Memories of my visit decades ago to George Washington’s home are hazy. I remembered that Mount Vernon is situated on a beautiful section of the Potomac, but I could have given no detailed description of the house or its grounds. But I did carry away one firm memory. I asked a guide about George Washington’s slaves. She gave a curt, dismissive reply, “General Washington only referred to his ‘servants.’” How dare I refer to “slaves”!

Mount Vernon today sings a different song about slavery. I found on a recent trip that not only was slavery at Mount Vernon now openly acknowledged, the importance of slavery to Mount Vernon was stressed. There was a guide in each room of the house, and many talked about slaves. The nearby quarters that housed the slaves who worked in and around the house contained many informative descriptions of what life was like for these African-Americans. Special presentations are made throughout the day at Mount Vernon. When I was there, many of them were about slavery. The “Women of Mount Vernon Tour,” for example, included a discussion of “enslaved women who made [Washington’s] hospitality possible.” I could have had an “immersive experience as Christopher Steele, General Washington’s enslaved manservant, goes about his daily activities.” I could have dropped in to “hear from Caroline Branham, enslaved housemaid and seamstress.” I could have participated in the daily “Tribute at the Slave Memorial and Cemetery.” I could have walked with others on the “Enslaved People of Mount Vernon Tour.” An exhibit in the educational center extensively explained and explored slavery at Mt. Vernon and in George Washington’s life.

Since slavery is an integral part of American history, I appreciated that Mount Vernon now considers slavery something that should be discussed and studied. We don’t really understand our country unless we know about slavery. But as I went through the exhibits in the educational center, once again I felt that although I could learn about slavery, but I could never truly understand it. American slavery rested on deeply ingrained precepts that now seem so foreign and appalling—or at least I want to believe that those precepts are now foreign and appalling—that the institution of slavery cannot really be grasped.

The cliché is that Washington had a complicated relationship with slavery, but that seemed to me just another way of saying he had a relationship with slavery we cannot understand. Try to grasp this: When he was eleven, he inherited ten slaves. What does it mean that one prepubescent boy “owned” men, women, girls, and boys? How did this affect his developing psyche? Was it better or worse for the psyche of the enslaved people to be owned by an eleven-year-old or by an adult? Did Washington as a youth ever discipline his “possessions”? Whip them himself? Have others whip them? To think about this for a few moments brings a torrent of unanswerable questions.

When Washington died, 317 slaves were at Mount Vernon and its five outlying farms. I did not learn how many non-slaves were there at Washington’s death, but surely it was many fewer, probably not one tenth as many. What did it do to a white person to be so outnumbered by enslaved people, almost all of whom, did not desire continued captivity? This “town” had to be maintained and organized. How much fear had to be instilled into the slaves to accomplish this? How was the fear instilled? Can we possibly understand the effects of slavery on the psyches both the enslaved and the non-enslaved?

Washington, the owner of slaves from boyhood to death, did not have static views about the institution. As he grew older, he stated more than once that he hoped that a plan of gradual emancipation would be adopted. Washington also said that he would not sell any of his slaves because he did not want to break up families. On the other hand, he spoke out against the “tactics” of many abolitionists, and he never publicly supported a plan of gradual emancipation, even though Pennsylvania adopted such a plan during Washington’s lifetime.

In his will, executed a few months before his death in 1799, Washington granted the manumission of his slaves upon the death of his wife Martha. Of course, this might be seen as hypocritical. He used the enslaved people during his life, and he was going to allow Martha to use them during her life, too. George and Martha would benefit from slavery as long as both should live. Therefore, only after George and Martha would suffer no “inconvenience” from the emancipation would freedom reign.

The Mount Vernon exhibits, however, suggest that a more complicated reason may have also caused the delayed emancipation.

(Continued on March 23, 2018)

She worked for a Brooklyn cultural institution. Her given name sounded like “Deema.” She explained that her father was Palestinian, and he had given her a name from his homeland. Her mother is of Italian and Irish extraction. She had named Deema’s sister Sarah. Sarah is a lesbian and did not use gendered pronouns. Deema likes Irish soda bread slathered in good butter, but she prefers pita bread for its versatility. Her mother is Roman Catholic. Deema, like her father, is a Muslim, although she is not a practicing one. She is an American. Hers is an American family.

The newsletter highlighted the part of the distinguished academic’s speech during which she said, “At this moment in time, we lawyers and educators of lawyers-to-be need to be building other bridges as well.” I thought that it was bad enough that the academic had redundantly said, “At this moment in time” without having some editor drawing special attention to it.

“Never part with a fact unless you’ve no choice.” Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach.

The server in the Hilton Head restaurant was from Jamaica. I asked her what foods she missed from the island. She said that there were not many because Orlando had a good Jamaican store, and when she visited her sister in Florida she brought a cooler to bring back the foods she missed, such as goatfish. She continued, however, that she missed the KFC from Jamaica. She maintained that it was better than any in the United States. She waxed ecstatic about the taste of Jamaican KFC. Her fiancée was coming to visit her soon, and she was happy that he was going to bring some for her. I wondered if there were others like him carrying that chicken from Jamaica and what the flight would smell like.

He was a few tables away in the restaurant—a large man, somewhat disheveled, maybe sixty. Perhaps his loud voice was necessary because he was sitting across from two women older than he, but it seemed as if it was his normal tone.  He was talking incessantly, and I could hear him say, “Dick Powell was a very good-looking man.” Then a few beats of silence. He continued, somewhat nervously, “I meant that as a moviegoer. Not as a man.”

“’You know the expression,’ Eddie said. ‘Don’t write if you can talk, and don’t talk if you can nod.’” Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach.

As soon as the doctor came into the examining room, I said the carpal tunnel surgery he had performed on me was as good as it could be. I continued, “I have never had a better outcome from surgery.” He beamed and responded, “Thank you.” Then he paused for a moment or two and asked, “You have had other surgeries, haven’t you?”

Yours truly cannot think about Ava Gardner without thinking about her body. The Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina, displayed costumes from a number of her movies, and the placard near one said that she was 5’6’’ tall and wore size six shoes. The dress indicated nothing more than an average bust size, but the waist of one gown was remarkably small. It seemed to illustrate define the term wasp-waisted. The card said that the dress measured eighteen inches at the waist. That might certainly explain why her breasts appeared bigger on the screen than the dresses indicated.

She did have an hourglass figure, but I still could not imagine a grown woman with that small a waist. That led me later to Google and websites listing measurements of Hollywood stars. (How they know these things I do not know.) One site says she wore a size eight shoe and a size six dress and had measurements of 36-24-37 inches. Another site takes an inch off her waist and says she was 36-23-37, but that her bra size was 34B. (I don’t really understand these things, but doesn’t that contradict that 36-inch measurement?) Looking at her photographs and the clips of her in movies, however, I realized it did not matter what her sizes were. She was a completely beautiful woman.

I am not sure that I could have named a single movie Ava Gardner was in before going into the Museum. She appeared in none of the movies I would have listed as my favorites, and I have little concept of her acting ability. I now seem to have some memory of her from the iconic film noir, The Killers, which made her a star and launched Burt Lancaster’s career. I may watch that again, and I might see The Night of the Iguana, which also starred Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr. I have heard that it is good. The posters in the museum indicated, however, that she was in many movies with some of the most famous actors and actresses.

The visit to the Ava Gardner Museum made me think not only about her but about the museum itself. It made sense that it was near her birthplace in Smithfield, but I found it unlikely that the town or county had spent the money to collect all that memorabilia or to produce the film about her that was being shown in the museum. I thought that the origins of the museum must be due to someone’s obsession. The strange novel, The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize, came to mind. In that novel, Kemal starts collecting objects that relate to his obsessive love of an unattainable woman. He eventually creates the Museum of Innocence from this compulsive collection. And to my surprise, I found that the novel had a reference to the Ava Gardner Museum.

I did not have to wonder long about the obsession that was the origin of the museum. The Ava Gardner Museum itself told me that the museum originated in the collection of one Tom Banks, who had met Gardner when he was twelve and she was eighteen and in her only year of college. The adolescent boys teased the college girls, and one day Ava chased Tom and gave him a kiss. (If I had met Ava Gardner when I was twelve and she was eighteen, there is a good chance I, too, would have been obsessed with her for the rest of my life. And perhaps I still would not have washed the kissed cheek.) He, not surprisingly, noticed when she did not return for her second year and then saw a newspaper article about her Hollywood contract. He immediately started collecting all the memorabilia he could find about her, and later after he was a psychologist, he even bought Gardner’s childhood home. He started a part-time Ava Gardner Museum, and after he died his wife, who apparently joined her husband in collecting anything related to Ava Gardner, donated the collection to Smithfield.

It was only some quirk that finally got me into the Ava Gardner Museum, but I enjoyed it and would recommend a visit to others. That has made me think about all the other local, specialty museums I have seen and passed by. It would not have taken much effort to stop into many of them, and perhaps at least some of them would have been enjoyable and even educational. I realized that had been true for one of my few other visits to a personal museum. It was the Toy Soldier Museum near Cresco, Pennsylvania, and I only went because the spouse and I had guests who were museum people and we knew the owner of the toy soldier collection. The visit, as it was with the Ava Gardner Museum, turned out to be a visual and informative delight. (The spouse has written about the Toy Soldier Museum and given its website in her guest post of February 16, 2018. Check it out.)

I finally made it to the Ava Gardner Museum only because we got a late start for the drive south and stopped well short of my five-hundred-mile mark. On the second day we were near the museum at noon. On the first night, we stopped in Colonial Heights, Virginia, and after we checked into a hotel, we went out to dinner at a local Outback. On the way there and back, we passed the Keystone Truck and Tractor Museum, which apparently would allow me to experience the last century’s agricultural heritage as illustrated by antique farm equipment. Alas, in a familiar story, we were there after museum hours. Now I am wondering if I will ever be back to Colonial Heights when the museum is open because I have decided, if so, I am going to stop in at the Keystone Truck and Tractor Museum.

I can cross another thing off my list. I finally went to the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina, a place that has been on my agenda for quite a while.

When I drive south from my home to South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida, I always want to get at least five hundred miles in before stopping for the night. Smithfield is the first town after that mark, and over the years I have often found a hotel near Smithfield for the night.

The first time I found myself there, the spouse and I drove into town and found a surprisingly good restaurant downtown. At other stops in or nearby Smithfield, I sought out that eating place again. The restaurant was memorable not only because the food was much better than I had expected in this town of ten thousand or so, but also because one time after we had left, we went to our car and found a host of barbecue rigs set up in an adjacent park. These were not your backyard Weber grills, but the kind that attached to the back of a truck. I had only before seen such monstrous grills and smokers on television.

I quickly learned that the next day the annual Johnston County barbecue competition was being held and that I was witnessing competitive pit masters. (I recently saw a taste test of spiral hams on a cooking show. Johnston County Spiral Ham was considered by far the best.) The fifteen or twenty participants would smoke meat during the night, and their results would be judged the next morning. Many of them displayed trophies from previous competitions. I learned about a circuit that many of them traveled. They were friendly and talkative except for one man. He had nothing to say and bullied me away from what he was doing. He somehow thought I was going to steal his secrets. He eyed me as if I, the Brooklyn boy, was a spy for another participant.

I went to bed thinking that we might come the next day and taste the wares even though I am not much of a central North Carolina barbecue fan–I don’t like that vinegar base. It started pouring after midnight and was still coming down the next morning. I thought about how miserable the night must have been for all those nice, but competitive, people, but I decided to continue on without another visit to all those smokers.

Smithfield, however, always stuck in my mind primarily because going to and coming from the restaurant, I would see on a side street—I believe it was Third Street–the Ava Gardner Museum. The thought of a museum dedicated to the glamorous Ava Gardner in this dinky town amused me. I would joke about going there, but I only passed it in the evening when the museum was closed.

The recent trip south, however, had a different timing, and the spouse and I were going to pass Smithfield at noon. We decided to make the detour. The Ava Gardner Museum was now in a different location. It no longer on a side street but on the main drag. My memory was that before it had been in a slightly seedy building that had once been a house, but it was now in a modern facility. The museum seemed to be doing okay financially.

The museum itself was carefully and tastefully laid out with well-written, informative placards accompanying the displays of letters, posters, photographs, and costumes. I was never an Ava Gardner fan and knew little about her other than she had a striking face, a beautiful body, and had been married to both Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra, who remained a devoted friend even after their divorce. I learned that she had also been married to Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader. I only knew of Shaw because he was an amusing guest on late night talk shows, often talking about his many wives, and, at least according to him, his many more girlfriends. It was only because of these TV appearances that I recognized Shaw as I entered an Appellate Division courtroom one day to argue a case. He was there I heard to hear an argument about litigation stemming from one of his divorces. True to his image, Shaw was surrounded by stunning women. (I have no memory of what case I was arguing.)

From what I learned at the Ava Gardner Museum, Shaw tried to improve twenty-five-year old Gardner’s education in their year-long marriage, and as a result she took English courses at a Los Angeles college. This made me think about the trajectory of her life as I learned it at the museum.

She was born near Smithfield in 1922 to farmers who lost their property when Ava was young. Her mother then ran boarding houses, and her father died when Ava was fifteen. This was a poor family in depressed times. I wondered how many outdoor toilets she had used, and whether she had been behind a horse in a cart more often than in a car. I would not have been surprised that when she graduated from high school she had never been in an elevator or through a revolving door.

Gardner attended a local college for a year studying to be a secretary. During that summer, she visited her sister, who somehow had made it to New York. The story then goes that she had her picture taken, which was displayed in the window of a photographic studio. People noticed. Soon she had a screen test in New York. MGM signed her to a contract, and at the age of nineteen, she moved from little Smithfield to glamorous Hollywood.

Within a decade she was one of the screen’s major stars. Besides her husbands, she had a long-time relationship with Howard Hughes and was a close friend with Gregory Peck. Later in her life, she moved to Madrid where she knew Ernest Hemingway and had Juan Peron for a neighbor. At least according to the museum, however, she never forgot Smithfield and came back even after she had achieved international fame. She is buried in Johnston County.

(Concluded on March 16, 2018 )

The development of American masculinity as revealed by the Olympics “American Miracles on Ice”: From the manly art of body checking to the domestic science of sweeping.

“But no one could tell Samantha anything: She often acted, Ruby thought, as if she were the first person on the planet to give birth to a human child, as if mothering were so sacred and rarefied, anyone who wasn’t a mother couldn’t possibly understand how profoundly it changed you.” Kate Christensen, The Great Man.

Are you like me and didn’t know what “Come at me bro” meant?

A tall, stern looking woman came into the bar. The bartender went over to her. She did not want the menu but pointed to the wall. The bartender went to the wall, got a framed certificate, and presented it to her. By then she had pulled out from a bag a shirt with the health department logo and put it on over what she was already wearing. This was a health inspection. I could feel the tension from all my friends who worked in the bar and restaurant. The inspector was still there when I left a half hour later, but the bartender, who by then was a little more relaxed, told me everything was going fine. I won’t find out for sure until I go back. As I left I realized that I do want health inspections but wondered if anyone grows up wanting to be a health inspector.

Is there a difference between a chief and a chieftain?

The opera singer was born in Alabama. Her parents were from India. She described herself as a “brown person” and said that brown people had trouble getting operatic roles, especially in Europe.

“An obsessive love of our children is proof that we are unhappy about something else, Queen Marie of Rumania once said—and who am I, are we, to argue with Queen Marie of Rumania?” Adam Gopnick, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York.

Robert Sullivan in Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants explains how a researcher trapped rats and then fed them Baltimore garbage that had come from various sources. The rats had preferences. They most liked scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese. They least liked raw beets with cooked cauliflower high on the dislike-list. Does this make you think that rats are more like you than you realized? And would the rats have reacted differently if the cauliflower had been roasted to a golden nut-brown?

IX.      Gun control advocates often seek major alterations in our gun laws, but our politicians are not ready for such changes. We can only hope for incremental improvements in gun safety, but enough of them might add up to a real difference. Increasing the age to buy assault rifles will not by itself make a huge difference in gun violence, but perhaps it will lessen gun deaths and injuries a little bit. Requiring all who buy guns to have background checks will not make a huge difference, but perhaps things will improve somewhat. Improving state reporting of felony and domestic violence convictions will not make a huge difference, but it might help some. Limiting the size of magazines will not make a huge difference, but perhaps some lives will be saved. If we could make enough little changes, we might end up strides ahead of where we are now.

Here’s my suggestion for an incremental improvement: Make it a crime to carry a gun while intoxicated. Of course, carrying a gun is not the same as using it, but even carrying one while drunk should be prohibited because the decision whether to use a carried firearm should not be made when a person is intoxicated. The consequences should be similar to drunken driving. Perhaps a first conviction would only be a misdemeanor, but just as driving licenses are suspended for a period for a DUI, the right to possess guns would be suspended for a period and all guns owned by the person placed in police custody during that time. A second conviction would be a felony, and the person could no longer possess guns. . . and might even go to jail

Frequently after a car accident, the driver gets tested for intoxication. The same should happen after gun accidents. Each year at least a few people are hurt or killed in hunting accidents when there has been too much drinking.

X.      How much, if any, difference, would various incremental changes to our guns law matter? We do not know. In fact, we know little about most aspects of gun violence, and the federal government and the NRA want to keep it that way.

A study funded by the Centers for Disease Control was published in the early 1990s. It found that having a gun in the home was correlated with an increased risk of homicide. Those conclusions, of course, undermined the NRA message that guns are needed for protection and the defense of liberty. In response to that study, the NRA pushed what is known as the Dickey Amendment. Passed by Congress in 1996, it stated that CDC funds available for “injury prevention and control” could not be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” Of course, while the offending study may have led reasonable people to think about gun control, the study did not advocate gun control, but Congress not only passed the Dickey Amendment, it also reduced the CDC budget by the exact amount the guns-in-the-home study had cost. The message became clear: no studies of guns. (The Dickey Amendment was expanded to other government funding agencies in 2012.)

The result has been that we have almost no research into gun violence. Periodically, noises are made to repeal the Dickey Amendment, but they have all been quickly beaten back. John Boehner, when Speaker of the House, memorably dismissed any such repeal by saying, “The CDC is there to look at diseases that need to be dealt with to protect the public health. I’m sorry but a gun is not a disease.”

He’s right, of course, but injuries are caused by more than diseases. Cars and roads are not diseases, but extensive research, much of which has been government funded, have made cars and roads and driving practices safer. Workplaces are not diseases, but research has made many of them safer. Guns are not diseases, but if we care about lessening gun deaths and injuries, we need to know more about gun violence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “Experience informs us that the first defense of weak minds is to recriminate.” When gun reforms are proposed, the opponents recriminate. Wayne LaPierre recently called the reformers “socialists,” but the usual recrimination is to say that the reformers are out to destroy a precious constitutional right so that the government can oppress us all. But maybe Coleridge was not entirely correct. The first defense of weak minds is to stay ignorant, and that is the official stance of our government about gun violence. A great country cannot seek to maintain ignorance, but that is what the United States does.

XI.      “[P]eople with interests to protect expect to be challenged and demand the right to assert themselves, to hold guns and fear minorities, and they call it liberty.” Adam Gopnick, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York.

VI.      Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s Executive Vice President recently said that those speaking out for gun control wish “to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedom so they can eliminate all individual freedoms.” We have often had overheated political rhetoric in the country, but I still find these claims astounding and even more astounding that people like LaPierre have convinced many others that such nonsense is true. I have yet to see any credible attempt to eliminate the Second Amendment, something that would be incredibly hard to accomplish.

I also don’t understand the basis for the second part of LaPierre’s demagoguery, which implies that gun rights are the foundation for the rest of our individual rights. I don’t pretend to be the most accomplished historian, but I have read the constitutional debate notes kept by James Madison. I have read the Federalist papers. I have read the collection of documents by those who opposed the adoption of the constitution. I have done research in American newspapers from 1765-1800. In all this reading, I don’t remember that a dominant theme was that the individual right to keep firearms was the basis of all our other rights. This claim did not seriously emerge until the end of the twentieth century.

I have also been struggling to think of examples when the individual right to keep and bear arms has preserved other individual rights. Perhaps it can be claimed that property has been made more secure by firearms, but what about all those other rights? When has carrying a gun preserved your right of free speech or your right to a jury trial?

Now try to think of when one person carrying a firearm has deprived others of their rights. Our history is filled with examples of guns used to prevent others from speaking freely or peaceably assembling. Every time a gun has been used in a robbery it has been used to deny someone’s right to property. Every time a gun has been used in a murder or wounding or even in an accidental shooting, the bearer of that gun has denied the individual rights of others. Nikolas Cruz, according to many, had a right to buy, keep, and bear an AR-15. How did that work out for preserving all the other individual rights?

VII.    The majority of the people in this country do not possess firearms and yet they are able to exercise their rights. They speak freely, go to church, and vote. Their rights have not been taken away because they don’t have a gun.

VIII.   Gun control advocates have tried to get politicians to reject money from the NRA. The real power of the NRA comes not so much from its funds but from its ability to marshal bloc voting in favor of what it considers Second Amendment rights. For example, the Colorado legislature a while ago passed gun control measures. The NRA went to work and got recall elections against some of the supporters of the legislation. Stories like that scare politicians about the consequences of opposing the NRA.

The fear of that power needs to be broken if we are ever to advance towards sensible gun measures. Here’s my suggestion: Gun control organizations should identify five or so legislative districts in each state that might be swing districts where the incumbent follows the NRA line. Time, money, and effort should be concentrated by gun control organizations on these relatively small number of elections. Gun control advocates would not have to win all these elections to have an impact. If thirty or forty state legislative incumbents lost their positions at least partly because they were allied with the NRA, the NRA would start to look less invincible. Only when legislators begin to think that they could lose their seats because of their support of the NRA will the NRA’s hold on this country start to lessen. (To be concluded on March 9.)

I.       The President and other “conservatives” are advocating arming teachers to make schools safer. We could talk about whether this is a good idea, but I am struck by how this indicates a shift in “conservative” thinking about teachers. The President maintains that we can expect teachers to be heroes because they “love” the children. Public school teachers over the last generation, however, have been repeatedly denounced by “conservatives” and others. Think Scott Walker in Wisconsin less than a decade ago. A large component of his attacks on public unions was really an attack on public school teachers. The teachers get paid too much and have cushy jobs. They are concerned about an easy job, not educating their students. And so on. The image that has been fostered is that teachers are leeches, almost the equivalent of cheating welfare recipients, and the teachers are incompetent to boot. Apparently “conservatives” now think that even though teachers can’t teach, they can shoot. (Take a guess what Florida teachers get paid. According to the Florida Department of Education, the average annual salary for a Florida certified teacher is $45,723. This is not the starting salary. That average teacher has over twelve years of experience.)

II.     Much has been said about the “warning signs” missed by the FBI and local law enforcement concerning the Parkland, Florida, shooter. But as the spouse said to me, if they had properly paid attention to this information, what could they have done? Nikolas Cruz legally owned the murder weapon and his other guns. The police could not have taken them away, and if they had tried, surely the NRA would have screamed about the violation of Second Amendment rights. What could law enforcement have done before the shootings?

In considering the “warning signs” about Cruz, there is a hindsight bias. We know that Cruz in fact slaughtered many people, and that makes the missed warning signs seem especially egregious. But we need to evaluate “warning signs” before the violence, not after. Are there signs that are good predicters of future gun violence? How often are the signs accurate? How often do they produce false positives? What are the responses that lessen the possibility of the future violence? How often are such warning signs reported to law enforcement or other agencies? What resources does it take to respond? Where do the resources come from? What responses will politicians legally authorize? How can we answer these questions without gun-related research . . . that has been banned by the Dickey Amendment, but more on that later.

III.      When we talk about victims of gun violence, let’s always include the police officers who have been gunned down.

IV.       A discussion of gun violence should recognize that there is a constitutional right “to keep and bear arms.” Those who wish to control guns better to lessen gun violence need to acknowledge that they recognize the Second Amendment and that they are only seeking to make it more likely guns will be used safely.

V.       We have only limited knowledge of the extent of the Second Amendment right. We might say that also about other constitutional provisions. Every year the Supreme Court renders decisions about the First Amendment rights of free speech and the free exercise of religion or the Sixth Amendment right of counsel, so our understanding of these provisions continues to evolve. However, these rights have been interpreted frequently by the Supreme Court and even more by the lower courts for upwards of a hundred years. We may continue to learn about the contours of free speech, but we do know a lot about that First Amendment right. In contrast, the Second Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court only a handful of times, and we know much less about its content than we do about other constitutional rights. We do know, however, that while the Supreme Court has not interpreted the Second Amendment often, the Court has indicated the Constitution allows for reasonable regulation of firearms. Just as liberals should recognize that there is a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, NRA-types need to recognize that the Supreme Court has allowed for the reasonable regulation of those arms. Both sides need to better understand the Constitution. (Continued on March 7.)

So, the New Amsterdam wall was constructed. Did it work? Did it make the village safer? Did it keep out the undesired? On one level, the answer is “yes.” No New Englanders or English ever attacked the settlement from the north. On the other hand, the New Englanders and English never tried to invade this way. Perhaps that means that The Wall was an effective deterrent, but that is doubtful. Even if enemies wanted to conquer the settlement from the north, the thought of slogging through forests and over rivers was more likely a deterrent than some planks stuck in the ground.

The Wall was certainly unlikely to be a successful defense by itself. It would only have been useful along with a strong military presence. The Wall surely could have been scaled. Fighting folks would have been necessary to repel the climbers. Furthermore, you would think that a cannonball would have gone through the wooden planks easily and that fire might have brought it down entirely. The Wall might have slowed an attack, but by itself seems unlikely to have stopped a determined force. The goal must have been to give the inhabitants time to gather their own forces to repulse an attempted incursion, not for The Wall to provide an impregnable barrier.

There were flaws in this reasoning, however. First, The Wall, as with infrastructure today, needed to be kept in good repair for it to function well, and that did not happen. Those stories about the thrifty Dutchman come into play here. Apparently, many New Amsterdam residents when they needed a shelter for Petrus the pig or Harriet the hen wondered for a moment where they would get the wood for the structure and then—aha—remembered the planks a short walk away. The Wall was also an inviting source of firewood. Planks soon were missing from The Wall. A careful eye might have noticed that whenever there was a new gap in the wall, there was freshly sawn wood in someone’s yard.

The defense strategists, however, had a bigger problem. While the English and New Englanders never breached The Wall, unfriendly Indians did enter New Amsterdam. After The Wall was built, Stuyvesant left the village taking troops to confront Swedes in Delaware. At the same time, Indians of various tribes came down the Hudson heading to Long Island for a confrontation with traditional enemies. As they crossed Manhattan outside New Amsterdam, an Indian woman was killed by a Dutchman for stealing a peach from his orchard. The Indians then stormed into the village, ransacking houses. The Wall did not prevent this. The Indians did not even have to climb or breach The Wall; they simply went around it. The Wall may have gone from river to river, but even if it extended into the rivers, it was apparently not hard to wade or swim or canoe around it. (Remember the effectiveness of the Maginot line?) In what became known as the Peach War, fifty whites and fifteen or so Indians were killed. Peace was obtained not through better border protection but with a treaty.

This Indian incursion highlighted the fact that even if The Wall had successfully sealed off the northern border, it did not change a fundamental fact of New Amsterdam’s geography. The island–surprise, surprise–was mostly surrounded by water. Why attack from the land when there were so many landing spots for boats and men?

Eventually, New Amsterdam was threatened by the English, but not from the north. Instead, the English in 1664 menacingly anchored four warships with a couple thousand men off Brooklyn at the entrance to the harbor. A quarter of those men proceeded to a ferry landing across from Manhattan. Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but not many other residents of New Amsterdam, if any, stood with him. The settlers may have thought they would have been destined to lose any battle, but it also seems that having settled in New Amsterdam, they had no great tie to the Netherlands and no great enmity towards the English. Their true bond was to their life in New Amsterdam. The English promised that they could continue with their lives as long as they swore allegiance to the English king. This was an easy choice for these commercial men. Soon, without a shot having been fired, the men of New Amsterdam, including Peter Stuyvesant, had signed that English oath. (Stuyvesant was recalled to the Netherlands for a how-could-you-let-that-happen? conversation. He blamed the West Indies Company for not having better armed the colony. Even though it was now controlled by the English, Stuyvesant returned to New York and his house and farm where he died in 1672.)

On September 8, 1664, New Amsterdam was formally ceded to the English and the settlement became New York. What remained of The Wall, which stood in the way of progress and expansion, was torn down by the English in 1699.

The Wall was a waste of time, effort, and money. It served no useful purpose other than to give the illusion of a defense to what was not a real danger.

Perhaps some other time we can talk about the Berlin wall.

The construction of The Wall across the northern border of New Amsterdam teaches some additional lessons. Planks were needed, and this meant money was needed, and wealthy people stepped forward, as they always do—not to selflessly aid their homeland, but to make more money. The well-to-do loaned money for the building of The Wall at ten percent interest. What do we think will happen if we build a wall today on our southern border. Many contracting and supply companies will be involved, and no doubt most will make money—which will come from our tax dollars. (If we hold our breath waiting for Mexico to pay for it, even the red staters will have turned blue.) Construction, however, can be a risky business, and some of the construction companies may have financial difficulties and perhaps will not make money. On the other hand, I am confident that the financiers of the wall will profit. One of the certainties of our history is that financiers will always make money out of wars and defense spending (and today pay a lesser tax rate than they would had they toiled physically toiled for their gains.)

But I digress. Some of the money went for the planks, and many, if not all, were purchased from Thomas Baxter, an Englishman. It might seem strange that he was selling the material for a barrier against his fellow countrymen. Perhaps the reason was simply the frequent one of profit above all else. But Baxter had left England, and this might indicate that he felt few ties to his birth place. And while New Amsterdam was Dutch, it was not a hostile place to others.

New Amsterdam was a commercial establishment. The Company wanted to increase the population of Manhattan to increase trade and agriculture and thereby to grow profits. All things considered, Holland was a nice place to live. Not enough Dutch wanted to move to the new world, and consequently the West Indies Company did not shun non-Dutch immigration. Thus, many of the New Amsterdam residents came from places other than Holland. In 1643, one correspondent said that he counted eighteen languages being spoken in the settlement. Twenty years later records indicate that perhaps from a third to a half of the possibly 2,000 inhabitants were non-Dutch.

Peter Stuyvesant, however, had one exception to this open-border policy. Stuyvesant was a devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the established church in New Amsterdam. (At least in my experience, it was the Dutch Reformed Church, or at least that was what it was called by my high school friends who were members of it. With our never ending adolescent humor, we called them dike jumpers. We also checked their thumbs to see if they could plug a hole in a dike to keep back the flood. Their church was stricter than those attended by the rest of us. On Sunday afternoons, we often played pickup baseball or football games, but Dutch Reformed kids were not allowed such frivolity on the Christian sabbath. That did not stop them from playing with us, but we had to move our games to some out-of-the way location where their parents were unlikely to drive by and spot them. Many years later, I ran into one of these childhood friends who had become a minister. When I referred to the denomination as Dutch Reformed, he corrected me and said now it was simply The Reformed Church.) While accepting of the non-Dutch generally, Stuyvesant was, to put it mildly, not overly fond of Jews, and when some moved into his town, he sought to expel them. His bosses did not take kindly to that and ordered Stuyvesant to allow the few Jews to remain. A healthy economy, they realized, required immigrants. Only the Dutch Reformed Church was permitted to have public services, but Jews, Puritans, Lutherans, Catholics, and Quakers were permitted to worship in the privacy of their homes. Jews were even allowed to have land for a burial ground about a mile north of The Wall, and that plot is the oldest European cemetery on Manhattan. (Many of us owe a debt to the New Amsterdam Reformed Church. The Puritans did not celebrate Christmas; it was just another work day. Many of the Dutch in America saw Christmas time as both solemn and joyous. The joyous part included “Sinter Klaus” who gave presents on St. Nicholas Day, December 6.)

This acceptance of immigrants may have meant that many of the non-Dutch came to see New Amsterdam as home and felt little allegiance to the countries of their origins. Certainly, Thomas Baxter, the Englishman who sold the planks to build The Wall to keep out the English, did not seem to have had much loyalty to the English. After his plank salesmanship, he became a pirate and preyed on English ships. But that does not mean that he had developed an attachment to the Netherlands. He also went after Dutch ships. It appears that his allegiance was simply to money.

New Amsterdam may have paid for The Wall, but it did not pay for the labor, or at least not for all the labor. The West Indies Company was involved in many commercial enterprises, and one of its most lucrative businesses was the African slave trade. New Amsterdam probably had slaves from its beginning, and by 1635 a person was appointed to be an official overseer for the Company’s slaves. By the 1660s, New Amsterdam had about three hundred slaves and perhaps seventy-five free blacks, accounting for about twenty percent of the village’s population.

Peter Stuyvesant “contributed” slave labor to The Wall. This may not have been the entire workforce, but if not, we do not know who the other laborers were or what they got paid or what the relations were between the paid and coerced workers.

(To be continued.)