January 2011

On the twentieth of November, 1945, the trial began “in a high solemn moment of extreme importance!’ as the Soviet member, General I. T. Nikitchenko. put it. Geoffrey Lawrence, the British member, made a brief statement before the indictment was read as required by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (it took nearly two days to read it in four languages).

The strangest romance in I he annals of the Old South culminated in North Carolina, not many miles west of modern Winston-Salem, in 1843, when Chang and Eng Bunker, slaveholders and adoptive southerners, married Sarah Ann and Adelaide Yeats, daughters of a Virginia clergyman. It was by necessity a double ceremony.

Today the memory of the bridegrooms is celebrated by a double headstone over their single grave in the cemetery of the Baptist church of White Plains, North Carolina. From great quarries nearby, granite has gone to mark many other graves and to build such monuments as the Wright Memorial at Kitty Hawk and the Arlington Memorial Bridge across the Potomac. But Chang and Eng’s real monument is not of the familiar Carolina granite, though it may one day prove as enduring. It is the term “Siamese twins.”

Thomas Jefferson was impatient. Work on the United States Capitol had been progressing only fitfully since George Washington had approved the architectural plans in 1793; and now, in the fall of 1803, things seemed to be moving at a glacial pace. The north wing, to be sure, had been finished for several years and was in use by the Senate—in fact, the floor beams were already beginning to rot and the roof leaked badly. Meanwhile the south wing, intended for the House of Representatives, existed only as a crude temporary structure built on a more or less permanent base; and the middle section was just a confused network of uncompleted foundations. In March, 1803, President Jefferson had appointed a new architect to push the work along; yet here it was November and nothing palpable had been accomplished.

It began one day early in January when a Negro named Robert Fox boarded a streetcar in Louisville, Kentucky, dropped his coin into the fare box, and sat down in the white section of the car. Ordered to move, he refused, and the driver threw him off the car. Shortly after, Fox filed a charge of assault and battery against the streetcar company in the federal district court, claiming that separate seating policies were illegal and the driver’s actions were therefore improper. The district judge instructed the jury that under federal law common carriers must serve all passengers equally without regard to race. So instructed, the jury found the company rules to be invalid and awarded damages of fifteen dollars (plus $72.80 in legal costs) to Mr. Fox.

The American Civil War produced nobody quite like William Tecumseh Sherman, the world’s first modern “man of war.” Not only was he a great commander; he also evolved fresh strategic techniques, and concepts developed from study of his operations had a tar-reaching influence in the Second World War.

Sherman showed both the qualities and characteristics of genius. He was tall, lean, angular, loose-jointed, careless and unkempt in dress, with a restlessness of manner emphasized by his endless chain-smoking of cigars, and an insatiable curiosity, a raciness of language, and a fondness for picturesque phrases. But he was a blend of contrasting qualities. His dynamic energy went along with philosophical reflectiveness. He had faith in his own vision but a doubt of his own abilities that could only be dispelled gradually by actual achievement. He combined democratic tastes and manners with a deep and sardonic distrust of democracy. His rebelliousness was accompanied by a profound respect for law and order. His logical ruthlessness was coupled with compassion.

I have many resons to make me love thee whereof I will name two,” Margaret Winthrop once wrote her husband. “First because thou lovest God, and secondly because that thou lovest me. If these two were wantinge all the rest would be eclipsed.”

Speaking to an audience in Richmond early in January, 1863, Jefferson Davis undertook to remind all southerners of the oppressive weight which a Northern conquest would inevitably bring to them. The weight was being felt, as he spoke, within much less than one hundred miles of the Confederate capital, and President Davis was eloquent about it.

“The Northern portion of Virginia,” he remarked, “has been ruthlessly desolated—the people not only deprived of the means of subsistence, but their household property destroyed and every indignity which the base imagination of a merciless foe could suggest inflicted without regard to age, sex or condition.”