On May 26 of 1857 Dred Scott got his freedom. The wrong way. Too late. But there is some small comfort in the matter despite the horrifying backdrop.

Scott was, of course, the slave plaintiff in the most important case in American judicial history and the most disastrous and judicially preposterous ruling the U.S. Supreme Court ever made. And I say that in full awareness of Roe v Wade.

Dred Scott was born into slavery to one Peter Blow, who later sold him to a U.S. army surgeon named John Emerson. And it was Emerson’s widow Irene that Scott sued for his liberty in 1846, after she refused to sell him his freedom and that of his family, on the grounds that Emerson had taken Scott to a free state, Illinois, and also the free Wisconsin territory. (By the way, a paradox of slavery is that a slave could have his own money; you’d think logically it would all be the master’s.)

The case wound its tortuous way through Missouri state courts. But here’s one weird thing: Scott’s lawyers were paid by Peter Blow’s children, who had turned abolitionist. Ultimately he lost due to very doubtful rulings. But by 1853 Scott was owned by Irene’s brother, John F. A. Sanford, who resided in New York while Scott if free would reside in Missouri so he was now able to sue in federal court. (That’s why the Supreme Court case would be Dred Scott v Sanford except for a clerical error that made it Scott v Sandford).

By now Blow’s children were tapped out for legal fees. But Scott found lawyers willing to take the federal case pro bono. And meanwhile, the second weird thing, Irene Emerson had married an abolitionist named Calvin Chafee, who on subsequently being elected to Congress was attacked for hypocrisy because of owning Dred Scott. He responded that neither he nor his wife knew anything about the whole business until it hit the headlines and then wrote to one of Scott’s lawyers to ask if his wife could free Scott.

Here’s the third weird thing. It somehow turned out that Sanford never really owned Scott. So Mrs. Chaffee did still own him and his family, and she gave them to Peter Blow’s son Taylor so he could free them.

Regrettably Scott died of tuberculosis 16 months later. And the whole thing is an appalling mess, from the institution of slavery itself to the Taney court’s wretched judicial overreach in defence of it to the slaughter necessary finally to end it to the aftermath of bigotry and segregation. Yet in the darkness this much light does shine: not only Peter Blow’s children but Irene Emerson were converted to the anti-slavery cause and actually tried to do something about it.

It’s amazing how many otherwise decent people never did grasp the to us overwhelmingly obvious wrongness of human servitude. And not enough people saw the light to prevent the Civil War, or indeed to abolish the “peculiar institution” decades earlier.

Scott got his freedom the wrong way, and too late. But he did get it, from individuals whose hearts were changed. And that is some small comfort.

“I resign.” If used when appropriate it would be used more often than it is. And yes, it’s an admission of failure, or at least of unsuitability to a job. But think of Tumbledown Dick, who did it on May 25 of 1659.

I refer of course to Richard Cromwell, one of only two commoners to be head of state in England, when he inherited the pompous title of Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland from his dad, Oliver Cromwell. There is of course something fishy about commoners inheriting hereditary power. As there was something fishy about Cromwell Sr.’s whole elaborate pretense of rule of law that only amounted, as one wag put it, to putting a wig on the point of a sword. But here’s the thing.

Cromwell Sr. never saw the irony, or tyranny, of making himself a disguised king. But his son Richard did. What’s more, he looked in the mirror and realized he wasn’t looking at someone who could or should be a dictator. Instead he saw a guy nicknamed “Tumbledown Dick” and, to his enormous credit, he recognized that there was some justice in the label.

So on inheriting the office, if not exactly the power, when his father died of malaria contracted ravishing Ireland, he summoned a Parliament that wasn’t forcibly composed only of Puritan radicals. The army balked, and Richard Cromwell formally resigned, creating a power vacuum that particularly with general George Monck marching an army south led to a restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the ancient constitution.

It didn’t all go smoothly, of course. Although Charles II kept just this side of attempting absolute rule, his foolish brother and successor James II didn’t, so you got the Glorious Revolution. But on balance it is remarkable how little bloodshed and bitterness it took to wind up the Commonwealth and restore balance in English government.

Sometimes great historical events depend on someone stepping up and decisively affecting the course of history. For instance Churchill or Washington. But sometimes they depend on someone stepping down, because for every ten who fancy themselves a Churchill or Washington nine are not and eight are fools. And if Richard Cromwell was not exactly a fool, he was certainly sufficiently aware of his limitations not to get in the way of people sorting out the situation.

He had his reward, sort of. He went abroad in July 1660, and though he lived in poverty as well as obscurity for most of the rest of his life, he did ultimately return to England and live on the income from his estate in Hursley, dying in 1712 at 85 as the longest-lived ex-head of state in British history. Sadly he never saw his wife again after leaving for France; she remained loyal but died in 1675. And of his nine children, five of whom reached adulthood, none had children of their own so there are no descendants of the Cromwells either to make fatuous claims to be the rightful Lord Protector or to toast the man wise enough to know he wasn’t made of such stuff and whose wisest remark ever, too rarely imitated down to the present day, was “I resign.”

Ah, the wonders of the steam age… again. This time it’s never mind the Internet, here comes the telegraph.

For on May 24 of 1844 Morse, who for some reason I had no idea was an accomplished if not brilliant painter who supported himself with brush and canvas while dabbling in science, proved he was neither a crackpot nor a charlatan in the latter realm by sending a message from the U.S. Capitol to Baltimore, choosing the strangely inappropriate Biblical text “What hath God wrought” (Numbers 23:23) chosen by the daughter of U.S. Patent Commissioner Henry Ellsworth, who had backed Morse.

Actually it was by no means the first telegraphic message. Morse’s real breakthrough was figuring out how to send messages over significant distances by including frequent relays. And with public funding he had strung a line to Baltimore in time to telegraph the May 1, 1844 nomination of Henry Clay as the Whig candidate against James K. Polk.

What is remarkable about the May 24 demonstration is that it formally opened the line. And with that time and space were shrunk in a way more dramatic than further refinements, from radio to telephone to Internet, could possibly achieve, on which I recommend Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet. (Morse himself was driven in part by having received a letter saying his wife was getting better only to rush home and find her dead; he hadn’t even known she was ill).

One advocate for a telegraph cable across the Atlantic wrote in 1846 that “All the inhabitants of the earth would be brought into one intellectual neighbourhood.” And indeed most of what we think is incredibly modern, recent and cool dates to the 19^th century including instant news without reflection, brought to newspapers by telegraphed reports of incidents that one rushed to be first in print with in the hopes of beating rivals in newsstand sales for a day, as one now rushes to blog or better yet Tweet it first in the hopes of trending ephemerally.

We find it inconceivable nowadays to live in a world where news did not travel faster than foot or hoof could carry it. We suppose that life must be incomparably better because of it although if things really had been getting better as fast as we think for as long as we suppose I cannot grasp how our ancestors did not perish of physical or psychological misery if not by their own trembling hands, which they manifestly did not. So let me introduce a sour note from, of all things, a Charlie Chan novel, The Chinese Parrot, in which they manage to tune in a Denver concert at a ranch in the California desert and the owner, even though it’s his own daughter singing, complains “All the way from Denver, mile high amid the Rockies. I tell you, man’s getting too clever. He’s riding for a fall. Probably a sign of age, Mr. Eden, but I find myself longing for the older, simpler days.”

Man, you ain’t seen nothing yet, we may be tempted to respond. Wait until you see what TV or smartphones will do to the very concept of getting away from it all. But if the concept of radio ruining things now seems unbearably quaint, or of the telegraph revolutionizing them, I am prompted to ask why we are so convinced that with the Internet we can at last begin to live, or are now thoroughly unable to, or worse yet that the next stunning changely innovation will really take the economy and society somewhere we want to go.

In fact, proving I can find nostalgia almost anywhere, I’m rather sad that the Morse code invented by the same Samuel Morse is no longer in use at sea, where the French navy was the last to give it up on January 31, 1997, while the last U.S. transmission was on July 12, 1999 and was, in fact, “What hath God wrought.”

I called this an odd message and here’s why. The development of the telegraph, the astonishing shrinking of time and space that was celebrated in the 1872 poem “The Victory” dedicated to Morse (“And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,/ That Time and Space ruled man no more”) was about what man had wrought. The notion that our own powers would now transcend the conditions that had limited our existence from the dawn of time may have been inspired, menacing or both. But it was certainly not a tribute to the power of God and an inspiration to put our faith in Him. Rather, it was a kind of metaphysical Declaration of Independence by man, that from now on we would write our own ticket, control our own destiny, reshape fundamental forces to suit our will.

It is what man hath wrought, for better or worse, even as the mad rush of technology overtakes Morse’s telegraph and his code. And May 24 1844, when it became a regular commercial “thing,” is a more important date in the development of the instant global village than anything seen in our day.

Innovation, in short, is old hat. As is pride and a desire to be as gods. Somewhat older, as I recall, than the 19^th century. And not, in the traditional understand, a good thing.

The Battle of Ramillies makes me sad. So does the battleship HMS Ramillies.

OK, to quote the radio detective “The fat man,” Brad Runyon, “that statement could stand a little clarification.” For starters, today is the anniversary of the famous Battle of Ramillies on 23 May 1706. Which of course was a key victory for the Grand Alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession that decisively advanced Britain into the rank of major powers.

OK, this is getting worse, not better, right? Well, does it help that a British battleship in both world wars was called the Ramillies, in commemoration of a landmark in Britain’s long struggle to keep any one tyrant from dominating Europe and then turning aggressively outward that resulted in the acquisition of Gibraltar and also significant territory in the future Atlantic Canada? Or perhaps it will help revive Albion’s faded glory if I mention that the British commander was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, son of one Sir Winston Churchill and ancestor of another, whose brilliant career decisively advanced that family in Britain.

Maybe even that now means little. The War of the Spanish Succession might seem one of those foolish dynastic quarrels over which rich old men sent poor young ones to die. But it was part of the British attempt to stop Louis XIV from conquering all of Europe in a burst of dangerous vainglory, part of their long habit of cobbling together alliances of various sorts (in this case the unlikely lineup included the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, Savoy, Portugal and on and on) to keep any one despot from dominating the Eurasian land mass and threatening the rest of the globe that culminated in the two World Wars before it became decisively America’s problem.

As for the battleship, one of five Royal Navy vessels named in commemoration of this pivotal battle in this crucial war, beginning with an 82-gun “second-rate” (the name refers to size not quality) launched in 1664 and renamed HMS Ramillies in 1706. There were also two 74-gun “third-rates” in the 18^th century, a battleship launched in 1892 and scrapped on the verge of World War I, being an obsolete pre-dreadnought.

So then there’s the Revenge-class HMS Ramillies, one of five whose names all began with “R”. Laid down in 1913 and commissioned in 1917, she saw action in World War II from the hunt for Bismarck to the D-Day landings (where she fired over 1,000 shells and did considerable damage to German tanks and rail transport), as well as extensive convoy duty before being scrapped in 1948. Mind you, Ramillies and her surviving sisters were obsolescent by that point, particularly lacking speed, and she would have fared badly if she’d actually met Bismarck; even the mighty Hood and the shiny new Prince of Wales had problems with the German behemoth. But in the desperate circumstances of World War II everything had to be pressed into service regardless of its age or condition, and certainly the presence even of an aging battleship on convoy duty was a great help; her 15 inch guns remained dangerous to almost anything afloat.

In a way the heroics of a fading Ramillies in World War II are a metaphor for Britain in that era. As is the even more depressing fact that there was to have been a successor HMS Ramillies, ordered in 1964 as the fifth Resolution class nuclear ballistic missile “boomer” submarine that carried the UK’s nuclear deterrent from the 1960s through 1994. But she was cancelled in 1965.

As I said, contemplating Ramillies makes me a little sad.

On May 22 back in 334 BC Alexander the Great laid an instructive beating on the Persians at the Granicus River near the site of Troy. I’m not a big fan of Alexander, who seems to be a rare but not unknown example of someone who conquered things for no reason beyond liking battles. But what’s instructive is that Alexander’s forces took about 300 to 400 casualties and the Persians around 4,000. As Victor Davis Hanson points out in Carnage and Culture it’s a remarkably stable figure over the next two and a half millennia.

Now no smart-alec comments from the back that Alexander and the Persians haven’t been fighting ever since like something out of an original Star Trek episode. But West and non-West have been and the battles have been strikingly, consistently lopsided.

Granicus is remarkable partly because it’s just a century and a half after the critical clashes at Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea when Xerxes’ mighty Persians sought to snuff out the small, independent, squabbling Greek city-states before the “Golden Age” of democracy even got started, only to suffer a series of stunning defeats and go home pretending nothing important had happened. Yet here’s Alexander rampaging through their territory, having conquered Greece not because Macedon was an alien civilization but because it wasn’t.

That’s not to say the Greeks liked him or being conquered by the Macedonians. (In fact one of my favourite anecdotes from Plutarch concerns a rumour sweeping Athens that Alexander had died and people rushing about saying we must revolt we must revolt only to be calmed by the statesman Phocion observing dryly that “If he is dead today, he will still be dead tomorrow.”) But such is the dynamic might of open societies that it is already Persia that is on the periphery of Mediterranean wealth and power looking in, a situation that would only become more acute as Rome became the dominant Western power.

It’s not a matter of a pendulum, with Greece or Rome dominant at one point and Persia at another. Instead if you look at the modern world, there’s Iran trying to stare down the Western powers over their concerns about its nuclear program, and Britain, all but disarmed, still sending its submarines to patrol off Iran’s shores not the other way around.

That’s not to say I’m unconcerned about the decay of Western power and resolve. Quite the reverse. I’m acutely alarmed about it. But I still wouldn’t trade our problems for those of non-open societies. Bad as things get here, the imbalance at Granicus is just as dramatic today.

Speaking of awards you might not want, May 21 is the anniversary of the Imperial Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, created in 1725 by Empress Catherine I of Russia (not to be confused with her granddaughter-in-law Kate the Great) and awarded for service to Russia, typically of course state service. To the Russian government.

For starters, the motto is “For Labor and the Fatherland". That’s not gonna be good. Then you get Nevsky himself, a big hero including to Stalinists for defending Russia against German and Swedish invaders… on behalf of the Mongol Golden Horde to whom he paid tribute. Hence Eisenstein’s highly praised film Álexander Nevsky and the decision of the Bolsheviks, when they abolished all Tsarist honours, to recreate this one in 1942 as the drab grey concrete Order of Alexander Nevsky. And Vladimir Putin revived it in 2010.

He would, since one of Alexander Nevsky’s claims to fame is that on driving off the invaders he punished Novgorod for defying Mongol tax collectors, cutting off a number of leading citizens’ noses. (Later, Ivan III would crush its independence entirely, an important step in stifling any semblance of local of self-government in the nascent Russian empire.)

In consequence, Nevsky is a saint and polls suggest the most venerated hero in Russian history. Which surely shows, like the French having that award from Napoleon, a lack of genuinely inspiring heroes whose undoubted courage, determination, patriotism and leadership skills actually produced a result worth cherishing and imitating. It makes things enormously difficult for those brave Russians trying to construct an open politics and strengthen civil society.

Amusingly, exiled claimants to the nonexistent Russian throne still award the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky or, in a rival version scorned by most Romanovs, a dynastic knighthood called the Russian Imperial Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky.

As with either official version, you can keep mine.

The Trinity is 1691 years old today. Sort of. For it was on May 20 of 325 AD that the First Council of Nicaea convened to settle various matters including the proper date of Easter and, most crucially, the relationship of Christ the Son to God the Father in Christian theology.

There was lively debate whether Christ was in some way subsidiary, created by God from nothing and having a temporal beginning as Arius in particular argued, or whether he was “begotten” from the Father’s own being and thus existed eternally. The decision was overwhelmingly for the latter. Of the attendees variously estimated between 250 and 318, exactly two voted Nay.

The vote didn’t settle things at once; the “Arian heresy” troubled the church for many years and has a few adherents today. (At least one medieval Christian thinker declared Muhammad “the successor of Arias” and he didn’t mean it in a good way.) But in the end it did settle things, and the Nicene Creed contains the orthodox position on the Trinity believed by virtually all Christians today.

It’s the sort of argument that might strike modern people as frivolous, caught up as they are in debates over New Coke and various types of hip hop and Twitter fights over who is more like Hitler. (Answer: online everybody sooner or later.) But the decisions taken at Nicaea have held up, and inspired people, for very nearly two millennia.

Is any major decision taken in our time likely to be remembered at all, let alone still believed, in 3707 AD? Actually in an age of progress, where change is our mantra, I suppose we’d be dismayed if anything we agreed on now were still believed in a decade, let alone a millennium. But then what’s the point of agreeing on it now?

At least at Nicaea they thought it mattered.

Can I be given the “Legion d’Honneur”, formally “Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur” for persistently annoying the French? I suppose not. But it does underline the problems that exist in taking pride in one’s heritage in most of the world that the highest French award for civilian and military merit, won by a great many thoroughly deserving recipients, should have been initiated on May 19, 1802 by Napoleon, from whose hands I would be most reluctant to accept an award.

I reflect on this problem when depressed by the state of things in “the West” and particularly in the Anglosphere, the first and last bastion of genuine liberty, whose various societies seem to me to be in serious danger of disintegrating politically, culturally and economically. It is hard work rallying people, battling through vested interests and lethargy to reclaim our heritage. But at least we have a heritage that is, at bottom, worth reclaiming.

Imagine you lived in, say, Russia, where great valour has been exhibited by tenacious people in defence of a country horribly misruled since the Mongols. Suppose you rose in the Russian parliament today to denounce Putin’s thuggish tyranny, and called on Russians to remember… remember… well, about 68 times freedom was brutally suppressed and the no times at all that it prevailed.

Likewise in France, for all its magnificent cultural achievements from agriculture to food, there aren’t a lot of really inspiring political moments of lasting importance. France is a lot better off than most of the world. But it has no Magna Carta, no Glorious Revolution, no Queen Victoria. They have to settle for Louis XIV for magnificence that squandered the nation’s wealth, Robespierre for proclaiming liberty that resulted in mass murder and terror, and Napoleon for victory that ended in defeat… and awards worthy of a better leader. They’re even stuck with Charles de Gaulle instead of Churchill.

As for Napoleon, I just don’t like him. I don’t admire him and I don’t want anyone to try to imitate him. I don’t want him shaking my hand or pinning anything on me. He was a dictator, an aggressor and a failure.

Don’t get me wrong. I like France. My trip there in 2014 was a great experience and the people were welcoming and helpful. I’d love to go back. But even if I were offered a medal, I’d be uneasy about where it originally came from.