Until August, 1831, most Americans had never heard of Virginia’s Southampton County, an isolated, impoverished neighborhood located along the border in the southeastern part of the state. It was mostly a small farming area, with cotton fields and apple orchards dotting the flat, wooded landscape. The farmers were singularly fond of their apple crops: from them they made a potent apple brandy, one of the major sources of pleasure in this hardscrabble region. The county seat, or “county town,” was Jerusalem, a lethargic little community where pigs rooted in the streets and old-timers spat tobacco juice in the shade of the courthouse. Jerusalem lay on the bank of the Nottoway River some seventy miles south of Richmond. There had never been any large plantations in Southampton County, for the soil had always been too poor for extensive tobacco or cotton cultivation. Although one gentleman did own eighty slaves in 1830, the average was around three or four per family. A number of whites had moved on to new cotton lands in Georgia and Alabama, so that Southampton now had a population that was nearly 60 per cent black.
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January 2011
That the photographs of G. Frank Radway were ever resurrected from the files of an old Boston newspaper was, in the beginning, simply a matter of luck. No one particularly remembered or was looking for Radway’s work, few people, then or now, recognized his name, and the paper for which he covered the Boston scene—the Boston Advertiser —is now defunct.
The story of how the pictures shown below and on the next six pages came to light is one of those small, odd, true stories that whet the appetites of assorted collectors and those who browse through junk shops.
The mails this month brought us a large carton from the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission; it disgorged a shiny box labelled “Media Kit,” which was big enough to hold the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Within that was a shiny file folder containing only some thin leaflets. A meaner or more thrifty commission could have stuffed its whole message into a No. 10 envelope. Conceived with all the skills of the soap-wrapper-designer’s art and full of public-relations zing, the kit seeks to fire us up about a rather vaguely described program of events, happenings, and nonhappenings through which 1976 will remember 1776. Frankly, we thought the White House had forgotten. Not a bit of it. The commission reminds us of some immortal words of President Nixon back in 1969: America is 50 states. America is big cities, small cities and small towns. It is all the homes and all the hopes of 200 million people.
The first time I saw Adlai Stevenson was in July, 1953. After the splendid but massive failure of his 1952 campaign he had spent five months travelling, mostly in Asia. He had received world acclaim to set against his national defeat. London was the last stage of his journey. I heard him speak briefly to an all-party House of Commons tea meeting. The chairman introduced him with a somewhat self-conscious impartiality: America was indeed fortunate to have been able to choose between two candidates of the distinction of General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson.
Stevenson’s reply was less heavily felicitous. I recall it as being brief, graceful, self-deprecatory, and mildly moving. It was not Olympian, but it was agreeable and satisfying. It confirmed me, then a young backbencher with few American contacts, in a simple view that it was a tragedy he had not been elected.
We have, unintentionally, baffled a number of our readers—and ourselves—with a picture that we ran in our August, 1972, issue. It appears on page 73 and shows a group of pa- triotic ladies diligently repairing the huge flag that Francis Scott Key watched flying over Fort McHenry while the words of our national anthem began to come together in his head. But this inspirational scene is marred by a grotesque apparition hanging in the air above the banner. Among others, Mr. John Hood, of Houston, Texas, wrote to ask us “What is that Thing soaring over their work table? Fifty people have looked at this picture and not offered a single sensible suggestion.” We had no idea and questioned the owners of the picture at the Smithsonian Institution. They looked into the mystery and came back with an answer. It is some sort of cactuslike plant in a pot that has been hauled up and braced with ropes to keep it out of the way of the restoration in progress. Too bad; we had hoped for a heathen idol.
We are happy to announce that James Thomas Flexner has just received the National Book Award for George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, the fourth and final volume of his biography of the great man, as well as a special PuIitzer Prize citation for the whole series. Over the years we have published no fewer than nine excerpts from this monumental work, and we are deeply pleased to see the author honored. Flexner’s acceptance speech, an eloquent personal statement of his feelings about Washington after more than a decade of tracing his career, appears below.
In the twelve years that I have worked on a biography of Washington, I have made various unexpected discoveries. Surely the most surprising was that George Washington is alive. Or, to put it more accurately, millions of George Washingtons are alive. Washingtons have been born and have died for some two centuries.
Perched on Mount Falcon as the mist rose and the cloudcapped towers caught the first rays of the morning sun, it would seem a dream palace, the residence of the Great Khan or a Dalai Lama, remote, unapproachable, yet somehow the center of the world. The rational air of midday would give the granite battlements and vast donjon the more formidable aspect of the krak des Chevaliers or Marienburg of the Teutonic Knights. A road hewn out of solid rock would curve sharply upward to the sally port below grim quadruple towers and a terrace that ended in a sheer traitor’s drop. The evening light would again lend a softness, an enchantment to the turrets and pinnacles. Here, it might seem, lay the entrenched power of the lord of the earth.
It was easy enough for an excited and passionate South to pass secession resolutions in 1861—yet harder than it thought to get away from the Old Flag. When a committee to decide on a new banner met that February in Montgomery, Alabama, it was deluged with ideas, of which (in the larger pictures) we show six examples, together with extracts from the not always coherent arguments proposed by their designers. None of these suggestions made it, of course, and the fanciful ensigns disappeared into limbo until recently unearthed by Michael P. Musick, of the National Archives in Washington. The only rebellious banners which came near that city—the official and unofficial Confederate Hags above—shared with most of these, however, a certain reluctance to abandon the symbolic stars and stripes.
According to enduring Irgend, General Ulysses S. Grant was a hunt man of war who understood nothing hut fighting, had no lighter moments except for those occasionally evoked by a bottle of whiskey, kepi his steel-Imp mouth closed so firmly that neither jests nor casual chitchat ever emerged, and had about as much tender sentiment in his make-up as a disillusioned grizzly bear.