LEGACY OF A FIRE BRAND

 

I want to explain the political term, "fire brand". The original definition was a piece of kindling, a bit of burning wood used to start a larger fire. And those who start political fires for a living can be called "Fire Brands." And the most famous fire brand in the history of  American politics, one of the first self described political demons, was William Lowneds Yancey. 

Yancey’s (above) South Carolina family were strongly pro-Federalist, and at an Independence Day celebration in 1834 as a young man, he told a crowd, “Listen, not then...to the voice which whispers…that Americans…can no longer exist…citizens of the same republic…”  He also championed the Federal Union as editor of the newspaper the “Greenville Mountaineer”...

...at least until 1835, when he married an Alabama widow with an Alabama plantation and 35 slaves. Once his comfort and profit came to depend on treating human beings as property Yancey converted to pro-slavery.  And then the economic panic of 1837 slashed cotton prices and wiped out William Yancey’s new found fortune and social status. That traumatic event also converted Yancy into a radical. 

Yancey went back to the profession he knew best, and in 1838 he bought a failing newspaper. Needing to make money quickly, Yancey's very first editorial was sure to please the money people of Alabama - a passionate, radical defense of slavery.  In a follow up editorial he even favored reopening the slave trade with Africa, which had been closed down by British Naval patrols since 1819. Yancey publicly opposed the compromises of 1850, which sought to establish a balance between slave states and “free” states within the Union. By now anything short of total domination by slave states was a cowardly compromise,  in Yancey’s view.

Also in 1838 the true nature of the man was revealed, when an alleged political insult led to a street brawl between Yancey and his wife’s uncle. Yancey shot the man dead on the street. He  justified this hot blooded murder, writing he had been,  “Reared with the spirit of a man…and taught to preserve inviolate my honor…”,  which seems to me an admission of a fragile ego. . He was convicted of manslaughter but served only a few months before being pardoned by the Alabama Governor. His reputation as a murderous hot head did nothing to prevent him from being elected to first the Alabama legislature and then, in 1844,  to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1858 Yancey wrote what Horace Greeley called, ‘The Scarlett Letter’, in which he first used the term "fire eater" to describe himself.  He pledged that with like minded southerners, he would, “…fire the Southern heart – instruct the Southern mind …and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into revolution.”  This was why Yancey was called the “Orator of Secession”. 

He worked hard to split his own (Democratic) party on the issue of slavery, believing the election of a Republican (anti-slavery) presidential candidate in 1860 would further his cause and radicalize the south. He was, in the words of that genius Bruce Catton, “…one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850’s (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but not do anything more than that.” 

That the North had twice the population of the South, that the North had ten times the industrial and agricultural capacity, that slavery was already dying in the upper South, that the North would not fight to end slavery but would fight to preserve the union, that Lincoln did not believe the Federal government had the power or the right to outlaw slavery, all this meant nothing to Yancey. 

William Yancey (above) wanted secession not despite the destructive effects it would have on the South, but, it seemed, almost because of them. President-elect Abraham Lincoln described the problem of dealing with the fire eaters like Yancey. "Not only must we do them no harm, but somehow we must convince them that we mean to do them no harm". 

It was William Yancy who greeted Jefferson Davis to his 1861 inauguration as Confederate President by saying, "The man and the hour have met". Tom Yancy could always deliver a phrase.  But once war broke out Jefferson Davis sent William Yancey to England to seek diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.  That mission seemed like an odd choice for this violent aggressive  man, so perhaps Davis really had little hope of Britain ever recognizing the Confederacy, and he just wanted to be rid of Yancey. 

Henry John Temple (above),  Lord Viscount Palmerston III, the British Prime Minister, eventually met with Yancey, but then asked if he had been serious about his call for a resumption of the slave trade. Yancey denied it, but as had been in print for decades without denial, that merely made him an obvious liar. And just asking the question indicated there was no chance that England would recognize the South, at least as long as Yancey represented a significant political voice therein.

Yancey returned home in frustration and defeat. He now served in the Confederate Senate, opposing Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ power to draft troops into national service and in the spring of 1863 blocking Davis’ attempt to form a Confederate Supreme Court.

It was during debate over the court when Yancey and Senator Benjamin Hill (above) of Georgia, got into a brawl on the Confederate Senate floor. It was almost a repeat of the 1838 shooting.  When the hot headed Yancy reached for his gun,  Hill grabbed the only weapon he had at hand - an ink stand. He beaned Yancey on the head with it, cold cocking him. The Confederate Senate censured Yancey and took no action against Hill.  I guess they had judged his true character.

So it seemed that even his political allies and friends did not like William Yancey very much. And this was one of the men the South had staked its future upon. I believe it was William Yancey whom Jefferson Davis was thinking of when he said the epitaph of the Confederacy should be, “Died of a Theory.’

After censure, Yancey returned to Alabama,  where he died of kidney failure in July of 1863, just 2 weeks before his 49th birthday. He had lived just long enough to see the twin defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, which together sealed the doom of the Confederacy.  But even then the fire eaters kept up their arson. More southerners died in the last year of the war, than in the previous 3 years. 

The product of William Yancy's life’s work was the death of 750,000 men, women and children -  the vast majority of them southerners - the gutting of the southern wealth for a century, the  total abolition of slavery in America and the ultimate victory of Federalism over State’s Rights. It is an estate today's fire eaters ought to take note of.  But I doubt they will.

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HALL OF MIRRORS

 

I think it a profound that all telescopes involve mirrors. In 1846 this idea was stumbled upon by the obsessive-compulsive painter Alvin Graham Clark, when he realized there was more money to be made in selling telescopes to rich people than in just painting portraits of rich people. Alvin then dropped his brush and took up the polishing rag. 

It was said this self taught optician could feel imperfections in the glass lenses through his thumb while polishing them. For over a half a century Alvin Clark and Sons ground magnificent telescopes for rich clients who saw funding observatories as grand monuments to their own intellectual beneficence. 

Five times Alvin Clark and Sons produced lenses for the largest refraction telescopes in the world. But it is another sad truth that making optical telescopes is an ephemeral art form, since in the eyes of the viewer all mirrors tell lies. Even a Clark

One of Alvin Clark's most enthusiastic customers was Mr. Percival Lowell, whose mommy gave him a 2 1/4 inch Clark on his fifteenth birthday. Astronomy was the kind of hobby mother and son could share atop their Brookline, Massachusetts mansion. At his father's insistence Percival went into business in Japan (above - the tall one without the hat). But he always returned to his first love; astronomy.  And as the end of the 19^th century approached, Percy was attracted by the approach of Mars. 

The more people looked at the red planet, the more it looked like earth. Kepler was the first to realize that Mars was a neighbor of ours. But it was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, who drew the first detailed maps of the distant planet's surface. 

Then in September of 1877, as the orbits of Earth and Mars converged, Giovanni Schiaparelli used a new and better telescope and saw what looked like mountain ranges and plains and long mysterious grooves which crisscrossed the planet. He described the grooves in Italian as “canalii”,  a word meaning a channel, or path.  It is sad to point out here, that although Percival Lowell spoke fluent Japanese, he did not speak Italian. 

In 1896, Percival retired from the business world and built his own world class observatory in the mountains, 7,180 feet above Flagstaff, Arizona, atop a peak he named Mars Hill.  Here, for $20,000 (half a million today) Percival installed a 24 inch Clark refracting telescope. Every summer night for the next 23 years, Percival Lowell (above) sat at the bottom of his telescope, observing Mars. During each day he slept in the 24 room mansion he also built on Mars Hill. Being rich has its advantages, and Percival would have been a fool if he had not taken advantage of his advantages.

And what he saw through the eyepiece of his expensive magical tube when he looked at Mars was amazing. He saw canals - real canals - more than 180 of them, some of them 4,000 miles long. And he wondered what sort of creatures had constructed such a massive, intricate irrigation system. “Quite possibly, “ he wrote, “such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed...Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.” 

Percival wrote three books, “Mars”, “Mars and its Canals”, and “Mars as the Abode of Life”. Each and every book became a best seller. He inspired H.G. Wells to write “War of the Worlds”, as well as inspiring Edgar Rice Burrows, who besides the “Tarzan” series, wrote 13 adventure books centering on life on Mars. 

By the year his third book was published, in 1907, Percival Lowell (above) was recognized as the world's expert on the planet Mars. And then, almost over night, Percival's magical red world was deflated by his doppelganger, Mr. George Hale.

George Hale also came from a rich Boston family. But where Percival's father had insisted he attend business school, George's father had sent him to MIT to become a professional astronomer. 

And in 1908 George opened the lens cap on his new 60” reflector telescope in a new observatory atop California's 5,700 foot high Mount Wilson (above).  And almost the first thing George peered at was Mars, where he found...no canals. Not a one. No matter how hard he looked. 

It has been alleged that George once saw an elf in his bedroom, but he saw no canals on Mars.

The photographic proof was conclusive. What Percival had seen as canals proved, when seen through a newer, bigger, telescope,  to be just an optical illusion...

...or maybe the blood vessels (above) in the back of Percival's own eye.  Percival had a nervous breakdown. And when he recovered he sought to re-establish his reputation. He took up the search for the the last great mystery in the night sky, the powerful conundrum of Planet X.

According to Percival's own mathematics, there was something very odd about the planets Neptune (named after the Roman god of the sea)  and Uranus (named after the Greek god of the sky - grandfather of the war god Mars). Both planets were too big. Neptune was spinning on its side and they both wobbled oddly.  

It looked to Percival as if there had to be another planet further out from the sun, tugging at Uranus and Neptune. 

He called his suspect "Planet X".  Percival even calculated Planet X's mass, and he knew exactly where it had to be in the sky, 40 times further out from the sun than the earth.

For ten years Percival and his assistants – okay, mostly his assistants – scoured photographs of the night sky, searching for the tell-tale movement in the star field that would herald the discovery of Planet X. 

Twice the camera on Percival's 12” Clark took pictures of the moving X.  But the humans who had to examine each of the thousands of photographs, failed to notice the one dot which had moved slightly. 

And then,  in 1916, at the age of sixty-one, Percival Lowell suffered a stroke and died. 

He was interned in a private mausoleum (above) next to his beloved 12” Clark atop Mars Hill.  But thanks to Percival's fortune, the search for Planet X continued.

In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh (above) found Planet X. And since he was being paid by Perciva Lowell's endowment, and still using Percival's 12” Clark telescope, Planet X was named using Percival Lowell's initials – PL - in it's name - Pluto (Greek god in charge of the underworld). 

And isn't it amazing that Planet X became the official IX planet in the solar system? You don't often get to use Roman Numerals in a joke. But, of course it was not bigger than the earth,, let alone Jupiter.

Ah, but things were about to get even more amazing. With the refinement of observations of the outer planets a number of new great mysteries appeared in the night sky, as they always do. The more you know the less you know, you know.  

The first thing astronomers realized they did not know was why two of those cold blobs of rock and ice - Neptune and Uranus -  circling so far out from the Sun. They were too massive to have been formed at the edge of the spinning disc which eventually became the solar system. Heavier (in proportion) rocky planets like the Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars were near the center. Lighter gas giants should hgave formed toward the edge. In 2005 the mystery was solved (we think) at the University of Nice, in France.  Neptune and Uranus, said the French astronomers, had originally formed in the inner solar system.

Four billion years ago the newly formed gas giants Jupiter and Saturn had turned the inner solar system into pool table on the break -  with the still molten rocky planets slamming and careening into and off of each other. This gravitational pin ball game had pulled our moon into a collision with the Earth, and allowed its capture. It had ground up rocks trying to form a planet and spewed them into the asteroid belt. 

And it had flung rocky Uranus and Neptune out of their formation orbits and into their current positions, leaving behind a lot of oddities as they swerved out into the edge of our solar system.

And that left Pluto. And the more people looked at the guardian of the outer realms the odder it looked. Better telescopes, including one in earth orbit, have shown it to have less than two tenths of 1% of the mass of the Earth, and to be only about half the size of our moon. That is far too small to have perturbed the orbits of Neptune or Uranus. In fact it is even too small to be classified as a planet.

On 24 August, 2006 the International Astronomical Union struck Pluto from the list of planets and gave it the new title of "dwarf planet".  It seems that for all of Percival Lowell's careful calculations, and for all of Clyde Tombaugh's perseverance, and for all the sensitivity of Alvin Clark's thumb,  finding Planet X right where it was supposed to be was...just a coincidence.  It was the human mind which mistook blind luck for a deep cosmological insight. Just  as the swelling in the blood vessels behind Percival Lowell's eyes, which would eventually burst to create the stroke which killed him,  had built the canals of Mars in his mind's eye.

It makes me wonder how we can ever really be certain we are certain of anything. And it seems that no matter how big our telescopes become, or how far out in the sky we search, such as with the new James Webb telescope,  we are always looking into a mirror.

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THE AMAZING RANDOLPH

  

I agree with William Plummer’s 1803 assessment of John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia; “I admire his ingenuity and address, but I dislike his politics.”  This amazing man represents the tap root of two great branches in American conservative politics, patrician conservatives and gay conservatives; because if John Randolph wasn’t gay, then neither was Roy Cohen.

Some biographies of Randolph insist that he suffered from a condition called “Klinefelter’s syndrome”, which occurs in only 1 out of every 500 males, or 0.02% of the general population, while homosexuality is a genetic variation that occurs in (conservatively speaking) about 5 – 6% of the population, making it far more likely that Randolph was gay. And in any case, both conditions are genetic variations, having nothing to do with sin, intelligence, choice or morality. So, from a purely practical standpoint, it is just simpler to concede that Randolph was gay and move on.

Randolph was a slave-owning elegantly dressed ‘fashionista’, described by one author as “The most notorious American political curmudgeon of his time”. That may be putting it kindly. John Randolph specialized in what the Romans called the “Argumentum Ad Hominem” or the ‘argument against the man’. As a verbal tool it allows the speaker to change the subject, to argue the man not the issue, and thus to tar a political position with the alleged sins of one of its advocates, thus forcing advocates to defend themselves, not what they stand for. And if that method of attack sounds familiar, it is confirmation of the connection between Randolph’s ideological bloodline and its present day Republican practitioners.

John Quincy Adams borrowed from Ovid to describe John Randolph; “His face is ashen, gaunt his whole body, His breath is green with gall; His tongue drips poison.” It is a fair description of the “…abusive eloquence which he possessed in such abundance” (ibid)..

It is a shame that both of those distinguished blood lines are now being excised from the Republican Party in preference to the Donald Trump template. The idea that a dumb, uneducated heterosexual conservative is preferable to a smart homosexual conservative is akin to abandoning a talking dog because you don’t like the way he pronounces “Béarnaise sauce”.  The Trumpanisters remind me of the words of British Prime Minster Lloyd George who said of one opponent; “He has a retail mind in a wholesale business.” Or, to paraphrase John Selden, ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but ignorance in general is inexcusable.

Randolph’s first biographer, Lemuel Sawyer, described him this way; “As an orator he was more splendid than solid; as a politician he (lacked) the profound views of a great statesman...he was too intolerant." But John Randolph admitted to enjoying “That most delicious of all privileges – spending other people’s money.”  Its hard to condemn a man who admits his own sins so gleefully.

Randolph was elected to congress at 26 years of age in 1799, and served off and on in both houses of the Federal Congress, as well as in the Virginia State legislature until his death. He never married, and admitted “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality." And in describing his chosen career Randolph observed that “If electioneering were allowed in heaven, it would corrupt the angels.”

As if to prove his point, in 1824 Randolph turned his cutting tongue loose in the defining speech of his life, on the floor of the U.S. Senate. It was described by one author as “rambling, sometimes incoherent, funny, insulting and devastating….filled with literary and classical allusions, among other odds and ends, and delivered with a delightful insouciance.”

Randolph attacked the Federalist position on the central issues of the day and said any compromise with Speaker of the House, Henry Clay of Kentucky, or with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, would be anathema, as “…their friendship is a deadly distinction, their touch pollution”. And as to the very idea of a strong central Federal government, Randolph called it “That spirit...which sees in government nothing but a job, which is never so true to itself as when false to the nation.”

I’ve read that sentence at least ten times and each time it makes less sense to me than it did before. At the time, however, it had a great effect on its audience. I guess you had to be there.

Then Randolph got down to the most troublesome part of his attack. He described Henry Clay as “…so brilliant yet so corrupt, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.” Among southern aristocrats, being called a ‘stinking mackerel’ were fighting words. Henry Clay was willing to overlook the insult until, in 1826, the insult was repeated in print, in the newspaper "United States Telegraph". Clay could no longer pretend Randolph had not said the words, and after a properly stiff exchange of notes, Clay issued Randolph a challenge to what one witness described as the “…the last high-toned duel I ever saw”.

They met at about 4:30 p.m. on 8 April, 1826, just over the Little Falls Bridge from Georgetown, Virginia.  Randolph was resplendent in a bright yellow coat. Clay was coldly determined. The night before Thomas Hart Benton had pleaded with Randolph not to go through with the duel, saying Clay had a young son and wife who would be left destitute if Clay were killed or seriously injured. Randolph seemed unmoved, but he had replied to Benton, “I shall do nothing to disturb the sleep of that child or the repose of the mother.” But I don’t think anybody told Clay he had nothing to worry about.

The men paced off ten steps apart (about 30 feet), and then as the countdown began Randolph’s gun misfired. The gun was reloaded and the countdown began again; “Ready, aim, fire.” Clay’s shot hit the dirt in front of Randolph, whose shot struck a stump behind Clay. The men then reloaded and the insanity began again. This time Clay got off the first shot, sending a ball through the hem of Randolph’s expensive yellow coat. Randolph held his fire, and then dramatically fired his shot into the air.

Then Randolph strode forward with his hand extended. The opponents shook hands in the center of the “field of honor”, and Randolph dryly said, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.”

I don’t think Clay ever paid for the coat, because when John Randolph died in May of 1833, his will instructed that after his slaves were transported to Ohio and freed, his body was to buried in Virginia and he was to be planted facing west, so he could keep an eye on Kentucky’s Henry Clay. Now that is going a long way for an insult.  By the way, like most such wills, Randolph's slaves were not freed. They had been used as collateral for loans, and were sold "down river".  

It could be said of John Randolph that he had opposed most if not all of the famous men and great causes of his time, that politically he gave as good as he got, and that he made the most of the talents that God gave him; not a bad legacy. Except, it must also be said that nothing he supported made the nation stronger, nor helped improve the lives of the the people, white, black or red,  of his state. A politician who chose the career of a speed bump cannot, in my opinion, be said to have used his talents for the public good.

Why he did not do so might be explained, at least in part, by a letter he wrote in the winter of 1833,  addressed "To the Honorable Waller Holladay, Esquire, of the county of Spotsylvania, of the State of Virginia, of the United States of America, of the Western Hemisphere, of the Globe." And amazingly, it was delivered.  Mister Randolph wrote,  "I am sure you will be surprised and pained to hear that I was honored last night by a visit from no less a personage than His Satanic Majesty. His Majesty assured me that my only hope of much longer continuance of my mortal existence depended upon my subsisting entirely upon the milk of your fine Medley mare, which would restore health to my worn out body. Under these melancholy circumstances, I have no choice but to throw myself upon your friendly mercies and I implore you to let me have the mare without delay...that her milk may save the life of your sincere but suffering friend. Randolph of Roanoke"

Mr. Holladay read the letter but did not dispatch the mare. Instead he immediately filed the missive away without answering it, in the hope he said later that "the aberration was but temporary". It was not.  Randolph died in May of 1833. And the letter concerning Mr. Randolph's visit from Satan, was thought to be  proof of his insanity.  Or perhaps the visit was real, a sort of courtesy call, from one sly and merciless liar upon another.  

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