Dr. Gilbert Highet, long the noted Anthon Professor of Latin at Columbia University, recently wrote us, saying:
I was looking at some old furniture in East Hampton when I remembered something once told me by an American officer who heard me speak at West Point. … He said that you could always tell the date of a piece of nineteenth-century furniture if it had the American eagle on it, because if the country had been at war when the piece was made, the eagle was looking to the side in which it held the lightning bolts, and if we were at peace, it had its head turned to the side of the olive branch. Is there any truth to this?
Miss Sarah B. Sherrill of Antiques magazine was kind enough to check into this possibility of dating old furniture and found it was—perhaps unfortunately for buffs—a myth. Which way the eagle faced, she discovered, “depended on the whim of the artist.” Indeed, artists, we also ascertained, not only faced their eagles to the left or right without a waror-peace theory in mind, but also exchanged the lightning bolts and olive branch from one claw to another for no discernible reason. Until President Harry S. Truman decreed otherwise in 1945, the President’s seal, coat of arms, and flag carried the eagle facing the bolts in its left talon. This was changed by executive order so that the eagle looks to its right—the position of honor in heraldry. It thus now faces the talon holding the olive branch. The eagle on our cover, a wood carving dated 1840, is hence wrong : it has no olive branch at all.
AMEN
George L. Howe, a contributor to this magazine in the past and a long-time subscriber, took a look at the gravestone rubbings by Avon Neal and Ann Parker in our August, 1970, issue (“Graven Images: Sermons in Stones”) and was prompted to try to identify an old epitaph he had often seen quoted: “Young to the pulpit did he get, / And seventy-two years in’t did he sweat.”
As Mr. Howe puts it, “Even in that sudorific age, seventy-two years must have come close to the record for clerical perspiration.” He believes he found the holder of said record in the Biographical Dictionary compiled in 1809 by John Eliot, corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The man who fits the bill, Mr. Howe says, is the Reverend John Higginson, who was born in England in 1616 and came to the New World when he was twelve. The son of a minister, Higginson assisted the pastor of Guilford, Connecticut, from 1643 to 1659, when he moved to his father’s church in Salem, Massachusetts. He was ordained its pastor in 1660 and died at the age of ninety-two in 1708.
Assuming that he preached for seventy-two years, as per the epitaph, Mr. Howe surmises that this man of God must have been twenty years old at the time of his first sermon, sometime in 1636. That, he says, “doesn’t seem an improbably early age for his sweating to have begun.”
… AND A MAID
The indefatigable Mr. Howe also recalls another great epitaph, which will perhaps amuse the Latin scholars among our readers. It is a parody by Longfellow of the one Dr. Samuel Johnson composed for Oliver Goldsmith: “Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.” Longfellow called his, “Epitaph on a Maid of All Work:”
Hic jacet ancilla
Quae omnia egit;
Et nihil letigit Quod non fregit.
“It has been stylish, even during his lifetime, to laugh at Longfellow as a linguist,” concludes Mr. Howe, “but I think that translating ‘maid of all work’ as ‘ancilla quae omnia egit’ is a tour de force that Dean Swift himself could not have excelled.”
NEVER ASK A LADY …
We were purposely vague about the year of birth of Willa Gather in introducing the article she wrote about the fortieth anniversary of Brownville, Nebraska, in the October, 1970, issue (“Ghost Town on the River”). However, Virginia Faulkner, editor of the University of Nebraska Press, insists that there is “no uncertainty” at all about the birth date; it was December 7, 1873:
Miss Gather started fudging on her age when she began to be well known as a novelist, and for years all sources listed her as born in 1876. But as long ago as 1951 Mildred Bennett, in The World of Willa Cather, proved incontrovertibly that 1873 was the year (birth certificate, letter from Charles Gather announcing the event, and family Bible). The family Bible is now in the restored Gather home in Red Cloud, and on the birth-record page one can see that Miss Gather made a game attempt to change Wilella to Willa and 1873 to 1876. All our Gather publications and most recent scholarship in the field give the date correctly, and gradually standard reference works are making the correction, but the wrong date is still given in a flock of them. Perhaps when the Gather centennial is celebrated in 1973 they’ll pull up their socks.
SOLD OUT
After 194 years the federal government has formally gone out of the silver business. During most of that time the U.S. Treasury had purchased only the silver it needed to mint coins, but it began to stockpile the metal in 1934 to bolster the depressed mining industry. Then, with the increase in photographic and other industrial uses after World War II, the Treasury turned seller in an effort to keep the price of silver down, so that its own coins would not become more valuable to melt down than to use as money. Since the phasing out of most silver coins and their replacement by lead-colored “sandwiches” of nickel and copper, the Treasury’s role as a holder or seller of silver has disappeared. Last October it auctioned off its last marketable silver, 1.5 million ounces, at $1.84 per ounce. (The Treasury still has thirty-five million unrefined ounces left; they are earmarked for Eisenhower silver dollars.) With bimetallism for all intents and purposes now a dead issue, one Treasury official commented that “William Jennings Bryan must be spinning in his grave.”
PARSON WEEMS’S LAW
Governments pass laws constantly, but the only ones with any lasting force are those unofficial ones provided us by Newton, Gresham, Acton, Parkinson, and others like them who have observed the basic cussedness of things. In the business of history we have a little rule of this kind that is (or ought to be) known as Parson Weems’s Law. It has given us Washington and the cherry tree, Pilgrims jumping onto Plymouth Rock, young Lincoln courting Ann Rutledge, the unstained innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti—but enough examples. Let us state the law:
Historical fancy is more persistent than historical fact.
The law at work is demonstrated, to the deep regret of the editors of our new American Heritage History of the 20’s and 30’s, on page 321 of that book, in the account of President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court. The book states that one of the Court’s then members, Justice Pierce Butler, of Minnesota, “had failed in constitutional law at college.” That was the fancy circulated at the time of the battle over “nine old men” who were supposed to be impeding justice, right, reform, and All That Is Good. A recent work of erudition on Justices of the Court perpetuates the error and was routinely consulted on the point by our book’s checker.
Now, however, we hear from the late Justice’s indignant daughter, Mrs. Edward K. Dunn, of Baltimore, who possesses a transcript of his grades at Carleton College in Minnesota. In 1887–88, his senior year, he was given a mark of 7.6 (on a scale of 10) in constitutional law, which is clearly passing. We apologize to Mrs. Dunn and assure her that any future editions of the book will be corrected. But we cannot promise that, even in this carefully checked magazine, Parson Weems will not strike again.
LAST STOP
After nearly a decade of litigation the town of Kennesaw (originally humble Big Shanty), Georgia, has finally won back for good a picturesque locomotive that was stolen from there by Union soldiers 109 years ago. The engine, known as the General, and three boxcars were taken by James J. Andrews, an espionage agent, and nineteen federal soldiers in disguise while the train was stopped at Kennesaw for a breakfast break on April 12, 1862. The Northerners planned to run the train to Chattanooga, then the objective of a Union Army offensive, and, by burning bridges on the way, hoped to seal that city off from Confederate forces to the south and east. Andrews and his men never made it, however. The train crew bolted from the breakfast table as their train pulled away and gave chase first on foot and then in commandeered locomotives. Eight hours and eighty-seven miles later, after many hairbreadth episodes twice glorified in movies, the General ran out of steam. Andrews and the Union men hid in the woods, but all were rounded up within a week and he and seven others were executed. The General returned to serve the southern cause and survived the Battle of Atlanta, though in a badly battered shape. In 1870 her owner, the Georgia Railroad, leased the engine to the newly formed Western & Atlantic Railroad, which converted her from a wood burner to a coal burner. After that line was acquired by the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railroad in 1890, the General was spotted by an enterprising photographer sitting amid the weeds on a siding at Vining’s, Georgia. The NC & StL restored the engine in her W & A livery and then put her on display under the train shed of Chattanooga’s Union Station. There she rested, except for brief excursions to such fairs as the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, until the Louisville & Nashville Railroad absorbed the NC & StL in the late 1950’s. Since Chattanooga citizens were in no mood to have their venerated locomotive moved out of state, Louisville & Nashville officials resorted to kidnapping to use the engine in a planned centennial re-enactment of her Civil War escapade. Early in June, 1961, the wire fence surrounding the General was cut, and the engine, covered with canvas, was pulled from the train shed across a specially laid sixty feet of track to the railroad’s main line. She was then hoisted aboard a flatcar and sped the next day to Louisville, where the engine was converted anew, this time to an oil burner. On February 7, 1962, the General operated under her own power for the first time since 1914 and two months later performed handily in the centennial celebration, followed by a nationwide tour. When the railroad then announced its intention to deposit the engine at Kennesaw, the already-irate city of Chattanooga took the matter to court, contending that the General was its “charitable trust.” The suit was finally settled this past November by the U.S. Supreme Court, which let stand a lower court ruling that said the railroad could take the engine anywhere it wished.
