January 2011

On May 3, 1942, a small detachment of Japanese sailors, the grd Kure Special Landing Force, landed without opposition on Tulagi Island, then capital of the British Solomon Islands.

Their prize was a group oi faded, tin-roofed wooden buildings, a cricket field, and one of those peculiarly British colonial institutions called “The Residency.” The usual inhabitants of the little seat of government, the mixed group of missionaries, civil servants, and Chinese traders, had been forewarned and had left.

After making what shift they could for their own comfort, the Kure men settled down in the tropic heat. They were only an outpost. They had been landed on Tulagi as the flank of the New Guinea front the Japanese were trying to develop in the late spring of 1942.

Auld, Lang, and Better The Vindicators Pride Followeth a Landfall The Voiceless Dead

During my undergraduate years at Harvard College, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was preparing for an official celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the royal charter that created the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of my favorite professors in those days was Charles Townsend Copeland, known affectionately among his students as “Copey;” a man to whom legends clung like steel filings on a magnet; and one of my favorites among those legends—whether true or apocryphal I cannot say—was the story of Copey and the Massachusetts Tercentenary Committee for Monuments and Memorials. When asked by the committee to suggest appropriate sites for historical markers, Copey, so the story ran, proposed a tablet in the heart of Cambridge Common bearing an inscription that read: On this spot on April 1, 1630, Prudence Goodchild was raped by a friendly Indian .

I was born August 22, 1841, in Amberson Valley, Franklin County, Pennsylvania. My ancestors migrated from Scotland to the north of Ireland soon after 1600 and emigrated from thence to America in 1712, settling in Chester, Pennsylvania. In 1729 they removed to what is now Franklin and named their settlement Culbertson’s Row. They called themselves Scotch-Irish, a domineering race, aggressive, fearless, and tireless.

Amberson Valley, my birthland, lies snuggled between the Kittatinny and Tuscarora mountains: it is about four miles long and one mile wide, well watered, and originally was heavily wooded with oak, chestnut, hickory, sugar maple, and other trees. By the time I arrived on the scene, much of the timber had been cut away by the early settlers, some for building purposes, some for fencing and fuel. Much of it was wantonly destroyed. There was no market for timber at that date—every farmer had timber to burn, and the land was needed for farms.

“The law,” declared Sir Edward Coke, is the “perfection of reason”; although to Mr. Bumble, the beadle of Oliver Twist , it could be, in its baffling workings, “a ass—a idiot.” Much the same argument continues to this day, with the points of view relatively unchanged. No one respects law more, or argues more heatedly about it, than the English-speaking peoples. No one manufactures more of it, in sheer weight, bulk, and complexity, than the Americans. The law has reflected and sometimes accelerated the transition of the United States from a rural republic to a city-dwellers’ democracy. And how has most of this law been made? Not, despite fond popular belief, in our legislatures, but in our courtrooms.

“All right,” said the hollow voice from inside the flour sack. “You may drive on.”

The driver didn’t waste time. On this particular day—the third of August, 1877—he was alone on the stagecoach; not even a passenger was with him. Glancing down at the tall figure by the roadside holding the old-fashioned shotgun, he released the big hand brake on the Wells Fargo coach and slapped the reins over the six-horse team. He risked one look back (the man with the gun raised his left hand in a genial farewell) and then he was oft, hell for leather, bound for Duncan’s Mills to tell everybody about the most original damned bandit he’d ever run into in Sonoma County, California—or anywhere else.