A history magazine, we think, has a special obligation to be accurate, since mistaken history is worse than none at all. At the same time, we take the view that accuracy is not necessarily promoted by all the academic machinery that sometimes stultifies the pages of professedly “scholarly” journals. We do not regularly footnote our articles, for instance; but nevertheless we try to check all factual statements carefully before they go into print.
But the most experienced and learned authors make mistakes. So do editors, researchers, printers, and copyreaders; it is amazing how many pairs of practiced eyes can look hard at something and not see what turns out, later, to be an “obvious” mistake.
It is a touching tribute to man’s faith in his fellows that a certain percentage of these mistakes are simply the result of assuming that some previous worker in the historical vineyard knew what he was doing—when in fact he was fumbling. “History repeats itself”; so, unhappily, does historical error, especially when it is what might be described as attractive error. In our December, 1965, issue, which included a thirty-six-page picture portfolio on Canadian history, we noted with amused surprise that the lithographers of the panoramic view of the Battle of Queenston Heights (page 18) “made the American uniforms red and the British-Canadian blue.” We have received this polite corrective letter from LyIe Thoburn, of Gates Mills, Ohio:
“I would like to submit the theory that the depiction may be correct for this reason: the United States troops captured Queenston Heights and were later driven off by the British. This panoramic view might very well be the moment in which the British were in the act of doing so. This is supported by the fact that a close examination of the picture shows three flags, which appear to be the British Union Jack, being carried by the red-uniformed troops of the landing party.” Mr. Thoburn is quite right, as we proved to our dissatisfaction by looking closely at the picture as it appeared in our own pages; then we began to wonder how this strange case of color blindness could have afflicted us so easily. It seems that we rented the color plate for this particular picture from another magazine, which used it back in April, 1957. Not as an excuse, but simply as an illustration of the unfortunate tendency for historical mistakes to be repeated, we quote their caption at the time: “At Queenston, Americans attack across the Niagara. By error of unknown colorist, Americans are in red uniforms, British in blue.”
Boomer Boner
Then there is the category of the likely legend. Sometimes a popular but mistaken story just seems so comfortably appropriate to the known historical circumstances that it gets accepted without due challenge. An article on the 1889 Oklahoma land rush in our February issue asserted that, among other “firsts” during the boom, “William Wrigley, Jr., rolled his first slab of chewing gum in a tent store at Guthrie.” Now we hear from Robert L. Bridwell, of Norman, Oklahoma, that although this claim has been long and fondly promoted, sometimes in Guthrie itself, there’s no truth in it. The great chewing-gum company has repeatedly pointed out that their founder, neither boomer nor sooner, started his enterprise in Chicago in 1893, and that, further, “he personally never made a stick of gum.” That should give the legend makers, including us, something to chew on for awhile.
More Tales of a Table
Something over a year ago (April, 1965) we published a short Civil War narrative by Mary A. Benjamin, based on a biographical sketch of Union General E. O. C. Ord written by his granddaughter. It revolved around the famous scene in the parlor of Wilmer McLean, at Appomattox Court House, when Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865. The gist of the story was that McLean presented to Ord the table on which Grant wrote the surrender terms—because Ord had, a few months before, kindly let McLean’s young son, a sick Confederate soldier, pass through his lines on his way to the safety of home. There has always been much confusion and controversy about which of the two small tables in McLean’s living room Grant sat at, and which Lee; and Miss Benjamin’s version stirred that up again. In addition, we got letters, some of them quite ill-natured, attacking the story of McLean’s son as a fabrication on the ground that this son could not have been more than eleven in 1865.
Luckily, the Senior Editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE happens to be one of the most esteemed authorities on the Civil War. With some agitation, we put the complaints on his desk, and elicited the following memorandum:
“It is indisputable that the table Ord got from McLean was the table on which one of the signatures to the surrender terms was signed. Whether it was Grant or Lee that signed on this particular table is assuredly a matter of minor importance. For the rest, our story is a recital of the Ord family tradition regarding the way General Ord came into possession of the table, and as such is worth presenting in anybody’s magazine. That the good general, years afterward, may have been confused about the identity of the young Confederate soldier—he could have been some other relative of McLean’s, or the son of a friend or neighbor—is a little beside the point.”
