January 2011

Had Sir William Howe fortified the Hills round Boston, he could not have been disgracefully driven from it: had he pursued his Victory at Long Island, he had ended the Rebellion: Had he landed above the lines at New York, not a Man could have escaped him: Had he fought the Americans at the Brunx, he was sure of Victory: had he cooperated with the N. Army, he had saved it, or had he gone to Philadelphia by land, he had ruined Mr. Washington and his Forces: But as he did none of these things, had he gone to ye D———l before he was sent to America, it had been a saving of infamy to himself and of indelible dishonour to this country.”

One fine November day in 1848 a railroad locomotive christened the Pioneer chugged westward out of Chicago a distance of eight miles. It pulled only a single coach, a baggage car temporarily outfitted to carry a handful of prominent Chicagoans being treated to one of the first runs of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad. Spotting a farmer driving an ox wagon filled with wheat and hides toward Chicago, two of the passengers purchased the goods and transferred them to the baggage car. The train then returned to its home city. This simple event foreshadowed the future course of Chicago’s development: within twenty years the modest railroad comprising ten miles of track became the giant Chicago & North Western, one of the roads that made Illinois the nation’s leader in railroad mileage; while the city itself grew tenfold to a population of 300,000. The inflow of wheat, which had begun when a group of men on a one-car train hauled a few bushels, amounted to tens of millions of bushels annually.

The path of the Russian diplomat in America, like that of his American counterpart in Russia, is far from smooth. He must of necessity follow every tortuous twist and turn of international politics, and upon his shoulders he must carry the crushing burden of history. This has been particularly true since the Soviet Revolution of 1917, and the diplomat’s situation has grown even worse since the freeze in Russian-American relations that followed the brief thaw at Yalta.

Lines on maps may be drawn by engineers, but they are interpreted by political events. Seldom has history recorded an amicable and abiding acceptance of such demarcations when they involve restless dynastic movements, whether the example be Pope Alexander VI’s division of the New World in 1493 between Spain and Portugal, or the twentieth century’s unhappy establishment of the border between East and West Berlin after World War II. The surveyor’s work becomes a symbol, and his name may become a catch phrase for a congeries of political and social issues of which he never dreamed.

The S.S. Virginius of New York, Captain Charles Fry, darted up from the Jamaica coast, bound for Cuba, which lay blue in the distance. It was November, 1873. As the ship crossed the brilliant Caribbean, the Spanish gunboat Tornado took chase and closed quickly. When the Spaniards boarded, they found the Virginius stacked high with arms for Cuba’s rebels, then engaged in another of their apparently endless insurrections against the mother country.

The captured ship was taken to Santiago, on Cuba’s southern shore. Forty-three of the passengers and crew were bound, lined up against a wall, and shot. The rest were saved only by the arrival of H.M.S. Niobe , whose captain insisted that the Spanish governor “stop that filthy slaughter.” For a time, war between the United States and Spain seemed unavoidable. President Grant ordered the fleet mobilized at Key West.

The Approach Timorous

Miss Henderson:

I beg to apologize for addressing you thus, being an entire stranger; but having the misfortune to be unknown to you is my excuse for this strange proceeding, which, I am well aware, is entirely at variance with the rules of etiquette. I have for two sabbaths seen you at church, and I am frank to confess that your appearance has made so deep an impression upon me as to make me extremely desirous of forming your acquaintance. I am, at present, a clerk in the ribbon department at Smith & Brown’s store. Will you do me the great favor of allowing this to commence a friendship, which, I trust, will never be regretted by yourself. Please deign to give me at least a single line in reply to this, and oblige,

Your Sincere Admirer,

Wesley Barnum.

The Freeze Deep

Mr. Barnum.

As dawn approached on the morning of May 25, 1863, General William S. Rosecrans, the Union commander in Tennessee, found himself in charge of a prisoner he would soon and gladly be rid of. The man was Clement L. Vallandigham—the most reviled member of that controversial political sect of the American Civil War, the Copperheads. A former United States congressman from Ohio recently defeated for re-election, Vallandigham had achieved notoriety by denouncing Abraham Lincoln as a dictator and by demanding an immediate armistice to end the war, with full restoration of the South’s constitutional rights and privileges. His real game, many believed, was to accomplish the permanent separation of the South and the acceptance of its independence by the North.