In the summer of 1864, as the Civil War dragged on, the Reverend Elias Brewster Hillard, a Congregational clergyman from Connecticut, was asked by a Hartford publisher to visit the last surviving soldiers of the American Revolution in order to record their memories of that earlier war and to obtain their views on “the present rebellion” imperiling the Union they had helped bring to birth.
Feats of memory, particularly of the kind of memory derided as “photographic”—Tor all the cornucopias of wealth they sometimes pour over television contestants—are looked down on in modern limes, but they have their role in history. Consider, for example, the story of Samuel Slater. It would be impolite tu call him a spy, lor he would not have considered himself one. Furthermore, he was a man of peace. Yet in his own time this cotton spinner’s apprentice achieved with his prodigious memory an effect as great as or greater than any successful military espionage has brought about in our own. For he successfully transplanted the infant Industrial Revolution, which was in many ways an English monopoly, across an ocean to a new country.
The old-fashioned epitaph, a literary form all its own, runs to both conscious and unconscious humor, as this little sampling bears lasting witness. The inscriptions come from a number of sources, but we acknowledge the special help of Peter Beilenson of the Peter Pauper Press in collecting them.
Throughout the mid-1830’s there raged in American naval circles, as veil as in Congress when defense appropriations came up, a debate on the wisdom of introducing into our sail-driven frigate fleet a revolutionary new method of propulsion—steam. Most captains as well as congressmen were opposed to the innovation. It was costly. It was uncertain. Sailors knew nothing about machinery and did not want to learn. There had even been a near-mutiny when a Navy crew refused to hoist out firebox clinkers from an experimental floating battery designed by Fulton.
TENSIONS EASE BETWEEN SHIP AND SHORE, AND PERRY GOES SIGHT SEEING
AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY AND MILITARY METHODS AMAZE THE JAPANESE
JAPANESE WRESTLERS, AMERICAN MINSTRELS ENLIVEN THE TREATY MAKING
A LILLIPUTIAN LOCOMOTIVE DELIGHTS PERRY’S HOSTS
Among the Indians of the Plains and the Rocky Mountains the sport of horse racing was a product of necessity and passion—the necessity of mastering the breeding of the horse, on which their very lives depended, and a passion, seemingly inborn, for gambling. Wherever they came together—witli other Indians or with friendly white men of sporting blood—horse racing became the principal social event.
The Umatilla and Caynse tribes had since 1853 lived on the same reservation in northeastern Oregon. When they crossbred the horses they had acquired from otlter tribes with animals obtained from white men who came through their country, the result was a pony that was small, tough, and fast.
In 1875, A. R. Meacham, just finishing a six-year term as superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon, published a now-forgotten book called Wigwam and War Path. In it I found the following account of a horse race in whicli white men tried to cheat their Cayuse adversaries—with results that were wholly unforeseen.
—John Clark Hunt
It took a lot of time to run an army, and that was why Major General James B. McPherson, commanding the United States Army of the Tennessee, didn’t write his Baltimore fiancee, Emily Hoff man, as often as he should. Not that he loved her any less—he had idolized that unbeatable Victorian combination of blue eyes, golden hair, and chaste daintiness ever since the summer they met just before the war—but he well knew that Emily, the daughter of a prosperous local merchant, was exposed to many attentions, arid perhaps he had also heard that a thirtyyear-old girl won’t wait forever.
In any case, by the summer of 1864 McPherson felt that Emily was growing a little petulant, and, living with that “secesh” family of hers, there was no telling what might happen. Now, with the Atlanta campaign getting under way, there would be even less chance to write, so clearly something had to be done. At this point, McPherson’s superior, Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman, took over: Head-Quarters Military Division of the Mississippi Acworth, Ga. June 9, 1864
My Dear Young Lady,