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This Hallowed Ground
“The man who really fought the Civil War, whether he tame from the North or from the South, was pretty largely a sweaty private in a somewhat heterogeneous uniform, a man who could get by on parade when he had to hut who spent most of his time slogging it out in mud. dust, rain, sleet, blistering sunshine, or other uncomfortable conditions. He rarely bothered to strike an attitude, and...
[Stories]
Myths That Hide The American Indian
Ever since the white men first fell upon them, the Indians of what is now the United States have been hidden from white men’s view by a number of conflicting myths. The oldest of these is the myth of the Noble Red Man or the Child of Nature, who is credited either with a habit of flowery oratory of implacable dullness or else with an imbecilic inability to converse in anything more than grunts...
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When They Built The Big Bridge
People living in Brooklyn in the 1870’s were able to boast that their home town was the third largest, fastest growing city in the United States, but they had one major daily headache—getting to work in New York. For, they were dependent upon the terries; and the ferries, delightful though they could be, were in turn dependent upon the weather, fee, log, and wind played merry hob with their...
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Allan Mclane Unknown Hero Of The Revolution
Captain Allan McLane rode out before dawn of June 16, 1778, to keep a dangerous rendezvous. With his cavalry he had been probing the British perimeter around Philadelphia, trying to learn for General Washington at Valley Forge whether the enemy was about to evacuate the city. The previous day a young girl had slipped through the British lines and had told McLane that her father would bring him “...
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And The Navy Got Its Wings
U.S.S. Pennsylvania , a four-stacker armored cruiser with massive hitting power but only moderate speed, lay at anchor south of Goat Island in San Francisco Bay in the clear morning of January 18, 1911. Her afterdeck was disfigured by a temporary wooden platform, 119 feet in length; just forward of this, heavy canvas was draped from the searchlight platform. Most of the ship’s company crowded...
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Sheaves Of Golden Grain
It’s the snugness that makes the valley. On both sides blue mountains hem it in, brooding over the farmhouses like a mother hen blooding over her chicks. There is a time, just when the sunlight touches the crest of the Blue Ridge, when there is too much beauty for believing. This is land to come to and not leave. The Indians loved it, and named it Shenandoah —“Daughter of the Stars.” They came to...
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Robert Morris And The “art Magick”
Early in the York town year of 1781 the Continental Congress heard the report of a committee which had been at work estimating the debts of the United States. The committee failed to find enough income even to meet interest charges. The Continental paper had reached a point where it cost more to print a bill than it was worth in the market place. Next day the members of Congress voted...
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Builders For The Carriage Trade
Not long ago a distinguished New Yorker, manager for many years of the great National Horse Show, was asked for his opinion of the famous, vanished carriage-building firm of Rrewster it Company. Wouldn’t he describe them as “the Tiffany of the carriage business”? Not at all, he replied. “Rather, I would say that Tiffany is the Rrewster of the jewelry trade.” When, in November, 1927, William...
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Reading, Writing And History
American Tragedy Error by Mrs. Stowe And the Middle West
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American Tragedy
Running through the dark center of American history there is a vivid red thread of tragedy. Deep in the national subconscious lies the stain put there by the fact that through nearly half of its independent existence the nation had to live with an intolerable thing which could neither be rationally justified nor peacefully disposed of—the institution of human slavery. Men a century ago...
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Dickens In America: The Boz Ball
  If Chicago has reason for remembering Valentine’s Day, New York has reason, too, for remembering a famous, less grisly fourteenth of February in her own annals. For on that clay in 1842 Manhattanites threw sophistication and decorum to the East River winds and put on a public reception that was to be the talk of the town for many a Knickerbocker moon. The occasion was the arrival of...
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Reading, Writing, And History
Half-Horse, Half-Alligator Central to the American experience is the fact that in this land men have had to create their own traditions. Out of a past still too close to be fully understood have come legends which turn into articles of faith before they are even complete. And no article of faith has had greater force with us than the one which centers about the era of the great frontier...
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America: Curator Of British Political Relics
In exploring the highways and byways of American politics, I have been drawn to the conclusion that there is more real conservation of ancient English institutions in the rich geological strata of American politics—at the state and county level, perhaps, even more than at the federal level—than there is in England itself. Americans come to Britain to see the roots of their political system in...
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A Congressman’s Prayer
This poem was not written for publication or to impress the constituents of the author, nor are these empty phrases. The gentleman from the Plymouth District of Massachusetts belonged to no party and meant every word he said. Placing duty before self, national interests before local, and justice before all, he served in the House through the long years between 1831 and 1848, when, at eighty,...
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An Iowa Christmas
E very Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches. My bells were on my father’s team of horses as he drove up to our horse-headed hitching post with the bobsled that would take us to celebrate Christmas on the family farm ten...
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Fire-eating Farmer Of The Confederacy
In October, 1818, a pale, spindle-legged young Virginia planter stood before the Prince George Agricultural Society and nervously read an essay he had prepared on calcareous manures. Edmund Ruffin was 24 then, small and sickly, with a preposterously long mane that hung far below his shoulders. His delivery was poor, but his eyes burned with zeal and impatience as he told new truths about the...
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“The Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny”
For a young American who wanted excitement and adventure along with a chance to get rich quick, the United States of a hundred years ago offered plentiful opportunity. The adjustment of the Oregon boundary with Great Britain in 1846, the decisive victory over Mexico and the acquisition of about half the territory of that unfortunate republic in 1848, and then, almost immediately afterward, the...
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“we Were There, Waiting—”
One of the genuine but little-known classics of Civil War literature is a book called The Battle of Gettysburg , written by a Northern soldier named Frank Aretas Haskell. Haskell fought in the battle, and less than two weeks after the fighting ceased he wrote a detailed account of what he had seen and experienced and sent the manuscript to his brother, back in Wisconsin. Haskell had seen...
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The Third Day at Gettysburg
As the sun arose to-day, the clouds became broken, and we had once more glimpses of sky, and fits of sunshine—a rarity, to cheer us. From the crest, save to the right of the Second Corps, no enemy, not even his outposts could be discovered, along all the position where he so thronged upon the Third Corps yesterday. The men were roused early, in order that the morning meal might be out of the way...
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Apostle To The Indians
Whenever the Reverend John Eliot walked along the Indian trail from Roxbury to Dorchester Mill in the autumn weather, he tried to put the time to proper use by continuing the metrical version of the Psalms that he and Richard Mather and Thomas Weld were working on. His somber figure pinpointed the brightness of the afternoon as he strode along, heedless of the crickets’ antiphonal shrilling....
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Gettysburg Today
It all happened 94 years ago, and all of ihe men who were there are dead now; but the ground today is just the same, the sun still slants down in late afternoon from the crest of the blue mountain wall to the west, and quaint, archaic statues mark the places where living men once stormed and shouted at one another … and, taking everything together, Gettysburg today is a place where gallant...
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Bonnet, Book, And Hatchet
She was born Carry Amelia Moore in Kentucky, in 1846. By the time she came into the public eye she was Carry A. Nation, an amazon nearly six feet tall who kept her weight clown to 175 pounds by the prodigious wrecking of saloons. The odd spelling of her first name was clue to the imperfect learning of her father. Her mother lived for many years in the delusion that she was Queen Victoria and...
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Farewell To Steam
  It was the way they worked the cord and changed the steam pressure that made the whistle almost seem to talk. Of course, there was a regular language of signals—two long blasts for starting up; one long tremolo for approaching a station; and, at grade crossings, the familiar whoooo, whoooo, hoo, whooooooooo! mournful and infinitely expressive—but within these supposed...
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A Re-examination
Every lime there’s a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, “Dan’l Webster—Dan’l Webster!” the ground’ll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while you’ll hear a deep voice saying, “Neighbor, how stands the Union?” Then you better answer the Union...
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Great Man Eloquent
For more than a hundred years everybody has been writing about Daniel Webster and some have written well, but it can be plausibly argued that only one has written truthfully. There are twelve formal lives of Webster listed in the Dictionary of American Biography , and this takes no account of shorter studies by historians, philosophers, journalists, orators, and every known brand of...
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The Undimmed Appeal Of The Gibson Girl
In the dear, nostalgic days of the 1890’s and early igoo’s a vibrant, radiant young woman took the country by storm. She was the Gibson Girl, a brilliant invention, something quite new. She was lovely, animated, and unquestionably American. And today, though four change-filled decades have passed, more men are still in love with her than you might think. Why is her appeal still so potent?...
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T. R. On The Telephone
On June 7, 1916, the national conventions of the Progressive and Republican parties were about to open simultaneously in Chicago. Of the many presidential candidates who would be suggested at the Republican convention only two, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, seemed to have a real chance of being nominated.On June 7, 1916, the national conventions...
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War Makes Thieves, Peace Hangs Them
Piracy along the American coast began with legalized plunder. Sea warfare in colonial times was only partly an affair of navies. The rest was free private enterprise. If an individual adventurer could reap a fortune from a war, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his riches were patriotically gained.In the war which England waged in the late years of the Seventeenth and the early years of the...
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Reading, Writing And History
The Golden Dawn Conquistadors and Saints And in New England The Way of General Sherman
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The Golden Dawn
One of the oddest things about the whole American story is the fact that a nation completely dedicated to the future has always had a deep sentimental attachment to the past. More than any other people—except perhaps the desert-wandering Children of Israel—the Americans have moved forward with a sense of mission and a belief in a great destiny; but at the same time there has always been the...
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Conquistadors And Saints
The golden legend was watered down somewhat by the time it reached New Mexico. Men still believed in it, and pursued it with determination, and felt that beyond the rim of the next mesa they would see something that would make Montezuma’s fabled city in the lake look small and weak; but the substance of the dream was evasive, out in the great empty stretches of New Mexico, and they found before...
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And In New England
From New Mexico to New England it is a long way, and the stories of these separate colonies are very different; yet it is possible to suspect that some of the principal actors in Catholic New Mexico and Protestant New England would have understood one another very well, even if their ways of speech and the objects they were trying to attain were in substantial contrast. In each case the...
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The Way Of General Sherman
Few Americans seem less mystical, on the surface, than General William Tecumseh Sherman, who sacked Atlanta and Columbia and in his old age remarked succinctly that war is hell. But in his own odd way Sherman, too, was a man given over to a vision, and after the Civil War ended he landed in the precise spot where he could do something to help make it come true. First he was commander of the...
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Song Of The Hoops
Sailing down the crowded street, Scraping every one they meet, With a rushing whirlwind sound, Muffled belles around abound. Hoop! hoop! hoop! What a vast, expansive swoop! Hoops of whalebone, short and crisp, Hoops of wire, thin as a wisp; Hoops of brass, thirteen yards long, Hoops of steel, confirm’d and strong; Hoops of rubber, soft and slick,...
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“I Find No Intellect Comparable To My Own”
Margaret Fuller is usually remembered—if at all—because she is supposed to have told Thomas Carlyle in London, “I accept the universe.” The legend implies that she underwent a struggle to achieve this accommodation, and that the universe was to feel complimented. So posterity chuckles over Carlyle’s reputed comment, “By Gad, she’d better!” A more documented testimony to what many of her...
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How Rails Saved a Seaport
On June 1, 1881, the morning train from New York arrived in Baltimore on schedule at 2 P.M. Its most distinguished passenger, a large, heavy-set man in his early sixties, stared eagerly from the window of his private palace car as the train was broken up and shunted aboard the ferry steamer Canton for the trip across Baltimore Harbor to the B&O piers at Locust Point. The temperature was in...
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Early Memories Of The B&o
The very name itself, flashing by on the trim blue cars, has a rhythm and a poetic ring: Baltimore...
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The Needless War With Spain
The United States in the 1890’s became aggressive, expansionist, and jingoistic as it had not been since the 1850’s. In less than five years, we came to the brink of war with Italy, Chile, and Great Britain over three minor incidents in which no American national interest of major importance was involved. In each of these incidents, our secretary of state was highly aggressive, and the American...
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The Man Who Killed Custer
FOREWORD Few episodes in American history have held more fascination for writers—or the public—than George Armstrong Custer’s Last Stand. More has been written on this relatively unimportant incident in American history than on the Battle of Gettysburg—and probably no two accounts agree in all details.Much of the new material on Custer’s Last Stand comes to the attention of the editors of...
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The War In Cuba —a G.i. View
The Spanish-American War at first promised to be little more than a naval exercise. It began with an easy coiu|iiest of the Spanish Philippines when Commodore Dewy sank the Spanish Pacific Meet in Manila Day. Hut the hope that Admiral William T. Sampson’s North Atlantic Squadron could duplicate that triumph in the Caribbean and forte a quick and comparatively bloodless decision was short lived...
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First In Toga, First In Sandals—
As Artemus Ward once put it, “Old George Washington’s forte was not to hev eny public man of the present day resemble him to eny alarmin extent.”Some similar thought must have occurred to the legislators of North Carolina when, back in 1815, they decided to empower Governor William Miller to get a full-length statue of the great man, and to get the very best. Governor Miller inquired of William...
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The Unlucky Collins Line
It was a time when the sea called out to every Yankee lad its promise of adventure and reward. America was still the coastline and the rivers, and both then and thereafter seemed laden with an unmistakable scent of brisk salt air. Mr. Madison’s War of 1812 had ended, the seas beckoned to all who would sail them, and it began to look as if America would not only sail them—but might even inherit...
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The Unknown Conspirator
In going through Stanton Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress while doing research for a new book, Philip Van Doren Stern found himself one day looking at something he could not believe. It was an official order listing the chief conspirator who had been arrested following Lincoln’s assassination and who were being transported into close and separate custody. What startled...
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The Slave Ship Rebellion
 Long and low and black-hulled, the schooner beat along the Cuban coast in the black and starless night. The moon at midnight tried to break through the pall of the clouds, but was blotted from the rim of the featureless horizon by a drenching smother of rain. The schooner pitched and bucked in head winds and seas, discomfort in her after cabin where two wealthy Cuban planters slept fitfully...
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Rebels And Redcoats
The tension between American colonists and English rulers had at last reached the breaking point. British troops held Boston, and their commander, General Thomas Gage, believed the time had come to put some sort of curb on the rebellious colonial leaders. On an April day in 1775 he sent out a detachment of soldiers to take action against what seemed clearly a rebellious movement.That touched it...
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H And Non-h
Dear Sirs: Oliver Jensen’s editorial, “H and Non-H,” in the December issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE requires, first of all, some factual correction and, secondly, consideration of his basic criticism of outdoor museums of history. By oblique implication the author criticizes The Farmers’ Museum at Cooperstown for “pseudo cuteness and creeping costumization.” His observations derive from...
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When Karl Marx Worked For Horace Greeley
On Saturday morning, October 25, 1851, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, entrenched after a decade of existence as America’s leading Whig daily, appeared with twelve pages rather than its usual eight. The occasion was too noteworthy to be passed over without comment by the paper itself. So a special editorial was written—probably by Greeley’s young managing editor, the brisk, golden-whiskered...
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The Great Rail Wreck At Revere
So long as it remained in public consciousness it was known as the Great Revere Disaster. Written or spoken it deserved the adjective, and the capitals. Worse railroad wrecks had happened before; worse were to come after. But none had such far-reaching results as this tragedy which in 1871 took place in the small Massachusetts village whose name sought to honor the state’s incomparably best-known...
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Hayfoot, Strawfoot!
The volunteer soldier in the American Civil War used a clumsy muzzle-loading rifle, lived chiefly on salt pork and hardtack, and retained to the very end a loose-jointed, informal attitude toward the army with which he had cast his lot. But despite all of the surface differences, he was at bottom blood brother to the G.I. Joe of modern days.Which is to say that he was basically, and incurably, a...
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“I've Got This Thing Simplified”
To observe Franklin D. Roosevelt across the barrier interposed between the President and the press was often to have the impression of a brilliant and accomplished actor meeting the challenge of a critical audience. He took pleasure and pride in his own performance and, with his mastery in later years of the difficult technique of the press conference, he seldom missed his cues.It was a rare...
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