John T Hogan

The article considers the challenge Church poses by presenting a black man and a white woman together alone outdoors in a natural setting in the ante-bellum South. Comparisons with two earlier painters, Thomas Cole and Edward Hicks, lead to an identification of the imaginative landscape of Eden in Church’s painting of the Natural Bridge. This application of the story of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden to the painting of the “Natural Bridge” suggests Church’s interest in the view of the United States as a new Eden inhabited by the American Adam and Eve. The article suggests that Church wants the identity of the black man in the painting to be ambiguous but to include the possibility that it is a representation of Frederick Douglass giving a speech to a willing and interested female audience. Douglass made a famous speech to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and strongly supported the vote for the Declaration of Sentiments. Setting a declamation in front of the Natural Bridge in Virginia, which was owned by Thomas Jefferson and which became a very famous national landmark, suggests that the philosophical, theological, and political background to the painting is the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Sentiments. Church thus proposes that the United States will realize its potential when black men and women and white women have the same rights as white men. Church also relies on the general public’s interest in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in particular on Hammatt Billings’ illustration of ”Little Eva reading the Bible to Uncle Tom in the arbor.” The article puts this painting in the context of Church’s religious background and considers briefly the relationship between this painting and his earlier painting (1846) “Hooker and Company Journeying Westward through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636.” A suggestion is made that Church both in this painting and in the “Natural Bridge” portrays right political action as having a religious foundation particularly in the Hebrew Bible.

In his famous chapter (3.82) on the revolutions engendered by the Peloponnesian War Thucydides notes that the effects of "stasis" ("faction" and "factional strife") reached even to the words people used. His overview should be translated ""Men changed the customary valuation [or" estimation"] of words in respect to deeds in judging what right was." Thucydides bases his understanding of distortions of language and understanding in revolutions on an implied idea that we need to use measures and standards in evaluating the moral qualities of action. His ideas concerning revolutions and factions during the Peloponnesian War can and should be compared with Plato's, notably in "Republic" Books 1 and 8.