North and South. Book (pages 193 – 196)
(page 193, par. 1, line 6) Holland Land Company grant to create its first settlement Hotchkin, J.H. A History of the Purchase and Settlement of Western New York.
(page 193, par. 2) Jonathan Forman (1755 – 1809) was educated at Princeton College, Class of 1775, where he was a fellow-student with James Madison. Forman left college during his senior year to join the Monmouth County Militia. By November 1776 he transferred into the Continental Army and served for the remainder of the Revolutionary War. He participated in Sullivan’s campaign against the hostile Six Nations in update New York in 1779, and, promoted to the rank of major in 1781, was part of the Yorktown campaign under General Lafayette in Virginia. At war’s end he had achieved the rank of lieutenant-colonel, retaining his position in the Third New Jersey Regiment even after demobilization of most of the army in 1783. He headed a regiment against the Whisky insurgents of West Pennsylvania in 1794. See: Forman and Draper, Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi 1888, p. 29-30; Fairchild, Helen L. Three Revolutionary Soldiers: David Forman, Jonathan Forman, and Jonathan Marsh Forman; and Harrison, Richard A. Princetonians, 1769-1775: A biographical Dictionary, pp. 377-378.
(page 193, par. 3, line 6) Jonathan’s old tent which had seen service through the Revolution Forman Travels, NYHS manuscript c. 1850.
(page 195, par. 3, line 6) locked away in the custom cherrywood chest he had borne across his frontier travels Forman Travels, NYPL manuscript c. 1850, p. 74
(page 195, par. 3, lines 9-10) “So vanished my eight hundred acres of valuable land in the promising Mississippi country” Forman and Draper, Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi 1888, p. 59.
(page 195, par. 3, line 7) victimized by some supernatural force or spirit See: Irving, Washington The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In the fictional Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian soldier decapitated in a nameless Revolutionary War battle, seeks the return of his head. The tale scared the wits out of readers two centuries ago as it does today, It has become a Halloween staple. Samuel S. Forman never dealt with his personal saga’s ghosts – Ginnie, the Two Disaffected Fellows, the Ladies of Lancaster, his own role in enabling creation of the Cotton Kingdom – other than transforming them all into the story of his Spanish land grant gone mysteriously missing.
I speculate that the ghosts of Ginnie or the Two Disaffected Fellows, returning to seek their freedom and compensation for lifetimes of forced and unpaid labor, would have constituted apparitions more disturbing to Samuel S. Forman than a dead Hessian mercenary with a pumpkin for a head.
(page 197, par. 2, line 9-10) marching past his window, their Springfield rifle barrels glinting like organ pipes in the sunlight. The conjectural scene and paraphrasing I present recalls Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms…” in The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, pp. 23-26. Inspired by his visit to the U.S. Army’s Springfield, Massachusetts Armory, Longfellow was simultaneously impressed with the industrial scale of production of rifled muskets, racks upon racks of them in storage, suggesting a vast pipe organ; and dread at the mayhem the weapons would eventually unleash.
Samuel. S.’s Syracuse mansion was built on a then-prestigious mid-town street of the kind before which departing Union soldiers probably marched, in easy viewing by the elderly and ailing Samuel S. Forman. Longfellow’s poem is most often associated with the human toll of the Civil War. I directly quote the same work later in this paragraph: “loud lament and dismal misery will mingle with their awful symphonies.”
(page 197, par. 5, lines 1-2) “retains all his mental faculties” “Forman Brief Biography,” Atlas and Argus. Published on March 14, 1861, just a month prior to Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter and the commencement of four years of fratricidal war, the words assume a poignancy both in its own and modern contexts: “[He] prays that he may yet, before being gathered to his fathers, see his distracted country restored to primitive glory, and that the proud flag which he saw waving from over the ramparts of Fort George [in New York City at the final British evacuation of the city], on the 25th [Thanksgiving] day of Nov. 1783, again spread its ample folds over a firmly re-united American Confederacy.” An almost identical sentiment is quoted in Forman and Draper, Ibid, p. 18.
(page 198, par. 1, lines 1-2) “closing years were embittered over the distracted condition of his country, embroiled in fratricidal war…” Forman and Draper, Op. cit., p. 18
(page 198, par. 2, line 5) “a more perfect Union” is from the preamble to the United States Constitution as signed on September 17, 1787. (lines 5-6) “One flag, one land, one heart, one hand…” Holmes, The Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Oft quoted last lines from “Voyage of the Good Ship Union” pp. 398-401.