Remembering Maj. Sullivan Ballou on Memorial Day

Anyone who has seen Ken Burns’ moving miniseries, The Civil War, will recall the hauntingly beautiful letter that Maj. Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry wrote to his wife Sarah on July 14, 1861, while his regiment was stationed in Washington, D.C. Ballou was mortally wounded on July 21, 1861, at the first Battle of Bull Run and died on July 29. He was 32 years old.

Born in Smithfield, R.I., in 1829, Ballou was of Huguenot ancestry. A Republican lawyer, he served as speaker of the R.I. House of Representatives. He married Sarah Hart Shumway in 1855. A son, Edgar, was born in 1856, followed by a second son, William, in 1859. Ballou’s widow, who was 24 at the time of his death, never remarried. She died in her early 80s in 1917. Sarah and her husband are buried beside one another at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, R.I. 

Here, on this Memorial Day, when we honor those who died in battle, is an abridged version of Sullivan Ballou's last letter to his beloved wife.

________

My very dear Sarah:

 
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days - perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing - perfectly willing - to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt . . .

Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them for so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood, around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me - perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness . . .

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again . . . .

Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island

May 4, 1776: Rhode Island gives us our first Independence Day

Statue of Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island

When the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, it was simply catching up with one of its member colonies - Rhode Island - which made its break with England on May 4, 1776.

“Little Rhody” was feisty from the get-go, and it has played an oversized role in American history. Even its official name - the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations - belies its standing as the smallest state in the Union.

Founded in the 17th century by dissenters from Puritan Massachusetts, including Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, Rhode Island became "a lively experiment" that embraced such then-radical ideas as freedom of conscience. An inscription on the exterior of the Rhode Island State House reads: "To hold forth a lively experiment that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained with full liberty in religious concernments."

As tensions mounted in the years leading up to the American Revolution, defiant Rhode Islanders boarded and torched HMS Gaspée, a customs schooner, on June 9, 1772, well over a year before the Boston Tea Party and almost three years before the battles of Lexington and Concord.

True to form, Rhode Island later became not only the first of the 13 original colonies to declare its independence, but also the last of the original 13 states to ratify the U.S. Constitution. It did not do so until May 29, 1790, more than two years after Delaware became the first state to adopt the Constitution.

Today, a statue known as the Independent Man looks down on the capital city of Providence from atop the State House dome.

The Northeast's deadliest storm: the Hurricane of '38

Southbridge, Mass., after the storm.

It happened 12 years before I was born. But my parents, who were living in Southbridge, Mass., at the time, remembered it well, and talked about it periodically for the rest of their lives.

Initially, no one was overly concerned about a northbound Atlantic storm in September 1938, because it was expected to blow itself out at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. But on Sept. 21 of that year, forecasters learned how wrong they had been. That's when all hell broke loose.

As the PBS series American Experience reports on its web site, what later became known as the Great New England Hurricane of '38 "suddenly began an unexpected sprint north along the coast, surprising even the Coast Guard. No one had ever seen a storm like this; radar had not yet been invented."

The hurricane "ripped into the New England shore with enough fury to set off seismographs in Sitka, Alaska. Traveling at a shocking 60 miles per hour -- three times faster than most tropical storms -- it was astonishingly swift and powerful, with peak wind gusts up to 186 mph. The storm without a name turned into one of the most devastating storms recorded in North America. Over 600 people were killed, most by drowning. Another hundred were never found. Property damage was estimated at $400 million -- over 8,000 homes were destroyed, 6,000 boats wrecked or damaged." Rhode Island was especially hard hit, and suffered the most casualties.

The winds recorded that day dwarfed the land wind speeds in storms Irene and Sandy. "The hurricane was the death knell for many mills and factories that had barely survived the Great Depression," according to The Associated Press. "It stripped 4 million bushels of apples from orchards, killed livestock and felled millions of trees . . . . Bridges and dams were destroyed, and rail travel was halted for weeks."

Cranston, R.I., following the Hurricane of '38

When pariahs become heroes: the case of Anne Hutchinson

Cover of a 2004 biography

The history books are full of people who were scorned in life but are now idolized in death, because time has shown that they were visionaries, geniuses or gifted artists.

Anne Hutchinson was one such. Born in England in 1591 as Anne Marbury, she and her husband, Will Hutchinson, were Puritans in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony when she ran afoul of the authorities there.

A headstrong woman in a male-dominated society (strike one), Hutchinson took to preaching at her home, initially for women, but later for men as well (strike two). When she broke with Puritan leaders on theological points (strike three) she was put on trial. A civil court voted to banish her. Then, on this date in 1638, a religious court excommunicated Hutchinson from the Puritan Church.

"You have stepped out of your place," one minister told her. "You have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject."

A pariah in Massachusetts Bay, Hutchinson moved on, first to the much more tolerant colony of Rhode Island, where she is admired to this day as a co-founder of the town of Portsmouth, and then to New York, where she was killed by Indians in 1643.

Over time, the tide turned - even in Massachusetts.

In 1922, the state erected a statue of Hutchinson and her daughter Susanna in front of the State House in Boston. The inscription describes her as a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration." Sixty-five years later, Gov. Michael Dukakis pardoned Hutchinson and lifted the banishment order that Gov. John Winthrop had imposed in 1637.

Anne Hutchinson statue, Boston, Massachusetts

There's good naked, and then there's the other kind

Seinfeld fans may recall the episode in which Jerry finds himself going out with a woman who insists on hanging out naked in his apartment. All the time. Once exposed to non-stop nudity, he quickly decides that there’s good naked and bad naked, and that having a woman parade around the apartment in her birthday suit at all hours of the day and night creates way too many bad-naked visuals.

That came to mind when I read an Associated Press item about one Robert E. Bailey of Cumberland, Rhode Island. (State motto: “We may be the smallest state, but we’re big into weird.”) Bailey, 65, has been placed on probation for a year because he washed his pickup truck in the nude at Economy Car Wash in North Attleborough, Mass., on May 31.

There is a formula for this sort of thing. Please keep it in mind the next time you are tempted to follow Bailey's example. (Yes, the formula does apply even if you're driving a domestic sedan, a spiffy import or an SUV rather than a pickup, so no excuses.) Here it is: driver + nudity + vehicle + car wash + witnesses = bad naked.