January 2011

A Haunted Half-World— … and the Fight to Own It

Among the many treasures left behind by the highly literate Chief Executive, Woodrow Wilson, is a storehouse of 1,400 letters between him and his first wife. Ellen Axson Wilson, whom he married in 1885 and who died in the White House in 1914, during his first term.

It is something of a historical event that a representative selection from these letters is now to be published, skillfully edited in a book entitled The Priceless Gift , by Mrs. Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, youngest daughter of Woodrow and Ellen Wilson. It offers a macthless and sometimes surprising insight into the character of one of our most famous Presidents. In the letters to the girl he loved, Wilson exposed his deepest feelings without concealment or restraint. Many of his well-known traits—idealism, intensity, uncompromising integrity, persistence—are run amply seen; but unfamiliar fucets are also revealed—drollery, self-mockery, even jealousy.

In the history of religion in the United States, surely no story is more astounding than that of the Mormons, or, as they style themselves, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their chronicle has a Biblical ring, for it contains not only a revelation and a martyred prophet but also a pilgrimage through a wilderness and a discovery, after long sufferings, of a promised land. It starts with a few disciples, then a few score; today it reckons its numbers close to two millions, many of them beyond the seas, with fresh converts added daily. Yet all this is the work of barely a century and a third —as if the whole Old Testament could be crowded into the span of but four or five begats, and Moses were the contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain.

On the other side of the siege lines lay the nearly beaten Confederates, for whom Petersburg and Appomattox were a sad climax to four years of gallant effort. Something of their spirit is preserved in the following excerpts from the memoirs of Berry Benson, a young sharpshooter who with his brother, Blackwood, served in General Samuel McGowan’s First South Carolina Brigade. Edited by his daughter-in-law, Susan Williams Benson, the memoirs will soon be published by the University of Georgia Press as Berry Benson’s Civil War Book.

—Ed.

On Sunday, April 2, 1865 … we learned that five miles to our left, at the very point held by McGowan’s Brigade all winter, the enemy had stormed and carried the defenses of Petersburg. Our corps commander, General A. P. Hill, had been killed. After stubborn resistance, Fort Gregg had fallen. Petersburg and Richmond were being evacuated; the whole army was in retreat. …

The most damnable outrage ever!” the Memphis Scimitar called it. President Theodore I Roosevelt, it was learned, had entertained a I black man at dinner at the White House, and I the reaction was about what might have been expected in America in 1901. One southern newspaper described the affair as “a crime equal to treason”; an editor warned that “no Southern woman with proper respect would now accept an invitation to the White House.” And “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the irascible, oneeyed, unsuccessful farmer who was now a senator from South Carolina, spoke for the militant racists: “Entertaining that nigger,” he said, would “necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in tiie South before they will learn their place again.”

No matter what the record books seem to say, John F. Kennedy was not elected President of the United States on November 8, 1960, by 34,221,485 votes over Richard M. Nixon’s 34,108,684. On that Election Day, 1960, John F. Kennedy merely won a popularity contest.

He was elected President on December 19, 1960, by 303 votes over Nixon’s 219.

He could have won the November popularity contest and still have lost the December election to his opponent. That has happened—to Grover Cleveland in 1888, for example.

He could have won the November popularity contest, missed election in December by getting fewer than the 269 votes he needed (albeit more than his nearest rival), and lost the Presidency in January Io Nixon. That, too, has happened, a couple of limes. (In 1876 Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the November election by 264,292 votes, missed the December canvass by one vote, and eventually saw his Republican rival, Rutherford B. Hayes, inaugurated as President.)

As the raft on which she drifted carried her down the half-tamed Ohio, Susan Blythe envisioned bright futures for the child that stirred within her. If the destiny of any emerging life were in truth unpredictable, surely, here in a world of huge skies and endless resources, the auguries were good. It was to find these auguries that she and her Scottish husband had adventured from her native Ireland. Far from Europe’s ancient, killing winters, her baby would inhabit a springtime world.