January 2011

Editor's Note: Shortly before he died, Edward White decided to put down on paper a fascinating story, which he entitled “A Personal Reminiscence of John Brown.” It is a graphic eyewitness account of Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), his capture and interrogation. White, a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, was then nineteen years old. Nearing death almost three decades later, he began writing his report of those momentous events in a flourishing script. But he was ill and the effort was too much, so he dictated instead to his teen-age daughter Margaret. White’s account, which has never before been published, is reprinted here with the kind permission of his grand-daughter, Mrs. Murray Longley Griffiths, of Balboa Island, California. Spelling and punctuation follow the original document.

All that is left now of Grandpa’s village is a handful of well-worn homes on the peninsula side of Shoalwater Bay (now officially Willapa Harbor—but the water remains shoal), a small estuary of the Pacific Ocean in the sparsely populated southwestern corner of the state of Washington.

Four hundred feet of salt meadow protect the village from the bay, but the breastwork is a porous one. In December swollen morning tides turn the meadow into an archipelago of gorse-topped islands. My parents’ home, now the property of their surviving children, seems afloat then, and I have known the street behind it to become a waterway for rowboats and rafts.

A hundred inches of rain fall in a normal year; we have mutated so that we breathe comfortably in air that is half water. I suspect that if the peninsula sank, we could live under water entirely.

Grandpa’s village is a far reach from the rest of the world even today; but when I spent my knee-pants years there, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the reach was even farther.

His name led all the rest. On the document proclaiming America’s independence it is inscribed boldly with flourishes, the mark of a confident, proud man; and the fact that it was written an inch longer than he customarily signed it gave rise to the legend that John Hancock had recorded his name large enough for George in to read without spectacles.

In fact the name was well known to the king by 1776. More than a year earlier Hancock and his friend and political tutor Samuel Adams were singled out as the only rebel leaders not to be included in an offer of amnesty—their offenses being “of too flagitious a nature.” Hancock had come unnaturally to this perilous eminence, led and cajoled toward sedition by Sam Adams, who knew a promising acolyte when he saw one.

“I photograph for my own pleasure and culture.” Thus Horace Engle—agriculturist, mineralogist, electrical “experimenter”—summed up what was an avid hobby for most of his eighty-eight years. Engle took his most unusual photos when in his late twenties in 1888-89. They were the product of a “spy” camera, a round can six inches in diameter and less than two inches thick. It had a fixedfocus lens and single shutter setting—but no viewfinder. Engle wore it hidden underneath his coat, with the lens protruding from a buttonhole, and pointed himself at the subject, pulled the shutter cord (also concealed, in a pocket), and hoped to catch the subject unawares and in frame. The camera could snap six stills on a round glass plate that was rotated after each shot by a tiny knob. As many as eighteen thousand spy cameras were sold at the time, but, strangely, few photos still exist; so the nearly two hundred taken by Engle are a unique collection, including some of the earliest examples of candid photography. Just as remarkable is how the photos were salvaged after fire and exposure had done considerable damage.

Briefly to complete the roster, the last two founders were Dr. Joseph Taylor of Bryn Mawr and Annie Nathan Meyer of Barnard. Dr. Taylor was a retired Quaker who took literally the stated Quaker tenet that women’s minds were as valuable as men’s. Bryn Mawr opened in 1885, dedicated to educating those minds. Annie Nathan Meyer was a twenty-year-old bride when she set about cajoling and charming Columbia’s trustees and alumni into sponsoring a women’s college. It is a tribute to her skill and tenacity that Barnard opened three years later in 1889.

Today the place is one great migraine headache of noise and neon, and it takes a very observant visitor indeed to pick out the few pathetic remnants of the old glory: a scrap of decorative wrought iron on top of a building, a carved wooden allegory in the clammy depths of an ancient tunnel of love. But in its day Coney Island was the incarnation, in wood lath and plaster, of all that Americans found grandiose, compelling, and titillating. Here they could see more electric lights than some entire midwestern states could claim, admire the graceful complications of the Doge’s Palace (cleverly reconstructed in pressed tin), watch long dresses whisked up around their owners’ calves by giant seesaws and scenic railways, and (in a prescient glimpse at what the new century held in store) take a Trip to Mars by Aeroplane. “If Paris is France,” wrote George C. Tilyou in the 1880’s, “then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world.” Tilyou was just seventeen when he made this jaunty assertion in his own newspaper, Tilyou’s Telephone .

Because it is February, members of Congress will shortly have in their hands the proposed federal budget for the next fiscal year, which begins on July 1. It promises to be the largest financial, outlay in our history, and the arguments have already begun that certain portions of it must be cut. If the past is any guide, much of the criticism will center on the defense budget. For while certain analysts maintain that the current level of military spending is barely adequate to support the nation’s dejenses and that savings must come from the government’s social programs, others hold that the Department of Defense has received a disproportionate share of federal moneys over the last twenty-eight years and that if cutbacks are required, the defense budget is the place to begin. We present here a review of military spending and how it has grown.

Founders Five FOUNDERS SIX AND SEVEN

Ten years ago it was possible to mention the Seven Sisters almost anywhere in America and expect instant recognition. These prestigious eastern women’s colleges had a national, and often international, reputation; and alumnae were handed an image with their freshman registration forms that could be made to last a lifetime. Radcliffe was academically rigorous; Bryn Mawr, intense; Smith, athletic; Barnard, sophisticated; Wellesley, blonde and literary; Vassar, radical; and Mount Holyoke, refreshingly wholesome. Now, however, the images are blurring as, in one way or another, the Sisters adopt varying relationships with the men. Dropping all reference to gender, the Seven have quietly renamed themselves The Seven College Conference.

Stark, mist-enshrouded Dartmoor prison has long held a fascination for those interested in British crime. Since 1850 many of England’s most notorious criminals have been condemned to labor on the bleak Devonshire moor seventeen miles from Plymouth, and crime enthusiasts and novelists have found the cold, lonely prison an exotic subject. However, for the generation that lived through the War of 1812 Dartmoor held a far different reputation. In American ports during the first half of the nineteenth century Dartmoor was remembered as a symbol both of the heroism and suffering of American sailors and of British tyranny and oppression, for on Christmas Eve, 1814, at the moment when the treaty ending the second war between England and the United States was being signed in Ghent, over five thousand American sailors were confined in the huge stone prisons constructed near the little village of Princetown in the middle of Dartmoor.