January 2011

“Let us cross the river and
rest under the shade of the trees.”

—Stonewall Jackson

The English were still nursing the dream of a Northwest Passage to the Orient. The Spanish were trying to nail down the ancient edict of Pope Alexander VI which made the whole Pacific a Spanish lake. The Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, thought it would be a neat coup if he could beat the maritime powers at their own game of exploration.

Thus it was that the power drives of three European empires converged, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, on the Northwest Coast of America. They found no Northwest Passage, and no gold, but they found the sea otter. This was the rich prize which brought more ships, and the threat of worldwide war, to the remote waters of Nootka Sound. It brought, too, a fleet of Yankee traders, who snatched the prize, and one of whom discovered the great River of the West.

It was my privilege some time ago to discuss the fundamentals of American government with President Eisenhower. The talk led to George Washington. Mr. Eisenhower said that, in his view, the great hour of Washington’s life came at Valley Forge where, militarily speaking, Washington achieved a miracle.

I doubt anyone will want to gainsay Mr. Eisenhower on a military opinion. On the other hand, civilians may turn their eyes on Washington’s civil career to see if they discern similar evidence of divine inspiration there.

I am quite satisfied on the subject. There were times when, acting to influence our nation’s future, Washington so divested himself of the ambitions common to men in his position as to take on the semblance of an instrument of Providence. He did this, for instance, when he resigned his commission.

The slave had nothing to lose but his chains, and even second-class citizenship is a vast improvement on outright bondage. But it is at the same time a denial of one of the basic parts of the infinite American dream, and its existence brings problems of its own. The Emancipation Proclamation did not, unfortunately, do anything to end the race problem; it simply committed the country to an unending search for a way to end it. And it is this problem, and its terrible connection with the peculiar institution itself, which engages the attention of Mr. J. C. Furnas in his new book, Goodbye to Uncle Tom .

Like Mr. Stampp, Mr. Furnas readily discerns the roots of this problem in the mythology that grew up about slavery itself. But it is his contention that a highly damaging part of this mythology was contributed by the abolitionists themselves, and his principal target is no one less than Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and who is practically the patron saint of the ancient antislavery cause.

One of America’s great disasters might just as well have happened in a void so far as public knowledge of it is concerned. This was the tragedy of the Peshtigo Iorest fire in Wisconsin, during which some twelve hundred people lost their lives on the evening of October 8, 1871. By an incomparable irony of l’a te, this happened also to be the night when, in the barn of a Mrs. O’Leary, a cow supposedly kicked over a lantern that set Chicago on fire and burned it down to the edge of the lake.

Seventy years later, when I was in I’eshtigo to talk with five survivors, they were still bitter. One aged man pounded the table. “Who,” he demanded, “ever heard ol Peshtigo?” An old lady explained matters. “Chicago got all ol the publicity,” she said.

On a hot and humid July morning in 1902, a burly, aoo-pound scientist and connoisseur of good food and drink sat hunched over his desk in a red brick building in Washington and planned deliberately to feed twelve healthy young men a diet containing borax. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, had in mind a double objective: first, to determine the effects upon human beings of certain chemicals then commonly used to preserve processed foods; and, more broadly, to educate the public in the need for a federal “pure food” law. Food preparation was becoming industrialized and subject to more complicated processing; products were traveling longer distances, passing through many hands. Manufacturers, facing a novel situation, turned to dubious additives to make their products appear more appetizing or to preserve them. Borax compounds, the first object of Dr. Wiley’s investigations, were used to make old butter seem like new.

Stories of the vast size of the buffalo herds that once roamed the Great Plains of the West sound like the imaginings of a Paul Bunyan. They would hardly be credited today except that they were attested by many reliable travelers and by early settlers.

Often the herds of shaggy beasts darkened the whole horizon. In 1832, after skirting the north fork of the Platte River, Captain Benjamin Bonneville climbed a high bluff that gave him a wide view of the surrounding plains. “As far as the eye could see,” he reported, “the country seemed absolutely blackened by innumerable herds.” John K. Townsend, while crossing the Platte Valley, stopped on the rise of a hill to view a similar scene. The whole region, he wrote, “was covered by one enormous mass of buffaloes. Our vision, at the least computation, would certainly extend ten miles; and in the whole of this vast space, including about eight miles in width from the bluffs to the river bank, there apparently was no vista in the incalculable multitude.”