Two birthdays today. On this day in 1882 Annie Bethel Scales Bannister was born on a farm in Henry County. Better known by her married name, Spencer, she was a poet, a civil rights activist, a teacher, a librarian, and a gardener. While fewer than thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the black literary movement of the 1920s—the Harlem Renaissance—and only the second African American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). Noted for iambic verse preoccupied with biblical and mythological themes, Spencer found fans in such Harlem heavyweights as James Weldon Johnson, who commented on her “economy of phrase and compression of thought.” In addition to her writing, Spencer helped to found the Lynchburg chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was also an avid gardener and hosted a salon at her Lynchburg garden, which attracted prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Her former residence is now a museum that is open to the public.

If for no other reason than this, read the entry to read about Anne Spencer’s friendship with the African pygmy Ota Benga.

Also on this day, in 1833, James Ewell Brown Stuart was born in Patrick County. Stuart, of course, grew up to ride horses. In the words of the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, he was

Reckless, merry, religious, theatrical,
Lover of gesture, lover of panache,
With all the actor’s grace and the quick, light charm
That makes the women adore him

Spencer’s preoccupations were less romantic than Stuart’s, or Benét’s, for that matter. Here is her meditation on a lynching:

They pyred a race of black, black men,
And burned them to ashes white; then,
Laughing, a young one claimed a skull,
For the skull of a black is white, not dull …

As my wife would say, “Thanks for that, Brendan.”

IMAGE: Top: Anne Spencer in her garden by Jimmy Ray (Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum); Anne Spencer House (Flickr user eli.pousson); bottom: Confederate uniform jacket worn by J. E. B. Stuart (Virginia Historical Society); eight of clubs in a deck of Confederate playing cards that dates to the second half of the nineteenth century (Virginia Historical Society)

On this day in 1811, King George III, who suffered from a debilitating physical and mental illness (possibly porphyria), was declared unfit to rule. His son George, Prince of Wales, was appointed regent.

On this day in 1924, Woodrow Wilson, born in Staunton, died not far away in Washington, D.C. (He is the only president to be buried there.) Wilson had never been particularly healthy, suffering from the flu and attacks of asthma as president and then, in 1919, the stroke that paralyzed him on the left side and slurred his speech. On January 31, 1924, he experienced indigestion that was enough to bring his doctor home from vacation, only to find Wilson near death. On February 1, the former president said, “I am a broken piece of machinery. When the machinery is broken …” He fell silent for a moment, then added: “I am ready.”

These were his last words.

Also on the day, in 1807, the future Confederate general Joseph Eggleston Johnston was born at Longwood House near Farmville. That the State Teachers College at Farmville would change its name, in 1949, to Longwood College is perhaps not a coincidence.

IMAGE: Woodrow Wilson caricature, 1915 (Library of Congress)

On this day in 1973, the Richmond Times-Dispatch featured a photograph of Adèle Clark on its front page with the skeptical headline, “Beginning of an ERA?” The ninety-year-old Clark had shown up at the Highway Department auditorium—the largest meeting room near the Capitol—along with 800 others to express her opinion on the Equal Rights Amendment. As usual, Clark did not mince words. “This is an appalling amendment,” she told the audience. “It reflects the thinking of fifty years ago. They are fighting a battle that has already been won.”

Clark was a founding member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, nineteen years the chair of Virginia’s League of Women Voters, dean of women at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, New Deal-era field worker, and an accomplished artist and arts advocate. Clark called politics and art her “creative spirits,” and she exemplified the crucial role women played in the social reform movements of the twentieth century, applying her sharp intellect, artistic skills, and fiery determination to championing both women and the arts. She died in 1983 at the age of 100.

IMAGES: A placard used by woman suffrage activists early in the nineteenth century; a similar image can be seen here (Library of Virginia); this photograph of Adèle Clark was featured on the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch on February 2, 1973 (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

On this day in 1864, Confederate forces under George E. Pickett were fighting down in North Carolina. They faced Union troops who were hip deep in swamps and dug into the riverbanks around New Bern, and after a tough, middle-of-the-night firefight, Pickett’s Virginians managed to cut off and capture most of Company F, 2nd North Carolina (U.S.). Including Nethercutt’s and Whitford’s battalions, the men of Company F were mostly from right there in the area. Their ranks included a few men who were staunchly loyal to the Union—North Carolina, it should be said, hesitated even longer than Virginia before seceding, and a statewide referendum on the question had actually failed. Others were, as one historian put it, “men of questionable loyalty,” while still others were deserters from the Confederate ranks.

This latter group included young men like 21-year-old David Jones and 26-year-old Joseph L. Haskett, who had avoided conscription into Confederate service by joining a home guard unit, only to see that group recently folded into the Army of Northern Virginia. That’s when Jones and Haskett decided to flee—it was either that or leave home and face the carnage up in Ole Virginny. The irony is that these fugitives often ended up in Union enclaves on the coast, where they were easy pickings for often unscrupulous army recruiters. Jones and Haskett both later insisted that they were threatened and forced into joining the 2nd North Carolina.

Whatever the case, 53 men in all from Company F were captured and marched behind Confederate lines, and there a few Confederate soldiers recognized the faces of deserted comrades, including those of Jones and Haskett. Now, it was quite bad enough if you were from North Carolina and caught wearing Union blues. But it was much, much worse if you had once worn Confederate grays. Writes Donald E. Collins:

When General Pickett confronted the two men he was openly contemptuous and left no doubt about their fate. The previous day he had been overheard to say “that every God-damned man who didn’t do his duty, or deserted, ought to be shot or hung.” At about sunset, Pickett came out of his tent and confronted Jones and Haskett, who were standing near a campfire. He asked where they had been, and after listening to their reply angrily told them, “God damn you, I recon [sic] you will hardly ever go back there again, you damned rascals; I’ll have you shot, and all other damned rascals who desert.” Jones answered that he did “not care a damn whether they shot him then, or what they did with him.” With that, Pickett ordered them away from his tent. He then told Generals [Montgomery D.] Corse and [Robert F.] Hoke, who were present during the confrontation with the two Confederates-turned-Yankee, that “we’ll have to have a court-martial on these fellows pretty soon, and after some are shot the rest will stop deserting.” Corse agreed, stating “the sooner the better.”

Corse got his wish. After twenty-six of the fifty-three men captured from Company F were identified as deserters, a board of court-martial—led by Lieutenant Colonel James R. Branch and composed entirely of Virginians—convened in nearby Kinston, North Carolina, on February 2 to hear its first two cases: Jones and Haskett. They were found guilty and sentenced to hang on February 5. On February 4, five more men were tried and sentenced to hang. And on February 11, the board convened in Goldsboro and sentenced another 13 to hang. There were no findings of “not guilty” and no leniency. Lawyers were denied the men and witnesses turned away.

The merciless swiftness of Pickett’s justice might suggest just how big a problem desertion was for the Confederate army. Perpetually short of food and clothing, the army, because of that, was now losing its men. Just a few days earlier, on January 22, Robert E. Lee had written to the secretary of war that “desertions to the enemy are becoming more frequent, and the men cannot continue healthy and vigorous if confined to this spare diet for any length of time. Unless there is a change, I fear the army cannot be kept together.” The previous August, Lee had even been more explicit in a message to the general John D. Imboden:

There is much desertion, I regret to say, from this army, principally from the North Carolina troops, but it also occurs among others, and, I am pained to add, among the Virginians. The [relatively light] punishment you recommend has been resorted to, but I begin to fear nothing but the death penalty, uniformly, inexorably administered will stop it.

With that in mind, perhaps, a gallows was erected in Kinston and General Hoke put in charge of the executions. With Hoke’s brigade and the condemned men’s old unit making a square around the platform, Jones and Haskett were hanged on February 5. Besides troubling the locals—many of whom knew the two men and were not entirely Confederate-friendly to begin with—the executions set off an unfriendly exchange between Pickett and Union general John J. Peck, who enclosed in a note a clipping from the February 8 edition of the Fayetteville Observer headlined, “Traitors Executed” (see image above). After telling Pickett that he hoped such rumors were unfounded, he wrote:

I am instructed to notify you that if the members of the North Carolina regiment who have been captured are not treated as prisoners of war the strictest retaliation will be enforced. Two colonels, 2 lieutenant-colonels, 2 majors, and 2 captains are held at Fort Monroe as hostages for their safety. These officers have not been placed in close custody because the authorities do not believe that any harm is intended by you to the members of the Second North Carolina Regiment.

By the time Pickett replied, he had executed five more on February 12 and thirteen all at once on February 15. A Confederate chaplain later wrote that “the scene beggers [sic] all description … They had only twenty four hours to live, and but little preparation made for death. Here was a wife to say farewell to a husband forever. Here a mother to take the last look at her ruined son; and then a sister who had come to embrace for the last time the brother who had brought disgrace upon the very name she bore.” The historian Collins, meanwhile, describes the scene after the executions on February 15 as “bizarre,” with a “tall, stout, dark-complected, cross- or squint-eyed” hangman from Raleigh taking his pay “directly from the bodies of the dead men,” leaving some completely nude.

These weren’t the only executions in Kinston, either. As many seventy soldiers were hanged or shot during this time. An officer from the 6th North Carolina wrote that it was scaring his men: “It was sort of a general hanging down there. There were so many executions that I was considerably worried at having to take my men over so often.”

By the time the court-martial board convened one last time to hear the final six of Company F’s cases, twenty men had been hanged and the appetite for more finally seemed to wane. Only two of the six were sentenced to hang this time, facing their cross-eyed executioner on February 22.

And what about those who weren’t hanged? They were treated as prisoners of war and shipped to Richmond, arriving on February 11 and 12. There they immediately came down with disease, with eleven of the twenty-seven dying. The rest were quickly sent south to Andersonville, in Georgia, with thirteen arriving alive, and ten of those dying within a month, also of disease. The remaining three were paroled. As for General Pickett, he faced possible criminal charges for his actions and after the war fled to Canada. Only intervention by Ulysses S. Grant on his behalf allowed him to return.

PS: While not a word of the Kinston hangings can be found in Mrs. Pickett‘s voluminous postwar writings, neither can mention be found in Wikipedia’s entry on George E. Pickett.

IMAGES: Top: A different execution by hanging, sketched by Alfred A. Waud, and published as an engraving in Harper’s Weekly, January 25, 1862; middle: colorized portrait of Confederate general George E. Pickett; two clippings from the Fayetteville Observer, February 8, 1864 (top) and February 11, 1864 (bottom); Confederate general Robert F. Hoke (Barden Collection, North Carolina State Archives); bottom: clipping from an Adjutant General’s Office document (like this one) used as part of the postwar criminal case against Pickett (“Murdered by order rebel Genl’s PIckett and Hoke at Kingston NC in the spring of 1864″

Defense of Thomas Jefferson:

Many of us have harbored ambivalence toward Thomas Jefferson for all the reasons set down in this article. Perhaps it is time to rethink the dilemma Jefferson himself must have faced. To me, the word, paternalism, jumps out. What was he to do with the slaves he owned? At this particular time in our history, this would have been tantamount to abandonment. (Could he have afforded to free them and pay them wages? As it was, he died in debt). They would have faced less compassionate owners, poverty or worse. If we consider that it was another 60 years before Emancipation and another 90 years til Civil Rights, in retrospect, did Thomas Jefferson make the right decision? Many will still say, he should have backed up his words by freeing his slaves. But at least this article will open the debate.

In pointing out the accomplishments of many of Jefferson’s slaves’ descendants, perhaps – just perhaps – the ends justified the means. – Still Learning, Maryland

In an earlier post about the New York Times‘s review of the Smithsonian exhibit on Jefferson and slavery, I suggested that there was room to push back on the notion that the descendants of Monticello slaves have been successful thanks to Jefferson’s ideal. I did not, however, expect such a full-throated defense of the notion. I have to say, though, it’s an anomaly among the review’s many responses. Read all the comments here.

IMAGE: Detail from Thomas Jefferson by John Trumbull (1788)

On this day in 1865, the United States House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by a vote of 119 to 56. The amendment abolished slavery. Although the Senate had already approved the legislation the previous April, the House had voted it down in June before finally approving it. Lincoln signed the amendment on February 1 and then waited for the states to ratify it.

I guess because I have been reading political speeches of late—this one, in the Senate of Virginia, was courageously antislavery, while this one, in the House of Representatives, was stubbornly and sometimes eloquently pro—I was curious to know what the debate was like on this momentous day. What struck me right away is how little acknowledged were the interests of actual enslaved men and women. Archibald McAllister, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, had voted against the amendment the first time around but in the face of Confederate intransigence, changed his mind: “It must therefore be destroyed,” he told the House, referring not to the “peculiar institution” but to Jefferson Davis‘s government, “and in voting for the present measure I cast my vote against the corner stone of the southern confederacy, and declare eternal war against the enemies of my country.” Mr. McAllister likely was referring to the Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens‘s famous Cornerstone Speech (1861), in which he declared slavery to be the cornerstone of the Confederacy.

One gets the sense that if freedom had been the cornerstone of the Confederacy, then Mr. McAllister might well have been against it!

The next speaker to rise was a fellow Democrat from Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton Coffroth. “Mr. Speaker,” he began, “I speak not to-day for or against slavery.” Mr. Coffroth was a lawyer, and his concern, it seems, was only the law. Which meant that he went on for quite awhile, lecturing on what he supposed the Constitution would allow and not allow (would it allow an amendment undoing the republic and establishing an autocracy, for instance? of course not!) before explaining that his “no” vote in June had been because the amendment “was taking away the property of the people of the States that remained true to the Union.” But then Missouri and Maryland abolished slavery. Slaves were no longer property—problem solved!

Then Mr. Coffroth reminds us of the political troubles caused by slavery over the years, while making a special appeal for his own party:

Mr. Speaker, I desire above all things that the Democratic party be again placed in power. The condition of the country needs the wise counsel of the Democracy … The question of slavery has been a fruitful theme for the opponents of the Democracy. It has breathed into existence fanaticism, and feeds it with such meat as to make it ponderous in growth. It must soon be strangled or the nation is lost. I propose to do this by removing from the political arena that which has given it life and strength.

One gets the sense that if Republicans had been for slavery, then Mr. Coffroth would have been an abolitionist!

Click on the pages below to read for yourself this portion of the House debate.

It was not until a third Pennsylvania Democrat rose from his desk, this time (ironically) to speak against the amendment, that actual black people came into a brief focus. After lamenting that he had to speak at all (“I had hoped that I would be permitted to close my short career upon this floor without claiming any of the time or attention of the House”) and then acknowledging the House’s right to abolish slavery, William H. Miller demanded to know what then? “Abolish slavery,” he said, “and no man among them [i.e., the amendment's proponents] has pretended to show what we are going to do with the freedmen, except that, as good Christians, it will become our duty to feed and clothe them.”

God forbid!

One gets the sense that if it hadn’t been his duty as a good Christian to feed and clothe the poor, then …

IMAGES: Top: Untitled painting by Janie McGee; bottom: a telegram sent from John Nicolay to President Abraham Lincoln on January 31, 1865, that reads: “Constitutional amendment just passed by 119 for to 56 votes against” (Library of Congress); Alexander Hamilton Coffroth, Democratic member of the House from Pennsylvania; “Scene in the House on the Passage of the Proposition to Amend the Constitution, January 31, 1865,” Harper’s Weekly, February 18, 1865

Having been tried, found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death by a Parliament-appointed High Court of Justice, England’s King Charles I was executed on this day in 1649. One can find a particularly dramatic account of the event on page 2,852 of the Library of Universal History and Popular Science …* (1910):

King Charles I was taken to the place of execution, in front of the palace of Whitehall, January 30, 1649. He ascended the scaffold with a firm step; and in his last moments he reasserted his “divine rights,” and declared that “the people have no right to any part in the government, that being a thing nothing pertaining to them.” Addressing those around him, he declared himself innocent toward his people and forgave his enemies. Turning to Bishop Juxon, he said: “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can take place.” The bishop replied: “You exchange a temporal for an eternal crown; a good exchange.” The king then laid his head upon the block, saying to Bishop Juxon: “Remember.” One of the executioners then cut off the king’s “gray and discrowned head”; and the other, holding it aloft, exclaimed: “This is the head of a traitor!” Many of the spectators wept at the horrid spectacle, and a groan of pity and horror proceeded from the vast multitude.

The film Cromwell (1970) follows this same script, more or less, with Alec Guinness (soon to be Obi-Wan Kenobi) as the king and Richard Harris as Oliver Cromwell. In the clip above, you’ll notice the two making eyes at one another as Charles—looking the long-haired rogue compared with his stern, black-robed accusers—walks to the butcher’s block. And perhaps it makes a weird kind of sense casting an Irishman like Harris to play the Puritan Cromwell. According to Wikipedia, the masked executioner may himself have been an Irishman, possibly named Gunning. Which explains, of course, the Kings Head pub in Galway.

* … Containing a Record of the Human Race from the Earliest Historical Period to the Present Time; Embracing a General Survey of the Progress of Mankind in National and Social Life, Civil Government, Religion, Literature, Science and Art. Complete in Twenty-Five Volumes.

IMAGES: A German engraving of Charles I’s execution; The Kings Head

On this day in 1849, the normally close-mouthed R. L. T. Beale of Westmoreland County made an impassioned speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in defense of proslavery members and their attempts to find common ground on the issue. You might recall Daniel Bryan from the other day, and his own impassioned speech in the Senate of Virginia deploring slavery and the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Well, the Missouri Compromise was still on the mind twenty-nine years later, with Beale recalling those days when white Southern men like himself feared the “dark and damning fanaticism” of the North and sought some kind of compromise “in the vain hope that the power of the giant might be stayed.”

(Background: Southern slaveholders sought to spread slavery into the territories in part because new slave states, such as Missouri, meant more representation for their interests in Congress. Antislavery politicians in the North sought to check that power by balancing Missouri with the admission of Maine, a free state, and then drawing a line, above which would always be free. Or, in the words of Mr. Beale: “36° 30′ was tendered as a compromise, in whose rich soil of peace the olive of reunion might flourish in lasting beauty.”)

Except that this great compromise that antislavery men like Senator Bryan had found so deplorable was now, in 1849, no better in the eyes of Mr. Beale and his confederates.

Click on the pages below to read for yourself this portion of Mr. Beale’s speech.

“Satisfied?” the Virginian asked his fellow House members, referring to the Missouri Compromise—and looking at his portrait above, I imagine those eyes of his bulging a bit as his rhetoric really starts to escalate.

No; far from it. The spirit of fanaticism just felt its power; the concession became only a stepping-stone from which it leaped onward in its career with a velocity unequaled before. Again the tocsin sounded. The warrior clans again assembled. Like the Vandal chief, this spirit of aggression pointing with the one hand to the sterile province conquered on the steppes of the Alps, with the other pointed her followers to the rich Italian plains—the scene of future victories. [Mr. Beale's words can't help but invoke images like this one. –Ed.] Then commenced the flood-tide of petitions, not from isolated individuals, but from organized societies. The mails were sought to be made the medium for transmission of incendiary publications. The public mind was excited by constant discussions. The household altar of the Virginia master was stained by the blood of his children. The South, stung to madness by these incessant attacks, but clinging even in the retchings of her despair to the plighted faith of her contract, asked in mercy from the Government some protection from these insidious assaults.

To our collective literary detriment, one does not witness words like this on the House floor too often anymore. But what on earth was Mr. Beale talking about? As far as I can tell, the Vandals here represent those terrible abolitionists who, having managed to “conquer” (others might say “free”) those states north of the Missouri Compromise line, have now set their sights on the rich Italian plains Washington, D.C., that final territory in which the United States government still holds full sway. Why not try to abolish slavery there? So “organized societies” of abolitionists began mailing “incendiary publications” to Congress—i.e., petitions asking for their question to be heard. Well, “these incessant attacks” just had to stop! I mean, who had ever heard of citizens petitioning their own government like that?

So, Mr. Beale, how did the government protect itself from such “insidious assaults”?

The celebrated 21st rule was adopted, and from that period a new ally was folded to the bosom of political abolitionism.

We could go on with this forever, but the 21st rule was (just barely) passed by the House in January 1840 and actually banned the reception of any petitions calling for the abolition of slavery. In retrospect, we can thank the only former president to serve in Congress, John Quincy Adams, for his dogged opposition to said rule, some of which can be witnessed here. The 21st rule was overturned four years later, but as Mr. Beale pointed out, not before the opponents of slavery had rallied ’round their flag, so to speak.

No larger point here, just a reminder of how hopelessly tangled up in slavery the politics of the day were.

PS: Then he started into dealing with slaves / And something inside of him died / She had to sell everything she owned / And froze up inside

IMAGE: Hon. Richard Lee T. Beale, Rep of VA Gen in C.S.A. (Library of Congress)

This haunting photograph of 76-year-old Carrie Buck Detamore was taken in February 1980. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, at the time she

lived forgotten in a one-room cinderblock house off Rio Road in Albemarle County. The house had no plumbing and only a wood stove for heat. She was a small, shy, pleasant woman.

She was nervous that two reporters in coats and ties had come to visit and ask her about her past in light of revelations about the state’s sterilization movement.

She sat at a small kitchen table. Her husband, his leg infected from a ghastly wound, lay groaning on the bed a few feet away. She appeared thin and wan.

“I won’t get into trouble if I tell, will I? I don’t want no trouble,” said Detamore, then in her 70s.

She spoke then of how she had always yearned for children, though she was not bitter about her sterilization.

“I tried helping everybody all my life, and I tried to be good to everybody.  It just don’t do no good to hold grudges,” she said.

Shortly after that visit, she was taken by local health officials to a hospital and treated for exposure and malnutrition. Later she was moved to a state nursing home in Waynesboro, where she died on Jan. 28, 1983.

On this day twenty-nine years ago.

Only a handful of people attended her burial at Charlottesville’s Oakwood Cemetery.

But she was, in fact, a historical figure.

Why? After their nephew raped Buck when she was 17, Buck’s foster parents had her committed to the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg. (Better that than suffer the shame of a daughter’s pregnancy, right?) Buck’s biological mother and half sister had also been committed, suggesting to eugenics-minded doctors that “feeblemindedness” ran in the family and so the best thing to do was make sure no more kids came along. Even Carrie Buck’s eventual daughter was suspected of “imbecility,” which finally led Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to write—in his decision in Buck v. Bell (1927) upholding the constitutionality of forced sterilization—that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Never mind that Carrie Buck was neither “feebleminded” nor an imbecile; never mind that her daughter earned A’s and B’s in school. Just think about that sentence from Justice Holmes and then look again at the photograph above.

“It just don’t do no good to hold grudges,” she said.

IN ADDITION: Read Holmes’s decision here and view documents related to the case here.

IMAGE: Carrie Buck Detamore by Gary Robertson (Richmond Times-Dispatch)