The Lone POW of Pearl Harbor

 

The Lone POW of Pearl Harbor

Eighty years ago, Japanese submariner Kazuo Sakamaki was taken prisoner by the U.S.—and erased from his own country’s history

 

          Japanese submarine HA-19 on an Oahu beach after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

                                             PHOTO: U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

 

By Takuma Melber

 

Wall Street Journal

Dec. 4, 2021 12:01 am ET

 

Until the end of World War II, Japan celebrated its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, as a glorious victory. But the patriotic legend also created a victim: Kazuo Sakamaki, a lieutenant in the Japanese Navy who was taken captive during the attack, becoming Japan’s first prisoner of war in the conflict.

During their military training, Japanese recruits were taught that for imperial soldiers only victory mattered; there must be no retreat. Individuality and personal sentiments were to be subordinated to the group. “Whatever happens to me—if I go, it will be in the service of my country. Words cannot express how grateful I am for the privilege of fighting for peace and justice,” the 22-year-old Sakamaki wrote in a letter to his parents, expecting them to read it after his death.

The submariners left behind hair and fingernail cuttings

for their relatives to bury in the event that they died. 

Weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakamaki had been put in command of HA-19, a Kō-Hyōteki-class midget submarine—a speedy ship barely 2 meters wide, with room for just two crewmen. It carried two torpedoes, but if they had no other option the submariners were instructed to crash directly into the target, sacrificing their own lives in the process—underwater kamikazes. The submariners left behind not only letters to their families but also hair and fingernail cuttings so that their relatives would have something of their bodies to bury in the event that they died.

The Japanese plan called for five of the submarines to be unloaded from their tenders about 12 miles from the entrance to Pearl Harbor, then conceal themselves in the bay and attack American battleships following the first air raid. On Dec. 5, 1941, the squadron entered American waters as planned and was able to tune in American jazz on the radio. Inside submarine tender I-24, the last religious rites were performed to ritually cleanse body and soul.

                            Kazuo Sakamaki as a young officer in the Japanese Navy.

                                                                                        PHOTO: ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

 

When he boarded HA-19, Sakamaki wrote in a memoir after the war, he discovered to his horror that the gyrocompass, the most important navigation instrument in his midget submarine, was defective. As a result, the sub was soon 90 degrees off course, moving in a circle away from Pearl Harbor instead of heading toward the entrance. It quickly became impossible to maneuver and ran aground on a coral reef.

When the bombing of Pearl Harbor began on the morning of Dec. 7, the destroyer U.S.S. Helm managed to escape the inferno and sailed at full speed to safety on the open sea. At 8:17 a.m., the Helm reported spotting a stranded Japanese submarine and opened fire. HA-19 was shaken and Sakamaki lost consciousness for a moment, but when he came to he saw that the shots had missed their target and freed the submarine. His steersman, Kiyoshi Inagaki, had the presence of mind to immediately put the engines in reverse and steer back into the water at full speed.

The sub’s battery had been damaged and was giving off toxic fumes, and the two-man crew began to feel lightheaded from lack of oxygen. Sakamaki ordered his steersman to attempt evasive action and head for the island of Lanai, one of the eight main Hawaiian Islands, to rendezvous with the submarine tender. HA-19 managed to get away from the Helm, but it drifted for hours in the water, badly damaged and incapable of maneuvering with two dazed seamen on board.

Sakamaki and Inagaki activated the self-destruct mechanism and left the vessel, attempting with their last strength to reach land. They realized on the way that they had not heard an explosion and that the self-destruct mechanism had not worked. Sakamaki wanted to turn back, he recalled, but then he saw a huge wave carry off his crewmate Inagaki, and he himself was swept exhausted onto the beach, where he lost consciousness.

On the morning of Dec. 8, while wounded American servicemen were being treated and the dead buried, 21-year-old corporal David Akui, a Japanese-American born on Hawaii, was patrolling with Lieutenant Paul Plybon on Oahu’s Waimanalo Beach southeast of Kaneohe Naval Air Station, which had been heavily bombed the day before. They discovered an unconscious man lying on the beach: Kazuo Sakamaki, who became the U.S.’s first Japanese prisoner of war. His crewmate Inagaki was found dead.

As Sakamaki learned when he was interrogated, all of his other comrades in the midget submarines had also died. None of the Kō-Hyōteki submarines returned from Pearl Harbor. Sakamaki asked to join them in an honorable death by being executed or allowed to take his own life. But the request was denied, and he remained in captivity until the end of the war.

Japanese propaganda tried to brand Sakamaki,

at least by implication, as a kind of outlaw.

 

Japanese propaganda tried to brand him, at least by implication, as a kind of outlaw. Sakamaki’s comrades, described as “nine fallen soldiers, distinguished by their incomparable uprightness and loyalty” and celebrated as “war gods,” were the subject of books, paintings and songs. In April 1942, they were given a state funeral in the presence of Prime Minister Tōjō, and they are still venerated today in ultranationalist circles.

Meanwhile, Sakamaki’s face was missing from all pictures, his name wasn’t mentioned and his whereabouts were left unspoken. In the U.S., the captured HA-19 was exhibited for the rest of the war to promote the sale of war bonds. It toured the country decorated with red, white and blue ribbons and the inscription “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Instead of damaging the U.S. Pacific Fleet, it thus helped to finance the American war against Japan.

When Sakamaki was released at the end of the war and returned to Japan, he published a book about his experiences in American captivity. He went on to work for decades for Toyota and was manager of the company’s subsidiary in Brazil, but to the end of his life he was stigmatized in Japan as the “first prisoner of war.” When he died in 1999 at the age of 81, his family requested that the news not be made public.

—Dr. Melber teaches history and transcultural studies at Heidelberg University in Germany. He is the author of “Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Attack and America’s Entry into World War II,” published by Polity Press.

Veteran, 103, retains vivid memories of Pearl Harbor attack

 

                                                                                    PHOTO BY DANIELLA SEGURA

REDONDO BEACH

Joe Eskenazi says ‘the Lord saved me again’ on that fateful day in Hawaii.

By Daniela Segura

Correspondent, San Gabriel Valley Tribune

Though it’s been 80 years, 103-year-old Joe Eskenazi can still feel the percussion from the Japanese torpedo bombers dropping bombs on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

The then-23-year-old Army private first class was asleep at Schofield Barracks, about 20 miles inland from the seaside base, when the first Japanese bomber appeared in the sky at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941.

“It was a beautiful day, very sunny, very beautiful. But what woke us up was the bombings that was taking place at Pearl Harbor,” Eskenazi, who will turn 104 on Jan. 30, said. “I jumped out of bed. I said, ‘I know we’re being attacked. We’re at war with Japan and that’s what’s happening.’ ” Eskenazi, a Redondo Beach resident, shared haunting memories from eight decades ago with an audience as he was honored by the South Bay Quilters Guild last weekend at the American Legion in Redondo Beach. The quilters presented him a quilt decorated in red, white and blue, along with American flags and the words “God Bless America.”

“I only wish my wife were here to see this,” Eskenazi said. “She just passed in June. I loved her so much.”

Eskenazi is one of a rare breed these days, one of the remaining survivors of the “day that will live in infamy.” There is no official list of Pearl Harbor survivors, but it’s clear with each year that passes, the number is dwindling.

On that morning in 1941, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes descended on the base. Nearly 20 American naval vessels were damaged or destroyed, along with eight battleships and more than 300 planes, according to historical reports. During the attack, more than 2,400 Americans died, including civilians, and another 1,000 were wounded.

The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.

For Eskenazi, at the time of the attack, it was initially unclear at first if there had been an assault. Another soldier convinced Eskenazi that all the activity may just be naval maneuvers. But when the men stepped outside, there was no mistaking that an attack was underway.

“I look up, and I see a Zero (aircraft) flying over my head. He was flying so low that I think I could see his goggles,” Eskenazi recalled. “I said, ‘Oh my God. That’s a Zero fighter going by us,’ and then I saw bombs drop.”

The bombs, however, did not detonate.

Eskenazi grabbed his M1 Garand rifle and some ammo and jumped in a truck with other soldiers, driving 20 miles to get a glimpse of the attack’s aftermath.

Soon after, Eskenazi’s captain asked for volunteers.

Eskenazi’s hand shot up. He looked around to find his was the only hand raised.

Eskenazi’s captain gave him orders to take a bulldozer across Hickam Field, the principal army airfield adjacent to Pearl Harbor. The bulldozer was needed to move the planes that were on the other side of the field in the event aircraft needed to land.

“I’m crossing the runway. I see it. I see a Zero fighter following the path of the runway but way out there in the distance,” Eskenazi said. “Actually, I saw just a little black dot in the sky, and then it started getting closer. I got my rifle.”

He fired and lost sight of the Zero fighter. Moments later, “I started to see the dirt kicking up only three feet away from the door.”

Thankfully, the gunfire ceased.

“I thought we were almost dead and thought, ‘The Lord saved me again’ … I’m thankful for the God that we believe in and that He controls everything that happens to humans,” Eskenazi said.

Ed Candioty, 70, who attended Sunday’s event, has known Eskenazi his entire life and considers him an uncle.

“He’s the sweetest, warmest, kindest man you’ve ever met,” Candioty said. “He taught me how to sail. He’s the one who first took me out on the ocean to learn how to sail.”

As he’s gotten older, Candioty has come to appreciate Eskenazi’s stories.

“He can recount them (the stories) bullet for bullet, minute by minute, name by name,” Candioty said. “I mean, it’s incredible that somebody 103, almost 104 years old, can retell a story like it happened yesterday.”

Eskenazi’s granddaughter, Marcella Mastrangelo, said her grandfather’s mind is the result of his curious, engineering nature.

“He’s so old. Right? But he’s such a kid at heart,” she said. “He can use an iPhone. He loves a challenge. He loves to learn. I think that’s why he stayed so young and healthy because he keeps up like every day’s a new day.”

Eskenazi was born in 1918 in New York City after his family immigrated to the United States from Turkey.

“In 1911, his grandfather didn’t want to be drafted into the Turkish Army,” retired lieutenant colonel Dan Massey said of Eskenazi at Sunday’s quilt presentation. “He left with the family and went to America.”

His family, though, originally hailed from Spain.

When Eskenazi was 4 years old, his family moved to Puebla, Mexico. He remained in Mexico until he decided to travel back to New York City in 1936. He enlisted in the Army in 1938 at Fort MacArthur at the age of 20.

In September 1941, he was sent orders to report to Schofield Barracks just three months before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. He served in the U.S. Army as a private first-class in the C-Company, 804th Engineers for the duration of World War II. After six years of active duty, he decided to conclude his time with the military and was discharged in 1945. He was ultimately awarded the Army Good Conduct Medal, Asiatic—Pacific Campaign Medal, Pearl Harbor Survivor’s Medal and the Combat Medal with Cluster.

Following the war, Eskenazi traveled back to Mexico, where he met his wife, Victoria Faradji. The two married in 1947, came to California and settled in Redondo Beach. They have one daughter, Belinda Mastrangelo, three grandchildren — Raquel Mastrangelo Nassif, Marcella Mastrangelo and Mike Mastrangelo — and two great grandchildren.

Eskenazi went on to work for the Los Angeles Department of Public Works and later at LAX. He retired as the head of engineering at the drafting department at the age of 61 in 1979.

“Instead of looking for work, I decided I wanted to do what I’ve always wanted to do — travel as much as I can and visit as much of the world as I can,” Eskenazi said. “The only part of the world that I didn’t go to was in the East.”

Eskenazi and Victoria traveled the world together, visiting Canada, England, Italy, Brazil, Israel, Turkey and beyond. The couple was married for 74 years.

“He’s just in love with my grandmother, who just passed away in June,” his granddaughter Marcella Mastrangelo said. “They were just the cutest couple. They were inseparable. Inseparable.”

Eskenazi said he has no sage advice.

“I’m not wise, but all I can say is I hate war, and I hate what happens to people,” he said. “I don’t care who they are or what they are, as long as they’re humans we shouldn’t be attacking one another. Instead, be a nice person; be a good person.”

Joe Eskenazi poses for a photo on Nov. 28 at the American Legion in Redondo Beach, where he shared memories from the attack on Pearl Harbor with an audience as he was honored by the South Bay Quilters Guild with a quilt decorated in red, white and blue and the words “God Bless America.” Eskenazi, 103, said he was touched by the tribute but wished that his wife, Victoria, who died in June, could have been there, too.

 Abraham Lincoln's Witty One-Liners

Abraham Lincoln’s Witty One-Liners

Retrieved from inspiringquotes.com 27 November 2021

 

Abraham Lincoln experienced many hardships in his life, suffering from what in his day was known as “melancholy,” but today we would call clinical depression. Despite this, the United States’ 16th President loved to laugh and tell jokes. His many witty stories elicited chuckles and groans in equal measure, while his sharp one-liners were used to poke fun at his rivals as well as at himself.

Humor was a release mechanism for Lincoln, who was constantly under great strain, especially during the American Civil War. During critical cabinet meetings, he would often start by reading a passage from one of his favorite humorists. On one occasion, when those gathered for the somber meeting failed to appreciate the humor, Lincoln reportedly said, “Gentlemen, why don't you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh occasionally I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”

This statement, perhaps better than any other, demonstrates Lincoln’s use of wit and humor. Much like Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Lincoln knew how powerful laughter could be in dark times. As the following quotes show, Lincoln’s sharp wit was both self-deprecating and, at times, a potent weapon in the political realm.

I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying; and for this reason: I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be block-head enough to have me.

Abraham Lincoln poked fun at himself as much as at anyone else, as shown in this line from a letter written to Mrs. Orville H. Browning in 1838 (four years before he married Mary Todd).

I didn't want the [damned] fellow to kill me, which I think he would have done if we had selected pistols.

In 1842, the young Abraham Lincoln publicly ridiculed politician James Shields during a debate about banking in Illinois, leading Shields to challenge Lincoln to a duel. Being the far larger and stronger man, Lincoln, who had the privilege of choosing the weapons, went with “cavalry broadswords of the largest size.” The two men later called a truce on the day of the duel.

Shoot me, for if I am an uglier man than you I don’t want to live.

One of Lincoln’s favorite stories involved an encounter with a stranger who apparently told him, “Some years ago I swore an oath that if I ever came across an uglier man than myself I'd shoot him on the spot.” It may be a tall tale, but Lincoln’s response is funny nonetheless.

He has a good deal of trouble with his popular sovereignty. His explanations explanatory of explanations explained are interminable.

This zinger is from a 1858 presidential debate with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln poked fun at his opponent’s seemingly contradictory ideas regarding popular sovereignty, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?

This self-deprecating comment is perhaps the most famous Lincoln one-liner from the Douglas debates. Lincoln made the quip in response to Douglas’ accusation that he was two-faced.

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.

During an 1861 speech in Pittsburgh, Lincoln addressed a supportive and vocal crowd who were more than willing to laugh at his jokes — especially this one, which poked fun at the chattering political class in general.

My dear McClellan: If you don't want to use the Army I should like to borrow it for a while.

During the Civil War, Lincoln became increasingly frustrated by Union General George McClellan’s unwillingness to attack the Confederate Army. Lincoln recalled him to Washington with the simple but barbed message above.

My dear girl, the ball that hit him, would have missed you.

While visiting a wounded soldier, Lincoln noticed a young woman asking the injured man where he had been shot. The soldier had been shot through the testicles and didn’t wish to give the woman an answer. After talking with the soldier, Lincoln gave the woman this delicate explanation.

 

WEBSITE vs BLOG?

As many of you know, I have a website, https;//www.greensblueandgray.com, along with this blog by the same name. I'm considering dropping the website and just keeping this blog going.

Why, you might ask? Well, it comes down to time and energy, it seems. The host of my website had all of its hosted sites re-format; I'm still in the process of re-doing my site. This happens to be my third website build with this host. It's a lot of work to re-do a site, the cutting and pasting, dropping images in place, moving margins, fixing fonts. You get the idea. I'm tired of doing it...again.

So, I am thinking of just going with this blog. I can put most everything I now have on the website right here in a series of posts. I know it won't be the same, but neither am I the same as I was years ago when I started the website. I'm running out of that special energy one must have to maintain a hopefully vibrant and new website. 

The same is true for maintaining a blog, perhaps as much of that energy. 

Hmmm.

I'm considering dropping the website and just keeping this blog going. I go back and forth with the pros and cons. Perhaps I need to work on getting some of that special energy... 

 AFGHANISTAN AFTER OUR WITHDRAWAL

Nation-building and pretense of knowledge about this world

 

By Alexander William Salter and Abigail R. Hall

 

“In establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.” These are wise words from former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown Institutions protecting personal freedoms are necessarily the result of slow and steady development. The Anglosphere didn’t arrive at liberal-democratic capitalism overnight. As we watch the Afghan government collapse and the Taliban seize control, we’re seeing once again that nation-building didn’t work. It would never work. You cannot impose democracy from the top down.

 

Blame President Biden for the withdrawal fiasco, but not for the failure to transform the graveyard of empires into a modern state. The hubris of the last two decades has a deeper source. “Experts,” both civilian and military, thought they could export liberal democracy and free enterprise to a nation with no historical experience with the political and cultural mores necessary for these institutions to flourish.

 

Nation building is doomed to fail. To see why, consider one of the most important economists of the 20th century: F. A. Hayek. Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work on business cycles, he is most famous for his work on the “knowledge problem” as a critique of socialism.

 

Simply put, the knowledge required to coordinate an extensive division of labor cannot be harnessed by a single person or group of experts. Information is often tacit, defying quantification and communication. We need markets to channel this knowledge, creating a social intelligence that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Bureaucrats and politicians thinking they can out-plan businesses and households is nothing more than a “pretense of knowledge.”

 

Hayek’s later work on political and legal theory extended this insight to the institutions  supporting markets: property rights, the common law and constitutional democracy. These too cannot be designed or imposed in top-down fashion. They must grow organically. Thanks to Hayek, we know rationalism in politics is just as dangerous as in economics, if not more.

 

Nowhere is this more aptly portrayed than in the work of economist Christopher Coyne. His book “After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy” detailed the perils of attempting to build or otherwise reconstruct nation states. His work should be required reading for all serious students of international relations, as well as policymakers arrogant enough to think they can construct a country when they can’t even balance their own budget.

 

Coyne argues that successful reconstruction, as in the case of Afghanistan, requires “building, and in some cases building from scratch, both formal and informal institutions in order to achieve fundamental political, economic, and social change.” The citizens of the imposed upon nation must learn to live as comfortably within the new institutions as the old ones. But the required social and political knowhow can’t be transferred. The result is permanent friction between governors and governed.

 

To complicate matters, an intervening government simply cannot know all the information necessary to plan and implement radical institutional shifts from the top down. The network of political and legal rules that constitute successful countries are more like an ecosystem than an engineering problem. Nation-building is just as much a fatal conceit as central planning.

 

So what are we to do when confronted with oppressive regimes and immense human suffering?

 

There are no panaceas, but it’s far better to live up to our ideals than forcing those ideals on others. First, focus on free trade. When goods cross borders, so do ideas. It is when ideas are adopted that policies, and regimes, change. Second, look at immigration. If we truly want to alleviate human misery, allow those who want to live under liberal democratic principles the chance to do so. For Afghanistan, that means getting as many refugees here as want to come. [Not sure I agree with this idea. What if 30 million Afghanis want to come to the U.S.?]

 

Ought implies can. If nation-building is impossible, it’s absurd for us to try. Our fool’s errand in Afghanistan cost nearly a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Long ago, President John Quincy Adams warned against the temptation for America to venture abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” We ignored his wisdom, with tragic results. What we need first and foremost is to embrace humility in foreign policy. We are not the world’s savior or guardian. Pretending otherwise will create nothing but misery.

 

Alexander William Salter is an economics professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute. Abigail R .Hall is an associate professor of economics at Bellarmine University. She is the coauthor of “Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism.”

 

Article from San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 29 August 2021.

 

 

 

In this image provided by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 24, 2021.

MASTER SGT. DONALD R. ALLEN — U.S. AIR FORCE VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Agitators of the Peace

A Civil War Book Review

Frances Seward, Harriet Tubman and Martha Wright

KENT BARTON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War, it could be said that the moral center of the nation rested in the Finger Lakes region of central New York state. The district was a hot spot of abolitionism and the fledgling women-rights movement.

Rochester, on the region’s western edge, was home to Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and celebrated orator, who published his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in a church basement. The village of Seneca Falls, on Cayuga Lake, was the site of the first women’s rights convention, in 1848, with its seminal Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. A medical school on Seneca Lake was the first to award a degree to a woman, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.

Our celebration of seasonal books on topics like nature, gardening, food and baseball—plus David Hockney in France, Richard Thompson’s musical memoir, ‘The Agitators’ and more.

Then there is Auburn, which sits at the northern tip of Owasco Lake. The town is at the heart of Dorothy Wickenden’s “The Agitators,” an absorbing and richly rewarding chronicle of three principled women who fought on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights. The title comes from Lucretia Mott, a prominent feminist, abolitionist and Quaker who proudly modeled herself on the early Friends—social activists whom she once described as “agitators, disturbers of the peace.” Ms. Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker, traces the Auburn women’s lives with intelligence, compassion and verve. In an earlier book, “Nothing Daunted,” she told the story of two Auburn girls who left home to become teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916.

The most famous member of the Auburn trio is Harriet Tubman, whose life story is well-known. Born into slavery in Maryland, she escaped to Philadelphia in 1849, when she was in her 20s, only to return to her home state as a conductor on the Underground Railroad that carried escaped slaves to freedom. During the Civil War, she worked as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union Army. 

Auburn was one of Tubman’s stops on the Underground Railroad. Close to Lake Ontario, it was a jumping-off point for Canada, where fugitive slaves could be assured of safety. In Auburn, Tubman was introduced to Martha Coffin Wright and Frances Miller Seward, who opened their homes to the freedom seekers she sent their way. Giving a meal and a bed to a runaway slave was an act of courage in an era when the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 imposed harsh penalties on those who helped escapees. On the night that the first fugitive arrived in the Wrights’ kitchen, Martha felt “a sense of satisfaction unlike any she’d ever experienced,” Ms. Wickenden writes. “She was violating a law she could not tolerate, transforming her kitchen—the symbolic heart of woman’s sphere . . . —into a place of political asylum.”

Martha Wright, a mother of seven, was the younger sister of Lucretia Mott and a compatriot of feminist leaders Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She went on to become a founder of the Seneca Falls Convention, a supporter of property rights for married women, and an advocate of women’s suffrage.

The third member of this circle of friends, Frances Seward, was, in Ms. Wickenden’s words, a “quieter rebel.” The most conventional of the three, she belonged to a well-off family and had been educated at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, the country’s best school for girls, at a time when no college accepted women. On a visit to Virginia in 1835, when she was 30, she was radicalized by the sight of 10 weeping black boys, ages 6 to 12, naked, roped together and overseen by a white man with a whip. The children were on their way to auction, where they would be sold to work in the fields of the Deep South.

As the wife of William Henry Seward, governor of New York, then senator and Lincoln’s secretary of state, Frances often found herself in the painful position of trying to follow her conscience without damaging the career of her husband, who was not as outspoken on the contentious issue of abolition. In keeping with his wishes, she kept a low public profile about her antislavery work, declining to sign an antislavery petition or publicize her work educating freed slaves. In private, however, she was a powerful and insistent adviser to her husband, pushing him to press Lincoln to emancipate the slaves.

In telling the stories of Martha Wright and Frances Seward, Ms. Wickenden relies heavily on their letters and diaries and those of close family members. The result is an intimate, detailed portrait of the women, including the effect that their activism had on their families. When we meet Martha in the 1820s, she is dissatisfied with her life as a homemaker and its endless drudgery. She writes: “The only way is to grub & work & sweep & dust, & wash & dress children, & make gingerbread, and patch & darn.” Frances, for her part, loathed being a political wife, choosing to spend long periods in Auburn rather than joining her husband in Albany or Washington. After 35 years of marriage, she informed Henry, by then a senator, that she would no longer act as his hostess. For both women, their work on the Underground Railroad sparked political awakenings and a resolve to take leadership roles in the causes they championed.

Harriet Tubman, who was illiterate and left no written record, is nevertheless the one who comes most alive in the book’s pages. Drawing on published interviews with Tubman and letters and diaries of people who knew her, Ms. Wickenden paints her as highly intelligent, determined and dignified—“a small, unstoppable woman . . . unafraid of the slave power of the South and the lawmakers in Washington.” When Tubman needed a home for the family members she had rescued and a base for her work, Frances Seward sold her a house in Auburn.

One of the pleasures of “The Agitators” is the cast of supporting characters who pass through its pages. John Brown “had a hypnotic effect on abolitionists who lacked his fire-breathing pugnacity.” Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, one of Lincoln’s opponents in the 1860 election, was “a small, pot-bellied man with hooded eyes and big ambitions who had an ability to crash through legislative logjams.” Susan B. Anthony was “neither graceful nor beautiful nor rich nor winning to strangers” in the assessment of Martha’s daughter Ellen. Frances Seward describes Lincoln as “amusing and friendly, with a manner like an unassuming farmer’s—not awkward & ungainly but equally removed from polish of manner.”

As the story moves into the war years, the book’s focus shifts and Martha and Frances fade somewhat into the background. Tubman’s wartime service in South Carolina is chronicled in an electrifying chapter about a military raid on plantations along the Combahee River in which she leads 750 slaves to safety. A chapter on Martha’s son Willy, wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, is deeply moving. Ms. Wickenden’s fast-paced description of the attack on Henry Seward by an associate of John Wilkes Booth on the night of Lincoln’s assassination is—in a word—thrilling. A Seward daughter who witnessed the attack writes in her journal: “Blood, blood, my thoughts seemed drenched in it—I seemed to breathe its sickening odor.”

Violence is an ever-present feature of “The Agitators”—from slavery’s brutalities to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War. Auburn, where not everyone approved of the women’s work, was not immune. “These are lawless times,” Frances tells one of her sons after someone throws a rock through a window of the Seward home. That incident came on the heels of an assault on a black boy she was tutoring and after the family dog had been poisoned.

So, too, religion is a continuous presence. Martha, Frances, Harriet—Quaker, Episcopalian, Methodist—all believed that God was on the side of the abolitionists. Tubman went so far as to say that God wouldn’t let Lincoln win the war until he had freed the slaves. The women’s religious faith bolstered their moral determination and shaped their work.

In the book’s closing pages there is an astonishing photograph of Tubman, probably taken outside her home in Auburn in 1911, two years before her death at around the age of 90. It shows a diminutive figure dressed in suffragette white. After the war, the woman who had led slaves to freedom and shown wartime valor turned her attention to advancing the roles of women, black and white.

“The Agitators” carries no political message, but Ms. Wickenden’s assessment of the era leading up to the Civil War will resonate with readers in our own fractious age: “The nation never had been so politically engaged—or so divided.”

—Ms. Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of the forthcoming “Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman.”

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 10, 2021, print edition as 'Disturbers of the Peace.'

 

 

 Speaking again of John Brown:

Abolitionist’s gravestone returning

By Annakai Geshlider

ageshlider@scng.com

 

After years of preservation efforts by the Altadena community, a gravestone honoring abolitionist and former Altadena resident Owen Brown will soon be reinstalled at his gravesite in the foothills north of town.

“We’re really glad it’s finally happening,” said Michele Zack, a local historian and chair of the Owen Brown Gravesite Restoration Committee, which was created by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Owen Brown was the son of John Brown, the abolitionist who led the pre-Civil War raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. According to local historian Paul Ayers, Owen Brown stayed across the Potomac River during the raid, taking care of horses in preparation for a planned getaway and slave rebellion.

Instead, the raid failed and John Brown was hanged for his anti-slavery attempts, prompting his son to flee to Ohio. He lived as a fugitive for 20 years following the raid and eventually followed two siblings to California. In 1881, he settled into a cabin with his brother, Jason Brown, in

                                    

A plaque of Owen Brown is on display at Altadena Triangle Park in Altadena on Nov. 11, 2017. Brown’s gravestone is being returned to his gravesite in the foothills north of the city. ED CRISOSTOMO STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

 

Altadena Meadows, in the foothills north of town.

According to Ayers, the Brown brothers’ participation in the fight against slavery made them well-received when they arrived in Pasadena, where they paraded up and down Colorado Boulevard singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of their lungs. Those who founded Pasadena in 1874 had fought for the Union to abolish slavery, making the new city a safe place for the Browns to take refuge.

In the years following Owen Brown’s death in 1889, hundreds of White and Black locals came to pay homage at his gravesite, Ayers said. Interest faded as the 20th century wore on, especially as the Ku Klux Klan dominated Pasadena in the 1920s, and it “became a very racist town,” Ayers said.

The road to preserving Brown’s gravesite has been rocky.

Brown is buried on a 6-acre piece of land at the top of Rising Hill Road, near the base of the foothills. The area, known as “Little Roundtop,” sits not far from the cabin where Brown once lived. In the 1980s, preservation group Altadena Heritage unsuccessfully attempted to get historical status for the site. Because the land is private, preservation efforts have required negotiations with various owners over the years. One owner attempted to bar public access to the gravesite with a “No Trespassing” sign, resulting in a a 2006 ruling affirming the public has legal access to the site.

To top things off, the grave marker kept going missing. In 2002, the landowner at the time rolled the marker down the hill, and it disappeared from public view for 10 years, Ayers said. In 2012, locals rejoiced when Altadena resident Ian White — son of artist Charles White — discovered the grave marker while on a walk near his home.

For years, the area near the gravesite was caught in bitter debate. Developer Tim Cantwell planned to build 18 single-family units at the nearby gated community of La Vina, causing locals to protest the proposed development. Meanwhile, people were still fighting to preserve Brown’s grave for public access.

In 2019, an agreement was reached: The La Vina project will be completed with Cantwell agreeing to buy the land containing the gravesite to preserve it for the public. Cantwell also agreed to fund programs educating locals about Brown and Pasadena’s antislavery history.

Zack anticipates the gravestone will be installed soon, perhaps in the next couple months. With Cantwell having promised to fund the installation and a contractor hired, everything is ready to go. The only thing the committee is waiting is funding from the developer, Zack said.

The Owen Brown Gravesite Restoration Committee has been hosting public meetings since March. Zack said the committee is looking forward to the installation of the stone, marking the culmination of a long process.

“It’s a big deal,” Ayers said, especially because California doesn’t have many historical representations of abolitionism. A major goal of the gravesite restoration project will be educating the public about California’s importance in the Civil War, Zack said.

The state was “the key jewel that the Confederacy wanted” in its attempt to expand slavery, and Pasadena was a stronghold of anti-slavery sentiment, she added.

The gravesite restoration committee has four main tasks, Zack said: restore the gravesite, get the site designated as a historical monument, put the site and the surrounding property in a conservancy (giving it an added level of protection) and educate the public on the site’s significance.

In addition to educational programs for local youth and the public, Zack said the committee is hoping to work with filmmaker Pablo Miralles to create a documentary about the Brown family’s presence in California. In 2019, preservationists worked with Miralles to create a short film about the gravesite.

John Brown “believed firmly that slavery was an abomination, an evil of this country,” Ayers said. “And I think that’s a thing people have to embrace now, that racism is the original sin of the United States and that we have to confront it.”

                                    

Owen Brown, who was born Nov. 4, 1824, in Hudson, Ohio, was John Brown’s third son, and his stalwart lieutenant in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry during the Civil War.

Article source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune 071121