Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Legacy of St. George Tucker
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Vanderford, Chad Vincent
BIRTHDATE: c. 1974-8/8/2017
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.utpb.edu/cas/academic-departments/history-department/faculty/chad-vanderford * http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/oaoa/obituary.aspx?pid=186356794
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015037794
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Vanderford, Chad
Field of activity: History--United States
Profession or occupation:
College teachers
Found in: The legacy of St. George Tucker, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Chad
Vanderford)
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin, website
viewed June 15, 2015 (Chad Vanderford, Assistant
Professor of History , Early American History; BA,
University of California, Berkeley; MA, California
State, Northridge; PhD (2005), Louisiana State
University)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born September 28, 1973; died August 8, 2017, in Odessa, TX; son of Ron and Judy Vanderford; married; wife’s name Nichole; children: Emilie.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A.; California State, Northridge, M.A.; Louisiana State University, Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Odessa, Texas, associate professor of history.
WRITINGS
Contributor of academic articles to periodicals, including Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, and Virginia Magazine of History & Biography.
SIDELIGHTS
Professor and historian Chad Vincent Vanderford researched and wrote about slavery in Virginia, the Founding Fathers, the South, the history of intellectual life, and political thought. He was associate professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin where he taught early American history. Vanderford died at the age of forty-three on August 8, 2017, in Odessa, Texas.
Vanderford published academic articles in history journals, including Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, and Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, writing about slavery, secession, the Confederacy, the Founding Fathers, and Henry Tucker. He earned a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree from California State, Northridge, and a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 2005. His dissertation, “Rights of Humans, Rights of States: The Academic Legacy of St. George Tucker in Nineteenth-century Virginia” was the basis for his 2017 academic book, The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and Rights of States, 1771–1897.
His book examines how college professors in the South viewed the rights granted in the Constitution, as well as slavery and states’ rights, and the relationship between the two. He contends that historians need to consider such views in the context of their own time, not by our modern sensibilities. For example, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, historians struggled to understand proslavery and pro-secession arguments of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century. Vanderford focuses on one Founding Father, St. George Tucker (1752-1827), who was a professor and politician, and his descendants, son Henry Tucker (1780-1848), and grandson, John Randolph Tucker (1823-1897), in order to show how professors of the time helped formulate Southern ideology regarding human rights, slavery, and states’ rights.
In his thesis, Vanderford shows how academics at the time made the distinction that the justification for slavery was based, not on classical natural right, which said that because men are generally unequal the wise and the superior should rule, but on modern natural right, which said that political power comes from the consent of the governed, who are equally free and independent people in a free and independent state. This modern natural right, therefore, required a state be free and independent of the federal government, and sought continuation of slavery that followed from this natural right, rather than from notions of racism and economy.
As to Vanderford’s overall thesis, Brent Tarter noted in his opinion on the Civil War Book Review website: “Now is the time to complicate rather than to simplify things and try to understand how ideas about religion, race, class, law, and natural right operated together in the intellectual soup of southern legal and political thought…Almost all inquiries about the nineteenth-century south benefit if they employ the long historical context used here.” Commenting at Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, Patrick H. Breen observed: “Vanderford is always passionate and often insightful but sometimes awkward. He occasionally appears unfamiliar with a rich historiographical tradition. For example, Vanderford spends much time discussing the way that defenses of slavery could avoid racism, overlooking the fact that Eugene D. Genovese made the same point nearly fifty years ago.”
In another observation, Vanderford explained that slaveholders justified not freeing their slaves out of fear of bodily harm from the freed slaves. In a review in Journal of Southern History, Jennifer Oast commented: “One of Vanderford’s most problematic arguments is his assertion that [St. George] Tucker, [Thomas] Jefferson, and others were not hypocritical for continuing to be slaveholders because they had a legitimate right to self-preservation that would be threatened if they were to free their slaves.” Although Vanderford provides a stronger discussion on states’ rights, according to Oast, she added: “Vanderford’s arguments are thought provoking but not entirely convincing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, 2017, Jennifer Oast, The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897, p. 404.
Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 2016, Patrick H. Breen, review of The Legacy of St. George Tucker.
ONLINE
Civil War Book Review, http://www.cwbr.com/ (November 1, 2017), Brent Tarter, review of The Legacy of St. George Tucker.
OBITUARIES
Dignity Memorial, http://obits.dignitymemorial.com/ (November 1, 2017), Dr. Chad Vincent Vanderford obituary.
Chad Vanderford
chad
Associate Professor of History
Office MB 4148
Phone (432) 552-2312
E-mail: vanderford_c@utpb.edu
Education
BA, University of California, Berkeley
MA, California State, Northridge
PhD (2005), Louisiana State University
Research and Teaching Interests
In his research and teaching Dr. Vanderford focuses on the history of intellectual life in general, with especial emphasis on political thought, the Founding Fathers, and the South.
Courses Taught
United States Survey (to 1877 & since 1877); World Civilizations to 1500; Colonial America,1607-1763; American Revolution, 1763-1789; U. S. Early National, 1789-1815; Jacksonian America,1815-1850; Founding Fathers; Historian's Craft.
Recent Publications
THE LEGACY OF ST. GEORGE TUCKER: COLLEGE PROFESSORS IN VIRGINIA CONFRONT SLAVERY AND THE RIGHTS OF STATES, 1771-1897. KNOXVILLE: UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS, 2015.
"Declarations of Independence: Slavery, Secession, and the Confederate Scapegoat." Tennessee Historical Quarterly LXX (2011): 92-107.
"The Divided Legacy of a Founding Father: Henry and Beverley Tucker confront Nullification and Secession." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography CXIX (2011): 210-243.
In Memory of
Dr. Chad Vincent Vanderford
September 28, 1973 - August 8, 2017
Obituary
On Tuesday, August 8, 2017, Dr. Chad Vincent Vanderford, 43, of Odessa, was taken too early from his family and friends. A wake will be held on Monday, August 14, 2017, 6:00 – 9:00 pm at Frank Wilson Funeral Home with a Rosary at 7:00 pm. A funeral service will be held on Tuesday, August 15, 2017, 11:00 am at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Odessa, TX. Chad is survived by his wife, Nichole; his daughter, Emilie; his parents, Ron and Judy Vanderford; his aunt and uncle Carol and Len Davids; his half-brother, Jim Rosenthal and his family; his uncles, Raymond and Robert Vanderford; his parents-in-law, Jim and Sandy Rougeau;
The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897
Jennifer Oast
83.2 (May 2017): p404.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897. By Chad Vanderford. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015. Pp. x, 262. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-216-4.)
Chad Vanderford has written an intellectual history of how white southern scholars viewed the Constitution, particularly regarding slavery and states' rights, in The Legacy of St George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897. Vanderford analyzes how professors in Virginia--in particular, three generations of the Tucker family--addressed those contentious topics.
St. George Tucker, his son, Henry Tucker, and his grandson, John Randolph Tucker, are the central figures, although the writings of other contemporary intellectuals receive attention, too, such as Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ruffner, and George Frederick Holmes. Two chapters are devoted to each generation of Tuckers and their contemporaries: the first chapter examines their views on slavery; the second focuses on their opinions on states' rights. Throughout, Vanderford makes the tenuous claim that southern arguments for the necessity of slavery and the rights of states were based on intellectual issues related to natural right, not motivated by racism or the economic benefits of slavery.
Vanderford draws a distinction between modern natural right and classic natural right. Modern natural right is the idea expressed at the founding of the United States that the consent of the governed is necessary to legitimate government and that all men are equal. In contrast, classic natural right is the theory that the wise should rule; it is drawn from ancient philosophers like Aristotle, who believed that men were inherently unequal. Vanderford asserts that St. George Tucker, in his role as a professor and a writer, was a strong defender of the concept of modern natural right.
How did St. George Tucker's championing of modern natural right relate to slavery? According to Vanderford, while Tucker did argue that Virginians should free their slaves, he and his like-minded contemporaries justified slavery because they feared retribution from manumitted slaves. One of Vanderford's most problematic arguments is his assertion that Tucker, Jefferson, and others were not hypocritical for continuing to be slaveholders because they had a legitimate right to self-preservation that would be threatened if they were to free their slaves. He argues that historians have underestimated the inherent dangers of freedpeople to their former masters: "it may well be contemporary historians, not men like Jefferson and Tucker, who have failed to give the slaves of this period their due" (p. 22). Generally, Vanderford takes a dismissive tone toward modern historians and their "obsession with racism" (p. 12). Perhaps Tucker, Jefferson, and their intellectual heirs did try to justify slavery as a necessary evil by claiming the right of self-preservation, but Vanderford's presentation of this view as legitimate is puzzling. Vanderford also discusses how St. George Tucker's legacy was betrayed when southern intellectuals began to argue that slavery was a positive good instead of just a necessary evil, which reflected a new reliance on classic natural right.
Vanderford is stronger in his chapters on the Tuckers' views on states' rights. St. George Tucker argued that individual states had rights analogous to the rights of individuals. Because under modern natural right individuals can leave the social compact, the states also had the right to secede from the United States under the Constitution. In contrast, Vanderford argues that those who opposed secession had reverted to classic natural right in insisting that the states remain subservient to a "wise" federal government. Vanderford's sympathies lie with the Tuckers; regarding the present he argues "the rights of states should continue to exist as a means to defend the rights of political minorities" (p. 137).
In brief, Vanderford's arguments are thought provoking but not entirely convincing. This book would make for some spirited conversation in a graduate seminar.
Jennifer Oast
Bloomsburg University
Oast, Jennifer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Oast, Jennifer. "The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 2, 2017, p. 404+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495476216&it=r&asid=d7d154575b4abe8bf41d151b9924d611. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495476216
Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 2016, Patrick H. Breen, review of The Legacy of St. George Tucker.
Breen, Patrick H.
Source:
Virginia Magazine of History & Biography. 2016, Vol. 124 Issue 3, p266-268. 3p. 1 Black and White Photograph.
Document Type:
Book Review
Subjects:
LEGACY of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery & the Rights of States 1771-1897, The (Book)
INSTITUTIONAL Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges & Businesses in Virginia 1680-1860 (Book)
VANDERFORD, Chad
OAST, Jennifer
NONFICTION
Section:
Book Reviews
The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia
Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897 • Chad
Vanderford • Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015
• x, 262 pp. • $49.95
Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges,
and Businesses in Virginia, 1680-1860 • Jennifer Oast
• New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016 • xii,
264 pp. • $99.99
In April 2016, the New York Times ran a prominent article on a peculiar fact about the history of Georgetown University. In 1838, Fr. Thomas Mulledy, S.J., the provincial of the Maryland Society of Jesus, arranged the sale of 272 slaves owned by Jesuits to Louisiana. For Georgetown, which has been struggling to understand its obligations to black students and the black community more broadly, this sale is telling. Of course, Georgetown was not the only school to profit from slavery or the slave trade, and it is no surprise that historians are also grappling with the legacy of slavery in such places as Virginia's colleges.
In The Legacy of St. George Tucker, Chad Vanderford examines St. George Tucker, a law professor at William and Mary famous for two positions: a support of states' rights and a plan to emancipate Virginia's slaves. Vanderford attempts to track these ideas by looking at their place in the lives of St. George Tucker, one of his sons, Henry Tucker, and a grandson, John Randolph Tucker. Vanderford wants to defend states' rights, but he thinks that such a defense "works only if built upon a foundation of modern natural rights," by which he means essentially a Lockean foundation (p. 7).
Vanderford rightly describes his own interpretations as "idiosyncratic," but the more striking thing is how this comes across as an autodidact's book (p. x). Vanderford is always passionate and often insightful but sometimes awkward. He occasionally appears unfamiliar with a rich historiographical tradition. For example, Vanderford spends much time discussing the way that defenses of slavery could avoid racism, overlooking the fact that Eugene D. Genovese made the same point nearly fifty years ago. His treatment of classical natural rights theorists also is thin, not recognizing the importance of such modern thinkers as Jacques Maritain. Although he is fascinated by political philosophy, Vanderford is not especially systematic. He uncharitably dismisses Richard Randolph, who freed his slaves in his will, as caddish, when there is nothing in Randolph's denouncement of slavery that is inconsistent with a Lockean understanding of individual rights (p. 76). Indeed, as one reads Vanderford's take down of Randolph, one wonders if his real problem with Randolph is that Randolph was able to move past the presumption of a race war in a way that none of the Tuckers could. Likewise, Vanderford sees Henry Tucker, not Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, as the true heir of their father, but one wonders if this is a helpful way to approach St. George Tucker's ideas. By the time Vanderford gets to Tucker's grandson, John Randolph Tucker, the effort to draw a line between the liberal non-racist and Christian racist appears untenable. Ultimately, Vanderford fails to convince me that St. George Tucker's family preserved its patriarch's legacy, which is less important than what the book does, which is to present a provocative and engaging discussion about the relationship between modern liberal political thought, slavery, and racism.
In Institutional Slavery, Jennifer Oast contributes to a historiographical trend of the last forty years in which historians have been moving away from using the large cotton plantation as the model for slavery. Oast complements the stories of other historians who have examined slavery in cities and on small farms by studying those slaves who "were not owned by individuals but by churches, schools, and colleges" (p. 1). Institutional Slavery focuses on corporate slavery in Virginia at Protestant churches, free schools, and colleges, and briefly on the history of industrial slavery, concentrating primarily on Virginia's colonial ironworks and its early national mines. Unlike Vanderford, Oast approaches her subject cautiously. Recounting the story of slavery at Briery Presbyterian Church -- in a chapter mischievously entitled "The Worst Kind of Slavery" -- Oast shows how the church hired out slaves it owned to help subsidize the church. This way of funding the church created profits and problems, as its members -- who accepted the propriety of individual slaveholding -- began to wonder if churches should really be in the slaveholding business. By 1835, the church decided "to allow the slaves to choose their own masters 'much to the satisfaction of the slaves & the congregation'" (p. 101). The richness of such carefully wrought stories brings into question the theoretical framework of the book, that there was an institutional slavery. For it is unclear that the issues facing churches that owned slaves were really of the same kind as those faced by mines or schools. Oast herself rightly points out that the Yeats School, which provided good medical care for the slaves who needed it, "stands in contrast with
how Briery Presbyterian Church, another institutional slave owner, hired out its slaves" (p. 70).
Oast's care for the sources creates another problem: she has been unable to find much evidence of how the slaves who were owned or leased by institutions experienced their slavery. At times, institutional slavery seems less paternalistic, although the example of Briery Presbyterian selling slaves to owners of their own choosing shows how careful one should be in making a general statement about institutions that owned and hired slaves. According to Oast, slaves owned by the Yeats School endured a "particularly brutal" form of slavery because they had to endure "the annual humiliation of being re-hired on the auction block, the fear of separation from loved ones, and the lack of stability resulting from not knowing where they would live from one year to the next" (p. 73). But these indignities were connected to slave hiring, not necessarily to institutional slavery. In fact, the striking thing about the Yeats School's slaves was not their vulnerability but the astonishing stability of their situation. One hundred and thirty years after Yeats wrote his will, the slaves who were part of his original bequest had grown to eighty-six slaves, all of whom still remained in Nansemond County. And this may be the most remarkable thing about institutional slavery. Because institutions can exist in perpetuity, institutional slavery was, when the institutions themselves were stable, an enduring form of slavery.
The permanence of these institutions makes Oast's work potentially more salient today, for people may ask how these institutions should atone for their historical involvement in slavery. On this question, Oast's answer -- we can "erect tangible memorials to the slaves that they once owned" -- strikes me as a meager first step (p. 239-40). I am not convinced that Vanderford's answer is right, but the scope of his project -- rethinking our political principles and the federal system -- seems more appropriate for someone who is serious about addressing our tangled history with slavery.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and Rights of States, 1771-1897
by Vanderford, Chad
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Retail Price: $49.95
Issue: Summer 2016
ISBN: 9781621902164
Legal Legacies: How Virginia’s Law Professors Defended Slavery and States’ Rights
Law professors were among the most influential people in the southern United States during the century and a quarter this volume treats. It is unfortunate that as a discreet population they have not received more attention. Here they do. Four law professors of the Tucker family of Virginia occupied unusually prominent positions in the legal and political realms of the antebellum south. Their books on law and the Constitution were instrumental in shaping southern politics before the Civil War, and their legacy remained important long afterward. Their students resided throughout the south and influenced legal cultures in all the states as they taught in other law schools and served in legislatures, on courts, in constitutional conventions, and in Congress. The Tuckers and their students contributed to southern defenses of slavery, defined philosophies of federalism and state rights, and if they lived past the Civil War struggled to fit their beliefs to the new constitutional and legal orders that emerged afterward—or to fit the new orders to their old beliefs.
Chad Vanderford, currently associate professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, focuses on three Tuckers, beginning with paterfamilias St. George Tucker (1752–1827), law professor at the College of William and Mary, state court judge, federal judge, and compiler of the first American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1803), which included the first extended commentaries on the Constitutions of the United States and of Virginia. The second is his elder son, Henry St. George Tucker (1780–1848), state court judge, law professor at his own school in Winchester and at the University of Virginia, congressman, and author of Commentaries on the Laws of Virginia (1831). The third is in turn his son, John Randolph Tucker (1823–1897), attorney general of the Confederate state of Virginia, law professor at Washington and Lee, congressman, author of the posthumously published The Constitution of the United States(1899), and president of the American Bar Association. Vanderford also includes substantial sections on several other Virginia professors who wrote about or taught law, history, political economy, or philosophy and on Henry St. George Tucker’s brother, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851), who taught law at William and Mary, published A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (1845), and wrote a novel, The Partisan Leader (1831), one of the first arguments for southern secession.
St. George Tucker, Henry St. George Tucker, and John Randolph Tucker each is the primary subject of two chapters, one treating slavery and the other treating state rights. Vanderford argues that all three men grounded their beliefs on both subjects in the American Revolution’s natural right understanding that all people were born free and equal and that government was based on the voluntary consent of the governed. Members of the Revolutionary generation withdrew consent from the government of Great Britain and gave consent to their separate states and to the United States. Each state was a voluntary, consensual political entity composed of people—that is, of adult white men—who had been born free and equal. The new United States government was also a voluntary, consensual union of free and equal states, which having given their consent to join the union retained the right to withdraw that consent.
Slavery posed more complex and difficult interpretive problems. The Tuckers understood it to be a naturally occurring phenomenon throughout history. The Bible did not condemn slavery, but they nevertheless regarded slavery as a violation of natural right because enslaved people had not voluntarily given their consent to that form of government over their lives. Enslaved people had not consented to the state or national governments, either, and therefore not being parties to the governmental compact were not entitled to rights of citizenship; but were they entitled to freedom by natural right? Evidently not.
In the 1790s St. George Tucker prepared a plan for the gradual abolition of slavery. His plan was so gradual that it might have taken a century to put into effect. Never adopted or even seriously considered, it was decidedly limited in its scope. If implemented it would have eventually converted enslaved Virginians into a species of vassals with few or no civil or economic rights. That is about as far as any Tuckers went toward explicit public criticism of slavery or expressing before the Civil War an opinion about accepting freed people into the consensual body politic. Vanderford suggests that Tucker viewed slavery as a necessary evil. Perhaps a better way to categorize the Tuckers’ perception is that slavery was a sort of entailed inheritance that became essential to their way of life. They could not abolish it even if they wanted to without impoverishing themselves or immorally destroying or expelling enslaved or freed people from the country or making themselves vulnerable in a race war. A very Jeffersonian view.
St. George Tucker and Henry St. George Tucker both died before having to face the question of withdrawing consent to the union of states—secession—which Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (who also died before the secession crisis) advocated and which John Randolph Tucker of the third generation accepted. But they all faced slavery. They all owned slaves and lived in the parts of Virginia where slavery was almost ubiquitous and had become the cornerstone of the way of life elite white Virginians had created. The Tuckers’ legal theories about natural right played a prominent part in public discussions about government and the place of slavery in the nation. Their jurisprudence gave aid and comfort to the pro-slavery ideology that developed during the decades before the Civil War and to legitimizing secession. Vanderford embellishes this with extended asides on the intellectual ferment about slavery and the law in which other Virginia college professors also engaged.
This book suggests the value of additional inquiries about the spread of these ideas through the southern legal community and into the law and particularly into the understandings of the general population. It is not fair to criticize the author for not writing a different book, but I wish he had included more about Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The most extreme of the Tuckers, he is the subject of some very good scholarship and on the question of slavery might be regarded as a Calhoun before Calhoun and on secession as a fire-eater before fire-eaters. Vanderford treats him as an outlier in the family rather than as a member taking some of the family’s core beliefs further or in a different direction.
Vanderford believes that the Tuckers’ understanding of natural right was the basis for their ideas about slavery as well as their theories of federalism and state rights. He rather casually dismisses race and racism from the inquiry. The explanation for doing so and the consequences are not entirely satisfying intellectually. It reminds me of the old saying about a good lawyer being a person able to contemplate a thing which is inextricably intertwined with another thing without regard to that other thing with which it is inextricably intertwined. It produces a clarity of vision that is too much narrowed and consequently distorted and without proper context. Leaving out race may have robbed this inquiry of an extra dimension it needs in the same way that concentrating entirely on race to the exclusion of legal theory would have.
That criticism aside, and I may even be in error on that, The Legacy of St. George Tucker invites legal and intellectual historians to go forth and do likewise throughout the states of the old south. Now is the time to complicate rather than to simplify things and try to understand how ideas about religion, race, class, law, and natural right operated together in the intellectual soup of southern legal and political thought. And to keep an eye open for post–Civil War changes in legal thought, too, which Vanderford wisely investigated with some thoroughness. Almost all inquiries about the nineteenth-century south benefit if they employ the long historical context used here, with the Civil War not just as the end of something or as the beginning of something else but in the center of a long interpretive arc contemplating change and continuity.