Thursday, April 25, 2013
Book update
After lots of procrastination and fussing, I finally sent off the book proposal last night. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or terrified at the moment.
Tuesday, April 09, 2013
The CSA constitution in light of the secession ordinances
Over the last four years, conservatives have tried to own the constitution, just as they have for the last half century owned the flag and patriotism. And, once again, liberals are making a monstrous mistake by not fighting for it. Liberals also love and support the constitution. That we interpret it differently than conservatives does not mean we do not believe in it.
I read the Constitution. I keep a little one right here on the desk next to a copy of Archy and Mehitabel. These are the only books on the desk. I also read other constitutions. A few years back I went through all the state constitutions to see what they said about religious rights. Every so often I read the Confederate Constitution. Like the secession ordinances, it's a very interesting view into what was important to them at the time they seceded.
Let's review the secession ordinances. Five of the eleven seceding states gave reasons for doing so. Those states were South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Arkansas. The one reason they all agreed on was that the victory of the Republicans in the recent election made them sure that abolitionists would use the power of the state to end slavery. The next most common complaint was that the northern states refused to enforce fugitive slave laws. Three states specifically cited slavery being excluded from most of the western Territories. Two were upset that Black men were allowed to vote in the North. Arkansas was upset that slave owners were prevented from bringing their slaves with them when traveling in the North and Texas was upset that the federal government didn't do enough to prevent Indian attacks.
All this is preface to the Confederate Constitution. These were the immediate stated reasons for secession. Surely, there were other, broader issues that they cared about? Yes, there were. That's still true today. Different regions have different priorities. Depending on the makeup of their populations, their economies, and and their geographic positions, some things will matter more than others. The Confederate Constitution reflects what mattered to the slave-holding states in 1861. Today, I'll talk about how the Confederate Constitution dealt with their grievances over slavery. In the next installation of Treason Appreciation Month, I'll look at what it has to say about big government and states' rights.
How did the Confederate States of America get their constitution? The United States Constitution was the result of months of deliberation by some of the greatest minds of the thirteen states and tested by more months of public debate before being ratified. That's not how the Confederates did it. In fact, their Constitution was an afterthought.
On January 11, 1861, Alabama was the fourth state to secede. While the previous three secession ordinances speak only for their specific states and the immediate moment. Alabama's ordinance envisioned a common front among all slave states, whether for defense, negotiation, or other purposes. By resolution, Alabama invited all of the slave states to meet in Montgomery on February 4 "for the purpose of consulting with each other as to the most effectual mode of securing concerted and harmonious action in whatever measures may be deemed most desirable for our common peace and security." When the convention met, they were pretty much decided on forming a new federation and promptly empowered a committee to write a constitution. They gave them two days to do so. Fortunately, one of the members of the committee already had a constitution in his pocket and by the due date they had completed the task and already had copies to pass around the convention.
Considering the short work involved, it should surprise no one that the Confederate Constitution is nothing more than a revision of the Union Constitution. They did not begin anew from first principles; they simply changed those parts they didn't like. The easiest change they made was to go through and change the word "United" into "Confederate" wherever it appeared.
Next, they added God. Today, it's common wisdom among Christian nationalists that the founding fathers intended the US to be a Christian nation. They just, uh, forgot to mention that when they wrote the Constitution or when they wrote that amendment about established religion. What did the good Christians of the Bible belt do to fix this? I think most modern Christian nationalists would say "not enough." To the Preamble, they added, "invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God." Where dates were mentioned, they used the form "year of our Lord." Other than that, they gave squat to Christianity. The First Amendment was carried over unchanged into their Constitution.
What else did they change? There are a number of line by line comparisons on the internet. That's the best way to go. The first time I read the Confederate Constitution was in a paperback book of Civil War documents published in the seventies with brackets and fonts to indicate what the Confederates kept, added, changed, and deleted. It was fascinating, but it took a lot of close attention and note-taking to understand. The internet version I most often go to these days is this one. I like the simple two-column comparison with a third column for comments.
The Confederate Constitution is very clear on the issues of slavery. Whereas the US Constitution never uses the word "slave"--using instead circumlocutions like "Persons bound to Service--the Confederate Constitution makes clear exactly what they mean by using the word "slave" whenever they mean slave. As far as the issue of slavery is concerned, the most important clause in the entire constitution is in the list of things Congress cannot do: Article I, section 9, part 4, "No ... law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." The common complaint in the secession ordinances was that they feared the Republicans would attempt to use the power of the central to abolish slavery. This clause puts that fear to rest. Three of the other complaints are specifically dealt with.
The US Constitution already had a clause dealing with with fugitive slaves (Art. IV, Sec. 2, Pt. 1). The complaint of the southern states was that the northern states refused to enforce it. This should not have been a problem in the Confederacy, unless non-slave states were admitted at some date in the future. Their only changes to the clause were to make it more clear and emphatic.
Arkansas' complaint that slave owners were prevented from bringing their slaves with them when traveling in other states was dealt with in a very clear manner. Article IV, Section 2, Part 1, which in the US Constitution reads "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States..." was changed by the addition of "...and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired." Again, this should not have been a problem in the Confederacy, unless non-slave states were admitted. The final clause prevents any kind of shenanigans whatsoever.
The issue of taking in additional states was something that the architects of the Confederacy had on their minds. Pro-South groups existed throughout the West. If the secession crisis had happened a year later, there might very well have been a friendly territory carved out of southern California. After the shooting started, the leaders of the main tribes in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) agreed to join the Confederacy. Rather that go east to fight the Union, Texas sent part of its armies west where they created a territory called Arizona. The Confederate Constitution kept the the same provisions as the US Constitution that allowed the central government to administer territory not belonging to any individual state, to organize territorial governments, and to admit territories as new states (Art. IV, Sec. 3). Naturally, a new clause was added that required all territories to allow slave owners to bring their slaves and guaranteed that all new states would be slave states. one unexplained difference between the two constitutions it that the Confederate Constitution required a two-thirds majority in congress to admit a new state while the US only required a simple majority.
The final complaint in the secession ordinances was that northern states allowed free Black men full citizenship, including the vote*. One of the clauses of the Amendment offered by Arkansas to save the Union was that freedmen in other states be disenfrancised. South Carolina cited racial equality in the North as one of the insults suffered by the South. Texas indignantly proclaimed that it was an "undeniable truth that the governments of the various States ... were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity." While the other complaints were dealt with in a very specific manner, this one is not.
Since the reason for the secessions and the formation of the Confederacy was the preservation of a system of race-based subjugation it's curious that nothing is said in the Confederate Constitution about limiting citizenship, or the vote, or anything to just the White race. The word "White" never appears. Did they think it was too obvious to mention? That would be an odd thing to think. All of the revisions made to the Constitution relating to slavery, were made to make explicit things they believed understood by all that had been interpreted by the rest of the Union in ways that hurt slave owners. How difficult would it have been to shove in a sentence that said only White folk could become citizens and exercise the rights of citizenship. Perhaps, to them, it was so obvious that they didn't think to mention it.
Next: Big Government, States' Rights, and the Rest of the Confederate Constitution.
* I was always under the impression that Louisiana Freemen did have the right to vote. Does anyone know the details on this?
Labels:
Civil War,
Confederacy,
history
Sunday, April 07, 2013
Shetland mammoths were bigger than shetland ponies
A few weeks ago, some surveyors in the Shetland Islands north of Scotland came across an interesting piece of bone. It was about a foot in length, thick, curved and broken at both ends. They thought it might be a piece of walrus tusk, but it was unusual enough that they took it to Val Turner, the island archaeologist. Turner is not a paleontologist, but she knew enough to realize this was not a walrus tusk. She bundled it up and sent it to the Paleontology Museum of Uppsala University in Sweden.
Based on the nature of this blog, I'm sure you can all guess what it is. If I was there I could have told them in less than a minute that it was a piece of tusk from a proboscid, and determined whether it was from a mammoth or a modern elephant (the trick is to look at something called Schreger lines). That is what Uppsala told Turner.
Why is this a big deal? Sections of mammoth ivory are found all over the North and this one is a pretty ratty looking piece. What makes this piece unique and explains Turner's inability to identify is that no evidence of mammoths has ever been seen on the Shetlands.
The islands were completely buried under the ice during the last glacial maximum. Because so much water was locked up in the ice caps the oceans were several hundred feet lower during the glacial maxima. Britain was attached to the mainland and most of the North Sea was dry (or ice covered land). Mammoth ivory is fairly common in England and Ireland and trawlers regularly bring up mammoth bones and ivory from the sea.
This brings up two possibilities to explain the ivory. First, is that a small population of mammoths established themselves on the islands after the ice melted, but before the ocean had risen to its current level. Second, is that this is a piece of ivory washed up from the North Sea during a storm. Hurricane force storms are not uncommon in those parts.
For now, the Shetland Amenity Trust has closed the area where the tusk was found. This week, experts from Uppsala arrived to hunt for other mammoth bones. I'll be watching for follow-up news.
Based on the nature of this blog, I'm sure you can all guess what it is. If I was there I could have told them in less than a minute that it was a piece of tusk from a proboscid, and determined whether it was from a mammoth or a modern elephant (the trick is to look at something called Schreger lines). That is what Uppsala told Turner.
Why is this a big deal? Sections of mammoth ivory are found all over the North and this one is a pretty ratty looking piece. What makes this piece unique and explains Turner's inability to identify is that no evidence of mammoths has ever been seen on the Shetlands.
The islands were completely buried under the ice during the last glacial maximum. Because so much water was locked up in the ice caps the oceans were several hundred feet lower during the glacial maxima. Britain was attached to the mainland and most of the North Sea was dry (or ice covered land). Mammoth ivory is fairly common in England and Ireland and trawlers regularly bring up mammoth bones and ivory from the sea.
This brings up two possibilities to explain the ivory. First, is that a small population of mammoths established themselves on the islands after the ice melted, but before the ocean had risen to its current level. Second, is that this is a piece of ivory washed up from the North Sea during a storm. Hurricane force storms are not uncommon in those parts.
For now, the Shetland Amenity Trust has closed the area where the tusk was found. This week, experts from Uppsala arrived to hunt for other mammoth bones. I'll be watching for follow-up news.
Labels:
mammoths,
paleontology,
Shetlands
Saturday, April 06, 2013
Reading is fundamental
Speaking of reading core documents, reading your job description is always a good idea. This is from the Oklahoma Democrats page.
Below is an email exchange that was a call for help from State Rep. James Lockhart (D) – Heavener who requested help from his colleagues at the Oklahoma State Capitol, but was greeted with an extremely anti-education response from Rep. Mike Reynolds (R) – Oklahoma City.
Lockhart to Reynolds
Subject: Re: Our brightest students…..
No but we sure give out tax credits to a lot of companies that I question whether or not they actually need them. Over 5 billion each year!
What we are seeing is the first generation of Americans who will earn less than the previous, be less educated, earn less and have less access to healthcare.
Basically we are doing a poor job of improving the lives of the people we represent. That is pretty clear in the fact that most people think we either don’t care about them or are unable to do something about improving their standard of living.
I am here to try to improve the quality of life of the average person in however small a way possible.
I would suggest you do the sameThe answer, sent a day later:
It is not our job to see that anyone gets an education. It is not the responsibility of me, you, or any constituent in my district to pay for his or any other persons (sic) education. Their GPA, ACT ASAB, determination have nothing to do with who is responsible. Their potential to benefit society is irrelevant.It's not the legislature's job to see that anyone gets an education. Hmmm. Let's look at the OK constitution and see if he's right.
Section XIII-1: Establishment and maintenance of public schools.
The Legislature shall establish and maintain a system of free public schools wherein all the children of the State may be educated.What do you want to bet he calls himself a "constitutional conservative."
Labels:
education,
Mike Reynolds,
Oklahoma
It's Treason Appreciation Month
Or, as they call it in
the Old South, Confederate Heritage and History Month. There is enough in this
topic for a full month of posts (at my speed, that could mean three). Let's start
by looking at the article that alerted me to this. John Avlon, a southerner by
birth, wrote a good piece over at The Daily Beast. After receiving a press
release from the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans
celebrating the month, Avalon became curious enough to call their PR person,
Ray McBerry, for more information.
But what did shock me was this quote from the press release: "So much is portrayed by Hollywood today that Georgia and the South were evil; when, in reality, the South was the most peaceful, rural, and Christian part of America before war and Reconstruction destroyed the pastoral way of life here."
The South under slavery: "peaceful, rural, and Christian." This isn't heritage, this is wholesale historic revisionism. And it is ugly stuff.
[...]
"The way that slavery was in the Old South is not in keeping with the way it has been portrayed," McBerry insisted.
Instead he offered up a pastoral vision of mutual respect between slave and master.
"Many people still try to say that the war was about slavery," McBerry continued. "Nothing could be further from the truth... It was about a federal government that was out of control and imposing its will on the states--a federal government that was acting beyond the scope of the Constitution. Ironically, some of the very issues we are debating today."
Go read Avlon's piece.
It's good stuff. For now, let’s take a quick look at McBerry outrageous
statement that "Many people still try to say that the war was about
slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth." This is nonsense. The
war was about slavery. In almost every discussion of the Civil War, Confederate
apologists show up to shout that it wasn't about slavery, it was about
economics, it was about culture, it was about how much sugar to put in iced
tea. Wrong. The Southern states seceded because of slavery. The war was fought
to keep the Southern states in the Union. Therefore, the Civil War was fought
over slavery.
Don't take my word for
it. Let the Southerners speak for themselves through their secession resolutions.
South Carolina was the
first to succeed, doing so in December 1861 as soon as the Electoral College
confirmed Lincoln and the Republican Party as the winners of the election. The
title of the resolution makes it clear that they intend the document to be a
simple statement of the reason they are seceding "Declaration of the
Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from
the Federal Union." They use the word "causes" in the plural
form so we should expect a list of the many different reasons that have led
them to this drastic step. And, on reading it, we will be completely
disappointed in that expectation.
The resolution is a
little over 2200 words long. The first half is a little civics lesson on the
Declaration of Independence and on the ratification of the Constitution laying
out their argument for the legality of secession. Next, they give one reason
for seceding: slavery. It's framed as several different complaints, but all
of them are aspects of slavery.
Their chief complaint
is that the Northern states won't enforce fugitive slave laws. Because of that
one thing "these ends for which this Government was instituted have been
defeated." Following this, they complain that Northern states allow
abolitionist societies to exist and exercise their right of free speech. Next
they claim that "a sectional party" hostile to slavery (the Republicans)
succeeded in electing a president. Finally, they make a rather oblique comment
about free Black men--"persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are
incapable of becoming citizens"--being allowed to vote in the North.
Next up to secede was
Mississippi. Their ordinance of secession is modeled on the Declaration of
Independence and includes a fairly substantial list of grievances--all relating
to slavery--with this introduction:
"Our position is
thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material
interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far
the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These
products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an
imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the
tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow
at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long
aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation.
There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a
dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our
ruin."
Florida's resolution
is the shortest. In one 138 word sentence, it simply says, "we quit."
Alabama's resolution
gives as its reason the election of Lincoln by "by a sectional party,
avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions" of Alabama. Which domestic
institutions could that be? They also invite fourteen other states to join.
What do you suppose those states had in common?
Next up, Georgia.
Clocking in at 3300 words, this by far the longest of the ordinances of
secession. They begin their list of complaints with this sentence: "For
the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against
our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of
African slavery." The Georgia resolution does make a digression away from
the subject of slavery to complain about federal support for Northern
manufacturing industries in the earlier part of the century through tariffs and
by building lighthouses (?). After admitting that the federal government no
longer does that, it coverts than fact into a slavery oriented conspiracy
narrative. Lacking protective tariffs, the North decided to destroy slavery.
Louisiana followed
Florida's model and passed short resolution saying simply that they were
leaving the union.
Texas was the last of
the pre Fort Sumter states to secede. Their resolution is a little confusing
because they continually refer to the USA as the confederacy (the CSA not
having been formed yet). Their list of grievances is becoming familiar by now:
the Northern states won't enforce fugitive slave laws, that they allow
abolitionist groups to exist, that they allow Black men to vote, and that they
have succeeded in limiting the number of Western territories that could become
slave states. Texas makes only one complaint that is not slave related and that
is that the federal government has not done enough to fight Indians on their
borders.
Six days later, the
Confederate States of America was formed in Montgomery, Alabama. The conference
appointed Jefferson Davis as provisional president and Alexander Stephens as
vice president. In a speech given of March 21, 1861, Stephens made clear why
the Confederacy had been formed: "The new Constitution has put at rest
forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar
institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the
negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late
rupture and present revolution." The Confederacy was founded "upon
the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery,
subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."
Following the
establishment of the Confederacy, the remaining eight slave states took a wait
and see approach to events. Arkansas held a convention on secession and voted
to stay in the Union. Following the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call
for troops to pull the Confederate states back into the Union, four of those
eight states voted to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. Virginia, North
Carolina, and Tennessee all passed resolutions similar to those of Louisiana
and Florida, simple legal documents stating that they were no longer part of
the Union.
Arkansas had a
slightly different ordinance of secession than the other states, in their
pre-Sumter convention, they had drawn up a list of grievances and proposed
eight constitutional amendments to deal with them in the hopes that this would
preserve the Union. In their ordinance, the recalled convention stated "in
addition to the well-founded causes of complaint set forth by this convention,"
their reason for seceding was that Lincoln had, in effect, declared war on the
other slave holding states by calling up troops. What were the causes of complaint
listed at the first meeting of the convention? They were the usual
suspects, the Northern states won't enforce
fugitive slave laws, that they allow Black men to vote, and that they have
succeeded in limiting the number of Western territories that could become slave
states, and that they voted the Republicans into the White House.
Arkansas' draft
amendments once again make clear that the only real issue at hand was slavery.
- The president and vice president should be elected alternately from slave and non-slave states.
- The division of territory in the West becomes permanent and any new territories gained follow that division.
- Congress cannot legislate on anything relating to slavery unless it is to strengthen it.
- The federal government must enforce fugitive slave laws and if a slave escapes, the federal government must reimburse the owner for his lost slave.
- The Northern states have to enforce fugitive slave laws.
- Slave owners shall be free to bring their slaves with them when traveling in non-slave states.
- No future amendments dealing with fugitive slaves or the three-fifths principal can be passed without unanimous consent of the states.
In the final slave
state, Missouri, a convention at the beginning of the year voted to stay in the
Union. Following Lincoln's call-up of troops, the pro-Confederacy governor,
Claiborne Jackson, refused and declared neutrality. This led to a mini civil
war within the state. Coups, conspiracies, and skirmishes followed. In the
summer, the convention met again and voted to stay in the Union, again. In late
fall, Jackson and the pro-Confederacy members of the legislature met in the far
Southwest of the state and voted to secede. The primary reason they stated was
that the state had been invaded under orders of the tyrannical Republicans in
Washington.
To recap: among the
resolutions that did list reasons for seceding, the overwhelming reason given
was slavery. The only other reasons listed were the federal government not
doing enough to fight Indians (TX), the federal government warring on other
slave states (AR), and invasion federal troops (KY and MO). None of the
resolutions mentioned big government as the problem.
The Civil War was fought
over slavery.
Labels:
bad ideas,
Civil War,
Confederacy,
history,
Slavery
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
One year later
I was just reminded that it's been a year since my baby sister died. Sometimes, I forget and think of something I want to tease her over. Then I remember. I will always be grateful that number one sister flew me up so I could be with her. She was in a coma and we had to make the decision to unplug her. When she finally went, her husband and I were there holding her hands. All morning the hospice people and grief counselors came by and introduced themselves. Just a little before, a harpist came by and asked if she'd like to hear anything. Her husband asked if the harpist knew and Led Zepplin. She did, and she played it for us.
Bonnie McKay (1959-2012)
Labels:
family
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Life's little pleasures
I just sharpened the kitchen knives and celebrated by slicing a tomato really thin.
Labels:
just because
Friday, March 22, 2013
The teeth of giants
In 1645, the twenty-seventh year of the Thirty Years War, Swedish armies inflicted a devastating blow to the Imperial forces in Bohemia and swept into Austria with the aim of capturing of Vienna. The Imperial capitol, was not prepared to give up easily. The Swedes soon found themselves digging in for a long siege, negotiating with allies for support, and building fortifications around the occupied countryside. Upriver from Vienna, in the Krems district, while digging trenches, a group of Swedish soldiers discovered the bones of a giant.
The discovery took place on St. Martin's Day, November 11. The soldiers had been ordered to build a series of defensive fortifications around an old tower at a place called Laimstetten. The winter was not making their job any easier. Rain and groundwater filed the trenches. The engineers in charge ordered the men to dig a series of deep drainage ditches down the hillside. It was in one of those ditches, at a depth of three or four klatters (eighteen to twenty-four feet), in a layer of yellowish soil that smelled of decay, that they ran into a cache of enormous bones.
The most impressive bones are described as being a skull as large as a medium-sized table, arms as thick as an average man, a shoulder-blade with a socket large enough to hold a 24 pound cannonball, and teeth weighing up to five pounds. Someone in charge ordered the diggers to save the bones so that they could be sent to learned men in Sweden and Poland for study. Two more giants were uncovered in the trench but, with a war to be fought, they were left there and nothing more was said about them.
Here, the account of the discovery does the soldiers a great injustice. Many of the bones, including the skull, fell to pieces as they were brought out. Naturally, the workers got the blame for mishandling the bones. In fact, it would have been difficult to save most of them. Ancient bones, that have not petrified, are very fragile things. Collagen rots and acidic water carries away many of the minerals. As the bones dry out, deprived of the surrounding soil that maintained their shape for so long, the bones can literally turn to dust, just like in the movies. Only the densest parts of bones survive very long out of the ground without careful preparation. Skulls, which look so solid, are not among the best survivors. Sinuses honeycomb the face which, in many animals, is really nothing more than a series of thin plates. As it was, only the shoulder-blade with its amazing socket, a leg bone, and some teeth were in good enough condition to be sent away for study.
The sources tell us that rest of the bones, including at least one good tooth, were taken to the nearby Kremsmünster Jesuit abbey. Another tooth was sent to Habsburg Emperor in Vienna for his collections. Two others eventually made it to churches in Germany. This presents us with a little mystery. For the Lutheran Swedes, the abbey should have been viewed as an outpost of the enemy. Worse, it was a Jesuit monastery. In the Protestant world at that time, Jesuits were regarded as ninjas of the Pope: amoral spies and saboteurs capable of any evil in the service of their master. Did the Swedes invite a group of probable spies into their military defenses, as a courtesy, because they thought the Jesuits might be interested in something they dug up? Did the Swedish commander pick out one of the better fossils and send it to the Habsburg Emperor, the leader of the enemy alliance, out of a sense of good sportsmanship? The earliest account of the discovery, was written by Matthew Merian six years after the fact, and makes it sound as if that's exactly what happened. What's more likely, is that the Jesuits collected the bones after the Swedes were gone. By then, they would have been exposed to the elements for eight months and the teeth would have been the best prizes left among the remains. It's also likely that it was the Jesuits who sent the a tooth to the Emperor and not the besieging Swedes who did so. Sadly, there are no records to confirm this at the abbey, now owned by the Benedictines.
Merian's description of the discovery and the bones is short--about 350 words--but he was a first-rate engraver and produced a detailed image of the tooth at the abbey. Merian made no attempt to explain the giant bones and teeth, however the implied explanation is that they are the remains of a giant human. Any modern zoologist or paleontologist will be able to identify the tooth at a glance; it comes from some kind of elephant. At a second glance, they will tell you that it is the tooth of a mammoth. Merian could not have made the mammoth identification, the word would not be introduced into Western Europe until forty years after his death and even then it would only apply to the ivory. If any ivory was recovered with the Laimstetten bones, Merian never heard about it. Even identifying the bones as elephantine would have been difficult for him. In his day, only a handful of elephants--assuming you have very large hands--had made it north of the Alps. Even written anatomical descriptions of elephants would not be available until after his death.
In 1664, Emperor Leopold I hired Peter Lambeck to be his royal librarian and court historiographer. In this role, one of Lambeck's primary duties was to organize and catalog the Emperor's various collections. The Krems tooth appears in the first volume in a chapter dedicated to giants' teeth, a bucket of three hundred year old grain, and a two-headed chicken. The grain and the chicken were both normal sized. Lambeck barely mentions the actual teeth in the collection writing, instead, an extended meditation on the nature of giant teeth. Were they the teeth of true giants, tricks of nature (i.e., stones shaped like bones), or were they the teeth of some other animal, like a whale, elephant, or Carpathian dragon? In his use of extended block quotes from St. Augustine, Athanasius Kircher, and others, Lambeck would have been a natural born blogger. As to the Krems tooth, Lambeck gives a one sentence description of the discovery, misstating the year as 1644, and provides an illustration.
The next mention of the Krems giant comes in the popular journal Relationes Curiosae by the novelist and historian Eberhard Werner Happel. Happel's description is nothing more than a paraphrasing of Merian's description. What's new is his illustration. Despite the low quality of the illustration, it is clear that this is a completely different tooth than either the Krems abbey tooth in Merian or the or the Imperial Museum tooth in Lambeck.
Writing in the next century, Hans Sloane figured that Happel's tooth was the tooth dug up at Laimstetten in 1645 and that Lambeck's tooth was a different tooth dug up the year before. Lambeck says the tooth was found "under fortifications near Krems." He doesn't say who was digging the fortifications. If you assume that it was the Austrians who were preparing fortifications, Sloan's theory makes sense. I have two problems with Sloane's theory. First, in 1644, the Swedish army was nowhere near Austria; the main theater of the war was in Northern Germany. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the Austrians would have expended much energy building fortifications four hundred miles away from the fighting. Second, I question how Happel obtained his image of the tooth. Happel spent his entire life in Northern Germany. Even if he did travel to Vienna, he would not have found the Imperial collections open to the public. I think I know where he found the drawing.
Four years after the publication of the first volume of Lambeck's catalog, another giant tooth passed through the Imperial Museum. The tooth had been sent from Constantinople by a seller who hoped the Emperor would pay twelve thousand ducats for it. The seller claimed that the tooth had been found in a tomb in Jerusalem under an inscription in Chaldaic which read: "Here lies the giant Og." In the old Testament, Og of Basan ruled a kingdom east of the River Jordan. He and his people were destroyed by Moses and the Hebrews. According to some traditions, Og was the last of the true giants. Despite these extravagant claims for the tooth, the Emperor decided to keep his ducats and sent it back to Constantinople, but not before Lambeck made an engraving of it. The tooth of Og was included as an appendix in the sixth volume of Lambeck's catalog.
The illustrations of Og's tooth in Lambeck and the Krems tooth in Happel bear a strong resemblance to each other. Both show a well weathered elephant's tooth with no roots. Happel's illustration faces the opposite direction than Lambeck's, which was a common occurrence when hand engraved illustrations were copied.
After Happel, Merian's story was repeated from time to time, but no more illustrations of the teeth were made. By the end of the century, several anatomies of elephants had been published in Europe making it possible to identify the teeth. In the new century, although it was possible to identify specific teeth as elephantine, the belief in ancient giants still persisted in some circles. As late as 1764, Claude-Nicolas LeCat could get a hearing by the French Academy for his paper on giants, essentially arguing that so many prestigious authors of the past could not be wrong.
In 1703, Georg Henning Behrens made a charming argument against the teeth coming from giants. Behrens did not deny the reality of giants, he simply thought the teeth were too big. Behrens reasoned that Og was the biggest man in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, it is written that his bed was nine cubits long--thirteen or eighteen feet, depending on your cubit. Since beds are always longer than their owners, let's say he was eight cubits tall (a normal man is four and a very large man might be five). If we assume both Og and the Krems giant had the same basic proportions than a normal man, we find the Krems Abbey tooth is three hundred, ninety-six times the size of a very large man, which is clearly ridiculous.
In 1905, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel traveled to Kremsmünster abbey to help Fr. Leonhard Angerer organize their fossil collections. Abel had gathered many of the items in the collection, including a complete cave bear skeleton, which he mounted. Abel had a special interest in mammoths, having hypothesized that pygmy mammoths were the source of the cyclops legend. Abel had read about the 1645 discovery and decided to try to identify the tooth in question. By then the abbey had accumulated a few more giants' teeth. In 1770, a merchant named Meyer in Krems found six mammoth teeth while digging a cellar and donated them to the abbey. By comparing the Merian drawing with the teeth in the Abbey collection Abel found one very good candidate for the Laimstetten tooth, but Fr. Angerer had doubts. The tooth that Abel identified weighed 628 grams. Some bits probably fell off over the years, but not enough to make a big difference. Merian gives two wildly different weights for the tooth. In the text he says it weighed five German pounds, about 2800 grams. On the illustration he says it weighed 8.5 medical ounces, 256 or 297.5 grams, depending on which system he was using. Neither measure is even close to Abel's tooth. The best we can say about the tooth that's currently on display at the Abbey is that maybe it is the right one.
The anonymous Swedish soldiers and Herr Meyer have not been the only ones to find ancient bones in the Krems district. Many mammoths have been dug up along that stretch of the Danube over the years along with thousands of human artifacts. Hunting camps have been identified and, in 2005, the grave of two human babies, probably twins, was discovered. The two had been sprinkled with red ocher and covered with a mammoth scapula. So far, no new human giants have been found.
The discovery took place on St. Martin's Day, November 11. The soldiers had been ordered to build a series of defensive fortifications around an old tower at a place called Laimstetten. The winter was not making their job any easier. Rain and groundwater filed the trenches. The engineers in charge ordered the men to dig a series of deep drainage ditches down the hillside. It was in one of those ditches, at a depth of three or four klatters (eighteen to twenty-four feet), in a layer of yellowish soil that smelled of decay, that they ran into a cache of enormous bones.
The most impressive bones are described as being a skull as large as a medium-sized table, arms as thick as an average man, a shoulder-blade with a socket large enough to hold a 24 pound cannonball, and teeth weighing up to five pounds. Someone in charge ordered the diggers to save the bones so that they could be sent to learned men in Sweden and Poland for study. Two more giants were uncovered in the trench but, with a war to be fought, they were left there and nothing more was said about them.
Here, the account of the discovery does the soldiers a great injustice. Many of the bones, including the skull, fell to pieces as they were brought out. Naturally, the workers got the blame for mishandling the bones. In fact, it would have been difficult to save most of them. Ancient bones, that have not petrified, are very fragile things. Collagen rots and acidic water carries away many of the minerals. As the bones dry out, deprived of the surrounding soil that maintained their shape for so long, the bones can literally turn to dust, just like in the movies. Only the densest parts of bones survive very long out of the ground without careful preparation. Skulls, which look so solid, are not among the best survivors. Sinuses honeycomb the face which, in many animals, is really nothing more than a series of thin plates. As it was, only the shoulder-blade with its amazing socket, a leg bone, and some teeth were in good enough condition to be sent away for study.
The sources tell us that rest of the bones, including at least one good tooth, were taken to the nearby Kremsmünster Jesuit abbey. Another tooth was sent to Habsburg Emperor in Vienna for his collections. Two others eventually made it to churches in Germany. This presents us with a little mystery. For the Lutheran Swedes, the abbey should have been viewed as an outpost of the enemy. Worse, it was a Jesuit monastery. In the Protestant world at that time, Jesuits were regarded as ninjas of the Pope: amoral spies and saboteurs capable of any evil in the service of their master. Did the Swedes invite a group of probable spies into their military defenses, as a courtesy, because they thought the Jesuits might be interested in something they dug up? Did the Swedish commander pick out one of the better fossils and send it to the Habsburg Emperor, the leader of the enemy alliance, out of a sense of good sportsmanship? The earliest account of the discovery, was written by Matthew Merian six years after the fact, and makes it sound as if that's exactly what happened. What's more likely, is that the Jesuits collected the bones after the Swedes were gone. By then, they would have been exposed to the elements for eight months and the teeth would have been the best prizes left among the remains. It's also likely that it was the Jesuits who sent the a tooth to the Emperor and not the besieging Swedes who did so. Sadly, there are no records to confirm this at the abbey, now owned by the Benedictines.
Matthew Merian, Theatrum Europaeum, 1651. "Truthful size and image of a tooth, from that broken body which was dug up at Krems in lower Austria in the year 1645 weighing eight and a half medical ounces or one half pound." Source.
Merian's description of the discovery and the bones is short--about 350 words--but he was a first-rate engraver and produced a detailed image of the tooth at the abbey. Merian made no attempt to explain the giant bones and teeth, however the implied explanation is that they are the remains of a giant human. Any modern zoologist or paleontologist will be able to identify the tooth at a glance; it comes from some kind of elephant. At a second glance, they will tell you that it is the tooth of a mammoth. Merian could not have made the mammoth identification, the word would not be introduced into Western Europe until forty years after his death and even then it would only apply to the ivory. If any ivory was recovered with the Laimstetten bones, Merian never heard about it. Even identifying the bones as elephantine would have been difficult for him. In his day, only a handful of elephants--assuming you have very large hands--had made it north of the Alps. Even written anatomical descriptions of elephants would not be available until after his death.
Petrus Lambecius (Peter Lambeck), Commentariorum de augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarese Vindobonensi, 1674. "Tooth of twenty three ounces, found in the year 1644 at Krems." Source.
In 1664, Emperor Leopold I hired Peter Lambeck to be his royal librarian and court historiographer. In this role, one of Lambeck's primary duties was to organize and catalog the Emperor's various collections. The Krems tooth appears in the first volume in a chapter dedicated to giants' teeth, a bucket of three hundred year old grain, and a two-headed chicken. The grain and the chicken were both normal sized. Lambeck barely mentions the actual teeth in the collection writing, instead, an extended meditation on the nature of giant teeth. Were they the teeth of true giants, tricks of nature (i.e., stones shaped like bones), or were they the teeth of some other animal, like a whale, elephant, or Carpathian dragon? In his use of extended block quotes from St. Augustine, Athanasius Kircher, and others, Lambeck would have been a natural born blogger. As to the Krems tooth, Lambeck gives a one sentence description of the discovery, misstating the year as 1644, and provides an illustration.
Happelius (Eberhard Werner Happel), Größte Denkwürdigkeiten der Welt oder so genannte Relationes Curiosae, 1689. "Giant Tooth." Source.
The next mention of the Krems giant comes in the popular journal Relationes Curiosae by the novelist and historian Eberhard Werner Happel. Happel's description is nothing more than a paraphrasing of Merian's description. What's new is his illustration. Despite the low quality of the illustration, it is clear that this is a completely different tooth than either the Krems abbey tooth in Merian or the or the Imperial Museum tooth in Lambeck.
Writing in the next century, Hans Sloane figured that Happel's tooth was the tooth dug up at Laimstetten in 1645 and that Lambeck's tooth was a different tooth dug up the year before. Lambeck says the tooth was found "under fortifications near Krems." He doesn't say who was digging the fortifications. If you assume that it was the Austrians who were preparing fortifications, Sloan's theory makes sense. I have two problems with Sloane's theory. First, in 1644, the Swedish army was nowhere near Austria; the main theater of the war was in Northern Germany. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the Austrians would have expended much energy building fortifications four hundred miles away from the fighting. Second, I question how Happel obtained his image of the tooth. Happel spent his entire life in Northern Germany. Even if he did travel to Vienna, he would not have found the Imperial collections open to the public. I think I know where he found the drawing.
Petrus Lambecius (Peter Lambeck), Commentariorum de augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarese Vindobonensi, 1674. "Monsterous teeth of the Ancient Giant, Og King of Basan." Source.
The illustrations of Og's tooth in Lambeck and the Krems tooth in Happel bear a strong resemblance to each other. Both show a well weathered elephant's tooth with no roots. Happel's illustration faces the opposite direction than Lambeck's, which was a common occurrence when hand engraved illustrations were copied.
After Happel, Merian's story was repeated from time to time, but no more illustrations of the teeth were made. By the end of the century, several anatomies of elephants had been published in Europe making it possible to identify the teeth. In the new century, although it was possible to identify specific teeth as elephantine, the belief in ancient giants still persisted in some circles. As late as 1764, Claude-Nicolas LeCat could get a hearing by the French Academy for his paper on giants, essentially arguing that so many prestigious authors of the past could not be wrong.
In 1703, Georg Henning Behrens made a charming argument against the teeth coming from giants. Behrens did not deny the reality of giants, he simply thought the teeth were too big. Behrens reasoned that Og was the biggest man in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, it is written that his bed was nine cubits long--thirteen or eighteen feet, depending on your cubit. Since beds are always longer than their owners, let's say he was eight cubits tall (a normal man is four and a very large man might be five). If we assume both Og and the Krems giant had the same basic proportions than a normal man, we find the Krems Abbey tooth is three hundred, ninety-six times the size of a very large man, which is clearly ridiculous.
The Kremsmünster Abbey tooth identified by Othenio Abel in 1912. Source.
In 1905, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel traveled to Kremsmünster abbey to help Fr. Leonhard Angerer organize their fossil collections. Abel had gathered many of the items in the collection, including a complete cave bear skeleton, which he mounted. Abel had a special interest in mammoths, having hypothesized that pygmy mammoths were the source of the cyclops legend. Abel had read about the 1645 discovery and decided to try to identify the tooth in question. By then the abbey had accumulated a few more giants' teeth. In 1770, a merchant named Meyer in Krems found six mammoth teeth while digging a cellar and donated them to the abbey. By comparing the Merian drawing with the teeth in the Abbey collection Abel found one very good candidate for the Laimstetten tooth, but Fr. Angerer had doubts. The tooth that Abel identified weighed 628 grams. Some bits probably fell off over the years, but not enough to make a big difference. Merian gives two wildly different weights for the tooth. In the text he says it weighed five German pounds, about 2800 grams. On the illustration he says it weighed 8.5 medical ounces, 256 or 297.5 grams, depending on which system he was using. Neither measure is even close to Abel's tooth. The best we can say about the tooth that's currently on display at the Abbey is that maybe it is the right one.
The anonymous Swedish soldiers and Herr Meyer have not been the only ones to find ancient bones in the Krems district. Many mammoths have been dug up along that stretch of the Danube over the years along with thousands of human artifacts. Hunting camps have been identified and, in 2005, the grave of two human babies, probably twins, was discovered. The two had been sprinkled with red ocher and covered with a mammoth scapula. So far, no new human giants have been found.
Today is a special day
I woke up this morning to find that it had snowed in the night. Not a lot, maybe a half or three quarters of an inch. This the only snow I've seen here this season. It's melting away and will probably be gone by dinner. The only real problem with the snow is that it took out the power. The computer has a good battery and I can get a wireless connection with my phone, so no problem there. But this has meant no stove and no stove means no coffee and that is problem. About a half hour ago, I couldn't stand it anymore and I went out to get a latte (a treat I very rarely allow myself).
Oh yeah, today is also my tenth blogiversary. Maybe I'll fix something special for dinner.
Labels:
anniversaries,
blogging
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Mini-Snopes: Congressional pay edition: again
I've run into two different versions of this in the last few days. I suppose it's tied to the same populist frustration as the last one.
Let's be clear. Neither members of Congress, nor the President, nor the Vice President get their pay for life. That is bullshit. Think about it for a minute. Do you really think some one-term, House member is going to get his pay for life after only "working" for two years? Even if you're going to be extra cynical and say "they would if they could" the correct answer is, they couldn't and they never will.
Members of Congress get a civil service pension just like the person delivering your mail or sending you your tax return does: it's a formula based on the number of years they worked for the government times their highest pay grade times a fractional multiplier. The total cannot equal their final pay, even if the were boyhood friends with Jefferson Davis like Strom Thurmond was. Ever since they began to pay for Social Security and Medicare in 1984, they have been eligible to collect from them.
I'm all for economic populism, but let's focus on the right things. How much pay Congress makes is not important. How much pay you make is. How much Social Security and Medicare your parents, grandparents or you collect is. How much food, rent, and medical support other vulnerable American get is. If you've fallen into the the trap of hating the poor, then do it for the veterans. Many of them are poor, old, hungry, and sick. Everyone loves the veterans, in theory. It's too bad they don't care as much for the civilians that the veterans were protecting.
Labels:
mini-Snopes,
politics,
populism
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