January 2011

The American Leviathan Territorial Experiment What the War Meant The Unending Task

When one retails that the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the governors of four states once mobilixed against the fanners of western Pennsylvania an army almost as large as ever took the field in the Revolutionary War, the event appears at first glance one of the more improbable episodes in the annals of this country. Equipped with mountains of ammunition, forage, baggage, and a bountiful stock of tax-paid whiskey, thirteen thousand grenadiers, dragoons, foot soldiers, pioneers, a train of artillery with six-pounders, mortars, and several “grasshoppers,” paraded over the mountains to Pittsburgh against a gaggle of homespun rebels who had already dispersed.

Captain Robert Stobo enters the pages of history on horseback, at the head of a company of Provincial Virginia troops marching as reinforcements into Colonel George Washington’s encampment on the western border. He departs seven years later after a career in which he distinguished himself in the battle that opened one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the eighteenth century; was turned over to the enemy as a hostage for promises that would not be fulfilled; wrote a letter that made him an international figure; was sentenced to have his head cut off; escaped from prison twice and was recaptured twice; escaped a third time to lead a small band through seven hundred miles of enemy territory; was twice captured by pirates; was given an ovation by his government; consorted with the mightiest men of his day; and played a major role in winning one of history’s decisive battles.

The foregoing may be accepted as Colonel House’s final testimony. It is incomplete but obviously honest; it provides a rational basis upon which the historian may rest his own opinion. As an ex parte statement it demands critical examination. But it is clear that Colonel House had not lost the objectivity that had always been a major aspect of his character; his memory was as photographic as ever in its quality; and his capacity to rise above petty issues was unchanged. From first to last he steadfastly refused to throw on the shoulders of Woodrow Wilson an atom of blame for any responsibility in the ending of the friendship. If personal factors were accountable for the break, then in House’s opinion, the charge should be laid at the door of those who for one reason or another resented his influence with the President.

Dartmouth is not by any means the oldest college in New England—Harvard was founded in 1636, Yale in 1701, and Brown in 1764—but by 1815, when the great crisis struck, it was more than four decades old. In 1769 King George III had authorized the establishment of a college “for the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this land … and also of English Youth and any others.” The following year Dr. Eleazar Wheelock (Yale ’33) was invited to move his Indian Charity School from Lebanon, Connecticut, to New Hampshire. He settled in Hanover, and there the new college—named for the second Earl of Dartmouth, head of its trustees in England—began in a log hut (above).

The bloody encounter between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis is one of the best-documented actions in the history of the United States Navy. From the available eyewitness accounts we have selected three: that of Jones himself; of his young first lieutenant, Richard Dale: and of one of his midship?nen, Nathaniel Fanning. These have been excerpted and arranged at riglit to give a running account of the greatest battle of Jones’ career.

During the 1860’s a literary movement of considerable force and originality flourished in that boisterous, gaudy, nouveau riche metropolis of the frontier, San Francisco. Gathered here were Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Henry George, and a number of lesser lights, such as the flamboyant Joaquin Miller. Their activities produced one of the most exciting of American provincial rebellions.

Today I had lunch with Colonel House at his apartment on 68th Street. I arrived at 12:15 to find him dressed and lying on the sola in the little front sitting room (not the side study). He looked like a wax effigy, motionless except for the hand he raised to greet me, the face that of an Eastern philosopher who has discovered the answer to the riddle of life, no emotional disturbance at any time touching his voice or the lines around his eyes and mouth.

So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain. —Proverbs 1:19

Buildings in America have always been imperilled by those who covet the land upon which they stand. In 1808, when the First Church of Boston, during the pastorate of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lather, sold its “Old Brick” Meetinghouse ot 1713 in Washington Street to move to Chauncy Place, the following lamentation appeared in the Independent Chronicle: