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Milton in America: The case of Jackson County, Florida

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360600559746

1470-1308

Bruce Boehrer,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Peter Nicholls, Leigh Edwards, the two anonymous readers for Textual Practice, and the Florida State University English Department Faculty Works-in-Progress Seminar for helpful guidance in revising this essay. Likewise, I am deeply grateful to Diane Roberts, Jerry Singerman, Mark Hinson, Linda Hall, and John Milton for their kind assistance with my early research and writing. Notes 1. For some additional John Miltons see the genealogical discussion to follow; for more detail see William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) passim, who discusses a dozen different individuals with the names of John Milton or Melton. Needless to say, this is not an exhaustive list. 2. See William J. Northen, ed., Men of Mark in Georgia 6 vols. (Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 181–182 for further biographical information relative to this John Milton. 3. For a brief summary of Governor John Milton's background, see John E. Johns, Florida During the Civil War (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1963), pp. 82–83; W. Buck Yearns, ‘Florida’, in W. Buck Yearns, ed., The Confederate Governors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 61–62. 4. Johns, p. 83. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6. 6. Anderson, p. 13. 7. Anderson, pp. 145, 148. 8. Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 21 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), vol. 9, pp. 238–239. 9. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 15. 10. See the Florida Office of Cultural and Historical Programs, ‘Florida Governors’ Portraits', http://dhr.dos.state.fl.us/museum/collections/governors/about.cfm?id = 12. 11. J. Randall Stanley, History of Jackson County (Marianna, FL: Jackson County Historical Society, 1950), p. 183. 12. J. Evetts Haley, Jeff Milton: A Good Man with a Gun (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1948), p. 4. 13. Daisy Parker, ‘John Milton, Governor of Florida’, Florida Historical Quarterly (April, 1942), pp. 346–61. 14. Daisy Parker, ‘Governor John Milton’, Tallahassee Historical Society Annual 3 (1937), p. 14. This genealogy is also reproduced almost verbatim in Parker's honours thesis, n.p. [but: p. 2]. 15. For the number and identities of Sir Christopher's children, see Perceval Lucas, ‘The Family of Sir Christopher Milton’, Notes and Queries ser. 11, v. 7 (1913), pp. 21–22, and John Shawcross, The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton's Relatives and Associates (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), pp. 24–30. Shawcross's more recent findings correct Lucas's on some points, particularly the latter's listing of two daughters named Anne. 16. For the daughters in question – a ‘Mrs Milton of Grosvenor Street, a housekeeper to Dr [Thomas] Secker, [Archbishop of Canterbury], … who died 26 July 1769’, and a daughter Margaret, ‘baptized on 7 March 1681 at St Dunstan's in the West and … buried on 25 June 1685’ – see Shawcross, pp. 31, 33. 17. See William Riley Parker, vol. 2, p. 1176, n. 138, who observes that two Thomas Miltons were listed for burial in the registers of St. Dunstan's in the West on 1 July 1680, and 30 December 1683, respectively. Also see Shawcross, p. 32. 18. William Riley Parker, vol. 2, pp. 1176–77, n. 138; Shawcross, p. 33. 19. William Riley Parker, vol. 2, p. 1177, n. 138. 20. John Milton, Paradise Lost 6.375, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Further references to Milton' verse are to this edition. 21. Joseph Milton French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), vol. 5, p. 352. 22. This union in turn produced a daughter named Anne, a niece to the poet, who in turn received a license to wed one David Moore of Richmond, Surrey, on 29 December 1662. For the wedding of Thomas Agar and Anne Milton Phillips, see A. W. Hughes Clark, ed., The Register of St. Dunstan in the East, 1558–1664 (London: Harleian Society Publications, 1939), p. 115. For Anne Agar's wedding to David Moore, see George J. Armytage, ed., Allegations for Marriage Licenses issued from the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, London (London: Harleian Society Publications, 1886), p. 67. 23. Daisy Parker, Florida Historical Quarterly, p. 347, n. 2. 24. Daisy Parker, Florida Historical Quarterly, p. 347. 25. Shawcross, p. 30. 26. Daisy Parker, honours thesis, n.p., n. 3. In this case the honours thesis is more useful than the Florida Historical Society Annual piece, which includes no endnotes or source documentation of any kind. 27. Daisy Parker, Florida Historical Quarterly, p. 348, n. 7. 28. Haley, p. 3, n. 1. Haley does not claim either Jeff Davis Milton or Elise Gamble as the specific source for his remark that the Florida Miltons descend from ‘the great blind poet of England’; in fact, he cites no source for this remark at all. But given Haley's extensive contact with this generation of the family and his identification of them as the source for his general family history, it seems unlikely that his information would have come from elsewhere. 29. For a conventional summary of the distinction between ascribed statuses as ‘those which are assigned to individuals without reference to their innate differences or abilities’ and achieved statuses as ‘those requiring special qualities’ and ‘not assigned to individuals from birth’, see Ralph Linton, The Study of Man: An Introduction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1936), p. 115. 30. Daisy Parker, honours thesis, n.p. [but: p. 3]. Parker's genealogy, as reported here throughout, has been confirmed by my own correspondence with John Milton of Marianna, Florida, the great-great-great grandson of Governor John Milton. 31. Daisy Parker, honours thesis, n.p. [but: p. 3]. 32. Northen, vol. 2, p. 182. For a general history of the Society, see Minor Myers, Liberty Without Anarchy: A History of the Society of the Cincinnati (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), passim. Milton was charter secretary of the Society's Georgia branch. 33. Shawcross, pp. 2–3. 34. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 70. 35. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), p. 83. 36. Northen, vol. 2, p. 181. 37. He also earned the rank of brigadier-general in the Second Brigade, First Division of the Georgia Militia. See Daisy Parker, honours thesis, n.p. [but: p. 3]; Northen, vol. 2, p. 182. 38. A Soldier, ‘Gen. Milton as a Soldier’, The East Floridian, Thursday 27 September 1860. 39. R[obert] S[pencer] C[otterill], ‘Milton, John’, Dictionary of American Biography, 22 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), vol. 13, p. 21. 40. Haley, p. 5. 41. John Steadman, Milton and the Paradoxes of Renaissance Heroism (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 173; also see Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), for the argument that Milton sought ‘to spiritualize the heroic poem’ by ‘retaining such conventional motifs as kingship and warfare’ while ‘alter[ing] their traditional character by stressing their internal rather than external significance’ (p. 193). 42. Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 203. 43. For Voltaire's characterization of Milton as a ‘barbarian … who, imitating in all seriousness the comic invention of firearms in Ariosto, has the devils fire cannon in Heaven’, see Voltaire's Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories, trans. Donald M. Frame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), p. 84; for Johnson's complaints about ‘the confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narrative of the war in heaven’, see the Lives of the Poets, pp. 439–40, in Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 337–642. 44. Stanley Fish, Surprised By Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 179; Arnold Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on ‘Paradise Lost’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 25; Fish, p. 171. 45. Merritt Hughes, Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 201–202. 46. Richard Rambuss, ‘Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival’, boundary 2 27.2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 50, 55, 50. 47. Samuel Kinser, Carnival, American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 88–89. 48. Kinser, p. 88. 49. I draw these figures from the University of Virginia's Historical Census Browser (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census). 50. Don DeLillo, White Noise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 81–82. 51. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 23. 52. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 103; G. F. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 37; Keith Stavely, Puritan Legacies: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the New England Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 2; Kevin Van Anglen, The New England Milton (University Park: Pennsylvania SUP, 1993), p. 41; Rambuss, p. 55. 53. Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 66. 54. Fahs, p. 67. 55. Michael W. Kaufmann, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 87. 56. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 6, p. 325. 57. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 6, p. 342. 58. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 6, p. 343. 59. For a summary of these events and Milton's response to them, see Yearns, pp. 62–63; Johns, pp. 84–96. 60. J.E.F., ‘Health of Florida, and Gov. Milton as Physician of the State’, Florida Sentinel, Tuesday 21 January 1861. 61. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, p. 426. 62. See Johns, p. 84; Yearns, p. 62; William H. Nulty, Confederate Florida: The Road to Olustee (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), pp. 28–29. 63. ‘Tropical Fruits’, The St. Augustine Examiner, Saturday 4 July 1860. 64. The Gainesville News, 31 April 1885. 65. Qtd in The New Yorker 63.39 (16 November 1987), p. 148. 66. Gloria Jahoda, The Other Florida (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967; rpt., Port Salerno, FL: Florida Classics Library, 1984), pp. 68–69. 67. Jahoda, pp. 69–70. 68. Quoted in Jahoda, p. 70. 69. Daisy Parker's honours thesis claims that the Governor ‘hanged himself in his barn’ (n.p.). However, most accounts agree that he in fact killed himself with a shotgun while alone in an upstairs bedroom of the plantation house. See, for instance, Clifton Paisley, The Red Hills of Florida, 1528–1865 (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1989), p. 209; Stanley, p. 181. 70. Dr Charles Hentz, ‘My Autobiography’. MS #332 in the Hentz Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Library of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Vol. 1, pp. 361–362. 71. ‘Death of Governor Milton’, Lake City Columbian, Wednesday, 5 April 1865. 72. Daisy Parker, honours thesis, n.p. 73. Stanley, p. 181. 74. Peter Ackroyd, Milton in America (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), pp. 8, 74. 75. Ackroyd, p. 214. 76. ‘Gen. Milton’, The Cedar Keys Telegraph, Saturday, 28 July 1860.