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These sharp-dressed men are members of a Turnverein, an athletic club favored by 48ers.

Summer 2023

30 L incoln in His Own Words

The rare scrapbook he shared with a friend on the campaign trail tells much of the man.

38 Going Electric

From puffing engines to crackling wires, American railroads put away the coal shovel and plugged in. By Richard

46 Color on Canvas

The racially pathbreaking 19th-century genre art of William Sidney Mount. By Katherine Kirkpatrick and Vivian Nicholson-Mueller

54 The 48ers

Fleeing oppression in their native lands, European revolutionaries brought their ideals to America.

A political poster for the 1944 election featuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President Harry S. Truman. —see page 20

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PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

Lives Remembered are never Lost

STEPHEN AMBROSE HISTORICAL TOURS PRESENTS

REVOLUTIONARY WAR: BOSTON TO QUEBEC

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Future Plans

WITH APOLOGIES to our wonderful readers, the e-mail address we gave you to use last issue was not working properly, but it is now, so please send us letters! For now, enjoy this missive written by Robert Fulton, credited with inventing the steamboat, to George Washington. The first president was a firm believer in canals and was involved with the Patowmack Canal, vestiges of which remain on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River, above, and can be accessed by a hiking trail.

His EXCELLENCY GEORGE WASHINGTON. LONDON, February 5th, 1797.

Letters

SIR, – Last evening Mr. King presented me with your Letter acquainting me of the Receipt of my publication on Small Canals, which I hope you will soon have time to Peruse in a tranquil retirement from the Busy operations of a Public Life. Therefore looking forward to that period when the whole force of your Mind will Act upon the Internal improvement of our Country, by Promoting Agriculture and Manufacture: I have little doubt but easy Conveyance, the Great agent to other improvements will have its due weight And meet your patronage.

For the mode of giving easy Communication to every part of the American States, I beg leave to draw your Particular attention to the Last Chapter on Creative Canals; and the expanded mind will trace down the time when they will penetrate into every district Carrying with them the means of facilitating Manual Labour and rendering it productive. But how to Raise a Sum in the different States has been my greatest difficulty.

I first Considered them as National Works. But perhaps an Incorporated Company of Subscribers, who should be bound to apply half or a part of their profits to extension would be the best mode. As it would then be their interest to Promote the work: And guard their emoluments.

That such a Work would answer to Subscribers appears from such Informations as I have Collected, Relative to the Carriage from the neighbourhood of Lancaster, to Philadelphia. To me it appears that a Canal on the Small Scale might have been made to Lancaster for 120 thousand Ł and that the carriage at 20 shillings per ton would pay 14

thousand per annum of which 7000 to Subscribers and 7000 to extension. By this means in about 10 years they would touch the Susquehanna, and the trade would then so much increase as to produce 30,000 per annum, of which 15,000 to Subscribers, the Remainder to extension; Continuing this till in about 20 years the Canal would run into Lake Erie, Yielding a produce of 100,000 per annum or 50 thousand Ł to Subscribers which is 40 per cent.; hence the Inducement to subscribe to such undertakings.

Proceeding in this manner I find that In about 60 or 70 years Pensilvania would have 9360 miles of Canal equal to Bringing Water Carriage within the easy Reach of every house, nor would any house be more than 10 or 14 miles from a Canal. By this time the whole Carriage of the country would Come on Water even to Passengers -and following the present Rate of Carriage on the Lancaster Road, it appears that the tolls would amount to 4,000,000 per year. Yet no one would pay more than 21 shillings and 8d per ton whatever might be the distance Conveyed; the whole would also be Pond Canal on which there is an equal facility of conveyance each way. Having made this Calculation to Show that the Creative System, would be productive of Great emolument, to Subscribers, it is only further to be observed that if each State was to Commence a Creative System It would fill the whole Country, and in Less than a Century bring Water Carriage within the easy Cartage of every Acre of the American States, –conveying the Surplus Labours of one hundred Millions of Men.

Hence Seeing that by System this must be the Result, I feel anxious that the Public mind may be awakened to their true Interest: And Instead of directing Turnpike Roads towards the Interior Country or expending Large Sums in River Navigations – Which must ever be precarious and lead [no where] I could wish to See the Labour, and funds applied to Such a System As would penetrate the Interior Country And bind the Whole In the bonds of Social Intercourse.

The Importance of this Subject I hope will plead my excuse for troubeling you with So long a Letter, And in expectation of being Favoured with your thoughts on the System and mode of Carrying it into effect, I remain with the utmost Esteem and Sincere Respect,

Your most obedient Servant

American History readers wanting to pillory, praise, or query the publication: write to us at americanhistory@historynet.com

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Working America

Mosaic

THE AMERICAN FOLKLIFE Center at the Library of Congress in March released its fourth season of “America Works,” a podcast series showcasing American workers in a diversity of jobs, careers, and life situations. The new series features stories from a cement plant worker, a grocery store cashier, a professional wrestler, a midwife, a herdswoman, and a neonatologist, among others.

Each “America Works” episode is based on a longer interview from the American Folklife Center’s Occupational Folklife Project, a multiyear initiative created to document work force culture.

Over the past 13 years, fieldworkers from the American Folklife Center have interviewed more than 1,800 working Americans, documenting their experiences in more than 100 professions. More than 600 of these full-length interviews are now available online.

“Our researchers are sending the Library so many great interviews with workers throughout the United States that it was hard to select just eight for Season Four. Despite the pandemic and a shifting economy, the humor, common sense, and pride reflected in these first-person accounts of working in America are inspiring,” said Nancy Groce, host of “America Works” and senior folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center.

The first three seasons of “America Works”— launched in August 2020, April 2021, and January 2022, respectively—are also available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and at loc.gov/podcasts.

Rare Lincoln Portrait Unveiled Archaeology at Jamestown

The National Portrait Gallery in February unveiled a rare portrait of President Abraham Lincoln. The nine-foot-tall portrait, painted by W.F.K. Travers in 1865, is one of only three known full-length renderings of the 16th president and will be on loan to the Smithsonian gallery in Washington, D.C., for the next five years.

The painting, which hung for decades in a municipal building in a small New Jersey town, has been restored and is now part of the “America’s Presidents” gallery.

Lincoln sat for Travers in 1864 and Travers completed the oil painting in Germany shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Travers then sold the painting to an American diplomat living in Frankfurt. In 1876, the painting was displayed at an exposition in Philadelphia, where Mary Todd Lincoln was reportedly, “so overcome by its lifelike appearance that she fainted and was carried out of the hall.”

For years, it hung in the U.S. Capitol while Congress considered whether to purchase it, but it was ultimately sold to the Rockefeller family. In the 1930s, Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge—daughter of William Jr. and niece of John D.—built the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building in memory of her deceased son and filled it with art, including the Lincoln portrait.

In 2017, an archivist discovered that a marble bust of Napoleon sitting in the corner of the council room of the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building had been sculpted by Auguste Rodin, prompting the foundation to reassess all of the art in its collection. The loan of the Lincoln portrait to the National Portrait Gallery is part of that reassessment.

In addition to Lincoln’s likeness, the painting is filled with symbols noting the president’s place in history. He stands in front of a bust of

George Washington and a rendering of the painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze. Lincoln’s hand rests on a bound copy of the Constitution, next to a scroll bearing a draft of the 13th Amendment. Behind the scroll is a small statue of an African American man rising as he pulls the chains from his body.

Jamestown Rediscovery archaeologists have been hard at work all winter on several projects, including work on uncovering the historic 20th century moat fill and the well-builder’s trench below to prepare for well excavation later this year. In February, archaeologists worked to take down the unit to the builder’s trench and fully expose the well surface. The archaeologists are using advanced photography and LiDAR scanning to create highly detailed models of the unit. The archaeology team also scans the area using Ground-Penetrating Radar. In March, archaeologists also opened a new unit in the North Field. They’re investigating the expansion of James Fort and Jamestown, looking for structures and landscaping features that would indicate where John Smith’s town of 50 houses was located.

Jamestown Rediscovery was launched in 1994 to find the site of the earliest fortified town on the

island and share the discovery with actual and virtual visitors. Within a few years, Jamestown Rediscovery uncovered enough evidence to prove the remains of James Fort existed on dry land near the church tower. A dozen staff members still excavate, interpret, preserve, conserve, and research the site’s findings. The team has mapped thousands of archaeological features, such as post holes, ditches, wells, foundations, graves, and pits.

Spero Takes the Helm at the Washington Presidential Library

What is It?

What was the purpose of this unusual tool?

Be the first to email the correct answer to dshoaf@historynet.com, subject heading “Home Building,” and your name will be posted with the description of the item.

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has appointed Patrick Spero, Ph.D., its new executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Spero had been serving since 2015 as the librarian and director of the Library & Museum of the American Philosophi cal Society in Philadelphia.

“On March 9, 1797, 226 years ago today, George Washington departed Philadelphia for Mount Vernon after ending his second presidential term. I am thrilled to now head to Mount Ver non myself to start a new chapter as the George Washington Presi dential Library Director and to be a part of such an inspiring and dynamic place,” Spero said. “I am excited to grow its collections and develop new programs that expand knowledge of the life, leadership, and legacy of George Washington.”

Spero is the author of Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Frontier Reb els: The Fight for Independence in the American West (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), and Botany and Betrayal: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Kentucky Conspiracy of 1793 (Jeffersonian America series, University of Virginia Press, forthcoming Fall 2024), and co-editor of The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the 21st Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Prior to his time at the APS, Spero served on the faculty of Williams College, teaching courses on American history and political leader ship. Spero is chair of the Executive Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; on the Board for the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; on the Academic Advisory Board of the Benjamin Franklin House in London; and has served for many years on the Washington Library Cabinet at Mount Vernon.

The executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library fosters scholarship surrounding George Washington and his era, leads academic and public programs, and grows the library collection.

Spero will direct the center as it celebrates its 10th anniversary in September 2023, and charts the course for the decade, including the significant anniversaries recognizing America’s 250th in 2026 and George Washington’s 300th Birthday in 2032.

Answer to last issue’s What is It?

Congratulations to Bob Atnip, Westfield, Ind., who was the first to correctly identify a fire insurance plaque that was placed on a house. Stories have long circulated that if you did not have one of these, the fire department would not fight the fire. But it is more likely the plaques merely functioned as advertising for the insurance company.

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Against the Odds

On April 3, Civil War Trails unveiled a new sign at the first Civil War Trails site that champions the story of Jewish soldiers. Located at the Love Hope Center for the Arts in Fayettville, W.Va., it tells the story of men under the command of future-President Rutherford B. Hayes who were camped in the wilds of West Virginia and managed to pull together all the items required to properly observe the Passover holiday in 1862.

“In the midst of our nation’s darkest hour, these soldiers came together, enabled by the larger community and in doing so they offered peace and hope to a nation at war,” said Drew Gruber, executive director of the Civil War Trails program.

The project is the result of several years of dedication by local historians, Temple Beth El in Beckley, Love Hope Center for the Arts, and the New River Gorge Convention and Visitors Bureau. Dr. Joseph Golden, Secretary of the Temple Beth El congregation reads from the soldier’s diaries during their own Passover celebrations and has also researched the story of the 1862 Seder. Despite being a historic story, it rings true for the Jewish community today.

“Commemorating this Passover Seder celebrated by 20 Jewish Union soldiers has importance to the Jewish community in Fayette and Raleigh Counties. Although they were a minority in the Union Army, they were and we are part of the diverse fabric that make up this nation” said Dr. Golden.

This 1865 manuscript broadside of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, is signed by then-Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and 111 congressmen. It’s one of a handful of commemorative copies circulated in the halls of Congress for signatures.

The amendment passed the Senate with 38 votes in April 1864, but then faced a long fight in the House. Months later, on January 31, 1865, it barely reached the necessary two-thirds in the House of Representatives with 119 votes (58 opposed). As a courtesy, the official copy of the resolution was sent to the White House for Lincoln’s approval, although that was not required by the Constitution; it remains the only constitutional amendment signed by a president. In this commemorative copy, a space was left open for President Lincoln in the center of the document, after “Approved February 1st 1865,” suggesting that signatures were still being gathered on this copy when Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865. It sold at auction March 30, 2023.

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Picture Perfect

Ox teams provided a lot of draft power for farmers from the 17th century through the opening of the 20th century. They were particularly prevalent in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. This proud drover poses with his team in the middle of a muddy street. The solid hue of the beasts might be a clue that they are Red Devons, one of the earliest ox breeds to be used in America. Note that a horse makes an appearance at lower right. And most curiously, two young men have photobombed the scene by posing in the act of having a bare-knuckle showdown.

ABT Marks Milestone Preservation Victory

After taking possession of 117 acres at Buffington Island, site of the largest Civil War battle in Ohio, the American Battlefield Trust has now protected hallowed ground at half the states in the Union. Founded in 1987 in Virginia, the Trust has saved a total of 56,000 acres across 155 sites in 25 states. Geographically, the organization’s footprint stretches from upstate New York westward to New Mexico, and chronologically from the “shot heard ’round the world” at Lexington and Concord that began the Revolutionary War to the stillness at Appomattox as the Civil War drew to a close.

The Trust first announced its intention to secure the Ohio site, adjacent to the existing Buffington Island Battlefield Memorial Park, in the spring of 2022 with assistance from the Buffington Island Battlefield Preservation Foundation.

In March, the Trust also announced the protection of a combined 47 acres at both the Cedar Creek Battlefield and the Cedar Mountain Battlefield.

The land was saved with the assistance of the National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program, Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, Virginia Land Conservation Fund, and Trust donors.

The newly saved property at Cedar Creek is adjacent to park headquarters and on a central part of the battlefield, once touched by the determined actions of Union and Confederate troops on October 19, 1864, during the boldly executed Battle of Cedar Creek.

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Veteran's Cemetery

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Outside the Box

Innovations

DESPITE ADVANCES in the comfort and usefulness of the catcher’s mitt by the early 1900s, one can assume that James E. Bennett III of Momence, Ill., was not a fan when, in 1904, he patented this “base ball catcher.” The contraption included a cage attached to the player’s chest, reinforced on all sides with wood and springs at the back to cushion the blow. Once

the ball passed through the open front end, it closed automatically, and the ball would drop out through a tube at the bottom. Seemingly designed to free up the catcher’s hands, Bennett’s device was never produced nor used in a game. You could say, it never caught on. —Melissa

The Dark Side of the White Knight

THE STOCK MARKET had been falling for a month, slowly at first, then faster. On Friday, October 18, 1929, the decline hastened in heavy trading. On Monday, prices fell again. On Tuesday, they rose a bit, only to plummet on Wednesday. On the morning of Thursday, October 24—the day dubbed “Black Thursday”—prices tumbled so fast that spectators in the gallery began to weep.

American Schemers

At 1:30 that afternoon, Richard Whitney, acting president of the New York Stock Exchange, appeared on the trading floor and strode briskly to Post Number 2, where stocks in U.S. Steel were traded. Tall and distinguished, Whitney stood silent for a moment, with a golden pig—the symbol of his Harvard dining club—dangling from the watch chain encircling his prosperous paunch. He had just convened a meeting of the nation’s most powerful bankers, who agreed to put up $20 million to stop the sell-off and stabilize prices. The room fell silent as traders strained to hear what Whitney would say.

He asked the price of U.S. Steel’s stock and was informed that it had fallen below $200 a share. “I bid 205 for 10,000 Steel,” he responded.

Then he moved to other posts and paid generous prices for other blue-chip stocks. It worked: the market rallied and Whitney became a hero. “Richard Whitney Halts Stock Panic,” read one headline, and tabloids dubbed him the “White Knight of Wall Street.”

The rally didn’t last long—the market crashed

five days later, leading to the Great Depression—but Whitney’s fame endured. He served five years as president of the New York Stock Exchange, and became a symbol of America’s old-money, blue-blood elite—first for his coolness in crisis, then for his arrogance and corruption.

He was born in Boston in 1888, to a family that had arrived in Massachusetts in 1630. His father was a bank president. His uncle and his brother were executives in J.P. Morgan’s financial empire. At Groton, Whitney was captain of the baseball team. At Harvard he rowed on the varsity crew. He married a rich woman and started his own brokerage firm—Richard Whitney & Co.—which, thanks to his connections, became the official broker for the House of Morgan. He bought a five-story townhouse on East 73rd Street in Manhattan and a 495-acre estate in New Jersey, where he raised thoroughbred horses and served as Master of Fox Hounds for the Essex Hunt.

As president of the Stock Exchange during the early 1930s, Whitney found himself battling another graduate of both Groton and Harvard—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When FDR backed a bill to create the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market, Whitney led the battle against it. The regulations were a “menace to national recovery,” he said, and if they were adopted, “grass will grow on Wall Street.” There’s no need for government regulation, he insisted: “The exchange is a perfect institution.”

Whitney ’s lobbying failed to convince Congress, which passed the bill creating the S.E.C. Then Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy—a savvy former stock manipulator himself—as S.E.C chairman, reasoning that Kennedy knew all the dirty tricks of the trade and could therefore crack down on them.

Whitney detested Kennedy as a traitor to the exchange but he admired Kennedy’s financial wizardry. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Kennedy made a fortune importing Haig & Haig Scotch and Gordon’s Gin. Inspired, Whitney decided to get into the booze business. He founded the Distilled Liquors Corporation and began producing an applejack called Jersey Lightning. It failed to catch on. He imported 106,000 gallons of Canadian rye whiskey, but that didn’t sell either. When Distilled Liquors’ stock plummeted, Whitney tried to boost the price by borrowing millions to buy more shares. It didn’t work. Apparently, nobody wanted his booze or his stock. Desperate, Whitney borrowed more money from his wealthy friends to finance various get-rich-quick schemes. But they, too, failed.

So “the White Knight of Wall Street,” started stealing.

Whitney’s first theft was $150,200 in bonds belonging to the New York Yacht Club, for which he served as treasurer. But that wasn’t enough to save his crumbling empire, so he stole from his brokerage firm’s customers— Harvard University, St Paul’s School, his father-in-law’s estate, his wife’s trust fund. And he embezzled more than $1 million from the New York Stock Exchange’s Gratuity Fund. That fund paid benefits to the families of deceased members of the Exchange, so Whitney’s theft, wrote Wall Street historian John Steele Gordon, “amounted, almost literally, to stealing from widows and orphans.”

Inevitably, Whitney’s schemes collapsed. Rumors spread on the street that his company was failing. Officials of the exchange investigated and discovered that Whitney was embezzling from his customers. Undaunted and arrogant, Whitney tried to convince Charles Gay, his successor as president of the exchange, to cover up his crimes.

“I am Richard Whitney,” he told Gay. “I mean the stock exchange to millions of people. The exchange can’t afford to let me go under.”

In Whitney ’s heyday, the exchange’s old-boy network might have protected him. But, as Gay understood, in the new era of S.E.C watchdogs, that was no longer an option. So, on the morning of May 7, 1938, Gay announced

to the exchange that Whitney and his company were suspended for “conduct contrary to just and equitable principles of trade.”

“Not Dick Whitney!” President Roosevelt said when aides told him the shocking news about his fellow Groton grad. “Dick Whitney—I can’t believe it.”

“Wall Street could hardly have been more embarrassed,” The Nation magazine noted, “if J.P. Morgan had been caught helping himself from the collection plate at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.”

Indicted for fraud and embezzlement, Whitney pled guilty and was sentenced to 5–10 years in prison. The next day, a crowd packed Grand Central Station to gawk as cops loaded five handcuffed prisoners onto a train bound for Sing Sing Prison—a rapist, two extortionists, a holdup man, and the former president of the New York Stock Exchange.

Whitney served three years and four months before he was paroled in 1941. Barred from the securities business, he managed a family-owned dairy farm in Massachusetts. His wife took him back and his brother repaid every dollar Whitney had stolen.

When he died in 1974, at age 86, his obituary in The New York Times noted the irony that Whitney’s shocking scandal had led to the enactment of the regulations he had fought so hard against: “It hastened the adoption of drastic reforms governing stock market dealings, long pressed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and resisted by an old-guard clique on the Street whose powerful leader had been Mr. Whitney himself.” H

Number Two

POOR KAMALA HARRIS. The vice president took office in January 2021 trailing a cloud of firsts: first woman to hold the job, first African American (thanks to her Jamaican father), first Asian-American (thanks to her Indian mother). But the job itself has been a cavalcade of vexations. President Joe Biden saddled her with an unattractive assignment—managing and explaining the migrant mess at the southern border. She is reputed to be hard on her staff in private, and she is often tongue-tied in public. Even media outlets friendly to the administration have run hit pieces on her.

According to The New York Times, “dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation” said (anonymously) that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The office of vice president was devised in the home stretch of the Constitutional Convention as a flywheel in the machinery for picking an executive, and a successor in case the president died or was removed from office. Along the way, Elbridge Gerry worried that veeps would be too closely allied to the presidents alongside whom they served, which provoked a snort from Gouverneur Morris: “the vice president will then be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father.” Initially the vice

presidency went to the runner-up in the Electoral College’s vote for president; the 12th amendment (1804) ensured that the veep would be the running mate of the winning presidential candidate.

The office got off to a rough start. John Adams, first vice president under George Washington, was the first (though not the last) to feel that he had nothing to do. Thomas Jefferson, second vice president under Adams, spent his term undermining his old friend and plotting to supplant him. Aaron Burr, third vice president under Jefferson, was shut out of all patronage, denied renomination when Jefferson ran again, and spent his post–vice presidential years plotting to break up the United States.

Most modern vice presidents, beginning with Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s number two, have been given substantive responsibilities, and have worked well with their number ones. Four of them—Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Joe

Guess Who?

You all know the man to the left, but who is that man at right? Why it’s FDR’s 2nd vice president, Henry Agard Wallace, who served from 1941-1945.

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Biden—have run for president themselves, two— Bush and Biden—successfully. But two vice presidents of an earlier era anticipated the problems bedeviling Harris today.

Henry Wallace was the scion of an Iowa family of farmer/journalists (they published a magazine called Wallace’s Farmer). His father served as secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge; Henry, crossing party lines, held the same job for FDR. In addition to his interests in crop cycles and new plant strains, Wallace had a passion for oddball religions. In the 1920s he came under the spell of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré painter and seer who dressed in Tibetan robes and claimed to be the reincarnation of a Chinese emperor. Wallace and Roerich exchanged hundreds of letters, in which they referred to each other and to famous acquaintances in mystical code: Roerich was the Guru, Wallace was Parsifal or Galahad, FDR was the Flaming One, or the Wavering One, whenever Wallace felt disappointed in him.

In 1934 Wallace got Roerich attached to an Agriculture Department expedition to Mongolia seeking drought-resistant grasses. Roerich was also seeking the Holy Grail on the side. American diplomats reported that he was traveling the steppes with a bodyguard of White Russian Cossacks, trying to set up a Central Asian Buddhist kingdom. Wallace, embarrassed, cut ties with him.

The Flaming One, tired of his crusty Texan veep John Nance Garner, tapped Wallace to be his running mate when he sought a third term in 1940. FDR wanted a man of liberal views, and Wallace fit the bill. One potential landmine threatened the new ticket. The Republican National Committee had procured copies of 120 Guru letters. The GOP

candidate Wendell Willkie nixed using them, however, afraid that the Democrats would expose his long-running extramarital affair with a prominent New York journalist. Roosevelt and Wallace cruised to victory.

Wallace found new soul mates post-Roerich—American Communists, whose designs he naively failed to penetrate. The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, and Communists were billing themselves as liberals in a hurry. Alarmed Democratic bosses told FDR in 1944 that he must dump Wallace, so the nod for his fourth run went to Missouri Senator Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died three months into his last term. When Wallace ran for president himself in 1948 as candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party, the Guru letters finally hit the papers. Wallace won a meager 2.4 percent of the popular vote, and carried no states. Repenting of his pro-Soviet backers, he lived until 1965.

Richard Nixon was tied to Dwight Eisenhower politically and personally. He served as Eisenhower’s veep for two terms, 1953–1961. After Nixon won the White House himself in 1968, his daughter Julie married Ike’s grandson, David Eisenhower. Yet his relationship with Ike was always fraught.

Nixon had been put on the ticket in 1952 as a sop to the conservative wing of the GOP that Ike had defeated in winning the nomination. The two barely knew each other, however. There was a 23-year age gap between them. In September, the press revealed that Nixon had a campaign expense account, characterized in headlines as SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND. Ike’s advisers, fearful of any taint on the war-winning hero, pressured Nixon to resign from the ticket. Instead he made a half-hour television speech, defending his innocence (the account was legal), attacking Democrats (Ike’s rival, Adlai Stevenson, had his own campaign account), and pledging to keep Checkers, a cocker spaniel that a supporter had given Nixon’s daughters. The Republican National Committee got millions of letters, telegrams, and phone calls praising the put-upon Nixon. Ike embraced his feisty running mate.

But their relations never warmed. Nixon was intelligent and hard-working, but too political and ambitious for his old boss. In August 1960, at the end of Eisenhower’s second term and the start of Nixon’s first presidential run, against Sen. John F. Kennedy, the president was asked at a press conference what role Nixon had played in his administration. Had the vice president offered any “major idea” that Ike had subsequently adopted? “If you give me a week,” Eisenhower answered, “I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign gleefully used the line in an attack ad. Had Ike meant it as a flat-out diss? Probably not. But he hadn’t made a ringing endorsement either. The 1960 race was razor thin. Could a love-bombing Eisenhower have pulled Nixon over the line? Nixon would have to wait eight more years for a second shot.

The Vice President is a constitutional fixture and a political anomaly—a high official with hardly any defined role; a successor whom the president picks but cannot fire until and unless he runs again. Wallace was a deficient veep whom the president—and almost only the president—liked. Nixon was a work horse the president never truly admired. Kamala Harris seems to enjoy the worst of both worlds: low achievement, low esteem. With Biden determined to run again, will she be replaced a la Wallace, or retained a la Nixon? All the political termites of D.C. will be gnawing on that question. H

Democratic bosses told FDR in 1944 that he must dump Wallace, so the nod for his fourth run went to Missouri senator Harry Truman.

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The History of History

In addition to stunning exhibit galleries, the DAR museum has 30 period rooms that have interesting history in their own right. The Colonial Revival kitchen was created in 1930 and sponsored by Oklahoma.

What Does Home Mean?

Historic furnishings and objects explore the country’s diverse living experiences

THE DAUGHTERS of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C., houses an impressive collection of nearly 30,000 objects made and used prior to the Industrial Revolution. As the museum’s director and chief curator, Heidi Campbell-Shoaf oversees the museum staff, works with the National DAR organization that serves as the museum’s executive board and helps curate the collections that the museum exhibits in accordance with its current mission statement.

“We want to use the lens of the different interpretations of home,” she says, “to inspire conversations about the American experience and encourage people to discover commonalities between different American life experiences.”

What is the history of the DAR Museum?

The museum was founded in 1890, at the same time the national organization of the Daughters of the American Revolution was crafted. The museum’s intent was to collect and preserve historical artifacts, many of which were donated by DAR members. The DAR is a lineage organization which requires a woman to have a direct descent from somebody who aided the American Revolution. Soon after the museum was founded, the collection shifted to focus less on artifacts that people

would assume to be related to the Revolution— namely military items such as muskets, swords, powder horns, and uniforms—to objects that the Revolutionary generation had in their homes. From that point on, it has been a museum that collects and preserves and interprets objects used in American homes of the past.

Can you tell us about the history of the period rooms?

Some of them date all the way back to the initial building of the DAR Headquarters and Museum in Memorial Continental Hall in 1910. As the headquarters, Memorial Continental Hall was built with a lot of offices in the building. The DAR is organized very similar to our government, with a central executive, state organizations, and within those state organizations, local chapters. The state organizations donated money to help build Memorial Continental Hall and in return secured the right to put the state name on an

office room. The period rooms today still have state affiliations because they started as the state sponsored office space. When the organization outgrew the first building and built an addition and moved offices there, those rooms became the period rooms, and the states would furnish them as historic interiors. In the late 1930s, all of the period rooms were moved under the control of the museum, and it’s been that way ever since. The museum maintains the rooms and interprets historic interiors from the 1600s through the 1930s in them. They’re furnished as bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, parlors, etc. Most museums have somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of their collections on display, but we have well beyond that because of the period rooms

What do the gallery exhibits focus on?

The exhibits have a wide range of topics. Our curators have specialties to the collection they manage, care for, and develop, and they conduct original research and put together exhibitions. The topics are in part pulled from the curator’s expertise or research interest. But they all have some relationship to the American home. Our current exhibition is about portraiture and power in the American home and looking at these portraits that many of us see in museums. They are by and large painted for people to hang in their homes, so what does that say about the people who have the portrait painted, the people painting the portraits, the people seeing the portraits in the homes? What is that statement being made? It all circles back to the home in some way.

When you purchase something for the museum, how are you looking to expand the collections?

Each of our curators look at their collections, and have a statement of collecting for each different category. For example, fine art, glass, ceramics, etc. We look at the mission and we look at the collections and we say, ‘Do we have everything we need to tell particular stories?’ Of course, much of our collection has been donated to us over the years by DAR members. So that reflects much of the demographic of the DAR membership, which in the past, up until the 1970s, was primarily White, middle and upper class. The membership is becoming much more diverse, and we want to make sure that our collections reflect that and that we are not just interpreting the DAR homes of the past, but a broader interpretation of American homes. It’s all American homes. Not just those related to the American Revolution. That means we need to look at the collections and see where we have gaps in representation. For instance, a few years ago we purchased a sampler from

California that was made by somebody of Mexican ancestry, and of course, early California was Mexico. We have purchased objects made by native Hawaiians. We’ve acquired objects made by African American people or that portray the picture of African American people. We look at what’s missing and we also look at what we have and determine whether it’s the best example of the object we can display. Is it displayable? Then we may decide we need to have a better example of something we already have.

What’s a favorite object of yours in the collection?

That’s a tough question! What’s amazing about the DAR Museum collections in general is that there are so many of the objects that have stories associated with them—family history, historic events at which this object was present. And many of the objects are amazing examples of historic craftsmanship. So, that’s a hard question. I could pick many things for different reasons. One example, there’s a painting in our current exhibition, it’s on the cover of our current exhibition catalog. She’s dressed in clothing from the 1810s. She’s holding a green parrot. It’s a fabulous painting I think, for a lot of different reasons. It’s well done. But, also, why do you choose to be painted with a parrot in your hand? You can tell she has money, because why else would she have a parrot? Dolley Madison had a parrot. The average person is not going to have a parrot. She also wears a tiara with gold and coral. The colors are fabulous.

America will be celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2026. What is the museum planning for its celebration? We are planning programming as we get closer to the 250th. We are also planning an exhibition. People may be surprised to find out that we don’t have a lot of Revolutionary War–related objects in the collection. Because of the ongoing emphasis on objects that are found in the home, they aren’t by and large militaria. We’re looking at an exhibition focused on people who were writing about the Revolution, prior to the Revolution, and through the Revolution. We’re using some of the collection housed in the DAR Americana Collection, which is a collection of historic manuscripts and documents. We’re working to combine some of that collection with some three-dimensional items from the museum collection to create that exhibition. Leading up to that, we have an exhibition in 2025 that focuses on Black craftspeople and their fight for freedom and liberty and what that means for them, not just in the Revolutionary period but all the way through the 19th century, as well.

A Decade of Service

Heidi Campbell-Shoaf has been with the DAR Museum since 2013. She oversaw the construction of two new exhibit galleries in 2017.

Do you find that visitors have different expectations of what the museum will hold or the stories it will tell?

I think so, yes. When people come to a museum like ours, they often want to find confirmation of their own interpretation of history. Sometimes they find that and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, that’s when education happens. We do have people who come with perceptions of what the DAR is as an organization, which has evolved since the one incident that people remember—in 1939 Marian Anderson was denied an opportunity to perform at the DAR Constitution Hall because of her race. That perception has stuck in people’s mind for decades, so they think they know what they will find when they come to the museum, but I think some of them are pleasantly surprised that we provide a wide lens onto American history. H

Present and Past

The Drake Well Museum and Park boasts a full-size replica of Edwin Drake’s worldchanging well, 240 acres to wander, and a large collection of rare early oil-drilling artifacts. The surveyors in the 1860s image at left undoubtedly came to Titusville to lay out their fortune.

Edwin Drake’s Well

PEOPLE LIVING NEAR TITUSVILLE, PA., had long been aware of the gooey substance seeping out of the ground. For thousands of years, the black ooze was used for medicinal purposes. Small doses were used to treat scabies, respiratory illnesses, and even epilepsy. The native Seneca people, on whose land present-day Oil City is located, used it for ointments and insect repellant. But it also fouled the water. No one realized this rural section of northwestern Pennsylvania would become the cradle of the modern petroleum oil age.

American Place

By the 1850s, scientists and entrepreneurs knew that the substance had a potential to replace the whale oil that lit homes across the country and to lubricate the engines of the booming Industrial Revolution. The problem was getting the oil out of the ground fast enough and at enough quantity to make it worth while. Enter Edwin Drake, a former New York railroad worker hired by the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of New York to attempt to drill for oil on a plot of land along Oil Creek, near Titusville, in 1857. Drake had no background in geology or drilling and it appears his job for the oil company was due to having invested $200—his life savings—in the company and having a railroad pass.

Drake hired William Smith, a blacksmith who had some experience working on salt wells, as his driller. A way to get to salt deposits without shaft mining, salt wells involved drilling down to a deposit, flooding it with water, and pumping the saline solution to the surface to evaporate. Even with Smith’s expertise, water from Oil Creek kept filling up the well. Finally, in early August 1859, Drake and Smith developed the “drive pipe” method of drilling, which inserted a cast iron pipe down the well to protect the drill and keep water at bay. Drilling three feet a day, they struck oil at the depth of 69.5 feet on August 27, 1859.

Soon after, despite a civil war, people flooded into Titusville, a ham let of 250 people. By 1865, the population had grown to 10,000. That same year, a new town with the illustrious name of Pithole City was founded near another well. In just six months, Pithole City boasted 16,000 peo ple, dozens of hotels, banks, stores, and saloons, and a daily mail delivery of more than 6,000 letters. Unreliable oil markets, fires, and decreasing oil production led to Pithole’s demise, just as quickly as it appeared. By 1877, it was a ghost town.

“Oil Fever” still burned in Western Pennsylvania, though it was much tempered after the early decades. Focus turned to refining the oil the wells brought to the surface, producing kerosene for the new lamps in people’s homes. In 1901, oil was found in Texas and all eyes shifted to the Lone Star State, where Pennsylvania drills and refining equipment supplied a new oil boom.

Population Boom

Oil well and storage tanks climb the heights from Oil Creek near Titusville, Pa. One area well, McClintock

Well #1, still pumps oil. The PHMC owns the well and uses its proceeds to keep up their historic properties.

Derricks and Ghost Towns

H Drake Well Museum and Park, 202 Museum Lane, Titusville, Pa., is home to a reproduction of Drake’s well house over the original well. Administered by the Pennsylvania History and Museum Commission (PHMC), it offers indoor and outdoor exhibits and programs both at the well and at the Pithole City ghost town.

H Western Pennsylvania is well-known for its football history. Johann Wilhelm Heisman, son of German immigrants, was raised in Titusville. In high school,

TODAY IN HISTORY

MAY 6, 1996

FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY WILLIAM COLBY IS FOUND DEAD ON A RIVERBANK IN ROCK POINT, MD. AN AVID OUTDOORSMAN, HE HAD SET OUT ON A SOLO CANOE TRIP NINE DAYS EARLIER. CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUND REGARDING THE CAUSE OF HIS DEATH. CLOAK AND DAGGER DAYS BEHIND HIM, COLBY WAS QUOTED AS SAYING “THE COLD WAR IS OVER, AND THE MILITARY THREAT IS NOW FAR LESS, IT’S TIME TO CUT OUR MILITARY BUDGET BY 50 PERCENT AND TO INVEST THAT MONEY IN OUR SCHOOLS, OUR HEALTH CARE, AND OUR ECONOMY.”

For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

Connecting Routes

CONGRESS

Commerce!

Lots going on in this 1890 image of the Erie Canal at Little Falls, N.Y. An unusual canal warehouse dominates the scene, and several people, including a woman, stand on the canal boats. Families would live on the boats for months at a time. A West Shore Railroad train puffs in from the left.

Editorial

HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS have a stealth factor. Take this issue. We planned no theme for it, we really never do. The goals is diversity in content. But...a bit of a theme emerged by accident. “Terra Firma” takes a look at an Erie Canal map, (P. 62). That busy ditch provided immigrants a fast and reliable transportation route from the East Coast to the Midwest. A number of 48er revolutionaries (P. 54) and other Germans fled oppression overseas and came to New York City, then made their way along the canal en route eventually to cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee. During the birth of the new political party system in the mid-19th century, many of them joined the Republican Party and would eventually cast their ballots for that gangly Illinois lawyer who kept a scrapbook (P. 30). Some would even die under his leadership, fighting for the Union Army. The themes of history can sneak up on you.

Lincoln in His Own Words

The 16th president’s pre-Civil War musings about ‘negro equality’

Prairie Lawyer

Artist George A.P. Healy painted this portrait of Abraham Lincoln from life in 1860. It took three sittings to complete the artwork. An intense study of the painting revealed Healy slightly shifted Lincoln’s cheek to make his jaw less blocky.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Springfield, Oct. 18, 1858

My dear Sir

I do not perceive how I can express myself, more plainly, than I have done in the foregoing extracts. In four of them I have expressly disclaimed all intention to bring about social and political equality between the white and black races, and, in all the rest, I have done the same thing by clear implication

I have made it equally plain that I think the negro is included in the word “men’’ used in the Declaration of Independence.

I believe the declaration that “all men are created equal’’ is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest; that negro slavery is violative of that principle; but that, by our frame of government, that principle has not been made one of legal obligation; that by our frame of government, the States which have slavery are to retain it, or surrender it at their own pleasure; and that all others—individuals, free-states and national government—are constitutionally bound to leave them alone about it_

I believe our government was thus framed because of the necessity springing from the actual presence of slavery, when it was framed.

That such necessity does not exist in the territories, where slavery is not present_

In his Mendenhall speech Mr. Clay says “Now, as an abstract principle, there is no doubt of the truth of that declaration (all men created equal) and it is desirable, in the original construction of society, and in organized societies, to keep it in view, as a great fundamental principle’’

Again, in the same speech Mr. Clay says:

“If a state of nature existed, and we were about to lay the foundations of society, no man would be more strongly opposed than I should to incorporate the institution of slavery among its elements;”

Exactly so—In our new free territories, a state of nature does exist In them Congress lays the foundations of society; and, in laying those foundations, I say, with Mr. Clay, it is desirable that the declaration of the equality of all men shall be kept in view, as a great fundamental principle; and that Congress, which lays the foundations of society, should, like Mr. Clay, be strongly opposed to the incorporation of slavery among its elements_

But it does not follow that social and political equality between whites and blacks, must be incorporated, because slavery must not—

The declaration does not so require_

Yours as ever

“...the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world— enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites....”

The Great Debates Lincoln gained great fame for his deft verbal jousting with Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Illinois debates.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library. H

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

“...I protest, now and forever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife. [Laughter and cheers.] ”

JAMES BROWN WAS A WELL-RESPECTED Sangamon County, Ill., farmer, cattle breeder and occasional politician. For more than 25 years, his life intersected with his neighbor and personal friend, Abraham Lincoln.

Born in 1806, he was Lincoln’s senior by three years, grew up in Kentucky, and at one time was an owner of enslaved persons. As a young man he served in the Kentucky militia obtaining the rank of captain, a title he proudly kept the rest of his life. Later, moving to Berlin, Ill., he emancipated his enslaved persons; many of them remaining in his employ for years afterward.

A part-time Whig politician, he served eight years in the Illinois House of Representatives including one term with Lincoln in 1840-1841.

In 1864 Baltimore, as a Lincoln-supporting delegate, Brown attended the Republican—then known as the National Union party—convention. Not quite a year later, heartbroken, he was a pall bearer at Lincoln’s May 4, 1865, funeral in Springfield, Ill.

When Brown died in 1868, his casket contained the mourning sash he wore on that somber 1865 day. His sons carried on his business interests and in 1911 he was honored by induction into the Illinois Farmers’ Hall of Fame. Discussing his role on the national stage, speaker Clinton L. Conklin said: “From a very early day [James Brown] was brought into intimate social and political association with Abraham Lincoln. They were both natives of [Kentucky.] They thought alike on the burning questions of the day about slavery.”

‘They Thought Alike’

“...I hold that... there is no reason in the world why a negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.”

No Coal, No Smoke Engineers test out an electric railroad “engine” at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory in 1880.

Going Electric

After 70 years of steam and smoke, American rail began to plug in

On January 8, 1902, the morning rail commute into Manhattan took a tragic turn. In one of many tunnels beneath Park Avenue, a New York Central locomotive bound for Grand Central Station rammed the rear of a commuter train waiting to enter the terminal. The steam engine plowed through the parked train’s last two cars, killing 17 on impact and injuring three dozen, many of whom were scalded horribly by steam from the locomotive’s ruptured boiler. The wreck made national news in stories salted with grisly details.

A jury acquitted New York Central engineer John Wisker of manslaughter, ruling that there was no way Wisker could have seen the stop signal in the congested tunnel, obscured as the marker was by steam and smoke from heavy coal-fired locomotive traffic.

Authorities deemed the New York Central ultimately responsible for the accident because “during the past ten years said officials have been repeatedly warned by their locomotive engineers and other employes [sic] of the dangerous condition existing in said tunnel… and they have failed to remedy said conditions.” The next year the New York State Legislature passed a law prohibiting steam locomotive traffic on Manhattan Island after July 1, 1908.

Steam had powered locomotives since 1830, when the Baltimore & Ohio became the first common carrier railroad in the United States. But after 70 years and 193,000 miles of track, steam locomotives were falling behind the times—a burgeoning nuisance and a hazard in the new century’s expanding cities.

Rail-borne steam and smoke obscured not only signage but skylines.

A Very Bad Day

Tunnels were darkly satanic. Locomotives, loud and dirty, often required switching that knotted up train movement. Steam trains’ immense water tanks and Brobdingnagian maintenance infrastructure gobbled real estate in areas where space was at a premium. America, on the verge of becoming a global manufacturer, needed locomotives to run on something more dynamic and forward-looking than water brought to a boil under pressure. America’s railroads needed electricity.

AS LONG AS there had been railroads, engineers and inventors had been experimenting with electricity to power them. Electric motors, generators, and power grids delivered mixed results, and advances in electrifying railroads came slow. The first big leap came in 1880 when Thomas Edison ran the nation’s first generator-powered locomotive on a test track at his Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory.

One young engineer drawn to the possibilities of electrified rail was Frank J. Sprague. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate with a sharp mind and a keen interest in electricity, Sprague was already developing an improved design of his own for an electric motor in 1883 when he went to work for

Past and Future Together in 1895

Edison. Sprague had hoped to work with the famous inventor on electric motors for rail and other applications, but Edison had eyes only for his incandescent lighting system, which he believed would change life more fundamentally than would electric trains.

Sprague built power stations for Edison’s incandescent light system for a few months before resigning. With savings and a loan, he founded Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company in 1884. He was not the first engineer to take on rail electrification. Other innovators, intent on outdoing horse-drawn trolleys, had tried to electrify streetcars, but the results were uncomfortable rides on unreliable machines. Sprague developed a self-regulating, constant speed motor that caused a sensation at the 1884 International Electrical Exhibition in Philadelphia. Observing Sprague’s unit in action, Edison remarked, “His is the only true motor.”

IN 1887, the Richmond Union Passenger Railway of Virginia hired Sprague to build an electric trolley system for that city. By summer 1888, Sprague’s operation was running 40 cars over 12 miles of track. Sprague’s system became the standard for electrified urban transport, inspiring other municipalities to follow suit. The benefits were evident and manifold. Compared to horses, electric trolleys were smoother, faster, easily handled—and manure-free. Within a decade some 900 electric streetcars were rolling on more than 12,000 miles of track in American cities. Horse-drawn trolleys passed into novelty.

Rail electrification held great potential beyond streetcars and trolleys. Matched against a steam locomotive of comparable weight, an electric

locomotive could produce more horsepower and exert more of the tractive force needed to pull a train. Electrics had fewer moving parts, reducing operational issues and maintenance needs, and were free of steam and smoke.

The first successful conversion of rail from steam to electric took place in 1893, when the Kentucky and Indiana Bridge Company electrified its Daisy Line, a five-mile light rail service that since 1886 had been shuttling commuters between New Albany, Ind., and Louisville, Ky. The conversion consisted of replacing steam locomotives with electric motor cars running on current transmitted by an overhead wire. The line ran 18 hours a day, and the smooth, clean 15-minute trip between cities proved immensely popular with passengers.

This and other early successes in electrification drew the attention of Charles P. Clark, president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Clark saw mainline and branch line electric service as an attractive alternative to steam. The New Haven’s many branch lines served one of the country’s fastest growing regions, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York City and environs. But by the 1890s the railroad’s almost exclusive focus on passengers over freight left it vulnerable to the rise of electric streetcars. Trolleys running parallel to New Haven branch lines peeled off passengers by offering uninterrupted, precise schedules that the railroad’s steam locomotives could not match owing to inadequate accelerating power and inability to run continuously.

Aiming to squelch trolley competition and retrieve passengers, the New Haven converted several lines. The first was a seven-mile stretch linking summer resort communities on Boston’s South Shore. The Nantasket Beach line, which opened on June 28, 1895, featured an electric motor car capable of pulling two 96-passenger trailers. The New Haven built a dedicated steam-driven power plant to generate electricity for the operation.

Compared to horses, electric trolleys were smoother, faster, easily handled—and manure-free.

Elevated coal trains smoke and thunder by on New York City elevated tracks, while on the street, electric trolleys go quietly about their business.

Within three years, New Haven traffic had doubled. Electricity was to “be promptly adopted by the company at other points on its lines,” Clark declared. The railroad made good on that promise, electrifying another 105 miles of track in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts between 1896 and 1907.

TWO DAYS AFTER the Nantasket Branch conversion sparked to life in 1895, the first mainline electric railroad passed beneath Baltimore’s streets. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Belt Line rail extension, which began construction in 1889, was originally designed to be a steam-powered cure to a transport bottleneck in the Maryland port. This 7.2-mile line included a 1.4-mile double-track tunnel under Howard Street, and that’s where the B&O ran into problems. The city prohibited venting steam and smoke from the tunnel into the air. B&O decided to electrify, and in 1893 hired a new

company, General Electric, to wire the Howard Street Tunnel.

Aided by financier J.P. Morgan, GE had coalesced the year before as a conglomeration of smaller companies. These included Edison’s several electric enterprises and his recent acquisition, Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company. The new concern quickly marked itself as an innovator by building a 30-ton electric locomotive, its motor three times larger than any in existence, capable of 30 mph. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, GE billed the behemoth as “the first practically operational high speed electric locomotive in the world adapted to the requirements of the steam railroad.”

The firm designed and built a locomotive for B&O powerful enough to muscle a 500-ton passenger train at 35 miles per hour or a 1,200-ton, 30-car freight train at 15 miles per hour up a 0.8 percent grade. To run the beast, GE also built a steam-driven power plant. The Belt Line was a local sensation when it debuted on July 1, 1895.

GENERAL ELECTRIC’S LUNGE at electric dominance drew a challenge from George Westinghouse, inventor of the railroad airbrake and founder of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. Eager to explore electrification, the Pennsylvania Railroad hired Westinghouse to convert its seven-mile Burlington to Mount Holly, N.J., branch line, which went into regular electric service on July 22, 1895.

The near simultaneous debut of the mainline Belt Line and those Nantasket and New Jersey branch electrifications positioned electricity well as a motive power for railroads. But major issues prevented other railroads

from doing likewise. Going from steam to electricity cost dearly, requiring the purchase of new locomotives and equipment to generate, transmit, and distribute power all down the line.

There was also the question of which system was better, alternating current or direct current. Westinghouse and Edison took sides, and the resulting War of the Currents reached far beyond rail electrification. Edison single-mindedly embraced direct current, and consequently GE favored DC for rail. DC motors and transmission and generation infrastructure were lightweight and easy to operate, suiting them to light rail and short-line railroad electrifications. But low-voltage DC systems were not suitable for heavy loads or great distances. They required large current flow, demanding heavy cables and multiple power substations along a line.

Westinghouse stood with alternating current because AC addressed DC’s shortcomings. Transformers enabled users to step AC voltage up or down from generation to distribution, providing transmission efficiency that DC could not match and suitable for heavier loads over longer distances. In the early 1890s the Westinghouse Company perfected the rotary converter, enabling the transfer of power from a high-voltage AC power supply to a low-voltage DC electric motor. Around that time GE independently built a rotary converter, one of many technology overlaps between the rival innovators. In 1896, Westinghouse and GE entered into a patent pooling and cross-licensing agreement, clearing the way for broad use of rotary converters and other equipment and technologies and making long distance electrification a practical reality.

GENERATOR CAPACITY, transmission lines, motors, and other electric railroad equipment got better as well. In 1897, Sprague, who continued to innovate even after GE bought his company, developed a multiple-unit control system enabling an engineer to manage the controls of any car on a train from one location. Multiple-unit control enabled power to be evenly distributed throughout a train, improving tractive ability. These developments laid the foundation for conversion from steam to electric motive power across the rail network. The 1902 Park Avenue accident and New York’s ban on steam locomotives in Manhattan sparked the nation’s railroads into action.

The New York Central was the first to move, bringing the sprawling Grand Central rail hub into the modern era. Hemmed in on all sides by some of the world’s most expensive real estate, Grand Central had no room to grow and thereby accommodate rising rail traffic. Electrifying the

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling Top, General Electric engineers test out an electric locomotive ordered by the Georgia Rail Line. Presumably, the engine wouldn’t have much snow to deal with in the Peach State. Above, workers pose with their electric streetcar in New Albany, Ind., 1920.

terminal not only solved the pollution problem but created elbow room by eliminating steam-related infrastructure. Now Grand Central could add trackage with multi-level underground rail tunnels and platforms.

The new Grand Central Station opened for business on February 3, 1913. Electricity supplied by two new GE-built power plants powered a terminal that contained 31 upper-level tracks for long-distance trains and 17 lower-level tracks for suburban traffic.

The New Haven Railroad began a significant extension of its electric network, converting a 33-mile stretch from Grand Central to Stamford, Conn., featuring some of the nation’s heaviest passenger rail traffic. Westinghouse, partnering with Pennsylvania’s Baldwin Locomotive Works, provided locomotives, a dedicated power plant, and the first-ever AC power infrastructure. The

first electric trains ran in 1907, with electrification later stretching to several branch lines through southern and central Connecticut and downstate New York. By 1915, the New Haven had doubled its commuter traffic in and out of Grand Central.

THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD’S entry into electrification signaled a major boost in growth of mainline and branch line electric rail. At the turn of the 20th century, the Pennsylvania was one of the nation’s largest railroads, operating over 10,000 miles of track throughout the Northeast as far west as Illinois. Fortune magazine called the railroad “a nation unto itself.” But the Pennsy had no rail access to the thriving New York metropolitan area.

To compete with the New York Central, the New Haven, and other rivals, the big company developed a bold strategy. In 1900, the Pennsy purchased the Long Island Railroad, an extensive steam-powered network serving New York’s largest suburb but stopping short of Manhattan at the East River. The Pennsy faced a similar problem on Manhattan’s west side; all its east-bound traffic stopped in New Jersey at the Hudson. The Pennsy would bring these lines into Manhattan and erect a massive midtown terminal at which they would meet. And the whole operation would be electrified.

Work on the eight-acre Pennsylvania Station began in 1904, as did excavation of rail tunnels under the East and Hudson Rivers. Simultaneously, electrification of the LIRR began with a 38-mile stretch connecting Brooklyn, Queens, and Far Rockaway and opening in 1905. By 1913, the LIRR had electrified 188 miles of track. By 1920, passenger traffic had increased over 350 percent with more than 64 million passengers annually.

Pennsylvania Station opened on November 27, 1910, serving LIRR traffic and for the first time bringing eastbound Pennsy trains into Manhattan. The neoclassical terminal, designed by the architecture firm McKim, Mead and White, occupied two full city blocks and included a 30,000-square-foot

New York’s Big Dig

A 1908 image of some of the excavations needed for the construction of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station.

waiting area with a 150-foot ceiling that made it the largest railroad station in the world. The subterranean levels featured 16 miles of track.

A dedicated power station in Long Island City managed both the LIRR and the Penn Station terminal—one of the last times a railroad built a dedicated power plant to serve its electric needs. Public utilities had grown in number and sophistication and could satisfy electric rail’s heavy power needs. Railroads also saved money on electrical infrastructure and maintenance by contracting their electricity needs to the power companies.

GROWTH IN PASSENGER service in large part drove rail electrification in the Northeast. The area around New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., was the country’s most densely populated region, a steady source of high demand for efficient, modern transportation. But electrification’s uses went beyond shuttling passengers among eastern metropolises, and innovation was not confined to one region.

Electrification projects in the early 1920s in the Appalachians demonstrated electric rail’s freight hauling capabilities. The Norfolk and Western Railway and the Virginian Railway ranked among the nation’s largest coal haulers, taking coal from mines as far as eastern Kentucky directly to ports in Norfolk, Va. These rivals both turned to electricity to cut time and cost crossing the rugged Appalachian terrain.

Unlike passenger lines, freight haulers required power systems able to handle heavy tonnage when demand for coal surged. Advances in electrical engineering led to a system in which high voltage AC electricity was transmitted along the line to power a rugged motor capable of high-energy output.

The 208-track-mile Norfolk & Western electrification in West Virginia and the 229-trackmile Virginian line were completed in 1925, saving the railroads a fortune in time and expense. Electric locomotives pulled 50 percent greater tonnage in less time at a cost savings of 12.5 percent compared to steam.

The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad obtained similarly satisfying results from its 1927 electrification of nearly 900 miles of track. Running from Harlowton, Mont., to Seattle,

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s entry into electrification signaled a major boost in growth of mainline and branch line electric rail.

Wash., and known to all as the Milwaukee Road, this railway was a remarkably versatile system that carried eastern manufacturing, Midwestern agriculture, Northwestern logging, and transcontinental passenger traffic. After electrification, passenger trains ran more smoothly through high mountain passes and kept tighter schedules. Freight service carried double the tonnage of the steam era.

BACK EAST, the Pennsylvania Railroad was running almost at capacity. By 1928, the Pennsy’s eastern lines were carrying the densest freight and passenger traffic in the country, and all data pointed to those numbers growing in years to come.

Understanding that more track alone could not forestall catastrophic service disruptions, Pennsy leadership announced a bold electrification program that eclipsed any such project undertaken to that point.

In the course of 10 years, the Pennsy electrified more than 2,000-trackmiles to connect New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and many points between. At the project’s peak in 1934, amid the Great Depression, the electrification work engaged 12,000 men, with another 12,000 manufacturing 139 electric locomotives, equipment, and infrastructure.

Brief Electric Triumph

A 1913 image of Grand Central Station, above, and a 1918 map that shows how many underground electric rail lines converged in the station that remains a New York City icon.

The Pennsy electrification, completed in 1939, was a resounding success. In the next five years freight and passenger run times shrank, freight tonnage more than doubled, and passenger traffic quadrupled. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrified rail network became the nation’s largest and busiest, suggesting a bright future for electrification.

IN 1939, THE UNITED STATES had approximately 6,300 track-miles of electrified rail, more than any other country and one-fifth of the world’s total. Though that number marked the peak of electrification in the country, it nonetheless represented only two percent of the nation’s rail network. World War II brought a halt to new electrifications. Assumptions and hopes that the return of peace would mark a rebirth of electrification quickly withered.

Starting in the late 1940s, rail companies lost revenue as freight and passenger traffic melted away with the industrial decline of the Northeast, construction of the interstate highway system, and the rise of commercial air transport. As railroad fortunes dwindled, so too did plans for post-war electrifications. By the 1970s, virtually every American rail company had gone out of business, merged with competitors, or been consolidated and taken over by the federal government.

Another hurdle to widespread electrification was the diesel-electric locomotive. First used in the early 1920s as railyard switcher engines to push train cars into position for locomotives, diesel-electrics used a diesel-powered engine to drive an alternator that produced electricity to run the locomotive, in effect a self-contained electric running off its own power plant instead of wires or third rails.

Diesel locomotives were not as efficient or environmentally friendly as pure electric locomotives but they provided a greater return on investment. Diesel fuel was cheap and the conversion from steam to diesel did not require an entirely new system with a dedicated power infrastructure the way electrification had. Many electrified lines were converted to diesel or made obsolete by railroad mergers or other forms of transport.

The dream of widespread rail electrification lives on. The United States has roughly 1,000 miles of electrified rail, mostly in the Northeast Corridor. Many cities and suburbs operate electric mass transit. The call for faster,

cleaner, and more economical transportation is as strong as it was a century ago. The drive to dump fossil fuels in favor of cleaner technologies also invites the promise of electric rail’s resurgence. All that remains is the will to reinvest. H

Richard Brownell is a frequent contributor to American History magazine. A passionate historical writer, he is fascinated by rail history.

Color on Canvas

Racial Diversity in the Art of William Sidney Mount (1807-1868)

William Sidney Mount, one of America’s finest 19th-century genre, or scene, painters, created glorious portraits of Black and multiracial people, among others. In politics, he was a Jacksonian Democrat, who favored states’ rights to choose slavery as America’s borders expanded westward. Later on, he would vote against Lincoln. And yet, unlike most White artists of the mid-1800s, who portrayed Black people in demeaning caricatures, Mount painted his subjects with humanity, realism, and psychological depth. Before the Civil War, photography wasn’t common and Black individuals were rarely portrayed in fine art. Mount’s paintings are extremely valuable to the historical record both because of their rarity and their quality. Out of several hundred paintings Mount made in his lifetime, his dozen works that feature Black and multiracial individuals are among his best.

Mount lived his whole life on the rural North Shore of Long Island, N.Y., aside from several years in Manhattan. He never married. From the local farming homesteads, held by his siblings, extended family, and their neighbors, he chose his models, both Black and White. He was also a fiddler, and he liked to illustrate country folk, both Black and White, making music. Due to New York’s partial manumission acts beginning in 1799 and the state’s abolition of slavery in 1827, all Mount’s Black models were free.

Wealthy, White, urban, East Coast businessmen, such as Henry Breevort Jr., Edward L. Carey, Gouverneur Kemble, and Luman Reed purchased Mount’s rural scenes of the 1830s and 1840s. “Yankee” themed artwork became popular in America during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1829 to 1837, which Jackson billed as the “era of the common man.” Mount’s farming scenes won him accolades at the National Academy of Design exhibitions in Manhattan. Racial diversity added to the marketability of such paintings, but with one caveat—that Black and White individuals be segregated within the illustration. As art historian Elizabeth Johns points out, White American buyers were not interested in artwork that challenged the existing segregated and hierarchical social order.

In the 1850s, Mount created three large portraits of Black and multiracial musicians for an entirely different clientele: European buyers of lithographic prints. Mount’s New York agent for the Paris-based international art dealership, Goupil, Vibert & Co. (later Goupil and Co.), commissioned paintings that put Black people front and center in the composition. Europeans were apparently more open-minded about portraying Black people than were their American counterparts.

A Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845) is one of the few works of fine art from early or mid-19th century America that features a Black woman. As such, it was considered controversial among the affluent, White audience in New York who saw the painting exhibited at the National Academy of Design. Several art critics found the subject matter of the “negress” to be in poor taste for a painting on public view. Today the work is considered to be one of the best of its era in America. The white, two-story building in the background of the scene with its accompanying farm is St. George’s Manor on Strong’s Neck in Setauket, Long Island. Manhattan attorney George Washington Strong (17831855), who commissioned the work, had grown up at St. George’s; the newly built manor house shown here belonged to one of his older brothers, the Honorable Selah Brewster Strong I, a congressman (1792-1872). A childhood memory of the Strongs may have inspired the painting’s subject matter, though Mount himself had fond recollections of spearfishing as a boy with an elderly, enslaved Black man named Hector. Spearfishing along the protected waters of Strong’s Neck was a common activity in Mount’s time, as it had been for centuries among the native Setalcotts. Selah Brewster Strong’s 10-year-old son Judd (Thomas Shepard Strong II, 1834-1909) served as the model for the boy in the skiff. No documentation exists to tell us the name of the eel-spearing woman. She may have been Rachael Youngs Tobias (1805-1866), who was born into slavery at St. George’s Manor. Another possibility is that she was Rachel Brewster (1799-c. 1880), a woman of Black and Native American ancestry who grew up in Setauket’s Brewster House, shown in Mount’s painting Long Island Farmhouses (1862-1863). Mount was closely affiliated with both the Strong and Brewster families and would have known each of these women from childhood years and beyond.

B Mount painted Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride (1830) when he was only 23 years old. This simple scene of couples dancing in a crowded inn earned Mount his first sale and his first award in an art exhibition at New York’s National Academy of Design, where he had studied. Mount enjoyed the satiric engravings of British artist William Hogarth, among others, who illustrated comic characters and storylines. The story here, a romantic vignette, involves a man in an olive green waistcoat and trousers, who looks on in shock as the woman in a white gown steps out onto the dance floor with another man. Compared to Mount’s later paintings, his figures, both Black and White, are clumsily rendered and their faces have a sameness to them. His Black fiddler resembles the stereotypical Black caricatures in 19th-century cartoons. The other two Black figures in the composition, the coachman in the red cap and the man holding the bellows, are equally stereotypical with their childlike, grinning faces. Seventeen years later, Mount’s skills in realistic portraiture had progressed to an extraordinary degree when he painted a biracial fiddler in Right and Left (1847). The room shown in Rustic Dance is believed to be the main room in the Hawkins-Mount House in Stony Brook (c. 1725, enlarged 1757), where Mount lived from the age of six into his teenage years, and for periods afterward. Mount recalled a talented Black fiddler named Anthony Hannibal Clapp (1749-1816) he had known as a child. Clapp was possibly Mount’s inspiration for the fiddler in Rustic Dance

C Wilhelm (William) Schaus, Mount’s agent for lithographic prints at the

firm Goupil, Vibert & Co. liked Mount’s painting of a White fiddler, Just in Tune (1849), and asked Mount to paint a Black fiddler. The result was Mount’s magnificent portrait Right and Left (1850). Subsequently, Schaus asked Mount to paint two more portraits of Black musicians, a banjo player, and a bones player. Mount’s musical portraits are reminiscent of the works of 17th-century Dutch master Frans Hals, whose vivid, expressive figures assumed the same three-quarter length poses. Eloquent and psychologically rich, Right and Left marked a vast departure from the racist caricatures of Black fiddlers shown in newspaper cartoons, and on theatre billboards and sheet music covers during Mount’s time. The fiddler’s attire indicates that the picture is meant to be of a traveling performer. The horseshoe hung on the wall behind him may symbolize the variable luck of a musician’s life. The title of the painting carries a double meaning. Mount’s fiddler is left-handed, and “right and left,” is a square-dance term. To Mount’s annoyance, when this painting was copied as a lithograph, the artist flipped the figure as a mirror image, making the fiddler right-handed. Mount’s model for this portrait may have been Henry (Harry) Brazier (c. 1817-1895), a biracial man who lived in Smithtown and Mastic, Long Island, and was known to play the fiddle.

DD Farmers Nooning (1836) brings us to a field during harvest time when a group of young men and boys take a break from their labors. The reclining figure of the Black man looks as though he could be having a good dream. A young, White boy wearing a Scottish-style tam-o’-shanter, playfully tickles his ear with a piece of straw. One of the others in the group sharpens farm tools, preparing for the work still ahead. Art historian Elizabeth Johns suggests that Farmers Nooning conveys an encrypted political message regarding the dangers of abolitionism. The boy’s tam-o’-shanter, she says, symbolizes the English and Scottish antislavery groups that funded American abolitionists. The ear tickling, she says, is a visual representation of an expression popular in preCivil War America about “filling the naive listener’s mind with promises.” Another art historian, Deborah Johnson, interprets the Black man as “in a liminal state, suspended between the slumber of slavery and the awakening of emancipation.” The model for the reclining Black man is believed to be Abner Mills of Smithtown, Long Island, who worked on the Mills Pond estate owned by Mount’s distant cousins. One of Abner’s older, half-brothers was Robbin Mills, Mount’s model for The Power of Music. The models for the other figures in Farmers Nooning are likely the sons of Mount’s sister, Ruth Seabury.

E The cattle-bone clappers in the musician’s hands make fast, clickety sounds similar to the taps of a tap dancer. The jug and glass in The Bone Player (1856) suggest the musician is in a tavern, and the box in which he carries his “bones” suggests he is a traveling performer. His elegant clothes, including his knotted red silk scarf, further indicate that the performer is a

minstrel. Nineteenth-century Blackface groups each typically had a bones player (as well as a fiddler, banjo player, and tambourine player). Because of this, some historians view this painting in a racist context; they suggest that William Schaus, Mount’s agent, purposed the subject matter of a bones player to Mount because of the popularity of Blackface groups that performed in tawdry, raucous halls in the Five Points district in lower Manhattan at the time. It is not known how Schaus, a German emigré, and a representative of a Parisbased firm for fine art, learned about bones players. In any case, Mount’s magnificent musician is painted in an ennobling European style, and purchases of this image as a lithograph were mostly overseas in cities such as London and Paris.

Mount’s model for The Bone Player was 40-yearold Andrew Brewster (1808–after 1860), a farmhand who worked for Mount’s brother, Robert Nelson Mount. Andrew was born in the Brewster House in Setauket, portrayed in Long Island Farmhouses. He lived there, and in the adjoining house on the property, for most of his life.

F The Joseph Brewster House, 1665, in Setauket, Long Island, N.Y., was home to six generations of Brewsters, both the White families and the Black families of the same name who worked for them. The colonial “saltbox” house at the foreground of Long Island Farmhouses (1862-63) is now a museum run by the Ward Melville Heritage Organization. In Mount’s time, as this picture shows, two adjoining houses stood on the property, as well as accompanying barns and other structures that were part of a farm of several hundred acres. One of Mount’s brothers, Robert Nelson Mount, a fiddler and dance teacher, married Mary J. Thompson Brewster, and the couple lived in the house in the painting’s background. Mount himself boarded with them on and off, at least twice in his lifetime, and it was in this house where Mount passed away in 1868. Two of the farmhands from this joint property modeled for Mount: George Freeman, The Banjo Player, and Andrew Brewster, The Bone Player. Andrew’s sister, Rachel Brewster, was possibly Mount’s model for the woman in Eel Spearing at Setauket

G Dance of the Haymakers (1845) takes us to a joyous celebration in a barn at the end of a harvest day. The two men at the center dance the quick steps of the hornpipe in sync, and possibly in a friendly competition to see who can outdo

the other. Mount enjoyed dancing and playing music himself (the fiddle and flute) and his rural life gave him many opportunities to record such gatherings with his pencil and tiny sketchbook he carried in his pocket. In his sketches and paintings, Mount’s dancers and musicians are sometimes Black and sometimes White, and those watching them are sometimes Black and sometimes White. Today it makes for an interesting cultural discussion that both Black and White people appear in Mount’s artworks in interchangeable roles, albeit in separate areas of the compositions. These multiracial scenes suggest that 19th-century society, at least on Long Island, was not as segregated as was once believed. Most of the real-life models in Dance of the Haymakers are well-documented as Stony Brook residents and friends of Mount. The fiddler is Mount’s second cousin Shepard “Shep” Jones; the dancers, left to right, are Tom Briggs and Wesley Ruland; the spectator behind the fiddle is Horace Newton; the man seated on the box is Billy Biggs; and the boy with the flail is Joe Jayne. The people in the loft, peering out of the darkness, could be Mary Brewster and her biracial daughter, Phelena Seabury, who were connected to the household of Mount’s sister and brother-in-law, Ruth and Charles Saltonstall Seabury.

This portfolio is adapted from The Art of William Sidney Mount: Long Island People of Color on Canvas, The History Press, 2022, $23.99

Katherine Kirkpatrick studied English and art history at Smith College, and is the author of nine books. Learn more at katherinekirkpatrick.com.

Vivian Nicholson-Mueller is an educator and historian who has done extensive research on the lives of White, Black, and Native people of Long Island. She is related to many of Mount’s models and to Mount himself.

H Mount dressed his model as a jaunty stagecoach driver. The shiny object that hangs around his neck is a bugle mouthpiece; coachmen used bugles as drivers use car horns today. The striped cap may also signify the dress of a coachman. The figure of The Banjo Player (1856) has great vitality, and all the musical details of the painting, including the expensive, calfskin model of the banjo (manufactured by the William Boucher Banjo Company of Baltimore) and the careful way Mount positioned the subject’s hands (performing the “claw hammer” style), are technically accurate. Most of all it is the young man’s sense of joyousness that makes this painting one of Mount’s most popular and enduring. The model for the work was George Freeman (1835-1880), a 21-year-old farmhand indentured to John Brewster, owner of the Brewster House (shown in the painting Long Island Farmhouses). Andrew Brewster, Mount’s model for The Bone Player, who was nearly twice George’s age, also lived within the joint Mount–Brewster household. As he did for all of his portraits, Mount worked slowly and with precision when he made The Banjo Player. Mount wrote in his diary that he completed the painting in eight days, with his model posing for him twice a day. According to one of Mount’s nephews, Mount particularly enjoyed the company of George Freeman as he was creating the painting. Mount owned a flute, several violins, and several hundred musical scores, both classical and folk, including African American tunes such as “Possum Up a Gum Stump.” There’s no record of anyone in the Mount or Brewster families owning a banjo, however. Whether it was an instrument George Freeman played remains a mystery.

The 48ers

When European monarchs crushed rebellions in the mid-1800s, America benefited

Hanging on Every Word

An overflowing, enthusiastic audience roars its approval of a speech by Carl Schurz in New York City’s Cooper Union. Schurz was arguably the most famous 48er.

In November 1850, Gottfried Kinkel was locked up for life in Berlin’s Spandau Prison. The university professor had been among leaders of a spate of unsuccessful revolutions to sweep German-speaking regions of Europe in 1848-49. A student and revolutionary follower of Kinkel’s, Carl Schurz, vowed to spring his mentor. Schurz, 21, also had been incarcerated for his politics, but he had escaped confinement and fled to Zurich, Switzerland, from which he secretly returned to Berlin with a jailbreak scheme in mind. Through like-minded friends, Schurz met and cultivated disaffected Spandau jailer George Brune, who for a price agreed to spring Kinkel.

The prisoner was in a third-floor cell. One evening, as fellow guards were celebrating a birthday at a nearby inn, Brune, seeing an “all-clear” signal flashed by lantern, looped a rope around Kinkel’s waist and lowered him out his cell window to Schurz, waiting below. As Kinkel had feared, he loosened bits of the old prison’s masonry walls during his descent—but to their good fortune, the clatter was obscured by a passing horse cart with iron-rimmed wheels. Kinkel and Schurz quickly boarded a waiting carriage, traveling 150 miles north to the North Sea port of Warnemunde. Posing as merchants and using aliases, they sailed to Edinburgh, Scotland, and then headed to London. In 1852, Schurz left Britain for America, where he became the most prominent of an influx of energetic and influential European emigres, who have come to be known as “48ers.”

UNDERSTANDING THE 48er phenomenon demands familiarity with Europe’s revolutions of this period. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the continent came under the “Metternich System” of autocracy. Royal families ruled every state in the region; even once-revolutionary France had reinstalled its monarchy. But beneath a veneer of order maintained by repression, republican dissatisfaction roiled, especially among the educated. Starting in Sicily in January 1848, uprisings spread to France and soon engulfed the entire continent, reaching as far as Ireland.

The German Confederation comprised 39 states sharing Teutonic cultural identity and the German language. Liberals around the Confederation, intent on corralling those 39 principalities into a unified republic, formed the Frankfurt National Assembly—an impressive sounding but powerless entity. Hardliners urged armed revolt; German radicalism had its base in the southwestern state of Baden, which saw several uprisings. In April 1848, radical lawyer Friedrich Hecker

proclaimed a republic, then led a march through Baden, hoping to spawn a mass movement. He miscalculated and had to flee to Switzerland.

Tavern-goers hailed him in the Heckerlied or “Hecker Song”:

When the people ask, is Hecker still alive?

Can you tell them?

Yes, he’s still alive.

He’s not hanging from a tree

He’s not hanging on a rope

He has his dream of A free republic

As had happened in Baden, revolutions across the German principalities foundered after they confronted the strength of the rulers’ armies. Revolutionary leaders were imprisoned, executed, or were wanted men with a price on their heads, although the movement’s foot soldiers were granted amnesty, according to The German-American Forty-Eighters, edited by Don Heinrich Tolzmann. Some took refuge in Switzerland, England, or France, but 4,000 to 10,000 ended up in the United States.

GERMAN SPEAKERS were not the only 48ers; some hailed from Hungary and Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, and other European locales. But most did come from the Fatherland.

“The typical Forty Eighter,” writes Dann Woellert in The Cincinnati Turner Societies, “was a male in his twenties, unmarried, in excellent physical condition, politically enlightened, and financially stable or coming from a family of means.” The average 48er was anti-clerical, which understandably could set off conflict with

devoutly religious German Americans.

Fired Up for Revolt

When Friedrich Hecker arrived in New York in October 1848, thousands of freedom-loving German Americans lined the wharf to welcome him. In Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other large cities, he was likewise celebrated. Non-celebrity 48ers had it rougher. An 1887 reminiscence by M.J. Becker, included in Tolzmann’s anthology, recalls that Becker, who in the old country had studied mathematics and engineering, found himself on Long Island tending radishes and onions. Becker’s friend, an accomplished sculptor, was getting by carving cigar-store Indians. Those who mastered English were able to resume Old World professions such as law, medicine, pharmacy, and teaching. Some flocked to journalism that did not require learning a new tongue: wherever German immigrants clustered, German-language newspapers proliferated. Others went into business or agriculture. Carl Schurz tried farming in Watertown, Wis., before passing the bar in 1858. Hecker had a successful farm in Summerfield, Ill., where he often received fellow refugees.

Some 48ers favored New York, Philadelphia, and other established Eastern immigrant centers. Midwestern cities with existing German populations also drew newcomers; the most prominent were Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. A heavily Germanic Cincinnati neighborhood across the now-defunct Miami & Erie Canal from downtown, became known as Over the Rhine for its location, growing into a “veritable Deutschland” rich in taverns, breweries, music halls, German bakeries, and cigar-makers.

Young revolutionaries

Gottfried Kinkel and Carl Schurz, above left. The engraving above shows Friedrich Hecker rallying a crowd in the German state of Baden. By 1848, he was in America.

German and Czech 48ers settled in smaller numbers in the Hill Country of central Texas, to which Germans had been coming since the 1830s. Luckenbach, Texas, was named for German nobleman Jacob Luckenbach, one of the first settlers. Tejanos—descendants of the original Mexican settlers of Texas—also populated the region where, thanks to German and Czech influence, the polka and the accordion worked their way into Tejano music.

The average 48er was anti-clerical, which could set off conflict with devoutly religious German Americans.

Athletes in Action

THE 48ers HAD A HAND in popularizing physical fitness in the United States. In Germany, many had been members of the Turnverein, or Turner movement, a discipline that stressed gymnastics, exercise, and “a sound mind in a sound body.” When Hecker visited Cincinnati in late October 1848, several recent immigrants

asked him about establishing a Turnverein there. Hecker enthusiastically approved, calling the movement “the carrier, developer and apostle of the free spirit.” Soon, Turner societies were spreading nationwide.

Fresh from the whip of monarchic rule, 48ers fervently opposed slavery. “The Louisville Platform,” an 1854 manifesto by 48ers in that Kentucky city, called slavery “a political and moral cancer” and demanded repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. But 48ers’ anti-clerical bent put them at odds with the Abolitionist movement, whose mainstays often were preachers. Many abolitionists also advocated strict temperance, anathema to lager-loving Germans. They found political haven in the new Republican Party, formed in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery. Officially, Republicans opposed the extension of slavery into the Western territories, but many, if not most, had a “ hidden agenda”: ending slavery altogether. When the party ran John C. Fremont for president in 1856, Illinois Republicans chose two electors-atlarge—Hecker and Abraham Lincoln. In 1860, Hecker and Schurz campaigned for Lincoln, Hecker mainly speaking in German and the younger Schurz orating in both German and English.

THE CIVIL WAR was the 48ers’ finest hour. More than 200,000 German-born immigrants enlisted in the Union Army, first among them many 48ers seasoned at combat by the 1848 revolutions. Entire Turner societies joined en masse. The highest-ranking German American officer during the Civil War was Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, a 48er from Baden. A commander in the revolution of 1849 there, he came to the United States from England in 1852, became a teacher, and rose to be superintendent of St. Louis schools. After Sigel accepted the politically motivated offer of colonelcy in the Army,

Germans throughout the Midwest volunteered to fight “mit Sigel.” Irish American tunesmith John F. Poole, known for writing the song “No Irish Need Apply,” turned the phrase into a comic dialect number sung to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:

I’ve come shust now, to tells you how

I goes mit regimentals

To schlag dem voes of liberty

Like dem old Continentals

Vot fights mit England long ago

To Save de Yankee eagle

Und now I get my sojer clothes

And goes to fight mit Sigel

CHORUS: Ja, das ist true, I speaks mit you

I goes to fight mit Sigel!

Sigel had his best moment of the war in March 1862 at Pea Ridge, Ark., where his men surprised a Confederate force, pounding the foe with artillery until they retreated. At Wilson’s Creek, Mo., in 1861, however, he had left a flank exposed, leading to a devastating Confederate counterattack. Sigel stumbled at Cedar Mountain, Va., in 1862 when he delayed because he was waiting for a supply train to deliver meals for his troops; and in 1864 at New Market, Va., when less than half his troops were on the battlefield as fighting began. Sigel was contentious, often bickering with fellow officers. Henry Halleck, the Union commander in chief in 1862–64, harped about Sigel in a letter to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, griping about the “damned Dutch” (a corruption of Deutsch, meaning “German” in German) who “constitute a very

dangerous element in society as well as the Army.” After fighting at Harpers Ferry in July 1864, Sigel was relieved of his command.

All for the Union

While Schurz and Franz Sigel had their pros and cons as military leaders, there is no doubt they helped solidify GermanAmerican support for the North during the Civil War. Hecker was a solid commander.

LIKE SIGEL, Schurz was a “political general,” appointed by Lincoln to curry favor with German Americans. Schurz’s division in the Army of the Potomac’s 11th Corps included several German regiments. Though better regarded than Sigel by fellow officers, Schurz too came in for criticism. The press reviled Schurz and the German troops as “flying Dutchmen” for retreating when overwhelmed by Confederate forces at Chancellorsville. Schurz demanded a hearing by a military court, but got none. At Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, Schurz’s troops fought well, but had the bad luck of deploying on terrain that was hard to defend, as well as being outnumbered. His regiments withdrew to Cemetery Hill, where he regrouped and the next day helped drive back the Confederates.

Hecker also received a commission as a colonel, and in 1862 was given command of the 82nd Illinois Volunteers, mainly German in composition but leavened by Scandinavians and a Jewish company organized in Chicago. Hecker, who was wounded at Chancellorsville while fighting under Schurz, also saw action at Missionary Ridge and elsewhere. The invective aimed at Sigel and Schurz did not splatter him; an inquiry into a disappointing showing by troops that he and other officers led at the Battle of Wauhatchie, Tenn., in 1863 found, “So far as the conduct of Colonel Hecker is concerned, it is not deserving of censure.”

When the fighting ebbed, 48ers in blue relaxed together, enjoying Gemutlichkeit, or “good feelings.” Sigel once invited General James Garfield to his headquarters for tea; Sigel and Schurz entertained Garfield with their piano playing. Toward the end of the war, at Lookout Mountain, Tenn., Schurz and Hecker amused themselves with the German card game Skat.

Military or civilian, German Americans in the North saw supporting the Union as a way to gain acceptance as Americans. Few Germans had emigrated to the South, where opposition to the Confederacy was a black mark. In Texas, German-majority counties voted against secession in 1861. When Texas

Official Duty

During his term as Secretary of the Interior, Schurz, had numerous meetings with Native Americans. Here, front row, he poses with Ute Indians in 1880.

joined the Confederacy, Germans there formed a militia—the Union Loyal League—and resisted the draft. In April 1862, Confederate troops came to the Hill Country to enforce conscription, burning homes and making mass arrests. That August, 60-odd Germans took off for Mexico, planning to reach Union-held New Orleans from there. Confederate pursuers caught them at Nueces, killing 19 and wounding others. Texas Germans rejoiced when the Union won the war.

AFTER THE WAR, Schurz continued in public life. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson sent him South to examine “the Negro problem.” Schurz found that powerful Southern Whites still believed that coercion was the only way to get African Americans to work, that African Americans were being deprived of their rights, and that they were constantly in danger. Johnson, a Unionist who championed the poor Whites over freed Blacks, ignored Schurz’s report.

In 1868 Schurz was elected as a Republican U.S. Senator from Missouri. He soon did a seeming about-face: In 1870, he helped found the “Liberal Republican” faction whose adherents believed equality for African Americans in the South had been achieved, and that the priority now was to restore self-government in the former Confederate states. In 1871, he voted against the Ku Klux Klan Act, which permitted federal action against that terror organization, on the grounds that the measure gave too much power to the president. The Liberal Republicans disappeared after their presidential candidate, Horace Greeley, also endorsed by the Democrats, decisively lost to incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. In the Senate, Schurz was noted for his advocacy of civil service reform, a major issue in that era of the spoils system.

Schurz lost his Senate seat in 1874. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him secretary of the Interior. In 1879, Schurz took a well-publicized trip to the West, meeting with Native American chiefs. In Washington, Schurz met with Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca tribe, which had been forced to leave Nebraska and resettle in Oklahoma. Schurz expressed sympathy with the tribe’s hardships. But when Standing Bear and his people tried to return home without permission, Schurz ordered the Army to arrest them and turn them back, drawing sharp criticism. Upon

A Baker’s Dozen of 48ers

Mathilde Franziska Anneke, feminist pioneer. During a Baden uprising in 1849, she assisted her husband, Friedrich by delivering messages. They fled to Milwaukee, and Mathilde published the first femaleowned feminist publication in the U.S. She lived in Switzerland during the Civil War and wrote anti-slavery fiction; afterward, she returned to the U.S. and devoted herself to women’s suffrage.

Hans Balatka, a Czech conductor and composer, promoted European classical music. As a student in Vienna, he joined a revolutionary group. In America, he settled in Milwaukee and conducted at music festivals

there and in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and elsewhere. Moving to Chicago, he led the Liederkranz Society, the Mozart Club, the Chicago Musical Society and other groups.

Lorenz Brentano served as president of the Baden provisional revolutionary government in 1849. He lived in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and finally Chicago, where he became a lawyer. While in Pennsylvania, he founded a German-language anti-slavery publication. He was elected as a Republican to the Illinois legislature during the Civil War. He was U.S. consul in Dresden 1872-76, then served one term in Congress.

Edward Degener, Texas Unionist. Degener, a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, came to the U.S in 1850 and farmed in the Hill

Country. During the Civil War, he was convicted of sedition by a Confederate court. After the war, he was a delegate to two Texas constitutional conventions, served as a Republican congressman in 1871-72 and on the San Antonio City Council from 1872-78.

Dr. Abraham Jacobi, pioneering pediatrician. Jacobi, as a young doctor, was one of several members of the Communist League who were tried in Cologne for revolutionary activities, and he later stayed with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London.

Arriving in the U.S in 1853, he taught at New York Medical College, where he was its st chair of children’s diseases, New York University, and Columbia University. At Mount Sinai Hospital, he established the

first Department of Pediatrics at a general hospital. He was a close friend of Schurz; each had a cottage on Lake George at Bolton Landing, N.Y. Jacobi served as president of the American Medical Association 1912-13.

Wlodzimierz Kryzyzankoski took part in the 1848 Polish uprising against Prussia, then fled to the U.S. As a civil engineer and surveyor in the 1850s, he helped railroads push west. During the Civil War, he raised a Polish regiment, was appointed as a general, and fought at Gettysburg and in other important battles. He served as governor of Georgia during Reconstruction.

John Michael Maisch, pharmaceutical pioneer. He came to the U.S. in 1849 and worked in

leaving Interior in 1881, Schurz moved to New York and turned his efforts toward journalism. Omaha Daily Herald Assistant Editor Thomas Tibbles publicized the case of the Poncas, and aided by lawyers working pro bono, Standing Bear sued for his release and won. The Hayes administration shortly permitted some to return to their homeland in Nebraska.

Other 48ers also went into public service. Some, like Lorenz Brentano and Julius Stahel, were appointed as diplomatic envoys. Others, like Thomas Meagher and Wlodzimierz Kryzyzankoski, were named to high posts in the Western territories and in the Reconstruction-era South. Sigel briefly edited the German-language Baltimore Wecker, then moved to New York and ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state. In the 1870s and 1880s he held local offices, including city registrar, pension agent for the New York District, and district inspector for the common (public) schools of New York. Despite his sketchy military reputation, Sigel remained a hero to German Americans. For years, in certain Midwestern taverns, veterans who had “fought mit Sigel” could get a free lager.

Hecker returned to his farm, occasionally hitting the lecture circuit. In 1871 he applauded the achievement of one of his dreams—a united Germany. But on a visit to the old country in 1873, he was dismayed at the lack of a national bill of rights, the Kaiser’s elevated role, the huge military budget, and rampant anti-Semitism.

In the 1890s, the 48er generation began to die off, but traces remain. A statue of Sigel stands in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, about a mile from Grant’s Tomb. Manhattan also has a Carl Schurz monument and a Carl Schurz Park. Monuments to Hecker stand in St. Louis and Cincinnati. And in Comfort, Texas, the Treŭe der Union (Loyalty to the Union) monument honors those killed in the Nueces Massacre. H

drugstores while studying pharmacy. By 1861, he was teaching at the New York College of Pharmacy. During the Civil War, he was chief chemist at the U.S. Army Laboratory in Philadelphia. He became the editor of the American Journal of Pharmacy and secretary of the American Pharmaceutical Association. In 1869, he drafted a model state law regulating pharmacies.

Thomas Meagher was a leader of the failed “Young Irelander” rebellion in 1848. Exiled by the British to Tasmania, he escaped to New York and founded an Irish weekly. When the Civil War came, he organized the Union Army’s Irish Brigade, was commissioned as a brigadier general, and led the brigade through several battles. Later, he served as territorial governor of Montana.

Bertha Ochs was the mother of New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs. Bertha Ochs came as a teen during the uprising in

Bavaria and lived with an uncle in Natchez, Miss. She was a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, and her son Adolph, who became publisher of the Chattanooga Times and later The New York Times, donated to Confederate commemorations. According to author David J. Jackowe, flaglike tile mosaics resembling the Confederate banner that once adorned the Times Square subway station were a nod by designer Squire Vickers in 1917 to the Ochs family’s fondness for the Confederacy.

Oswald Ottendorfer took part in uprisings in Vienna, Saxony, and

Baden. Arriving in New York, he started in the Staats Zeitung newspaper’s counting room and worked his way up, eventually serving as publisher 1859-1900. While he leaned Democratic, he supported Lincoln’s war effort. He served one term as an alderman, ran for mayor in 1874 on an anti-Tammany platform, and was known for philanthropy.

Edward Salomon, first Jewish governor of Wisconsin. A revolutionary student at the University of Berlin, he fled to the U.S. in 1849. After working as a teacher and court clerk, he passed the bar in 1856 and practiced law in Milwaukee. He was elected lieutenant governor as a Republican in 1860 and became governor following Governor Lawrence Harvey’s death in 1862. He later moved to New York, where he represented German interests as an attorney.

Margarethe Schurz was Carl Schurz’s wife. She was active in the kindergarten movement, a German creation, and in 1856 opened the first American kindergarten—a German-speaking school, like most kindergartens of the day, in Watertown, Wisconsin. She died at 43 after giving birth. Julius Stahel, Hungarian 48er and Civil War general. He took part in Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 uprising, fled to England, and in 1859 came to the U.S. Stahel, a German speaker, helped raise a German-speaking regiment. He saw action at both Bull Run battles, Cross Keys, and elsewhere, and received the Medal of Honor. After the war, he served as U.S. consul in Japan and China. He also worked as an engineer and insurance executive. R.G.

Canal Fever

Terra Firma

BETWEEN 1817 AND 1825, workers used picks, shovels, axes, draft animal power, and black powder explosives to gouge a ditch 363 miles long, 40 feet wide, and 4 feet deep from Albany, N.Y., to Buffalo, N.Y. The Erie Canal was the United States’ first major infrastructure project, and it finally connected the East Coast to the interior. The Erie took advantage of the Mohawk River Valley, a rare, fairly level natural break in the Appalachian

Mountain chain that runs from Maine to Georgia. Even so, 83 lift locks were required along the Erie Canal for navigation.

The impact of the canal, initially derided as New York Governor DeWitt Clinton’s “Big Ditch,” can hardly be measured. Canal boats drawn by mules could travel from Albany to Buffalo in a

week, breakneck speed for the era. New York City, connected to the canal by the Hudson River, boomed and never looked back as the dominant city on the East Coast.

Millions of Irish and German emigrants travel ed west on the canal to find a new life, exiting at Buffalo and moving on through the Great Lakes

network. Cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee grew and expanded due to canal traffic, economically and politically tying the Midwest to the East Coast. That alliance was made clear during the Civil War.

The Erie Canal’s success brought on a “canal fever.” This map shows how the waterways had veined their way through the Empire State by 1858. Canals were built in dozens of other states as well from the 1820s to the 1860s, but, a smoky competitor quickly loomed on the horizon: railroads. H

Guiteau Just Wanted Love

AN ASSASSIN IN UTOPIA engagingly recounts the story of President James Garfield’s 1881 assassination by Charles Guiteau against the backdrop of a 19th-century landscape overstuffed with characters that continue to amaze and entertain us. Horace Greeley, P. T. Barnum, Margaret Fuller, Pauline Cushman, the Fox sisters, Roscoe Conkling, and James G. Blaine are among those making appearances, sometimes with only a tangential relationship to the story.

An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder

The utopia of the book’s title—the Oneida Community in central New York—is best known today as the manufacturer of tableware and cutlery.

But for more than three decades after its 1847 establishment, Oneida was known for something else entirely—a devotion to sexual freedom, as defined by its founder John Humphrey Noyes, that both scandalized and titillated.

“In a holy community there is no more

reason why sexual intercourse shall be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be,” he had written in 1837, “and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.” In the midst of New York State’s Burned-Over district, which spawned, among others, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and the millenarian prognosticator William Miller, Noyes soon found eager supplicants. Within a year, Oneida was home to 87 men, women, and children, and by 1860 had become a prosperous community whose well-tended fields, manufactories, and notorious lifestyle combined to attract tourists.

In June 1860, the 19-year-old Charles Guiteau left college in Michigan to join the community. He was soon disillusioned, complaining of working too hard and resenting the practice wherein community leaders subjected members to public criticism.

But most frustrating was Guiteau’s inability to form any sexual liaisons; so unpopular was he that Oneida women dubbed him “Git out.” In

April 1865, Guiteau set out for New York, but within three months was back and almost immediately complaining again about his sexual rejection. “We took you in out of charity,” responded the Oneida leadership. “You are now, and always have been, a dead weight.” By November 1866, Guiteau was gone for good.

For the next 15 years, Guiteau shuttled back and forth between Boston, New York, and Chicago, usually dodging a growing list of creditors. When his support for Horace Greeley’s failed 1872 presidential run foiled hopes for a government position, Guiteau reportedly told an acquaintance: “If I cannot get notoriety for good, I will get it for evil. I will shoot some of our public men.”

It would take him nearly 10 years to act on this threat, during which time his life cratered. His wife divorced him and he was briefly institutionalized. By 1880, Guiteau, now shabbily dressed and shod in rubber sandals, cast his lot with James Garfield, convinced that his support during the campaign merited a diplomatic appointment to Vienna or Paris.

For several months after the election, Guiteau frequently appeared unannounced at the White House seeking a presidential audience before becoming convinced that only the ascendance of Chester Arthur to the Oval Office would reunify the Republican Party. On Saturday morning, July 2, 1881, as Garfield, accompanied by his Secretary of State and close friend James G. Blaine and two of his sons, waited to board a train, Guiteau fired two bullets into his back. It took 79 days for the president to die amid an excruciating display of medical ineptitude.

Guiteau’s defense, one of the first in the United States to claim temporary insanity, placed some responsibility for his action with the Oneida community. “Whatever the religious fanaticism that brought him into the Community,” opined the head of the Utica asylum, it was there developed in the midst of sensualism, contentions and self-conceit and laid the foundation for…his dishonorable conduct.” The defense proved unconvincing; Guiteau was convicted in January 1882 and hanged five months later. His stuffed head was put on display, first in New York and later in Indiana, until destroyed by fire in 1916. His skeleton remains in the collection of the Army Medical Museum.

An Assassin in Utopia is a hugely entertaining and rewarding book. Drawing on an extensive bibliography of a few manuscript collections and numerous secondary studies, it makes no pretense of representing original scholarship. But it is a book that invites further exploration by the reader, whether of figures such as Barnum and Greeley; the spiritualist craze; 19th-century

utopian communities; the presidential campaign of 1840 (from whence came the phrase “keep the ball rolling”); or the tragic death of James Garfield. It is not hard to imagine Susan Wels’ book taking a well-deserved spot alongside such perennial favorites as The Devil in the White City in bookstores everywhere.

Vaccine Vitality

Historian Andrew Wehrman makes a robust case that there is nothing new under the sun in public health in his fantastic new monograph, The Contagion of Liberty. He traces questions of vaccine mandates back to the origins of the American Republic. He found that resistance to such governmental dictates were rare during the American Revolution. The belief that government-mandated inoculations were an imposition on personal liberty increased dramatically over the next two centuries. America’s revolutionary generation, conversely, broadly favored inoculations and quarantines. In fact, large numbers of people demanded vaccines for themselves and for others once they became available. British North Americans knew firsthand the devastation of smallpox, which killed more than 100,000 colonists during the first three quarters of the 18th century. To this generation so preoccupied with questions of liberty, the notion of freedom from this cyclical epidemic was at the forefront of their concerns. My, how things have changed. Efforts to convince citizens to accept inoculations for polio, influenza, and, most recently, COVID-19 provoked nearly inverse responses to those Wehrman found in 18th-century America.

Boston, the cradle of the revolution, mandated smallpox vaccines for entry in 1776, the same year that the country declared its independence. Two years earlier, riots nearly broke out on Boston’s

The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023, $32

Anti-Vaxxers

An 1802 cartoon pokes fun at the vaccination process, with patients sprouting cows after being dosed with a dubious serum.

Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution

North Shore in the town of Marblehead as poor citizens sought out a smallpox vaccine that had only been made available to the community’s more privileged inhabitants. It wasn’t just in New England that citizens and soldiers alike favored vaccination. Similar consensuses emerged in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies.

In 1777, General George Washington faced a smallpox epidemic within the Continental Army that threatened its ability to carry out military operations. Washington mandated smallpox vaccines for his soldiers, largely eradicating the disease from its ranks. Wehrman asserts, quite persuasively, that America’s successful fight for its independence was aided in no small part by its soldiers and its citizens’ broad consensus around public health measures. During the 19th century, a growing public mistrust of government administrators and, particularly, doctors who became involved in quackery or outright corruption eroded some of the trust in such measures that existed during the Revolutionary era, setting the stage for more modern opposition to vaccine mandates. To tell this story, the author harnesses available governmental data and fistfuls of great anecdotes while situating it in a thorough historical context. The Contagion of Liberty is both timely and sturdy in its findings. It belongs on any list of the best history books of 2023.

Echoes of 1776

From the Battlefield to the Stage: The Many Lives of General John Burgoyne

Now, amid a time when Americans are in sometimes-violent debate over what an American and his or her government are, the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati surely thought it time to offer a reminder in the form of Jack D. Warren’s epically comprehensive history of the conflict that transformed 13 British colonies into the modern world’s first republic.

Gathering the strands of events and characters that came together to launch such singular creations as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Freedom presents them in a manner similar to Greek mythos, in which history reminds us of what we were and the myths of what we are and will be. The comparison is not that far-fetched, since the foundations of American democracy were laid by the Athenians (amid a world of kingdoms), which offered power over the government to a well-to-do class of aristocratic intellectuals while excluding foreign immigrants, slaves, and women.

The same could be said for the original edition of the U.S. Constitution, except that its basic principles were established in writing and came with a provision for eventually extending those principles to a widening population. Equally radical, the Constitution and the process of amendments

became the basis of defining the American nationality, rather than by geographic, ethnic, or religious bases.

The concepts of American democracy were not created in a vacuum—movements toward governments run from the bottom up rather than the royal top down were in process throughout Europe at the time. It was in the rebellious American colonies, however, that those concepts came together thanks to the far-from-unanimous collection of exceptional statesmen, generals, and common soldiers whose sacrifice over eight years of war and another decade of economic and political turmoil ultimately synthesized what Benjamin Franklin proclaimed “A republic...if you can keep it.”

Throughout the historic events recounted in Freedom are admonitions to the reader to better appreciate both the elements and all the cast members, great and small, who gave all they had to jump start that democratic process. The author’s presentation comes across at times as pedantic and exclusivist—his constant use of the first-person plural suggests his target audience is primarily domestic—but given the blood and drama that has tested the Constitution since its signing in 1789, perhaps a bit of revived pedagogy to a new generation is in order.

Gentleman Johnny

Larger than life historical figures loom ominously in military history; historians rarely call them down from pedestals to examine their humanity and, what’s more, popular memory does its own damage over the years, distorting kernels of truth into romanticized mythology. General John

Pomp and Circumstance

British General John Burgoyne presents his sword in surrender to Continental General Horatio Gates at the 1777 Battle of Saratoga.

Burgoyne is one such victim of a collective failure to examine our heroes or, in his case perhaps, our anti-heroes.

Norman S. Poser’s biography of the previously one-dimensional Burgoyne is a welcome contextualization of a multifaceted and previously misunderstood man. In this new work, Poser snatches the general off the battlefield at Saratoga and removes him from the confines of military history. Here, Poser gives Burgoyne the “new social history” treatment, in which Burgoyne emerges not just a general but a son, lover, husband, poet, and more. Poser’s detailed narrative reveals a much more dynamic and empathetic character than his reputation often warrants—a man whose military career may have been his destiny by birth, but which was clearly not his life’s passion. Poser’s Burgoyne is a man who was deeply affected by the political climate of the mid-18th century, the pursuits and passions of London society, and the age of Enlightenment, in which sentimentality and military heroism could coexist.

Poser’s From the Battlefield to the Stage adds depth and truth to “Gentleman Johnny,” by filling in the gaps of previous biographies to do justice to a figure who is more than his failures.

Art Lesson

The canon of American art—taught in art history classes and given pride of place in top

museums—is fairly short and fairly standard, running from Gilbert Stuart to, perhaps, Andy Warhol. There’s so much more. University of Kansas professor Charles Eldridge asked others in the field to select an American artist they deemed worthy of more attention than he or she receives. The Unforgettables is the result: short essays about 63 notables most of us have never heard of.

Many are from groups that faced historic prejudice: women, Blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics. The vivid reproductions of their work range from John Greenwood’s impressive portrait of a colonial era naval officer through Edith Hamilton’s expansive mural of the Grand Canyon to Harry Fonseca’s 21st century red-white-and-blue assemblage of plastic coins and glitter.

These are not unknowns; most have received some scholarly attention, and their work is in the collections of estimable but generally second-tier museums. But no one with even a passing interest in American art will page through this volume without discovering a few artists who strike a responsive chord and set off a personal search to see more.

A Tragic Failure

In recent decades, the aftermath of the Civil War has come under extensive scholarly scrutiny, with special attention paid to the violence that characterized the period from 1865 to 1877. John Patrick Daly ’s The War After the War represents a major contribution to our understanding of Reconstruction, the era that continues to color our nation’s struggles with race and the unresolved

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tensions between federal and state power.

Daly’s key contribution is a cogently framed structure within which to examine the Southern Civil War, “an ex-Confederate attempt to control the long-term meaning of the American Civil War,” between 1865 and 1877. In episodic fighting that lacked the drama of the previous four years, as many as 20,000 people (most of them Black), were killed as biracial coalitions of unionists fought ex-Confederate extremists in as many as 50 local battles.

The author divides events into three chronological periods—the terror phase (1865–67), the guerrilla phase (1867-72), and the paramilitary phase (1872-77)—and describes each at length. An appendix lists 29 “major incidents” from this period, including such familiar events as the massacres in Memphis, New Orleans, Camilla (Ga.), and Colfax (La.).

The federal government’s failure to impose advantageous peace terms on the defeated South enabled the first, briefest, and bloodiest, phase of the Southern Civil War. Ex-Confederates, in control of state and local governments, were emboldened to kill African Americans and their White allies with little fear of federal reprisal. A Congress appalled by the bloodletting imposed military rule, initiating a second phase in the war during which ex-Confederates resorted to guerrilla tactics best exemplified by the nascent Ku Klux Klan.

actions against the Klan as too little, too late.

The final paramilitary phase witnessed ex-Confederate extremists organizing wellarmed militias that, having little to fear from federal interference, openly attacked Blacks and their White supporters. Democrats won back control of Southern statehouses at the ballot box and any momentum to protect Black rights dissolved. The Compromise of 1877 effectively marked the end of the Southern Civil War but did nothing to stem ongoing violence against Blacks that would characterize the South for the next century.

Daly pulls no punches when arguing that the North’s heart was never in the fight to build an equitable biracial society on the ashes of the Confederacy. “Traditions of northern and national racism, distaste for standing armies, and suspicions of central government action certainly undermined decisive action.” The Southern Civil War, Daly concludes, “underscores the lie in the triumphalist narrative that holds that the American Civil War heroically won lasting moral and institutionalist progress for the nation.”

The reader closes the book convinced that such progress remains as much to be hoped for as celebrated.

Little Mac Reassessed

A scathing Thomas Nast cartoon mocks Horace Greeley and a companion for urging African Americans to “cooperate” with Ku Klux Klan members.

Between 1867 and 1872, biracial Republican coalitions took control of every Southern state government and in several instances saw governors organize effective biracial militia units that gave as good as they got when fighting guerrillas. The presence of Federal troops in the South, long a sore point for Lost Cause apologists, actually did little to stem guerrilla depredations, Daly argues, and he dismisses President Grant’s oft-lauded

The historical reputation of George B. McClellan is, to say the least, an unenviable one. For the most part, students of the Civil War have followed the lead of his wartime critics in viewing “Little Mac” as a general whose misplaced caution in attacking slavery was matched by a misplaced caution in the conduct of operations in the field. This is not to say McClellan has lacked defenders, but it is safe to say that they have enjoyed a much rougher ride on what historian Joseph L. Harsh in 1973 labeled the “McClellanGo-Round” than the general’s critics. Of course, it was the 1862 Maryland Campaign, which produced the largest surrender of American forces until 1942 and what remains the bloodiest day in American military history, where McClellan made some of his most important contributions to the course of the Civil War.

In the past few decades, interestingly, scholarship has appeared on the campaign by the likes of Harsh, Thomas Clemens, and others that has challenged readers to reconsider the traditional image of McClellan as being too slow and indecisive in his conduct—an image that has placed great weight on McClellan’s supposed failure to take sufficient advantage of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191—the so-called “Lost Orders.”

In The Tale Untwisted, Gene M. Thorp and Alexander Rossino offer an impressive challenge

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The Tale Untwisted: General George B. McClellan, The Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee’s Lost Orders

to criticism by the likes of Stephen W. Sears of McClellan’s handling of operations prior to reaching Frederick on September 13, 1862, and of his failure to prevent the fall of Harpers Ferry, a failure they properly place blame for squarely on the shoulders of Henry Halleck and Dixon Miles.

Central to Thorp’s and Rossino’s analysis is their effort to discredit the traditional account of McClellan coming into possession of Lee’s orders before noon on September 13 through documentary analysis and a meticulous re-creation of the movements of McClellan and his army that morning that is both effective and persuasive. This, of course, enables them to present the general’s conduct before and after the receipt of the orders and during the two days leading up to his army’s arrival at Antietam Creek in a very different light from what is presented in most accounts, making this a work that should have a significant impact on future scholarship on the campaign—and the man who led Union arms to victory in it.

Mail From the Front Lines

Just after the fall of Fort Henry in February 1862, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued Field Orders No. 1. It wasn’t about his next objective or about the status of his command. It was about the mail. Grant understood the importance of mail from home to keeping up the morale of his troops and how much friends and family needed reassurance that their loved one had come through the battle safely.

fellow Kentuckian Francis Blair appointed Markland to be a special postal agent for western Kentucky. His duties included investigating financial and contract fraud, internal mail theft, and official misconduct in a system where opportunities for illegal activities were rampant. Markland was very good at his job. On his way to his new posting, Markland traveled through Cairo, Ill., where he found the postal service “at a standstill.” That’s where his path again crossed that of Grant. They formed a successful partnership that lasted throughout the war into Grant’s presidency.

Markland accompanied Grant’s army to Vicksburg and opened the post office there immediately after the city fell. The system he set up routinely handled the timely distribution of tons of incoming and outgoing mail, often exceeding 200,000 daily. Markland’s job gave him entree into the highest circles Union officialdom including fellow Kentuckian Abraham Lincoln. “He had visited with Lincoln nearly every month from the time he began working with Grant in the West until March 1864,” writes Hooper, “when the postal agent came East with Grant and Markland began weekly visits.” Markland was frequently praised in newspaper accounts of his work and in official reports and correspondence of Union officers.

Letters have become one of the bedrock sources for Civil War historians. But how did mail get to the troops and to the folks back home? For soldiers serving under Grant, the answer was Absalom Markland. Candice Hooper has given this long neglected personage a full-length biography that he so richly deserves. Hooper stumbled across Markland’s papers at the Library of Congress while working on another project but knew she had found an important story that needed to be told. She tells it with a combination of thorough research and compelling narrative.

It all started with a brief childhood friendship between Grant and Markland when both were at the Maysville Academy in 1838. Grant went on to have a military career while Markland, according to Hooper, “was the epitome of the nineteenth century’s self-made man.” Hooper contends that “Markland had reinvented himself many times in four decades—schoolteacher, steam boatman, newspaper reporter, express agent, clerk, political activist, lawyer—until the reunion with a childhood friend led to his reinvention as a oneof-a-kind special agent of the Post Office Department for General Grant’s armies.”

When war broke out, Postmaster General and

In December 1864, Grant sent Markland to meet General William T. Sherman’s command when it reached the sea after being out of touch with the outside world as it marched across Georgia. Markland met Sherman and his bummers with three ships carrying 30 tons of mail and “collected the thousands of letters Sherman’s soldiers had written during the march.” When he opened the post office in Savannah on December 31, the Savannah Republican reported that Markland “has taken hold of his work with a determination to offer us the best mail facility possible.”

After the war, Markland was a regular at Grant’s White House and was instrumental in initiating the passage of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act because klansmen had been attacking trains carrying U.S. mail. The act broke the power of the Klan because Grant threatened to stop delivering mail to any city if a train carrying its mail was attacked by White terrorists. After leaving the Post Office Department, Markland was welcomed at numerous veterans’ reunions, wrote magazine articles detailing his wartime experiences, and served as an attorney for select friends and family. When Markland died on May 25, 1888, General Sherman voiced the feelings of thousands of old soldiers when he wrote to the postman’s widow “that he was a messenger of joy to us for we knew he was the bearer of news from home.”

Below Deck

The toy was cleverly designed with a removable deck, so all the loose components could be stowed away until the next cruise.

Home Port Battleship

Toy Box

THIS 1890S TOY Battleship Philadelphia was made by the Rufus Bliss Company of Pawtucket, R.I. The body of the warship was wood, and is covered with detailed colored lithographs. The vessel, nearly 32 inches long and about 6 inches wide, was equipped with wheels so it could be towed.

The late 19th century and early 20th century were transitional times for the U.S. Navy. Steel hulls replaced wood, and steam power replaced sail, though masts were still included, just in case. The real Philadelphia, the fourth ship of that name, was launched in 1889 and remained

in Navy service until 1926. During the ship’s long career, it took America’s flag to numerous oceans and international ports, and served as the flagship for several admirals.

Like many warships eclipsed by the advance of military technology, Philadelphia was sold for scrap in 1927. Fortunately, its wonderful toy doppelganger looks like it is still up to the task of sailing across stormy living room seas. —D.B.S.

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