January 2011

As a newspaper correspondent with the Union armies in the Civil War, Sylvanus Cadwallader occupied a position of privilege such as few journalists have enjoyed before or since. He had orders from General Grant permitting him to pass any lines at any hour of the day or night and to commandeer any transportation, up to and including an Army transport, for his personal use.

Cadwallader’s extraordinary privilege had its origin during the Vicksburg campaign in a steamer on the Mississippi River when he saved General Grant from public disgrace as a drunkard. From that day on he lived virtually as a member of the general’s staff. His memoirs, written years later, present a new, intimate picture of the famous general which is not only a lively human-interest document but a highly important contribution to history.

Even for those not primarily interested in the colorful but complicated art of heraldry, the great seal of the sovereign state of South Carolina is worth studying. Centered within it is a large palmetto tree—just such a tree as you see in luxuriant reality all through the low country and in iron effigy in the capitol grounds at Columbia; beneath its roots lies the trunk of a giant oak, blasted along its length and with both ends splintered, the whole memorializing the very first battle action of the armed forces of the United States against invasion by a foreign foe.

The swing to conservatism in American politics and culture is one of the most remarkable facts of our age. The signs of this conservatism are all about us. After generations of exile from respectability, the word itself has been welcomed home with cheers by men who, a few short years ago, would sooner have been called arsonists than conservatives. Politicians, columnists, businessmen, and editors shout the slogans of the great revival; the campuses run over with poets and professors who yield to no one in their insistence that “what America needs is a healthy dose of true conservatism"; a President who proudly proclaims himself a conservative sits in the White House and enjoys overwhelming popular support. The tide of conservatism runs in confusing patterns, but no one will now deny that it runs deep and strong.

In the summer of the year 1864, a white-haired man of 69, gentle in appearance and reflective in manner, spent many days on the benches of Central Park in New York, a penny notebook and a box of water-color paints spread out on his lap. Far to the south Atlanta smoked in ruins, but in the mind of the artist, a retired Pennsylvania German carpenter named Lewis Miller, destruction was part of another world. For before him glistened a magic sight: the bridges, ponds and statuary, the shaded paths and rustic summer-houses of America’s first great park. Then still building under the wise hands of its designers, Olmstead and Vaux, Central Park had only recently been a tangle of rock and swamp and squatter shacks. Miller himself had seen the area in this earlier guise, and now it struck him as a “Paradise” which “would bear comparison with the boasted scenery of the old world.” Unlike many who make statements like this, Miller had been abroad; remarkably well traveled for one so humble, he occupied a long life of 87 years in making a naive but charming record of his world of ordinary people.

When Jean Baptiste Isabey made his preliminary sketch for a painting of the Congress of Vienna, he imparted an incongruous air of romanticism to his little group of leading personalities.

When Jean Baptiste Isabey made his preliminary sketch for a painting of the Congress of Vienna, he imparted an incongruous air of romanticism to his little group of leading personalities.

Colonial houses are rarely called “dark” although their windows are tiny, glass being then a rare luxury. In the Nineteenth Century, glass had become a factory-made staple and the Victorian house has large windows and plenty of them. It is true that they were barricaded by a fivefold layer of shutters, blinds, muslin curtains, velvet drapes and tasseled valances (“lambrequins”) but most of these have been discarded and light is pouring in.