January 2011

On June 21, labor violence erupted at the Southern Illinois Coal Company’s strip mine near Herrin, Illinois. The United Mine Workers (U.M.W.) was in the midst of a nationwide strike, but it had agreed to let members of the steam-shovelmen’s union remove dirt from the site. In mid-June, however, the shovelmen started loading coal. In the strikers’ eyes, this made them scabs—not a good thing to be in Williamson County, where 90 percent of the work force, even shopkeepers and farmers, held U.M.W. cards.

The fighting began on the morning of June 21 when a truckload of laborers, recruited from Chicago without being told they would be strikebreakers, was stopped on the way to the mine. Accounts differ as to who shot first, but gunfire was exchanged on the road and, shortly after, at the mine. One strikebreaker and two strikers were killed, and a third striker was mortally wounded. Within hours, union men from surrounding communities were flocking to the mine, liberating guns and ammunition from stores as they went.

On June 2 Mark Twain, perhaps America’s most original writer ever, gave American journalism one of its sturdiest clichés. Twain and his wife were in London, where they had quietly taken up residence following the death of their daughter Susy the previous August. In a rented house in Tedworth Square, Twain lay low, grieving for Susy and writing what would become Following the Equator . When months passed with no word from him, rumors about his fate started crossing the Atlantic.

On May 8 the Associated Press reported: “The canard circulated in the United States, saying that Samuel L. Clemens, ‘Mark Twain,’ was dead, had not the slightest foundation. Mr. Clemens is in London and in better health and spirits than for a long time past.” But the rumors refused to go away. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal , sent another reporter to see whether Twain was really “dying in poverty.”

On May 14, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, John Philip Sousa premiered his most inspired and glorious march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” As might be expected, it brought down the house. A joyous audience made the Sousa Band repeat it twice more, and critics in the next day’s papers were just as ecstatic. One called the new piece “stirring enough to rouse the American eagle from his crag and set him to shriek exultantly while he hurls his arrows at the aurora borealis.” As the band continued its tour, reviews in Washington, Baltimore, and Boston were equally enthusiastic, if less eloquent. Only in Toronto did one sorehead, understandably lacking in Yankee patriotism, grumble that it was “rather noisy.”

On June 9 the British revenue schooner Gaspée ran aground in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay while chasing a suspected smuggler. Word quickly spread among the merchants, sailors, and smugglers of nearby Providence, who, like all Rhode Islanders, hated anything to do with duties and tariffs. The colony’s residents had been attacking customs officers and ships ever since a 1764 sugar tax imperiled local rum distillers, whose product was used to buy slaves in Africa. But they especially resented the Gaspée because of the zeal and high-handedness of its captain, Lt. William Dudingston.

In late May, New England’s colonial legislatures passed laws to guard against a variety of menaces within and without. On May 25 the legislature of Connecticut addressed a pair of vices that had recently been causing much trouble: tobacco and alcohol. In a convoluted set of regulations, it restricted tobacco smoking to those “allreddy accustomed … to the use thereof,” although a non-addict could qualify by procuring a doctor’s certificate “that it is vsefull for him.” Smokers could not indulge in the streets, nor in the fields or woods unless they were on a journey of at least ten miles or it was dinnertime. They could puff away freely in their homes, but only if no more than one other person “who vseth and drinketh the same weed” was present. And to fight “that great abuse which is creepeing in by excesse in Wyne and strong waters,” the legislators made it illegal to drink in a tavern for more than half an hour at a time—leading, no doubt, to increases in pub-crawling.

On June 24 John Cabot, a Genoaborn English mariner, became the first European since Viking days to set foot in North America, when he landed on what is now called Newfoundland.

Or something like that. An event resembling the one in the preceding paragraph did take place in 1497, but virtually every detail is subject to question. Cabot left no written record of his journey, and the few surviving secondhand sources contradict one another. Even basic biographical facts are skimpy. Records show that John Cabot (or Caboto, Cabotto, Kaboto, Calbot, Caboote, Cabote, or Talbot) was a naturalized citizen of Venice, but his place of birth is uncertain—most likely Genoa, possibly Gaeta. He may or may not have lived in Valencia, Spain, in the early 149Os. In 1496 King Henry VII of England granted him a charter to sail west and monopolize trade, presumably in spices, from what he thought would be eastern Asia. After an abortive journey that spring, Cabot’s ship, the Mathew (or Matthew ) departed from Bristol the following year.

On the morning of April 18, about eighty-five hundred United States troops led by Gen. Winfield Scott routed twelve thousand Mexicans at Cerro Gordo. Since capturing the seaport of Veracruz three weeks earlier, the American Army had marched inland virtually unmolested. Meanwhile, Mexico’s charismatic president, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, was rallying his scattered forces for a final stand at a mountain pass along the road to Mexico City. They had enough time to set up artillery, and as the Americans approached, their defenses looked formidable. But adept scouting by Lt. Robert E. Lee (who at one point lay motionless behind a log for hours to avoid capture) revealed that a path could be cut through dense wilderness behind the Mexican lines. The Americans attacked from front and rear simultaneously, and within three hours the overwhelmed and shattered Mexicans were fleeing in complete disarray. By April 24, having taken the cities of Jalapa and Perote without resistance, Scott could report that “Mexico no longer has an army.”

On April 1 Virginia’s House of Burgesses petitioned King George III of England for “your Majesty’s paternal assistance in averting a Calamity of a most alarming Nature.” Specifically, they asked the king to let them ban the importation of slaves, which “hath long been considered as a Trade of great Inhumanity” and might “endanger the very Existance of your Majesty’s American Dominions.” Slaves from West Africa had allowed Virginia to grow and flourish over the previous century and a half, during which time the trade’s inhumanity had troubled few buyers. Now those same slave buyers wanted to cut off further imports. The reasons behind this apparent switch reveal Virginia’s ambivalent attitude toward the institution.