January 2011

In his effort to reconstruct the past the historian is haunted by the knowledge that absolute, across-theboard certainty is hard to come by. Like the poet Whittier, who spoke of “believing where we cannot prove,” he lays blind hands on such facts as he is able to get and lets the logic derived from their size and shape tell him what kind of building he is going to put up. If he has assembled enough facts and made the right deductions, he can be reasonably satisfied that his finished work is a good reproduction of the long-vanished original. By dint of hard work, logic, and the insights born of a creative imagination he has a truthful replica of the long ago and far away.

John Hempsted,
Connecticut Militia:

I now Setdown to give a narrative of My proseding on the 6th Day of Sept., 1781. … In the morning of the sd day I was att my house in bed, between Brake of Day and Sunrise. I hard the Signel of an-larm by the fireing of thre Cannon … I turn’d Out and ask’d my wife to git Brakefast as soon as possabel for I must go off. I went Down on the hill … Whare the fleet was in fare Site in a line acrost the haber. There was 15 Sale of Ships an other Square rig’d Vessels, besides other Vesels. I came home. My brakefast was redy. After Brakefast … My hors Being redy I Slung my Musket & Cartrig Box and mounted with my littel Black Boy to bring the hors Back. … After I got Under Way my wife Called to me prety loud. I Stopt my hors and ask’d her What She wanted. Her answer was Not to let me hear that you are Shot in the Back.

Brigadier General Benedict Arnold,
British Army:

On March 18, 1941, eighty-two days out of Manila, all sails set, rigging taut, a small, green, weathered schooner entered the port of Fremantle, Western Australia. Atop her afterdeck house a small-caliber, slim-barrelled cannon sat on a brass pedestal. Faded, tattered Philippine and United States flags whipped from her spanker gaff. Above them, at the main peak, floated a wisp of bunting that the intrigued onlookers aboard the Allied warships present thought might be a man-o-warsman’s commission pennant.

The windjammer’s name, U.S.S. Lanikai, sparked instant recognition at headquarters—twice during the last three months she had been reported overdue and presumed lost. Chief of staff Rear Admiral William R. Purnell met her skipper with appropriate astonishment: “My God! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!”

Ask anyone where fox hunting originated and odds are he will respond promptly, “Why, the British Isles, of course.” Indeed, the cry of “Tallyho!” conjures up visions of Lord or Lady Poddlesmere galloping across the English countryside, leaping mammoth hedges for hours on end, and sipping strong waters around the fireside at the end of the day. As it turns out, though, we Americans can lay just as much claim to pioneering the sport as our cousins across the Atlantic, and probably no one will ever know for sure who is entitled to the honors.

One of the ghastliest incidents of the Revolution took place at Groton, Connecticut, during the last engagement of the war in the north. Seventeen hundred British, Hessian, and Tory troops under the command of Benedict Arnold—now a British general after his defection the year before—set out against New London, on the west side of the Thames River from Groton, to seize a large supply of military stores there. The wide harbor between the towns was defended by two forts a mile or two north of the mouth, Trumbull and Griswold, the latter in Groton.

On Christmas Day of 1849 a party of twenty-seven wagons heading through Nevada toward the California gold fields lumbered over a barren ridge and downhill into a desolate place. Before the travellers lay miles of scorched and blasted earth, raw outcroppings of multicolored rock, and stunning heat. The little caravan split up; a group of bachelors who called themselves thejayhawkers piked north, and two families—the Bennetts and the Arcanes—pushed southward along with a few single men. The Jayhawkers were out of it in two or three days, but the other group pressed on deeper into what one of them called ”… the most God-forsaken country in the world. … this was the Creator’s dumping ground where he had left the worthless dregs after making a world, and the devil had scraped these together a little. …” Day after brutal day they slogged across blinding salt flats only to come up at last against impassable mountains. The wretched party camped around a water hole and devised a forlorn plan. Two young men, William Lewis Manly and John Rogers, would go forward over the mountains and scout a trail to the civilization that had to be close by.

Anthony Comslock made it his life’s work to purify this nation, to protect the young from such sights as might lead them into paths that would corrupt their souls and eventually lead them into the yawning pit. He was very certain that he was doing the work of the Lord, and almost singlehandedly for more than forty years he conducted a campaign against wickedness that not only swept in many real offenders against decency but also landed some pretty small fry whose sins appear almost nonexistent to a less discerning eye than Comstock’s. He liked to visualize his accomplishments and in an interview in 1913, two years before he died, said:

“In the forty-one years I have been here I have convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty passengers each and the sixty-first almost full. 1 have destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.”