Skip to main content

January 2011


Walker had been in his grave less than a year when the American Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter—April 12, 1861. Immediately afterward, and continuing down to the present day, there has been an argument: Who really started it? Did Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, give the orders that began the war—or did President Abraham Lincoln cleverly maneuver things so that he was able to bring the war on even though he gave the appearance of letting the other man start it?

In a way this is an argument over nothing at all. The new Confederate nation wanted the United States forces out of Fort Sumter, and the United States government, knowing that it could not keep its soldiers there, refused to pull them out until somebody shot at them and made them go, and what was really at issue was whether there would be one or two American republics. The immovable force met the irresistible object, the guns went off, and there was a war. The conflict was inevitable, and all the two Presidents did was to accept the fact.

From the American Civil War to the beginning of America’s involvement in the Second World War is a long time, and the two things apparently have very little relation with one another. Yet there is a thread connecting them, if it is nothing more than the thin strand that runs through human affairs, tying the man of the 1930’s with the men of the 1860’s; and one is somehow compelled to think about it in examining the career of General George Catlett Marshall, who became America’s top military man just in time to handle the momentous matters that led the United States to go to war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany and the Japanese Empire.

Romantic on the Loose Who Started the War? Heritage of the War


In the hierarchy of art collectors there are definite social strata as sacred as those of any ant colony. At the top, perhaps, belong the collectors of Chinese jades and oil paintings. Then come the fanciers of antique furniture. Dead Sea scrolls, and Baccarat paper-weights. At the bottom of this social register languish the accumulators of cigar bands and the picture post-card collectors. But if he is close to the lowest rung of the acquisitive society, unrecognized by the museums and Duvecns, the post-card collector is nevertheless a kind of historian and, even if accidentally, serves a useful purpose.

The debut of the picture post card in the United States occurred at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. With its advent began a hobby and a collecting spree that whirled unabated until shortly after the First World War. Then suddenly the post-card album, a book second in importance only to the family Bible, vanished from atop the player piano.

The border line between the known and the unknown is very hazy. History is in one compartment, legend and myth are in another, and between the two there is an undiscovered world whose margin, as Tennyson remarked, fades forever and forever as we move. We know a little of our past, and much less of our future; somewhere between what we know and what men who lived before us have dreamed, there is a haunted half-world out of which we can never quite make sense but which we can never possibly ignore. We are bounded in myth and legend, and it is never really possible for us to determine just what we know and what we wish that we knew.

Who knew about America, for instance, before anyone had given the place a name or really seen it? Why is that word magical? Just where, before history had its dawn, did someone know about it, touch its shores, and make out of it something that stirred the pulse and quickened the imagination? Was all of this just a figment of the imagination, or did someone—centuries before Columbus—know something that got lost in the mist of prehistory?


It is true, of course, that once the leap is made the things that may immediately come of it are expensive, disillusioning, and (for the time being, at least) very costly. Irishmen, Vikings, and Heaven knows who else had a look at America. What they had seen, other men set out to exploit, and their exploitation turned out to be somewhat bloody. The number of men who died trying to find America is much less than the number who died trying to determine who was going to own America once it had been found, and the moment of vision was followed by a long period in which it became painfully evident that the way of the explorer is much less costly than the way of the exploiter.

As a sample, there is The French and Indian Wars , by Edward P. Hamilton, which tells of the desperate struggle for North America waged by the French and English people who came over to have a good go at the marvelous land which the explorers had opened.


Sirs:

When an historical mystery is exposed to your readers, it is apparently likely to be resolved. In your April, 1961, issue, you published an article entitled “Brother Against Brother” based on the letters I furnished you between two of my ancestors. My great-grandfather, John C. Pratt of Boston, was writing his brother, Jabez David Pratt of Baltimore. As the Civil War drew on … the brothers argued over the increasingly bitter issues, the correspondence angrily broke off, and you noted: “So the story ends. … whether the two men adjusted their differences and struck hands once more as brothers … this, like so many other questions arising out of the Civil War, goes off into mystery.”

Since publication, however, I have received a number of letters. The first came from Mr. Owen A. Sheffield of Hackensack, New Jersey, who … is compiling a history of Dun & Bradstreet … He has kindly sent me copies of letters taken from facsimiles of the copying-press book of R. G. Dun, who in 1865 bought out J. D. Pratt & Co. completely. …


Likewise, when an historical generalization is made in our pages, it is likely to be challenged. In our December, 1961, issue Virginius Dabney described “Jack Jouett’s Ride,” the heroic all-night gallop in 1781 whereby a devoted Virginia patriot saved Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the rebel cause from capture by the British. The flip subhead we supplied under Mr. Dabney’s title read: “His feat was more daring than Paul Revere’s, but Virginia’s hero had, alas, no Longfellow.”

To Mr. Dabney’s office at the Richmond Times-Dispatch came the following letter:

“In your search for a poem, did you ever come across one by Mrs. Julia Johnson Davis, late of Norfolk? It was published about ten or twelve years ago in a collection of hers called The Garnet Ring. It begins like this:

Above the rush of wind and water could be heard their hymns of praise as they sprang from the shallop onto the rock, the stern-faced men in wide-brimmed pot hats, the women modestly poised between this world and the next. So the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth seemed to generations of American schoolchildren nurtured on Felicia Hemans’ poem with its later visual embodiments in the paintings of Henry Sargent and Peter F. Rothermel.

Enjoy our work? Help us keep going.

Now in its 75th year, American Heritage relies on contributions from readers like you to survive. You can support this magazine of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it by donating today.

Donate