January 2011

“O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation…”

These possibly unfamiliar lines (they are from the last stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner”) express the oldest and probably the most noble motive for fighting: defense of one’s hearth and homestead. It’s true that, pragmatically speaking, modern warfare has made nonsense of this motive—ask the survivors of the London blitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima. But the motive persists, and even in a clearly offensive war the invading armies always manage to convince themselves that they are doing it for the folks back home. Especially for the women. Since the advent of the photograph, few dead soldiers have been found without pictures of one or more females tucked into a wallet. Indeed, the most famous conflict of all time, the Trojan War, began because the Trojans abducted the beauteous Helen.

On April 17, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Castile, signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe, the agreement by which Christopher Columbus, one-time wool-weaving apprentice in Savona, Italy, undertook a voyage of discovery to the western Atlantic.

Riflemen lined the roofs along the parade route. Cavalry squads patrolled the intersections. Rumors of armed mobs and assassination swept through Washington, D.C., that cold, angry March of Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration; and even though that afternoon’s parade and swearing-in ceremony went peacefully enough, the entire city was caught up in a somber, uneasy mood hard to dispel.

That night inaugural ball-goers tried to recapture the gay good spirits that had marked other inaugurations. The wooden ballroom behind the District of Columbia’s city hall was festooned with red, white, and blue muslin. Under the brilliant and flickering light of five huge gas chandeliers, the crowd danced enthusiastically to the tunes played by a forty-five-piece band. When the new President arrived at eleven, they gathered around him, all trying to shake his hand, until he finally led them off into the supper room, where they feasted on oysters, chicken, and champagne.

Our forebears were much given to singing. They sang themselves through revolution with “The Liberty Song” and “Yankee Doodle,” and afterward each struggle of the young nation inspired songsters to extol in music and lyric the virtues of freedom. Political songs were also common, so perhaps it is not surprising that the Presidential campaign of 1840 turned into a songfest— at least for the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison.

Shortly past noon on April 30, 1789, a tall, somber man, dressed in a simple brown suit, was inaugurated as the first President of the United States at Federal Hall in New York City. For the people who watched the ceremony it was a day of celebration and of enthusiastic confidence in the man who now led them. But the emotion that stirred the crowd, the cannon salutes, the cheers, could not soothe the anxiety of the new President. The future promised only crisis in every area of national life, and the agitated and nervous bearing of George Washington that April afternoon suggested the dread he felt as he contemplated the “Ocean of difficulties” that lay before him.

In the summer of 1861, when the newspaper generals in New York clamored for a clash of arms to put down the Confederate rebellion, the battle and the recriminations came sooner than expected. The people of Washington loaded up picnic baskets in buggies and carriages and drove across the bridges of the Potomac to watch the fun. Under the southern sunlight the sabers of the Union cavalry glistened, and the hope of a quick and punishing victory was in the smoking air. Suddenly, out of a dawn rain, came retreat from a little creek in Virginia called Bull Run: wagons swarming with mud-caked men in blue, hundreds killed, and thousands wounded and missing. Johnny Reb had proved more than a match for Billy Yank. Both sides had been bloodied, and there was no longer any prospect for compromise without casualties. The general commanding the fortunes of the United States was Winfield Scott, a veteran of the War of 1812, old and bloated and literally asleep at the telegraph that carried the bad news. The Army of the Potomac was, as Carl Sandburg would put it later, “a cub of an army.”

Those who followed the sad story of P. T. Barnum’s mighty Jumbo in our August, 1973, issue will be grieved to hear that the elephant’s remains were destroyed last April in a fire that swept through the P. T. Barnum Hall at Tufts University’s Medford campus. But all is not lost. Canny showman that he was, Barnum had Jumbo’s bones and skin mounted separately after the elephant was knocked into eternity by a Grand Trunk freight locomotive. Barnum donated the hide to Tufts and the skeleton to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains, stark and sound.

There seems to be a paucity of ingenious Bicentennial projects, especially compared to the ones that flourished during the 1816 Centennial. Consider, for instance, Felix Meier, a Detroit clockmaker who, imbued with the spirit of the time, produced this masterpiece. He spent ten years constructing his clock, which stood eighteen feet high and weighed two tons. It indicated the time in thirteen cities, as well as the day, month, season, the signs of the zodiac, and the revolutions of the planets around the sun. There was one movement that was repeated only once every eighty-four years. But most remarkable was the scene enacted hourly. According to the sonorous prose that accompanied this engraving, a mechanical figure representing Washington “slowly rises from the chair [ beneath the canopy ] … extending his right hand, presenting the Declaration of Independence. The door on the left is opened … admitting all the presidents … including President Hayes.