101 Ways, Part 97: "Fell in Battle at Molino del Rey"

For a brief intro to the "101 Ways to Say 'Died'" series, click here.

This series has featured several variations on the verb "to fall." I'm sort of surprised that it's taken me this long to add "fell in battle," but I checked the intro page and it doesn't seem that I've used it already.

Moses Emery Merrill of Brunswick, Maine was a West Point grad, though not a particularly stellar student (he graduated 37th in a class of 41). He served with the 5th United States Infantry and was killed at the Battle of Molino del Rey during the Mexican-American War.

Fort Merrill, a shortlived outpost in Texas, was named for Moses Merrill.

Moses' son, William Emery Merrill (b. 1837), followed in his father's footsteps, attending West Point. William was a much better student — he graduated first in the class of 1859 and went on to be General Sherman's chief engineer during the Civil War.

Even Shakesville's Got the Cemetery Fever

The recent eruption of cemetery news has even reached the non-history blogs I read!

If this keeps up much longer, I'm going to have to find something even more obscure in which to specialize. Such is the inclination of the grad student.

Molly Fowler Gravestone Stolen?

 Thanks to Fritz for pointing me toward this story in the comments.

On Saturday, Richard Platt, the city historian for the town of Milford, Connecticut, noticed that one of Milford's most famous gravestones was missing. The stone, dedicated to Mary Fowler (d. 1792), is famous for its epitaph:

Molly tho pleasant in her day

Was sudd'nly seiz'd and sent away

How soon shes ripe how soon shes rott'n

Sent to her grave, & soon for gott'n

A picture of the full stone is available in the Farber Collection.

Thankfully, the stone was recovered today. It seems that someone may have dragged it into the woods before abandoning it. Those things are heavy.

This is just another reminder to be vigilant when you're in your local cemetery/graveyard. If you see something amiss or can't find a beloved stone, report it! Also, if you ever see a gravestone (or part of a gravestone) in an antique store or gallery, try to find out if it's a reproduction. If you're not sure, call your local historical society, preservation organization, cemetery commissioner, or police and ask them to check it out.

Name o' the Day

From the cemetery on Bath Road in Brunswick, ME:

Anniversary

I didn't catch her (his?) last name — this marker was in a family plot and I don't seem to have a picture of the main monument.

More From Salon

The third article in Salon's series on "grave offenses" at Arlington National Cemetery is out today. I've been unimpressed by the series so far, but the newest installment does contain some actual examples, rather than vague allegations.

In 2003, Arlington workers dug into a plot that they thought was empty, only to find an unexpected casket there. The remains are still unidentified. The situation is unacceptable, but, as far as anyone knows, it is an isolated incident.

I don't mean to defend Arlington's director — he sounds like a tyrant — but I'm still not convinced that this constitutes the "malfeasance" that Salon alleges. The fact that the investigation has found only one screw up at such a gigantic, multi-century cemetery speaks to the generally high level of competence and care at Arlington. As the cemetery spokeswoman quoted in the article notes, the situation reemphasizes the need to update the records system, which is an ongoing project.

Of course, all efforts should be made to identify this unknown soldier. If they cannot identify him/her, he/she should be honored by burial in the Tomb of the Unknowns. There's an open spot.

I wonder how this story would have been different if Mark Benjamin and Salon had approached it in a less sensational, less confrontational way. Instead of accusing Arlington of "malfeasance" and punning about "grave offenses," Benjamin could have used the story of this newly discovered unknown soldier to explore Arlington's personnel troubles, budget limitations, and grave decoration policies. Instead, he went in guns blazing, screaming scandal. Instead of producing a well-written, insightful investigative report (like this one), he created a breathless, sensational piece. Piggybacking off the truly horrifying situation at Burr Oak is insensitive and irresponsible.

Salon is one of the organizations trying to prove that new media can do investigative journalism just as effectively as traditional newspapers. This series is not helping to make that case.

Hidden Gems of the Bible

America is full of Davids, Johns, and Marys. Over the past decade, a few other biblical names have gained popularity — Jonah, Levi, Jacob, etc. There has even been a slight uptick in the incidence of Hezekiahs (#929 in 2008), Ezekiels (#241), and Nehemiahs (#364).

But how many Americans really dig deep into the Bible for baby names? How many Zelophehads do you know? How many Hazzelelponis? I've never met an Epaphroditus, though I have seen a few in the records.

One I've never seen before: Mehuman.

Mehuman Hinsdell

Deerfield, MA

1746

More Cemetery News

Apparently, cemeteries are the new Michael Jackson. I've never seen so much cemetery news in so many prominent outlets in the same week. On the heels of the Burr Oak tragedy and the unproven allegations against Arlington, the New York Times has a front-page (of the online edition) piece on Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The historian in me is very pleased. The hipster in me wonders when all of these tourists will go away.

101 Ways, Part 96: Nobly Fell by the Impious Hand of Treason & Rebellion

For a brief intro to the "101 Ways to Say 'Died'" series, click here.

I love Massachusetts. One day, we're mourning the brave patriots slain by cruel, bloody, British oppressors and the next we're complaining about "the impious hand of Treason & Rebellion."

Meet Jacob Walker of Whately, MA. In 1787, Walker responded to a call for volunteer militia to put down Shays' Rebellion, an uprising of debtors in western Massachusetts that is best known for exposing the weaknesses of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation. Walker was killed by Jason Parmenter, a suspected ringleader who resisted efforts to arrest him.

Walker is buried in Hatfield, MA under a headstone that testifies to the malleability of political rhetoric in the Revolutionary era. Compare entry #28 to entry #96:

To the Memory

of

Mr JACOB WALKER

who respected by the Brave,

Beloved of his Country's Friends

Dear to his Relations,

while manfully defending

the Laws & Liberties

of the Commonwealth,

NOBLY FELL

by the impious hand

of Treason & Rebellion,

upon the 17th February AD 1787

in the XXXII Year of his Age.

Citizen passing drop a tear

And dare to imitate the BRAVE.

I am of the opinion that gravestones do not merely reflect the evolving demands of loyalty to the new United States — as public monuments, they helped to create new standards for patriotism. Whoever composed this epitaph was making a political argument and trumpeting it in a public space.

As a work of art, this stone is particularly nice. The carver — the Farber Collection is unsure whether it is John Locke or Solomon Ashley — makes lovely letters, though he could have used a once-over from a better speller. I especially like those capital As.

Mementos at Arlington

I've been reading Salon's series on "Grave Offenses" at Arlington National Cemetery and I have to say, I'm pretty underwhelmed. Despite the author's outraged tone, there seems to be little cause for the sensational titles. Coming in the wake of the Burr Oak disaster, I think it's somewhat irresponsible of Salon to sensationalize this series which, as far as I can tell, has uncovered no malicious intent or actual wrongdoing.

The first installment made a few serious (though unsubstantiated) accusations — some bodies are not buried beneath the correct headstones — that, if true, are truly troubling. Other complaints — the computer database project is taking longer than expected — are par for the course and hardly outrageous. The boss sounds like a jerk, and, should the investigation find that he did mistreat his employees, he should be punished. That said, Salon presents no evidence to back up its most sensational claims about the actual treatment of bodies at Arlington.

Today's follow-up piece examined the treatment of mementos left at veterans' graves. The author, Mark Benjamin, writes in high dudgeon about personal artifacts being "trashed" at Arlington, rather than catalogued and preserved as they are at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

The sun was out after several days of rain . . . Left out in the rain to rot were crayon drawings by children who had lost a parent, photographs of soldiers with their babies, painted portraits and thank-you notes from grade-school kids to fallen soldiers they had never known. Colors of artworks ran together. Photos were blurred and wilted. Poems and letters were illegible wads of wet paper. A worker in a brown uniform wandered among the graves, blasting the headstones with a power washer without regard to what was left of the mementos -- or the obviously uncomfortable mourners looking on. Some items got further soaked. The worker blasted others across the grass. Many of them would end up in a black trash bin in the cemetery's service area.

Benjamin goes on to interview family members who are "distraught" to discover that their grave offerings are destroyed after they are collected during regular cemetery maintenance. He is shocked at the paltry collection of artifacts preserved by cemetery staff — medals, uniforms, children's drawings — which pales in comparison to the vast collection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "What war stories had been lost forever? What words from a father to a son or wife to a husband were sitting in some landfill? What meaningful personal artifacts had been relegated to the Arlington trash bin?"

Benjamin has two major objections: the artifacts are treated disrespectfully and they are not being preserved for posterity. The first seems quite overblown — he admits that he visited after several days of heavy rain and the "disrespect" he witnesses seems to consist mainly of soggy letters that have blown about. Does he want Arlington to build a dome? And yes, items left at graves are often removed and discarded in order to keep the cemetery uncluttered. I don't think that this comes as a surprise to anyone. The word "trashed" seems harsh, but I haven't read anything that suggests to me that the Arlington staff has treated grave offerings with callous disregard.

The second complaint is more interesting to me. As an historian, I'd love to see every artifact ever created preserved, but that's a very selfish impulse.

I started out on Benjamin's side, but his over-the-top indignation lost me by the end of the article. His major complaint is that Arlington's collection policies are not the same as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's. Of course they aren't. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial's policy of collecting, cataloguing, and preserving every photograph, flower, and teddy bear left by visitors is extraordinary, not routine. The collection is vast and growing and is already a valuable resource for scholars.

Benjamin laments that no similar collection exists at Arlington, but that strikes me as an unreasonable standard. No cemetery saves all of the grave offerings — how could it? Set aside the logistics of collecting artifacts from Arlington's 600+ acres vs. the VVM's 500 linear feet, set aside the logistics of cataloging and preserving all of those tons of artifacts, set aside the fact that Arlington has never made a commitment to building a collection (in fact, they ask people not to leave items other than flowers). Should Arlington save the offerings? I'm not so sure.

What is the function of a grave offering? Is it meant for the historian's eye? Or does the historian commit an act of violence merely by gazing? Does it do its work in an archive? Or is it the exchange between the bereaved and the beloved that matters?

As historians, we want to know everything, read everything, and speak for others. We want to dig below the surface, expose everything to the light, claim understanding. It is very hard for us to accept the sacredness of silence and the utility of decay. I would like nothing better than to dig up every body in the slave section of the Newport Common Burying Ground and count the beads, examine the bones, analyze the offerings. What stories I could tell! But I have accepted that those offerings are not for me. It's why I don't support the idea that gravestones should be removed from cemeteries in order to preserve the art — decay is part of the life of that object and it can never mean the same thing in a museum as it did on a hill overlooking the harbor.

Why should we save a letter left on a soldier's grave? Why is it disrespectful to let it dissolve in the rain, soak into the soil, or fly away in the wind?

Benjamin's article reminded me of a seminar I attended when I was in high school at a local historical society. A preservationist from the SPNEA was speaking about preservation techniques for textiles and furniture to an audience of amateurs with attics full of family relics. The preservationist's specialty was quilts, and her eyes widened with wonder when one elderly woman brought forward an ancient quilt that had passed from generation to generation in her family. It was a beautiful quilt — intricate, colorful, and very, very old by quilt standards. When the woman started talking about how their family uses the quilt for their annual family picnic, the preservationist's eyes just about fell out of her head. There was a lot of stammering about wrapping it mylar and NEVER EVER taking outside ever again. The woman looked at the preservationist like she was crazy and said something along the lines of, "everyone in my family for eight generations has sat on this quilt, and you'd better believe it's going to see nine and ten."

What is the value of a quilt? Should it be protected from moths and studied by professors? Or should it decay with use by a family that values it for what it means to them, not for what it tells us about the social and cultural history of quilting?

I'm a professional scholar of material culture. I love an old quilt. I love an old letter. If I had a box full of grave offerings from the 18th century, I'd faint with delight. But I'm not troubled by the treatment of artifacts at Arlington as described in the Salon article. The artifacts are not preserved, but they seem not to be mistreated. What's wrong with that?

Verbatim Pat Buchanan

"This has been a country built, basically, by white folks in this country."

Hingham Cemetery

Last Saturday was beautiful. Since there have not been too many beautiful days this summer, I took advantage of the sunshine by visiting Hingham Cemetery. After spending nearly an hour on Rte. 3A, I was not expecting the cemetery to be lovely, but it was.

I've seen some small-town graveyards that are still in use after 300 years, but Hingham Cemetery is different. The 17th- and 18th-century graveyard has been incorporated into the landscape of the 19th-century rural cemetery to create a beautiful and interesting time-collapsed environment. In this place, gravestones from the 17th century stand just a few steps from graves so new they have not yet grown grass. It was strange, but not unpleasant.

The old section of the cemetery is located on a hill behind the Old Ship Church (1681). The oldest surviving gravestone is from 1672, with the bulk of stones dating to the latter half of the 18th century. Many of these gravestones were carved by the Pratt family, whose tiny, bewigged and bonnetted faces always strike me as funny in their exaggerated solemnity.

If you visit Hingham Cemetery, don't overlook the 19th-century sections. It's no Mount Auburn, but there are some lovely monuments, including the marble statue of Civil War-era governor John Andrew.

Confederate Tennis

Here are some incidental favorites from my recent forays into Civil War naming trends:

Confederate Tennis
white male
b. 1864
1870 residence: Grafton, VA


Lee Grant Laughter
white male
b. 1869
1870 residence: Edneyville, NC
(note: 15 people listed in the 1870 census bear the first name "Lee Grant" — all but three were born after 1861)

General Lincoln Grant Shirely
white male
b. 1866
1870 residence: Frederick Co., VA

Emancipation Coggeshall
white female
b. 1863
1870 residence: Franklin Co., OH

Secession Seigler
black female
b. 1861
1870 residence: Hibler, SC

Confederacy Cypret
white female
b. 1861
1870 residence: Baldwin Co., AL

States Rights Gregory
white male
b. 1861
1880 residence: Chickasaw, MS

Gettysburg Battle
white female
b. 1878
1900 residence: Union Church, AL
(To be fair, if my last name were "Battle," I would be hard pressed to resist doing this to my children.)

What are the rules for Confederate Tennis?

Cryptic Symbols

Most of the gravestones in Hatfield's Hill Cemetery are slate, granite, or marble, but a few of the earliest are made of local red sandstone. Several of these were carved by Joseph Nash, who seems to have been a part-time or self-taught carver. His letters are rough and his stones have irregular shapes and barely any decoration. He does seem to have embellished stones by gouging out steps in the surface of the stone — a technique often used to cut out a mistake, but seemingly employed for effect on the John Belding stone (1725).

Some of Nash's stones are embellished with strange symbols:

To me, this looks like crossed bones, a skull, an hourglass, and a pick and shovel:

If I had to guess, I would venture that Nash was attempting to copy the much more intricate stones of the Boston carvers of the late 17th century. Their stones occasionally have rows of cryptic symbols just under the death's head:

Mary Goose, d. 1690

Granary Burying Ground, Boston, MA

Richard Kettell, d. 1680

Phipps St. Cemetery, Charlestown, MA

If that's true, I would guess that Nash may have lived near Boston at one time and remembered that style after he moved west. Those symbols are uncommon on Boston-area stones carved after 1700, but Nash was carving them on his family's stones in the 1720s. This may be an example of an old-fashioned style surviving in a rural area after it has fallen out of fashion in Boston.

Yikes

 On the heels of the Burr Oak fiasco, Salon is running an article on possible misconduct at Arlington.

Lois Cook Bartlett, Matriarch

I haven't been able to track down any information on Lois Cook Bartlett of Brunswick, ME, but I was enchanted by her headstone.

LOIS COOK BARTLETT

1768-1857

Mother of

Clarissa Bartlett Spear

& Grandmother of

Elizabeth G. Spear Wing

& Great-Grandmother of

Louise E. Wing Varney

& Great-great-Grandmother

of

Luigino E. Varni Gardinier

"Arise Daughter and go to thy Daughter

for thy Daughter's Daughter has a Son."

An inscription on the gray stone underneath the marble notes that five generations of descendants attended Lois' burial.

Does anyone recognize that daughter's daughter quotation? I poked around on the internet and found a few similar quotations in New England captivity narratives, but I'm not sure of the source. It sounds scriptural, but, as far as I can discover, it isn't.

This stone is a late example of the practice of noting the extent of an elderly person's posterity on his/her gravestone. While not tremendously common, these stones crop up all over New England.

Daniel Tyler

d. 1802

Brooklyn, CT

A friend of mine who recently traveled to Utah for a grandmother's 90th birthday party assures me that modern Mormon gravestones often list the deceased person's children (you see this in New England sometimes, too). I don't know if that's a long-standing tradition that goes back to the Mormons' genealogical links to colonial New England or if it is a new trend.

Luck in the Graveyard

Pete has an unusual talent for finding four-leaf clovers. His mom has a picture frame filled with pressed clovers that he collected as a child. Whenever he accompanies me to graveyards, he scans patches of clover and, more often than not, finds one. Maybe there's something about his engineer's brain that can easily recognize patterns in the chaos — he will occasionally spot a four-leaf clover and then ask me to find it, which I never can.

Happy anniversary, Pete!

Speaking of Civil War Names . . .

. . . is Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) named for Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard?*

I ponder this question as I watch the man confess a shocking ignorance of the history of American law while on national television.

In case you haven't been watching Judge Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, I will summarize Senator Sessions' remarks:

White men are neutral. Everyone else is prejudiced. The application of American law was TOTALLY NEUTRAL AND OBJECTIVE before women, people of color, queers, and their allies started messing everything up.

I watch CNN at the gym, but I had to turn it off this morning. I really could not stand to hear Senators Sessions and Grassley accuse Judge Sotomayor of "activism" in the Ricci case when her ruling was based on precedent and law while Justices Scalia and Alito created a new standard in order to satisfy their political imperatives and bent over backwards to ally themselves with a lawsuit-happy fellow Italian-American. I'm certainly no constitutional originalist (no is, no one can be, no one should be). I just could not stand to see those smug idiots display their prejudices so baldly while simultaneously claiming to be "objective."

They live in a fantasy world, where our national aspirations have already been wholly fufilled. Sometimes I wonder why I bother to study American history, but now I know — so I can laugh in the face of anyone who says that the history of American law is a history of objective decisions rendered by impartial marble men.

Senators Sessions and Grassley (and others, I'm sure — I just didn't watch that that far) have criticized Judge Sotomayor for saying that her experiences and her individual perspective will undoubtedly color her rulings. Of course they will. Just as Justice Scalia's color his. Just as Senator Sessions' color his questions. Are they against introspection? Reflection? Acknowledgment of the inescapability of bias?

What a disgusting display of willful, partisan, racist, historically-illiterate ignorance.

*To be clear, he'd be an asshat whatever his parents named him — I just have Confederate names on the brain.

Unionist Naming in the Postwar South

There's a very interesting discussion going on over at Civil War Memory about John Stauffer and Sally Jenkins' new book, The State of Jones. I haven't weighed in on the comments thread because John Stauffer is my department chair, so I feel it would be inappropriate for me to comment. Nevertheless, I have been following the debate with great interest.


I don't have much to add on the subject of Jones County, but if there's one thing we love here at VPI, it's onomastics! In their comments on Civil War Memory, Prof. Stauffer and Ms. Jenkins ask, "How many white Southerners do you know who, in 1868, named a son after Ulysses S. Grant?"


As it happens, quite a few.

I've been working on a series of posts about pro-Union naming among white Southerners and pro-Confederate naming among black Southerners. I'm still working on compiling the comprehensive data, but I can offer a few surprising tidbits here:

1) The 1870 census shows 103 men with the first names "Abraham Lincoln," "Abe Lincoln," or "Abraham L." living in the 11 ex-Confederate states. Most of the little Abes lived in Tennessee, Virginia, or Arkansas.

 

All of the Abraham Lincolns and Abe Lincolns were born during or after the war. Some of the men named "Abraham L." were born before the war (18%), but 82% were born during or after the war, which tells me that most of them were named after Lincoln.

2) Ulysses S. Grant was also a surprisingly popular name among white Southerners. There are dozens of them. Here are a few examples:

General Grant Norton, b. 1866, McMillans, Marion Co., SC

U.S. Grant Owens, b. 1869, Hawkins Co., TN

Ulysses S. Grant Harris, b. 1866, Hill Co., TX

I count 494 men and boys named "Ulysses S. Grant," "US Grant," "Ulysses Grant," "General Grant," or "Grant" in the 11 ex-Confederate states in the 1870 census. The vast majority of those are simply named Grant.

In some states (AL, LA, FL), the number of boys named Grant born before the war was about the same as the number born after the war, indicating that those born after may not have been named for the general. In states with strong Unionist naming trends (AR, NC, TN, VA), the number of little Grants shot up during and after the war, which indicates that many of those boys were indeed named for Ulysses S. Grant.

3) Like those parents who name their children after presidents, white Unionists in the South sometimes named their children in sets:

Twins: Ulysses Grant Clem and Schuyler Colfax Clem, b. 1869, Liberty, AR

Abraham L. Smith (b. 1863), Henry Sherman Smith (b. 1866), and Ulisses S.G. Smith (b. 1869), Wittenberg, NC

 Abe Lincoln Kennedy (b. 1865) and James Sherman Kennedy (b. 1868), Union, MS

Abe Lincoln Woody (b. 1863) and U.S. Grant Woody (b. 1868), Yahoola, GA

Union Holleman (b. 1862) and Abraham L. Holleman (b. 1873), Fayetteville, AR

This is just a smattering of the pro-Union names given to white children in the Confederate and post-Confederate South. From General Sherman Dobbins of Floyd Co., VA (b. 1866) to Abe Lincoln Britt of Henderson Co., TN (b. 1866), hundreds of boys (and a few girls) wore their families' pro-Union sympathies in a very public way. Some were clustered in commuities, like three little boys named U.S. Grant (b. 1867, 1869, 1869) living in Richland, AR in 1870.

How many white Southerners named a son after Ulysses S. Grant?
Several hundred.

Note: My charts do not include Ulysses Collins, son of Jasper Collins, because he is listed in the transcription of the 1870 census as "Ulysses L. Collins." This means that my current methodology probably undercounts Unionist naming in the South. My numbers include neither boys whose names are recorded simply as "Ulysses" nor those with the middle name "Grant."