Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Lorenzo Sabine was a Yankee, all the same

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After running across his name repeatedly while researching the history of our old house, I decided to look him up. Lorenzo Sabine turns out to have been a remarkable character. Best known today for his two-volume, provocative 1864 book Loyalists of the American Revolution, his adulthood included an influential span in Eastport.

Here are some highlights.

 

  1. He was born in 1803 in what’s now Lisbon in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with a Methodist minister for a father and roots going back to French Huguenots who arrived in Rehoboth, Massachusetts from Wales in 1643. Lorenzo moved with his parents to Boston in 1811, and then to Hampden, Maine, in 1814, where he completed his preparatory studies. His father had been taken prisoner by the British in the War of 1812 while working in a military hospital.
  2. At age 18, following his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, he came to Eastport not long after Maine gained statehood from being a district of Massachusetts. At first, he was employed as a clerk, then tried his hand at his own business but went bankrupt, followed by working as bookkeeper of Passamaquoddy Bank and then engaging in a series of enterprises, including stints as a mercantile partner with William and Jacob Shackford, sons of the Revolutionary War veteran who built our house and much more. He shows up as a witness on many property deeds and other court records.
  3. He was editor of the weekly Eastport Sentinel newspaper to 1834, during Benjamin Folsom’s time as publisher. He was also founder of the Eastport Lyceum, and incorporator of the Eastport Academy and Eastport Atheneum.
  4. He served as a member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1832-33, and was deputy collector of customs at Eastport, 1841-43.
  5. From early childhood, he was what he called “revolution-mad,” something that grew in other directions after his move to Eastport, abutting Canada and having many residents descending from Loyalist lines. This led to his insight that “there was more than one side to the Revolution.” Prior to this “every ‘Tory” was as bad as bad could be, every “son of Liberty” as good as possible.” During the 1840s, the results of his research appeared in the North American Review, America’s first literary magazine.
  6. Quite simply, his work was not favorably received by “patriotic” Americans though it did receive support from several important historians. Lorenzo then revised and expanded his material into an 1847 book The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in The War of the Revolution; Alphabetically Arranged; with a Preliminary Historical Essay, erupting a firestorm of controversy. The work received a more thorough two-volume edition for its republication in 1864. You can read it online to see why it challenged many of the conventional treatments of the Revolutionary War and the tensions leading to the War of 1812 from the British side. He did, do note, receive honorary degrees from Bowdoin College and from Harvard.
  7. He moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1848 as a trial judge and was elected to Congress in 1852 to fill a seat vacated by death but did not run for reelection.
  8. Appointed secretary of the Boston Board of Trade, he relocated to Roxbury and also served as a confidential agent of the U.S. Treasury Department.
  9. He was married three times, to Matilda F. Green in 1825, Abby R.D. Deering in 1829, and 1837 to Elizabeth M. Deering, who survived him. Only one of his five children survived him.
  10. He died in Roxbury in 1877 but is buried in Eastport’s Hillside Cemetery.

Back to the press and a personal debt

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The first printing press in Britain was established at Westminster in 1476 (during the reign of Edward IV, 1461-1483) by William Caxton. Modern movable type had been invented not that much earlier around 1450 by Johannes Guttenberg.

Caxton is considered a central figure in establishing Chancery English to the standard dialect used throughout England. In his haste to make translations for publication, he imported many French words into English.

Well, England did rule much of France during the century.

As a reader and writer, I’m indebted to both men and a host of those who followed.

Lately, I’ve been returning to the Baskerville typeface, which we used for our high school newspaper, though now its in honor of an earlier resident of our house. The face dates from the 1750s.

One classic I’ve long been fond of is Caslon, from the 1720s, by another English designer. It’s similar to Goudy, a 1915 American design based on historic Italian faces and one I’ve been using on my Thistle Finch publications. It really is elegant.

Sometimes the very appearance of a word in type or a well-designed page will make my heart sing.

Just so you know what happens when ink gets in your blood.

Looking for whales

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Everybody on board the Eastport Windjammers’ Ocean Obsession was engaged in looking for the next whale to appear, as were a few other vessels beside Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada.

We did observe humpbacks, finbacks, and minkes on the outing, but the rare right whales are less frequently seen.

For more whale-watching experiences, take a look at my Lolling with Whales photo album at Thistle Finch editions.

 

Why you don’t get bids with a binding contract

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

That’s also a warning if you do find a contractor who will present one on a project like ours.

Experienced tradesmen should know there are too many surprises when you’re dealing with an old house. The only way for them to come out ahead with that factor is by cutting corners or – as often happens – ghosting the client altogether.

Doing the job right, on the other hand, takes the amount of time it demands.

There’s an artistry in working with an existing old house.

~*~

That said, you better be prepared to deal with the expenses that do come up.

On our contractor’s end, when I look at all of the tools and equipment that’s been parked in our house, I’m surprised he’s making any money on this project. Much of his gear is very pricy, and we don’t even see the hidden costs, like insurance.

As for fireworks

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Let’s start with a pitch I once considered using.

“Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and I’m a retired hippie. One of millions and, unlike many, I’m not embarrassed to admit it was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its potential. What is often overlooked is that the central element was the hippie chick. My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrates her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to a rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town. May I introduce you to the full story?”

Well, that attempt has now been woven into what stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Still, as I also proclaimed:

“In many of my novels, the hippie movement opened their minds. Or at least their horizons. Or even a few hearts. What’s most opened yours?”

That led to these points:

  • Crucial to the outcome were personal transformations that few today will speak of.
  • We’re still caught between two worlds (or) unfinished business. I wanted to present my work as letters from a retired hippie or letters to youth and a call to action.
  • I wanted to tell them I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we messed up.
  • And yet, it wasn’t all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.
  • Looking around, there are the old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.
  • It was a youth movement. What you need to know about its legacy is this.
  • Economics:. globalization and digitalization versus small-is-beautiful. As for the tax base? And the kleptomaniac One Percent? How about selling yourself into slavery?
  • Relationships: the restructuring of marriage and family (dare we consider ashrams and similar shared householding).
  • Environment and the earth: Global warming is a reality, despite years and millions of dollars expended in its denial.
  • Justice and equality. Dare I say more?
  • Alternative lifestyle. Think of clothing, the arts (Edge City), food, even basic skills such as use of a broom or hammer.
  • Drugs, alcohol, etc. Legalization is one thing, appropriate usage another. Jail is not the deciding point. Oppressive life situations, however, are.
  • Yup, the whole system of shaping our children.
  • I’m not going there today, other than to say deep readjustments are in order. I hope they get to the bottom rather than enrich the most elite of society.
  • Discipline and self-discipline. For me, that leads to the next.
  • Spirituality and religion. Personal experience of something divine and then holy community.

Now, back to those contributor’s notes possibilities:

  • As an unabashed political liberal, Jnana despairs for public sanity.
  • He knows nothing good can come from a politics of hate.
  • Jnana is a Lincoln Republican who votes Democrat by default.
  • I was UPROOTED, repeatedly. In location, relationship, my career, even faith.
  • The undertow or rip current, pulling me away. I expected to live in large cities, my life filled with opera and symphony performances. Instead, it’s been mostly small cities in rural conditions.
  • My life journey has had little resemblance to what I anticipated from college on. Repeatedly, it seemed I was uprooted – in location, career, relationship, and even spirit – just as I began to address a situation fully. Outwardly, the result has been fragmentary, unified only in the mind and heart that embrace its many facets.
  • In recent years, much of my experience of wandering and sojourn has constellated in an investigation of the metaphors of Light and Seed as they were expressed in the early Quaker movement. I now perceive a semblance between the Dharma bums of Asian religious practices and the vagabond ministry of itinerant Quaker ministers, and find comfort in their legacy, with its parallels to my own movements.
  • After throwing myself into business crusades and tumultuous relationships, I consider myself a survivor. I love classical music and opera, mountaintops and the North Atlantic, Quaker Meeting and New England contradancing.
  • For me, poetry is a state of mind. Its essential element is silence, linking it to sacred (An impossibility, of course, considering the nature of words. And yet!)

Or, to reconnect with Ezra Pound, literature is slow news, something allowing some breathing space and reflection, rather than the minute-by-minute confusion before us.

Which takes me back to Scripture, diving into antiquity for parallels to today.

Now, let’s sit back tonight for some gloriously fleeting pyrotechnics. Something that might inspire and awe almost everyone.

How French-speaking Canadiens provoked the American Revolution

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In my research for the book that became Quaking Dover, I became much more aware of the ongoing tensions in New England with the French to the north.

I thought that ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, but I was wrong.

The British tried to assimilate the Canadiens into the wider society but by 1774 realized the futility of the effort.

To alleviate the situation, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, covering the former New France. The measure permitted the continuation of the French language, legal system, and Roman Catholic religion in what was now enlarged and renamed Quebec. Crucially, reference to the Protestant faith was removed from the oath of allegiance required for holding public office, and the Catholic church could again impose tithes.

Many of the English in the New World were outraged, seeing this as a granting freedoms and lands to their former enemy and including the possibility of stripping them of their self-elected assemblies and voiding their claims to land in the Ohio Country, granted by royal charter to New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia but now unilaterally ceded to Quebec.

The act had been passed in the same session of Parliament that imposed punishments on the Boston Tea Party, among other affronts the Patriots derided as the Intolerable Acts.

Patriots also saw the measure as establishing Roman Catholicism in the 13 colonies and promoting the growth of “Papism.” in general.

I was unaware of its inflammatory influence as a direct cause of the American Revolution until I heard of the measure as an aside on a CBC Radio commentary.

Just nine months after the act’s enactment came Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the “shot heard ‘round the world” in the rebellion at Boston.

Barely two years after its passage, the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in Philadelphia.

C’est vrai.