January 2011

He is the President no one knows. If school children remember him at all, it is as a name that comes somewhere between the Mexican War and the Civil War—and that judgment is strangely close to the heart of the matter. The generation of Webster, Calhoun, and Clay was gone by 1852. In Baltimore, where the divided Democrats were meeting to select a presidential candidate, forty-eight ballots failed to produce a two-thirds vote for any of the contenders. Then, on the forty-ninth, the delegates gave the nomination to Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, whose only virtue seemed to be that no one hated him enough to keep it from him. He was safe, and safe was what a man had to be in Baltimore in 1852.

Sometimes the, weariest old clichés turn out to be, true. The Civil War was, really, a war of brother against brother. Now and again tlie brothers come under the magnifying glass and can be seen, hot and bitler against one another.

The Civil War began in mid-April, 1861, with the bombardment of Fort Suniter. President Lincoln called for troops. Among the contingents that headed for Washington was the 6th Massachusetts, which marched through Baltimore on April 10, got into a jight with a street crowd, and reached the capital only after a melee in which both soldiers and civilians were killed.

The stately Hotel Grillon on the Place de la Concorde was a scene of frenzied activity in the early months of 1919. It was filled with 1,300 Americans who had come to Paris for the peace conference that would end the First World War. The corridors swarmed with ethnologists, geographers, economists, interpreters, army officers, reporters, and ambassadors. On occasion, President Wilson, the first American President to cross the Atlantic while in office, could be seen hurrying to keep an appointment with his top advisers.

On the evening of December 8, 1933, William C. Bullitt boarded a train bound from Paris to Moscow. This time he traveled as the first American Ambassador to Russia since the Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917. For Bullitt, who had long worked for the recognition of the Communist government by the United States, it seemed a moment of triumph. As one observer commented, his new appointment was a chance for him to “enjoy from a box seat one of the greatest mass social experiments in history …”

Newburyport, Massachusetts—the modest seaport town at the mouth of the Mcrrimack River—is immoderately rich in social history. Under the name of “Yankee City,” Newburyport has been the subject of an intensive sociological study by W. Lloyd Warner and his associates, published in five volumes which picture the subtle division of its inhabitants into grades of class and status. The son of an old Newburyport family, John P. Marquand, remained until his death last July the nation’s most effective novelist of manners and customs, of social aspiration and decline. And Newburyport, too, was once the home of an extraordinary individual named “Lord’ Timothy Dexter, in whom sudden wealth and prominence worked to produce an exceptional extravagance of character—a man Mr. Marquand has described as “one of the greatest eccentrics so far produced in America.”

On a blizzardy April morning in 1892, fil’ty armed men surrounded a cabin on Powder River in which two accused cattle rustlers had been spending the night. The first rustler was shot as he came down the path lor the morning bucket of water; he was dragged over the dOOrstep by his companion, to die inside. The second man held out until afternoon, when the besiegers fired the house. Driven out by the Hames, he went down with twenty-eight bullets in him. HE was left on the bloodstained snow with a card pinned to his shirt, reading: “Cattle thieves, beware!”

So far the affair follows the standard pattern of frontier heroics, a pattern popularized by Owen Wister and justified to some extent by the facts of history if you don’t look too closely: strong men on a far frontier, in the absence of law, make their own law for the protection of society, which generally approves.

Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph, when the Civil War came, proved to be an essential weapon—permitting the commander in chief personally to direct his armies. No one was more aware of its importance than Abraham Lincoln, who came each morning to the War Department telegraph office across the street from the White House; and jew men had a more intimate picture of the wartime President than the telegrapher Albert Chandler, whose recollections appeared forty years later in the noiu-dejunct Sunday Magazine. We are obliged to E. B. Long of Chicago, a Civil War authority, for rediscovering them.

One morning in the spring of 1883 two women were alone with their children in a small adobe house on Eagle Creek in the southeastern corner of the Arizona Territory. The men of the family had gone out early to determine how many of their sheep had been slaughtered or driven off by Geronimo and his Apaches in the latest raid through the area. Being left alone at such a time meant a certain danger for the women, since Geronimo might take it into his head to return that way, but to such dangers they had long since been inured.

At some time during the forenoon one of the women left the house to bring water from the spring several yards away in a thicket of willows. A few minutes after she went out, the house dog began to bark and brought the other woman to the window. All she was ever able to report about what she saw was that it was red, enormous, and ridden by a devil.

The biographer in between books is doubly vulnerable because biography seems to be everybody’s business. For the novelist, the plot of his next book is a private matter between himself and his typewriter—a happy secrecy, permitting conception without interference of seduction or extracurricular rape. With me at least, my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a subject. The grandmothers of strangers are crying from the grave, it seems, for literary recognition; it is bewildering, the number of salty grandfathers, aunts and uncles that languish unappreciated. Telegrams propose a day and hour of appointment, when I can have the privilege of learning the circumstances and (irresistible) character of the deceased. Sometimes the subject is not decently dead but signs the telegram, in which case wires must be dispatched, stating regret and my plans for immediate departure to far places. Subjects have been known to ring my doorbell, unannounced, and standing upon the mat, all in the open air begin what salesmen call their pitch.

It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.