Robert Heard’s Family Genealogy

By Robert Heard

Copyright 2011 Robert Heard

Last Updated: July 24, 2011

Copyrighted by Robert Heard, June 2011

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This is a long website, so long that the last seven photos I tried to include do not appear. So I divided the document, hoping I could add the second part to the website. You probably cannot finish reading this in one sitting. Note where you finish – a name or date – this webite still will be here when you return.

The first person in history that I think we may be linked to is a Scandinavian king named Heardred, king of the Geats (southern Sweden), who lived in the 6^th Century (500s C.E.) if he is not a mythological figure. After a brief reign, Heardred dies in battle with other Swedes (middle and northern Sweden) and is succeeded by Beowulf, who also may have been a mythological person (certainly some of the exploits attributed to him are fantastical). Beowulf is the subject of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, the oldest tale in any Germanic language, first committed to paper around 700 C.E. after being preserved orally in the same way Homer, a blind Greek poet/troubadour 1,200 years earlier (circa 750 B.C.E.) preserved The Iliad (about the 10-year Trojan War, circa 1250 B.C.E.) and The Odyssey, on the de-cade of his travels to his home in Attica, Greece, by hero Odysseus of the war at Troy. The oldest copy of Beowulf, written in the 900s C.E., is stored at the British Library (formerly at the British Museum). Heardred and his father, King Hygelac, are mentioned in the Beowulf poem. Here are two translations:

Afterwards, later in loud clash of war

Hygelac had fallen and Heardred been slaughtered

below the shield-shelter by sharp claymores [two-edged broadswords],

death-dealing blades, when daring Swedes,

fierce fightingmen, found him by seeking

among his honored Geats and with enmity

hunted and harried Hereric’s nephew;

afterward the broad kingdom passed to Beowulf’s hand.

For fifty years, he defended it well.

Beowulf, translation by Ruth P.M. Lehmann, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1988, lines 2200-2208, p. 81.

This is the cover art for Beowulf, translation by Ruth P.M. Lehmann, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1988. This is an artist’s imagined view of one of the monsters killed by Beowulf, who is a nephew of Higelac (or Hygelac), king of the Geats (GAY-ettes). Beowulf, a Geat, journeys to the great hall Heorot of Danish King Hrothgar, a descendant of Scyld, king of the Danes. The monster Grendel terrorized Heorot for a dozen years, killing Hrothgar’s men. A follower of Hrothgar named Unferth first taunts Beowulf, a great swimmer, for Beowulf’s “defeat in a swimming match” with Breca. Beowulf not only gets back at Unferth by telling the true story of Unferth’s failure to fight the monster Grendel, he also denies the allegation Breca defeated him in a swimming match. Rather, Beowulf says, he and Breca, as boys, vowed to test their courage in the open sea, where Beowulf slew “sea monsters” that harried Scandinavian fishermen for generations. Beowulf journeys to Denmark to dispatch Grendel. Unarmed but with “a grip of iron,” Beowulf is grabbed by Grendel, wrestles with Grendel and tears off Grendel’s arm. Unferth sees that Beowulf is a better fighter and lends him Unferth’s sword. Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother, who seeks revenge for her son’s wound, and Beowulf learns that Unferth’s sword will not wound the mother, so he grabs a nearby sword made by “giants” that is lying around in the cave of Grendel and his mother. Beowulf cuts off the head of the mother, then cuts off Grendel’s head. But the blood of Grendel and his mother melt the sword of the giants, leaving only the hilt. After the death of Beowulf’s uncle Hi gelac, king of the Geats, and also of Higelac’s son, Heardred, Beowulf (Heardred’s cousin) succeeds Heardred as king of the Geats (southern Sweden) and rules for 50 years. We know from other sources that Higelac is killed in about 521 C.E. in a raid on today’s Netherlands, and we know from the Beowulf poem that Heardred is slain soon afterward by Swedes, who kill him by striking him with broadswords beneath Heardred’s shield. After Beo-wulf rules for half a century, a dragon finds it has been robbed of a treasure it guarded and it devastates the country. Beowulf and 11 companions go out to meet the dragon, which breathes fire. All of Beowulf’s companions except Wiglaf flee to the woods. Beowulf’s sword breaks, and the dragon sinks its teeth in Beowulf’s neck. Wiglaf wounds the dragon, whose strength wanes. Then Beowulf kills it, but the wound by the bite in the neck is mortal.

In a funeral ritual alien to modern ears, Beowulf’s body and all of his trasure are burned.

In an essay entitled Beowulf’s Heroic Death, in Readings on Beowulf, J.D.A. Ogilvy and Donald C. Baker write on p. 73:

Happiness and prosperity -- all human goods except, per- haps, fame -- are transitory. Victories may sometimes be gained, but wars are never really won, and fate stands ever ready to sweep away the lives and works of men. The religious, Christian answer is, of course, to seek the permanent bliss of heaven. The heroic answer, as embodied in Beowulf, is a valiant stoicism: “Do your utmost. A good name is all you can win in this world.”

The monsters killed by Beowulf are the “sea monsters” that plagued Scandinavian fishermen for generations, Grendel’s mother, Grendel and, in Beowulf’s old age, the dragon that breathed fire. The Beowulf poem emphasizes alliteration, same-sounding syllables at the beginning of lines rather than modern poetry’s rhy-mes at the end of lines. Modern verse also can be blank, but there are few examples (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is the main exception) of blank verse that are worth anything.

One must remember that the early church believed in dragons and identified the devil as “the dragon.” Here are the first three verses of Chapter 20 in Revelation in the King James Version of the Bible (1611):

1: And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. 
2: And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, 
3: And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

One also must remember that Revelation is part of the early church’s canon because the church’s fathers couldn’t understand Revelation anymore than we can, but because it might be real and genuine (inspired by God), they put it in. The Beowulf poem at one point also calls Grendel’s mother and Grendel descendants of the biblical Cain. That and a reference to Cain’s brother Able are reasons scholars believe the composer of Beowulf to be Christian. Despite that, the composer chose to write the poem about a pagan Geatish king whose adventures take place in modern Denmark and Sweden.

No one knows who wrote Beowulf. We probably are indebted to Roman Catholic monks for preserving the poem. Its survival is a lucky stroke for us, because when King Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of Catholic monasteries and grabbed their wealth in the late 1520s, many books got destroyed, but a single copy of Beowulf turned up in 1563 in the hands of a private collector, Lawrence Nowell. The next owner seems to be scholar Sir Robert Cotton, who ordered it bound. Damaged slightly by fire in 1731, Beowulf eventually came to the British Museum.

Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries after Pope Clement VII denied Henry an annulment in his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Ann Boleyn (to sire a male heir). Henry also established the Church of England, today known as the Anglican Church in Britain and the Episcopal Church in America. Each church stems from an urge beneath Henry’s belt.

Here is the morerecent translation of the same lines in Beowulf that mention Heardred:

A lot was to happen in later days

in the fury of battle. Hygelac fell

and the shelter of Heardred’s shield

proved useless against the fierce aggression of the Shylfings: ruthless swordsmen, seasoned campaigners, they came against him and his conquering nation,

and with cruel force cut him down so that afterward the wide kingdom reverted to Beowulf.

He ruled well for fifty winters, grew old and wise as warden of the

land . . .

Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize for Literature -- poetry -- in 1995), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, lines 2200-2209, pp. 149, 151.

This is the cover art for Readings on Beowulf, David L. Bender, publisher, The Greenhaven Press, San Diego CA, 1998. The artist here shows the third monster slain by Beowulf (a dragon that breathes fire) first mortally wounding Beowulf by biting his neck. Beowulf drops his sword (which here is in one piece instead of being broken, as the poem says), and the fire breathed by the dragon trails out of its mouth to the rear.

The map below, from the same book, p. 18, shows the migration of Germanic tribes to England (previously inhabited only by Celtic (KELL-tic) tribesmen. The Frisians (modern Holland, or The Netherlands) slew Heardred’s father and Beowulf’s uncle, King Hygelac of the Geats on a raid against the Frisians, whose peoples, as well as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others, contributed to the Old English (called Anglo-Saxon today) spoken by the new peoples controlling what we know as Britain, a language later made famous by Chaucer and then Shakespeare. The inhabitants of what Shakespeare labeled “This Septered Isle” got a gift of 12,000 Old French words after the Norman (Northmen: Scandinavians who settled in northwest France) Invasion of England in 1066. The English took words, and still take words, from anywhere that seem useful, in contrast with the snooty French, who to this day guard the “purity” of their tongue, particularly against the “pop culture” of Americans. The result: English today boasts more words than any other language and ranks as the dialogue of choice around the world in business and other important areas. In fact, pilots the world over must speak English to air controllers everywhere.

This is not to say the Heard family dates from King Heardred of the Geats (GAY-ettes). More likely, if there is a connection at all, we are related to soldiers or serfs of Heardred. But if we are related to Heardred, so what? Did you ever hear of him before reading his name here? It’s not like he’s famous. Beowulf and Heardred lived at about the same time, circa 520 C.E., as did Celtic warrior in Southern England that we know as King Arthur. Arthur also may be mythological, or mere-ly a captain of a small force rather than a king. In Latin, the Englishmen of the ear-ly centuries of the Common Era in the Western world, referred to Arthur as dux bellorum, leader of battles in Latin. The Arthurian legend includes two tragic love stories involving knights of his supposed Round Table: Launcelot (Lancelot in English) and Arthur’s Queen Guinevere, and Tristan and Isolde. The latter in-spired the great German composer (but rabid anti-Semite) Richard Wagner in the 19^th century to write one of the most painfully sweet overtures ever penned. Tristan and Isolde runs about 18 minutes and -builds to the kind of exquisite finish that Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, 1839-1881, fashioned for an artist-friend’s Great Gate at Kiev in his Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky died of alcohol-related illnesses at age 42.

If the story of Heardred and Beowulf sounds ancient, remember the Romans, who began the final conquest of England in 43 C.E. under Emperor Claudius I (Julius Caesar first invaded England in 55 B.C.E., before the common era), and the Ro-mans withdrew in the early 400s as the empire disintegrated. Germanic peoples (Anglos, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians) invaded England, and Vikings (Danes) raided it in the 700s. Besides, 26 centuries before Caesar, the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. And about 2,000 years before that, Sumerians (Iran/Iraq) became the first farmers and brewed the first beer in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers area (thought by many to be where “the Garden of Eden” existed; certainly the ancient Hebrews got many of their ancestral stories from their captivity in Babylon in the 6^th century B.C.E., and one of those stories, about Noah’s Flood, may have some historical va-lidity, scientists recently learned, with flooding of the Black Sea after the bursting through the Darenells of the Mediterranean Sea around 7500 B.C.E. of the last Ice Age plug).

Also, you might run into a fundamentalist Christian who claims he or she descen-ded from Adam and Eve. Talk about mythological figures.

Beowulf’s “grip of iron” reminds me of Jack London’s Wolf Larsen in London’s novel The Sea Wolf. Larsen possessed a grip of iron, and actor Edward G. Robinson, who played Larsen in the 1941 movie named for the novel, used his grip on actor John Garfield, holding Garfield’s wrists across a table after Larsen went blind and his ship started sinking. Actually, the actor Robinson probably stood no taller than 5-6, but being a good actor, he made viewers believe he possessed such great strength. I forget what happened at the end. London, a famous American writer in the early years of the 20^th century, coined the phrase “The Great White Hope,” in his effort to get the previous, white, heavyweight boxing champion, Jim Jeffries, to come out of retirement and challenge Jack Johnson, the first black champion. Johnson, from Galveston, won the fight against Jeffries in 1910. At 40, London killed himself in 1916.

So we probably came from a Viking culture, as far back as when the Vikings fought each other. Then they began raiding poorly guarded treasure in Europe, mainly in England and France, in the 700s, and many settled in western and northwestern France, intermarrying with the French and, mainly later, after 1066, with the Celtic tribes in England, plus the Anglo-Saxons, Jutes and Friesians who earlier invaded England. This brings up another oddity. Those of us who grew up listening to Winston Churchill in World War II (I am one) got the false idea -- promoted by Eng-land’s victories at sea against the Spanish Armada in 1588, Lord Horatio Nelson’s triumph at Trafalgar against Napoleon’s fleet in 1805, and the Duke of Wellington’s surprising success, thanks to the late arrival of the Prussians, at Waterloo in 1815, that what Shakespeare called the Septered Isle never suffered defeat. In fact, England may be the most conquered piece of real estate on the planet.

The Vikings (later Normans) found life easier in France and England, if only be- cause of the weather. The same thing happened earlier to many of the barbarian hordes from the eastern steppes that attacked Roman cities. They liked the life they saw and began to be influenced (civilized) by it. Many biblical scholars think the same thing happened even earlier, more than a thousand years before Christ, to the ancient nomadic Hebrews, who fought the Philistines and Canaanites, then settled east of Canaan and began farming, then took over Canaan and its gods El, Baal and Asherah, jettisoning Baal and Asherah, and renaming El for their own supreme being, now referred to as Jehovah (the unpronounceable, consonants-only YHWH, with vowels: Yahweh).

It is interesting to note -- and this, too, may have no legitimate bearing on anything -- that in generations of our family dating back at least to the 19^th century many Heards featured red hair, freckles and extremely fair complexions, as does a higher percentage of others descended from Irish forebears (my aunts Bertha and Mag in particular inherited these from their father—and their mother, my grandmother Lizzie Cummings Heard, also of Irish descent (southern Ireland, therefore Catholic), wore beautiful auburn hair in her youth). In addition, my dad and my uncle John also wore heavily freckled faces (and hands), and so did I as a boy.

The portion above about Heardred appeared in the second edition of my genealogy in June 1999. Here is material from JWH regarding some centuries between Heard-red and “Sir” John Heard and his emigration from Ireland in 1719. Europeans gave the name Normans (Northmen) to fierce and roving tribes of Scandinavians also referred to by historians as Vikings. The Northmen, who included our ancestors, began their raids by boats of the coastal regions of northwestern Europe early in the Eighth Century (700s C.E.). Then they penetrated deeper via rivers, even plunder-ing Paris itself, finally forcing King Charles the Simple to cede to Norse ruler Rollo part of Neustria, thereafter called Normandy, for the Northmen, in 911 C.E. (JWH says 912, but the Columbia Desk Encyclopedia dates it one year earlier).

This cession, to a Norse leader named Rollo, occurred 97 years after the death of Charlemagne (Charles the Great), who founded the first empire in Western Eu-rope after the fall of Rome, and who ruled from 800 to 814. Unfortunately for Fran-ce, the monarchs who succeeded Charlemagne all turned out to be weak despite adopting the name Charles. These included Charles the Fat and Charles the Simple.

Probably early in the 10^th Century (900s C.E.), soon after the cession, the Scandina-vian Heards (not the spelling at that time—possibly Yerd) settled on lands appor-tioned to them in what became Mayeene Province, 150 miles southwest of Paris and in a southern portion of the new Norman domain.

Our Scandinavian ancestors later fight with William the Conqueror, a descendant of Viking chieftain Rollo, in the Battle of Hastings in southern England, Oct. 14, 1066 (The Normans landed on Sept. 28). The Heards in the Norman Invasion by this time go by the name “De Herde” (similar to Charles De Gualle) In one of the translations of Beowulf (there are dozens) Heardred is rendered Heardred, close to the De Herde of those Norsemen who fought with William of Orange at Hastings. They changed it to the more Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) name Heard after one Heard wins land in County York, England, for his service in the victory at Hastings and later battles. William ruled gently and sought to ingratiate himself with his new subjects (remember, history usually is written by the winners), but increasing con-spiracies, revolts and an insurrection in the north in 1069 caused him to suppress re-bellion brutally, laying waste to the northeast part of England, especially between York (about 35 miles from the east coast) and Durham (about 60 miles north of York and about 15 miles from the coast). His army killed more than 100,000 peo-ple, and he confiscated their lands. William later gave the Heards some of these lands near Keighley, West Riding, in Yorkshire, as their primary land.

Two of the 72 sections of the Bayeux (buy-you) Tapestry (technically an embroid-ery, not a tapestry), a celebration of Norman duke (not king) William of Orange’s conquest at Hastings in southern England in 1066. William then became a king, of England. The entire tapestry is 231 feet long (77 yards, equal to one of the longest football punts you’ll ever see). It is thought to be the work of an Englishman from the early 1200s, which confirms that the winners write the history. A century and a half after the battle, the Englishman who produced the tapestry would himself have been celebrating the conquest of his own island, because he would have descended from its conquerors. I pick the lower section because it shows Halley’s Comet an inch or so from the right at the top of the second strip (shown heading toward the right). Halley’s is known to have been in the sky in February 1066, and, strange as it may seem to us, got some credit as an “omen” of William’s conquest, even though the Battle of Hastings, 64 miles southeast of London near England’s south-ern coast, did not occur until Oct. 14 of that year. Oh, how we will stretch to incor-porate a superstition into our humdrum history. The tapestry shows little combat, which fits reality, because war is not as much about combat (although we glorify such scenes) as it is about movement to gain an advantage -- much marching and digging-in and marching again. The tapestry shows a lot of the buildup to the battle, the negotiations and the movement of ships, men, horses, weapons, and armament like shields. Bayeus is a small town near the Normandy coast of France not far from Omaha Beach, where allied forces landed on D-Day, June 6, 1944. William first sailed from the mouth of the River Dives, about 15 miles east of Caen, which is 15 miles east of Bayeus. From there, William docked in the bay at St. Valery, the mouth of the River Somme (where a generation of young Englishmen perished in World War I in the Battle of the Somme), thence across the English Channel about 55 miles to Pevensey, west-southwest of Hastings about 15 miles. Illustrations above and below from The Bayeus Tapestry, John Collinwood Bruch, Dorset Press, a division of Marlboro Books Corporation-Bracken Books, New York, 1987, first printed in 1838 in Paris, France, pp. 67 and 134.

Two more of the 72 sections of the Bayeux Tapestry, showing, in the top panel, the death of King Harold of England. Each of the two figures in the top middle, the one standing and holding the shaft of an arrow whose tip is at his head, and the one toppling from a horse, with his sword ready to fall to the ground, is thought to be Harold, according to Grant Wood in his Dark Ages, Facts on File Publications, New York, 1987. The lettering above the top panel reads: “Here King Harold was killed.” It is known that an arrow (probably from a long bow, like the ones the Eng-lish used at Agincourt in 1415) to an eye killed Harold. Harold hurried south to op-pose William, too late, after fighting in the north of England. Another good source is 1066: The Year of the Conquest, David Harworth, Dorset Press, New York, 1977. The depictions of butchered bodies in the tapestry are only slightly less crude than those drawn by AmerIndians (American Indians) after rare victories such as the one over George Armstrong Custer and the 7^th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Williams’ armament advantage, more long bows against the English battle axe, is a bit puzzling, because the English under Henry V vanquished three times their number 349 years later at Agincourt (1415) in France by employing the long bow at 200 yards to rain down on mounted Frenchmen wearing armor. The tapestry remained little known for six centuries. When Napoleon learned of it, in 1803, he ordered it brought to Paris temporarily during his preparations for invading England (which he never tried, because of the English Navy). Real victor at Hastings: The English language, which absorbed 12,000 French words. Unlike the snooty French, who fight among themselves to see who can better protect the “pur-ity” of their tongue against Incursions, particularly against American pop culture, English always is happy to adopt any foreign word or phrase not already expressed by an English term. That’s why English is the international language today.

Those who love the Winston Churchill of 1940 (I am one), tend to think England never got conquerored. After the Battle of Britain in 1940, where an air force less than a third the size of Hitler’s, fought the Nazis to a draw (over England), Church-ill immortally said, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, this was their finest hour.” I particularly loved Church-ill’s pronunciation of “last” (lahst) that gave rise to the unconquered idea. Actually, Britain is one of the most-conquered pieces of real estate anywhere. Various Viking tribes, including the Danes, did it centuries before 1066, and Rome did it centuries before that, holding the southern portion of the island (building “Hadrian’s Wall” to protect themselves from the Picts (Scots) for more than 400 years. And not only did the British Empire fail to last for a thousand years, the empire soon dissolved after World War II. But the commonwealth survives. Canady, Australia and New Zea-land still consider themselves as part of Britain’s commonwealth, making formal bows to the English monarch (as American women do for Prince William’s wed-ding in 2011. Even India holds a soft spot for things British (like cricket). Or some Indians do. However, in any important sense all those are free and independent countries. See the Sioux drawing after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 for its similarityto the Bayeau Tapestry.

The Heard Family Coat of Arms (see text below).

The “demi-goat” half body at top is the salient (the posture of the animal leaping) “attired or ducally gorged” (encircled around the throat with a Ducal Coronet). The chevron (thick, inverted “v” in “gules” or red) on the shield of the Heard Coat of Arms represents the rafter of a roof, emblematic of stability (loyalty) and is used only by those families whose ancestors participated in positions of responsibility in the Norman invasion of 1066. Three crescents (bowl-shaped, quarter-moon designs with the tips at both ends jutting upward and painted in “argent,” or silver or white) on the chevron have two interpretations, both indicating service in at least one of the Crusades, 1187-1291), but here there are three, indicating participation in all three crusades. Genealogists think a Heard participated at least in the Third Cru-sade, 1187-1191, commanded by Richard the Lionhearted of England. There are three black water bougets on the coat of arms, two above the chevron and one be-low. A “bouqet” is two bags of animal skin on a stick, used to carry drinking water for the Crusaders. At the crest of the coat of arms is a demi-goat (leaping but with its hind legs hidden behind a bar atop the coat of arms, with a ducal coronet around its throat; the goat symbolizes the chase), and the family motto on a scroll beneath the shield is “Audior,” from the Latin verb “to hear” and is literally translated “heard.” In our line of the family, the word sometimes is translated to mean “I will listen” or “I will hear,” either rendering is a peculiar notion for such a voluble group. Other families, Yards, Yerds, Herds, etc., carry this coat of arms, according to my dad’s 1957 genealogy.

The Third Crusade occurred about a century before Venetian Marco Polo 1254-1324?) travelled to far-off Cathay (China). In 1455 German printer Johann Gutenberg, who invented movable type, printed the Mazarin Bible. Some think Dutch-man Laurens Janszoon Koster and/or Italian Pamfilo Castaldi invented movable type earlier.

14^th Century, the 1300s, in which period the Shroud of Turin, the alleged burial cloth of Jesus, is created according to carbon dating. To concentrate on either the so-called Holy Grail or the Shroud of Turin is idolatry. It is to focus not on what we are led to believe Jesus taught and instead concern ourselves with alleged arti-facts of his life that Jesus himself would have dismissed as next to worthless.

In succeeding centuries, Heards settled along the north coast of County Devon (the southwestern-most point of England except for Cornwall). For example, records show at least 14 John Heards born in 14 different Devon towns between the years 1533 and 1598. 1533 is 41 years after Christopher Columbus set sail with three ships, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, from Polus, Spain, on Aug. 3, 1492. He sighted Watling Island in today’s Bahama group on Oct. 12. Four other John Heards are known to have lived in Cornwall between 1530 and 1557, and other Heards lived in County Essex on England’s east coast (immediately northeast of London). One Sir Isaac Heard (we don’t know if “Earle” John Heard descended from him) presented to Queen Elizabeth a frigate, armed and equipped, to help repel the Spanish Armada of 1588, 24 years after the birth of William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Galileo Galilei also is born in 1564 (d. 1642). Michelangelo died in 1564.

King Henry II (1133-1189) of England attempted to take “peaceful” possession of Ireland in the 12^th Century, and for the next four hundred years the Irish remained in rebellion, with the English controlling only a small portion of the island (north). The Irish launched all-out war late in the 16^th Century, and enjoyed initial success under chieftain Hugh O’Neil, Earl of Tyrone, but the English crush the insurgents in 1603 and redistributed more than 600,000 acres to leaders among the victorious English leaders. Twice again before 1650, the Irish rise up only to be smashed, with the loss of additional lands. The Heards of West Riding, County York, contributed large sums of money to the suppression of the rebels. For “services to the crown,” probably soon after 1603, Heards won estates near Aiglish, County Tyrone, Ire-land. By the time the Heards (“Earle” John Heard and his 11 children) emigrated to America in 1719 and 1720, they became so thoroughly Irish they spoke only Gaelic, which John spoke the remainder of his long life (he lived to be at least 101 after being captured by the British at age 100 in Wilkes County, Georgia, and being freed from the Augusta, Georgia, stockade by a grandson named Barnard when Ameri-can forces retook Augusta in 1781).

The second Stephen Heard, grandson of “Sir” John Heard and son of John Heard’s third son John (the first Stephen counted as his second son), founded Fort Heard in 1779 in what is now Washington, Georgia (the first town or state named for George Washington, in 1780, with the revolution still being fought). Fort Heard became the temporary capital of Georgia when the Georgia Assembly abandoned Augusta on Feb. 5, 1780, and went to Fort Heard (about 50 miles northwest of Au-gusta) after the British took Savannah. In the absence of Gov. Richard Howley, who attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, George Wells, as president of the Assembly (or Council), served as acting governor, but he died on Feb. 18, 1780, and the Council elected Stephen, who became acting governor.

Here we come across another delicious story, like “The Irish dog has your daugh-ter,” that, a pity, also turns out not to be true, although there may be some relation to a historical event, just as the “Irish dog” story turned out to be partially true for a son of the original Stephen (Jesse), and to have taken place in this country and not overseas. The problem with this story is that the Rebels defeated the Tories at Kettle Creek, not the other way around (the Tories threw their cooking kettles in the creek, giving it its name). Stephen and other Heards fought with 500 Rebels against 700 Tories (Loyalists) at War Hill on Kettle Creek, and Stephen numbered among 23 Rebels wounded and captured by the Tories and turned over to the British at the stockade at Fort Cornwallis in Augusta. So it is more likely the Rebels captured some wounded Tories. Stephen owned a huge slavewoman named Mammy Kate, probably 6 feet or more and weighing over 200 pounds, and Kate visited her master with the permission of the British, whose ruffled shirts she ironed to win their favor. She asked if she could take Stephen’s laundry and return with clean clothes. “He won’t need them. We will soon hang that rebel,” said the jailer. “Let him hang in clean clothes,” begged Kate. They granted this request, allowing her to go back and forth to the prison twice a week and return his clothes for washing (JWH) says she made only one trip). (John Wilkerson Heard of San Antonio, whom I interviewed in 1984; I interviewed him and attorney Oliver Heard of san Antonio at the same time to see if either possessed a “Robert Lee Heard Jr.” in their line of ancestors; my late brother John G Heard and his wife Joanna gave me an 1867 silver beaker (drinking vessel) that they found and purchased for $300 to give to me; neither John Wilkerson nor Oliver did; I since came to the conclusion that the Robert Lee Heard Jr., or rather his father (Sr.) got named for that same Lee who came out of the Mexi- American War as the most-famous junior officer in that “conflict”; the 19^th century boy with my name received the beaker from his “grandfather” and “Gmother” (more male dominance) got named earlier for the civil war commander; indeed, the Civil War commander probably got offered the command of the Union armies be-cause of his exploits in the earlier war, if not for his capture of John Brown and his band in 1859 at Harper’s Ferry. The Heard captured by the British in the 18^th century, Stephen, a small man (we later Heards got our size from grandmother Lizzie’s Cummings Heard’s ancestors, who included the “Strongman” who became my great grandfather), curled up in Mama’s large laundry basket, and she carried him out on top of her head.

This capture story is not to be confused with the capture of the second Stephen’s 100-year-old grandfather, “Sir” John Heard, also incarcerated in the Augusta stock-ade before another grandson, Barnard, freed the old man after Rebel forces retook the town in 1781. Incidentally, the last “cabinet” meeting for the Confederacy took place in the Heard Mansion in Washington, Georgia, but Jeff Davis subsequently got captured before he could flee to Cuba.

Apparently a true story from this period, however, quoted by JWH from The Story of Washington-Wilkes, says Loyalists drove Stephen’s wife and child out of their cabin into a snowstorm in his absence and burned the cabin. The wife and child died of exposure. They make a bigger deal about the Heards in Georgia than Texans do about the Heards here. I admit these old stories are cinfusing regarding who did what.

The second Stephen’s younger brother, Thomas (1742-1808), the Heard from whom we are descended, served as a captain in the American Revolution and then in the Georgia Legislature in 1795.

Here, with additions, is the direct line from “Sir” John Heard to Wyatt Hubbard Heard, as printed by my father, Dow H. Heard Sr., for the family on June 9, 1957. Those in the direct line to Wyatt Hubbard Heard and Mary Elizabeth Cummings Heard, and the 10 children of WHH and MECH are underscored. For the sentence or two added to each name to give historical perspective, I am mainly indebted to four books: The Almanac of American History, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., general editor (who later served in the White House with John F. Kennedy), John S. Bowman, executive editor, Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 1993; The New York Times PAGE ONE Commemorative Edition 1896-1996, by Adolph S. Ochs, Galahad Books, New York, 1996; The Film Encyclopedia, Ephraim Katz, Third Edition, HarperPerennial, New York, New York, 1998 (last Oscar awards listed are for 1996 movies); and the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, David Crystal, editor, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1995. In some cases, like the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, I am indebted to other books, in that case, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: The Story of Nazi Germany, pp. 1047-1071, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1960.

1670s? Birth decade (?) of “Sir” John Heard, who, in a dispute over tithes, uses a pitchfork to run off a minister of the established church, then emigrates from Ang-lish, County Tyrone, Ireland, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (JWH says Virginia) in 1719 (13 years before George Washington is born in 1732) as a widower with six sons and five daughters. Since he counts 11 children in 1719, he probably is at least 45 years old, meaning he would have been born around 1675 (JWH says 1680, and may be right -- check 1781, when John is freed by one of his grandsons as a British prisoner in Augusta GA at age 100-plus). He marries his second wife, Ester La Pierre, on July 10, 1722. He goes down the coast to Charleston, South Carolina, “where he must have remained sometime,” according to my father’s 1957 docu-ment.

One story says he lived to be more than 100 years old and spoke nothing but Gaelic his entire life. For historical perspective, let’s call Sir John’s birth year 1675. That’s the year King Philip’s War begins at Plymouth in what now is eastern-most Massachusetts. Philip, a Wampanoag Indian (real name: Metacomet), realizes growing English settlements soon will push all Indians out of the colony, so he recruits other tribes to join him in raiding those settlements. New Englanders today don’t dwell on the history of their own barbarism against the Indians (scalping began as an Anglo-American practice, to prove how many of the “savages” a settler killed).

John Heard almost certainly is an Angilican, and with his pitchfork he rebels against the established church, meaning the Church of England, established in 1534 by Henry VIII after Pope Clement VII refuses to annual his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who bore six daughters (only one survived infancy) but no male heir. John lives in Tyrone County in Protestant Northern Ireland, making his obstinacy more perilous. Of course, all Christians in Western Eu-rope professed the Roman Catholic faith (except, perhaps, for primitive Bap-tists, or so say some Baptists) prior to Martin Luther’s nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the doors of the church at Wittenberg in Germany in 1517.

When citing Luther’s great contribution to Christianity -- band it is monu-mental – one also must consider what drew Luther to the Roman Catholic priesthood in the first place. However, we also must ask if the church ever apologized for Pope Leo X (reigned 1513-1521) for approving the sale of indulgencies to restock the church’s treasury that his lavish living style depleted.

Ancient institutions and traditions resist change, and after Henry VIII broke with the Vatican, many in England and Ireland secretly (on pain of death) re-mained Catholic while publicly performing what they needed to (tithes, atten-dance at church, sacraments such as baptism, marriage and death controlled by the Anglican Church) to escape sanctions. These resisters are remembered as recusants (REK-you-zents), people who rebel against authority, specific-ally Roman Catholics in England and Ireland in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s, who rejected the Anglican Church.

They seldom do it publicly, however. I learned this from a 1998 biography of Shakespeare, by Oxford-educated-writer Anthony Holden (Little, Brown and Company, Boston, New York, London) ­-- similarly, there is always a new book on cosmology, as I learned from the late McDonald Observatory director Harlan Smith. Shakespeare’s father numbered among the recusants. Elected bailiff (mayor) of Stratford in 1568 in his mid-30s, and charged with enforcing the laws of the Anglican Church, which he did reluctantly, John Shakespeare paid personal fines for nonattendance at church on several oc-casions, sometimes employing the bogus excuse he needed to avoid creditors. It seems clear William grew up trained both as an Anglican (publicly) and a Catholic (privately). In 1757, 156 years after the father’s death in 1601, workmen replacing tile in the father’s home on Henley Street in Stratford (still owned by one of John’s descendants) discovered between the tiles and the rafters a packet of 14 articles that in effect profess the Roman Catholic faith (Holden, p. 25). Many recusants owned such material, printed in Rome and smuggled into England, which they hid from authorities. Evidence from the son’s plays, sonnets and philandering ways (particularly as expressed in the sonnets) indicate William held no (controlling) religion as a mature man, but clearly his childhood training involved both faiths.

Scholars contend our language changed less in the 400-plus years since Shakespeare than it did in the 200 years between Chaucer and Shakespeare. They say that is true because we didn’t want to lose Shakespeare. True. But an argument could be made that the same thing is true because we didn’t want to lose the King James Version of the Bible. Both no doubt are true. Indeed, some think, citing unconfirmed tradition, that Shakespeare and fellow playwright Ben Jonson collaborated “to polish up the Psalms as we know them” in the King James (Holden, p. 290).

The Cummingses, of course, come from the south of Ireland in the late 18-40s after the Potato Famine and would have been Catholic. However, in the late 19^th century no non-Hispanic Catholic Church exists in Uvalde County, the closest probably being in San Antonio (or perhaps Castroville), 100 miles and four-traveling-days to the east. The Cummings by the late 1800s prob-ably already switched to Protestant faiths in earlier times. Wyatt Hubbard Heard and Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Cummings Heard traded the land on which the Heard/Church three miles above Reagan Wells is built in 1909, where Baptist services are held, for a lot or lots in Reagan Wells. This is where the Heard Reunion is held each year on the Saturday nearest June 23, Lizzie’s birthday (June 23) in 1877 (also her dad’s, in 1850).

It is a mystery to me how WHH and MECH ever got together, yet they eloped UP the Dry Frio Canyon in 1895.

1695? Birth decade of the original “John” (JWH says 1700, but that would make

John only 15 when he married, not at all unusual for a woman centuries ago, but most unusual for a man; although Shakespeare aged about 18 when he married a woman, Anne Hathaway, 26, in 1582) Stephen Heard, second son and second child of John, who stays behind in 1719 in Ireland a year to settle his father’s affairs, would have been about 20. Stephen marries Lady Mary Falkner in 1721. 1695: At about this time, some plains Indians, probably a branch of Shoshones in what is now eastern Wyoming, obtain horses (which the Spanish brought over to the New World). An unattractive and runty peo-ple, these Indians become known as Comanches, and no warriors in the history of the world better master the horse or fight more savagely. They sweep down through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The Spanish invite Ang-lo-American settlement in Texas in the early 1820s (Stephen Austin’s father Moses) specifically to create a barrier between themselves and the Coman-ches. But the Anglos mostly choose river-bottom lands in southeast Texas. Thirty-seven years after 1695, George Washington is born in 1732. Steph-en’s death year, 1774, comes two years before the American Revolution. He dies in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. In 1696, extensive slave trading is in-itiated by New Englanders, after the English Royal African Trade Company loses its monopoly in the slave trade. The Almanac of American History, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (who worked in John Kennedy’s White House), general editor, John S. Bowman, executive editor, Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 1993, p. 69.

1737, birth year of William Gulley in North Carolina, sired by the Gulley who

emigrated to North Carolina (year, first name and country of origin un-known). Three years before 1737, German-born newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger is arrested on Nov. 17, 1734, on a charge with seditious libel for articles in his New York Weekly Journal critical of New York Gov. William Cosby. Zenger is held in prison for 10 months before he is put on trial in 1735. Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton ably defends Zenger (this is where we got the phrases, “Hire a Philadelphia lawyer” and “You can’t beat a Philadelphia lawyer”). Hamilton persuades the jury the articles about the governor are not libelous because they are true. Truth, previously irrel-evant, thereby becomes a complete defense against a charge of libel, a major step in America’s adoption of freedom of the press. Almanac, p. 84. William Gulley is born five years after George Washington’s birth (1732) and six years before Thomas Jefferson’s (1743). William (his surname is spelled Gully after 1792, but his two brothers and later family members, including William’s heirs, consistently spell it Gulley) and Beathanea (called Bethany) Hinnant (birth year unknown) are believed to have married in 1764, because she gave birth to their first child, Sarah, on Nov. 10, 1765. Her 10^th of 11 children, John Gulley, came on March 4, 1788, in Duplin County, North Carolina. John marries Nancy Bizzell on Feb. 13, 1809, and she gives birth to Harvey Gulley, this writer’s great-grandfather, on May 10, 1831.

Sometime in the mid-1700s, the Heards in Virginia (before Thomas moved to Georgia after the Revolution) bought Arabian horses from George Washington. This is not a special feather our cap because Washington, the wealthiest man in Virginia, no doubt sold horses to lots of people.

A younger brother of Stephen, John, named one of his children Stephen, 1740-1815), who twice served as temporary governor of Georgia during the American Revolution, 1780-82. Georgia later named a county on the Alabama border south west of Atlanta Heard County in honor of this second Stephen. Neither JWH’s nor our line of the Heard family descends from the governor. One of the first of Steph en’s children, Jesse, is the JWH ancestor back to Stephen and his father “Sir” John. A younger brother of Jesse, Thomas, is our ancestor. My father’s genealogy in 1957 shows Jesse as having two other younger siblings before Thomas got born in 1742. Unless the two in-between siblings, George and (yet another) Stephen, are twins, this seems impossible.

Also in 1780, on March 1, the Pennsylvania Assembly enacts legislation mandating the gradual abolition of slavery. Also in 1780, New York and Connecticut cede to the Union their claims to western lands. In 1781, Jan. 17, American Gen. Daniel Morgan, with 1,040 men, defeats British Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton with 1,100 men in the Battle of the Cowpens in South Carolina with a feinting move forward in front of two elevations and a double enveloping maneuver that nearly destroys Tarleton and ever after is studied by generals all over the world.

Some of our Heard ancestors fought with William the Conqueror and his Normans or Northmen (in northwestern and western France) at the Battle of Hastings in southern England in 1066 C.E. (common era). Those Heards, then called “de Herde,” emigrated centuries earlier from ScanScandinavia. The name became the more Germanic Heard in England, and our ancestors later emigrated to Northern Ireland, thence to America in 1719.

1742, Thomas Heard, fourth son and fourth child of Stephen Heard andMary

Falkner, is born in Virginia in 1742 and dies in 1808. He serves as a captain in the American Revolution and for his service receives “troop bounties” and “land warrants.” 1742 is the year before Thomas Jefferson is born on April 13, 1743. In 1743, Benjamin Franklin helps establish the American Philosophical Society, limited to those who distinguish themselves in science, philosophy or literature. Franklin becomes the society’s president in 1769 and remains in that post until his death in 1790. Franklin is so successful in pub-lishing, printing and bookselling he retires at 37 and devotes himself to public service. Almanac, p. 87. (In 1775, Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush of Phila-delphia establish the first slavery-abolition society in America. Almanac, p. 117.) In 1742 German composer George Frideric (sic) Handel (b. Feb. 23, 1685) writes his Messiah, one of the 10 greatest musical compositions ever, but that assessment needs leveling by one of Mark Twain’s great lines in Huckleberry Finn, “Music is a good thing,” meaning by itself, without regard to what inspired it or what it may be used for. The same can be said of magnificent church cathedrals. (Compare Hitler’s insistence that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony be played on loudspeakers in the streets of Staingrad in 1943; search for Fifth Symphony below). Unfortunately, many of Handel’s other compositions, particularly for sopranos, sound like scales or caterwauling to me. After the American Revolution, Thomas moves to Georgia.

1770, March 5, in what becomes known as the Boston Massacre, an angry

Boston mob confronts British troops stationed in Boston. The soldiers fire pointblank into the mob, killing three, mortally wounding two and injuring six. A free black man, Crispus Atticus, largely responsible for provoking the crowd, is killed. The great role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mocking-bird is played by Gregory Peck. Four days later, Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchison orders the arrest for murder of eight British troops, who are tried in October-December 1770 and defended by, among others, John Adams, who six years later will lead the Continental Congress to declare in-dependence from England. A civil jury acquits Captain Thomas Preston and six of his men; two other soldiers are convicted of manslaughter and are punished with branding, then released. On Dec. 16, 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven is born. He dies in 1827 at 57, stone deaf in his final years, inclu-ding when he finished the Ninth Symphony, inspired by his friend Johann Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy. The Ninth perhaps is the greatest piece of music ever created. It is adopted two centuries later as the anthem of the Euro-pean Union.

1773, Dec. 16, eight thousand Bostonians meet at the Old South Church to

hear Samuel Adams, cousin of John Adams, tell them that Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchison will not permit British ships to leave the harbor without payment by colonists of the duty on tea. That night, a group of ac-tivists disguised as Mohawk Indians board the tea ships and dump all 342 casks of tea into the water in what becomes known as the Boston Tea Party. Almanac, p. 113. Two centuries plus later, an offshoot of the Republican Party call themselves the Tea Party (they mainly hate Barrack Obama, be-cause he is half black). A year later, April 22, 1774, a private consignee se-cretly tries to unload tea in New York Harbor in defiance of the colonial tea embargo, and members of the New York Sons of Liberty, disguised as In-dians, dump the tea in the harbor. Almanac, p. 113.

1775, Thomas Heard (son of Thomas) is born as the third son and seventh

child of the first Thomas Heard and Elizabeth Fitspatrick (this is a cor-rection in my father’s 1957 genealogy, which states the first Thomas Heard birthed children with his second wife, Mary Veasy, but later information suggests he got all his children with Elizabeth).

1775, Daniel Boone leads settlers through the Cumberland Gap and founds

Boonesboro, Kentucky. Boone blazed the trail through the gap several times earlier. In his 1775 trip, he led hundreds of settlers, including a man named Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of the Civil War president. Also in 1775, March 23, Patrick Henry delivers his famous call for American independ-ence from Britain, telling the Virginia Provincial Convention, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” But Henry later opposes the ratification of the 1787 U.S. Constitution. So this writer wishes someonegave him death. The second Thomas Heard dies in 1810 at only 35.

1775, April 1920, British Gen. Thomas Gage orders 700 troops to Concord,

Massachusetts, to destroy the colonial arms depot there. Minutemen at Lexington and Concord oppose the British, touching off the American Revolution. The Minutemen fire at the Redcoats from behind trees, considered un-sporting by the British (who later refuse to put helmets on their troops or allow parachutes in early airplanes in the first year of WWI, calling them un-sporting. Almanac, pp. 109-110.

1776, July 2, the day the Continental Congress votes to accept Thomas Jeffer

son’s Declaration of Independence with Congress’ hundreds of changes. Most of the signings occurred on July 4, plus some on later days, up to and including Aug. 2. Reportedly, King George III made this entry in his diary for July 4: “Nothing important happened today.” Remarkably, we learn from David McCullough’s 2005 book, 1776 (p. 130), that George Washington and his generals urged Congress to declare independence. Generals usually are conservative, supporting the status quo. In a famous clash of political philosophies, Jefferson’s republic of free and independent yeomen, farmers and landowners will lose to Alexander Hamilton’s strong, centralized gov-ernment, run by the rich (The American Civil War insured Hamilton’s vic-tory). Historian Forrest McDonald, perhaps our best scholar on 18^th century American political thought, noted in his masterly 1994 The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, pp. 233-234, that at a dinner party in late April 1793, Jefferson, John Adams and Hamilton discussed the best form of government. Adams thought the British system, minus its corruption, the best. Hamilton thought the British system, with its corruption, the best (I suppose he imagined rich guys [who proved their superiority by gaining riches] would bribe their way into powerful political positions). At that in-stant,says McDonald, Jefferson determined to oppose Hamilton, and from that determination grew the first political party in America, Jefferson’s Republican-Democratic Party, which later became the Democratic Party, opposed initially by the Federalists, who became the Whigs, who became, in 1854, the Republican Party (in Lincoln’s Illinois in 1856).

Alexander Hamilton also is the man we must thank, or curse, for promo-ting the idea of corporations. The much-praised-by-liberals 14^th Amendment after the Civil War, which led to the extension of the Bill of Rights to the states, known as the Doctrine of Incorporation (by the U.S. Supreme Court in the late 19^th century, but gained strength in the 20^th Century with the decent of Union veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Gitlow vs. New York decision ), also gave birth to the notion that corporations are entitled to the status of entities that could be citizens and sue and be sued in court. What Hamilton held in mind is that corruption is good in the sense the monarchy could reward the most talented people who bribed their way into office (with money they got that proved their merit; you know, making money “proves” one is smart). What Jefferson held in mind is an aversion to anything resembling a bribe, or aristocracy, for that matter. Today, of course, corporations run our lives. It would take the most potent enema in history to rid ourselves of the curse of corporate control, made worse in a 2008 decision by a 5-4 decision (with the late appointment by the dumbest president in our history of Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito) stating that corporations may contribute any amount of money to political candida-tes or campaigns. The reader would be surprised at how little even most lawyers know about the Doctrine of Incorporation. Guess which poliical party that decision favors.

1787. The greatest political document ever struck off at one time by the hand of

man (so said, among others, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881, who twice served in that high office, 1868 and 1874-1880), the U.S. Constitution).That document and its first 10 amendments (the Bill of Rights) contained four major and two minor flaws. What would anyone expect? More than the normal amount of men at the 1787 convention came with superior educations of outstanding brains. But they hoped to craft a democracy (as they saw it) never tried before in the history of the world.

They failed miserably, but also inevitably, to deal with slavery (only our worst-ever war 74 years later answered that question; there would have been no United States if the Founders insisted on abolishing slavery).

Second: It gave each state two U.S. senators and a minimum of three electo-ral votes (one for each senator and one for a single representative, based on a tiny population, like Wyoming’s) in presidential races.

Third: It allowed the candidate with the second highest vote total for presi-dent to become vice president even if he (they didn’t think of women) advo-cated a different political philosophy than the winner.

Fourth: The Second Amendment is vague enough to allow gun nuts to claim it gives them the right to own any firearm or bazooka or flamethrower or bomb they wish to possess. (Actually, I’ve felt for some time that liberals like me ought to tolerate gun nuts so long as they don’t attack the First Amendment. The problem is, in recent years, the religious kooks, most of whom support the National Rifle Association, have attacked the First Amendment by supporting entanglement of church and religion, by wanting all taxpayers to pay for school vouchers for tuition to private (read church) schools, and by wanting “Creationism” or “Intelligent Design” to be taught in public schools alongside evolution. “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design” have nothing to do with science. They are based on faith, religious faith, and cannot be duplicated in a laboratory. They should be taught, if at all, in the home or at church, places where, in a free country, faith without evidence in whatever superstition one favors may be allowed or even cham-pioned.

Imagine the beauty of the Founders’ product if Charles Darwin preceded them by 73 years instead of trailed them by that period.

Many people want their kids taught ”Intelligent Design” together with evolu-tion (because evolution is needed for admittance to most colleges -- all the good ones). They also want “prayer in schools.” All of that is possible with-out involving schools. Simply teach your kids “Intelligent Design” at home. Or let teachers in your church teach them that. How about that? Plenty of praying goes on in public schools, anyway, particularly before tests that kids aren’t prepared for. A ban on praying in schools never won recognition. Goes on all the time. What is prohibited is government prayer in schools, official prayer in schools, which backers always want to be Christian prayer, in a time paid for by all taxpayers.

Why not teach a Christian faith in a setting and at a time paid for by a large majority of the taxpayers, who call themselves Christians? Glad you asked. (Incidentally, that’s precisely what Muslim countries do today regarding their faith; talk to them about separation of church and state, and they’ll look at you like you have three heads.) The Founders’ sole motive for the Bill of Rights involved protection of the rights of the minority against the majority. A guy (or gal today) can stand aside from the majority, hold a dif-ferent opinion from the majority, and not suffer retaliation. That’s what it means to be free. Some Founders thought they didn’t need a Bill of Rights, that those guarantees are implied in the original document. Not so, others argued. If you don’t spell it out, and do it now, some will come along later and say the majority must rule, in all things, all the time. But that’s a tyran-ny, too.

Think of the balancing act the Founders performed. With no guidelines! It ain’t easy being green, as Kermit the Frog would say a couple of centuries later.

Besides, the Founders did not think their work would last two-plus centur-ies. Jefferson thought the Tree of Liberty needed the nourishment of the blood of revolutionaries every 20 years or so. The Founders kept the Constitution short, with room to stretch, like a well-designed, spare house. And if it did last a long time, it applied only to the federal government, not the states (before the Civil War).

We know now that later men in our federal government accidentally exten-ded the federal document to the states, when they wrote the 14^th Amendment (this is why some Republicans want to repeal that amendment) to make sure the former slave states did not mistreat their former slaves. It took many years for our judges to understand that the men who wrote the 14^th Amendment did not use language applying solely to former slaves, any-more than the original document talked about slavery -- it spoke only of “free persons” being counted in reference to representation in Congress and regarding taxation, with the number of those persons “bound to service for a term of years” (indentured servants) being added to “free persons,” but that “all other persons” [meaning male slaves over 21] but not Indians) should be counted as three-fifths of a person. The North objected to the use of the word “slave” in a majestic document covering the entire country. The South could live with that, but the South wanted its slaves to count for something. That would give the South greater clout in what everyone expected to be a weak federal government, so the two sides compromised by counting each adult male slave (“other person”) as three-fifths of a person.

Seeking to protect former slaves from former slaveholders after the Civil War, congressmen wrote these words at the end of the first section of the five-section 14^th Amendment: “ . . . nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It takes three-quar-ters of the states to amend the Constitution. The 13^th Amendment, ratified by three-quarters of the states on Dec. 6, 1865, abolished slavery, leaving no class of “other persons” qualified for the five-fifths of a person mentioned in the original Constitution. Three-fourths of the states ratified the 14^th Amendment on July 9, 1868. Lawyers began to argue that the language of the 14^th Amendment applied to everyone, not merely to former slaves. The U.S. Supreme Court did not begin to agree with that argument until the 18-90s, and not until much later after a dissent by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1925 Gitlow v. New York case, where New York convicted socialist Benjamin Gitlow of violating its law against distribution of socialist liter-ature.

Thereafter, the high court accepted what is called the Doctrine of Incorporation, which means the entire Bill of Rights no longer applies merely to the federal government but is extended to all the states and municipalities as well.

James Madison, considered by most scholars the Father of the Constitution (Jefferson served as ambassador to France in 1787) helped create the compromise (called the Connecticut Compromise or the Roger Sherman Compromise) with the small states on congressional representation and with the Electoral College. One of my favorite authors, Forrest McDonald, says on pp. 163 and 176 of his American Presidency: An Intellectual History, University of Kansas Press, 1994, that Pierce Butler of South Carolina hatched the idea that became the Electoral College on Aug 31, 1787. With-out a scheme like the Electoral College, the small states would not have voted for the Constitution. The Founders always intended the representa-tion in the “lower House” would be based on population. Would there be a Senate? If so, would it also be based on population? Yes and no. Each state would get two senators, regardless of population, and each state would get two electoral votes, one for each of its senators, plus one for its representa-tive in the House (if its population merited only one, more if it counted higher population) in elections of the president and the vice president.

So the Electoral College is skewed to favor the small states like Wyoming, which get slightly more weight in the selection of president and vice presi-dent than their population would justify if measured strictly on population vs. the population of the larger states.

That August 1787 compromise meant we would not have a pure democracy, but neither did ancient Greece. Like the new Americans, Athenian Greeks did not allow women to vote. Neither could the majority of the population in Athens vote – the slaves.

This writer finished the 12^th grade in high school in Atlanta, Georgia, at ages 16 and barely 17 (1946-1947). The popular debating topic for speech clas-ses then centered on this proposition: “Should the County Unit System Be Abolished?” Georgia used what it called the “County Unit System,” which meant the most rural and least-populated county got two county units (bes-towed on the candidate or proposition that achieved 51 percent of the vote) in each statewide election, while Fulton County (Atlanta) got six county units. That meant a voter in the county with the smallest population wielded almost 2,500 times more weight than a citizen of Atlanta. Every debater wanted to take the affirmative side of that debate, because it seemed grossly unfair for the vote of a farmer in the smallest county equaled the votes of nearly 2,500 voters in Atlanta. Georgia abolished that system many years ago. The Electoral College isn’t that lopsided in the weight given to, say, Wyoming, but the principle is the same.

The U.S. Supreme Court applied in 1962’s Baker v. Carr the same demo-cratic principle that Georgia did when it abolished the County Unit System. The high court forced Tennessee to redistrict (after refusing to do so for half a century despite the Federal Constitution’s mandating redistricting every decade, using the latest U.S. census. That high-court decision, called Baker vs. Carr today is called the “one-man, one-vote” decision. All states are required to redistrict every 10 years. Yet Vladmir Putin correctly told George W. Bush in Bush’s second term, “Your Electoral College isn’t exactly one-man, one-vote.” Nor will it be until we scrap the Electoral College in favor of popular voting. Under popular voting, Al Gore would have become president in 2,000 because he received more than 550,000 more votes than W. (which in my mind stands for “weak-minded’). So a Russian knew more about our system than W.

The Founders never intended for individual citizens to decide who would be

president. They always intended for the states to do that. They feared mob rule, influenced by mountebanks up to no good. Even Madison noted, “If men were angels, we wouldn’t need government.” The curiosity today, giv-en the extension of the Bill of Rights to the states through the post-Civil War 14^th Amendment, is why do we not also extend one-man, one-vote power to individuals? And the answer is conservatives still fear mob rule. With some justification. One merely must look at a demogauge like Huey Long of Louisiana in the 1920s and 1930s and, for that matter, at the George W. Bush administration to see constant attempts to influence opinion by promi-sing to do things, like helping Africa’s victims of AIDS (he got Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the United Nations about Saddam Hussein’s al-leged possession of weapons of mass destruction with that statement, promising money for Africa, if Powell would make that speech), or helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and then not following through, in the belief the average voter will forget those promises went unfulfilled.

Indeed, the George W. Bush administration follows the pattern set by Ron

ald Reagan -- spend the federal government into deficits so social pro-grams must be cut.

Actually, an argument can be made that W. proved to be such a poor presi-dent that it allowed us to elect the first (half-)black man, Barack Obama, to the White House. So wwe went from a dullard to a man who could not only graduate from Harvard, he servied as editor of the Harvard Law Review when he attended Harvard Law School.

The Electoral College plagues us to this day, giving more weight to votes in small states like Wyoming than to votes in large states. Four presidents took office with fewer actual votes than another candidate: Massachusetts’ Federalist (later Whig, and later still Republican Party) John Quincy Adams over Tennessee’s Democratic/Republican (later Democratic Party) Andrew Jackson in 1824, 108,740 votes to Jackson’s 153,544 votes; Ohio’s Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over New York’s Democrat Samuel J. Tilden in 1876, 4,036,298 votes to 4,300,590; Ohio’s Republican Benjamin Harrison over New Jersey’s Grover Cleveland in 1888, 5,439,853 votes to 5,540,509; and “Texan” (born in Connecticut and vacations in Ken-nebunkport, Maine) Republican George W. Bush over Tennessee’s Demo-crat Al Gore in 2000, 50,455,158 to 50,982,335 (Gore received more than half a million votes, 527,177, more than Bush). In all four elections, the more conservative candidate won, which explains why conservatives do not want to jettison the Electoral College in favor of a “one-man (woman), one-vote” standard.

Put another way, the candidate with the most votes lost the Electoral Col-

lege vote but won the popular vote by these margins (figures from America History Atlas, C.S. Hammond & Company, Maplewood NJ, 1959):

1824: Andrew Jackson over John Quincy Adams by 44,804 votes

(153, 544 to 108,740) out of a total of 262,284 cast, 38 percent to 32 percent.

1876: Samuel J. Tilden over Rutherford B. Hayes by 264,292 votes (4,300,590 to 4,036,298) out of a total of 8,336,888 cast, 51 percent to 48 percent.

1888: Grover Cleveland (incumbent) over Benjamin Harrison by 100,456 votes (5,540,309 to 5,439,853) out of a total of 10,980,162 cast, 49 percent to 48 percent. Cleveland ran again in 1892 and beat Harrison, making Cleveland the only candidate to win the presidency twice with a gap in between.

2000: Al Gore over George W. Bush by 527,177 votes (50,982,335 to 50,455,158) out of a total of 101,437,493 cast, 50.2598 percent to 49.7401 percent.

It also should be pointed out (as I will again below) that Abraham Lincoln

won the election in 1860 with barely under 40 percent of the popular vote (39.8 percent) against three Democrats, who split the rest of the 60.2 percent of the popular vote. Lincoln carried the electoral vote in Minnesota and Io-wa and in every state east of those two above the Mason-Dixon Line except Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey (New Jersey split its electoral vote be-tween Stephen Douglas and Lincoln), plus Lincoln carried California and Oregon).

But one must remember that Lincoln‘s name did not appear on ballots in seven Southern states.

Most of the West remained territories in 1860. Texas went for John C. Breckenridge, and Missouri’s electoral vote went to Douglas, while Ten-nessee, Kentucky and Virginia (not yet split between Virginia and West Virginia, which occurred during the Civil War) went for John Bell. Ob-viously, we are all glad that Lincoln won with a plurality of the popular vote, 1,856,452 to second-place Douglas’ 1,357,157, Breckenridge’s 847,-953 and Bell’s 590,631 (total for the three Democrats: 2,795,741), even though Lincoln’s election immediately precipitated the Civil War (which would have occurred later-but-inevitably). Lincoln won the electoral vote 180 to 123 total for the other three. With a one-person, one-vote democracy, Lincoln still would have won because he received the most votes of the four candidates. And Gore would have won a plurality of the popular vote and the White House over Bush in 2000.

A clear demonstration of how far we still must travel to reach democracy is

the case of Michael R. Bloomberg, mayor of New York City. A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg could not obtain the Democratic nomination for ma-yor, so he switched to the Republican Party and used his personal wealth (Fortune Magazine pegs his stash at $5 billion) to buy his way into office in 2001 by spending $73 million of his own money, mainly on television ads. It is true a majority of citizens of New York City in 2006 thought he did a good job. Still, when candidates can buy a public office, we fall well short of a democracy. Elections by popular vote would be an improvement.

In the backroom deal, or "understanding," that decided the 1876 election,

Hayes got the White House, but he agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction 12 years after the Civil War. Except we in Texas still must have a federal agency approve our voting procedure. Did you know that?

Bush -- not only born in Connecticut, but whose family vacation home is in

Kennebunkport, Maine -- won the 2000 election with precisely the 271 elec-toral votes needed for election, to 256 for Gore after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 a month after the election that Bush won Florida’s 25 elec-toral votes, giving Bush exactly the minimum electoral vote, 271, needed to win. A decision favoring Gore for the sharply contested, six million Florida votes (some “butterfly” ballots apparently “fooled” many Jews in South Florida into “voting” for Pat Buchanan, which would almost be like their voting for Hitler) would have given Gore a 281-to-246 Electoral College win.

Gore famously predicted Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (appointed by

Ronald Reagan) would never vote to put W. in the White House. But she did, becoming the fifth vote in the 5-4 decision the court declared could never be used as precedent for any other case (in law, following precedent is called stare decisis, Latin for “To stand by things decided,” which judges and lawyers all over the country have been taught to follow, guiding them on cases with similar facts). O’Connor thus joins Roger Taney of the 1857 Dred Scott decision in deciding the most infamous decisions in the court’s history.

W. won “reelection” in 2004 with a “We are at war” (with Islamic terrorists) campaign despite trashing nine days after he first took office (on Jan. 29, 2001), the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Report warning of, among other things, airplanes being used as weapons by terrorists to fly into buildings. Bush said his vice president, Dick Cheney, would study the matter and produce a report. As of Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney did nothing, but the admin-istration threw together a report a few days later. No one paid attention then. Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives, the Twin Towers in New York City lay in ruins, and an airliner crashed into the Pentagon.

After invading Afghanistan and defeating the repressive Taliban, Bush de-cided to invade Iraq, claiming its leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed weap-ons of “mass destruction” and might use them on his neighbors, especially Israel. No such weapons are found in Iraq, nor is there established a connec-tion between Iraq and Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks by hijacked airliners (It took Barack Obama to order the ex-execution of Bin Laden on May 1, 2011. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued in favor of W. bombing Iraq instead of Afghanistan be-cause the latter holds “no good targets” for bombing, but Iraq did. Four years after the United States attacked Iraq, the total number of American servicemen who lost their lives in Iraq hit 2,000 as of Oct. 25, 2005, 90 percent of them after “Mission Accomplished.” Remember that? Bush, whose job approval rating in late October 2005 dropped below his IQ to 37 percent, landed on an aircraft carrier in May 2003, with him wearing a flight jacket, as if he knew something about the military, and he preened beneath a large sign reading, “Mission Accomplished.” In addition to the 2,000-plus American dead, more than 20,000 suffered major wounds. And many more thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians are dead or wounded. Bush continued to preach that Americans died for “a noble cause.”

Noted 2005 bumper sticker:

Bill Lied About Sex

W. Lied About War

Another:

Impeach King George

The Turd

We cured the third major constitutional flaw in 1804 with the 12^th Amendment , which makes the person who receives the most electoral votes for vice president shall be the vice president (not the person who receives the second highest electoral vote for president). Following the Bill of Rights’ first 10 amendments and the 11^th Amendment, which prohibited national judicial power from deciding suits against a state, the “Doctrine of Incor-poration (see the second paragraph headed by “1924” below) adopted by

the Supreme Court in the 20^th century as a result of the language in the post-Civil War 14^th Amendment eliminated the 11^th Amendment) and extended the Bill of Rights, which originally applied only to the federal government, to the states as well. We haven’t come close to (nor are we likely to) fixing the second major flaw. Why would the small states give up their advantage? Perhaps only an offer to award them the federal lands in their states -- in most Western states, most the land is owned by the federal government, not counting national parks -- in exchange for scrapping the Electoral College might work. Probably not. Although that would appeal to developers (not a group known for brains).

Nor are we likely to cure the fourth major flaw in the Constitution (which is

a flaw only because of what I say is a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment) by forbidding the arming by Americans who are not members of a “well-organized militia,” the conditional language that starts off the Second Amendment. Hard to believe, but philosophical supporters of the Second Amendment argue that every male over 12 belongs to the American militia, knowingly or not.

The two minor flaws in the Constitution are: it did not specifically grant power to the Supreme Court to declare a law unconstitutional (Chief Justice John Marshall held that power is inherent in the court in Marbury v. Madison in 1803). Second: it did not specifically say the vice president would become president, with all the powers of that office, upon the death or dis-ability of the president (John Tyler assumed that logical position in 1841 upon the death of William Harrison).

There’s a twist to Marbury v. Madison. John Adams appointed Marbury a

justice of the peace in the District of Columbia in a “midnight appoint-ment,” a tactic used by many presidents of both parties over the generations. Adams’ successor, Thomas Jefferson wanted to fight the appointment of Marbury, and Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison, refused to deliver the commission to Marbury, so Marbury sued Madison. The prin-cipal of “judicial review,” in which courts can decide whether a law or ac-tion is constitutional or not, manifested itself in lower courts earlier, but no occasion rose before Marbury for the Supreme Court to do that.

What Marshall did in 1803 in a 5-0 decision is decide that Congress exce-eded its authority when it passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which autho-rized mandamus writs (by which courts can compel by order certain ac-tions). Marshall, secretary of state under Adams, nearly qualified himself as a “midnight appointee” and probably failed as secretary of state to grant Marbury his commission merely as an oversight. So Marshall said the high court did not have the power to compel Madison to issue a commission to Marbury. Others argue that the act of 1789 did not empower a succeeding president to deny commissions to the “midnight appointees” of his prede-cessor.

Marshall called the failure to give the commission to Marbury an arbitrary denial of property rights, but the court could not compel a reversal of that action. By showing “judicial restraint,” the high court shamed the Jefferson administration into granting the commission to Marbury. But Jefferson still encouraged members of the House of Representatives to begin impeach-ment proceedings against Marbury. That did not happen.

There’s another way to look at it. Since the Constitution is silent regarding who or what can or should decide what is or is not constitutional, did not Marshall “legislate from the bench”? Of course he did. Should we be glad? Without a doubt.

Even many lawyers today don’t know that Marshall, the conservative Fe-deralist judge whose appointment Adams claimed as the proudest public act of his career, issued at least three other power-grabbing opinions: 1816, that the U.S. Supreme Court can rule on state court decisions; 1819, Con-gress can “make all laws necessary and proper” for carrying out its powers; 1824, Congress can regulate any aspect of interstate commerce without in-erference from states.

Hold on there a goldarned moment. States’-righters thought they agreed to support the Constitution as a restriction on the federal government, not on the states. For example, the First Amendment forbade Congress from estab-lishing a state religion. It did not stop states from adopting an official state religion and supporting it with tax money. And some did. Only 1868’s 14^th Amendment after the Civil War and the U.S. Supreme Court’s belated Doctrine of Incorporation in the 20^th century (search for Doctrine of Incorporation below), did the “Federal” Bill of Rights get applied to all the states.

So Marshall, hero to conservatives for centuries, legislated from the bench, the bane of all 20^th century conservatives, like that idiot Edwin Meece, at-torney general under our sleepiest and most anti-intellectual president in

at least a century, Ronald Reagan. (Incidentally, it’s OK with me if they put Reagan on Mount Rushmore, as GOP worshipers want, so long as they keep his eyes closed, and the GOP pays for it) Meece constantly harped on “original intent,” meaning by the Founders when they wrote the Constitution. What about things like airliners, automobiles, railroad trains, speed boats, trucking, motion pictures, elevators, skyscrapers, nuclear power, machine guns, radio and television, etc.? The Founders held no original intent regarding those. They didn’t exist in 1787. So how do courts adju-dicate controversies involving them?

The reason we still have our original constitution is because bright Founders recognized that that spare document must be allowed to grow with the times. Otherwise, we’d be on our fifth or 10^th or 20^th constitution by now.

Of course, Marshall proved correct. We wouldn’t have a federal govern-ment if that entity could not be superior to “states rights” on issues like those he wrote about in 1816, 1819 and 1824. And we forever decided the issue of conflicts between the federal government and “states rights” at Appomattox. Only the historically retarded fail to recognize this. They may win short-term victories, but we will always go back to what makes sense.

George Washington, the indispensable man. He led America to victory in the 1775-1783 Revolutionary War. He could have become king at that point but chose “to walk away from power,” quelling the anger, and prompting the tears, of his unpaid of-ficers after the conflict by the simple human act of taking out his glasses while saying he regretted growing old in the service of his country. (Washington, and then Franklin Roosevelt, exceeded Reagan as actors in office, and Reagan proved better than most.) Washington alone could have chaired the 1787 Constitutional Convention and served as the first president of the republic. The father of Robert E. Lee, Richard Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, authored the best statement about Washington after the latter’s death: “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Perhaps we should credit George’s grim look to the ivory teeth (not wooden) he wore. On Napoleon’s deathbed in 1821 on the South Atlantic Island of St. Helena, the most-feared man in Europe said, “They expected me to be another Washington.” Only one other major figure in history, the Roman citizen-general (Lucius Quinctius) Cincinnatus (5^th century, B.C.E.), similarly walked away from power, returning to his farmer’s plow after saving Rome as its dictator. Photo from the cover of Forrest McDonald’s The Presidency of George Washington, University of Kansas Press, 1974. Incidentally, if you can find any book on late 18^th century America by McDonald -- there are many of them, most published by Kansas; except for his biography of Hamilton, 1974, Kansas obviously got to him first -- buy it.

Another likeness of Washington, by Charles Wilson Peale in 1787, from David McCullough’s book 1776, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2005. The Washington Monument is perfect for this man. Not without faults, he overcame most of them through self-discipline and will-power. An abstract representation of him in stone fits him just as Lincoln’s emotional memorial fits him. There’s a great story about Washington’s arrival at the 1787 convention at Philadelphia (I can’t find the pas-sage right now). At a reception of some sort for the delegates, one of them, knowing full well the result of his suggestion, egged on another to go up to Washington, clap him on the back and say something like, “How you doing, George?” The fellow did it. Washington turned around like a slow-moving iceberg and stared at the guy. The room fell to a hush. The hail-fellow-well-met dupe crawfished and got out of there as quickly as he could. Speaking of memorials, the off-to-the-side, split-personality Jefferson Memorial strikes the right note for our third president. I'll explain. Jef-ferson authored the words "all men are created equal," yet he never freed his slaves. And the memorial itself reinforces the idea of a man with two minds, although I'm sure the builders did not think of this. On the inside of the memorial, around the top, are inscribed the words: "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." That's a quote from a letter Jefferson sent to Dr. Benjamin Rush on Sept. 3, 1800, a couple of months before he won the dirtiest presidential campaign in our history, against incumbent John Adams (with due respect to the elder George Bush's Willie Horton ad in the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, and the Dallas billionaire Lyle brothers' ad in 2000 accusing John McCain of voting against breast-cancer research -- McCain's sister died of it). W.’s statement to McCain after that: “It’s only politics, John.” Pro-Adams forces in 1800 accused Jefferson of being an atheist. I doubt that, but he probably came close. Deist characterized most of our Founders – a watch-maker God that created everything, then stepped back and let the works run itself. In other words, no personal God that could be persuaded by prayer to intervene in men's affairs. If such a deity existe,we would get rin whenwe need it, and it would stop short of flooding. Jefferson edited out all harsh lines in his copy of the New Testament, like Matthew 10:21, 10:34, 10:37; Mark 13: 12; and Luke 14:26. But when he said he swore “upon the altar of God,” he seemed not to recognize he used one superstition to condemn another. Is not reverence for “the altar of God” a belief without evidence? It is therefore a “tyranny over the mind of man."Both parties play dirty, but the middle class, the upper-middle class, and the rich being fewer in num-ber than the lower middle class and the poor, the GOP took dirty politics to a new level (plus, they usually need to nominate someone whose name is already well known, like that of a movie actor or a general).

The eldest of the Founders, Benjamin Franklin (1706-17-90), held more respect in Europe than any other American. He provided the steadying influence of great wisdom. Washington shown here is a detail of a larger painting that shows him astride his horse (the horse's ears are visible at lower right). Copies of each painting from Time's special edition The Making of America: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of a Nation, November 2005.

Thomas Jefferson, the spiritual father of our country. His presidency

is rated successful if only because of the Louisiana Purchase and the

Lewis and Clark Expedition through the new territory (the first and

odd extra-constitutional act by a champion of small government). Many scholars give Jefferson low grades as a manager of such a huge enterprise

as a nation. Forrest McDonald (search for his name) is not one of them. Check out this language from his The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, University of Kansas Press, 1994, p. 243:

He was an intensely private man, never comfortable in large groups. He

had a passionate aversion to (one might say almost a fear of) confronta

tion, argument, and disharmony. He was therefore polite, deferential, and conciliatory even in dealing with people he despised. His enemies regar

ded him as timid, irresolute, and spineless, and when he acted differently behind their backs from the way he did in their presence: devious, slippery, and hypocritical. However accurate their assessment, slipperiness, and hypocrisy -- if combined, as they were in Jefferson, with persuasiveness, charm, and a firm sense of purpose -- are priceless political assets . . . In sum, he ran the government masterfully and more thoroughly than his predecessors and

all but a handful of his successors, and he took bold foreign policy initiatives into the bargain.

However, Jefferson thought so little of the presidency, he did not mention it on his headstone, preferring instead: “Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia” (1819). Of all the eloquent things he wrote, two stand out: “All men are created equal,” a phrase from the Declaration of Independence that Lincoln reached back to, bypassing the emotionless Constitution, to change the northern rationale for winning the Civil War from one emphasizing the preservation of the Union (still important) to one of abolishing slavery. The second in a Jan. 1, 1802, letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, saying the First Amendment erected “a wall of separation between church and state,” which became the only original contribution of this country to world political thought. Unfortunately, many clever, not brilliant, Americans in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, including the late Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, disputed Jefferson’s “wall,” apparently preferring creation of a majoritarian Christian government to one neutral regarding religion. The weapon of choice for anti-wall enthusiasts in recent years is the “voucher,” which Republicans hope will appeal to minorities. But minorities will learn that vouchers alone will not gain entrance for their kids to private schools, because those schools will raise their tuition beyond the vouchers’ value, for the specific purpose of keeping most of those kids out. Copy of the White House painting of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860) early in 1800, from Fawn M. Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson:

An Intimate History, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1974.

I pause here to pursue an important tangent. Jefferson believed in democ-racy, the ability of the common man to govern himself. No common man himself, certainly, Jefferson meant “informed, educated” common men. True. But this hedge reminds me of a teenage boy who asked me in October 2005 who Hitler was. A question like that can cause a person to despair. The previously most important thinker on the subject of democracy, Athenian philosopher Socrates, 469-399 B.C.E., did not believe in democracy, which he viewed as rule by the rabble. Socrates preferred the totalitarian government of Sparta, rule by “those who know.” Little wonder the early fathers of the monarchical Roman Catholic Church admired men like Socrates above all other preChristians.

We all know the best government is one by a wise and benevolent dictator. The hitch, of course, is that we can’t be certain that dictator will be succeeded by another wise and benevolent dictator. But we do know the successor will inherit all the power of the good guy. Democracy is messy, often stumbling, the worst form of government, as Churchill said, “except for all the rest.” But the common people eventually get it right. The same is true of the jury system.

At great cost in human life, we decided as a people in our Civil War that “popular government” is the way to go. And many others try to follow our example (Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen), difficult as that path is (actually, it is hopeless in all cultures lacking a middle class). A few years ago, a scholar from somewhere in Asia (I forget exactly where) visited us and said he came to read the writings of our president. “Bush?” “No,” he replied. “Jefferson.” Which brings me to the two debts we all owe to I.F. Stone (full name: Isador Feinstein Stone; he probably dropped the first two names, preferring initials because of anti-Jewish bias in this country). Stone for 19 years produced I.F. Stone’s Weekly from Washington DC, in which he dug up scoops on

the rest of the media by the simple tactic of reading official documents, par-ticularly those from the Pentagon, that everyone else thought too boring. After being diagnosed with angina pectoris in 1971 at age 62, Stone decided to tackle a question that gnawed at him for years, the difference in views of freedom by Jefferson and Socrates. Nearly legally blind, he nevertheless taught himself ancient Greek so he could examine the oldest documents on Socrates’ trial in 399 B.C.E. that led to Socrates’ death sentence (he swallowed hemlock) on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and failure to worship the gods of Athens.

Stone sought to see the trial of Socrates from the prosecution’s point of view, a new idea because all earlier examiners of it, beginning with Socrates’ pupil Plato, made a hero of Socrates. Stone determined that, from the perspective of the Athenian people, Socrates did corrupt the youth of Athens, because he not only opposed democracy, he made fun of it. As I learned in the late 1950s from professor Ralph Lynn at Baylor, the fartherest back we can look in history and find people like our selves is to ancient Athens. Those guys started democracy, albeit a flawed democracy (I’ll get around to that later). Athens is the birthplace of Western Civilization.

Stone did more. He identified for us the first common man in literature who challenged aristocratic authority. The first of anything usually is thought to be brilliant and beautiful or ugly and nasty. A man named Thersites (thur-SIGH-tease) emerges from the mists of the past suddenly in Homer’s The Iliad, the oldest story in Western Civilization, telling of the Greeks’ conquest of Troy in about 1,250 B.C.E. Everything in the West before Troy is darkness, and after Troy the clouds closed in again for half a millennium. But it is fun to note we have the desiccated body of Rameses II, who lived a couple of centuries be-fore Troy, and that Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops in Greek) built the Great Pyramid in Egypt more than a thousand years before Rameses II. And Khufu’s pyramid isn’t the oldest in Egypt.

Homer, probably blinded by those who wanted to preserve his wonderful storytelling gift by not allowing him to get interested in anything else, dates to around 700 B.C.E., or a bit earlier. The story of Troy and its conquest Homer says is 500 years older, from about the mid-1200s B.C.E. Homer is credited with The Iliad and to a lesser extent The Odyssey, but he probably is only the guy who put the older stories together the best. Since he couldn’t see, someone else obviously wrote down what he recited.

If you never heard of Thersites before, it’s because Homer described him as the vilest of men, the ugliest of all the men who marched on Troy. He is “bandy-legged” and lame in one foot; his shoulders rounded and stooped forward over his chest; his pointy-head held almost no hair, only a scant stubble grew on his head (pp. 33-34, The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone, Little Brown and Company, Boston, paperback edition, 1988).

The first thing we do with people we don’t like is demonize them. Homer knew his audience wanted to glorify the Trojan War, the earliest success for Greek civilization. Athens might be democratic, but Sparta and the other city-states in Greece were not. Speakers for millennia pick up on lines their audiences applaud (Ronald Reagan did this in his career of speaking to Rotary, Lions’ and Kiwanis clubs after his acting career deteriorated to Bonzo movies and then to Twenty-Mule Team TV commercials and finally to no roles at all). His first wife, Jane Wyman, divorced him, I’m convinced, because she possessed talent and knew he did not.

Thersites takes it upon himself to speak for the common soldier against King Agamemnon to his face, “Son of Atreus, what are you dissatisfied with now? Your huts are full of bronze and plenty of women, the choice spoils we Achaeans give you whenever we take a town. Are you greedy for the gold that the horse-taming Trojans may yet bring you as ransom for a son, whom I or some other Achaean may have taken captive? Or some young girl to sleep with, that you will keep apart for yourself?” (p. 34, Stone). Thersites calls the king the “greediest of all men,” “clothed in shamelessness,” a drunkard “heavy with wine,” and a coward who possesses “the [fierce] eyes of a dog but the [timid] heart of a deer.”

The aristocratic paladins like Achilles detested Thersites. Not only that, Odysseus beat the hell out of him with his fists. So much for the notion of free speech.

Here’s a lesson I learned many years ago. If you produce a good phrase as you write, don’t fear to reuse it, infrequently. In the many translations of Homer’s two great works I possess, I found the phrase “the wine-dark sea” more than twice. Homer showed you can reuse a good phrase, but not overuse it. It’s similar to great classicalmusic composers. The genius that produced more melodies than any other, Russia’s Piotr (our Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky (chigh-KOF-ski), is so prolific, you want to say, “Slow down a little,” but he occasionally did reuse one. He comes back to the exquisitely pure, five-note refrain early in his Fifth Symphony. Puccini (Giacoco) and Wagner (Wilhelm Richard, of all people) are the only ones that come within a mile of Tchaikovsky on production of melodies. Brahms is a distant fourth. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Verdi display other unique talents (although Bee-thoven did write the best symphony of any of them, his Ninth). When others happen onto a great melody, most of them go back to it, and go back to it and go back to it.

Artist’s idealized head of Homer, from Sans Souci Palace, Potsdam, p. 834 of the massive (1,701 pages) Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiques, edited by Harry Thurston Peck, Cooper Square Publishing, Inc., New York, 1963.

“Blind Homer,” from Modena Hotel, Berlin, p. 191, Homer, Gabriel

Germain, translated by Richard Howard, the Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1960.

Possibly the gold death mask of King Agamemnon, but there is more doubt about that now, re-covered from one of the grave shafts at Mycenae (Crete). According to The Iliad, King Priam of Troy kidnapped Helen (“whose face launched a thousand ships,” and she became known as Helen of Troy), the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. King Agamemnon of Mycenae and his Greek confederates ostensibly made war on Troy to rescue Helen. Most historians think the war concerned trade routes and commerce, but that isn’t as sexy as fighting over a woman.

Dustjacket art for The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles Penguin Group, Viking Press, New York, 1990. The soldier’s spear is missing.

Undated, idealized image of Odysseus, Bettman Archive, History Club brochure, March 1997. Interestingly, Odys-seus is shown here with a dog. In Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1958 (first published in 1938), he wrote 33,333 lines of epic poetry, (17-syllable verses). Kazankasis, who also wrote Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, and other popular works, considered Odyssey his most important book. In Kazantzakis’ sequel to Odyssey, when Odysseus returns to Attica after 20 years (10 in the Trojan War, 10 on his voyages and adventures in the Mediterranean en route home), his 20-year-old dog recognizes him, and Odysseus feels compelled to strangle the dog so it won’t alert the suitors (about his presence) who are there for the hand of Odysseus’ wife Penelope.

Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend, forgets Achilles’ orders and tries three times to climb the wall of Troy. Three times the god Apollo throws him down, the last time with such force it knocks off Patroclus’ helmet and his shield away, and shatters his spear. A Trojan boy stabs Patroclus in the back, bringing him to his knees. Hector, Troy’s champion soldier, drives his spear into Patroclus and shouts his victory cry. “Don’t boast of my death,” Patroclus tells Hector with his dying breath. “It took three of you; first a god, then a boy, and last of all you, Hector.” Hector prepares to dismember Patroclus’ body, but Menelaus and Ajax of the Greeks arrive and fight Hector for the body, finally winning it. Achilles goes into a rage. Hector refuses to come out and battle Achilles, who then kills lots of Trojans, including Hector’s brother. Hector comes out to fight. The chief Greek god, Zeus, with-draws his ban on gods taking sides (so Apollo acted on his own ear-

lier in throwing down Patroclus). Achilles kills Hector after the god-dess Athena returns Achilles’ misfired spear. Achilles drags Hector’s body behind his chariot around Troy, breaking the hearts of Hector’s parents, who watch from the battlements.

After 10 years of fighting and siege, the Greeks apparently departed from Troy, but left in their camp (not at the gates of Troy) a giant wooden horse. The Trojans, a horse-loving people, did not know what to make of the horse, finally deciding to drag it into their city. The horse is hollow and contains Greek soldiers, who the next morning at dawn, while Trojans sleep off their drunken celebration, exit the horse, open the gates, and the Greeks sack the city. This, of course, gave rise to a saying we still use today, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” Menelaus at first wants to kill Helen with the rest of them, but his heart melts when he sees her, and he carries her home. The wooden horse story prob-ably is as fictional as Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and Jason and the Argonauts. This and the drawing of Patroclus above are from The Ancient Greece of Odysseus, Peter Connolly, Oxford University Press.

Another likeness of Jefferson, when he served as secretary of state under Washington, 1789-1793, by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) from Vol. 3 of Dumas Malone’s six-vol-ume biography of Jefferson, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, Little Brown and Company, 1962.

Another likeness of Jefferson, by Jefferson-contemporary sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon. There are many likenesses of Jefferson that look slightly different, moreso than for most other Founders (Franklin is an exception), so he must have been a hard subject to capture by artists. This one and the two above make him look better than many others. Photography did not reach this country until 1839, with the daguerreotype technol-ogy. All the Founders missed that era, Madison coming closest by dying in 1836. The same is true for all the Texas founders except Sam Houston, who lived until 1863. Stephen F. Austin, Davy Crockett (perhaps not a founder, in as much as he spent only a few weeks in Texas before he died), Jim Bowie, and William Barrett Travis all died in 1836, the last three in the Alamo.

James Madison, (1751-1836), Father of the U.S. Constitution. A small man (5-foot-2), Madison more than any other member of the 1787 Constitutional Convention (a “convention” recognized by that name only later; before that it amounted to the most recent session of the Continental Congress) studied ancient governments like those in Greece and Rome. His compromise with small-population states in June 1787 plagues us to this day through the Electoral College, which prevents us from coming close to a pure democracy. On the other hand, there would have been no United States without that compro-mise. (See Constitution, 1787.) Copy of painting from the dustjacket of The Founding Fathers, JAMES MADISON: A Biography in His Own Words, edited by Merrill D. Peterson, published by NEWSWEEK, New York, distributed by HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, INC., 1974.

James Madison (1751-1836) as a young man, 32, when he asked Charles Willson Peale in 1783 to paint miniatures of himself and his love at the time, Kitty Floyd. He looks so boyishly innocent here one wants to pet him.

Alexander Hamilton (175?-1804, slain in a duel with Aaron Burr). From the cover art of Forrest McDonald’s paperback edition of Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982.

Alexander Hamilton, painted while still in uni-form by Charles William Peale. Hamilton, an artillerist early in the Revolutionary War, later served on Washington’s staff and later still as Secretary of the Treasury. From Richard B. Mor-ris’ Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers As Revolutionaries, Harper & Row, New York, 1976. This likeness probably resembles its subject more than the drawing on McDonald’s book. Illegitimate from parents on Nevis, of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean, Hamilton in the long run won his battle with Thomas Jefferson on what kind of country we would become (see second paragraph of 1776, July 2).

1789, July 14, the French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille prison. On the world stage, this revolution is much more important than the American Revolu-tion because it occurs on a continent with a history of more than 2,000 years and with a population of 30 million instead of three million. Also, unlike the American Revolu-tion, this one is from the bottom up (most of the leaders of the American Revolution already ran the colonies).

John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States 1801-1835. The eldest of 15 children, he joined a regiment of militiamen at age 20 in 1775 and served as a lieutenant under George Washington, and served as secretary of state under John Adams, 1800-1801, served as one of three commissioners to France during the XYZ Affair (search for XYZ), then won appointment as Chief Justice from Adams in 18-01. He participated in more than 1,000 decisions, writing 519 himself, the most famous of which Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which established the doctrine that the Supreme Court would decide what law or act is and what is not constitutional (one of the omissions of the Constitution is that it did not specify who or what would decide that; it seemed so logical that the high court would perform that role that no one of stature objected). But Marshall wrote at least three other decisions that must the characterized as power grabbing, because the Constitution did not talk about those subjects, either (search for 1816, 1819 and 1824 above). This undated etching, on page 136 of Vol. 2, of the 12-volume Time-Life History of the United States, is credited to “Brown Brothers.” If you can find a copy of this Time-Life series in beige-bound volumes, you ought to get it. Not all Time-Life books are good. This set is. Here is the cutline beneath this etching: Chief Justice John Marshall took to drink now and then. But according to one story, he became so worried about drunken judges that he and members of his court shunned drink except in rainy weather. After the Louisiana Purchase, it was dry in Washington but they ruled that it must be raining somewhere.” That reminds me of the caution that one shouldn’t drink until 5 o’clock, but some fellas always noted, “It must be 5 o’clock somewhere.”

I found this copy of a painting of John Marshall in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1987, published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington DC 20560. You know the Liberty Bell is cracked, but do you know why? Because they rang it so much during the mourning for John Marshall’s death in 1835. He missed the earliest photographs in this country, Daguerreotypes in 1839, by four years.

I found this copy of a painting of John Marshall in the special commemorative edition of Life magazine in the Fall of 1991, the 200^th anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights. It’s almost a reverse image of the painting above it, except here Marshall is looking directly at you (and the copy is in color). This same edition of Life unforgivably headlined its section on the Second Amendment this way: “ . . . of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It omitted the first 10 words (including an wordthat should have been hyphenated) of that amendment: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free State . . . ” Without the introductory words, which oppo-nents of the National Rifle Association consider a conditional phrase, the mean-ing of the Second Amendment is completely changed. But the U.S. Su-preme Courtin a 2008, 5-4 decision (with two new justices appointed by George W. Bush – Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Aleto voting in the majority, gave the National Rifle Association precisely what it wanted for generations. Without citing the introductory phrase of the amendment (“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”). The court held,in effect, that the conditional phrase, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” is meaningless, as ifthe Founders wrote ANYTHING else in the Constitution that is meaningless. The closest the high court previously ruled on the question of private ownership of weapons occurred in 1939, when the court banned private possession of a machine gun. Thankfully, actor Charleton Heston (a liberal in the 1960s, but a gun nut years later) died before that 2008 decision.

1797, the year Peter Eldridge, the great-grandfather of this writer, is born. Photo, which my mother gve me years ago, may date as late as 1870. Eldrid-ge died in 1883. Also in 1797, American Jethro Wood got a patent on his cast-iron plow, which farmers refused to use out of fear it will contaminate the soil (Almanac, p. 169). Wood’s invention precedes the inventionin England of a casr-iron plow by six yearsAlso in 1797, Jan. 1, New York moves its capital from New York City to Albany. On Oct. 18, 1797, three agents for French foreign minister Talleyrand (considered by many historians as a great dip-lomat) approach America’s Peace Commission in Paris to “suggest” America make a “large loan” to France and a $240,000 bribe to Talleyrand (you didn’t read this about Talleyrand in school) as a precondition to negotiating a trade treaty with France. This becomes known as the XYZ Affair (referring to the three French agents), and prompted a member of the U.S. commission, Charles C. Pinkney, to declare, “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” Almanac, p. 170. Later Chief Justice John Marshall also served on the commission. Pinkney’s idea will not become American policy until after the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. George Washington dies two years later, in 1799, after doctors put leeches on him to drain his blood. (Two centuries later, physicians learn the use of leeches can be therapeutic.) After Washington’s death, Gen. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee, declares before Congress on Dec. 26, 1799, that Washington is “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Almanac, p. 172. Lee died March 25, 1818. Eldridge aged 39 when the Alamo fell on March 6, 1936.

On April 30, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, more than doubling the size of the United States, for $11.25 million, plus the cancellation of American claims against the French in the amount of $3.75 million, for a total of $15 million. Jefferson lacked the authority to make the deal but feared Napoleon might change his mind. France ceded the land to Spain in 1762, but the Spanish planned to give it back to France. Napoleon said he did it to cause trouble for Brittain, with which he warred. Jefferson made the deal without waiting for a constitutional amendment to authorize the purchase. Jefferson feared France or Spain might deny the United States trade access to New Orleans. When Jefferson submitted the deal to the U.S. Senate, it overwhelmingly approved. France claimed the land originally after the sailing down of the Mississippi River by explorer Robert sieru de LaSalle (1643-1687), who claimed for France the entire Mississippi valley. La Salle also landed on the coast of Texas in 1682. Napoleon said, "This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride." That proved true.

1799 Nov. 28, Wyatt T. Heard is born as the first son and first child of the

second Thomas Heard (the date of his death and name of his wife are unknown). Wyatt is born in Greene County GA and he marries Mary M. (surname unknown), who is born in Wilkes County GA on Sept. 15, 1801. Wyatt’s fourth son and eighth child is Lawrence Pike Heard, listed below. A half-year later, on May 9, 1800, violent abolitionist John Brown is born in Torrington CT. Brown will “consecrate my life” to the destruction of slavery at a memorial service for abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy of Alton IL, whose printing presses got destroyed by pro-slavery goons three times be-

fore murdering Lovejoy on the night of Nov. 7, 1837.

As a boy John Brown drove a herd of cattle 100 miles though forests from Ohio to Michigan, where his host treated him well but beat the host’s slave boy with an iron shovel. The memory left a permanent mark on Brown, who failed at everything he tried until he obsessively sought martyrdom and achieved it at his trial and hanging after he and 21 followers captured the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, (now West Virginia) on Oct. 16, 1859. Leading a contingent of U.S. Marines, Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee stormed the arsenal and captured Brown on Oct. 18, 1859.

The South cheered. The North rang church bells in sadness. And less than a year and a half later, one of the few wars that absolutely needed to be fought, because no other solution to slavery would have been acceptable to the South and its “peculiar institution,” erupted at Fort Sumter SC. This inevitable war (as Winston Churchill later called it) grew out of the failure of the nation’s Founders to resolve the issue of slavery and at the same time get a new nation started when no colony in the history of the world successfully rebelled against the mother country.

John Brown helped ignite the war, but the war would have started whether John Brown lived or died. As he said himself, the nation would not be purged of its sin of slavery “but by blood.” Lincoln fought the war to preserve the Union, but two years into it, he saw an opportunity to change it to a war over slavery and a “new birth of freedom,” and he did it with his Emanicipation Proclamation freeing slaves in those states still in rebellion against the Un-ion. Soon a popular tune struck up all across the North:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering

in the grave, but he keeps marching on.

But the music would be hijacked for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Not all Yankees applauded the Emancipation Proclamation, especially some from Southern Ohio. It changed the purpose of the war from solely maintaining the Un-ion to one that also would end slavery.

Most of the following family history (not the first items on the Cummingses) are from my father’s genealogical efforts in 1957, my mother’s (Minerva Tennessee Gulley Heard’s) Birthday Address Book, and Nell GriffinGraham’s compilation, by date, with my additions and comments.

1806, birth year of Benito Pablo Juárez, a full-bloodied Zapotec Indian who will rule Mexico as president, 1861-1872. As a legislator, his 1856 land-reform law broke up large estates and forced the Roman Catholic Church to sell its lands. Under Juárez, Catholic priests are forbidden to wear their reverse collars in public and nuns are not permitted to wear their habits in public. By the end of the 20^th century, most of Juárez’ reforms are forgotten, and a visit by Pope John Paul II results in the approval of the first step toward sainthood for the Mexican “boy” Juan Diego (hardly a “boy,” Diego, aged 57 years (born in 1776) at a time when most men died before age 50), who, on Dec. 9, 1531, said he saw a vision of a dark “Virgin” later called the Virgin of Guadalupe, on Tepeyac Hill (earlier site of an Aztec idol; this writer visited the Catholic church on Tepeyac Hill in 1980). To prove that the virgin appeared to him and talked to him, Diego showed a cape with the virgin’s image to the infamous Bishop Juan de Zumarrage, who destroyed more than 20,000 Aztec idols and all Aztec religious documents (to the horror of anthropologists of later centuries) in order to replace those “pagan” manifestations with Catholic idols. Zumarrage instantly saw that Diego’s cape could fill the need for a new idol for Mexicans to worship. Juárez dies in 1872. The church built its Cathedral of Mexico beside the central plaza (the Zocolo) in Mexico City a mere 50 years after the church destroyed the Aztec Temple. But the destruction proved so thorough that no one could remember where the temple stood. More than four centuries later, in 1978, ditch diggers for a new gas pipeline accidentally stumbled upon the site of the temple. The Cathedral of Mexico missed the correct site by two city blocks. This time the dog missed the spot.

1810, the third census in the United States shows a population of 7,239,881, a gain

of 36.4 percent over 1800. On Sept. 26, 1810, American settlers living in the western portion of Spanish West Florida, rise up in rebellion against their Spanish rulers, seizing the fort at Baton Rouge and declaring the region between New Orleans (founded by Louisiana governor Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, in 1718 -- a year after San Antonio is founded in what will become Texas -- as part of French expansion along the Mississippi River) and the Pearl River to be the Republic of West Florida and seeking annexation by the United States. Twenty-six days later, President James Madison announces the annexation, the Louisiana Purchase will be made by Thomas Jefferson for $15 million ($11,250,000 for the land, $3,750,000 for debts owed by France to citizens of the United States) became part of the Louisiana Purchase and the land seized becomes the state of Louisiana in 1812.

1811, Dec. 15, the greatest earthquake in United States history occurred sixty-five miles

southwest of New Madrid, Missouri, begining along the Saint Francis River in Ar-kansas. Called the New Madrid Earthquake, it and aftershocks would have registered magnitudes of 8.0 or higher on the Richter Scale, scientists think. People all over the country, with the exception of the Pacific Coast, felt them. Large areas sank into the earth, new lakes formed, the course of the Mississippi River changed, and forests over an area of 150,000 acres disappeared, as did many houses, but few died because of sparse populations in the area in 1811.

1812, James Madison is reelected president with 128 electoral votes to 89 for De

Witt Clinton, and Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts (of Gerrymandering fame) is elected vice president over Federalist Jared Ingersoll by 131 to 86 votes. Alma-nac, p. 195.

1812, the speculated birth year of Patrick Cummings, the speculated name of the

father of Lawrence Cummings, the first Cummings we have records on, born almost certainly in Ireland, the great-great-great-grandfather of this writer. The fol-lowing information about the early Cummingses, from before Lawrence, is pro-vided by Gary Cummings, 53, of Waynesboro VA via emails in February 2000. Patrick (1812?) begat Lawrence (1832), who begat John Albert (1850), who begat Mary Elizabeth (1877), who begat Dow Hubbard Heard (1896), who

begat me, Robert Heard (1930)., the fourth of four sons (no daughters).

Gary also descends from Patrick and Lawrence, but his line diverges at that point and runs from one of John Albert’s younger brothers, the second Patrick, who begat Marshall (b. in Leakey TX Aug. 6, 1907, married Nattie Brice and re-membered soubered (Marshall did) Reagan Wells TX; Marshall dies July 1, 1971). Marshall begat Gary (1946). So Gary, who remembers swimming at Blue Hole, half a mile northeast of the old Heard School/Church, and I do not have a common ancestor until we get back to Lawrence. I call John Albert the eldest of Lawrence’s children because Lawrence aged only 18 when John Albert got born in 1850 (perhaps Lawrence only aged 16 if an 1834 date of birth in one record is correct; earlier marriages occurred in earlier times -- Shakespeare aged 18 when he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, in 1582, when Anne already counted three months pregnant). I speculate Lawrence’s father, the first Patrick, got born around 1812 if we assume he would have been 20 when Lawrence ap-peared.

Also in 1812, on June 1, President James Madison, angry at England for bloc-kading American ports and impressing American seamen to serve on British warships as part of England’s fight against Napoleon, asks Congress to declare war against England. Fifteen days later, unaware of Madison’s action, British Prime Minister Lord Castlereagh, reacting to economic conditions worsened by Ameri-ca’s blocking trade during England’s fight with France, on June 16 lifts the bloc-kade and ceases the impressment of seamen, effective June 23. Two days after June 16, both sides still unaware of the actions of the other, the U.S. Senate votes 1913 in favor of war (the House voted for war 79-49 on June 4). Madison proclaims a state of war on June 19. Regarding the early history of the Cummingses, Gary says:

. . . the Cummings or Cummns lived in Ireland since 1310 or so, when the Irish Cummin(g)s got driven out of Scotland by the followers of Robert the Bruce, who in 1306 killed John the Red Comyns, related to one of our ancestors, in front of the altar of the Catholic Church at Dumfries. John the Red rivaled Bruce for the Scottish throne. For over 100 years, the Comyns (Cummin[g]s) ruled in Scotland until 1310. The Comyns built many castles in Scotland, the most famous being Lochindorb in Northern Scotland. Robert the Bruce destroyed all their castles. Before this, the Comyns descended from Robert de Comines, who came to England from France with the Norman invasion of 1066. A friend and ally of William the Conqueror, who made him Earl of Northumberland for Comines’ services in 1066. This lasted awhile until the people he ruled overthrew him, and killed Robert de Comines. His descendants fled to the Scottish Highlands, where they became the ruling power until 1310. Before their time in England, Scotland and France, the de Comines went back to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. They are descendants of Charlemagne.

Later, Gary further claimed -- skipping a few centuries here and there -- connection with earlier Frankish Kings, then to Priam, King of Troy (remem- ber Helen?), then to a Cimmerian king in Western Turkey, then to Judah and Tamar of Genesis, to Abraham, to Shem, to Noah, to Adam. At that point I suggested to Gary he should step away from the bar. Even if a fraction of that tale proves true, everybody supposedly traces back to Adam and Eve, a fan-ciful fiction created by Hebrew writers to fill the need for a first man (those writers also took other yarns, such as Noah’s Flood, from ancient Sumer du-ring their Baby-lonian captivity in the sixth century before the common era).

My guess is that genealogists in England and elsewhere in the 19^th century and the early 20^th century learned they could do more business if they “dis-covered” for visiting Americans hungry for family history a link with royalty in some manner. Thus we find claims of an earl/earle both in the Heard and Cummings’ lines, each stemming from 1066. Or, maybe there is truth to it, which I would regret, because I identify with my ancestors who fought in the American Revolution (especially with Captain Thomas Heard) against the divine right of kings and against inherited tit-les. What those soldiers and our Founding Fathers created dwarfs anything achieved by all the kings and roy-alty that ever lived. I’ll bet any connection between the Cummingses and Charlemagne involved soldiers or serfs of Charlemagne and not Charlemagne himself. Same thing with Heardred, remember? On the other hand, Charlemagne kept busy with four wives and six concubines. That increases the chance everyone can claim decent from him, if anyone wanted to, which would shock our forebears who fought the British in the American Revolution, where they rejected the idea of aristocracy.

1831, May 10, this writer’s great-grandfather Harvey Gulley, the eighth son and

12^th child of John Gulley and Nancy Bizzell, got born in Monroe County, Ala-bama. Harvey’s family moved the next year to Dallas County, Alabama, then moved to Conecuh County, Alabama, and in the mid-1840s moved to Arkansas.

1832, the birth year of Lawrence C. Cummings (b. 1832 or 1834, in Tipperary, Ire-

land), father of John Albert Cummings, the “Strongman of the (Dry Frio) Can-yon” (see 1850). Gary Cummings emailed messages regarding Lawrence to Sue Heard Helveston, of Willow Grove PA, a genealogist of the Heard family (and others). I call John Albert the eldest of Lawrence’s children because Lawrence aged only 18 (perhaps only 16) when John Albert appeared June 23, 1850 (d. Aug. 7, 1920, in the Dry Frio Canyon), in Albany NY (one record says Louisiana). Gary says he visited the Catholic church of Lawrence’s christening in Tipperary, Ireland (south-central). Lawrence married Mary Elizabeth Cummings (b. Dec. 26, 1830, almost a century before this writer appeared in Big Spring TX; d. Jan. 22, 1922) and brought their family to this country in 1848 or 1849 after the Great Potato Famine of 1847.

John Albert Cummings later named his eldest child after his mother, Mary Elizabeth Jameson Cummings of Belfast, whom Lawrence married in New York City, and perhaps after his eldest sister, Mary Elizabeth “Dottie” (b. April 2, 1868; d. July 21, 1945 -- see below – I think I drove my grandmother, Lizzie, in her 1942 Pontiac to visit Dottie).

The third Mary Elizabeth (Cummings, my grandmother) married Wyatt Hubbard Heard and bore 10 children. Lawrence’s other children included Lawrence Jr. (apparently died in infancy), Joseph Frank (b. 1857; d. circa 1872), Henry Patrick (b. May 30, 1858; d. Feb. 29, 1912), Robert Henry “Sarge” Cummings (b. a month before the Civil War, on March 12, 1861; d. Feb. 12, 1923), Mary Elizabeth “Dottie” (b. April 2, 1868; d. July 21, 1945), Thomas Baxter (b. March 15, 1869; d. July 30, 1928), and M. Ann (b. May 28, 1872).

Gary thinks Lawrence Cummings’ first wife may have done away with (poisoned?) him, perhaps because he married another woman while still married to Mary Elizabeth. By his second wife, Margaret Kearsey, Lawrence fathered John W. Cummings (b. March 1880) and Margaret L. (b. September 1884).

“Sarge” unquestionably is the black sheep of the family. My first-cousin George Nelson and this writer are the black sheep today; George recalls the story our Uncle Sid Heard (b. Jan. 7, 1904; d. Aug. 31, 1996) told about Sarge having to leave Refugio (ree-FURY-oh) County “because of his beliefs.” A freethinker? No. “He believed all the cattle in the county (Patricio) belonged to him.” Of the many other tales about Sarge are ones involving his escaping, after selling stolen horses or mules in Mexico, from a Uvalde-stationed Texas Ranger by leading his horse (Hub’s Conella, probably a later corruption of the Spanish conela: cinnamon tree or cinnamon colored: in this case, reddish-brown horse) over a narrow, banisterless railroad trestle (high over the Pecos River) that the Ranger, Nat B. “Kiowa” Jones, wouldn’t risk. The Ranger’s nickname may indicate Indian heritage. Sarge saluted Jones after he reached the other side, and Jones returned the salute.

Sarge got acid thrown into his face through a window by the mother of a woman he pursued. He or a gang member may have murdered a redhaired Ranger named James Woods, who tried to infiltrate Sarge’s gang -- after whom Red Hollow in the upper Dry Frio Canyon on the east side probably is named. Sarge pulled a gun to force an Army officer to open Frank Cummings’ coffin after its shipment back to Reagan Wells from New York City in early 1919 (indeed, Frank lay in the coffin, with a beard half an inch long, either because the beard hair continued to grow after his death or, more likely, because the skin shrank, or maybe both. Sarge ran naked and howling at the moon late in life (20^th century). He is buried at the cemetery at Vanderpool.

Patsy Lee Cummings McKelvy of Brackettville TX informed me on Feb. 26, 2000, that Lawrence Cummings served in the Confederate Army (my cousin Nell Griffin-Graham also researched Lawrence Pike “Cap” Heard’s military service, learning he may have signed up at different places as many as three times, no doubt to secure the bonus for signing; he wouldn’t have been the only Rebel to do that). Patsy is descended from John Albert’s brother, Henry Patrick, and her father’s name (popular among the Irish): Patsy (b. April 14, 1905; d. Oct. 15, 1975).

Gary is descended from the next sibling after Patsy, Marshall, so he and Patsy Lee are first cousins. As with Gary Cummings, she and I do not have a common ancestor until we go back to Lawrence Cummings (b. 1832).

Also in 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall and the Supreme Court ruled un-constitutional a Georgia law that sought to supersede the power of Indian tribes to make treaties. President Andrew Jackson, longtime Indian hater, said: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Cherokee Indians lost their lands in northeast Georgia, southeast Tennessee and western North Carolina, and marched to Oklahoma under duress as part of what came to be called “The Trail of Tears.”

The Black Hawk War took place in 1832, with Abraham Lincoln serving with settlers opposing Indians returning to Illinois from west of the Mississippi because the Indians thought they did not get dealt with fairly, which universally is the case when a superior (or at least more powerful) culture encounters an inferior one. Fellow volunteers from New Salem elected Lincoln captain at age 23. They never engaged the Indians. At one point Lincoln drilled his troops in a march that approached a fence. Quick-thinking Abe halted the troops and commanded that they reform their formation on the other side of the fence.

On July 13 of 1832, an expedition under Henry Schoolcraft finds the source of the Mississippi River in Montana at Lake Itasca. Indian tribes ceding ancestral lands east of the Mississippi to the United States in this year include the Black Hawk, Sauk and Fox, and Chickasaws. Another term for ceding is yielding to coercion. Another, from the Indians’ point of view, is stealing. This reminds me of a quote by Abe Lemons (himself one-eighth Indian) when he served as men’s basketball coach at the University of Texas (I wrote a book on his quotes in 1978: You scored one more point than dead man: The Sardonic Humor of Abe Lemons; we sold out the first edition of 3,500 hardback copies many years ago, and it still is in demand). Abe said this of the American West, “Out here you must obey the white man’s law: never steal nothing smaller than a state.”

Also in 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoes a recharter of the Bank of the United States, which he considered evidence of Eastern control of the nation, and Jackson used the issue to get reelected in this year. Democrats in the 19^th century generally opposed governmental banks. Whigs, and then Republicans, generally favored them.

Lincoln, as a member of the Illinois Legislature, favored banks and any frontier improvements, like roads and canals. Abe tried to break a quorum in 1840, when the Legislature considered banning the establishing a bank. He and a buddy went to the chamber, then meeting on the second floor of the Springfield Second Presby-terian Church. They called for a vote to determine if a quorum existed. The sergeant at arms locked the doors behind them. With Abe and his friend, the body held a quorum. When Lincoln and his buddy saw that the doors got locked, they attempted to escape by going through a second-story window.

A Democratic newspaper in Springfield seemed to make fun of Abe by noting one of the escapers seemed almost to touch the ground as he hung from the window sill. This writer read about that incident in a book on Lincoln several years after I write “The Miracle of the Killer Bees: 12 Senators Who Changed Texas Politics” in 1979, two years after those state senators broke the Texas Senate quorum. I wish I knew about that Lincoln story when I wrote that book.

Lawrence Pike Heard, b. 1835, in photo taken when he aged about 45 (1880). My dad gave a copy of this picture to my brothers and me (and probably others) nearly half a century ago. Lawrence is my great-grandfather Heard.I think the hands are fake – the same for every man who sat for the photographer.

1835, Oct. 29, Lawrence Pike Heard is born in Cass County GA 36 days

before Ben Milam leads a force that attacks San Antonio on Dec. 4 and wins the surrender of the Alamo five days later from Gen. Martin Perfecto de Cos, brother-in-law of Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who recaptures the Alamo the following March 6, killing all defenders. Milam dies on Dec. 7 in the Dec. 4-8 fight, the only Anglo-American fatality. In 1835, the Whig Party in Massachusetts nominates Daniel Webster for president, a group of citizens in Canaan, New Hampshire, burn down the Noyes Academy after it enrolls 14 black students, and a mob in Boston parade lead William Lloyd Garrison through the streets with a rope around his neck to protest his abolitionist views of slavery. In 1835 French political and cultural historian Alexis de Tocqueville publishes the first volume of his Democracy in America, which evey doctoral applicant tries to cite for a century or more; inventor Samuel Colt patents a revolver later used by the U.S. Army and is called the “equalizer” in the American West; Danish author Hans Christian Andersen writes Tales Told for Children. (I think his book includes the line ”the emperor has no clothes”). Exactly 96 years after Lawrence is born, on Oct. 29, 1929, Wall Street experiences Black Tuesday (following the previous Black Thursday), launching the worldwide Great Depression.

1836, May 25, Martha Emeline Thompson Hammer (Heard) is born in the year the Texas

Revolution is won, two months and 19 days after the fall of the Alamo on March 6, a month and four days after independence is won from Mexico on April 21 at the Battle of San Jacinto, and six days after Comanches raid Fort Parker (between Groesbeck and Mexia, 40 miles east of Waco), kill several inhabitants and seize five captives, including Cynthia Ann Parker, then nine or 10 years old. Cynthia Ann later marries Chief Peta Nocona and bears him three children, including later Comanche Chief Quannah Parker, before her unwilling recapture by Texas Rangers on Dec. 18, 1860, near the Pease River in Northwest Texas. On Oct. 22, Sam Houston is inaugurated as the first constitutionally elected president of the Republic of Texas. In 1836 Congress establishes the Wisconsin Territory and admits to the Union the 25^th state, Arkansas, which recognizes slavery, and English author Charles Dickens writes Pickwick Papers.

In Douglas L. Wilson’s 1998 Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, p. 224, we learn that in November 1840, Lincoln, a 31-year-old Illinois Whig, served as Springfield’s representative in the Illinois House, which met temporarily in the Second Presbyterian Church in Springfield. Lincoln and other Whigs opposed an anti-State Bank measure pushed by Democrats, who inherited their aversion to government banks from Democratic President Andrew Jackson’s antipathy toward a National Bank in the mid-1830s.

Lincoln and other Whigs determined to defeat the Democrats’ legislation by denying the Illinois House a quorum. Lincoln and two other Whigs attended briefly to be sure the absence of a quorum would be determined by their calling for the ayes and nays on a roll call. But the sergeant at arms rounded up enough lawmakers, including Lincoln and the other Whigs, to constitute a quorum by the end of the roll call. “Barred from absenting themselves by the doors [locked behind them], the panicked Whigs opened a [second-floor] window and scrambled out,” says author Wilson. “This, of course, availed them nothing on the issue of a quorum, for no Whigs remained to demand another roll call . . . ” The measure passed. Wilson says Lincoln suffered “instant ridicule and humiliation, the memory of which pained him the rest of his life.” The Illinois State Register, obviously not a Whig publication, hugely enjoyed Lincoln’s discomfort: “We have not learned whether these flying members got hurt in their adventure, and we think it probable that at least one of them came off without damage, as it was noticed that his legs reached nearly from the window to the ground.”

Perhaps the Whigs did not know how many representatives would absent themselves. Perhaps the rules of the 1840 Illinois House and the rules of the 1979 Texas Senate differed on this point. The 12 Texas senators called Killer Bees knew that if 11 of the 31 senators did not show up at the first roll call in the Texas Senate on May 18, 1979, they would break a quorum. Two-thirds of the members, 21, constituted a quorum and permitted the Senate to transact business. With 12 gone, only 19 sat at their desks. Nothing could be done unless the sergeant at arms and Texas Rangers could find two of the Bees and bring them to the Senate.

The Bees -- nine of whom remained the entire 4-1/2 days in a garage apartment in West Austin (one departed from the apartment because of claustrophobia and hid in Houston; one traveled in Oklahoma; and one skipped over the Rio Grande from his South Texas district and hid in Mexico -- accomplished their purpose: To prevent a $5 million separate primary bill that would have permitted conservative Democrats to vote in the Democratic primary and later also vote in the Republican primary for former Gov. John Connally, a recent turncoat who switched to the GOP and ran for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination (Connally was among the first former Democrats who said he did not leave the party, the party left him; what they really meant is that the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights bills in 1964 and 1965 granted more rights to blacks than those white “Democrats” thought they should have).

It would have been great fun in 1979 if we knew of Lincoln’s tactic of attempting to break a quorum to prevent passage of legislation he opposed. That would have scored points for the Bees with the public. I wish I knew of Lincoln’s maneuver when I wrote my 1981 book, The Miracle of the Killer Bees: 12 Senators Who Changed Texas Politics. But I couldn’t have known, because Wilson did not publish his book until 1998. And I don’t know if that incident is described in any of the other 42 books I held on Lincoln alone, including Carl Sandburg’s 1926-39 six-volume biography of Lincoln, the 1953 nine-volume The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, and Harvard professor David Herbert Donald’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln in 1995. We learn from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which also won the Pulitzer Prize, that Lincoln passed through a horrible period of melancholy/depression in 18401841.

At the end of my 1981 book, I noted this (in essence) party-purification maneuver would lead to the election of more liberals, blacks, browns and even Republicans. I did not know how true my prediction would turn out to be for Republicans. Today, there are more liberals, blacks and browns in the Texas Legislature, but far more Republicans, who control both the Senate and the House of the 2005 and later Legislatures. That’s one reasonwhythe possible candidacy of Gov. Rick Perry for president is unlikely, because the remainder of the country outside the South rightly regards Texas as a backwater, despite its being the second-largest populated state.

A vigorous Sam Houston, the Father of Texas (more so than Stephen F. Austin) shown after he led 783 “Texians” to victory over 1,200 Mexicans under Mexican dictator Santa Anna at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, surprising them at their siesta (Santa Anna, who divided his forces, is believed by some historians to have been involved at the time in a sexual escapade with a “high yellow” woman later called The Yellow Rose of Texas). The battle lasted only 18 minutes, with the Texians slaughtering most of the 600-plus Mexicans who died, yelling, “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” and many of the Mexicans bleating, “Me no Alamo. Me no Goliad.” Photo possibly taken at the beginning of Houston’s service in the U.S. Senate, 1846-1859. William J.E. Heard (undoubtedly related to us, but not in our direct line) served as one of the captains, of Company F, 1^st Regiment, in the Texian Army at San Jacinto. Heard, from Egypt TX (which my wife Betsy always wants to visit because of its exotic name -- it’s a typical, dirty, wide place in the road west of Houston), quarreled with General Houston on occasion (he thought Houston, in his flight eastward in front of Santa Anna, should have made a stand at the Colorado River, p. 138, The Day of San Jacinto, Frank X. Tolbert, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1959). Houston taught Heard in school years before in eastern Tennessee. The flamboyant general chose a light-colored steed for his mount at San Jacinto, then at

the last minute apparently realized his horse would make a good target for the Mexicans and tried to trade for Heard’s bay. “This old bay is a pet, General,” Heard is supposed to have said. “I couldn’t any more trade him off than I could a child” (p. 138, Tolbert; incidentally, the Uvalde newspaper falsely reported Tolbert’s demise several years ago, and it fell tome to tell Tolbert that.). An article by Kent Biffle in the April 20, 1986, edition of the Dallas Morning News reported, “Once, prancing in front of the artillery, Houston narrowly missed being blown apart by one of the hot-mouthed Sisters [twin cannon]. John C. Ware, of Mont-gomery County, later founder of the first town in Uvalde County, Waresville, near Utopia, in 1852, also served as a captain at San Jacinto. The Texians charged to the music of a bawdy song, Will You Come to the Bower I have Shaded for You. Photo from TEXAS: The Lone Star State, Fourth Edition, Rupert N. Richardson, Prentice Hall, Inc., Edgewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981, a book perhaps not as good as T.R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans, MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1968, but so far as I know Richardson never took on airs similar to Fehrenbach, who once told me he didn’t need to use footnotes giving the sources for his statements because 50 years hence he would be considered the source for Texas history. Imagine an ego that large.

Sam Houston later in life. As governor of Texas in 1861, he opposed the Civil War, predicting the South would lose. The Leg-islature removed him from office. Houston died in 1863, two years before the Civil War ended.

Earliest likeness of Abraham Lincoln, a Daguerrotype reportedly taken by Nicholas H. Shepherd toward the end of 1847, when Lincoln served his only term in Congress, a single term largely because he opposed the war with Mexico.

1850, June 23, John Albert Cummings is born in Albany, New York three months after the publication on March 16 of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. John became known as “The Strongman of the Dry Frio Canyon” (stories about him, from my 1998 Random Recollections of the Heard Family, also are included here beginning with the second paragraph under 1890). John is the third and last of my great-grandfathers who lived past 40. Photo probably taken in the last five years of his life, 1915-1920.

My fourth great-grandfather, Harvey Gulley (b. May 10, 1831, in Monroe County, Alabama, the eighth son and 12^th child of John Gulley and Nancy Bizzel), moved with his family to Dallas County, Alabama, in 1832, then in 1836 to Arkan-sas, where the family lived with Harvey’s employer, James Madison Lijon, who hired Harvey as an overseer. Lijon’s niece, Minerva Jane Lightfoot, 16 (b. Nov. 25 1835), and Harvey, 20, marry on Feb. 4, 1852. Harvey and Minerva’s first child, Mary Ellen Gulley, is born less than six and months later, on Nov. 25, 1852. After 10 years of marriage and six children, Harvey joins the Confederate Army in Arkansas (Company I, 37^th Arkansas Infantry) as a private on his 31^st birthday, May 10, 1862. What the hell was he thinking? Their sixth and last child, my grandfather John Lightfoot Gulley, was born Jan. 18, 1861, less than three months before South Carolinians open fire on Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War. John’s father joined the Confederate Army in Arkansas a year and four months after John’s birth, and took a shot “in the left hip” in his first fight, at Helena, Arkansas, July 4, 1863 (the same day Ulysses Grant takes Vicksburg, and one day after Robert E. Lee loses at Gettysburg). I think Grant cut his rearward lines, crossed the river and attacked Vicksburg from the souh.Vicksburg did not celebrate July 4 again until 1942, after the beginning of WWII. Captured, Harvey dies in January 1864, probably of smallpox, on Rock Island in the Mississippi River off Alton, Illinois, site of a Union prison [probably called Pock Island and miscalled later]. My grandfather Gulley married twice in Arkansas, but both died, and he left the state for Texas. On p. 80 of Fenley’s 1957 book, Will T. Bunting, born in 1870, later famous as for Uvalde honey and pecans, says his father served in Terry’s Rangers, Littlefield’s Company, of the Confederate Army until captured at Mossy Creek, Tennessee, and confined to Rock Island, where prisoners “even watched the rat holes to catch rats for food whenever they could.” Bunting never gets around to giving his dad’s first name, but he relates this story about a “Negro” named Nathan with Capt. Littlefield. After “a pretty hot” fight, the Negro told what he heard in the fight. “He said those little ‘minnie balls’ would come at him and say, ‘Na-a-athan! Na-a-athan!’ and directly a big ‘bum shell’ come by and says, ‘Whah Iz ya?’ He said he answered it, ‘Right down hyah ‘hind dis tree!’ Capt. Littlefield took care of that Negro as long as he lived, and when he died, he put up a nice tomb stone at his grave.” Ithink Littlefield enjoyed Nathan;s illiterate talk.

Incidentally, “Capt. Littlefield” is the same man, George Washington Littlefield, (photo below) who after the war vied with Unionist George Washington Brackenridge, (photo below) each a wealthy Austinite, to see which one could give the most money, and therefore exert the most influence upon, the University of Texas. Obviously, this competition greatly benefited UT. Littlefield (b. 6.2.1842; d. 11.10.1920), in addition to his earlier benefactions (including his Victorian home on the northwestern portion of the present-day campus, and statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis), left $500,000 to UT to build the new administration building (the UT Tower, completed in the mid-1930s, and in which some federal money also helped), but conditioned that bequest on the school’s staying at its present site. He knew Brackenridge wanted to move the school to the Brackenridge Tract near the present Deep Eddy swimming pool close to the Colorado River in southwest Austin, north of the river. Brackenridge, born almost 10 years before Littlefield, Jan. 14, 1832, nevertheless survived Littlefield by a month and a half. But when Brackenridge learned of Littlefield’s conditional gift, he realized he could not top it. Thought at one time to be worth between $3 million and $4 mil-lion, Brackenridge actually claimed an estate of $1.5 million at the time of his death, Dec. 28, 1920.

Brackenridge never married and did not serve in the Civil War, but he and his father, anti-slavery lawyer John Adams Brackenridge, supported the Union, while Brackenridge’s two brothers, James Madison Brackenridge and Robert John Brackenridge, served in the Confederate Army. Son George devoted little space to himself on a family granite memorial stone in the Brackenridge Cemetery at Edna, Texas, but noted his father “inspired Abraham Lincoln, who heard him in court when a boy . . .” George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, Marilyn McAdams Sibley, University of Texas Press, 1973, p. 5.

Robert became a physician, and Austin’s Brackenridge Hospital, founded in 1884, is named for him. It is the oldest public hospital in Texas, dedicated to ac-cepting anyone, regardless of ability to pay. A centennial book about the hospital, Admissions, Lisa Fahrenthold and Sara Rider, with copy by Carolyn Bobo, 1984, published by the hospital, notes on p. xi in a prefatory note by one of this writer’s favorite interviewees, the late Joe Franz, himself a liberal, who says the site of Texas’ first public hospital did not win acclaim from everyone, because “Texas has always been an independent-minded state which regarded Austin as a center of radicalism.”

As one might expect, a chapter in Admissions is devoted to the UT Tower sniper episode in 1966.

The six-volume New Handbook of Texas, Vol. 1, p. 609, says George W. Brackenridge became a “war profiteer in the Matamoros cotton trade.” But it should also be noted that Brackenridge’s benefactions to UT included B Hall, where boys of small means could stay while attending the school. Later U.S.Sen. Ralph Yarborough lived in B Hall, and once ran ”naked” (actually wore under-wear shorts) from that dorm to the state capitol at night. Latei n life, Yarborough had not beenrecognized as a distinguishe UT alum. This writer asked former House Speaker and Lt. Gov. (presiding officer in the Texas Senate) Ben Barnes to use his influence to obtain that distinction for Yarborough. Barnes went to bat for Yarborough with former Gov. John Connally, and Yarborough received that honor. This writer remembers sitting in the then-Memorial Stadium (DRK’s name preceding “Memoial” did not occur until several years later) main pressbox and watching Yarborough excult in that honor.

George Washington Brackenridge. Photo from George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, Marilyn McAdams Silbey, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1973.

George Washington Littlefield, photo from p. 231, Vol. 1, The New Handbook of Texas, Texas Historical Association, Austin, 1996.