January 2011

The author recommends three books: Oliver P. Temple, East Tennesssee and the Civil War (Cincinnati: Ayer Company Publishers, reproduction of 1899 edition), an eyewitness account of the strife in East Tennessee; Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), the most thorough recent book about the internal dissent among the Confederates; and Phillip Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), a dramatic account of the pro-Union Confederates who were shot in East Tennessee.

When the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty failed to enchant local audiences, a distributor begged MGM to make “no more pictures where they write with feathers.”

Nevertheless, people have been writing with feathers since the dawn of the industry: as soon as movies began to tell coherent stories, they found subjects in the past.

For good or ill, movies have played an enormous part in giving us a sense of our history. For instance, they invented an American West for all of us, and, if its inhabitants sometimes went about their business with the stylized inevitability of the Japanese Noh theater, they nonetheless reflected something we wanted to believe about the conflicts that formed our country. To protest that it is not true is to miss the point.

With his usual threats of death to deserters, Gen. Andrew Jackson led two thousand troops through the wilderness of eastern Alabama for a final confrontation with hostile Creek Indians. About nine hundred Creeks had chosen a peninsula formed by a bend in the Tallapoosa River as the perfect site for a defense. They had barricaded the neck of the peninsula with thick log breastworks and were ready with canoes at the riverside if escape became necessary. Jackson saw immediately upon his arrival on March 27 that they had merely penned themselves up for slaughter.

Jackson began the Battle of Horseshoe Bend by firing cannonballs at the wall while Gen. John Coffee surrounded the peninsula from the other side of the river. Coffee sent his best swimmers across the Tallapoosa to cut loose the Creeks’ canoes and set fire to their village; as the smoke appeared, Jackson ordered an assault on the fortification.

Ulysses S. Grant, the author of resounding victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, was a national hero when he arrived in Washington, D.C., on March 8 to assume supreme command of the Union armies. Grant was to be promoted by an act of Congress to lieutenant general, a newly revived rank that was second in authority only to the commander in chief. By this time newspapers across the North were suggesting that even lieutenant general was too low a rank for Grant.

The general quieted presidential rumors by ignoring them; indeed, once in Washington he seemed to want nothing so much as to leave. He quietly accepted his orders and broke with custom by deciding to move his Union command headquarters out of Washington, to the front with the Army of the Potomac. He revealed his impression of the city when he declined Lincoln’s invitation to dine at the White House. “Really, Mr. President,” Grant said, “I have had enough of this show business.”

March 3: With correspondents from several Boston newspapers on hand, Lothrop Withington, Jr., a Harvard College undergraduate, won a ten-dollar bet by swallowing a live goldfish in the college union. Withington was merely duplicating for his friends a feat he had seen on a Honolulu beach years before, but the publicity that came out of Boston inspired a mania for goldfish swallowing that emptied aquariums in college towns all across the United States.

As the novelty waned, students tried to swallow more and more goldfish at a sitting, but when one young epicure was suspended from his classes at Kutztown State Teachers College in Reading, Pennsylvania, for swallowing a record forty-three goldfish, the stakes seemed to have gone too high. The craze burned itself out in about a month, by which time pioneering students were eating magazines at Lafayette College and 78-rpm records at the University of Chicago.

James R. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union, was convicted on March 4 of tampering with a federal jury in 1962. After three years of appeals, durine which he retained his union presidency, Hoffa entered a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin a thirteen-year term. President Richard M. Nixon commuted the sentence in December 1971 on the condition that Hoffa not be involved with union management until 1980. Hoffa was fighting to regain control of the Teamsters when he disappeared on July 30, 1975. The FBI has never been able to prove its suspicion that Hoffa was murdered by enemies in organized crime.

March 4: President Lyndon Johnson appointed ten women to government posts in a move designed to end “stag government.” His major appointee, Katherine E. White, became the U.S. ambassador to Denmark. “Our determination to enlist women in this administration… will be a continuing aim not because it is politic but because it is sound,” the President told his audience at the Women’s National Press Club dinner. “I am unabashedly in favor of women.”

When Colonel Samuel Lyman Marshall came home in 1945, he was one of millions of Americans who had served in the Second World War. Perhaps a third of them had seen combat, and Marshall, as the European theater’s deputy historian, had talked to an unprecedentedly large number of them. In a few months, he began the little book that was to make him S. L. A. Marshall, a respected and highly influential military historian. In the 211 pages of Men Against Fire, Marshall made an astonishing assertion: In any given body of American infantry in combat, no more than one-fifth, and generally as few as 15 percent, had ever fired their weapons at an enemy, indeed ever fired their weapons at all.

The horn of plenty may never have seemed as bounteous as it did to the generation of Americans that came of age in the prosperous 1850s. The tastemakers of the period favored ostentatious furnishings that symbolized their success, such as the exquisite chair opposite, made in about 1855 by John Henry Belter, New York’s leading cabinetmaker of his day. The intricately carved back of the chair—aswarm with grapevines and framed by sinuous cornucopias—instilled in its sitters the agreeable sensation that the harvest was in, the granaries full, and the wine cellar well stocked.

Belter started life with the given name Johann Heinrich in Germany, where he was born in 1804. As an apprentice in Württemberg, he learned both cabinetmaking and carving. In 1833 he emigrated to the United States. His passport described him as five feet seven inches tall, with brown hair and gray eyes and “incomplete” teeth. In 1839, having Anglicized his name to John Henry Belter, he became an American citizen. Five years later he opened a shop on Chatham Street, then New York’s fashionable cabinetmaking center.

Starting in 1879, the naturalist John Muir was so enthusiastic about Alaska that he is considered largely responsible for its first wave of tourism. “No excursion that I know of may be made into any other American wilderness where so marvelous an abundance of noble, newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view,” he wrote. In 1884 cruise ships on the Inside Passage brought 1,650 visitors to the Great Land, as the Indians called it. Last year nearly a million tourists came.

Now, as then, the first-timer is likely to sign up for a tour. Each summer big outfits like Holland America-Westours and Tour Alaska deploy thousands of awestruck travelers over the rugged miles, briskly coordinating convoys of trains, buses, and ships. I was in the hands of Westours last summer on a twelve-day trip into Alaska’s interior, down the southeast coast, and over the Canadian border to the Yukon Territory. Reminders of the past were scattered everywhere—like the raw gold the jubilant miner George Carmack found in August 1896 along Bonanza Creek, “laying thick between flaky slabs like cheese sandwiches.”