PSYCHOZOIC ERA (Era of the Mind)

“Zeno, a negro boy in the family of another neighbor, was a companion in my play. He told me one day that he had been whipped severely, and the next day he ran away. He was pursued and brought back, and wore an iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule. He found means to break the collar, and fled forever.”- Autobiography of William H. Seward

          The language of kinship that I’ve loosely employed to extend my own family narrative into the world at large, was also used by North American tribes in dealing with their alien invaders. Ninety-three year old Anna Osterhout explained in her deposition, that the Indians who had kidnapped her and her brother John as children, did so because, “..one of the Indians belonging to the party had lost children about the same age, and wanted them to adopt.” Adoption and kidnapping was unlimited in extending family. Father, grandfather, brother, uncle, nephew and cousin, were fluid uses of familial language in intertribal negotiations, as well as societal interaction with the whites; sometimes meaning one thing, sometimes another. It was important to know one’s standing in the family power dynamic, as cousins were added daily, and the all powerful “fathers” remained in Washington, or London. With Zeno, there was no such compact of kinship. He was whipped, chained, yoked…..and eventually “fled forever,” hopefully to a better life. 

    William Henry Seward knew little of his family, apart from his parents and grandparents, when he started his memoir. Henry begins with a simple admission; “I can tell you little of my ancestors.” He explains the Tory leanings of his Sweezy (Swezy) grandparents, but not much insight is provided as to the Jennings’ politics. As with most of us, he preferred to concentrate on his own glorious past.

   “Of my maternal grandfather, Isaac Jennings,” Seward wrote, “I know only he was of English derivation, a well-to-do farmer, who turned out with the militia of Goshen, and, more fortunate than most of his associates, escaped the Indian massacre at the battle of Minisink. His wife Margaret Jackson, who was of Irish descent, survived him many years. Her peculiarity which I most distinctly remember was, antipathy toward the Roman Catholic religion. My mother, Mary Jennings, enjoyed only the advantages of education in county schools, but improved them. She is remembered by her survivors as a person of excellent sense, gentleness, truthfulness and candor.”

      

    In 1819, the economic leverage of the southern states was based on tobacco and cotton production and exports to Europe; bolstered and maintained by industrial level plantation operations. Henry Seward observed these large southern planter operations first-hand, realizing how much they depended on slave labor to remain viable in an increasingly competitive market economy. And this pro-slavery model was rapidly spreading westward. Many were contemplating whether this was good  for young America. In response to masters and mistresses moving into Kansas, Texas, and the territories, an arbitrary line was drawn at 36 degrees 30’  parallel, forbidding slavery north of that line. 

    The Missouri Compromise allowed Maine to enter the Union as a free state, while Missouri would be admitted as a slave state. This Federal dictate was viewed by southern states as overreach, an unwelcome and illegal intrusion into their rights to exploit human bondage, state by state. The ensuing Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott decision were fait accompli dictates, setting up the legislative and judicial tensions that would eventually bring about a caning on the floor of the Senate, and full civil war. The Federalist vs. State’s rights discussion, and threats of southern secession over the slavery issue, had been going on since Henry Seward was a college student at Union. As any high school student of history knows, William Henry Seward was a major player during all of this.

     Then I came across one of the most bizarrely coincidental anecdotes in the Seward autobiography. I read it on August 21, 2017. The synchronicity is overwhelming. I want to quote it before going over to the family cabin at Wolf Lake to celebrate my 65th birthday, on the day of a full solar eclipse. In four days I’ll be older than Richard Jennings was on the day he was murdered. These aliens are no longer unknowns nor abstracts. They appeared, as humans had on earth in the Psychozoic era, magically, now resting comfortably in the hypo-campus, dancing nimbly through my finger tips.   

    

   “One day before I reached the age at which I was to take a legitimate place in the school,” Seward wrote, “I went there with my elder brothers, without parental permission. While there, and “all of a sudden” it grew dark; the light from the windows failing. The larger boys and girls formed a circle, round the open door, to recite their customary lessons. I had no doubt that the tyrannical schoolmaster had kept us in school until night, and I expected every moment to see the aerial inhabitants (witches) enter the schoolhouse, and make short work of us all, for obstructing them in their nocturnal abode in the garret. Crying vociferously, I was discharged from the school, and ran for my life homeward. On the way I met what seemed to me a great crowd, while some of whom were looking down into a pail of water, while others were gazing into the heavens through fragments of smoked glass. In after-years I came to learn that I had thus been an observer of the total eclipse of the sun which occurred in the year 1806. The phenomenon repeated itself to me, sixty-three long years afterward, under the sixtieth parallel of latitude, in midst of the Indians of Alaska.