January 2011

Great-grandmother was a farmer’s wife, a little woman of considerable spirit and stamina who raised eleven lively children to be a credit to CX the community of Aquebogue, on Long Island, New York. In the age of homemade soap and the scrub board, cleanliness was harder to come by than godliness, but Great-grandmother saw to it that her family measured up in both respects. When the Civil War broke out and Great-grandfather left home to help hold the Union together, it was Great-grandmother who by sheer courage, character, and hard work kept the family from falling to pieces.

Horror Taken for Granted Heritage for Today

A Swede from Illinois and myself were sent to the headquarters of the 2nd 2nd South Midland Field Ambulance Company of the 61st Division in St.-Nicolas, a suburb of Anas. The headquarters of the and was in an old two-story brick house, about the only one there which had not been hit by a shell. Lieutenant Colonel Hurroughes, who was in command of that unit, Captain Robson, and another officer were having supper when we arrived. It was a bleak-looking place, with no furniture except an improvised table and boxes for chairs. We slept upstairs on army cots. I thought at the time it was pretty bad, but later experience taught me that we were living under elegant conditions compared to the usual tiling anywhere near the front.

One summer’s day recently, a pair of vacationers were relaxing on the beach at Siasconset, which is on the eastern end of Xaiitucket Island. The ocean surf was gentle and the sky was clear, and the nearest land to seaward was Portugal, sonic ^,ooo miles away. “I’ll tell you ihc only trouble with this place,” said one of the pair. “And that is, you’re completely cut off from the world.”

“Oh?” replied the other. “And what’s the world got?”

Lewis Herbert Metcalf was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1835, and he died in i8j), and during his brief life he knew one great and terrible day—July 21, 1861, when he fought as a Union Army private in the First Battle of Bull Run. A few years before his death he wrote his story of the battle; after gathering dust on a shelf for more than a century it is printed here (slightly condensed) for the first time.

Last fall, when the December issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE was being prepared for the printer, the Editors looked into the career of Emanuel Leutze, painter of the famous "Washington Crossing the Delaware," which was featured in an article in that issue (“Why Washington Stood Up in the Boat”). One thing that struck us was a statement by Dr. Raymond L. Stehle, writing in the journal Pennsylvania History , that Leutze had painted a companion piece, "Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth," equally heroic in conception and scale (about 23 feet by 13 feet), but today almost completely forgotten. According to Dr. Stehle, who is writing a biography of Leutze, the great canvas had been given to the University of California, Berkeley, late in the nineteenth century, but had not been exhibited for over fifty years.