January 2011

It took an Englishman, William Gladstone, to say what Americans have always thought: “The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” From this side of the water, however, the marvel has not been so much the unique system of government that emerged from the secret conclave of 1787 as the array of ordered and guaranteed freedoms that the document presented. “Every word of [the Constitution],” said James Madison, the quintessential framer, “decides a question between power and liberty.”

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Judge Zobel recommends Irving Brant’s The Bill of Rights (Mentor edition, 1965); Carl Van Doren’s The Great Rehearsal (Viking, 1948) for general background on the Constitutional Convention; and for those who want to go back to the sources, The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 , edited by G. Hunt and J. Scott (Greenwood Press, 1970), which are the actual notes that James Madison kept during the proceedings. Zobel also recommends The Modern Library’s edition of the Federalist Papers, called simply The Federalist (1937).

Hundreds of illustrated envelopes, known to collectors as “covers,” have lasted a century or more, almost in spite of themselves. And although nothing is more disposable than an envelope, the now forgotten correspondents of the 1850s and 1860s who mailed the examples seen here took great pains with them. One sender selected a printed patriotic motif to send to Prussia, while another drew a scene in lively detail, filing his small-scale canvas and incorporating both stamps and address in the design. And what functioned in its time as an ordinary trademark—the stamp of the Pony Express—now stands as a rare survivor of the short-lived overland mail run, able to fetch thousands of dollars at auction.

—C.D.

“Do you know anything about that wonderful invention of the day, called the daguerreotype?...Think of a man sitting down in the sun and leaving his facsimile in all its full completion of outline and shadow, steadfast on a plate, at the end of a minute and a half!...It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases—but the association and the sense of nearness...the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!”
—From a letter of Elizabeth Barrett, the poet, to Mary Russell Mitford, the novelist in 1843

This picture of a famous trio is very clearly posed —with all parties in their Sunday best, on chairs moved out on the lawn—but is matchless. Alexander Graham Bell, who spent much of his life working for the deaf, took on Helen Keller, both deaf and mute, and blind besides, and found her a great teacher, Annie Sullivan, the “miracle worker.” Here, in 1894, Bell is “talking” with his hand into Miss Keller’s right palm, while with the fingers of the other she “listens” to the lips of Miss Sullivan. It is a “conversation” that no one would have thought possible, among three brilliant people. It is only the beginning of their achievements, and it would melt a heart of stone.

These two pictures write their own editorials on wealth and poverty and how a better world should be managed, but they also have interior interest in their own right—always a problem for the serious propagandist. The grandchildren of that scoundrelly and shameless manipulator of railroads, Jay Gould, have just received lavish presents from their parents, the George Jay Goulds, around 1903 to 1905. They are imported French voiturettes , used as city runabouts and powered by one-cylinder engines, although the little one, seating young Edith, may be only foot-powered. The Gould chauffeur in the grown-ups’ 1902 Panhard-Levassor beams at everything, but the rich little children, saving perhaps Kingdon at the far left, seem bored already. Rightthinking people should be outraged at seeing children so badly spoiled, no doubt, but I would really like to have had one of these toys myself, and for that matter still would.

Last summer, when we published a group of newly uncovered letters by William Tecumseh Sherman, we faced a dilemma as to how to illustrate the cover. We had to choose between a photograph of Sherman that captured his personality superbly but was in poor condition and a recent painting in color based on that photograph. At the last minute, a fine print of the old photograph turned up and we ran with it. Why choose a black-and-white photograph over a colorful painting? Although the communications experts who profess to know what readers like might have chosen the painting, once the good print arrived the contest was over. The reason is that a photograph signals authenticity—and when the subject is news of major historical import, art bows to documentation.