January 2011

The year was 1753, the month November. Through bone-chilling rain and sleety snow, seven horsemen plodded slowly up the jagged slopes of the Allegheny Mountains. Around the narrow trail were miles upon miles of giant black walnut, cherry, oak, and locust trees, heavy with moss and knitted together by tangled Virginia creeper. It was a primeval forest, and in its shadowy depths Indian war parties were on the prowl. The seven men were taking a desperate gamble, and no one knew it better than the rugged six-footer who rode at the head of the little expedition.

George Washington, a twenty-one-year-old major in the Virginia militia, was attempting what more than one veteran frontiersman had denounced as insanity: a winter journey through the unmapped wilderness between his native Virginia and the shores of Lake Erie. The purpose: to deliver a message that might start a war.

In the spring of 1847 Thomas Woodcock, president of the Natural History Society of Brooklyn, New York, received from England a crate containing several pairs of small, dingy birds. He released them in a city park. None survived the following winter. Woodcock repeated his experiment with a similar lack of success each of the following three or four springs. In either 1851 or 1852 his persistence was rewarded, and Passer domesticus , the house sparrow, joined Rattus norvegicus , the house rat, Mus musculus , the house mouse, and Homo sapiens , the house builder, in the ranks of America’s major settlers.

All four of these immigrant species continue to prosper here despite the way the first three annoy the fourth. Many other varieties of once-foreign fauna and flora also thrive in the hospitable hemisphere to which they have come.

On January 15,1865, the United States Army and Navy bombarded, stormed, and captured Fort Fisher, the great Confederate strong point which guarded the outlet of Cape Fear River just below Wilmington, North Carolina. This battle closed the Confederacy’s last port for blockade runners; it also cost the Federal Army and Navy some 1,300 casualties.

Among the men killed at Fort Fisher was Edward K. Wightman, of the 3rd New York Volunteer Infantry, who was shot to death in the attack on the northwest bastion of the fort. His father, a New York attorney named Stillman King Wightman (1803–1899), at once concluded that it was his sad duty to go to Fort Fisher, recover his son’s body, and bring it north for proper burial. Despite grave obstacles, the father did this, and two months later, with the experience still raw and fresh, set down in writing his account of it.

In late March, 1865, Abraham Lincoln spent a few days at City Point, Virginia, aboard the Malvern , a captured blockade runner with rather cramped quarters, which Admiral David D. Porter had converted into his flagship. One little problem that arose is described in reminiscences that Porter published twenty years later:

SACCO’S GUILT

To the Editor:

In October, 1958, AMERICAN HERITAGE published an article by Francis Russell in which he said that he was convinced that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were innocent of the crime of murder, of which they were convicted and for which they suffered death. In the issue of June, 1962, you published an article by the same author in which he said he believes Sacco was guilty but that Vanzetti was innocent. On what evidence, or alleged evidence, does Mr. Russell base his change of mind? He says that a test with Sacco’s .32 Colt pistol made in 1961 proves that the fatal bullet (known as Bullet III) taken from the body of Berardelli (one of the victims of the shooting in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920) matched the markings of a test bullet fired in 1961. …

When Hernando Cortés and his little band of Spaniards fought their way in 1519 from the tropical shores of Mexico up to the high plateau and first saw stretched below them the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, gleaming on its lake under the morning sun, they experienced one of the truly dramatic moments in the history of America. Fortunately we have the words of a reporter worthy of the scene, the foot soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo, whose True History of the Conquest of New Spain is one of the classics of the Western world. He wrote:

“Gazing on such wonderful sights we did not know what to say or whether what appeared before us was real; for on the one hand there were great cities and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not number even four hundred soldiers!”

After Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered by an anti-Mormon mob at Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, great contention arose among the Latter-day Saints as to who would succeed Joseph as head of the Church. At a vast meeting beside the unfinished temple on August 8, Sidney Rigdon urged that he be made Church guardian, claiming that he had received a revelation from on high that this should be his office. A little later a sturdy figure rose from the audience and spoke for himself. Not as tall as Joseph Smith, Brigham Young was nevertheless of commanding presence. He proclaimed himself a dedicated follower of the Prophet, and he spoke with a sincerity and practicality which made Rigdon seem both small and pretentious. He was overwhelmingly sustained as president of the Twelve Apostles, on whom the power of the Church now rested.

In 1861, when the word “traitor” came to be used pretty loosely, the average northerner would probably have placed John B. Floyd no lower than second on the blacklist of treason. Floyd, everybody said, was a sinister secret agent who had used his position as Secretary of War in President James Buchanan’s Cabinet to send guns by the carload to Dixie. He had armed the South with federal muskets. As the war went on and the defeat of the Confederacy turned out to be more than a three-months’ outing, Floyd’s villainy seemed to grow even more monstrous. Hadn’t he proved his apostasy by going south and becoming a Confederate general?

But was John B. Floyd guilty as charged? The question remains as puzzling today as it was a century ago.