A few years back a Massachusetts hardware salesman named Stuart Goldman bought a trunk which, he believed, had been sealed since 1799. When he opened it, he found the crisp silhouette of the Continental officer at left. The soldier was identified as Major Hugh Maxwell of Charlemont, Massachusetts; the artist, only as “P.C.” Intrigued by his find, Goldman set about tracking down F.C., and eventually learned that the initials stood for Frederick Chapman. The name, unfortunately, was all Goldman could discover about the man, but he apparently worked the military camps in upstate New York, charging a few pennies for his quick, deft likenesses. Goldman has located twenty-one of Chapman’s silhouettes and owns four. Some of the subjects remain as shadowy as the artist himself. We have no details of Maxwell’s service, and know nothing of Stephen Horton, at right, save that he was a sergeant, and survived the war to prosper sufficiently to give his wife, Submit, shown below him, a silver tea service in 1790.
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January 2011
The first commercial transatlantic flight still lay three years in the future when the Queen Mary began her maiden voyage in May, 1936, but Sir Percy Bates, chairman of the Cunard Line, made the sailing the occasion for an extraordinary forecast. “The crux of the matter,” he said, “will lie whether, twenty-five years from now, it would be the universal desire to travel like rockets at supersonic speeds in a closed metal container, probably without windows, or whether many would still prefer a more leisurely progression.”
There were 281,881 Union fighting men wounded in the Civil War, and, while figures from the Confederate side are sketchy, we can safely assume that the number was at least half that. Of such men, many thousands of right-handed individuals lost their right arms—a minor footnote, perhaps, but not for men forced to alter the functional patterns of a lifetime.
When George Edward Anderson was born at Salt Lake City in 1860, Brigham Young’s desert kingdom—“the resting place of Israel for the last days”—still stood defiantly apart from the rest of America, embattled and alone. By the time Anderson died in 1928, Utah had been a loyal and contented state of the American Union for more than three decades. Anderson chronicled that peaceful transformation with his camera.
Mark Van Doren, who died in 1972, was one of America’s most distinguished poets, critics, and educators. He was born on a farm at Hope, Illinois, in 1894, and upon graduation from the University of Illinois in 1914 went to Columbia University (where he later was to teach literature for many years) to pursue graduate study. In the spring of 1917, with America finally involved in the Great War, he returned to his family home in Urbana, Illinois, and registered for the draft. In midsummer he was indeed drafted, and served in the Army until December, 1918. Finding it difficult to concentrate on literary scholarship, immediately after the war, he wrote what he called “a plain account of all that I can remember” about the period between June, 1917, when he went back to Illinois to await the call, and his discharge nineteen months later.
On the face of it, there was little in the life or career of John McCaffary to suggest that his name would ever be connected with the prestigious National Register of Historic Places. McCaffary, an obscure Irish immigrant who moved to the small lakefront community of Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the 1830’s, led no regiments in battle, built no railroads, made no great fortune, won no political office—in short, did nothing one would expect of a man whose name has earned an apparently permanent place in our history.
What he did do was kill his wife.
Great events generate their own folklore, much of it having little to do with the facts at hand, and some of it downright hallucinatory. Such certainly was the case with the following bizarre account of the first Fourth of July, written by a German named Christoph Heinrich Korn. The story appeared in his book Geschicte der Kriege in und ausser Europa Von Anfange des Auffange des Aufstandes der Brittischen Kolonien in Nordamerika an (History of Wars In and Outside of Europe From the Beginning of the Uprising of the British Colonies in North America Onward) , published at Nuremberg in 1777. The relevant portion was translated and sent on to us by Dr. Karl J. R. Arndt, professor of German at Clark University:
’ A ccording to Mormon belief,” histoXA.rian Rodman Paul wrote in “The Mormons: From Persecution to Power” (June, 1977), the skin color of black people “means that they bear a lifelong curse as the descendants of one of the sons of Adam and Eve, Cain, who in a fit of jealousy slew his brother Abel. For this bloody deed, Cain and his descendants were cursed with black skins—the ‘mark of Cain.’ Someday, Mormon theory runs, the curse will be lifted, but until that time participation in the priesthood is forbidden to blacks. … For modern Mormon liberals, the church’s flat prohibition—and the blunt implication of racial inferiority—has become a heavy cross.”
Those who enjoyed “Forbidden Diary,” Natalie Crouter’s remarkable account of life in a Japanese prison camp during World War II (April/May, 1979) will remember Captain Rokuro Tomibe, the gentle camp commandant who did his best to make life for the Americans under his control as bearable as possible. Nevertheless, after the war Tomibe became a defendant during the Allied War Crime Trials held in Manila. Fortunately, Jim Halsema, a former prisoner of Tomibe’s, was in Manila covering the trials as a reporter; he insisted on testifying in Tomibe’s behalf, and on the strength of his evidence Tomibe was exonerated.
Taps is the Army’s most beautiful bugle call,” Bruce Catton wrote in This Hallowed Ground . “Played slowly and softly, it has a plaintive, tender, and touching character. It rolls down the curtain on the soldier’s day, and upon the soldier’s life.”
Most Americans would agree, for most have heard the sweet melancholy of the song’s notes at one time or another—too often at funerals. But few have known the circumstances under which it was composed, or when. Now, Colonel Eugene C. Jacobs of Vero Beach, Florida, has ferreted out the story and written it up for the July, 1978, issue of Military Medicine .