Personal Notes in Memory and Honor of Bert Wyatt-Brown

Among the benefits of my association with the St. George Tucker Society, an organization of southern historians named for one of the early Virginia foes of slavery, none was more interesting or gratifying than my belated friendship with Bert Wyatt-Brown. I say belated for a reason. We had narrowly missed becoming colleagues and friends half a century earlier—and thereby hangs a tale I had no inkling of before Bert told me the story.

In 1964 Bert was finishing his doctoral studies under Vann Woodward in Baltimore. I was then a restless editorialist in Greensboro, wondering if I were headed in the right professional direction. A lively new chancellor, Otis Singletary, had arrived at the Woman’s College, unc (as it then was). He held his own doctorate in history from lsu, where his master had been T. Harry Williams. He had written interesting monographs on the black militias of Reconstruction South Carolina and the Mexican War and had recently been a star teacher at the University of Texas. Soon after their arrival, Jane and I invited the Singletarys to dinner: the beginning of a cordial and eventful friendship. Otis noticed that I was reading a book by Walter Millis and that spurred a conversation about military history (one of my dilettantish indulgences) and the discovery of many mutual historical interests. Otis soon uncovered my untested interest in scholarship and teaching and, after a couple of failed offers, he signed me up for a three-year appointment as an assistant professor of history—in a department rich in talents, to which he had recently brought Richard Current, who was also to become a friend and sparring partner over the merits of the so-called carpetbaggers. I was a stark amateur among professionals, but I had a notion about a book I wanted to write.

It was then—and here I come to the point—that Bert’s and my stars came into brief alignment. Or maybe it is more accurate to say, became crossed. I did not know that Dick Bardolph, the head of the history department, had been in negotiation with Bert Wyatt-Brown for the vacancy I was to fill. No doubt this was unamusing to Bert, but it was not without its comic side. I met Vann Woodward, already one of my heroes, at the aha meeting in Washington in December. When I explained who I was and what I was doing, Vann probably identified me as the usurper of his student’s job, but as always was too polite to say so. Mrs. Woodward was from Greensboro and Vann, as a Chapel Hill Ph.D., knew the North Carolina academic scene; and it is a good guess that he had helped Bert make the now thwarted connection. So I became, though only for a year, an instructor of American history, which included Otis Singletary’s honors section when he took leave in mid-year to become the first head of the Job Corps. By then I imagine that Bert was settled in other pastures. It is a mere ironic footnote that while I enjoyed teaching, and would have a distant future in it, this early experience didn’t dilute the printer’s ink that ran thick in my veins and I soon returned to editorial journalism.

The great Lewis Namier remarks that nothing is stranger than the unbidden twists of fate that make for significant, sometimes unsought, turns in our lives; and the remark is certainly pertinent to this brief discourse. I was cheated, to my loss, of an early association with Bert; and our destinies did not intersect again for a half century—until David Moltke-Hansen phoned one day and asked me to come to Augusta to talk about Vann, who had recently died. My reminiscences of Vann in the Washington Post and at the Tucker, and Bert’s, prominently displayed in the New York Review of Books, struck eerily similar notes. If I had any doubt of Bert’s and my predestined collegiality, that similarity dispelled it. But in any case I count it...