Dr Johnson and General Oglethorpe

This week’s batch of The Rest is History is a four-episode series on Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and their world. So far it’s a delight, and reflects well on Johnson. It also got me thinking about Johnson’s friendship with one of my heroes: soldier, humanitarian, and founder of Georgia James Oglethorpe.

I can’t recall how I first discovered their connection but it may have been through reading John Buchan’s Midwinter, a novel set during the Jacobite Rising in ’45 and in which both men appear. Possibly because of that, I dug into my copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and turned up a number of charming and tantalizing anecdotes about Johnson’s dinners at Oglethorpe’s house (and one in which Johnson unexpectedly hosts Oglethorpe).

I’ve been meaning to research this further but haven’t gotten around to it; what I can do is copy a few choice excerpts into this, my commonplace book, something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I hope y’all enjoy these as much as I have.

Here’s Boswell’s first mention of Oglethorpe, in the context of the publication of Johnson’s neoclassical poem London in 1738:

One of the warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose ‘strong benevolence of soul,’ was unabated during the course of a very long life; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning and taste, as for his other eminent qualities; and no man was more prompt, active, and generous, in encouraging merit. I have heard Johnson gratefully acknowledge, in his presence, the kind and effectual support which he gave to his London, though unacquainted with its authour.

A good sketch of Oglethorpe’s character and virtues. I’d like to look into this further (this GHQ article is where I’ll start), as Oglethorpe was in England recruiting for his regiment in 1738 but Johnson’s London was initially published anonymously.

Boswell’s first account of a dinner at General Oglethorpe’s has Boswell provoking conversation with a question about the morality of dueling. Oglethorpe leaps in before Johnson can reply: “The brave old General fired at this, and said, with a lofty air, ‘Undoubtedly a man has a right to defend his honour.’” Not one to break character, the General.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth with Oliver Goldsmith before Boswell presses Johnson on the question of “whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.” Johnson gives a “masterly” and lengthy answer in favor of dueling as a form of self-defense. Oglethorpe chips in with an anecdote about accidental insult diplomatically avoided:

The General told us, that when he was a very young man, I think only fifteen, serving under Prince Eugene of Savoy, he was sitting in a company at table with a Prince of Wirtemberg. The Prince took up a glass of wine, and, by a fillip, made some of it fly in Oglethorpe’s face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him instantly, might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been considered as cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye upon the Prince, and smiling all the time, as if he took what his Highness had done in jest, said ‘Mon Prince,—’. (I forget the French words he used, the purport however was,) ‘That’s a good joke; but we do it much better in England;’ and threw a whole glass of wine in the Prince’s face. An old General who sat by, said, ‘Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l’avez commence:’ [He did well, my Prince; you started it] and thus all ended in good humour.

Dr. Johnson said, ‘Pray, General, give us an account of the siege of Belgrade.’ Upon which the General, pouring a little wine upon the table, described every thing with a wet finger: ‘Here we were, here were the Turks,’ &c. &c. Johnson listened with the closest attention.

An evening of war stories with General Oglethorpe!

There are several other mentions in the Life of dinners at Oglethorpe’s house, but not as much conversation. We do get observations of Oglethorpe’s character, though, such as Boswell’s note that “[t]he uncommon vivacity of Oglethorpe’s mind, and the variety of knowledge . . . sometimes made his conversation too desultory.” That is, he rambled. Johnson glossed this by saying of that Oglethorpe “never COMPLETES what he has to say.” One imagines him as an interesting conversationalist who leaps quickly from subject to subject.

There’s also the anecdote alluded to above, when Oglethorpe apparently assumed Johnson was having him over for dinner—entirely unbeknownst to Johnson. How this mixup occurred Boswell doesn’t say, but when he

mentioned this to Johnson, not doubting that it would please him, as he had a great value for Oglethorpe, the fretfulness of his disease unexpectedly shewed itself; his anger suddenly kindled, and he said, with vehemence, ‘Did not you tell him not to come? Am I to be HUNTED in this manner?’ I satisfied him that I could not divine that the visit would not be convenient, and that I certainly could not take it upon me of my own accord to forbid the General.

Boswell found Johnson talking to some ladies that night, morose because of a poorly performed play, but when Oglethorpe arrived Johnson was “was as courteous as ever.” A glimpse both of Johnson’s regard for Oglethorpe—which Boswell mentions almost every time he comes up—as well as some of Johnson’s mental troubles.

A final detail with regard to Johnson’s respect for Oglethorpe: one evening at Oglethorpe’s for dinner, Johnson “urged [him] to give the world his Life. He said, ‘I know no man whose Life would be more interesting. If I were furnished with materials, I should be very glad to write it.’”

It’s a shame we never got that book.

Again, a topic for further research one of these days. In the meantime, check out The Rest is History’s series on Johnson, and definitely give Buchan’s Midwinter a look. I glanced back through the parts mentioning Oglethorpe—Johnson is a major character throughout while Oglethorpe lurks in the background—and greatly enjoyed the novel’s final chapter, in which Johnson and Oglethorpe finally meet. The novel’s protagonist, Jacobite spy Alastair Maclean, who has befriended Johnson over the course of the uprising, arrives at Oglethorpe’s headquarters but

was not prepared for the sight of Oglethorpe; grim, aquiline, neat as a Sunday burgess, who raised his head from a mass of papers, stared for a second and then smiled.

“You have brought me a friend, Roger,” he told the young lieutenant. “These gentlemen will be quartered here this night, for the weather is too thick to travel further; likewise they will sup with me.”

When the young man had gone, he held out his hand to Alastair.

“We seem fated to cross each other’s path, Mr Maclean.”

“I would present to you my friend, Mr Samuel Johnson, sir. This is General Oglethorpe.”

Johnson stared at him and then thrust forward a great hand.

“I am honoured, sir, deeply honoured. Every honest man has heard the name.” And he repeated:

“One, driven by strong benevolence of soul,
“Shall fly like Oglethorpe from pole to pole.”

The General smiled. “Mr Pope was over-kind to my modest deserts. But, gentlemen, I am in command of a part of His Majesty’s forces, and at this moment we are in the region of war. I must request from you some account of your recent doings and your present purpose. Come forward to the fire, for it is wintry weather. And stay! Your Prince’s steward has been scouring the country for cherry brandy, to which it seems His Highness is partial. But all has not been taken.” He filled two glasses from a decanter at his elbow.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

* * * * *

Addendum: After posting this yesterday I listened to the end of the second episode, which mostly concerns Boswell, and Tom Holland quoted—in part—a charming passage from Boswell’s journals about his starstruck astonishment to be sitting and talking with Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith: “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

As it happens, I had just read the same passage in The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, by Leo Darmosch. For my purposes, Holland left out an extremely important bit. Here’s the whole passage from Darmosch:

In 1772 Boswell was flattered to be invited to dinner by General James Oglethorpe, then in his seventies, who had been a pioneer in prison reform and co-founder of the colony of Georgia. In his journal Boswell noted, “Mr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith and nobody else were in the company. I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Oglethorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished myself; and here is Mr. Johnson, whose character is so vast; here is Dr. Goldsmith, so distinguished in literature. Words cannot describe our feelings. The finer parts are lost, as the down upon a plum; the radiance of light cannot be painted.” (283)

I read this while browsing Mr K’s, our local used bookstore. I didn’t end up taking The Club home—I’m trying, however feebly, to thin our library out—but I did pick up Trevor Royle’s Culloden, which includes several pages on Oglethorpe’s role in suppressing the Jacobite Rising.

Me and the Southern accent

Last month on his microblog, Alan Jacobs linked to this short Atlantic piece—now paywalled—about the slow extinction of the Southern accent. Quoting the author of the essay on the decline of distinctive Southern accents among the young and the eventual reality that the accents will only survive among the old in out-of-the-way places, Jacobs noted, “I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.”

Likewise and likewise. The regret is painful.

My speech, like Jacobs’s, is identifiably Southern to outsiders, but largely through syntax (e.g. double modals), vocabulary (e.g. y’all, fixing to), and peculiarities of emphasis (e.g. saying umbrella instead of umbrella). My accent, in terms of pronunciation, is limited to ineradicable features like the long I noted in that Atlantic essay, yod-dropping, hanging on to the H in wh- words, and the occasional dropped G. I have neither a drawl nor a twang.

This is a regret to me because I feel it severs me from previous generations and the place I come from in one of the most fundamental ways. We learn speech at our mother’s breast and from those closest to us, not only in terms of family but in physical proximity. Gradually losing that means losing a part of me that participates in them and in home.

And I cherish those accents—of which The Atlantic rightly notes there are many. I learned two kinds of Georgia accent growing up. My dad’s parents, natives of Clarke County and the Athens area, spoke a lot like Flannery O’Connor—a Savannah native with her own peculiarities of pronunciation—does in this recording, a soft, non-rhotic accent that outsiders read as genteel. My maternal grandparents, Rabun County natives, spoke in a strongly rhotic accent with heavy Appalachian features. Both of these are from “north Georgia,” broadly speaking, but couldn’t be more different. Southern accents have immense county-by-county variety.

Generation adds more variation. My parents’ accents, both still marked by their parents’ roots, nevertheless grew toward each other, and my own is a yet finer blend—dominated by my maternal side’s Appalachian terseness. It comes out when I try to say iron (arn) or Florida oranges (Flarda arnjes).

In old home movies I have a shrill, squeaky, very country little voice. I’m not sure when the most obvious marks of family and home began to fall away, but it must have been around middle or high school. Unlike the writer in The Atlantic, it was never intentional. I never wanted to blend in, was never ashamed of being Southern—far from it, I grew a sizable chip on my shoulder during an undergrad career surrounded by Yankees and Midwesterners who thought nothing of moving South and mocking the locals for saying umbrella—and, if anything, I wanted more of an accent than what I ended up with.

Faking it is not, I decided long ago, an option. Better to let it emerge occasionally, a nice surprise. (I’ve noticed myself, in the classroom, pronouncing opportunity without the R lately, a real surprise.) I try to comfort myself with examples of other provincials who unintentionally lost their accents—namely CS Lewis, a Belfast native who, quite unconsciously, slowly conformed to the speech of whomever surrounded him and ended up sounding like this.

But when I remember my grandparents’ voices, and talk to my parents and aunts and uncles and siblings, and think about those home movies, and then recall my own kids’ sweet speech—in which very little Southern remains—all I can do is regret. Time isn’t the only thing that gets away from us. And this, the Ubi sunt? sense of loss, is perhaps the only thing more Southern than the accent I used to have.

Wiley Junction

Near the house where I grew up stood a long, low, thin strip of stores we collectively called “Wiley Junction.” This included a Gulf station—later BP—the old one-room Wiley Post Office, and one shop where you could buy NASCAR trading cards, rent a movie, or lie in a tanning bed. But the store attached to the gas station was always Wiley Junction’s main draw.

The “junction” proper was the awkward joining of Old Highway 441, a two-lane road built to parallel the long-defunct Tallulah Falls Railroad, and New 441, a two-lane highway built in the 1970s with a more aggressive approach to the terrain—cutting through hills and banks and leveling off hollows to drive straighter through our county. In Wiley (unincorporated) Old and New 441 curved toward each other, like dancers bumping rears, and offered a natural location for a connector road. We drove through Wiley Junction literally every day. And most days we stopped at Wiley Junction—the store.

The Wiley Junction store was typical of the now-endangered local country stores throughout the South. Long and narrow, one entered through a glass door in the middle with the cash register at your right elbow, visible through the bunker-like gap between the lottery ticket stands on the counter and the overhanging racks of cigarettes. There was no bulletproof glass but there was a “need a penny, take one” dish. I wondered why I couldn’t take one every time—an informal education in courtesy.

To the left were three narrow aisles of goods: Slim Jims, pork rinds, chocolate bars, Big League Chew, and Lance crackers foremost, with bait, tackle, Styrofoam coolers, and basic hardware necessities hooked to a pegboard wall in back. The aisles led to the coolers, which had a smaller selection than today’s mega gas station chains but were always amply stocked. I bought many, many Cokes and Mello Yellos there, especially during those mid-90s summers when you could win prizes directly from the bottlecap. I never got that Coca-Cola Mustang but it was a great day when I won a second, free 20 oz bottle.

That was one half of Wiley Junction. Turning from the coolers and walking back to the register, you entered a bottleneck between the checkout counter and the short-order kitchen—which is the part of Wiley Junction I miss most.

You can identify this kind of country store not just by its thin, low-slung appearance, but by the smell. Wiley Junction had that smell. Clean, but not sterile. Lived-in. A faint hint of the concrete floor under the brown tile. A suggestion, somehow apparent to your nose, that the place was built by hand. But the kitchen added to that scent and elevated it. Wiley Junction smelled always, richly and warmly, of its signature offering: biscuits.

Even a short trip into the store to pick up one item left you smelling like biscuits the rest of the day. That happened to my sister one morning when she went into the store for perhaps two minutes, and I tormented her for years by calling her “Biscuit.” The thing is, the smell was wonderful. It was a greasy smell, sure, but with a sharp sweetness to it that I struggle to describe. The smell had texture—smooth and floury and warm.

Wiley Junction’s breakfast kept the place hopping in the mornings. Local tradesmen, construction workers, highway crews, state troopers with the odd local businessman thrown in during the week; local families, fishermen, hunters, and vacationers who had gotten wise to a good thing on the weekends. Sometimes it was hard to find parking.

From the narrow space between the kitchen and the cash register one could pass into an open dining area that somehow felt larger than the rest of that skinny building. There were particle board booths with one-piece benches contoured to the country rump and a bay window opening toward New 441. It was good to eat there. You would almost certainly see someone you knew. Often, for me, that was my granddad.

I’ve written about him a lot here. He was a plumber-electrician and frequently picked up biscuits at Wiley Junction on his way to construction sites all over Rabun County. On special occasions, when we had a church car wash or when the whole extended family was setting forth on a fishing trip to Tugalo, he’d pick up a big white sack of biscuits for everyone. But on weekdays, running into him during the few minutes when he’d be sitting in one those booths, eating his biscuit, was a treat—no matter that we saw him almost every day anyway. Something about Wiley Junction and the biscuits made it special.

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of his death, aged just 65, in 1998. A few years later the Georgia DOT bought up Wiley Junction and bulldozed it to widen the New Highway. It’s a four-lane now with a grass median and is safer for the traffic it has to handle between Atlanta and Western North Carolina, little of which stops in Wiley any more. But when I visit home I can’t pass that weedy, angular patch of land without thinking about what was lost.

My granddad has now enjoyed just over a quarter century of the life everlasting, and so I can hope to see him again. Wiley Junction, a happy blip in a fallen world, is not coming back in any form. But if seeing my granddad again proves to be anything like it was to see him in real life, that first moment of recognition and reunion will bear with it, before it fades away forever in light of unimaginably better things, the lingering scent of breakfast in a country store.

The Great Locomotive Chase

Conductor William Fuller (JEffrey Hunter) flags down the locomotive Texas in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). That’s Slim Pickens in the cab of the engine.

Last night for family movie night I got to share a movie with my kids that I had previously seen only once, probably thirty years ago, but wanted to rewatch ever since. It’s an action-packed Civil War story and, best of all, was shot in my home county in northeast Georgia. It’s Walt Disney’s 1956 spy thriller The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a bit of a legend back home. For years the Clayton Cafe on Main Street had a photo of Disney himself, enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette in one of the booths, framed on the wall behind the register. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had some connection to the film. A cousin of mine claimed a grandfather on his dad’s side was visible on the station platform in one scene. Others who didn’t appear as extras remembered the filming, or seeing Disney and his cast and crew around. There have been plenty of movies shot in Rabun County, but none remembered quite as fondly as this. It certainly doesn’t provoke the shame or hostility that Deliverance still does.

As for me, after years of hearing about it and having developed a powerful interest in the Civil War in elementary school, I finally got to watch it one afternoon when my dad rented a VHS from the now-defunct Movie Time Video next door to the now-defunct Bi-Lo. I watched it eagerly, and we returned it, and I never saw it again. Until this weekend.

I’d forgotten a lot about it. I mostly remembered the standard old Hollywood Confederate uniforms—gray with blue infantry collars, cuffs, and hatbands—that struck me even at the time as unrealistic. And I remembered a railroad tunnel and, at the end, the Yankee spies walking circles in a prison yard. But that was about it. When I ran across an unopened DVD at our local used book store I snapped it up.

I’m glad to say it was an enjoyable adventure, and much better than I even remembered.

The Great Locomotive Chase is based on the true story of the Andrews raid of April 1862, in which twenty Union saboteurs led by civilian spy James Andrews infiltrated north Georgia, boarded a train at Marietta north of Atlanta, and hijacked it. The plan was to steam northward to Chattanooga vandalizing the tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges and causing as much destruction as possible to cripple a key link in the Confederacy’s flimsy rail network.

Unfortunately for Andrews and his men, they were held up several times by southbound freight trains. Worse, and fatally for them and their mission, they were doggedly pursued by employees of the railroad, who at first assumed the train had been stolen by deserters. One of the pursuers, a young conductor named William Fuller, chased them for 87 miles, starting on foot before working through three locomotives, the last of which he drove backwards up the tracks.

As for Andrews and his raiders, Fuller’s pursuit cost them the time needed to take on fuel and water. When they ran out of steam they abandoned the locomotive and were swept up by Confederate cavalry. Eventually, eight were executed as spies, including Andrews. But the raiders became the first recipients of the new Congressional Medal of Honor.

Disney’s film tells this story straightforwardly, framing it with the presentation of the Medal of Honor to some of the raid’s survivors. Among them is William Pittenger (John Lupton), who serves as narrator. Parts of the first act feel rushed, as Andrews (Fess Parker) is introduced quickly, briefs a Union general, requests a team, and instantly receives one. Only as the group travels south to infiltrate the Confederacy do the raiders get characterization. The most notable after Andrews and Pittenger, who mostly works as an observer for the audience, is Campbell (Jeff York), a nationalist hothead who becomes fed up with the “bowing and scraping” of his spy cover and wants nothing more than to murder Southerners. His temper and desire to fight present a constant danger to the secrecy of Andrews’s mission.

But once the raiders are aboard the train and put their plan into motion, the film is continuously propulsive, suspenseful, and well-paced. The train action, almost all practical, staged aboard real trains on the Tallulah Falls Railroad, is genuinely impressive. Andrews and Fuller (Jeffrey Hunter) engage in a stream-driven game of cat and mouse, with Andrews sabotaging the line ahead of Fuller in numerous creative ways and the tenacious Fuller using his expertise as a railroad man to counteract them and keep up the pursuit. Adding appreciably to the quality of the action, it appears that Hunter did most of his own stunts. The final leg of the chase, in which he shouts orders to the engineer from the back of a locomotive racing along in reverse, is especially exciting.

Based on some of what I’ve read online, people at the time and since have found the film’s final act anticlimactic or even too depressing. I thought it fit the structure of the story perfectly, allowing the action-heavy first parts of the film to conclude on character-driven notes of respect if not reconciliation.

The ending serves Parker especially well, as for most of the movie he is stoic, manly, and brave, but not much else. In this film he lacks the charisma that made him famous as Davy Crockett, and so—without giving too much away—a heartfelt speech in his final scene gives him a belated depth that was very moving. The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to fine. One confrontation between Campbell and the more patient members of the raiders has some noticeably wooden acting, but I was pleased to see how many locals got bit parts in the film and how well they did. Among the rest of the professional cast, I especially liked seeing Slim Pickens in an early role as one of Fuller’s engineers.

But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.

Disney put a lot of effort into this movie, shooting it in Technicolor CinemaScope like the more special effects-heavy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had come out two years before, so it’s a shame it wasn’t as financially successful as he had hoped. More to the point for us nowadays, it’s a shame that Disney’s successors haven’t given this film a decent home media release. It’s currently available to rent in HD on Amazon Prime, but as far as I can tell the 20+ year old, non-anamorphic DVD I found a few weeks ago is the sole home video release since the VHS days. A restored Blu-ray would be nice, especially since this film meant as much to Disney—and the people of my county—as it did.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a simple, straightforward film, but a fine example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. If you haven’t seen it before or haven’t even heard of it, I hope you’ll check it out.

More if you’re interested

The Walt Disney Family Museum has a good “making of” article on The Great Locomotive Chase that gives good attention to Rabun County and the technical side of filming. For local resources and memories of the film, here’s a Rabun County Historical Society newsletter with behind the scenes photos and detailed captions, and here’s a Foxfire podcast interview with locals who appeared as extras.

If you’re interested in the true story of the Andrews Raiders, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia article above for a good overview. Here’s a short volume from Osprey’s Raid series on the Andrews Raid, and here’s the primary source behind the film: William Pittenger’s memoir Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War, available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.

Athens and Sparta... Georgia

The Temple of Hephaestus and the Athenian acropolis c. 1870

Maybe it’s my background in British history, or just growing up in northeast Georgia, but I love placenames and the layers and layers of history you can discern as you dig through them.

The Georgia connection is important. Long ago, I noticed that not only did my homestate have an Athens, the city where I was born and where my family has deep roots, but a Sparta, too. And a Rome. And a Smyrna. And a Cairo.

When I began teaching US History almost ten years ago and regularly explaining the Founding generation’s love, admiration, and emulation of the classical world to students, I remembered these observations and connected them to things I had learned about other states since then—that Cincinnati, Ohio is named after a heroic dictator from the early days of the Roman Republic (and, implicitly, George Washington), that New York has even more Greek and Roman placenames, and so forth. And I developed a pet theory I would occasionally expound to students.

Give someone a lot of spare time and grant money, I thought, and the ability to map the locations and dates of founding of American cities with classical placenames, and I bet they’d cluster noticeably along the frontier of the Early Republic, roughly from the Washington to the Jackson administrations.

And, lo and behold, this week I came across a piece from Antigone, an online classical journal, entitled “Classical Place-names and the American Frontier.” This essay concerns upstate New York specifically, where the author notes 130 classical placenames in use by 1860:

An upstate New York itinerary could take you on a drive from Troy to Ithaca via Utica and Syracuse, with stop-offs off in Camillus, Manlius, Cicero, and Pompey. One could be buried under four feet of snow in Rome. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, lived in a log cabin in Palmyra. You can read the works of Homer or study the military tactics of Marcellus in places that bear their names.

And the author confirms precisely the guess I made about Georgia’s classical cities: “Classical place names were given to frontier settlements there in the years immediately following the War of Independence. As the frontier moved west, so too did the practice.” He goes on to explain the shady buyout of the Iroquois Confederacy’s land in the upstate and the influx of settlers coming northward and inland from the coast.

Looking at Georgia’s considerably fewer such names, you can still note the same pattern: an early city like Sylvania, founded in 1790, lies in well-established territory between Savannah and Augusta, itself a classical name by way of the Princess Augusta, King George III’s mother. Sparta, founded in 1795, is farther north and west. Athens, founded in 1806 as a college town with a name intentionally meant to evoke Plato’s Academy, is yet farther north and west of that.

The displacement of Indians plays a role here, too, albeit a generation later than in New York. Following the Indian Removal Act in 1830 you get Smyrna (1832) and Rome (1834) in former Cherokee territory in the northwestern corner of the state, beyond the Chattahoochee, and Cairo (1835) in the far southwest.

Look at these cities on a map and mark them in the order they were founded and you see a clear march upcountry from General Oglethorpe’s original enclave on the coast and the Savannah River.

Even Atlanta (1847), with its complicated history, fits this pattern, given its cod classical name (part feminine tweak of Atlantic, which is itself derived from Atlas, and part nod, probably coincidentally or indirectly, to Atalanta). Before taking the name Atlanta, the city was Marthasville (1843), and before that it was Terminus (1837). As the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes, Terminus “literally means ‘end of the line,’” an appropriate name since Terminus was established as mile marker zero on a new railroad built to connect the western interior of the state to the coast (there’s that westward, inland movement again). But it only means that because Terminus was originally a Roman deity who protected boundaries and property lines, a god of ends.

I’ve already started recommending this essay to students, not only because it gratifyingly confirms a pet theory but because it makes abundantly clear the pride of place the classical world had in the imagination of the Early Republic. And not only for obviously learned showoffs like Jefferson and Adams.

“It was part of a wider cultural movement to align the new Republic with Classical ideals,” the author notes, “but it was neither as organized nor as calculated as one might think.” Such naming conventions were not part of a top-down agenda but grassroots:

What is interesting about the Classical place names of upstate New York—and what previous historians who have addressed the subject have overlooked—is that many of them were chosen by the pioneers themselves. Except for the town names of the Military Tract, there was no government initiative or evident persuasion that lay behind their selection. The pioneers in their rough-hewn settlements—far from the centres of education in the coastal cities—were choosing to align themselves with the Classical past.

Even the hardbitten types moving to edge of civilization were well-versed in the classical past and its republican ideals and made those cultural priorities clear in the names they gave their settlements.

And their children. Georgia has both a Homer (1859) and a Homerville (1869). These were founded later than the other examples I’ve given and were named for prominent local men, and so only indirectly for the great blind bard, but consider when these men were born.

Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but reflect on the change since then—given the option of naming things, Western civilization has gone from Utica and Troy and Ithaca and Rome to Boaty McBoatface and friends in two centuries.

I’ve marked a few cities on a Google Map and embedded it above. If you click through to the full map you can see the dates of each city’s establishment arranged in chronological order. Mouse over the list and the pins will light up in exactly the pattern described. I don’t have the time to do that with with all the New York and Ohio placenames mentioned in the Antigone piece but I hope someone will someday. An animated map would be a stellar classroom resource.

In the meantime, definitely read the entire essay. It’s a concise and insightful look at ordinary the relation Americans from an earlier era had to the classical past and should give us cause to reflect on our own relation to them.

Another Dark Full of Enemies sighting

A few paperback copies of Dark Full of Enemies have been sighted at Re/Max of Rabun in my hometown of Clayton, Georgia. They're available at the front desk for just $10, three dollars off the list price of $12.99. Stop by and pick one up while they're still available!

If Clayton is too far a drive, you can always find it and my other books at Amazon. Enjoy!