January 2011

“Is there anything under the sun which people will not collect?” the famous French novelist Balzac once asked. “They collect buttons, walking sticks, fans, political pamphlets and newspapers. One day,” he added contemptuously, “they may even collect posters.”

At the Edge of Glory Rock of Chickamauga The Other Hill

One of the fascinating subchapters of history is the story of the man who did not quite make it—the talented man, richly deserving, who rises very near to the top and then, in a sudden moment of crisis, sees all that he has gained slip away from him. Looking back afterward we may see clearly that his solid achievements greatly outweigh his failures. Taken all in all, his career has been a success. Yet the real pinnacle eludes him, and instead of coming down in history as one of the country’s giants, he is remembered simply as a good competent man who lacked something—good fortune, perhaps, or the capacity for doing precisely the right thing at a time of extreme pressure.

Sometimes, with such a man, a full reappraisal is called for. History can render faulty verdicts; now and then a man is fully entitled to a sort of posthumous promotion. In other cases history’s verdict seems fair enough, but we are left with the tantalizing realization of the part that luck can play in the life of a man or a nation.

The man who succeeded Rosecrans, of course, was General George H. Thomas, who saved the day at Chickamauga and was known as “The Rock” forever after; a man whose fame was immeasurably enhanced by the very defeat which put Rosecrans’ own fame under an enduring cloud. Yet if Thomas won national acclaim for what he did at Chickamauga, he remains another general who, almost unaccountably, was somehow deprived of the full measure of recognition he might have had. His record contains no blots, yet he was obscured by others: the towering reputations of men like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan put just a little shadow on him.

Perhaps one trouble with Thomas was that he had no important backing. He came from Virginia, and his state had seceded; he stayed with the Union, but when the war began, his state had no important representatives in Washington to push his cause. His merits spoke for themselves, but nobody else bothered to speak for them; at one point, when his name was up for promotion, Lincoln is supposed to have remarked, “Let the Virginian wait.”

Back to Chickamauga again: this time to take a look at the Confederate side. One of the gifted soldiers there was a withdrawn, somewhat cantankerous man named Daniel Harvey Hill, who commanded an army corps under Braxton Bragg and who, like most of Bragg’s other top commanders, emerged from the battle feeling that the Confederacy had missed a great opportunity because of the failings of the man at the top.

“I suppose you have read some large stories about the mines but they arc not half of them true; no two men tell the same story. Some men make $16,000 in one day, but it is only one chance out of a thousand; the average is from ½ to 2 ounces per day.…I shall stay up to the mines all winter, if I can make an ounce a day.”

— From a miner’s letter, September, 1849 .

“We left Panama the 7th of March on the Bark Emily…we had very light winds and long calm…the thermometer stood at from 100 to 120. We had not been out long when disease and Death made its appearance among us. There was from 30 to 50 sick at one time myself among that number. There was from 2 to 3 shoved over board some days, some of them before they had fairly breathed their last. There was seventeen died before we got half way…”

— From a letter describing a voyage north from the Isthmus of Panama, 1852 .

“You can have no idea of the suffering among the emigrants traveling down the Humboldt and crossing the desert for more than one hundred miles before reaching the Sink…There is no grass of any consequence, the water is slippery stuff resembling weak lye as much as anything; from the Sink to Carson River is a distance of forty miles, the last twelve deep sand.”

— An emigrant’s description of hardships on the overland trail .