During a bloody spate of Indian uprisings against the British in the Great Lakes region, Gen. Jeffery Amherst proposed a novel means of curbing the violence. In July, Amherst suggested to Col. Henry Bouquet that he provide Indians with blankets contaminated with smallpox. The idea intrigued Bouquet, but in the end he relied on more conventional weapons such as musketry and bayonets.
1838
One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
The July issue of the learned North American Review included an acerbic essay on fashion history by one Charles W. Brewster. The apparel of the ancient Egyptians, wrote Brewster, was “certainly distinguished by bad taste, but there was a harmony in its badness.” By the fifteenth century “costumes became still more fanciful and grotesque.” Brewster was scarcely more tolerant of the sartorial idiosyncrasies of his own time: “All antiquity boasted nothing in the way of head-gear so absurd as the hats of the present day. . . . One great reason why Americans stoop so much, is, that, living in a country where high winds prevail, they are obliged to walk stooping half the time, to prevent the wind’s blowing their hats off.”
The Great United States Exploring Expedition set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, on August 18 under the command of Lt. Charles Wilkes. With six vessels and 440 men, the Wilkes Expedition would in the course of four years circle the globe, survey 280 islands, map 800 miles of coastline in the Pacific Northwest, and confirm the existence of Antarctica, surviving perils ranging from brutal polar storms to Fiji cannibals.
Wilkes himself was a harsh and arrogant commander. He had little use for the civilian “scientifics” on board, and he continually suspected his officers of conspiracy. When his promotion to captain failed to come through by the time the expedition departed, he promoted himself: once at sea, he appeared on deck in a captain’s uniform. The expedition’s return in 1842 was marked not by fanfare but by a volley of court-martial charges between Wilkes and members of his crew.
Despite such peccadilloes, the Wilkes Expedition managed to bring back thousands of zoological and botanical specimens, native artifacts, and a wealth of important scientific findings. Expedition scientists conducted geological surveys that helped formulate early theories of continental drift, as well as pathbreaking studies in anthropology and oceanography. Important astronomical observations were made from the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and nautical charts prepared by Wilkes himself were in use as late as World War II.
1863
One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
After their hard-fought victory at the battle of Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee led his troops northward, through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. The battered Army of the Potomac followed. On July 1 the two armies clashed near the small town of Gettysburg. The Army of the Potomac had a new and untried commander in Gen. George G. Meade. Three days before the battle, Gen. Joe Hooker had resigned his command in a dispute with Lincoln. The early fighting favored the Rebels, who drove the bluecoats back through the town to the high ground south of it.
While Lee uncharacteristically hesitated, the Federals had time to concentrate troops and secure their position on Cemetery Ridge. Late in the afternoon of July 2, the Confederates struck hard against the Union left, leaving thousands dead in wheat field and peach orchard and a maze of rocks known as Devil’s Den. But in the end the Union ranks held. The next day, in a last, desperate bid, forty-two gray regiments started toward Cemetery Ridge in the doomed and gallant charge that will forever bear the name of one of the generals who led it, George Pickett. Although artillery pounded the attackers, inflicting appalling losses, the Rebels pushed forward until they reached the Union line. But they couldn’t hold; in the end five thousand men managed to get back to the place where fifteen thousand had started out not long before.
The Army of Northern Virginia was finished as a fighting force. Lee retreated on July 4. Meade was reluctant to pursue. “We had them within our grasp,” said a frustrated President Lincoln. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the Army move.”
But the North was nearly as shaken by victory as the South was by defeat; the three days’ fighting had cost Meade some twenty-three thousand casualties—over a quarter of his force. All told, more than fifty thousand men were killed, wounded, or captured at Gettysburg.
By the time Meade’s army was ready to go back on the offensive, the Army of Northern Virginia had retreated to the other side of the Potomac River, ending the last Confederate offensive in the North.
Less dramatic than Gettysburg, and far less bloody, Gen. Ulysses Grant’s siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, played an equally crucial role in turning the tide against the South. Grant and his army held the strategically vital city in a choke hold. As one Confederate soldier put it, “A cat could not have crept out of Vicksburg without being discovered.”
Gen. John Pemberton and his thirty thousand Rebel soldiers held out for two months, but when supplies dwindled to nothing, there was little choice. On July 3, as Pickett and his men charged up Cemetery Ridge, Pemberton was discussing terms with his besiegers. He surrendered the city the next day. The fall of Vicksburg put the Mississippi River into Northern hands and divided the Confederacy in half.
Sam Houston, the soldier and statesman who enjoined Texans to “Remember the Alamo!” during the battle of San Jacinto, died in his Huntsville home on July 26 at the age of seventy. The Tennessee native had served as the president of the short-lived Republic of Texas and then, after statehood, as one of its first senators. In 1859, Houston was elected governor. Though his anti-secessionist stance threw him into disfavor with his fellow Texans, forcing him to resign the governorship in 1861, Houston passed away in true Lone Star style. As his wife Margaret sat at his bedside, Houston uttered his last words: “Texas! Texas! … Margaret!”
The border war between antislavery Kansas and proslavery Missouri reached its grim peak on the morning of August 21 when a band of 448 Missouri guerrillas led by William Clarke Quantrill rode into Lawrence, Kansas, a center of abolitionist activity. Quantrill’s raiders set fire to most of the town’s buildings and butchered more than 150 people.
The Phrenological Journal of New York published a special issue in August. “Noses Illustrated” featured “Noses of Americans, English, Irish, French, Germans, Hungarians, Russians, Negroes, &c.”
1888
One Hundred Years Ago
The United States Patent Office issued two patents in August that changed—to a degree—the way we all live. Theophilus Van Kannel received a patent on August 7 for his “storm-door structure,” popularly known as the revolving door. Van Kannel’s other inventions included the “changeable fulcrum door check” —the device that keeps doors from slamming—and “Witching Waves,” once a popular ride at Coney Island and other amusement parks.
On August 21, William Seward Burroughs was issued patent No. 388,116 for a “calculating-machine,” the first commercially practical adding machine. An earlier version of the machine failed because it was too difficult to use; only Burroughs himself could consistently pull the lever at the speed required to yield correct sums. The improved adding machine soon became an essential business tool, and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company went on to play an instrumental role in the development of the modern digital computer.
Tariffs and temperance emerged as hot issues in the summer of the 1888 presidential campaign. The Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, ran on a protectionist platform that called for higher tariff duties and a repeal of taxes on tobacco and alcohol. The “free whiskey” platform provoked indignation among adherents of the growing temperance movement. “The declaration is an illustration of the decadence of the party whose just boast was that it was a party of moral ideas,” complained an editorial in the August 25 issue of Harper’s Weekly. Meanwhile, rumors circulated that the Hoosier candidate’s wife made “the best claret punches that ever quenched thirst in Indiana.”
1913
Seventy-five Years Ago
Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree”) was published in August in Poetry magazine. “Trees” became Kilmer’s most celebrated poem, though critical reaction to it was decidedly mixed. Heywood Broun called it “one of the most annoying pieces of verse within my knowledge. …”
The author Jack London (The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf) wrote furiously and went deeply into debt to finance his Wolf House, a sprawling home of stone and wood built among the looming redwoods of London’s California ranch. On the night of August 21, mere days before London and his wife were to move in, a mysterious blaze destroyed London’s Xanadu. The thirty-seven-yearold writer watched forlornly while the turpentine-soaked wood burned with an eerie blue flame. As dawn rose over the , smoking ruins of his estate, he simply said, “Tomorrow we will start to rebuild.” But his failing health and crippling debt prevented him from keeping his vow.
1938
Fifty Years Ago
The millionaire industrialist Howard Hughes set a record for flying around the world when his twin-engine Lockheed 14 plane, New York World’s Fair 1939, returned to New York’s Floyd Bennett Field on July 14. Hughes and his four-man crew made hurried pit stops in Paris, Moscow, Siberia, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis to complete their global circuit in three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes, cutting Wiley Post’s 1933 record in half.
Three days after Hughes’s flight, Douglas Corrigan unobtrusively took off from the same airfield. His destination: Los Angeles. Twenty-eight hours later Corrigan’s 165-horsepower single-engine Curtiss Robin touched down—in Dublin, Ireland. “Wrong-Way” Corrigan, as he was soon dubbed, had apparently misread his compass and flown east, crossing the Atlantic in twenty-eight hours, with a leaky fuel tank to boot. Aviation authorities had repeatedly denied Corrigan a permit to fly across the Atlantic. Whether the flight was an honest mistake or a clever ploy is still up in the air.
1963
Twenty-five Years Ago
The New York Court of Appeals banned Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in a 4-3 decision. Judge John F. Scileppi called the controversial 1934 novel “a compilation of a series of sordid narrations dealing with sex in a manner designed to appeal to the prurient interest.” The high courts of Massachusetts and California had recently permitted the book in their states; the latter court compared the obscenity charges against the book to the “incantations of forgotten witch doctors.”
Representatives from the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the limited nuclear-testban treaty on August 5 in Moscow. The treaty, aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear war and lessening risks from radioactive fallout, prohibited the detonation of nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater. It did not ban underground testing, because of unresolvable disputes over verification procedures. In a nationwide television broadcast, President Kennedy declared the treaty “an important first step—a step toward peace—a step toward reason—a step away from war.”
More than two hundred thousand demonstrators gathered in the nation’s capital on August 28 for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Planned by representatives from civil rights organizations, church groups, and organized labor, the march was a peaceful but emphatic call for social reform.
In the South, efforts by blacks and civil rights activists to end segregation of schools, restaurants, and public facilities were meeting with terrorism, lynching, and police brutality. The Kennedy administration’s civil rights record thus far had been more a matter of rhetoric than action. March leaders demanded passage of the proposed Civil Rights Act, the integration of public schools, and new laws barring job discrimination.
The demonstration reached its climax when Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., mounted a podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
“I have a dream,” King told his listeners, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.... that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
