January 2011

Sometime in the sleep of every year, between the browning of the oaks and the first greening of the spring wild grasses, that country flamed.

The man and the face are anonymous-and familiar. Familiar, because this man, propped up with the tools of his trade, was but one of the many thousands who over a period of about seventy years in the trans-Mississippi West spent the bulk of their adult lives wrestling with the brute immobility of stone. They were miners, hard-rock miners, though more often than not they called themselves hard-rock stiffs, as tough and horny-handed a breed of men as any in the world. At the peak of the goldand silver-mining industry in the nineteenth century, there were well over fifty thousand such men in the West, scattered from Grass Valley, California, to Tombstone, Arizona, from Coeur d’Alêne, Idaho, to Cripple Creek, Colorado. They far outnumbered the cowboys, whose image has come down to us as the definitive expression of that long-vanished time; the cowboy has had a good press, the miner almost none at all, but there is one strong similarity between the two: like the cowboy, the miner was a laborer, and he worked -worked as hard as men have ever worked.

They were Hubert Humphrey’s kind of people trudging through the corridors of the U.S. Capitol that day. Ordinary Americans from everywhere— blue-collar workers, men and boys in sports shirts and polyester pants, women and girls in shorts or jeans and halters, businessmen in double-knit suits. Humphrey’s kind of people.

I was talking with my friend Leonard about the matter of keeping a house warm in the depths of a northern Michigan winter, and he asked if I knew what the most beautiful sound in the world was. I replied, dutifully, that I did not, and Leonard got a faraway look in his eyes and told me.

Alexander Hamilton’s contribution to welding the thirteen semi-independent states which had won the Revolution into a unified political entity was greater than that of any other Founding Father, with the possible exception of Washington. But this tells only half the story. The other half is that while Hamilton’s genius built national unity, his psychic wounds caused disunion which was also absorbed into the permanent structure of the United States.

Hamilton’s lack of balance was such that his greatest contributions were realized only when he was working side by side with another statesman, also brilliant but more stable. He had two major collaborators: James Madison and George Washington.

It is normally the winners, not the losers, who erect triumphal irches at a war’s end. Yet at Parlington Park in West Yorkshire, some two hundred miles north of London, stands this monument, boldly dedicated to Liberty in North America Triumphant, MDCCLXXXIII . Built in 1783, the year America officially wrested her independence from England, it is the little-known creation of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, the eighth Baronet of Parlington and an aristocrat with distinctly individual views.

A dreadful prospect opened up for mankind when Napoleon’s Grande Armée won the battle of Austerlitz and swept on to conquer all of Europe. The enthusiastic multitudes of revolutionary France had placed at Napoleon’s disposal the resources of an entire nation, and he had fashioned from them a mighty new weapon: the mass citizen army, the Grande Armée. War was no longer a game for kings and small hired armies; it had become a cataclysm into which entire nations were hurled. The scale of war was henceforth to be set by the total population, productivity, and determination of nations, not by the limited resources of the king’s treasury. We had entered the era of mass war, of total war, of mindless attrition that threatened to drown the most advanced societies in their own blood.

On the pleasant Sunday evening of April 6, 1862, the men of Company H, 33rd Ohio Infantry, were relaxing around their campfires near Shelbyville, Tennessee, admiring the Southern springtime and trading the latest army rumors. They were joined by the company commander, Lieutenant A. L. Waddle, who announced that he wanted a volunteer for a secret and highly important expedition behind Confederate lines. Corporal Daniel Alien Dorsey, twentythree, a former schoolteacher from Fairfield County, Ohio, said that he was willing to take a crack at it, and he was told to report to company headquarters in the morning. As soon as the lieutenant was out of earshot, the catcalls began. “Good-bye, Dorsey!” “Dorsey, you’re a goner!” And a final shot from the next tent: “Leave us a lock of your hair, Dorsey!”