January 2011

In going through Stanton Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress while doing research for a new book, Philip Van Doren Stern found himself one day looking at something he could not believe. It was an official order listing the chief conspirator who had been arrested following Lincoln’s assassination and who were being transported into close and separate custody. What startled Mr. Stern was the appearance of a name he had never seen before. As the author of The Man Who Killed Lincoln and an outstanding authority on the Civil War period, he thought it almost inconceivable that in his years of research he should never have seen this name before. Furthermore no other specialist in the Lincoln assassination had ever heard of this name.

The very name itself, flashing by on the trim blue cars, has a rhythm and a poetic ring: Baltimore & Ohio, and its history is the longest among American railroads. Peter Cooper himself piloted its first engine, his own Tom Thumb, and got her up to a dizzy eighteen miles per hour. (One passenger was astounded to discover that he could still take readable notes at this breakneck pace.) The BfeO pioneered to the Ohio River; it also tried out the first baggage car, the first diner, the first iron box car, the first electric locomotive, the first air-conditioned train. Coal ran it; coal was its fortune. Through it all, in peace and war, the B&O, unlike so many lines, never defaulted its bonds, never sold out, and wound up running 6,020 comfortably profitable miles of mainline railroad in thirteen states—all under the original charter, granted in 1837.

Few Americans seem less mystical, on the surface, than General William Tecumseh Sherman, who sacked Atlanta and Columbia and in his old age remarked succinctly that war is hell. But in his own odd way Sherman, too, was a man given over to a vision, and after the Civil War ended he landed in the precise spot where he could do something to help make it come true.

First he was commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, which meant that he was in charge of everything the army did in the Great Plains region in the late 1860’s, and then he was commanding general of the whole army; and for eighteen years he was responsible for keeping the peace (or as much of it as could be kept) in the great West at the exact moment when the expanding republic was elbowing the red man out of the last of his ancestral preserves. Few soldiers have ever had a more thankless task.

Margaret Fuller is usually remembered—if at all—because she is supposed to have told Thomas Carlyle in London, “I accept the universe.” The legend implies that she underwent a struggle to achieve this accommodation, and that the universe was to feel complimented. So posterity chuckles over Carlyle’s reputed comment, “By Gad, she’d better!” A more documented testimony to what many of her contemporaries sneered at as her “infinite me” is a remark she made at Emerson’s table: “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” The heroine of such anecdotes is bound to seem to us a bit ludicrous, if not conceited, almost as much as she did to James Russell Lowell in the 1840’s. But the fact is that at Emerson’s table she was speaking the truth.

One of the oddest things about the whole American story is the fact that a nation completely dedicated to the future has always had a deep sentimental attachment to the past. More than any other people—except perhaps the desert-wandering Children of Israel—the Americans have moved forward with a sense of mission and a belief in a great destiny; but at the same time there has always been the feeling that somewhere to the rear there was a golden dawn, magically preserved on a long-lost horizon, its light coloring the land that lies ahead even though the dawn itself was experienced long ago.

The golden legend was watered down somewhat by the time it reached New Mexico. Men still believed in it, and pursued it with determination, and felt that beyond the rim of the next mesa they would see something that would make Montezuma’s fabled city in the lake look small and weak; but the substance of the dream was evasive, out in the great empty stretches of New Mexico, and they found before long that they had invaded a harsh and difficult land that offered little more than hard work, a bleak subsistence, and room for limitless visions. Tenochtitlan was real and the Seven Cities of Cibola were not, but the dawnlight still lay upon the land, and the Spaniard pushed on up to found cities like Santa Fe and Albuquerque, thereby—as is the way of pioneers—accomplishing much that he had not thought about when he made his start.