Two Poems for Dr. King on April 4——National Poetry Month 2025

 

Martin Luther King lays on the balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel moments after he was shot as aids point to where they believe the shot that killed him was fired.

Except for the month of April, this blog is generally in the business of history. But in this month dedicated to poetry, things that matter can get short shrift. Take today. It is the 57th anniversary of a gut-wrenching occasion that left a scar on the nation and on many of our hearts. It was on April 4, 1968 that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. He was in the city to complete some unfinished business—a march in support of striking garbage collectors, a follow up to an earlier march where violence had broken out as younger marchers began smashing shop windows.He returned against the unanimous advice of his closest associates. But he felt he had a duty to complete the march in peace. 

 

On the eve of his assassination Dr. King delivered his eerily prescient final speech to a packed church.

The rainy night before, Dr. King went to a local church that was packed to the rafters to hear him. It was there that to a strangely hushed crowd he delivered his own elegy: 

… I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. 

The night of the killing riots erupted around the nation. Black rage boiled on to the streets. In Chicago the West Side burned. White America cowered in front of their television sets in fear and horror. At tiny Shimer College, I locked myself in a closet and cried for what seemed like hours. 

We’ll leave it to the pathetic conspiracy theorists to argue about who to pin the rap on. It really doesn’t matter if we know the name attached to the finger on the trigger, or the names of who may have paid or abetted, or even of those who just winked. A festering boil of racism killed Dr. King in the forlorn hope that they could kill his dream and the march to justice. Traumatic events like this are often processed through poetry. Think of Walt Whitman’s elegies to fallen Lincoln—O Captain, My Captain and When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloomed. 

Today, let’s remember through the eyes of two Black women. Nordette Adams grew up in New Orleans. After a varied career as a journalist, government public relations person, ghost writer, technical writer, and writer and producer of documentaries, she is concentrating on her creative writing and poetry. 

 

Nordette Adams.

 Remembering A Life 

I remember him in the misted vision of toddler years 

and again in girlhood, the booming voice on TV, 

someone grown-ups talked about, eyelids flapped wide. 

Elders huddled ’round the screen enraptured, 

in fear for him, in awe. 

 

I remember him. His words swept the land, singing our passion. 

Dogs growled in streets. Men in sheets. 

Police battering my people. (Water, a weapon.) 

Yet my people would rejoice ... And mourn. 

 

I remember him, a fearsome warrior crying peace, 

a man—blemished by clay, the stain of sin as 

any other, calling on the Rock— 

Death's sickle on his coat tails, 

yet he spied glory. 

 

Shall we walk again and remember him, 

not as the Madison Aveners do, 

but in solitude and hope 

with acts of courage and compassion, 

with lives of greater scope 

carving fresh paths of righteousness? 

 

I remember. 

—Nordette Adams © Copyright January 2004, Nordette Adams 

 

June Jordan.

June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, Poet, activist, teacher, and essayist, she was a prolific, passionate, and influential voice for liberation. Jordan died in 2002 but lived and wrote on the front lines of American poetry with political vision and moral clarity. 

In Memorium: Martin Luther King Jr. 

I 

honey people murder mercy U.S.A. 

the milkland turn to monsters teach 

to kill to violate pull down destroy 

the weakly freedom growing fruit from

being born 

 

America 

tomorrow yesterday rip rape 

exacerbate despoil disfigure 

crazy running threat the 

deadly thrall 

appall belief dispel 

the wildlife burn the breast 

the onward tongue 

the outward hand 

deform the normal rainy 

riot sunshine shelter wreck 

of darkness derogate 

delimit blank 

explode deprive 

assassinate and batten up 

like bullets fatten up 

the raving greed 

reactivate a springtime terrorizing 

death by men by more 

than you or I can 

 

STOP 

II 

They sleep who know a regulated place

or pulse or tide or changing sky 

according to some universal 

stage direction obvious 

like shorewashed shells 

 

we share an afternoon of mourning 

in between no next predictable

except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal 

bleach the blacklong lunging 

ritual of fright insanity and more 

deplorable abortion

 more and 

more 

—June Jordon From Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005) © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust.

 

 

 

Amanda Gorman still just 27 years old has become America’s most popular and widely read poet. She has piled accomplishment upon accomplishment up in a few short years from graduating from Harvard suma cum laude and being named the first National Youth Poet Laureate overcoming learning disabilities and a speech impediment. 

Her poem for Joe Biden’s first inauguration, The Hill We Clime made her a national celebrity who followed up with other high profile performances at the Library of Congress, the Super Bowl, and the 2024 Democratic National Convention as well as a bestselling collections The Hill We Climb: Poems and Call Us What We Carry and Something, Someday for young readers. 

Gorman has also carefully curated her own image as a fashionista, designer, model, brand spokesperson, and entrepreneur. She is also politically active and has openly said she want to run for President in 2036. 

In addition to the aspirational anthems that have inspired so many, Gorman also uses her poetic platform to address major social issues including climate change. In the wake of the May 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Gorman published a short poem on Twitter and encouraged action to promote gun safety, as well as penning Hymn for the Hurting. She continued to express her support for Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in a poem posted on Twitter on June 24, 2022, which includes the line, “We will not let Roe v. Wade slowly fade.” 

Today we will look back at the poem she read at the Library of Congress back in 2017 when she was named National Youth Poet Laureate. 

The hand written manuscript of In This Place (An American Lyric) is preserved at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

In This Place (An American Lyric)

There’s a poem in this place— 

in the footfalls in the halls 

in the quiet beat of the seats. 

It is here, at the curtain of day, 

where America writes a lyric 

you must whisper to say. 

 

There’s a poem in this place— 

in the heavy grace, 

the lined face of this noble building, 

collections burned and reborn twice. 

 

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square

where protest chants 

tear through the air 

like sheets of rain, 

where love of the many

 swallows hatred of the few. 

 

There’s a poem in Charlottesville 

where tiki torches string a ring of flame

 tight round the wrist of night 

where men so white they gleam blue— 

seem like statues 

where men heap that long wax burning 

ever higher where Heather Heyer 

blooms forever in a meadow of resistance. 

 

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant 

of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising 

its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago— 

a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil, 

strutting upward and aglow. 

 

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas 

where streets swell into a nexus 

of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown, 

where courage is now so common 

that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters. 

 

There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide 

where a single mother swelters 

in a windowless classroom, teaching 

black and brown students in Watts 

to spell out their thoughts 

so her daughter might write 

this poem for you. 

 

There's a lyric in California 

where thousands of students march for blocks, 

undocumented and unafraid; 

where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom 

in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community. 

She knows hope is like a stubborn 

ship gripping a dock, 

a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer 

or knock down a dream. 

 

How could this not be her city

 su nación 

our country 

our America, 

our American lyric to write— 

a poem by the people, the poor, 

the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,

the native, the immigrant, 

the black, the brown, the blind, the brave, 

the undocumented and undeterred, 

the woman, the man, the nonbinary, 

the white, the trans, 

the ally to all of the above 

and more? 

 

Tyrants fear the poet. 

Now that we know it 

we can’t blow it. We owe it 

to show it 

not slow it 

although it 

hurts to sew it 

when the world 

skirts below it. 

 

 Hope— 

we must bestow 

it like a wick in the poet 

so it can grow, lit, 

bringing with it 

stories to rewrite— 

the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated 

a history written that need not be repeated 

a nation composed but not yet completed. 

 

There’s a poem in this place— 

a poem in America 

a poet in every American 

who rewrites this nation, who tells 

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth 

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time— 

a poet in every American 

who sees that our poem penned 

doesn’t mean our poem’s end. 

 

 There’s a place where this poem dwells— 

it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell 

where we write an American lyric 

we are just beginning to tell. 

 —Amanda Gorman

On Trans by Miller Oberman—National Poetry Month 2025

Poet Miller Oberman and his new collection Impossible Things.

Yesterday, April 1, was the Trans Day Visibility. But it is not too late for this apt verse from Miller Oberman, the author of Impossible Things, from Duke University Press, 2024 and The Unstill Ones, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017. He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Poems from Impossible Things have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, and Foglifter. Poems from The Unstill Ones appeared in Poetry, London Review of Books, The Nation, Boston Review, Tin House, and Harvard Review. Miller is an editor at Broadsided Press, which publishes visual-literary collaborations and teaches at and serves on the board of Brooklyn Poets. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in New York. 

 On Trans

The process of through is ongoing. 

 

The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall 

down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. 

 

We were just going. I was just leaving, 

which is to say, coming 

elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words 

 move through my limbs, lungs, mouth, as I appear to sit 

peacefully at your hearth       transubstantiating some wine. 

It was a rough red,                 it was one of those nights we were not 

forced by circumstances       to drink wine out of mugs. 

Circumstances being,            in those cases, no one had been 

 

transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough       to wash dishes. 

I brought armfuls of wood                              from the splitting stump. 

Many of them, because it was cold,                went right on top 

of their recent ancestors.                                It was an ice night. 

 

They transpired visibly,            resin to spark, 

bark to smoke, wood to ash.     I was 

transgendering and drinking     the rough red at roughly 

the same rate                            and everyone who looked, saw. 

 

The translucence of flames       beat against the air 

against our skins.                     This can be done with 

or without clothes on.              This can be done with 

or without wine or whiskey     but never without water: 

 

evaporation is also ongoing.                     Most visibly in this case 

in the form of wisps of steam                    rising from the just washed hair 

of a form at the fire whose beauty was      in the earth’s 

turning, that night and many nights,          transcendent. 

 

I felt heat changing me.                    The word for this is 

transdesire, but in extreme cases      we call it transdire 

or when this heat becomes your maker we say 

transire, or when it happens             in front of a hearth: 

transfire. 

—Miller Oberman

Our National Poetry Month Series 2025 Kicks Of With Cheryl Caesar’s Aftermath

It’s National Poetry Month again! If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our 14th annual round-up of daily doses of verse! If you are new, here’s the scoop. Every day of the month I will feature poets and their poems. I aim to be as broad and inclusive as possible in style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices. 

Many years certain themes emerge either by plan or by happenstance. This year I suspect we will share voices of experience of repression of all sorts and rising resistance. The times call for the poet as the prophet, tribune, and rebel. We’ll see. I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too. 

As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims. Yours may be different. But I am open to—eager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers. I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts. I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff. Please feel free to turn me on to some. Here is a challenge—Poets, send me your own best stuff be it personal, political, or polemical. I don’t and can’t promise to use everything. E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net . 

Cheryl Caesar.

Today we will kick things off with a tone setter—Cheryl Caesar’s Aftermath. Caesar is a writer, teacher of writing and visual artist living in Lansing, Michigan. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University and does research and advocacy for culturally-responsive pedagogy. 

Aftermath first appeared in Across the Margin. Cheryl’s chapbook of protest poetry Flatman (Thurston Howl Publications) is available from Amazon. 

Other artwork and verse has appeared in journals including Abergavenny Small Press Literary Journal, After the Pause, Angel Rust Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Breathe Everyone!, Datura Literary Journal, Fresh Words, The Gorko Gazette, Graphic Violence Lit, The Highland Park Poetry Challenge, Last Leaves Magazines, Plants and Poetry Journal, Poetic Sun, Punk Monk Magazine, Silver Birch Press, They Call Us Feminist Literary Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, and The Washington Square Review. 

 Aftermath 

On the first day our Facebook pages went black. 

We drove to work through a film of tears 

and hugged each other in the hallways, unashamed,

and in the women’s room. We talked about renewing passports,

and families in Canada. We avoided referring

to the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. We went

on to meet our classes, or conference with students

who complained, “I didn’t know

this assignment would be so evidence-based.” 

We kept our blurry eyes front, and flowed

through the day on a current of work and love. 

 

On the second day, we posted galaxies and poems

of resistance on Facebook, and the numbers

of suicide hotlines. And Joplin’s “Solace” was playing

on WKAR on the way in, and the sun

reached a few gentle fingers through the clouds.

 So at work we taped the resistance poems

to the inside stall doors in the women’s room. 

In the halls we wondered how the Refugee

Development Center was doing, how we could help. 

         We went on to conference with students who said, 

“I just kinda smushed two facts and two sources together,”

for the sake of convenience. 

 

And we slept several hours each night, albeit 

          with Ambien, which we had been off for three months. 

And now I have to admit that I have no idea

whether anyone has gone back on Ambien but me. 

But it feels so much better, stronger, safer, to say “we,”

like Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, explaining, 

“We put the butter on our skin.” She had no idea either. 

But a friend had posted on Facebook, “This is no reason

to break your sobriety,” so I know others are tempted 

to temporary oblivion, and I kind of smush

the facts together.  Which is I guess

a definition of fiction. On Monday I will see

 

the fact-smushing student, and tell him, 

“So maybe research is not your jam.  Maybe you prefer

fiction. But in these times, submerged in a flood

of information, wouldn’t it be good to have a few tools

to tell the difference?” I hope it will work.  I hope

he still believes in some kind of truth. Yesterday he wrote,

“I used a reliable source but the facts were wrong. I learned

not to trust the internet.”

 —Cheryl Caesar

Mrs. Adams’ Famous Dear John Letter Laid Down Early Demands for the Ladies

Abigail Adams, painted here as the first mistress of the Executive Mansion in Washington D.C., kept up a frequent and detailed correspondence with her husband John while he was in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress.

Note—This has become a semi-traditional wind-up for Women’s History Month here. 

 

On this date in 1776 as the Revolutionary War was still young and Boston was besieged by George Washington Abigail Adams sent a letter to her husband John who was in Philadelphia as a Delegate to the Continental Congress from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. The success of the war against the most powerful empire in the world was far from being assured and the Declaration of Independence, of which John was a prime mover, was yet months away. But amidst the turmoil Mrs. Adams admonished her husband not to neglect, as male governors had done from time immemorial, rights and needs of women. 

 

In the midst of a lengthy, chatty letter filled with news from home she included one remarkable passage, not even a full paragraph: 

 

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. 

 

Abigail may have regarded the threat of rebellion with tongue firmly in cheek. For his part John did not seem to take it seriously, although he frequently relied on his wife’s advice. Certainly, neither he nor Congress did anything about it. To lawyer Adams, women’s rights and privileges would certainly continue to be constrained by English Common Law which is to say they hardly existed. Women were and would remain virtual chattel first of their fathers and then of their husbands. Even widows and spinsters had precious little control of their property or affairs. 

 

Abigail's noted comment was contained in a short passage of the lengthy three page letter.

Mrs. Adams was 32 years old that year and the mother of five children. She was every inch the match of her husband, well read, keenly intelligent, strong willed, and independent. She comfortably mastered raising her brood and managing the affairs of the family and their small stone farm during the long absences—months, even years—while her husband was away helping to invent America and serve its interests. In New England where many wives of merchant traders, fishermen, and seafarers had to cope with such long absences perhaps women were more used to self-sufficiency than in other regions where they mostly stayed with their mates on family farms or tended house in villages and towns. 

 

Since the letter was not a public document, it roused no movement among women who might have been similarly disposed. It was not published until 1848 when Abigail’s grandson Charles Francis Adams included it in his multi-volume compendium of their correspondence. Of interest mostly to serious historians, the books were not widely read, and little special notice was given to a single passage which was not echoed anywhere else in the collection of missives. 

 

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton cited Abigail's phrases in the first volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage more than 100 years after she wrote it.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took note of the letter in the first volume of their epic History of Woman Suffrage which was first published in 1886. Slowly the quote spread in the suffrage movement largely to add a connection to the nation’s founders. 

 

But it was the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s that really made the passage famous. Gloria Steinem featured it in early issues of MS. Magazine and was featured on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and demonstration placards. 

 

 

Dozens of widely circulated memes keep Abigail's words alive on the internet.

In the 21st Century it has become widely shared as a meme. Whatever Abigail intended by her passing comment, it certainly has grown legs.

When Seward Bought the Ice Box from the Tsar for Pocket Change and Lint

The Negotiators--Left to right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State William H. Seward, William Hunter, Russian chargé d'affaires Bodisco, Russian Ambassador Baron de Stoeckl, Senator Charles Sumner. 

Secretary of State William H. Seward, a hold-over from the Lincoln Administration in the Cabinet of weak and unpopular President Andrew Johnson, concluded secret negotiations with envoys from Tsar Alexander II of Russia on March 30, 1867. With a flourish of a pen he acquired Russian America, a huge territory encompassing 586,412 square miles occupying the northwest of North America. 

 

Of course the interests and claims of the indigenous peoples who had already been enslaved and abused by the Russians and who didn’t recognize the land as the Tsar’s to sell were not considered at all. 

 

Approved by Congress, not without controversy but in good time, the Treasury Department dutifully paid for the deal in full with a single check for $7 million, the equivalent of just a little over two cents an acre—virtual pocket change. From a narrow strip of land along the Pacific Coast it opened up into trackless forest, rugged mountains, tundra, perpetually snow and ice covered lands on the Arctic Sea. Except along the coast and a string of fur trading posts the new land was vastly under populated with only about 2,500 Russians and creoles, and 8,000 native peoples under the direct government of the Russian fur company, and an estimated 50,000 Inuit, Aleut, and other native tribes in the vast ungoverned areas.  

 

Russian America in 1867.

 

A once lucrative trade in sea otter, harbor seal, and other furs was petering out due to excessive harvesting. The territory had no other known resources except for timber too remote to get to markets. The Russians had staked a claim to the whole Pacific Coast as far south as Spanish held Yerba Buena—later San Francisco—based on the explorations of Vitus Bering and his successors beginning in 1741. A lucrative fur trade was established and in 1799 the Russian-America Company was given exclusive rights and charged with governing. 

 

By the early 19th Century much of the area along the coast was being contested by claims by the British and Americans. The British relied on activity by their Hudson’s Bay Company around Vancouver Island and the Americans on the explorations of Lewis and Clark and activity by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. The rivalry first centered on what became called Oregon. The Russian agreed to a treaty with the Americans in the 1840’s that ceded their coastal claims south of Vancouver. 

 

The British, however, were a more troubling rival. Not only had the Russians been at war with them in the Crimea from 1853-56, but they were also emerging as a global threat the Tsarist empire. After gold was discovered along the Thompson River in 1858, the British established the Crown Colony of British Columbia to reinforce their claims on the mainland north of the recently settled border with American-held Oregon abutting the already established Crown Colony of Vancouver (1849) on the island. These territories began to fill with gold seekers and settlers, were soon fairly strongly garrisoned with troops and the natural harbors made a perfect base for the mighty Royal Navy. 

 

In St. Petersburg, the Russian government determined that its North American possessions were indefensible in the event of new hostilities with Britain. Feelers went out to both the British and Americans about a possible sale. The British turned the offer down, probably believing that they would sooner or later come into possession anyway. Serious negotiations with the United States never got underway after the Civil War broke out. The end of the war in the U.S coincided with a huge loan from the House of Rothschild to the Tsar to pay off the debts of the Crimean War coming due. Short on cash and fearing default, the Tsar dispatched a high level team to Washington to negotiate a deal that would pay off the loan, or most of it, and checkmate British ambitions in the Northern Pacific. The shrewd Steward recognized that he had the Russians over the barrel. 

The Treasury Department check for $7 million  in specie used to pay for Alaska and stamped "Paid/"

 

He needed to buy the territory for a sum that would not require any borrowing on the US’s part and which could easily be paid in a lump sum out of Treasury reserves. The Russians were forced to settle for $7 million, far less than they had hoped. The history books would have us believe that the whole nation mocked Seward’s Folly as a wasteful, bad investment. But it was actually only a noisy minority in the press who made the biggest stink. Most Americans, if they paid attention at all, where more than happy to grab more land and pinch British Columbia in on both sides. Many believed that the purchase would lead to the eventual acquisition of the British colonies on the coast.   The treaty sailed through a Senate dominated by a Republican super majority, many of the Senators loyal to Seward, if not his erstwhile Democratic boss. 

 

A typical cartoon mocking the sale shows Seward and President Andrew Johnson hauling away ice while a laughing Russian officer makes off with a $7 bag of gold. 

 

But the protesting press was loud and creative. Alaska was denounced as a frozen wilderness not worth accepting even as a gift. One unknowingly prescient editorialist said that the government would never recoup its investment unless gold was unexpectedly discovered at some distant time. Of course gold was discovered, but not until 1898 when the Alaskan Gold Rush erupted. By that time other Alaskan resources, particularly its fisheries, were also beginning to pay off. 

 

But all of that was far in the future when Russian America became the U. S. Department of Alaska under the military governance of General Jefferson C. Davis—no, not the former Confederate President, the former Union officer. A ceremony in the muddy streets of Sitka on October 16, 1867 outside of the log Government House hauled down the Russian Double Eagle flag—after three soldiers had to be sent shinnying up the flag pole to cut it loose from a snag—and raised the Stars and Stripes . A handful of American troops and ships in the harbor rattled off a ragged salute. 

 

General Jefferson C. Davis, seated, takes control of Alaska in Sitka from Russian officials.  Note the portrait of the Tsar being taken down.  It is doubtful that a portrait of President Andrew Johnson who was on shaky ground with Congress and would soon face impeachment was hung in its place.

 

The Russian residents and Creoles were supposed to be given three years to take American citizenship or return to their homeland. But General Davis ordered most Sitka residents evicted from their homes to make way for Americans and general lawlessness soon overtook the district. Most Russians packed up their belongings and headed home on the first overcrowded ships available. 

 

Alaska finally became the 49th State on January 3, 1960. In the end the massive natural resources of Alaska including not only gold, but copper and other metals, fisheries, timber, and at last oil and natural gas, made Steward’s investment one of the shrewdest in history. It also became a strategic check to the Japanese in World War II and the Soviets in the Cold War. 

 

Ask Sarah Palin who said she could see Russia from her house…

Haven’t We Met Before? A Familiar Dutchman and Sweden’s Claim in America

Peter Minuit, Former Governor of New Amsterdam, famous for purchasing Manhattan Island from the natives, led the Swedish colonization project after being ousted by his Dutch bosses.

Ok, quickly now, students, go to a map and show me the location of the colony of New Sweden. What? You say you’ve never heard of such a thing? Well on March 29, 1638 two ships carrying Swedish and Finnish—Finland was at the time part of Sweden—immigrants sailed up Delaware River and landed near modern day Wilmington. They claimed the river and its drainage for the New Sweden Company. 

 

In command was a veteran of North American colonization, Peter Minuit. Minuit is familiar to school children as the Dutch Governor of New Netherland who supposedly swindled Native Americans out of the island of Manhattan for $24 in beads and trinkets. Like most such arch-typical tales, the story was only half right. Minuit did purchase the island—and near-by Staten Island—for about 60 Guilders—a significant sum in those days—in trade goods including steel ax heads, needles, hoes, drilling awls, pots, and trade wampum. A historian described it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.” Both parties to the deal were happy and neither felt cheated. 

 

Minuit served as governor from 1626 to 1631 when he was suspended by the Dutch West Indies Company because the fur trade with Native Americans, which was supposed to finance the colony, was less remunerative than anticipated and because Minuit was suspected of skimming for his personal purse. Outraged Minuit turned to the Swedes, who were going about the business of entering the competition for New World riches. They were glad to have him. 

 

Queen Christiana was the early teenage daughter of Gustavus Adolphus when Stuyvesant sailed up the Delaware River.  She was called the most learned woman in Europe but created a scandal by refusing to marry or produce an heir and by famously cross dressing.  When she abandoned Sweden's Lutheran state church and converted to Catholicism she abdicated her throne at age 28 in 1654.  She was memorably portrayed by Greta Garbo in a famous 1933 MGM biopic that wrote in a love story with a Spanish Catholic diplomat as a cover for the real Queen's lesbianism.

 

Sweden, at the time, was at its height of its influence as a world power. It ruled over much of Scandinavia including Finland, and most of Norway, portions of Russia, all of modern Estonia, Latvia, and most of Lithuania, parts of Poland, Germany, and Denmark. The Baltic Sea was a virtual Swedish lake. The Swedes felt more than ready to join the mercantile powers in America.

 

Minuit established Fort Christina, in honor of Sweden’s twelve year old Queen. But as Minuit well knew, the drainage of the Delaware River was claimed by the Dutch. After establishing his colony, Minuit decided to return to Sweden for more colonists and make a dash down to the Caribbean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the trip profitable. Unfortunately, he was killed in a hurricane off of St. Christopher. 

 

A museum model of Fort Christina.

 

Over the next dozen years 12 groups of settlers totaling more than 600 reached New Sweden and established settlements on both sides of the river. The settlers were mostly small farmers. They introduced a form of shelter never seen before in the new world—the log cabin—which would become the standard pioneer abode for the next two hundred years. They had excellent relations with the local tribes and lived comfortably with the near-by Dutch until a new governor arrived in 1654 and seized the Dutch post of Fort Casamir, modern day New Castle. 

 

A tapestry hanging in the American Swedish Museum in Philadelphia depicts the Swede's most enduring cultural legacy in the New World--the log cabin

 

The notoriously bellicose Dutch governor in New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, dispatched five armed ships and 317 professional soldiers to retake the post. They then proceeded up the river and forced the surrender of Ft. Christina. That ended Swedish sovereignty over the area. 

 

The wrath of peg-legged Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant upon learning that the Swedes had captured Fort Casamir was depicted in this painting.
 

But the Dutch made no attempt to expel the existing settlers. In fact they granted them extraordinary rights to retain their lands, practice their Lutheran religion, and govern themselves as a quasi-independent “Swedish Nation.” But the Dutch themselves were not long to retain their American possessions. After a series of wars, they were gone for good by 1674 and New Netherland became New York. 

 

In 1681 William Penn was granted his charter for Pennsylvania, which included the “Three Lower Counties” which make up today’s Delaware. The Swedes, with no reinforcements coming from the mother country for decades, were quickly subsumed by the British. 

 

Hundreds of years later an Irish American from Pennsylvania would settle in Delaware and put the small often ignored state back on the map of American consciousness. But damned few of Joe Biden’s Senate constituents were decedents of those old Swede settlers.