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January 2011
I enjoyed Marcus Cunliffe’s “What If?” but I notice he stuck to the academically “safe” examples. Generally regarded as the best speculation on a world where the South won the Civil War is not the Churchill essay but Ward Moore’s novel, Bring the Jubilee , which is less optimistic and more realistic than Churchill’s scenario. And I’m surprised that he omitted Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail (1973), a largely economic history of British North America following the crushing of the rebellion by Burgoyne at Saratoga.
Also interesting historically is L. Sprague de Camp’s short novel, The Wheels of If , in which the crisis points are the Synod of Whitby (which I had to go look up after reading the story) and the Battle of Tours, plus having the Viking contacts with America continued and Vinland being a modern nation. De Camp even goes into linguistic changes, a rare thing in alternate histories.
“Ship portraiture” is a unique form of painting, modest in purpose but exacting in execution, long scorned by serious artists yet calling for particular knowledge and skills often beyond the ken of the fine artist. The specialty developed during a period when ships were growing mightily in size, complexity, speed, beauty, and grace. When the American sculptor Horatio Greenough first saw a clipper ship under full sail, he exclaimed, “There is something I would not be ashamed to show Phidias.”
The earliest American paintings of ships appear mostly as backgrounds for portraits of owners and masters or as amateur efforts. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, however, European artists specializing in ship pictures came to this country, and they soon acquired American-born students, protégés, and imitators. Thomas Birch left England for Philadelphia in 1794, Michel Corné arrived in Salem from Naples in 1799, the Scotsman Robert Salmon landed in Boston in 1828, and James Buttersworth arrived from England in 1850.
I have received the handsome magazine containing reproductions of my watercolors done for the W. P. A. Arts Project (“Interior America,” December 1982). My gratitude is boundless. In those strange, creative days I never dreamed of having my work shown in such splendid color process. The reproductions are brighter than the originals. I am happy to know that the entire collection of watercolors is being kept for posterity at the National Gallery of Art. I will offer a prayer for all the dear souls who have taken care of the papers all the years and finally presented them in a book of class and distinction.
SOME SIX MILES north of Wilmington lies a stretch of countryside chiefly inhabited by du Ponts, du Pont servants, and some two dozen major du Pont estates. Of these the largest, the loveliest, and by far the most eccentric is Winterthur, for seventy years the home of a shy, fidgety collector of antiques named Henry Francis du Pont. In Winterthur’s heyday as a private residence, between 1930 and 1950, it was far more than a rich man’s estate. It seemed like a European duchy, a private Ruritanian fiefdom carved out of America through the power of great wealth spent without stint.
I read with interest and nostalgia the article “What If?” by Marcus Cunliffe in the December 1982 issue of the magazine. During my second year at the University of Virginia—in 1931–32—a special one-semester course entitled “Roman Archaeology” was offered, given by a visiting professor from Johns Hopkins. Several of us signed up—some no doubt because they saw an easy way to get three credits. After a few weeks about ten of us were still there—fascinated with the course. The night before the final exam, the good professor advised us that any sort of cramming would be useless and suggested we all take in a good movie.
How right he was! The exam consisted of one question: “If Carthage had won the Punic Wars instead of Rome, discuss the subsequent effect on the history of Europe and America. ” Wow! We all tore into that one—filling lots of exam books. Nobody flunked.
THE AMERICAN frigate Constitution is preserved in Boston, where she was built and where she was launched in October 1797. She was one of a series of six splendid frigates built to defend American shipping on the high seas, and her adventurous life included some of the most dramatic actions of the war between Britain and America. The British claimed the right to stop and search American ships for deserters, and the United States resented this claim to act as a sort of universal policeman. War was declared against Britain on June 18, 1812. The Constitution , captained by Isaac Hull, went to sea in the July and in August fought and defeated the British frigate Guerrière, which the British had themselves taken from the French. While the Constitution ’s cannonballs found their mark, the British ones seemed to bounce off the hard timbers of the American ship, and she won her nickname of Old Ironsides in that action.
AMERICA is in the midst of a revival of interest in things nautical—nineteenth-century nautical. It began with the efforts of a handful of romantics to preserve the few remnants of the age of sail and was intensified by the magnificent Bicentennial Operation Sail. Now seaports across the country—in New York and San Diego, Philadelphia and Galveston, San Francisco, Boston, and Houston- are turning their waterfronts into public parks, often with a tall windship as the centerpiece. Such acts of urban renewal and historic preservation are praiseworthy and even stirring but they are happening only because of the irony that our historic ports are being abandoned by modern shipping.