January 2011

Unlike many other flags, which evolved long after the character of their nations was established, the American flag was born with the Revolution, and few if any national emblems have inspired the veneration we accord it. We salute the flag, pledge allegiance to it, fly it from our humblest homes and from our tallest buildings. We lavish it with affectionate epithets—Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the Grand Old Flag, the Red, White, and Blue—and we even set aside a national holiday in its honor. No other device—be it the eagle, the Liberty Bell, or Uncle Sam—evokes the feelings the flag does. Symbols are a shorthand method of telling a complicated story, and our flag immediately calls to mind the struggle of the thirteen original colonies united in the common cause of freedom.

In 1888 young Theodore Roosevelt published a biography oj Morris, which showed that for all his affairs and shopping expeditions, the statesman had a grim and taxing time during his tenure in Paris. As the richly written passage below suggests, Morris occasionally displayed great courage in the discharge of his duties.

A n American named Elkanah Watson was in London on December 5, 1782, when George III acknowledged the independence of the United States. The following is from Watson’s journal:
It is to be remarked that George in is celebrated for reading his speeches with a distinct and audible voice and with great emphasis. On this occasion however he was evidently embarrassed … and paused several times and hiccuped twice. The subject was not palatable to his digestive powers … but he had to swallow the dose however repugnant to his taste.

One morning in June, 1830, Edgar Allan Poe rode the steamer from New York up the Hudson River to West Point. His spirits, like his expectations, were uncharacteristically high. He was about to become a cadet at the United States Military Academy, but he anticipated only a brief cadet career; with his prior military experience he expected to be an officer soon.

The academy Poe was entering was only twenty-eight years old, but under the guidance of its superintendent, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, it was already beginning to establish a wide reputation as the nation’s first engineering college. It was still a small institution, though, and an isolated one; its twenty-five or thirty buildings, laid out haphazardly in the idyllically beautiful Hudson scene, presented what was later described as “the effect of a somewhat irregular village.”

Like many another well-to-do young man of his day, Joseph Reed seems an unlikely revolutionist. His background, money, education, marriage—all these, one would suppose, would have placed him firmly on the side of the status quo, kept him loyal to the Crown. It did not turn out that way, of course; yet Reed was something of an enigma even to his contemporaries. Political radicals thought him insufficiently radical; many fellow officers considered him a reluctant soldier.

Reed’s ancestors had come to America from Northern Ireland, and the family was well established in these parts by the time Joseph was born in 1741. His father prospered as a merchant in Trenton, and Joseph attended the College of New Jersey at Princeton before reading law with Richard Stockton, the able, eloquent Princetonian who was generally acknowledged as one of the best lawyers in the province. Young Reed went to London for two years at the Middle Temple—during which time he regularly attended the debates in the House of Commons—and by the time he returned to America he was about as well prepared for public service as a colonial could be.

COPYRIGHT © 1976 BY RICHARD WHEELER

In his new book, Voices of the Civil War, Richard Wheeler tells the stories of that war’s major battles in the words of people who were there—newspaper correspondents covering the armies, civilian men and women, and soldiers, in both their official and their private capacities. The book will be published later this month by Thomas Y. Crowell Company. The following excerpt is Mr. Wheeler’s skillfully woven narrative of the miserable, discouraging battle for Vicksburg.

The bell is old and it is badly cracked and it has not been rung for years, nor will it ever be rung again. But although it is quite useless from a practical standpoint, it is perhaps the most prized possession we have. It carries words about proclaiming liberty to all the people, and when it spoke it set off long echoes that have never stopped reverberating. The Liberty Bell announced that the American people were in fact making a revolution and not just demonstrating for a redress of grievances, and few announcements in the history of the human race have been more momentous.

Three fourths of all the men who have served in the nation’s military forces since 1775 are alive today. They number 29.4 million, which means that two out of every five males over the age of 18 are veterans. Together with their 66 million dependents they constitute nearly half—47 percent—of the current population of the United States. All of them are potential clients of the veterans’ benefits system that over the last two hundred years has cost an estimated $280 billion.

This year alone veterans’ benefits total $19 billion, an increase of nearly $3 billion over 1975. The bulk of the money will be spent on veterans of twentieth-century wars, but nearly $34 million will be shared by survivors and surviving dependents of nineteenth-century campaigns.

It was not long after the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855 that Bedford Clapperton Pirn declared with perfect composure that of all the world’s wonders none could surpass this one as a demonstration of man’s capacity to do great things against impossible odds.

“I have seen the greatest engineering works of the day,” he wrote, ”…but I must confess that when passing backwards and forwards on the Panama Railway, standing on the engine to obtain a good view, I have never been more struck than with the evidence, apparent on every side, of the wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance, which must have been exercised in its construction.”

Bedford Clapperton Pim was a British naval officer and of no particular historical significance. He had, however, seen a great deal of the world, he was a recognized authority on Central America, and his opinion was not lightly arrived at.

Of all the remarkable men who forgathered in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, and perhaps to do even more, Gouverneur Morris was certainly the most talkative. Between May and September, when the delegates adjourned, he made a hundred and seventy-three speeches—twelve more than Madison, his nearest competitor. Yet he was never tedious, and though there was often a vein of cynicism in him that distressed Madison, he was very much in earnest when he spoke about the absolute necessity of founding a strong central government. In the controversies that developed between the small states and the big states, Morris asserted that “state attachments and state importance had been the bane of the country” and that he was present not as a mere delegate from one section but “as a representative of America,—a representative in some degree of the whole human race, for the whole human race would be affected by the outcome of the convention.”