January 2011

Perhaps it is the intensity of the fight that makes the difference. Everything that a nation has is put into the struggle. New powers are developed, new forces are let loose, new capacities are discovered and exploited, and these have a permanent effect. Beyond either victory or defeat they go on working; it becomes impossible for the warring nation to go back to its prewar status simply because the effort of fighting the war has destroyed that status forever.

The classic example of this is, of course, that hardy perennial of the modern book lists, the American Civil War, and Allan Nevins examines the process in an excellent new book, The War for the Union . He subtitles his book “The Improvised War,” and he is chiefly concerned here with how the improvisation took place and what it finally led to.

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, two gunmen killed a paymaster and his guard, seized the $16,000 payroll, and escaped. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were picked up by police and identified by several witnesses as the holdup men. In 1921, at the conclusion of a trial in Dedham, the two men were found guilty of murder. The leisurely legal processes of exception and appeal, however, went on for six years; in that period many people came to feel that the trial had been unfair and that Sficco and Vanzetti had been convicted not because they were murderers, but because they were anarchists. In June, 1927, the late Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a committee of review composed of fudge Robert Grant, President Samuel W. Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard. The Lowell Committee concluded that the trial had been fair and made no recommendation for clemency. Sficco and Vanzetti were executed in the early morning hours of August 23, 1927, in the Charlestown State Prison.

During his stay in America, Trottman’s guardians were theoretically the Messrs. James & Dunker, Philadelphia merchants; but these gentlemen were too deeply engrossed in more pressing affairs to pay much attention to their ward. Or perhaps they were just indulgent where he was concerned. In any case, he was allowed to roam the city of Philadelphia in the company of his friend George West of Carolina.

The time is 1898, ana the place, a small Vermont town on a branch line railroad. Any resemblance to presentday America is purely accidental., for the Williamstown that R. L. Duffus knew as a boy might just as well be part of another country on a different planet. As we read the veteran newsman’s reminiscence of his life sixty years ago (it is fair to assume that he was a typical boy in a typical rural American town), we are likely to feel something beyond mere nostalgia—perhaps a certain regret for a more peaceful, more leisurely, and less impersonal way of life that can never be recaptured.

VERMONT IN THE 1890’s:
A boy’s world full of wonder

My father said, one day when I was eight and we were living in Mill Village, that some day he’d hire a horse and rig from J. K. Linton and take us all to see the Barre Quarries. Two years later, when I was ten and we were living in the General E. Bass house, we still hadn’t gone to see the quarries, but I kept hoping we would.

My Dear X,

I am delighted that you have made the plunge and decided to go to America. … But feeling, like all good Europeans, that the Americans owe us a living, as medieval monks and renaissance scholars felt that robber barons and condottieri owed them a living, I yet hope that you can get more out of this trip than a holiday, a few gadgets like electric razors and can openers, and the chance to see some of the French pictures that the Americans, in the past generation, have stolen with their ill-gotten dollars.

Edward Clark, a respectable forty-year-old lawyer, found himself, in the summer of 1851, in a disconcerting position. He was (or so it seemed to Clark) newly yoked in partnership with a man of spectacular depravity, a man so lost to shame as to seem that he had never had any to lose. Everything Clark had discovered about his new partner dismayed him; everything in dark’s character and background demanded that he dissolve the partnership. Yet if he did, a glittering fortune would, he feared, go glimmering. For Clark’s wife, the choice was simple. “Sell out,” she urged him, “and leave the nasty brute.” Rut still Clark hesitated. He might, he argued, somehow conceal from the world the excesses of his abandoned partner; indeed, with good management and a generous admixture of luck he might pluck good from evil and even succeed in presenting the scoundrel in the unlikely guise of mankind’s benefactor. And so Clark decided to stick.

The American merchantman Mary Ann was primly named, but she had a scandalous history. In i8j8 she cleared lor West Alrica, ostensibly on a trading voyage lor such products as palm oil, which the new American railroads and factories used as a lubricant. He mates and crew seemed to have signed on unaware that any other scheme was in the wind. Eut the course her captain set took her not to the mouths of the Niger, locus of the palm oil trade, but to the Gallinas River area, notorious for its bootleg slave markets.

Forty years beTore, Great Britain and the United States had outlawed the slave trade, and eventually the whole western world followed suit. Subsequently the United States had declared slave trading to be piracy, subject to capital punishment. Dut booms in sugar and colTee kept Cuba and Brazil hungry lor slave labor, and immense profits from slave smuggling brought unscrupulous seamen and shipowners—“the matured villainy of the world,” a U.S. Navy commander called them—Hocking like buzzards into a rich racket.