In your December issue you enclosed a tribute to the late President Kennedy—a poem of Emily Dickinson’s written in 1865. … Both my husband and myself feel that the eight-line poem expressed better how most of us felt than all the millions of words that were written about Mr. Kennedy’s death.
At first I was astonished that The Magazine of History had chosen so personal an expression of grief as Emily Dickinson’s poem. But I soon saw it was a perfect choice, for one of the most incredible features of this terrible and incredible business is that so many of us feel so personal a sorrow for a man we never laid eyes on.
In the spring of 1885, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s friend, neighbor, and onetime collaborator from Hartford, Connecticut, visited the International Exposition at New Orleans. He was astonished to find that “white and colored people mingled freely, talking and looking at what was of common interest,” that Negroes “took their full share of the parade and the honors,” and that the two races associated “in unconscious equality of privileges.” During his visit he saw “a colored clergyman in his surplice seated in the chancel of the most important white Episcopal church in New Orleans, assisting in the service.”
At the close of the nineteenth century Rudyard Kipling saw southeastern Pennsylvania as a land of “little houses and bursting big barns, fat cattle, fat women, and all as peaceful as Heaven might be if they farmed there.” This is the home of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and even today, when the face of rural America elsewhere has changed drastically in appearance, the Pennsylvania Dutch region still looks much the same.
If he had never come across the Great Sea, it he had never founded his peaceful commonwealth, we would still be in debt to William Penn. At twenty-six, with all his better-known achievements before him, he performed an enduring service to the liberties of the English-speaking world. It was London in 1670, ten years after the overthrow of Cromwell’s Puritans and the Restoration of the Stuarts. A new crusading faith was making its appearance (they are always annoying to the authorities), and young Penn, a Quaker agitator, was on trial for disturbing the peace.
Members of the court threatened the jury with fines and hinted at torture if they did not bring in a verdict to the judge’s taste — but they would not yield: “NOR WILL WE EVER DO IT!” their foreman shouted in answer to Penn’s impassioned appeal, “Give not away your right!” The trial is a landmark in English and American history.
On October 22, 1844, thousands of Americans in widely scattered localities left their homes tor what, they were perfectly convinced, would be the last time. Their leaders had meticulously corrected an earlier prediction that 1843 would be the final year. Now they were ready.
Many of them had given away or abandoned their property; some had let their crops go to ruin. They went in solemnly excited groups to meetinghouses and tabernacles to witness the Second Coming of Christ and the imminent destruction of the world. In the great moment now at hand, they fervently believed, they would “go up” to blissful eternal life, while millions of sinners and scoffers would be thenceforth doomed to the ineffable tortures of hell.
Like closing enemy pincers on a battle map, the unfinished steel of a new bridge across the Hudson River brackets the ferryboat Orange as she steams toward Newburgh from Beacon, New York, in the year-old photo above. The scene was due to be repeated for a few months more—with Dutchess or Beacon , as often as not, cast in the role of the encircled victim. Then, early last November the bridge ends joined, the three boats were sold, and ferrying on the Hudson north of Manhattan Island came to an end.
E arly in 1863 there appeared in the cozy circle of Confederate agents and sympathizers in Paris a southern gentleman whose looks were fully as distinguished as his reputation. Erect and tall—he stood six feet two—with a massive head crowned by a backswept plume of iron-gray hair, he had aquiline features, a penetrating glance, and a hard, resolute mouth. He carried himself with an air of authority; though he was the son of a Tennessee frontier preacher, he had the bearing and manners of a born aristocrat.
Ever since he was executed by the British on the morning of September 22, 1776, the death of Nathan Hale has been recognized as one of the great moments of American patriotism. Some years ago the late George Dudley Seymour gathered all the contemporary descriptions of the young hero’s career that he could find, and had them privately printed in a Documentary Life of Nathan Hale . In the selections below we can read at first hand, in the words of both his friends and his foes, a story that has inspirited generations of Male’s countrymen.