January 2011

The chords of memory may be mystic, as Abraham Lincoln described them, but how accurate and reliable they are as evidence is a dilemma every historian must face. From the time Herodotus walked through Asia Minor two thousand years ago, asking questions, tapping the recollections of hundreds of eyewitnesses, historians have depended on the retentive faculty of the human mind for information about the past, and they have learned that such reliance has its minuses as well as pluses.

I first encountered the negative side of how much to lean on an eyewitness’s memory when I was doing research for the book Decisive Day, about the battle for Bunker Hill.

Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution House Styles at a Glance

by James M. McPherson; Oxford University Press; 192 pages; $19.95.

The Princeton history professor James M. McPherson here follows his excellent 1988 history of the Civil War era, Battle Cry of Freedom , with a book of short, lucid essays about the war and Lincoln’s role in it. As the title suggests, the book has two intertwined subjects: the idea of the war as a second American Revolution and the role of Lincoln in guiding its purpose and outcome.

Was it really a kind of Revolution, or did it, as many have argued, change little or nothing? McPherson argues forcefully for the former. The war ended for good the South’s political domination of the nation, destroyed its slavery-based economic structure, and left blacks undeniably far freer and better off—at least temporarily. Moreover, it gave liberty itself a new meaning.

In 1987, Robert Townsend charged $100,000 on his 15 personal credit cards to finance the production of a major motion picture, Hollywood Shuffle. It was a big risk, a desperate gamble that the movie would be successful and pay off the bills. It worked. Most Americans go through life making credit-card gambles these days, though on a much smaller scale, charging their clothes, furnishings, vacations, toys, and more in the hope that they’ll have the time and ultimately the money to pay it off. It’s hard to imagine that a few years ago you couldn’t charge tickets to a theater, let alone the making of a movie. Now you can charge virtually anything—and some things you must charge: pity the soul who tries to rent a car with mere cash.

The 1966 “Time Machine” piece in the July/August issue left the impression that hatred of a parent and “a lifelong fascination with guns” pushed Charles Whitman toward the Texas Tower and mass murder. Recall that Whitman’s autopsy revealed a sizable brain tumor. I suspect it deserves at least equal billing.

As a recent law school graduate, I read John Steele Gordon’s “Reforming the Law” (“The Business of America,” September) with interest. Mr. Gordon is quite correct in ascribing the success of Dudley Field’s code to the efforts of lawyers, but he goes astray when he quotes Henry VI, Part II as support for his proposition that lawyers are normally part of the problem and not of the solution.

Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line should be taken in context. Henry VI was the last English king of the House of Lancaster. The House of York believed it held a better claim to the Crown. When a popular uprising, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, occurred in 1450, the Yorkists seized the opportunity to challenge Henry VI and (eventually) drive him from the throne. This conflict began what is usually known as the “Wars of the Roses.”

Your excellent article “The Tyranny of the Lawn” (September) left out the classic English lawn anecdote:

SCENE —Two men stand before a grand English estate lawn, acres of velvet without so much as a cloverleaf showing, clipped as a putting green, smooth as a cat’s back.

TOURIST : My, it must be a lot of trouble to get a lawn like that.

GROUNDSKEEPER : No, sir, no trouble at all. You just go over it now and then for the odd weed, and you roll it once every day.

TOURIST : Every day?

GROUNDSKEEPER : Exactly. Every day for five hundred years.

When Joseph Capen moved to Topsfield, Massachusetts in 1682 to become minister of the Congregational church there, his prospects did not seem bright. Two of the last three preachers had difficulties collecting their salaries, and another went on trial for intemperance. These conflicts degenerated into charges and countercharges of slander and drunkenness. Most of Topsfield’s population lived in one- or two-room houses that offered little protection from a New England winter—or from Indians, if they decided to resume the wars that had recently raged through the colony. Boundary disputes regularly set neighbor against neighbor and town against town, and, often enough, community gatherings such as militia drills would deteriorate into drunken brawls that ended in gunfire. Wolves roamed the streets of the town at night, stalking the hogs and sheep.

Bernard Weisberger says of the Vice Presidency: “If the job is so important, why shouldn’t it require at least the two-thirds vote that a nominee for the cabinet or an ambassadorship needs from the Senate?” In fact there is no such constitutional requirement for a two-thirds vote by the Senate to confirm any presidential nomination.