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| "Little Aleck" Stephens around 1860 |
"Little Aleck"**--that was what the press and admirers and enemies called him--was a highly interesting character. A lifelong bachelor--I used to be convinced he was not gay; now I'm not so sure, but I still don't have hard evidence--he grew up poor in Middle Georgia, son of a farmer. Several benefactors enabled him to get an education, including college. After an ill-fated year teaching, he became a lawyer, then a state legislator, a U.S. congressman, and vice president, as I've said. He went back to Congress after the war and died as governor of Georgia.
If he looks sickly, it's because he was. The man never weighed more than 90 pounds in his life. More than one observer said he looked like some refugee from the graveyard. But he was a good and diligent lawyer and largely through his practice, and later through the products of his land, he amassed a good deal of money. He was definitely part of the upper crust. He ended up owning 32 slaves, all of whom stayed right there on his property after the end of the war.
But I'm letting myself get caught up in his story when all I meant to do was explain that this guy is the reason I have not been diligent about posting to the blog this week. I've been working on a presentation about him and Jefferson Davis to Civil War Round Tables in Milwaukee and Chicago at the end of next week. So he will also be the reason I'm going to be offline again at that time. My hope is to try and get something up on the blog--I think I've told you the guilt trip I put on myself for not posting every day--even on the days I'm gone. There will be a few more of those near the end of May when I'm off to Denver to see my mom and then to Louisiana for another history presentation.
**As any southerner can tell you, "Aleck" is pronounced "Ellick." People in Louisiana, for example, call Alexandria "Ellick."
5 comments:
Very interesting. Thank you for this post.
I hope you expand a bit on the symbiosis that comes about after spending 10 years writing about another person. I think it would be good to read.
your a more disciplined blogger than i am! i aim for at least once a week. most of the time i'm busy with teaching and that suffices for an excuse, but i got back from the netherlands semester april 20 and have had much less to do....partly though i think it's the idea that since nobody has asked me to write the blog and no one is paying me, i have the luxury of writing as much or as little as i want about whatever i feel moved to write about.....a luxury that my sporadically and minorlly professional writing life doesn't allow. so when the muse doesn't yelp at me, i tend not to write.
but anyway, i know a bit of how you feel about 'little aleck'. i've been in love with the women of tudor england for years, and in the mid 90s published a book on henry's wives, with a lot of asides on other women in tudor england that impressed me. i felt very bound to them already, but certainly that instensity of living with them deepened those feelings, and they are definitely 'people i know', and have feelings about. watch what you say about 'bloody mary' around me!....
i had a funny and delightful experience re this a few months ago. i was googling for a short article i could use for a class i was teaching on the tudor martyr ann askew, and came upon one on the site of the tudor series [which i tried to watch and dislike]. as i read the article it seemed very familiar so i looked for the author's name. it was me!
have fun with your presentation--isn't it great to be able to speak publically on people you feel so entwined with?
aghhh! i am a clumsy typist at best,and i just looked at my comment, which began with 'your', an error for which i'd lower one of my writing student's grade!
Hey, Karen. What do you teach? Do I gather that your three months in the Netherlands is a recurring class that you do over there? If so, is it always in the wintertime?
It's going to amaze you to learn that my minor in grad school was Stuart England. So I'm more than just slightly acquainted with the Tudors.
As for the writing, I've always been slightly anal about a lot of things. Part of the same strangeness, I suppose, that feeds certain pack rat tendencies I have and my inordinate--I don't know if that overstates the case or not--affection for containers. I hate disposing of boxes on the theory that you never know when they might come in handy. My kids and wife tease me about it all the time.
The best part about talking about Stephens is that I know the material backwards and forwards. Not always the case.
hi tom,
i am one of those perennial fulltime parttime college teachers. i teach several different courses at 2 different colleges. my courses at the castle--yep, it's a genuine castle, in the middle of a small dutch town--are magazine writing and 2 great lit classes. one is the basic great-books class, called literary foundations, starting with homer and ending with shakespeare, and the other is a sort of speicalized 'topics' class, appropriately in this case 'topics in european literature.' i choose works that are related to either places students go on mandatory class trips or places i know from experience most of them will go on their own on our 3-day weekends.they are almost always books i love. this past term, since we were going to prague as we had a few years in a row, i did force one on myself that some of last year's kids had suggested. it makes sense, but as soon as i hit page 2 of 'unbearable lightness of being' i realized that whether it was light or not, it certainlhy was unbearable. found a short story of his i could stomach, though barely. made up for by the course having introduced me to jan neruda, who is wonderful....
here in boston i teach primarily women in media and an american studies course called Television in American Life, both of which are a lot of work and a lot of fun. a few other courses here and there....
funny a friend sublet this term while i was away, and did some house-straightening and organizing. she put all the yogurt and other containers i've held onto into 2 big boxes, hoping i'd get rid of them. it was so hard to throw them out! like you, i always think i'll have a use for them, but this was enough for a dozen fulltime cooks to store things for a year....anything there might conceivably be a use for, i save...and then evrything gets so cluttered that if i did find a use for them i'd never find them anyway....
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