January 2011

I enjoyed your Civil War issue (March), especially Peter Andrews’s article on George H. Thomas. Mr. Andrews is correct in observing that Pap Thomas has not been given his due by historians—even in his native state of Virginia. When he cast his lot with the Union in 1861, even his family disavowed him. According to legend his two sisters turned his portrait to the wall. “As far as we are concerned,” one later said, “our brother died in 1861.” Even after the war they refused to reply to his correspondence, and no members of his Virginia family attended his funeral in New York in 1870.

A vivid reminder of the bitter rift within the family is a beautiful sword with a silver scabbard and solid-gold pommel given Thomas for his services in the Mexican War. He wore it only once, to his wedding; then he left it with his sisters for safekeeping. He never saw it again. When he wrote his sisters after the war to request the sword, they refused to return it. In 1900 the family presented it to the Virginia Historical Society where today it is prized as one of the most valuable items in our museum collection.

In his fascinating article on Alexander Hamilton (“The Founding Wizard,” July/August), John Steele Gordon states, “With the exception of the United Kingdom … the United States today has the oldest continuously constituted government on the earth.” Shouldn’t this be “oldest continuous constitutional government”? Any legal government, even that of the late unlamented Stalin, is a constituted government, and I believe the Danes, with an unbroken chain of monarchy extending back to the 1200s, hold the honors for longevity. Thanks to the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell and his bloody-minded roundhead Puritans, the English are out of the running.

A good book about how the U.S. patent system got started is B. W. Bugbee’s Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law (Public Affairs Press, 1967), while other aspects of its history are discussed by David F. Noble in America by Design (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) and Floyd L. Vaughan in The United States Patent System: Legal and Economic Conflicts in American Patent History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1956). The Selden patent case is ably described in William Greenleaf’s Monopoly on Wheels: Henry Ford and the Selden Automobile Patent (Wayne State University Press, 1951). For the Xerox story, see Sol Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man (Little, Brown, 1985).

—O.E.A.

Shortly after noon on Thursday, April 20, 1775, a weary post-rider swung out of the saddle at Hunt’s Tavern in New Haven, Connecticut with an urgent message from the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence. At dawn the day before, British light infantry had killed six militiamen on Lexington Green. Anxious New Haven citizens crowded into an emergency town meeting and voted to maintain a policy of neutrality despite Massachusetts’s plea for troops and supplies.

In the course of his uphill campaign to unseat the Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, the Whig candidate Gen. William Henry Harrison introduced a new element to American politics: the stump speech. Harrison broke the tradition of candidate silence, delivering twenty-three speeches ranging in length from one to three hours. Though not known as an inspiring orator, Harrison drew large crowds made up of both supporters and curiosity seekers.

His most dramatic address took place on September 10, when the old general appeared before a huge rally in a valley outside Dayton, Ohio. The former governor of the Indiana Territory and hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe depicted himself as a common man who had humbly accepted the mantle of leadership. “I am no statesman by profession,” he said, contrasting himself to the politico Van Buren. “I am a half soldier and a half farmer .. .”

Americans listened anxiously on September 10 as Edward R. Murrow reported from London on the German Luftwaffe ’s air assault on Britain: “I’ve seen some horrible sights in this city during these days and nights, but not once have I heard man, woman, or child suggest that Britain should throw in her hand. These people are angry. How much they can stand I don’t know.”

A week earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced an executive agreement between the United States and Great Britain. The United States would lend the British fifty aging destroyers in return for rent-free, ninety-nine-year leases on naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and five other British territories.

As troop levels neared President Lyndon B. Johnson’s goal of 125,000, U.S. forces in Vietnam became involved in escalated conflicts. Daily bombing raids over North Vietnam began on September 16 as B-52s destroyed suspected Vietcong bases in the Mekong Delta.

Opposition to the U.S. presence in Vietnam crystallized as rallies took place in cities around the world the weekend of October 15. In Berkeley, California, the poet Allen Ginsberg led an estimated ten thousand marchers in an aborted attempt to reach the Oakland army base. The rally ended outside Berkeley as members of the motorcycle gang Hell’s Angels attacked Ginsberg and his “flower people.” In New York City another ten thousand protesters gathered, among them David J. Miller, a Catholic pacifist who burned his draft card in front of the cheering crowd. Three days later FBI agents arrested Miller for violating a law President Johnson had signed on August 31 making destruction or mutilation of a draft card a federal offense.

In a decision of far-reaching significance, a federal circuit court in 1985 ruled that the Eastman Kodak Company had infringed the instant-camera patents held by Polaroid. The court ordered Kodak to cease making and selling its own instant camera, a product on which Kodak had sunk many millions of dollars in an effort to beat out Polaroid and bolster its position as a camera and film manufacturer. The ruling, which capped a nine-year legal battle between the two concerns, stunned the financial world and came as a severe blow to Kodak, while allowing Polaroid to breathe a vast sigh of relief. Damages have yet to be set as of this writing, but they could go as high as fourteen billion dollars.

Lloyd Ostendorf and James L. Swanson presented an intriguing circumstantial case for Dr. Philip O. Jenkins’s Lincoln canvas in “Lincoln from Life” (March). However, a reader familiar with the literature of Lincoln iconography might reasonably wonder why Jenkins would, years after his supposed sittings with the future President, boast to a prospective customer that he’d once painted not Lincoln but a mere senator. Most of the artists lucky enough to have painted Lincoln from the flesh were quick to let the world know.

The sculptor Leonard W. Volk said that the future President sat for a bust in 1860, then told him, “Mr. Volk, I have never sat before to sculptor or painter—only for daguerreotypes and photographs.” If Volk’s was the first life portrait in 1860, how could Jenkins so qualify with an effort dated four years earlier?