#6: What does Sarah Bradford’s 1869 biography of Tubman (part of which you will read for next week) tell us about Sarah Bradford? Does this biography tell us more about Bradford than about Tubman?

I don’t think that Bradford’s “little book” necessarily tells us more about Bradford than it does about Tubman, but it does reveal certain motivations and opinions about the woman behind “Scenes in the life of Harriet Tubman”.

Every time Sarah Bradford speaks personally about Tubman, there is such an admiration in the tone of the writing, and the quotes from Harriet are written out so… lovingly, it seems to me. Bradford didn’t know Tubman for that long, but she has such a fondness for everything the woman said and did as much as for the woman herself. “Would that instead of taking them in this way at second hand my readers could hear woman’s graphic accounts of scenes she herself witnessed”, Bradford says about her.

This fondness is shown as well in that, despite the fact that Sarah was leaving the country, she put pen to paper as fast as she could in order to help raise money for Tubman.

And then, even on such short a time frame, she insisted on as thorough a fact checking as she could do, asking for letters and confirmation of stories from friends and family of Tubman. Thomas Garrett’s letter to Bradford about Tubman’s “remarkable labors…in aiding her colored friends from bondage” is presented in it’s entirety, as well as other stories, either quoted from Harriet, or just told by Bradford, that Bradford insists are confirmed by Garrett or others. There may still be some errors on her part– for example, the exact number of trips Tubman took and the number of slaves she brought back with her to the North– but she truly wanted to present a factually based tale.

Bradford may not have been able to do that perfectly, and she may have inadvertently put Tubman in a more exciting or favorable light than was actually called for, due to her obvious fondness for the woman and her deeds. But Bradford did make a point to try, which is more than can be said for authors like Weems and his tales of George Washington.

In response to the comment from Dr. McDaniel I have looked a little bit into other Presidential assassinations in order to compare the reactions of the nation to the loss of a President.

In American history we have lost four Presidents to assassination– Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901), as well as John F. Kennedy (1963).

Lincoln was killed, as most know, by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, after the end of the Civil War; he was shot in the head at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.

Garfield was shot in the back by religious fanatic Charles J. Guiteau after he denied Guiteau’s requests to hold office in D.C.

President William McKinley was shot and killed by factory worker and anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz while at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

According to the introduction of “Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives”, which is part of the JFK Assassination Records in the National Archives, conspiracy theories appeared after two of those three murders.

After Lincoln’s assassination, there was a major anti-Catholic movement known as the “Know-Nothing Movement” because many of Booth’s co-conspirators were Catholic. They believed that the whole thing was a Papist plot against the United States. It was ultimately dismissed, but other theories that had to be dismissed popped up as well, one that even included the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. There were two separate investigations into Lincoln’s death, but “Neither finally laid to rest the suspicions around the death of President Lincoln”.

Garfield’s murderer, Guiteau, plead insanity but was found guilty and hanged. For some reason, no conspiracies were concocted concerning his death.

McKinley’s assassination, since it was surrounded by Czolgosz’s anarchist beliefs, was full of conspiracy theories. He insisted that he had acted alone, but that didn’t stop America from pointing the finger at anarchists as a group, and anarchist leaders were arrested and their groups had restrictive measures placed upon them. Yet after all this, “the theories appeared to collapse shortly after the execution of Czolgosz”.

So it seems that three of the four assassinations in the United States’ history were surrounded by conspiracy theories shortly after they occurred, but Kennedy’s is the only one that has lasted so thoroughly and for this long.

Or is it? The paper I was reading from mentioned that the Lincoln conspiracy theories were never proved or disproved, but not how long rumor persisted among the people about what might have happened. So perhaps some research into that is necessary. Because if the theories lasted as long as there were people who were alive when Lincoln was, then it makes sense that people still wonder about what happened to Kennedy. Kennedy’s murder mystery of an assassination hasn’t had time to fade into history like the conspiracies surrounding Booth might have.

So I think that’s my focus for next week, finding what I can about Lincoln’s assassination in order to compare it to Kennedy’s.

http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/findings.html#assassinations

By the way the many images portray the man that was John Brown as he is led to his death, someone with absolutely no knowledge of who he is and his place in history could probably see him as a matyr and a hero. In each image here he looks like a calm and proud old man, unconcerned with what is about to happen to him, only satisfied with what he has done. From reading the texts one would discover less of an esteemed martyr and more of a violent rebel, but the lithographs and paintings give no such clues that this would be the case.

In each image John Brown and his large white beard tend to take up the majority of the frame, putting him as the focus of each of the images. Even the exceptions to this have Brown in focus in another way, by color or by only having three characters within the frame. And usually John Brown’s face is the most detailed compared to the other people. The southerners taking John Brown to his death tend to be all similarly-faced, just like the Mexicans in the paintings of Davy Crockett’s ‘last stand’. When there are many of them they tend to fade into the background, all dressed in the same uniform and with no particularly identifying facial features. Obviously this is how the artists of the time saw the ‘evil’ Southerners– the same way that painters of Davy Crockett saw the ‘evil’ Mexicans– as faceless evil soldiers, doing only what they are told, but with evil intent.

The African Americans in the images, despite being a prominent figure in the scene of the kiss, are, for the most part, painted or etched as subservient figures to both John Brown and the white Southerners. The mother and her child are placed below or sitting compared to John Brown and the other white men in the images. So while Brown is fighting to see them become equals, the creators of these paintings and etchings still present African Americans in the same subservient position they have always been placed in. The image labeled as “John Brown – the Martyr”, where the woman, sitting and colored fairly lightly, is reminiscent of the Mother Mary in Catholic imagery, with her child looking Christlike. This image only has two other people in it, John Brown and the man who will lead him to his death, filling the symbolic places of God and Satan next to Mary and Christ. This religious theme continues into “John Brown’s Blessing”, where Brown places his hand upon the child’s head, not unlike a priest does to a child being baptized.

So the artists seem to have less of an opinion of African Americans than they feel the need to portray them in a light that makes Brown look even more the part of a martyr.

I went to the library the other day to look into books about John F. Kennedy’s death and legacy, only to discover before me three bookshelves, with about 10 shelves each, simply filled with books about JFK’s presidency and death. Most of the last bookshelf was filled with ONLY books on his assassination. Due to the massive amount of books and the vague descriptions in Fondren’s catalog, I had a tough time finding books about what I really wanted to look into specifically- why JFK’s assassination made him the figure he is still seen as today, despite some plunders in his presidency as well as social life.

One of the books I checked out was a little more helpful than the others (though I’ll have to go back to Fondren to see what else I can find), as it’s main focus is, as the title says, the “Unfinished Life” of Kennedy. I actually think this is one of the reasons Kennedy became a legend– he had all this promise that was cut so abruptly short.

A man by the name of Dallek is the author of this look into Kennedy’s life and death. The vast majority of it is biographical, its many pages focusing on the life that Kennedy lived, but his final chapter, “An Unfinished Presidency”, as well as the epilogue were particularly insightful as to the reason that JFK lives on in the hearts of America.

People could tell, Dallek said, that Kennedy simply loved being president. And that rubbed off on the American people- for the most part, they loved seeing him as president. They loved seeing a handsome young man take control of the country, and foresaw for him great things. What those things may have been? It doesn’t even matter; what mattered to Americans once they heard about the shots that ended Kennedy’s life was that that bright future was gone! I think they saw Kennedy in their hearts as comparable to the nation: young, compared to the long lived European countries, but ready to make his footprints on the sands of time, ready to make a difference in the world.

So those two shots (or three) violently and suddenly blasted away that man and that symbol in 1963.

All that might have died down, though. It seems to me that the constant theories of conspiracy focusing on the Kennedy’s assassination keep him always a current topic. I read somewhere once that around a third of Americans still don’t believe we have the full truth about Kennedy’s death. The forensics are looked into in another book I have found, but only been able to skim (though I am excited to examine his evidence fully): Fuhrman’s A Simple Act of Murder.

In his introduction, Fuhrman points out that this is a case with too much information and too many variables, both laying out for the public to see. But he also insists that murder is simple once you examine the facts. It seems he plans to prove that the JFK assassination went exactly as the Warren commission found it did. The fact that he can write a whole book on this, that there are entire shelves dedicated to this in the library, that there ever had to be a commission in the first place to investigate what looked like simple murder at first… it fascinates me.

I think that’s a good topic to look into- why are we, as a nation, so concerned and suspicious about the death of a President? Would this have happened to any president, or is it special to the case of JFK?

Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Boston: Little, Brown, and, 2003. Print.

Fuhrman, Mark. A Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963. New York: William Morrow, 2006. Print.

In the same way that the little black girl, Gwendolyn, has been removed from Crisp’s history, figures that missed out on one of the stages of the making of history get left behind. But when figures with perspectives that differ from the majority are left out, that’s a perspective that the people of the future miss out on, and so we end up with the history that the rich white men have written. It’s the same problem with most of history– their perspective is seen as of little consequence compared to the men who believe they are making history, and so it becomes lost. To anyone looking back, from historians to the average student in a history class, this is such a loss when you’re trying to look into the time period. Such misconceptions get printed and perpetuated until myth mixes with history to the point that no one knows the difference anymore.

This is why Crisp is such an advocate of rediscovering these covered up voices. Pena could have enlightened generations as to what really happened at the Alamo, but he was shut out and so not read or thought about for decades at a time. Any mention of Juan Seguin, or any of the other Tejanos, could have clarified the role of Tejanos and Mexicans in the Revolution, but they passed by the wayside as the Alamo story was popularized and the stories of the revolution became tales of good vs evil in terms of Anglos versus Mexicans.

Our image of the Revolution could have been dramatically changed, as a nation looking back and as well as any individual, had these voices remained for all to hear. Maybe then such a dramatic dichotomy between the sides of the war would not have been created. Crisp insists that racism was not the main element behind the Revolution and the hate mail that came from people a century later to writers that ‘attacked’ their long held views, but it was still an element. This is interesting, as one considers if that hate mail might never have come if only the voices of Tejanos and Mexicans had been allowed to survive. That becomes even more of a possibility if the Disney version of Davy Crockett could somehow change to allow less of said dichotomy as well, as that is the image that seemed to stick most into people’s heads. That was the image that people saw as disrespected when writers point out inaccuracies in Crockett’s presumed death scene.

If men like Juan Seguin showed up in that Disneyland special, what are the chances that writers like Crisp would be receiving hate mail on the topics of their papers and books?

We as Americans may never know, but can only hope to try and keep such silencing from happening in the present, so voices like those men’s can be heard in the future.