August 2012

Bruce Catton Tribute

David Blight's enjoyable and penetrating article on Bruce Catton stirred some personal memories. I began writing for American Heritage in 1962. I had published my first book, Now We Are Enemies, the Story of Bunker Hill, in 1960, with some success. In one of my visits to the magazine, I was told that Mr. Catton would like to see me.          

I was startled and pleased. Catton was a larger than life figure for me. I had read his books with admiration, and occasional awe. I had brought his approach to my book on Bunker Hill, rooting the narrative in the personal stories on both sides of the battle line.

I was soon seated in Catton's office, reassured by his warm handshake and welcoming smile. “I read your book,” he said. “I thought you'd like to hear how good I thought it was.”

“You can take quite a lot of the credit for it,” I said. “You're the man who made me appreciate the importance of a strong narrative.”

“Are you going to do the whole war?” he asked. “It cries out for a good narrative treatment.”

From "N.C", by Andrew Wyeth

My father was a very robust, powerfully built man. But, strangely enough, his hands were delicate. One of the stories around Chadds Ford was about a milk train he would meet and how he would help the farmers lift their enormous 10-gallon cans—one in each hand—up onto the platform beside the tracks.

He was a man who admired many arts—literary, dramatic, musical. From being hardly a reader at all in his youth, he became a constant reader. My mother’s mother got him reading Thoreau. He read Tolstoy, too. And he loved poetry—Robert Frost, Keats, Emily Dickinson. He went to see O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and talked about it many times. He loved music; on Sundays after dinner, we kids would lie on the floor and listen. And of course, he loved art and artists. Rembrandt was a favorite. And he especially admired George de Forest Brush and mentioned him often to me.

Ernest Hemingway told a wonderful story about his liberation of Paris. He claimed that he was one of the first to enter the city, taking over the bars at the Crillon and Ritz hotels. Famed World War II historian S.L.A. Marshall corroborated Hemingway’s account in “How Papa Liberated Paris” in American Heritage 50 years ago. —The Editors

From the war, there is one story dear to my heart of which I have never written a line. There are reasons for this restraint: a promise once made; the unimportance of trying to be earnest about that which is ludicrous; and the blight of the passing years on faded notes.

It was the discovery of a lifetime. Helena Iles Papaioannou, a researcher with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, was meticulously combing through 1865 correspondence of the U.S. Surgeon General when she came upon the long-lost report of Charles Leale, the doctor who treated the president on the night he was shot.

While Dr. Leale’s later testimony at a congressional hearing was known to historians, his original 21-page clinical report written the day after the assassination was missing.

Leale, a 23-year-old Army doctor just out of medical school, was sitting only 40 feet from the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. He saw John Wilkes Booth jump to the stage, waving a dagger.

Hearing cries that the “president had been murdered,” and thinking that Lincoln had been stabbed, Leale rushed to the president’s box and found him paralyzed, comatose, and leaning against his wife. “O Doctor, do what you can for him,” cried Mary Lincoln several times.

The room was abuzz. More than 2000 young historians milled about, setting up exhibits featuring Harvey Milk, Charlie Chaplin, and hundreds more.

For the 32nd year, middle and high school students from around the country competed in the National History Day competition, held this year at the University of Maryland.

“The event is a wonderful chance to celebrate their work,” said Crystal Johnson, a staff coordinator in Illinois who wrote her thesis on the history of National History Day. “It showcases the skills students build over the course of the year that they’re going to take with them.”

The event began in Ohio in 1974 and became a national program in 1980 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now, more than 500,000 students participate, creating projects in one of five categories: paper, website, historical documentary, performance, or exhibit.

This year, students played off the themes of revolution, reaction, and reform. For Leah Towle, 18, and Hazlett Henderson, 16, both from Lawrence, Kansas, that meant researching racial conflicts that occurred in their own high school in the late 1960s.

Square-riggers, schooners, and sleek gray warships from around the world converged on Baltimore the second week of June for the “Star Spangled Sailabration” commemorating the bicentennial of the War of 1812’s start.

“It’s finally here,” said Jeffrey Buchheit, director of the Baltimore Heritage Area and one of many who helped plan the week of festivities. “We’ve worked four years on this, and all of a sudden it’s here.”

On a sunny, breezy afternoon, relief was evident on Buchheit’s face as he looked out from the bridge wing of the USS San Antonio, one of four U.S. Navy ships entering the harbor. From this spot in September 1814, 19 British warships poured thousands of cannon balls, exploding shells, and red-glared rockets on Fort McHenry and the nearby town.

Alexander Graham Bell did not spend the Christmas season of 1903 in the festive tradition. On the contrary, the inventor of the telephone passed the holiday engaged in a ghoulish Italian adventure involving a graveyard, old bones, and the opening of a moldy casket. Accompanied by his wife, Mabel, he had traveled by steamship from America at his own expense and made his way down to the Italian Mediterranean by train. His destination was Genoa, and his goal was to disinter the body of a minor English scientist, who had died three-quarters of a century before, and bring the remains back to America.

At the time of Bell’s trip, the ancient city of Genoa spilled down steep hillsides to the edge of the Ligurian Sea. The town was a shadowy warren of 15th-century cathedrals and narrow, twisting alleys that had seen generations of plague, power, and intrigue. Once an international center of commerce and art, with palazzi and their fragrant gardens stretching to the water’s edge, Genoa in winter of 1903 was a grim place, its harbor full of black, coal-heaped barges.

The day of Antietam—September 17, 1862 — was like no other day of the Civil War. “The roar of the infantry was beyond anything conceivable to the uninitiated,” wrote a Union officer who fought there. “If all the stone and brick houses of Broadway should tumble at once the roar and rattle could hardly be greater … and amidst this, hundreds of pieces of artillery, right and left, were thundering as a sort of bass to the infernal music.” Over the course of 14 hours of this unceasing roar and rattle, 22,700 Northerners and Southerners were killed, wounded, or listed as missing—the worst one-day toll of the war, indeed 
the worst loss of life in a single day in America’s history. Yet at the end of that indescribably bloody September 17, neither side had won and neither had lost. A Northern war correspondent called it, optimistically, “partly a success; not a victory, but an advantage had been gained.”

The story of Osceola and the Great Seminole War in Florida seems so fantastic at times that it is hard to believe it is all true. One warrior with courage, cunning, and audacity unsurpassed by any Native American leader masterminded battle tactics that frustrated and embarrassed a succession of U.S. Army generals.