Good Weather for Fishing

I have become unaccountably delighted when that advice shows up on the C'town accu-weather daily forecast. That what it was yesterday and today, "good weather for fishing." It's chilly, it's damp. I'm beginning to understand why people who know this House are telling us that we're going to want to build fires in the front room fireplaces this winter.

A bit punchy for now. Waiting for el V to return so we can run over to Miller Library for a book I want, and the have dinner, which is just about ready. So maybe we'll do that in reverse order. I've written the through lines for three groups of characters for the treatment today, and transcribed some notes for the book. And worked out and showered. I feel completely stupid. Time for television: the concluding episodes of Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983 -- Golden Age of mini series television), starring Sam Neill. This series is so good!

Fifty years later, students recall integrating New Orleans public schools

At this moment Vaquero's attending a commemorative event - ceremony down in the Lower 9th honoring the girls who were the center of the battle to integrate New Orleans's public school system.

"Today at 9 a.m. -- the exact time that "The McDonogh 3" integrated the school 50 years ago -- three women and the federal marshals who once escorted them will unveil a state historical marker in front of McDonogh No. 19."
The shameful, ugly behaviors of white Louisiana at that time have never provoked an apology of any kind later down the line.

Rather, most white families that can manage to do so, have deserted the public school system all together. Now, the system is rapidly being privatized, via 'charter' schools and various other devices devised in the last decades that are essentially re-segregation of education, allowing smug middle and upper middle class people to defend pulling their kids from public education because it is a failed system.

Here in NYC with the massive loss of jobs for many middle-class parents, they are discovering what it means to trash and desert public education, now that they can't afford the fees to send their kids to private schools.  The tales of the ruses, subterfuges and temper tantrums to which these parents have resorted to get their entitled kids into the remaining good public schools, despite them not living in that school's district, would be high comedy if they weren't so representative of the ugly, selfish, stupid people this nation's citizens have by-and-large become.

Super HyperLocal Trivia -- Dishwasher!

I haz. I uze. 4 1st time.


Lunch yesterday was a lot of dishes, but not really, since everything was cooked before guests arrived, and then Vaquero (mostly) washed up. Dinner was eaten out, courtesy of the Starr Center, at a very fine local restaurant. But breakfast -- so many dishes. A very large breakfast. That included apple pie and ice cream. Why not? We are all consenting grown-ups here, and if we think adding (hot) apple pie and (cold) ice cream to breakfast, which is sort of also lunch, who is to say us nay? So many plates, cups, mugs and silverwares!

So, why not uze the dishwasher which it iz I haz?

Guests drove off, 45 minutes late, because K bought more merchandise from one of the town's antique booksellers for his own store's stock, which he knows he can turn around immediately for much much more than he paid for it.

Vaquero left earllier, about 15 minutes late, for the Balitimore airport, for the Congo Square Festival and Conference in New Orleans. He called just as I was filling up the dishwasher, to say he was entering the boarding security line.

So all is on track, with a most successful visit in every way for everyone from the Starr Center hosts, David Stewart, our personal guests, and ourselves. Everyone loved each other, David gave a most exhilerating talk on Burr's western adventure and the aftermath, we all had a fabulous dinner at a place new to us. I had a chunk of local beef that I couldn't finish, but is ambrosia. With all the left-over food of various kinds I won't have to cook for few days, not even when Vaquero gets back Wednesday evening.

However, it is suddenly, extraordinarily, quiet and empty around here, after almost 24 uninterrupted hours of talk-talk-talk-talk-listen-listen-listen with so many people, serially, sequentially and all together. When we left all the others last night it was nearly midnight, and then we stayed up longer, yawning but talking with great excitement about various history projects and antique books and bookselling, and yawning, but like little kids, not wanting to go to bed. We finally had to, then we're all up before 8.

I'm happy to learn I still know how to be a hostess. I loved having K and C, and look forward to them coming back pretty soon, which I'm pretty sure they will.

Capitalism / Slavery = Expand Or Die

From today's NY Times Disunion column, by Jamie Malanowski. For those particularly who insist even now that the Civil War wasn't about slavery -- here it is, in Jefferson Davis's own philosophy, that the Civil Was about nothing else but slavery:

And so, inevitably, the South thinks of secession — and expansion. The South has long believed that unless slavery keeps expanding, it will die, and take the slave-holding elite with it. As Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi recently said, “We of the South are an agricultural people, and we require an extended territory. Slave labor is a wasteful labor, and it therefore requires a still more extended territory than would the same pursuits if they could be prosecuted by the more economical labor of white men.” Limiting slave territory, Davis says, would “crowd upon our soil an overgrown black population, until there would not be room in the country for whites and blacks to subsist in, and in this way. . . reduce the whites to the degraded position of the African race.” Oddly, Senator Charles Sumner, the ardent abolitionist from Massachusetts, has in a rather different way reached the same conclusion: limiting slavery will kill slavery.


And so the slaveholders seek to expand, although whether they can go further north and west is more than a political question; there is much doubt whether the climate and crops of western America would sustain slavery. But all doubts vanish when they turn their backs to the north, and see rimming the Gulf of Mexico verdant lands that could, and have, enriched slaveholding planters. “To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, including Cuba and all the other lands on our southern shore,” toasted one Texan at a convention in 1856, and that sentiment burns at the heart of many of the fire-eaters now crying secession.

Don’t forget that not very long ago, such sentiments burned brightly in Washington as well. The Polk and Pierce administrations tried to buy Cuba. Just six years ago, the current president, James Buchanan, who was then Minister to Great Britain, was one of the three authors of the Ostend Manifesto, which maintained that if Spain wouldn’t sell us Cuba, we would be justified in seizing it. Accompanying these official efforts were unofficially encouraged forays by slaveholder-supported filibusteros to invade Cuba, foment a rebellion and grab the island on behalf of expansionist-minded southerners.

Expansionists north and south initially supported William Walker’s campaigns to seize control of Nicaragua, but it was the southern expansionists who were his true constituency. The south’s moral and financial support sustained Walker when he seized Nicaragua’s presidency in 1856, and though he governed only briefly, he managed to re-establish the legality of slavery before a coalition of Central American powers defeated his cholera-ravaged army and sent him scampering. Walker made further attempts to conquer Nicaragua, the last of which ended last September in front of a firing squad in Honduras. But southerners backed every one.

A mere freebooter, Walker nearly succeeded. The ultras dream of what could be accomplished in Nicaragua, and Cuba and northern Mexico and the West Indies if a cotton-rich American government should seek its destiny in commanding a tropical empire that would dominate the world’s supply of not only cotton but the staple of sugar as well.

So here, then, is the South’s choice. Does it select a future in which the southern slavocracy is less powerful; more isolated; consistently subjected to moral castigation by northerners for an economic system that profits not just planters but innumerable northern shippers and insurers and mill owners? Or does the South choose to establish a new nation that will sit at the center of a rich and powerful slaveholding empire that will dominate the hemisphere?

There are plenty of people in the south who oppose disunion and wish to move slowly or not at all. But most of the South’s leadership — its money and its political establishment and its opinion-makers — know that the South is at a crossroads, and they mean for it to choose independence.

This independence, then, would mean constant war of conquest. Jefferson Davis himself understood that -- and also expected to be sitting in the White House as President by the end of the next year. The South did not expect to contain slavery in the existing slave states -- the new Confederated nation -- ever. This is why they were going to war. There was no other reason.


This is why, earlier in the nation's history, the United States knew it could not tolerate Texas as an independent slaveholding republic at its flanks -- for Texas slavery, in its capitalist manner of ever burning out land and moving on to unsettled regions of relatively cheap acreage with its cheap slave labor, would perform Davis's philosophy. Texas would annex for slavery by war and conquest these other regions that the rest of U.S. already perceived as her own, for her other economic vision, which would never be compatible with slavery.

This is why there was no need for a civil war in any other nation to abolish slavery. In this nation, this was the only way way slavery could ever be finished as a legal institution backed by all the instruments of court and government. Born in blood, always in oceans of blood, usually the blood of 'others.' this nation will drown in its own blood, not the blood of 'others,' at the end.

Living the Dream, Inhabiting a Bubble, the Not Real World

I am inhabiting 24/7 a place in which history matter 24/7, in which people care about history, in which people read history, in which people research history, in which people write history, argue it, discover it, a place, where, Lordessas Save Us -- HISTORY IS EVEN ENTERTAINMENT.

We will be hosting our first house guests this week.  C and K will be arriving for David Stewart's account of the "Tale of Aaron Burr's Western Expedition and Conspiracy Trial."  As C and K are doing incredible research into the life and times of Aaron Burr's second wife, it seems fit to introduce them to David, and to the Starr Center people.  They are doing exactly what the Starr Ctr. perceives as its current mission.

So many people in town will be at David's lecture -- the town and the college connect in these presentations.   There are so many wonderful people that are always coming into Washington College -- tomorrow is Junot Díaz, for instance.  This past week I attended this, a harp accompanied presentation of Beowulf, by Benjamin Bagby. There is a lot to do here because of WC. The quality of people they bring in, in all fields, is world class. It's very exciting to have all this so easily accessible, so accessible, I have had to ration myself or else I'd never do anything else, because our social life is also built around these things. So sociable it is here. I was getting fairly reclusive in NYC due to my physical condition and how plain horrible it is there these days with the gridlock of tourism in my area of the city. Among other incentives to socialize is that it is just so much easier and more comfortable in every way than at home.


Tonight my baby gets back after a week away.  Poor baby too -- he's caught cold.  I'm so glad he's returning.

Privateers and Steam Brigs

The rains that appears to be pouring down along all the Atlantic coast is keeping me inside today. I'd planned to spend it at the Kent County News transcribing from issues published during the War of 1812 and stories about the first steam brigs taking slaves from here down to New Orleans. The biggest professional slave trader, Isaac Franklin and his partner, had built steam brigs for specifically built for them and this trade. I'm trying to find out who the builder was (Franklin's traders came into the C'town port). Thursday is good for this, since this is the day the weekly issue comes out, thus things are a bit less hectic in the offices.


Then I'd planned to finish up the day in the library to transcribe material from reference books on the Letters of Marque in the War of 1812. There's an excellent history of this published in 1930 by a local Baltimore history publisher, and later by Norton, with the best definitiions of the differences between piracy and privateers, and the history of privateers -- going back to the 13th century! I didn't know. But the real point is the Brits and how they dealt with all those Eastern Shore slaves running away and converging upon their ships in promise for transport to elsewhere and freedom. As well, the slave population provided many services to the British navy from navigation to food to spying out information -- to the bewildered outrage of their owners, of course. I'm trying to get some real numbers. Also find out what really happened to those who were transported to the West Indies, as promised -- where slavery was still in effect. This one's kind of a replay of the Brits - slave relationships during the War of Independence.

But I don't want to take my laptop out for a walk in the rain. My umbrella is small. Nor do I have the right rain footgear here yet.

Fortunately I can continue with other areas here at home.

The Stillness, The Beauty, The Solitude, The Work

Yesterday el V drove off, first to C. College upstate NY, to do an annual presentation for a Media class taught by a friend and colleague.  He's been doing this since she began teaching there.  Usually it's the second week of the semester, but due to our own academic and other schedules this year, it was yesterday.  He's leaving the car at their home upstate while he then trained it to NYC and our apt., and the three gigs he's got in town this week.  As well as starting the rounds of medical visits etc., now that the WC health insurance is operational.

I'm here still.  Alone.  In the House.  In this town, this county, this region. Reveling in the beauty.  Doing my War of 1812 thing.  Finding out more about the steamboat manufacture on the Chesapeake. Tracking down citations out of primary dox and sources to back up assertions I've made during our constant conversations, updates, etc. about our project.

Night hunting, multiple-barrel guns and huge punt guns had been been used in the Chesapeake around the turn of the 20th century to take down the geese in their tens of thousands.  I knew this -- from where? But I can't just go and say this without backup.  For something like that factoid, the backup is easy to find in all the local sources, including transcribed oral interviews.  This kind of hunting, which wiped out the grand riches of the migrated Canadian geese early in the 20th C, became in the regional lore something like the moonshiners and the -- hunters and their guns vs. the local authorities trying to get hold of those guns, and spike or otherwise take them out of commission.  Thus, this is easy to find multiple reputable sourcing cites for, unlike some other assertions I make, that "I just know." (It seems that even into the eras of wide-spread ecological awareness of overhunting and overfishing, even now yeye olde guyz still don't think they were doing anything wrong, while bemoaning the loss of that harvest.)  Just knowing does not writing reputable history make.

In any case, the War of 1812 has been given not only short, but little, shrift in the h.s. and undergraduate courses in U.S. history. I can understand that, but it leads to the lamentable contemporary situation of 'libertarians' and other such ilks, quoting their god Robert Heinlein, from the Heinlein Bible, Starship Troopers, in which a fictional character (so, can you certainly know that RH believed that himself?) declares the War of 1812 "one of the bush-fire wars on the sidelines of the Napoleonic Conflict.” Which is not only inaccurate but dumb. If anything, it was a continuation of the War of Independence. There was so much crowing in England that this was the new campaign, and at its conclusion the 'colonies' would be back under the Crown's rulership and administration.

Another reason this war has been rather lost in the teaching and awareness of U.S. history, is, as one of the privateer replica captains observed in the course of Downrigging Weekend's Captain's Forum: "It was fought here. Most of the United States weren't yet states. California was still New Spain. The War of 1812, the Chesapeake - Baltimore privateers don't mean anything to them. They've got their own historical boats and traditions."

These captains are very smart, well-informed, personable people. But when they get the opportunity to get down to knots and sails and masts and wind -- they may as well be Captain Aubrey with his own naval colleagues. I say this in all admiration. However, it seemed to me, that it would have been the height of bad form to have brought up Captain Aubrey and Patrick O'Brian's books to any of them this weekend. They have read those books, and loved the film of Master and Commander. But just imagine, how constantly they must run into lubber passengers who think we can sail one of these ships because we have read and digested O'Brian's novels thoroughly. How tiresome for them we must be after a point.  "You cannot learn to sail a boat like this from books!" thundered one captain.

In the meantime the three-year anniversary observance of the War of 1812 is just about upon us.  Thus it has been decided to keep Lynx and Pride of Baltimore 2 over here for most of this time.  Such a decision is provoked as well by the current economic catastrophic conditions which has pulled so much state and local community monies from what had been the constantly expanding historic ship inclusions in local observances of this and that.

This war -- was it three years?  Was it actually four, as many of us think?  See?  Three years or four years, that is not a small war for those who were in the thick of it, as were all the people here.