April 2018

From "Practice Range," American Heritage, February, 1968

The calendar has it that these events occurred 50 years ago last summer. It is hardly more credible than that a thousand ages can be like an evening gone. But, as President Lincoln said, “we cannot escape history.” 1916 was the year of the Wilhelmstrasse’s amazingly successful plot to distract President Wilson’s attention from the war in Europe by involving him with Mexico, of General “Black Jack” Pershing’s invasion of Mexico in “hot pursuit” of Pancho Villa, after that worthy had staged a raid across the Rio Grande on Columbus, New Mexico. Poor General Pershing never caught up with Villa.

"For my Part, I can’t but think ... That it is highly Incumbent on all who are not Seized with a Vertigo, to Stand upon their Guard, and in the most ardent Strains to lift up their Voice to the Most High, when the Religion of the Bible is like to be laid aside, for Some present immediate Inspirations—And not only so, but that Men should be often, and earnestly call’d upon and caution’d to Avoid that New Light which will lead Us into Darkness." —JOSIAH COTTON TO SAMUEL MATHER, 1742

In 1752, the British-born artist Joseph Blackburn painted a portrait of prominent Bermuda merchant and official Francis Jones. Seated at a table, Jones is shown hard at work on his correspondence; his writing set is positioned in front of him with a quill and a stick of red wax standing at the ready for the merchant to compose and then seal his letters. At the moment, however, the sitter grips an opened letter in his left hand and with his right points toward the window behind him. Jones’s gesture reminds the viewer of his commercial interests, symbolized by the ship sailing near the Bermuda coast. But his raised finger also calls attention to the pile of opened correspondence that sits before him.

In the summer of 1829, Thomas Spotswood Hinde initiated a correspondence with former president James Madison. Having heard that Madison was writing “a Political History of our Country,” Hinde offered to provide essential information for this project. Born in Virginia in 1785, Hinde had moved to Kentucky with his family as a child; in his twenties and thirties, he had been a newspaper editor, a businessman, and a Methodist minister in Ohio and Illinois. But the story that he proposed to tell Madison was not that of the western pioneer, the town founder, or the circuit rider. Instead, he offered information about “that Singular transaction” known as the Burr Conspiracy.

After swallowing a dose of liquid mercury on Thursday morning, June 6, 1799, Patrick Henry sat calmly near a window at the northeast corner of his modest house in Charlotte County, Virginia. As he pondered the blood congealing under his fingernails, Henry whispered words of comfort to his wife and children and waited for the mercury to cure him or kill him.

A little after 9:00 p.m. on March 5, 1770, a detachment of British soldiers fired into a crowd of townspeople on King Street in Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The result—the “Boston Massacre”—has echoed through the pages of newspapers, pamphlets, and history books ever since. It is perhaps the most densely described incident in early American history (with more than two hundred eyewitness accounts), yet the descriptions are sufficiently contradictory to make the unfolding sequence of events surprisingly hard to pin down. To say what happened would seem to be a straightforward task, but, in many ways, the Boston Massacre remains an irreducible mystery.

During negotiations to end the Seven Years’ War, Great Britain’s diplomats used the leverage that came with conquests in Canada, India, Africa, and the West Indies to gain large territorial cessions from France and Spain. After the terms of the Peace of Paris went into effect on February 10, 1763, colonial British America extended from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across the Caribbean—at least on paper.