January 2011

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.

What prompted me to write is the illustration by Neal McPheeters on page 20 showing the Bowie knife used to stab Secretary of State Seward on the night Lincoln was shot. Your artist obviously went to extraordinary pains to try to track down the actual knife and did an excellent job of reproducing it.

I know because the knife is in my collection of Lincoln assassination relics, along with the manacles kept on Payne, the wielder of the knife, and the noose that was used to hang him.

I find it disconcerting that while Marcus Cunliffe says that “what if” conjectures have intrigued him since his teens, he fails to mention a single work of speculative or science fiction in his article.

Mr. Cunliffe mentions that there have been various fantasies concerning the Civil War. He notes Churchill’s scenario as well as Thurber’s comic satire. Yet he ignores the wonder and sadness of Ward Moore’s 1952 novel Bring the Jubilee , which meticulously traces the outcome of life in America after the “Southron War for Independence” has been won. Later in his article he states that the historian William E. Leuchtenburg couldn’t conceive that American history would have been the same if Roosevelt had been assassinated in 1933. But he never once mentions Phillip K. Dick’s tragic novel of alternate reality, The Man in the High Castle (1962), which has counterfactual history depart at that exact point when FDR was/was not shot.

In the December 1982 issue, Peter Andrews, writing of the conquests, musical and amorous, of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, nineteenth-century pianist and composer, states that during a triumphal tour of Spain, Gottschalk was “romantically linked with … the queen’s sister, Dona Luisa, and the Countess de Montijo, who was soon to become the wife of Napoleon III.”

The author has confused the Empress Eugénie with her mother, Maria Manuela de Montijo. She was the countess. The daughter, Eugénie, was called Mademoiselle, or, sometimes, Countess of Teba.

I hope Mr. Andrews does not mean anything serious in using the phrase “romantically linked,” which in our modern usage has come to mean a liaison. True, the Andalusian beauty had many suitors. But she told Napoleon III that she was a virgin. Louis Napoleon believed her. And so do I.

The author replies: I have no wish to slander Eugénie—whose self-proclaimed reputation for sexual probity was the bored talk of the Continent—with the indiscretions of her more pliant mother, as Mr. Carson argues so persuasively that I have done. Mr. Carson’s letter does raise some questions, however. First, I said only that the two were “romantically linked” in court gossip. This I believe to be true, although I hope it is understood that court gossip is no more binding than a Rona Barrett column. Perhaps one reason for the haste of Gottschalk’s departure was to protect Eugénie’s name. But my article referred only to the rumor, not to the fact. Second, there is some confusion as to who is the countess of what. The excellent Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary identifies Eugénie as the Countess de Montijo. If Mr. Carson’s research identifies her as the Countess of Teba, I accept the correction. Regardless of the title, however, the person we are talking about here is almost certainly Eugénie, who would have been about twenty-six at the time of Gottschalk’s visit to Spain .

I will not deny that Andersonville (“Hell and the Survivor,” October/November issue) in 1864 was a vastly overcrowded prison pen where disease and malnutrition took a frightful toll, but to say that it was “the worst” is to fly in the face of history. The Federal prisons at Elrnira, New York, and Point Lookout, Maryland, produced higher percentages of death than did Andersonville, with less reason for doing so. The Confederate prisoners also suffered from disease, malnutrition, and sadistic guards, but in a land of abundance, while those in Southern prisons suffered more due to a breakdown of transportation and supply.

Let us hear no more of Andersonville’s horrors and Henry Wirz’s unfounded crimes, for to cast stones at the South’s prison system is but to bury Northern self-righteousness under an avalanche of dead men’s bones.

I have always loved Mr. MacLeish’s poetry—in fact almost everything he did was monumentally impressive. But it still hurts me now, more than fifty years later, to hear or read the castigation that has come Herbert Hoover’s way ever since he left office. It seems amazing to me that a scholar such as Mr. MacLeish (“America Was Promises,” August/September issue) could have forgotten Hoover’s service to Belgium and France, after World War I broke out, in the distribution of food and clothing. Or his service to Eastern Europe after the Armistice in 1918. Or the fact that he and his associates formed a private charitable organization called the European Children’s Fund, which fed and clothed literally millions of orphaned, destitute children. It wasn’t only good intentions, or Lord Bountiful; his magnificent gifts for administration and organization made these programs work.

I have read John Cole’s article “If You Ran a Small-Town Weekly” in your October/November issue with outraged mortification. I am in the position of the man who called the editor to say: “You know that story you ran yesterday about me making a million dollars last year in the stock market? Well, there were some things wrong with it. It wasn’t the stock market, it was retail clothing. And it wasn’t last year, it was ten years ago. And it wasn’t a million, it was three million. And it wasn’t me, k was my uncle. And he didn’t make it, he lost it.”

The Cole article is a continuous fabrication that violates my history, goals, character, and credibility and does disservice to my chosen profession. In the single page you permit me, it is impossible to refute point by point a four-page feature article. Briefly then:

DURING THE summer of 1958 Edmund Downing, an American amateur skin diver and a descendant of one of the voyagers aboard the Sea Venture , joined the divers, historians, and archaeologists looking for the wreck of the ship. He spent the summer diving near a break in the reefs off the eastern end of Bermuda and on October 18 finally spotted the faint outline of the keel and ribs of a ship. A salvage operation launched the following summer produced pottery fragments, part of an ax handle, and a pewter spoon—all dating from the right period—and one cannon, identified as belonging to a later century. Discouraged, the Bermuda government cut off funding for the investigation.