Objective Viewpoint Negro’s Viewpoint Dream on, H. M. Small
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January 2011
Speaking to an audience in Richmond early in January, 1863, Jefferson Davis undertook to remind all southerners of the oppressive weight which a Northern conquest would inevitably bring to them. The weight was being felt, as he spoke, within much less than one hundred miles of the Confederate capital, and President Davis was eloquent about it.
“The Northern portion of Virginia,” he remarked, “has been ruthlessly desolated—the people not only deprived of the means of subsistence, but their household property destroyed and every indignity which the base imagination of a merciless foe could suggest inflicted without regard to age, sex or condition.”
For relief, turn to another treatment. In Lincoln and the Negro , Mr. Benjamin Quarles discusses one poignant aspect of the Civil War which cannot easily be reduced to terms of sea slugs: the business of the Negroes who lived just below the ladder’s bottom rung when the war began and who found in the war, in spite of all the odds, a chance to start climbing.
Mr. Quarles has a point of view of his own, the substance of which apparently is that what people think about an action taken—what they feel deep in their hearts, what they respond to with their blood and muscles and their dreams—may in the end mean even more than the action itself; may in fact transfigure the action and make it contain more than the actor himself originally meant. It may, finally, confound the mathematics of the pundit who adds two and two together and finds that the answer cannot possibly be anything greater than a meager four.
He concerns himself here, chiefly, with the Emancipation Proclamation.
There are many kinds of inventors. One is the heralded, or no-one-is-laughing-at-themany-longer, variety, like Edison, Elias Howe, and the Wright Brothers. Then there are the heralded-for-something-else inventors, like Mark Twain, who devised a new kind of scrapbook, or Lillian Russell, who patented an improved trunk. (Her own scarcely needed any improvement.) But there is, alas, a sad, forgotten group, the inventors of useful and clever devices that never quite catch on. Some of the splendid ideas of these unsung geniuses are shown here in patent drawings picked out from a recent booklet on patents published by E. I. da Pont de Nemours & Company, where they know a good deal about the subject.
There hangs in my study a photograph of the Second World War Cabinet, signed by each of the eleven members, plus the President.
I. The Radio Priest from Royal Oak
The handling of wartime seditionists was at all times a thorny problem, and especially in the case of Father Charles E. Coughlin, the famous “radio priest” of Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin had become prominent through his antiSemitic and anti-New Deal tirades on the air and in his weekly newspaper, Social Justice . According to Biddle, Father Coughlin’s opposition to the war effort and his predictions of defeat posed a very real danger, for even after Pearl Harbor the priest still commanded a huge following. Ordinarily, Biddle would have instituted legal action, but he feared that a sedition indictment against Coughlin would stir widespread resentment among the Catholic population and from the powerful isolationist press at a time when national unity had to be preserved at all costs. Another means of quieting the troublesome priest had to be found.
Please send me by the Rock Creek stage 100 pounds salt, ½ barrel brown sugar; 100 45-calibre Winchester cartridges, 10 gallons best sour mash whiskey-like the first sent. Also send me two woolen undershirts for a lady quite thick, two hoopskirts for a lady of some em bom point, and a corset for a girl of 15. P.S. Send 50 pounds of coffee, a few late copies of the Weekly Boomerang, a copy of the New Testament and Psalms bound together, large print, and be very particular about the quality of the sour mash whiskey.
Shortly before Christmas in 1864 a captain of the Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers came home to New Haven from the Shenandoah. His appearance was hardly that of the returning hero. He was thirtyeight. His coarse blue fatigue uniform was threadbare and begrimed with vestiges of Virginia mud and the dust of two days’ travel on the railroad. His face, thin and sallow from the effects of malaria and dysentery, was all but hidden behind an enormous ragged brown mustache and three weeks’ growth of beard. His body was emaciated to a wolfish thinness. He had served honorably for over two years in the South and had been slightly wounded at the siege of Port Hudson, and he was returning with the same captain’s bars on his shoulder straps he had carried away in 1862. By all accounts, John William De Forest’s military career was closing on a note grim and unsuccessful enough to match the mood of the nation.