January 2011

In the violent, restless decade before the Civil War some close ties were forged between the woman's-rights movement and abolitionism. The great feminist Susan B. Anthony, for instance, was a paid agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, while Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, was a frequent speaker at woman’s-rights conventions. But if the relationship was occasionally a close one, it was rarely tranquil. Many feminists held that supporting the antislavery issue weakened their own cause, and there were abolitionists who felt woman’s rights were merely a red herring. At times the controversy became bitter and heated, as it did when the proceedings of an 1851 woman s-rights convention in Akron, Ohio, were interrupted by the appearance of the lean, fantastic figure of Sajourner Truth.

There has been much comment about the crass and exploitative marketing ideas that have been spewing out upon us since the beginning of our bicentennial celebrations, but credit for the most vigorous and unusual protest must go to Luckenbach, Texas.

Luckenbach is a very small town sixty miles northwest of San Antonio. It was founded in 1850 as an Indian trading post and today consists of a saloon, a dance hall, and a general store. Some revenue is generated by a single parking meter. Three people live there. Nevertheless, last February 29 a crowd of five to six thousand converged on Luckenbach to take part in the Non Buy-Centennial Awards Day, when handsomely engraved certificates were distributed “for singular achievement in bad taste by abusing the spirit of the U.S. Bicentennial.”

America was an experience man could only have once. Knowledge of China, knowledge of Africa, festooned as it was with the Spanish moss of myth and legend, had penetrated Europe from the days of Imperial Rome and beyond. When discovered, the animals of Australasia were stranger by far than America’s, and the aborigines and the bushmen of Tasmania were more primitive, even more uniformly naked than the Caribs whose appearance was so startling to Columbus. By then the strangeness of the Americas had destroyed the sense of novelty. There could only be one New World.

On August 7, 1865, George Anderson, a recently freed slave, wrote from Dayton, Ohio, to his sometime master, Colonel P. H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee. The mordant, fascinating letter was apparently dictated to the V. Winters mentioned therein, who sent a copy to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. It was published in the society’s Anti-Slavery Reporter on November 1, 1865. As the editor commented, “It is certainly a curiosity in its way, and presents a kaleidoscopic internal view of slavery.” We thank Nan Gillespie of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, for calling Anderson’s ironic exercise to our attention:

Those of our readers who happen to be passing through Indiana and decide to stop at a historical society to take a look at some local artifacts should be on the alert against a possible surprise. Due to a loophole in state laws, shops selling pornographic magazines and films are currently avoiding prosecution by calling themselves museums.

Through a printer’s error the credit line was dropped from Childe Hassam’s painting of Boston at dusk that ran on page 32 of our April issue. The painting belongs to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

A half dozen readers responded to a rather puzzling picture that appeared in August, 1975, in our article on the Hamilton-Burr duel. Among them was Robert Thaden of Golden, Colorado, a man who knows his shooting irons:
The illustration on page 50 shows a pair of pistols. The one on the right is a full-stocked flintlock pistol; the one on the left is a half-stocked cap-and-ball (percussion-lock) pistol.

A RELIC COMES TO LIGHT CREDIT DUE MYSTERY PISTOL DEAR COLONEL A WORD OF WARNING BUY-CENTENNIAL AWARDS

For the last few years people wandering through the county courthouse in White Plains, New York, could stop for a moment and take a look at what appeared to be a dingy reproduction of an early copy of the Declaration of Independence. The copy had been turned over to the county by the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It hung on a pillar and was regularly drenched with water by cleaning women. It did not look like much, and nobody paid it a great deal of attention.

But last year, when the old courthouse was replaced by a new one, the County Executive, Alfred DelBello, suggested that it might be a good idea to have the copy checked by experts; perhaps it was valuable.

It was. The document is one of the oldest existing copies of the Declaration of Independence and is worth about a quarter of a million dollars.