Missives from Samsara

Those that know me know I have a personal interest in the letter J. I recently learned that it was the most recent letter added to the alphabet. It apparently appears after the letter ‘i’ because it started as a flourish to that letter at the end of a Roman numeral, what is known as a swash.

Take “XIIJ”, or 13. In this case the ‘J’ is used in the place of the last ‘I’ to signify that a series of ones has ended. Apparently, ‘i’ and ‘j’ were used interchangeably to write both the consonant and vowel sounds, The first time the two were distinguished as separate letters was in a 1524 text called (in English) ‘Trission’s epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language’, written by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550).

Jesus plays a role, too. Distinguishing the soft ‘j’ sound helped Trissino choose how the Greek word Iesus, a translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, should be spelled, and pronounced, the way it is today.

Change takes time though, and as late as the mid-1700s, English lexicographer Samuel Johnson still argued that ‘j’ was merely a variant of ‘i.’

Not surprisingly, the letter ‘j’ is one of the least common letters in English.

I finished 5 books this month and am really enjoying the new ones I am reading.

What’s new these days is that I am also reading a few Kindle ebooks on my iPad. My Kindle purchase rule is to buy nothing that costs more than $3.99. That said, I have still managed to acquire 28 at this point. Happy days!

While reading Jill Lepore’s new book about the Constitution, We the People, I came across the quote below about when New Hampshire officially declared that slavery was abolished in the state. It surprised me that a New England state waited so long to do that. I also remembered their strident state motto, “Live Free or Die.”

I decided to put down the book and poke around to find out what happened, as New Hampshire’s motto seemed a bit hypocritical in light of the relatively late 1857 abolition of slavery. For starters, I learned that the phrase came from a letter written by a New Hampshire veteran of the Revolutionary War. His name was John Stark and the full line from the private letter was “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.”

The state didn’t actually adopt the motto until 1945, as World War II was ending. The primary meaning behind the phrase as a state motto had to do with political sovereignty and the abhorance of living under governmental tyranny. But what about individual freedom? Why would a state that so boldly proclaims the importance of liberty wait until such a late date to ban slavery?

Apparently, the New Hampshire state constitution, ratified in 1783, stated ‘all men are born equally free and independent,’ which many assumed abolished slavery. However, no law officially banning the practice was every passed. Slavery faded out over time and by 1840, the census indicated that there was only 1 enslaved person in the state.

The reason they eventually made it official in 1857 had to do with the politics of the time. Their 1857 law explicitly stated ‘No person, because of descent, should be disqualified from becoming a citizen of the state.’ It was a direct response to the terrible Dred Scott decision of that same year in which Roger Taney wrote that black Americans were not and could not become American citizens. That makes more sense.

So, my conclusion after digging a bit deeper is that my initial thoughts of hypocrisy by New Hampshire were not totally warranted. Slavery had disappeared in New Hampshire, but the politics of the tumultuous 1850s encouraged New Hampshire to make it official. Sorry I doubted you New Hampshire!

I came across a reference to the Battle of Towton while reading Neil Howe’s fascinating The Fourth Turning is Here — a book I’ve been pretty absorbed in the past few days, as I mentioned in a recent post. Howe’s central argument is that history moves in cycles, and that every eighty years or so, societies go through a violent, transformative upheaval. Towton shows up in the narrative as a decisive event in the War of the Roses.

Towton was fought on Palm Sunday, March 29, 1461, in the middle of the war, which was England’s brutal dynastic civil war between the Houses of York and Lancaster. The Yorkist forces of the newly proclaimed Edward IV clashed with a massive Lancastrian army in what became, by most accounts, the deadliest battle ever fought on British soil. Estimates of the dead range widely, but tens of thousands of men were likely killed in a single day of savage fighting. When the Lancastrian line finally broke, the retreat turned into a massacre, with fleeing soldiers cut down across the fields and meadows of Yorkshire.

The mentioning of Yorkshire jumped out at me because I spent my junior year abroad at Sheffield University, which sits maybe 35 miles south of where all this took place. I remember the landscape outside of Sheffield fairly well. What comes to mind are the rolling green hills shrouded in fog, the old stone walls, and the way the countryside feels ancient. To think that one of the most violent days in human history happened just up the road is a bit mind-bending.

Howe’s book has me looking at history differently. As I touched on in an earlier post; less as a straight line and more as a recurring pattern of crisis, renewal, and crisis again. The Battle of Towton is a reminder that those cycles can be extraordinarily brutal. England in 1461 wasn’t so different from other moments in history when political order collapses and people settle their differences in the worst possible way.

Worth remembering, in whatever turning we happen to be in right now.