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Humanities,
May/June 2009
Volume 30, Number 3
Volume 30, Number 3
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| Curiously Reckless Rebels |
An exquisitely fine pencil drawing hanging in a bedroom at Tudor Place in Georgetown in the nation’s capital has a tragic tale to tell that is lacking in some basic details. During the Civil War, Confederate cousins in U.S. Army uniform rode into a Union fort in Tennessee claiming to be on assignment from Washington. The information they would have been able to gather would hardly have been the stuff of espionage. The instigator, and subject of the portrait, below, William Orton Williams, had courted one of Robert E. Lee’s daughters but was turned down eventually for his drinking and reckless behavior. To this day, historians are baffled by the actions of the cousins. Tudor Place received a grant from NEH to assess the artwork in the mansion for conservation.
William Orton Williams
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“Their conduct was very singular indeed,” a Union commanding officer put it, remembering the arrival in a Union camp in 1863 of two soldiers, wearing Federal uniforms. The pair were later discovered to be Confederates and were executed within hours. The two, William Orton Williams, known as Orton, and Walter “Gip” Peter, were cousins and direct descendants of Martha Washington and relatives of Mrs. Robert E. Lee as well. The drumhead court-martial produced no evidence that they were indeed spies, and they both denied till their dying moment that they were. Orton had been in the Union Army but later resigned and had served with distinction in the Confederate States Army at Shiloh. During childhood, he had been orphaned and grew up under the guardianship of George Washington Parke Custis at his Arlington mansion (now in Arlington National Cemetery) and at the family home, Tudor Place, in Georgetown. Robert E. Lee, Orton’s boyhood idol, was furious over the seeming injustice and wrote three years later, “My blood boils at the thought of the atrocious outrage, against every manly and Christian sentiment which the Great God alone is able to forgive.” Orton’s likeness, a “pointillist”
pencil drawing, hangs in a bedroom at Tudor Place. The mansion, built in the early nineteenth century, had a commanding view of Georgetown, the Potomac River, and Arlington. Britannia, Orton’s aunt who lived at Tudor Place during much of the Civil War and ran it then as a boardinghouse, used to signal across the Potomac to relatives in Arlington before the outbreak of the war by waving petticoats from the second-floor bedroom window. A year after the cousins were hanged, the family was allowed to bring the bodies home to Georgetown, where they were interred in nearby Oak Hill Cemetery.
| Velo News |
Histories of bicycle racing often give in to hagiography, but historian Christopher S. Thompson, through NEH-supported research for his book The Tour de France (University of California, 2006), keeps pace with the sport without succumbing to veneration. In a passage deconstructing Gallic rationale and passion for arduous bicycle racing, Thompson acquaints readers with the Tour’s original impresario, Henri Desgrange; the sports paper of record for cycling, seemingly misnamed, L’Auto; and the era’s love affair with exercise sustained on two wheels.
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Shouldn’t these tiny travelers be beaming? Notwithstanding the tots’ dour demeanor, Philadelphia, sometimes known for its irascible sports fans, is also the kid-loving burg where a leading department store installed a monorail for youngsters so they could gaze down upon the treasures that lay below, making mental notes, perhaps, for requests to Kriss Kringle. The John Wanamaker monorail, now in historic Memorial Hall in Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum (which received NEH funding for remodeling), made its rounds of the eighth-floor toy department from 1946 to 1984 before the ingenious merchandising tool was nearly destined for the salvage heap. A worker had the foresight and kind heart to call the curator to see if there was any interest. The Rocket Express now helps parents and grandparents transport memories from one generation to another.
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| —Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives |
The Tour de France was . . . created at a time when the French were investing the bicycle with their deepest hopes and fears as they digested recent traumas, experienced dramatic change, and confronted an uncertain future. Despite— or perhaps because of— contemporary misgivings about cycling, L’Auto’s editorial line never wavered. In a lengthy front-page article in 1913, Desgrange noted that the invention of the bicycle had modified society by contradicting retrograde theories that opposed physical exercise: a nation’s greatness was measured not only by its literary, artistic, and scientific achievements but also by its athletes and the “solidity of its children’s bodies.” The great sporting events of which the Tour “the greatest crusade” had convinced “new crowds” of the importance of physical exercise as the foundation of a good life and future healthy generations. Today’s French youth were far more resolute, audacious, and willful than their predecessors of thirty years earlier (who, he did not need to remind his readers, had lost the Franco-Prussian War). This “new France,” aware of the dangers facing the nation, was impatient for combat. These were ambitious claims indeed, but the scale and difficulty of L’Auto’s great bicycle race appeared to justify them.
© 2006, 2008 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with permission of the University of California Press.
| Father Secchi’s Dim View |
| From Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, Renée Bergland’s NEH-supported biography of one of America’s first professional astronomers. Mitchell’s comet sighting and mathematical abilities launched her career as a computer of the paths of Venus for The Nautical Almanac. In 1858, on a visit to Rome, she was determined to visit the observatory of Father Angelo Secchi who years before had spotted the same comet within days of Mitchell’s discovery.. |
When Mitchell began campaigning to get into the Vatican observatory, her purpose was much more political than astronomical. . . . She had read Secchi’s writings and spoken to him when he visited her in Rome, and he had already shown her his photographs of Saturn’s rings and told her about his work in spectroscopy. No—what she wanted was to fight against the sexist strictures that declared “my heretic feet must not enter the sanctuary, that my woman’s robe must not brush the seats of learning.” . . . An acquaintance whose uncle was a monsignor successfully interceded on her behalf. Permission was granted.
To enter the observatory, she walked through the Church of St. Ignasio “through rows of kneeling worshippers, by the strolling students, and past the lounging tourists” to meet Father Secchi, who waited behind a pillar near the altar. Mitchell’s Italian maid . . . begged to be allowed to accompany them, but Father Secchi demurred, so, as Mitchell described it: “alone, I entered the monastery walls. Through long halls, up winding staircases . . . ; then through the library of the monastery, full of manuscripts on which the monks had worked away their lives; then through the astronomical library, where young astronomers were working away theirs, we reached at length the dome and the telescope. One observatory is so much like another that it does not seem worth while to describe Father Secchi’s.” She noted perfunctorily that the telescope was about the size of the one in Washington, D.C., and that the Vatican had invested in a sophisticated transit-circle mechanism. There was a bit of historical irony there; as Mitchell put it, “the telescope must keep very accurately the motion of the earth on its axis; and so the papal government furnished nice machinery to keep up with this motion—the same motion for declaring whose existence Galileo suffered! The two hundred years had done their work.”
But if the struggle for heliocentrism had been settled long ago, the struggle for women’s access to scientific institutions was just beginning. “I should have been glad to stay until dark to look at nebulae,” she explained, “But the Father kindly informed me that my permission did not extend beyond the daylight which was fast leaving us, and conducting me to the door, he informed me that I must make my way home alone.” After all the long nights of observation with her own father, the months of hard night work with the men of the Coastal Survey, the hours and hours spent observing with the Bonds at Harvard, and even the nights spent tucked into the tiny makeshift bedroom in the turret of the Greenwich Observatory, this was Mitchell’s first experience of being excluded from nighttime observation, because, as a woman, she was seen as a sexual threat. As the back door of the Collegio Romano slammed shut behind her, leaving her unescorted in a dark Roman alley, Mitchell found herself rudely pushed into a battle for female access that she had never imagined she would need to fight. Rome had radicalized her.
© 2008 by Renée Bergland. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
Humanities, May/June 2009, Volume 30, Number 3
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