January 2011

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN first appeared in 1851 as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era; when it came out in book form the next year, it quickly sold three hundred thousand copies. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely powerful tract (without it, Charles Sumner claimed, Lincoln would never have been elected President) long outlived the war it helped bring about and has left in our national consciousness at least one indelible image: the slave Eliza, child in arms, fleeing across the ice to freedom.

In 1892 an ex-slave named Lewis George Clark wrote of the people he knew whom Mrs. Stowe had incorporated into her story and of his own role in it. His account, never before published, appears here through the courtesy of a New York autograph collector:

Down to the sea …

Because the sea has always offered Americans both protection and peril, we devote a special section to four centuries of our maritime heritage. Among the features:

The saga of the Sea Venture …

When this British ship carrying colonists to Virginia was driven aground in 1609, the survivors acted with courage and unusual resourcefulness. But their plight is only the beginning of the story. Out of this adventure came the inspiration for one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, and the first stirrings of democracy in the New World.

The Essex horror …

She was the only whaleship ever to be sunk by her massive prey. But that’s not the only reason why she’s remembered. Among those who have been gripped by the terrible ordeal that faced her survivors was Herman Melville, who found in it the germ of Moby Dick .

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A FEW YEARS AGO, writing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the distinguished historian Henry Steele Commager charged that while civil-military relations had been healthy during most of the nation’s history, the relationship had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Something close to “reverse principles” now governed our thinking, and the official line now held “that the military should never be challenged, that it is not the business of people to inquire into or to challenge what the military does, [and] that it is proper for the military to make wars on its own. …”

To be sure, we will have our disagreements about the truth of Commager’s assertion. Some may respond that all military men do not think alike, that there is hardly a monolithic military establishment in America, and that hawkish civilian leaders in the Pentagon are a greater threat to world peace than the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In any event, few would disagree that the military career of George Washington casts light on what should be the first principles of civil-military relations.

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THAT SMALL protuberance near the top of the tree at right is a man, a claim supported by the enlargement at left. Gordon Kinney, of Seattle, Washington, who sent us the sixty-year-old hand-colored photograph, explains who the brave fellow is:

WASHINGTON’S RUIN, LINCOLN’S COMPORTMENT LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN THE PRESIDENT AND THE AUTOGYRO THE MAN WHO TOLD MRS. STOWE ABOUT ELIZA

DURING THE MONTH containing the birthdays of the two most revered Americans, it is interesting to read the following observations by a young man named Albert Macomber, who served with the Sanitary Commission in Washington, D. C., during the Civil War. They are taken from letters he wrote home in 1863 and appear here through the courtesy of his niece, Grace Goldsworthy of Alhambra, California:

Although Robert Friedman’s “Digging Up the U.S.” (August/September) is generally a fine article, I was somewhat dismayed by his statement that in Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s, “Any excavating for artifacts had to be done at a prearranged distance from the site, and sometimes, as at Colonial Williamsburg, the two groups [archaeologists and architects] almost came to blows.” Having done the research for a book on the history of archaeology in Williamsburg, I can state without equivocation that in the years from 1931 to 1957 no explosive differences of opinion surfaced between Colonial Williamsburg’s architects and archaeologists. On the contrary, its archaeologists were architectural draftsmen on the senior architect’s own staff.

POTTER STEWART CAME TO the Supreme Court in 1958, appointed by President Eisenhower at the age of forty-three. The product of a prominent Ohio family long given to public service, he himself had served on the Cincinnati City Council and as a judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. As the second youngest Supreme Court appointee in this century, Justice Stewart was able to sit for twenty-three years and retire, in 1981, at just sixty-six, an age when many a justice has only begun to hit his stride and some are still learning the ropes.

In his quarter-century on the country’s highest bench, Justice Stewart managed to keep his private philosophy very much to himself, subordinating his views on what might be good or bad for American society to his conscientious reading of the Constitution. He was fond of rejecting such labels as “liberal” and “conservative,” favoring instead such formulas as “I’d like to be thought of as a lawyer—a good lawyer, looking at every case under the Constitution and the law.”