Category: miscellaneous matters

In the Boston Globe, E. J. Graff reports that Massachusetts courts may rule in favor of same-sex marriage before July 13. If they do, then the first two states to allow same-sex marriage (or in Vermont’s case, its legal equivalent) in the twenty-first century will be the first to have abolished slavery in the late eighteenth century.

The two states would also be making their decision in the same sequence. Vermont forbade slavery in its 1777 constitution, and a Massachusetts court decision abolished it in 1783, according to Kelley and Lewis’s To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. Why is this happening? (If it is happening. So far there are only one and a half data points.) My guess is that legal arguments for same-sex marriage are most likely to succeed in states that abolished slavery early and were therefore free to write (and rewrite, in the 1840s) their constitutions with strong and broad assertions about human rights.

If you look up 1790 in the Historical United States Census Data Browser, you’ll see that at the time of the first national census, only Massachusetts (and its then-subsidiary Maine) and Vermont were absolutely free of slaves. Here are the states with the lowest proportion of slaves to total population in 1790:

• Vermont: 0%
• Massachusetts & Maine: 0%
• New Hampshire: 0.11%
• Rhode Island: 0.14%
• Pennsylvania: 0.85%
• Connecticut: 1.11%
• New York: 6.23%

In other words, if the pattern holds, don’t hold your breath for same-sex marriage in New York, despite its ultraliberal reputation. Look for it next in Pennsylvania, which passsed the country’s first abolition law in 1780, or in crusty, Republican New Hampshire, where slavery ended in 1783.

Returning from Italy with her husband and infant son, the American feminist and critic Margaret Fuller drowned on 19 July 1850 when the Elizabeth sank within sight of Fire Island. Her papers were lost, including the manuscript of her history of the short-lived Roman Republic, and her body was never recovered.

Also lost in the wreck was a statue by Hiram Powers of John C. Calhoun, the proslavery senator from South Carolina who had died in March, before the Compromise of 1850 had been worked out. But on 26 August 1850, the New York Herald reported that the statue had been found. Captain Waldron of the cutter Morris tried to raise it, still in its packing crate, but “by some awkwardness or other of a person on board, in attempting to hook it up, the lid was broken off, and . . . the statue was injured. The boatswain then stripped, and dived down . . . He felt the legs and other parts so distinctly as to leave no doubt of the certainty of the object.” Unfortunately, no divers on hand knew how to attach the tackle to the statue to raise it, and it remained submerged. Perhaps it was raised later, but I haven’t yet stumbled across an article saying so.

Postscript: According to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the North Carolina Museum of Art once owned a marble statue of Calhoun by Powers, which was only 29 inches tall, but it’s currently listed as “unaccessioned.”

Post-postscript: On 9 November 1850, the Herald reported that the statue was indeed recovered, thanks to “James A. Whipple, the celebrated Boston diver. . . . The only injury . . . is the loss of the left arm from the elbow.” The life-size statue, “clothed with the Roman toga and sandals,” was shipped to Charleston on board the steamship Southerner a few days later (Herald11 November 1850).

T. R. Klysa, USMC, sends these photos of Iraqis and their tea, which, he says, “is served very hot, with lots of sugar, in little shot glasses. ‘Tea makers’ are included on government-employee rosters and count as civil servants. We are paying them at the moment.”

Left: “After a mission of explosive ordinance disposal (getting rid of unexploded ordinance in farmlands).” Al Kifl, Iraq. May 28, 2003. Right:Coffee shop, Al Hillah, Iraq. May 23, 2003.

Elementary school, Hasimiah, Iraq. May 25, 2003.

On 3 April 1850, the New York Herald hailed a new and extraordinary invention by a Frenchman named Dr. Alexandre: artificial leeches. “They never fail, they give no pain, they cause no trouble, they inoculate with no disease, they do not crawl and scare one, and wriggle and refuse to bite,” the reporter wrote. No longer would American doctors have to import the “horrid reptiles” from Sweden.

What did artificial leeches look like? The Herald doesn’t say. My first guess was that they must have been metal and demonic, with gears and pincers, like the cockroach-in-a-watchfob that turns people into vampires in Cronos. Then I thought of rubber suction cups, which would be less glamorous but more plausible. It turns out, however, upon a consultation with Google, that an artificial leech looks like the cylinder of a pin-and-tumbler lock, attached to a glass syringe with a cork plunger.

A few days later, the Herald returned to the jewelry and fancy warehouse that was selling the artificial leeches, only to discover that Dr. Alexandre was debuting a second invention, “a sort of sub-marine boat, in which a company of persons can go down to the bottom of a river, have communication with the ground, perform any kind of work by digging or otherwise, and return to the surface when they please” (8 April 1850). This submarine would be very useful to the gold prospectors in California, the reporter supposed, “but for home purposes . . . , we admire the artificial leeches more.”

On 15 January 1850, a young woman nicknamed Shorty was seen spending money with abandon in the groggeries of the New York City slum Five Points. A constable arrested her, because he thought that the money—more than sixty dollars—must have been stolen.

In fact Shorty had earned it. As she explained to the judge, and as the New York Herald reported the next day, at the end of a three-month stint in prison for prostitution, Shorty had dressed as a sailor, gone to Nantucket, and signed up for a whaling cruise. “In this disguise this young woman maintained her position among the other men in the forecastle for over seven months,” the Herald wrote. She wasn’t discovered until after the ship had rounded Cape Horn. Then the captain turned her over to the American consul, who sent her home to New York. In Five Points she was spending her wages.

It’s intriguing that it was Shorty’s money, and her prodigality with it, that didn’t look altogether gender-appropriate. In New York, she dressed femme, more or less. The Herald reporter described her thus:

This singular female has a very good looking countenance, short stature, and broad build; her hair was cut short; she both chewed and smoked tobacco, and talked sailor lingo very fluently. . . . Her manner of walking and movements of her body would appear to the observer as if she was a young man dressed up in female clothing.

Upon hearing Shorty’s explanation, the judge released her.