Antiquarians

Fictional Draft

(A Fictional Draft).

Yes.

There are those family legends.

The latest was that Alabama novelist Harper Lee who had died three, maybe five years past, was a distant Tailin relative by marriage through Light Horse Harry Lee, the namesake of Leesburg, Virginia, and interred with his wife Rebecca on the grounds of their estate, Mt. Balfore.

Of course, it was not necessary to believe them. Even so, some made for good telling.

It occurs that the primary sources of oral legend were now gone, and it was better to write them down and commit them to paper if the legends are to be told. It is for others to verify what is beyond reach, and edit where his facts are in dispute.

There is the one about Lincoln’s visit to the N Street House, a temporary D. C. hospital after First Manassas. Harriet’s grandfather was a medical doctor whose wife’s family also owned the Octagon. The legend concerned a hanging chandelier in the foyer at N Street, having to be raised or removed, so tall was Lincoln, and taller with his hat.

Lincoln, it must be said, did visit the dozens of makeshift surgical theaters around D. C. after Manassas, including the halls of the Smithsonian, and that’s fact.

The hat at N Street may have been apocryphal, a convenient fiction perpetrated by some avid real estate agent hyping sale of luxury Georgetown property, but the blood-soaked floors, the stain of which survived the centuries, were not.

And the one about Grandma Harriett’s babysitters in nineties in Georgetown, being Alexander Graham Bell’s daughters. And President Taft stepping on Harriett’s toes at some turn of the century soiree’ in Georgetown were she came out. And Harriett’s elder sister, his great Aunt Philby, sitting for a posed souvenir photograph in the Wright Brothers’ aircraft at Ft. Myer across the Potomac from Georgetown in September, 1908, with some young officers.

Ft. Myers is, after all, just across Key Bridge, and Philbys’ uncle had socialized with certain rising cavalry officers in the 1890s posted at The Fort. They subscribed to the Georgetown Dance Society he, and his single gentlemen friends in Georgetown, formed to bring out eligible young ladies of that neighborhood in the late 1880s.

And the theft by Union troops during the Civil War of the Cornwallis Table on which the British surrender at Yorktown was signed, from Rooney Lee’s plantation, White House. Or the one which claims that Herman Melville’s brother-in-law was related by marriage to his grandfather’s mother. Or that Harriett’s little brother Augi served and was wounded at Argonne Forest with George S. Patton in early October 1918. That was before Patton became Patton. And Augi’s battle-scarred French Renault tank being on display at Ft. Meade, Maryland. And Col. Thomas Muntwell, CSA, the commander at the Battle of Aldie near Middleburg, married not one, but both Tailin sisters.

Sophy Burnstone (b. 1936), a successful Washington, D. C. memoirist, and author of books about angels, shared a common Virginian antecedent named Sophie Burlingame Snyder, nee’ Tailin, born a century earlier. The modern Sophy was briefly at a Mt. Balfore family reunion in 2001, and immediately charmed those she met.

There was his opinion that people who are most attracted to each other, are probably relatives. Distant relations, perhaps, because some have observed it is easier to love kin, some kin at least, at a distance, and most especially those with the decency to leave long intervals between visits.

It just turns out that way.

The family had a custom, viewed historically, of marrying cousins. To be fair, this can be viewed two different ways. Through pride of family, in which case few outsiders measure up. Or, the more likely view currently in favor, that anyone unfamiliar with family quirks could not possibly tolerate such unions.

Years ago when Aaron visited from New Delhi during his cousin’s postgrad work at Berkeley, they got to talk of family. He was en route back to family and friends in Arlington while his Foreign Service parents were still posted to Delhi.

It is not necessarily a good, or painless, thing to take up questions asked forty years earlier in the thrall of youth.

Aaron remembered, even then, that nicely outfitted young lady that his cousin had been seeing in Upstate New York. It may have been that time in Berkeley that the cousin first admitted to Aaron he had been in love with Aaron’s older sister, his cousin Susan, since he was four.

She was then six, but back to that Berkeley conversation between cousins on Hillegas Avenue three or four blocks from the University of California campus in Spring that year.

“Ah yes, the Tailins,” the cousin recalls intoning. He looked at Aaron, two years his junior. His eyes wanted to ask the same question the cousin had always asked, himself.

“Where did all that money go?” was blurted out by, neither one remembered whom, and the two of the young men guffawed over it. Come to think of it, there must have been beer on the table as they talked. Aaron’s cousin was taking postgraduate courses at Berkeley; Aaron was traveling around the world.

It was his grandmother’s family. Born in 1890, she had grown up in Georgetown and Virginia. She remained socially conscious of her supposedly fancy grandmother, Sophie Burlingame Snyder, nee’ Tailin, all her long life.

Thereafter for thirty years, the cousin had not a single word of conversation with Grandma Harriett about it, for she lived to 107. Nor would that have been proper, you see. Just one of those things a cousin ought not address.

Nor did his father have a clue.

They are, all of them, gone now, although the cousin gets an annual unsigned card from Aaron and Laura at Christmas, or more accurately, at Hannukka.

Aaron was at State Department for years, then foreign trade director at the same D.C. law firm where Bob Mondale worked. Runs some Third World residential housing charity last his cousin heard, in Silver Spring. They live in a D. C. suburb some call with affection, Tel Aviv-on-the-Potomac, west of Chevy Chase. Laura, like all her Atlanta family, holds a senior position in banking, in her case as an attorney at the World Bank.

The cousin, too, landed in federal service fresh from a series of academic research jobs in New Haven, Birmingham, Heidelberg and Cold Spring Harbor near John Lennon’s residence east of Oyster Bay, Long Island.

The cousin’s progress after Long Island as a Commerce scientist had been steady, and eventually he landed a permanent, tenured slot at GS15, until the management began to take a notably, shall we say, non Euro-American, appearance and point of view, on future staffing and promotion at the Institute.

With the farm the cousin bought in Loudoun County a dozen or two years back, he took an interest in steadily planting some few of his three dozen acres, to grapes with the notion of building up self-sufficiency. In the process, he learned to make wine professionally, won a few medals during his internships, and began an independent saw milling business when he was not in vineyard or winery.

With this, now his sixth year of cultivating wine grapes, came the few months of the year that separated the harvest from Spring planting each season. There was enough of the instinct of the former biology professor remaining, that the cousin read deeply and widely during his agricultural intercession, say mid-November to mid-March.

The cousin’s mother once consulted a pediatrician when he was young, to ask whether it was normal for a young kid to read as much as he apparently did.

The query Aaron asked so many years ago, emerged at harvest last October.

When his cousin had to visit D. C. for a wine meeting at the French Embassy, his beloved cousin Susan suggested a small dinner party for her husband, a retired political science professor, his daughter now a DC engineer, and himself, when he offered her a bottle of the wine he had made professionally in Charlottesville.

It was always a risk, given how different Susan and the cousin were politically. In fact, opposite ends of the political spectrum might be accurate.

Of course, being a farmer now, he had to field many questions about his little farm west of Leesburg. Lynda, the cousin’s daughter, suffered the same Beltway bias that Susan believed. Nevertheless, they struggled to be polite.

The Tailins (John Tailin III) had built the Octagon House a block or two from the White House in 1800, and had in fact been James and Dolly Madison’s landlords while the Official Residence had been rebuilt after the Brits burned it in 1814. Rent due from the U. S. Treasury, $500, according to archives. John Tailin III’s granddaughter had been Harriett’s grandmother, with more prefix greats, all totaled, than the cousin could reliably enumerate despite his training as a genetcist.

When working text pedigrees without graphic diagrams, he swore to himself there must be an easier way to designate such relationships without the encumbrance of geometrical increases of the prefix greats. When speaking of family, he found it useful to just assign each a nickname with slightly off color implications, a trick he learned from the President.

Before dinner while they sampled the Hormund nebbiolo wine he had brought, the conversation turned to government service, race, Tailins and politics. Suzie suggested a book to him that clearly embarrassed and mortified her, Richard S. Lund’s The Truth about Tara, Two Plantations (2014). It summarized a forty-year academic study that compared slave conditions at a sugar plantation in Jamaica called “Bermuda Hundred” and John Tailin III’s Richmond County, Virginia plantation, “Mt. Balfore”.

Her cousin politely demurred at her suggestion that he borrow it: he was not good at returning borrowed books. They tended to blend in with the other thousands cluttering his tiny Leesburg farm household.

With Super Tuesday came the first signs of Spring in rural Loudoun that previous year, meaning the planting season. He had a moment a few months after Suzie’s dinner party to find the Lund book in Lovatsville Public Library, and knew he’d better take the opportunity before the ground thawed, and the mill came back into service.

Suzie’s mother, who was both the cousin’s actual Aunt and served his long deceased parents as his Godmother as well, had passed but Suzie had forwarded to him, personal items from her estate as mementos for he had been close with her mother but sadly, not with his beloved cousin Suzie.

Her mother, like him, had married outside the Church but after her husband’s death which coincided with his move from Alabama to Chevy Chase, they again became constant companions. She had moved to a single apartment, and the cousin’s family remained in Alabama. He lived a block away on Wisconsin Avenue in Chevy Chase.

He thought often of his Aunt these few years later: she and he had exchanged long letters, hers from India, from the time he was ten years old, and then continuously for years. They were blessed with common interests and attitudes, and could talk hours over tea in her rooms at the exclusive Irene Apartments in Chevy Chase, when he had time away from his research.

His Aunt’s four brothers, his own father among them, had all headed for college, but her mother Harriett and her father John did not believe in the 1930s and 1940s, in education for women, for their daughter, his Aunt. To the cousin’s view, it was an unconscionable tragedy that such a bright and literate woman would have to face her future with little more than high school, and she settled into the life as devoted wife of a minor diplomatic corps official in Foreign Service.

That winter, the cousin finally had time to delve into an unopened box of his late Aunt’s favorite books about Tailins, Georgetown, family history and genealogy, topics that held the interest of his Aunt and him far more than others in the family.

Coincidentally, he suddenly realized from Lund’s book, that the Tailins had been major landholders not only in Essex and Richmond counties in Virginia, but had four or five large plantations further South in the Canebrake.

In Alabama.

He had prospered at Commerce before the rise, ascension and coronation of a certain African American technocrat who pushed political correctness to an art form in persecuting any whom he chose with impunity in the process of preferring minorities for advancement. Turns out, the cousin thought he had a friend in this technocrat on the move as the technocrat had also been from Birmingham.

But he was mistaken, and this he learned too late.

The cousin did many favors to no avail, and the technocrat rose higher and higher, and was eventually confirmed by the Congress as Institute Director during the Obama administration. In the meanwhile, the cousin found himself with a pressured settlement, without office or laboratory, planting grapes and making wine in Virginia.

What that meant, was the cousin would study the Lund book with new intensity, the names of the several hundred Mt. Airy Virginia slaves taken to Alabama between 1833 and 1865, when all were emancipated.

Was it possible the racial bias he had been victim of five years in the federal government, had some ancient antecedent in Alabama? The notion of postponed, generations-later retribution, in a sense reparations extracted under other pretenses, what with modern genealogy data online and the funding for slave pedigree research.

So, where had all that Tailin money gone?

The greater share of their wealth walked away shortly after the fall of Selma in April 1865, those that had not escaped from January 1, 1863 and Lincoln’s Proclamation. The Tailin holdings in Canebrake Alabama were a dozen miles from Selma, farms with names like Oakland, Adventure, Larkin and Woodlawn, all plantations near Uniontown and Demopolis, Alabama.

Over the period from the 1890s to 1910, the Tailin holdings were slowly bought out and absorbed into adjacent parcels, and its story had been lost perhaps intentionally, nor was it held to be a proper or legitimate undertaking to trace roots that reached back to slavery, not as captives but as owners.

Then, there were reparations and the cost the Tailins were required to pay to reinstate their citizenship in the United States of America after 1865: a distant cousin and history expert reported that assessment to be in excess of ten thousand dollars in the late 1860s to gain a personal pardon from President Andrew Johnson for any secessionist planter worth in excess of twenty thousand.

To be fair however, John Tailin’s son William Henry Tailin had been in the political minority of white Canebrake cotton planters who voted against secession in an 1861 meeting of leading citizens among the planters held in Demopolis, Alabama.

With the cessation of hostilities, the planters lost at least three quarters of their fortunes, apart from fines and assessments to restore their citizenship. Their land holdings enjoyed a brief resurrection until the boll weevill blight that infested the state from Mississippi in 1910 moved to the Canbrake, devastating cotton permanently.

The family was left with a fraction of their land and wonderful antebellum houses like Mt. Balfore, the Octagon House and 3051 N Street, NW, Georgetown, but little working capital, and most were pressed to sell the remaining real estate under market value a generation later, shortly after the crash of 1929.

Mt. Balfore alone remained in family, and the Octagon House where President Madison, and while a tenant, signed the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812, was eventually purchased as national headquarters of the American Institute of Architects in 1905.

There was a wonderful portrait photograph of Harriett, by then in her mid-twenties, descending the steps of the historic Octagon as if she owned it, when in reality, it had been sold a dozen years earlier.

More recently toward the end of the last, the twentieth century, the cousin had fully intended to live in the old family neighborhood of Georgetown when he himself moved up from Alabama while his family was finishing their education in Birmingham.

Georgetown and N Street proved too far from his office and labs in Gaithersburg, then his Aunt’s husband died and he settled on a place in Chevy Chase near the Gaithersburg Metro a block from Suzie’s mother, his favorite Aunt Mary Louise.

Each time he saw her name, it reminded him of its proper Southern pronunciation, according to his Grandma Harriett: Mar-Lweeze.

Over New Year’s a few years back, he had discovered the Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, held some thirteen thousand letters written by the Alabama Tailins (1830-1871), some of which were addressed to his grandmother’s father, the Episcopal Rector who died in 1922 at the National Cathedral, or the Rector’s mother, Sophy Burlingame Tailin.

The same National Cathedral had claimed to research genealogists like the one the cousin had hired, to have no knowledge of its historic staff ever since the proponents of social justice had taken over administration of the Cathedral and Archives.

The Rector who died of a heart attack in the Cathedral library in 1922, was of course, the son of Sophy Burlingame Snyder, nee’ Tailin.

The Rector, had sat in the lap of Robert E. Lee himself, as a young boy, whom he met through Georgetown family. General Lee had lived nearby to Georgetown, just across Key Bridge.

The Rector, trained as a lawyer who moved to the ministry, was devout in his Episcopal beliefs. His start was not among the exclusive social strata of Georgetown society, but to an urban Episcopal ministry at St. Mary’s for an almost exclusively African American congregation.

The cousin often wondered to what degree that ministry, was motivated by a sense of the guilt of his mother’s family and the slave labor that had made them great wealth, and which they had wholly lost.

And what of the cousins modern nemesis who, as a senior African American bureaucrat, had prospered and risen rapidly under the regime of political correctness of the Obama Administration? The technocrat was rumored to have suffered discrimination as a graduate student and federal employee, and his rise had begun with the affirmative action settlement the resulting promotions.

Would records of the technocrat’s family name near Birmingham, be among the files in Richmond of the black slave families carted to Marengo, Hale and Perry Counties in Alabama, from Richmond County, Virginia, between 1833 and 1865 by the Tailins?

Later, it came out that the technocrat resigned his Institute Directorship the day before Trump’s Inauguration.

It seemed the cousin was bound to learn more about family connections, that his cousin Suzie would rather disavow. As a politically connected, liberal Democrat married to a political operative, she would be mortified. Her home on Sixth just behind the Capitol in D. C., was an affluent enclave of federal retirees.

The cousin’s schoolmate friends from Upstate New York were puzzled at his unexpected Virginia and Alabama identity in his later years. Apparently, he came by it honestly, his political leaning and, it later transpired, his religious affiliation.

* * *

So, John Tailin III, seemed to have been a real estate billionaire and entrepreueur, a man of imperious temperament, distant and demanding.

Curious thing about real estate and how it leads to politics, even now. It was he who built both the Octagon House in D. C., and Mt. Balfore, the latter of which remains a remarkable architectural icon of the colonial and early federalist period, that remains in the family.

For many reasons, William Henry Tailin (b. 1799) and his little brother Henry Augustine Tailin (b. 1808), are far more sympathetic, and better documented in the historical record. Billy sent Henry, the youngest and least substantial of brothers, to Marengo County, Alabama in 1833 to scout, clear and establish a farm in Alabama on land previously owned by the French.

He had been preceded there by, believe it or not, a crowd of Napoleon Bonaparte’s generals who fled France’s turn of events after Napoleon was defeated. Although amnesty was professed, when their colleague Marshall Ney, was executed, senior officials all fled the new Bourbonist regime.

They had petitioned the United States Congress, and had been granted land where the city of Demopolis, Alabama was to rise.

Their proposal was the planting of both wine grapes and olive trees in the rich Alabama soil, although none had direct agricultural experience or had been to America.

They had recruited slave labor at New Orleans, a French colony early on, and worked diligently to clear a large tract of land in what was later termed the Black Belt Canebrake after the rich hues of its soil for planting tobacco. Unfortunately for the generals, the surveyors had erred and the French tract was miles to the west. Not only were olives and grapes unproven, but tobacco proved to be far more difficult to cultivate than in Virginia where the Tailin tobacco plantings had leached the soil to the point of barrenness, and grapes were no better than had been demonstrated at Jamestown in 1610.

Neither did olives nor wine grape vines survive their Canebrake plantings, and there was little motivation for the French expatriates to remain in such unproductive circumstances.

Cleared land thus, became available when the French colony was forced to vacate, and the ensuing land rush brought Virginians in their early twenties like young Henry Tailin, who, with the substantial backing of family wealth still intact in the 1830s, and would begin to carve out large plantations in adjacent areas of Hale, Marengo and Perry County.

Nor was it just from the Commonwealth of Virginia, that seekers of fortune arrived in the 1830s.

* * *

And just what sort of people did Col. Thomas T. Muntwell, C.S.A., a Virginian, find when he arrived with his wife Emma Tailin, in Perry County, Alabama after the Southern defeat in the Civil War? The cousin had tracked Munford from his battles at Aldie, Gettysburg and Tom’s Brook, and through two marriages in family.

Thomas and Emma had been granted a 2000 acre plantation in Perry County, the Canebrake, called Oakland, one of five or six large plantations owned by the Tailin brothers, by 1860, and tracts that would be worth far less by 1865.

Munwell had survived the war: the better part of that, was that the Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, had tens of thousands of Tailin papers, business transactions and supporting records that touched up all of the notables in the cousin’s untold kinship and past in Virginia and Alabama.

It remained just a matter of a research trip, and time to absorb and evaluate who these people were, and whether the legends bore any trace of truth.

The fact that there were already several historical texts about the family published by Harvard and Virginia scholars, its times and demise, and the plantation house Mt. Balfore, now reduced to less than a half dozen acres, and fronted by a barbed wire and chain link cyclone fence of a county prison built across the road.

* * *

John Witherspoon Dubose’s summary from a century back, defined the Canebrake as the geographic region bounded by meridians of longitude for Demopolis to the east, and Uniontown on the west, and parallels of longitude that pass through Dayton on the south and Greensboro on the north, about six hundred fifty square miles, almost identical to the land area of Loudoun County, Virginia.

Although unsuited to agriculture of many crops, new, blight-proof strains of cotton proved the basis of the fortunes and society that developed there between 1830 and 1865, a mere thirty-five years that seems to have impressed itself on the popular imagination far out of its proportion, commercial impact or longevity.

Settlement expanded with the brothers William and Henry Tailin, and like-minded eastern seaboard entrepreneurs. Many of the Canebrake’s newest landlords were practitioners of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America. Those who came before, were not, and viewed the arrivals with suspicion, associating them with stereotype almost Roman Catholic forms, ceremonies, wealth and culture, envied by other protestant faiths.

The Episcopal arrivals were viewed, according to a contemporary sectarian observer, as lacking in fervent piety, were morally lax, too superior in their attitudes toward other religions, and entirely too close to the much-despised Roman Catholic Church.

It recurred to him later that month: not only was the Canebrake geographically similar to Loudoun County, but the agricultural rush to plant cotton in the 1830s, was not entirely without parallel to the vast expansion of the wine grape plantings and industry in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 2010.

But how the cousin returned to the development of the parallels, and learned from earlier history, was another chapter…

* * *