January 2011

Mention the words “women’s rights” and much the same picture storms into the avrage American recollection: the grimlipped, podium-pounding suffragette of the late nineteenth ccntui-y. She lias three resonant names (very likely one of them is Carrie) and you cannot by the wildest stretch ol the imagination conjure up an image ol her reading nursery rhymes to the young. Is not the gap between social reform and “Mary Had A Little Lamb” too wide and too dramatic to bridge?

In fact, it is not. For the lady who invented Mary in i860 and saw her pass into folklore via McGuffey’s Readers probably had more influence on women’s status than her noisier sisters. Her name was Sarah Josepha Hale, and as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book for forty years, she sel a pattern for today’s women’s magazines and deeply influenced two generations of American wives anil mothers in her own lifetime.

The tradition of the American lumberjack is an ancient one, as industrial antiquity goes in the united States. It began more than three hundred years ago, some say in 1631, when colonists set up the first sawmill in America in what is now South llerwick, Maine, and ted it with the great white pines, a classic species whose graceful outline was soon to appear on (lags, provincial coats ot arms, even on shillings.

It was here in the New England timber, too, that certain customs and practices originated which were to follow the loggers across the continent. For instance, an early timber baron was Sir William Pepperell, who, says an old memoir, appeared at his log landings along the Saco River “attired in a coat ol scarlet cloth.” This is the earliest record ol brilliant garb worn in connection with logging, and one likes to think it was irom Sir William that the lumberjack took his liking lor red, whether ol sash, shirt, or honest woolen underwear.

At last, they saw him stop and stand motionless. Hastening up, they perceived that his face wore an expression telling that he had at last found the place for which he had struggled. His spare figure was erect; his bloody hands were quietly at his side. He was waiting with patience for something that he had come to meet. He was at the rendezvous. They paused and stood, expectant. …

He was invaded by a creeping strangeness that slowly enveloped him. For a moment the tremor of his legs caused him to dance a sort of hideous hornpipe. His arms beat wildly about his head. …

His tall figure stretched itself to its full height. There was a slight rending sound. Then it began to swing forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree. A swift muscular contortion made the’left shoulder strike the ground first.

The body seemed to bounce a little way from the earth. “God!” said the tattered soldier.

The youth had watched, spellbound … His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

One of the most talented Civil War propagandists was a citizen of Baltimore named Adalbert Johann Volck, a German emigrant who made his living as a dentist but who was a gifted artist and engraver. In 1861 he passionately espoused the Confederate cause —as did many others in Baltimore—and he created a remarkable series of etchings which had both high emotional voltage and genuine artistic excellence. He attacked the Union and its leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Benjamin Butler (a favorite object of scorn in the South, which nicknamed him “Beast” Butler), and he extolled the Confederacy and its people. The sketches he did, their emotional power still undiminished, speak of the passion and heat of that terrible period when brother fought against brother and the nation struggled with itself for survival and unity. On these pages, some of the most striking of Volck’s engravings are presented as a clue to the mystery of why embattled Southerners fought so long and with such effective fervor. We are indebted to Dr. W. B. Spinelli of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from whose collection these etchings come, for permission to reproduce them.

As the state of Oregon nears its one hundredth anniversary, the realm where the Tonquin ’s wayfarers experienced some of their bitter hardships is about to be added to our series of national historic shrines. The event will salute not the first permanent settlement of Americans at the mouth of the Columbia River, which was that of the Pacific Fur Company in 1811, but one which even preceded it.

This was Fort Clatsop, a 50-foot-square log stockade built by Lewis and Clark during the stormy winter of 1805–6, abandoned when they paddled back up the Columbia toward distant civilization, and visited by the Astor Argonauts from the doomed Tonquin five or six years later.

Deserted, Fort Clatsop eventually succumbed to the prodigious growth of the “rain forest.” Its last vestiges, even its foundations, disappeared. But in 1955, to herald the sesquicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the fort was rebuilt by community enterprise to the exact specifications in the expedition’s famous Journals .

When, on the night of August 24–25, 1814, General Robert Ross burned Washington, most though not all, of the infant congressional library went up in flames. Patrick Magruder, who doubled as clerk of the House and librarian, had betaken himself to Virginia Springs, and the convulsive efforts of his assistants to save the library foundered on the lack of wagons. A subsequent congressional investigation concluded somewhat illogically that the hapless Magruder should have foreseen this embarrassment and provided for it, and accepted his resignation.