January 2011

At first glance, the portrait at the left seems hardly unusual—hundreds of the same sort were painted by the largely self-trained artists who roamed the country in the days before the camera was invented. But the subject is a Negro, and from all indications of dress, an unusually prosperous onesomething of an oddity, for the portrait apparently dates from the 1830’s, a full quarter-century before the Emancipation Proclamation. Who was the man holding the book with the initials “W.W.”?

Of the origins of the painting, nothing can be said for certain. Stylistic and chronological evidence suggests that it is the work of William Matthew Prior (1806-1873) of Boston, a mass-production artist who advertised likenesses “without shade or shadow” for as little as 82.92 (today they bring $500 or more). Too, Prior was a confirmed abolitionist and is known to have done several portraits of Negroes.

The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” So begins Article III of the United States Constitution. This simple sentence provides the authorization for the entire structure of the federal judiciary. The Supreme Court, unique, prestigious, but controversial, is the crown of the system. Beyond question it is the best-known and most powerful judicial body in the world. Designed chiefly as a court to settle arguments between the states, matters involving foreign ambassadors, and other quarrels beyond the scope of state courts, it has from the time of John Marshall to that of Earl Warren added to its power by slow accretion, until today its influence is felt in every aspect of American life. Troops deploy, governmental agencies and great corporations dissolve, little children march past jeering mobs to school, because nine black-robed justices in Washington have discovered new meanings in an old and hallowed document.

On October 15, 1825, there appeared at Monticello, the home of the venerable Thomas Jefferson, one John Henri Isaac Browere, sculptor and celebrity hunter. He had come, he announced, to make a likeness of Mr. Jefferson. Browere had already gained some degree of lame for his busts of well-known people. Not carved from wood or chiselled from marble, these busts were cast of plaster, in the European manner, from molds taken of the features of living subjects. He made the molds with a grout whose formula he himself had concocted and which he jealously guarded.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was as flamboyant by nature as by name, and during the first two years of the Civil War this quality, coupled all too often with a readiness to lay down the sword and take up the pen in defense of his reputation, had got this Confederate general into considerable trouble with Jefferson Davis, who sometimes found it difficult to abide his Creole touchiness off the field of battle for the sake of his undoubted abilities on it. Called “Old Bory” by his soldiers, though he was not yet forty-five, the hero of Sumter had twice been relieved of important commands: first in the east, where he had routed Irvin McDowell’s invasion attempt at Manassas; then in the west, where he had saved his badly outnumbered army by giving Henry Halleck the slip at Corinth.

In September, 1862, he was put in command of the Department of South Carolina and Georgia, with headquarters at the scene of his first glory, Charleston.

Here as elsewhere he saw his position as the hub of the wheel of war.

But it is easy to become very fuzzy-minded about American traditions. They deal with what the American people do when they are doing their best, and they can bring together a descendant of John Alden and an heir of Ellis Island to the benefit of everyone concerned, but they can also be unformulated until what one lone man has in his heart becomes expressed in action. The things that make democracy work are uncatalogued and various, and now and then they arise from the faith of the individual citizen.

There was the case of Robert E. Lee …

Life would be a great deal simpler, of course, if people who want to do their duty by one another and by their common country could more easily see just what that duty may involve. The faith that can move mountains may be a common heritage, but the mountains will not be moved unless the faith can be put to work in the most effective way. We need to know, not merely what we want to do but how we can best go about doing it.

A brooding examination of this problem is contained in Arthur Goodfriend’s book, The Twisted Image . Mr. Goodfriend spent a good many years in India, as an official of the United States Information Service, and he remarks that our valiant attempt to present democracy’s argument to the people of the world’s new nations goes along a path that is all strewn with booby traps.

At almost any moment during the decade that began in 1870 a thoughtful man could be forgiven for thinking the world was going up the spout. On this side of the Atlantic carpetbaggers and scalawags swarmed over a beaten South; other enlightened Americans were liberating the Great Plains by exterminating the resident Indians and buffalo. Across the water an older civilization verged on the abyss. Statesmen pondered what Bismarck, the German strong man, would do next. The Balkan cauldron bubbled angrily; there were dark hints of secret pacts; Austria and Russia were squabbling over the Near East; fighting broke out between Russia and Turkey; and a British fleet sailed to support the Turks while the music halls resounded to: “ We don’t want to fight, but by jingo, if we do, We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too .” Day after day, month upon month, tension mounted. If ever a great man was needed, it was now.