The weather in the Straits of Florida was turbulent in June of 1865. Throughout that spring the Caribbean boiled from one storm after another, but this latest one was particularly severe. Ocean-going steamers delayed their departures because of it, yet, in its very center, six desperate men bailed and prayed in a sailboat barely seventeen feet long. One of them in particular, a tall, handsome man, might have looked back, if his fevered labors had allowed time for reflection, to a June five years before when, as both senator-elect from Kentucky and Vice President of the United States, he had accepted the nomination of the Democratic party for the Presidency. Now, despised and indicted as a traitor, he was trying to escape the country, certain of imprisonment if captured and fearful of execution.
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January 2011
Everard H. Smith III, of Washington, D.C., has called our attention to an unhappy example of America’s vigorous efforts to destroy the remnants of her recent past. Mr. Smith writes: Joan Paterson Kerr’s article in your April issue, “Gracious Record of a Connecticut Family,” struck a responsive chord in me as soon as I read it, for I spent my undergraduate career at Yale in Timothy Dwight College on Temple Street. Both of the fine old New Haven mansions shown in the photographs on page 77 were located less than half a block from the college. … The Trowbridge-Hotchkiss house, Nos. 310 and 312, served Yale for many years as a graduate art school dormitory. … It was copiously decorated with slogans of a populist nature during the Black Panther trial in May, 1970.
American spirits were at a low ebb as the year 1776 drew to a close. The Hudson River forts were gone, Long Island and New York were taken, and now Washington’s wretched army of three thousand men was in full retreat through New Jersey with Cornwallis’ veteran troops close behind. Moreover, the enlistments of many of the Continental soldiers were due to expire with the old year; after December 31 the army would virtually cease to exist. Morale demanded a victory, and if Washington was ever going to strike, it would have to be soon.
Captain Andreas Wiederhold, Hessian forces:
On December 14, 1776, we marched to famous Trenton, which I shall remember as long as I live, and to which place our all too merry Brigadier [Colonel Johann Rail] is said to have brought us by his solicitation. How well he would have done not to have solicited for it! He might perhaps have kept and preserved the undeserved praise which was ignorantly bestowed upon him. But here it all fell into the mud!
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Major von Dechow very wisely suggested to throw up some earth-works and to put the cannons into them, so that all might be in readiness for as good a defense as possible in the case of an emergency. “Let them come,” was the Colonel’s answer. “What, earth-works! With the bayonet we will go for them.”… He believed the very name Rail more effectual and stronger than all the fortifications of Vauban and Coehorn together, and no rebel would have the courage to attack him.
An unknown officer on Washington’s staff:
Charlie and I first met under the most informal conditions imaginable—we were both stark naked. We were not alone in this, for with hundreds of others we were taking a physical examination for acceptance in the first officers’ training camp at Fort Myer, Virginia. The date was May 16, 1917.
On the previous day approximately twenty-five hundred men had descended on the post. Our hopes were high, even though the first latrine rumor most of us heard was that only one in four would be commissioned.
Who is James K. Polk?” The Whigs promptly began campaigning on that derision, and there, were Democrats who repeated it with a sick concern. The auesium eventually got an unequivocal answer. Polk had come up the ladder, he was an orthodox party Democrat. He had been Jackson’s mouthpiece and floor leader m the House of Representatives, had managed the anti-Bank legislation, had risen to the Speakership, had been governor of Tennessee. But sometimes the belt line shapes an instrument of use and precision. Folk’s mind was rigid, narrow, obstinate, far from first-rate. He sincerely believed that only Democrats were truly American, Whigs being either the dupes or the pensioners of England —more, that not only wisdom and patriotism were Democratic monopolies but honor and breeding as well. “Although a Whig he seems a gentleman” is a not uncommon characterisation in his diary. He, was pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains. …
Whenever you think or hear of anything at all that happened m 1846 , DeVoto wrote his friend and mentor Garrett Mattingly in 1933, send me a memorandum on it . He had chosen that year as a kind of test-boring that would encapsulate the history of the frontier, and he was also looking for individuals whose careers would epitomize whole chapters of the frontier experience. He told Mattingly about one such man: