January 2011

In previous winters when Clarence King and James Gardner finished their work in the Nevada desert and hoarded a river boat for San Francisco, they were the center of the attention of the other passengers. Clarence King was the director of a geological survey of the land along the new transcontinental railroad, and Gardner was his first assistant. They were trying to discover what minerals could he found out in the desert waste, what crops could he grown, and how much water was available.

But in October, 1872, when rains and high winds stopped the survey’s work again and King and Gardner once again headed for winter quarters, none of the other passengers paid any attention to them at all. The passengers were talking about something that thrilled every Californian. Somewhere out in the American Desert, two prospectors had stumbled across a whole mountain of diamonds.

The history of statecraft, in the U.S. as in every nation, is studded with great chances, to be seized or lost forever. To the people who lived through any such critical time, it was seldom clear when the decisive moment came or whose counsel M’as the best.

Sometimes, by luck or wisdom, the right course was taken and the ship of slate sailed serenely on to peace and prosperity. Who knows what wars and calamities might have beset the Republic if the Founding Fathers had not secured the aid of France in the Revolution? If Jefferson had not bought Louisiana? If Monroe had not stated his Doctrine? If Lincoln had not gone to war to preserve the Union?

These are questions which, happily, history has no need to answer. But there were other times when, as we can see in retrospect, opportunities were missed. The wars and calamities which followed provide the proof of these failures of statecraft.

In one of the world’s great success stories Ben Franklin adverts to a resounding failure with which his name is associated. Quoting from Dryden’s rendition of a Juvenal Satire , he counsels us:

Franklin’s brain child, the Albany Plan of Union, failed of adoption because neither the colonists nor the mother country knew their own good. “Such mistakes are not new,” the scientist-statesman reflects in his Autobiography . “History is full of the errors of states and princes.” The best measures of statesmanship, he shrewdly remarks, are seldom “adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.”

The Atlanta Cyclorama is the best surviving example in America of an art form which flourished in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. The huge canvas was a project of William Wehner, a German who established studios in Milwaukee in 1883 and set out to create a series of “spectacle paintings” for display in the large cities of the U.S. From Germany Wehner imported a staff of twelve artists, many of whom had worked on cycloramas glorifying the German victories in the Franco-Prussian War.

To ensure historical accuracy, Wehner engaged Theodore Davis, a staff artist for Harper’s Weekly who had been at Shcrman’s field headquarters on the afternoon of July 22, 1864, and who had witnessed much of the battle. As a vantage point from which to plot the action on the terrain, a wooden tower was erected at the center of the battle scene. Here the artists planned and sketched through the summer of 1885, while Confederate veterans and neighbors helped them out with information and reminiscences.

Two years ago, when I was a passenger aboard a Norwegian freighter bound from Rio to New York on a fourteen-day run, we spent the better part of a week quietly avoiding a hurricane. It was early September, and we were about 400 miles above the equator. There were eleven other passengers along for the ride. We also had a wireless operator as part of the ship’s company, an agreeable fellow who had developed a crush on a pretty Argentine girl with an Irish name who was on her way to this country as an exchange student, and it was he who first announced the hurricane.

It seemed to me that he wanted to throw a scare into the young lady. I may be doing him an injustice, but he appeared to think that a good scare might help to soften her up. That, though, is outside the present story. To get back to it, the hurricane’s name was Carol. It was building up approximately 120 miles to the southwest, moving on a direct line toward the course that we were following.

The friendships of the President of the United States inevitably have a significance far transcending those of an ordinary citizen. When these friendships are with members of the foreign diplomatic corps, the relationships may influence the course of world politics. Theodore Roosevelt’s likes and dislikes for particular ambassadors stationed at Washington during his presidency proved to be peculiarly important.

International relations were then at a critical stage, with the alliances that were destined to clash in 1914 already taking shape. The friendship of the United States alter its impressive show of strength in the Spanish-American War was regarded as a prize of great value. And, finally, the highly personal character of Roosevelt’s leadership invited attempts to win favor through the establishment of intimate contacts between the embassies and the White House.

August 22, 1777. The militia had marched and been defeated. Behind the stockades of the New York frontier, many widows wept, not for their dead husbands only but for their still living children. The invader, Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger of His Majesty’s Thirty-fourth Foot, did not lead a civilized army; his troops were largely cruel Iroquois. In star-shaped Fort Stanwix on the banks of the Mohawk a few militiamen remained in arms, but a tunnel dug under the direction of British engineers approached the mud walls to the sound of scalping knives being sharpened. Casting around for a source hope, the settlers found no comfort in the fact that Hon Yost Schuyler, a hall-insane Tory in leathers, was raving by the hostile council fires.

The Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta is here reproduced, complete and in color, for the first time in any magazine. AMERICAN HERITAGE is indebted to the Department of Parks of the City of Atlanta for its courtesy in granting permission for this publication; to Mayor William B. Hartsfield, to Mr. George I. Simons, general manager of the Department of Parks, and to Mr. C. F. Palmer for their kind assistance; and to Mr. Wilbur G. Kurtz for his expert advice on the battle.

The three great fights for Atlanta, fought in 1864 between the Federal army under General William T. Sherman and the Confederate army under General John B. Hood, took place as shown on ihe map above. The area of the second of these combats, the Battle of Atlanta proper-the battle depicted in the Cyclorama—is shown in yellow.

The grimmest face in the American picture gallery is that of old Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania abolitionist who forgot nothing, forgave nothing and made himself the living symbol of the so-called radical viewpoint after the Civil War—the view which saw the South as a set of conquered provinces that could and should be remade even at the expense of completely destroying the structure of the society which had existed there. In most accounts of the tangled, tragic reconstruction era, Stevens is cast as the villain.

Now comes Mr. Korngold to tell a different sort of story. He sees Stevens not merely as a humanitarian dedicated to the fight for the underdog, but as a man who was not vindictive or cruel; a statesman who was finally driven to espouse unrestricted Negro suffrage (with all which that entailed) solely by the intractability of the southern leaders who had lost the war but who refused to accept defeat.

Thaddeus Stevens: A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great , by Ralph Korngold. Harcourt, Brace and Co. 460 pp. $6.

To the Editor of American Heritage:

A propos of nothing at all except that I just thought of it, I wonder if this little bit of Civil War-iana would interest you.

It started back in 1903 when I was a chemist in the laboratory of the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company in Richmond, and on Saturdays played on the Boston Heights team of the Tri-City semi-pro league. In our first game the opposing team’s first baseman was Jim Darby. I remembered him vividly on account of his spiking me—unintentionally. I still have the cleat scars. Next day I looked at the box score in the paper and said to a teammate: “They’ve got this guy’s name wrong. Enroughty. It was Darby.”

“Yes. That’s the way the nut spells ‘Darby.’ ”

“What?”

“That’s right.”

“I never heard of such damn foolishness.”

“Well, you’ve heard now.”