipated, Congress repealed the Embargo Act two weeks later and replaced it with the somewhat less onerous Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, which prohibited trade only with England and France. (The Non-Intercourse Act wasn’t any more popular than the Embargo Act.) The War of 1812 was looming.
I do not know the extent of the Tillinghast and Pearce involvement in Brown & Ives. This letter indicates some shared interest, whether by association, contract, or perhaps even employment. Given the amount of international trade from the Carolina backcountry at the time, Paris Tillinghast and Oliver Pearce may have moved to North Carolina to further the business interests of Brown & Ives and then been hindered by the Embargo Act. For generations after this letter, they were merchants, among other things. For at least three generations before Paris, the Jenckes and Tillinghast men had been ship captains and traders to the West Indies.
The Browns had supplied Dr. Benjamin West Robinson with the telescope he used to observe the transits of Venus and Mercury in 1769, so there is a known connection of the Browns to the Pearce family through Dr. West’s daughter. And, of course, all of these families had roots in Providence, which was a relatively small city at the time. In 1769, Providence’s population was about 3,300 people; by the date of this letter, fewer than 10,000 people lived there.
That’s not all the family news, though. In the letter, Paris tells Nicholas that his wife’s niece, Eliza West Pearce, had met Dr. Benjamin Robinson – the nephew of Senator Moses Robinson of Vermont – and that they would soon be married. Paris also reported that his daughter, Joanna Jenckes Tillinghast Huske, had given birth to a healthy son. This son was John Winslow Huske (1809-1841), the eldest brother of Joanna Anne Huske. Joanna Anne Huske grew up to marry her second cousin, Dr. Benjamin West Robinson. They are my 3rd great-grandparents.
The diagram puts everyone in a tree and in the places where they were (and where they were from). The names of the people mentioned in the letter are ALLCAPS, and the sender and recipients are bold. I also transcribed the letter. Please let me know if anyone can make out any of the writing that I couldn’t read.
Hope Brown was named for her paternal grandmother, Hope Power. The Brown, Power, West, Pearce, Jenckes, and Tillinghast families entangled over generations in Providence and continued entangling with each other and with Huskes, Starks, and Robinsons once they arrived in North Carolina.
At the beginning of the letter, Paris refers to Sebastian Staiert, to whom Paris had advanced some of Nicholas’s money. Sebastian’s daughter Ann married John Jennings, a great-uncle of my 2nd great-grandmother, Laura Pemberton. Two generations after this letter, Laura would marry Oliver Pearce Robinson and bring him to Arkansas to run the plantation she had inherited. That plantation – we now just call it a farm – has been in our family since the 1850s.
Thirty years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell. It encircled only part of the city, dividing it between East and West and serving as a metaphor for the contrasting ideologies of Eastern and Western Europe at the time.
Borders mark where one authority begins and another ends. We mark our borders with laws and signposts and walls. Sometimes, we can’t really see where the border is, but we know generally that over here is one place, and over there is another place. In 1889, 25-year-old journalist Rudyard Kipling was assigned to cover conflicts near the Khyber Pass, one of the few ways through the Hindu Kush and across the border between Afghanistan and what was then British India. Kipling described the pass as “a sword cut through the mountains” because the weather and terrain of the pass kill people. The mountains themselves were this border’s wall. The Pass lies on one of the main routes of the Silk Road that stretches across borders from Shanghai in the East to Spain in the West. In the shadow of that 10-foot-wide pass, Kipling wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet.”
When British India split, the East remained India and Hindu, and the West became Pakistan and Muslim. The two shall never meet—except at the precisely choreographed “Beating Retreat” ceremony that has been performed at the Wagah-Attari border crossing for the last sixty years.
Picture this: a pair of ornate iron gates blocks passage on the road, a white line painted on the pavement between them (just like the floor of the bedroom you shared with your sister when you were eight); the black uniforms of the Pakistani Rangers trimmed in white, and on their heads, a giant black cockscomb rises at least two feet high. On the other side of those gates, Indian Border Security Forces wear khaki. Not to be outdone by the Pakistanis, they also wear giant cockscombs on their heads—in bright orange-red.
It’s the end of the day and time to lower the flags and go home. Drums beat a frantic tempo. On both sides, a master of ceremonies leads a call and response with grandstands packed with hundreds of spectators who wave flags and yell with nationalist fervor. This is a border pep rally. Machine gun-toting, sword-brandishing guards flex their muscles, grimace, and point thumbs down at their cross-border rivals. They march with giant steps and high kicks straight out of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. The guards on the opposite side of the gates are doing the exact same thing—same steps, same thumbs down, same silly walks. The ceremony ends with the lowering of flags and an exaggerated handshake between an Indian guard and his Pakistani counterpart.
Here’s a taste of the Beating Retreat border ritual:
And here’s a longer version. It’s quite a sight.
The Wagah-Attari border has been called the Berlin Wall of Asia. The Berlin Wall was that other place where East was East and West was West, even though “West” only meant a portion of a Western city surrounded on all four sides by East. The Wagah-Attari border may be the most uniquely ritualized one in the world, but the Berlin Wall is the standard by which all other borders are measured.
In the wake of World War II, France, the U.K., the U.S., and the Soviets each were to occupy a portion of Germany and its capital, even though Berlin lay 100 miles inside the Soviet zone of occupation. But in 1948, the Soviets tried to evict the other three allies from Berlin by imposing a land and river blockade. They cut power and stopped distributing food in the western-occupied sections of the city. The West responded with the Berlin Airlift, and the conflict between East and West ramped up.
Borders are arbitrary. They are a line drawn in sand, a mark on a map, a gate across a road. The idea is to keep things separated, to keep the bad guys out and the good guys safe.
A long time ago, on a continent far, far away, Mongol hordes regularly invaded their southern neighbors. The Southerners built a series of walls that were eventually joined into one because they were so tired of the constant invasions by those bad hombres. North is north, and south is south, and never the two shall meet in peace, right? I know this because I was once married to a man who refused to vacation north of the Mason-Dixon line, which, he firmly maintained, cut somewhere between Nashville and Louisville.
Chinese schoolchildren are taught that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space. When one of their astronauts admitted that he couldn’t see the wall despite trying hard with extra-sharp astronaut-caliber eyesight, there was some discussion of rewriting Chinese textbooks. But walls, it seems, are too important to let facts get in the way. Although China’s Great Wall can’t be seen from space, its air pollution can. Some things just don’t respect borders.
People challenge borders. A matched pair of graves in the Netherlands sit in two cemeteries. The wife was Catholic, and her husband was Protestant, so they could not be buried in the same cemetery. They were laid to rest against the wall that divides the Catholic cemetery from the Protestant one. A stone hand reaches out from the top of each of their tombstones and clasps the hand from the other, defying the wall between them. Walls are made to be breached, and borders are made to be crossed.
Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” starts with the western theft of an eastern horse. The theft was only possible because borders are porous. Under Soviet occupation, it turned out that many inhabitants of the Eastern Bloc preferred living in the West. Berlin’s border was very porous. Defectors found their way to Berlin and from there to the West through one of the 81 crossing points in the city.
After 15 years of defections, the Berlin Wall was built almost overnight in August 1961. Guards now simply shot people trying to cross from East to West. The Brandenburg Gate entered the collective consciousness as a symbol of freedom denied. The wall cut workers off from their jobs, prevented friends from seeing each other, and separated families. East was East and communist and totalitarian, and West was West and capitalist and democratic, and the two could not possibly coexist.
The Berlin Wall was not the first such border. In 1953, as East and West and North and South struggled for dominance in the Cold War, a line was drawn between the Koreas. Despite its name, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, is probably the most heavily militarized border in the world. Like at Checkpoint Charlie, people in the DMZ’s no-man’s-land risk being shot on sight.
In the 1970s, South Korea discovered four tunnels beneath the DMZ and accused the North of planning an invasion. The North hotly denied it, claiming the tunnels were coal mines. They had even blackened the walls of one tunnel to prove it. Oddly enough, the DMZ welcomes 1.2 million tourists every year, and yes, the tunnels are on the itinerary. Tourists can enter a conference room in a building that sits in both countries just to say they’ve been to the North. And there’s an observatory in the DMZ.
Unlike the Great Wall of China, the dividing line between the Koreas can be seen from space, at least at night when South Korea is as brightly lit as any other first-world country and North Korea is pitch-dark, not unlike a coal mine.
The Berlin Wall attracted tourists, too. In the summer of 1983, I went to Europe with a Eurail pass, a backpack, and a loose cadre of companions. When we arrived in Salzburg it was raining too hard for sightseeing, so a couple of the women in our group boarded a train for Berlin. They somehow got a visa to enter East Berlin. They saw a typical modern city when they got off the train in West Berlin. When they crossed to the other side of the wall, though, dull, brutalist, concrete block architecture greeted them. There were no neon signs or billboards. The people seemed as gray as the buildings. A week later, in Amsterdam, my friend Michelle was still stunned as she described the stark difference between East and West.
East is East, West is West, North is North, and South is South, but people don’t define themselves by directions on a compass. Borders give a false impression that something significant lies on the other side. Borders sometimes may be more of an idea than a reality.
Hadestown is a relatively new musical on Broadway. It re-tells the myth of Orpheus trying to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. Hades has put Eurydice and other unfortunates to work building a wall. Hades asks them, “Why do we build the wall?” “To keep us free,” they respond. “How does the wall keep us free?” “It keeps out the enemy.” “Who is the enemy?” “The enemy is Poverty.” Hades reminds the builders that the people on the other side of the wall want what the Underworld has: freedom–and a wall. Of course, no one is free to leave the underworld once they arrive.
The inequity of the Berlin Wall was immediately apparent to the West. Two American presidents, 25 years apart, stood before the wall and condemned it. John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963. In 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and spoke directly to the Eastern leaders, saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Two years after Reagan’s speech, in the summer of 1989, reform and revolution spread through the Soviet Union and the satellite states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary. East Germans fled their country in droves. On November 4, 1989, half a million angry protesters filled the streets of East Berlin near the wall. To try to keep the population happy, on November 9th the East German government announced it would allow people to pass through checkpoints if their documents were in order. A journalist asked when the new rules would take effect. The government spokesperson didn’t know, so he said, “Immediately.”
But no one expected that it would just end, especially as it did—within hours. The news was broadcast at 8:00 that evening throughout Berlin. People began amassing at the wall demanding passage. At 10:45, lacking instructions and knowing that the announcement had been made, guards began allowing people through. East Germans swarmed the gates and were greeted jubilantly by West Berliners with flowers and champagne. The West claimed credit for the fall of the wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain that followed.
Saturday, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some citizens of Berlin sent a gift to the people of the United States. They inscribed a 2.7-ton slab of the Berlin Wall with a letter addressed to President Trump, which closed with: “We would like to give you one of the last pieces of the failed Berlin Wall to commemorate the United States’ dedication to building a world without walls.”
The White House rejected the gift. Apparently, our president doesn’t want a wall after all.
This post was originally a paper presented to the Æsthetic Club on 12 November 2019.
Robert Harrison Poynter (1844-1902) was a Methodist minister who rode a circuit in southeastern Arkansas in the latter part of the 19th century, preaching and otherwise interacting with local people. He had served in the Confederate forces in Arkansas during the Civil War. He kept a diary from January 1896 until just a couple of weeks before his death of pneumonia in 1902. The first section of the diary is an account of his life.
I unearthed a typescript of the diary a few days ago when I sorted through a box of family history ephemera and treasures. The box in which I found it had been in storage for at least four years. The items in the box came from lots of different sources. They included 100 years of photographs, miscellaneous documents dating from the 1930’s to the 2010’s, 40-year-old letters and 25 years of printed emails related to family history research, a scrapbook that had belonged to my grandmother as a child, concert ticket stubs spanning 1975-2004, brochures from vacations from the 1950’s through 2004, my great-grandfather’s legal files (he died in 1967), mementos from the first Clinton-Gore presidential campaign, and so many other various and sundry items they defy exhaustive description.
I found a reference to Rev. Poynter’s diary online. As of 1995, the actual diary belonged to L.D. Poynter, Jr., of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I assume that the diary’s owner is a descendant of Rev. Poynter. Rev. Poynter’s obituary was printed in the Minutes of the Methodist Episcopal Church South for 1902 and is available online.
Typed copies of newspaper articles, handwritten family group sheets, and handwritten notes about the diary are appended to it.
As best I can tell, Rev. Poynter was not a relative of mine and did not interact with anyone in my extended family. Creation of an index to the people and places mentioned in the diary would greatly assist other researchers of southeastern Arkansas history and genealogy. I don’t think I’m going to take on that project any time soon, though!
I wish I knew how this typescript came into my possession. I would gladly give credit to the person who spent great effort and considerable time creating it. If you know about this diary or the creator of the typescript, please contact me.
I have had just about enough of people saying the 16 to 18-year-old students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida are being used by their elders for an agenda they don’t understand. It’s insulting to teenagers everywhere, and it’s insulting to yourself if you make that argument.
Why? Because when you were 16, 17, and 18, you didn’t do a damned thing unless you wanted to. I’m guessing that sometimes you even refused to do what you did want just because some adult liked the idea. Remember?
Sure, you might have grudgingly gone to church when you’d rather have slept in, or you grudgingly went to dinner at Grandma’s when you would have preferred to be with your friends, but when something really mattered to you, didn’t you stand your ground? Didn’t you push back against the adults who tried to force you?
I keep seeing the argument that these kids are far too organized to have done it by themselves, and know the talking points far too well. Let’s think about that.
Maybe – just maybe – those kids know the talking points because they are the same talking points that get trotted out whenever there is a mass shooting. These kids have lived with the horror of large-scale carnage their entire lives. They have heard the talking points and they have seen how nothing gets resolved because the politicians – the adults who actually have the power and ability to change the law – have said after every incident that “this isn’t the time to talk about it.”
And every time these kids and others just like them have buried their friends and noticed that these emperor politicians wear no clothes.
Rick Santorum’s statements that “these kids aren’t really doing anything” by speaking out and marching is one more example of a naked emperor. They are doing exactly what they CAN do. They are demanding that lawmakers take action. They aren’t old enough to be elected to office yet. When they are, watch out – they will be. And they will be the agents of the long-overdue change they demand.
And maybe – just maybe – they have had help from adults getting organized. Adults who care about the same things those kids care about: that bodies stop dropping to assault weapons, that reasonable gun laws be enacted and enforced, and that politicians who sell children for $1.05 to the NRA answer for how cheaply they value life – not to mention answering for the fact that they have sold their integrity for power.
Maybe – just maybe – those adults and even (gasp!) the kids themselves recognized that the adults weren’t the best faces for the TV interviews and to speak at the rally. Why? Because overwhelmingly, KIDS die in these mass shootings at their schools. The KIDS are righteously outraged that adults with the power to have prevented this carnage have failed to do so time and time and time again. That these adults smile smugly and say that they won’t stop selling the lives of children to the gun lobby because, you know, they NEED that blood money.
At least two adults refused to lend their notoriety to the Parkland kids because they felt the kids themselves were absolutely the best spokespeople for this travesty. Look up what George and Amal Clooney said to them. Never has “no” been said with so much love and respect and admiration.
And what do these kids think they can do, anyway? What possible examples in history can they look at to think they can effect change? Let’s consider that.
Guess how old Joan of Arc was when she led the French army to victory against the English. She was 17 at the Battle of Orleans and had already been fighting for three years – in a leadership role. A 13-year-old girl had made adults not just listen, but let her lead them into battle. She had something to say, she said it, she got the attention of the people who needed to hear it, she said it again, and she took the action she could take. She was just 18 when the British captured her and barely 19 when they burned her as a witch – a witch who dared to speak her truth to their power.
How old was Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de LaFayette, when he came to America to help with the Revolution? Well, at 13 he was commissioned an officer in the French army. He was a major-general in the American Revolution at 19. And that, of course, was just the beginning. By Yorktown in 1781, he was confirmed beyond any doubt as a serious and able leader, and he was still only 26.
How about Alexander Hamilton? This brilliant guy was the same age as Lafayette and was one of his best friends during the six years of the Revolution. But even before the Revolution, he ran a major shipping company from the West Indies – at the age of 14. He designed the American economic structure before the age of 30. But when he was just a 17-year-old kid and wrote that famous essay that got him a one-way ticket to New York, he was already cognizant of horrific truths like the evils of slavery and the despair of poverty – truths that he championed the rest of his too-short life.
Oh, but these guys were “special.” We shouldn’t consider them. OK, let’s look for less stellar examples.
We don’t have to look far. Lots of them can be found right there in the Revolution.
James Monroe was 18 in 1776. He was a farmer. Two years before the Revolution – at the age of 16 – he and his school friends stormed the Virginia governor’s palace to seize arms for the Virginia militia. Do they want to argue that he was misled by his elders who had some nefarious plan in mind and wouldn’t have done it without their influence?
How about Nathan Hale, who was hanged by the British as a spy at 21? He was the same age as Lafayette and Hamilton and went on his first major spying mission at the age of 17. That’s right, he was the same age as those kids at Parkland when he snuck behind British lines and gathered serious intelligence for Washington. He was so unaware of what was really going on that he regretted having but one life to give for his country. But he probably didn’t really have a clue, you know?
Let’s talk about Sybil Luddington.This 16-year-old girl’s efforts dwarfed Paul Revere’s 14-mile trip to warn of the British invasion. She rode all night long, for 40 miles, to alert the militias that the Redcoats Were Coming. She just didn’t get a poem – and damn it, she deserved one. Is anyone seriously going to argue that, because of her tender years, she did not really know what she was doing or why she was doing it?
Do you know why the rebelling colonists won that war, against impossible odds and against the superpower of the day? Because KIDS thought it was important and DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT. They couldn’t remake the laws, so they made a country.
And don’t let me get started on the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam, and the hugely important major role played by CHILDREN – people not old enough to vote, to drink alcohol or buy cigarettes, or to hold office. I’ll rant on about things like Kent State and the Freedom Riders and the Little Rock desegregation crisis, and the kids that made things happen and changed the world.
Never try to argue that teenagers aren’t perfectly capable of recognizing a problem and taking action when it matters enough to them right there in that moment.
When I am anxious or don’t feel well, I often do genealogy research to take my mind off things. I have always enjoyed learning about family history, but really got bitten hard by the bug the first time I had cancer, in 1994. I was at home recuperating, on painkillers and other drugs that made concentrating difficult, and I found message boards on AOL that were all about genealogy. And my ancestors were there! I connected with some very distant cousins and compared notes. I started learning more and more about my origins.
It occurs to me that we are all the products of our parents, who are the products of their parents, who were the products of theirs, and so on. Our parents don’t just pass genetics on to us. Even when we disagree about things like politics or religion or how to raise our children, the values of our parents are distilled into us, just like the values of their parents were distilled into them. We find that professions tend to run in families – a certain branch of the family may tend to be lawyers, writers, preachers, doctors, architects, artists, military, etc.
An obituary notice in a newspaper from 1822 led me to him. He was named as the father of one of my 5th great-grandmothers, a woman whose origins were completely unknown to me before that moment. The man was phenomenal, and I don’t understand why every generation after him hasn’t continued to hold him up as the pinnacle of the Enlightenment. This guy’s brain was so huge and active I don’t know how it managed to stay confined in his skull.
Benjamin West, from the Brown University Portrait Collection
Benjamin West was born in Bristol, Massachusetts in March 1730. I think of him as the Stephen Hawking of his day. His accomplishments in math and science are truly remarkable because he was an autodidact – his formal schooling lasted a whopping three months of his childhood. He was poor and had to borrow every book he read until about 1758, when he managed to find some backers to open a dry goods store. A couple of years later, he opened the first bookstore ever to grace the commercial avenues of Providence, Rhode Island. He managed to pay for the books he so desperately wanted by selling them to other people.
He married Elizabeth Smith, daughter of Benjamin Smith, in 1753 when he was 23. They were married for 53 years and had eight children, only three of whom survived Benjamin. The 1822 death notice for his daughter, Mary Smith West (wife of Oliver Pearce), in a Providence newspaper, alerted me to him. The death notice that mentioned her father was “Dr. Benjamin West of Providence.” Mary West Pearce died in Fayetteville, NC. Her daughter, Eliza West Pearce, married Dr. Benjamin Robinson, that guy from Vermont who tested out that newfangled smallpox vaccine on his little brother and his brother’s friends and basically got run out of Bennington for his efforts. Science is strong in my family!
Benjamin West was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer. His buddies were the founders of Rhode Island College, which later became Brown University. He loved mathematics and astronomy, and conferred with some truly fantastic minds of his day. He published annual almanacs for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Providence, Rhode Island for nearly 40 years. He didn’t have the formal schooling necessary for good academic chops, though, and before he opened that dry goods and book store, he failed at operating a school. He tutored students privately for all of his adult life.
Astronomical Genius
In 1766, something would happen that ultimately would reverse his fortunes and open some gilded doors for him. A comet appeared in the constellation of Taurus on the evening of April 9. Being a good astronomer, Benjamin took careful measurements. The next day wrote a letter to an astronomer named John Winthrop who was at Cambridge College (now known as Harvard University). He had never met or corresponded with Winthrop, but was so excited about his observation he simply had to share it.
Providence, April 10, 1766
Dear Sir:
For the improvement of science, I now acquaint you, that the last evening, I saw in the West, a comet, which I judged to be about the middle of the sign of Taurus; with about 7 degrees North latitude. It set half after 8 o’clock by my watch, and its amplitude was about 29 or 30 degrees. Nothing, Sir, could have induced me to this freedom of writing to you, but the love I have for the sciences; and I flatter myself that you will, on that account, the more readily overlook it.
I am, Sir, yours,
Benjamin West
He and Winthrop became great friends and continued to write to each other. For the rest of their lives, they would share observations about the night sky.
1769 Transit of the Planets
Johannes Kepler and Edmund Halley figured out how to apply the theory of parallax to determine the distances between astronomical bodies. With both Mercury and Venus predicted to pass between the Earth and the Sun in 1769, astronomers worldwide were anxious to test the theory. Since this was the first really good opportunity to view the transits of both inner planets since Kepler’s original accurate prediction in 1627 of the 1631 transit, everyone in the field of astronomy was excited. Captain Cook would famously observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti while on his ill-fated circumnavigation and while bringing European diseases and disharmony to the South Pacific. At the time of the last transit of Venus in 1761, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who had just finished their survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, had traveled to the Cape of Good Hope to observe it. All of these men used astronomy as an important part of their lives – navigating the oceans and surveying the land required precise measurements, and measurements started with the stars.
Telescope used by Benjamin West, at Providence, Rhode Island, to observe the 1769 transit of Venus. Ladd Observatory, Brown University
There was no telescope in Providence in 1769. Benjamin West, Stephen Hopkins (the signer of the Declaration and great-grandson of the Mayflower passenger) and the four famous Brown brothers – they were among the founders of Rhode Island College, later known as Brown University – were determined to see the phenomenon, though, so they managed to import a telescope from England at the incredible expense of 500 pounds. They set up on the outskirts of Providence. Transit Street in Providence is named after the spot where they viewed the transit on June 3, 1769. There are photos of the telescope on the Brown University website – the school still has it.
Benjamin West’s diagram of the transit of Venus, 1769, from the Ladd Observatory, Brown University
As was his habit, Benjamin West made careful measurements of the transit. He published a tract (and dedicated it to his friend Stephen Hopkins) about the event. A copy of the tract made its way to John Winthrop at Harvard, and on July 18, 1770, Benjamin West – the man with only three months of formal education – was awarded an honorary Master of Arts from Harvard. Here’s the text of the notification letter from John Winthrop:
Cambridge, July 19, 1770
Sir —
I have the pleasure to acquaint you that the government of this college were pleased, yesterday, to confer upon you the Honorary degree of Master of Arts; upon which I sincerely congratulate you. I acknowledge the receipt of your favour, and shall be glad to compare any observations of the satellites.
Yours,
John Winthrop
American Academy of Arts and Sciences: the American Philosophical Society
That same year, Benjamin West was unanimously elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia – the American colonial version of Great Britain’s Royal Society. He would meet and befriend another author and publisher of almanacs there: a fellow named Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin West was still primarily a merchant at this time, and the Revolution was on its way. When full-blown war finally arrived, commerce dried up. He went to work manufacturing clothing for the American troops. He continued his studies and his correspondence with the other great minds, though.
Mathematics was Benjamin’s first love. In 1773 he wrote to a friend in Boston of a theorem he had developed to extract “the roots of odd powers” that was probably his greatest contribution to the field of mathematics. That’s right – he discovered a math formula that I can’t even begin to hope to understand, but other really smart people who could math really well understood it and lauded him for it. When he finally explained his theorem to other math geniuses in 1781, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences not only published it in one of their earliest journals but unanimously elected him to membership and awarded him a diploma. It was his second honorary academic degree, and he still supported by only three months of formal education. The theorem caught the attention of the European mathematical geniuses, who, giddy with discovery, also published it. Benjamin West, already pretty cool, became seriously hot stuff.
He didn’t stop at math and astronomical observations, though. One of the biographies I found explained a physics problem he cogitated upon for more than two years in conjunction with John Winthrop and a Mr. Oliver. It had to do with the properties of air in a copper tube that was then put into an otherwise airless container. The qualities of invisible gases – basically, the scientific understanding of the very concept of the physical nature and properties of “air” – were in their infancy. Our ancestor speculated about the attractive and repulsive nature of the tiny particles that made up the matter of air – what we now call its molecules – and how they would behave under different conditions. Gravity, matter, magnetism, and ultimately the behavior of the tails of comets played into his understanding of the question. This is stuff my brain simply isn’t big enough to handle.
Benjamin West’s mind was at the peak of its illuminating brilliance as the world around him heaved. His most important discoveries and writings happened as the American Revolution was about to explode. By the end of the Revolution, he had returned to academic pursuits. He tutored students in math and astronomy. He still wasn’t rich; despite his prominence in academics he never became particularly wealthy. The well-endowed founders of what would become Brown University had not forgotten their friend, though. In 1786, he was elected to a full professorship there.
For some reason, he did not begin teaching at Brown for a couple of years. Probably because of his honors and his friendship with Ben Franklin and the rest of the gang at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Benjamin West was invited to teach at the illustrious Protestant Episcopal Academy there. The name of that school is familiar to members of my father’s family. Although Benjamin West was the direct ancestor of my Arkansas-born mother, my dad, an Irish-Italian kid who grew up in the Philly suburb of Gladwyne, went to school at Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy while his dad coached its sports teams. (Insert refrain from “Circle of Life” here.)
Brown University awarded Dr. West his first non-honorary degree, his Doctor of Laws, in 1792. He taught mathematics and astronomy there from 1788 until 1799. Then he opened a school of navigation and taught astronomy to seafaring men. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, this man loved to teach other people the wonders of the universe.
I’m proud of him for another reason, too: Benjamin West was a member of an active abolitionist group in Providence.
I’ve found several contemporary biographical accounts for Benjamin West. They are typical of their time: purple prose and flowery metaphors abound. They all reach one conclusion: Benjamin West was a genius. He was a determinedly self-educated man who contributed considerably to the arts of science and mathematics during his lifetime. He was truly a product of the Age of Enlightenment: a self-educated, self-made man whose gifts and prominence considerably exceeded his bank account.
This discovery of my ancestor Benjamin West is exactly why genealogy research is so rewarding. And given the anxiety-provoking events of November 8, I expect to be doing a lot more of it – in between my stepped-up schedule of political activities, that is.
Bibliography:
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Book of Members (2016 edition), p. 252. Entry for Benjamin West, elected 1781, Fellow. Residence and Affiliation at election: Providence, RI. Career description: Astronomer, Educator, Businessperson, Book of Members; American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Leonard Bliss, The History of Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts: Comprising a History of the Present Towns of Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Pawtucket, From Their Settlement to the Present Time (Boston: Otis, Broaders, and Company, 1836). Google Books
John Chauncey Pease, John Milton Niles, A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode-Island: (Hartford: William S. Marsh, 1819), 331-333. Biographical entry for Dr. Benjamin West. Google Books.
Unattributed, “Biography of Benjamin West, L.L.D. A.A.S.: Professor of Mathematicks, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in Rhode Island College – and Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, &c.”, The Rhode Island Literary Repository Vol I, No. 7 (October 1814): 137-160 (337-360).
I love all these things. I love reading, period. There is so much to learn, so much to know. If I can come away from a few minutes of reading with one real fact to share at a cocktail party, the magazine rack in my bathroom library is worth the small investment.
I like science books explain concrete things that we don’t ordinarily think about. They engage us in subjects that aren’t essential to our survival or even to our happiness, but that simply interest us and send us off on a quest to know more. They may be the books that explain innovations, technologies, or practices that controlled the civilizations of their time, from the development of agricultural practices to the economy of the Silk Road. They may examine animal behavior, linguistics, migrations, burial practices, or art. They may be the history books that examine the politics and personalities of an era that led to a revolution. The books that stick with us are the books that teach us something.
I know which books kicked open my love of English medieval history. I know when I read them and why. Sometime in the mid-1970’s, my dad was re-reading one of his favorite authors. As he often did, he read the fun parts aloud to whichever of his children happened to be in earshot – he loved sharing his books as much as he loved reading them.
That day, he was reading Thomas B. Costain’sBelow the Salt. I remember asking him what the title meant, and he explained that in medieval times salt was still a precious commodity. Only the wealthy had much access to it. Even in the dining halls of royalty or nobility, only the head table was allowed free access to a salt cellar. At the other, lower, tables sat the hired hands, the retainers, the working people, and the less influential members of the noble house. They sat “below the salt,” or at tables without access to valuable salt.
Salt? Cheap, ordinary salt? I was incredulous. Dad read me more passages from the book about heroic William Marshal, the beautiful and tragic Maid of Brittany, and King John, perhaps the most depraved of the Plantagenet kings of England.
“The stories are true,” he told me. “Mostly.”
Thomas B. Costain wrote historical fiction that was so well researched that even experts found it difficult to discern what was truly history and what was not. When Dad finished Below the Salt, I picked it up and read it for myself. Then I asked for more. Dad didn’t just give me Costain’s novels, though. Costain had written four nonfiction books about medieval England’s Plantagenet rulers. These works are his true gifts to his readers. Those four books about the very real, larger-than-life descendants of William the Conqueror absolutely riveted me. I couldn’t put them down. I was only about 14, and I was fascinated by the battles, the swordplay, the tournaments, the lust, and the alliances.
And I had so many questions! Why was the Count of Anjou called “Plantagenet”? (Because he wore a sprig of blooming broom – “planta genêt” in French). Why were the kings of England named for a French Count? (Because he was their father, and married their English princess of a mother, who used to be an empress before she had to settle for a mere count.) How did the counts from France get to be English kings? (Read the books!)
Then I asked for more. Dad didn’t just give me Costain’s novels, though. Costain had written four nonfiction books about medieval England’s Plantagenet rulers. These works are his true gifts to his readers. Those four books about the very real, larger-than-life descendants of William the Conqueror absolutely riveted me. I couldn’t put them down. I was only about 14, and I was fascinated by the battles, the swordplay, the tournaments, the lust, and the alliances.
Costain’s writing led me on a romp from one English civil war (with the death of Henry I and the usurpation of the throne by his nephew Stephen of Blois) to the next (the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses). I credit these books with making medieval English history roar to life for me. Costain’s vivid descriptions of the personalities and actions of the Angevin kings, their nobles, and their enemies launched my lifelong fascination with this era.
And the writing! These are not dull history books. Engaging, fluid prose exposes the mysteries, romances, political posturing, and betrayals. Anyone who can tell stories like this really should be a history teacher. No one can possibly come away from these books without a new fascination for the Conqueror’s family and their unique brands of turmoil and governance.
I realize that all this sounds like hyperbole, but truthfully, I don’t have enough words to explain how wonderful these books are and how they made such a difference in how I viewed history – and not just English history, but all of it – for a lifetime.
When I looked on my mother’s shelves for these beloved books a few years ago, I couldn’t find them. I set about the business of locating replacements. The books were out of print and resellers charged a premium for them. Apparently no one who owns them really wants to give them up, and others who want them can’t find them.
I finally came across a boxed set of the books online and I ordered it. When it arrived, I devoured every word just as I had done years ago. Costain’s writing and storytelling are every bit as good as I remember. Some of the stories were missing, though, especially those about the fractious, ruthless sons of the Conqueror. In particular I remember a story of a very suspicious hunting accident that brought down King William Rufus…no, dear readers, George R.R. Martin wasn’t the first to think of a boar hunt as cover for regicide. I realized that the first book of the set I now own was edited rather heavily before its inclusion.
The boxed set holds Costain’s own explanation as to the revision:
A HISTORY OF THE PLANTAGENETS
I began these books of English history with the hope of carrying the series forward, under the general title of The Pageant of England, to a much later period than the last of the Plantagenet kings. Pressure of other work made it impossible, however, to produce them at the gait I had hoped to achieve. And now the factor of time has intruded itself also. Realizing that my earlier objective cannot be reached, I have decided to conclude with the death of Richard III and to change the covering title to A HISTORY OF THE PLANTAGENETS.
This has made necessary some revision in getting the four volumes ready for publication. The first five chapters in the initial book, which began with the Norman Conquest and covered the reigns of William the Conqueror, William (Rufus) II, and Henry I, had to be dropped. The first volume in this complete edition of the four begins with the final scenes in the reign of Henry I, whose daughter married Geoffrey of Anjou and whose son son succeeded in due course to the throne of England as Henry II, thus beginning the brilliant Plantagenet dynasty. The title of the first volume has been changed to THE CONQUERING FAMILY. In addition to the deletion of earlier chapters, a few slight cuts and minor revisions have been made throughout the series. Otherwise the four books are the same as those published separately under the titles, THE CONQUERORS, THE MAGNIFICENT CENTURY, THE THREE EDWARDS, and THE LAST PLANTAGENETS.
The boxed set of the four Plantagenet books is available at a premium – it’s out of print and only available in the secondary market. The lowest price I found a full set for was $175.00 at Amazon, although a seller on Facebook is offering it at a bargain for only $164.99.
A full set is rare and hard to find, but the ebooks are available – even the original first volume. I downloaded it and have hope that it contains the missing parts that were edited from this final version contained in the boxed set. I’ll be reading it tonight, looking for clues as to who killed William Rufus. (Spoiler: the culprit was likely a minion of his brother Henry, grandfather of those fascinating Plantagenets.)
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette gave significant print space today to state senator Jason Rapert to let him deny that he ever called for Judge Chris Piazza’s impeachment. (It seems the paper printed the story, and then refused to issue a correction despite Rapert’s demands, so they allowed him to submit a “guest column.”)
You may recall that Judge Piazza declared the ban against same sex marriages unconstitutional, which raised Rapert’s Neanderthal hackles. Rapert’s screed focused on the will of the people as opposed to the foundational laws of our country – at least, the will of 753,770 people who voted a decade ago against letting any pair of consenting adults marry.
Oh, and God, God, God. Because God. Or, at least, Senator Rapert’s version of a god.
From Rapert’s essay:
I believe the current culture war on marriage between one man and one woman is a symptom of the degradation of the fundamental principle that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution–that our government is based upon “We the People.”
We, the people of this country and of each state, do indeed elect those who make our laws. Occasionally, in the case of a referendum (the ban on same sex marriage was a referendum back in 2004), we the people actually vote on whether something should be a law. But we don’t all vote – not even when we’re eligible.
Judge Piazza decided that 750,000 individual citizens of our great state, representing 75 percent of the electorate at the time, were wrong, and their sense of morality and beliefs no longer mean anything in Arkansas. In reality, he rendered a judgment essentially saying that the will of an overwhelming majority of the people in our state means nothing and their votes do not count.
But did the majority of Arkansans, actually reject same sex marriage? Did we, the Arkansas people, actually speak with a strong voice about this matter?
Arkansas has a population of around 3 million people, 3/4 of which are over 18. According to the United States Election Project, 54% of the population eligible to vote in Arkansas made it to the polls in November 2004, when the legislature’s referendum was on the ballot. The total turnout was 1,070,573 – about a third of the actual population of the state. Nearly 2 million Arkansans were eligible to vote.
About 1/4 of the population of the state was sufficiently incensed over the notion that equality might happen that they beat a path to the polls in that election to vote against equal marriage rights for their LGBT neighbors, friends, and family members. Not a majority of the population. Not even a majority of the population over 18 or a majority of eligible voters. Just a majority of people who voted on that issue decided to maintain an unequal status quo.
It gets better:
Judge Piazza and activist judges like him … are saying they no longer respect the values, traditions and mores of the majority of the population in our nation and that they singularly have the right to impose the will of a small vocal group upon the rest of our state and the nation.
More than anything, this quote from his essay underscores Sen. Rapert’s lack of understanding of both the concept of separation of powers and the role of the judicial branch of government. It also tells me that a man charged with the responsibility of making laws does not understand that there is this foundational document called the United States Constitution that gives him – and the judges who overrule him – that authority. The U.S. Constitution and the Arkansas Constitution define the roles of each branch of government and explains how checks and balances work. Where state and federal laws conflict, federal law trumps.
Changing that foundational document takes much more than the proverbial “act of congress,” and ever since Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803, the judicial branch was confirmed as that branch of government endowed with the responsibility of interpreting how laws should be applied. Therefore, judges like Chris Piazza are doing their jobs – not engaging in activism – when they interpret laws withing a constitutional framework. We don’t have to like their decisions. If we don’t like their decisions enough, we can appeal them to a higher court, until the buck stops with the US Supreme Court. Ultimately, the language of the United States Constitution applies.
Jason Rapert and his ilk don’t like the decision. Rather than wait for the appellate process to weave its constitutional magic, they scream like banshees at the idea that other human beings – human beings who are a tiny bit different from them – will get treated like actual full citizens of this state and country.
Rapert felt the need to make a number of points about how awful it is for the nasty homos to call themselves a family:
As for the context of the debate raging in our nation and now in Arkansas over same-sex marriage, there are a few things that must be said.
First, honoring the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman whether out of a sense of morality or based upon one’s religious faith does not mean that a person hates homosexuals.
With this quote, we see what the problem is. Jason Rapert really wants to live in a Christian theocracy. Of course, not a theocracy defined by, say, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, or Evangelical Lutherans. Nope – he wants a Southern Baptist or fundamentalist evangelical theocracy. In other words, if someone else’s religious beliefs don’t mesh with Rapert’s, then they obviously shouldn’t have the right to hold those beliefs.
And he doesn’t hate homosexuals – he just doesn’t think they are really “people” and that they shouldn’t have the same rights to the pursuit of happiness as “real” people. Of course he doesn’t hate them. How can you hate someone that isn’t really a person? It would be like hating a doll or a tree or a puppy. It’s like accusing an atheist of hating God. It’s not possible to hate something that doesn’t exist.
Rapert’s claim of a “sanctity” of marriage is the big giveaway. Marriage is a contract between two people. It isn’t a sacred state; it’s a legal one. Sure, the couple can have their marriage blessed, and because that blessing is important to many people the state generously allows religious leaders to file their credentials with the state and empowers them to confirm the existence of the marriage in a religious ceremony. The bottom line, though, is that the state has the final say over whether someone is married or not and over who can sign the marriage license. The legal documents have to be in order. The mere act of blessing the couple’s union is not sufficient to marry them. And by virtue of their elected or appointed office, nonreligious people also have the power to marry people.
Furthermore, to dissolve a marriage is akin to dissolving any other legally binding contract. What the state has joined together, the state must split asunder.
This is the sanctity Rapert wants to protect. Seriously.
Rapert goes a step further in his “I don’t hate” insistence:
I do not personally hate anyone who has chosen a homosexual lifestyle and I believe they should be able to live their lives in peace like anyone else.
Really? Then why is he so gung-ho to deny them the basic and fundamental right to form a family with the partner of their choice? Why does he want to deny them the rights that heterosexual spouses have when it comes to matters like health care decisions? Why does he want to deprive them of inheritance and property rights like dower and curtesy? Why does he want to deprive them of the parental rights to children they have raised together? Why does he want to deny them the tax status granted to legally married partners? Why does he want to deny them the ability to obtain insurance as a family? Why does he want to deny them retirement benefits a spouse would normally get automatically? Why does he want to refuse them the privilege of not testifying against each other in court? Clearly, he does not want them to be able to have the same rights, privileges, and protections “like anyone else.”
Oh, there’s a reason for that, according to Senator Brother Rapert. “[M]arriage is integral to the concept of family, and research shows that children are given the best opportunity for well-rounded social development when they are raised in homes with a mother and father.”
Sure, children do better when there are more adults with a hand in child rearing. The gender of the parent-figure doesn’t matter, nor does the gender orientation of that parental figure. The fact that there is a stable home with the same adults in the household matters.
Not just one, but several factors tend to forecast a happy, successful child. Stability of the family is a paramount predictor of a child’s success. Based on all the research gathered to date, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) has concluded that “[l]ike all children, most children with LGBT parents will have both good and bad times. They are not more likely than children of heterosexual parents to develop emotional or behavioral problems.”
Canada agrees. In 2006, the Canadian Psychological Association reiterated its 2003 position on the issue:
CPA continues to assert its 2003 position that the psychological literature into the psychosocial adjustment and functioning of children fails to demonstrate any significant differences between children raised within families with heterosexual parents and those raised within families with gay and lesbian parents. CPA further asserts that children stand to benefit from the well-being that results when their parents’ relationship is recognized and supported by society’s institutions.
Therefore, if this is all about the children, validating the union of same-sex parents will go much farther to stabilize families than telling the kids that they don’t have a “real” family at all.
Senator Rapert calls a marriage between one man and one woman “natural” marriage. Once again, he displays his ignorance on a sleeve.
Marriage is whatever the law deems it to be. Let’s look at how marriage laws used to be:
Click to embiggen and read this wonderful infographic that comes complete with citations.
Out of all that, he picks only one style of marriage to be “natural.” Blinders make the world a lot less expansive, don’t they?
Mildred Loving might find his comments ludicrously funny. She would have noted the irony that completely escaped Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent in the DOMA and Prop 8 cases that were decided a year ago: but for a US Supreme Court finding that equal protection was violated by the anti-miscegenation statutes on the books of many of the states, his own marriage and family would not be recognized as valid.
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his melanin-challenged wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas
Senator Rapert claims he’s not prejudiced.
Fourth, the tactics of intimidation toward those who object to same-sex marriage, including comparisons to racism, are unfair, unwarranted and shameful. When I was invited to join over 100 African American pastors on the steps of the Arkansas Capitol just a few days ago as they took a public stand for marriage between one man and one woman, that argument began to fall completely apart.
He actually wants us to believe that his embarrassingly solitary white face in that crowd of black pastors was because they invited him, not the other way around.
Jason Rapert lies, therefore his argument is invalid.
The comparison to racism is unfair? Why? Because giving equal rights to people born with a different skin color is different somehow from giving equal rights to people born with a different gender orientation?
Let’s imagine for a moment that in 1859, there was a vote in some slave state (just for giggles, let’s pick Arkansas) to preserve the status quo and make it illegal for the government to free the slaves. Heck, let’s take it one step further and suggest that in this vote, any black people who weren’t slaves would automatically become slaves unless they left the state before the end of the year. The state was determined to maintain an unequal status quo.
Rapert then claims that the bad press he’s gotten is because people don’t like his “stance on marriage and also as the sponsor of the Arkansas Heartbeat Protection Act.” He is absolutely right. His ideas are completely repulsive to those of us who value our individual liberties, autonomy over our own bodies, and the freedom to make very personal choices for ourselves. He claims that these are the acts of “liberal extremists.”
If only “liberal extremists” are in favor of same sex marriage, then we have generations of “liberal extremists” to look forward to. Liberal policies are the hallmark of progress, while conservative policies tend to be just the opposite. Senator Rapert, like many Tea Party Republicans, goes beyond maintaining a status quo, though. His policies are regressive and authoritarian. Passing statutes for no good reason other that wanting to deny equal rights to a segment of society they find distasteful is a reprehensible way to govern. He does not deserve the office he holds, nor do his like-minded comrades in office. Their policies are fascist.
It’s all about Senator Rapert’s religion, when it comes right down to it:
The America I was taught to honor and respect would never force Christians to do anything that violated the tenets of their beliefs. We have freedom of religion in this nation, not freedom from religion altogether.
No one is forcing anyone else to get gay-married. They aren’t forcing them to go gay-grocery shopping or to gay-teach students. No hate-filled Christian has to have gay sex or even decorate with glitter or rainbows. They don’t have to hire gay interior decorators, get their air trimmed by gay stylists, or wear clothes designed by gay designers. They also don’t have to benefit from the use of computers conceived by gay Alan Turing or read books and plays by gay Oscar Wilde or Gore Vidal. They can switch the channel when Ellen comes on. They can boycott Wachowski films like the Matrix trilogy, Cloud Atlas, and V for Vendetta. They don’t have to patronize LGBT businesses and art any more than LGBT people have to patronize those who proudly proclaim their prejudices and hate.
What they cannot do, though, is refuse service to any LGBT person on account of their hate. As it did upon the demise of Jim Crow laws, the Heart of Atlanta case will provide the precedent to prevent discrimination by businesses through the application of the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.
Oh, and that dig about freedom from religion? Yes, that’s actually a thing. It’s also the law. If we don’t have freedom from religion, we can’t possibly have freedom of religion. Otherwise, courts would be in the business of establishing religion, and telling us which tenets we have to observe and which we don’t. And the First Amendment to the US Constitution says that can’t happen.
But Senator Rapert feels victimized:
It is very interesting that Christians are targeted so heavily with the venom of the homosexual lobby because most all other major faith traditions do not embrace homosexual marriage either, including Islam.
I would suggest to Senator Rapert that perhaps because they invoke their religion as the reason someone else can’t do something, they seek to establish their religion as the law of this country. And like I mentioned above, they don’t want to establish the denominations that are tolerant of other people’s private behaviors. They want to establish an authoritarian, restrictive, invasive religion. That is entirely, absolutely, completely, and decidedly unacceptable. If the Muslims were the ones doing the screaming and quoting the Qur’an as the reason we shouldn’t allow certain people equal rights, Senator Rapert and his troglodyte cronies had better believe that the American people would object to that, too.
I’m not even going to respond to the whole God thing Senator Rapert spewed on and on about in his column. The United States of America is not a theocracy, and Senator Rapert and his ilk may not cherry-pick their favorite version of the Bible to oppress people with Iron Age laws. If immigration rates continue the way they have been, pretty soon a majority of Americans will be Papists. Does he want a Catholic nation just because the majority of the population attends mass?
If the basis for a law is Biblical, it should immediately be suspect, and it should bear intense scrutiny. The science and research do not support these laws, no matter what they are.
Arkansas voters and legislators have an unpleasant history of maintaining an unequal status quo. When men make decisions for how a woman may take care of her own body, when straight people make decisions for how gay people may create and care for their families, when white people make decisions about whether black people can take part in the electoral process, there is a very real danger that the dominant and privileged among our population can – and will – oppress those whose voices are not as strong. That’s why the constitutional safeguards of equal protection and due process exist.
Oh, and
P.S. It’s not “activism” for a judge to uphold the constitution.
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