January 2011

The Treaty of Utrecht ending the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 cost France heavily in the New World, but its smooth-talking diplomats salvaged one strategic point. This was Cape Breton Island, a rugged, lonely bit of real estate jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean off the tip of Nova Scotia. There France built the fortress of Louisbourg, renowned in the early eighteenth century as the strongest in North America and perhaps in the world.

Some twenty miles southeast of what is now the island city of Sydney, a narrowgated harbor faced the North Atlantic. About two miles long from northeast to southwest, with an average width of half a mile, the bay was usually clear of ice the year round and sheltered from ocean storms by two necks of land that pinched the entrance to less than a mile, although rocks and shoals restricted the navigable passage to less than half that. Near the middle of the harbor mouth sat a small island.

The Indians called it kebec—(“the narrow place”). There a mighty river, compressed to a width of less than a mile, broke through the mountain barrier, added the weight of another stream flowing from the north, and, spreading out in its great bed, began a four-hundred-mile sweep to the sea. The French adopted the name.

The meeting of the St. Lawrence and St. Charles rivers created a high, triangular promontory whose flat summit would one day be covered by a splendid city. A natural fortress on two sides, the bluff soared steeply upward to a height of 333 feet above the St. Lawrence and extended for miles along the river with few passages to the top. Along the St. Charles the grade was gentler but guarded at the bottom by open mud flats at low water.

John A. Garraty replies: The origins of nicknames are often very difficult to pin down with certainty. Several different “explanations” often coexist, chiefly because most nicknames emerge gradually. Just who thought of the name or under what circumstance may not be known even by the person named or for that matter by the namer. What makes most nicknames beyond the Billy-Jimmy-Peggy type interesting to historians is that they tend to reflect traits of character and personality that are hard to document with conventional sources. Slow Trot and Black Jack are good examples.

Fourteen miles below its awesome cataract, the swiftly flowing Niagara River sweeps through a steep gorge into Lake Ontario. Just before it reaches the lake, the river makes a sharp turn, creating a low, triangular-shaped bluff on the east shore. This inconspicuous neck of land was the strategic key to the control of the Great Lakes pre-Revolutionary fur trade.

From Quebec to the farthest reaches of the lakes, the backbone of the trade was water transportation. To move from one end to the other, all traffic had to pass through the Niagara. Who controlled the bottleneck at “Thundergate,” as the Seneca Indians called the river mouth, had a stranglehold on the trade.

Fort Niagara was the cork in the bottle.

Who was George Templeton Strong, and why single out for special attention a conservative and supercilious New York lawyer who is remembered chiefly, if at all, for a diary he kept between the years 1835 and 1875? A civil leader and much esteemed man of affairs, he took an active part in the educational and cultural life of his turbulent city and served with distinction on the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. But he never occupied top positions, never coveted the limelight, had no special influence on, important people. He died without national lamentation in his fifty-fifth year.

Way back when I was a teenager, it was common knowledge that the mass media—newly reinforced by television—were generating mass conformity, mass passivity, and mass “loss of autonomy.” They were even producing a new kind of dismal American, a truly ominous being, grimly referred to as “mass man.” In other words, it was common knowledge that the one thing we could not expect from the forth-coming 1960s—still hidden then in the womb of time—was exactly what we got from that turbulent era: a vast revival of political activity, a vast throwing off of the chains of conformity, and an exhibition of youthful autonomy so appalling to many a media critic that when last heard from they were blaming television for breeding unrest and political rebellion. Not since it was common knowledge that international trade made war obsolete (this was in 1914) had people’s bottomless capacity for mischief proved so many reputable social thinkers so devastatingly wrong.

In item 36 of “101 More Things …” Dr. Garraty states that Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas was given the nickname of Slow Trot because of his methodical preparation for battle. Francis F. McKinney’s biography of General Thomas, Education in Violence , gives a differing account.

McKinney’s explanation is that Thomas, while an instructor at West Point, in an effort to spare the post’s horses from excessively vigorous riding, constantly reminded the cadet riders, “Slow trot, slow trot!” This was subsequently picked up as a nickname.

Who is right?

On the northwest shoulder of South America, looking out over the blue waters of the Caribbean, an ancient citadel stands guard above a Spanish city. Three thousand miles to the north, where the Gulf of St. Lawrence meets the gray rollers of the North Atlantic, the guns of another once-menacing fortress stare sullenly across a bleak, empty sea. The tropical city is Cartagena, Colombia. The northern bastion is Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, once called the “Gibraltar of the West.”

The story of Cartagena, Louisbourg, and a handful of similar strongholds is the story of the European conquest of America. Built far apart in time and distance, every one of them embodies the same reasoning: the attempts to preserve a colonial empire by hiding behind stone walls.

Three and a half centuries ago Cartagena de Indias was renowned as the richest trading center and most beautiful city on the Spanish Main. It was the principal emporium for merchandise sent from Spain to its South American colonies and the shipping point for gold, silver, emeralds, and pearls mined in Colombia and Venezuela. Between 1544 and 1741 Spain’s enemies sacked the town five times.

Built on a narrow, low strip of land between the open Caribbean Sea to the north and a huge bay behind, Cartagena was hard to defend. The marshy soil made poor footing for the heavy stone fortifications required in the tropics, and in any case there was no stone to build them with. The only harbor entrance was miles to the south.

Lack of landing beaches, heavy surf, and shallow water that kept bombarding ships at a distance combined to make the direct northern approach quite secure. The back door, however, presented problems beyond the capacities of seventeenth-century weapons and tactics. Once inside the bay an attacker could easily close in from the south.