It’s a beautiful spring morning here in southeastern Virginia, and all seems right with the world. Hockey’s second season is under way, professional cycling is shifting into high gear, and baseball has started. Why not make your life even better and read John Wilson on books and baseball? It’s the first of hopefully many bi-weekly columns over at First Things.
Speaking of baseball, Wired has talked with the experts and determined that it is almost impossible for fastballs to get any faster.
Nick Ripatrazone reviews James Carroll’s novel The Cloister at National Review. “The Cloister is a novel by an author who has made the Church his subject. As a seminarian at St. Paul’s College, Carroll returned to study with Tate — this time at Sewanee. Even then, Carroll wavered between his vocations and saw the reunion with his mentor as having a particular purpose…”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remains have been rediscovered in a wine cellar. The exact location of the poet’s coffin “had been forgotten until recent excavation uncovered the vault.”
The boy—now an adult—who lied about seeing heaven while in a coma, which his father turned into a book, is suing the publisher Tyndale House for not doing more to disassociate his name from his fabricated account. He is also suing for not being paid for the fabrication. “‘Now that he is an adult, Alex desires to have his name completely disassociated from the book and seeks a permanent injunction against Tyndale House requiring it to do everything within reason to disassociate his name from the book,’ according to the complaint, which was covered in The Washington Post.” The book is no longer in print.
How the sweet potato took over the world all by itself.
Essay of the Day:
The Constitution defines treason as “levying War” against the United States or “in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” In this week’s magazine, Allen C. Guelzo writes that as “stark as that prescription is, fewer than 30 people have been tried for treason by the federal courts.” One man who wasn’t: Robert E. Lee. Why?
“Surely, if anyone could be said to have levied war against the United States, it must have been the man who for four years inflicted one embarrassing defeat after another on United States troops during the Civil War and almost single-handedly kept the Southern Confederacy alive until its final expiry in 1865. What aggravates Lee’s offense is his pre-war career of over 30 years as a U.S. Army officer and the offer of command of the U.S. Army made to him at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, which he refused. ‘What has General Robert Lee done to deserve mercy or forbearance from the people and the authorities of the North?’ the Boston Daily Advertiser shrilly demanded after Lee surrendered his dwindling, scarecrow band of rebels at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Lee was ‘the bloodiest and guiltiest traitor in all the South,’ and Congressman George Julian foamed at the outrage of allowing ‘old General Lee’ to roam ‘up and down the hills and valleys of Virginia,’ free and unarrested.
“But roam he did, because when Lee surrendered, he secured from Union General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant a ‘solemn parole of honor’ that protected Lee and his army ‘from molestation so long as they conformed to its condition.’ Grant had been eager to avoid any further bloodbaths, and granting the paroles was, by his estimate, the easiest way to induce Lee’s surrender.
“That was until five days later, when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre. At once, the new president, Andrew Johnson, and his attorney general, James Speed, decided that Grant ‘had no authority’ to offer anything like a pardon to Lee. The Appomattox paroles were ‘a mere military arrangement and can have no influence upon civil rights or the status of the persons interested,’ in the words of John C. Underwood. And on June 2, Underwood, the sole functioning federal district judge in Virginia, impaneled a grand jury in Norfolk (which had been occupied by Union forces since 1862) that issued an indictment for treason involving Lee, his two sons (both Confederate generals), and 34 other high-ranking Confederates. Underwood, a Unionist Virginian who had suffered personally at Confederate hands, was in deadly earnest: Lee ‘did maliciously and traitorously . . . ordain and carry on war against the United States of America.’”
Image: An illustrated tribute to Pinocchio
Poem: J.D. McClatchy, “Resignation”
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