January 2011

The electric cars dusted along beside dirt roads, sped through the meadows, and brought you right into Main Street. Some were little pinch-waisted wooden affairs, like the Massachusetts car at left, and some were enormous, like the one below, a relic of an unfulfilled dream called the Chicago-New York Air Line. This is an account of how, in a few brief years of glory, the interurban laced America’s small towns together with a network of cheap steel rails and copper wire. The automobile, of course, brought all this to an end. Yet today the traffic is so bad that a new kind of interurban is coming back to life.

When Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt expired in New York City on January 4, 1877, with members of his family gathered about his bed singing “Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy,” he was by far the richest man who had ever died in the United States of America. He had gone to bed for the last time early in May of the previous year. After nearly eighty-three years of strenuous living, his staunch body was finally exhausted by a multitude of ailments, any one of which might have killed an ordinary person.

No student of naval history is likely to forget Admiral Mahan’s famous line about the storm-tossed British warships that stood between Napoleon’s army and the dominion of the world. Britain stayed afloat during the desperate wars that followed the French Revolution largely because the British fleet did its long, hard job with such fidelity and confidence. The legend of Britain’s indomitable Jack Tar seems to get most of its substance from the two decades that began in the mid-1790’s.

Yet the record of those great years contains one very singular chapter that is too often overlooked. For in 1797, when Britain stood alone against a Europe dominated by France’s revolutionary armies—a moment of crisis just about as sharp as the one that followed Dunkirk, nearly a century and a half later—the British fleet mutinied. During the most critical weeks of the war, 50,000 British sailors manning more than 100 warships went completely out of control. The instrument on which the British nation relied for survival suddenly became unusable, and all that saved the day was that Britain’s enemies did not know what was happening.

Around almost everyone—and everything—connected with the Burr conspiracy, time and flourishing legend have drawn a cloak of mystery. This is particularly true of three supporting characters: Burr’s beloved daughter, Theodosia, and Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett, the couple who were charmed into contributing much of their fortune to the little colonel’s grandiose schemes. The mystery continues to cling even to the surviving portraits reproduced above and on the opposite page.

Had Czar Alexander II not been assassinated by Russian revolutionaries in 1881, the Statue of Liberty might have meant something quite different from what it actually has signified to the world in the eighty years since its dedication. For the Czar’s death at the hands of nihilists, some of whom happened to be Jews, set off a series of violent anti-Semitic riots in Russia; and this in turn jarred a young New York poetess out of a romantically placid existence and moved her to write some lines that have become famous as the message the Goddess radiates abroad.