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Summer Session Kansan Friday. July 1. 1960
Cool in Philadelphia Hot in British Empire
BY JERRY KNUDSON
THE MORNING OF July 4, 1776, promised a cool day for Philadelphia in mid-summer. When Thomas Jefferson arose at dawn in the threestory brick house at the corner of Market and Seventh Streets, he noted in his Account Book that the temperature was 68 degrees Fahrenheit. His highest reading for the day was 76 degrees at 1 p.m.
Throughout his life Jefferson was a meticulous observer of climate wherever he went, and this day at Philadelphia — when adoption of his Declaration of Independence was imminent—was no exception.
The 33-year-old delegate from Virginia dawdled on his way to the State House where the Continental Congress was meeting behind closed doors. Jefferson stopped off at a shop to pay for a thermometer he had bought earlier, and he purchased seven pairs of women's gloves for Martha, his wife of four years waiting at their mountaintop home at Monticello.
On July 4, 1776, at Oxford, England, Chancellor Lord North conferred honorary degrees on Thomas Hutchinson, late royal governor of Massachusetts Bay, and Peter Oliver, late deputy governor.
THE SHOOTING WAR between mother country and rebelling colonies had been going on for more than a year since the clash at Lexington and Concord, but it was a quiet day in the Empire.
The year 1776 was a fateful one for Thomas Jefferson, but he had greeted its early months with usual calm. The war was brought to Virginia when Lord Dunmore bombarded Norfolk, but at inland Monticello the fighting seemed remote.
Lieutenant of militia Thomas Jefferson dutifully listed the volunteers from Albemarle county, but he also tapped a keg of Madeira wine, vintage 1770, began to stock his hilltop plantation with deer and rejoiced that his prize horse, Fearnought, had added another foal to his stable.
At Shadwell, his boyhood home just down the valley. Jefferson's mother had died in March at the age of 57. In his papers, Jefferson recorded the happening with characteristic reticence about personal matters.
THE YOUNG VIRGINIAN was to have returned to the Continental Congress at that time, but one of his blinding headaches, probably migraine, kept him bed-ridden for five weeks.
By early May he had recovered and with his Negro servant Bob he set off for Philadelphia. He would have preferred to have gone to Williamsburg where the most distinguished of the Virginia Revolutionary conventions was assembling, but he accepted his role at Philadelphia without complaint.
Then events moved rapidly. On May 15, 1776, the Virginians assembled at Williamsburg instructed their delegates at Philadelphia to move for secession from the British empire. The "Common Sense" of Thomas Paine was having its effect.
On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced his famous resolution for independence. The inherently shy Jefferson did not participate in the debate on the resolution which took place several days later.
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS decided to postpone action on the resolution until July 1. In the meantime, a committee was appointed to draft an accompanying declaration. The committee consisted of Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston.
In the 17 days between June 11, when the committee was appointed, and when it reported to Congress on June 28, Jefferson labored over his draft of the document on a folding writing-box which the cabinet-maker Benjamin Randolph had made from Jefferson's own drawing.
In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson drew from George Mason's Declaration of Rights and the list of charges against George III which Jefferson had sent to the convention at Williamsburg.
SIGNIFICANTLY, JOHN LOCKE'S phrase of "life, liberty, and property" was changed to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Later, Jefferson recalled that he had endeavored "Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take."
Historians snigger at the validity of the charges lodged against the British monarch, but the fight for independence had to be personalized, and every one of the grievances can be traced to a specific happening.
TEN YEARS LATER, Thomas Jefferson met George III face-to-face, and the American's opinion of the Briton was unchanged.
Antiquarians haggle about celebrating July 4 as the birth date of the American nation.
Intent of separation from the empire was established on July 2 when Lee's resolution was adopted.
On July 4 the delegates were merely voting to accept or reject the written declaration. Even so, the action of July 4 did not become unanimous until July 15 when New York finally conceded to join her sister colonies.
The Declaration of Independence was not made public until July 8 when it was first released by the Philadelphia Committee of Safety.
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS did not order the document to be engrossed on parchment until July 19, and Jefferson himself could not have signed it until Aug. 2.
But for better or worse, July 4 has become the prime American national holiday. It really matters little that July 4, 1776, was only a day among many in a chain of events that was to rend the mighty British empire.
What matters are those immortal words of Thomas Jefferson which remain the essence of the American ideal:
"... these truths (are) self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
THOMAS WOLFE, by Elizabeth Nowell. Doubleday. $5.95.
In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald, never the warmest friend of Thomas Wolfe, wrote Wolfe a friendly letter in which he advised, as a novelist himself, that the North Carolinian become more of a "leaver-outer" than a "putter-inner." Fitzgerald used Flaubert as his model, heaping criticism upon Zola, and, by implication, Wolfe.
For Wolfe was a great "putter-inner." He was a magnificently designed man who wanted to eat up and drink up all the world, especially America, and write about all of it. He might stand on a ferryboat, trying to inhale all the salt air of the ocean. He might feel the warmth and beauty of a Midwest cornfield, the most American thing in America to him. When he visited the mighty Redwoods of California he tried to embrace one of them, and then lay on the forest floor for an hour, just taking in everything about him.
ELIZABETH NOWELL, who has edited the Wolfe letters and who had close publishing relationships with Wolfe, has written a fine biography of Wolfe. To the best of my knowledge it is THE book about Wolfe. One reason it is such is that Miss Nowell often lets Wolfe tell the story, out of his letters, his celebrated Purdue speech delivered a few months before his death in 1938, his "Story of a Novel" and his four great books.
Miss Nowell grasps this important aspect of Thomas Wolfe: the fact that he tried to include everything in his books as he tried to include everything in his life. Wolfe in time will compare favorably with Whitman. Like Whitman he wrote about and catalogued and listed everything within his ken. He wanted to eat all the food and drink all the liquor and sleep with all the women and ride all the trains and visit all the cities and read all the books.
BESIDES BEING a "hungry Gulliver," which another has called him, Wolfe was a paranoiac and an insecure man going from father-substitute to father-substitute. He sensed this need for a father; whether he sensed his persecution mania is another matter. He turned on one father-substitute, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, because he felt that Perkins was persecuting him. He broke up a party at the Sherwood Andersons when Mrs. Anderson observed that southerners who could not denounce Wolfe for other reasons were referring to him as Jewish.
In his tirades he was as wrathful a figure as old W. O. Gant himself, the sculptor-father of "Look, Homeward, Angel." He was a good deal like his mother, too, and though he seemed to fling his money around he held to it as closely as Eliza Gant held to hers.
He must have been a frightful, yet exciting, person to know. Big, clumsy, unruly yet sensitive, he was making an impression with his latent genius as early as his years at Chapel Hill. Then at Harvard, in Baker's celebrated Workshop 47; at NYU, where he taught English: in Brooklyn; back in the South years later; in Europe, particularly Germany, many times — this gargantuan writer ranged and ranted about his world.
PERKINSWOULD ask him to cut 50,000 words from the long "Of Time and the River," and Wolfe would return with 75,000 words more. A critic would praise a Wolfe novel and chide Wolfe in one critical sentence, and Wolfe would take that one sentence and brood over it and get drunk and try to quit writing and pour out his soul to his mistress, Aline Bernstein, or the forever embattled Perkins.
This is an excellent biography about a great man. Fifteen years ago one might have to apologize for being a lover of Wolfe. There is no apology here. Thomas Wolfe looms larger and larger all the time, his stature in literature as giant as was his stature in life.
PAT GARRETT, by Richard O'Connor. Doubleday, $3.95.
Pat Garrett is the villain among western marshals. Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and the many fictional additions via television are in the true heroic mold of Gary Cooper and John Wayne. But Garrett's name shall live in infamy. He killed Billy the Kid.
WHAT HE KILLED was little better than a coyote, the worst marauding coyote, at that. But Garrett was hated and reviled, denounced in newspaper editorials, victimized in anonymous letters, scorned on the streets of New Mexico villages.
Richard O'Connor has produced in "Pat Garrett" an interesting though minor treatment of the man who killed Billy. O'Connor finds it necessary to write as much about Billy, and other personages, as about Garrett, for Garrett is not a character to grasp the imagination. Garrett did not call out the buck-toothed killer on a dusty street at high noon, but waited in a darkened room of a ranch-house and shot Billy as he entered. One would gather from denunciations of Garrett at the time that he owed it to the community to let Billy shoot him down, as Billy surely would have done.
THE STORY OF the search for Billy is still of epic scope. And the book goes downhill after that. Garrett became mixed up in Uvalde County, Texas, affairs (one of his friends and associates was an apple-cheeked young lawyer named John Nance Garner). He tried to solve the still-unsolved-today slayings of Judge Albert J. Fountain and his son. And he himself was somewhat mysteriously slain.
A footnote to history concerns the presence in the cast of characters of one Albert Fall, Democratic politician and opportunist in turn-of-the-century New Mexico. This is the same Albert Fall who switched to the Republican party and got his name into the Dictionary of American Biography by the celebrated and infamous Teapot Dome finaglings in the Harding administration.