My Declaration of Dependence

James Duane Bolin

“Home and Away”

My Declaration of Dependence

            We celebrate Thursday on the Fourth of July our birth as a nation, our independence from a distant and tyrannical government that failed to protect our natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Around this time of year we tend to contemplate Thomas Jefferson’s paraphrase of the philosophy of John Locke.

In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote about independence: “WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of the Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.”

            Jefferson’s declaration made a strong and sure argument for independence, but it seems to me that during the trying times of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made a strong and sure argument for dependence, dependence on each other as a union of people and dependence on a higher power. Lincoln wrote and spoke in the Gettysburg Address “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

            According to Lincoln, our government was established “of the people, by the people, for the people.” We learn about independence from Jefferson, but we also learn about dependence from Lincoln. As much as we cherish independence and individuality in America, we live, after all, in community with each other. Writers such as Wendell Berry have written about the local economy that helps to sustain us, and the local community of which we depend. As much as we tout the new global economy, in times of crisis we turn not to the far-flung world for comfort, but to our immediate family and friends. Perhaps we need a Declaration of Dependence to go along with our Declaration of Independence.

            I know that during a health crisis my family and I learned a great deal about dependence. We learned how much we took for granted our family, neighbors, and friends, how much we had come to depend on them.

            Over three hundred years ago, Brother Lawrence came to depend on goodness from above. In “The Practice of the Presence of God,” Joseph de Beaufort, Brother Lawrence’s close friend, wrote that in the monastery, “even when he was busiest in the kitchen, it was evident that the brother’s spirit was dwelling in God.”

Brother Lawrence came to depend on God even while he performed the most menial of tasks. De Beaufort wrote that Brother Lawrence “often did the work that two usually did, but he was never seen to bustle. Rather, he gave each chore the time that it required, always preserving his modest and tranquil air, working neither slowly nor swiftly, dwelling in calmness of soul and unalterable peace.”

            Our thoughts have turned of late to Thomas Jefferson and the independence we share as a nation, but our thoughts also turn in gratefulness to dependence on our community of family, neighbors, and friends.  And like Brother Lawrence, this writer is learning to depend on another source for courage and strength. Such is my Declaration of Dependence.

Duane Bolin is Professor Emeritus of History at Murray State University.  Contact him at jbolin@murraystate.edu

James Duane Bolin

“Home and Away”

Murray Ledger & Times

 

[This brief series on the Civil War ran in 2011, the first year of the 150^th commemoration of the war. Of course, the remembrance of the war will never end, but to bring an end to the sesquicentennial commemoration of the war in this column, I have decided to run this brief series again. The war rent the nation, but it especially split apart the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and the repercussions we still feel today.]

 

A Divided Kentucky

 

            Historian Thomas D. Clark referred to Kentucky as a “land of contrasts.”  Never were those contrasts more evident than during the Civil War.  Kentucky novelist John Fox, Jr. wrote, “When the great news [of the war] came, it came like a sword that, with one stroke, slashed the state in twain, shearing the strongest bonds that link one man to another.”  Father fought against son, brother against brother.  Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge of Lexington, perhaps the leading voice for the Union in Kentucky, even though he owned over thirty slaves, saw two sons ride south, and two sons ride north.  His nephew, John C. Breckinridge, former Vice-President of the United States and now U. S. Senator, explained, “I exchange with proud satisfaction a term of six years in the Senate for the musket of a [Confederate] soldier.”  Even President Lincoln’s family was divided.  Mary Todd Lincoln had a brother, three half-brothers, and the husbands of three half-sisters who took up arms against the First Lady’s husband.  Again, John Fox, Jr. wrote, “As the nation was rent apart so was the Commonwealth;  as the state, so was the county;  as the county, the neighborhood;  as the neighborhood, the family, so brother and brother, father and son.”

            Of course, the war also had an impact on those left behind.  One wife wrote, “even as I write my eyes are blinded by tears and every breath I draw, every throb of my heart is a passionate prayer for your safety.”  Still, the lives of women were changed forever as they assumed leadership roles on farms and in towns and cities that had once been reserved for men only.

            In military action, soldiers clad in blue and gray fought over 400 battles and skirmishes all over Kentucky, from Columbus, “The Gibralter of the West,” to Bowling Green in the center, to Mill Springs in the East.  Exotic names such as Felix Zollicoffer and Braxton Bragg and Don Carlos Buel and Albert Sydney Johnston played significant roles on various battlefields.  At the Battle of Richmond on August 30, 1862, one Confederate soldier remembered, “We charged through the open field . . . and scattered the enemy. . . . We mowed them down like grass.”  At Perryville, the most devastating engagement on Kentucky soil with 4,200 Union casualties and 3,400 Confederate losses, a survivor recalled that “In every hospital that could be established, there was piles of arms and legs as high as tables.”  Another said that “The ground all around was slippery with blood.”

            The Battle of Perryville (October 9^th and 10^th, 1862) ended in a draw, but with the rapid withdrawal of Confederate troops, the South never mounted another major offensive in the state.  Instead, Confederate raiders such as “the Thunderbolt of the South,” John Hunt Morgan, a former Lexington hemp merchant and the grandson of a millionaire, frustrated the Union occupiers with sweeps through the Commonwealth, destroying military stores, capturing prisoners, and stealing horses.  Unionists chanted this jingle to express their contempt of the man they dubbed “the King of the Horsethieves”:

“John Morgan’s foot is on thy shore,

His hand is on thy stable door,

You’ll see your good gray mare no more

He’ll ride her till her back is sore

And leave her at some stranger’s door

            John Morgan.”

            The Union had an answer to Morgan in Col. Frank L. Wolford of the “Wild Riders” of the First Kentucky Cavalry (USA), but Wolford was eventually dishonorably dismissed over comments he made about Lincoln after Kentucky African Americans were allowed in the Union army.  The Civil War in Kentucky represented nothing less than a revolution.  And most white Kentuckians rejected the revolution as we shall see next week.

Duane Bolin teaches in the Department of History at Murray State University.  Contact Duane at jbolin@murraystate.edu

 

My Heart and Hers Are the Same

I’ve written it before and I’ll write it again;  Evelyn is the rock of our family.  She is the steady one, the strong, remarkable woman who remembers what to do and when.  It is not the professional historian in the family who serves as the keeper of the family history, but Evelyn, who guards it carefully and zealously.  In our family, Evelyn is the keeper of Christmas and Easter traditions.  She and her three sisters—Rebecca and Marilyn and June—and her extended family maintain a close, loving relationship.

Wesley and Cammie Jo love and adore her, and so do I.  My claim to fame is that I know what she is thinking, even while she is thinking it;  she does not have to utter a word.

 My favorite Avett Brothers songs are “I and Love and You” and even though Evelyn and I were married in December, “January Wedding.”  In “January Wedding,” one of the brother’s sing:

“She’s talkin’ to me with her voice

Down so low I barely hear her

But I know what she’s sayin’

I understand because my heart and hers are the same.”

After we married in 1982, I often quoted the Robert Browning lines to Evelyn as I reveled in young love that I knew would mature and deepen through the passing years:  “Grow old along me!  The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.  Our times are in his hand, who saith, `A whole I planned, youth shows but half;  Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!”

I still believe the truth in those Browning lines, but while I do trust God, I have to admit that I am also sometimes afraid.  One thing that I was not afraid about was the recent hullabaloo about the world ending on May 21.

When a church member asked a wise minister whether he was a premillenialist or amillenialialist or a postmillenialist, the minister assured his inquisitor that he had read the book of Revelation and that he was a panmillenialist.  He said that the Lord would make sure that it would all pan out in the end.

As I have revealed to you before when I am fearful or anxious about other things, I turn  to my faith and to Evelyn and then to Wendell Berry.  Berry has surely written about his relationship with Tanya in his poem “They Sit Together on the Porch,” but he has also written unawares about my relationship with Evelyn in a few years.  We are not far away, after all, from an empty nest.

“They sit together on the porch, the dark

Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.

Their supper done with, they have washed and dried

The dishes—only two places now, two glasses,

Two knives, two forks, two spoons—small work for two.

She sits with her hands folded in her lap,

At rest.  He smokes his pipe.  They do not speak,

And when they speak at last it is to say

What each one knows the other knows.  They have

One mind between them, now, that finally

For all its knowing will not exactly know

Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding

Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.”

“One mind between them, now.”  “My heart and hers are the same.”

When it comes to a love so fine and deep, both Wendell Berry and the Avett Brothers have written a great truth.

Watching the Road Rush By

It seems that as I write this “Home and Away” column week by week I spend more time writing about home than away.

Perhaps that is how it should be, because I love home so much.  I love to travel, to be sure, and in a few weeks I will be going on a sure enough adventure for an American historian, a trip to Beijing and Xian, China with several other Murray State faculty and staff members.  This will be the trip of a lifetime for me;  I will visit places that I have only read about or taught about or seen on television.

 Of course, with email and texting and international cell phone packages, it is much easier now to keep in touch with loved ones back home, and to help my family who are unable to go with me this time to experience the things that I am experiencing, at least vicariously.

I have just returned from another trip to Lexington, two within a week—one, my very first meeting of the Kentucky Oral History Commission and another, an editorial board meeting of the University Press of Kentucky.  These trips to Lexington are not unfamiliar to me, and I am never surprised by the distance.  One of the charms of Murray, Kentucky is that it is centrally located—four hours from everywhere (except, of course, Nashville).  Usually, of course, I drive myself.

Rare are the times that I have been able to sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.  During such a trip, I read for a while, but then enjoy the luxury of peering out the window at a pleasant western Kentucky landscape.

In the passenger seat, one is immediately made aware of wider vistas.  You look down on the scene, not exactly a bird’s eye view, but maybe that of a Kentucky thoroughbred.

In the late spring, the redbuds and dogwoods would be all but spent, but everything would still be fresh and green.  Looking away to a tree-lined horizon, the trees floated by with varying speeds, depending on the distance from myself.  I found it interesting that the nearer my gaze, the faster things seemed to pass by.

And then, looking down directly to the road beneath my window, the pace quickened still, the gray asphalt and white road lines rushing by, weaving in and out at a frantic, dizzying pace.

I had not watched the road rush by like this since childhood, when from a backseat window in our white Rambler station wagon, we journeyed from Texas to Oregon and then to Tennessee and eventually back to our Kentucky home.

Unencumbered in those days by seatbelts, I hugged the right rear door, and peeked past the jackets and suits hanging from a hook above the car window.  Even though the road rushed by beneath my window, back in those days, as a ten year old boy, it seemed like I had all the time in the world.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote, I had “all my road before me.”  Now, a generation later, my grown-up life has taken on a frantic and dizzying pace, much like the road rushing by beneath the car window.

While the road stretches out before Wesley and Cammie Jo, and for hundreds of recent Murray State University graduates, it seems that for Evelyn and me, at least, great chunks of road have already passed by.

On that long ago cross country trip, only when I lifted my gaze from the rushing road so near myself to the far horizon, only when my vision took in the big picture, the great wide scene, only then did the trees and fields slow down to a manageable pace.  Some of the trees almost appeared to move forward.

Despite the distance, only when I lifted my gaze could I really see.  And today, only when I lift my gaze away from myself, only then can I really see, and only then can I really live.

Graduates Leave Remarkable Thumbprints

Saturday is graduation day at Murray State University, the May commencement that marks both endings and beginnings.

Graduate Will Pitman, for example, a Murray native, is headed for Medical School at the University of Kentucky.  Will Cartwright, from Madisonville, is bound for Lexington as well, to the University of Kentucky School of Law, but first, he will spend his summer in Washington, D. C. with two internships, one in the United States Senate and the other in the United States House of Representatives.

After a proper celebration this weekend, other young men and women Murray State graduates will end their undergraduate careers to commence careers or graduate schools all over the United States and indeed the world.

Our high school daughter, Cammie Jo, just experienced another sort of celebration, her junior/senior prom.

This is, after all, a season for celebration, and in celebratory times such as these, deep insight sometimes is revealed.  Abraham Heschel, a Jewish rabbi, remarked that “true insight is a moment of perceiving a situation before it freezes into similarity with something else.”

The writer of one of my Sunday school lessons paraphrased the rabbi’s statement.  “Celebration,” he wrote, “is a moment of perceiving a situation before it freezes into similarity with every other experience in our past.”

Celebrations help break up the hum-drum tick-tock of our lives.  We set these times aside to remember the past, to revel in the present, and to anticipate what the future might hold.  In a sense, a celebration serves as a culmination of all that has gone before.  The prom represents the social event of the junior or senior year.

A graduation or commencement is the academic culmination of four years of homework, research papers, and examinations.

Dr. Harry Spalding, a Kentucky family doctor and at one time the mayor of Bardstown, was also a poet.

His collection of poetry, “Tales of a Kentucky Town,” includes a poem about the last days of the old Bardstown Preparatory School for Boys.

One of my former students, Jen McPherson, now a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, quoted from Spalding’s “The Last Prep Man” in her research report on Nelson County in my History of Kentucky class.  The poem gives a note of finality at the last commencement of that venerable institution:

“And now he was the very last

Of all that he’d then known;

The faces, the names, the glow

In friend’s eyes, the teachers past

The span of time, the truth they’d shown,

And the voices that echo, echo, and echo.”

Certainly a sense of finality as well as celebration pervades the pomp and circumstance of both proms and graduations.

And yet, there is at the same time an understanding that there is so much more to experience and to learn.  “You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands,” wrote John Updike.  “Take it up reverently,” he advised, “for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

So, to the graduates of Murray State University, take up the rest of your lives reverently.

You will encounter millions of other thumbprints as you proceed, but you will also leave your own mark, a thumbprint like no other.

Remembering My Mother’s Hands

I remember my mother, Cammie Mann Bolin, everyday, but especially as Mother’s Day approaches my memories intensify.

My mother, born in 1921 at the beginning of the “Roaring Twenties,” grew to adulthood in the years of the Great Depression, raised with my father two boys during the Cold War, lost and mourned a husband who died on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, and then lived out her days, first alone in the house where she had lived with my father, and then at Murray’s Glendale Place, two blocks from our home, before spending time at a nursing home and in the hospital before dying at the age of 85 on August 19, 2006.

My mother worked as a schoolteacher in Atlanta, Georgia;  Martin, Tennessee;  and Fulton and Dixon, Kentucky.  She also worked as an assistant pharmacist at Bolin’s Drugstore, as a homemaker, and then as a substitute teacher after my brother and I had grown up to honorable manhood (we hope), and married and had families of our own.

My mother worried constantly—a trait that I inherited—but through her worries she ministered consistently to those around her.

Her sweet smile could make your day.  She sent cards penned in her elegant hand, remembered others in her daily prayers, which more accurately would be described as her hourly prayers, for she followed the Biblical injunction to pray without ceasing, and she made sourdough bread which she always gave away.

Back in Webster County, Mama Bo’s meals were legendary, especially Sunday dinners, which she began to prepare the previous night and early the next morning before Sunday School and church, and then completed after church, somehow before everyone else had changed into more comfortable clothes.

I remember those meals and remember the hands that made them.  I remember my mother’s smile, but I also remember her hands.  Her hands were beautiful to me, not in the usual sense of long, slender fingers, but, ironically, in the fact that her right hand was severely crippled.  Most folks thought that my mother suffered from debilitating arthritis, the way the fingers on her right hand were shaped, but she actually suffered a gruesome injury that went a long way in forging her determined character.

As a 14-year-old girl, helping her father in his meat shop in the middle of the Depression, my mother inadvertently caught her hand in a meat grinder.  The doctors in that rural 1930s outpost did what they could do, and she went through several operations, but in the meantime, not to get behind in her school work, she immediately learned to write with her left hand.

And then, after her right hand had healed as much as it would heal, she re-learned to write with her now crippled right hand.  She graduated from Martin High School as the valedictorian of her class.

The re-learning process took such patience and fortitude that is hard to imagine, but the result was that one of my mother’s distinguishing characteristics was her beautiful, flowing penmanship, a characteristic always commented on by those who received her thoughtful letters, notes, and cards.

And those notes received by my brother’s family and by mine on every imaginable occasion—birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions—in her rounded cursive handwriting, with the letters made just so, continue to bless us as we find them in desk drawers and in file cabinets today.

I remember my mother’s smile, but I also remember my mother’s beautiful hands, hands that nurtured me and loved me right up to the night that she died as I stood by her side holding her hand—her right hand—in mine.

A Writer in Search of an Audience

As a teacher and an aspiring writer I think a great deal about audience.

Who will heed the words that I say and write?  Who will participate in the discussions I plan for my classrooms at the university or my Sunday school class at church?  Who will read the words of my weekly “Home and Away” newspaper column?  Who will read the books that I hope to write?

Even now as I make my schemes—that’s the way my old professor friend and mentor and I would put it as we sat hunkered down over a steaming cup of coffee in a corner of a cafeteria, relaxed but exhausted after a day of teaching;  not talking;  not having conversation;  we sat “making our schemes”—for whom do I plan and scheme?

Who after all is my audience, that particular, unique group of individuals sitting expectantly before me on a Tuesday afternoon or on a Sunday morning, waiting to see what they will have to endure or how they will spend the time during the class, and then how they will spend their time outside of class to prepare for discussions, presentations, quizzes, and examinations.  Even now, I am trying to anticipate my audience for tomorrow’s History class.

Even now, I am thinking of the audience that is my cherished Sunday school class at my church.

Already I have read and studied several commentaries for the lesson from the first chapter of the Old Testament book of Joshua.

But now I picture in my mind’s eye each class member.  I pray for them.  And I anticipate the insights they will bring to the lesson.

Even now I am thinking about the audience gathered before me as I stand behind a podium in that church classroom, before a group of ladies and gentleman whom I love beyond measure.

And even now I am thinking of the audience for this newspaper column.  I have particular readers in mind as I write these weekly columns.  My audience includes readers such as Dr. W. J. and Martha Pitman who will sometimes call to comment on a column that they have read.

When I hang up the phone I always know more than when Evelyn handed the phone to me. And when Dr. Pitman calls—his conversation sometimes interspersed with questions and asides to Mrs. Pitman nearby—when the Pitmans call, I always feel more alive, more in tune with the important things of life:  faith, family, and friends.

I also learn more about my vocation, centered around teaching and learning, reading and writing.

So even now as I write these lines I am thinking about readers such as W. J. and Martha Pitman, who sometime this week will pick up the newspaper, sacrificing a few minutes to read some obscure and sometimes otiose column, written by a friend who loves them and their families beyond measure.

Even now I am thinking about my newspaper audience, those faithful readers taking the time to read the ramblings of a fellow Kentuckian whose values sometimes mirror their own—faith, family, and friends, teaching and learning, reading and writing.

I know one thing to be true.  At the university, in my Sunday school class at church, and in the readers of my “Home and Away” column, I have a great audience.

Now if I could only do them justice.