January 2011

After their hard-fought victory at the battle of Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee led his troops northward, through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. The battered Army of the Potomac followed. On July 1 the two armies clashed near the small town of Gettysburg. The Army of the Potomac had a new and untried commander in Gen. George G. Meade. Three days before the battle, Gen. Joe Hooker had resigned his command in a dispute with Lincoln. The early fighting favored the Rebels, who drove the bluecoats back through the town to the high ground south of it.

The United States Patent Office issued two patents in August that changed—to a degree—the way we all live. Theophilus Van Kannel received a patent on August 7 for his “storm-door structure,” popularly known as the revolving door. Van Kannel’s other inventions included the “changeable fulcrum door check” —the device that keeps doors from slamming—and “Witching Waves,” once a popular ride at Coney Island and other amusement parks.

On August 21, William Seward Burroughs was issued patent No. 388,116 for a “calculating-machine,” the first commercially practical adding machine. An earlier version of the machine failed because it was too difficult to use; only Burroughs himself could consistently pull the lever at the speed required to yield correct sums. The improved adding machine soon became an essential business tool, and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company went on to play an instrumental role in the development of the modern digital computer.

Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree”) was published in August in Poetry magazine. “Trees” became Kilmer’s most celebrated poem, though critical reaction to it was decidedly mixed. Heywood Broun called it “one of the most annoying pieces of verse within my knowledge. …”

The millionaire industrialist Howard Hughes set a record for flying around the world when his twin-engine Lockheed 14 plane, New York World’s Fair 1939, returned to New York’s Floyd Bennett Field on July 14. Hughes and his four-man crew made hurried pit stops in Paris, Moscow, Siberia, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis to complete their global circuit in three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes, cutting Wiley Post’s 1933 record in half.

Three days after Hughes’s flight, Douglas Corrigan unobtrusively took off from the same airfield. His destination: Los Angeles. Twenty-eight hours later Corrigan’s 165-horsepower single-engine Curtiss Robin touched down—in Dublin, Ireland. “Wrong-Way” Corrigan, as he was soon dubbed, had apparently misread his compass and flown east, crossing the Atlantic in twenty-eight hours, with a leaky fuel tank to boot. Aviation authorities had repeatedly denied Corrigan a permit to fly across the Atlantic. Whether the flight was an honest mistake or a clever ploy is still up in the air.

The New York Court of Appeals banned Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in a 4-3 decision. Judge John F. Scileppi called the controversial 1934 novel “a compilation of a series of sordid narrations dealing with sex in a manner designed to appeal to the prurient interest.” The high courts of Massachusetts and California had recently permitted the book in their states; the latter court compared the obscenity charges against the book to the “incantations of forgotten witch doctors.”

Representatives from the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the limited nuclear-testban treaty on August 5 in Moscow. The treaty, aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear war and lessening risks from radioactive fallout, prohibited the detonation of nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater. It did not ban underground testing, because of unresolvable disputes over verification procedures. In a nationwide television broadcast, President Kennedy declared the treaty “an important first step—a step toward peace—a step toward reason—a step away from war.”

Among the forgotten artists of the nineteenth century enthusiastically taken up by our own, few are as remarkable as Fitz Hugh Lane. Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1804, the son of a sailmaker, he was crippled at the age of eighteen months, probably by polio, although his contemporaries believed he had been poisoned by an apple of Peru—what we could call a tomato. For the rest of his life, Lane could walk only with the help of crutches.

From an early age Lane showed a talent for drawing, but his first job was as a shoemaker. “After a while,” as a nephew described it, “seeing that he could draw pictures better than he could make shoes, he went to Boston and took lessons in drawing and painting and became a marine artist. …”

The July issue of the learned North American Review included an acerbic essay on fashion history by one Charles W. Brewster. The apparel of the ancient Egyptians, wrote Brewster, was “certainly distinguished by bad taste, but there was a harmony in its badness.” By the fifteenth century “costumes became still more fanciful and grotesque.” Brewster was scarcely more tolerant of the sartorial idiosyncrasies of his own time: “All antiquity boasted nothing in the way of head-gear so absurd as the hats of the present day. . . . One great reason why Americans stoop so much, is, that, living in a country where high winds prevail, they are obliged to walk stooping half the time, to prevent the wind’s blowing their hats off.”

Republican austerity, the simple life suited to a new and still quite .primitive nation, was an appealing notion when the United States came into being. There was something rugged about the continent itself, after all; and we were quick to contrast ourselves with the corruption of an effete monarchical government. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson began his Presidency, and his own egalitarian principles pushed the country still further away from the pomp and etiquette that prevailed overseas.

But it never occurred to Jefferson—or, indeed, to most of the other Founding Fathers—to equate simplicity of manner with ugly houses or plain furniture. The archives of the period bulge with letters in which these statesmen, Washington foremost as usual, require their correspondents to ship them a wide variety of luxury goods. Just recently a bottle of Jefferson’s Bordeaux wine reached a vast sum at auction ($156,450); some of his French furniture is back at Monticello; and, of course, that house and the Jefferson-designed University of Virginia are among this country’s architectural masterpieces.

Natchez, Mississippi, is the oldest permanent settlement on the Mississippi River; it had more millionaires in pre-Civil War days than anywhere else in the United States but New York, and more than five hundred of the handsome houses with which Natchezians glorified themselves and their town still stand. High on the bluffs above the river, Natchez proper was considered the healthiest, pleasantest, and most genteel place to live in the whole region, while at the same time its lower, scruffier section, two hundred feet below on the riverbank, known as Natchez-under-the-Hill, was described by travelers of the time as a “most licentious spot” and the “nucleus of vice upon the Mississippi.” Natchez is also the terminus of the most heavily traveled road in the old Southwest, the Natchez Trace.

On a recent visit I approached this city of superlatives via the Trace, now a serene, lovely parkway, beautifully planted and maintained for leisurely driving free of commercial traffic. It is punctuated by historical markers and sites that tell the road’s story.

Natchez’s fall Pilgrimage will take place from October 8 to 29 this year, and the spring Pilgrimage from March 11 to April 9 in 1989. You can get information about tickets and events at any time of year by writing Pilgrimage Tours, P.O. Box 347, Natchez, MS 39120, by calling 601-446-6631 or 1-800-647-6742, or by visiting the tourist center on Canal, at State Street.

As for accommodations, when I was there, some tourists were moving from one historic house to another, to enjoy staying in a different splendid building each night. Natchez also has the standard hotels and motels. From the Ramada Inn, incidentally, high on the bluff, you can get a superb view of the sunset over the Mississippi.

The food is traditional Southern—emphasizing fried chicken and catfish in every possible form—and good. I particularly enjoyed a meal in one of the two restaurants at Natchez-under-the-Hill, where I could sit outdoors and look at the river while eating my catfish.