January 2011

Diplomatic coups were scarce that season. Thomas Jefferson had temporarily left his duties at the Court of Versailles to join John Adams, America’s first minister to the Court of St. James’s. Adams had summoned him to help in concluding several treaties, but soon after Jefferson’s arrival in London on March 11, the negotiations ground to a halt. Tripoli’s ambassador informed the Americans that sixty thousand guineas would be required to prevent Tripoli and Tunis from seizing American vessels and enslaving sailors, a sum the struggling states could hardly afford. The possibility of reaching a trade agreement with Britain seemed equally remote, and the commercial treaty under way with Portugal was being delayed. Overworked, underpaid, and dispirited, Jefferson and Adams decided it was time for a holiday and set out for a fortnight’s tour of English countryseats.

Somewhere on the high seas between Boston and Calcutta in the year 1830-31, a sixteen-year-old sailor fell to studying the movement of his ship’s wheel. He noticed that it could be spun in either direction but would lock into position when still. Since age seven, when he was found reassembling a pistol he had taken apart, this youth had displayed an affinity for firearms and explosives. As he reflected upon the wheel’s mechanism, he realized it could be incorporated into firearms, and, seizing a discarded tackle block, he began whittling what would be the first model of a rotating cylinder intended to hold six balls and charges. Several years later, on February 25,1836, young Samuel Colt received Patent No. 138 for his invention, the revolver.

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, March 25, on the top floors of the Asch Building near Washington Square in New York City, six hundred garment workers rose from their machines and cutting tables and prepared to go home. Most were immigrants—Italians or Russian Jews —and the majority were girls and women between the ages of thirteen and thirty. It was the end of their six-day workweek, and they were eager to leave. As they wound their way past bins heaped with lint and rags, crowded rows of sewing machines, and tables covered with bolts of cloth, someone may have stopped for a last furtive cigarette and tossed a match carelessly aside. How it started was never determined, but suddenly, on the eighth floor, a fire leaped up, and despite efforts to extinguish it, it spread quickly.

Shortly after I read Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s “Roanoke Lost” in the August/ September 1985 issue, I read another account of the lost colony which asserts that the colonists merged with the Lumbee Indians of southeastern North Carolina. Does Kupperman classify this as another rumor, or is there perhaps some validity to the idea?

What is the connection between India and the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787? A connoisseur of constitutional trivia would answer, “Warren Hastings,” explaining that an account of the impeachment of Hastings in 1787 by the House of Commons for plundering India came to the framers’ attention late in their proceedings and offered guidance for their own impeachment clauses. Warren Hastings, however, is not the appropriate answer. The connection between India and the convention is that both have recently been the subjects of widely acclaimed, though very different, television series, one of which has persuaded many observers that Americans have, at last, attained the proficiency of the British in using television to present historical events.

The Calumet horror…

For a little while during the last century, Calumet, Michigan, was one of the wealthiest towns in the country. The vast copper deposits on which it stood had made it rich, had built its streetcar system and its opera house and its fine, stone business blocks. But Calumet was a company town, and when the ore began to run thin, the company said the miners had to work harder for less money. In the summer of 1913, they struck, and their bosses brought thugs from the tenements of New York City to the wilds of the Upper Peninsula to break the strike. Miners and hirelings battled through the long, grim autumn without either side gaining the upper hand, but winter brought a catastrophe so devastating that it not only ended the strike—it killed the city.

“The humorist’s humorist”…

Joseph Stimson’s photographic portrayal of Diamondville (October/November 1985) clearly shows that the amenities of the modern industrial world were making little impact on that Wyoming city in 1903. Note the total absence of any sort of paving on the main street, the crude wooden sidewalk, and the ever present “chic sale” in the vicinity of each of the residences. There was one notable exception, though, that the famed Western photographer captured with his lens—the impact of electricity.