January 2011

Sandy Welsh was hired man on my great-uncle’s farm, just below our house—the Brick Farm House farm. But to put it this way will give you quite the wrong idea of what he was to Uncle Xiram and Uncle Niram to him. For “hired man” in Vermont, particularly in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, does not mean at all what it means in some places and in some times. Sandy was an Irish boy, lovable, steady, hard-working, competent, and my Uncle Niram was a childless farmer with a very warm heart. To him, Sandy brought to the farm a breath of youth and warm vitality, which was very comforting to an old farmer who had no children of his own. And Sandy felt for “Mr. Niram” the love a nephew might feel for his uncle. Here in the country, you see, an affection can exist like that felt in a family, even when there is no blood kinship. We think it’s rather nice to have older and younger people feel that way about each other. And when I say “rather nice,” I am using Vermont understatement.

On August 24 and 25, 1814, British forces were in full possession of Washington; from August 29 to 31 other forces held Alexandria. From September 11 to 14 they were feeling out the defenses of Baltimore. Then the greater part of them vanished out of sight; once the British ships were over the horizon there was almost no means of knowing where they were and far smaller means of knowing what they intended, for by this time the blockade of the Atlantic Coast was highly effective, and there were few ships to bring in news even of the outside world, certainly not of the movements of the British lleet. No one could even be sure that any further offensive movement was meditated, but it was the duty of the American government to act on the hypothesis that the enemy would attempt to do all the harm possible —and that implied that British movements must be foreseen and guarded against.

In the beginning, noble Greeks and Romans

Stylists made history a high literary art

In America a century ago, historians were best sellers

Some were explorers in the field… Some recluses in the study

Some let the facts alone speak… Some relied on interpretation

Mr. Lincoln’s wardrobe remains the prototype of the armor of Nineteenth-Century statesman. Rooted in the noble visual line of his heroes, Webster and Clay, it was essential to his career before the bar and in elected office. Within this proper black shell, affected by all ambitious men, burned the emotions of the convulsive Nineteenth Century—including the rich humanity of Old Abe. It was the almost morbid vestment of the Public Person. It was such a frock coat that unfurled the lawyer’s flourish; it was just such shirts that Douglas and Stanton stuffed; on very similar trousers frontiersmen slopped whisky in deadly Dodge City. From proper Boston to rowdy San Francisco, this was the American male’s sartorial pose, The Look. Its purpose and perhaps only vestigial virtue was dignity: sometimes, as in Lincoln’s case, this was virile and authentic; but more often it was merely pompous or fraudulent. In this outfit, one man bribed his senator, another delivered the Gettysburg Address.

When Davy Crockett, profusely billed as “the wild frontiersman,” visited New York in 183], he made such a hullabaloo trying to live up to his reputation in his hotel room at the American Hotel, in the choice row fronting City Hall Park, that he infuriated the neighbors, chief among them Philip Hone, sometime mayor ol New York and its most respected resident. Nevertheless, the former mayor couldn’t ignore the “coonskin congressman,” a member of his own political party.

Davy described Hone as “the politest man I ever did see, for when he asked me to take a drink at his own sideboard, he turned his back upon me, that I mightn’t be ashamed to fill as much as I wanted. This was what I call doing the fair thing.”

Late in the year 1825 two riders jogged into Oxford, Ohio, from the Cincinnati road and pulled up at the old college building. Down from the saddles slipped a man and a boy, William Holmes McGuffey and his nine-year-old brother Alexander H. The unknown new professor carried a bag of books and a roll of clothing to a room on the second floor of the old wing. He was 25 years old, about to be graduated in absentia from Washington College in Pennsylvania, and ready to begin his career. Forty years later his name would be as familiar as the alphabet.