March 2011

The late-18th- and early-19th-century U.S. soldier James Wilkinson enjoyed “one of the most extraordinary careers as a secret agent in the history of espionage,” writes Andro Linklater. Code-named Agent 13, Wilkinson provided Spanish authorities in North America with important information about American intentions and capabilities, even while he served as commander in chief of the U.S. Army. As Linklater also points out in this fascinating biography, Wilkinson’s actions were not exactly secret. Many people in the young republic—including its first four presidents—had reason to suspect his loyalties.

Family photographs have long played an important role in accessing the past—and now an innovative web-based multi-media project has started archiving thousands of African-American family photos in an attempt to explore lives and history through this uniquely intimate lens.

Digital Diaspora Family Reunion is the brainchild of Thomas Allen Harris, a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He is on a campaign to encourage African Americans to share the contents of their old family albums with the world via the web.

“We’re taking these images out of attics and shoe boxes and making them part of the public record,” says Harris, “so we can assemble a more complete idea of African-American life as well as American life in general.” Until recently, says Harris, the work of both professional and amateur African-American photographers has rarely been preserved and interpreted by archives, museums, historical societies, and similar repositories.

At the height of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, former All-American football star Ron Kramer was watching the news on television. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, chief of U.S. ground forces in the Persian Gulf, was detailing an assault by his forces into Iraq, using arrows and diagrams to illustrate the maneuvers. Kramer, who had played tight end for Green Bay from 1957 to 1964, squinted at his television screen. He had seen those arrows before.

“I wrote a letter to General Schwarzkopf,” Kramer says. “I sent ‘49’ to him and told him he had plagiarized Vince. He was at Army when Vince was there.”

Schwarzkopf indeed had played football at West Point, and he wrote back with his memories of the famous coach. The “49” to which Kramer referred was a basic sweep play in which the halfback runs around the flank of the offensive line. It became synonymous with the great Packers teams of the 1960s, and sportswriters soon called it the “Lombardi sweep.”

Two hundreds years ago, Meriwether Lewis, the leader of one of America’s most important expeditions, met an ignoble end at an obscure inn near Hohenwald, Tennessee. Two years earlier, the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s triumphant return to St. Louis—after an arduous and extraordinary three-year journey to the Pacific and back—had thrilled the young nation. The 35-year-old Lewis was returning east to deliver his journals to his friend and expedition sponsor, President Thomas Jefferson, when he died from a gunshot wound to the head at Grinder’s Stand Inn.

Both the president and William Clark believed that depression had caused Lewis to take his life, although rumors and some circumstantial evidence suggest that it may have been murder. Buried hastily not far from the inn, Lewis received neither military nor civilian honors.

This October 7, the Lewis and Clark Heritage Trail Foundation will conduct a national memorial service at the gravesite, complete with full military honors. A highlight will be the unveiling of a bronze bust of Lewis that was commissioned from Missouri sculptor Harry Weber.

Times change. History changes. Take Monticello: Thomas Jefferson’s storied home and temple to the republic’s founding has just this year gained a spectacular 42,000-square-foot visitor complex that replaces the small off-site facility. I recently entered the flagstone courtyard, wondering which of five stunning “pavilions” to enter first, and had a flash of déjà vu.

Decades ago, I was first guided through the house by a lady of gentle breeding with the silk-soft accent for which the Old Dominion was famous. While her poise and style were memorable, she proved unable to answer questions more difficult than the color of Jefferson’s hair (red) or the number of words in the Declaration of Independence (1333).

When I revisited Monticello this summer, our T-shirted guide provided both relevant dates (construction began in 1769) and facts (the plantation comprised 5000 acres and a workforce of 120 slaves, one of whom, she volunteered, had borne some of Jefferson’s children). Now, there was an established fact that my guide of yore had never probably even imagined.

Equal Pay, Twice the Profit

It was not surprising to me to read in Mr. Huntington’s article in the Summer 2009 issue, “The Emancipation Question,” that it was cheaper to produce sugar with ‘free’ labor than it would be with slave labor. It always seemed to me that slavery introduced far too many additional costs in terms of ‘getting’ and ‘keeping’ the slaves; plus it provided a disincentive to hard work.

That has led me to a hypothesis that there was also an economic, as well as social and moral, cost to segregation and racism prior to the modern Civil Rights movement, particularly in the South. The economic power of Southern African Americans was evident from the success of the Birmingham bus boycott—the buses discovered they needed the “black” dimes as much as the “white” dimes. Just as Henry Ford maintained that by paying his workers, he made more money, because they could afford to buy his cars, wouldn’t formerly segregated American businesses have profited more from a strengthened black workforce and its consumerism?

Lovers of Honor

We don’t hear the word “honor” used much these days; it may seem a quaint and old-fashioned notion in some circles, gone the way of dueling, cavalry charges, and trench warfare. Americans were skeptical about President Nixon’s plea for “peace with honor” in Vietnam, since we seemed neither willing to fight to win nor end the sacrifice if it was not worth the cost. Was honor merely a public façade, a dangerous narcissism?

James Bowman, a scholar and former American editor of The Times Literary Supplement, recently wrote a thoughtful book entitled Honor: A History in which he notes that honor has virtually disappeared “from the working vocabularies of English and other European languages.” Mr. Bowman laments we are living in “a post-honor society,” with no widely accepted notion of honor against which a given person can be measured.

 A Patriot Mother’s Tale

I enjoyed Edwin G. Burrows’s “Patriots or Terrorists?” in your Fall 2008 issue. As an archivist at the Historical Society of Dauphin County, New York, which houses the Graydon Collection, the reference on p. 58 to Captain Alexander Graydon’s imprisonment in 1776 jumped out at me. I wanted to share the remarkable story of his mother, Rachel Marks Graydon.

After hearing that the prisoners were being badly treated, Rachel Graydon traveled to Philadelphia to obtain passes for safe conduct to British lines from John Hancock, the President of Congress, and Gen. George Washington. Crossing over into Brunswick, New Jersey, she met British soldiers who brought her to Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who permitted her to go to New York aboard a British sloop. 

In New York, Graydon applied directly to Sir William Howe at the British Headquarters, pleading with him as a mother for her son’s freedom. She vowed, “If I have any influence over him he shall never take up arms again.” General Howe, after a bit of hesitation, released him. Mother and son traveled back to Philadelphia together. 

—Louise Owen, Harrisburg, PA

Revolutionary War Prison Ships

The sad, inhuman, and long-untold history of the Revolutionary War 

prisoners of war, “Patriots or Terrorists?” which occurred in New York and Brooklyn, as told in American Heritage’s Fall 2008, issue was exceptional.

It brought back memories of childhood excursions my Mother took us on Sunday afternoons. We would walk to many of the Borough’s Parks, including Ft. Green Park, and home again, because we had no car. Before leaving Ft. Green Park, Mother always stopped at a 200-foot tower, a monument to the Revolutionary War sailors and soldiers who died, condemned by England to the “hell ship prisons” in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn, and Manhattan waters.

—Marguerite C. Ajootian

White Stone, VA

I take issue with the description of the British prison ship Jersey in the article “Patriots or Terrorists?” in your Fall 2008 issue. The Jersey is described as “a fourth-rate frigate of 64 guns. No frigate in the 18th-century carried 64 guns. And Jersey did not carry her guns “on two decks below the main deck.” Since ships carried guns on their main decks, that would have made Jersey a three-decker. 

In late 16th-century London, a group of curious Elizabethan courtiers gathered around a sheaf of watercolors and murmured in wonder. A chief Herowans wife of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years exhibited no spectacular artistry, yet did provide something extraordinary: the first representational glimpse of the New World. Aside from a few sailors and a handful of intrepid adventurers, no Europeans had laid eyes on North America or its inhabitants, either live or in representation, and so these images were akin today to seeing people who had never been photographed before.

The painting revealed a well-proportioned Algonquian mother carrying a gourd filled with water for her family, a smile lighting up her tattooed face, as if in warm conversation with the artist. She wore several strings of pearls (much treasured in England), while her daughter showed her a doll, a red glass bead necklace, and a gold pendant, which some Englishmen had given her and were the only evidence of Europe in the scene.