February 2011

A few generations ago, American colonial history centered on a single narrative that flowed from Jamestown in 1607 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Today, early American history has blossomed into a braided narrative with many story lines.

A starting point might be four small beginnings, far apart in space but close in time. On April 26, 1607, Captain John Smith and his comrades founded Jamestown in Virginia. Four months later, in mid-August 1607, Captain George Popham established a New England colony near Pemaquid in Maine. The following year, during the spring and summer of 1608, Spanish colonists, led by Captain Martínez de Montoya, built a permanent settlement at Santa Fe in the region they called New Mexico. And on July 3, 1608, Captain Samuel de Champlain founded the first permanent colony in New France at Quebec. The stories that began to unfold at these places shaped much of modern North America.

What the USS Monitor’s crewmen remembered most about the moments before the battle on the morning of March 9, 1862, was the silence.

“Every one was at his post, fixed like a statue,” Paymaster William Keeler recalled. “The most profound silence reigned” on board the ironclad, and “if there had been a coward heart there its throb would have been audible, so intense was the stillness.” All 58 men on board the Monitor had reason for the deepest foreboding. Their vessel, untested in battle, had barely survived its maiden voyage from New York to Virginia, where its Confederate foe, the former Merrimack, now reborn as the CSS Virginia, lay in wait.

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s first day in office, a letter from Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, landed on the new president’s desk, informing him the garrison would run out of provisions in a month or six weeks. Lincoln had to make his first, and one of his most important, decisions as commander in chief. Would he keep his inaugural vow to “hold, occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government” at the risk of starting a war that might drive the rest of the slave states into the Confederacy? Or would he heed the advice of the Southern Unionists, Northern conservatives, and William Seward, his own secretary of state, and withdraw the troops to preserve the peace?

 Konnichiwa, Snoopy! 

In 1955, when I was 17, the Navy sent me to Naval Air Station Atsugi in Japan to serve as a photographer, where I shot everything from President Eisenhower’s visit to various crime scenes. I’ll never forget how my homesickness lifted when I came across Peanuts comic strips published in a Japanese paperback! I was surprised to learn that the book sold very well there, perhaps because the Japanese were interested in international events and different cultures. But the real reason was probably because Snoopy and his friends are so universally amusing. Your tribute to Peanuts in the Fall issue brought back a lot of memories.

— D. E. MacAllister 

Newport News, VA

Lessons Learned in Korea?

Robert Dallek’s article, “Wrong Turns in Korea” in the Fall 2010 issue, pointed out that “the Forgotten War” ended in an armistice, not a fully fledged peace treaty. Since then, ship sinkings, missile launches, presumed nuclear tests, balloons filled with propaganda messages, and assorted other aggressive acts make it abundantly clear that this last arena of the Cold War remains mortally dangerous.

 In the shadow of Independence Hall and a half block from the Liberty Bell, on some of this nation’s most hallowed ground, sits the brand new glass-and-terra-cotta National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened this November. It’s somehow fitting, this juxtaposition of a museum devoted to one of the world’s most persecuted peoples, and the colonial hallways where our founding fathers banged out the grand ideals of religious tolerance. 

The museum celebrates the special relationship that Jewish Americans have had with this country beginning with a display of President Washington’s 1790 letter to the congregation of the Newport, Rhode Island, synagogue, which reads “The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It then runs through the Jewish American  role in the Revolution, Civil War, western expansion, business-empire building, the world wars, and on to the present day.

The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., has opened the second half of its Civil War exhibit, Discovering the Civil War, which includes a Union certificate of service, left, that went to the mother of a man in the 30th Iowa.

Electronic technician Ed Anderson makes last-minute checks of the new Illinois Gallery at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, Illinois, which displays a Civil War timeline superimposed over Fort Sumter in flames. The exhibit, “Team of Rivals,” showcases Lincoln’s decisio- making as war broke out. It runs until August 15, 2011. www.alplm.org

 First Family: Abigail and John Adams

By Joseph J. Ellis

Best-selling author of American Sphinx and Founding Brothers, Ellis admires the most prolific political couple in American history. John and Abigail Adams raised four children (losing two others) and produced 1200 letters. Combining historical biography, political history, and quotidian romance, First Family is both learned and chatty. Ellis arranges the letters into a chronological double portrait as he mines them to explore the nature of this marriage and the structure of its success, which lay in these soul mates’ intimacy in every realm: the intellectual, emotional, and physical. In his last years, Adams tried to organize his papers. Ellis writes, “These letters, spread all around him, were his ticket into the American pantheon of the original postmythical hero. And he was the only one who would be admitted with his wife alongside him.” (Knopf, 320 pages, $27.95)

JFK Day by Day: A Chronicle of the 1,036 Days of John F. Kennedy’s Presidency

By Terry Golway and Les Krantz

"November 17, 1864—Three of our men were frozen to death last night in the stockade! Large fires are going, but many are so reduced in vitality that they easily froze notwithstanding,” wrote Union Private Robert Knox Sneden while imprisoned at Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia, an overflow camp for the infamous Andersonville prison 160 miles to its west.

Historians know much about this prison camp because Sneden, a 32-year-old former mapmaker and member of the 40th New York Regiment, kept a meticulous diary and drew detailed sketches with pencils on scraps of paper. (After the war, he would turn more than 500 of his drawings into watercolors.) Seven hundred men died of starvation and disease in Camp Lawton during its six weeks of operations. Yet after the war, the camp’s name and location disappeared from popular memory. That’s proved a blessing in disguise for the archaeologists who have recently discovered the fort on the grounds of Magnolia Springs State Park.