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Churchman Of The Desert
Winter storms in the Gulf of Mexico overtook a small ship beating her way from New Orleans to Galveston in January, 1851. Despite the fact that she had been condemned as unsafe, she carried 100 passengers. One of these was a French priest, 37 years old, who on November 24, 1850, in Cincinnati, Ohio, had been consecrated a bishop. Carrying with him the papal bull of Pius IX, which appointed him as...
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The Bloody End Of Meeker’s Utopia
On September 29, 1879, a small band of Ute Indians went wild on the Western Slope of Colorado and murdered their Indian agent and all his employees at the remote Ute Agency on White River. A few hours earlier, another small Ute band ambushed a relief force of soldiers at Milk Creek 25 miles away. All told, the White River Utes, who had never hurt anybody before, killed 30 white men and wounded 44...
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Prescott’s Conquests
“When you see Prescott, give him my cordial remembrances. You two are shelved together for immortality.” Over a century ago Washington Irving thus prophesied an eternity of readers for two New England scholars, George Ticknor, first American master of European literature, and his close friend, the historian William H. Prescott. It is a coincidence of America’s cultural flowering in the nineteenth...
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When Everything Hung By A Thread
The business boom in the post-Civil War decades spawned an arresting advertising device fully as charming as it was effective—the trade or premium card. Given away by merchants, usually to the children of customers, they were welcomed into the American home for their bright lithographed color and their depictions of the newest developments in an age of rapid change. Many families even saved...
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First By Land
The most momentous event in the geographical history of the North American continent, aside from its discovery, was the first complete crossing of it from coast to coast—a feat that was three centuries in the doing. This epochal achievement first confirmed the guesses of civilized man about the breadth and structure of the continent and led directly to the opening up of the West. Yet millions of...
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Doctor Gatling And His Gun
All was not quiet along the Potomac early in 1862. The 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment, under command of Colonel John W. Geary of Kansas fame, was guarding a 24-mile stretch of the river, and there were occasional skirmishes between the opposing armies. On February 7, Geary shelled Harpers Ferry, and a few weeks later marched in and recaptured the town from the Confederates.At some time...
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Whither The Course Of Empire?
Shortly before his death James Fenimore Cooper left off scolding his countrymen long enough to heap praises on the memory of his late friend Thomas Cole. Not only was Cole “the highest genius this country has ever produced” but also, in Cooper’s estimation, his The Course of Empire, the series of five paintings, was “one of the noblest works of art ever wrought.” He went on to predict that these...
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Two Civil War Letters
Hardly a person in America was untouched by the Civil War, and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were no exceptions. Because they were perhaps the most distinctly “American” writers of their time, their reactions to the conflict are particularly interesting. Printed here are two of their wartime letters, both written within six months of each other, at a time when the North seemed on the verge of...
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Untitled
Esmeralda, Sept. 9, 1862 Dear Billy: … It appears to me that the very existence of the United States is threatened just now. I am afraid we have been playing the game of brag about as recklessly as I have ever seen it played, even on an Arkansas steamboat—“going blind” and “doubling the pot” and “straddling” and “calling” on hands without a “pair,” or even an “ace at the head.” D——n it...
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Untitled
Washington, March 19, 1863. Dear Nat, and Fred Gray: Since I left New York, I was down in the Army of the Potomac in front with my brother a good part of the winter, commencing time of the battle of Fredericksburgh—have seen war-life, the real article—folded myself in a blanket, lying down in the mud with composure—relished salt pork...
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A Yankee Skipper Who Preyed On British Shipping Relates His Wartime Experiences
George Coggeshall of Milford, Connecticut, was a sea captain in the great Yankee tradition. His father had been a successful shipmaster but was ruined by repeated confiscations of his cargoes by British and French vessels in the years after the Revolution. Young George, too poor to attend school, had been sent to sea as soon as he was old enough to carry a message from the quarter-deck to the...
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Reading, Writing, And History
The Romantic Outlook Sea Raider Realist’s War Young Innocents
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The Romantic Outlook
It may be that we would all be better off if we could rid history of some of the romantic haze which keeps blurring the outlines. This (it is only fair to add) is a responsibility of the citizen at large as well as of the historian. The romance is there, all right, and there is no way to avoid seeing it; the trick is to keep that fact from distorting our scale of values. The romantic...
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Sea Raider
What was true on the land was also true on the water. The sea raid was like the cavalry raid. It was bold, eye-filling, inspiring, and in the grand tradition, and it could be done (given the right leader) with the materials at hand. But it did not—in the nature of things, it could not—lead to final victory. Undying legends could be erected on the exploits of a Confederate cruiser like Alabama...
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Realist’s War
Perhaps General William Tecumseh Sherman had caught the idea. It might be going too far to say that he had thought the thing through, but something in him seemed to respond instinctively to the changed condition. He fitted in, where Stuart and Semmes did not. He was no man for the knightly gesture or the grand flourish that both of these men understood so well, but he knew precisely what to do...
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Young Innocents
Bear in mind that this romantic viewpoint was by no means confined to the South. It was all but universal, and you can see it in the North as well as in Dixie. It is eminently visible in the history of any of the hundreds of volunteer regiments which wore the Federal blue; very strikingly so, at this moment, in an excellent new book, The Twentieth Maine , by John J. Pullen, which tells how a...
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The Great New England Sleigh
For Americans of all ages who are disappointed by today’s mild winters, when a fall of snow turns to slush overnight or is shunted aside by the relentless plow, here is Roxbury, Massachusetts, a century ago, just after a “regular built, old fashioned snow storm.” Past the Norfolk House ( right ) sweeps the great New England sleigh Cleopatra’s Barge . It was named after the first American...
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Reading, Writing, And History
Era of Transition War of the Amateurs Old-Time Army Time of Maturity
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Era Of Transition
Any thoughtful student of American society in the first decade of the present century would have had abundant reason for bleak pessimism. An ominous stratification seemed to have set in, creating sharp class lines in a democracy which had always supposed itself classless. Enormous aggregations of capital had developed; the instruments of control seemed to have collapsed; there were tensions of...
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War Of The Amateurs
One of the things that made the first part of this century so bewildering and complicated for those Americans who had to live through it was the fact that the nation had just concluded a war with Spain: one of the most significant and consequential things that the country ever did, for all that the struggle itself was only of pint size, in a military sense, and was loftily dubbed “a splendid...
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Old- Time Army
That the United States Army came to the war with Spain poorly prepared for that conflict was only natural, because its background and tradition were unique. For the better part of a century it had had a special job to do, and it had done it very well. The nation had not needed an integrated force constantly ready for a fight with a regular European power, and so in 1898 it did not have one....
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Time Of Maturity
But if it is easy to understand why the Spanish war brought unexpected problems to the Army, it is not quite so easy to see why the country got into that war in the first place. Mr. William Miller considers this question in his first-rate New History of the United States , and concludes that “every justification has been offered for America’s going to war with Spain because no clear...
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T. R. Writes His Son
Tenesas Bayou, Oct. 10, 1907. Blessed Archie: I just loved your letter. I was so glad to hear from you. I was afraid you would have trouble with your Latin. What a funny little fellow Opdyke must be; I am glad you like him. How do you get on at football? We have found no bear. I shot a deer; I sent a picture of it to Kermit. Tenesas Bayou, Oct. 10, 1907. Blessed Archie: I just loved your letter....
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Where Ignorant Armies Clashed By Night
In the summer of 1918, with Russia removed from World War I as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, the United States sent troops into Russia at two points. It did so only after the greatest soul-searching on the part of President Wilson, who had said that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations … will be the acid test of their good will …” Two factors influenced the decision. In...
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The Hawthornes In Paradise
There are only a few great love stories in American fiction, and there are fewer still in the lives of famous American writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote one of the greatest, The Scarlet Letter . He also lived a story that deserves to be retold—with all the new knowledge we can bring to bear on it—as long as there are lovers in New England; it was his courtship and conquest of Sophia Peabody....
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The Charm Of Christmas Past
It is one measure of the changes that occur in a dynamic society that Christmas, which the Puritans regarded as an idolatrous feast not to be celebrated or even tolerated by Godfearing men, became by the nineteenth century the quintessential expression of all that was dear to the pious Victorian generation. Here, with all the fringes and doodads and with all the clutter and the sentiment, is a...
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The Lordly Hudson
Orientals were first upon the river. They came by land, and their journey eastward across the continent from its northwest coast to the banks where, their soothsayers had said, they might rest beside a water that-flows-two-ways, had lasted many generations. There is no knowing who first saw the ocean bound current turn about and run toward the mountains whence it came, but the realization of: a...
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Ghosts In The White House
Again and again in the past few months when President Eisenhower has spoken over television I have heard a listener mutter cynically, “I wonder who concocted that one.” But the concocting process itself is no secret. Everybody understands that more or less hidden advisers have helped to make the talk sound well and that they have checked and rechecked the content to avoid embarrassing “boners.”...
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Last Of The Rebel Raiders
On the night of October 8, 1864, a little group of men hurried through log-shrouded streets in Liverpool, England, to board the steamer Laurel, which lay waiting in the harbor. They posed as passengers and pretended to be strangers to one another, but in tact they were officers and men of the Confederate Navy. Some of them had reached Europe oil the blockade-runners that slipped in and out of...
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Railroad In A Barn
The Boomer Brakeman, a Paul Bunyan of western railroad lore, is supposed to have made the run over the Sierra Nevada mountains just once. For nearly forty continuous miles, in the 1890’s, the main line of the Central Pacific Railroad was covered by wooden snowsheds—a railroad enshrouded in one long, twilit forty-mile tunnel protecting the tracks and the transcontinental trains against some of the...
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The Constitution: Was It An Economic Document?
By June 26, 1787, tempers in the Federal Convention were already growing short, lor gentlemen had come to the explosive question of representation in the upper chamber. Two days later Franklin moved to invoke divine guidance, and his motion was shunted aside only because there was no money with which to pay a chaplain and the members were unprepared to appeal to Heaven without an intermediary. It...
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Myth On The Map
Wherever there’s a Newton, there’s a Jasper.”When my father said that to me three years ago, he inaugurated a search that reveals what I believe to be a heretofore unrelated bit of American history. Casually spoken, his remark had been casually received. Soon afterward, however, my husband and I attended a fox hunt in Jasper County, Texas, and discovered that Newton County was next to it and that...
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The Tragedy Of King Philip And The Destruction Of The New England Indians
“Where there is love there is no fear”Behind the present town of Bristol, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay, rises the aoo-foot hill called Mount Hope. East of it is an estuary dividing Rhode Island from Massachusetts; west of it is Bristol harbor, and west again, the peninsula of Poppasquash.In 1620, when the Pilgrims landed forty miles to the east at Plymouth, Mount Hope was the seat of...
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A Century Of Cooperstown
For a village of only 2,700 souls, peaceful Cooperstown, on Lake Otsego, New York, has enjoyed a modest fame. Most people know it as the home of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, a beautiful resort, and as the place where baseball was supposedly invented by Abner Doubleday. Less well-known, but of increasing interest to regional historians and lovers of the American scene, is the record left by the...
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Lincoln’s Second Inauguration
The winter of 1864-65 had been unusually cold, with ice on the Potomac so thick that it could support crowds of skaters who were in a gay mood despite the war. But in Petersburg and Richmond, where the war was very real, the remnants of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia clung grimly to the elaborate network of fortifications and trenches that guarded the two cities. Only a few hundred yards away,...
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Reading, Writing, And History
Morning Star Go It Alone What We Are Like
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Morning Star
According to the legend, America is a nation devoted to pure action—a muscular, highly organized country, as little given to brooding introspection and as dedicated to physical activity as a professional football team. The simile may be a good one; we see to it, by elaborate mechanisms, that our colleges and universities provide an adequate, unfailing supply of skilled athletes and worry very...
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Go It Alone
This exercise in considering our society as a world JL civilization is a useful one, but it does run counter to a powerful, deeply embedded impulse in American life—the impulse to look on America as a land set apart from all others, able to go its own way without reference to what the rest of the world may be doing. The man who is ruled by this impulse we call an isolationist, and when we try...
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What We Are Like
Civilization, in the nature of things, is an experiment, and the test of its excellence (failing a better one) is probably its capacity for survival. The chief difference between our civilization and others may be that from the beginning ours has been a conscious experiment; at every step we have been pragmatists, shooting the works on the chance that what we were up to would somehow bring in...
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The Social Structure Of Early Massachusetts
Settlers of Massachusetts Were of two sets: Those by Grace of God elected; Those rejected. One good way to tell the sainted From the tainted Was that those whose prayers were heeded Had succeeded. As a rule it therefore followed That the hallowed Were the favored upper classes, Not the masses. Quite a number of the lowly Acted holy,...
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Unwanted Treasures Of The Patent Office
While the British were busily engaged in putting the torch to Washington on the evening of August 24, 1814, Dr. William Thornton, superintendent of the Patent Office, stood aghast by a window in Georgetown watching the Capitol, of which he was the chief designer, go up in flames. But the next morning, when he learned that the Patent Office too was threatened with fire, he mounted a horse and...
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Pandemonium At Promontory
Historians are agreed that the most dramatic and at the same time the most significant single date in the record of the American West was May 10, 1869, when the rails of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads met and were joined at Promontory Point, a desolate spot in the Utah desert, about forty miles northwest of Ogden. Here in a single day and hour worlds met head-on, the American...
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Funston Captures Aguinaldo
 In the relatively uneventful spring of 1901, news of an army officer’s daring exploit in a newly acquired possession across the Pacific was the talk of America. By an elaborate ruse General Frederick Funston had captured Emilio Aguinaldo, guiding spirit of the insurrection in the Philippine Islands. Since the Filipinos had no other leader of Aguinaldo’s prowess, it was apparent that the...
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Classmates Divided
It was just a century last summer since a tall, raw-boned Ohio farm boy stepped from the two o’clock boat to West Point’s South Dock. He shouldered his baggage and climbed the steep path to the plain. Sun-drenched fields, dipping elms, indigo hills, and silver river spread out before him: the almost unbelievable beauty which would be the backdrop of his life for the next four years.He stood for a...
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The Last Stand Of Chief Joseph
In June, 1877, just one year after the Custer debacle, a new and unexpected Indian outbreak flared in the West. To an American public wearied and disgusted with a governmental policy, or lack of policy, that seemed to breed Indian wars, this one, an uprising by formerly peaceful Nez Percés1 of Oregon and Idaho, was dramatized by what appeared to be superb Indian generalship. One army detachment...
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The Yankee And The Czar
In late October the sun hangs low in the south over the Gulf of Finland and sets early into the Baltic’s leaden waters. The equinox is usually seen only through clouds scudding from the rime-crusted shores, and it signifies not the turning point of autumn but the onset of winter, bringing ice that soon seals the harbors.Captain Beckford of the American merchant brig Horace, over seventy days out...
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“Now Defend Yourself, You Damned Rascal!”
As the chanting of his slaves announced the approaching death of Andrew Jackson, on a June day in 1845, the old warrior spent part of his last conscious moments dictating farewell messages to men whose love he had valued—Francis P. Blair, Sam Houston, and Thomas Hart Benton. The appearance of Benton on this list was natural, for he had become the old general’s most devoted partisan; but thirty...
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The Charleston Tradition
From the beginning, Charleston was different. Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, chief among the Lords Proprietors, planned it that way. For his “darling,” as he called the settlement, he had philosopher John Locke prepare Fundamental Constitutions designed to avoid “a too numerous democracy.” This frontier province, the future Earl of Shaftesbury hoped, would be a bulwark of the aristocratic principle...
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“… Especially Pretty Alice.”
“I first saw her on October 18, 1878,” he wrote, “and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face. We spent three years of happiness such as rarely comes to man or woman.” So began a memorial to Alice Hathaway Lee of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, written by Theodore Roosevelt some time during 1884. She was remembered but rarely mentioned in the 35 years that followed.October 18, 1878,...
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Henry Ford And His Peace Ship
“We’re going to try to get the boys out of the trenches before Christmas,” the confident automaker said. “I’ve chartered a ship, and some of us are going to Europe.” This much-ridiculed attempt to stop the European war in 1916 is given a fresh, impartial evaluation in the second of a definitive series of books on Ford, recently published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Excerpted from: Ford: Expansion...
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