The need for a determination of the rights and wrongs in the affaire Fraskell-Watling is, clearly, no less urgent now than it has ever been.
Dr. Donge, by incredible, indeed almost impossible, labor has proved that the issue was one of veracity. Colonel Fraskell intimated to Joseph Cooper, following a meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati, that Major Watling had been, in the words of Cooper’s letter of July 18,1789, to his brother Puntell in Philadelphia, “drauin [drawing] the long Bow.”2
O fatal indiscretion! For Puntell Cooper delayed not a week to “relay” the intelligence to Major Watling by post, as a newsy appendix to his order for cordwood from the major’s lot!
The brief, fatally terminated correspondence between the major and the colonel then began; I suppose most of us have it [better change to “at least key passages of corresp.” HS] committed to memory.
* DONGE, Dr. J.: supra, p. 774, u.
The first letter offers a tantalizing glimpse. Watling writes to Fraskell, inter alia: “I said I seen it at the Meetin the Nigh before Milkin Time by my Hoss Barn and I seen it are you a Atheist Colonel?” It has long been agreed that the masterly conjectural emendation of this passage proposed by Miss Stolp in her epoch-making paper3 is the correct one, i.e.: “I said at the meeting [of the Society of the Cincinnati] that I saw it the night before [the meeting] at milking time, by my horse barn; and I [maintain in the face of your expressions of disbelief that I] saw it. Are you an atheist, colonel?”
There thus appears to have been at the outset of the correspondence a clear-cut issite: did or did not Major Watling see “it”? The reference to atheism suggests that “it” may have been some apparition deemed supernatural by the major, but we know absolutely nothing more of what “it” may have been.
Alas, but the correspondents at once lost sight of the “point.” The legendary Watling Temper and the formidable Fraskell Pride made it certain that one would sooner or later question the gentility of the other as they wrangled by post. The fact is that both did so simultaneously, on August 20, in letters that crossed. Once this stone was hurled [say “these stones”? HS] there was in those days no turning back. The circumstance that both parties were simultaneously offended and offending perplexed their seconds, and ultimately the choice of weapons had to be referred to a third party mutually agreeable to the duelists, Judge E. Z. C. Mosh.
Woe that he chose the deadly Pennsylvania Rifle!* Woe that the two old soldiers knew that dread arm as the husbandman his sickle! At six o’clock on the morning of September 1, 1789, the major and the colonel expired on the cward behind Brashear’s Creek, each shot through the heart. The long division of our beloved borough into Fraskellite and Watlingist had begun.
After this preamble, I come now to the modern part of my tale. It begins in 1954, with the purchase of the Haddam
• STOLP, A. DeW.: “Some Textual Problems Relating to the Corre-
•poodence between Major Elisha Watling and Colonel Hiram Fraskell, Eleusis, Pennsylvania, July 27-September 1, 1789” (art.) in Bull, of
•» Tuscarora Township Hist. Soc., Vol. IV, No. 1, Spring, 1917.
« Amusingly known to hoi polloi and some who should know better as fee “Kentucky” Rifle.
property by our respected fellow-townsman, that adoptive son of Eleusis, Dr. Caspar Mord. I much regret that Dr. Mord is apparently on an extended vacation [where can the man be? HS]; since he is not available [confound it! HS] to grant permission, I must necessarily “skirt” certain topics, with a plea that to do otherwise might involve a violation of confidence. [Positively, there are times when one wishes that one were not a gentleman! HS]
I am quite aware that there was an element in our town which once chose to deprecate Dr. Mord, to question his degree, to inquire suspiciously into matters which are indubitably his own business and no one else’s, such as his source of income. This element of which I speak came perilously close to sullying the hospitable name of Eleusis by calling on Dr. Mord in a delegation afire with the ridiculous rumor that the doctor had been “hounded out of Peoria in 1929 for vivisection.”