After the whole brouhaha over Barack Obama‘s support for gay marriage and Newsweek‘s declaration that he is our first “gay” president, the historian James Loewen reminds us of James Buchanan. The dude was straight-up gay without even trying very hard to hide it! For instance, on May 13, 1844, the future president wrote a letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt describing his social life after the departure for Europe of his great love, Senator William Rufus King:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Imagine if the news media got hold of such a letter today!

Anyway, I don’t spent too much of my time contemplating presidential sexuality (honest!) but today I did happen to wonder about Buchanan after reading about his early romance with Anne C. Coleman, daughter of a Pennsylvania millionaire. Buchanan, then twenty-eight, courted her during the summer of 1819, but they quarreled and she broke things off. Soon after she died suddenly, possibly of suicide. “I have lost the only earthly object of my affections,” Buchanan wrote, “without whom life now presents to me a dreary blank. My prospects are all cut off, and I feel that my happiness will be buried with her in the grave.”

The book I was consulting, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents by William A. DeGregorio (updated 1997), mentions not a thing about Buchanan being gay, and not being a Buchanan scholar, I thought, “Hey, maybe he was just bummed about his girlfriend’s suicide. After all, her father blamed Buchanan and wouldn’t even allow him to attend the funeral. I would probably remain a bachelor my whole life, too.”

No! says Loewen. The truth is right there in that letter, if you’ll only just believe it. Which some people don’t, apparently.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall storyline is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the nineteenth century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

Well put, I think.

IMAGE: Buchanan takes his rightful place on the cover of Newsweek (Wikipedia/Salon)

Thomas Jefferson loved music—it “is the favorite passion of my soul,” he wrote—but according to Bonnie Gordon, “little attention has been paid to what he heard and how he processed those sounds.” A professor of music at the University of Virginia (and, no small thing, a fellow violist), Gordon helped to organize a conference here, Soundscapes of Jefferson’s America, that happened in March. Wait, in March? How did we miss this?!

Well, we did. But now Gordon’s piece in Slate tells us that Jefferson’s world was a noisy one: “The sounds of cicadas, thunder, speech, bells, and horse hooves animated early America. Music resounded in taverns, parlors, political rallies, official celebrations, and dances.” He didn’t have headphones to block stuff out, of course, but he did know enough to put the slave quarters and workspaces down the hill, thus minimizing the chatter and even the singing. While Jefferson wrote that his enslaved Africans were “more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time,” their compositions were obviously inferior. Humorously, Gordon offers up this couplet from Jefferson’s own music collection:

When first I saw Betty and made my complaint
I whined like a fool and she sighed like a Saint

Jefferson’s skill on the violin, meanwhile, is likely a myth. Or so claims Gordon. I’m not sure I can agree. My feeling is that if Blythe Danner says it, it must be true.

Whatever the case, Gordon, in using Jefferson as her hook, gives short shrift in her piece to just how fundamentally different early Virginians relationship to sound was from our own. For more on that, I recommend How Early America Sounded (2003) by Richard Cullen Rath. I reviewed the book a number of years ago for the Christian Science Monitor, and what struck me was how sound—not sight, as today—ruled the lives of early Americans. The sound of bells, for instance, helped to regulate the size of towns; to live outside earshot was to live dangerously outside the government’s protection. And it was thunder, which is to say sound, that killed, not lightning.

Rath looks to the Sea Venture for an example of this thinking. He notes how William Strachey‘s description of the terrible storm that sent the Jamestown-bound ship off course to Bermuda depended upon evocations of sound:

At the storm’s onset Strachey remarked that “the wind singing and whistling most unusually” had caused the Sea Venture ”to cast off our pinnace,” which was in tow. One ship was thus lost even before the hurricane had descended in earnest. “A dreadful storm and hideous” immediately ensued, “swelling and roaring as if it were by fits.” Immediately, the sound of the storm made communications onboard impossible. The “clamours” of women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomfort” and the prayers and shouts of the more seasoned crew were all “drowned in the winds and the winds in thunder.” There was “nothing heard that could give comfort.”

With this in mind, one is tempted to revisit that couplet Gordon quoted, the one about Betty and “my complaint.” “It might make a UVA frat boy blush,” Gordon writes, but isn’t it also interesting that rather than ask us to picture the dirty deed, the writer instead insists that we hear it?

IMAGE: Wreck of Sea Venture by W. H. Harrington, 1981 (Bermuda National Trust and Bermuda Maritime Museum)

From School History of the United States by Albert Bushnell Hart (1918)

This is one in a series of posts that pays homage to The Art of Google Books.

On this day in 1843 Sallie Anne Corbell was born in Nansemond County, the eldest of nine children and the only one of them to grow up and marry George E. Pickett. It was marriage number two for George, who out West had hooked up with a Haida Indian and even produced a son. But Sallie stole his heart. Heck, she stole everybody’s heart, or so she’d have you believe. After the war, she changed her name to LaSalle and fashioned herself the “Child-bride of the Confederacy.”*

According to our entry, “She subtracted years from her age (sometimes five, sometimes even more) and told stories from the perspective of a child, smoothing the complexities of the antebellum South and slavery into a self-justifying myth soaked in the ‘fragrance of the snowy magnolias.’” She also wrote a book called Pickett and His Men (1913), and it’s only mildly surprising that she likely made most of it up.

By my lights, though, her best book is Kunnoo Sperits and Others, published in 1900 and claiming to offer a “phonetically genuine” guide to African American speech. For instance, here Mrs. General Pickett demonstrates how an African servant “preached the gospel of contentment”: “You ‘bleeged ter be satusfied wid w’at you’s got. Nobody hain’t got ebbyt’ing in dis worl’.”

Which is true, and why the Lost Cause tells us the slaves were so danged faithful. This was especially so with mammies. Listening to her own rendering of phonetically genuine speech transformed the former Miss Corbell into “a child again, looking up into the dear dusky face of that beloved black mammy, listening with my unhurt, unclouded faith to the folklore of her speculative midnight race, as she solved in her own random, shadowy way the dim mysteries of creation …”

It almost goes without saying that this made our author famous. Help! Somebody should make a movie!

* That honor might better be reserved for Helen Longstreet, but who am I to judge?

A version of this post was originally published on May 16, 2011.

ADDITIONALLY: Here is a program to one of Mrs. General Pickett’s lectures.

IMAGE: “‘Twuz a long time ago“ from Kunnoo Sperits and Others by LaSalle Corbell Pickett (1900)

From today’s Atlantic:

A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown’s Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery–the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.

These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly‘s course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.

Read the rest of the story here.

IMAGE: ”The Pirate Banister, hanging at the Yard Arm” from The Pirates Own Book by Charles Ellms (1837)

The Richmond Examiner is always a good read. As our entry on Civil War newspapers explains, it was the go-to organ of dissent in the Confederate capital, with editor John M. Daniel‘s criticism of Jefferson Davis becoming more intense and more personal as the war dragged on and defeat loomed. So above is the top of the front page for this day in 1863; you can read the whole four-page issue here [pdf]. What was going on in Richmond?

• “Baron Wardener,” a “titled Dutchman” captured by John S. Mosby and imprisoned for a time at Libby, “has returned to the North on parole, and ventilated his Teutonic spleen by the publication of some of the most barefaced and monstrous lies in regard to the management of the prison and its officers,” including the claim that he was fed “flesh of defunct mules“!
• The new Confederate national flag “was again displayed from the capitol yesterday, and met the approving gaze of thousands.” This was the Second National Flag, described here.
• On the very day that Stonewall Jackson was buried in Lexington, the Examiner scolded Richmonders who attended a recital dedicated to the late general. “The production was in rhyming verse, occupied about ten minutes in its delivery, and was excellent in sentiment,” the editors wrote; “but we thought the boisterous applause that greeted some of its most solemn passages, ill-times and out of place. Will theatre audiences never learn discretion?“
• Casualties (above and beyond Jackson) were still being tallied after the bloody Battle of Chancellorsville, fought a week or two earlier, with the paper noting that the Richmond Zouaves, Company E, Forty-fourth Virginia Regiment, commanded by the future playwright, Captain Edward M. Alfriend, lost about half its men.

Just about a month and a half previously, the Bread Riot had turned the city on its head, and much of the Examiner‘s front page is given over to reports from various prosecutions of the rioters. Mary Duke is a typical case. Charged with rioting, the accused appeared before the judge “a finely dressed woman of forty, with a quantity of rouge on her face.” A citizen named George Watt was the first to testify:

Saw the accused in the riot at P. K. White’s, on Main street; when the crowd went round to Sweitzer’s, on Franklin street, I followed them; saw the woman crowd round Mr. Sweitzer’s door; saw a chuckle headed irishwoman assail the door with an axe; I rushed forward and seized the axe; three or four men then seized me; the accused was in the crowd pushing back the persons who were attempting to put down the riot; saw a navy revolver and leveled it at the gentlemen who were endeavoring to quell the riot; in the confusion some one got the pistol from her; after I had extricated myself from the crowd, the accused came to me and demanded her pistol …

Long story short, he said she could pick it up at his store next week. On her behalf, a man name Lampkin picked it up, claiming that the pistol was his and he had only loaned it to Mrs. Duke, whose name some claimed to be Lucy, not Mary. Whatever the case, the jury found Mrs. Duke guilty as charged and fined her $100 and sentenced her to six months in prison.

PREVIOUSLY: For more on the Examiner, click here.

On this day 150 years ago, Union general Benjamin Franklin Butler, the military governor of New Orleans, issued his notorious General Orders No. 28, or what became known as the “woman order.” It declared that any woman who treated a Union soldier disrespectfully—spitting was the preferred method that spring—would be treated by the law as if she were a prostitute. “The edict,” writes the historian Chester G. Hearn, “was a little out of character for Butler, whose reverence for women was well established and untarnished by any hint of personal scandal. The general, however, had a short temper, and this trait, combined with his penchant for stimulating controversy, often dominated his actions.”

So true. And even though the order was not meant to suggest that the women literally were prostitutes, only that they be subject to equivalent penalties before the law, and only after they had done something so unladylike as to spit on a soldier, word of General Orders No. 28 “hit the streets of New Orleans like a giant keg of gunpowder.” Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, whose very name seemed a defense of courtly manners, was shocked … SHOCKED!

MEN OF THE SOUTH: Shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters, and our sisters be thus outraged by the ruffianly soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat at their pleasure the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse, friends, and drive back from our soil those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.

Butler, meanwhile, could just as easily offend those on his own side. Exempli gratia: two years later, President Lincoln was preparing for a touch reelection fight by looking for a new running mate. He sent Simon Cameron to chat with Butler, who, for all his failings as a general, had always been an able politician, at least in Massachusetts. Butler, however, valued his military prowess more highly than others and told the president’s emissary: “I would not quit the field to be Vice-President, even with himself [Lincoln] as President, unless he will give me … [assurances] that he will die or resign within three months after his inauguration.”

Butler, I believe, meant this as a joke. But it probably wasn’t all that funny then, and it’s a hell of a lot less funny now, and that’s even considering Alan Alda‘s fatuously delivered maxim in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): “Comedy is tragedy plus time!”

IMAGE: Cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1862

Cavalier Diner by Ralph W. Holsinger (undated). The Corner, University Avenue, Charlottesville. The image has been reversed. Notice, too, the two men unobtrusively reading the newspaper. And could that be Holsinger himself in the mirror behind the counter? (Holsinger Studio Collection, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia)

This interactive battles and casualties map of the Civil War was created by the Washington Post. That’s a screen shot above; you’ll have to go to the site to play with it. The Post explains its features:

Press the play button below to watch the war unfold over time. Drag the scrubber or click on the months and years to change the date range. Roll over the circles for more information on each battle. Casualties are defined as killed, wounded, missing and captured.

IMAGE: Screen shot of Washington Post interactive graphic; created by Gene Thorp and published on April 12, 2011

File this under … what? The odd twists and turns of history and politics? Whatever the case, it begins (for me) with a column just published by the British-born writer John Derbyshire. Recently fired from the National Review for writing a column (for another publication) in which he urged his own children to avoid black people, Derbyshire has reappeared, this time arguing on behalf of the much-maligned phrase “White Supremacist”:

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

As the National Review editor might put it: Needless to say, no one at Encyclopedia Virginia shares this view of history. What interested me, though, is that Derbyshire published his thoughts on a website called VDARE.com, whose logo looks like this:

The name, you might have guessed, refers to Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born in North America. Born on August 18, 1587, at Roanoke, she was the granddaughter of John White, the colony’s governor. Little Virginia disappeared along with the rest of the so-called Lost Colonists, including her parents, although some writers have claimed over the years that she reappeared as a white doe—hence the graphic element in VDARE’s logo.

In The White Doe: the Fate of Virginia Dare; an Indian Legend (1901), the Virginia-born writer Sallie Southall Cotten offers up this version of the story: After Dare rejects the advances of an Indian witch doctor, he turns her into a white doe. Her true love, an Indian hunter named Okisko, tracks her down and shoots her with a silver arrow. She magically transforms into a woman, only to die in his arms. Cotten tells all of this in verse, although she helpfully provides a critical explanation at the beginning. Apparently, Virginia’s blood ”melted from the silver arrow into the water of [a] spring.” This made the water disappear, except that there then sprouted the seedling of a Scuppernong tree, which grew into a beautiful retreat where Okisko could go and

cherish thoughts of his lost love, Virginia Dare, and marvel on the wonders of her death. Then it came to pass that when the fruit came upon this vine, lo! it was purple in hue instead of white like the other grapes, and yielded a red juice. Full of superstition, and still credulous of marvels, O-kis-ko imagined the change to be due to the magic arrow buried at its root. He gathered the grapes and pressed the juice from them and lo! it was red—it was the semblance of blood, Virginia Dare’s blood, absorbed from the water …

Just in case you missed it: the water turned to wine! And Virginia Dare is Jesus!

So what does any of this have to do with a website interested in publishing apologies for white supremacy? VDARE’s founder, Peter Brimelow, explains his reasoning here, and the best I can make out is that he sees Dare as symbolic of the vanishing white person in America. “It’s the immigration, stupid!” is a battle cry on this site, which advocates that American borders be “sealed,” illegal aliens “expelled,” and “alien enclaves … assimilated.”

But what was Virginia Dare if not an immigrant, an intruder, an “illegal”? Brimelow acknowledges this (sort of); yet, he can’t quite unravel the irony. Says Derbyshire: “I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group”—except maybe at Roanoke. But who wants to say that on a site called VDARE?

IMAGES: The White Doe by Sallie Southall Cotten (1901); Virginia Dare by Munroe Bell (2012)