January 2011

The lamplight filtering through the haze and drizzle gave the streets of New Orleans an eerie pallor that October night in 1890. It was nearing midnight when Dave Hennessy, the city’s thirty-two-year-old police chief, left his office and headed home, escorted by an old friend, Captain William O’Connor. There had been threats on Hennessy’s life, but the popular and respected chief took them lightly. When the two men reached Girod Street, where Hennessy lived, the chief told O’Connor it was not necessary to accompany him any farther. The two men bade each other good night, and Hennessy headed up the damp and deserted street alone.

He had almost reached home when the silence of the night was shattered by the roar of gunfire. The shots came from a shanty on the other side of the street where a recently arrived immigrant Sicilian shoemaker was living. Hennessy was hit, but he managed to draw his service revolver and get off three or four shots as his attackers fled.

Defeated in his attempt at apolitical comeback in the Presidential election of 1912, the fifty-four-year-old Theodore Roosevelt started off 1913 eager for fresh adventures. The former President accepted invitations from the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to deliver addresses in their respective capitals and also gleefully agreed to accompany the explorer-priest John Augustine ^ahm on ajourney through the Amazon basin. The American Museum of Natural History in New York added two naturalists, George K. Cherne and Leo E. Miller, to the party that would also include Roosevelt’s second son, Kermit, who had been working for the past year and a half in Brazil. As well as being his father’s beloved “side-partner,” Kermit would prove invaluable as the expedition’s interpreter and photographer. Some of his photographs taken during the trip appear in the following pages.

This article is an excerpt from a new book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt recently published by Doubleday & Company. It is being publicized as The F.D.R. Memoir “as written by Bernard Asbell. ” Mr. Asbell undertakes to recount the story of the Roosevelt administration in the first person, as he thinks F.D.R. himself might have written it had he lived to do so. This literary ploy is sure to excite controversy, and one might reasonably fear that m years to come, confused or careless readers will attribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt observations actually made by Bernard Asbell. However, Mr. Asbell has anchored each of his plausible but fictive chapters with a “background memorandum,” using more conventional historical methods and showing the private experiences in F.D.R.’s life that were especially relevant to the foregoing chapter. Roosevelt is a familiar field for him, since he was the author of the best-selling When F.D.R. Died (1961). The following excerpt is adapted from the “background memorandum”for a chapter dealing with F.D.R.’s campaign of 1936.

In the early summer of 1775, when the time came to appoint major generals to serve with George Washington in the Continental Army, Congress voted unanimously that Israel Putnam was to be one of them. Then in his fifty-eighth year and known universally as Old Put, he was five feet six inches tall, powerfully built, and had the face of a cherubic bulldog mounted on a jaw cut like a block of wood. More to the point, he was regarded not simply as a good soldier but as a great one; a reputation won during years of frontier warfare had hung a great fog of legends about him.

New York during the Revolution was, a loyalist wrote, “a most dirty, desolate and wretched place.” And indeed it was. No other American city suffered as much from the war. It had been dug up by Americans for defense, shelled by British warships, ravaged by two severe fires, looted by enemy soldiers, even denuded of its trees for firewood. More than half its citizens had fled when the British began their seven-year occupation in the fall of 1776. Yet, astonishingly, by the turn of the century New York was on the threshold of becoming the largest city in the new Republic. By then it had already been—briefly, to be sure—both the nation’s first capital and the capital of New York State. The number of its inhabitants had swollen from thirty-three thousand at the time of the first federal census in 1790 to sixty thousand in 1800 and to ninety-six thousand in 1810. Landfills joined new streets by the waterfront to the once-meandering cow paths of Dutch New Amsterdam. Spurred by the population growth, residents moved northward.

Major General Nathanael Greene, commanding the Continental Army in the south, spent mid-March of 1781 trying to lure Cornwallis and his army into battle on advantageous ground. He had to do it quickly, for the enlistments of many of his soldiers would soon expire. Greene finally deployed his troops on the high ground surrounding Guilford Court House in North Carolina. Cornwallis took the bait and began to move against him with some two thousand men. Although Greene had more than twice that number, most of them were shaky militia whose reaction to battle was wholly unpredictable. Greene planned accordingly. He posted untried North Carolinians across the probable path of the enemy and, grinning encouragement, told them to fire only two volleys before they ran away. Behind these men was a tougher line of Virginians, and behind them the rock of Greene’s makeshift army, indestructible Maryland and Delaware regiments. The units took up their final positions on the cool, bright morning of March 15.

Major General Nathanael Greene,
Continental Army:

…I took the resolution of attacking the enemy without loss of time, and made the necessary disposition accordingly, being persuaded, that if we were successful, it would prove ruinous to the enemy, and, if otherwise, it would only prove a partial evil to us.

The army marched from the High-rock ford on the 12th, and on the 14th arrived at Guildford.…

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee,
Continental Army:

The country to a wide extent around, waste and rolling, was covered with lofty trees and thick shrubby underwood. Narrow tangled glades wound between the hills and … dripped their scant rills into a larger stream … that crossed the great Salisbury road, about two miles from the courthouse. The melancholy horror, the wild sterility, and the lonely aspect of the scene, seemed ready to overawe the rage, and to welcome the fears of men.