15 March 2020

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 15 March 12020 is (we may suppose) Constitution Day in Belarus, 1848 Revolution Memorial Day in Hungary, J. J. Roberts Birthday in Liberia, and Youth Day in Palau. If my memory isn’t deceiving me it is Andrew Jackson’s birthday. The sun is still in Pisces for a few more days, but will soon be progressing into Ares with the onset of spring. And that’s what I’ve got for the day. I’m too damn tired to come up with anything else.

Quotation of the Day

T

rump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.—Jack Goldsmith

[Source: “Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?” Atlantic, October 2017]

Without God and the Bible Part Four: The Lawyer

A

s you may recall, I’ve been reviewing the steps in the textual transmission of a bizarre fake George Washington quotation. It has led us from a step in an argument attempting to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being assigned to Washington by a playwright (It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being) to its simplification while making it apply to human governance by a preacher (It is impossible to govern the universe without God), and to a further tweak putting it firmly in the realm of terrestrial affairs by a politician (It is impossible to govern the world without God). Our next (and final) stop in this little road show leads us to the lawyer—Howard Hyde Russell.

Born in 1855, the son of a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, Howard Hyde Russell grew up to become in turn a clerk, a cattle-herder, a newspaper editor, and a lawyer, before finally giving in and following in his father’s footsteps. Although his law-practice is said to have been lucrative, he gave it up in 1883 to study theology, and in 1885 he became a Congregational minister. In taking this course he may have been influenced by his wife Lillian (they married in 1880) who was obsessed with religion.

Merely being an ordinary minister wasn’t enough for him; in 1888 he turned to the “temperance” movement as an outlet for his energies. In 1893 he helped establish the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, of which he was named the first state superintendent. Two years later he took part in founding the American Anti-Saloon League and was named the first national superintendent. He lived long enough to see both the birth and death of Prohibition in the United States, eventually dying in 1946 at the age of ninety.

For our purposes the main thing he accomplished in his life was writing one book: A Lawyer’s Examination of the Bible, a work of recycled Christian apologetics that wrapped up the arguments (along with the outmoded scholarship) of the likes of Paley and McIlvaine into a colorful package to put under the tree of a new generation. The volume came out in 1893, the same year that saw him turn his interests to the anti-alcohol movement.

This slick repackaging of tired apologetics is couched in the conceit of a trial:

We will place the gospel of Christ on trial and by aid of the clearest reason we possess, and under the careful scrutiny of legal rules and precedents, we will test and weigh for ourselves the evidences which prove Christianity to be the God-given religion for mankind. [p. 16]

So the case of Christianity vs. Infidelity is presented, with the readers as the jury. Russell at the outset however restricts his jury to believers. “Christ discriminated—as should we—between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is ‘Can't believe’—unbelief is ‘Won’t believe.’ Doubt is honest, unbelief is obstinate. Doubt looks for light, unbelief is content with darkness.” In other words, believers who have doubts are welcome; unbelievers are not. Human reason is not welcome either: “pride in the powers of human reason, is often the source of prejudice against the Christian Religion [sic].”

Russell tells the following anecdote:

They have a court tradition in an Iowa County, how upon the trial of an important case, after the counsel for the prosecution had ended his argument and before the defendant's counsel began to speak, one of the jurors ran out of the Court-room into the jury-room. When the Court asked an explanation of his conduct he said, “I have got my mind made up now, and I don’t want to have it disturbed.” There is many an error of law and fact, in court and out of court, because the opinion had been formed before the facts had been heard.

In view of Russell’s extremely one-sided presentation of what he likes to think of as evidence this is, shall we say, humorous. There is no question of anything in his book disturbing the minds of his reader-jurors. Here, for example, is his treatment of Thomas Huxley, called on page 44 as a witness for Infidelity: “What then do we know about the originator or originators of the gospel? absolutely nothing. * * * * I repeat without the slightest fear of refutation that the four gospels, as they have come to us are the work of unknown writers.” “In this matter as in many others, infidelity merely enters its denial,” Russell claims. “But denial is not disproof. The objection of infidelity must according to law be overruled.”

Okay, not so fast. This may fly in Russell’s kangaroo court, but we’re in a higher court now, the Court of History, and we’d like to hear what Huxley had to say for ourselves. And the result turns out badly for Russell—because Huxley didn’t actually write what Russell claims. To say that Russell misrepresents Huxley would be an understatement. Russell flatly lies about what Huxley is saying. He did so under necessity—if he had allowed Huxley to testify freely it would have been fatal to his case.

As is often the case, context means everything. Now the context of Huxley’s remarks was an ongoing (let us say) discussion between him and Henry Wace, author of the still-useful Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature, concerning the true meaning of the word agnosticism. Like certain present-day atheists (though for different reasons) Wace was determined to bulldoze the distinction between disbelief and unbelief, insisting that agnosticism was merely a weak synonym for infidelity. Huxley, who after all had coined the word, wrote to set him straight. (And honestly the article is not one of Wace’s shining moments.) This back-and-forth extended over several articles and was joined by others, the whole thing being eventually archived for posterity (that’s us) in a volume entitled Christianity and Agnosticism: A Controversy (New York, 1889).

In discussing the plausibility of the story of the Gadarene swine Huxley observed that the episode belongs to the “groundwork” of the first three gospels, rather than the “superstructure.” This refers to the contemporary status of the synoptic problem—the issue of the relationships among the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is self-evident that the three share a common textual ancestor; comparison allows extraction of the parts where the three run together. This triple tradition, or “groundwork” as Huxley calls it, may be assumed to be a source. (The consensus of opinion today is that the common source and canonical Mark are in fact identical; in other words that Mark is Matthew’s and Luke’s source. But B. H. Streeter et al had yet to come along, and this is where matters lay then.) It is in this context that Huxley observes:

What then, do we know about the originator, or originators, of this groundwork—of that threefold edition which all three witnesses (in Paley's phrase) agree upon—that we should allow their mere statements to outweigh the counter-arguments of humanity, of common sense, of exact science, and to imperil the respect which all would be glad to be able to render their Master? ¶ Absolutely nothing. There is no proof, nothing more than a fair presumption, that any one of the Gospels existed, in the state in which we find it in the authorized version of the Bible, before the second century, or, in other words, sixty or seventy years after the events recorded. And, between that time and the date of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Gospels, there is no telling what additions and alterations and interpolations may have been made.

Huxley’s point here was that we know alterations were made to the gospels during the time when manuscript evidence is available—the additions of an ending to Mark and of the story of the woman taken in adultery to John are the most noteworthy (though far from the only) examples—and that we have no way of knowing what alterations may have been made earlier. He argued this point at the necessary length, presenting the necessary evidence—which means that Russell was twice wrong here—Huxley wasn’t saying what Russell claimed, nor did he merely enter a denial sans evidence. “Judge” Howard Hyde Russell is, to use a technical term, full of shit.

And further, Russell deliberately falsified the quotation, substituting the words “the gospel” for Huxley’s “this groundwork.” He further tacked on a footnote from the same page that actually was (at least indirectly) about the authorship of the gospels, but was a side-note for Huxley. To back up a little Huxley had made an observation in an earlier piece (“Science and the Bishops,” The Nineteenth Century, November 1887, p. 632) about alleged miracles like withering a fig tree or cursing pigs with demonic possession “Whether such events are possible or impossible, no man can say; but scientific ethics can and does declare that the profession of belief in them, on the evidence of documents of unknown date and of unknown authorship, is immoral.” An anonymous author in The Quarterly Review (“Robert Elsmere and Christianity,” October 1888, pp. 288-290) took issue with Huxley, claiming that “the case against the authenticity of the New Testament books has in the main completely broken down.” He says that even Ernest Renan (who had written a skeptical life of Jesus decades before this) had admitted as much, though in fact Renan explained the similarities of the synoptic gospels in part by assuming that subsequent scribes had attempted to make them more complete by borrowing from each other. Huxley replied to this in a footnote repeating that the gospels “as they have come to us” are the work of unknown writers—that is, that whoever may have written the hypothetical original works, our present documents had been altered in unknown and unknowable ways.

Russell’s reply is lame but predictable. It’s the old appeal to tradition bit. Christians have always believed in the “authenticity” of the gospels in an unbroken tradition going back practically to the beginning, therefore they are “authentic.” QED. Russell traces the tradition back all the way to Hermas and Barnabas, companions of the apostles. Too bad he apparently hadn’t bothered to consult Joseph Lightfoot’s relatively recent edition of the Apostolic Fathers. He would have learned that nobody still suffered from the illusion that the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabas were actually written by the Hermas mentioned in Romans or the Barnabas who figures in Acts.

So what have we learned from this side-excursion? Well, we’ve picked up at least two valuable things about Howard Hyde Russell. His scholarship was wretched and he was entirely capable of altering a quotation to serve his ends. With these things in mind we are now ready to examine his (alleged) George Washington quotation.

Washington is dragooned into being a witness for the plaintiff concerning the “authenticity of the testimony” on p. 40, along with a number of other U. S. presidents and an incongruous Queen Victoria. Thus Andrew Jackson is made to testify “That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests,” as he had in the account in Morris’s book. And Martin Van Buren likewise is made to say as he had in Wilson’s pamphlet “The atonement of Christ is the only remedy and rest for the soul.” Russell, unlike Wilson, obviously did not rely on a single source for the bulk of his quotations.

So what about the Washington quotation? What he received was the saying as Henry Wilson had left it: “It is impossible to govern the world without God.” But in that form it didn’t really serve its purpose. This is unsurprising; it originally meant that a divine force was needed to keep the world running, not that God had to be a copilot at the world’s helm. That was easily fixed; the infinitive “to govern” could be neatly split with an adroit “rightly” and all was well with the world. A greater difficulty was the fact that Russell’s book was about the Bible, and this saying made no mention of it. The addition of three small words—“and the Bible”—took care of that problem, and voila! the saying as we know it at last achieved its canonical form.

Now of course it’s always possible that Russell was not the person responsible for this bit of tinkering, that he found it ready-made in some second-hand repository, but there is no necessity for assuming that—at least, on the available evidence. Occam’s razor and all that. Russell had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to commit this bit of forgery, and as we saw from his alteration of the Huxley quotation, his ethics did not bar him from falsifying evidence if it served his ends.

So this reasonably brings to an end the story of this fake quotation. A playwright first gave it to us in the form It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a supreme being—this as part of an argument for the existence of God; a preacher simplified it to It is impossible to govern the universe without God and applied it to temporal affairs; a politician cemented that interpretation by changing the word universe to world; and a lawyer gave it a final twist by adding rightly and and the Bible, to create the ultimate version:

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.

I’ll have a few final observations tomorrow.

Sources and further information:

James Terry White (ed.), “Russell, Howard Hyde,” The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (J.T. White, 1906), vol. 13, p. 330

John William Leonard et al (eds.), “Howard Hyde Russell,” Who's who in New York City and State, Issue 3 (L.R. Hamersly Company, 1907), p. 1136

“Howard Hyde Russell,” Ohio: A Four-Volume Reference Library on the History of a Great State (Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1937), vol. 4, pp. 391-393

“Howard Hyde Russell,” Anti-Saloon League Museum website, Westerville Library

Howard Hyde Russell, A Lawyer’s Examination of the Bible (Fleming H. Revell, 1893)

Edwin A. Abbott, “Gospels,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition, vol. 10, pp. 789-854 [useful for the state of the synoptic problem at the end of the nineteenth century]

Henry Wace, Thomas Henry Huxley et al., Christianity and Agnosticism: A Controversy (D. Appleton, 1889)

Without God and the Bible Part 2: The Preacher

I

n the previous installment on the history of a spurious Washington quotation (“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible”) we observed its birth in the stew of gossip James Kirke Paulding picked up in the decades following Washington’s death (or maybe cooked up in his own imagination). The next stage takes place during the maelstrom of the Civil War, and our central figure is the preacher—Benjamin Franklin Morris.

The son of an Ohio senator, B. F. Morris was educated at Miami University in Ohio, where William Holmes McGuffy (of McGuffy Reader fame) was a professor. Morris became a minister in the Congregational church, spending most of his life in the Midwest, but eventually ending up in Washington, D.C. Unlike his father Thomas Morris, or his brothers Isaac and Jonathan, he was never elected to Congress and so evaded the necessary “notability” to end up in Wikipedia. (He is the only one of our four quotation-shapers to do so.) In view of the scarcity of information about him, let me give the entire entry on him from The Twentieth Century Dictionary of Notable Americans, volume 7, no page number:

MORRIS, Benjamin Franklin, clergyman and author, was born in Bethel, Ohio, Aug. 18, 1810; son of the Hon. Thomas and Rachel (Davis) Morris. He was graduated at Miami university, A.B., 1832, A.M. 1836. He was a Congregational minister in Iowa and Illinois, 1833-40; pastor of Presbyterian churches in Indiana, 1840-59, and of a Congregational church in Lebanon, Ohio, 1859-61. He removed to Washington, D.C., in 1861, where he engaged in literary work. He is the author of: The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (1864); The Nation's Tribute to Abraham Lincoln (1865); and Life of Thomas Morris (1856). He died in Springfield, Ohio, June 28, 1867.

He was married to Eliza Chittenden in 1833 and they had seven children together, four boys and three girls. At least two of his children died before he did.

Now as I said B. F. Morris was a minister, and if he’d stuck to his profession there’d be no need to drag him out of his well-deserved obscurity. But he didn’t. In addition to his ministerial duties, B. F. Morris engaged in a rather odd hobby—reading through historical and biographical tomes and manuscripts to cherry-pick nice things famous people had said about Christianity and the Bible. (Evangelist David Barton would pursue the same hobby a century and a half later, and he would make it pay.)

Now you have to remember that for Morris this wasn’t simply a matter of going online, finding your source, selecting your passage, copying it, and pasting it into your notes or whatever. Nor could he do as I used to do, carry his source to a convenient photocopier and run off a few pages. Indeed, even propping the volume up by his typewriter and quickly copying his selected passage was out. No, Morris had to copy out his material by hand, relying (most likely) on sunlight for illumination, or maybe candles or lamps if the sun had gone down.

Further, the multi-volume sets and rare pamphlets he wanted were apparently not within his reach. He had to frequent the libraries of wealthy collectors, with all the inconveniences that entailed. In Indiana he used Samuel Parker’s “large political and historical library”; in Ohio he availed himself of Thomas Corwin’s collection. In the nation’s capital he made use of the Library of Congress, the “large and invaluable collection of books and periodicals illustrative of the early history of our country” belonging to Peter Force (and later acquired by the Library of Congress), and Washington’s manuscripts in the State Department. He scanned through the commentaries of Story, Bayard, and Rawle on the Constitution, the works of Webster and Burke and Beecher, the histories of Bancroft and Hall and Grahame, Jared Sparks’ edition of Washington’s works, volumes on preachers and politics, orations, official records, charters, constitutions, collecting bits and pieces, laboriously copying them out by hand—perhaps hastily, perhaps under other less-than-ideal conditions.

I say this because his quotations are often inaccurate. Sentences from separate documents are run together as one, words are substituted for other words, material is silently dropped, quoted material is misattributed or left unattributed altogether. It was Morris who first misattributed “true religion affords to government its surest support” to Washington for example, and it was he who borrowed John Wingate Thornton’s misquotation / paraphrase to make John Quincy Adams write “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” And he passed on the fraudulent version of Patrick Henry’s famous bequest of Christianity in his will: “I have now disposed of all my worldly property to my family: there is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had this, and I had not given them one shilling, they would be rich; and if they had it not, and I had given them all the world, they would be poor.” He mistakenly supposed (like William Wisner and Jared Sparks before him) that Benjamin Franklin wrote his infamous “Don’t unchain the tiger” letter to Thomas Paine (a mistake later echoed by David Barton). (130) A possible explanation, at least, is that hastily-taken notes were not always clear when it came time for him to turn them into his magnum opus, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, published in 1864.

The purpose of this untidy compilation, if purpose doesn’t seem too grandiose a term for it, is to show that American institutions are not incompatible with Christian principles—indeed, that Christianity holds a special place in American government and law. The closest Morris comes to articulating a thesis is the following passage, towards the beginning of his tome:

The institutions of the North American republic had their birth and baptism from the free inspirations and genius of the Christian religion. This fact has given to the state its political power and moral glory, and shed new light on the benign nature and adaptation of the Christian system to secure the highest political prosperity to a nation.

As the Civil War was raging as he wrote the book (and in fact the last chapter is devoted to “The Christian Element in the Civil War of the United States”) it is possible that he was reacting to the common belief that the war was God’s judgment on a sinful nation. His response was to cast the war as a holy war, portraying the actions of the Confederacy as “an attack on the Christian religion and the institutions of Christian civilization which had grown out of it and were cherished and sustained by it.” While acknowledging “national vices and degeneracy” Morris pronounced that “All devout and thoughtful minds felt that God, while he chastened and humbled the nation on account of its sins, would again interpose for the preservation and perpetuity of the nation.” It was the United States, not the Confederacy, that was on God’s side, and the Christian element would “reinvigorate and recover the republic, its institutions and functions of civil government, and its political and social character, from the decay and degeneracy of national virtue, and to replenish the life of the nation with increased moral vigor and purity.” (pp. 669-70)

In any case, whatever his actual point was, there is page after page of this wearisome stuff. Every time an American commander attributes his success to the aid of the deity, Morris has to dutifully note it. Every time an American statesman closes an address by asking for a divine blessing Morris feels obliged to quote it. Even the use of the familiar “in the Year of our Lord” to date the US Constitution calls for comment.

Nothing is too trivial, nothing is too pathetic for him hide in a decent obscurity. When President Zachary Taylor proclaimed 3 August 1849 a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer in response to a recurrence of the second cholera pandemic in the United States—some five or so years before the true cause of cholera would be discovered—Morris has to record the fact in all its sad fatuity. When John Quincy Adams inflicted a series of wearisome letters about the Bible and its worth on his young son while away in St. Petersburg serving President Madison as ambassador to Russia, Morris feels obliged to quote page after page of this drivel, often incorrectly and oddly jumbled.

His habit of not citing sources makes it difficult for us to evaluate his work properly. For example, when he tells us that Martin Van Buren “died inspired with the immortal hopes of the gospel, saying ‘the atonement of Christ was the only remedy and rest of the soul’ we are stuck with his bare assertion; nobody else seems to know of it. And from what repository did he get the reverend John S. C. Abbott’s account of Andrew Jackson’s death, with his immortal words “That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests. It is the bulwark of our free institutions”? We can only guess.

This seemingly endless parade of foolishness and futility extends for hundreds of pages of warped pedantry (the word erudition overvalues his accomplishment) that would make the angels weep. When you consider the labor involved in this sad endeavor, the endless hours spent in libraries miscopying throwaway boilerplate and casual acts of public piety, the further hours spent arranging this claptrap for publication—well, words fail me. I can only hope that B. F. Morris enjoyed the endless hours he spent on this inane project; if writing it was as tedious for him as reading it is for the rest of us it was truly a sad waste of a life.

But—and maybe I’m just kidding myself in thinking that the reverend Morris and I are in some sense kindred spirits—there’s at least a chance that each little discovery of some forgotten gem of piety gave him a kick, a sense of satisfaction combined with the feeling of some vast never-to-be-finished jigsaw puzzle coming together. The work was its own reward. I hope so, anyway.

While the pious abolitionist Morris and the pro-slavery rationalist Paulding seem to be at opposite poles of the human spectrum in some respects, they do have this in common: both attribute the saying It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being to George Washington. But the context they give it is as different as possible. Where for Paulding it was part of an argument for the existence of God, for Morris it was part of the boilerplate conclusion of Washington’s sixth annual address to Congress of 19 November 1794 (Morris’s additions are in bold; his omissions are struck out; the punctuation is his throughout):

“It is impossible,” said he, “to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being. Let us, therefore, unite therefore in imploring the Supreme Ruler of nations to spread his holy protection over these United States; to stop turn the machinations of the wicked; to the confirming of our Constitution; to enable us, at all times, to suppress root out internal sedition and put invasion to flight; to perpetuate to our country that prosperity which his goodness has already conferred, and to verify the anticipations of this government's being a safeguard to human rights.”

Morris didn’t get this version from Jared Sparks’ edition of Washington’s writings, nor from the official publication of the address to Congress, nor from the manuscript copy in the letter book preserved in the Washington papers. Nor do the differences seem plausible; the insertion of the Paulding fragment is an irrelevancy and interrupts the sense, and the alterations to the “machinations of the wicked” passage seem to be a plain misunderstanding of the text. On the other hand the changes don’t seem to be tendentious. If anything they seem simply, well, pointless. And this leads me back to the hypothesis—for want of any better idea—of Morris’s misreading of his own notes.

If Morris didn’t find the Paulding fragment already embedded in the sixth annual address to Congress—and he manifestly didn’t—then where did he find it? How did he come to attach it to a passage from Washington’s sixth annual address to Congress? Obviously he could have found it in Paulding’s biography of Washington—but I’m inclined to doubt it. Paulding’s biography probably would not have appealed to him, being written by a pro-slavery advocate and for children. I didn’t find any obvious evidence (outside of this passage) for Morris’s use of Paulding—which doesn’t mean there isn’t any. Morris doesn’t mention Paulding in his list of sources, but that also doesn’t mean he didn’t use his work—Morris does not pretend to give a complete list, and he clearly did use many sources he did not specifically acknowledge.

And in fact none of the sources he listed contains our passage. But—and this may not mean much, but I like it—the author of one of his sources did in fact use our passage in a work not cited by Morris. John Frederick Schroeder released his Maxims of Washington: Political, Social, Moral, and Religious in 1855 and included the Paulding fragment on p. 341 under “Religious Maxims”. Several pages later (on p. 348) in the same section he included the conclusion to Washington’s sixth annual address to Congress. (He gave no citation for either.) One possibility at least is that Morris copied one piece from p. 341 into his notes, and then the other from p. 348, and when looking at them later mistakenly thought that they belonged together. There are objections to this hypothesis—but the most likely alternative is to suppose that Morris deliberately falsified the speech for unknown reasons.

Obviously it’s possible that Morris took the speech already falsified from some unknown source, but that just pushes the problem back a stage. How did this hypothetical text-manipulator come to make these changes, and what was his motive? It’s far more likely that Morris himself is the culprit here, whether by incompetence or malice. It’s not like he’s the model of scrupulous care elsewhere. On pp. 33-34, for example, he quotes Washington as writing

I am sure that there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten that agency which was so often manifested during the Revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them. He must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.

But these are actually fragments from two different letters joined together—the first written to John Armstrong on 11 March 1782, and the second to Brigadier-General Nelson on 20 August 1778. Whatever the cause of these errors—carelessness or dishonesty—Morris appears to be the one responsible for them.

The effect of this incongruous juxtaposition is to change the meaning of the sentence about God’s governance from being a proposition in the argument for his existence to being an axiom from which an action follows: because God governs the universe, therefore we should implore him so that certain desirable results follow. When Morris joined these two bits together he created a false impression, deliberately or not—specifically that the quotation under discussion concerned politics rather than cosmology.

The alleged quotation appears again on p. 510, this time with a different continuation. “‘It is impossible,’ he said, ‘to govern the universe without God,’ and, ‘a fortiori, impossible to govern a nation without him.’” In this version “God” has replaced “the aid of a Supreme Being” and there is also a political addition—a different one. It’s hard to believe that Morris intended the additional words to be attributed to Washington. Since Washington is speaking ex cathedra, as it were, he has no need to interpret his previous words via a logical argument; he might just as well have said on his own It is impossible to govern a nation without God. I can’t help wondering if Morris intended to put the final words in Washington’s mouth, or whether this wasn’t a quotation fail, a printer’s error perhaps, and these words were his own comment on the supposed Washington quotation. In any case the words are Morris’s, whether he intended us to take them as Washington’s or not.

It is the first part of this sentence, the words It is impossible to govern the universe without God, however, that is the seed for future developments. B. F. Morris thus started the process of chipping away at the quotation by separating it from its context, giving it a political spin, and replacing the phrase “the aid of a Supreme Being” with the simple word “God”. (He also took the step of replacing “universe” with another word, “nation”, though this change, for some reason, didn’t take.) And within a few years a contemporary, a politician, would get to work on it in his own way. This will be the subject of the next installment: Part 3: The Politician.

Are We Bored Yet?

I

 am in a foul mood this bleak Saturday in the 12014^th year of the Holocene Era. It’s cold out here, and icy winds knock down boughs and powerlines outside. Inside it’s not exactly toasty, but it’s quite warm, thank you, and I suppose I ought to count my blessings.

And one of those blessings is this page on a website called Reneland, “Where The Truth About Religion Is Told, Life In Los Alamos Is Remembered and Crimes Against Women Are Acknowledged”. Reneland sounds like a fun place—so how do I explain this inane entry, over two years old now, which makes some extraordinary claims about US religious history.

The author gets off to a rocky start by confusing the foundation of the nation (in the late eighteenth century) with the coming of the first settlers (early seventeenth century). There is a considerable difference. The first settlers did not found a nation. They set up colonies. The work of founding the nation belonged to a later generation.

She goes on to say “The freedom our founding fathers were in search of was the freedom to not be persecuted for their religious beliefs by the Catholic Church. By religious beliefs I mean Christianity, or better yet Protestantism.” This is bizarre. Puritans (for example) fled religious persecution by Anglicans, Catholics fled religious persecution by Huguenots, as well as various protestants fleeing Catholic persecution.

She then randomly flails away at a straw man who claims that the founders were not Christian—a belief held by nobody that I am aware of. (But the world is large, and there are many false beliefs. Nobody of any significance believes this anyway.) Yes, she is absolutely correct that the founders were white Christian men. And so?

But the ludicrous frosting on top of this half-baked cake is the following statement, made apparently in all seriousness:

There was no idea of any other non Christian religion, no religion, pagan or Jewish religion to any documents written when the forming of our government was happening.

I freely admit that I have no idea of what Reneland was trying to say, but the founders were quite aware of a variety of nonChristian religions, and wrote about them. George Washington, father of the country, explicitly included Judaism in the religious beliefs that were held by right, not by mere toleration. Other writers mentioned Hinduism and Islam as well. The idea that non-Christian religions were missing from “any documents written when the forming of our government was happening” is, to use one of her favorite words, ignorance.

And now come the golden sprinkles on this festive offering. “Let me give you some examples in the form of quotes by our founding fathers” Reneland writes. And of course you, my long-time readers (if any there be) know what is coming. A rich offering of fake quotes, misattributions, and other bizarrenesses. Let’s go:

First up, and by far the best of the offerings, are two quotations from John Adams. (Or from my viewpoint the worst, as they are legitimate. More or less.) The first:

I must not write a word to you about politics because you are a woman.

I actually don’t know why this one is here, or what the point of including it was. It comes from a letter to his wife Abigail (11 February 1779), and is part of an explanation of why he is avoiding a discussion of politics:

I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.

What an offence have I committed! A woman!

I shall soon make it up. I think women better than men, in general, and I know, that you can keep a secret as well as any man whatever. But the world don’t know this. Therefore if I were to write my sentiments to you, and the letter should be caught and hitched into a newspaper, the world would say, I was not to be trusted with a secret.

Of course Adams had learned about the danger of intercepted letters, to his cost. And then we have this one, a familiar out-of-context quotation from Adams’ 11 October 1798 reply to the officers of the first brigade of the third division of the Massachusetts militia, slightly misquoted:

Our Constitution was made only for the [sic] moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

And now the real fun begins. Reneland lists three quotations attributed to George Washington, of which one is legitimate. The first is an over-familiar fake:

It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, it first appeared in this form in 1893, and rests only on the word of a lawyer who never met Washington. Believe it if you like, but there’s no reason to think it authentic. This is White Queen country here. Our next is a lightly-mangled excerpt from Washington's Farewell Address:

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that natural morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Here is the authentic passage:

Let it be simply asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.

It’s close, at least. The third and last is a ring-tailed doozy:

We are persuaded that good Christians will always be good citizens, and that where righteousness prevails among individuals the nation will be great and happy. Thus while just government protects all in their religious rights, true religion affords to government its surest support.

As I’ve pointed out before, these are not Washington’s words in the least; they are taken from a letter written to him—let me reiterate to him—by a group of religious leaders. Washington is no more responsible for them than for any other random assemblage of words directed to him in his long and illustrious life.

Next comes a John Quincy Adams quotation, or rather, a slight misquotation:

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this, it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.

I’ve written about this one before. It’s basically legitimate, though it would be better to quote it directly from Adams, rather than from John Wingate Thornton. Also, John Quincy Adams isn’t really a founder.

Nor is James K. Polk, to whom this next mishmash is attributed:

The Bible is the rock on which this Republic rests. Under the benign act providence of almighty God the representatives of the states and of the people are again brought together to deliberate for the public good.

The first sentence is something usually attributed to Andrew Jackson, though on no very good authority. (Need I point out that neither is Jackson a founder?) The rest is legitimate, and is the opening of his fourth annual message to congress, 5 December 1848. Except, of course, the words “benign act” should be the word “benignant”.

And last, my favorite punching-bag, the ultra-fake Patrick Henry “quotation” written in 1956, long after the fiery orator’s death:

It cannot be emphasized enough to strongly or to often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It’s misquoted, but that’s the least of its problems. It is ignorance of the rankest variety to believe that Patrick Henry, or anybody of his time for that matter, could have written this—this piece of idiocy.

And it’s really too bad because, honestly, Reneland is not a bad place to visit. Just don’t drink the Kool-aid.

David Barton’s “Unconfirmed” Quotations—The Current Score

As yesterday's observations moved one of David Barton’s “unconfirmed” quotations from the Fake to the Slightly Mangled column, I thought it might be fun to see how the entire group stacks up so far. Here they are, in his order:

1. It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!—Patrick Henry

Fake. This one has been done to death; it’s an obvious fake—actually written in 1956, and misattributed to Henry in the 1980s.

2. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.—George Washington

Fake. This is a misquotation of a saying attributed to Washington by James K. Paulding in a children’s biography of Washington: “It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being”. Paulding insisted in his preface that he got his material from people who had known Washington, and maybe he did, but as he chose not to give his sources, it remains an unverified claim. In any case this rewritten version is manifestly fake.

3. Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian.—Holy Trinity v. U. S. (Supreme Court)

Fake. The actual author of this quotation is not the United States Supreme Court, but the Illinois Supreme Court (Richmond v. Moore, 1883): “Although it is no part of the functions of our system of government to propagate religion, and to enforce its tenets, when the great body of the people are Christians, in fact or sentiment, our laws and institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. And in this sense, and to this extent, our civilization and institutions are emphatically Christian, but not for the purpose of compelling men to embrace particular doctrines or creeds of any church, or to support one or another denomination by public burthens, but simply to afford protection to all in the enjoyment of their belief or unbelief.”

Barton’s response on learning this shows that he is still far from embracing scholarly standards on evidence, in spite of his claims—he moved the quotation from the unconfirmed to the confirmed column, apparently on the ground that somebody somewhere had said it, or something like it. If that’s his standard, then all of these quotations should be moved to the confirmed column forthwith, since every one of them was said by somebody on some occasion. The issue, of course, is whether they were said by the person (or in this case court) to which they are attributed. This one isn’t. EOD.

4. We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves . . . according to the Ten Commandments of God.—James Madison

Fake. The only genuine portion of this passage were the words “the capacity of mankind for self-government”—and Barton left them out of his mangled version of the pseudo-quotation. The quotation appears to have originated around 1958 and may be based on Dean Clarence Manion’s exposition of this Madison phrase in The Key to Peace. In any case, it’s not Madison’s.

5. Religion . . . [is] the basis and foundation of government.—James Madison

Fake. Barton prefers to call this one “inaccurate” for some reason, but it’s a fake pure and simple. The word “religion” comes from a passage Madison was quoting, and the words “the basis and foundation of government” are from the title of the piece being quoted. They aren’t Madison’s, and they don’t belong together. EOD.

6. Whosoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.—Benjamin Franklin

Fake. The words are Jacques Mallet du Pan’s, not Franklin’s, though du Pan claims they represent Franklin’s sentiment. He didn’t say where he got this idea.

7. The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be assessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.—Noah Webster

Unconfirmed—probably genuine. The passage supposedly comes from a letter Noah Webster wrote to an unnamed New York newspaper around 1837.

8. There are two powers only which are sufficient to control men, and secure the rights of individuals and a peaceable administration; these are the combined force of religion and law, and the force or fear of the bayonet.—Noah Webster

Likewise unconfirmed—probably genuine. It is the next paragraph from the same supposed letter, minus the introductory phrase “In my view”.

9. The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion.—Abraham Lincoln

Unconfirmed—likely fake. It can’t be traced earlier than the mid-1970s.

10. The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.—Abraham Lincoln

Unconfirmed—likely fake. This one also can’t be traced earlier than the late twentieth century.

11. A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.—Samuel Adams

Genuine. Samuel Adams wrote to James Warren on 12 February 1779, “A general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America than the whole Force of the Common Enemy. While the People are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their Virtue they will be ready to surrender their Liberties to the first external or internal Invader.”

12. I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens.—Thomas Jefferson

Attributed. On 15 June 1852 Daniel Webster wrote a letter to “Professor Pease” concerning the sabbath-school movement in which he recalled an afternoon spent with Thomas Jefferson a quarter of a century or so before. In it he quotes Thomas Jefferson as having said to him “I have always said, and always will say, that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.” This letter was published in 1858 and these lines have been quoted from it ever since.

13. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.—Alexis de Tocqueville

Fake. This line is a misquotation from another foreign visitor to the United States, Andrew Reed, who along with James Matheson visited the United States from Great Britain during the Jackson administration. In one of his letters he wrote back home “Universal suffrage, whatever may be its abstract merits or demerits, is neither desirable nor possible, except the people are the subjects of universal education and universal piety. America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.” Quoted a number of times during the nineteenth century, it was garbled early in the twentieth and misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.

14. The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.—John Quincy Adams

Genuine. Almost. What John Quincy Adams wrote to an autograph collector on 27 April 1837 was “The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this—it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity. If it has never been considered in that light, it is because its compass has not been perceived.” John Wingate Thornton attributed the version above, sans quotation marks, to John Quincy Adams, making a couple of trivial changes. Perhaps he was quoting from memory, as the changes seem pointless. In any case it has been quoted in the Thornton version ever since.

By my count we have seven fakes, two probable fakes, two possibly genuine items, one attribution, and two legitimate quotations. It could be worse, I suppose. Some of them are plausible, anyway. But at least three of the fakes (the Patrick Henry and the two James Madisons) are so egregious as to make you wonder how anybody could have been deceived by them. And the Illinois Supreme Court decision is grotesque, an out-of-context quotation at its worst. (And three guesses as to why he didn’t quote this line from the same decision: “a total severance of church and State is one of the great controlling foundation principles of our system of government.”) The Washington strikes me as iffy at best, especially in Barton’s form (which goes back to 1893 at any rate), but there’s nothing impossible about it, as there is with the Henry, for example.

With the remaining unconfirmed items keep in mind that the burden of proof is always on the person citing the quotation as genuine. Once again let me invoke Martin Porter’s first principle of quotation: “Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.” It’s not a bad basis to work from.

Impossible to Verify

I stumbled onto an internet meme involving an odd use of the phrase “natural history” that led me here, to a weblog entry entitled simply “Natural History is Not Science” by somebody calling himself Dr. David Shormann. The piece turns out to be the usual claptrap about how geology and astronomy and the like are “interesting, fun, and adventure-filled pursuit[s]” but not “real science” because you can’t examine a supernova in a laboratory or watch the continents drift in real time or whatever the nonsense of the day is—as it’s retread stuff I didn’t really pay attention. The thing that did catch my attention, however, was the author’s bizarre claim that it is impossible to ever verify a historical event. Speaking about the past he says “you can theorize all day long, but unless you have a time machine, you can never verify your ideas”.

WTF? Where’d that come from? Of course you can verify your ideas—or disprove them, for that matter. Here’s an example from something I’m working on right now. I have a narrative in front of me, a narrative that purports to be the true story of a man’s life in nineteenth century America. It has some quite interesting material in it, if true. But is it? According to Dr. David Shormann there is no way on earth that I can determine this, since I don’t happen to have a time machine. I guess I just have to take it at face value.

Or do I? The author claims to have been raised by a man named Drake on a farm adjoining the land owned by former President Andrew Jackson. No way I can test this, right? Think again. Our narrator supposedly lived there from say 1836 to 1847. This means that if I look at the 1840 census I should find an entry for a man named Drake somewhere near the entry for Andrew Jackson, and there should be at least one male inhabitant in the correct age range for our narrator. Finding that would tend to confirm our narrative; not finding it to disconfirm. (No evidence of this sort of course proves or disproves a claim; proof belongs to logic and mathematics, not to history.) There was no such man, by the way, not a good sign.

Our narrator claims to have met Kit Carson in a St. Louis hotel in 1847, and to have accompanied him thereafter to Bent’s Fort in Colorado. Well, Kit Carson’s activities are well-documented for this time-period. If the narrative were true we would expect to find other records of Kit Carson staying at a St. Louis hotel, and leaving town with a fifteen-year-old boy in tow. The records do indicate that Carson was in St. Louis in 1847, but he stayed at a private residence, not a hotel, and he went from there to Arizona with an army regiment and went on from there to California—not to Bent’s Fort. And no fifteen-year-old boy puts in an appearance. Not conclusive, but a bad sign.

Again, he claims to have bought land on the Sacramento River and ranched there from 1867 to 1872. If he did, there should be a title transfer recorded in the land records there (and there isn’t). And he should have shown up in Sonoma county or thereabouts in the 1870 census. Instead he shows up in that census at the opposite end of the state, in Santa Barbara county, landless and breaking horses for a living.

And again he spent time in the 1860s fighting the Apaches with General Crook—when General Crook according to army records, newspaper accounts, and a host of other documents was fighting the Shoshones in Idaho. He was the scout who brought in the Modoc leader Captain Jack in 1873 according to his own account—but reporters on the scene make no mention of him, assigning that feat to a regular army detachment, assisted possibly by some Warm Springs Indians. This is supported by the military records, by recollections of participants, and by contemporary references, none of which so much as allude to our narrator’s participation in events.

Now, not everything in this guy’s narrative failed to pan out. He claims for example to have been in Seattle in 1888, and sure enough, his name appears there in the city directory, just as it should. He claimed to have known Buffalo Bill Cody—and there are witnesses who saw Buffalo Bill embrace him and give him a seat of honor when he showed up as an old man at one of his wild west shows. But when so many records of the time fail to bear out his story, or worse yet, place him elsewhere from the place he claimed to have been, it’s impossible to take his account very seriously.

My point is this: contrary to Dr. Shormann’s claims, it is entirely possible to verify, or to controvert, historical hypotheses. Police investigators do it every day. So do epidemiologists. Realtors. Lawyers. Accountants. It’s part and parcel of the way we do business in the world. And we don’t need time machines to do it.

A Death-Bed Testimonial

One of the things about doing something for a long time—in this case, running down historical sources that have been badly annotated—is that after a while you start developing a sort of eighth sense for these things. There’s a moment when you open a box of documents and you suddenly get a sense that this is a hot source, or alternatively you see a quotation (for example) that just plain looks fishy, that has a bad odor about it, so to speak. (I have no sense of smell myself, so I’m going by literary descriptions of what smell is like here, but I think I’m using the concept correctly.) You see it, and something about it triggers the BS detector. It may take a bit before you can identify the specifics of it, why it’s cool, or it’s iffy, or whatever, but you get the sense of it before the logic takes over.

I got that feeling today (well, yesterday, technically) when looking at an (alleged) Andrew Jackson quotation. I’ve seen it before, but it never struck me as out of the ordinary until now. Here it is, as related by Frederic William Farrar in the introduction to a collection of his lectures on the Bible:

”That Book, sir,” said the American President, Andrew Jackson, pointing to the family Bible during his last illness, “is the rock on which our Republic rests.”

Well, that seems reasonable (and I hear this in Johnny Standley’s “It’s in the Book” voice). It is kind of a cliché however, the dying man’s tribute to the book of books and all that. Patrick Henry supposedly lamented while dying that he’d never had time to read the Bible properly—this despite his seeming familiarity with its language and content. One of my favorites in this genre came from a visiting scholar at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in halcyon bygone days—one of the great nineteenth century biblical expositors lay on his death bed. This man had spent his life explicating the dark passages of the Hebrew text, he knew the cognate Semitic languages the way a mail carrier knows the diurnal route he’s traveled for decades, and he now lay facing the Great Unknown. A minister sat by the side of the nearly unconscious scholar, reading to him the sonorous words of the KJV Psalm 23. Something about the language caught the dying man’s attention, and his eyes opened. “That, sir,” he is supposed to have said, “is an egregious mistranslation,” and so passed on into the void.

Did it happen? I doubt it very much, but, you know, what a way to shuffle off this mortal coil. I should be so lucky. I’ll probably exit mumbling incoherently the name of every drummer for the band that became the Beatles (anybody else remember Tommy Moore?) or trying to recall the date of the third quarto of Romeo and Juliet. But what about this rock upon which our Republic rests line?

Well, there’s nothing beyond that that really leaps out at you. The language and sentiment seem to be in accord with what little I know about Ol’ Hick’ry, one of my least favorite American presidents. But I don’t find it in the biographies immediately available to me, or in standard collections of quotations, or any other source that might give me a lead to where it came from.

And maybe that’s what bugs me about it—the company it keeps. It always seems to turn up with rather disreputable associates—the Washington “impossible to govern” bit, Jefferson’s “cornerstone” and Penn’s “ruled by tyrants” snippets—bastard pieces of flotsam floating in on the tides of history, parentless, abandoned, unknown. And when an alleged source does turn up for it, it inevitably turns out to be bogus. Yeah, Jackson said or wrote the rest of it, but not that saying. It intrudes where it obviously isn’t wanted like an uninvited party guest, and ends up tossed onto the pavement by the bouncer of hard documentation.

It turns up in haunts frequented by the usual suspects—A Lawyer’s Examination of the Bible, The Highest Critics vs. the Higher Critics, Testimonies of American Statesmen and Jurists to the Truths of Christianity, and Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States—to name but a few. This last may well be the oldest source available for the incident; there are several accounts that turn up in the year 1864, and this is the only one of them to give a source. The author, B. F. Morris, gives a sketch of the last scenes in Jackson’s life written (he says) by John S. C. Abbott, a clergyman. The sketch concludes as follows:

During his last illness, to a friend he pointed to the family Bible on the stand, and said,—

“That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests. It is the bulwark of our free institutions.”

Yes, I see, the testimony of an unnamed friend, the bane of this sort of literature. There’s no chain of custody, no evidence of transmission. How did the story get from the “friend” to the Reverend Abbott? Even if we had the “friend’s” account directly it would still be second-hand testimony. Did he get it straight from the “friend”? In that case we’re looking at third-hand testimony—but Abbott doesn’t say that. And this is the best scenario. Or did Abbott get it from somebody who got it from the friend (fourth-hand testimony)? However you look at it, this is not good.

But Andrew Jackson did have some nice things to say about the Bible during his final days, and these rest on solid second-hand evidence taken from a contemporary diary, which is as good as it gets for anything short of a recording or written record by the subject. This comes from the 29 May 1845 entry in the diary of William Tyack, a family friend and visitor during Jackson’s final days, as quoted by James Parton in his Life of Andrew Jackson (volume 3, p. 673):

The Bible is true. The principles and statutes of that holy book have been the rule of my life, and I have tried to conform to its spirit as near as possible. Upon that sacred volume I rest my hope for eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The next day Tyack observed (p. 674):

His Bible is always near him; if he is in his chair it is on the table by his side; when propped up in bed, that sacred volume is laid by him, and he often reads it . He has no power, and is lifted in and out of his sitting posture in bed to the same posture in his chair.

So, yeah, it sounds like he could have said it, that stuff about the Bible being a rock and a bulwark and all that. Trouble is, he could have said a lot of other neat things too, and absent evidence, we really have no basis for saying that he did say them. This little factoid may be legit, but it needs some proper ID before it can be admitted to the club of history. In the meantime it’s going to have to wait outside, with the pretenders and the wannabes. It’s the way things work in the academic racket.