Sunday Morning

Silent Saturday

Picking Blueberries

We went blueberry picking over the weekend. It was a beautiful day, 75 degrees with a light breeze and low humidity. Perfect weather for being out, and since the blueberry farm was open for the first day of the season, picking was unusually easy.

My lady friends went straight to the task while I documented the outing.

 If you're three, there is a rhythm to picking: one in the bucket, two in the mouth, one in the bucket, three in the mouth ...

"And the problem with that is?"

William Anderson Hatfield, revisited

I am forever amazed by this medium. More than a year ago I posted a blog about William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, my great-grandfather's first cousin. It got the usual, few visits to which I have become accustomed. We're not doing this to become rich and famous, right? I was happy. But then last week a cable television channel ran a three-part miniseries on the Hatfield-McCoy feud and suddenly a year-old blog becomes popular.

Devil Anse, better known as Kevin Costner these days, became an item of interest. Very quickly that year-old blog had registered more than 1,500 visits! That may not be a lot for some of you bloggers out there, but for me the numbers were astronomical!

Now if each of those who visited my blog in search of Devil Anse had contributed only one dollar, we would have more than enough money to really fix up his family's cemetery that is so in need of attention.

Disclaimer: I have not seen the miniseries. We watch almost no television to begin with, plus I have very little respect for Hollywood's portrayals of historic events and characters. The Hatfield-McCoy feud is the most famous of the many post-civil-war family vendettas simply because accounts of it sold newspapers in New York City. While there were a very few events of extreme violence scattered through the period, twelve people died after all, there also were long stretches of time, years, in which nothing happened. That did not deter the reporters who filed their stories anyway, making up atrocities perpetrated by ignorant, bare-foot hillbillies to titillate their audience. That fiction persists in accounts being written today. And since "hillbillies" are the last ethnic group that is socially acceptable to ridicule, there apparently is an audience still.

Idle, Idyll

Memorial Day is behind us, so despite what the almanac may tell us, summer is here. That means we now have an excuse for being idle, for taking things easy, for loafering. I prefer to think of it as an excuse to appreciate my surroundings.

Leonidas Polk, Bishop and General

When I visited the church I posted yesterday, St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harrodsburg, KY, I saw this historic marker next to the street. I had been aware of Bishop Polk previously, but the marker set me wondering anew about why a bishop would go off to war. Yes, I knew they did such things during the Crusades, but this was in the middle of the 19th century. Hadn't the church gotten beyond that by then?

Seen through twenty-first century eyes, Bishop Polk was a man of great contradictions. He was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY, but quickly resigned his commission to enter seminary to become a priest. He married the great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan preacher and theologian. Ordained in 1831, he moved his family to Tennessee the following year. By 1840 he was reported to be the owner of 111 slaves. The U.S. Census of 1850 listed him as owner of 215 slaves. In the interim, he had been elected Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana. He was one of the founding bishops of The University of the South, at Sewanee, Tennessee, which was founded with secessionist motivations.

When Louisiana seceded from the Union, Polk also separated the Diocese of Louisiana from the Episcopal Church of the United States. He then wrote to his former West Point classmate, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, offering his services to the Confederate Army. Davis named him a Major General. Polk served without distinction, but still managed to be promoted to Lt. General, due to his friendship with Davis. He was killed by Union artillery on June 14, 1864, near Marietta, Georgia.

Looking back, Bishop Polk seems to have been a man of great ego and even greater ambition. It appears he had little respect for his superiors and their orders, with the result that he was blamed for both defeats and lost opportunities on the battlefield. Yet he apparently was loved by his men and greatly mourned when he died. Perhaps he was best suited to serving the church, after all. But then there's that small detail of owning all those slaves.....

Sunday Morning