January 2011

The Romantic Outlook Sea Raider Realist’s War Young Innocents

It may be that we would all be better off if we could rid history of some of the romantic haze which keeps blurring the outlines. This (it is only fair to add) is a responsibility of the citizen at large as well as of the historian. The romance is there, all right, and there is no way to avoid seeing it; the trick is to keep that fact from distorting our scale of values.

The romantic outlook does no particular harm if it is confined to the past. The trouble is that it won’t stay there. It gets into the present as well, and then it represents a flight from reality. It embodies an attitude toward life—an attempt to perpetuate an impossible dream-image of bygone times—which makes it impossible to cope with today’s problems. When that happens the future is apt to become rather difficult.

As a case in point, consider the American Civil War.

Esmeralda, Sept. 9, 1862

Dear Billy:

Washington, March 19, 1863.

Dear Nat, and Fred Gray:

Shortly before his death James Fenimore Cooper left off scolding his countrymen long enough to heap praises on the memory of his late friend Thomas Cole. Not only was Cole “the highest genius this country has ever produced” but also, in Cooper’s estimation, his The Course of Empire, the series of five paintings, was “one of the noblest works of art ever wrought.” He went on to predict that these canvases would one day be valued at fifty thousand dollars. In today’s booming art market and with today’s inflated prices that figure seems modest enough. But it was ten or twenty times larger than the artist’s original fee and a far higher sum than any American painting had yet sold for.

Hardly a person in America was untouched by the Civil War, and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were no exceptions. Because they were perhaps the most distinctly “American” writers of their time, their reactions to the conflict are particularly interesting. Printed here are two of their wartime letters, both written within six months of each other, at a time when the North seemed on the verge of defeat. While Whitman’s letter to his New York friends, Nat and Fred Gray, has appeared before, the Twain letter is a completely new find. Both are owned by the noted book collector, Clifton Waller Barrett, and AMERICAN HERITAGE publishes them through his courtesy.

The business boom in the post-Civil War decades spawned an arresting advertising device fully as charming as it was effective—the trade or premium card. Given away by merchants, usually to the children of customers, they were welcomed into the American home for their bright lithographed color and their depictions of the newest developments in an age of rapid change. Many families even saved their favorites in scrapbooks. These thread industry cards are from the collection of Samuel Rosenberg.

The most momentous event in the geographical history of the North American continent, aside from its discovery, was the first complete crossing of it from coast to coast—a feat that was three centuries in the doing. This epochal achievement first confirmed the guesses of civilized man about the breadth and structure of the continent and led directly to the opening up of the West. Yet millions of Americans—indeed, most of us—know neither the date it was done nor the name of the man who did it.

Contrary to popular belief, it was neither Lewis nor Clark. Eleven years before they set out on their famous expedition—when Clark was still a young lieutenant fighting Indians on the Ohio River frontier and Lewis was a teen-age youth in Virginia—the man who would first conquer the continent was already on the last lap of his trip, paddling up an unknown river in western Canada two thousand miles beyond the frontiers of civilization.