January 2011

One morning in early November of the year 1868 three men appeared at the railroad depot in Union, New York, just outside Binghamton. The most imposing of the trio, a tall, heavily bearded figure in his mid-forties, dressed in funereal black, identified himself to the station agent as George Hull and explained that he wanted to collect a shipment being held for him. After the necessary formalities the visitors carefully levered a heavy, iron-strapped wooden box almost a dozen feet long into their wagon and set off in a northerly direction.

All through the spring and summer of 1781 Major General Nathanael Greene had fought his way through the Garolinas, never quite winning a battle but always hurting the British more than they hurt him. When Greene had started his campaign, British posts had stretched across hundreds of miles. Now, in late summer, they had melted away under Greene’s persistent attacks, and the enemy had sure control only in the area around Gharleston.

On the morning of September 8 British Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stuart, along with two thousand tough and able troops, was camped in a handsome North Carolina plantation near the twin sources of a river called Eutaw Creek. Greene advanced on Stuart’s camp with about twenty-two hundred men, most of them tested Continental soldiers every bit as resilient as Stuart’s regulars. Marching with Greene and in charge of the North and South Carolina militia as well as his own brigade was Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox,” who had agreed to use his guerrilla fighters as line troops in the coming action.

Major General Nathanael Greene, Continental Army:

We crossed the river at Howell’s Ferry, and took post at Motte’s plantation. Here I got intelligence that the [British] army had halted at the Eutaw Springs, about 40 miles below us, and that they had a reinforcement, and were making preparations to establish a permanent post there. To prevent this, I determined rather to hazard an action, notwithstanding our numbers were greatly inferior to theirs. On the 5th we began our march. … We moved by slow and easy marches, as well to disguise our real intention as to give General Marion an opportunity to join us. … [He] joined us on the evening of the 7th, at Burdell’s plantation, 7 miles from the enemy’s camp.

Lobbies have traditionally held a central place in the demonology of American politics, and to some extent their reputation for corruption and shady dealing is richly deserved. But it is also true that they represent an important constitutional right and, properly used, can be an effective force for good in the legislative process.

The image of the lobbies as a threat to good government is too firmly fixed in the popular imagination to be easily dispelled. Even if we discount much of that unsavory reputation as the product of a distant past, it is still difficult to avoid the notion that any organized effort to influence legislation is both insidious and inimical to the public interest.

The paintings of an almost obscure Michigan farmer-artist named Horatio Shaw (1847-1918) are one of the treasures that have recently been unearthed by the Bicentennial Inventory of American Paintings Executed Before 1914, an ambitious federally sponsored project to compile for students, scholars, and researchers data on all American paintings up to World War I. Shaw lived and painted at a time when native American art—amateur and professional—was flourishing, and though he had academic training, the spirit that permeates his oils is that of rustic simplicity. No better description of the man and his art can be found than that written by his nephew, Wilfred B. Shaw, on the occasion of a brief exhibition sponsored by the Ann Arbor Art Association in 1940, and it is with the association’s kind permission that we reprint it here.

“Sometimes the desire to build attacks a man like a fever—and at it he rushes,” the successful young landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church wrote from abroad to his friend and patron William H. Osborn in 1868. Church, his wife, and his young son were on an eighteen-month tour of Europe and the Middle East, but it was clear that he had other things on his mind than the average tourist did. Soon after they arrived home with boxes of “rugs—armour—stuffs—curiosities, etc. etc. etc.” and “old clothes (Turkish), stones from a house in Damascus, Arab spears—beads from Jerusalem—stones from Petra and 10,000 other things,” they set about building a suitable showplace for them—a thirty-seven-room “personal Persian” villa perched on the crest of Mount Merino overlooking the Hudson River not far south of Albany.

In the decades before the First World War he was the most dynamic, persuasive, and at the same time the most lovable figure that American Socialism had produced. He hated capitalism but could hate no man. Hoosier-born, he combined in his gangling person a rural nativist populism and the class-conscious zeal of the urban foreign-born worker. Now that the American Socialist movement, shattered by World War I and disintegrated by the Russian Revolution, has faded and the other Socialist leaders of that eia are forgotten or all but forgotten, Eugene Debs remains a vital memory. His Indiana friend James Whitcomb Riley wrote of him:

And there’s ‘Gene Debs—a man ’at stands And jes’ holds out in his two hands As warm a heart as ever beat Betwixt here and the Jedgement Seat.

Of all the thousands of duels fought in this country, only one is known to every high-school student. Never before or since has there been an encounter between two such nationally prominent men, the Vice President of the United States and the former Secretary of the Treasury. Moreover, the outcome was considered by most persons a triumph of Evil over Good—in flagrant violation of the American dream.

Time has blurred the bitterness, but in general the popular notion of what happened is not much different now than when this bit of doggerel was nailed to Aaron Burr’s front door:

Before September 23, 1780, the three seemed unlikely stuff for heroes. But on that day Major John André came their way, and fame for the trio followed.

David Williams was the oldest at twenty-five. John Paulding, acknowledged as their leader, was twenty-two. Isaac Van Wert was the youngest— hardly twenty years of age. Only Paulding could read, for all three lacked formal education. When fighting began in the American Revolution, they were hardly more than boys living on farms in Westchester County, New York.

It seemed to me paradise then,” said Mrs. Alden Van Campen, “permanent and timeless.” Mrs. Van Campen, a surviving niece, was speaking of the bright and languid life of the Drakes of Corning, New York. And indeed that family enjoyed the crest of an era when moderate wealth brought with it an extraordinary amount of security, ease, and even the general approval of those not wealthy. It did not last. Mr. Drake was caught in the recession of 1913, and everything had to be sold— the bank stock, the big Corning house, Drake Point and all its furnishings. A few years later the rest of the era followed the Drakes, its people a bit myopic from a long age of placid certainties and lured by the jaunty, cozening songs of the Great War. That war, of course, changed everything, and America has ever since been in exile from the sunny, faintly preposterous, most attractive days that preceded it. So with the Drake girls; Dort had to give cello lessons, and Madge worked as a secretary in the Corning Glass Works. Drake Point became a small amusement park that featured a roller-skating rink, a tavern, monkeys, and an obliging bear that drank soda pop.