January 2011

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I would ride with a young carpenter, Ed Beall of Alton, Illinois, in the last week of April 1865, on assignment for the Chicago & Alton Railroad. In Springfield the Lincoln house at Eighth and Jackson streets was to be draped in mourning. Ed was a rangy youth with a long reach. While comrades on the roof paid out a rope, he slid down, headfirst, to the eaves, where black “droopers” were set in place. Then the crew moved on to the Illinois statehouse to build a catafalque in the assembly hall.

On a railroad siding in Chicago lay a special train, twelve days’ slow journey from Washington. Its black-draped coaches carried a military company in dress uniforms. In the next car were Gen. “Fighting Joe” Hooker, Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, Gov. Richard Yates, and Lincoln’s old friend Chief Justice David Davis. Inside the last car, bearing the President’s seal, a large coffin rested beside a small one. The small casket contained the body of twelve-year-old Willie Lincoln, who had died three years before in Washington. Now he was to be buried beside his father in Springfield.

The triumphal victory parade of the Union Armies in Washington, May 23 and May 24, 1865, is the scene that would have given me the most pleasure. There is an unforgettable description in The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams: “A lovely summer afternoon—blue sky overhead—roses everywhere all over the houses—regiment after regiment came marching past, bands playing—squads of contrabands looking on. We sang out as each regiment passed, ‘What regiment are you?’ ‘Michigan!’ ‘Wisconsin!’ ‘Iowa!’

”… We were early and got nice seats … and eighty feet from us across the street sat the President, Generals Grant, Sherman, Howard, Hancock, Meade…

I would like to have witnessed Jacob Brodbeck’s first manned aircraft flight over Luckenback, Texas, in 1865. Newspaper clippings attest to the fact that there were witnesses, but they do not describe what the craft looked like, except to say that it was powered by a large clock spring. Brodbeck decided to call his machine an “airship.”

My choice would be that cool and bright Monday out in Promontory, Utah, when top rail officials, their guests and dozens of track workmen watched as token touches were made on a $400 golden spike by a silver sledge.

The flamboyant, nationwide celebration marked an event as important to Americans as the opening of the Suez Canal —also in 1869—was to western Europeans. The antebellum generation of railroad development saw an iron network connect eastern seaports with established towns and cities, and by 1860 reach the edge of the frontier from Wisconsin to Texas. In the 187Os and 188Os the westward reaching trans-Mississippi rail lines moved well ahead of the frontier, created new communities, and pulled millions of settlers into the West. In the last decades of the nineteenth century these new rail lines were taking the Texas longhorn from the Kansas cow town to Chicago, were serving the gold and silver miners of Leadville and Virginia City, and were moving to eastern markets the crops of the prairie homesteader and farmer. Well before 1900 these Western railroads had helped close the last American frontier.

In these dark days of rampant terrorism, toxic waste, acid rain, and statesmen playing games of nuclear “chicken,” I’d like to have been present at some incident that might cheer me up. The scene that comes instantly to mind is the Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when the nation was at long last linked by rail “from sea to shining sea.” Specifically, I’d like to have been present at the exact second when A. J. Russel took his famous picture of the two locomotives coming together.

I would like to have witnessed the dawn meeting that took place in the Fifth Avenue Hotel on November 8, 1876. Present were John C. Reid, the managing editor of The New York Times , Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and one or two other politicians. The subject: How to steal the Presidency of the United States.

During the preceding night it had become apparent that Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic candidate, was ahead by some two hundred and fifty thousand in the popular vote. Almost every newspaper in New York, including the Republican Tribune , had conceded victory to the Democrats. But John Reid discovered that not even the Democrats knew who had carried Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, three states the Republicans theoretically controlled, thanks to the federal troops still stationed on their soil. If the Republicans could hold these states, their candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, would win by one electoral vote.

I would like to have witnessed the attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, by Federal troops on the evening of July 18, 1863. The fort—a massive affair made of logs, earth, and sand—stood at the northern tip of an island that curved around into Charleston Harbor. Its capture was to be preliminary to taking the city.

The assault was led by the 54th Massachusetts, the first black regiment recruited in a free state. In command was Col. Robert Gould Shaw, of Boston blue blood and of true heroic character. At starlight, the regiment—600 troops and 22 officers— made for the earthwork at the doublequick, with orders to seize it by bayonet assault. The Confederate forces within opened up a devastating fire from cannons, naval guns, and mortars. Men were falling on all sides; every flash of fire, a survivor would say, showed the ground dotted with the wounded or killed. Colonel Shaw gained the rampart before he was shot through the heart.

I wish most of all that I could have been a listener aboard the steamer transport River Queen , just off Hampton Roads, on February 3, 1865.

This, of course, was the conference between Abraham Lincoln, who was accompanied by Secretary of State William H. Seward, and Vice-Président Alexander H. Stephens, who represented the Confederate States of America, and was accompanied by Sen. R. M. T. Hunter and former Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell. They were trying to work out some way to quickly end the Civil War and to restore the Union.