Much as we may admire General Sherman’s military skills, it would be a mistake to endorse his crabby, self-serving attacks on the press (“The New Sherman Letters,” July/August).
After an initial shakedown period the hundred-odd war correspondents for the North accepted reasonable restraints on where they might go and what they might report. Even in the war’s early days, their lapses of security never cost the Union a major battle, much less a campaign. Some of them were killed, and a larger number captured. A few reporters brought in valuable intelligence gathered in forays between the lines, and one —Henry Wing—brought an anxious Lincoln the first news that Grant’s army was safe after the Battle of the Wilderness.
And why were the correspondents there? Because, in the words of the New York World (February 27, 1862), “This is a people’s war. … They have a right to know how their war is conducted.” No military bureaucrat would ever willingly admit to mismanagement. It was much easier to hide incompetence behind a veil of “security.” Reporters know this, and as one of them put it, their duty was not just to “applaud valor and merit” but also “to point out abuses and blunders that would not otherwise be reached.” Those were good words in the 186Os. And they still are.
Bernard A. Weisberger Author of Reporters for the Union (1953) Elizaville, N.Y.
Rebutting Sherman
Differences between the news media and the professional military establishment continue smoldering today. The current truce will not likely be permanent.
Also smoldering is the resentment (or worse) toward Sherman in the South, even though his total war tactics mercifully hastened the Confederacy’s inevitable end. One cannot expect Southerners to acclaim him, but their irrational bitterness has denied this military genius the place in history that he justly deserves. A small example: There is no memorial to General Sherman at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, where monuments and memorials to heroic graduates abound.
Paul S. Cullen USMA 1940 Lawton, Okla.
Another Dreamer
Zounds, Annie Dillard, where were you when I was a kid? (“The French and Indian War: A Memoir,” July/August)
I, too, grew up thrilled at the idea that I may have stood on the very same spot as an Indian or a French or British soldier gazing at the Allegheny River snaking through the rolling hills some twenty miles upstream from Fort Pitt. I played on those hills more than ten years where the Raystown Path met the Allegheny, in the “Indian Caves” and the foundation of the log cabin burned during Pontiac’s War. Our nightly campfires were theirs, and our heads filled with bloody and terrifvins massacres.
Then, suddenly, I was fifty years old and living five miles from General Forbes’s Camp (listed as Bouquet’s Camp), his last on the march against Fort Duquesne. There his army of twenty-five hundred men with only weapons and light packs encamped on November 24, 1758, and heard the thunder of the explosions and saw the glow in the sky as the Fort at the Forks was destroyed by the French. The next day, with his officers, among whom were Colonels Mercer, Armstrong, Bouquet, and Washington, he tramped the last miles to the fort. They found it burned and abandoned. On those ashes rose the great Fort Pitt.
Thanks to my friend Ed Williams, octagenarian, historian, and author for the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, and his intensive research, I was introduced to the exact campsite. I stood on the W-shaped fortification thrown up 229 years ago and now overgrown with trees and briars. I climbed into the breastworks a quarter of a mile to the south that guarded the Forbes Trail. The trail is now a paved road.
Dressed in my eighteenth-century uniform as surgeon in Col. Hugh Mercer’s 3d Battalion, Pennsylvania Regiment of Provincials, I’ve sat on the ramparts of Old Fort Niagara while below me were hundreds of tents, candlelit and alive with more than 500 uniformed reenactors; watched the shooting stars over Edge Hill, where Pontiac’s screaming horde killed or wounded 123 of Bouquet’s force at Bushy Run; strolled atop the original brick walls of Fort Pitt as the twentieth-century real world roared on the expressway overhead; listened to the far-off drums from the breastworks of Fort Necessity; perched high on the rock ledges overlooking Jumonville’s Glen; and for the past eleven years, helped refight the Battle of Fort Ligonier. And I slept in all those places with the ghosts and spirits of the dead. It’s true, George Washington slept in my backyard.
Thanks, from another dreamer.
Wallace E. Covert Pittsburgh, Pa.
The Three Elevens
Our local school students don’t know the origin of Veterans Day. They don’t know it was first called Armistice Day. They have not learned of “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”
My mother told how she knew the war was over in 1918. She was hanging her laundry on the clothesline when the local coal-mine whistles started to blow at eleven o’clock. There was no radio then. Of course, eleven o’clock in France was six hours ahead of eleven o’clock local time. The news had come to this country, and telephone switchboard operators called other operators across the country. Our local switchboard operator called the local coal mine.
Mine whistles were used for many signals. They blew at five in the morning to wake miners. They blew at six for the miners to start to the mine and at seven for them to start work. The end of the workday was signaled with the whistle too. If the mine was to work the next day, the whistle was blown at eight o’clock at night. If the wind was right, the whistle could be heard for fifteen miles, and there were more than a dozen within hearing distance. Each whistle had a different tone, and each engineer would have his own way of blowing it.
There were different whistle signals for emergencies, such as a fire or explosion in the mines, and the local people knew them all. The special blowing at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month told the community that the war was over—over there.
James F. Jackson Carlisle, Ind.
Commencement Oratory
Reading about Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address (“The Time Machine,” July/August) reminded me of my great-greatgrandfather’s commencement address when he graduated from Columbia University in 1816. This ancestor, Isaac Ferris, became chancellor of New York University in 1852, and NYU has a collection of his papers in their archive that I discovered a couple of years ago. Among them is this commencement address in his handwriting. I find the speech absolutely charming. It opened up for me a whole new view of what it was like to be an American in those early years. To quote a little of it:
“May she [America] be ever emulous to stand foremost in the ranks of Intellectual Refinement! She has indeed acquired a proud & enviable station for her military virtues, but let her remember that the wreath of the muses shall long survive green and fresh when the diadem of martial glory shall have fallen from her head. The splendor of arms may crown a nation with a temporary renown, the monuments of art may be an honorable record of the greatness, wealth & genius of a people. But unstable & transitory would be the column of fame erected on either of these bases were there no poet enraptured by the sacred wine,—no orator to thunder forth on the rostrum or in the senate, no historian to perpetuate greatness & worth by his impartial pen.”
Sally Campbell Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.
Last Picture
I was most interested in the photograph of FDR in the July/August issue of American Heritage. Of course, we, like everyone else, had never seen this item before. It is most arresting evidence of the ravages of time and illness on the man. We have a number of photographs taken about two weeks previous to this one that show the same—but not as clearly and dramatically as the Robbins photograph does.
We are currently completing a general revision of our museum gallery devoted to President Roosevelt’s life, and we look forward to displaying a copy of the Robbins photograph.
William R. Emerson, Director Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Hyde Park, N.Y
Then and Really Now
I just received my very first issue of American Heritage (July/August), and 1 was particularly impressed with the “Then and Now” photos of the Cleveland glass shopping arcade. The layout was unlike many then-and-now photos I’ve seen, which were taken at careless and sloppy angles, making it all but impossible to compare the two pictures. My highest compliments to your photographer.
