Henry and all,

I notice Henry refers to himself as a "Yankee". And when I read that line,
I, like others, I suppose, smiled with mild amusement with his poking fun at
himself. I consider myself a Yankee, although the majority of my ancestry
most likely had Southern sympathies since being residents of Virginia.
Today, I feel we look upon this term "Yankee" not as the derogatory term it
was considered to be over 150 years ago. We look at it in a different way.
Therefore when transcribing diaries word for word it is not for us to decide
how previous generations defined slang. They may have been using it in a
derogatory way or a playful way, as Henry just used the term "Yankee". As
always, there are two sides to every coin. We should not try to be
interpretive in our transcriptions. Let the previous generations speak for
themselves.

Lonny Watro

----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry Wiencek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006 10:55 PM
Subject: Re: Transcribing Civil War Diaries


>I think that Mr. Dixon deserves a lot of credit for discovering the error
>in
> the transcription of the Ellen Coolidge letter in the Gordon-Reed book.
> The
> Coolidge letter is one of the essential documents in the Hemings
> controversy
> and the Gordon-Reed transcription completely reverses the meaning of that
> particular sentence, which is a very important one.  I am convinced that
> it
> was an inadvertent mistake, but we are fortunate that Mr. Dixon and others
> have loudly called attention to it.  If they had not, the erroneous
> "evidence" might be widely quoted.  Gordon-Reed did not make reference to
> that sentence in her main text and did not build any of her arguments on
> it,
> as far as I can tell.
>
> For what it's worth, there have been errors in the transcriptions of the
> newspaper statement of Madison Hemings about his ancestor, Captain
> Hemings.
> In the original newspaper column Madison said Captain Hemings commanded a
> "trading vessel."  In the Gordon-Reed transcription this appears as a
> "tracking vessel" and in the Fawn Brodie transcription it is a "whaling"
> vessel.
>
> I am embarrassed to say that in my first published piece about Thomas
> Jefferson I stated with certainty that Monticello is in the Blue Ridge.  I
> was then residing in New York and to a Yankee one Virginia mountain range
> was as good as another.  No power on earth, even the Internet, can fully
> expunge that error of mine, and I still cringe when I see Monticello, from
> the top of my street, firmly fixed in the Southwest Mountains with the
> Blue
> Ridge in the misty distance.
>
> Henry Wiencek
> Charlottesville
>
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