January 2011

And so, the last great old-style infantry charge in history begins. With the sun flashing off their muskets, fifteen thousand men—a phalanx of men a mile across and half a mile deep—begins to move silently, slowly, in parade fashion, out of the shadows of the trees and into the open, sunbaked fields … this antique military creature, a giant throwback to how men fought in the Middle Ages, has just made it to within two hundred yards of the Union guns when the Federals open up with canister…

This moment fills me with awe. Somehow I would have liked to be present during the ominous march of George Pickett and his men on the third day of fighting at Gettysburg in 1863. Not only to see this deadly spectacle but to know at the same time the outcome was ensuring that our great and noble experiment in government was going to last.

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.

Incidents in history are usually significant only in combination with a succession of other incidents. Isolated incidents can assume importance only when they summarize an epoch in one dramatic moment or when fuller knowledge of the event might alter interpretations.

The moment of Samuel F. B. Morse’s proclaimed “flash of genius, ” during which he believed that he invented the telegraph, retains critical uncertainties. Morse was returning to the United States on the S.S. Sully in 1832 when he engaged in spirited conversations on Ampere’s recent electromagnetic experiments. The Boston chemist Dr. Charles T. Jackson told him that the length of wire did not retard the speed of electricity. Morse declared, euphorically, “I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance.” He always believed this idea was the true invention, and it was wholly his own.

I would have liked to visit Thoreau’s hut: nothing in our past interests me more. The Gettysburg address perhaps, but it was a big crowd and I would get tired waiting. The tea party in Boston sounds like an escapade that became big news; but the hut—that I would like to have seen, with a tape measure to verify the figures in Walden , and check up on other details—not to put down Henry David but simply to see what the distance was between the facts and his fancy. He had such a large fancy.

The one event I would most like to have participated in was hardly recorded—the first vision of that endless sea of grass, when the first explorers crossed the Mississippi and headed west across those plains the like of which no other world boasted, the plains that extended to the horizon, deep with grass to a man’s armpits. There buffalo lazily wandered, headless and secure, feeding on this natural abundance, fearless of man, be he white or red. That ocean of land would vanish as men cut it, plowed it, burned it, ravaged it, killed the buffalo, killed the Indians, turned it into a network of steel, concrete, and plowed furrows, and exterminated one of the wonders of the world. I can not get the sight of it out of my eyes, and it brings me close to tears.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Scottish friend Thomas Carlyle said of Daniel Webster: “No man can be as great as that man looks.” Looked and sounded . I elect to have heard and seen him; but I don’t choose one of the famous set-piece occasions (in the Supreme Court, or the Senate, or at Bunker Hill, where an attentive multitude listened for hours in the hot sun). Instead I go for a more relaxed, almost neighborly set of vignettes, spread out over several days in August 1843.

Webster had come to Concord, Massachusetts, to argue a case before the Suffolk County bar. Emerson went along to observe and was enchanted. Even among prominent attorneys Webster was, said Emerson, “a schoolmaster among his boys.” His rhetoric was “perfect, so homely, so fit, so strong.” He dominated the scene, even to adjourning the court, “which he did by rising, & taking his hat & looking the Judge coolly in the face.”