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Romantic On The Loose
The 1850’s have been called the tormented decade of American history. In those years the slavery question got entirely out of control. In 1850 the problem might still have been settled by debate, compromise, and mutual arrangement, but by 1860 it was insoluble, and war had become virtually inevitable. The nation’s political machinery became progressively less and less able to deal with the...
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Who Started The War?
Walker had been in his grave less than a year when the American Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter—April 12, 1861. Immediately afterward, and continuing down to the present day, there has been an argument: Who really started it? Did Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, give the orders that began the war—or did President Abraham Lincoln cleverly maneuver...
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Heritage Of The War
From the American Civil War to the beginning of America’s involvement in the Second World War is a long time, and the two things apparently have very little relation with one another. Yet there is a thread connecting them, if it is nothing more than the thin strand that runs through human affairs, tying the man of the 1930’s with the men of the 1860’s; and one is somehow compelled to think about...
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“curses-foiled Again!”
HELEN (Steps on balcony. It crumbles beneath her.): My God, it is falling! Help! Help! (She goes down with balcony, but catches on cliff. At same moment War field enters above, followed by Major and Norwood.) WARFIELD (Rushes to edge.): Helen, hold! I’ll save you! Ah, the flag! (Swings down on flag.) Hold! I am coming! HELEN: I cannot. My hands are slipping. Good-bye. God bless you....
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Untitled
Passion, Pathos, and Adventure “Thank heaven I arrived in time…” Next week—“East Lynne”! (laughter) Ladies of the Lithograph “For this relief, much thanks”
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Passion, Pathos, And Adventure
The three chief plot ingredients of turn-of-the-century melodrama are unmistakably tagged in these three posters. Any impression that The Woman in Black would turn out to be as somber as its title is cheerfully dissipated by the artist’s choice of a scene in which Ruby, “an English music hall artiste,” gives a private showing of the cancan to “Tony Jack” Crane, son of the play’s...
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“thank Heaven I Arrived In Time …”
The rescue scene was to melodrama what the strip tease later became to burlesque; without several per show, the patrons would have demanded their money back—indignantly. As a consequence, the “scenic artist” and his crew of painters, carpenters, and mechanics were as important to box-office success as the author himself. There we herculean efforts to invent new effects, especially since...
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Next Week—“east Lynne”! (laughter)
ARCHIBALD: And now, Barbara, I’ll see you to your gate. BARBARA: Never mind, Archibald, it’s only a few steps. I can go by myself. ARCHIBALD: Nonsense, Barbara! Allow you to go by yourself along the high road at this hour? Take my arm. (They go out.) (Enter Lady Isabel and Levison, in time to see them off.) LEVISON: There, Lady Isabel. I told you what you might see: there is...
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Ladies Of The Lithograph
Although the dramatic scene was slock in trade for the lithograph artist, now and then an outstanding star u’as enough of a box-office magnet to justify a poster portrait. Such was the splendid Julia Arthur, whose jet black hair, dark, luminous eyes, rich voice, and tremendous stage presence evoked raptures in many an audience between 1885 and iooo. Her sultry beauty suggested an exotic...
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“for This Relief, Much Thanks”
Some theatre posters reflected the fad that even the audience far gone on melodramatic thud and blunder was not insatiable: a spot of comedy now and then was more tlian acceptable. Certainly the scene chosen for this lavish lithograph advertising The Fatal Card (1805) looks like something out of a gay farce by Oscar Wilde; and the caption at the bottom does nothing to alter the...
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Professor Henry And His Philosophical Toys
James Smithson, bastard son of the Duke of North-umberland, was a man who kept one eye on posterity. After leaving his fortune to what would one day be called the Smithsonian Institution, he wrote: “My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Xorthumbcrlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten.” A debatable prophecy, perhaps. But the name of Smithson has certainly...
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Smithson And The Smithsonian
In New York Harbor. on January 19, 1904, a coffin bearing the remains of a man who had never been in the United States, and is not known to have had a single American friend, was transferred from a British ship, the Princess Irene , to an American ship, the Dolphin . Draped with an American Mag, the coffin was conducted by Alexander Graham Bell and an escort from the United States War...
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Melting Pot In The Bayous
Louisiana was America’s first melting pot. Here the mixing of races and nationalities from the four corners of the globe, which began early in the eighteenth century and continued well into the beginning of the present one, has resulted in a region that is absolutely unique in the United States. Nowhere, perhaps, has the triumph of the Great American Experiment been demonstrated more vividly...
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The Greole Sketchbook Of A. R. Waud
A century ago, before the levelling onslaught of modern life caught up with them, New Orleans and the isolated bayou country of southern Louisiana were not only different from the rest of the United States—they were a world apart. A superlative portrait of the phenomenon that was Creole Louisiana was made in the years following Appomattox by Alfred R. Waud, an English-born illustrator who had...
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Victory On Lake Champlain
 On April 11, 1814, the British army under Wellington fought the last battle of the Peninsular War at Toulouse. Less than a hundred days later—on July 12—the Governor General of Canada reported that the first brigade of this army had readied Montreal, ready to undertake offensive operations against the United States.  On April 11, 1814, the British army under Wellington fought the last...
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Faces From The Past-xiii
The image is all but gone from the glass plate; what remains is a faded shadow of the man and his daughter, frozen forever in the interrupted moment of their chess game. When this picture was taken, Clement Clarke Moore was past middle age, with most of his achievements behind him, with the way of life he had known in rural Manhattan disappearing. Born midway through the Revolution, he would...
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The Overland Limited
When, in July, 1947, the Southern Pacific trains Nos. 27 and 28, the Overland Limited, disappeared from the schedule under that title, one of the great, romantic names of the Old West began to slip quietly into oblivion. The San Francisco Overland, which took its place, was hardly the proud, all-Pullman varnish run of de luxe implications that had come into being on the Southern Pacific’s...
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“i Gave Him Barks And Saltpeter •”
On February 23, 1803, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, professor of the Institute of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the foremost American physician of his day: Dear Sir: I wish to mention to you in confidence that I have obtained authority from Congress to undertake the long desired object of exploring the Missouri...
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General Reynolds And “dear Kate”
Very early on the morning of July 1, 1863, on a ridge in southeastern Pennsylvania, one of history’s pivotal battles was about to begin. A division of Confederate infantry heading east on the Chambersburg Pike toward the town of Gettysburg stumbled into a body of Union cavalry; a few shots were exchanged, lines were formed, and the great struggle was joined. Not long afterward Major General...
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Black Pawn On A Field Of Peril
Dred Scott was nobody in particular. A slave born of slave parents, unable to read or write, physically frail, he was a man without energy, who lor a full decade drifted about in St. Louis as an errand boy and general odd-jobs factotum, an unremarkable bondsman on whom the burden of servitude rested rather lightly. Nobody directly concerned with him wanted him as a slave. As a chattel he was a...
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Vice Vs. Virtue, A Puritan Remembrancer
The lithograph on the opposite page will, no doubt, make most of our readers smile; so will the other moral illustrations on the following pages. They make amusing decorations for the den or bar, interesting to study out for their wealth of detail. But how could hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, so many of them our own forebears, have taken such things so literally and...
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Lamplight Inauguration
In Vermont, the night of August 2, 1923, was definitely unusual. It was the hottest night of the summer and one of the sultriest ever recorded in Plymouth Notch, normally one of the breezier areas at the eastern fringe of the Green Mountain range. Fully as peculiar was the fact that the kerosene vapor lamp hanging from the ceiling in Cilley’s Store—an easy stone’s throw from the Coolidge...
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When The Turkeys Walked
In June, 1863, George Bruffey and his partner, a Mr. Hurd, were following the trail along the South Platte in northeastern Colorado, on their way to the gold-rich young boom town of Denver. Not far from their destination, they witnessed a peculiar sight that impressed them as much as any buffaloes, antelopes, or Indians they had so far encountered. This was a man driving a flock of five hundred...
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Reading, Writing, And History
The Feel of the Lash Poverty and Cholera Numbness on the Heart
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The Feel Of The Lash
Speaking of a man who could see nothing really disturbing in the institution of human slavery, Abraham Lincoln once remarked that this person was so constituted that he could not feel the lash that landed on somebody else’s back. Only if it hit his own back could he understand that a flogging was going on. The insensitivity Lincoln was talking about is one of the commonest and most...
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Poverty And Cholera
It would of course be comforting to think that this moral obtuseness was peculiar to Englishmen. It seems, however, to have been prevalent in America as well, and the cholera epidemics of the last century bring the thing into focus. In 1832 the first epidemic of Asiatic cholera struck the United States. It was a complete mystery; no one knew what caused it or how it was transmitted, but...
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Numbness On The Heart
Of all of the black chapters that would not appear in the history books if it were not for man’s insensitivity to the sufferings of other men, the AfroAmerican slave trade probably is the worst. Here, if anywhere, is the account of a trade that was built on unvarnished cruelty and on the almost incredible sufferings of millions of men, women, and children. We put up with it, here in America,...
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Art As Propaganda
The Black Legend The Spaniards [wrote Las Casas of the scene above] were no sooner arriv’d in the Isle of Cuba , but this Cacyque [chief] who knew ’em too well, … resolv’d to defend himself … but he unfortunately fell into their Hands [and] was burn’d alive. While he was in the midst of the Flames, tied to a Stake, a certain Franciscan Frier of great Piety and Vertue, took...
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A Man Of Conscience
Nothing is more central to the American experience than the journey of the immigrant from the Old World to the New in search of freedom, security of person, or simply his daily bread. If Carl Schurz, who arrived from Germany in 1852, found all these things in abundance, he repaid the republic in rare and precious coin: half a century of honest, devoted service. He was a crusader for abolition...
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Faces From The Past—ix
The great man could spare exactly two minutes. Like a huge, baleful dragon he sat, not posing but confronting the camera, defying it to do its worst, gripping the polished arm I of the chair so that it looked like a gleaming pigsticker aimed at the vitals. The photographer, Edward Stcichcn, had time for two exposures; then his visitor rose, clapped a square-topped derby on his head, reached for...
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“here Is My Home At Last!”
After Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered by an anti-Mormon mob at Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, great contention arose among the Latter-day Saints as to who would succeed Joseph as head of the Church. At a vast meeting beside the unfinished temple on August 8, Sidney Rigdon urged that he be made Church guardian, claiming that he had received a revelation from on high that this should...
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Was The Secretary Of War A Traitor?
In 1861, when the word “traitor” came to be used pretty loosely, the average northerner would probably have placed John B. Floyd no lower than second on the blacklist of treason. Floyd, everybody said, was a sinister secret agent who had used his position as Secretary of War in President James Buchanan’s Cabinet to send guns by the carload to Dixie. He had armed the South with federal muskets...
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America On Ice
No one knows when man first ventured from terra firma onto ice that was less firm, and began to slide. It must have been a very long time ago, for primitive skate blades made of animal bone have been dug up all over northern Europe, and there are references to skating in ancient runic poetry. There is even an official first topple, recorded in the fourteenth century, when a Netherlands lass...
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Conquest And The Cross
When Hernando Cortés and his little band of Spaniards fought their way in 1519 from the tropical shores of Mexico up to the high plateau and first saw stretched below them the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, gleaming on its lake under the morning sun, they experienced one of the truly dramatic moments in the history of America. Fortunately we have the words of a reporter worthy of the scene, the...
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Six Minutes That Changed The World
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s great services to history was the appointment, in 1942, of the eminent Harvard professor Samuel Eliot Morison to write the story of the United States Navy in World War II. This was to prove no ordinary task of scholarship, for Morison was given the opportunity to witness at sea much of the combat he would one day describe. The result of this firsthand...
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G. Washington Meets A Test
The year was 1753, the month November. Through bone-chilling rain and sleety snow, seven horsemen plodded slowly up the jagged slopes of the Allegheny Mountains. Around the narrow trail were miles upon miles of giant black walnut, cherry, oak, and locust trees, heavy with moss and knitted together by tangled Virginia creeper. It was a primeval forest, and in its shadowy depths Indian war...
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Our Fellow Immigrants
In the spring of 1847 Thomas Woodcock, president of the Natural History Society of Brooklyn, New York, received from England a crate containing several pairs of small, dingy birds. He released them in a city park. None survived the following winter. Woodcock repeated his experiment with a similar lack of success each of the following three or four springs. In either 1851 or 1852 his...
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In Search Of My Son
On January 15,1865, the United States Army and Navy bombarded, stormed, and captured Fort Fisher, the great Confederate strong point which guarded the outlet of Cape Fear River just below Wilmington, North Carolina. This battle closed the Confederacy’s last port for blockade runners; it also cost the Federal Army and Navy some 1,300 casualties. Among the men killed at Fort Fisher was...
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Long Blade, Short Scabbard
In late March, 1865, Abraham Lincoln spent a few days at City Point, Virginia, aboard the Malvern , a captured blockade runner with rather cramped quarters, which Admiral David D. Porter had converted into his flagship. One little problem that arose is described in reminiscences that Porter published twenty years later: I offered the President my bed, but he positively declined it, and...
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Tragedy In Dedham: A Final Note
SACCO’S GUILT To the Editor: In October, 1958, AMERICAN HERITAGE published an article by Francis Russell in which he said that he was convinced that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were innocent of the crime of murder, of which they were convicted and for which they suffered death. In the issue of June, 1962, you published an article by the same author in which he said he believes...
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Doctors Of The Frontier
At every step in the trek westward, America’s pioneers found an enemy more ubiquitous, more stealthy, and more deadly than the Indians, yet in our histories we tend to forget this dread opponent. It was, quite simply, disease. Epidemics of malaria ravaged frontier settlements through most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. In the gold camps of California, cholera, malaria, typhoid, and...
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Reading, Writing, And History
The Incredible Century To Bleed to Death Offensive on the Somme The French Mutiny
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The Incredible Century
Go back fifty years in time and you are in a world which seems as remote as the age of the dinosaurs, which in some ways it indeed resembles; the age of the imperial dynasties which ruled a great part of Europe, rigid and wholly static anachronisms which had somehow survived into a time whose intense dynamism was altogether too much for them. Confronting the inevitable changes of the modern...
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To Bleed To Death
Yet perhaps it was the way the war was fought that really did the damage, for it inflicted a psychic wound of the kind from which there is no easy recovery. Above everything else, that war was savage, with an insensate sort of savagery for which there is no good rationalization. We are used to terrible things in our generation—fire raids on great cities, and the unspeakable hideousness of...
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Offensive On The Somme
Before the war ended mankind was at the mercy of its own machines of destruction. It had perfected the techniques of mass slaughter without mastering them, indeed without even thinking about them coherently, and it could do no more than stretch itself on a rack of its own construction. Dreadful as it was, Verdun was not really unique. There was also the Somme. In a way, this battle at least...
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The French Mutiny
There is, after all, a limit to what men will put up with, and early in 1917 the French Army reached that limit. When the year 1917 opened, the French Army had lost—in men killed, dead of wounds, captured, or simply “missing”—some 1,300,000 men. Reflecting on this, the French government at last nerved itself to relieve Marshal Joffre, and it replaced him with General Robert Nivelle, who had...
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“a Gradele Of Trobel”
The Battle of Brooklyn Heights, in August of 1776, was a near disaster for the half-organized Continental Army, many of whose officers were sadly inexperienced in the art of war. The following verbatim excerpt from the diary of a participant, Colonel Josiah Smith, of East Moriches, Long Island, suggests that some militia officers were also spectacularly unskilled along other lines. ( AMERICAN...
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The Eight Wonder Of Erastus Field
“A professed architect, on looking at this picture, might have the impression that a structure built in this form would not stand.” Thus, in 1876, did Erastus Salisbury Field begin a description of his Historical Monument of the American Republic —a, structure which, had it ever been built, would have made the Washington Monument look puny. From a massive base rather reminiscent of the...
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The Man Who Stopped The Rams
To watch the movements of the Southern agents I who are here purchasing arms and munitions of war and engaged in fating out vessels for the so-called Southern Confederacy it is necessary to employ one or two detectives and occasionally to pay money in way of traveling expenses to the men so employed. They are not as a general thing very estimable men but are the only persons we can get to...
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The Saloon
Scarcely a man is now alive who has bellied up to the mahogany in an old-fashioned saloon and said to Mike or Otto, “the usual.” For more than fifty years over half of the states have been without saloons. Indeed, half of the total area of the United States was legally dried up as long as seventy years ago. Since lew women, other than painted Jezebels, ever saw the inside of a pre-World War...
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