January 2011

On July 4, 1838, the people of Fort Madison, in the Iowa Territory, invited an old Sauk war chief named Black Hawk to be guest of honor at their Independence Day celebration. A wrinkled and feeble old man, he sat at their banquet table under the trees on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and listened dourly while the white men bestowed honor and friendship upon him. When his turn came Black Hawk, too, spoke of friendship, but he could not forget the past as easily as the whites. They, after all, had gained by it; he had lost. “Rock River was a beautiful country,” he told them now, leaning on his cane and gazing out over the river. “I loved my towns, my cornfields, and the home of my people. I fought for them. … I was once a great warrior. Now I am poor.… Now I am old.”

On October 17, 1777, Elijah Fisher confided the following information to his diary: … Gen. Burgoin and his howl army surrendered themselves Prisoners of Ware and Come to Captelate with our army and Gen. Gates. … Then at one of the Clock five Brigades was sent for Albeny (for there come nuse that Gen. Clinton was a comin up the North river). … Gen. Clinton having nuse that Gen. Birgoyne had capetlated and had surrendered his army prisoners of war he Returned back to New York. …

In this maze of misspellings there are not only the essential facts about a major turning point in the American Revolution the surrender of Major General John Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga—but also the reason why Burgoyne, totally surrounded, and outnumbered, was able to browbeat the American commander, Horatio Gates, into making the surrender a “convention.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the famous Supreme Court justice, was not only a renowned professor of anatomy at Harvard but by popular acclaim the genial poet laureate of Boston, which he preferred to call “the hub of the solar system.” Despite his usual good humor, Holmes was an aggressive Unitarian and spent much time assaulting the Puritan theology of his forebears. He was also fond of horses and carriages; and when, in 1858, he sat down to write a burlesque of the relentless logic by which such a divine as Jonathan Edwards had defended orthodox Calvinism, he decided to make a “one-horse chaise” the vehicle of his satire.

THE GREAT JEFFERSON CONTROVERSY FIRST THE GOOD NEWS …

Charles Manon Russell, the famous artist of the American West, came to Montana m 1880 as a boy of sixteen. He lived there the rest of his life, working for a number of years as a cattle wrangler and gradually getting to know with intimacy the men and the country that were to be his great subject during forty-six years of drawing, painting, and sculpting.

It is always interesting to see the early efforts of an artist who later became a master. Below and on the following pages are a few samples, some never before published, of sketches made by Charlie Russell when he was only fifteen. It was later on m that same year, 1880, that he travelled to Montana for the first time. It was decisive: lie put school and the Middle West and East behind him forever.

One day in late October of 1864, as the Civil War was moving into its final stages, eight young men in civilian clothes arrived in New York City from Toronto by train. Though they spoke with southern accents, they were quickly caught up in the swirl of the city’s life, for there were thousands of Southerners in New York—businessmen and planters who had come north to protect their interests; families fleeing from ruin; and ex-Confederate soldiers, prisoners of war on parole, looking for a way to return home. If these eight men acted out of the ordinary at all, their behavior went unnoticed.

They were, in fact, Confederate officers, volunteers in a desperate plot to force the North to accept southern independence in return for peace. The story of how close they came to succeeding underscores a major dread of any nation at war within itself: sabotage by an enemy who looks and acts like a friend.

To his contemporaries Thomas Nast was unquestionably America’s greatest and most effective political cartoonist, attacking corruption with a brilliant and often vitriolic pen, harrying the bosses, creating the political symbols that still remain the emblems of our two major political parties. His grandson’s impression is quite different. He remembers him as a gentle and witty companion, as the creator of our conception of Santa Claus, as a sad and lonely man whose life ended poignantly in a foreign land. Harper & Row, whose predecessor company first published m i8go a collection of Mast’s Christmas pictures, will reprint later this month Thomas Nast’s Christmas Drawings for the Human Race , with a new text by that grandson, Thomas Mast St. Hill. The following article is excerpted from this biographical reminiscence.

By no strange quirk of fate, no unlikely chance or mysterious destiny, were Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt brought together in casual acquaintanceship. Even had they been wholly without ties of blood and family tradition, unsharing of the same family name and distant ancestry, the strangeness would have been in their not meeting as they pursued their highly mobile physical lives within that small social world, close-knit and rigidly exclusive, which both of them inhabited.