January 2011

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 destroyed the legal foundations of segregation in America, but it did nothing to end the literacy tests and terrorism that Southern states used to deny black Americans the right to vote. In Alabama’s Wilcox and Lowndes counties, for example, not a single black voter was on the registration rolls. Nearby Selma was the logical place to take a stand for voting rights, explained Martin Luther King, Jr., “because it had become a symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement in the Deep South.” King announced plans for a protest march from Selma to Montgomery to take place on March 7. “We’re not on our knees begging for the ballot,” he said. “We are demanding the ballot.”

"Americans just can’t get enough of the Civil War.” So says a man who should know, Terry Winschel, historian of the Vicksburg National Military Park. Millions of visitors come to Vicksburg and to more than a dozen other Civil War national battlefield and millitary parks every year. More than 40,000 Civil War re-enactors spend hundreds of dollars each on replica weapons, uniforms, and equipment; many of them travel thousands of miles to help re-stage Civil War battles. Another two hundred and fifty thousand Americans describe themselves as Civil War buffs or “hobbyists” and belong to one of the hundreds of Civil War round tables or societies, subscribe to at least one of the half-dozen magazines devoted to Civil War history, or buy and sell Civil War memorabilia.

On the morning after Election Day in 1989, history had been made in a normally dull “off-year” race. The Democrat Douglas Wilder won the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia, although the margin was so thin the Republicans demanded a recount. Wilder would be the first black governor ever elected in an American state—and the state, no less, that sheltered the capital of the Confederacy. He is, to be sure, no racial activist. But he is the grandson of slaves, and his showing overshadowed the election, the same day, of David Dinkins as the first black mayor of New York. Black mayors are no longer a novelty in American cities.

Well, then, two cheers for democracy (to quote E. M. Forster) in the Old Dominion. Two only, because a touch of skepticism intrudes. The Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of race, was ratified in 1870. What took so long for blacks to show their voting strength?

The pistol on the facing page is a fancy version of the Colt 1860 Army model revolver. Standard issue to Union troops in the Civil War, prized by the Confederate troops lucky enough to capture it, it was also the crowning achievement in the life of the arms manufacturer Samuel Colt.

Colt had a certain eccentric genius for self-promotion, so it seems quite possible that the popular story about his invention of the Colt revolver was itself an invention. The story goes that in 1831 Colt, a seventeen-year-old seaman returning from Calcutta to London, observed the spokes of the ship’s wheel line up with a fixed point on a compass. The idea then came to Colt for a modern, efficient gun in which the cylinder would revolve and automatically lock in place by the simple action of cocking the hammer. It was the first practical design for a weapon one could fire repeatedly up to six times without pausing to reload. Colt took out a British patent on the idea in 1835 and an American patent the following year. In 1836 he also set up the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company at Paterson, New Jersey.

The Federal fleet that hammered its way into Mobile Bay during Adm. David Glasgow Farragut’s damn-the-torpedoes foray a century and a quarter ago did no harm to the city itself, but Mobile has been radically altered by another Yankee innovation that, if not quite as devastating as the Civil War, has left a far greater mark on the landscape: the strip. When I arrived on a warm, fine weekend early last November, I found that recent development had sucked much of the commerce out of downtown Mobile and left it strung out along the big road that leads to the city’s airport. I also found that the process had left a fascinating residue of nineteenth-century buildings and that the city is currently waging a vigorous battle to save its old district.

The Alabama Bureau of Tourism (Dept. AT, 532 South Perry Street, Montgomery, AL 36104/Tel: 205-261-4169) will be glad to get you started. Mobile’s hotels include the Admiral Semmes (205-432-8000), the new Stouffer Riverview Plaza (205-438-4000), and the Malaga Inn, a forty-room hotel in an 1862 building surrounding a pretty courtyard (205-438-4701). Mobile’s various historic districts are set forth house by house in the excellent booklet Historic Mobile: An Illustrated Guide (Mobile Junior League Publications, P.O. Box 7091, Mobile, AL 36607). Midway up the eastern shore of the bay is Point Clear, which has been a resort since 1847; not long ago Marriott refurbished the fifty-year-old Grand Hotel (the third on the site) and surrounded it with a 650-acre park and a championship golf course (1-800-228-9290). On your way down toward Dauphin Island, stop at Bellingrath Gardens, 65 acres of scrupulous landscaping wrought on bayou wilderness by the man who secured Alabama’s Coca-Cola franchise shortly after the turn of the century.

1765 1865 1915 1965

Readers who enjoyed Bobby Horton’s Homespun Songs of the C.S.A. , which was reviewed in these pages a few issues ago, will be pleased to know that he has produced a Union counterpart. This shows considerable breadth of spirit; Horton is a sixth-generation AIabamian, and his ancestral ties to the Confederacy are very strong. “I had never considered doing a collection of Union tunes; however, at the request of several Northern friends I decided to give it a shot. As I studied Union lyrics, I discovered one strong trait shared by the Yankee and Rebel soldiers: they both sacrificed their youth and, all too often, their lives for a cause they believed was right and just.” Thus he dedicates his tape to both North and South, and in fact brings to his Union songs the same lilt, spirit, and sincerity that inform his ballads of the Lost Cause.

In his short, audacious, and quite remarkable novel, Lamar Herrin seeks to reveal Lee and Stonewall Jackson not through their campaigns but through the spirit that made those campaigns successful.

On the road again

“If God were suddenly to call the world to judgment,” a South American observer wrote in 1818, “He would surprise two-thirds of the American population on the road, like ants.” It’s still true. And wherever we’ve been, we’ve left something of ourselves behind. Once again the editors devote an issue to seeking the past in the places around us. Among the journeys:

Hunting Buffalo

The mystery writer Lawrence Block and his wife have been spending a lot of time on a weirdly rewarding quest—they’ve set out to visit every town in America named Buffalo.

School for sailors

Thomas Fleming explores the Naval Academy at Annapolis, a place where American history expands to encompass the history of the world.

Red Cloud

The Nebraska town that informs Willa Gather’s writing is still eloquent of the woman, her world—and ours.

East Anglia