User talk:MinorProphet/Charles Gano Baylor Article

Some issues that have been besetting me:

Overview

Charles Gano Baylor was a political maverick who came from a prominent Southern family of soldiers and politicans. He stands out from the rest of his immediate family as an archetypal black sheep. His father and four brothers were all soldiers, the oldest two of who fought in the Mexican War/TX war of Independence and died before the Civil War: the other two were Colonels in the Confederate Army, one (John Robert Baylor) was a Knight of the Golden Cross in the same 'castle' as John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Lincoln.

There has been little impetus to preserve CG Baylor's name in the annals of the Solid South as a traitor to the Southern cause who was an advocate for Black civil rights. As a scalawag he was one of 144 witnesses to the Reconstruction Committee which imposed martial law on the South and introduced the 14th Amendment, 1868. Although he strongly advocated the franchise for Afro-Americans, it was openly and avowedly for political ends rather than through any purely philanthropic or other higher moral purpose.

Because at the time Baylor favoured literacy or property tests for African Americans (later used as a means to disfranchise them and others until 1965), he cannot be counted among the tireless proponents of universal Afro-American civil rights like Charles Sumner who abstained from the congressional vote to pass the 15th Amendment in 1870 because it failed to provide universal and impartial suffrage. Furthermore, his espousal of a socialist left-wing cause later in life leaves him out on the edge of current political thinking.

His name was revived by Julian Bond (in the Galveston Daily News) during Jesse Jackson's 1979 Middle East trip: not as a white critic of US imperialism, but as a black one. Bond was later the president of the NAACP. He came from Georgia where he served in both houses of the state legislature. He can be excused his ignorance of Baylor's role in Georgia's history 100 years earlier, since the Radical Republican past of a turncoat who deserted the Southern cause in 1864 was unlikely to have been deliberately preserved. On the other hand, the records were held at his place of work (the Georgia senate) if he had been inclined towards some research...

Are all these people the same man?

Since there is no printed biography of CG Baylor, I have had to make a number of deductions from the available and somewhat confused material online. It seems at least possible that all these names refer to the same man, although there is apparently no online resource available which connects them all together:

CG Baylor, Charles G. Baylor, Charles Gano Baylor, C. Goethe Baylor, Charles Goethe Baylor. His name is also variously given as C.G. Buylor, C.J. Baylor, Charles Y. Bayler. He is also referred to disparagingly as "Colonel Baylor" in reference to Colonel PT Barnum: according the 1864 newspaper source (can't find it now, but I have it) he was even more of an "arrant humbug" than that purveyor of spectacles. Should have gone to SpecSavers...

• 1. Charles G. Baylor or CG Baylor. This name appears in all official publications and correspondence during his lifetime. The inital G. is not expanded. That this is (in all likelihood) the same person as Charles Gano Baylor is shown by the list of his children in Baylor's history of the Baylors. Although the information in this book should be treated as somewhat dubious, his children's birthplaces (especially in England, where he was consul in Manchester in 1858) tally with his known whereabouts according to both federal/state legislative documents, and secondary sources.

• 2. To connect the name C. Goethe Baylor with Charles Gano Baylor is a slight poser. The similarity of the middle names is immediately apparent; but why choose that of a German poet? Well, since you ask... The earliest reference I can find to C. Goethe Baylor is the 1850 newspaper report of his consulship to Amsterdam. The name Goethe seems peculiarly apt in light of the fact that in 1853 Baylor married Louisa Denison Wadsworth, daughter of Alexander Scammel Wadsworth (died 1851): Louisa was the cousin (through her father's sister) of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It could be a humorously disparaging nickname thought up by Longfellow; and the newspaper report of his Amsterdam consulship (this name appears never to have been used officially) could just be an in-joke.

The name C. Goethe Baylor does not seem to appear in contemporary official publications or reports of proceedings. However, one contemporary (newspaper) source (NY Tribune 7 September 1850) does list "C. Goethe Baylor" as being appointed consul to Amsterdam by the US President.

New York Tribune September 7 1850 (PDF)

Other sources disagree (eg Official Register 1850) about the name of the appointment of a consul named Baylor to Amsterdam (although the dates tally), but this is the only contemporary primary source I have found which connects C. Goethe Baylor to Charles G. Baylor.

• A poem by C. Goethe Baylor entitled Virginia to Massachussets appeared in the New York Evening Express, 6 April 1877.

Baylor, C. Goethe (6 April 1877). "Virginia to Massachussets" (PDF). New York Evening Express.

Baylor lived in Virginia after the Civil War, according to his own testimony to the Reconstruction Committee of 1866.

• A more troublesome reference to Charles Goethe Baylor (NB note use of fully expanded name) appears in connection with an 1871 poem entitled America to Germany:

Miske, Ulrika (2008). The Image of Germany and the Germans in Erica Jong’s "Fear of Flying " and Walter Abish’s "How German Is It ". GRIN Verlag. p. 8. ISBN 9783640166619.

Miske quotes a secondary source on page 23 of this university dissertation summary:

Schieber, Clara Eve (1921). Transformation of American sentiment towards Germany (reprint, no publisher ed.). New York. p. 23.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

Miske also gives the original source of the poem (as quoted in Scheiber) as the Boston Daily Journal [no date] January 1871, which I have not been able to locate online.

But the quoted poem America to Germany does not appear at all in the book, let alone page 23; according to the website bibliographic info the pagination actually starts on page 50. However (he sighed), according to the title page of Transformation... it is reprinted from the Journal of international relations, vol. 12, no. 1, July, 1921. This seems to imply that the pagination refers to the entire issue, and that page 23 is part of a different contribution. However, I cannot find this journal online either.

The above edition is only a summary of the dissertation; other editions (eg 1923) may be of the entire work. A few lines are actually quoted in

David E. Barclay, Elisabeth Glaser-Schmid (2003). Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776. Cambridge University Press

so it apparently exists somewhere...

Well, having read that CGB played the flute exquisitely, it seems at least possible that he really was the poet from a relatively early age. Two newspaper announcements deliberately get his name wrong: 'C. Goethe Baylor' and 'Charles Y. Baylor' are used in announcements of his appointments as consul to Amsterdam and Cologne. I'm pretty sure it's a family joke. If I ever one find a report of his Manchester consulship, I expect some sort of titter.

• Google Books actually attributes the 1852 pamphlet Free Trade to "C. Goethe Baylor", although it is by Charles G. Baylor. Something they're not telling us? The text of the book doesn't appear to be online, and only its title-page will show.

• 3. The name Charles Gano Baylor doesn't occur in any print documents I have found until 1897, where it appears under a lengthy diatribe against US imperialist ambitions in Cuba during the Spanish-American war. This article appeared in the VA Richmond Planet, an Afro-American publication, and it could be mistaken for the work of an Afro-American, especially the way he uses quotes of other black writers.

• The Oswego Daily Times 1907 obituary notice also uses his full name, Charles Gano Baylor, and gives him as the "author of the famous Georgia address on which constitutional reforms effecting the colored race are based"; this could just be his "Free Trade" speech to the 1851 Macon GA Cotton Planters' convention and again later to the Georgia senate (not available online); or something else like the 1866 Southern Loyalists' Convention, but this was in Philadelphia. Or even his testimony to the Reconstruction Committee earlier that year, but that was in Washington DC...

• The Baylor family history (1914) also knows him in full as 'Charles Gano Baylor, and ties him to Louisa Denison Wadsworth (confirmed in his Oswego obituary notice): I am relatively confident that all these names belong to one and the same person.

>All the above section by me MinorProphet (talk) 01:26, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Was Baylor African-American?

CG Baylor has been thought by some to be African-American; this may stem from a slightly ambiguous reference to him by Paul Robeson (possibly the Cuban article ) and from the overtly pro-Black nature of his views. It is, of course, possible that the Cuban article was written by someone else using his name. But the article's socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist tone appears only a few years after the 'real' Charles. G Baylor stood for Governor of Rhode Island on the Socialist Labor Party ticket. Charles Gano Baylor died in Providence, RI in 1907: his wife Louisa Denison Wadsworth died in Edgewood, Rhode Island in 1910. >MinorProphet (talk) 02:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

"Bird-shit" Baylor

So why didn't he use his middle name? Hmmm... Do you have a nasty big brother? Well, Charles Gano had four. Boys being boys, I imagine that at least one of them must have tried calling him Charley Guano Baylor... >MinorProphet (talk) 12:39, 24 November 2011 (UTC)