WILLIAM ELLIOTT NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

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1 NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

2 1778 April 27, Monday: William Elliott was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, the first son of William Elliott and Phoebe Waight Elliott (the Beaufort Elliotts descended from a Baptist bricklayer named William Elliott who became a plantation master). The Elliotts had come to possess cotton and rice plantations in Beaufort and Colleton districts in South Carolina and on the Ogeechee River in Georgia, and houses in Beaufort and Adams Run, South Carolina, and in addition maintained Farniente, a summer place in the mountains at Flat Rock, North Carolina. William Elliott was a nephew of the botanist Stephen Elliott. Nonvoting Americans on a Beaufort, South Carolina plantation (each person worth 5/8ths of a federal vote, to the local white men of property)

3 NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT William Elliott Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

4 1803 At the age of 14, William Elliott matriculated at Beaufort College. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? NO, THAT S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN S STORIES. LIFE ISN T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project William Elliott

5 1807 Richard Henry Dana and Walter Channing were expelled from Harvard College for participating in the Rotten Cabbage Rebellion, a student revolt triggered by a maggoty lunch. Also, Dana s mother died during this year. Channing would, under the tutelage of Dr. James Jackson, continue the study of medicine. Harvard tutor John Farrar was appointed as the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. He would begin to maintain weather records in Cambridge, seeking to understand the mathematical complexities of this bulk atmospheric natural process. At the age of 18, William Elliott graduated from Beaufort College in South Carolina and matriculated at Harvard. NEW HARVARD MEN THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project William Elliott

6 1808 Stephen Elliott was re-elected to the legislature of South Carolina, where he would be active in establishment of a state bank. Allegedly in poor health, Stephen Elliott s nephew William Elliott withdrew from Harvard College and returned to South Carolina. Except for some early incursions into politics, he would chiefly devoted himself to the management of his estates, and to writing and lecturing on agriculture and other topics. He would contributed to one of the newspapers of Charleston, South Carolina a series of sporting sketches which would be collected and published in THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project William Elliott

7 1810 Harvard College awarded an honorary Bachelor s Degree to William Elliott of South Carolina, who had been forced to withdraw in 1808 allegedly due to ill health. Publication of Professor John Quincy Adams s LECTURES ON RHETORIC AND ORATORY, DELIVERED TO THE CLASSES OF SENIOR AND JUNIOR SOPHISTERS IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810). Professor Adams s father, John Adams, would send the volumes to Thomas Jefferson, describing them as Two Pieces of Homespun. The volumes would be in Jefferson s library as sold to the government in 1815 to help cover the former president s debts and to create a Library of Congress. The original volumes, as above, are now on view in the reconstruction of Jefferson s library in the Northwest Gallery of the capitol building in Washington DC.

8 1814 Stephen Elliott had been active in the founding of the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina, and in this year became its president (he would serve until his death in 1830). In this year and the following one, Stephen Elliott s nephew William Elliott would represent St. Helena in the South Carolina House of Representatives, and also would serve as a trustee for Beaufort College. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. William Elliott Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

9 1815 Thaddeus William Harris received his BA degree from Harvard College and entered the Harvard Medical School. NEW HARVARD MEN Convers Francis, Jr. also received his bachelor s degree. Still on file there is his Spherical Problems. Convers Francis (21 ¾ x 29 inches). The Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard, John Farrar, was sponsoring the building of a weather observatory at Harvard (the project would not accumulate the required funds). Harvard awarded its automatic degree of Master of Arts to William Elliott of South Carolina (who actually, now fancy this, hadn t even graduated with his class). Professor Sylvestre François Lacroix left the École Polytechnique to take up a chair at the Sorbonne, and was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the Collège de France where since 1812 he had been teaching. CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT William Elliott Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

10 1817 May: Through marriage with Ann Hutchinson Smith, daughter of Thomas Rhett Smith ( ), a planter in St. Bartholomew Parish, and Anne Rebecca Skirving Smith, William Elliott acquired control over at least five slave plantations in Colleton District: Balls (1,083 acres) in St. Bartholomew Parish, Social Hall, the Bluff, and Middle Place (totalling approximately 3,400 acres) near the Ashepoo River and Chehaw Creek, and Pon Pon, later called Oak Lawn (1,750 acres) on the Edisto River. He also owned Myrtle Bank plantation on Hilton Head Island, Bee Hive and Hope tracts on the Edisto River, Ellis, Shell Point, The Grove, and Bay Point plantations in Beaufort District, as well as Farniente, a mountain house in Flat Rock, North Carolina, and houses in Beaufort and Adams Run. William Elliott and Ann Hutchinson Smith Elliott would be the parents of nine children: William Elliott ( ), Thomas Rhett Smith Elliott (died 1876), Ann Elliott ( ), Mary Barnwell Elliott ( ), Caroline Phoebe Elliott ( ), Emily Elliott ( ),

11 William Elliott ( ), Ralph Emms Elliott ( ), and Harriett Rutledge Elliott ( ). Nonvoting Americans on a Beaufort, South Carolina plantation (each person worth 5/8ths of a federal vote, to the local white men of property) WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF William Elliott Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

12 1818 In this year and the following one, William Elliott would represent St. Helena in the South Carolina Senate.

13 1819 Yale College awarded to Stephen Elliott an honorary degree of Doctor of Law. From this year until 1824, Stephen Elliott s nephew William Elliott served as intendant for Beaufort.

14 1822 Harvard College awarded to Stephen Elliott the honorary degree of Doctor of Law. Stephen Elliott s nephew William Elliott sat for a portrait by Thomas Sully, and ran for the United States House of Representatives but was defeated. July 22, Monday: The British Parliament enacted one of the 1st animal rights laws, the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act intended to protect farm animals. After three months devoted to his music, Gioachino Rossini departed from Vienna because Prince Metternich, a great admirer, has engaged him as the official composer for the Verona Conference (coming up in November). In Heinzendorf in what was then Lower Silesia, Johann Mendel was born. His father Anton Mendel ( ) was a peasant veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. His mother Rosine née Schwirtlich ( ) had already given birth to three daughters, two of whom had died. The surviving daughter, Veronica, was two years old. GREGOR MENDEL

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16 The botanist Stephen Elliott wrote to his nephew William Elliott about the recent conspiracy by a Charleston Bible teacher, Denmark No one thought to describe his face Vesey, to free the slaves of South Carolina. SERVILE INSURRECTION The Boston house known as the Beehive was a 2-story dwelling with a sharp roof, with its end toward the street. This house was called the Beehive house because it had many little windows, making it look from the outside very like a honeycomb. The lady of the house was a Mrs. Cooper, who had two daughters and many female boarders. On this evening at about 9PM a crowd of about 200 men, attired in various outlandish costumes and with well-blackened faces, carrying various work implements, suddenly came around the corner accompanied by a band. It took them approximately ten minutes to virtually rip this house to shreds. The first thing they did was turn all the featherbeds inside out from the windows so that the neighborhood took on the resemblance of winter. They then proceeded with a will to utterly demolish the furniture, the walls, the roof, the frame, everything about the house, their intent being not to leave any two sticks fastened together or any stick larger than a door hingepin. As they departed they set a fire in some brimstone, feathers, and wool rags so that the house lot not only seemed like a trash heap, and looked like winter, but smelled like Hell itself. (So, where were the Boston authorities? Elsewhere.)

17 1826 William Elliott would represent St. Helena in the South Carolina House of Representatives from this year through 1829.

18 1829 William Elliott s tale Devil Fishing appeared in the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine of Baltimore.

19 1830 William Elliott s tale Drum Fishing (Pogonias Chromis) appeared in the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine of Baltimore.

20 1831 December 31, Saturday: Friedrich August Koch, Baron Gise replaced Georg Friedrich, Baron Zentner as President of the Council of Ministers of Bavaria. Following a special election in St. Helena, William Elliott qualified for the South Carolina General Assembly. He would resign from the South Carolina Senate because he was a Unionist and his constituents were instructing him to vote in favor of nullification of the federal tariff laws (he opposed secession because he feared the economy of the South was inadequate to sustain a condition of independence). In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 31 of 12 M 1831 / With my H attended the funeral of Avis Lockwood who died on the 29th about 3 OClock in the Morning Aged 57 Years at the house of her Venerable father in law Moses Brown We sat in the Parlour where we had a solid opportunity -Hannah Robinson in testimony & supplication Moses Brown & the immediate connections were in the Keeping Room & he & Wm Almy had short but lively testimonies to the virtues of the deceased RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

21 1832 William Elliott of South Carolina expressed his Unionist views in opposition to nullification in Address to the People of St. Helena. His opposition to secession was based on fears that the economy of the South would be inadequate to sustain a condition of independence. He was careful to point out that he was not in any way, shape, or manner opposed to race slavery since that was an institution of society that was sanctioned by religion, conducive to good morals, and useful, nay indispensable. Upon reaching the age of 25, William Henry Brisbane came into possession of the rice and cotton plantation called Milton Lodge on the Ashley River near Charleston, and came into ownership of its complement of 22 black field slaves. It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God. Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141

22 1839 As president of the Beaufort Agricultural Society and vice president of the South Carolina Agricultural Society, William Elliott urged crop diversification and industrialization; he sought the appointment of an agricultural professorship at South Carolina College and the establishment of an experimental farm.

23 1846 The family of the Reverend Dr. William Henry Brisbane relocated from Cincinnati, Ohio to Brook Farm outside Boston, Massachusetts. Here the Reverend would write a novel of race slavery, and a Biblical exegesis in regard to abolitionism. William Elliott s CAROLINA SPORTS BY LAND AND WATER: INCLUDING DEVIL-FISHING, WILD-CAT, DEER AND BEAR HUNTING, &C (Burges and James), a collection of articles written for a local newspaper under the pen names Piscator and Venator. This volume would be available to Henry Thoreau in Stacy s Circulating

24 Library of Concord, Massachusetts. CAROLINA SPORTS

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26 1847 The Elliott College building on the University of South Carolina campus was named in honor of Professor Stephen Elliott. Stephen Elliott s nephew William Elliott came north from South Carolina, escorting his son William Elliott, Jr. to Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1

27 1850 William Elliott privately published a five-act play he had written, Fiesco: A Tragedy, about the 16th-Century conspiracy of John Lewis de Fiesco of Genoa against the Dorias, the ruling family of Genoa, Italy 1. William Elliott, Jr. had been born in Beaufort, South Carolina on September 3, 1838 and had like his father attended Beaufort College. After bombing at Harvard he would study law at the University of Virginia and be admitted to the bar in Charleston. He would enter the CSA and rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel. At the close of civil war he would take the oath of loyalty to the federal union and hang out his shingle again, in Beaufort. He would be a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1866, be intendant of Beaufort in 1866, be delegated to the Democratic National Convention in 1876, run unsuccessfully for the 49th US Congress as a Democratic candidate in 1884, run successfully for the 50th US Congress in 1886, obtain a seat in the 51st US Congress and be initially accepted (until unseated by Thomas E. Miller, who had contested this), run successfully for the 52d US Congress, obtain a seat in the 54th US Congress and be initially accepted (until unseated by George W. Murray, who had contested this), run successfully for the 55th, 56th, and 57th US Congresses, run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate, and then be asked by President Theodore Roosevelt to make himself useful in marking the graves of Confederate dead in the North. He would serve in that final capacity until his death in Beaufort on December 7, 1907.

28 1851 Squire Samuel Hoar represented Harvard College before the Massachusetts Legislature, and was credited by President James Walker with having saved it. When the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen resigned as professor of history at Harvard, Richard Hildreth applied for that post (his attacks on the Cambridge party probably had rendered this a hopeless pursuit; Harvard simply has never ever functioned, and presumably will never ever function, in any mode other than that of self-congratulation). Late in this year, William Elliott s son William Elliott, Jr. left Harvard. NEW HARVARD MEN

29 1852 Using the pen name Agricola, William Elliott had expressed his ideas in favor of race slavery and in opposition to disunion in a series of letters to newspapers, and these were collected and published as THE LETTERS OF AGRICOLA. From a lithograph published by Nathaniel Currier in this year, we can see that the intimate connection between our nation s Founding Fathers and the peculiar institution of race slavery had not been nearly so problematic in this antebellum year, as it has become in more recent times. Here is President George Washington, captured in the act of doing his white-masterly stuff at Mount Vernon:

30 By way of a medium at a seance with the supernatural, in this year the spirit of the deceased Nathaniel Peabody Rogers would be made to offer to William Lloyd Garrison the revealed truth that immediatism was wrong. To force a slavemaster to free his slaves would be to make that slavemaster become the slave of the enforcing power. But such a course of action would not be to eliminate slavery, rather it would be to perpetuate it. The spirit of Rogers professed that it had learned during its afterlife that those who are enslaved must wait until the slavemasters have themselves persuaded themselves freely, of the iniquity of their being slavemasters and have freely and voluntarily granted to them their uncoerced manumission.

31 1853 The Elliott Society of Charleston, South Carolina was founded. William Elliott took his daughters Ann Elliott and Emily Elliott to Europe, where they visited Paris, France, and Basle and Interlaken, Switzerland.

32 1855 Our national birthday, Wednesday the 4th of July: 2 It was while the Emerson gate was festooned with its usual 4th-of-July black mourning cloth for the slave that Whitman s anonymous book LEAVES OF GRASS arrived in the mail. In Worcester, Massachusetts, citizens demonstrated against city officials who had refuse to fund the usual drunken 4th-of-July event. In Columbus, Ohio there was a parade of firemen, Turners, and other local tough-guy societies, and after awhile this segued into a downtown riot, leaving one corpse and several citizens injured. Inspired by the George and Godfrey Frankenstein panorama of Niagara Falls, the poet Corrila rhapsodized the birthday of our nation by a reference to these painters/presenters in a poem ending: America, Niagara, Frankenstein Three names united in a kindred bond Glad freedom s home her voice of Praise her mind. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY The poet was equating this name, not at all sarcastically, with the collective mentation of America! George Frankenstein would later be renowned for his Civil War scenes while Godfrey Frankenstein s painting Lagonda Creek has been described as representing the Emersonian Transparent Eyeball, the eye of inner 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne s 51st birthday.

33 man transcending the ego to view God s nature, in the surrounding landscape, and himself, as one. Godfrey enjoyed the romantic setting of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, painting dramatic scenes of the rugged landscape. (Well, lots of people enjoyed the romantic settings of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In fact, in this year Currier & Ives was issuing a print featuring fishing at Silver Cascade in this area.)

34 Frankenstein Cliff in Crawford Notch was named after Godfrey by Dr. Bemis, who owned land in the area. Dr. Bemis, like Dippel and like the Victor Frankenstein of Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley s romance FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, was fascinated with technology. He invented artificial teeth, developed a new genetic strain of apples, and is credited with taking the very first Daguerreotype landscape images (scenes in the White Mountains). This venue would be remarked upon by Henry Thoreau, Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, Daniel Webster, and Hawthorne. For instance, in SKETCHES FROM MEMORY Hawthorne would describe the area around Frankenstein Cliff: A demon it might be fancied or one of the Titans, was traveling up the valley elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle but rendering it asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its guileless water, all the secrets of the mountain s innermost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. It is only today that a name such as Frankenstein evokes either an image of a monster from a Hollywood makeup lab or an image of the Mad Scientist of Hollywood. Hoping to promote South Carolina s trade in sea island cotton, William Elliott was serving as South Carolina s commissioner to the Paris Exposition, and on this day addressed the Imperial Agricultural Society of France (in a letter home from Europe, he wrote of having seen Queen Victoria s legs 3 ). Thoreau saw Frederic Edwin Church s The Andes of Equador at the Athenaeum gallery in Boston. July 4. To Boston on way to Cape Cod with C. The schooner Melrose was advertised to make her first trip to Provincetown this morning at eight. We reached City (?) Wharf at Well, Captain Crocker, how soon do you start? To-morrow morning at 9 o clock. But you have advertised to leave at 8 this morning. I know it, but we are going to lay over till to-morrow.!!! So we had to spend the day in Boston, at Athenaeum gallery, Alcott s, and at the regatta. Lodged at Alcott s, who is about moving to Walpole. 3. In this year she was 36 and although an exceedingly short person (4 ' 10 '' before osteoporosis would shorten her another couple of inches) she had not yet begun to become rotund.

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36 1856 The Elliott family of Beaufort, South Caroline had had extensive dealings with a swashbuckling Cuban, General Ambrosio José Gonzales (38 years of age, who actually had been working in Washington DC as a mere patent clerk), and in this year he shaved off his beard and got one of this prominent Southern family s prizes, William Elliott s 15-year-old Harriett Rutledge Elliott, to tumble head over heels for him. Gonzales, who was forever insisting that in Cuba he had been a General, would be serving in the army of the Confederate

37 States of America for the duration of the US Civil War as a local Chief of Artillery, while forever struggling through Elliott family influence to rise to the coveted rank of CSA Brigadier General. President Jefferson Davis would in fact be denying six times in succession! petitions for a promotion to such a high-society rank. As a mere Chief of Artillery, however, Gonzales would make himself useful in the defense of Fort Wagner against the black horde of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment at first by the use of mines and then with a cadre of 60 local white men specially armed for closeup slaughter with double-barrelled shotguns. 4 (In the famous illustration above, it does not at all seem to be made clear that the lads in gray uniforms were blasting holes in the lads in blue uniforms, by the employment of specially-provided-for-that-moment doublebarreled shotguns.) ROBERT GOULD SHAW US CIVIL WAR 4. These double-barreled shotguns that would prove so useful in the us-white-men defense of Fort Wagner against the all-black onslaught of the 54th Massachusetts were also employed by the Texas Rangers, and by United States cavalrymen of the Wild West and Comanche braves are reported to have had double-barreled shotguns, barrels sawed off, strapped across their saddle pommels. (The most popular caliber was a truly enormous 8-gauge, firing a shell all of.835 inches in diameter, while British dragoons in South Africa chose to rely on double-barreled weapons that were merely 12-gauge, finding these to be more easily reloadable while nevertheless still capable of blowing a man or a horse apart at a range that left powder scorches around the entry wound).

38 A 2d edition of William Elliott s CAROLINA SPORTS BY LAND AND WATER: INCLUDING DEVIL-FISHING, WILD- CAT, DEER AND BEAR HUNTING, &C (Burges and James, 1846). CAROLINA SPORTS

39 1857 In a series of articles in Russell s Magazine, William Elliott would be describing his Trip to Cuba.

40 1859 A 3d edition of William Elliott s CAROLINA SPORTS BY LAND AND WATER: INCLUDING DEVIL-FISHING, WILD- CAT, DEER AND BEAR HUNTING, &C included a new fantastical chapter on the New England sea serpent. CAROLINA SPORTS

41 1860 William Elliott was registered on the census as the owner of 103 slaves in St. Helena parish, and 114 in St. Paul parish. As investment capital, the value of the nation s slaves at this point far exceeded the cash value of all the farmlands in the South, equaling three times the cost of constructing all US railroads then in existence. Since 1800 the number of enslaved African-Americans had quadrupled, from one million to four. A compendium of arguments was put together by a pro-slavery advocate in this year of the election that helped bring on the Civil War: COTTON IS KING, AND PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENTS / COMPRISING THE WRITINGS OF HAMMOND, HARPER, CHRISTY, STRINGFELLOW, HODGE, BLEDSOE, AND CARTWRIGHT, ON THIS IMPORTANT SUBJECT. Augusta, Georgia: Pritchard, Abbott & Loomis, The volume included the case of Dred Scott. We note that the Dred Scott decision put the lie to states-rights doctrine, standing it on its head. Basically, the decision translated the proslavery structure of law from the level of particular state governments to the level of the national union in a transparent attempt to expand slavery from an institution peculiar to some jurisdictions into a national standard that could no longer be repudiated anywhere. An example of an antecedent opinion at the state level, two generations of human life before Scott, can be found in Ex Parte George, A Free Man of Colour (1 Georgia Reports Annotated, 80-93). In a lengthy argument in Chatham County Superior Court in 1806, the Attorney General of the State of Georgia had asserted that, the constitution of this state... was not made to establish the rights and liberties of slaves or free negroes; they are left at the disposal of the ordinary sovereignty... [They] can derive no benefit from the constitution. The object and ends of fundamental laws are the organization of government, and the protection of the general rights of mankind. The slave is divested of all those rights, for which government is erected... It obviously was the intention of the legislature [by the act of 1770] to place the free negroes upon the same footing with the slaves. Policy demands it of us, that no other privileges than those which flow from an imperfect state of freedom should be extended to persons of colour, or free negroes, than those enjoyed by slaves... [A]s soon as distinctions are attempted to be made in these respects, the free negro or man of colour, will begin to feel a dignity of character, and to affect rights highly incompatible with that distance at which he ought to be kept. Dred Scott took precedents of constitutional legal theory evolved for decades in proslavery state courts and incorporated this into the current interpretation of the federal Constitution. We have quite forgotten, because in our post-civil-war life experience, we remember that it was the Southerners who seceded, and we experience that it is now the Southerners who howl indignantly about their states rights. Before the Civil War, we must remind ourselves, it was people like Henry David Thoreau, in New England, who were the secessionists, and who were in favor of states s rights.

42 February 2, Thursday: A South Carolina spokesperson for slavery and for secession explained the situation on the ground in the South, when he declared I mistrust our own people more than I fear all the efforts of the Abolitionists. He was referring to the threat represented by the attitude of Southern whites too poor to own slaves. If these people had been able to seize an occasion offered by a successful army of black fugitives armed with rifles and pikes after the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in order to act, in pogrom, against the institution of slavery that was harming them as well as the slave by interfering with their livelihoods, a genocide against all the unprotected black Americans of the South would most likely have ensued. As Peter Wallenstein has succinctly explained the political situation in the South: Even if a successful attack by nonslaveholding whites against slavery appeared improbable at the voting booths or in the legislatures, other kinds of threats could not be so readily dismissed. Some whites disliked slavery out of a sense of companionship, or for religious or other reasons. Some disliked it because it drove down their own pay and limited rather than fostered their prospects; some who might have supported slavery turned against it when their chances of becoming slaveholders themselves seemed to fade. For some whites in the South, in short, slavery was a threat or an abomination, whether because of what it did to whites or because of what it did to blacks. Proslavery forces would do what they could to cow or cajole fellow whites into following their lead. (Actually, I offer that Wallenstein has not here adequately represented the position of the white people for whom it was distressing that any of these inferior people of color were present on the soil of the New World, who were abolitionists because they desired that all members of the black race be either elsewhere, or dead, and who considered that whichever one of those two options was implemented didn t much matter to them. This was certainly a prevalent attitude in the North as indicated by Waldo Emerson s reference on May 1, 1859 to Americans of color as putrid Black Vomit, which is to say, as a disease black vomit was one of the names used in this period for the dreaded deadly yellow fever and I would have supposed it would have been at least as prevalent in the South.) 5 RACE POLITICS 5. Upon the secession of South Carolina from the federal union, William Elliott, who up to that point had been a political opponent of nullification, would opt to side with the Confederacy. He had been an opponent of secession only because he was fearful that the economy of the South would be inadequate to sustain independence his had never been a principled opposition to secession, for he had never had the slightest qualm about race slavery, believing that the South s peculiar institution was sanctioned by religion, conducive to good morals, and useful, nay indispensable.

43 1861 February 21, Thursday: Henry Thoreau had checked an interesting book out from the Stacy Circulating Library in Con cord, and here does something that was most untypical of him, providing in the pages of his journal in which he had made no entries whatever for a few days before and would make no entries whatever for a few days afterward what amounts to a book report! 6 PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF! Feb. 21. I have just read a book called Carolina Sports by Land and Water; including Incidents of Devil-Fishing, Wild-cat, Deer and Bear Hunting, Etc. By the Hon. Wm. Elliott. The writer is evidently a regular sportsman, and describes his sporting with great zest. He was withal the inventor and institutor of devil-fishing, which consists in harpooning a monstrous salt-water fish, and represents himself in a plate harpooning him. His motive, however, was not profit or a subsistence, but sport. However, I should have found nothing peculiar in the book, if it did not contain, near the end, so good an example of human inconsistency. I quote some sentences in the order in which they occur, only omitting the intermediate pages. After having described at length his own sporting exploits, using such words as these, for instance. Being in pursuit of a wildcat, he says (page 163): It was at this moment that Dash, espying something in motion in the leafy top of a bay-tree, cracked off his Joe Manton with such good effect, that presently we heard a heavy body come tumbling through the limbs until it splashed into the water. Then came a stunning burst from the hounds a clash from the whole orchestra in full chorus! a growl from the assailed, with an occasional squeak on the part of the assailants, which showed that the game was not all on one side. We were compelled, all the while, to be delighted ear-witnesses only of the strife, which resulted in the victory of the hounds. This proved to be a raccoon, though they thought it the wildcat. Again (page 168), being in pursuit of another cat, which had baffled them a long time with great cunning, he says: The cat, with huge leaps, clambered up a tree; and now he had reached the very pinnacle, and as he gathered himself up to take a flying leap for a neighboring tree, I caught up my gun, and let slip at him in midflight. The arrowy posture in which he made his pitch, was suddenly changed, as the shot struck him to the heart; and doubling himself up, after one or two wild gyrations, into a heap, he fell dead, from a height of full fifty feet, into the very jaws of the dogs! Again (page 178), being [in] pursuit of a deer, which he had wounded, and his gun being discharged, he tried to run him down with his horse, but, as he tells us, the noble animal refused to trample on his fellow quadruped, so he made up for it by kicking the deer in the side of the head with his spurred boot. The deer enters a thicket and he is compelled to pursue the panting animal on foot. A large fallen oak lies across his path; he gathers himself up for the leap, and falls exhausted directly across it. Before he could recover his legs, and while he lay thus poised on the tree, I fling myself at full length upon the body of the struggling deer my left hand clasps his neck, while my right detaches the knife; whose fatal blade, in another moment, is buried in his throat. There he lay in his blood, and I remained sole occupant of the field. Opposite is a plate which represents him in the act of stabbing the deer. 6. In addition to placing these extracts in his journal, Thoreau copied extracts into his Indian Notebook #10.

44 Page 267. He tells us that his uncle once had a young wildcat, a mere kitten, but that, to prevent its worrying the poultry, a cord was fastened round his neck, and a clog attached to the end. Still he would endeavor to catch the fowls. My uncle one day invited several of his friends, to witness this development of natural propensity in his savage pet. The kitten, with his clog attached, was let out of the box; and it was curious to observe with what stealthy pace he approached the spot where the poultry were feeding. They scarcely seemed to notice the diminutive thing that was creeping toward them; when, crouching low, and measuring exactly the distance which separated them, he sprang upon the back of the old rooster, and hung on by claw and teeth to the feathers, while the frightened bird dragged him, clog and all, over the yard. After several revolutions had been made, the cat let go his hold on the back of the fowl, and, with the quickness of lightning, caught the head in his mouth, clinched his teeth, shut his eyes, stiffened his legs, and hung on with the most desperate resolution, while the fowl, rolling over in agony, buffeted him with his wings. All in vain! In a few seconds more he was dead, and we looked with abhorrence on the savage animal, that had just taken his first degree in blood. In this case, there could have been no teaching no imitation. It was the undoubted instinct of a cruel nature! We wondered that this young beast

45 of prey should have known, from this instinct, the vital part of its victim! and we wondered still more, that in the providence of God, he had seen fit to create an animal with an instinct so murderous. Philosophy is ready with her explanation, and our abhorrence may be misplaced, since from his very organization, he is compelled to destroy life in order to live! Yet, knowing this, our abhorrence still continues; whence we may draw the consolatory conclusion that the instincts of a man naturally differ from those of a wild-cat. A few pages further (page 282) in a chapter called Random Thoughts on Hunting, which is altogether a eulogy on that pursuit, he praises it because it develops or cultivates among other qualities the observation, that familiarizes itself with the nature and habits of the quarry the sagacity that anticipates its projects of escape and the promptitude that defeats them! the rapid glance, the steady aim, the quick perception, the ready execution; these are among the faculties and qualities continually called into pleasing exercise. Physician, heal thyself! This plucking and stripping a pine cone is a business which he and his family understand perfectly. That is their forte. I doubt if you could suggest any improvement. After ages of experiment their instinct has settled on the same method that our reason would finally, if we had to open a pine cone with our teeth; and they were thus accomplished before our race knew that a pine cone contained any seed.

46 He does not prick his fingers, nor pitch his whiskers, nor gnaw the solid core any more than is necessary. Having sheared off the twigs and needles that may be in his way, for like a skillful woodchopper he first secures room and verge enough, he neatly cuts off the stout stem of the cone with a few strokes of his chisels, and it is his. To be sure, he may let it fall to the ground and look down at it for a moment curiously, as if it were not his; but he is taking note where it lies and adding it to a heap of a hundred more like it in his mind, and it now is only so much the more his for his seeming carelessness. And, when the hour comes to open it, observe how he proceeds. He holds it in his hands, a solid embossed cone, so hard it almost rings at the touch of his teeth. He pauses for a moment perhaps, but not because he does not know how to begin, he only listens to hear what is in the wind, not being in a hurry. He knows better than try to cut off the tip and work his way downward against a chevaux-de-frise of advanced scales and prickles, or to gnaw into the side for three quarters of an inch in the face of many armed shields. But he does not have to think of what he knows, having heard the latest æolian rumor. If there ever was an age of the world when the squirrels opened their cones wrong end foremost, it was not the golden age at any rate. He whirls the cone bottom upward in a twinkling, where the scales are smallest and the prickles slight or none and the short stem is cut so close as not to be in his way, and then he proceeds to cut through the thin and tender bases of the scales, and each stroke tells, laying bare at once a couple of seeds. And then he strips it as easily as if its scales were chaff, and so rapidly, twirling it as he advances, that you cannot tell how he does it till you drive him off and inspect his unfinished work.

47 1863 February 3, Tuesday: Samuel Langhorn Clemens published his first piece under the pen name Mark Twain (he had previously used pen names such as Quintius Curtius Snodgrass, Josh, etc.), in the Virginia City, Nevada Territorial Enterprise. People were trying to kill each other at Dover / Fort Donelson. Cassius M. Clay spoke before the Law department of the University of Albany, New York. (His speech would find publication, while he was ambassador to Russia, at the Journal de St-Petersbourg.) William Elliott died in Charleston, South Carolina. Colonel Canby s replacement as commander of the Federal District of New Mexico was Brigadier General James H. Carleton, whose understanding was that there were gold mines to be opened up in the hinterland and that conflict with the Navajo hostiles was the reason for the present depressing backwardness of his territory of New Mexico. He declared a condition of martial law and turned to Kit Carson to help him upgrade New Mexico and thus his own career. Carson accepted the surrender of about a hundred Mescalero Apaches but then, when he learned that General Carleton intended to order him to pursue the Navajo, on this day submitted a letter of resignation (somehow, that resignation would not stick). MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project William Elliott

48 COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: October 15, 2014

49 ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

50 Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.

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