A favorite Lincoln biographer of mine is Carl Sandburg. In 1926, he published a two-volume work, Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years, and then in 1939, he published a four-volume work, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years. This latter work won Sandburg the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940.

Although fellow historians have pointed out that Sandburg did a poor job citing his sources, his readers find his biography “exhaustively researched, and magnificently illuminating.” One reviewer called the six volumes, “The best written biography of Lincoln ever.”

One reviewer cautioned though, “It is a dense read; don’t be in a hurry. You won’t be able to plow through it quickly anyway. It is slow food.”

In the final chapters of The Prairie Years, Sandburg covers in quick succession the grim details that Lincoln faced between November 6, 1860, the day his 180 electoral votes won him the election, and March 4, 1861, the day Chief Justice Roger Taney administered the oath of office to Lincoln.

During those four months as President-elect, seven Southern states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—seceded from the Union, because he opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories, and because he considered slavery immoral, wrong.

The first sentence in Sandburg’s chapter “The House Dividing,” he writes, “Lincoln’s election was a signal.” On February 8, 1861, the seceding Southern pro-slavery states formed their own provisional government, the Confederate States of America, with President, Congress, and Courts.

Alas, people now spoke of war less as a possibility, and more as a surety, imminent, and inevitable.

No less hurtful was the hate-mail. Sandburg writes, “In the day’s mail [in Springfield], for Lincoln came letters cursing him for an ape and a baboon who had brought the country evil. He was a buffoon and monster; an idiot; they prayed he would be flogged, burned, hanged, tortured.”

Lincoln spoke little of his plans, except to advise those in Washington that, “they must stand for no further spread of slavery. ‘On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel,’ he counseled, and warned, ‘The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.’”

In the last chapter of The Prairie Years, entitled “I Bid You an Affectionate Farewell,” Sandburg describes Lincoln’s final days in Springfield. First, he visited his step-mother, Sarah Bush Lincoln.

“They held hands and talked. They talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him. He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing, and wanting, wanting.”

People noticed a change in Lincoln. “He is letting his whiskers grow,” men were saying in January.

Then, Sandburg writes, “Between seven and twelve o’clock on the night of February 6, there came to the Lincoln home several hundred ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ It was the Lincolns’ good-bye house party. The President-elect stood near the front door shaking hands, and nearby was Bob, and Mrs. Lincoln.”

On February 10, “he and Billy Herndon sat in their office for a long talk about their 16 years as law partners.” Lincoln had stuck with Herndon, even though the partner had a powerful thirst for alcohol.

Then, it was the day. Sandburg writes,

“A cold drizzle of rain was falling February 11 when Lincoln and his party of 15 were to leave Springfield on the eight o’clock at the Great Western Railway station. He spoke slowly.

‘My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man.

‘I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.’”

At Lincoln’s inauguration on the steps of the Capitol’s east front, he said, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.

“You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’ I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends.”

A month later, on April 12, a Civil War began when Southern forces bombed the Union’s Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina, forcing its surrender. Lincoln called up Union troops, as four more states seceded: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Sandburg recognized that no President ever faced as dire a situation as did Lincoln, and he knew that Lincoln never returned alive to his beloved home town of Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln’s body though was returned there for burial after his assassination four years later, on April 15, 1865.

Roots, the television miniseries, aired over eight nights, from Sunday, January 23, through Sunday, January 30, in 1977, forty-five years ago. It proved wildly successful, despite ABC executives’ fears about showing white men kidnapping, buying, selling, and whipping black men, and women.

It made television history though. Some 30 million people watched it every night, although I missed the episodes, something I now regret, because I was busy studying in college.

Based loosely upon Alex Haley’s book of the same name that he published the year before, the miniseries followed the lives of four generations of enslaved African-Americans late in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries.

There was Kunta Kinte, a teenaged boy who was kidnapped in Gambia, Africa, and transported across the Atlantic on a brutal, smelly slave ship to Annapolis, Maryland; Kunta Kinte’s daughter Kizzy; Kizzy’s son, Chicken George; and Chicken George’s son, Tom Harvey.

The cast included dozens of well-known black actors and actresses: LeVar Burton, as Kunta Kinte, later young Toby; Louis Gossett, Jr., as Fiddler; Leslie Uggams, as Kizzy; Ben Vereen, as Chicken George Moore; and Cicely Tyson, as Binta. Even O. J. Simpson starred as an African, Kadi Touray.

Among the white cast members were: Lorne Greene, of Bonanza; Vic Morrow, of Combat; Edward Asner, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Lynda Day George, of Mission: Impossible; Chuck Connors, of The Rifleman; Ralph Waite, of The Waltons; and Robert Reed, of The Brady Bunch.

As for the book, Haley devoted twelve years of steady work before completing Roots: The Saga of a Family. The most difficult part—Kunta Kinte’s ordeal when handcuffed to a board on a slave ship—Haley wrote nights, when at sea, on a freighter.

The book sold millions, and made Haley rich and famous.

Yet, it is still a question today, as it was in 1976, “Where in a library or a bookstore would you find Roots, in fiction or non-fiction?” I would lean toward fiction, in that Roots resembles James Michener’s novels: for example, The Source, Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, and Tales of the South Pacific.

Like Michener, Haley created memorable characters, placed them in a certain time and place, and recorded what he believed they said and did.

A writer named Michael Patrick Hearn wrote a lead essay last month in The New York Times Book Review, and in he described his relationship with Alex Haley, when both were at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, in the late 1960’s, Hearn as a student, and Haley as his instructor.

Hearn says that at some point during the writing, “Haley’s ‘nonfiction’ book became a novel, though both author and publisher insisted that it was the unadulterated truth.” Haley was convinced that in Kunta Kinte, he had found his African ancestor, albeit back several generations.

Hearn though is more matter-of-fact. He writes, “Haley was not a scholar. He was not a genealogist. He was not even a novelist. What he was was a professional journalist always on the lookout for a good story. And he never found a better one than that of his own family history.”

Hearn quips, “Haley was not a historian, but he made history.” In 1977, Pulitzer Prize officials awarded him a “special award and citation” for journalism.

After his fabulous success, Haley was drug into court twice in 1978, on charges of plagiarism.

Margaret Walker Alexander, director of black studies at Jackson State College in Mississippi, brought a case against Haley, arguing that there existed “similarities between Roots and her novel Jubilee, that re-counted the life of her great-grandmother from 1835, into the Reconstruction era.”

Judge Marvin Frankel disagreed. On September 21, 1978, he issued “a 15-page opinion,” and said, that “no actionable similarities exist between the works.”

Then, on December 14, 1978, Haley agreed to a settlement, after a six-week trial, with Harold Courlander, a prodigious author who had written and published in 1967 a similar novel, The African.

Courlander’s novel tells of, “a slave’s capture in Africa, his horrific experience as cargo on a ship, and his struggle to hold on to his native culture in a harsh new world.”

Courlander’s suit alleged that, “Without ‘The African,’ ‘Roots’ would have been a very different and less successful novel.” A literary expert testified that, “The evidence of copying from ‘The African’ in both the novel and the television dramatization of ‘Roots’ is clear and irrefutable.”

Haley insisted that, “he did not plagiarize, but he admitted that some sections of ‘Roots’ appeared to have originally appeared in ‘The African.’” The settlement Haley paid was for a reported $650,000.

Despite the two trials’ negative publicity, Haley’s Roots “described the brutalities that one race inflicted on another.” Alex Haley passed away on February 10, 1992, at the age of seventy.

January 6, 2021

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election on Nov. 3, 2020. Although some 74.2 million voters voted for him, 81.2 voted for Biden, a difference of over 7.0 million. Then, Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Despite those facts, Donald Trump vowed he would never concede.

Instead of acting as a gracious political contender who had lost an election, he acted otherwise.

Trump claimed that the election was stolen, that ineligible voters had mailed in ballots. He rallied his supporters with, “Stop the Steal!” and “This election was rigged!” He tried to throw out the votes and overturn the results, even begging an election official in Georgia to “find him the votes.”

Yet, Attorney General William Barr and officials in each of the 50 states found no evidence to support Trump’s claims. Attorney’s who brought to court accusations of voter fraud or of possible irregularities failed to produce a scintilla of evidence to support the allegations.

On Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, a joint session of Congress met to count electoral votes that would verify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. At the same time, Donald Trump spoke at a “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, the park south of the White House, west of the Capitol.

Thousands arrived to hear the President speak, to cheer him on, to nod in agreement to his baseless claims that he had won the election, and to insist that Congress overturn the 2020 election and give it to Trump. Near noon, he began his speech.

“We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This is the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.” “This is not just a matter of domestic politics. This is a matter of national security.”

“With your help over the last four years, we built the greatest political movement in the history of our country, and nobody ever challenges that.” “We must stop the steal, and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.”

“Together, we will drain the Washington swamp, and we will clean up the corruption on our nation’s capital.” “And we fight. We fight. And if you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Near his closing, he said, “So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give.”

Yet, he did not walk beside the crowd. Instead, he rode back to the White House, where he turned on a television and watched as the crowd of thousands—by then an angry mob—stormed into the Capitol, shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” This was an insurrection and a direct attack on democracy.

Because of that mob’s attack on the Capitol, five people lost their lives.

A Capitol Police officer shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, as she climbed through a broken window. Roseanne Boyland was crushed to death by her fellow rioters. A rioter named Kevin Greeson suffered a heart attack and died, and a rioter named Benjamin Philips suffered a stroke, and he also died.

Also, the rioters overpowered and beat a Capitol Police officer named Brian Sicknick, who suffered a severe gash to his head. Carried away to receive medical care, he nonetheless suffered two strokes the next day, and at the age of 42, he passed away, the most tragic outcome of this provoked melee.

People in a crowd will do and say things that they would hesitate to do or say when alone.

Days later, after the riot, the House impeached Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” On Saturday, Feb. 13, 2021, the Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict Donald Trump, less than the two-thirds needed to convict, but by then he was no longer President.

Mitch McConnell spoke for 20 minutes to his fellow Senators on Saturday after the vote and said, “Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

“The riot was unsurprising given the lies that Trump had fed to his supporters about the election being stolen.” He was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection.

“This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.” This vote “does not condone anything that happened.”

Democracy is not a right. It is tenuous, here today and gone tomorrow. It demands protection, and the voters’ allegiance, plus a willingness to respect and obey laws, and to step aside when voters insist.

Yet, certain officials—those who thirst for power and then work to grip it forever once they have it—rely upon timeless tricks. For example, they can declare a national emergency, discard an election’s results, shove aside their opponents, and proclaim themselves all powerful.

May it not ever happen in America anytime soon.

The ancient Greeks pointed to as many as 88 constellations spread across a night sky, and then they pinned names to them that they took from their religion of stories and myths. They wanted to see order in a night sky, because it seemed chaotic, a jumble, pinpoints of light splashed helter-skelter.

The ancient Greeks gave mythological names to the zodiac’s 12 signs. They include: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces.

The ancient Greeks saw a bull in a certain constellation and called it Taurus, their word for a bull. In Sagittarius, they saw an archer, in Aquarius a water bearer, and in Pisces a fish.

Their word “cosmos” meant “order,” because they wanted to believe that the gods who lived on Mount Olympus had set the world in order, in a harmonious mix of stars, earth, moon, and planets.

The one constellation I can identify without much effort is Ursa Major, “the greater or larger Bear,” or the Big Dipper, in the northern sky.

Last time in these pages, I talked about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s fruit trees, and that the wise men, who came from the east to Judea, came bearing expensive gifts, three minerals, and yet today we give three types of foods—fruits, nuts, and sweets—to our children on Christmas Day.

Emerson mentioned the stars in his first book, “Nature.” He wrote,

“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.”

Emerson’s strange friend, Henry David Thoreau mentioned a star in the final paragraph of the final chapter of his most well-read book, “Walden.” A series of cryptic words, almost poetry, he wrote.

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Founders of the International Dark Sky Places Program came together 20 years ago in 2001, and began to name certain locations across Earth, as Dark Sky Parks, where people can stare up at the stars without much interference from light pollution emanating from a nearby urban area.

Last June, officials certified that Mesa Verde National Park in extreme southwest Colorado was an International Dark Sky Park. The closest cities, Cortez and Durango, are 25 miles and fifty miles away, respectively, from the park.

A month later, in mid-July, I visited Mesa Verde for the first time. My spouse and I stayed at the Far View Lodge, a solitary hotel and restaurant, stuck high on a mesa, at 8,000 feet elevation. I was most anxious to see the stars, but it was overcast and it rained, almost an unheard-of event on that mesa.

Perhaps next time, if I visit that area, I will see the stars. I am now receiving emails from the Far View Lodge, telling me, “Bookings for 2022 are now open!”

When I read Tony Hillerman’s crime novels set in the Four Corners area, his characters will try to describe the awesome spectacle when they look up and see the stars for the first time at that high elevation. “Always present, but inaccessible.” Others would say, almost indescribable.

A travel journalist named Stephanie Vermillion recently mentioned in “Outside” magazine a new program at Mesa Verde. Now that the national park has a Dark Sky Place certification, rangers there, who belong to a Native American tribe, present stargazing programs to curious tourists.

But they point to a constellation and prefer to say its Native American name, not its Greek name. The hunter Orion is known as Wintermaker, “a figure that signals that cold weather is on the horizon.”

Park ranger and Laguna Pueblo member T. J. Atsye, said, “If you look up, you have this whole immense universe. The sky is alive, and the cosmos is another aspect of the park. They hold meaning for contemporary indigenous people, just like they did for our ancestors.”

This week we celebrate Christmas, a time when families gather to give gifts, to eat a Christmas meal, to enjoy time with smiling children and grandchildren, to sing carols, and to remember the Christmas story as the gospel writers told it.

The three wise men from the east saw a single star, and they followed it to their destination in Judea, but, one wonders, “How?” The gospel writers fail to tell us, only that the star guided the three wise men. Their eyes were on that star, but in their hands they each clutched an expensive gift.

Have a very Merry Christmas.

In 1905, the USDA published a bulletin: Nomenclature of the Apple: A Catalog, that listed 17,000 names. After removing the duplicate names, it still listed 14,000 different varieties of the apple.

Between Captain John Smith in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the beginning of the 20th century, American settlers planted thousands of fruit trees, and produced thousands of varieties. Horticulturists now consider those three centuries the Golden Age of pomology, the science of fruit-bearing trees.

The most famous of the early planters was John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed. “By the 1830’s, he owned a string of apple-tree nurseries across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.”

Most fruit that we eat comes from trees first cultivated in Europe and Asia, and carried to America.

As for native American fruit trees, they include: the Juneberry, the Red Mulberry, persimmon, may haw, wild cherry, and pawpaw. Also, the few plum and crabapple trees native to America produce a tart fruit, good only for making preserves.

Sixty years before the USDA published its bulletin, a young and enthusiastic pomologist named Andrew Jackson Downing wrote a most interesting book, first published in 1847, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America: The Culture, Propagation, and Management.

An enthusiastic lover of fruit trees, Downing is almost lyrical when he writes: “It is the most perfect union of the useful and the beautiful that the earth knows: trees full of soft foliage; blossoms fresh with spring beauty; and fruit, rich, bloom-dusted, melting, and luscious.”

“I heartily desire that every man should cultivate an orchard, or at least a tree of good fruit.”

Downing points out that each generation of living men and women possess fruit trees because of the countless hours of work that previous generations undertook and completed. For decades, they each tested by trial and error, and then grafted, cultivated, and pruned their fruit trees.

He then declares that there are two tendencies within every fruit tree, “a tendency to improve, but a stronger tendency to return to a natural or wild state.” It is men and women’s duty to fight off a fruit tree’s tendency to return to that wild, more primitive, albeit natural state.

He writes, “If the arts of cultivation were abandoned for only a few years, all the annual varieties in our gardens would disappear and be replaced by a few original wild forms,” and, “In the midst of thorns and sloes, Man the Gardener arises and forces nature to yield to his art.”

Downing connects “culture” back to its original meaning, “a piece of tilled land, or to cultivate,” before it became known as “intellectual training and refinement.” Indeed, the word “culture” has its roots in agriculture and arboriculture, “the grafting and pruning and training,” of human beings.

A current-day biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., said of Downing’s book, that “it is proof that one person can change things. No orchard keeper can be a believer in fate.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson—writer, thinker, essayist, and poet extraordinaire—read Downing’s book when first published, and took to heart Downing’s call to plant fruit trees. He first planted grape vines, and then over a hundred trees in the acres beside his house in Concord, Massachusetts.

He planted thirty apple trees, a dozen quince trees, plus plenty of plum, peach, and pear trees.

Richardson says that Emerson’s trees died long ago, and that today most of those acres, “have run wild. Only a few steps from the house the land is densely overgrown, abandoned, and impenetrable.”

That stronger tendency to return to a natural or wild state superseded that weaker tendency to improve. At least that is what happened on Emerson’s soil.

For those who like to catch and digest trivia, Concord grapes were named after Emerson’s town, but not due to Emerson’s efforts, but due to Ephraim Bull’s, the town’s fire chief, who “planted and evaluated 22,000 seedlings before he found his perfect grape,” a well-documented effort on his part.

Certain people find the time to take on substantial tasks that result in profound achievements.

For centuries, at Christmas time, adults have presented to their children— after they have sang carols and acted out the nativity scene in a Christmas program—a Christmas sack, filled with unshelled peanuts, almonds, cashews, and pecans; an apple or an orange; and a candy cane or two and chocolates.

Sweets, nuts, and fruit, the better things that men and women who work with and through nature, can and will create. The three wise men came from the east bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but children today receive that “union of the useful and the beautiful,” fruit from a tree.

The French writer Voltaire, in his fictional novel Candide, tells of a tireless old man who explains to Candide, “I only worry about the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold. I and my children cultivate them; and our labor preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.”

Candide commented, “I know that we must cultivate our garden.” And our orchard too.

Senators and Representatives first met in Congress, under the U.S. Constitution, on March 4, 1789, in the Federal Building in New York City. Six months later, on Sept. 25, James Madison, a Virginia Representative then, submitted to the House 12 amendments to the new Constitution.

His first—called the Congressional Apportionment Amendment—specified that each member of the House shall represent no more than 30,000 people. It fell one state short of adoption, and no state since has ratified it. It appears dead.

Madison’s second—called the Congressional Pay Amendment—stated that “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take affect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

In other words, those who vote themselves a raise must wait until after a subsequent election before anyone in Congress receives a nickel of extra pay.

It is hard to believe, but this Pay Amendment languished for 202 years, 7 months, and 10 days before a sufficient number of states ratified it. How did it revive?

In 1982, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas, in Austin, named Greg Watson, first heard about Madison’s second amendment in a government class. He wrote a term paper for the class and suggested that certain states should ratify it now.

Watson initiated a campaign, and ten years later enough states did ratify it, that it then became a part of the U. S. Constitution on May 5, 1992, and is now known as the 27th Amendment, the last of the amendments to the U. S. Constitution.

On Dec. 15, 1791, a sufficient number of states ratified Madison’s remaining ten proposed amendments—called the Bill of Rights—that they became a part of the Constitution. They guarantee certain freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, petition the government, keep and bear arms, etc.

On Nov. 7, the New York Times posed a question, “What amendments do we need today?”

After all, 30 years have passed since the states ratified the 27th Amendment, and fifty years, since 1971, have passed since 18-year-olds received the right to vote by the 26th Amendment.

Perhaps, Americans do need more Amendments now.

The New York Times staff asked journalists, Constitutional scholars, and professors to respond, and then they printed a number of their more daring, even outrageous, ideas in a supplement to the Times.

A bold headline to the special section shouts, “Snap Out of It, America! Our once restlessly inventive country has settled for sclerotic politics and modest ambitions. It’s time to dream big again. This is a special section featuring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment.”

A law professor in New York suggested that America needs an amendment to extend a member of the House’s term from two years to four years. “A longer, four-year term would facilitate Congress’s ability to once again address major issues that Americans care most about.”

A political columnist at The Week stated, “We’ve had 50 states long enough.” He proposed breaking up the larger states with massive populations, like California, Texas, Florida, and New York, into several additional states. “We need new states. We should start by carving some out of our largest.”

A law professor from Pepperdine suggested a twenty-eighth amendment that would “expand the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to sixteen, that their service would terminate after fifteen years, and that two-thirds of the justices must vote to declare a law unconstitutional.”

A demographer and journalist insisted that all citizens should vote, even babies. He writes,

“The denial of the franchise to children is an injustice that should be corrected. All citizens should be allowed to vote, regardless of their age. The minimum voting age should be zero, with parents and guardians casting the vote for their small children.”

A law professor at Columbia also suggested a 28th Amendment. “All workers shall have the right to form and join labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining, to picket, strike, and boycott.” She says that without this amendment, “The consequences are dire. Income inequality has soared.”

One writer, classified as a legal resident, wants an amendment that would give her the right to vote.

“Nearly 15 million people living legally in the U.S. cannot vote. Expanding the franchise in this way would give American democracy new life, restore immigrants’ trust in government and send a powerful message of inclusion to the rest of the world.”

Certain of these ideas will challenge, disturb, or even upset those who favor the status quo.

The staff at the New York Times did not ask me, but if they had, I would suggest the Constitution needs an amendment that would insist upon a viable third or even a fourth political party, separate from the Democrats and Republicans, in each of the Congressional and Presidential elections.