January 2011

In June, 1863, George Bruffey and his partner, a Mr. Hurd, were following the trail along the South Platte in northeastern Colorado, on their way to the gold-rich young boom town of Denver. Not far from their destination, they witnessed a peculiar sight that impressed them as much as any buffaloes, antelopes, or Indians they had so far encountered. This was a man driving a flock of five hundred turkeys.

Very early on the morning of July 1, 1863, on a ridge in southeastern Pennsylvania, one of history’s pivotal battles was about to begin. A division of Confederate infantry heading east on the Chambersburg Pike toward the town of Gettysburg stumbled into a body of Union cavalry; a few shots were exchanged, lines were formed, and the great struggle was joined. Not long afterward Major General John Fulton Reynolds, bringing up the main body of the Union Army’s First Corps to support his cavalry, was struck in the back of the head and killed by a Rebel sharpshooter’s Minié ball.

The death in battle of a professional soldier, even one of so high a rank, is not remarkable. But this soldier was someone quite special, and the subsequent disclosure of his secret engagement to a handsome and unusual young woman—an engagement so abruptly and tragically terminated—makes his passing one of the most poignant stories of the Civil War.

Dred Scott was nobody in particular. A slave born of slave parents, unable to read or write, physically frail, he was a man without energy, who lor a full decade drifted about in St. Louis as an errand boy and general odd-jobs factotum, an unremarkable bondsman on whom the burden of servitude rested rather lightly. Nobody directly concerned with him wanted him as a slave. As a chattel he was a liability rather than an asset, and in any case his various owners seem to have been antislavery people. Yet his unsuccessful legal battle to become free left an enduring shadow on the history of the United States and was an important factor in the coming of the Civil War.

The image is all but gone from the glass plate; what remains is a faded shadow of the man and his daughter, frozen forever in the interrupted moment of their chess game. When this picture was taken, Clement Clarke Moore was past middle age, with most of his achievements behind him, with the way of life he had known in rural Manhattan disappearing. Born midway through the Revolution, he would die seven days after the Battle of Gettysburg, his eighty-four years spanning the birth and breakup of the Union.

When, in July, 1947, the Southern Pacific trains Nos. 27 and 28, the Overland Limited, disappeared from the schedule under that title, one of the great, romantic names of the Old West began to slip quietly into oblivion. The San Francisco Overland, which took its place, was hardly the proud, all-Pullman varnish run of de luxe implications that had come into being on the Southern Pacific’s timetables in 1899, flashing between San Francisco and Chicago on the fastest known schedules, with the names of the great and powerful of the earth on its sailing lists. What remained was a cross-country train of ordinary vintage that was to undergo successive stages of downgrading until, today, it is nothing but an overnight stub run from Oakland, California, to Ogden, Utah, operating only in the summer and at Christmas-time. It is all too familiar a story in the recent history of American railroads.

Louisiana was America’s first melting pot. Here the mixing of races and nationalities from the four corners of the globe, which began early in the eighteenth century and continued well into the beginning of the present one, has resulted in a region that is absolutely unique in the United States. Nowhere, perhaps, has the triumph of the Great American Experiment been demonstrated more vividly.

On April 11, 1814, the British army under Wellington fought the last battle of the Peninsular War at Toulouse. Less than a hundred days later—on July 12—the Governor General of Canada reported that the first brigade of this army had readied Montreal, ready to undertake offensive operations against the United States.