January 2011

The way of the reformer is hard. The way ofthat idealistic David who slings his polished stones at the Goliath of military bureaucracy is trebly hard. He needs a firm heart and strong friends. Franklin W. Smith, the principal in a celebrated naval court-martial during the Civil War, found one such just and farseeing advocate in Abraham Lincoln.

Without the President’s help Smith would have lost everything—business, fortune, reputation, health, freedom itself. Even with Lincoln’s last-moment intervention, he went through a prolonged agony that would have utterly overwhelmed a less dedicated idealist. It is disquieting to note, too, that if Lincoln had not acted when he did, Smith’s unjust sentence might have been executed. For this was probably Lincoln’s last act of personal justice; he was assassinated less than four weeks later.

It isn’t every day that one can see a man pushing a peanut with his nose along the main street of an American town. But it is not an impossible sight, either, especially when election wagers are being settled after what ex-President Truman has called our “four-yearly spasm.” Sometimes the penance is performed with an orange or golf ball. Or the loser transports the winner over an agreed-upon route in a baby carriage or handcart. Losers have gamely walked barefoot, been rotten-egged, eaten crow—literally—for their fallible political judgment. But the long-time favorite of all zany arrangements of this sort requires a wheelbarrow. Meet, then, the man who started it all, Major Ben: Perley Poore (that’s the way he wrote his name), who introduced wheelbarrow trundling into the Presidential canvass shortly before the Civil War. More blithe spirit than party zealot, Poore was a Massachusetts militia officer, a jovial companion, and a successful journalist in Washington, and sometimes called the first American political columnist.

Published well over a century ago, the reports of the Pacific Railroad Surveys, “made under the Direction of the Secretary of War, 1853-6,” have careful maps, profile views, and illustrations of the flora and fauna and geology of the area. They also contain remarkable illustrations by the artists who went along with the various parties but these suffer from the technical inadequacies, as far as color is concerned, of the state of printing in that era. Most of the original art itself, it was long thought, had been lost. Now, however, we have been fortunate enough to come on to a set of water colors painted for a Pacific Railroad survey, the northernmost one, made along the forty-seventh to forty-ninth parallels of latitude by Isaac Ingalls Stevens. They belong to the notable collectors Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, through whose kindness they are reproduced here.

The whole history of America affords examples of men who fitted precisely the needs of a particular moment, only to be cast aside, forgotten or traduced when the tide of events they created or manipulated waned and time passed them by. During and after the Revolution, it happened to James Otis and Samuel Adams, but for no one did ingratitude follow fame quite so cruelly as for Thomas Paine.

No one, it has been said, ever really learns to accept the fact that it was a coupling by his parents that produced him. The novelist Louis Auchincloss extends this and says we can never believe in the sexuality of our grandparents.

When we go back even beyond our grandparents and their contemporaries, questions of procreation become unimportant when compared to the struggle that must be made to believe that these people actually existed. I myself fought this battle for the ten years that I gave to the writing of three books. Sitting in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, fingering letters forgotten these fifty years, I would think, “How marvelous and touching”; and standing on hillocks in Flanders surrounded by the graves of the New Army of igiG’s Great Britain, I found it hard not to weep—but I always had the very strong feeling that I was not dealing with anything real. The past, yes. Characters in history. Dust. But not real people.

In America the status of hero—durable, full-fledged hero—has been awarded to few men. The subtle, complex factors that have led us to be so selective were brilliantly described three decades ago in a book, The Hero in America, by historian Dixon Wecter. For a reissue of this book, which will be published later this month by Charles Scribner’s Sons, novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren has written an introduction examining Mr. Wecter’s categories for glorification and speculating about who today—in this present age. of the “Anti-Hero” or the “Slob-as-Hero”—might be candidates for future canonisation. AMERICAN HERITAGE is proud to publish Mr. Warren’s thoughtful and witty introduction to this classic work of history.

At 4:30 A.M. on a cold, drizzly day in the spring of 1944, there came a knock on the guarded door of the top-secret White House Map Room. The one officer on duty opened the door to admit a rotund gentleman in white tie and tails, smoking a cigar and offering a cordial “Good morning!”

The Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853 —a grand national reconnaissance extending over half a continent and led by men who would later be counted among the most prominent soldiers and scientists of the Republic—were the capstone of an American age of exploration in the Far West. They were packed with adventure and stalked by death, and they were conceived in desperation by a preCivil War Congress hopelessly deadlocked over the proper location for the first vital transcontinental railroad, which would link the Mississippi Valley with golden California. Should the route go north, or south? Sectionalism offered loud answers but no agreement. The railroad surveys were an attempt to let science decide a question that, after eight years of continuous debate, appeared to be beyond the powers of mortal men. Not since Napoleon, in the midst of his short-lived conquest of Egypt, had taken a large corps of savants to study that country’s lands and culture had such an array of scientific talent been marshalled in the service of geographical conquest.