January 2011

If you happen to meet someone who thinks history is boring or irrelevant, hand them this American Heritage to help them see the error of their ways. This issue packs a punch, with some of the most harrowing stories in American history and thought-provoking essays that tell us much about who we are as a people.

Longtime American Heritage readers will remember we helped break the story nationally about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings in Fawn Brodie’s “The Great Jefferson Taboo” in our June 1972 issue. Ever since, we’ve kept abreast of the story, running a number of pieces including one by former editor, Richard Snow, whose stepdaughter was a descendant of Hemings and Jefferson. It’s a story that resonates and bears looking because it runs right to the heart of how we as Americans think about our history.

Snake River, Oregon side, June 1877

The charismatic Indian leader Chief Joseph stood on the bank of the Snake River, looking across the water to Idaho and beyond to his people’s new home, the Nez Perce reservation in the Clearwater Valley. With him were several hundred men, women, and children, many on horses, dragging their belongings behind them on travois. These Northern Plateau Indians, who called themselves Nee-Me-Poo (The People) or Iceyeeye Niim Mama’yac (The Children of the Coyote), were deeply unhappy about being turned out of the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon, where their people had lived for centuries. But federal officials had given Chief Joseph and his people an ultimatum only six months earlier, forcing them to join other Nez Perce who had signed a treaty more than a decade before and moved to the reservation.

Mobile, Alabama, August 1864

One hot summer day in war-time Mobile, a city garrisoned by 10,000 Confederate troops, 17-year-old Wallace Turnage was driving his owner’s carriage along Dauphin Street in the crowded business district when a worn harness broke, flipping the vehicle on its side. Thrown to the ground, Turnage narrowly avoided the crushing wheels of a passing streetcar. The stunned teenager shook himself off, then set off for the house of his owner, the rich merchant Collier Minge. Turnage was no stranger to hardship: he had already been sold three times, losing contact with his family. Ugly scars on his torso bore witness to many severe beatings and even torture. Yet his life was about to get even worse before it got better.

Florence, near present-day Omaha, August 1856

For 28-year-old Patience Loader, the journey so far had been chiefly exhausting. During the four weeks from July 25 to August 22, 1856, the company with which she was traveling had covered 270 miles from Iowa City to Florence, a fledgling community six miles north of where Omaha stands today.

Dorchester Heights, Boston, September 3, 1775

On that dusty gray Sunday morning, Benedict Arnold, a newly commissioned Colonel in the Continental Army, accompanied his Commander in Chief, George Washington, and reviewed the 16,000 troops laying siege to British-held Boston. Riding a big chestnut horse and resplendent in the scarlet uniform he had designed, the forceful Arnold called for volunteers willing to undertake a bold and dangerous mission: he had persuaded Washington that, if they could move quickly, Quebec City could be taken before the British could bring reinforcement from England. He would only need independent authority and 1,000 men for a surprise attack on the enemy stronghold through the Maine woods. Men volunteered in droves.

Lancaster, Massachusetts Bay Colony, February 10, 1676

At sunrise on this cold winter’s day, 39-year-old Mary Rowlandson awoke to the sound of musket fire rippling across her remote town in north central Massachusetts. A peek out of her family’s fortified house revealed her worst nightmare: a large number of Indians descending on the small village of 50 to 60 families, firing houses and killing anyone who set foot outside. A wounded man pleaded for his life. The Indians “knocked him in the head, and stripped him naked, and split open his bowels,” she recalled. Methodically, the Indians moved toward her house.

For two hours, “they shot against the House, so that the Bullets seemed to fly like hail . . . and “wounded one man among us, then another, and then a third.” The Indians set fire to flax and hemp they had jammed against the house’s outer walls. Her housemates found themselves “fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the House on fire over our heads, and the bloody Heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred to [go] out.”

Florida panhandle, Fall 1528 -- The 250 starving Spanish adventurers dubbed the shallow estuary near their campsite the “Bay of Horses,” because, every third day, they killed yet another draft animal, roasted it, and consumed the flesh. Fifty men had already died of disease, injury, and starvation. What was worse, after having walked the length of Florida without finding gold, those still alive had lost contact with their ships. They were stranded on an alien continent.

“We were in such straits that anything that had some semblance of a solution seemed good to us,” wrote Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the expedition’s royal treasurer, in one of the most harrowing survival stories ever told. “I refrain here from telling this at greater length because each one can imagine for himself what could happen in a land so strange.”

In the years since the publication of my book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, I have traveled throughout the United States and overseas talking about them—and life and slavery at Monticello. Writers are, in the main, solitary creatures. Or, at least, the process of writing forces us into solitude for long stretches of time; I find it refreshing and gratifying to meet people who have read one’s work (or plan to) and have questions, observations, and opinions about it. In all the venues I have visited, from Houston to Stockholm, one question always arises: Did they love each other?

Photographer Robert Capa fled Paris in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II, abandoning three cardboard cases containing some 3,500 photographic negatives taken during the Spanish Civil War. Capa, whom a British magazine once acclaimed “the greatest war photographer in the world” for his work spanning five conflicts, never saw them again, a landmine claiming his life while he was on assignment in Indochina.

Four decades after his death in 1954, a Mexican filmmaker confessed to having the negatives. Last December, they reached the International Center for Photography in New York City. Most of the delicate, nitrate-based negatives, are in “miraculously good condition, all things considered,” says ICP director Willis E. Hartshorn, who expects the negatives will reveal “just an enormous amount about the development of [Capa’s] style and of his approach.”