Tips for Working from Home

Is it procrastinating to think about your workflow and routine? I get my best work done on this project when I have a few uninterrupted hours in which to focus. We're probably moving soon, and I've already identified the room in our potential house that will be my office. It has doors that I can close and so make it a dedicated workspace.

I found this article from The Simple Dollar to be an excellent way of thinking about how to carve out that time. I particularly liked the idea of not going into the space unless you're ready to dedicate time to working. I tend to be a workaholic, so when I am sitting down I am always doing something, working on something. Part of the catch now is living in a small apartment where the living room is everything. A house will have a proper dedicated room I can enter to work, and leave to do other things.

"The Loneliness of the Military Historian" - Margaret Atwood

The Morgan horse story is not one of military history (at least not this chapter of it, as far as I know), but I still identify primarily as a military historian, and this particular poem sings in my heart when I'm doing research in the dispassionate, incisive way that I was taught. Real history, the parsing and the weighing and the pulling apart, tends to unnerve people, no matter its subject.

"The Loneliness of the Military Historian"
Margaret Atwood
from Poetry Foundation

Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of sensible cut
and unalarming shades of beige,
I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:
no prophetess mane of mine,
complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.

In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.

In my dreams there is glamour.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendour.
The Arabs ride against Crusaders
with scimitars that could sever
silk in the air.
A swift cut to the horse’s neck
and a hunk of armour crashes down
like a tower. Fire against metal.
A poet might say: romance against banality.
When awake, I know better.

Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.
True, valour sometimes counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right—
though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes,
or the absence of them.
It’s no use pinning all those medals
across the chests of the dead.
Impressive, but I know too much.
Grand exploits merely depress me.

In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar
or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)
The word glory figures a lot on gateways.
Of course I pick a flower or two
from each, and press it in the hotel Bible
for a souvenir.
I’m just as human as you.

But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.

Best Laid Plans

I arrived at Middlebury on Monday...two hours late for the lecture on Joseph Battell that I had intended to see. I swore, a lot, and stomped around a bit. Then I spent a few minutes drawing smiley faces on the boards of friends in the history department (professors have these white boards outside their doors now...kids these days!) and settled down to read Eleanor Waring Burnham's Justin Morgan: Founder of His Race. I might as well get some work done now that I'd driven an hour away from home.

The more I think about this project - and the more secondary sources I read, especially those from the 20th century - the more I think that this is in part a twofold story to tell. There's the history of the actual horse, Figure, the colt that Justin Morgan brought to Vermont in 1792, and who died in a field in Chelsea, VT in 1821.

Then there's the story of the legend: Figure, the "founder of his race," the "Morgan horse," who pulled logs no other horse could budge, who beat the best Thoroughbreds in America, who went tirelessly from job to job, and who had a near-magical ability to sire horses who were his image. That story is built, layer by layer, through hearsay and reporting and fiction. Sometimes there is an historical basis for a story. Sometimes it's made up out of whole cloth, as the story about Figure as James Monroe's parade mount seems to have been.

Burnham's book is a really seminal text for the second story. There's so much to unpack there; thick sentimentality, turn-of-the-century ideas about proper American patriotism, the importance of origin stories, the anthropomorphism of equine characters that leads in a straight line to Black Beauty, mythology-within-mythology, and more gender politics than you can shake a stick at.

So, I find myself torn. The original story of Figure is what got me started on this quest, but the puzzle of historiography is what really needs to be untangled. The question is then, how to shape that into a narrative? how to tell those two stories alongside each other?

In Search of Robert Evans

Figure was passed through a bewildering number and array of hands during his lifetime. Some early sources refer to him not as "the Morgan horse" but as "the Goss horse" because he beloved to various members of the Goss family for over ten years - and to Justin Morgan for just over three.

Morgan historians have traditionally pieced together Figure's history through a variety of sources. There are timelines floating out there that place him with anywhere from 10-15 owners every two or three years. Sometimes his actual ownership is murky; was he leased as a breeding stallion or a working horse, rather than directly transferred?

It's not clear to me what historical basis there is for the various owners, beyond Linsley or Battell's collecting of secondary sources many years later. Betty Bandel did a great job of tracing the first 2-3 owners in her biography of Justin Morgan, and was able to provide sources. Beyond that? I will grant that I have a lot more reading to do, but so far, nothing is jumping out at me.

All that is a very long way of saying that I'm more or less starting from scratch. I'm using the timelines provided in secondary sources and online as a jumping off point, and taking an attitude of "trust but verify." Though perhaps "trust" is a strong word to use in this situation.

Justin Morgan has been pretty well documented by Betty Bandel, so I'm starting with the next name classically associated with Figure: Robert Evans.

In Morgan mythology, Evans is the hired man who leased Figure from Morgan to clear land for his employer. He was the one who discovered Figure's extraordinary strength; he was the one who was supposed to have set up the pulling contest at the mill. Most sources put that sometime between 1792 and 1795. Later, after Figure passed through a few other owners, he was purportedly owned by Evans from 1801 - 1804.

So, what do we actually know about Evans? Not a whole lot, as you may have guessed. Again, starting from scratch. I started with the absolute basics and treated it like a genealogy problem. Off to Ancestry.com, where I turned up my first bit of evidence: the 1800 census.

click to embiggen

Here's the census for Randolph, VT, in 1800. Because it was 1800, sigh, all we get are white male heads of household and a tally of others in the household. In this case, we see a Robert Evans (and a few other Evans families; possibly he was not a lone hired man but someone with larger community connections?). 

In his household were a white male under 10, a white male between the ages of 10-15, a white male between the ages of 26-44, and a white female between the ages of 26-44. That puts Robert Evans as a younger man with a wife and two sons in 1800. It doesn't appear they had any extra family members, servants, or slaves living with them, given that the total number of household members was 4 and they are all enumerated. (Though Vermont had nominally outlawed adult slavery with its constitution, de facto slavery persisted and does show up on the 1800 census from time to time.)

After some of the other rabbit holes I've gone down on this project, it's encouraging to see Robert Evans as a real person who really existed!

Slumping Vaguely Onward

I know everyone in the whole world is singing the same tune, but: seriously, this winter. I am bereft of motivation, energy, warmth, and basically all good things.

Anyway, in an attempt in the last few days to un-stick myself, I've done a few things to progress on this project.

The first was to attend a workshop through Geek Mountain State on writing science fiction. Yes, I know, history is not precisely writing science fiction. Or really, not at all the same thing. But it was good to talk about writing, and to be among people who aspire to write. It's been a long time since I have thought of myself as a writer. I have fallen into thinking of myself as an historian first, and the writing being one method of communication. I like getting back to that identity as writer.

(Plus, two of the speakers were friends, and it was good to support friends who write.)

The second is an upcoming lecture about Joseph Battell. I've only mentioned Battell obliquely here on the blog, because his role in the work I'm doing is more historiographical than historical, but he is a crucial figure in the history of the Morgan horse in general. He picked up the work that Linsley did in reconciling early accounts of Figure and in tracing progeny and expanded on it tenfold, publishing the first true stallion register. He was also responsible for reinvigorating the breed through his breeding decisions around the turn of the century, when that true foundation style was all but lost. His Morgan horse farm in Weybridge eventually became the Government stud, which is today the UVM stud.

Anyway: Battell. Interesting guy, and learning and thinking more about him will help inform some of the general framing on the project.

Third, this article from the Harvard Business Review about making time for your passion project: yeah. Yeah. I needed that kick in the pants.

2015 Resolutions

Measurable, specific, attainable, all these things, right?

Here's my 2015 goal: I want to be writing and editing text, as in chapter text, for NaNoWriMo, November 2015. Yeah, I know it's about novel writing. Yeah, I know that's ambitious.

I'm putting it out there, though. And I'm going to pick this blog back up and blow the dust off and rattle it around a little bit.

I'll start next week, with a few hours scheduled on Monday to start to work through some of Daniel Chipman Linsley's reports. I'll also check in with Abby Maria Hemenway, and see if she collected any good early stories related to Figure.

By the end of January, I want to have visited both the Woodstock and Randolph Historical Societies and gone through what they have on file. I'll also start fleshing out and fact-checking the timeline I've put together from various sources. I'm finding more and more, as I think about and read about this, that there's a lot of received wisdom and not a lot of double-checking. (See also my investigation into whether Figure was used as a parade mount for James Monroe.)

I'll be reporting on my progress as I go along, and checking in at the beginning of February to report my next goals & things to tackle.

Onward!

Vermont Morgan Horse Association

Well, I've finally taken another serious step toward this project: joined the Vermont Morgan Horse Association. I've also registered for the Annual Meeting, which should be a really nice night and give me some good information above and beyond the Morgan connections - the keynote is about Equine Metabolic Syndrome.

You can also like the VMHA on Facebook to support them.