January 2011

For me the moments of highest drama in our history are the congressional debates preceding the monumental tragedy that was our Civil War. Like the chorus in a Greek drama, the players had their say and moved offstage within two years’ time.

In the Senate were not only Clay, CaIhoun, and Webster but Benton and Sam Houston, who refused to secede when Texas did. They were all there. Clay had already spoken, in all his golden eloquence; Calhoun, sitting by like a ghost, had had his last warning read for him on March 4, 1850, which, according to the press, might have forced the Northern senators to bow to the will of the South, “had it not been for Mr. Webster’s masterly playing. ” The day was March 7, when Webster delivered his magnificent oration in defense of the Union he so loved, Calhoun creeping into the chamber to hear his great antagonist once more.

This is an invitation to fantasy—to see the unseeable, to witness the unwitnessable, to summon the past into the present. Since we are entering an imaginary world through the looking glass, why not go for broke? Why not choose to recover what no one has ever seen, not even the participants, not even the protagonist? Many of the most important events of history never had any witnesses, were in fact invisible. Yet they happened, and historians are always writing about them. They were the decisions, the fateful commitments, and they took place entirely within the mind and heart. If we may enter the mind as we enter the looking glass, many temptations present themselves. No accounting for choices in such matters. Forced to pick one, I would look in on the mind of Col. Robert E. Lee on being offered the command of Union forces in 1861.

To have been a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition has long been one of my historical fantasies. To have traversed that vast and silent wilderness, filled with mystery, danger, and beauty, would have been —as Thomas Jefferson once figured it— equivalent to traveling backward in time, beyond the dawn of civilization, to confront unspoiled nature in a way that will never again be possible on this planet.

Ten years ago I stood on a remote, nondescript rock outcropping in northern Idaho, and in my mind’s eye I conjured up a vision of some men who had preceded me there by more than a century and a half. They were Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery; their arrival at Sherman Peak was the climax of their crossing of the LoIo Trail, the Indians’ old buffalo road through the northern Rockies—and in some ways it was the climax of their transcontinental journey.

Lewis and Clark were such extraordinary leaders that much of their great exploration seemed remarkably uneventful. The outcome was in doubt only during those excruciating days on the LoIo. Winter was coming on, game was scarce, the terrain almost impassable to man or beast; the men were exhausted, their feet were freezing, they were on starving times. They ate their horses, a raven, a coyote.

I wish I had been with Lewis and Clark in November 1805 when they first glimpsed the object of all their labors, the reward of all their anxieties—the Pacific Ocean—and to have looked over William Clark’s shoulder as he scribbled in his logbook: “Ocean in view! O! the joy.”

They had explored a region more unknown to them than the moon is to us, and accomplished the feat without machines or electronics, but solely by the wills and sinews and spirits of mortal men.

I would like to have been in St. Louis toward noon on September 23, 1806, when Lewis and Clark and their men returned from the Pacific. Word had preceded them, and a mixed crowd of French, Spanish, blacks, Indians, Canadians, and Americans, some in broadcloth and some in buckskin, were waiting when they pulled into the boat landing at the levee. Gunfire, cheers, excitement.

We in St. Louis knew by then that our country had increased its size majestically by purchasing the Louisiana Territory. We knew—some of us at least—that beyond the Rockies was a river called variously the Oregon and the Columbia, to which the otter trader Robert Gray had established a claim for the United States—a claim Great Britain disputed.

I would like to have witnessed the opening of the Erie Canal late in October 1825 —the grand procession that started in Buffalo, where the canalboat Seneca Chief moved slowly into the canal carrying two kegs of pure Lake Erie water and a huge portrait of Governor Clinton in a Roman toga. I wish I had been in the procession, preferably riding on the canalboat carrying two Indian youths, two bears, two fawns, et cetera, and of course named Noah’s Ark . Then, after traveling a week on the canal through Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady, and Albany, I wish I had been in New York City for the final “Grand Aquatic Display” as Clinton poured that Erie water into the Atlantic, and for the mile-and-a-half parade in Manhattan, as throngs—including me—gaped.

July 8, 1776, was a warm, sunny day in Philadelphia, and as the hour of noon approached, people began to gather in the statehouse yard. Residents mingled with others who had traveled from the surrounding countryside. Although one observer commented, “There were few respectable people among them,” those present included Mayor Samuel Powel, other city officials, and some members of the Continental Congress. As the yard began to fill, the people waited patiently, their eyes occasionally seeking the platform of the crudely constructed structure erected in 1769 for observing the transit of Venus.

The crowd had become restless when, shortly after twelve, Philadelphia’s sheriff, William Dewees, arrived and climbed the observatory stairs followed by his acting deputy, Col. John Nixon. As Dewees approached the railing and prepared to speak, the people quieted. “Under the authority of the Continental Congress and by order of the Committee of Safety,” he began, “I proclaim a declaration of independence.” Colonel Nixon then stepped forward and proceeded to read the document.

There is one supreme event that I’d like to have witnessed: the Constitutional Convention, and more specifically the unrecorded deliberations of the Committee of Detail and especially the Committee of Eleven that submitted its report on August 24, 1787. The central issue, which would be resolved only by force of arms in the Civil War, was defined by George Mason of Virginia: it was whether the general government would have the power to “prevent the increase of slavery.” In August it appeared that the convention faced a nonnegotiable conflict over the future of American slavery. We know the bare details about the adoption of the three-fifths compromise, the slave-trade extension clause, and the fugitive-slave clause. But we know very little about the actual deals made or the meanings attached to such crucial words as migration, commerce, importation , and such persons .