January 2011

Sam Patch was his name. He was born on a Massachusetts farm in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a time when a boy of modest origins had many new avenues open to him. Sam chose a very new one indeed: he jumped oft waterfalls—and into American legend. There he joined the slangy, brawling, boastful heroes of Jacksonian America, sons of the western woods and the city slums: men like Davy Orockett and Mike Fink.

He began simply enough. As a boy he went to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and found work as a mule-spinner, tending the machine that twisted and wound cotton thread in Samuel Slater’s cotton mill. The mill stood just above the Pawtucket Palls, and some of the hardier mill hands used to jump into the river from the top rail of the bridge that spanned the falls, or from the roots of adjacent mills that towered one hundred feet above the deep water. Thus Sam Patch found his career, jumping the Pawtucket Falls before admiring townspeople.

At 12:30 P.M., Easter Sunday, 1891. a band of one hundred men began slowly to march eastward out of Massillon, Ohio. The group’s destination and purpose were summed up in the words ol an improvised battle hymn that a few of them sang as they trudged: We’re marching on to Washington, To right the nation’s wrongs .

It was not a good day for singing: the weather was cold and damp, the turnout of marchers disappointingly small. The more sensitive “soldiers” felt embarrassment at the publicity they were receiving, for forty-three special newspaper correspondents representing every major daily in the East were in attendance, with lour Western Union telegraph operators and two linemen. “Never in the annals of insurrection has so small a company of soldiers been accompanied by such a phalanx of recording angels,” wrote the visiting British reformer William T. Stead in the Review of Reviews .

At a flying clip the trotting horse moved effortlessly through the nineteenth century, easily distancing all competitors as the country’s most widely acclaimed hero of sport. In lesser circumstances he pulled a sleigh, a road wagon, or a plow. He was a dashing symbol for a nation that liked its pleasures to have a practical aura. The trotter was a favorite of the printmakers, and their portraits of him on the track, on the road, in the solitary splendor of his stall, or in a quiet pasture brightened walls of homes, hotels, offices, and livery stables.

He had been a long time reaching the perfection he attained in the nineteenth century. The ancients, both Greeks and Romans, undoubtedly trained some horses to trot consistently—that is, to move a foreleg on one side and a hind leg on the other at the same time. This gait greatly increased the smoothness and endurance with which a horse could pull a chariot or wagon. Trotting matches were popular in many parts of the Old World, and the term “trotters,” derived from a French word meaning “to tread,” was in use in the sixteenth century.

…Behold Urilla, nature’s favored child; Bright on her birth indulgent fortune smiled; Her honored grandsire, when the field was won, By warring freemen, led by Washington, Nobly sustained, on many a glorious day, The fiercest fervors of the battle-fray…

Her sire, whose freighted ships from every shore Returned with wealth in unexhausted store, Was doubly rich:—his gold was less refined Than the bright treasures of his noble mind.

Although the life of George Washington is extraordinarily well documented, he is by no means the best-understood of our national heroes. Nor is he the best-loved. The legend of Washington as the hatchet-wielding young prig and our image of an awesome, remote Father of His Country both fail to do justice to the virile, warm, fallible man who was “by far the most popular of living Americans” during his lifetime.

Lincoln buffs are naturally meticulous about facts, and the excerpt from Twenty Days , the new book about Lincoln’s assassination by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, in our April issue, stirred up some controversy. We heard from several readers on two questions in particular: whether John Wilkes Booth really did bore the peephole in the door to Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre; and whether Stanton really did say (as the Kunhardts reported it) “He belongs to the angels now,” rather than “Now he belongs to the ages,” at the moment of Lincoln’s death.

On the first of these intriguing queries, it has been brought to our attention that Mr. Frank Ford, the son of Harry Clay Ford, treasurer of Ford’s Theatre, is still very much alive, and that he vehemently disputes the statement by the Kunhardts that Booth, on the day of the assassination, “bored a peephole in the door to the box itself. …” In 1962 Mr. Ford wrote a letter to Dr. George J. Olszewski, official historian of Ford’s Theatre, including these remarks:

After reading “A Brief Note for Expectant Parents” in our February, 1965, issue—about unusual names given to infants in nineteenth-century Connecticut—Charles R. Schultz, Librarian at Mystic Seaport in that state, sent us the following item from the Charleston, South Carolina, Daily Courier of October 31, 1856:

“We heard of a family in Detroit, whose sons were named One Stickney, Two Stickney, Three Stickney, and whose daughters were named First Stickney, Second Stickney, and so on. The three elder children of another family were named Joseph, And, and Another, and it has been supposed that should they have [had] any more, they might have named them Also, Moreover, Nevertheless, and Notwithstanding. Another family actually named their child Finis, supposing it was their last, but they happened afterward to have a daughter and two sons, whom they called Addenda, Appendix, and Supplement. Another parent set out to perpetuate the names of the Gospels, and named the fifth child Acts. A man in Pennsylvania called his second son James Also, and the third William Likewise.”