Plaster Saints

[hrj]

I've been corresponding in the last couple of days with a guy who maintains a historical website for the area that my great-great-grandfather Abiel (he of the voluminous Civil War diaries and correspondence) came from and who wants permission to include his writings, which I gave. But I reacted a little strongly to something he wrote in his letter and I though I'd share that snippet and my response to it.

him:

The items such as this diary are exactly the type material I have wished to share with others about our great ancestors. Mr. LaForge wrote with a simple grace that expresses the high values that our gritty ancestors possessed. Simple farmers, mostly, who lived for family, country and lastly self.

my response:

The funny thing is, a "simple farmer" is about the _last_ way I'd describe Abiel. The more I read through his writings, the more I appreciate what a complex, sophisticated, highly educated, funny, and contradictory person he was. A family man eventually, yes, but quite a "man about town" with the ladies (even after starting to court my g-g-grandmother) until he got married. While stationed near DC, excursions while on leave included avidly attending Italian operas and one of his letters home asks that they send his French dictionary (I believe he was reading some French novels). There's one vignette where he remarks "I have been reading Moors translation of Homers Odyssey, very interesting I find it. gave Lt Hepburn a lesson in french this evening. There has been a good deal of paper exchanging until the middle of the afternoon when the Rebs took the notion of firing which stoped it of course."

I love that the everyday detail in his letters demonstrates how very much he and the people he knew were just like us: complex human beings who loved and hated, who did good and ill, who were generous and selfish, who worked for the future and lived in the moment, who could be both kind and wise and in the next moment ignorant and bigoted. It does Abiel a disservice to try to frame him as some sort of plaster saint who "lived for family, country, and lastly self". And the great treasure he gives us is not a glimpse of some lost golden age of "high values" but rather his wonderfully articulate descriptions of the ordinary lives of ordinary people that demonstrate that "ordinary" should never be mistaken for boring or meaningless or trivial.

Comments

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

You are fortunate to have such documents. Yes, I think many people misinterpret who "simple farmers" of the past might be. George Washington claimed to be a simple farmer too, you may recall. Farmers were the backbone of our country before agribusiness drove most off their land.

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

Abiel sounds like a very interesting man! I hope more people will get a chance to read his documents.

[ichseke.livejournal.com]

Too many people want to simplify and exalt The Patriot, and cut off all the bumps and extrusions that make the actual people interesting, and individual. As though being complex and possibly contradictory will somehow undermine their illustrative value. (My paternal grandfather was convicted of embezzlement, and that was only the beginning of HIS story.) Stick to your guns!

[xrian.livejournal.com]

Two thumbs up for giving the correspondent a dose of reality. Even the saints weren't plaster saints when alive ;)

[dame-cordelia.livejournal.com]

Your description sounds like a very interesting and complex man.

One of my great grandfathers was the first doctor in Waycross, Ga. He read Latin and Greek, and named his 6 daughters after Roman goddesses. He was considered peculiar because he washed his hands between patients, but there was no other doctor, so people went to him anyway. I wish I knew more about him, but he does not appear to have been a writer.