January 2011

Almost every day the strange figure, swathed in ancient black, might be seen walking down the street toward the Chemical National Bank. There she went directly to the vault, pulled out the trunks and bags that were stored for her under a staircase, and sat cross-legged on the floor rummaging through the masses of papers and documents that represented her fortune of more than fifty million dollars.

Between close of the Civil War and the turn of the century, a group of unique athletes soared like rockets across the American sporting scene, rising to the heights of public adulation and then sputtering into oblivion with the dawning of a less ingenuous day. The names of Adam Bogardus, Doc Carver, and Ira Paine are all but unknown today, even among well-informed sports writers; but there was a time when their names were family bywords and when royally applauded their exploits. They were a singular by-product of a passing frontier, and at least one of their number found immortality and left a permanent mark on America s culture.

The night of July 6, 1776, the smell of war mingled boldly with the smell of the salt marshes. Milford, Connecticut, was infused with a boisterous, optimistic bellicosity. That spring the rebels had driven the redcoats out of Boston; now that an enormous new British expeditionary force threatened Washington’s army at New York, all of Connecticut was signing up regiments of new levies to go down there and help, and no one doubted for a minute that the redcoats would be promptly beaten again. That night Captain Samuel Peck of the 5th Connecticut was explaining to the men of Milford that he was recruiting for an especially short tour of duty, only six months. “You’ll be out, lads, on Christmas Day.”

Editor's Note: General "Slam" Marshall served in both world wars and was the Army’s chief historian in the European theater at the time of the events related here. He wrote many books of military history, including Pork Chop Hill and the American Heritage History of World War I.

From the war, there is one story above others dear to my heart of which I have never written a line — the loony liberation of Paris.

There are other reasons for this restraint: a promise once made; the unimportance of trying to be earnest about that which is ludicrous; the vanity of the hope that fact may ever overtake fiction; and the light of the passing years on faded notes.

On a bitter Sunday morning some two hundred years ago, a frail, middle-aged man lay in the snow at the gateway to one of the Friends’ meeting houses in Philadelphia. His right leg and foot were bared to the icy winds. When passing worshippers warned him, “Benjamin, thee will catch thy death of cold!” he retorted, “Ah, you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad.”

The rebuked Quakers shrugged their shoulders and hurried into meeting. Benjamin Lay’s protests against slavery were an old story. In an era when the keeping of slaves was considered no more sinful than keeping horses or cattle, he made a full-time career of trying to convince his fellow Philadelphians that it was not possible to be both a slaveholder and a Christian. He buttonholed government officials, harangued civic leaders, and preached—usually uninvited—to church congregations of all denominations.

When ex-Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois retired from politics in 1923, he had served almost continuously in the House of Representatives for nearly fifty years, and was regarded as a master political strategist and a shrewd judge of men. But, as he sorrowfully confessed to his longtime secretary and biographer, L. White Busbey, his discernment did not extend to inventors and their get-rich-quick schemes.

I met a learned Justice of the Supreme Court who had looked into [an invention for converting base metal into gold] … He assured me that a man who had a thousand dollars to invest would become a millionaire in a few years. … I had been a man of frugal ways and had saved a thousand dollars. I had the money in bank and I took the advice of the jurist and the scientists and got in on the ground floor. The scientists and other less scientific dreamers, including myself, are no longer looking for millions but would be quite happy to get back our thousands.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : The cause of the massacre, a portion of which we are now about to exhibit to your view, cannot be given. But a short account of the condition of the country will suffice to exhibit this tragic epoch in our country’s history in its proper light.

In the dim morning light of Sunday, February 28, 1909, two men stood on a snowy bluff at Cape Columbia, a bleak promontory at the extreme northern end of Ellesmere Island. With narrowed eyes they gazed northward, across the Arctic Ocean toward the Pole, 413 nautical miles away.

The ice was the object of their observations. Below them, it extended endlessly toward the horizon, with no sign of water. To most persons the sight would have been forbidding, but to the two men it brought a sense of relief: they could see no open water to hinder them during the early part of their journey toward the North Geographic Pole.