Frances Hunter

blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth

 

Frances Hunter's Journal
January 2008

Winner, Violet Crown Award for Fiction

Silver Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Finalist, Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards

 

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January 25, 2008: Searching for Paul Morphy

The recent death of the brilliant and creepy American chess champion, Bobby Fischer, put me in mind of the first great American chess player, Paul Morphy. Morphy was one of the greatest chess players of all time and is credited with revolutionizing the game in the 1850s.

I never heard of Morphy until we were doing the research for To the Ends of the Earth. Our villain, General James Wilkinson, was commander of the United States Army and a traitor in the pay of Spain. We needed to find out who was the Spanish consul in New Orleans in 1809; in other words, who would have been Wilkinson's "contact."

It turns out in 1809, a new consul, Diego Morphy, had recently taken up the post. Morphy was the son of an Irishman, Michael Murphy, who had moved to Spain in 1753. Murphy married a Spanish woman and hispanicized his name to Morphy. Eventually he became a footnote person in history by serving as the American counsul in Malaga, a port city in southern Spain. There are letters between Morphy and Thomas Jefferson in the National Archives.

Michael's son, Diego Morphy, was born in 1765. Interestingly, he married an Irish woman. The couple moved to the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo but were driven out at the time of the bloody slave uprisings in the 1790s. Diego had to hide his infant son in a basket, cover him with vegetables, and dress his wife as a market vendor to get them on to a ship going to Philadelphia. He later moved to Charleston, where he served as the Spanish consul to the Carolinas and Georgia. His wife died, and in 1797 he married a Spanish woman named Louisa Peire.

In 1809 the Morphys moved to New Orleans, where he took up the post of Spanish consul until his death in 1813. One of his sons then took over the job and kept it until 1818. The Morphys became became American citizens and permanent residents of the city. They lived at 1113 Chartres Street, which is today known as the Beauregard-Keyes house and which you can still visit. You can find some great pictures of the house (which is open to the public) and much more on a great site about the New Orleans of Paul Morphy.

Don Diego's son, Alonzo, became an attorney in New Orleans and started a family that eventually included Paul Morphy. Unfortunately, Paul's life followed a trajectory very similar to that of Bobby Fischer. Attracted to chess almost from babyhood, he began to beat world-renowned chess champions before he even reached adolescence. By the age of 22 he had conquered the chess world.

But by the age of 25 Morphy had withdrawn from competitive chess. Like Fischer he developed a disdain for the limelight that eventually made him a recluse. The Civil War blighted his family's prospects, which further embittered him. He did not engage in any work, and began to show signs of paranoia. At age 38 he was briefly institutionalized. He died of a stroke in the bathtub at the young age of 47.

You can spend hours of fascinating reading this very extensive site dedicated to documenting the life of Paul Morphy, the "pride and sorrow of chess."

January 16, 2008: Book Club Discussion Guide

Attention book club fans! A discussion guide for To the Ends of the Earth is now available.

Was Lewis Gay?

In recent years, as gays have come out of the closet and into the mainstream of American life, there's been a big effort by gays to "out" famous Americans of the past. It's easy to understand why. Gays want people to understand that they've made important contributions to American life. And outside of the arts, most of those contributions were made by people who had to hide their homosexuality.

In his recent biography of Alexander Hamilton, for example, Ron Chernow unearthed long-suppressed love letters between Hamilton and his boyfriend, John Laurens, when they were young men during the Revolution. Later in his life, Hamilton was married and had affairs with both men and women. Chernow's great biography is not prurient at all, but does show how Hamilton's constant risk-taking in his sex life was part and parcel of his character, and came to jeopardize everything else he'd worked so hard to achieve.

Of more dubious value was C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, which makes a lot out of Honest Abe's close friendship with Joshua Speed, with whom he shared a bed in his circuit rider days; his stormy marriage to Mary Todd; and his fondness for bawdy jokes. Tripp's book fails to convince because it pulls Lincoln's actions out of any historical context. Same-sex bed sharing was common on the frontier in those days; so were intense romantic friendships. In those days, sex was almost never talked about, and many people in polite society didn't even know that gays existed. This actually freed people to have close friendships in a way that we have not been since sex began to come out into the open (around the time of the Depression). Besides, in later years Lincoln often publicly introduced Speed as the man he used to sleep with, which he hardly would have done if he were worried about any scandal.

Some gay historians have also turned their attention to Meriwether Lewis. Unfortunately, very little of Lewis's personal correspondence has come to light, so the case for Lewis being gay has to be based largely on conjecture and circumstantial evidence. Lewis had certain traits that we think of today as being stereotypically gay. When he worked as Thomas Jefferson's secretary, he was a well-known dandy who wore all the latest fashions in clothes and hair style -- what we might call today a "metrosexual." Not only that, he was high-strung, temperamental, and loquacious. And one day on the Expedition, when the Corps of Discovery was pulverized by a hail storm, Captain Lewis gathered up some of the hail stones and made punch.

It's easy to make fun of this mighty thin gruel. More substantively, Lewis was never married and was notably unsuccessful with women. When he came back from the Expedition, he wrote that he was "determined to get a wife." But despite being well-built, nice-looking, and a genuine American hero, Lewis repeatedly struck out. Something about his personality sent women screaming in the other direction. After one particularly brutal dumping, in which Lewis went to the woman's house only to find she had left town in the middle of the night, he wrote glumly, "I never felt less like a hero." At age 35, he felt doomed to remain a "musty, fusty, rusty old bachelor."

Lewis's letters and his Expedition journals reveal a man profoundly uncomfortable with sex. When writing about women back home in Virginia, Lewis writes not of specific girls, but of "fair ones" and "celestial creatures." When writing about Indian women, Lewis seems positively repulsed, especially by the naked Clatsop women on the Pacific Coast, who exposed their "bubbies" and "battery of Venus" for the world to see.

There's a great discussion of Lewis's writings on sex and women in Clay Jenkinson's monography The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Completely Metamorphosed in the West. Jenkinson doesn't think that Lewis was gay, but he does think that Lewis, like his mentor Thomas Jefferson, had some serious issues that prevented him from finding love and being happy with a woman. Others aren't so sure. Brian Hall based his successful historical novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company, on the premise that Lewis was gay and had unrequited love for Clark. Lewis's suicide provides the capstone to all the conjecture. Many gays have experienced the haunting loneliness that comes with the certain knowledge of social ostracism if their proclivities became known. What better explanation of Lewis's tragic death do you need?

Well, maybe. It's certainly possible that Lewis was gay. Lots of people with his personality type and problems are. But there are also a lot of straight men who wear nice clothes, are squirmy around open displays of nudity, and can't get a girlfriend. Maybe he came on too strong. Maybe no woman could measure up to his mother. Maybe stories about his drinking and carousing got around.

Or maybe Lewis was just clueless. After all, this is the man who wrote when Sacagawea told the story of how she was kidnapped as a young girl, "I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this even, or of joy in being restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere." To say the least, this aren't the words every woman longs to hear.

If Lewis was gay, his enemies didn't pick up on it. In the Hamilton biography, Chernow provides examples of times when Hamilton's detractors wrote snidely that Hamilton "pranced" or otherwise acted "effeminate" or "womanish." A great website about Pierre L'Enfant, the architect of Washington, D.C., talks about the way George Washington and others reacted with alarm to his homosexuality. It seems impossible that Lewis's enemies, especially the gossipy and destructive Frederick Bates, would have failed to comment if they found anything gay about Lewis's behavior.

Unless more papers are found that might shed some light on this topic, all we can do is wonder about this piece of the very complex puzzle that was Meriwether Lewis.

More links:

Sex in the 1790s (From Bob Arnebeck's website about early Washington, D.C., which covers many topics, not just those about sex. Check out The General and the Plan and be prepared to spend the afternoon!)

Was Lincoln Gay?

January 9, 2008: Lewis and Clark's Virginia Roots

The roots of the Lewis & Clark expedition are planted deep in Virginia soil. The expedition's mastermind, Thomas Jefferson, was born and lived almost all of his life in Albemarle County near Charlottesville, where Monticello still stands today. In 1774, Meriwether Lewis was also born in Albemarle, just a few miles from Jefferson's majestic estate.

And if William Clark's daddy had been able to make a go of his farm in Albemarle as a young man, Lewis & Clark might have grown up as playmates. John Clark inherited property in the county and started his marriage to Ann Rogers in Albemarle County. His first four children, including the famous General George Rogers Clark, were born there. But in 1757, John moved his family to less-remote Caroline County, and William was born there in 1770. The two men didn't meet until they served together in the U.S. Army in the 1790s.

Both the Lewis and the Clark families had been involved for several generations in western expansion from the tidewater country and exploration of the mountain country to the west. Lewis's grandfather, along with Jefferson's father and others, was one of the original settlers of the mountain country that became Albemarle, and was involved in the first surveying of the land west of the Alleghenies. Lewis was also related to Dr. Thomas Walker, the first white man to find a route to the west through the Cumberland Gap.

As for the Clarks, some intriguing genealogical research implies that William Clark's grandfather may have also been involved with the Meriwether family in the original settlement of Albemarle County. And William Clark's brother, George Rogers Clark, was one of the founders of Kentucky. Trail-blazing was something that came naturally to Lewis & Clark.

There are some good websites about Lewis & Clark's Virginia roots. I like Anchored in the East, which has great genealogical information as well as maps, pictures, and information about the places Lewis & Clark lived. Lewis & Clark's Charlottesville has interesting information and video interviews with local experts.

January 2, 2008: Brave Enemies

Like most Americans, I know almost nothing about the American Revolution in the South. If it didn't happen to George Washington and the Continental Army, it didn't make the cut in school. I only realized in the last few years how important and complex the war was in the West, and still don't know anything of what happened in the colonies south of New England and Mid-Atlantic.

Robert Morgan's historical novel Brave Enemies takes place in 1780 and 1781 in the Carolina border country, where a veritable civil war has been raging for years. Rebels burn down the houses of Tories, lynch Tory men, and rape the women; Tories return the favor. Night riders terrorize the countryside, and no ordinary person can feel safe. There is no nobility or sense of fighting for freedom here, just fear, confusion, and unending retribution.

A 16-year-old girl named Josie Summers is caught up in a nightmare of her own. A strong, stoic, and thoughtful farm girl, Josie is becoming a woman, and attracting the unwanted advances of her worthless stepfather. When their relationship finally explodes into terrible violence, Josie is forced to run away into the very countryside criss-crossed by rebel militias, the British troops of the much-feared Banestre Tarleton, and the neighbor-upon-neighbor feuding that has left the Carolinas devastated.

To survive, she disguises herself as a boy, and in that guise meets another young person, John Trethman, an itinerant Methodist preacher. Each chapter is told in first-person by either Josie or John Trethman, and the contrast in point-of-view between the down-home Josie and the college-educated, tormented Trethman is very skillfully handled.

Josie attaches herself to Trethman as his assistant. I'm not a big fan of "girl disguises herself as a man" stories, because I don't find them credible. Even trained actors generally can't pull off this kind of ruse. But true to the conventions of this kind of storyline, Trethman is pretty slow on the uptake. When he finally does realize that Josie is a girl, they (not surprisingly) fall in love. Trethman's pride and fear of losing his hard-won congregations lead him to perform a sham marriage between him and Josie. They embark on a secret life as husband and wife while she continues to live as a boy to the rest of the world.

Soon, however, their budding life together is destroyed when John is arrested by British troops as a rebel organizer and taken away. A pregnant Josie is on the run again, and eventually falls in with the rebel militia under Dan Morgan, the legendary "Old Waggoner." She becomes a soldier and the young couple eventually wind up on opposite sides of the epic Battle of Cowpens. I learned later that the battle, which took place near present-day Spartanburg, South Carolina, was technically a British victory. But the Americans administered such heavy casualties -- "a devil of a whipping" -- that Cowpens later proved to have set the stage for the British defeat at Yorktown 10 months later.

There is a lot to like about Brave Enemies. The depiction of this unknown (to me, anyway) part of the war made the story of the American Revolution seem fresh and new. I had no idea of the atrocities that Americans visited upon one another in the Carolinas, much less the depredations of the British under the detestable Tarleton. Josie and John are wonderful characters, thoughtful young people with much to learn. While I still can't buy the idea that a guileless young pregnant woman could fool a bunch of soldiers into believing she was a man, Morgan made the character so delightful that I decided to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride.

Morgan's language is simple but rich, reminscent of John Steinbeck. I loved Josie's description of her unborn child as a "glowing seed," though at other times I became impatient when Morgan veered further into the self-consciously literary. The philosophical underpinnings of the story lead the reader towards a pacifist conclusion, as John Trethman reflects:

For I had come to believe that there was really no right side or wrong side in war. All killing was wrong and all hatred was wrong. I guess I had come to think as a Quaker in that way. It made no sense to kill and then kill again. Better to avoid the fight. Better to be humble and forgiving.

I'm not now and will never be a pacifist, so this and several similar passages made me want to wring Trethman's neck. Which I would consider to be a measure of the reality of the characters and the success of the book. Brave Enemies is a compelling read that will be enjoyed by fans of literary historical fiction.

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